SHOC, according to its “Our History” tab at its main website, “was formed by advocates, service providers and formerly homeless and low-income individuals in 1987 and merged with Sacramento Housing Alliance (SHA) in 1991.”
If you go to its two websites – sacshoc.org and shoc.wikispace.org – you will find no mention of anyone associated with the organization. This is so even though the “Our History” tab at the sacshoc website provides a full page of information. A history of an organization – that came into being in 1987, we’re told – but has no named people who are involved – that have ever been involved? Strange, eh? And the organization is a “committee.” How do you have a committee with no named people? Pretty clandestine, you think?
At the Facebook page [ https://www.facebook.com/SacHomeless ] cited as that of the organization [at bottom of this page], however, you will find what appears by all evidence to really be just the Facebook page of Paula Lomazzi. People in Homeless World who have been around for a while and know Loaves & Fishes’ Friendship Park are aware that SHOC has an office up on the landing near the Park entrance. Aware people know that Lomazzi has been for more than five years The SHOC Person. Funny that she is so circumvent about that on the web. At SHOC’s wikispace, a person IDed at “paulal” has put up all the information. But, again, she is not named anywhere as responsible for anything.
Is there a reason that SHOC and Lomazzi should be so withdrawn; so abashed; so sneaky? I think so.
From my research, I will explain how SHOC came into existence and explain what it is. WHAT it is is kept hidden from the public, excepting -- of course -- insiders to its activities. The obvious reason for stealth and quiet is that the public would be appalled, and would not have made many of the donations SHOC received. It seems likely, as well, that a grant or grants the organization has received came as a result of SHOC providing incorrect, incomplete or not-fully-forthcoming information. For instance: Would the Bank of America Foundation contribute to a communist political-outreach group. Don't think so, intentionally.
SHOC is a political organization birthed by one of the most vile groups one could imagine. From the article “Globalization and Education within Two Revolutionary Organizations” – written by John D. Holst and published in the academic journal Adult Education Quarterly of November 2004 – you can piece together a sense of SHOC’s beginnings and then tie its association with communist politics into recent history.
Holst’s article tells us that there was an organization that went through many regroupings and name changes that became the California Communist League that later shortened its title to become just the Communist League in 1970. There was more tumult. A Marxist-Leninist political party the group worked at creating folded in 1993 which stirred the emergence of a grouping called the National Organizing Committee.
I would aver that SHOC is one of this National Organizing Committee’s subcommittees (or was, initially). The Holst article tells us that the League of Revolutionaries for a New America [aka, LRNA] became the new name of the group in 1995. It is the name of the group, today.
While the names, groupings and some stratagems of the string of organizations change a bit, there has been a core to it all, coming from a man named Nelson Peery (who has served as founder and in the leadership role), his many adherents and family. From that core is a sustaining principle: Anti-revisionist Communist ideology. “Anti-revisionism” means the group holds to the original programs and policies of The Revolution when it first came on the scene. Peery is associated with a steadfast commitment to Joseph Stalin’s way of doing things. In the online document, “Nelson Peery on Stalin and Revolution” you can read Peery’s words justifying and praising Stalin, a man who murdered [outside of war] perhaps 60 million people in his own country and in neighboring nations that were savaged or annexed.
From what I’ve read (centrally, the book Stalin's Genocides) , Joseph Stalin, the totalitarian dictator of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s til the happy day of his death in 1953, proved himself to be a clear manifestation of Absolute Evil1. No one else comes close to his dastardly sadistic personality and egomaniacal conduct. With the great power he had, he destroyed people with the venom of a snake. Compared to psychopathic Stalin, Hitler is practically the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Joe stirred up twice as much senseless carnage than Adolph.
The Holst article tells us “Structure. LRNA is organized geographically and by work areas.” As examples of work areas, two are provided: Homelessness and trade unions. Thus, the National Organizing Committee-given or LRNA-given name Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee emerges.
In its “Our History” statement, the SHOC webpage tells us it merged with Sacramento Housing Alliance in 1991. There is no indication of this at the SHA website. I inquired by email with the communications person at SHA, but received no reply as to SHOC’s connection with SHA.
There is an SHA membership list, which SHOC is on, but I see many independent homeless/poor-services providers, not a list of organizations that are in any way all merged with the Sacramento Housing Authority. There is a “Homeless Advocacy” page at the SHA site, but it is blank – under construction – as of the date I am writing this.
So what does SHOC do?
When I was first homeless in 2008 it was an interesting time. Sacramento and its homeless situation became the center of an outside-media feeding frenzy. It was rumored that Oprah was in town. [She wasn’t; just a protege and film crew connected with her program, as it turned out.] Michael Moore came to town, and filmed, some, though only a snippet about Sacramento made it into a documentary he was producing. Supposedly, Sacramento with its Tent City was the bellwether of a decaying nation. A manifestation of great poverty, reminiscent of the Great Depression, was at the door, threatening everybody.
Actually, the Tent City thing was a small tempest, albeit playing a ruinous role in many fine homeless people’s lives, but not the herald of a national collapse. But it did prod the homeless scene in Sac to heightened activity. Libby Fernandez led her “the homeless as victims” protests. And by 2009 SHOC began its so-called Homeless Leadership meetings which played a role in the creation of SafeGround.
