Below are two pictures of Camden NJ from 1960. The population was 117,000 and RCA was the big employer. It was a safe, flourishing middle class city.
Democrats have run the city since 1960. LBJ announced his War on Poverty in 1964. Today there are 77,000 people left in Camden NJ. There are 885 registered Republicans. This fine metropolis voted 99% for Barack Obama. Have you ever seen the video of Dresden, Germany after it was devastated by American bombers during World War II? Watch this video of Camden NJ today and judge for yourself whether we’ve won LBJ’s War on Poverty?
Concerned MIllenial says:
Clearly those days of the 60s are long gone, and there’s no turning back. The only bright spot in Camden, and I use the term bright loosely, is the Susquehanna Bank Center. My friends and I were lost trying to find the place while ono ur way to a concert there, one of the more mildly terrifying experiences in my life was asking a mechanic’s shop for directions. Right in the heart of Camden. Windows were up, doors locked, no joke.
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10th January 2013 at 8:46 am
Jimi d says:
Many cities were built up by the wealth generated from a supporting industry (or several). New Bedford, Fall River and Lowel, MA come to my mind. These cities were built with the textile industries. For the most part these communities flourished along with the supporting industries. The industries left long ago and now these cities are total shit holes. It is happening all over America, and indeed most all of the western world. There are no easy answers because there are no industries on the horizon that can or will employ millions of people at a living wage. I would say that these decaying shit holes represent the end of the industrial society that built them. The overhead costs to maintain these hell holes is too great a burden to carry. Industries like “Facebook’” will not give meaningful employment to the struggling masses. People are becomming superfluous. All evidence points towards a societal collapse.
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10th January 2013 at 8:49 am
harry p. says:
the place really is a shithole. my wife’s cousin is (was) an architect and bought a home in Camden where the firm she worked for was doing a revitalization project, she bought into the idea completely. The house and the block it is on is nice but 2 blocks in any direction looks like a cesspool. She leans liberal and doesn’t like guns and believes places like Camden and Detroit just need some money to rebuild the infrastructure so prosperity can return. Very nice person but reality challenged. We visited her once years ago so we could go to an Eagles game and i refused to ever go back. 2 years ago she lost her job and couldn’t find work so she got a job and is going back to school working in an industry that is thriving in that area, Social Work. She focuses on counseling sexual assault and rape victims. She is extremely busy.
It is so horrible there, I don’t think people writing fiction 50 years ago could have predicted it being that bad.
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10th January 2013 at 8:50 am
Jimi d says:
All we would need to ‘light the fires’ of a societal collapse would be a deep financial panic with a ‘bank holiday’ that closes all of the banks for several weeks, or longer. No debit card or credit card transactions, unable to get access to one’s savngs or checking accounts, and the money may be of less value than toilet paper by this time anyway. Or a USA bombing of Iran causes gasoline prices to skyrocket and creates gas lines and shortages that make 1974 look like a Sunday walk in the park – The masses would go bat shit crazy after two or three days ! “LIGHT EM UP” !
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10th January 2013 at 8:57 am
Eddie says:
The Law of Unintended Consequences in action.
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10th January 2013 at 9:04 am
Stigmation says:
You got to be out of your mind to live in Camden. I grew up in Philly and when I was depressed with the state of the city, I would look across the river to Camden and be instantly cheered up.
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10th January 2013 at 9:25 am
Stucky says:
That’s a very biased video. It only showed the bad parts of Camden.
Camden has awesome gun stores.
Camden had terrific Art museums.
Camdenites have a wonderful sense of humor.
