Menace on the Menu: The Financialization of Farmland and the War on Food

By Colin Todhunter

Republished from Countercurrents.

Between 2008 and 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world and tripled in Central-Eastern Europe. In the UK, an influx of investment from pension funds and private wealth contributed to a doubling of farmland prices from 2010-2015. Land prices in the US agricultural heartlands of Iowa quadrupled between 2002 and 2020.  

Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020.  

Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation. 

Top-down ‘green grabs’ now account for 20% of large-scale land deals. Government pledges for land-based carbon removals alone add up to almost 1.2 billion hectares, equivalent to total global cropland. Carbon offset markets are expected to quadruple in the next seven years. 

These are some of the findings published in the new report ‘Land Squeeze’ by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), a non-profit thinktank headquartered in Brussels. 

The report says that agricultural land is increasingly being turned into a financial asset at the expense of small- and medium-scale farming. The COVID-19 event and the conflict in Ukraine helped promote the ‘feed the world’ panic narrative, prompting agribusiness and investors to secure land for export commodity production and urging governments to deregulate land markets and adopt pro-investor policies.  

However, despite sky-rocketing food prices, there was, according to the IPES in 2022, sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages. Despite the self-serving narrative pushed by big agribusiness and land investors, there has been no food shortage. The increased prices were due to speculation on food commodities, corporate profiteering and a heavy reliance on food imports.  

At the same time, carbon and biodiversity offset markets are facilitating massive land transactions, bringing major polluters into land markets. The IPES notes that Shell has set aside more than $450 million for offsetting projects. Land is also being appropriated for biofuels and green energy production, including water-intensive ‘green hydrogen’ projects that pose risks to local food production. 

In addition, much-needed agricultural land is being repurposed for extractive industries and mega-developments. For example, urbanisation and mega-infrastructure developments in Asia and Africa are claiming prime farmland.   

According to the IPES report, between 2000 and 2030, up to 3.3 million hectares of the world’s farmland will have been swallowed up by expanding megacities.  Some 80% of land loss to urbanisation is occurring in Asia and Africa. In India, 1.5 million hectares are estimated to have been lost to urban growth between 1955 and1985, a further 800,000 hectares lost between 1985 and 2000, with steady ongoing losses to this day.  

In a December 2016 paper on urban land expansion, it was projected that by 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland. Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities, and this land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.  

This means that, as cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers are being displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in developing countries and are key to global food security.  In their place, we are seeing the aggregation of land into large-scale farms and the spread of industrial agriculture and all it brings, including poor food and diets, illness, environmental devastation and the destruction of rural communities.  

Funds tend to invest for between 10 and 15 years and can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food security. Returns on investments trump any notions of healthy food, food security or human need. 

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The IPES notes that, globally, just 1% of the world’s largest farms now control 70% of the world’s farmland. These tend to be input-intensive, industrial-scale farms that the IPES says are straining resources, rapidly degrading farmland and further squeezing out smallholders. Moreover, agribusiness giants are pursuing monopolistic practices that drive up costs for farmers. These dynamics are creating systematic economic precarity for farmers, effectively forcing them to ‘get big or get out’. 

Factor in land degradation, much of which is attributable to modern chemical-intensive farming practices, and we have a recipe for global food insecurity. In India, more than 70% of its arable land is affected by one or more forms of land degradation. 

Also consider that the Indian government has sanctioned 50 solar parks, covering one million hectares in seven states. More than 74% of solar is on land of agricultural (67%) or natural ecosystem value (7%), causing potential food security and biodiversity conflicts. The IPES report notes that since 2017 there have been more than 15 instances of conflict in India linked with these projects. 

Nettie Wiebe, from the IPES, says: 

“Imagine trying to start a farm when 70% of farmland is already controlled by just 1% of the largest farms – and when land prices have risen for 20 years in a row, like in North America. That’s the stark reality young farmers face today. Farmland is increasingly owned not by farmers but by speculators, pension funds and big agribusinesses looking to cash in. Land prices have skyrocketed so high it’s becoming impossible to make a living from farming. This is reaching a tipping point – small and medium scale farming is simply being squeezed out.” 

Susan Chomba, also from the IPES, says that soaring land prices and land grabs are driving an unprecedented ‘land squeeze’, accelerating inequality and threatening food production. Moreover, the rush for dubious carbon projects, tree planting schemes, clean fuels and speculative buying is displacing not only small-scale farmers but also indigenous peoples. 

