[I have been concerned about housing for years; I joined the Grantist WIL in 2004 because I wanted to do something about the precarious housing situation of working people here in southern New England. The best article I ever wrote for the Grantists was entitled, "Give me shelter." So I was moved by Cde Celeste's paragraphs about the plight of those fleeing foreclosures and what has happened to the neighborhoods they used to live in. What follows is a note from Cde Celeste's blog. The description of street-level change in New York, that she refers to, will also be translated. -- YM]
As others see us: “Decline, in show motion”
By Celeste Murillo
http://teseguilospasos.blogspot.com/2008/10/la-decadencia-en-cmara-lenta.html
As others see us: “Decline, in show motion”
By Celeste Murillo
http://teseguilospasos.blogspot.com/2008/10/la-decadencia-en-cmara-lenta.html
While on both sides of the Atlantic they continue paying out billions of dollars, and the hysteria of the stock markets increases (up, down, rebound, fall, rebound-and-fall-again), life goes on for millions, but it gets worse, or with worse prospects. No one is an optimist now, or the optimists are the least pessimistic: recession is a fact.
Although little gets said about the tent cities on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the foreclosures, and the newly unemployed, the social crisis already arrived a while ago, and it only promises to become merciless.
In the same week that Paulson was announcing the purchase of bank shares to save them from bankruptcy, the raids against undocumented immigrants in the factories increased (in Los Angeles some weeks ago, the biggest raid took place, with the deportation of almost 700 people).
While Gordon Brown and the European Union (EU) were guaranteeing the bailout of the European banks, layoffs and suspensions of autoworkers began in the Spanish state.
Today, I read a postcard written from New York, which, for some reason, (I believe because of the tour of the stores) made me remember the unhappy walks of Jimmy in John Dos Passos’ _Manhattan Transfer_, which speaks of the growth of those smart [fashionable] neighborhoods in New York, that were built on the destruction of the neighborhoods that once served as a home for those who have now been fleeing from foreclosures, layoffs and deportations…. But, by chance, it carried a mark of anger as well.
* * *
[What follows is the text of the "postcard" Cde Celeste mentions above, and it is really a well-wrtten essay about social change. -- YM]
October 5, 2008
From the other side
From the other side
By Ernesto Semán
Thursday morning, while the US Congress was debating the fate of $700 billion, one of the first political graffiti in more than a decade appeared in Brooklyn: “No bailout it screws u!” it said on a highway column. It’s a neighborhood of bridges and highways, and the graffiti possibly came from the Red Hook Houses, an enormous public housing complex that coexists with the noise of the highway, and that also survives in the middle of a neighborhood that has changed at top speed.
Barely going up to the bridge over the graffiti, like the balconies of other houses in the area, Red Hook offers the best views of Wall Street. Every morning for fifteen years, a credit and consumption policy that transformed the US economy was set in motion from the other side of the East River. Right here, from this side of the river, every day one could see the ambivalences of that change.
[To be continued]
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