Displaced out of SF housing
By Lisa Garcia-Gray and Linda William
June 25— The deep sounds of never ending, mind numbing, headache-generating
traffic bombarded the weather beaten glass of the 6 Motel (not to be
confused with the pricier Motel 6), as I sat with displacement survivor
and former Valencia Gardens tenant Linda William.
Driving up Highway 80 East, I kept referring to my friend and fellow
PNN (Poor News Network) writer’s careful directions. “It’s
sort of near Vallejo,” she had said quietly on the phone, the weight
of her horrendous dilemma flooding her voice. “I couldn’t
actually afford a motel in Vallejo. They were too expensive, and all
the cheap ones were filled,” she concluded wearily.
It had been almost two years since Linda took the “sweet deal”
offered by the San Francisco Housing Authority to move out of her long-time
residence at Valencia Gardens in San Francisco. Valencia being one of
many hundreds of public housing projects in the Bay Area and across
the nation labeled “bad” and targeted for “redevelopment,”
which resulted in massive displacement of low-income tenants from public
housing to essentially “a piece of paper.” That is, these
tenants were handed a Section 8 voucher and a lot of promises of available
market-rate or privately owned low-income housing projects but ended
up, like Linda, homeless. As those of us in the know say, public housing
is better than no housing.
“They gave me a Section 8 certificate and said I could go anywhere
with it. Of course, I had always had a dream of moving out of the city
with my two kids, and I thought this was my big chance.”
As Linda spoke, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I, too, was
relying on a pending Section 8 certificate to stabilize the ever unstable
housing of myself, my mother, and my nine-month-old son, but from all
the recent reports out of the Bush administration, this “stable
housing” might remain a dream.
“So with that certificate, I started the search for housing in
Vallejo and Fairfield and Marin.” Linda continued her story, unfazed
by my uh-huhs and head nodding. “Well, whaddya know, I found closed
wait lists on almost all the low-income housing units in all of those
places, and all the rest of the landlords wouldn’t even return
my calls when I told them I had Section 8.”
As Linda continued to explain how she transferred her certificate to
Alameda County hoping for better luck in Oakland, I remembered the hideously
classist and racist experience of trying to find an apartment when I
told landlords that I was on Section 8. “Ohhhhh noooo, I don’t
think so,” they would say, dreams of welfare moms dancing in their
land-holding heads.
“Eventually, I found a place in the middle of so much gang-mess
that one of my babies almost got shot last month, so I gave up and moved
to this motel. And now my Section 8 worker is telling me that it doesn’t
matter anyway, ‘cause due to the Bush-inspired cuts they probably
won’t have any money left in the Section 8 program to fund another
apartment for me anyway — and I’ll end up homeless.”
Her voice trailed off into sadness, and the whoosh of the highway filled
the room’s silence.
Linda was referring to the very serious cuts that the Section 8 program
is facing due to the Bush administration’s cuts to the program
of $1.6 billion, resulting in places like New York City to lose millions
of dollars for existing Section 8 vouchers and Alameda County not having
enough money in May even to cover the rents of vouchers already in use.
“And now I hear that people are being offered more sweet deals
by the Housing Authority to move out of the Bay View so rich people
like Newsom and his buddies can make big bucks redeveloping the Bay
View.” Linda paused to hold back an onslaught of tears. “All
I can say to those folks is, ‘Don’t be fooled. Hold onto what
you have.’ Valencia Gardens had its problems, but it was still
my home — it was still housing.”
Source: POOR Magazine
Venezuela: the gang’s all here
By Alexander Cockburn
June 26 — You can set your watch by it. The minute some halfway
decent government in Latin America begins to reverse the order of things
and give the have-nots a break from the grind of poverty and wretchedness,
the usual suspects in El Norte rouse themselves from the slumber of
indifference and start barking furiously about democratic norms. It
happened in 1973 in Chile; we saw it again in Nicaragua in the 1980s;
and here’s the same show on summer rerun in Venezuela, pending
the Aug. 15 recall referendum of President Hugo Chávez.
Chávez is the best thing that has happened to Venezuela’s
poor in a very long time. His government has actually delivered on some
of its promises, with improved literacy rates and more students getting
school meals. Public spending has quadrupled on education and tripled
on healthcare, and infant mortality has declined. The government is
promoting one of the most ambitious land-reform programs seen in Latin
America in decades.
