For more information on how the United Auto Workers helped drive Detroit into the ditch, read this special report co-authored last year by the CWF Executive Director Matt Patterson for National Review, “Detroit: Empire of Rust.”  Here’s an excerpt:

On Detroit’s east side, the abandoned Packard automaking facility looms tomb-like over 40 acres of once-prime real estate, its hollow buildings ringed with mounds of glass and littered with broken beams and broken dreams. The complex once housed busy workers assembling the cars that connected America, and it once hummed and hissed with the sounds of muscle meeting machinery.

But those sounds are long gone, replaced by the wind through the shattered windows; the scurrying of half-starved rats, picking their way through the rubble; the whispering of spray cans as graffiti artists paint the walls with their kisses of bright red and blue; the crackle of the flames that warm the hands of the homeless.

Read the whole report here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/354333/detroit-empire-rust-matt-patterson-julia-tavlas