Part of a book reading at P.A.R.C. (Politics - Art - Roots - Culture) from his latest book Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition. Several community activists voice the words from historical actors Biggers has drawn from during the reading.
Jeff Biggers has been organizing against the tyranny of coal corporations in southern Illinois for many years. He was in northern Indiana to support a grass roots campaign to hold to account corporations that have poisoned the communities they have operated in. Capital has held workers hostage, as it relocated to exploit cheaper labor or made the threat, always abandoning the toxic landscape of operations to the workers and communities, they extracted their wealth from, to deal with.
Now working class and retirees are seeing themselves threatened with displacement by gentrification as land values are being driven up through predatory investment due to proximity to Lake Michigan.
It is usually the business boosters, who make up local government, that side with the "money" interests. Organizing the people to resist is what Biggers helps with by reminding them of Tom Pains inspirational words, words that motivated the yeoman farmers of his day to fight British tyranny, because today it is the tyranny of Capital that threatens their security with displacement.
P.A.R.C. - a coffee house, library, cultural performance space and location to share ideas outside of corporatized thought.
jeffbiggers.com
Jeff Biggers is an American historian, journalist, playwright, and monologist. He is the author and editor of eight books. His last book, "Trials of a Scold: The Incredible True Story of Writer Anne Royall," was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and chronicles the life and times of pioneering writer and muckraker Anne Royall. Social critic Jeff Chang called his forthcoming book, Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition, "powerful, urgent essays."
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