This is how unions jumped the shark. I'm grateful for what they did for improving working conditions and wages, but this crap is why they've rendered themselves irrelevant. Or the "you have to call a union electrician to plug in a PC and a union carpenter to hang a picture" shenanigans. My x/g/f was a manager at a large HMO and her underlings were union. She had one who was consistently late or just wouldn't show up; she had a little chat with (aka "wrote up") the retard, who immediately went out on "stress leave." GMAFB.

Why? Corporations don't pay taxes. They collect them from consumers and pass them back to the gov't. Tax them 100% and they'll just raise their prices in the US to cover that, we'll pay for it all, they'll still go overseas and they'll not ever think of coming back. Why shouldn't they go overseas where labor is cheaper and they don't have to deal with ridiculous unions or a regime than constantly demonizes anyone who turns a profit? We already have one of the highest corp. income taxes in the western world. Make it higher and see if jobs come back here from China. Uh huh.

How can you say union membership is declining when a;; public sector jobs are now unionized? I hate to say it but I am beginning to hate the public workers.

As for the section 8 renters homesteading - I seriously think it should be tried, but I suspect not one in ten are the type to try and go out and improve something. Good screening of candidates would be important - but what percentage of section 8 renters have any skills, DIY or better?

On the radio new this morn...Detroit Police Chief got the axe...details sketchy, but said something about a "reality TV show" being involved? Okay, Hugh...what did you do? :D

No one has mentioned Redlining yet.

What exactly is redlining?
What exactly is redlining? | Boykins for Michigan Senate

Redlining
Redlining - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...lining_map.jpg

I think it is sad, I love the old buildings, and was planning on starting a thread on Urban living last year. Who owns the buildings??? Seems to me that they could be call centers, at the very least. I look at that theater and it brings a tear to me eye, that had to be a show place, and could again. I have a couple friends who have bough, restored a few locally and used them for other venues, from showing old movies to Big Bands. George, in your line of work, you should be looking to get one of those building to convert to living, work, play space..

I have a wife and want to keep it that way. Besides Ann Arbor is more my scale and I could never give up Huron River Drive, where else can I drive a Porsche around here?

Look, I have no love for the man either. Richie clearly turned things around in his first term. You have a short memory what this city looked like 20 years ago.

On the news today, crime is less this year than last. I couldn't beleive that. But that is the media coverage for ya!

I live in this city and I don't know who will run against him. You can bet it will be more of the same. Sorry Leigon.

Simply put Unions have become BIG BUSINESS, in the business of providing LABOUR. After WW2 they had a monopoly on industrialized labour in the world, so they could put their hands in the pocket of business. Business was making so much money they agreed..Then things started to change around the middle 60's with the rise of Germany (Europe), Japan and then Korea and Taiwan. Now the competition hs spread to Indonesia, India, China and Brazil.

Remember the VW Beetle, Datsun and Toyota's...all cheap transportation...

So instead of smelling the roses and seeing which way the wind was blowing they kept on keeping on as if nothing had changed...the American people went to sleep thinking everything was fine...with their credit card and easy monthly payments. Nobody dared to wake them..Well that little slumber all burst in the fall of 2008.

BTW American business did wake up in the mid 80's as that was when they cleaned out the dead wood and got lean and mean...except those with big Union contracts like GM.....

Detroit would be a GREAT backlot for a studiio. Little traffic, plenty of old houses to burn down. Car wrecks, no problem. Lots of empty city streets that could be made to "look" inhabited. We're filming there pretty much for the tax credits on labor and materials, including the tax credits for the 90% of the crew we brought in from Los Angeles. Detroit, and other cities way of thinking is that if they offer tax credits for Season One of a TV series, we'll stay there for season two. Wrong. we can pretty much make any city look like another. NCIS which is supposed to be Virginia is shot in LA, ditto for CSI which is supposed to be Las Vegas. Ever notice when they're out in the woods how many Live California Coastal Oaks there are in Virginia? They shoot it in my backyard, so to speak.

nah... Unions (and politics) have become BIG BUSINESS, in the business of providing "representation." (WINK WINK)

. ..is there any bigger big-business?

There is a show on A+E called The First 48. A couple of months ago the film crew were filming a raid at a house when a girl was fatally shot.
Could be the reason he was fired.

U mean Mickey is going to screw Detroit....

The Mayor banned reality filming after that IIRC. Then the cheif got all duded up w/ semi-automatic weapon, cigar, etc. and did some sort of publicity stunt/shoot. Oh, that and boinking a subordinate in the department (even though both are unmarried) was more than Bing could tolerate. Me thinks there is more as the chief left rather quietly.

This was the way it was in the New York city area...everyone was fleeing the hostile and expensive city to go live in the suburbs. You remember...the bad old days back when they made films about New York like

The Warriors and
Escape From New York

The came Rudy Guiliani

He concentrated on quality of life issues: Get the hobos off the street, jail the muggers, no graffiti,don't cater to fringe political groups, instead cater to businesses, give sales tax holidays...and what do you know? Suddenly New York became a GREAT place to live.

Cities that emulated this prospered, those that didn't suffered.

Let's be fair here. NYC is still an insanely expensive place to live and shop. It's grossly overtaxed and overregulated. But Bloomberg has done a lot of that, while Giuliani cleaned up the crime, which helped the property values and thus prop. taxes a lot. Giuliani also cut taxes a lot. I read that some huge percentage of NYC's tax revenue comes from around 20,000 residents and that if even a handful of those folks decided to move, the city would go BK very quickly. However, having grown up in NJ during the Koch and Dinkins days, I knew NYC very well and there was a very noticeable difference once Giuliani went to work on the place. I remember my frist trip there after he became mayor and I saw those blue police barricade lining all the sidewalks, so people would only cross the street at crosswalks. That was a real shocker.

Yes, it took a REPUBLICAN to fix the liberal mess...;)

I find it hard to believe this could happen to a city like Detroit.
To me this is really sad. How long before the older people die off and the whole area is virtually abandoned? Then what?

What about cities like Chicago or Philadelphia? Could the same thing happen there?
Were did these people move to?

I just can't get my head around such a big problem. :(

I've never been there but it was always "the" car city...

What wrong with your car industry over there? (Maybe a title for a new thread)

To be fair to Bloomberg, NYC always was and always will be an expensive place to live and run. The maintenance on public infrastructure alone is a huge cost to be carried, let alone the expansion of it.

As for regulation...let's take the congestion pricing for traveling to lower manhattan. As somebody who has put up with that commute and traffic more than a few times, I'd say something has to be done. Bad traffic is another quality of life issue. More Path tubes, more ferries, more mass transit...but those things aren't going to pay for themselves, initially anyway. So, a punitive tax might not be a bad idea if it REALLY supports the solution , and again, makes NYC a better place to live in the long run.

Too bad the congestion pricing basically died on impact.

In my opinion of NY mayors, Bloomberg is pretty high up there.

Great place to live? Where the cops perform 100,000 "stop and searches" a year, where you need a special permit just to own a firearm for defense, where it's almost impossible to drive around, and where the cost of living is so freakin' crazy that a 3 br apt in Harlem costs $1000+ a month?

Seriously...

PS: Bloomberg is one of THE most anti-gun politicians EVER.