country house holiday is the pool. halls to remember the groom me to choose to feel the most acutely to the world pull the ribbons for itself. i welcome back you're with us you live from moscow we're highlighting the week's main headlines in the weekly here top job intrigue comes to an end president medvedev and prime minister putin could swap jobs after the two thousand and twelve presidential election pledging their time down will continue to work for russia. and. emotions are running high as palestinians bid for statehood on the u.n. standing ovations in new york but clashes of the border in the west bank. a finnish priest speaking out against a chechen terrorist website finds himself defrocked and just graced with his plight

being ignored by the mainstream media. i mean greek default is inevitable and the top officials know all about it leaks reports reveal the recession could go even deeper than that first. time my colleague kevin owen is here in half an hour's time but for now next it's motor city leaving a ghost town in its dust a special report on the death of america's car building harsh. but. please. see able to walk like. this this person will be the chairman of the genesee county land bank and will have to be responsible for its operations as well so not just understanding the fighting outside of the work but also understanding communities and how neighborhoods are stable how do. i basically have three choices one was six and 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 and spent a lot of time talking to the to the people in the white house and 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. don't you know you're like offending them you know i know you're under your do. not to scare you but there is a reality that foreclosure could occur and i would expect the share because we're pretty certain we've got things nailed out but with a new incoming treasurer the treasurer sets the house right and in my new work

starting the beginning of next year i'll be the president of a think tank of a policy center. to be a national organization to support the same kind of policies that i've developed here in michigan and particularly in flint with mr kildee then always being so such a humanitarian very very socially. i would hope the person in the crowd in his footsteps would have similar views sometimes it comes right down to there we always save money for property taxes and you know it's i just have to. hang on to my faith and you know i'm a christian so i mean i mean i think if we were them for that or we're going to got through.

several. february and. then we most of those. transitions. we have seen just because. of what is known as. the big three. four. and christ. we have celebrated right days and endured dark hours over approximately one hundred years of automobile industry. 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. i ask you to ponder the history of our manufacturing. first let's understand it is because this is of a man doesn't want. it he should not. it is gone who are being made into work by the sweat. and it is god he demands that a man should be the head of his home in leadership and example and in provision. right. management that's right. all these old police crowd. pleasers about. that very narrow ok i'm ok you're ok look

me in eyes i'm a day care you. know not where i've where are we going to go we gotta let it go we got to let it go baby does combat. make me laugh. like oh my mommy your granny or the government you know they lose credibility here. i've never seen these times before detroit. and southeast michigan of michigan as a whole which was once probably in the top five. of making a person financially independent now it's almost gone full circle and now it is you know ranking in the top five the porous and the union.

it's. we're fortunate because they were built to finance only as english the laws. 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 one hundred thousand in g.m. right now that are permanent people. thirty thousand people that's how many may have actually jobs the last. were there were they able to take a week of the schedule too many cars. they don't need really need a car so it's a have

a layoff weeks or years you know you don't shut the plant down. on down the homeowner and that's why you know bailout money g.m. 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 is a reasonable chance that any loans that the government would make would be paid back to the taxpayers and that they should that is joe we we all look at it is a bailout you know you're looking at well why should the taxpayers pay that well here here's a perspective we're all taxpayers you guys are paying taxes right. now they're saying well you guys make good money you know happens when you make good money you pay more taxes he's going 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 there's a lot of things attached to us than what it will affect that for every person

automotive anymore right because these people come into town every day so they're frequent stores gas stations you pick things up you know most everybody is here fascinated factory i think is ninety nine people the night of the town and right people want to slam a g.m. and their hourly wage is what they what people are work right that the town suffer because we don't this is for go fact if you don't have the my you are on the tops business right they offer so it affects everybody i have friends or carpenters brokers termers electricians in their little on the suffering because you're not we're not we're not building today we're not people are not spending money today because they own experience 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 when for size its commitment to smaller more fuel efficient cars you know i've seen them before they went bankrupt or 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. and they might say one thing to you in the beginning you know they'll say ok do your research come 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 war

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 and say and 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 and became so far ahead of the american counter titian that the only 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 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 g.m. you know a company that's rising from this ashes of of bankruptcy and basically makes g.m. irrelevant. soz jam like hiring a what if it is the i don't know. and accept. it bet you want to go over to

your idea if you're going anywhere. this put. things. there's really no jobs being offered in the automotive design world so it's really hard to say like ok general motors comes in 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 a position. they did talk about general motors being behind the times to. talk about flex fuel they put all kinds of money in that research you talked about clean energy you talked about. battery people don't want to

you know it's easy when gas was a four fifty a gallon they say well you guys build the gas guzzlers 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 hope down to one of these small cars in that trailer because everything always the car. today s.u.v. and the gas mileage is so much what you want to be able to put half the soccer team in it and put your wife and not have to worry about it you know because you know you've bought the best cook county the piebald or on the farm or yeah i hope they come back they're back here on the hill but i think they're both goals or whatever but if they come up here how

much you want is their home it turns out and how the news media spins and you know i'm all yours and while they make too much money well how do you know we don't do you you know i mean i can fix help ten or fifteen different occupations and make twice as much money as we make an hour that are doing a lot of the word on these people who are physically working and doing things will look here this is something you're never going to see it's all right dear. and you know you don't want to see this they're called highballs. this is exciting . for. general motors as if

it's not relation to you it might be your neighbor somebody you knew it was 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 when he got out high school he always wanted to follow in the footsteps of working at general motors and and zero eight he actually got hired as a entry level. but. he was laid off one 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 as a family. i mean it's tough all they gather

they got under more for 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 her tough but what i've noticed is gas prices have come down and that's pretty much fell right off. the road for the skips which we're voters from. my lifestyle is going to be on the wage that i'm able to meet the things that i'm able to do and you know eventually i'd like to have a family and be able to make is 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. yes it's whatever grew up and that's how i've

grown up that's the majority of my families were to become more. like it's men the bloods and the family you know it's a it's a living. the . last sat. fat i think the detroit will rebound i think it will rise again on detroit is a recap of the 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 a very good to me and i feel odd the obligation to be committed to help detroit to get back to where it needs to be. in the outing of detroit. and think this. is what it would cause. her. and be merry.

it's a city that has so much character and so much potential. that you know i really felt like ok you know the city has to change and on four years this is going to be great but the longer i've been 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 it our 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 brock and obama and i somehow sort of. actually planned to demolish an american city so this one says every day the obama administration gets scarier and scarier first they take over the financial institutions then private industries like. 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 their 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 we're 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 and the difficulty is that in many cases flint detroit both in prime examples we've had one period of growth followed by one period of decline and we can see far enough to realize that that's not the birth life and death of a city but it's just the cycle. i think for a long time this notion in merika 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 having your own house with your yard in your own garage in the region of 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 and you can do better if we want to be considered the best and we think it's going to take a major shift in our mindset. soup to.

be a good day going to be of the week. to . to. everything to. to

.

feel. the litmus tests . to. see.