up next our report on the gradual death of a place that was once the heart of the u.s. auto industry a report on detroit coming up. but . what. this person will be the chairman of the genesee county land bank and we'll have to be responsible for its operations as well so not just understanding the finance side of the work but also understanding communities and how neighborhoods are stable how do. i basically had three choices one was to continue what i'm doing now to stay in the political world and be a local policymaker and then maybe you know move on to some other office the other choice was to go work for the new obama administration and i was very interested in that and spent a lot of time talking to the to the people in the white house in you know was

almost ready to make that move but i really felt like this this third option of running my own policy center was a better fit for me. must have known your mother you're like of the middle name you know i don't you're earning your living you're do you going not to scare you i am but there is a reality that foreclosure could occur and i would expect to share because we're pretty certain we've got things nailed out but with a new incoming treasurer the treasurer sets the power right in my new work starting at the beginning of next year i'll be the president of a think tank of a policy center. to be a national organisation to support the same kind of policies that i've developed here in michigan and particularly in flint with mr kildee they and i always being so such

a humanitarian very very socially conscious i would hope the person in the crowd in his footsteps would have similar views sometimes it comes right down to either we eat or we save money for property taxes and you know it's i just have to. hang on to my faith but you know i'm a christian so i hang on to my faith of the world and for that i would have got through. security. in february and. then we most of those forty. transitions families. in the us. we have seen the rise in just the decline. of what is known

as the big three. general motors ford and chrysler. we have celebrated great days and endured dark hours over approximately one hundred years of all the mobility history. however we have never seen as midnight and now. as we faced see this coming. as our national lawmakers on capitol hill contemplate whether or not they will extend much needed financial assistance to these crucial american automobile manufacturers. but those of you who think that this is not a spiritualist. as you to ponder the history. of our manufacturing. first let's understand that it is god this is

a man doesn't work. then he should not eat. it is gone who ordain men to work by the sweat. and it is gone he demands that a man should be the head of his home. in leadership in example and in provision. acts like. all these old police value. plays bought by a very narrow ok i'm going to take your route. let me my mama take care your family our house where i live where are we going to go to god let me go we got plenty of gold baby does combat. make me happy. and i'm like no man your family or the family you know they know you're going to get out here

actually. i've never seen these times before detroit. and southeast michigan of michigan as a whole which was once viewed probably in the top five. of making a person financially independent now you know it's almost gone full circle and now it is you know ranking in the top five of the us in the union. we're fortunate because they built two new plants in lansing but there's still the

one. you know like when i hired in the one nine hundred seventy eight we had fourteen thousand members at local six fifty two right now we've got under a thousand in g.m. right now that are permanent people. thirteen thousand people that's how many may have actually jobs been lost. we're nor there were two able to go a week on the schedule too many cars. and they don't really need cars so and so there have been a layoff weeks or years ago you all shut the plant down we're. not going. to am i don't think the government should put any more money there until general motors shows that they can be

a viable company for the long term and that there's a reasonable chance that any loans that the government would make would be paid back to the taxpayers and they used you know we we all look at it is a bailout you know you're looking at well why should the taxpayers pay that while here here's a perspective we're all taxpayers you guys are paying taxes right now now they're saying while you guys make good money you know what happens when you make good money you pay more taxes it's better to pay more taxes but if you're making good money these are middle class people attach rates. main street there are spending the money to make the world go round and there's a lot of things attached to it yes then the trickle effect that every smashes in automotive anymore right because you know these people come into town every day so they're frequent stores gas stations you pick things up. here attached manufacturing i think it was ninety nine people but united somewhere else belltown and right people want to slam the g.m. in their hourly wages what they what people are work right that the town suffer

because we don't as trickle effect if you don't have the money on her on the tops business right they they offer so it affects everybody i have friends or carpenter brokers termers electrician the nurse they're the one that suffer and because you're not we're not we're not building today we're not people we're not spending money today because they honestly it's why it suffer. as it emerges from bankruptcy the once mighty general motors corporation could become the smaller general motors company half its brands are being sold off or phased out leaving only chevy buick g.m.c. and cadillac and the new g.m. reportedly is considering changing its logo background from blue to green to emphasize its commitment to smaller more fuel efficient cars. i've seen them before they went bankrupt and i've seen them after and honestly i don't see any change.

i see a lot of marketing. and i see a lot of hype but i don't really see a whole lot of effort. in the twenty first century making a car that gets twenty mpg just isn't acceptable i've worked on projects with g.m. and they might say one thing to you in the beginning you know they'll say ok do your research up with an idea the bottom line is there i'm going to listen to it they don't consider ideas unless there's some hot sketch on the wall and i think that's just completely backwards of how a car company should operate they were so focused on just making one type of pickup truck changing the headlights you know for them changing the grille was a major evolution. for decades while the americans had their head in the sand the rest of the world was being

alert i guess what what's kept toyota honda and you know all these japanese companies. so far ahead of the u.s. is just their incredible quality became so far ahead of the american competition that when these vehicles came into the u.s. it was like wow look at this car it's reliable it's durable and you know it uses half the gas of the truck that i'm using now. and if you look at the american truck. you know for decades they're using the same basic chassis that was developed you know back in the sixty's or seventy's.

