it wont ignore you.

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies. What is the big secret Mr. President ? Why the secrecy?

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

“The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way,” said Mr Kildee. “Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.”

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was “both a cultural and political taboo” about admitting decline in America.

“Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They’re at the point where it’s better to start knocking a lot of buildings down,” she said.

Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.

The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM’s founder – is a symbol of the city’s decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint’s decline began.

Regarded as a model city in the motor industry’s boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.

But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that “big is good” and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

He said: “The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there’s an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they’re shrinking, they’re failing.”

But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.

If the city didn’t downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.

Flint’s recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.

They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.

The local authority has restored the city’s attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.

Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.

Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.

The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.

“Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow,” he said.

Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution “defeatist” but he insisted it was “no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again”.

GM has proposed issuing 62 billion new shares, 100 times more than the 611 million now offered publicly.
Even though the U.S. government has agreed to back up GM and Chrysler new-car warranties, potential car buyers already view GM as if it’s in bankruptcy, reflected by the company’s steep revenue drop in the latest quarter, Lubben said. On Thursday, GM posted a $6 billion first-quarter loss and said its revenue dropped plunged by nearly half, largely because bankruptcy fears scared customers away from showrooms.
“I don’t think anyone is buying cars from a company who is wringing their hands about a potential bankruptcy for the past year or so,” he said.
Under Chapter 11, a company can stay in operation under court protection while sheds debts and unprofitable assets to emerge in a stronger financial position.
At this point, GM needs to resolve the uncertainty and get in and out of bankruptcy as quickly as possible, Lubben said.
The company is talking with the UAW and Canadian auto workers unions about concessions, including getting the UAW to take roughly 39 percent of its stock in exchange for half of the $20 billion GM must pay into a union-run trust that will take over retiree health care payments next year.
About 50 percent of the stock would go to the government for its loans. GM said last week it would need another $2.6 billion in May and $9 billion more for the rest of the year, bringing the total to $27 billion.
One percent would go to current shareholders, with bondholders getting the other 10 percent.
Bondholders are reluctant to take the deal because the government and UAW are getting far bigger stakes in the company, said Kevin Tynan, an industry analyst for Argus Research in New York.
“When you look across at what the union is getting and what the government is getting, to expect them to take 10 percent is just unrealistic,” he said.
Cutting dealers also remains a huge hurdle, with GM hoping to shed 2,600 of its 6,246 dealerships by 2010.
But dealers are protected by state franchise laws, and trying to shed them outside of bankruptcy would result in either millions of dollars in payments or multiple lengthy lawsuits, Lubben said.
“That means you’ve got to negotiate with each one of those dealers individually.”
Also, GM on Friday told its major parts suppliers that it would move up payments due on June 2 to May 28.
Company spokesman Dan Flores said it was being done to help the suppliers at a critical time, but he denied that the payments were pulled ahead of a potential June 1 bankruptcy filing.
GM has begun to temporarily close 13 assembly plants for up to 11 weeks through mid-July in an effort to control inventory. With Chrysler plants also shut down during its bankruptcy proceedings, parts suppliers will soon have no income and could go under.
It would help speed up GM’s stay in bankruptcy court if it could pull together big blocks of stakeholders to agree on reducing debt or changing other stakes, said Robert Gordon, head of the corporate restructuring and bankruptcy group at the Clark Hill PLC law firm in Detroit.
During its quest for government aid, GM executives said bankruptcy would severely cut their sales, with research showing that people would shy away from GM vehicles for fear that warranties would not be backed and parts would not be available.
Tynan said the executives now can’t change their story, even though they likely know that bankruptcy is inevitable.
“They’re sort of morally obligated to say ‘we’re intent on doing this outside of bankruptcy,’” he said. “But at the end of the day, they just want the magnitude of the restructuring to get done.” The collapse of GM will be one of the defining moments in the overall collapse of America