Within Detroit there's a festering, devastated area the size of San Francisco [a bit of a slum itself]. Outside the city limits, for miles along the Detroit River, there are burned out factories, rail yards, docks, etc, going on forever. [Cue 'Motor City's Burning' by the MC5] Across the river, Windsor Ontario looks as bad as Detroit did in the 90s. To the north, there's Flint and Lansing, Saginaw, then Benton Harbor, Grand Rapids...You can go SE to Toledo, Ohio. Further East, the bombed-out formerly industrial towns of NY and the Eastern Seaboard, Pittsburgh, etc. To the west there's Gary Indiana, an abandoned ex-steel city [Michael Jackson's home town], then huge swaths of Chicago, the industrial cities of the rest of the Midwest. [Cue something really banal here] And abandoned farms in between.
What people fail to realize is that this was the place where the 'wealth generating' [yes, in a purely capitalistic sense] industry pulled us out of Depression 1.0 and won WWII. That industry still exists, only it's employing other poor workers in vicious primitive accumulation. [cue this puppy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv0q3cW3x1s ]
The huge infrastructure projects wear down, can't be replaced. Pension and health care slashed for govt. workers, who are owed trillions in benefits that can't be paid. Speculation flourishes while productive industries rust away, trillions squandered in un-winnable wars that might kill more people than in 'Nam. Teabaggers howl and moan about homosexual marriage and birth certificates, the left whines about the same thing, oh well, to not end totally in the negative, cue the Airplane's 'We Should Be Together' and fade...
http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html
Mike B)
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