Latest news with #PullmanPalaceCarCompany
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's 'Freedom Cities' Are a Devious Scam
Tech bros love to repackage old ideas as innovation. We've all seen it. But their latest foray into disruption no one else wants, the so-called 'network state' and its constellation of start-up cities, deserves our attention. This notion has been embraced by President Donald Trump, who has rechristened them 'freedom cities.' In reality, the scheme is a techno-fascist vision of the future that's been quietly but persistently pushed and funded by billionaires such as Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong, and Sam Altman for years. Despite the shiny marketing materials for places like Próspera and California Forever, which make outlandish promises of futuristic utopias, the start-up city as a concept is a modern, ketamine-infused repackaging of something that flopped into obsolescence long ago: the company town. And I would know. I grew up in a coal-mining town in Southwestern Wyoming and compiled an oral history of the place called Out Here On Our Own. I talked to multiple people who grew up in the old coal camps where one company owned and controlled everything. The surveillance, the practice of paying workers in dubious currency (commonly referred to as 'scrip'), and the ultimate goal of creating small fiefdoms for company masters—it's all been done, and to horrific effect. From staggering rates of suicide and addiction to a constant sense of fear among citizens, the trauma of living in a company town cascades through generations. The company town framework gained steam during the Industrial Revolution. Pullman, Illinois, is a notorious American example. George Pullman, who owned Pullman Palace Car Company, forced people to work interminable hours in unforgiving factory conditions, and he paid them in scrip that was worthless outside his own stores. In 1893, Pullman cut workers' wages by 25 percent without lowering rent on their homes—not to mention the grocery prices in those same company stores—which led to fierce labor organization efforts and the bloodiest strike America had seen. The Pullman strike showed the world that the company town was a doomed experiment in human control. But the industrialists of the time were every bit as hubristic as today's tech oligarchs. They saw Pullman as a barometer for how much cruelty workers would endure before revolting. The profit margins were too enticing to abandon the model altogether, so company owners built fiefdoms across the country, albeit in slightly less extreme forms. The end result was always the same: worker organization—and often violent revolt. Coal, steel, and lumber companies set up camps and towns across the West based on where those resources were abundant, not where people wanted to live. My hometown, Rock Springs, is a paragon of that phenomenon. It's a windy, barren, and often frigid place that never would've been colonized and developed as somewhere to live were it not for its surfeit of coal. Coal jutted from the hills and badlands in the area. Union Pacific, or UP, didn't hesitate to lay tracks, dig mines, and set up a network of mining camps. By the early 1900s, Rock Springs grew into a proper town that was, for all intents and purposes, owned by Union Pacific. The company built shoddy housing with paper-thin walls for workers who toiled in mines where they were as likely to get mangled by runaway pit cars as they were to die in cave-ins or explosions. One former resident recalled visiting his uncle in company housing: 'The UP coal houses were stark. They were clapboard, and I remember the linoleum being all worn out. The lighting was simply a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.' Meanwhile, Union Pacific Coal raked in a fortune. Then, as now, my hometown had crushing rates of addiction and suicide. With miners regularly dying at work, the experience of living there was defined for many by despair. As if that wasn't enough, Union Pacific evicted families from their meager homes whenever miners got killed. Former inhabitant Les Georgis told me about an explosion near Rock Springs that killed several miners. Following a mass funeral, where 'the miners were laid out like cordwood,' Union Pacific evicted surviving family members from their homes, leaving them to fend for themselves. 'My wife's grandma had been living in a coal camp house, and she had a little baby,' Georgis said. 'The coal company told her that, since her husband wasn't around to work the mine anymore, she had to move out. They put all her stuff out on the street. I knew another family that happened to as well.' Such cruelty combined with harsh conditions in the mines to push miners to organize and strike. Union Pacific's desire to own and operate coal mines deflated when the train company switched to diesel engines, but Rock Springs and its satellite settlements still relied on coal mining. Union Pacific shuttered its mines with no concern for how people would survive. Other coal companies had moved in over the years, but UP closing its mines was a massive blow. The company simply boarded them up and left. Abandoned mines caused subsidence in neighborhoods where houses warped and sank, but what did Union Pacific care? Growing up in a mining town, and the conversations I had with multiple generations of residents, made it clear to me that it's a colossal mistake to allow companies and investment groups to build towns where they're free to do as they please. There have been efforts over the years to prevent company towns from forming again, but that hasn't stopped corporations like Amazon, Google, and Meta from flirting heavily with the concept. The network state movement goes well beyond those prior flirtations: It seeks to form a collection of corporately owned charter cities where regulation doesn't exist. This idea started gaining momentum with the publication of Silicon Valley gadabout Balaji Srinivasan's book, The Network State, which put him firmly in the company of those tech barons who've made democracy itself a target of their ire. Srinivasan argues that nation-states are dying and should be replaced with a global collection of corporately controlled enclaves, each functioning as its own de facto country. In his view, we should dismantle and replace countries like the United States, as engineers would an outmoded piece of software. Seen by tech fascists as an appealing alternative to democracy, the network state is the company town framework on a cocktail of steroids, ketamine, and life-extending placebos. Rebranded as freedom cities, this sophomoric thought experiment has been given the green light by Trump. But for the call to disrupt democracy, this movement has few, if any, new ideas. A direct callback to the use of scrip in company towns, cryptocurrency is a key component of freedom cities. One function of unregulated scrip in places like Pullman was to further ensnare workers by controlling their spending power and ability to leave. Paying workers in crypto coins, each of which is highly mercurial and vulnerable to scams and price manipulation, would provide similar levers for control. (It's worth noting that Amazon uses Swag Bucks, its own version of scrip, to reward high-performing employees, despite scrip becoming illegal in 1938.) What's truly disturbing is how far along the network state movement has gotten. Located off the coast of Honduras, a start-up city called Próspera hosts medical facilities that are free to explore genetic experiments with abandon. According to The New York Times, a construction worker died building Próspera. He fell to his death during a blackout. In northern California, a real estate coalition dubbed California Forever seeks to create its own city that local residents fear will buy up all the land, clog roads, and pollute their skies. Elon Musk's SpaceX owns Starbase, Texas, which poses threats to local wildlife and uses the old-hat tactic of filing employees away in company housing. The conditions of Musk's prefabricated homes are obviously better than the old coal camp houses, but there's still the question of what would happen to an employee's family if they got fired, especially in the face of eroded regulation and a CEO who thinks empathy is weak. As with company towns, where spying was a common tool to crush dissent and disrupt collective action, each of these start-up cities is, or will be, subject to relentless surveillance. Representative democracy has always been the enemy of plutocrats like George Pullman, Peter Thiel, Brian Armstrong, and now Elon Musk. Whether you call it a company town or a freedom city, the goal is the same: to foster a fascistic version of capitalism where company owners are free to explore the depths of their greed and sadism. But as Trump allows such ghouls to form their so-called freedom cities, those of us who've learned from human history will do well to recall that this has all been tried before—and remember the Pullman strike.
