Detroit: A simple problem with a complex answer

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Sunday July 28, 2013 · 3:11 AM PDT

2013/07/28 · 03:11

The bankruptcy of Detroit has served to bring a number of armchair philosophers, economists, and pundits out of the woodwork, all spouting their reasons for Detroit's decline and the future viability of the city. I freely admit to being one, but at the same time, unlike a lot of the more visible talking heads, I actually live nearby, in Ypsilanti - a city that suffers a lot of the same problems as Detroit does, just on a smaller scale.

Many believe that the 12th St Riot (otherwise known as the Detroit Race Riot of 1967) was the reason Detroit fell apart. The riot was not the reason, but it's easy to see how someone might get that impression. The riot was merely the flashpoint for a powderkeg that had been brewing since the 1930s. It threw fuel on the fire, but it was far from the spark that got the blaze roaring. To get a clearer picture of just what went into the fall of the city, you have to look back much, much further.

Back the clock up roughly thirty years. WWII is in full swing in Europe and President Roosevelt, along with Congress, have fully endorsed the "all aid short of war" standard that would be the norm prior to Pearl Harbor. American weapons, vehicles, and supplies are being sent to the Allies in massive numbers to support them, and American factories are struggling to keep up with the need.

More below the squiggle.

CryingLiberty

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Monday July 22, 2013 · 3:46 AM PDT

2013/07/22 · 03:46

Diarist Jon Perr let us know last week about the horrific spring of 2017 and its effects on voter turnouts. Unfortunately, in the years to come, things wouldn't get better, they'd get worse. Far, far worse. By 2020, thanks to the VILE acts, having been passed in 32 states after seeing Congressional and state representative districts being gerrymandered into absurdity, an increasingly emboldened Senate, House, and Presidency decided to fully play their hand and attempt to make America into the perfect haven for their corporate masters, passing several harsh laws that took an already deep chasm between the elites and the underclass of America and made it such an extreme caricature of itself that conditions in America became very, very grim.

What followed wasn't pretty, and had it happened a century ago, it might have ended differently. Unfortunately, in the modern world, with technology being what it is, all resistance effectively amounted to a flash in the pan. So how did it get there?

More on the Great Economic Schism of 2019, and the painful slide into corporatism that turned America upside-down -- and a personal look at southeast Michigan -- after the squiggle.

CryingLiberty

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Saturday July 06, 2013 · 1:32 PM PDT

2013/07/06 · 13:32

The wonderful Laura Clawson posted a story to the DKos Labor roll recently about fast food workers who are rebelling against their employers for wage theft, amongst other violations of labor laws. In turn, this linked to an NYT article that spoke plainly about some of the things that fast food workers are forced to go through just to make their meager ends meet.

Naquasia Legrand, a 22-year-old from Canarsie, Brooklyn, works at two KFCs. She washes dishes at one for $7.75 and mops floors at the other for $8. She says she must work four or five hours each week off the clock.
She needed to buy a MetroCard last week so she skipped lunch. She shakes her head. “I think I deserve to eat lunch.”

There was a Mexican man with gray hair and a bushy mustache who trained as an architect. His two daughters live in Mexico and depend on him, and he sleeps in a basement and makes $5 an hour delivering Papa John’s pizza.
“I delivered during Hurricane Sandy,” he said in Spanish. “They told us to ride bent over, so that the pizzas didn’t get wet.”

There are more stories than this, and certainly, New York is not the only place in America where wage theft happens - I've had it happen to me, but I was too young and stupid to realize it. However, the article I mentioned above is one of the few that the NYT decided to allow comments on, and so I began to read. Normally, the comments section of any newspaper's website is a total cesspool filled with people who hate anyone that isn't exactly like them, but there were quite a few well-reasoned commenters who actually made good arguments.

More below the squiggle.

Poll

40 votes Show Results

What means do you think would make the livable wage concept a reality?

