Kentucky: Shut down slumlords & liberal racists

A discussion and reading of a recent struggle article in Challenge.

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members from Kentucky organized a protest in downtown Corbin on Friday, August 30th to bring attention to rising rents and record evictions in the state. We also wanted to call out HB5, a bill which criminalizes homelessness, as an anti-worker bill supported by both Democrat and Republican legislators. The protest was sparked when local PL’ers noticed that a particular group of landlords, known as the Freeman Brothers, were notoriously infamous in Corbin for charging high rents and doing very little maintenance or upkeep on the properties they manage. The brothers are not just landlords, but also lawyers who own a property management business, a real estate brokerage, and have their own podcast. They have been known to make posts on social media websites such as Facebook, where they gloat about the negative attention that they receive from workers online who have seen their own rents go up as a result of the Freeman Brother’s influence on the market. Freeman Brother’s posts are often littered with comments from working-class tenants complaining and attacking the landlords for their disgusting behavior.