First it is military spending. The largest military bases are in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. Also, retirees are in Florida, not in Mass.

In case you have not been there lately, Detroit is a third world city along with Baltimore, Newark, Camden, etc.

Compare the water issue with the greater Atlanta Metropolitan area with the inability to build a powerplant, power transmission line, or even a highway in the Northeast.

Atlanta: Finishing What General Sherman Started

Missed opportunity after missed opportunity are adumbrated therein. Yet the magazine blames not ideology but “bureaucracy.” That's all right for our purposes, because the ideology hides in plain sight. Atlanta boomed in the wake of the monster capital investments made in anticipation of the 1996 Olympics, the magazine reports; “In 1990, the Atlanta area was projected to draw 800,000 new residents over the next twenty years; in the ten years following the Olympics, the total population increased by almost 1.4 million…. But in that same ten-year period, the reservoirs that supply our most vital resource grew not a bit.”

Nobody could have anticipated the breach in the infrastructure: “In 1969, a study by the Atlanta Region Metropolitan Planning Commission…determined that significant infrastructure changes would be required to avoid critical water shortages when the metro area's population soared to between 3 million (reached in 1993) an 5 million (2006). In the 1980s, water planners mapped out a proposed network of reservoirs throughout North Georgia to shore up water for inevitable droughts. Yet the reservoirs never got off paper. By the nineties, the projects were not only deemed to costly to pursue once rainfall returned in abundance, but they also threatened to further antagonize Alabama and Florida in the tri-state water dispute.” What did the Atlanta metropolitan area do instead? Issue building permits—48,262 in 1996; 68,240 in 2006. That's the free-market way. The conservative way.

“The drought of 2002 was another wake up call, and then-Govenror Roy Barnes said 2003 would be the 'Year of Water.' Would his plan to build reservoirs and aid municipalities in fixing leaks have worked? No one knows. That year's gubernatorial election came down to Confederate stripes on the state flag.”

Unwilling to build, maintain or pay for the basic infrastructure needed to maintain civilization, left on their own the South would turn into Mexico in less than ten years, and Haiti in fifty.

And transplant plants in the Midwest. (Don't forget NUMMI, set up long ago in Fremont, CA [Bay Area].) (Did Detroit learn from that? No.)

“The Big Three have to make fundamental changes in order to survive.”

Shhh. Politically incorrect you are, to name the real issues here. (New York City considered it politically incorrect to be told “No” …)

“Chrysler probably won't no matter what.”

Actually, that may be one reason the Bush people are taking their time before doing a bailout. Aside from cronyism, there may be ham-handed “winners versus losers” choices made with the bank bailout, and this may be another kind of example of the same thing; were Chrysler to go bankrupt, it would reduce overall bailout costs to give life support only to GM and if needed later to Ford, while at the same time it would strengthen Washington's bargaining position while reducing that of GM, Ford, and the UAW. Plus (again related to the bank bailout) there may be a desire to indicate there is never a guaranteed bailout of anyone, demonstrated by allowing some to fail while the rest get a bailout. Finally (also related to Wall Street greed), can't Cerebus simply pay Chrysler to keep it going? Letting Cerebus lose as well as Chrysler may be part of the motivation behind the delay. (Plus the Bush people have tried not to give definite dates or times for any decision, as you noticed with the bank bailout. We'll be told after the action has been taken.)

Well, first and foremost, the concern is that while the death of Detroit is hardly the death of industry, it means a huge whack at demand (threatening deflation on us all) as well as increasing state and federal unemployment-related fiscal problems. I believe that's what has mattered most in the decision by the Bush administration to do some kind of bailout, even if it's a federally funded pre-packaged bankruptcy. (This may also be due to the “kernel of truth” related to ideological _and_ political motives for opposing a bailout by certain transplant-state Senators; see below.)