Tourism is very strong. Jim Quinn contemplates Camden’s future in the 4th Turning
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10th January 2013 at 9:25 am
Chicago999444 says:
These cities were doomed by 1950, thanks mostly to the policies of the Roosevelt Brain Trust. They were depopulating very rapidly, their white populations heading for the heavily-subsidized auto suburbs that were being put down cookie-cutter fashion all over the country, while the black people who had headed north during the war to take all the jobs in wartime industries, found themselves becoming unemployed by the thousands, and festered in housing projects and were offered welfare. The Johnson War on Poverty was merely a continuation and expansion of the New Deal, which intended a suburban house and car for every “middle class” family, with the idea the the poor would be neatly packaged up in high rise housing projects. FHA and VA loans were offered to the well-paid, heavily unionized “middle class” of blue collar workers, who were also able to get car loans and who quickly bolted the cozy city neighborhoods their families had lived in for generations and where you could get everything you needed within a few blocks of your bungalow or 2-flat. But the members of Roosevelt’s inner circle thoroughly despised urban life and felt that the cure to the country’s social ills was to get as many people as possible out to the countryside, or a simulacrum thereof known as a “suburb”, where everybody would have their little houses and front lawns and back yards for the kids, and of course at least one, then two or more autos bought with borrowed money. Meanwhile,perfectly nice, intact city neighborhoods were “redlined” for lending by HUD and the FHA. You could only get one of those low-down FHA loans or no-down VA (my parents bought VA) on new housing stock in the burbs, while in the city, where most people still really wanted to be in 1950, you had to go conventional with 20% down. No contest for all the young GI Generation and Silent Generation couples eager to embark on child bearing and even more eager for a driveway to park that shiny new Chevy in.
By 1954, St. Louis’ formerly profitable St. Louis Public Service and its subsidiary, St. Louis Car Co. (which built half the rolling stock on the NYC and Chicago subway and elevated rail systems as well as almost every street car in the country) began to run in the red. By 1962 it was bankrupt and all the transit agencies in the area were rolled into one to operate skeletal service, vs the every-5-minutes 24/7 service that existed into the 1950s. St. Louis city’s population peaked at just under 1,000,000 at the close of WW2, and had dropped to 750,000 by 1960. Formerly middle income north St Louis was utterly upended after the city tore down the Mill Creek slums that ringed downtown in an effort to sanitize the area, and warehoused the denizens in the Pruitt Igoe and other projects on the north side, as well as a few on the near south just outside downtown.
By 1965, the stream of movement outward had become a flood, and our policy makers just couldn’t for the life of them understand how the cities were failing so badly so quickly and becoming derelict crime sinks where you couldn’t feel safe standing on the corner to wait for a bus… and the buses ran far less frequently. Employers started pulling up stakes and moving manufacturing out to cheap land in relatively far flung suburbs, and the city fathers did the only thing politicians can ever figure out to do to staunch the bleeding from the loss of tax revenues, and that was to- you guessed- RAISE TAXES on remaining businesses, thus providing them with a powerful incentive to move or close up shop.
The coup de grace came in 1970 when courts ordered busing within school districts to correct “de facto” racial segregation. In St Louis, parents with kids in still-excellent public schools in the remaining good neighborhoods got letters informing them that the following year, their children would be attending a school on the north side, miles from their homes and in the teeth of the ghetto. How long do you think it took parents to decide that it was at last time to bolt the city? By 1980, the population of the city had dropped under 500,000, and last I heard, it was hovering around 300,000, with half the population on some form of welfare and lacking a high school diploma. Meanwhile, the public school system lost its accreditation, a shock to one who attended these schools when they were AAA-rated and half my high school’s working-class pupils went on to college…. at a time when the colleges were ruthlessly selective.
I describe only one failing city here, St. Louis, which has for the past 40 years been one of the 5 most dangerous cities in the country and is in the top 5 for murder and arson. However, almost every other older, established city in the country followed the same sad trajectory, and the only thing surprising about it is how quickly it all happened. In 1975, I asked my mother: Could you stand at the corner of Union & Delmar in 1950 and imagine what was going to happen to that beautiful neighborhood in just 20 years? Could you imagine such destruction and ruin? No, she said.
The past 80 years have offered us one object lesson after the other in the unintended effects of ham-fisted government policy implemented across the board with countless billions of dollars in tax money,and how those effects amplify and cascade down through generations. Yet we don’t learn that no group of people, no matter how “educated” or powerful, no matter how much money they have at their disposal, can decide how and why people should live and conduct their lives, and they certainly have no warrant to steal from the productive members of the population to incentivize self-destructive behaviors in the non-productive, whether the non-productive be 17 year old welfare moms or parasitical businesses who owe their existence and profits to the welfare state.
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10th January 2013 at 9:45 am
Administrator says:
Dresden in 1945
Dresden today
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10th January 2013 at 10:09 am
Eddie says:
Proof that losi ng a war to The U.S.is the key to iurban renewal. At least it was when we had all the money.
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10th January 2013 at 10:32 am
ALEXISTAN says:
Let’s not forget that the bulk of the bombers were RAF.
