You'll have to forgive me for being just a little bit jaded about the "great news" coming out of Detroit regarding General Motors' IPO.
Although, to be fair, I was already a bit jaded before the Flint Journal announced today that GM would be ending all production at Powertrain North tomorrow, effectively shutting down the last plant at the old Buick City site.
During Buick City's heyday, 29,400 employees worked on the 235 acre site. Hell, for years, every single car carrying the Buick name was made right here in Flint, Michigan.
Today, the plant hosts 445 employees. The last employees will leave the site on December 6, leaving vacant a site that was once the backbone of the American auto industry.
I think I am just slightly jaded because we here in Flint have been largely forgotten in all the talk of the recent "comeback" of General Motors.
Comeback? This is no comeback.
General Motors is a terminally ill company. It's changed its name, of course. It's now Motors Liquidation Company, and many of its closed plants still stand, littering the landscape and reminding us of what used to be back when the United States of America had a robust middle class.
Do you remember the middle class? It too was born in Flint, Michigan, on February 11, 1937 when the UAW and General Motors settled the great Flint Flint Sit-Down Strike.
The company that now stands as General Motors bought most of its assets in what is commonly known as a section 363 sale, when a corporation with stakeholders such as the United States Government (60%), the Canadian government and the provincial governmen of Ontario (12%), the UAW and CAW unions (roughly 18%), and the unsecured bondholders of General Motors (10%) purchased the "good" assets of Motors Liquidation Company.
This new company rose from the ashes and made its triumphant return debut on the New York Stock Exchange, and everybody lived happily ever after.
Everybody, that is, except the people here in Flint, who are surrounded by many of those assets that weren't deemed "good" and were just shuffled to the side.
I've heard many of my friends in the south complain about Wal-Mart closing down one store to open a bigger one and just leaving the old store behind because there is nobody who can use their old facility. It's happened in more than one town.
Well, imagine that on a much grander scale and you have Flint. And in the places where they have demolished the building, often what is left behind is property that is unsuitable for human use and will require extensive cleanup.
Our population peaked in the 1960s at nearly 200,000 residents, many of whom were drawn to Flint by the promise of steady work, a liveable wage, and benefits that not only allowed their children to have affordable health care, but also allowed people to retire and maintain a respectable standard of living after their working days were through.
Flint was once the cradle of the American dream, and it has now become the most glaring symbol of the current American nightmare.
Long before the nation was in a recession, the state of Michigan suffered the effects of a "one-state recession". And before that, Flint suffered the effects of a "one-city recession".
Flint's automotive workforce is now roughly ten percent of what it was at the peak of the industry. The city is crumbling. Where well-built homes that once housed hard-working, blue-collar Americans seeking to provide a better life for their children once stood, we now have shells that have been boarded up, vandalized, or burned to the ground.
We have a demoralized populace that has suffered the brutal one-two punch of General Motors abandoning the city and its residents coupled with the disastrous economic policies put into place by the Reaganites.
And by and large, we've been forgotten.
Real unemployment in Flint is hovering around 50 percent. And the cynical part of me believes that both the center-right corporatists who have set the agenda in the Democratic Party lately and the sociopathic Republican junta that has doubled down on its efforts to make the far-right the new center are looking at the plight of Flint with a sense of glee, because Flint was ultimately their first victory in the war on the middle class.
They've turned "liberal" into a dirty word.
They've demonized labor unions to the point where the poorest among us view the closest thing that the middle class has to a political action committee as the PROBLEM.
And worst of all, they've stood idly by while one of our great rust belt towns, a town that I believe is the real birthplace of the middle class, has been left to twist in the wind like a rotting corpse left at the gallows; like a symbol to what's left of the middle class that "this too, can happen to you."
So while the talking heads on cable TV talk about the comeback of General Motors, forgive me if I sneer. General Motors isn't coming back. They left us for dead and have long since forgotten us.
And it seems as though America has forgotten us too.