By Jaspal Singh
News reports have stated that there are wild dogs in Detroit that roam the streets and have at occasions attacked small children for food. It is said that the owners of the dogs abandoned them when they left the city and now these dogs roam among more than 40,000 abandoned properties, looking for food. Over the years they have bred and multiplied. Since city has cut back in all services, there are no dog wardens to catch stray dogs to take them to dog shelters.
Earlier, it was reported that the city of Detroit has disconnected water supplies to thousands of people who have not been able to pay their water bills. The city has argued that it cannot provide water to those people and that water is not a right.
My memories of Detroit are of a vibrant city, bubbling with life. I have not been there for more than 40 years. Last time when I visited Detroit, it was considered a model city. It had a population of close to 2 million people. One of my friends gave me tour of the city. His father was a member of city council. I remember going to the city hall and visiting many exciting places. Ford, Chrysler and General Motors employed hundreds of thousands of people earning a good wage. Factories worked three shifts and there was plenty of over time. Many allied and ancillary industries were also booming. It was a prosperous city.
I remember going down the river on a yacht, belonging to a friend who pointed towards the various mansions on both sides of the river. The president of the auto workers union also lived in the same neighborhood where the president of Ford company lived. Motown sounds reverberated throughout the country. It was said what is good for GM is good for America.
But over the last four decades or so, Detroit has become a ghost town and looks like a war zone. It is reported that 1.3 million people have left the city reducing it to a city of unemployment, want and misery. Some areas of the city do not even have a grocery store. The residents have to go for 20 miles or so to buy food.
What happened to Detroit? In order to maximize their profits, the big three auto manufacturers abandoned it. They moved their units elsewhere to different parts of the world where they could pay workers one tenth of the wages. They moved to Mexico, China, Brazil and other places. Nobody in the workers’ unions, city government or the state and federal government opposed this move. As the old adage says, what cannot be produced cannot be distributed, therefore Detroit has been reduced to this sorry state of affairs where dogs roam and people cannot pay for water.
The citizens of Detroit, the workers should have asked the big three auto workers to pay back all the subsidies that the city, state and federal government had given them amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars over the years and taken control of factories to keep them there. But the trade union leaders as well as the political leaders compromised with the big three. They did not look after the interest of the people or the city. The owners of the big three moved on to the greener pastures where they could pay cheap wages and make tons of profits and of course not pay taxes that will pay for public services.
On the one hand, they abandoned Detroit, on the other, they called for cut back of services and taxes. Result is the ghost town of Detroit.
Of course, Detroit is just one example of this irrational system that has been imposed on the people, in which a handful minority of financial oligarchy decides what is best for it, that is maximum profits, has to be the law, no matter what misery it inflicts on rest of the society.
Not only that, it robs the public treasury of trillions of dollars to pay for its bad decisions as was done in the crisis of 2008. Detroit, Baltimore, Camden and hundreds of other cities in the US are a tribute to this human consuming system of relations and points towards necessity of renovation and renewal.