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I'm a resident of the Midwest and I am sick to death of listening to people in "The North" gripe about the South as a bunch of stupid, inbred rednecks who are dragging this country down. The management of the Big Three, the UAW and Northern politicians have had an incestuous relationship for years and it's reduced the Big Three to a slobbering, inbred mess - exactly the stereotype Northerners have of the Southerners (black AND white) who are going to remain employed while the Rust Belt keeps rusting. Why doesn't this article take John Dingell (DEMOCRAT - Michigan) to task for being the Big Three's Enabler in Chief for years?
And let me just say, the North has NO RIGHT to get on the high horse when it comes to race relations. The most segregated metropolitan region in the world is DETROIT, MI. Slobodan Milsosevic couldn't achieve the kind of ethnic cleansing that went on there, and white flight in Detroit (and countless other Northwern cities) wasn't an example of Jim Crowe, it was an example of CHOICE. See, in the South it was segregation by law. In the North, it was (and still is) segregation by choice. What's worse?
Second, the South and California are the places that understand globalization (which Democrats and Republicans largely defend) and they've found a way to adapt, instead of retreating into partisan and regionalist bickering that's kept the Northeast and Midwest perched on the edge of a cliff. If the U.S. govwernment doesn't show that it's competent and cares about helping the entire country adapt to a globalizing world, the South will simply do its own thing, and it'll do it with civil rights intact because, unlike the North, there's enough blacks in the South to keep some parity with the future.
Who knows? In 50 years, instead of having Mexicans swim across the Rio Grande to find jobs in the USA, you'll have Americans swimming across the Ohio River looking for jobs in the CSA.
