SHOC and Safe Ground, with John Kraintz's participation, at Communist confab in Detroit

Five delegates¹ from SHOC’s so-called “Homeless Leadership Project” and SafeGround [including John Kraintz, who is listed as a “participant”] were at the US Social Forum which, despite its name, was not about clog dancing, but, instead, turning our country into a communist one. The US Social Forum is a part of the People’s Movement Assembly which is a bunch of wacky, nutty far-far-far-Leftist craziness by people who are completely out of touch with the central lesson of the Twentieth Century: that Communism doesn’t work and is a bloody nightmare.

The assemblage was held in Detroit’s convention center and drew massively less than the 20,000 people the sponsors claimed.  People stayed away in droves.  But the Communist Party USA was there, one of the few groups that actually uses the C-word when advocating the C-word.

SHOC [aka, Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee] and SafeGround [aka, Safe Ground] are the Frankenstein offspring of Loaves & Fishes and have their offices in L&F’s Friendship Park.  Both are mysterious organizations, even to those of us who frequent Homeless World Sacramento.

The only named person associated with SHOC is Paula Lomazzi, even on the page at the SHOC website where its history is given.  My experience is that attorney Cathleen Williams is the brains behind SHOC.  She has been the leader at two SHOC meetings I attended in 2009, and at the so-called Homeless Power Forum.  All of these events were in Loaves & Fishes' Delany Center.  Both Lomazzi, and more so Williams, contribute to the Communist newspaper People's Tribune. [The organization behind People's Tribune (and another publication, Rally, Comrades!) is the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, [here's the wikipedia listing] formerly named the Communist League.  One online organization identifies them as Stalinist and fervently anti-democratic [Alternate link.]

I have asked that Safe Ground meet its one public obligation [a "public inspection" requirement] to know how it is organized, by seeing its nonprofit application. [See Publication 557]  Indeed, when I visited the organization's office last March 31, Libby Fernandez was summoned to come down to talk with me and instructed me to "wait patiently." To this day, Ms. Fernandez, a member of the board of directors of Safe Ground [I think; they provide no paperwork], has not turned over that information.  Her reason given last March was that Safe Ground had not yet gotten its non-profit approval number.

At the People's Movement Assemblies website, you get this as part of the Vision Statement from their homepage [emphases, mine]:

We believe that we can create a new economic system that is not based on individual, corporate or private ownership and does not exploit people, the planet, natural resources or living beings but instead is based on principles of collectivity and sustains our communities. We must move aside old systems that have failed and create new ones that serve and are accountable to all peoples and all living beings.


We must link arms with our sisters and brothers globally and commit to a willingness to work together to seek understanding, to coordinate action and to move forward collectively with a sense of urgency to create a more just world. We acknowledge the need to break down barriers. We must integrate our national struggles for the human rights to dignity, welfare, freedom and justice.

Can you say "Communism"!?  It's not a "new economic system," it's something that has been tried two-dozen times and killed more than a hundred million people, summarily [that is, not by war, but more in the fashion of lining people up in front of trenches and giving them a bellyful from machine guns], and the death and misery continues in several countries, today.

Communism fails because it gets all the incentives to work backwards and because the all-powerful government it puts in place has no 'checks' that deter corruption.  Communism may sound good, in the abstract, but in operation it devolves into a cruel totalitarian regime.  Every time. It may be forgivable to have believed in Communism eighty years ago, but to believe in it today is insane.  The evidence of its horror is abundant.

The Leftist so-called homeless-help agencies in Sacramento are an abomination.  They are not liberal.  They are not progressive.  They are foolish totalists.  They are spending some of any contributions you give to them to try to foment a massive conflagration of terror in this country (that, granted, won't happen during the lifetimes of any of us, since so many of us know a little history).  These whacky far-Leftists in Homeless World Sacramento may be naïve.  They are certainly ridiculous, and they put in a lot of effort to do something that would be astronomically high on the stupidity scale.

Here words from the May/June edition of Rally, Comrades!:

…abolition of private property has a name. Communism is the common, public ownership of the means of production – with everyone contributing to society what he or she is able to contribute and everyone taking from society what he or she needs. Today, when computers and robots increasingly replace human labor in supplying goods and services, communism is the way to reorganize society to get food to the hungry, homes to the homeless, health care to the sick. It is the way to save Mother Earth from the corporations and to unleash the full potential of humanity.

If you don't know your history, it may sound good, but it is catastrophic.  Many people, including me, are frustrated by the abusiveness of unfettered capitalism.  But there are many, many things that can be done to address all that that doesn't put an end to freedom and democracy and checks against government abuse.

For the record:  I am not a Tea Partier, nor a hard-hearted conservative nutjob.  I am Buddhist and liberal and know something about history.
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¹ Update 7/9/10 the article, posted at Street News Service, online, was originally published in hardcopy in SHOC's Homeward Journal, July/August issue, buried on page 4, with Cathleen Williams cited as the writer.