Jim Hightower: Chicago’s Taxpayer-Funded Ode to Robber Barons

[marmar]

by Jim Hightower


History, as the old adage goes, is written by the winners. Even though many "winners" are losers as human beings.

For a clear example of this irony, check out the new national monument to corporate greed created by our Park Service in Chicago. It’s on the site of what had been Pullman, a company town created by the feudalistic 19th-century profiteer George Pullman. He amassed a fortune as a rail car manufacturer, infamously suppressing the wages of his 5,000 factory workers.

Yet Pullman considered himself a beneficent employer, having built a 600-acre town for the workforce and vaingloriously named the place for himself. It included houses he rented to workers, churches, schools, a bank, a library, and parks - all owned by his company.

Indeed, when officials announced this year that Pullman’s town was becoming an honored part of America’s park system, officials attested to his generosity by hailing it as a place he created "to provide his employees a good life." ...............(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32877-chicago-s-taxpayer-funded-ode-to-robber-barons

[mopinko]

1. meh. it's history.

and it wouldnt be happening if the people who live there hadnt spent the last couple decades trying to keep that history alive.
there was a WHOOOOOOLE lot of private and even individual money that kept what was once a dying neighborhood from disappearing.

dont think anyone who lives there is under any illusion about just how blood soaked that history is. nonetheless, it is a story that needs to be told, needs to stay alive.

[MisterP]

2. wouldn't be the last top-down corporate paradise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia