It’s all about the ethnic makeup! Imagine if a giant saloon announced it was locating somewhere because it was in an Irish neighborhood, “and we all know how they like to drink.”

Teabags and sympathy

February 25, 2011 ~ susie

What Brad said.

Organize

February 25, 2011February 25, 2011 ~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Rerun from October. I thought it seemed timely – again.

Did you know that during the Greater Depression, communists and socialists organized people all over the country to stop foreclosures and evictions? Why aren’t more of us doing it now?

After the Battle of the Bronx, as it was later called, the landlords at Bronx Park East asked a blue ribbon committee of Bronx Jewish leaders to arbitrate the dispute. But the strike leaders rejected arbitration. “When times were good,” strike leader Max Kaimowitz declared “the landlords didn’t offer to share their profits with us. The landlords made enough money off us when we had it. Now that we haven’t got it, the landlords must be satisfied with less.”

The landlords retaliated by forming rent strike committees. They used their resources to push through quick evictions. Many of the renter strikes were broken. Mass evictions took place at 665 Allerton Avenue and 1890 Unionport Road.

The landlords continued their offensive and the judges rarely considered the neediness of the families. By December 1932 is appeared that the Bronx rent strikes had largely been crushed.

But then something happened.

in December of 1932 and January of 1933, the Unemployed Councils began a new wave of strikes that rapidly assumed far greater proportions than the last one. Beginning in Crotona Park East, the strikes spread into Brownsville, Williamsburg, Boro Park, the Lower East Side, and much of the East Bronx. In February of 1933, a panicked Real Estate News writer warned that “there are more than 200 buildings in the Borough of the Bronx in which rent strikes are in progress, and a considerably greater number in which such disturbances are brewing or in contemplation.”

Continue reading “Organize” →

Food riots

February 25, 2011 ~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Our current economic policies are unsustainable:

Bill Clinton is warning of food riots in poor nations because of rising global food prices rising and more corn being diverted to the production of ethanol fuel.

The former President Clinton told farmers and Agriculture Department employees on that while producing biofuels is important for reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil, farmers should also look beyond domestic production and consider the needs of developing countries.

Clinton said, “I think the best thing to say is we have to become energy independent, but we don’t want to do it at the cost of food riots.”

He said the United States needs to look at the long term, global effects of its farm policy.

Clinton said, “We know that the way we produce and consume energy has to change, yet for farmers there are no simple answers.”

“There is a way for us to do this and to do it right.”