The Super Bowl in Detroit: the manufacturing of a “national event”

Detroit is a particularly inappropriate locale for a celebration. Largely a barracks for the automobile industry, the city rose and fell in the twentieth century, epitomizing in the sharpest manner the decline of American industry. Detroit’s population has shrunk from some 2 million in 1954 to 900,000 today, although the greater metropolitan area remains one of the country’s largest. Flying into the city from the east, an airplane passenger sees mostly green, as so many city blocks have been reduced to one or two houses.

Census Bureau figures released last summer ranked Detroit as the poorest city in the US, with one third of its residents living below the federal poverty level, $19,157 for a household of four. Almost one half of the city’s children, 47.8 percent, live below the poverty line. In 2004, a study revealed that 39.1 percent of the residents of midtown Detroit earned less than $10,000 a year. Experts in the field estimate the real jobless rate in the city to be somewhere around 30 or 35 percent. Only a few blocks from Ford Field, where Sunday’s football game will be played, it would not be difficult to come on scenes of poverty and degradation out of the Third World.

General Motors has announced mass layoffs in recent months and just reported that it lost $8.6 billion in 2005; Ford last week announced that it was slashing at least 25,000 jobs. Some 1,400 Detroit city workers have had their jobs cut since last June. Only two days before the Super Bowl, Ford announced plans to eliminate several models, hastening layoffs at its suburban Wixom plant, already scheduled to shut down in 2007.

The Super Bowl preparations have provided the latest occasion for a spate of headlines asserting that “Detroit is coming back!” Under Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick—an unsavory political type around whom corruption scandals swirled last year—and his predecessors, taxpayer money has been funneled into the construction of three gambling casinos, a Major League Baseball park and a National Football League stadium. In the small pockets of Detroit targeted for gentrification, poor and homeless residents have been forced out to make way for luxury loft and condominium construction. Meanwhile, most of the city rots away.

The Detroit Free Press published a thoroughly predictable and banal op-ed piece by Kilpatrick on Friday, which claimed, “I have no idea who will win Sunday’s championship game between the Steelers and the Seahawks. But no matter who wins the football game, Detroit—Detroit the city and Detroit the region—is the clear winner of Super Bowl XL. The Super Bowl has helped serve as a catalyst for improvements that will be here after the game is a distant memory. They are improvements designed for the long term, not just cosmetic changes made for a single event.”

More
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/feb2006/bowl-f04.shtml