It's largely campaign contributions or more work on behalf of their constituencies, which include the “transplant” foreign auto makers. These companies are forming more and more of the main manufacturing base (at the auto assembly or “auto maker” level); they are more and more becoming the US auto industry, decade by decade. Their facilities can be subsituted for Detroit's in time of war. The kernel of truth (vastly hyper-dwarfed by the UAW's blame here; they are overpaid and living unrealistically, as they have for decades) is that the UAW and Detroit do appear to exert an influence on pay levels at the “transplants.” At least one transplant firm wants to lower wages at its facilities, to make them the same as other manufacturing work in the states where the facilities are located. To the extent that was made public knowledge, it might actually give Congressional Dems the spur to support “Card Check” as well as keep Detroit alive, so that the transplant firms could be unionized (the UAW's dream). More importantly to most people (because it's more meaningful), this “Card Check” is especially useful in unionizing sectors of the economy which can't realistically be relocated (and a federal law makes it impractical to move from card-check states to non-card-check states to escape Card Check). This means the service sector and other things that potentially could rival or surpass government in the extent of numbers and fractions of the labor force that would be unionized. To keep Detroit alive is to keep the UAW alive and gives big-news lift and support to Card Check next year (even if in reality Card Check is independent of Detroit's predicament). To what extent true opposition to moral hazard and interventionism and bailout fatigue, and dislike of unions because of government experience influences the Dems, remains to be seen. I believe if Obama were to show strong support for Card Check, the new Dem Congress would ram it through. It may be that Obama will instead defer, waiting first to see who else will support such an effort and to what extent.

The UAW is a dinosaur, long having earned contempt, bloated, going the way of the steel workers' unions. (Start looking at those PBGC maximum payment levels, boys and girls. And if the Big Three and many other companies fail during this recession, _all_ beneficiaries should brace for benefit reductions if a taxpayer bailout is in order.) But Toyota apparently wants the UAW out of its way before reducing pay levels. See below. That is the _tiny_ kernel of truth and paying attention to that should make union activists even more fiercely seek a bailout, then get “Card Check” started in Congress as soon as possible next month. (I'm not a union fan but understand what's logical for union fans. Keep the UAW alive, unionize the transplants, and unionize all the service and other stuff that makes no sense to move out of state.)

“However, an internal Toyota report, leaked to the Detroit Free Press last year, reveals that the company wants to slash $300 million out of its rising labor costs by 2011. The report indicated that Toyota no longer wants to “tie [itself] so closely to the U.S. auto industry.” Instead, the company intends to benchmark the prevailing manufacturing wage in the state in which a plant is located. The Free Press reported that in Kentucky, where the company is headquartered, this wage is $12.64 an hour, according to federal labor statistics, less than half Toyota's $30-an-hour wage.

If the companies, with the support of their senators, can wipe out or greatly weaken the UAW, they will be free to implement their plan.”

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/…

“The report from Seiichi (Sean) Sudo, president of Toyota Engineering & Manufacturing in North America, said Toyota should strive to align hourly wages more closely with prevailing manufacturing pay in the state where each plant is located, 'and not tie ourselves so closely to the U.S. auto industry, or other competitors.'”

http://www.freep.com/article/20081212/BUSINESS0…

That may be overreacted to by the union activists, but maybe not. At any rate, whatever Toyota wants, Toyota Senators are likely to seek.

http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/udall/n…

[sigh; faint smile of relief -- even if some fools are still in denial]

“I do not propose to permit our fiscal problems to set the limits of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the people of the city.”

[city, state, nation, failed dinosaur business-labor captive-market-no-more model]

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/PI158McM…

Not only is this transparently obvious, but the solutions are hardly innovative. Never mind the use of “Reconstruction” in yet another evil way (as was the original Reconstruction, and even some of its proponents were amenable to exchanging the Presidency for an end to it).

There's next to no legitimate grievance against the Southern and other Senators that scuttled the bailout (it was not only Southerners who voted No, and it wasn't only Republicans, incidentally, but never let the facts get in the way of lib-Dem hatred, particularly for the South). There is a small kernel of it, but trivial and in fact, negligeable here in contrast to the self-destruction over _decades_ by Detroit and the UAW.

Revenue sharing, central planning and direction, bleating about “race to the bottom,” none are anything new. (Peterson at Brookings was writing about this stuff thirteen years ago, for example, when disparaging real federalism in favor of something people like him, and Lind, etc., would prefer.)

http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/1995/feder…

http://web.syr.edu/~mrlazare/thepriceoffederali…

As far as blaming others for Detroit's and the UAW's obvious failures, it's no different than the stupidity we saw in demands for bailing out New York City after that liberal paradise bankrupted itself. Everyone else, reluctant to bail them out, was to blame! Not they! Never.

