too broke to bury their dead

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by AGDee

You missed my point completely. My point was that everybody can't be bosses. There have to be some peons. In a capitalistic society, there must be different classes and looking down on the middle/lower class is closed minded and short sighted.

You do get to choose which you will be though. I know too many first generation Americans who came here without a dime to their name from places like Vietnam and Iran who worked 2-3 jobs until they could run their own businesses and are quite well off today. If those people can be bosses, so can anyone else. It just takes hard and smart work. If you refuse to do that kind of stuff, yes, you will get to be a peon, but it's your choice.

I agree with you about unions. I am as anti-union as they come. Nobody in my family has ever been in a union.

I'm not even anti-union. I think some unions do a hell of a job advocating for their members without tanking the industry. A good example of that would be the plumbers and pipe fitters union. They really do a great job and I know the companies (because I've seen their books) which have these folks working for them can still do very, very well.

The residents of Detroit get to vote in the Mayoral election. The millions of people who work in Detroit do not. We have no power over who gets elected in the city of Detroit and are outraged time and time again that these clowns get re-elected. We have no power. We simply pay our income tax to the city because we have to.

Blame your parents and their parents for this phenomenon. This is a direct result of racism, the subsequent reverse-racism and white flight. Again, this is an issue entirely of the making of the folks which, as you say, "work in Detroit."

In fact, they're building a new movie studio in a suburb of Detroit and hiring hundreds of people. Google came to Ann Arbor and opened an office. Many jobs have been created in the Life Sciences Corridor of Tech Town, an area being developed to be a mecca of medical/biological research.

To be fair, just about every major metropolitan area sports its own 'Mecca' of biomedical research. We even have such an animal in OKC. Unfortunately, it just won't do to have an economy which is based and depends entirely on private and public grants to stay afloat.

I can't imagine being in such a horrible place that I had to ask people for money to take care of the remains of my loved one.

As I said before, I don't think that's a phenomenon which only occurs in Detroit. There are plenty of places around where folks can't scrape together $600+ for a cremation (although that seems rather steep, I think it's only around $450 here).