Voices include Stephen Colbert, J. Kyle Keener, Laura Berman, a Detroit firefighter and a UM senior.
"For the image of labor, Detroit is a catastrophe. . . . What affected yesterday’s manufacturing workers is now affecting policemen and firefighters. Nobody is safe.”
-- Gary Chaison, industrial relations professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., quoted in Time blog
"Do we pay off the debts by pulling the gold fillings out of the pensioners?"
-- Stephen Colbert, discussing Detroit bankruptcy, quoted at our site
“I remember sitting at his feet and being captivated by his elegance and dignity."
-- J. Kyle Keener, former Freep photographer who covered Nelson Mandela’s 1990 release, on Facebook
"I was at Camera Mart last week. A guy walked who was robbed of everything at gunpoint while photographing at the old Packard plant. . . . He said the cops told him since that plant is a haven for photographers, it is filled with thieves. Someone gets robbed there every day!"
-- Fred Levine of Detroit on Facebook discussion of visiting photographer rip-off
"Art is swell but the DIA isn’t a safe haven — not when the city’s residents are being forced to suffer."
-- Laura Berman, Detroit News columnist
"Business is business, but art is art. Keep the vultures away!"
-- Priscilla Downie, Free Press reader in letter today
“Every dime the [DIA] art could be sold for is a dime being taken from a Detroit retiree’s pension. This situation is a good example of why government should not be in charge of art or retirement accounts.”
-- Jarrett Skorup, Midland blogger, in Detroit News letter
“Detroit’s story is a lesson for union leadership and for other cities. Accounting fiction and financial escapades produce the worst-case scenario for workers, retirees and residents.”
-- Eileen Norcross of George Mason University, writing in The New York Times
Graphics by Lauren Ann Davies.
