Monday 22 July 2013

Detroit

How does a city go bankrupt?

Well, actually that is an easy one, they over spend, it is not rocket science, the real question is why?

Detroit was a booming city with nearly 2 million people and as it increased local services increased, however it has a tenth of that population now but unfortunately public services are still the same, hence ludicrous debt.

Why did the local council or whatever it is called in America scale back accordingly, because "councils don't do that!" Well they have learned their lesson now, or have they? The amount of debt in Detroit has just escalated to bankruptcy which is a staggering statement of an America city.

This was once the capital city of capitalism, the great roaring furnace at the very centre of America’s rise to world power and greatness. Stalin wanted to copy it on the banks of the Volga, but found he couldn’t replicate its spirit, or its cars. Aldous Huxley’s great prophetic novel Brave New World was written on the assumption that the ideas of its founder, Henry Ford, especially that ‘history is bunk’, would one day take over the planet. He may yet turn out to be right. Certainly, Ford’s desire for a world of vast mass-production factories in which the workers were paid enough to keep the economy going by buying their own products seems to be coming true.

Now, true to its past, Detroit is not just fading away gracefully, but noisily sick and dying, expiring as spectacularly as it once lived. Fifty years ago it was the fifth-largest city in the United States, with 1.85 million people. Now it is eleventh, with just over 700,000 people. It is likely to fall further behind as it shrinks, and as more Americans head for the Sun Belt and the flourishing South West where the work is...

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