The Struggle of the Poor In the USA

By Cheri Honkala

Director of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union

National Spokesperson for the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign

Given at the First Hemisferic Meeting Against Militarization

San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico

5.6.03

Good Evening. I’d like to begin this evening by thanking the organizers of this event for this historic event.

As a poor person from the US, it has been a long road to get here. As you know from my introduction I have been organizing poor and homeless people in the US for about 20 years now.

I have spent my whole life in poverty. As a mother of 2 children, I have experienced a great deal of violence in my life. The worst has been the economic violence of being homeless with my older son and not knowing one winter night if me and my son would freeze to death by the next morning.

I hope by the end of my talk to have convinced you of the serious crisis that the poor are in that organize for their daily survival.

In my country, 675,000 people have lost their jobs to NAFTA. 33,000 family farmers have lost their farms. 44 million peolpe are without health insurance and over 60 million people are living in poverty. And as our country´s media shows you lies about Iraq, another population of people have been made to disappear – the poor and homeless in the USA.

This year our country ended the entitlement to help the poor, which kept many of the poor from being homeless. Now our country’s urban and rural areas are now filled with millions of new homeless. People who once had jobs at these factories whose corporations have picked up and left our country to come to Mexico and other parts of the world to exploit the people by paying them even less.

All that is left for us is vacant, abandoned lots, land that they left polluted when they took our jobs. With welfare ending, drugs are now our number one source of income. Crack and heroin can be sold for less than a pack of cigarettes.

One day, I watched as 4 young people were stacked in the back of a paddywagon after they had died from bad heroin. These 4 young people’s lives didn’t even warrant an investigation. 4 expendable human beings. And the real painful thing is – nobody will ever know that these human rights violations are occuring in our rich and powerful country. The national guard has used the Chester housing projects for training and the national guard can been seen periodically boarding up abandoned houses in our neighborhoods.

Police are everywhere. One day, 450 police officers touched down with helicopters and dogs and pulled everyone over and patted them down under the ospesis (¿) of a drug raid.

We now have Target Tuesdays where people live in fear of going to jail on Tuesday. A month ago, our governer eliminated monies to help people with drug and alcohol problems. Thousands will remain in jail because this money no longer exists. 30,000 people with drug problems will be returned to the streets, making death of incarceration a daily reality in our community.

There is no affordable housing in Philadelphia and there are no plans in our elected leader’s plans to make any housing available. So what we have is more abandoned houses than homeless people. But if we move these families into the abandoned houses we go to jail. The city of Philadelphia just spent a year trying to prosecute myself and 2 of our leaders for housing homeless people. I was facing 6 months in jail for housing a high-risk pregnant mother.

You see, our country has more prisons than anyplace in the world. The number one crime in which people are in prison is for economic crimes. Our country also has the highest death penalty and uses it on children. Even before 9.11 the FBI was openly filming our efforts to house homeless people.

Before Bush became president we organized 10,000 poor women, men and children in a March for Economic Human Rights and as a result they threatened to take our children away if the mothers were arrested in our march. And they parked a huge police truck with officers inside in front of our office for months.

When we’re not busy moving homeless families into abandoned houses we’re building homeless encampments or participating in marches for our lives. We have no paid staff, only a will and a committment for a better life for ourselves and our children.

It is our children – the poor – who fight in rich men’s wars. Our children join because they have no way to feed their families, get healthcare or an education. Or they didn’t want to sell drugs in Kensington.

It is our poor families who also wave the American flag – for not to wave the flag would mean that you don’t support your own family.

We are a people who live from month to month, who cry at night for our children’s future, who wish we could have heat in our homes in the winter or water to bathe our children. And for those of us in our country who will sleep with our children in a car, under a bridge or on a church floor – we pray that we will remain invisible no longer and that people, organizations and movements will begin to see us and understand the level of danger we are in and that people will begin to bear witness to the war occuring in Kensington and across the US against the poor.

Our country houses the SOA – so when will people understand the serious danger of organizing in the belly of the beast or that the poor getting organized in the US against the empire should be seen as a strategic significance for all the people who live in daily terror from the empire we live under.

When will the solidarity networks, unions, religious leaders and legal community in our own country hear our cry and see our invisible people and faceless children. Whenever a military base is built or a bomb is dropped more of our people go hungry and become even more invisible and become in danger from speaking out.

So, what should be done –

  1. We need to encourage people to help build the movement of the poor in the US.
  2. See poverty as a human rights violation in the US because it could have been prevented. Monitor and document!
  3. Help us break our isolation.
  4. Don’t believe the stereotypes about the poor in the US.
  5. Understand that poverty is one of the root causes of war.
  6. Have the organized poor themselves participate directly on behalf of themselves in these conferences.

Let’s end poverty in the US and across the world!

Lastly, join us on August 2nd for the National Poor People’s March.

Together we can take down the empire!