Re: [Marxism] section 8 cuts in the U.S.

[andrew c pollack <andypollack@xxxxxxxx>]

I am SOOO glad you wrote this! I've tried to at least skim the articles
on Section 8 in the NY papers for similar reasons. I definitely think the
left should take this up. Not every city will have an activist group
ready to take it up, but everywhere, at least propagandistically, it's
worth mentioning.

The same phenomenon is seen in health care: states and cities get screwed
because of the way Feds legislate, regulate, but only partly fund,
Medicare and Medicaid. And local hacks like Pataki and Bloomberg (and
their partners like 1199's Rivera) can pass the buck to the Feds.

One final example: the local firefighters' union who endorsed Bush during
his visit last month totally ignored the way Federal cuts (under BOTH
Clinton and Bush) helped sabotage the city budget that meant firehouse
closings.

Needless to say if we can revive the Labor Party there'll be a much more
natural way to raise this both locally and nationally.

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 23:27:41 -0700 Josh Saxe <joshsaxe@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Has anyone been following this?  I'm beginning to do research on it
> because the group I'm part of in L.A. wants to join the resistance
> to
> the cuts.
> Section 8 is a federal program that provides assistance for poor
> people struggling to pay rent to private landlords.  Federal money
> is
> passed to local "housing authorities" who decide how precisely the
> money gets distributed.  In Los Angeles, 1,500 households are
> looking
> at getting thrown out of their units because of cuts by the Bush
> administration ("we're on a wartime budget!"), and it looks as
> though
> 5,000 more are threatened with eviction in the near future.  44,000
> households across the city utilize this program (_many_ more need
> it
> or are on the waiting list), which is threatened with more major
> cuts
> in the coming years.  Bush's budget proposal would throw 250,000
> households nationwide off the program (and, oftentimes into the
> streets, we can presume) in 2005.  I'm getting all this from
> http://www.lacehh.org.
> Of course this is terrible and yet another example of the war being
> waged against working people by a very confident state apparatus.
> But
> this also seems like quite an opportunity to organize - poor
> tenants
> are being backed into a corner all across the country.  A group of
> comrades in Northern California organized a group of section 8
> tenants
> in a small city and were able to force the city government to make
> up
> for the lost federal money.  So it's been shown we can at least
> defend
> tenants, if not yet dent the plans of the federal government.  I
> wonder if the left couldn't coordinate some kind of resistance to
> this?  With 250,000 families threatened one could imagine "save
> section 8" committees popping up across the country.
> All this reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend the other
> day.  In many ways the decentralized nature of government in the
> United States is a holdover initially from the colonial system but
> more importantly from the cycles of comprise and conflict between
> the
> merchant bourgeoisie and the Southern aristocracy up until 1861.
> "States rights" and decentralization was of course a legal
> justification for either slavery or wage labor depending on the
> state.
>  But the system of cities, counties, states and the national
> government each with their sovereignties and separate budgets is
> also
> a very effective means of dividing and ruling the population in
> postbellum America.  I heard it costs $500 a class in New York to
> go
> to a Community College.  In California it is much much less ($26 a
> unit) but rising.  How convenient that states can whittle away at
> living standards in heterogenous ways and across heterogenous
> timeframes, avoiding resistance on a national level...  How
> wonderful
> for us if the attacks always came all at once in every part of the
> country.  In that sense this section 8 thing might be an
> opportunity
> for the left?
> -Josh
>
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