>>> "Michael Hoover" <hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> 05/06/99 05:09PM >>>
> 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?..
CB: Yes. And he became famous for talking back to a McCarthyite Congressional Committee that never came back to town after he faced them down. But he couldn't get a job for a number of years afterward.
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and didn't he aggressively pursue corporate investment after his 1973 election, in effect, presiding over conventional, old-style downtown- growth politics?
CB: Yes. Although, the media line was always that even downtown did not grow, even though Young was accused of building downtown over the neighborhoods. The two "new" autoplants are not downtown.
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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...
CB: As the CP leader James Jackson ( who was Young's roommate in the 50's when Young was down and out) "Lenin said you could build socialism in one country, but he never said you could build socialism in one city."
Coleman Young's autobiography is _Hardstuff_ Viking 1994
Charles Brown