Los Angeles: Homeless Capital of America.

by Ina Jaffe - Los Angeles is sometimes called the homeless capital of the nation. More than 40,000 people in this city have no permanent place to live. The highest concentration of homeless is on Skid Row. In less than 1 square mile, on the edge of downtown L.A., you can see hundreds of people sleeping on the sidewalks.

Unlike other depressed neighborhoods around the country, Skid Row is not a faded remnant of a neighborhood fallen on hard times. It's long been a destination for low-wage, transient workers coming off the nearby railroad tracks to work in the city's factories and warehouses. They were mostly men staying in cheap hotels with tiny rooms and a shared bath.

You can still get a glimpse of that history from a sign on the roof of the Rosslyn Hotel. Like many hotels back then, the Rosslyn sign faces away from downtown and toward the railroad tracks. All a newcomer had to do was get off the train and look up, to see where a room could be found.

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ACORN Initates Civil Disobedience to Stop Foreclosures

As resistance to foreclosure evictions grows among homeowners, community leaders and some law enforcement officials, a broad civil disobedience campaign is starting in New York and other cities to support families who refuse orders to vacate their homes.

The community organizing group Acorn unveiled the campaign with a spirited rally on Friday at a Brooklyn church and will roll it out in at least 22 other cities in the coming weeks. Through phone trees, Web pages and text-messaging networks, the effort will connect families facing eviction with volunteers who will stand at their side as officers arrive, even if it means risking arrest.

“You want to haul us out to jail? Fine. Let the world see how government has been ineffective,” Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s chief organizer, said in an interview. “Politicians have helped banks, but they haven’t helped families in the way that it’s needed, and these families are now saying, enough is enough.”

At the onset of the foreclosure crisis, the problem was regarded by some as one of a homeowner’s own making, the result of irresponsible decisions made by families who chose to live beyond their means. But as foreclosures spread across the country, devastating even solidly middle-class communities, the blame has slowly shifted to the financial companies that made questionable loans and have received billions of dollars in federal aid to stave off collapse.

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Activists Place Homeless in Vacant Houses

As President Obama is scheduled to announce his $50 billion foreclosure prevention plan today the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is taking matters into its own hands and finding housing for homeless people in foreclosed and vacant homes. .

As people were getting thrown out of their homes across the country, and in the absence of any real government action thus far, some are taking action on the local level. The community organizing group, Acorn, recently unveiled a campaign in at least 22 cities to help homeowners resist foreclosure evictions. Meanwhile, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America is bussing homeowners facing foreclosure to the homes of chief executives of financial institutions to protest outside. Sheriffs in some places have also taken a stand. In Wayne County in Michigan, Sheriff Warren Evans, suspended all evictions starting February 2nd until the federal government implements a plan to help homeowners facing foreclosures. And in Ohio Congressmember Marcy Kaptur, recently speaking on the House floor, encouraged homeowners facing foreclosures to stay in their homes.

Today we go to Minneapolis to look at a similar organizing effort. The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign recently revealed to the media its long-running project to move homeless people into many of the foreclosed and vacant homes on Minneapolis’ North and South Side. They are also seeking a city moratorium on foreclosures, short-sales and evictions.

Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign

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Bail Out the People Movement

Bail Out the People Movement
FIGHTBACK CONFERENCE
Draft Working Paper

Realizing the Fightback – Some Perspective and Plans

Download PDF

The following was adopted at the Jan. 17 Fightback Conference in NYC. It is a work in progress.

 

In many ways, the U.S.-financed genocidal siege of Gaza that many of us have been demonstrating against in recent weeks is a harbinger of the widening war against the workers and oppressed peoples of the planet that is sure to intensify this year. In 2009, more and more lives are going to be devastated by the biggest global economic crisis since the depression of the 1930s.

 

This crisis is the challenge of a lifetime for those of us who have made a commitment to fighting for the rights of people. What we do or fail to do will prove decisive in the coming battle over whose interests in society shall prevail.

 

The election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama, realizes a measure of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream. But depression-level joblessness, evictions and foreclosures made worse by cutbacks, war, bigotry and racism are not a dream but a nightmare. This is a time of many contradictions. Many people feel that the new president will bring progressive change but at the same time, there are Black youth being summarily executed by police; Proposition 8; new attacks on reproductive justice; one of the biggest bigots presiding over the inauguration ceremony, the prospects of a widening war in Afghanistan and much more.

 

Part of the legacy of Dr. King is the understanding that no election or president--however historical and inspiring--can be a substitute for a mass movement in the struggle against war or for social and economic rights. There are signs that the workers understand this.

This past December the bankers and bosses got hit with a one-two punch. The workers at the Republic Windows and Doors Factory in Chicago occupied their plant to win some measure of their rights. One day after the workers victory in Chicago, the Smithfield meat processing workers in Tar Heel, North Carolina finally won their right to a union after a long and bitter struggle. These battles are part of the first chapter of the Fightback that must and will grow. How can we help the development of the Fightback?

