Three die in Oakland CA fire: Slumlords and Bankers responsible for urban blight and thousands of deaths

Urban gangs are small fry compared to these guys

In a previous blog I commented on a fire I heard about on the news as I was writing. There is a little more about this in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning.  As I mentioned yesterday, a woman and her child were both killed by the fire. It turns out a man that was also living there rescued the dead woman's other child but died himself when he went back in to rescue others; people knew him only as "Memo." Memo is a working class hero as John Lennon's song goes.  Two other people broke their legs jumping to escape the inferno. Had there been smoke alarms in the building they might have had a chance.

The dead woman was  a 23 year-old immigrant from El Salvador, her 3 year old daughter perished with her.  The building had no smoke detectors.  The fire was started due to  a series of extensions cords the woman had set up, plugging the main one in to a socket in another unit in order to get power as hers was shut off by the power company.

The previous owner who bought the property as an investment for his retirement had walked away from it as he couldn't afford the payments.  The bank that was supposed to manage the property, Bank of New York Trust,  paid not much attention to it and just let it sit there. The place was in a very shabby condition and no smoke alarms is illegal as far as I know.

The dead woman, Ruth Mejia had lost her job recently and was trying to survive in a country that is the worst industrial economy in the world to live in if your poor. It has no social welfare except for the rich.  She came from El Salvador, a country that was devastated in a civil war that was made all the worse by the US support of the oligarchs as it does throughout Latin America.  It doesn't mention Mejia's legal status but you can bet that if she turns out to be undocumented the immigrant basher's will be quick to point to this.  But why might she be here in the US?  People don't leave their own communities for nothing.

Maybe a minor glimpse at some El Salvadorian history might help us. In 1932, shortly after seizing power, Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez slaughtered some 30,000 Pipil Indians who had revolted against the giant landowners. With U.S. support he banned all Unions and ruled in the interests of the ruling elite until 1944. The coffee magnates that he and subsequent regimes supported with U.S. help took over so many small farms that the number of landless peasants in El Salvador quadrupled between 1961 and 1975. Hundreds of thousands left the country looking for work. Where do you think many of them went?

Supported by El Salvadore's Catholic Church a movement toward democracy developed in the late 60's and 70's that gave El Salvadorians some hope for a better future ( the Vatican eventually crushed this movement known as Liberation Theology).  But the more this movement developed the more repressive the oligarchy and its military dictatorship became. A civil war erupted in 1979 after an army coup aborted the results of a democratic election. During the next two years right wing death squads supported by the U.S. hunted down any dissidents; more than 8,000 trade unionists were murdered or abducted during this period. (Source:Harvest or Empire: Juan Gonzalez)

"We just have to put pressure on these big banks in New York City to pay attention, so more families don't die." says Larry Reid, an Oakland City Council member.  What sort of pressure he doesn't say. I do know that I have been involved in the past in fighting slumlords in this area.  Richard Thomas is a notorious Oakland slumlord who owned some 200 units at the time.  With tenants, we occupied the former mayor Jerry Brown's office at the time and the DA's office.  We demanded they indict Thomas but they never did.  The city councils and the politicians are under pressure from the big landlords not the other way round.

An activist in the Latino community, Gilda Gonzales, points out that there are thousands of people living these lives, living in foreclosed buildings that banks and giant landlords have let sit as they are merely investments just like a cd you might have at your local bank.  She points out that an "attentive landlord" might have known there were no smoke alarms in the building.  But there is no need in these situations for banker/landlords to be "attentive" there's no significan money flowing in from the venture so why pay attention to it.

We constantly hear about needing to beef up the police force to get youth of the streets and fight gangs.  But the gangs that cause the most human suffering and kill the most people are the slumlords, landlords, property developers and others who see money in people's need for shelter.  Their clubhouse, the  Chamber of Commerce is never raided and the culprits hauled off to jail.

The answer is not the magical pressure that the council member is fantasizing about for the media but for decent public housing; housing like medical care, should not be a business, an investment opportunity.  An earlier blog talks of the amount of workers'  money in pension funds, this money is used as a resource for the rich but this money is ours and can be used to build decent and affordable housing.  Investment in this way would also increase employment for such construction and also for permanent maintenance.

This would make people's lives safer and free them from the clutches of the banks and the slumlords that represents them. That is undoubtedly an attack on the rights of capital, against their right to exploit people as they wish for their personal gain. It is against their right to bleed people dry.   But it would increase our rights, the right to s decent and secure home and there would be less likelihood of another situation where a child is in the street crying "Mama! My mama's burning."