too broke to bury their dead

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by AGDee

Michigan is not alone in putting all of it's eggs in one basket. Many states utilize the resources that they have available. I don't disagree that the UAW was greedy, but, in their greed, they supported hundreds of thousands of other people in other industries: restaurants, theaters, boats, sporting goods, etc. If our society was able to completely eliminate the need for oil, where would Texas be? Why is there such resistance to moving to alternative fuel sources? Because people in that industry fight it.

Texas is a bad example. They have what is probably the most diversified economy in the country. Honestly, if the oil just dried up (which won't happen), Texas has enough other things going on that, while it'd feel an effect, it wouldn't be as bad as you think. We've even diversified in Oklahoma after learning our lesson in the 1980's.

It used to be that the labor unions worked together with the corporations to make sure that both entities could prosper. At some point, that changed. It became a game of the unions extracting as much as humanly possible from their corporate overlords. The result was predictable and yes, deserved. Further, as to Detroit, the city itself has had a long and storied history of corrupt leadership. Who keeps electing them? Who elected Kwame Kilpatrick?

For many of the people who live and work in the Detroit metro area, it most certainly is happenstance and bad luck. Many are, in fact, victims of circumstances over which they had no control and no warning.

No control and no warning? Really? That's kind of what I'm talking about. To say that you couldn't see the collapse of the auto industry after years and years of bleeding and losses is just astounding to me. I don't think I'd be stretching much to say that anyone who has paid attention to Detroit knew it was not a question of "if" Detroit collapsed, but rather "when."