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LYM Combats Mass Evictions at
Oakland's Harbor Apartments

by J. Robert Craig
LaRouche Youth Movement

OAKLAND, Aug. 29—Members of the LaRouche Youth Movement have been covering the map in the Oakland vicinity, deploying residential walking tours daily, awakening the forgotten men and woman, especially with our weekly singing rallies to enliven the drowsy ghettoes. Along with our normal deployments we went door to door at the Harbor Island Apartments, a 650-apartment complex in Alameda, which is being demolished and replaced by new "luxurious" tarpaper shacks. The tenants are being given 30 days to vacate their homes, and are being offered a measly $750 compensation. On Tuesday last, the entire Oakland Chorus spent the morning serenading the complex with "No Ways Tired," "O, Freedom!" "Signor Abbate," "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and, yes, "Jesu, meine Freude," which inspired many, annoyed few, and made many new contacts, and contributors. People came out on their balconies, and organizers were climbing on rails to hand them the LaRouche Democratic Platform, and the November Infrastructure report. One woman invited us to sing at their tenant rally the following week. We did.

Alameda City Council Gone Awry

The tenants' association had organized a rally at Alameda City Hall, where the Community Improvement Commission would hear their complaints. Thirty LaRouche organizers were at the City Council, already singing, when the tenants showed up, about 30 in total. Some joined us in singing "O, Freedom!" One anti-LaRouche Tenant Association hack interrupted the singing and began trying to create a populist fervor over our presence. One woman denounced us, crying, "We are just fighting for our apartment complex. You don't care about our problem." This was a strange thing to say, since we had inspired some tenants to attend. Passions were heated, and many fiery discussions ensued all at once, but people took our literature.

We then proceeded to go inside for the meeting. We requested to speak. The passions were just as intense. At the mention of Democrats, or politics, a populist fervor again set in, causing the moderator to crescendo, announcing that she had exposed our "secret agenda" (Secret? We all bore LaRouche signs, and carried a large banner). When asked, "What is the solution?" the moderator became a broken record, repeating: "We don't need your help. We don't need your help." One tenant in the front row spoke out and said, "We need all the help we can get." Many saw the strange irony in the moderator's words, being that they were there out of desperation. After a couple more minutes in this climactic scene, we resolved to depart, and so doing we sang "O, Freedom," resonating quite beautifully in those spacious halls.

Smoking Out a Nasty Operation

Summer and Sylvia, along with several others of the LYM, remained to speak as elected officials of Alameda County. The other speakers were unprepared and boring, except for one 12-year-old boy who commented, where am I going to invite my friends over to study? A trash can? Sylvia expanded the discussion to the national economic crisis, and the threat of Cheney, and the need for LaRouche's Platform to solve the problem. No other solutions were presented.

During and after the meeting, people were willing to take our literature and some signed up. Acording to one woman, a resident of the complex, who was happy to witness our optimistic presence, and had studied law for 20 years, she reported that this tenant association was running a sleazy operation, and was composed mostly of non-tenants, who were hostile to all outsiders, not just the LYM. Even a lawyer, who had come to the last City Council meeting to advise the tenants on their rights, was ridiculed and rejected. The woman said, "They claim to be leading us, but nobody elected them, they have no credentials, and are giving bad legal advice." This operation will be followed up further.

Gentrification

The Harbor Island Eviction is a result of an overall gentrification of the Oakland Port area promoted by local officials and other developers. Gentrification means bringing in wealthy people to invest and consume, and so the project will include the construction of a marina, along with a grand shopping center, cinema center, a grandiose Wal-Mart in West Oakland, a casino, promoted by the Governator himself, and hundreds of condos around the whole area, the likely reason for the mass eviction. Oakland homelessness is skyrocketing along with poverty, and pessimism is in the air, all the effects of the depression recognized by Lyndon LaRouche and his associates. The gentrification program is not to solve the crisis, nor are there any plans to introduce infrasructure projects to create productive employment, but it is designed to sacrifice Oakland to the gods of the "free market," bringing slave-labor consumer jobs in, where real jobs are desperately needed.