CBS News
20-02-2025
- Business
- CBS News
Chicago's Pullman Historic District marks 10 years as part of National Park Service
This week, the historic community of Pullman on Chicago's Far South Side is celebrating 10 years of being part of the National Park Service. Its history not only preserved through its architecture and its role in the labor movement, but by two brothers who worked and continue to live in the onetime industrial town. Brothers Al and Ray Qurioz may not consider themselves historians, but by most standards, they are. Al, 88, and Ray, 86, are former workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company — one of the first planned industrial communities that specialized in train car manufacturing in the United States. "When we started to work there, we learned how the cars were built," said Al Quiroz. Workers and their families both worked and lived on the grounds, which had a factory and its own streets and housing. "It was on-the-job training," said Ray Quiroz. "I just loved it." Today, the two are the last remaining workers to reside in the neighborhood. They not only have held on to their memories, but also rare artifacts from the era of the Pullman Palace Car Company. These items include century-old blueprints, train car memorabilia, and an electric bell once used to alert riders. The brothers saved all these items after being ordered by supervisors to throw them out. "The boss saw me and said, 'Ray, whatever is up there on the second floor, get rid of it,'" said Ray Quiroz. But Al saw it differently. "I'm a third generation of building railroad cars," Al Quiroz said. "This is my history." Thanks to the brothers, that history now preserved — and helping tell the story about Chicago's Far South Side Pullman neighborhood, where a renaissance of sorts is underway. Ten years after President Obama designated the Pullman Historic District as part of the National Park System, the area has seen nearly $500 million in economic development. Mike Shymanski is founding member of the Historic Pullman Foundation. "Every time somebody says a negative thing about the South Side, you should be prepared about four positive things," Shymanski said, "and one of the positive things is the national park." As businesses continue to flock to the area, locals hope it translates to foot traffic — and inquisitive minds coming to visit. "I came here for coffee and found some history," Shymanski said he hopes to hear people say. For the Quiroz brothers, they hope the spotlight will continue to shine on the Pullman and their long-lasting contributions. "It's about all the trouble we had, and all the problems we solved," said Al Quiroz. A brief history of the Pullman Company and historic district George M. Pullman, president of the Pullman Palace Car Company, had construction begun for his company town in the 1880s. The town of over 1,000 homes and public buildings was completed in 1884, according to the Historic Pullman Foundation. The City of Chicago annexed Hyde Park Township — which included all of the South Side east of State Street and south of Pershing Road — in 1889. Most Pullman residents voted against the annexation, and the Pullman Land Association continued to manage town properties despite the annexation, according to the foundation. In 1894, the Pullman Palace Car Company was the site of one of the most historically notable strikes in American history. The company had lowered wages in response to a drop in demand for train cars amid an economic depression in 1893, but the rents the company charged remained the same. Pullman himself refused to meet with workers and ordered them fired — leading to a strike that ended up paralyzing most railroads west of Detroit until it ended violently with the intervention of federal troops, according to the Historic Pullman Foundation. George M. Pullman died in 1897, and the following year, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the Pullman Company to sell all its properties not used for industry — including the company residences. But this did not happen until 1907, with residents being given the first option to purchase their rented homes. Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of President Abraham Lincoln, became president of the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1901, and served in that role for 10 years. In 1925, labor organizer A. Phillip Randolph formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The National Park Service notes that at the time, porters made up 44% of the Pullman workforce, and Pullman was the largest employer of Black Americans in the country. After years of downsizing and consolidation of its factories, and all operations Pullman Company was dissolved on Jan. 1, 1969 — though it maintained a central office staff to wind down affairs and handle a lawsuit until 1981, according to the Newberry Library. Also in 1969, the Pullman district received State of Illinois landmark status. Today, the Pullman clock tower still stands majestically at 11057 S. Cottage Grove Ave., though what stands today is much newer than it looks. Back in December 1998, an arson fire gutted the building and destroyed the tower and clock, and a new tower and clock were completed in 2005. A 1910 factory building on the Pullman site also burned down in the 1998 fire. On Feb. 19, 2015, President Obama designated the Pullman Historic District a National Monument that is now part of the National Park Service.
