The past few days have been hard on Flint and Detroit. There is a very strong windstorm in the area – with wide swaths of the city abandoned and little or no fire protection, the cities are burning and there are widespread power outages. A few arsonists here and there speed up the process.
Like many towns, Flint’s radio has been “clusterized” – having one owner buying up most of the stations in town and moving them into a single building. The owner of Flint’s main cluster has just recently come out of its “reorganization” with the bankers taking control of the stations – when the stations lost power, they went to a natural gas fired backup generator. That then caught fire. The fire was put out, but the stations are hanging on by a thread, and nobody thinks the power will be back on anytime soon.
One of my theories about the future – Dearborn Michigan has over a million Arab people (a mixture of Christians and Muslims) having prolific quantities of children – just across the city line you have a 90% African American city rotting out like an absessed jaw. At some point, someone is going to come up with a plan like “New Mecca” – to open up the City of Detroit with tax incentives or the like for immigrants to repopulate the city and start over. That much land and infrastructure can’t just decay into nothingness.
Don’t worry. Obama will soon show up to once again announce how well the economy is doing. Security will, of course, be tight.
I realize there are a lot of long gone towns across the states. But it really is hard to believe what’s happening here, given its size and as you said, its infrastructure. Crumbling from within.
Obama will have Jennifer Granthom by his side, praising all of the “trying” that went on to save the state and the unions. Let’s face it – Granthom is as much to blame for Michigan’s decline as Obama. She helped the state to lead in unemployment, foreclosures and corporations moving to Mexico (can you say “Whirlpool”?) during the economic boom years of 2006 – 2007 – I suppose that her “leadership” could be touted on her political resume for the next office she runs for. Bankrupting things is a job enhancement for progressives in power.
Mmhmm … and about how long have libtards been running that place? Mmhmm… .
Republican John Engler was the Governor for a lot of the time I lived there (starting in 1991). The population of Michigan is around 9 million. A Republican trying to win statewide office in Michigan has to overcome the city of Detroit that is close to 100% Democratic welfare recipients (now a little less than million people), and the roughly 1 million Arab people who live in the Dearborn area. Grand Rapids is the center of the Republican Michigan enclave – much of it related to the Amway empire.
Arab Americans immigrants from Syria and Lebanon were very active in the early days of the auto business – Henry Ford had supported their immigration about 100 years ago to work in the auto plants (this was prior to the Great Northern Migration) – so you’re talking about 4th and 5th generation Arab Americans. They also played a significant role in the formation of the UAW.
You might remember that Spencer Abraham was US Senator from 1995 to 2000. He lost his reelection in 2000. He then served as head of the Department of Energy under George W Bush. His family are Orthodox Christian Arabs – the Dearborn community is not monolithicly Democrats. The immigration of Islamic Arabs is fairly recent – and since many of the people fled to America to get away from Islam, they aren’t all that thrilled about the new arrivals.
The Levin brothers (Senator Carl Levin and Rep Sander Levin) are constantly on a tight rope. They are Jewish, but if they take strong positions against the forces trying to destroy Israel, they can drive Dearborn more towards Republicans – so they frequently are missing when it comes time to take votes.
Although the MSM makes much hay with the crumbling infrastructure in Detroit, here is one perspective which I found extremely enlightening.
http://www.palladiumboots.com/exploration/detroit
As a lifelong Michigander, it is often easy to disparage Detroit for the many years of corruption and decay. But as the documentary points out, the last few years have been feeling different. The young people coming here are a tribute to how freedom is truly the human desire. No matter that this freedom is a result of mismanagement of previous generations.
Keep smoking that stuff ;)
People probably thought I was kidding about buying a house for $10k. Problem is the real estate commission on a $10k house won’t pay the gasoline to drive people around. So people give up, the house is stripped of its copper, appliances and bricks and one more vacant lot appears…