This is a global industry we invented. We should be proud of it. We shouldn't disown it.

Everyone says look at what 'those people' did to my city. And race is always an element. In 1950, Detroit had a population of 1.8 million; 80 percent were white, 20 percent black. Today the population is 900,000 and those percentages have more than reversed.

Americans don't like poverty. Americans don't like things old. Americans don't like urban violence. We have all the problems everyone else has that people like to pretend exist only in Detroit.

This is an interesting place with its own distinctive culture. It's not Chicago, it's not New York, it's Detroit--and you've got to like it for that.

Detroit's the city everybody likes to look at as a place that's dangerous, abandoned and economically no longer viable. It's the most famous failed city in the United States.

The Super Bowl is over, Hurricane Katrina is finished, there are no hurricanes brewing in the Gulf. This will be big until the next big event.

But what people don't realize is that Detroit is the greatest success story in American history.

I'd love to see the city market its car culture, our automotive heritage. We invented the modern industrial world. We're still Motor City.

[S]tart at the turn of the last century, in 1901, with the celebration of Detroit’s bicentennial. That was the Detroit that came before--before all the racket that attended the making of the modern world, which happened here first and faster than anywhere else on this planet.

Detroit is just like everywhere else, only more so--a lot more so.