Huge swathes of farmland are being acquired by governments and corporations for these ‘green grabs’, despite little evidence of climate benefits. This issue is particularly affecting Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The IPES notes that some 25 million hectares of land have been snapped up for carbon projects by a single ‘environmental asset creation’ firm, UAE-based ‘Blue Carbon’, through agreements with the governments of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia and Liberia. 

According to the IPES, the ‘land squeeze’ is leading to farmer revolts, rural exodus, rural poverty and food insecurity. With global farmland prices having doubled in 15 years, farmers, peasants, and indigenous peoples are losing their land (or forced to downsize), while young farmers face significant barriers in accessing land to farm. 

The IPES calls for action to halt green grabs and remove speculative investment from land markets and establish integrated governance for land, environment and food systems to ensure a just transition. It also calls for support for collective ownership of farms and innovative financing for farmers to access land and wants a new deal for farmers and rural areas, and that includes a new generation of land and agrarian reforms. 

Capital accumulation based on the financialisation of farmland accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. However, financialisation of the economy in general goes back to the 1970s and 1980s when we witnessed a deceleration of economic growth based on industrial production. The response was to compensate via financial capitalism and financial intermediation.  

Professor John Bellamy Foster, writing in 2010, not long after the 2008 crisis, states: 

“Lacking an outlet in production, capital took refuge in speculation in debt-leveraged finance (a bewildering array of options, futures, derivatives, swaps, etc.).”  

The neoliberal agenda was the political expression of capital’s response to the stagnation and involved four mechanisms: the raiding and sacking of public budgets, the expansion of credit to consumers and governments to sustain spending and consumption, frenzied financial speculation and militarism. 

With the engine of capital accumulation via production no longer firing on all cylinders, the emergency backup of financial expansion took over. Foster notes that we have seen a shift from real capital formation in many Western economies, which increases overall economic output, towards the appreciation of financial assets, which increases wealth claims but not output.  

Farmland is being transformed from a resource supporting food production and rural stability to a financial asset and speculative commodity. An asset class where wealthy investors can park their capital to further profit from inflated asset prices. The net-zero green agenda also has to be seen in this context: when capital struggles to make sufficient profit, productive wealth (capital) over accumulates and depreciates; to avoid crisis, constant growth and fresh investment opportunities are required.  

The IPES report notes that nearly 45% of all farmland investments in 2018, worth roughly $15 billion, came from pension funds and insurance companies. Based on workers’ contributions, pension fund investments in farmland are promoting land speculation, industrial agriculture and the interests of big agribusiness at the expense of smallholder farmers. Workers’ futures are tied to pension funds, which are supporting the growth and power of global finance and the degradation of other workers (in this case, cultivators).   

Sofía Monsalve Suárez, from the IPES, states: 

“It’s time decision-makers stop shirking their responsibility and start to tackle rural decline. The financialisation and liberalisation of land markets is ruining livelihoods and threatening the right to food. Instead of opening the floodgates to speculative capital, governments need to take concrete steps to halt bogus ‘green grabs’ and invest in rural development, sustainable farming and community-led conservation.” 

Unfortunately, ordinary people cannot depend on ‘decision-makers’ and governments to bring about such change. Ordinary people themselves have always had to struggle for change and improvements to their lives. Groups across the world are fighting back, and the IPES report provides some inspiring examples of their achievements. 

Readers can read the IPES report here. 

The author specializes in food, agriculture and development issues and his two recent books on the global food system can be read here.

Systemic Racism and the Prison-Industrial Complex in the 'Land of the Free'

[Image by Keith Negley via NY Times]

By Holly Barrow

Following the tragic murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25th May, the world has erupted into protest to demand an end to the vicious racism which continues to infiltrate society. At the forefront of this crucial public discourse on race lies the criminal justice system as it has disproportionately targeted and traumatized BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) communities for decades.

Systemic racism and inequality is intrinsic to law enforcement in the US, with mass incarceration riddled with racial disparities. From the thirteenth amendment loophole to the War on Drugs, Black communities have suffered exponentially under this facade of ‘justice’, with families torn apart as a result. The War on Drugs is in fact one of the plainest and most brazen examples of heavily racialized laws borne out of a desire to incriminate Black communities. When looking at initial federal sentences for crack cocaine offenses, such inequalities within law enforcement become strikingly clear: conviction for crack selling - more heavily sold and used by people of color — resulted in a sentence 100 times more severe than selling the same amount of powder cocaine — more heavily sold and used by white people.

