I'm sitting here, planning a trip to Detroit. Why Detroit? Because the bus goes there, and I get an excuse to hum Motown tunes on the way...
Detroit is a city with (as of June 2008) an unemployment rate of 9.7%. That's almost one in ten people of working age that are currently unemployed. Now, I have (briefly) lived in towns with higher unemployment: Middlesbrough in the north-east of England had areas of the town with 70% male unemployment in the early 1980s when the local steelworks closed down, but it really was only small areas of town; 9.7% for a large city is truly awful. And that's before the coming recession...
I'm guessing that the jobs have gone south with the car industry to Mexico or further overseas to the slave labour economies of Asia. I'm also guessing that this is not uncommon in the US. The movie, "Roger and Me", comes to mind.
So why don't people complain? And I don't just mean to the car companies, they're just doing what the local economic ideology and laws encourage in any case. I mean, to their politicians? Why are there no protests in the streets? Why are there no mass pickets or sit-ins at City Hall? Why are people in similar circumstances in towns and cities not agitating together? It's not natural. The US is a democracy, and there is a choice if you want to make it happen. People seem to have become so enfeebled that they just sit and feel sorry for themselves, keep their heads down in any job that they can get, and essentially know their place. It's almost feudal.