Reply #5: You want the whole list or just the top 20,000 Sir Tuck? [View All]

[jotsy]

Okay so that's an exaggeration, yes.

Excessive compensation packages for upper management. I'd expect if given charts over a few years, we'd find a corporate structure that's a bit heavy on the top as well.

Likely yielding to the wishes and whims of big oil when they might have had a better shot at a stronger foothold on the small car markets before international models got heavily imported.

I'm guessing costs for insurance of all kinds went through the roof and splintered requiring new product premiums.

Demand and its relationship to inventory and price structure are and have likely been for some time, out of whack with one another and the lessening viability of this consumer base.

Labor was relocated in order to make the most of them who already had just that. All other consideration outside of profit doesn't qualify as such, damn the people and the community they developed and depended on. Things that might be everything to you and me is as insignificant as fractions of pennies to the affluent.

The Gordon Gecco mantra minus an o is what happened to the city. What's worse is such callus notions are not frowned upon, but envied and emulated.

These are guesses, I've not read up on the topic, though I do know a guy who knows a lot about the early days at Ford.

Other classic American cities are feeling a public pinch as illustrated in Atlanta on Wednesday, when 30,000 people showed up to get applications for a housing program. Unemployment is said to be stable but when benefits run out and folks still haven't found work, they're not counted anymore...at all. I see Detroit and Atlanta as precursors and more communities including my own Northwest hub where families are starting to live together as generations in tight quarters. Employment ads in the Sunday paper used to be its own section, now it barely fills a single page.

It is a short sighted society that would allow itself to bleed so profusely from the mid section. That may be the problem though, they don't see us as part of their society.