America's Toilet - Detroit

Detroit is a toilet.

It wasn't always. In its heyday, it was one of the hippest, most happenin' places in America.  Motor City was the birthplace of Motown, and of course, the center of America's car universe.

I can't put my finger on the exact moment that the once great city started circling the porcelain bowl, but I can give you a few clues as to why the once great city is a cultural wasteland in which it takes police an hour to respond to emergencies -- in which 2/3 of the homes are abandoned and where the population has dropped from a once booming 1.8 million-ish to a mere 700,000 people. 

Let's talk about those poor 700,000 people for a moment, shall we? I feel them. Truly, I do. The souls remaining in decaying Detroit are there because they didn't have the resources to abandon ship. They're the modern-day equivalent of steerage passengers on the Titantic. They didn't have the means or foresight to abandon the U.S.S. Detroit before the city was underwater, and now they're likely stuck in homes with mortgages that are underwater and no relatives or friends in other parts of the country to grease an escape route for them.

This is truly sad. 

That said, I don't think the rest of America owes the pitiable people in Detroit a darn thing. We've already bailed them out once. See the now-infamous auto bailouts. The country propped up some of Detroit's largest employers -- the auto manufacturers. And it wasn't enough. Detroit is still bankrupt.

I am going to point a few fingers and lay some blame here, because it is deserved: Unions, you did this to Detroit. 

I am saying this as a person who was once a member of a labor union. I was once a Teamster. It's embarrassing to admit, but I had no choice. I worked for a company that was essentially exempt from right-to-work state laws. If I wanted that job, I HAD to give a portion of my salary to the Teamsters. In return, they negotiated for things I didn't want, like dry cleaning, and fought against things I really wanted -- like being able to work part-time.

I was on the bottom rung, making $7 an hour. And when our company came to us and said, we have two choices -- everyone can take a pay cut, or we will start doing layoffs from the bottom of the seniority list -- my fellow Teamsters overwhelmingly voted to start layoffs from the bottom.

I was truly surprised, and apparently, naive. But anyway, that was the beginning of the end -- we were short staffed long before the bottom 10 percent of employees were ceremoniously shown the door. Long story short -- already questionable service crumbled further, and the downward spiral spelled the end for the company.

Would that company still have gone out of business had the employees taken paycuts? We'll never know, but I truly believe that without a union, management could have structured salaries differently with individuals and different work groups and could've started working on making those changes earlier. 

Basically the whole of Detroit is a giant labor union with no flexibility to make changes and adapt. Labor unions are just another nasty layer of bureaucracy run on fear and corruption. I'm not a fan and never will be. Back when I was a Teamster, I believed then and I still believe now, that I can negotiate better for myself than a Union can on my behalf. 

So Detroit's first problem is its industries' love affair with shady labor unions. Those labor unions extend, by the way, to its public employees.

Meanwhile, the city itself has been run by Democrats since 1962. I'm sure Detroit's ails will somehow all be turned around and blamed on George W. Bush, somehow. I don't want to alarm anyone, BUT the problems with Detroit can't be laid at the feet of GWB.  They just can't.

Some of the blame, however, can and should be squarely placed on Detroit's many, many years of Democratic leadership, who spent more and promised more than the citizens could afford for decades -- DECADES -- before the piper came to collect.

There's a lesson there about financial responsibility. Apparently it's one of the trickiest ones in the world to learn, but it goes something like this: Don't spend more than you earn. Set aside a little of the money earned now to use later, but be careful in promising the moon and stars when  you can't even reach the leaves in the treetops.   

America should heed the lesson Detroit is learning so painfully RIGHT NOW. We won't, of course, and I fear we're heading for a situation in which the people of Kansas, Wyoming and Texas have to subsidize the poor decisions of the people in Detroit. 

It's not fair. It's not right, and I believe it could lead to more than just a war of words. If I have to pay for Detroit, I should get some say in how they operate, and rule number one is you don't spend more than take in.