Federal standard, with a minimum wage below that standard like we have now

Revise federal minimum upward

State-level standard, with existing state minimums like we have now

Revise state minimums upward

Create both a federal and state standard, allowing existing minimum wage system to exist underneath livable wage system

Revise both state and federal minimums upward

County or municipality-level system administered by state agency, livable wage benchmark varies up and down from city to city and county to county

State-level standard with occasional upward municipality adjustment (to cover for cities where the cost of living is substantially higher)

Federal standard with upward state adjustment (for states where the cost of living is higher)

Some other system (comments)

40 votes Vote Now!

What means do you think would make the livable wage concept a reality?

Federal standard, with a minimum wage below that standard like we have now

2 votes

Revise federal minimum upward

4 votes

State-level standard, with existing state minimums like we have now

1 vote

Revise state minimums upward

1 vote

Create both a federal and state standard, allowing existing minimum wage system to exist underneath livable wage system

0 votes

Revise both state and federal minimums upward

5 votes

County or municipality-level system administered by state agency, livable wage benchmark varies up and down from city to city and county to county

0 votes

State-level standard with occasional upward municipality adjustment (to cover for cities where the cost of living is substantially higher)

2 votes

Federal standard with upward state adjustment (for states where the cost of living is higher)

20 votes

Some other system (comments)

5 votes

Two steps forward, one step back?

CryingLiberty

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Sunday June 02, 2013 · 3:43 AM PDT

2013/06/02 · 03:43

It's been almost two years since the first diary I ever wrote on DKos. In that time, things have changed for me - some for the better, some for the worse.

I still struggle with feeling successful, even in the wake of some of these changes, and I know that there are some very good things that I have had happen. But I can't help but feel a nagging sensation at the back of my mind that I'm digging myself deeper into a hole that I'm never going to get out of.

CryingLiberty

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Sunday February 26, 2012 · 12:49 AM PST

2012/02/26 · 00:49

I am, to say the least, an...infrequent diarist here. I've only written two, and I can say that I was fortunate to be heard well on one of them.

Of course, the tenor of the discussion regarding the teaching profession in this country, while it has quieted some, is no less vitriolic in its hatred for unionized teachers, intellectual pursuits, and all things involving education and the expenditure of public dollars thereof.

CryingLiberty

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Friday October 28, 2011 · 1:40 AM PDT

2011/10/28 · 01:40

In my last diary, I mentioned my own personal experience of growing up in a comfortably middle-to-upper-middle class household, with a conservative value system, and the rude awakening that life decided to give me once I graduated from college.

This time, I'm going to elaborate more on some of the things that have happened directly in the years since I lost my teaching job.

CryingLiberty

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Wednesday October 19, 2011 · 3:05 AM PDT

2011/10/19 · 03:05

I'll admit it. I was born into a live of relative ease. My parents were engineers, with my father working as a self-employed engineer designing everything from avionics to fire-control systems. My mother, for a major aircraft wheel and brake manufacturer. Both were heavily invested in Wall Street, and my parents very comfortably own their home, and ascribe to most of the conservative "values" being thrown around today.

I don't think I was ever actually part of the true 1% - maybe in the top 15 or 20% - but the thing is, I wasn't like my parents. I didn't think like they did. And so, I chose a different path from my parents, opting not to go the route of the "family business" - engineering. No, I was a musician. And a rather decent one, if I may be allowed some self-promotion.

My parents always told me that I should pursue what I enjoyed; that as long as I was happy, they didn't have any problems with what I chose to study in school. And so, with my parents' financial blessing as well as their personal ones, I ran off to music school to pursue my own little version of the American Dream.

Little did I know that it would turn into an American Nightmare.

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Detroit: A simple problem with a complex answer

Slipping into Corporatism

Wages, large and small (but mostly small)

Two steps forward, one step back?

Where do I go from here?

Withering on the vine

Falling from the 1% to the bottom of the 99%