Bailout Watch 306: Detroit News Plays the Race Card
Previously, on “We Can Confabulate the Managerial Incompetence Behind Motown’s Meltdown and Federal Cash Grab by Raising Issues About Race, Regionality, Class and (it’s coming) Religion,” we saw how the Detroit News encouraged hometown supporters to boycott the South (provided, presumably, those supporters aren’t in the South). I was laboring under the impression that we’d could tick the race thing of the list as well, as African American automotive carmudgeon Warren Brown had previously postulated that Detroit deserved the bailout bucks by dint of its contribution to the creation of America’s black middle class. But I guess The DetN couldn’t resist adding fuel to the pyre. “Auto woes rock black work force” makes the case that Detroit’s tough times are tougher on blacks than white folks. And here’s proof:
“Between 1979 and 2007, blacks lost more than 120,000 auto jobs, Schmitt estimates. The losses hit the African-American community more than whites or Latinos because the share of black workers in the auto industry — 14.2 percent — is much higher than their share of the total labor force — 11 percent.”
Does suffering more percentage wise man that black workers are suffering more? The DetN knows a hole in their logic when they make one–and rush to fill it with a completely unbiased source. Failing that, they trot out union-derived stats.
“According to separate study by the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor Washington think tank, auto job losses between 2000 and 2004 helped pull down median weekly wages of all black workers by 5 percent, to $523.”
Is that as compared to white workers? Anyone? Never mind; let’s connect the dots, shall we?
“Those jobs, and wages, will continue to shrink.
“The $17.4 billion federal bailout of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC requires the automakers to seek concessions from the United Auto Workers, with a target of wage parity with nonunion workers at U.S factories run by foreign automakers.”
There’s more, on the human interest level. But I guess you’ve got the picture by now. Bottom line: people who deny Detroit bailout bucks are racists, even if not intentionally. Nice.
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You have to live in SE Michigan, or Detroit for that matter, to really grasp and understand this type of mentality. It's a very complicated concept displayed in a very complicated metropolitan region. It would take more thab 2000 words to explain it better and I don't have the time to do that now.
re psarhjinian : its not that they r poor. i agree with ZoomZoom. you have to go out there and make something of yoru self. iam black, and ive seen in my family and with many other black people live off of the system, commiting fraud while they r doing it. getting over on the government. this is why i think that people need to get out there and make somethin of themselves on their own. to me there is no poverty problem. this isnt the civil rights era where a black man cant go out and do somethin with himself. the problem is the black man has become lazy. that is why it is up to us to correct our own problmes that we have mad for ourselves.