Germany's Historic Preservation/Restoration

[canuck]

I am just quoting spmething I posted on another thread about rehabbing important buildings in the city.
Germany and Japan got to be the 2nd and third largest economies in the world. One would think that a lot of the Marshall plan money went to heavy industry reconstruction but you can imagine that your butchershops and shoestores and other businesses werent started from nothing. Where did the money come from?

This is from the Marshall Plan descripion in Wikipedia under the Heading: Repayment

Quote:
European Recovery Program loans were mostly used to support small- and medium-sized businesses. Germany paid the US back in installments [[the last check was handed over in June 1971). However, the money was not paid from the ERP fund, but from the central government budget.

Both Canada and the US and other wealthy countries are pretty creative when it comes to giving gifts of money or technical or material support. A lot of times these programs mean that local agricultural production can no longer be sustained because of costs to the producer. These poisoned gifts are disguised subsidies to producers in wealthy countries. We can spend our money in wiser ways and instead play God in our own countries especially in cities like Detroit.

re Retroit: As for Europeans and what they would do if Detroit were theirs, A great many folks who came to Detroit during the 20th century were European immigrants. You should ask them why they left the ship. I think that maybe its a better idea to look forward instead of accusing one another in situations like this. Looking at what happened, at segregation and all the unpleasant stuff squarely, but to act on the evidence. Montreal lost 300,000 folks after the Quebec referendum in 1980. We had a lot of adjusting to do. A new city had to be reinvented in a sense. There are those who will always find fault with one of the major linguistic groups much like the black white issue in the D. I have some of these reflexes myself with the narrower minded anglos or the french nationalists, and I understand the struggle but it is unproductive to dwell on the past bigotry if nothing is done to correct the situation.