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10th January 2013 at 10:39 am
Eddie says:
And that the bonbing of Dresden, so late in the war, was completely unnecessary from a strategic perspective, but was carried out anyway in an attempt to completely demoralize the enemy and force a more rapid surrender.
Just goes to show…in a real war..and not one of our many trumped up police actions, that the rules of engagement regarding collateral damage and civilian casualties are thrown out the window.
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10th January 2013 at 10:46 am
Chicago999444 says:
The most hideous fact about the death of our beautiful cities is that they didn’t have to be bombed like Dresden.
We “bombed” them ourselves. We built some of the most impressive cities ever to exist in 40 years, between 1890 and 1930… and ripped them to shreds in 20 years, from 1950 to 1970. We did such an impressive job of shredding them that you have to feel that it was done deliberately, and maliciously, by people who hated the very idea of a city.
Like Roosevelt. And Rockefeller and Robert Moses whose notions of “urban renewal” became gospel for urban planners in the 50s forward: warehouse the population in high rise buildings isolated on parklands nowhere near commercial and surround by 10-lane highways, while almost paying people to move out to suburban subdivisions, and then 15 years later scratch your head and wonder why none of your grand plans for millions of people were working. Nothing, but nothing, fell into place the way the planners had hoped. While it is well known that destroying the fragile social networks of the poor by warehousing them in assigned apartments on the 10th floor of some concrete housing project was instrumental in producing the crime, blight, and general social disarray of today’s ghettos, not nearly enough is said about what suburbia did to our middle and lower-middle classes. Yet some social critics of the “high”era c. 1964 or thereabouts remarked on the massive increase in divorce, youth alienation, “housewife’s syndrome” and other social pathology as people settled in suburbs far from old neighborhood connections that often went back 4 generations, and people were stranded in bedroom subdivisions far from relatives and old friends, as well as commercial and cultural amenities. I do remember that at about that time, the marriage of many of my little friend’s parents started coming apart, and it seemed that at least a third of the kids I went to school with had parents who were divorced or contemplating divorce. Kids whose parents had decamped the city for a ranch house in “the county” would come back down to the city to hang out with the old crowd. People who had done fine with one car suddenly had to have two or three because they found themselves having to drive to stuff that was a block away from their homes in the city. And this was all considered “progress”.
Now we can see what we were “progressing” toward, but we don’t know how to find our way back.
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10th January 2013 at 11:12 am
AWD says:
How much would it cost to build a bridge back to Africa?
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10th January 2013 at 12:10 pm
Hope@ZeroKelvin says:
Camden and Detroit should be standing as monuments to the insanity of liberal progressive policies.
40+ years of implementation of these policies have destroyed these two cities and the lives of the people in them, plus countless others, and such policies now being adopted at the national level are speeding the “fundamental transformation of America”, as promised by Obama, into a mirror image of these hellholes.
The liberal progressive playbook (LPP) is really a primer on DEATH, IMPOVERISHMENT, IGNORANCE, LYING, ANARCHY and TYRANNY – and how to get away with it by dressing it all up in feel good slogans.
Let’s review a few things that the liberal progressives (LPs) hold dear, shall we?
1) Key to the implementation of the LPP is the adoption of the Rule of Men over the Rule of Law. Laws are either subverted or ignored for the benefit of the politically connected and are selectively applied to the perceived enemies of the regime (=those not connected to the regime). The idea of equality under the law is thus perverted and general lawlessness ensues, not only by the favored political/financial elites, but by the common thugs as well. Witness the complete anarchy in the cities ruled by the LPs. This dovetails with the LP ideal of moral relativism, that “right” and “wrong” are not absolutes but can only be interpreted in the appropriate, ie, LP mob defined, context.
2) The LPP, because the LP’s “care” and have so much “compassion” is really a license for people to live lives of wilful gleeful personal irresponsibility. This is, of course, financed by the “rich” and the taxpayers, whom, in the eyes of the LPs, have no “right” to keep their money since it was obviously obtained by grinding in the faces of the poor or from some “ism” that can be laid directly at the feet of Western Civilization (racism/colonialism/imperialism). Hence the LPs support for policies like welfare, AFDC, SNAP, Section 8 housing, etc, policies that undermine and destroy traditional and family values upon which, in their view, that evil Western Civ is based.
