Detroit- "We built it, We Abandoned it"

Any community that depends on a single form of manufacturing can not survive if those companies pull up stakes and leave.  NH is a great example of corporate desertion with many “mill towns” that suffered after a manufacturing exodus.  Sure, after a very long period of adjustment, some towns like Manchester and Nashua have recovered, but others never did.  

After fifty years the mill buildings in Manchester  have clawed their way back to near full occupancy. (Yet some are still vacant today.) Detroit was once the  “Motor City” and the center of auto production. Today it produces fewer cars than any auto plant in America.  The auto giants gradually motored out of town in search of  lower paying, non-union assembly plants in the south, Mexico and Canada.  

The people who depended on those jobs, and the city itself, was a blur in the “Big Three’s” rear view mirror. I realize our “free enterprise” system is under no legal obligation for the welfare of a community, even if they built the community. But it stinks- both morally and ethically-  to benefit from a community and then abandon the city they built  in search of maximizing profit. The free enterprise system will endlessly seek the lowest possible labor cost, wherever it may be, in what ever country it may be.  

Maybe the Republican big business motto should be, “We built it, we abandoned it.”