These outrageous acts of socioeconomic cleansing (see thread linked below) give the lie to all the mendacious claims that evictions of poor people’s encampments are about public health, safety, or “environmental impacts”. Even those that are exemplary models of minimizing those impacts are being evicted all over the country to appease landlords and upper-middle-income gentrifiers who have many times more detrimental effects on the local community and global ecology.
This is not about public safety, the environment, or even “quality of life”. It’s about maintaining extortionate housing prices and propping up the system of rentier capitalism by comprehensively criminalizing the mere act of existing anywhere, in any way whatsoever, without paying the banks and landlords their monthly pounds of flesh and engaging in the consumer economy at a level that the wealthy consider “respectable”.
There is simply no conceivable moral justification for this legalized neo-feudal protection racket, where if you don’t keep making skyrocketing extortion payments every month, the landlord / “property investor” class sends a band of sadistic psychopaths with guns to rob you of your belongings and displace you from your home by violent force.
This is happening practically everywhere and every day across the entire USA. And it’s not going to stop until people of conscience start organizing in large numbers to say, “No more! We won’t be forced to pay rent to live on the earth where we were born!” Every time these thugs show up for another round of evictions against the most marginalized people in this country, they need to start finding themselves faced with overwhelming resistance, including support for elements willing to engage in vigorous, forceful self-defense if necessary. That’s the only way we’re going to keep these crimes against humanity from continuing to accelerate.
This is, for me, on an equal footing with the climate and ecological emergency as the most urgent domestic problem in the US today, and it is inextricably intertwined with all the others. If we have no right to exist (and no, something we have to purchase is not a right - it’s a commodity), then none of our other rights count for a goddamn thing. This country’s unhoused people are on the front lines of one of the most crucial and urgent social justice struggles of our time, and need a hell of a lot more solidarity than they’re currently getting. Let’s all step up!
https://social.coop/@mlncn/110436188668525614
#Housing #HousingJustice #SocialHousing #Homeless #Houseless #Unhoused #RentStrike #RightToExist #PropertyIsTheft #Capitalism #SimpleLiving #Police #Minneapolis #Minnesota
![immigration to Israel [-Palestine]
Annual totals since 1948 show a peak at 240,000 persons entering in 1949 and show a peak at 200,000 persons entering in 1990.
(People emigrating are not envisaged.)](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/114/686/902/436/410/136/original/9e4c53d7b677d8c4.png)
