Open letter to The Fresno Bee

I have an alternative explanation to The Fresno Bee special section (Sunday, September 7) about why Fresno County is so poor http://fresnobee.com/special/broke/ : Class War! The rich and wealthy have stolen our labor, our land, the water in our rivers, and now the air we breath. This valley used to be incredibly beautiful and full of potential. The San Joaquin was the second largest river in California, full of salmon and a ferry that ran all the way from the San Francisco Bay to Fresno. The air was clean and wildflowers covered the valley.

But today, as stated in your report, too many of our children go to bed hungry at night, half of them won’t graduate from high school, the working poor do not have health insurance, and we have chronic double digit unemployment. Studies are now citing the Central Valley as the new Appalachia in this country.

How did this happen? Simply put, our wealth has been stolen. Our rivers in the Sierra have been dammed to produce electricity and diverted to provide water for agribusiness. The power companies take our natural resources and sell it back to us at a huge profit to benefit their stockholders and CEO’s. The farmworkers, most of whom are from Mexico, sure aren’t getting rich from the factories in the fields. Small farmers are just getting by. The absentee landlords and big West Side farmers are the only ones getting rich from the publically subsidized water that the working class has paid for.

Corporations locate here because they can pay low wages. Businesses, like the Fresno Bee, employ workers “part time” so they don’t have to pay health benefits. When home care workers rose up and demanded a living wage they were attacked by this newspaper and the power structure in the community. They were told that they were lucky to get paid at all for the work they do and that this was not a good time to ask for a raise. Somehow, it is never a good time to ask for a living wage in the Central Valley.

What do our politicians do to turn this bad situation around? According to your report - they took Measure C money (which is supposed to help clean up our air) and gave it to BIG corporations like McDonald’s and WalMart, promoting more sprawl at Palm and Hurndon! An earlier group of local politicians, not mentioned in this particular report, sold their votes to developers for new tires and cheap suits. Operation rezone just confirmed what many of us already know - that too many politicians and corporations in this community are feeding at the public trough and taking the food out of our children’s mouths.

We must get to the root of the problem and stop the privileged few from stealing our water, fouling our air, and exploiting our labor. If we are going to end poverty, workers need to be paid a living wage and the people in the valley need to benefit from their natural resources.

Sadly, the reason that The Fresno Bee could not identify a solution to the problem of poverty is because they are a part of the problem and are unable to see the forest through the trees. The Fresno Bee does not pay many of their workers a living wage, they have threatened to out source jobs when employees talked about forming a union, and The Bee does not support workers when they struggle to improve their lives (home care workers, for example).

The solution:

*Give workers in the Central Valley a larger share of the wealth they create.
*Make corporations pay more of the cost to clean up the environment they have destroyed. *Nationalize the natural resources and use them to benefit the working class, not the ruling elite.
*Stop Corporate welfare

If we are going to end the cycle of poverty here we are going to have to “think outside of the box.” Some people have suggested that we need a “New Deal” like FDR created in the 1930's. Others have suggested that an entirely new social contract between the rich and poor needs to be worked out to bring social/economic justice to this region.

It will start with people increasing their civic participation, joining together in labor unions, and believing they have a right to the wealth that they have created and to the natural resources of this valley - that is when we will start to end poverty in the Central Valley.