We get pretty down on ourselves in Detroit…but this lastest offering by urban planners might make you feel a little better. In 2030, New York city will hold the “second-greatest risk” of hurricaine damage next to Miami. Also be prepared for mass homelessness because of the end of federal housing funding. Oh yeah, labor wars. The unionized and non-union labor force will be engaged in a war for work.

Talk about a perspective shift.

New York magazine

As if they were rubbing salt in Detroit’s wounds, Toyota just announced that it is posting record quarterly profits for the 4th quarter of 2006. That’s the same quarter in which Ford posted a $5.8 billion loss to end its worst year in the company’s 103-year history.

The entire blame cannot be placed at the feet of high labor costs though that is where U.S. automakers seem to be cutting. As Ford, GM and Chrysler workers brace for lay-offs, Toyota is trying to decide where to build its next U.S. factory.

Toyota reports brisk sales of its fuel-stingy SUV, the RAV4 and the mid-sized Camry. During Super Bowl ads, Ford was still hawking the gas-guzzling, but high-profit margin F150. With oil prices set to rise as the winter gets colder, Toyota’s sales will only go up and Ford’s will drop.

After watching Who Killed The Electric Car? I can only say that U.S. automakers brought this on themselves. I’d buy a plug-in hybrid SUV in a minute!

Big Three: Why haven’t you learned anything?

Yahoo News

With all the success and hype around Dreamgirls, the movie based on the play based on Motown singing group The Supremes, we should remember that Detroit’s Berry Gordy was a role model for all entrepreneurs. He turned an $800 investment into a multi-million dollar empire and changed the world’s culture in the process.

Mark Reynolds offers an insightful article about Motown and Gordy’s role in what was once America’s largest Black-owned business on Pop Matters.

…Gordy was the right person with the right vision in the right place at the right time. As a songwriter with a couple of hits to his name, he knew how the music industry functioned. Detroit auto assembly lines fed his ideas for efficient music production. There was plenty of available talent, with musicians from the vibrant club scene and a public school system with strong music and English programs.

Motown lost a lot of its soul in 1988 when Gordy left Detroit in the middle of the night and moved the company to Los Angeles. A lot of the label’s magic sprang from the Motor City, and it never duplicated its early successes once it moved to La La Land.

Though the Motown model was never duplicated as successfully here or anywhere, the city’s musicians went on to influence funk, techno and hip hop. Detroit’s small businesses have had an impact on fashion, science and industry. Much of the inspiration for these businesses is owed to Gordy’s example.

Pop Matters

Last week, DJ Drama was arrested in Atlanta for selling mixtapes. It seems the Recording Industry Association of America is taking this mixtape stuff real serious. DJ Drama was charged with some RICO-type racketeering, felony stuff…

RIAA is cracking down. The recording industry isn’t taking this petty bullshit thievery anymore–file sharing, downloading, mixtapes….all that.

Kids, don’t try this at home.

NYTIMES

Mike Wilkinson’s Detroit News article on the exodus of students from Detroit Public Schools paints a glass-half-full portrait of the city’s failed school system. Wilkinson notes that parents are taking advantage of “school choice,” and are sending their children to charter schools in Detroit and public schools in the suburbs.

What Wilkinson doesn’t discuss is the tragedy that results from the miseducation of Detroit’s students. The hardships that families must endure by transporting their children across town or to the suburbs are often too difficult to bear in the nation’s second poorest big city. Many students who can’t find a way to a new school in a region without quality public transportation simply drop out.

Diane Bukowski’s article in the Michigan Citizen tells the grimmer side of the same subject. Diane analyzes the losses that Detroit families endure, not the gains of surburban school districts.

At Chadsey High School, one of the schools again targeted after being saved from the 2005 round of closures when students walked out in protest, students reacted with dismay and anger.

“My whole thing, if they close Chadsey, I know half of the students are going to drop out,” said Satin Johnson, 14. “Some of them get a chance here. Where will the students from Munger Middle School [next door to Chadsey] go if they close Chadsey? Those are our brothers, sisters, cousins and friends.” (more…)

Even though Michigan suffers a $1 billion budget deficit and a potential $2 billion revenue loss from the elimination of the single business tax, the state is going to pay $300 million to Ford Motor Company to help the struggling automaker upgrade aging equipment in six Michigan plants.

Where will the money come from? Does this mean Ford will keep more of the workers it previously planned to lay off or even better, will the automaker create new jobs??? Uh, no.

Half of the $300m will come from the state government, which will borrow $150m against an already-swollen budget deficit.

The other half will come in the form of property tax abatements, where the plants’ home towns will forego additional taxes that Ford would have normally had to pay on its investments.

Ford cannot guarantee that it will create any new jobs, nor offer a guarantee that it will continue to employ all of its existing workforce.

This is in contrast to similar deals where states offer car companies incentives to build car factories specifically to create new jobs.

Why is the state using money it doesn’t have to subsidize a company with poor management practices that is firing workers instead of hiring them?

The BBC

If you only watch American news one would think Iraqis were in the streets celebrating the execution of Saddam Hussein who was hanged for killing 148 Shia civilians. Detroit’s local news even trotted out photos of Iraqi children cheering.

Yet, thousands of Iraqis, Palestinians and Jordanians protested the execution of Saddam Hussein. The protests came after the Iraqi government also shut down an independent television station for “inciting secretarianism.” The US-based rights group Human Rights Watch condemned the hanging, saying history would judge his trial and execution harshly.

His eldest daughter said Hussein is a martyr.

In Hussein’s hometown he was mourned:

Men, women and children sat in queues facing each other in the tents as volunteers served out the bitter black coffee customary during mourning. 

