Who Built Detroit? Who...and in a derivative sense, What, is Trying to Destroy It?

Both the image and the following are from the Facebook page of “Bread and Roses 1912-2012,” which is managed by the Bread & Roses Centennial Committee, a non-profit organization. (I added the embedded hyperlinks.)   

“The history matters: Detroit automakers ‘too big to fail’ but Detroit’s working class not worth caring about? If the city workers’ pensions and retiree benefits are slashed look for this practice to expand real soon to a city near you! This is all part of making workers and their unions pay for the massive screw up big banks, mortgage lenders, the ‘golden boys’ of Wall St., Harvard, Yale, and Princeton-trained economists, and their enablers in Washington, DC. inflicted on the nation. Manufacturing unions have been attacked for decades—now public sector unions have the target on their backs.

Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886–1957) conceived The Detroit Industry fresco cycle as a tribute to the city’s manufacturing base and workers. He completed the twenty-seven panel work in eleven months, from April 1932 to March 1933. Together, the mural pieces surround the Rivera Court in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Go see them, because of the louses who’ll soon be in charge of screwing over Detroit and its working people will likely sell these pieces off to some oil magnet in Dubai and we’ll never see them in public again.”  

Suggested Reading:  

• American Social History Project (Christopher Clark, et al.). Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History, Vol. 1: To 1877. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 3^rd ed., 2007.
• American Social History Project (Roy Rosenzweig, et al.). Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History, Vol. 2: 1877 to the Present. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 3rd ed., 2007. 

Suggested Viewing: Detropia