This is no coincidence and just one example of a system patently stacked against low-income, Black communities. We need only look at some key statistics to recognize how deeply this goes: African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested, are more likely to be convicted and are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences. Beyond this, African American adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white adults.

In light of such disproportionate arrest and convictions of Black people in the US, dismantling the current prison system - particularly the prison-industrial complex - is key in the fight against racism. The prison-industrial complex describes the overlapping interests of government and industry; essentially, it refers to the corruption at the heart of the criminal justice system in the use of prisons as a mechanism for profit.

This is a system that abolitionists and activists have been attempting to eradicate for decades as it has become increasingly clear over the years that there is a very real and dangerous incentive to incarcerate human beings. With the rise of for-profit prison systems has come further exploitation of predominantly African-American men and other ethnic minorities. With regards to class, this system additionally hurts low-income citizens at a significantly higher rate, with many recognizing the harrowing reality that, in the US, poverty is often treated as a crime.

Poor and minority defendants are typically unable to access the same level of protection and defense as their wealthier counterparts. Similarly, the state recognizes the likelihood of their inability to afford bail, with over 10 million Americans in prison as they await trial on low-level misdemeanors or violations simply because they cannot afford the bail set for them. This keeps prisons filled; a key proponent of the prison-industrial complex.

With police officers incentivized to make arrests as they are aware that police departments will not be funded adequately if there is no motive to do so, and billion-dollar corporations having stakes in the private prison system - from technology such as tagging to hospitality for inmates - incarceration has become a means to generate wealth and boost local economies. This comes at the expense of the most marginalized groups, namely poor people of color.

Regrettably, this line between ‘justice’, ‘protection’ and corporate interest is becoming comparably distorted across immigration removal centers. And again, it is BIPOC who largely fall victim to this. Detention, surveillance and border wall construction have all become big business, with approximately two-thirds of all detainees being held in for-profit facilities. Tech companies have thrived off of tracking migrants, with software company Palantir holding a $38 million contract with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

To provide further insight into just how money-oriented the detention of predominantly vulnerable individuals - such as asylum seekers - has become, we can observe the distressing rise in shares in the largest prison company in the world. Shares in CoreCivic — which runs both private prison facilities and detention centers — spiralled by 40% when Trump was elected as president. This came following his promises to deport thousands and demonstrates a clear recognition that this would see private, for-profit immigration detention facilities boom.

To deny the concerning correlation between incarceration - both within prisons and detention facilities - and investment suggests willful ignorance. The treatment of prisons and detention facilities as money-making machines is of detriment to democracy and makes a mockery of those who hail America as the ‘land of the free.’

In fighting systemic racism, we cannot neglect to tackle the prison-industrial complex. Its roots and very mechanisms are rooted in the oppression of the most marginalized.

Holly Barrow is a political correspondent for the Immigration Advice Service; an organization of immigration lawyers based in the UK and the US

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

[Artwork by Mara Garcia, @magavitart]

By Eric Kerl

Originally published at Rampant Magazine.

he social, political, and economic crisis currently unfolding, shaped by a global pandemic, is a damning indictment of modern capitalism. In its first two months, more than 30 million people in the United States have lost their jobs. While business leaders cavort with the Trump administration and right-wing states’ rights advocates demand to reopen the economy, the crisis will only deepen. Indeed, many economists predict that the fallout will be the worst since the Great Depression.

The crisis of the 1930s culminated in the rise of fascist power in Europe. In the United States, it ushered in the New Deal coalition and the expansion of the welfare state. But, by the end of the decade, only the slaughter of World War II finally jumpstarted the global economy through sheer barbarism and unrestrained weapons production.

Like Donald Trump and the rest of today’s ruling class, leading capitalists of the 1930s had little to offer the majority of people after the stock market crashed in 1929. Unemployment, poverty, hunger, and homelessness mushroomed. As the crisis deepened, the industrial overlord, notorious anti-Semite, and failed presidential hopeful Henry Ford advised poor people to take up sharecropping to feed themselves. With paid advertisements in newspapers across the country Ford claimed, “Stocks may fail, but seedtime and harvest do not fail.”[1] Meanwhile, ecological catastrophe devastated the dustbowl-ravaged Great Plains and displaced more than 3.5 million people. By 1934, the Yearbook of Agriculture announced:

Approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land have essentially been destroyed for crop production. . . . 100 million acres now in crops have lost all or most of the topsoil; 125 million acres of land now in crops are rapidly losing topsoil.