Meanwhile, Lind has had other grand ideas before, namely the following. Imagine an army of Democratic, liberal carpetbaggers to accompany any tyranny directly from Washington.

Overcrowded cities on the coasts. Dying rural communities in the interior. The way to save both may be to create a post-agrarian heartland

Imagine a federal program that would help poor and working-class Americans to move not from crowded cities to suburbs in the same general area but from crowded states to low-density states where homes are cheaper and the general cost of living is lower.

In a second inland movement, wired professionals and well-paid service workers might make new lives in wide-open spaces that are slowly reverting from monotonous expanses of wheat and corn to wilderness. The first wave of heartland settlement was in the long-term perspective a failure, with consequences that are evident today. The high-tech pioneers of the twenty-first century, unlike their agrarian predecessors, may be able to reconcile the myth of the heartland with the American dream.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/01/lind.htm

Federal centralized control and revenue-sharing is just imperious elitism. Lind was also the guy who said that poorer people should just be given incentives to “homestead” fly-over country. (Why he didn't seize the demographic and political angles of relocation by many a Dem to the South is mystifying.) “National economic development” too quickly leads to planning, “industrial policy,” and the rest of the BS.

At least with UAW, “Card Check” is transparent. And wait until SEIU can zap the service sector everywhere with this, extending significant presence of unions in the private sector beyond the trivial level they are at, in contrast to government.

The “North” needs to get real (and that includes people like Lind and his fans) and face their own failures openly and honestly. They spark the social and economic equivalent of Gresham's Law, and try to punish the people and jobs who flee rather than correct all the push factors present in Blue Nation Rust Belt America. (And expanding the scope of what they want to the federal government to prevent voting No with one's feet is nothing new.)

Why don't they start looking at what's needed in the nest they have fouled rather than resent people fleeing to a better one?

If they can't do that and they're too busy being a combination of envious and hateful toward more successful places, they're in no position to conceive of what plenty of us could conceive in conjunction with a new constitutional convention, reorganizing the states and the concept of what the states should be (extent of sovereignty versus status as mere jurisdictional or mere geographical districts).

Where is the correct term and the correct approach that I have used before, the “Marshall Plan,” beginning with Detroit itself? See below. What would the Planners and the Experts and the elitists do there, in the heart of their own nest that they have ruined year after year? (In the case of New York City, bankrupted it before and put it and the state of New York in jeopardy now.)

The solution isn't “metropolitan area unification” to annex the suburbs and the tax base into the central city, so don't bother. (If anything, central cities should be controlled by directors selected from the successful suburbs, not vice versa.) It's not going to be instant-today new “green” tech. But what is the solution? Not transferring money from elsewhere, not imposing new Liberalism Uber Alles from the federal capital. What should be done? And not in the South that the idiots hate, but where the failures are happening?

HERE, AN EXAMPLE OF WHERE THE FAILURE IS:

http://media.freep.com/drivingdetroit/mcgrawsma…

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=…

By blaming “the South” you give a free pass to the Big Three who have made an art out of making bad business decisions. Right now the polls are showing that a majority of Americans are willing to let these companies go. It is a very bad decision to do so, but that is the vox populi and I doubt that they are only from one section of the country. there are GM plants in the South too, you know. The Big Three have to make fundamental changes in order to survive. Chrysler probably won't no matter what.

Reconstruction has a very negative connotation in the South, even nowadays. To bandy such a word around shows a poor grasp of history and a lack of sensitivity. While the goals of the proposal (minus the rhetoric) are laudable, the attitude sucks. Why can you be a little more sophisticated?

If you stated that there are several Republican Senators who, for their own selfish reasons (namely campaign contributions), have entered into a pact that is both dangerous and un-American, I bet that you would get the same numbers to believe you. Point out that by destroying the main manufacturing base these Senators leave us much more vulnerable in case of overt attack, will definitely cause a depression due to the lack of jobs and job opportunities, the Honda/Toyota/BMW complex will have to lay off workers in their states, and there is no country that has kept a stable democracy without a manufacturing base. The Senators know this and don't care. If they don't know this then they are stupid.

It is all a matter of perspective and simply blaming a section of the country instead of those who are responsible is the wrong perspective.