I attended two of the Leadership meetings and the beginning of SHOC’s Homeless Power Forum. All three were clearly Communist orientation and initiation meetings. At all three, Cathleen Williams, whose name was printed nowhere outside LRNA publications as a contributor, was the primary person.
In the first so-called Leadership meeting I went to, Ms. Williams first read an article from the then-current, August 2009 issue of the LRNA publication People’s Tribune. The title was "Revolutionaries Must Rally the People to a Vision of a New World" [It's the second article on this page.] Most homeless people are not so worldly to understand they were being fed slimy agitprop; but there it was in a steamy heap. Hard to say how homeless people could be useful in the production of a Communist take-over of the American government. Maybe as the first ones felled in machinegun fire in the Rose Garden at the White House? Don’t know. It was (and is) all wildly ridiculous, but Communism, of the worst variety, infects Homeless World, stemming from the Loaves & Fishes Compound, through SHOC and SafeGround.
I wrote about the Homeless Power Forum, in a Sacramento Homeless blog post titled “Far-left visionaries at ‘Homeless Power Forum’ hope to transform America [into Bulgaria?]” It said in part, this:
Yep. They're baaaaack. Only ten years into the 21st Century and the Central Lesson of the 20th Century, that communism DOESN'T WORK, is forgotten. It is forgotten that communism is a murderous debacle, tested twenty times with the same result. That as good as it may sound superficially, it is ruinous economically. Communism turns the incentives to do work on their head, making laziness pay and good effort and creativity meaningless. And, too, it ultimately results in maniacal totalitarianism and the deaths of untold numbers of fully innocent people.
With Cathleen "Cat" Williams hosting and writing notes for us on large sheets of white paper in the background, the two keynote speakers for the Power Forum spoke in the A.M. session.
Ethel Long-Scott, cited in the program as a "nationally recognized leader in the campaign for universal single-payer healthcare and Executive Director of Women's Economic Agenda Project [WEAP]" was the first speaker.
Ms. Long-Scott believes "It's time to build a new economic revolution" and in "new political movements aimed at the radical reorganization of society." She called for the homeless to take on a "new identity," "the Class of the Dispossessed," so as to be better packaged to confront how "power is held" in this country.
She said there was a "connection between safe ground [the effort to create a small legal encampment]" and seeking to establish "income and security as a human right." "As a freed slave," she said, "I have no worries about what happens to the rich man" in the advance of The Movement.
Ms. Long-Scott spent a lot of time on the scourge of corporations, seeing in them conspiracies to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor. "We have corporations writing the new social contract [in this country]," she said. "[We need] a technological and economic revolution."
In tune with what can be found in People's Tribune [see the article "Revolutionaries Must Rally the People to a Vision of a New World"], Ms. Long-Scott believes in stopping advancing technology because, in her view, it "replaces human beings," takes jobs and "causes whole industries to shut down." She asked the audience at the Forum, rhetorically: "Can you compete [for a job] with a computer that doesn't need health care, doesn't need a break!?" "We the People should run the resources!" she exclaimed. People of all races and backgrounds, indigents and undocumented immigrants, should band together, she said. We mustn't allow the rich and corporations to continue to set us apart.
Cat Williams wrote on a clean, huge sheet of paper: "Nationwide Movement"
We must coalesce around "new values, new priorities, new tactics," said Ms. Long-Scott. "This must be a united poor people's economic-rights campaign." Cat Williams wrote on her sheet: "economics 4 social justice."
Ms. Long-Scott told us, "We've got to link-up the causes: from safe ground to healthcare for everybody. We must get private gain out of public need," and bring about a "quiet coup."Bringing things to the current day, Paula Lomazzi and Cathleen Williams have contributed to the League of Revolutions for a New America’s newspaper, People’s Tribune2. You will find over sixty mentions of Ms. Williams name in the publication via a Google advance search and seven mentions of Paula Lomazzi’s name as a contributor of articles and for photo credits.
Citizens of Sacramento are being robbed by organizations that maintain the fiction that they are benign charities but are, in fact, nutzoid conveyors of truth-averse political slime. Yes, the homeless in Sacramento need all the help they can get to survive and to avoid being overwhelmed by despair, but year upon year upon year upon year of seeing the Great Good People of Sacramento being wantonly misled is criminal. It must stop. WHERE is the local media, to jump in and reveal all this shit? Come, come, media, wherever you are hiding. Don't be shy. Play your role, Bee, SN&R. THIS is where the press has an obligation to put forward what is true.
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Footnotes
1. I am not thinking here in terms of an incarnated Satan, but as "evil" in the way it is used by Lars Svendsen in his book A Philosophy of Evil. We cannot deny that evil exists/happens: four-year-old children get brutalized or crushed in car accidents. Some people are purveyors of misery and death. Stalin is the ultimate in bringing horror to innocent others, and being comfortable doing so.
2. Self-contradictorily, in People's Tribune's "About us" statement in its Aug 2013 issue, it is written "The People’s Tribune, formerly published by the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, is now an independent newspaper with an editorial board based in Chicago." However, the Board for the paper are mainly LRNA people, and it includes central figure Nelson Peery. It's mission and vision statements are clearly LRNA objectives [their usual blather] and not, say, typical liberal or progressive goals or political positions.
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