 

There can be no honest discussion about fighting without posing the inevitable question--Is it not time to terminate the capitalist system that appears only capable of trapping the people of the world in a nightmare of endless chaos, violence, misery, suffering, inequality, oppression, environmental destruction and other crises all in the interests of the super rich? How can this question not become the burning question as the absurd rules of capitalism mandate that no effort can be spared to bailout the barons of capitalist finance even while much of the population is pushed into life-threatening poverty? No doubt this unavoidable question will be an essential and welcome part of our discussion during the conference. Even if the question is not openly addressed, it will be the subtext of our deliberations.

 

However, though its direction is most definitely radical, it is not the intention of this document to unite conference participants around a comprehensive ideological position. Nor does it attempt to analyze the capitalist crisis, or address many issues of importance to all of us. This document is a framework for planning action. read more

 

 

Stop Foreclosures and Evictions!

Bail Out the People Movement

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Obama Can End Homeless Veterans’ Disgrace

by Aaron Glantz - In 1973, Roy Lee Brantley filed a disability claim with the federal government for mental wounds sustained in combat overseas. Over the years, the Department of Veterans Affairs has denied his claim five separate times. "You go over there and risk your life for America and your mind's all messed up, America should take care of you, right," he says, knowing that for him and the other veterans in line for free food that promise has not been kept.
On any given night 200,000 U.S. veterans sleep homeless on the streets of America. One out of every four people -and one out of every three men -sleeping in a car, in front of a shop door, or under a freeway overpass has worn a military uniform. Some like Brantley have been on the streets for years. Others are young and women returning home wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, quickly slipping through the cracks.
For each of these homeless veterans, America's promise to "Support the Troops" ended the moment he or she took off the uniform and tried to make the difficult transition to civilian life. There, they encountered a hostile and cumbersome bureaucracy set up by the Department of Veterans Affairs. In a best-case scenario, a wounded veteran must wait six months to hear back from the VA. Those who appeal a denial have to wait an average of four and a half years for their answer. In the six months leading up to March 31st of this year, nearly 1,500 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claims would be approved by the government.
There are patriotic Americans trying to solve this problem. Last month, two veterans' organizations, Vietnam Veterans of America and Veterans of Modern Warfare, filed suit in federal court demanding the government decide disability claims brought by wounded soldiers within three months. Predictably, however, the VA is trying to block the effort. On December 17, their lawyers convinced Reggie Walton, a judge appointed by President Bush, who ruled that imposing a quicker deadline for payment of benefits was a task for Congress and the president-not the courts.
President-elect Barack Obama has the power to end this national disgrace. He has the power to ensure to streamline the VA bureaucracy so it helps rather than fights those who have been wounded in the line of duty. He can ensure that this latest generation of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan does not receive the bum rap the Vietnam generation got. Let 2008 be the last year thousands of homeless veterans stand in line for free food during the holiday season. Let it be the last year hundreds of thousands sleep homeless on the street.

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The Roots of Contemporary Homelessness

Following the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs in the 1960s, homelessness was considered to be history in America. In the 1980s, however, the number of homeless people in America surged to levels not seen since the Great Depression. What caused homelessness to go from practically a non-issue to a population that today is more than one percent of the nation and growing?

There is no simple, concrete answer. The Western Regional Advocacy Project, for example, attributes the rise to "everything from economic downshifts, to high unemployment, to deindustrialization, to global outsourcing of jobs, to the rollback of social programs, to disruptions of familial networks, to urban renewal, to the reduction in open-market low end housing, to racial discrimination, to gentrification, to the near elimination of federally supported affordable housing." Phew.

ALERT: Write to Congress to Help Needy Families in Economic Stimulus Package

Join us in asking Congress to suspend time limits in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program as part of the economic stimulus legislation currently under consideration. Cutting families off TANF, the national assistance program for impoverished families with children, at a time of high and rising unemployment violates fundamental social justice and human rights principles and will further strain other safety net resources already taxed to the breaking point (including homeless shelters and soup kitchens).

Congress rightly recognizes that jobless workers need the safeguard of extended unemployment insurance benefits. So too, do TANF recipients at risk of losing their benefits at this tenuous economic moment, need to continue to receive these benefits.

In difficult economic times, the poor are often hit the hardest, and this will be especially true without increased funding for education and job training. In fact, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, food stamp caseloads have increased dramatically in recent months. The Center also projects that the number of poor children could increase by between 2.6 and 3.3 million as a result of the recession.

Write to your senators and representative urging them to remember the most impoverished families in the economic stimulus package by suspending the time limit on eligibility for TANF benefits for at least two years or until the economy has fully recovered.

Time is of the essence. Congress will be acting very shortly on the economic stimulus package. Act now by submitting an e-mail to your legislators.

CLICK HERE TO WRITE TO CONGRESS

Thank you for your support.

Sincerely,

Irasema Garza
President

Founded in 1970 as the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, Legal Momentum is the nation's oldest legal advocacy organization dedicated to advancing the rights of women and girls.

New York: 395 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Washington D.C.: 1101 14th Street, NW, Ste 300, Washington, DC 20005
www.legalmomentum.org/

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Homeless Crisis:Sucked Into The Tunnels Beneath Las Vegas.

Hundreds of people live under the casinos in a matrix of storm drains.

Matt O'Brien has been exploring those drains for five years. The tunnels go through urban art galleries and gritty homes, and includes an introduction to some of the "silver miners" that inhabit this underground skid row. Today, 14,000 people are homeless in Las Vegas.

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