While millions went hungry, Ford partnered with the growing Nazi war machine. During the first six months of 1932, Ford’s meagre operations in Germany struggled to make money. Although the plants were ridiculed as “foreign” by the wave of German nationalism, Ford swooned over Hitler’s new plans to shift automobile manufacturing into overdrive, fueled by government cash.  By 1937, Ford was a certified manufacturer of trucks and cars for the Nazi regime’s military.

Back in the United States, Ford summoned the police and National Guard against unemployed workers. During the spring of 1932, three thousand unemployed workers protested outside Ford’s behemoth River Rouge complex in Detroit demanding relief. Police attacked the protesters, injuring dozens. Four workers were shot and killed, including Joseph York, a twenty-three-year-old unemployed worker. The following day, York’s girlfriend, Mary Grossman, faced down the murderous cops:

Yes, I was there. I’m not sorry. I did it for starving millions. Blame capitalism which is the cause of all suffering. Now don’t talk to me![2]

Similar protests erupted in cities around the world, often organized and led by Communist Party members and other radicals. Politicians and media outlets routinely decried the reds and riots of unemployed. International headlines of the time read: “Spanish Jobless Riot,” “Canadians Attack City Hall,” “British Hunger Army Ready to Invade Commons,” “Police Battle Reds with Tear Gas at Detroit Factory,” “Police Protect President from Hunger Parade,” “German Jobless Charge Cabinet, Plunder Dole,” “Red Rebellion Flares in Spain,” and “Batons of Police Halted Red Mob in Washington Riot.”

Yet, as the American Civil Liberties Union noted at the time, “It is a matter of common knowledge among relief workers that vigorous demonstrations—so-called ‘riots’ by the unemployed, produce an almost miraculous effect in loosening the public purse-strings.”[3]

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

During the first month of 1928, nearly two years before the stock market crash of 1929, the entertainment industry magazine Variety expressed its anxiety for Chicago’s theater business. Unemployment, the article noted, was the highest since 1922. And theater-goers had reason to be uncomfortable: “The horde of ’boes and panhandlers infesting the Loop makes New York Times Square parasites seem like a coterie of philanthropists in comparison.” Still, the article remained naively optimistic. “Because of sound financial qualities, it is believed by authorities here the unemployment wave will be relieved considerably this year.”[4]

Instead, the number of unemployed Americans surged from 3 million to 15 million. By 1932, half of Illinois’s workers were jobless. In Chicago, where 60 percent of the state’s unemployed lived, a deep social crisis was underway. One report noted at the time,

There are several Chicago garbage dumps, some of which are under city supervision and some private. About a dozen places where garbage is dumped were visited by different members of the committee; and in every place where “soft” garbage, such as the remains of food, were found, people were reported to be picking it over and eating from it at the dump or taking it home to cook.[5]

The influence of communists and revolutionaries helped galvanize the unemployed into a fighting force, and authorities grew panicked about the increasing militancy and organization of the movement. While cops beat marchers in Detroit and New York City, Chicago police ransacked offices of unemployed and radical organizations throughout the city. Despite the repression, 50,000 workers mobilized in Chicago streets on March 6, 1930, for a national day of action billed as International Unemployment Day.

Less than a week later, three policemen were shot and eleven “communists” were arrested at the north end of Michigan Ave during a “riotous demonstration.” Those arrested included Bryan Moss, Ben Koblentz, Mrs. Anna Rejba, Martin Rich, Evelyn Weiner, William Bart, Frank Cordisco, William Bart, Morris Krivin, Anna Grossman, and Ida Mittelman. Their defense lawyer was Albert Goldman, an antifascist organizer who later emerged as a leader of the fledgling US Trotskyist movement, lead counsel for the Teamsters during the 1934 Minneapolis strike, and a mayoral candidate in Chicago. Ultimately, a “communist parade” preceded their acquittal, “in which several thousand men and women, half of them Negroes, participated.”[6]

The following July, the Communist Party’s Trade Union Unity League initiated a call for a national conference of unemployed councils.[7] More than 1,300 delegates from CP-affiliated organizations and unions met in Chicago. Black workers comprised an important number of the representatives and the conference highlighted racial justice demands in the unemployed movement.