The underpinnings of Western Civilization are primarily Judeo-Christian values. These are, in toto, responsible for the most freedom, liberty, wealth, human knowledge, and orderly government ever seen in human history. Anarchy is what has resulted when these values have been abandoned or destroyed, yet the LPP does everything in its power to destroy these values and misstate the historical record.
3) The LPs, in the name of “reproductive freedom” and “a woman’s right to choose” are fanatical supporters of abortion on demand. Most people instinctively understand that Life begins at conception: Medically, morally, ethically and genetically. Yet, Planned Parenthood this year alone boasts that 333,000 CHILDREN were aborted – and the body count is 55 MILLION CHILDREN since Roe vs Wade. Historically, 2/3rds of the abortions that occur in PP are performed on minority women. Most people would call this GENOCIDE and it is part of the overall devaluation of individual human life that is the dark heart of the liberal progressive’s world view.
There is a straight bright line between the readiness of the liberal progressives to kill the unborn with the readiness of a government using the LPP to kill those people also deemed “inconvenient”.
4) As LPs so “love” children and “support education”, they are ardent supporters of the teachers unions, heedless of the plummeting performance of the children under their care (=lash). A student possessing well honed critical thinking skills, with a grounding in historical reality and a moral center, is anathema to the mob mentality and group think the LP collective requires to function.
The US public school system, driven by the LPP, over the last 50 years has created millions of people without any of the above, creating a population easily manipulated into acting against their own best individual self interest. Toss in the false self-esteem created by “every child gets a trophy”, mix with some class envy and you have the perfect Progressive Citizen – an ill-educated, perpetually aggrieved narcissist, deluded into thinking they are morally and intellectually superior to the people (=knuckle draggers) who do not share their world view.
5) And lastly, the screaming of the LPs for total disarmament of the law abiding citizens completes the circle. Because the LPs do not value an individual’s life, there is no requirement for anybody to defend it. Your life only has value as it pertains to the needs of the collective. Hence, the collective will determine what defense, at a time and degree of force of its choosing, any given individual will receive.
Citizens who choose to arm themselves understand that the insane and violent cannot be legislated or wished out of our midst. Evil doers can only be defended against and then put somewhere where they can longer hurt the innocent. Law abiding armed citizens have chosen to DEFEND LIFE by whatever means necessary. Seemingly, the LPs care more for the lives of evil doers than for the innocent, perhaps because the former share their values of anarchy and death.
The idea that the individual has natural rights, including self defense, endowed by our Creator rather than bestowed by a government, empowers the individual to act in their own best self interest rather than that of the State’s. In fact, an individual’s best self interest may be directly contradictory to the State’s.
The insane and violent are not restricted to the ranks of your local gang. Our founders knew that central governments eventually devolve into tyranny, run by the insane and violent, hence the necessity of the 2nd Amendment. Therefore, the LPP driven central government MUST disarm the law abiding armed citizen in the interests of self-preservation at the very least. Worthy secondary goals in this worldview are to keep the sheeple in the herd and to thin the herds when necessary.
There is your choice: DEATH in the LP world view versus the LIFE affirming values of the law abiding gun owner.
Choose wisely.
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10th January 2013 at 1:03 pm
Stucky says:
On September 6, 1949 Camden shook America out of its post-war nuclear stupor. Howard Unruh was an unemployed WWII Veteran who lived with his mother. He kept his medals in his bedroom and a firing range in his basement. He didn’t get along well with his neighbors who teased the war hero relentlessly. Unruh began logging a diary with everything he thought his neighbors were saying or doing to him. At 3:00 in the morning on the 6th, he came home from a double feature at the movies to find a gate he had made for the front of his house had been stolen. At 8:00, he woke up, dressed in his brown tropical-worsted suit, white shirt and striped bow tie, then with his mother, he had a breakfast of fried eggs.
At 9:20, America’s first mass murderer, left his house with his German Luger, a six inch knife, and six tear gas shells.
In only twelve minutes he would shoot and kill 13 people with 14 shots. One of his victims was a young blond boy inside a barbershop on a white carousel horse getting his hair cut. Unruh was pronounced insane and still resides inside Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. He’s 87 years old. Shortly after his arrest, he was reported to have said to a psychiatrist, “I’m no psycho. I have a good mind. I’d have killed a thousand if I had bullets enough.”
