End of the Line for Detroit / USA - the National

[rndmprsn]

this article saddened me, but speaks the truth...

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090703/REVIEW/707029988/1008/

The American empire ends with a withdrawal. Not from Iraq or from Afghanistan, but from Detroit.

Of course, the real evacuation of the Motor City began decades ago, when Ford, General Motors and Chrysler started to move their operations out of the downtown area to harder-to-unionise rural areas and suburbs, and, finally, overseas. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Detroit could count tens of thousands of empty lots and over 15,000 abandoned homes. Stunning Beaux Arts and modernist buildings were left deserted to return to nature, their floors and roofs covered by switchgrass. They now serve as little more than ornate bird houses.

In mythological terms, however, Detroit remains the ancestral birthplace of storied American capitalism. And looking back in the years to come, the sudden disintegration of the Big Three this year will surely be seen as a blow to American power comparable Britain’s loss of India, that jewel in the imperial crown, in 1947. Forget the possession of a colony or the bomb. In the second half of the 20th century, the real marker of a world power was the ability to make a precision V8...

...Perhaps, then, we should think of the ruins of Detroit as America’s Roman Forum. Just as Rome’s triumphal arches still remind us of its bygone imperial victories in Mesopotamia, Persia and elsewhere, so Motown’s dilapidated buildings today invoke America’s fast-slipping supremacy. Among the most imposing is Henry Ford’s Highland Park factory, shuttered since the late 1950s. Dubbed the Crystal Palace for its floor-to-ceiling glass walls, it was here that Ford perfected assembly-line production, building up to 9,000 Model Ts a day – a million by 1915 – catapulting the United States light-years ahead of industrial Europe.