As unemployed workers flooded into Chicago from the Midwest and South in search of jobs, unemployed councils blossomed in neighborhoods across the city. Rent strikes, anti-eviction blockades, and street mobilizations occurred across the city and demonstrations targeted the role of cops in carrying out the evictions and repression. One Chicago Tribune article described a typical action;

300 men and women gathered outside the stations. Policeman Dominick Varsetto, assigned there, closed the door. Members of the group pounded upon it until they broke the glass, but no further damage was done. At that moment Liet. Make Mills of the industrial squad and Capt. Phil Parodi of the Maxwell street stations arrived with eight police squads. Leaders of the crowd made soapbox speeches before the gathering dispersed. Liet. Mills arrested five alleged ringleaders: Joseph Shoster, no address; Edward Van Horn, 642 Liberty street; Joseph Bebko, 1717 West Madison street; and James Adams, no address.[8]

Still, aid to one hundred and forty-three thousand Chicago families was cut by 25 percent, and perishable food supplies were slashed by half in 1932.[9] In neighborhoods across the city, Chicago’s poor rebelled in a firestorm of organizing and riots.

On a cold, rainy Halloween, 2,500 unemployed gathered at the corner of 22nd and Wentworth. On the city’s West Side, 3,000 gathered at Union Park. In Washington Park on the South Side, 2,000 protesters gathered. Along with thousands from other parts of the city, they converged in the Loop, wearing red armbands, red dresses, and carrying red umbrellas and red flags. One journalist reported,

As the singing, shouting, hunger armies moved toward the meeting place from north, west and south, their forces were constantly increased. Detachments joined on the end of the lines until, by the time the three groups were a few blocks apart in the loop, a total of some 15,000 persons was moving.[10]

Military veterans carried a banner that read, “Wilson’s heroes; Hoover’s hoboes.” Other contingents included a group of Italian antifascists and “a platoon of children, 7 to 10 years old, carrying empty milk bottles.” Unemployed Black workers highlighted the case of Scottsboro and pressed the issue of racial justice.

Less than a month later, “a genuine united front of working class organizations was constituted” in Chicago to fight the 50 percent reduction of relief. Unemployed organizations from across the city, along with the Communist Party, Socialist Party, and the Workers League, organized the event. As one participant described:

The call for the conference signed by the three organizations met with a huge response everywhere. The masses reacted as never before, and the conference bore testimony of this fact. 750 delegates representing 350 organizations made up the conference. Included in the conference were over 40 church organizations composed entirely of unemployed workers, the Farmer-Labor Party, the A.F. of L., fraternal organizations, the TUUL.[11]

The city’s authorities responded with a wave of repression, arrests, and deportations of unemployed and radical organizers. While the Chicago Police Department flaunted its racism and brutality routinely, the frequent deployment of cops also provided opportunities to exhibit their bumbling idiocy. On a Saturday afternoon in 1934, just four days before Thanksgiving, four thousand Chicagoans marched to City Hall with demands for unemployment and relief benefits. Nearly two hundred cops were stationed inside the building “in case trouble developed.” When none developed, one of the jackass cops “tossed a few firecrackers under the feet” of a Black cop. A frenzy of gunfire erupted inside the building and seven cops were shot in the barrage of friendly fire.[12]

Winning relief

Like Henry Ford’s sharecropping schemes, government and business leaders had no genuine relief to offer millions of poor and hungry workers. Genuine programs, of course, were organized and advocated by the unemployed themselves. In Pennsylvania, insurgent rank-and-file coal miners pressed their demands for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill.[13] In Charlotte, North Carolina, the unemployed council organized militant, interracial demonstrations in support of the bill.[14] In Chicago, hundreds of delegates from the Illinois Workers Alliance, Emergency Workers Union, and other organizations of the unemployed—representing about 750,000 workers—endorsed the bill in the fall of 1934.

The Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was unveiled by the Communist Party in the summer of 1930 and quickly won the endorsement of three thousand five hundred local unions. As Chris Wright described the bill,

In the form it would eventually assume, it provided for unemployment insurance for workers and farmers (regardless of age, sex, or race) that was to be equal to average local wages but no less than $10 per week plus $3 for each dependent; people compelled to work part-time (because of inability to find full-time jobs) were to receive the difference between their earnings and the average local full-time wages; commissions directly elected by members of workers’ and farmers’ organisations were to administer the system; social insurance would be given to the sick and elderly, and maternity benefits would be paid eight weeks before and eight weeks after birth; and the system would be financed by unappropriated funds in the Treasury and by taxes on inheritances, gifts, and individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year. Later iterations of the bill went into greater detail on how the system would be financed and managed.[15]

The bill was eventually co-opted and presented to Congress by the self-described “La Follette Republican” Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, a rabid isolationist and Nazi sympathizer.[16] Like the homegrown fascist radio personality Father Charles Coughlin he railed against the crimes and inequality of capitalism. But his neck swelled over the threat of communism and its advocacy for racial justice.

Nevertheless, the groundswell of action and organizing by socialists, communists, and unemployed workers—Black and white—ensured that Lundeen’s bill would “extend to all workers, whether they be industrial, agricultural, domestic, office, or professional workers, and to farmers, without discrimination because of age, sex, race, color, religious or political opinion or affiliation.”[17] Indeed, a New York Post poll showed that 83 percent of its readers preferred the more radical Lundeen bill over the Social Security Act.

The strength and popularity of the unemployed movement and genuine relief coincided with a massive strike wave that reached from San Francisco to Minneapolis, Toledo, and the textile mills of the South. While sectarian squabbles often counteracted the potential for solidarity in other areas of work, the Communist Party and Socialist Party both appealed for common, united front approaches to unemployment. For the CP, their united front demands included:

1. Decisive wage increases and reduction in hours, supporting a bold strike movement to win them

2. For the immediate enactment of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill

3. For the immediate enactment of the Farmers’ Emergency Relief Bill to secure for the farmers the possession of their lands and tools, and to provide abundance of food to the masses

4. For the immediate enactment of the Bill for Negro Rights

5. For the united struggle against war and fascism

6. For the broadest possible united action in localities, in factories, in trade unions, and on every question affecting the workers and toiling masses, to win better conditions[18]

Ultimately, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was defeated in favor of Roosevelt’s watered-down policies of the second New Deal. But it was not a foregone conclusion that something more radical—genuine relief—was within the grasp of the unemployed movement.

And, the current crisis of unemployment and poverty will not be magically solved by today’s politicians. Only our own self-activity can win genuine relief from this most recent and profound crisis of capitalism.

Notes

[1] “Henry Ford on Self-Help,” advertisement prepared and paid for by the Ford Motor Company as a contribution to public welfare, Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1932, 14.

[2] “15 Arrested After Police Slay Four in Unemployed Riot,” The Pantagraph, March 8, 1932, 1.

[3]  Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 158, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[4] “Chicago’s Heavy Breadline Tells of Unemployment,” Variety, February 1, 1928, 12.

[5] Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 157, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[6] “Jurors Acquit 11 Alleged Reds; Fired by Judge,” Chicago Tribune, April 20, 1932, 19.

[7] Solomon, Mark, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 148.

[8] “Seek to Raise Cash Pending U.S. Relief Loan,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1932, 2.

[9] “Relief to 143,000 Chicago Families Is Cut 25 Percent,” Alton Evening Telegraph, October 27, 1932, 1.

[10] Robert T. Loughran, “Radicals Parade under Guise of ‘Hunger March’,” Freeport Journal-Standard, October 31, 1932, 1–12.

[11] Albert Glotzer, “Stalinists Make Right About Face in Chicago Unemployed United Front,” The Militant, Vol. V, No. 28 (November 26, 1932), 1–2.

[12] “Hunger March is Peaceful but 7 Policemen Hurt,” Jacksonville Daily Journal, November 25, 1934, 8.

[13] Walter Howard, Anthracite Reds Vol. 2: A Documentary History of Communists in Northeastern Pennsylvania During the Great Depression (iUniverse, 2004), 152.

[14] Gregory S. Taylor, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party, University of South Carolina Press, 2009, 73–74.

[15] Chris Wright, The Hidden History of American Radicalism: The Campaign for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill” Counterfire, April 25, 2020, https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21138-the-hidden-history-of-american-radicalism-the-campaign-for-the-workers-unemployment-insurance-bill.

[16] B.W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018).

[17] M. Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 22.

[18] United States Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 231.