Class war in San Francisco

Class war in San Francisco Print E-mail
Editorial by Willie Ratcliff
Wednesday, 26 September 2007
The people's victory at the School Board Tuesday night predicts victory for Ahimsa Nov. 6

Sometimes people call the Bay View the radical Black paper. Some say we're the successor to the revolutionary Black Panther Newspaper, an assessment we're proud to acknowledge.

Call the Bay View whatever you want - I merely aim to tell the truth. And I don't mind using words that mean what they say.

Like "class war in San Francisco": What else do you call it when a city where land values are the highest in the world, led by a mayor who represents the ultra-rich elite - Gavin Newsom's father, Judge William Newsom, is the long time manager of Gordon Getty's $2 billion fortune, you know - puts its largest Black neighborhood, Bayview Hunters Point, with 33,000 people, 91 percent of them people of color and most of them poor, under the control of his Redevelopment Agency and the threat of eminent domain ... as big developers open their checkbooks to reward our mayor.

Then Newsom privatizes a huge swath of BVHP by extending the control by Florida-based "Master Developer" Lennar, one of the nation's largest and sleaziest home builders, from the Hunters Point Shipyard to Double Rock and Candlestick, some 900 acres of this compact city. The only Supervisors to vote against that privatization were Chris Daly and Ed Jew, and you know how Newsom and the major media have treated them since then.

Lennar, through its familial ties to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, twisted the Navy's arm, according to the Chronicle, to transfer the still-dirty - contaminated - Parcel A of the Shipyard so it could build 1,600 high-priced condos there. Pelosi's nephew, Laurence Pelosi, was first vice president and director of acquisitions for Lennar Communities at the time.

And wouldn't you call it class war when Lennar won't even hire from the community - where people are so thoroughly locked out of the economy that the last time their family had a breadwinner was before the Navy shut down the Shipyard decades ago? The main demand during the 1966 Hunters Point Rebellion was for jobs and contracts to replace those already lost at the Shipyard.

The few residents Lennar and its subcontractors do hire don't even have protective gear against the toxic dust that's poisoning them and the neighborhood, especially children and old folks.

That's another word people might call radical: poison. I've often said - and you probably have too - that Lennar is deliberately poisoning people here. What else can you call it when Lennar's own monitors keep showing huge exceedances of deadly, cancer-causing toxins right up to the recent sky-high readings?
Yet our "Master Developer" Lennar won't stop work or make any credible effort to suppress the dust. Lennar knows it's poisoning us and does it anyway.

Toxic dust - another "radical" term, some say: Isn't that being used as a deadly weapon? If anybody should stop the violence, it's Lennar.

Terror and torture - don't those "radical" words apply to little children or elders living alone when they can't breathe or a nosebleed won't stop? What about the lifelong scars a baby is creating by scratching an itchy rash raw?

And how long will that baby live? Bayview Hunters Point's infant mortality rate is five times the city's overall. The Chronicle pointed to the contaminated Shipyard as the most likely cause.

When I asked Congresswoman Pelosi at her recent press conference, held in a Hunters Point clinic, to explain how she can support Lennar despite its threat to our babies, she announced that the infant mortality rate has risen considerably since the Chronicle's story three years ago and is still rising.
And if our little baby lives to adulthood, will the asbestos fibers she's inhaling now cause cancer after their usual 20-year incubation period? BVHP's breast cancer rate among young Black women is already one of the highest in the world.

So we have a mayor who does the bidding of big corporations like Lennar running for re-election, and the Chronicle makes him look unbeatable. What does he say about the class war using toxic dust as a weapon of terror and torture in our part of town? Has he breathed a word about it?

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