Burlington will soon publicly commemorate what Mayor Miro Weinberger has described as a “dark” chapter in the city’s history — a 1960s urban renewal initiative that resulted in the destruction of a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood.
The city council unanimously agreed on Monday to allow installation of interpretative panels that recount the history of Burlington’s “Little Italy.” Titled “Neighbors Helping Neighbors,” “Neighborhood Groceries” and “Family and Religious Life” respectively, the three plaques will be at different spots on the northernmost block of St. Paul Street, near the post office.
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• What about the horrific arsons? Who ordered them? Who set those fires? Who botched those investigations? And of course, who profited mightily from all this misery?
So who was the dude that didn’t like the original language? Too bad if history stinks, huh? The solution is not to revise it, but to learn from it and to resolve to not repeat it.
Yeah, the positive spin is just that…spin. The fact that a whole neighborhood of working families was devastated is not pretty. They lost their homes, stores, businesses, and small shops so that the developers and the moguls could make a buck. That was and is disgraceful. Most of those folks could walk to work and didn’t have cars, but when their homes were seized and they were given much lower than market value as “compensation,” they had to move out to the suburbs and not only incur a larger mortgage, but transportation costs as well. How can we “spin” that?
It was a misuse of the government’s power of eminent domain and the sorry fact is that the misuse is still going on, but on a much larger scale.
The most egregious present day abuse is being carried out by a foreign corporation, TransCanada. To clear 1,700 miles of right-of-way for their huge, toxic Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada to Texas, TransCanada is in the process of using the US courts (and crooked judges) to use the power of eminent domain to take American homes, farms, ranches, woodlands, meadows, brooks, streams, etc. from private home/land owners.
Do some research folks! Look up the NY Times articles on the folks fighting to not have TransCanada take their property. Look up the 30% rise in cancer rates among the “First Nation” native Canadian tribes whose land is near the toxic Alberta tar pits. Their hunting grounds are polluted, their lakes are dying, etc. all due to the poisonous process and by-products of tar sands extraction.
Look up the safety records of the smaller Keystone pipelines already in existence – they have had at least one accident/leak a day for years! Educate yourselves as to the dangers of this project so that when you hear the uninformed sheeple who know nothing else but to parrot their lies of “jobs, jobs,” you’ll know the whole story, not just the spin.