Artwork by Art Hazelwood
As we have all been watching the Big Fascist Bill and all its concurrent fascist neoliberal companions—oppression, criminalization, and murder— it begs the question: How the fuck did we get to this point?
WRAP and our allies have embarked on a year-long research project looking at measures carried out by various federal administrations from the Reagan Revolution to today. Of course, colonization and oppression have been carried out by the United States long before 1980, but what we have documented is a progressive, multi-decade, and deliberate series of attacks on federal programs that were originally intended to ensure access to housing, healthcare, income supports, and food for all people, as well as the right to exist in public space.
Administration after administration, both Democrat and Republican, spent the past 40 years systematically defunding, dismantling, privatizing, and curtailing access to programs across the social welfare network. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of units of public housing have been demolished, and income requirements have continually been raised on the units that remain.
Our research starts with Reagan administration-era cuts and privatization of housing, income support and healthcare. It then connects Welfare Reform, HOPE VI, TARP, and HEARTH to document a decades-long pattern of retrenchment, obfuscation, and oppression under both Republican and Democratic administrations, all in a push toward neoliberal governance in the United States.
Now we add the Trump administration’s Big Fascist Bill (HB-1) and we see a logical and consistent progression of that same path, plus the addition of a militarized ICE and Homeland Security “brown shirts.”
We need to clearly understand how the fuck we got here and educate ourselves and our communities accordingly. That means adjusting our research, trainings, public education, cultural expression, and organizing so we can better express the interconnectedness of our struggles.
Some of us are losing our food stamps. Some are losing our healthcare. Some are losing our housing. Some are losing our income support. And depending on the color of their skin many people are losing their right to even be in this country.
The forty-year pattern we document in our paper clearly exposes the end results of these brutal federal policies: homelessness, carceral “care,” militarized policing, and further oppression of people deemed “other” or “them.”
This research is not a “hey, here is the answer” project; it is more of a call-in, with some facts behind it, to connect with groups that want to build messaging and cultural expression that we can all unite around. It is not to diminish our individual struggles, but to strengthen the understanding that our daily struggles are all interconnected.
As far as our federal government is concerned we are all disposable and as we show in this paper, if companies can’t profit off our existence federal expenditures towards our housing, education, healthcare, public parks, clean air or foreign aid will no longer exist, at all. The use of federal tax dollars for the “public good” has become firmly rooted in neoliberal economics, which prioritizes profits for corporations and the wealthy over the needs of the people. The trickle-down economics mantra of the Reagan era in the early 80’s was a precursor to the mess we are living in now.
WRAP’s focus will never waver from being accountable to our community living in homelessness; that is our heart and who we are. We are from the street. But we know we have to expose and eliminate all these forms of oppression because they are all the same oppression. Racism, classism and fascism don’t give a fuck about your housing status—they just want you locked up or gone.
What we are facing today and are gonna keep seeing tomorrow is deliberate, well thought-out, and part of a 40-year pattern of monetizing federal social welfare funding to generate a profit, making the whole ordeal economically worthwhile for corporations and bogus nonprofits. Regardless of who we are as human beings, we are all “them” to these fuckers.
Our little paper is a call to action. How can we not neglect our immediate focus, while also better understanding and acknowledging our interconnected struggles.
For years, many of us have talked about “breaking the silo of our organizing.” Our hope is that this paper helps move us towards action in the way it already has moved us here at WRAP.
Join us on Saturday, August 15 for two separate events at the Eric Quezada Center otherwise known as 518 Valencia Street.
2:00pm – Teach in on federal poverty policies over four decades to better understand the current state of homelessness & oppression today.
7:00pm – Cultural night of music, poetry, & artwork to celebrate our collective fight for dignity & respect!
We hope you will join us!
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