i look at g.m. and i see kind of the past. and that's what's hard for me about. thinking about working for something like that it's like why would i want to go into the past and for me i would want to work for the next year you know a company that's rising from this ashes of of bankruptcy and basically makes g.m. irrelevant. so it's g.m. like hiring anyone after this stuff i don't know. and accept. that you want to go over there would i be happy going anywhere. at this point yeah. there's really no jobs being offered in the automotive design world so it's really hard to say like ok general motors comes to you today and offers you a job and you take it but for me i wouldn't i don't think i could morally

or ethically take that position. they did talk about general motors being behind the times that he talked about flex fuel they put all kinds of money in that research here talking about clean energy. battery people don't want to you know it's easy when gas goes a four fifty a gallon they say well you guys build the gas goes there's no we build what people want people want trucks they want s.u.v.s for the different things or don't i'm not

going to go we'll go out there and how can one of these small cars in that trailer because everything always the car. it's a big s.u.v. and the gas mileage is so much but you want to be able to put half the soccer team in it and put your wife in it and not have to worry about it you know because you know you've bought the best county the piebald or on the farm or. yeah i hope they come back they are back here on the hill but i think they're both goals or whatever but if the they come up here how much you want is they have one intends on and the news media spins it in oh i'm all yours and while they make too much money or how do you know we hold you you know we do i mean i could pick out ten or fifteen different patients and make twice as much money as we make an hour

that are doing a lot of the we're doing these people are physically working and doing things well look here this is something you're never going to see it's a white year you know you don't want to see this they're called piebald. this is exciting. for. general motors as if it's not relation to you it might be your neighbor or somebody you knew so it's kind of a family run business you know myself i'm third generation my father was working there and you have a lot of two three and four generation families that are there my son's name was

rollin green but he had a high school he always wanted to follow in the footsteps of working at general motors and zero eight he actually got hired as a entry level. since. he was laid off when the crunch started hit he was one of the first ones to go. i'm already in the sense that he might have to leave the state to get work and that's something we've never had to face is a family. i mean it's tough all they gather they got under more gas prices went up about building gas guzzlers so everybody switched to you know going green you know you got to go green something energy efficient fuel efficient and so then at that point when i got laid off i started to look into the windmill industry for alternative energy because that started to take are tough but what i've noticed is gas prices have come down and that's pretty much

fell right off. for these gifts which we see from. my lifestyle is going to be on the wage that i'm able to make the things that i'm able to do and you know of actually i'd like to have a family and be able some acres to college and things like that hard to tell where we're going to end up and what's going to be a decent career. i would like to say that i'd be working for general motors and that's where i would like to work. it's it's whatever grew up my that's how i've grown up that's the majority of my family's work to done of course. it's been the blood it's in the family you know it's it's a living. i

i love. i think the detroit will rebound i think it will rise again ah detroit is who is a very zillion people haha people came here with great expectations i believe that many people can look back over their lives and and really honestly say you know detroit was very good to me and i feel abhi obligation to be committed to help detroit to get back to where it needs to be. in the outing of detroit now. that enjoy.

this. long way before. this. her her. and . it's a city that has so much character and so much potential. that you know i really felt like ok you know this city it has to change you know in four years the city's going to be great but you know the longer then here and as what was the

auto industry has now collapsed it's really only gotten worse. and you have look. since we started the land bank since i started this whole approach i've had people who like it and people who don't like us or reaction that i felt that i've heard more recently is a reaction to this idea of shrinking the city of intentionally trying to redesign the city to make it

a smaller and i think better place this is where. a lot of criticism was because they think that barack obama and i somehow sort of hatched a plan to demolish american cities so this one says every day the obama administration gets scarier and scarier first they take over the financial institutions then private industries like g.m. now big brother is coming to bulldoze your home. what i think is not a valid criticism is that we have to rebuild every neighborhood and we have to somehow recreate the flint of the past it's not going to happen it's not going to happen no matter what we do in shouldn't happen and so i reject that criticism that somehow by acknowledging that we should be smaller that that sounds like defeat.

in the u.s. we've had this. you know antiquated notion of our manifest destiny that will simply go west and get bigger in this has allowed us i think to make the mistakes of forgetting what's left behind. the notion that bigger is better is a fallacy a false promise it's not true it comes from the american west word expansion it's primarily it's this american obsession with growth and expansion in the u.s. most american cities have barely one hundred years of history in that the difficulty

is that in many cases flint detroit both being prime examples we've had one period of growth followed by one period of decline and we can't see far enough to realize that that's not the birth life and death of a city but it's the cycle. i think for a long time this notion in america that bigger was better was simply an undisputed fact for most people there was no reason to assume otherwise people didn't have. the long term vision to think that we could ever run out of space because we had so much of it people didn't have the vision to see that the smoke coming out of our tailpipes could possibly do us harm and today we're paying for that

but at the time it was simply just this deep love affair that we had with space and this whole notion of the american dream of having your own house with your yard in your own garage and you each have a car that's all great but is unnecessary. the fact that g.m. was so out of touch with the rest of the world i think that's directly connected to the fact that the united states was so out of touch with the rest of the world as a people were always wanting to be the best and in the twentieth century what we thought was the best was bigger and we were definitely the best at it in the twenty first century smarter it's going to be better if we want to be considered the best anything that's going to take a major shift in our mindset. susan

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president obama sets up a standoff at the u.n. general assembly with sovereignty seeking palestinians it sent to clash with a veto holding us despite overwhelming international support plus. valuing the drum for a new nation thousands of palestinians pour into the streets of the west bank supporting a bid for statehood at the u.n. . on hamad the palestinian fifteen of them i know where these two bananas and we find them and on the street as people celebrate if you stop me education join me in a few moments and when you will. and the eurozone teeters under its rapidly piling debts with greece trying to speed up cuts in the eye about boarding a new recession may be looming.