close one thirty am here in moscow you're watching r t with me kevin owen and this is our news review of the week and top job intrigue endive president medvedev and prime minister putin on saturday revealed that they could swap jobs off the twenty presidential election pledging that the tomtom will continue to work for russia. emotions run high too as palestinians bid for statehood at the u.n. last week with standing ovations in new york but clashes at the border in the west bank. the border the story about a finnish priest speaking out against a chechen terrorist website and now finds himself defrocked in disgrace with his plays ignored by the mainstream media. and great the false inevitable and the top

officials know it leaks reports reveal the recession could go even deeper the first few. next what used to be a home to the booming car industry now turned into a dusty ghost town revealed in r.t. special report. trees down the freeway system a tricky construction not only did we have nine mile backup in his apartment we're about to see some improvement on eight miles on the detroit self-heal border as crews are close to wrapping up a ridge project the way i remember there are motors going bankrupt i remember the feeling not being surprised at all.

for us it was you know a day like any other day. going to work. it was in the day like shocking news it was more like the inevitable death of a very old member of the family but i felt like ok now. we can move on to what it will be really has reached a deal is what it was really is it's of jeeves's sabio needs to gain it it's it's almost bigger than life it is too rock of gibraltar it can't go bankrupt. it was almost like hearing that. you're a child in your period that depend upon for your existence is on life support. there's a chance of snow showers friday's high holding to about thirty degrees thirty

fourth detroit's current. it was kind of a sad day. we were just all disbelief in all that it actually happened. when you have when you're supposed to have some of the smartest guys in charge of things and they say bankruptcy is the way to go i guess that you know you have is the hope that they know what they're talking about that you have emerged from that become a better company. they're the type of company that's always said or will just make of the people want. but obviously that's not what they were doing. the bankruptcy of g.m. was kind of you know it it's not really a popular thing to say around detroit but. i was actually pretty excited because i thought for once. maybe this big company had a chance to change. general motors. to you. since two

thousand. still saying to assist you. this was this is like. where i played i remember you know playing with my old trucks and this and this for trailing i remember seeing you know in the afternoon the schoolkids coming and going and then at a different time in the afternoon watching the factory workers walk to work many people just walked out here in america now everybody drives people drive to the end

of their driveway to pick up their mail. and then there's a different kind of a community. is a great neighborhood really. most of the people who lived here worked for general motors and buick factories just just a few bar block their way so it was a working class neighborhood it was a poor neighborhood. most of the people who work in the autumn of the factories did really well. nobody realized how fragile that economy was because it was always there general motors was actually born here in flint grew up here the people people work in the factories especially in after the one nine hundred forty s. and a very good wages. more than a college graduate would make.

you look at. this house like thousands of others. was abandoned and when people leave they don't take their houses with them and they also don't pay taxes anymore on the property and so my office. is responsible for tax collection and when people abandon their property and stop paying taxes we take that to court and we get a judgment and take ownership of the property so this house now is owned by the land bank we get those properties and we try to make a decision about what to do with them with with all these thousands of abandoned houses. that brings back a lot of memories and that heard that bell ring. really.

funny because there are the sounds that i remember. i remember the church bell ringing and then i remember the factory whistle going you know the factory whistle saying it's time for the shift to star course you don't hear that anymore than that . and think. hey i you know what i'm doing aright. yeah i think so you know this house i lived in when i was a little boy oh yeah yeah yeah well welcome back oh yeah exactly. yeah. i knew that. this was a city of about one hundred ninety thousand people and we had eighty thousand

people working for general motors so the odds are if you had a job in flint it was a job working for general motors for a job that depended on general motors only draining. we're.

now i mean the problem we have is that the legacy of general motors what i'm left with i deal with empty houses where g.m. workers used to live with empty buildings where general motors used to have factories with wide open space that used to be a. factory and it's now empty you know piece of abandoned property that we now on there's an office building that was once a general motors office building that but my land bank now on so in many ways were left i'm left dealing with the cleanup of this mass.

well these are all by i i own all they're all sherry's. each one has a different role i guess that our lives that you see here we have a dump truck that we use in our business to look for different things trees and stone and mulch and things or here we have the box man which if we want to move things around get what you put things inside plus we hook the bud truck which is the black truck up over there to go to the mud bogs and we haul at the black truck here to the trailer we move our equipment around that the skids here that sets over there and they ask evader the one next to the black truck over there is the white blazer and what were you with that as you go to the sand dunes the plaintiffs say and one for the mud one for the save. like truck here is for got a flaw in it from it's water out here in a farm keep the roads open and stuff i read when i drive to work in the wintertime

which also has a plow on it white when i drive in the summertime it gets better gas mileage has six owner in it and this is my wife's car. general motors have been number one forever they're the ones to beat forever and you want to talk about a sad day sad days when toyota announced that they your sales are more than what g.m. is you know that's probably a dated fix will be more than the bankruptcy and. i'm

the president of u.a.w. local six fifty two which stands for the united auto workers union and what i do is i'm in charge of the ministration of the hall of our membership and deal with any problems and when we come before the membership. my theory i am good i guess we're in the business of some catholics all right i think they got them in stock years ago you didn't have to worry about market share because you know it was just a given that people bought because that's what their dad drove or you know you this is what you buy and then slowly you know by not paying attention to use other things on the market and you don't have the loyalties that used to have you know the people just buying because that's what you bought you know somehow i get to be uncool to drive a domestic vehicle. i

