Detroit and Class Warfare.

I’ve already written about how I grew up in Detroit and what it was like in the fifties and sixties. I can’t really tell you much about the fifties since I was just a kid first trying to figure out what the heck was going on with this life thing. I did go to a freshly built elementary school three or four blocks from my home and my class size was around twelve or fifteen. It really was a neighborhood school. In 1963 I went to a newly built junior high school that was still within walking distance. I do remember the sixties – albeit with some foggy time toward the end of the decade, but that’s another story – and Detroit was hoppin’ and poppin’ – at least on my white ass side of town.

I grew up right in the middle of square miles of working class families and we were solidly middle class. One of my friends’ father worked in mid-management for Chrysler, and another friend’s father sold Chevys. My uncle Eddie worked forty-five years for Ford. He retired with a good pension and lived a long life. Sometime around World War II my mother worked for Fisher Body. Later she worked for the National Bank of Detroit whose biggest customer was General Motors. She once told me about having to track down a million dollars of GM money. That’s when I first learned that the rich see money differently than the rest of us.

In ’69 I worked for Ford for a couple of months in the summer. I worked at the Rouge Complex at the stamping plant. We put together all the sheet metal that went into cars, operating huge machines that shaped and cut the steel or spot welders that put pieces together. I had to join the UAW and they took forty dollars out of my first check for union dues. I was paid 3.47 an hour – that would be seventeen something today. The next year I worked at a machine shop five minutes from my home that made parts for Chrysler, the quintessential small business interface to the auto industry. It was non-union and I got 2.50 an hour – or about twelve something now. Notice that jobs were available and they paid rather decently.

My brother worked for Ford after he got out of the Navy while he went to college and law school. He worked testing electronic components. Did you ever see the movie Class Action? It stars Gene Hackman. Fred Thompson makes a cameo, kind of like he did in Hunt for Red October. He explains how a company knew about a problem but that the beancounters, the company accountants, ran the numbers and saw that it would be cheaper to settle lawsuits later then have a recall to make the cars safe. My brother worked for the unit that informed Ford of the problem that the movie references.

This is what has gone wrong with American business over my lifetime. The beancounters got control and dictate to the rest of us. The executives have the power and they wield it ruthlessly. Heartless, they care nothing for the pain they cause thousands and thousands of families. They have made millions and millions off the blood, sweat, and tears of the workers, the ones that actually do the work of designing and building cars. Scumbags like Roger Moore (Roger of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me), Henry Ford III, and Lee Iacocca literally destroyed Detroit as heads of the Big Three, yet they made themselves richer. It’s the same aristocratic attitude that our forefathers had a revolution over.

I left Detroit in 1973, and my parents did in 1975 when my father retired. By 1980 when I returned to Detroit to bury my father, I was shocked to see how badly the city had been devastated. The executives made millions, the workers got screwed.

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Its a New Dawn.

This was going up last night when we had a power outage for a few hours and I went to bed.

Never in my life have I seen such a thing. The whole world is rejoicing over the election of an American president. They were dancing in the streets around the globe, not to mention all over this country: two hundred thousand in Chicago, thousands in Times Square, Harlem, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Oakland and hundreds of other localities from coast-to-coast. They came out in a spontaneous public display of collective joy honking horns, whooping, or chanting, “O-ba-ma”, or just all around having a street party. It was like New Year’s Eve. Again, over the election of a president.

It is an incredibly profound event for the African-American community, and it is going to have a tremendous affect on society as a whole.

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Yes He Did.

I’ll flat out say it, Tonight I am really proud of my country. Ten months ago I didn’t think it possible. I thought there was no way America would vote for a black man, no matter that he is as much white as he is black and is the quintessential mythical American Dream story. It was interesting when he took Iowa, but then he lost to Hillary in New Hampshire. Then he kicked butt Super Tuesday and went on the ten state run. When states like Montana and Idaho went with the black guy over the white chick, I thought that it just might be possible.

Now tonight. I’m an oldguy. I cut my political teeth on the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. There’s a very good reason African-Americans are ecstatic and in tears tonight. Hell, I’m in tears! Something I never believed possible in my lifetime has occurred. This is a tectonic shift. The world has just changed. I can think of no more historic moment in my lifetime. Maybe the fall of the Berlin Wall – but this is where that change picks up.

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24 Hours.

Finally, it will all be over. Yes, I am stressed. All night tonight they’ve been running an anti-Obama Rev. Wright ad telling north Florida to be afraid of the angry black men – gotta frighten all the white folk. That’s what the Republicans are all about, and all they got in their bag. The past month has been the ultimate revelation of what their kind of politics brings us to, the brink of economic meltdown. Just because the DOW stopped its freefall, don’t believe we’re out of the woods. More than likely, the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Treasury just sent over to Wall Street was greatly appreciated and there were bargains to be had, with the result of a rise back above nine thousand.

Anyway, I have absolutely no trust in these people. They have no regard for the American people. We are merely sheep to be fleeced in their eyes. As a computer professional, I absolutely cannot trust computerized voting – it’s just too easy to mess with the votes. In our form of government, a citizen’s vote is sacrosanct, regardless of what the fascist judge Antonin Scalia would have us believe. My hope is that if Obama’s supporters turn out in overwhelming numbers, it will not be denied. I’ll be watching Virginia as an early barometer. If it goes Obama, it’s all over but the shouting. We can only hope and pray. Oh God, let justice reign.

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