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©2008 Carol Harvey, all rights reserved.
carolharveysf@yahoo.com
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UNHOUSED VOTING INDICATORS FOR NOVEMBER 4
I was a Chicago high school student. Black-suited men rapped on our door ordering my terrified father to “Name Names,” or lose his job. My parents, Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party unionists, joined writers and artists like Pete Seeger and Ring Lardner, in the Communist Party.
It wasn’t from bad civics classes that I blanked on my democratic rights under the first ten Constitutional amendments. For years, I avoided politics. I’m still in recovery from an irritating rash left behind by red diaper baby PTSD.
I learned realities of Fascist life early. Maxine Goldbarg said neighbors called her family “Those Jews who caused the War.” Mom warned me not to utter the word “communion.” As a teacher, I took loyalty oaths. I feared denial of a passport.
In The End of America – Letter of Warning to A Young Patriot, Naomi Wolf lists systematic steps by which, democratic rights are dismantled. Allende’s Chile, Bolivia, Indonesia, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Germany, East Germany, and Russia were converted from open to closed totalitarian states.
Like German Jews, the homeless are the Front Guard. During national conversion from Democracy to Fascism, they suffer first what we suffer last.
Neither Presidential candidate has outlined plans to resolve homelessness. But, which would preserve our democratic rights and which quick-step the country into the Bush-Cheney Fascist wetdream that Wolf’s book outlines below?
1. External and Internal Threats.
In the September Bay Guardian, [“What are safe streets? – Mayoral task force looks for ways to protect people in San Francisco from the homeless,”] Amanda Witherell described loss of tourism dollars, not from crime, but from “unpredictable” homeless behavior, reflecting the highest value of our Capitalist Republic – Money.
Honoring Sister Bernie Galvin’s retirement from Religious Witness with Homeless People, activist Richard Marquez quoted Brazilian educator, Paolo Friere asking a woman in a homeless shelter, “Are you American?” Tearfully, she answered, “No! I am poor.” Friere wrote, “That desolate woman expressed…the absence of citizenship. She had been expelled from existence itself.” We treat those without money and homeless as “non-people” without civil or human rights.
Like Hitler’s Jews or Bush’s Al Qaeda “evildoers” with their alleged 911 attempt to annihilate us, the internal threat endangering American capitalism most is the Poor’s public presence interferencing with commerce, bringing the nation down. The protofascist tactic is to scapegoat them as “Others” --- lazy, crazy, addicted, choosing to live on streets. These Dangerous Unsuccessful must suffer and die. Ignore these coalmine canaries at our peril. They foretell our fate.
In a recent SF Weekly article, “Homeless SF State students struggle to stay in school and stay loaded,” Trey Bundy undermines his stereotype of druggies’ deliberate street life. He quotes “Steve” describing depression resulting from an “abusive,”“dysfunctional” family. “That’s why we’re out here. No one in his right mind would be … [homeless].”
Supervisor Angela Alioto, with her strong record of helping the poor, once observed she never saw a homeless person refuse shelter.
By promoting stereotypic scapegoats, such articles skirt homelessness’ root causes which Nixon and Reagan accelerated by underfunding affordable housing. Workers and students in San Francisco’s high rent district, earn wages too meager for housing and quadruple up in apartments.
2. Secret prisons.
Mortgage meltdowns force families from homes. Secret Guantanamos are exposed. Media covered the New Orleans Superdome, showing “Average” citizens the emotional and physical abuse inflicted in homeless shelters.
3. A paramilitary force.
Security habitually harass homeless people.
We are numbed watching TV Cops brutalizing citizens. “Don’t taze me, Bro!” normalizes the presence of police and hired mercenaries waging war on us. In 2006, burly Blackwater guards protecting CEOs from CPMC hospital picketers told me they’d returned from Iraq through New Orleans where they shot people hip-deep in water “looting” food. Amy Goodman, and 14 Republican convention protesters, roughed up and tazed by police, were released from St. Paul jails picking copper wires from their skin.
4. Surveil Ordinary Citizens
Living on streets, homeless “citizens” are easily surveiled. Police Chief Heather Fong at Mayor Newsom’s Street and Neighborhoods workgroup, intended to make downtown “more uncomfortable for homeless and poor people” who “act strangely” and “talk to themselves” (though) “they haven’t committed a crime.” Police sweeps routinely confiscate homeless belongings, violating the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure.
The Mayor’s workgroup may request data about homeless vendors. Together with information stored in the computerized shelter reservation system “CHANGES,” this could be fed into the National Crime Information Computer Center downloadable to any officer’s laptop, criminalizing the unhoused.
Currently, “We”are experiencing a loss of fourth amendment rights of privacy of our papers. Writes Wolf, “According to the ACLU,” activists should assume “Your e-mail may be monitored and your phone calls tracked.”
5. Infiltrate Citizens’ Groups. “The next time you meet with your anti-war group,” (or a Street Sheet meeting), “…ask yourself if everyone present really is who you think he or she is.”
6. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens.
First Amendment Constitutional rights of the unhoused to assemble --- to sleep, stand, or sit alone or together on sidewalks, under bridges, in encampments in order to secure mutual protection, clean beds, food, and facilities, are routinely violated by police water-cannon washdowns or illegal levy of tickets for “quality of life infractions.” When multiple fines become too high to pay, people are often jailed and released.
Liberal Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy and singer Cat Stevens, now Usef Islam, were detained in airports, “on national security grounds,” according to Wolf.
7. Target Key Individuals.
“Job loss and career setbacks are the first kinds of pressure these people are likely to face.”
Advocates Sister Bernie Galvin, Supervisor Chris Daly and Coalition founder, Paul Boden have been misrepsented for years by the pro-Newsom ‘Chronicle.’
8. Restrict the Press.
“In dictatorships, targeting free press begins with political pressure.” Commentator, Keith Olberman, refers to Fox as “Fixed News.” Journalists know Americans get restricted inaccurate news, stunting our world view.
If you buy our paper, please read and take it seriously? Peer past the mainstream press’ negative PR and distorted homeless news. Coalition advocates offer through ‘Street Sheet’ well-researched documentation and solid reporting and are the City’s homelessness paper of record.
9. Cast Criticism as “Espionage” and Dissent as “Treason.”
Police distribute a photo depicting Chris Daly open-mouthed in an officer’s face, painting him a lawbreaker. Protesting Hastings’ threat to replace housing with parking structures, Daly grimaces painfully from the officer’s thumb lock.
10. Subvert the Rule of Law.
The unconstitutionality of quality of life “infractions” doesn’t stop City officials denying citizens without walls the right to rest, lie, or sit in the only place they can --- under the sky.
As of today, legendary Bush-Cheney subversions of Rule of Law evoke constant cries to “Impeach.”
A famous caution about our present political predicament is apt.
"In Germany, they came for Communists. I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t Communist;
They came for trade unionists, I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
They came for Jews, I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
They came for me . . . By that time there was no one left to speak up."
Pastor Martin Niemoller
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