A Letter to Fellow Poor People: You Didn’t Start This, But You Will Fix It. Stay Strong!

OAKLAND, CA — You may doubt yourselves……. you feel weak, unprepared, unlikely to be heard over well-dressed, well-spoken, respected, well cared for, wealthy voices saying you are the problem. They say the problem with homelessness is those unkempt, unruly, drug-addicted homeless people who come to our lovely communities for the lazy life in “Fentanyl City” or “San Fransicko” because those cities are “run by progressives who are soft on drugs, soft on slackers, soft on crime.”

The problem with this story is that it’s not true. And when someone consciously puts forward things that are untrue, it’s called lying.

You didn’t raise the rents, big corporate landlords like Blackstone and Wedgewood did. You didn’t jack up the housing prices, BlackRock did. You didn’t have 5 companies-in-one, with a company dedicated to finding distressed mortgage properties in Oakland and then passing them on to their eviction company, and then to  their auction-dominating company – Wedgewood Homes did.

You didn’t create and push through Proposition 13, the first of the big tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporate, the first big cuts to our state and local budgets for schools, roads, and other stuff a community needs. And 13 was pushed with lies, like “it’s for the Seniors, so their taxes won’t go up.”

You didn’t close the factories your parents or grandparents worked in for decent wages, Caterpillar did. DeLaval, Ford, GM, Nummi, General Electric, International Harvester, and a dozen other corporations closed their factories here in the early 1980s, to automate and exploit cheaper labor elsewhere. Their closures drove a hundred smaller shops out of business entirely, unable to compete in the new, digital economy.

You didn’t cut public schools funding to the bone, and then conspire to force Oakland Unified School District into deep debt and state control like Jerry Brown, Don Perata and Jack O’Connell did in 2003, so schools could be closed and neighborhoods emptied out for luxury housing investment.

You didn’t use automation technologies to drive down employment and lower wages across almost all industries, so that now, 60% of Americans don’t have the money to deal with a $1,000 emergency, and 40% can’t even handle a $400 emergency.

You didn’t sell predatory, NINJA mortgages to all the workers who now couldn’t afford to buy homes in the New Economy, and then evict them like Blackstone’s business model which took the company from $400K in 1985 to $25 Trillion (with a “T”!) assets in 2021.

You didn’t create the opioid (Fentanyl) addiction crisis, any more than you created the crack cocaine crisis. American big pharma companies and the for-profit health “system” created and pushed Oxycontin to workers in pain, from chronic work injuries and/or the emotional pain of living on the margins. The same drug companies, combined with the CIA and other security-state actors, ensured that addictive drugs permeated our low income communities because……doped-up folks just hurt each other, they don’t rise up like Watts 1965 and the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion.

You didn’t cut preventive maintenance to our entire infrastructure (because that’s the EASY PLACE to hide budget cuts), resulting in massive fires, deteriorating public buildings, bridge collapses, railroad disasters and pothole-saturated city streets and even highways.

Finally, you didn’t privatize healthcare so that even the public hospitals are now private “nonprofit” hospitals, and your lower income, higher rent and higher food costs now mean you go broke in a health emergency and get foreclosed and evicted.

These facts are what helped create the type of society we have today. No matter what mistakes you’ve made, you shouldn’t be houseless. Ever. People who make a mistake or have an emergency come up should not be punished, and definitely should not lose their housing.

People who say you are deficient, who say you’re the problem, may talk “nice” like Libby Schaaf and the Chronicle/East Bay Times/Merc News, or nasty like Michael Shellenberger and his protégé Seneca Scott who say people are houseless because they are drug-addicted criminals and layabouts, but they’re working for the suits who never dirty their hands with open attacks – just stay in the back room directing their stooges. They’re even manipulating stressed small landlords to attack any politician who fights for the common good.

So, how can you help get us out of this vicious mess?

Here’s a simple truth; you are strong in all the important ways. You are here, thinking about how to make change happen; you have survived everything they’ve thrown at you; you are together with real friends and comrades; you are strong, because you are speaking for the future and not a past that only benefits the rich.

You will make mistakes, like all of us. You’ve had lots of practice at being shoved around, ignored, hated, unappreciated; now you’re in the land of learning-as-we-go, of theory and practice – where the history of freedom movements, the science of social change, and the practice of attacking the system that attacks us, are united.

These billionaire corporate masters and their stooges seem powerful, and they do have power, but they are weak because they have nothing real left to offer any of us, just illusions  – and fear.

They are the past, and you are the future. You stand with the young people, who now insist on a world of respect and inclusion for all. This doesn’t mean we can coast; it’s an uphill battle all the way against a sophisticated, desperate enemy. Our tasks become clearer every day. We need unity – massive, powerful unity – with all other forces battling this dying system, from water to food to education to climate to housing and everything else that’s needed to save ourselves and our planet. We need good, smart tactics; tactics flow from good strategy. Another way of putting it is, smart actions flow from solid objectives, solid objectives flow from clear goals.

Decent housing for all, with no ifs-ands-or buts — is our goal, and that means making housing not a commodity — ultimately, taking it away from corporations. Objectives within that goal might include forcing the issue of housing onto the public stage in a way that polarizes the community against the corporate investment property owners, and tactics within objectives might mean a variety of actions, based on the overall goal.

As you take up these tasks, lose your doubts – and trust that you are the ones to lead this.