try to be a negative person and try to look at what we need to do right i think there put some people in place where they're going to write some wrongs and i think they're going to be all straight up maybe fly right i mean i you know i think they owe it to the people they all that's on selves to get a company to see that disappear from the landscape of the of the nation. g.m. donated this building to c.c.'s to use. to kind of turn into this. at the center of design in detroit with the college that i attend. just down the hall is the clay studio the computer labs everything is kind of right in these halls where so many infamous and. iconic designs

were presented right in this very room. i guess what makes me different from many of my other colleagues and students is that i focus mainly on sustainable transportation and solutions for. the environmental problems that we have today. coming from car design in a more sustainable way and looking for solutions to the problems it's just it's just crazy that now we're in the space where so many those problems were helped to create. i think general motors at one time represented kind of the pinnacle of the industrial era. how company could become so dominant in a market just through sheer brute force. general motors simply became too large

for their own good it's so many brands that they couldn't even keep up with and they just basically became a dinosaur i guess it's just almost fitting that the solutions are going to come from the same place the generator the problems and hopefully you know myself and the people at the school can do our best to find those solutions. to. the fisher body points where pretty much all cars were built from g.m. before they had their own design all the design work and all the body work was done by fisher. to me it just represents the glory days of detroit and it's just so strange to see to see this site and. and just environment around it is just so peculiar.

detroit used to be a very diverse city people lived downtown people walked people took the tram in a sense it was one of the most european cities and it's designed densely populated easy to get about and it had a very very good public transportation system grand central regress station. was simply the hub of that the epicenter of of the trains and the trams that ran all around the city. so when the automobile. basically came

to be general motors saw. the troll is there and the public transportation as cover titian for their new product and in order to eliminate it basically pile up that industry and saw to that it was not going to be around so the people in detroit were basically forced into the automobile. general motors people the you know the situation tell us the next round of layoffs to come on this month g.m. said it would change it wasn't even seventy three thousand positions just like he says deeds. the early sixty's six two three four five six those are

what i call the innocent years you know people begin to make good money things began to turn around here for african-americans and we as kids began to experience the better life than our parents did. you had people migrating up here from the south and with very little education to get hired in right away at the plant you know people were coming up here by the bus loads you know and it really built the middle class in southeast michigan so now that you see that lifeline is not gone but it has

changed drastically i want to be successful spirit i want to be successful now actually i want to be successful financially i want to be successful mentally because i was what good is what helps me to help people in making wise decisions on stewardship i have a discipline in finances hospice ific leave the area of accounting. that. god has for me here for such a time as this it is no coincidence that really greece temple has a pastor who happens to be an accountant.

we're financial kind of the financial times where we have got to put some principles in place a beer sales to care. because we. know where the economy regardless of what economy. cannot see your us ok. and this is what i'm trying to be is not is about three weeks you know me i'm looking for a partner carving out a place five hundred not i'm not a four years is that i will come to you for help with live with my first month's rent and i have benefits possible right gay magic and a car but they know in the vision. in the grocery. motivating people in this day in time is more difficult than it was in my father's pastorate when people were laid off right during those decades of you

knew how when you would be returning to work so my father the days of motivating was i think a little easier in my day they come to me as a bishop when i want to do and i can't say well in six months planes will be better i don't know so we have to exercise a greater faith in god we were very. well we thank you for this day and for this time of season we salute you brought together in loving unity we prayed as we move toward the nuptials.

communities all across this country don't know it but they're one decision away from being the next flint michigan. i think the cities in america that are willing to rebuild themselves and not simply pretend that we are the city that we used to be ironically are the cities that are going to be best positioned for growth in the future. now it's a city that is built for twice the number of people that we actually have so we think the kind of successful city that flint can be is going is going to require

that it become cleaner smaller i'm more sustainable but it also not every you know ever again. become dependent on one company. we've got thousands of abandoned houses we've got more houses than we have people so rather than simply selling those properties off the speculators that's the whole idea is that we get the property into the hands on land bank turn to turn to the neighborhood you know where is work comes in. phase one was we had gardens this spring i'm going to go more to southern food because i went to the farmers market this year and the first day the crowd of the black eyed peas purple holes and they sold out a medium and they really i did not have and so i know that we have young children i had ten children here teens to fourteen twenty one she some how to grow crops how

to become a business person and how to understand how girls and maybe interested in agriculture and to me it's the social connections that the neighborhood you come to try to you yeah you build a community around it really i mean i know just from seeing the neighbors come out when we've been out here a lot of times neighbors would come on talk when you got this going to center for them every. issue is that so much of you're going to need a lot of people here you are looking at is it time to rethink capitalism is we know it today should the world still be line markets generate wealth when the rich only get richer and the.

sp's to just say. it's to. keep up the spam. was. wealthy british style. past the time to cut back on. the market fine now for them to. find out what's really happening to the global

economy with mike's cancer for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines soon into cars a report on our feet. back to a. if

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