by Tiny, Poor News Network
Poor, unhoused, barely housed, indigenous, Black, Brown and Red people don’t have presidents. We have prison wardens, police, sheriffs, anti-social workers, landlords, judges, bailiffs, poverty pimps, case manglers, ICE agents, CPS workers and debt collectors.
POOR got wind of the unpublicized RAD plan to privatize all public housing years before it happened and protested valiantly to try to stop it. – Photo: PNN
Under Clinton, we lost welfare and the criminalization and incarceration of young people was institutionalized. Under Reagan, we were called welfare queens and accused of stealing and were permanently criminalized and racialized as poor single parents, plus we lost all mental health care.
Under Bush, working class and poor folks lost the right to file foreclosure suits, fake wars were declared against all Muslim people locally and globally, we lost dental care and were told we had to get married. And under Obama, more of our families were deported than ever, police terror against Black and Brown people and unhoused people has continued and increased and all of our public, poor people housing has been stolen.
Since the beginning of this colonial theft, our lives have been and are consistently consumed by an endless stream of people who feed off us, profit off us and “manage us” – obstacles that we have to navigate just to get through a day, acquire a crumb of help, stay housed, sheltered, not beaten, not terrorized, not deported, not have our children, belongings and lives seized, searched, harassed or ended.
Poor, unhoused, barely housed, indigenous, Black, Brown and Red people don’t have presidents. We have prison wardens, police, sheriffs, anti-social workers, landlords, judges, bailiffs, poverty pimps, case manglers, ICE agents, CPS workers and debt collectors.
So where does this leave us in the face of this adult Chucky monster claiming some “control” over us. First of all, it is important for those of us holding on barely to the margins of this stolen land to understand and innerstand that our dribble down experience of the monsterule is really the hate, oppression and terror we are already experiencing, just intensified. To preserve our human and mental bodies, we need to stay sane and realize this is NOTHING new.
Next we need to take action and yes, that’s protest, but it’s also offensive. This is the time to launch those reparations cases – reparations for stolen lives, stolen profits, stolen land, stolen rights.
Sabrina Carter and her son (far left) are joined by Tiny and Queennandi of POOR to protest the RAD program to privatize public housing that evicted them in 2014. “They criminalized my son so they could evict my family,” said Sabrina, single mother and resident of public housing building Plaza East in the increasingly gentrified Fillmore district of San Francisco. – Photo: PNN
Three years ago when the horror of the privatization of all public housing as we know it was launched by an illegal, backroom deal between poverty pimps, non-profit and for-profiteering housing developers, HUD and the Housing Authority, POOR Magazine and the Bayview launched a series of actions and a call out to a revolutionary law firm who would represent Black, Brown and poor people living in public housing for generations who were now facing eviction from their neighborhoods, barrios, towns because the stolen Ohlone land that their housing was built on was considered too valuable for mere poor Black and Brown families to live on.
This “program” is called RAD and began under Democrats Obama and Ed Lee and was written by another Democrat, Julian Castro.
As reported in multiple stories by POOR Magazine and the Bay View newspaper since 2013, the RAD program will mean the mass displacement and houselessness of literally thousands of very poor families across these United Snakes.
Last week, our Mayor Ed Lee, who has consistently navigated stolen Ohlone (San Francisco) land, resources housing and dollars to the very rich, causing the mass eviction and displacement of elders like 100-year-old Iris Canada and the police death of Luis Demetrio Gongora Pat, Amilcar Perez Lopez, Mario Woods and Alex Nieto, proudly announced again that he “successfully transferred all the public housing to private developers.”
“Bank of America-Merrill Lynch is pleased to continue its work with the City of San Francisco and the San Francisco Housing Authority on the second phase of SF-RAD,” said Maria Barry, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch community development executive.
This announcement is yet another example of the blatant theft of resources from the people and specifically from poor people. This is when we have the backdrop of ballot measures in cities across the U.S. that make it more illegal than it already was to be unhoused. And all of this is under a so-called Democrat. Neo-liberalism is killing us. Who needs Chucky Trump?
This is the time to launch those reparations cases – reparations for stolen lives, stolen profits, stolen land, stolen rights.
So once again, I hope people move offensively. If we can’t stop this evil from being inaugurated and even if we can, revolutionary lawyers help us launch those reparations and equity cases, disengage from the lie of “capitalist success,” institutional school debt, private ownership, nuclear families, age-grade separated lives, education and police and the belief that if we just get the right politrickster, we will be ok.
This is also why POOR Magazine, Krip Hop Nation and the Sogorea Te Land Trust launched the Stolen Land and Hoarded Resources Tour this year in Ohlone and Tongva Lands and will be touring and offering the medicine of redistribution to land-stealers and wealth-hoarders in New York, Philly and beyond in 2017.
Poor people don’t have presidents or governors or mayors. We have ourselves.
“Change won’t come from a savior, a pimp or an institution; change will only come from a poor people-led revolution.” – Po Poets Project
To contact us to get involved in the stolen land tour or help us launch this lawsuit for equity, email us at deeandtiny@gmail.com.
Tiny – or Lisa Gray-Garcia – is co-founder with her Mama Dee and co-editor of POOR Magazine and its many projects and author of “Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America,” published by City Lights. She can be reached at deeandtiny@poormagazine.org. Visit POOR at www.poormagazine.org.