[lbo-talk] "5000 Worker March": activistism gives rise to planning meeting

[Charles Brown]

That's a good question. An old friend of mine who used to work at 
Newsday once tried to get the paper to fund an investigation of who 
owned Manhattan. They almost went for it but chickened out. Basically no one
really knows who owns Manhattan (and the buildings and the land are
generally owned by different people). If by who owns Detroit you mean who
owns the auto companies, that's pretty easy: big institutional investors. If
you mean who owns the buildings and the land, that could be a big
investigative project. The info is probably available, but I doubt it's in
some easily analyzable form.

Doug

^^^^^
CB: Thanks for the help on how to even frame the problem. The real property
, yes. 

I have this fantasy about a web of finance capital sort of sitting on top of
the city like a giant net in the form of debtor-creditor relationships. (If
a web is not the right metaphor, what might be ?) Municipal bonds in the
first place, but  , with an army of Marxist accountants, I'm thinking it
might be possible to map the whole range of financial relations,including
mortgages ( want to include predatory loans), insurance (redlining
especially). Others ? It would be a shifting , everchanging set of
relations, making it much harder to track.

Of course, "Wall$treet" is not the geographic location in Manhattan, but a
globe of scattered points channeled especially through lower Manhattan ( I
think ).

As to the size of the investigative project, I can't think of a better way
to spend our time for we predominantly mental laborers for the working
class. The Detroit pilot project could be extended to other cities and
places.

The ultimate idea is to put the names of the biggest creditors on the lips
and protest signs of 10's of thousands demonstrating in the streets,
demanding bailout, "forgiveness".  We want a bailout like Chrysler, Long
Term Capital, Continental Illinois and others got. 
We want to make the names of the creditors, household names in the homes of
the debtors; and  no debtor faces a debt alone.

Detroit will be Argentina !