Al Jazeera English

Another NBA team fight has brought about enough news to take ESPN’s focus away from Barry Bonds and T.O. Saturday night the New York Knicks and the Denver Nuggets scuffled in a good old fashioned throw down. The fight was said to be started by the unsportsmanlike conduct of the Nuggets who continued to run away with a 20 point lead late in the 4th quarter and embarassed the hometown Knicks. In the middle of the fight was Detroit’s favorite son Isiah Thomas who coaches the Knicks, and told or warned (however you’d like to judge it) Nuggets players not to go back into the post.

Isiah Thomas has a storied history for being slandered at any time possible by the sports media as a whole for his unfavorable role in the 89 and 90 Piston Championships. The Pistons played a very physical style of basketball and were painted as thugs lead by southside Chicago’s own Isiah Thomas. In the era of Magic, Bird, Jordan, and Barkley the shortest guy that they all resented inside pulled out some of the BIGGEST GAMES in NBA history.

The NBA and players have taken firm stances against Isiah and here are some I’ll always remember. (more…)

Detroit Public School Superintendent William Coleman sent an email missive listing his “accomplishments” at DPS. This email came after news that Coleman would probably NOT keep his job as superintendent. The DPS school board has been conducting a search for a new CEO and Coleman’s name was not on the short list.

So Coleman, in some desperate mental-place, sent an email with no less than 65 bullet points on why he has done a good job. SIXTY FIVE!?!?! Couldn’t that time have been spent on the kids?

He also made dubious assertions such as: “Settled the 2005-2006 teacher’s contract while obtaining $22 million in concessions and a $15 million loan from DFT.” (Was this before or after the Governor, Mayor and other community folk stepped in?)
Anyway, it seems like begging works cause the school board is reconsidering what was considered by many…a very good decision.

Coleman and his 65+ justifications.

Detroit has been working this “renaissance”-thing since the 1970’s. According to the Detroit News, Detroit Renaissance has named Bill Ford, Jr. of Ford Motor Company the region’s most recently appointed economic savior.

Oh boy, are we in trouble now. Detroit needs reinvention not renaissance. 

During the 1970’s, the Ford’s also spearheaded the ill-fated Renaissance Center project which was supposed to be a ‘city within a city’ and a  response to white flight. The building languished in the 80’s and was taken on by General Motors in the 90’s…so much for a track record or urban renewal.

If I had hope for Detroit (which I do)…it does not rest in naming Bill Ford, Jr head of Detroit Renaissance. He can’t even get the Lions on track.

Why does Detroit keep asking the same people–many of whom are currently case studies in what NOT to do in business–how to revitalize the region?

I will bet anything that regional revitalizing won’t come from Bill Ford or Ford Motor company. They had a day…and it is past.

When I look at the city (AND feel hopeful) I notice the young entrepreneurs who fight everyday against Detroit’s deadly coporate mentality–the restraunteurs, retail outlets and other small enterprises fighting archaic city beaurcracy and an oppressive tax structure. Not the Bill Ford’s of the world or those weilding this nostaligic-Renaissance crap.

Bill Ford, Jr.  should focus on his cars and the family football team.

 “Road to Renaissance”  Oh, please.

As if there weren’t enough reports of police brutality, and excessive force in America over the last few months, the tragic murder of 16 year-old honor student Brandon Martell Moore has slipped under the national radar.

The unarmed Moore was killed the day after Thanksgiving by a Detroit police officer who shot him in the back as he ran. The cop also shot Moore’s 14 year-old friend Jonathan Stanley in the hand. (more…)

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in October 1966 - 40 years ago - largely in response to police brutality, oppression and poverty in urban communities.

The battle for civil rights and civil liberties was at a turning point. American soldiers were fighting an unpopular war of aggression against people of color in a far away land. The nation’s Texas-bred president was under great pressure from citizens to end the war and from business leaders to keep the war on track. Government agencies were cracking down on dissent by spying on anti-war protestors and other American citizens.

But Huey P. Newton isn’t around anymore, and any sense of deja vu that you have is misplaced. Comparing Iraq to Vietnam is like equating a quagmire in the middle of the desert to a swamp in the heart of the jungle.

This is the message of police advocates like Darrell Ross and David Klinger, who claim that despite the recent rash of violent police incidents that have been reported in the media (and showing up on YouTube), police brutality and the use of excessive force are much better than they used to be. (more…)

St. Louis, the World Series Champs, also hold another title — this one, a little less esteemed.

St. Louis is now the most dangerous city in America!

But Detroit fans, don’t get too mad. We aren’t far behind. Second place has become commonplace for our city.

Detroit followed by Flint, MI are the next two worst cities to live in.

This story sounds like something out of a new-aged Agatha Christie novel or a hip hop version of the game Clue.

On Oct. 17, rapper Fabolous was shot in the thigh in the parking lot of Diddy’s New York restaraunt, Justin’s. But while he was in stable condition in the hospitial he was also technically under arrest for weapons possession.

Now information has surfaced that Boston Celtics basketball player Sebastian Telfair may be connected.

According to police reports, Telfair’s $50,000 chain (probably filled with blood diamonds:) was snatched from his neck. After the robbery he supposedly made a cell phone call when he saw Fabolous had finished his food, thinking his entourage must have had something to do with the robbery.

Now Fabolous has hired a private investigator to iron out all the details and find his shooter.

It was the rapper with the revolver in the billiard room!

In the latest bit of bad political advertising, a blonde woman with bare shoulders tells Tenessee’s Democractic Senate candidate, who also happens to be an African American male, to ‘call her…’

Some say the ad panders to the lowest common denominator: Deep rooted fears about sex between Black men and white women.

Freud again? First, Oedipus complex in Michigan…now penis envy in Tennessee.

More psychological terrorism from the Republican marketing mind.