Detroit upgraded

[Michael Hoover]

> The legendary , twenty year Mayor Coleman Young , Detroit Red , including 
> in the commie sense, made many deals with Henry Ford II and other big 
> bourgies and corps, but somehow he must have been holding out and getting 
> something for the population in those deals, although the Left largely 
> fell out with Young too. Anyway, the bond grades and the monopoly media 
> running anti-Young commentary confirm that for whatever reason, Detroit 
> was to be economically blockaded something like Cuba. Young did win two 
> auto plants here in the era of plantclosings (especially in Detroit), but 
> somehow the media theme remained that Detroit was not working or had lost 
> its "world class status". 
> Charles Brown

didn't both the UAW and the auto companies blacklist Young in the 1950s 
because he was marxist labor organizer in the 1950s?.. 

and didn't he aggressively pursue corporate investment after his 1973 
election, in effect, presiding over conventional, old-style downtown-
growth politics?

he accepted the 'logic of growth' (even if he didn't like it) that makes 
clearance and subsidy projects inevitable...Todd Swanstrom quotes Young 
as saying:

"Those are the rules and I'm going by the goddamn rules.  This suicidal
outthrust competition...has got to stup but until it does, I mean to
compete.  It's too bad we have a system where dog eats gog and the devil
takes the hindmost.  But I'm tired of taking the hindmost." (_The
Crisis of Growth Politics_)

of course, if Richard Child Hill's analysis of Detroit (and other older 
manufacturing cities) is correct, Young would of necesssity accept the 
need to subsidize private sector activity in the city...the market 
governs and municipal officials are at the mercy of capital markets that 
control investments their cities need to prosper, so they must compete...
Michael Hoover