Stop Bandit Privatization!

Today a large group of local residents, members of the Tenants' Defense Committee and ZSP protested in the local council in defense of our neighbours from Targowa St. whose house has been privatized.

There is not much information about the basis of the privatization. Tenants were, in the style typical of the heartless and callous Warsaw bureaucracy, informed in the first days of August that as of August 1, they were no longer municipal tenants and their rents would be raised. The city still owns part of the building, but, as in other cases, it does not want to say which flats are owned by the private owners and which by the city. It is thus forcing all tenants to pay the private rent, although the city is not allowed to charge more than a much lower legal rate for rent. It refuses to explain whether it is keeping the difference or allowing the private owner to pay it at the lower rate. In either case, the tenants are screwed.

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Six Months after Death of Jola, Tenants Protest against Legal System

September 1 marks six months since the murder of Jolanta Brzeska, tenant activist burned in the Kabaty forest. Six months later and her family still cannot bury her remains and organize the funeral they wanted, since the authorities refuse to release the body, even claiming that it is "unidentified".  Since months later and the property speculator and his band of thugs who tried to break into her apartment once and who threatened her have not even been brought in for questioning. This is how the legal system turns a blind eye to the situation and insensitively increases the pain that the murder victim's family is suffering.

People held a picket to remind the world of this situation and point out how the case is being handled. Even though it took the state a long time to do a DNA test and definitely identify the body of Jolanta Brzeska, it seems to not recognize that she is dead. Her social security is still being paid, as if she was living. Only the debt collector now takes this money each month to pay the real estate speculators who had raised her rent, harassed her and tried to drive her away from her home. Conveniently for the speculators, until the state recognize Jola as dead, they can now collect the money they say she owed them, something that she was fighting against when she was alive. And the bill is being paid by us all, since the money is coming from the public social security system.

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