Today in Labor History March 6, 1930: 100,000 people demonstrated for jobs in New York City. Demonstrations by unemployed workers, demanding unemployment insurance, occurred in virtually every major U.S. city. In New York, police attacked a crowd of 35,000. In Cleveland, 10,000 people battled police. In Detroit, the Communist Party organized an underemployment demonstration. Over 50,000 people showed up. Thousands took to the streets in Toledo, Flint and Pontiac. These demonstrations led to the creation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), sponsored by Republican congressman Hamilton Fish, with the support of the American Federation of Labor, to investigate and quash radical activities.
The stock market is a source of economic instability, market crashes, and, in worst-case scenarios, worldwide economic depressions. Coops don't participate in the stock market and are robust to economic instabilities.
Today in Labor History October 31, 1931: Unemployed lumberjack Jesse Jackson led the inauguration of the first Hooverville on vacant land owned by the Port of Seattle near Pioneer Square. Within two days over 50 shacks were erected and by 1934, 600-1000 people were living in them. By 1941, Seattle's “Hooverville” covered 25 blocks. Hoovervilles eventually spread throughout the country.
Today in Labor History October 24, 1929: The NY Stock Exchange lost 11% of its value in one of the most devastating stock market crashes in the history of the US. It marked the beginning of the Great Depression, which saw unemployment in the U.S. rise to 25% and as high as 33% in other countries. Farming communities were particularly hard hit, with crop prices falling by 60%. The depression coincided with the Dust Bowl, further exacerbating the loan defaults and suffering in the Midwest. Hundreds of thousands of Americans became homeless, and began congregating in shanty towns that were known as "Hoovervilles." In 1933, Congress passed the Glass–Steagall Act mandating a separation between commercial banks and investment banks, in hopes of averting another similar crash. However, there have since been two stock market crashes worse than Black Thursday: The Black Monday of October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones fell 22.6%, and the Black Monday of March 16, 2020, when the stock market fell by 12.9%. Both saw bigger percentage drops than any single day of the 1929 crash.
Hammer & Hope is a new magazine of Black politics and culture. It is a project rooted in the power of solidarity, the spirit of struggle and the generative power of debate, all of which are vital parts of our movement toward freedom.
We are inspired by the courageous #BlackCommunists in Alabama whose lives and struggles to organize against capitalism and white supremacist terror in the 1930s and 1940s are memorialized in Robin D. G. Kelley’s book “Hammer and Hoe,” from which we take our name.
We will envision collectively what a better future might look like and the strategies that could get us there. Such an undertaking compels us to deepen our knowledge of history, politics, culture and our own movements.
Our aim is to build a project whose politics and aesthetics reflects the electric spirit of the protesters who flooded the streets in 2020, a project that breathes life into the transformative ideas pointing us towards the world we deserve.
"During the Great Depression, Detroit and its auto-industry suffered an exceptional amount.
After the stock market crash of 1929, around 80 percent of the industry was no longer producing and by 1932 large numbers of citizens were dying of starvation.
The Ford Motor Company, one of the richest employers, had laid off two-thirds of its employees.
On the morning of 7 March 1932, 3,000 former and current Ford workers and other unemployed members of the community gathered on the outskirts.
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🧵I know I mostly toot about #Ukraine here, but the #SCOTUS has got me annoyed. More than they usually irritate me. People in my generation (elder #millennial), #GenX'ers, and #Boomers, mostly grew up with a court that's legacy was in many ways progressive. As a result, most folks respected & trusted the SCOTUS as an institution, especially when compared to the other branches of #government. #Watergate, #Clinton's #impeachment, & various #bribery & #misconduct scandals in #congress 1/n
Listening to #MatthewCooke's American Origin Stories finally convinced me that all #US institutions were set up chiefly to protect the "landed gentry." #Billionaires are the new #aristocracy, and they are not benign. In a #feudal society, #fealty was rewarded by the feudal lord. Today, everyone is just a disposable "input factor."
We live in a virtually global #plutocracy.
This must be remedied.
Back to 70-90% income-tax...
How One Robber Baron's Gamble on Railroads Brought Down His Bank and Plunged the U.S. Into the First Great Depression (www.smithsonianmag.com)
In 1873, greed, speculation and overinvestment in railroads sparked a financial crisis that sank the U.S. into more than five years of misery