Most of this has been done under conditions of economic sabotage. Oil
strikes, a coup attempt and capital flight have resulted in about a
four percent decline in GDP for the five years that Chávez has
been in office. But the economy is growing at close to 12 percent this
year, and with world oil prices near $40 a barrel, the government has
extra billions that it’s using for social programs. So naturally
the United States wants him out, just as the rich in Venezuela do. Chávez
was re-elected in 2000 for a six-year term. A US-backed coup against
him was badly botched in 2002.
The imperial script calls for a human rights organization to start braying
about irregularities by their intended victim. And yes, here’s
José Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch. We last met him in
this column helping to ease a $1.7 billion US aid package for Colombia’s
military apparatus. This time he’s holding a press conference in
Caracas, hollering about the brazen way Chávez is trying to expand
membership of Venezuela’s Supreme Court, the same way FDR did,
and for the same reason: that the Venezuelan court has been effectively
packed the other way for decades, with judicial flunkies of the rich.
I don’t recall Vivanco holding too many press conferences to protest
that perennial iniquity.
The “international observers” recruited to save the rich traditionally
include the Organization of American States [OAS] and the Carter Center;
in the case of the Venezuelan recall they have mustered dead on schedule.
On behalf of the opposition, they exerted enormous pressure on the country’s
independent National Electoral Council during the signature-gathering
and verification process. Eventually the head of the OAS mission had
to be replaced by the OAS secretary general because of his unacceptable
public statements.
The Carter Center’s team is headed by Jennifer McCoy, whose forthcoming
book, The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela, leans
heavily against the government. One of its contributors is José
Antonio Gil of the Datanalysis Polling Firm, most often cited for US
media analysis. The Los Angeles Times quoted Gil on what to do: “And
he can see only one way out of the political crisis surrounding President
Hugo Chávez. ‘He has to be killed,’ he said, using
his finger to stab the table in his office far above this capital’s
filthy streets. ‘He has to be killed.’”
Media manipulation is an essential part of the script, and here, right
on cue, comes Bill Clinton’s erstwhile pollster, Stan Greenberg,
still a leading Democratic Party strategist. Greenberg is under contract
to RCTV, one of the right-wing media companies leading the Venezuelan
opposition and recall effort. It’s a pollster’s dream job.
Not only does he have enormous resources against an old-fashioned, politically
unsophisticated poor people’s movement, but his firm has something
comrades back home can only fantasize about: control over the Venezuelan
media. Imagine if the right wing controlled almost the entire media
during Clinton’s impeachment.
That’s the situation in Venezuela. Just think what Greenberg’s
associate, Mark Feierstein -- a veteran of similar NED efforts in ousting
the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections-can do with this kind of totalitarian
media control. NED? That’s the National Endowment for Democracy,
praised not so long ago by John Kerry, who, like Bush, publicly craves
the ouster of Chávez.
The NED is coming over the hill arm in arm with the CIA and CIA-backed
institutions in the AFL-CIO, where John Sweeney’s team has dismally
failed to clean house. The NED has helped fund the opposition to Chávez
to the tune of more than $1 million a year. Among the recipients are
organizations whose leaders actually supported the April 2002 coup --
they signed the decree that overthrew the elected president and vice
president and abolished the country’s democratic institutions,
including the Constitution, Supreme Court, and National Assembly. The
coup was thwarted only because millions of Venezuelans rallied for Chávez.
Left out of the coup government, despite his support for it, was Carlos
Ortega, head of the CTV (Central Labor Federation). The AFL’s Solidarity
Center, successor to the CIA-linked AIFLD, gets more than 80 percent
of its funding from the NED and USAID and has funneled NED money to
Ortega and his collaborators. The Solidarity Center has been up to its
ears in opposition plotting, a reprise of the Allende years, when the
AFL helped destroy Chilean democracy. The AFL has denied any role, but
Rob Collier, an excellent San Francisco Chronicle reporter, recently
gave a detailed refutation of AFL apologetics in an exchange in the
current New Labor Forum. “In Venezuela,” he writes, “the
AFL-CIO has blindly supported a reactionary union establishment as it
tried repeatedly to overthrow President Hugo Chávez --- and,
in the process, wrecked the country’s economy.
“The CTV worked in lockstep with FEDECAMARAS, the nation’s
business association, to carry out the three general strikes/lockouts”
of 2001, 2002, and 2003. The CTV, Collier says, was directly involved
in coup organizing, and its leader was scheduled to be part of the new
junta.
The end of this particular drama has yet to be written. The left here
in the United States could make a difference if it got off its haunches
and threw itself into the fray.
Source: Counterpunch