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10th January 2013 at 1:32 pm
Didius Julianus says:
I was walking door to door in Camden in the early to mid 1990s (I had a job as an auditor and was visiting life insurance policy holders along with the insurance agent). The place looked like a war zone then and I stood out like a neon lite advertising free food in a concentration camp. Managed to get out with no incidents though.
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10th January 2013 at 1:47 pm
Stucky says:
Blaming libtards for Camden’s problems seems like a gross over-simplification. Like blaming Boomers for everything wrong in America.
Camden was once a Republican stronghold, mostly white, populated by Germans, Italians, Polish and other immigrants. Was once an industrial giant. The city employed some 36,000 workers in its shipyards during World War II and built some of the nation’s largest warships. It was home to major industries; RCA Victor. New York Ship Building Corporation and Campbell’s Soup (still there, I believe, but offices only … no manufacturing).
Then steel mills closed. Then one factory after another closed. By the early 1970s, much of Camden’s non-poor population had been driven out by escalating violence White flight ensued. The poor remained. Suburban zoning kept the poor out of suburbs. Slums resulted in the city. The poor, now a majority, elected those who promised help … libtards.
But, according to the book “Camden After The Fall”, every effort to turn Camden around failed. The highway system has been modernized, only to allow commuters to buzz through Camden somewhat faster. Public buildings have been built, only to underline the fact that no new construction has taken place with private money in decades. Building a prison in the center of town created jobs, and now more jobs are being created to tear it down. Rutgers, the state university, has a branch under the shadow of the Ben Franklin Bridge. The battleship New Jersey is at anchor in a lovely riverside park, there’s a nice little minor league baseball park. Anything you can build with tax money has been built. There’s just no private industry, or business, or profession.
I know it is a popular opinion that poor people are responsible for the untenable living conditions in which they find themselves. Why don’t they just get a fucking job?! If only it were that easy.
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10th January 2013 at 2:22 pm
Clownbucks says:
I expect the next cities to fall will be those heavily invested in military spending. Places like Virginia Beach, VA and Norfolk, VA on the east coast will be affected by cutbacks. The Navy has already announced that a battle group consisting of a carrier and support ships, about 15 of them are being sent elsewhere. That’s a lot of people leaving the area.
Our biggest industry, warfare and military operations are being downsized and that seems to be the last bastion of our industrial might and R & D.
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10th January 2013 at 5:37 pm
Chicago999444 says:
Military spending helped murder St. Louis, Detroit, and a big part of Southern California, among many other places.
Bad money drives out good. St. Louis and Detroit both did lavishly well on defense largess through 1980, but it was very corrupting money, in that no other industry could compete with the inflated wages paid by defense contractors, who did not worry about their profitability because they could jack up what they bid as wages rose. Costs were no object to major welfare-state defense contractors like McDonnell Douglas or GM or Chrysler or Northrup or Martin Marietta. McDonnell Douglas paid $17 an hour to janitors in the 1970s, a time when $12 an hour was considered to be a very respectable wage.
The defense industry in these cities killed the finer-grained businesses like St. Louis’ formerly thriving shoe manufacturing and dry goods wholesaling districts. By the 50s, we were totally dependent on the related industries of auto-building and defense,.. and the auto builders became more dependent on defense contracts than on their core businesses. which decayed. They became very sloppy and uncompetitive as auto builders when they came to make much more money with much less trouble from defense contracts.
For a very good examination of how government-driven and subsidized industries destroy complex, fine-grained local economies and turn them into one-industry monocultures, I strongly recommend Jane Jacobs CITIES AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, where she dissects the process by which a complex urban economy develops, and how it is destroyed by welfare statism and government industries.
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10th January 2013 at 1:19 am
Novista says:
harry p
George Turner described it in “The Sea and Summer” (1987), should have been an undying classic but I guess the elites didn’t like the message.
His dystopian view of Melbourne in the 21st century, with the Sweet and the Swill, elites and the rest, and Melbourne slowly succumbing to rising waters. Public housing monoliths for the masses, perks for the others, and a MIC endlessly developing state-of-the art weapons as other countries, but all in a stasis.
Oh, it was republished in the U.S. as “Drowning Towers”. Out of print but 3rd pary sellers on Amazon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Turner_%28writer%29
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10th January 2013 at 2:22 am