Let's Suck Up To Billionaires, Parts 7,983 a) and b)

The four or five city blocks directly surrounding Ford Field, Comerica Park and the Fox Theatre are indeed bouncing back. (Go 2-3 more blocks, and the city is as much of a hellhole as ever.) Same story with the casinos. Oases of luxury in the middle of a bomb crater.

And 90 percent of the businesses, bars, restaurants, etc in that radius are directly owned or controlled by either Mike Ilitch, William Clay Ford, or their billionaire buddies. Meaning all profits go to them.

The two stadiums put together cost close to a billion dollars of tax money -- when Ilitch gets his new hockey playpen (the underlying goal of this sudden onslaught of media puff pieces), it'll be well over a billion.

A BILLION DOLLARS. $1,000,000,000.00. OF TAX MONEY.

Spent so Ilitch and Ford, already billionaires, can get richer and richer and richer and richer and richer.

And It's Working!! Woo Hoo!!

 

Besides, it was the previous owner of the Tigers who was the real wingnut conservative.
Nice post, slap, BTW.

 

Thanks.
My favorite story with the previous owner of the Tigers came when he once said that if he had to do it all over again, he'd have been a priest -- which must have just thrilled his wife, Marge, to death....
I'd see them in church, look over and just smile...

 

Slappy covered it earlier, but just want to chime in that the city is not "rebuilding brilliantly." Please understand that I'm not taking shots at Detroit. But gussying-up a few blocks downtown does not "rebuild" a city. Detroit's neighborhoods are crumbling and population is dropping at an alarming rate. Because real estate cannot even be given away, let alone sold, there are thousands of abandoned houses. Once torn down, the abandoned blocks essentially turn into urban prairies. It's not a pretty sight. Cleveland is in a similiar boat. There were so many great press clippings about the downtown Cleveland renaissance, while people ignored the continued decline of its neighborhoods and loss of its population base.

 

Ahem. They're already really rich.

Stabilize? I'd say it's more than just stabilize. The money pouring into the city because of the Ilitches is not going to come from anywhere else. They could have done like the Lions and Pistons did in the 70s and go an hour north. They didn't, and the city is much better for it. If you think everything was going to happen overnight, that's pretty clueless. Yes, right now there is just renewal in the blocks around Ford and Comerica. That will continue to grow.

I guess you could just wait for the people with no money to eventually do it. But I'm guessing the wait will be pretty long.

 

Let's face facts, Doc. Why does Starman hate the Ilitches so virulently? They're rich.

The Tigers clinched their first playoff berth in just about forever after a whole lot of down -- including one record-bad -- seasons. And he's acting like writing about the owner of the team in such a situation is a complete suckup. It's not. It's actually very normal. And if the Ilitches are so evil, I'm pretty sure there would be an awful lot of stories out there saying so over the other 364 days of the year. I'm guessing a lot of reporters in Detroit have really missed some stories there. Either that or it's just sour grapes. Which was my point in the first place.

 

I'm guessing that he dislikes the Illitches so much because they seem to be affluient louts with both hands and a foot inside a very limited public trough, and that a winning baseball team doesn't make them any less so.

 

This is what's going to happening all across North America as deindustrialization continues and we revert back to a feudal society. A handful of people will own most of the land and resources and the rest of us will be their serfs.

Feudal society is a sometimes debated term used to describe the medieval social order of western and central Europe and sometimes Japan (particularly in the 14th to 16th centuries) characterised by the legal subjection of a large part of the peasantry to a hereditary landholding elite exercising administrative and judicial power on the basis of reciprocal private undertakings.

Sounds about right.

 

The Tigers were fucking horrible, including as you note, Mother Fucking World Record Horrible three years ago, for 15 years mainly because of Ilitch's fucknut ownership who put shithead incompetents like Randy Smith in charge of the baseball operation.

They LUCKED INTO -- yes, lucked into -- a playoff spot (put the division title on hold, they're currently getting boatraced for the second straight night by the goddamn Kansas City Royals) -- because the competition collapsed and they finally came up winners on a couple of young pitchers, after crapping out for 15 years.

In between, Ilitch got the Taxpayers of Michigan to GIVE -- yes, give -- him a half-billion-dollar ballpark. Whoopeee for fucking him.

 

i read the article and almost vomited when the report said the tigers hadn't turned a profit since illich bought the team. please.

 

The Tigers have turned a profit every goddamn year since he bought the team.

 

But gee, that's not what Mikey says...