Page 16
May 23, 2018
O PINION
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Fighting Ben Carson’s 300 Percent Rent Hike
Portland’s
Gray Panthers
mobilize
l eW C hurCh
Ben Carson, Donald Trump’s
Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), proposed a
300 percent rent hike last month
against low-income tenants across
the country. Portland Gray Pan-
thers is fighting back!
In the excellent Portland Ob-
server opinion article (“Wrong
Time to Cut Back on Public Hous-
ing,” May 9 issue) writer Ebony
Slaughter-Johnson correctly chas-
tised Carson’s plan which only
throws fuel on the fire of this na-
tional housing crisis.
In Oregon, we have seen nation-
al publications like the New York
Times already label Portland as
“Tent City USA.” And in a now-in-
famous direct mail piece for last
week’s primary election for Port-
land City Council, losing candidate
Stuart Emmons issued a dire warn-
ing that “tents and tarps are coming
to your neighborhood.”
During a public forum on hous-
ing and homelessness held last
month at the offices of Metro,
50 attendees heard speaker after
by
speaker cite one of the primary rea-
sons for folks camping out in tents
and sleeping on sidewalks is sky-
rocketing rents.
Last year, the Oregon House and
Gov. Kate Brown supported a bill
to legalize rent control by cities in
Oregon, only to be blocked in the
Senate by Rod Monroe, a southeast
Portland lawmaker who was just
defeated in the May 15 Primary.
Advocates for tenants will be
back and plan to see rent control
come tenants, seniors and people
with disabilities at the Butte and
Biltmore buildings, downtown. At
one point, Gray Panther members
organized a six-month rent strike at
PSU to protest frequent rent hikes,
lack of repairs and management
problems with a subcontracted
landlord management firm.
As the rent strike developed,
coed tenants reported one building
manager for using his pass key to
enter apartments and refusing to
Housing is a basic human right.
The Trump Administration, per-
sonified in this case by the HUD
secretary, seeks to trample on the
ability of workers and poor folk to
keep their apartments and not be
evicted.
As we now know, Carson last
year sought to purchase a $30,000
dinette set (with blue satin trim)
for his office location in Washing-
ton, D.C. -- a purchase that was
rescinded under the lens of public
Housing is a basic human right. The Trump
Administration, personified in this case by the HUD
secretary, seeks to trample on the ability of workers and
poor folk to keep their apartments and not be evicted.
legalized in Oregon and halt Car-
son’s rent hike, as well.
Our newly-revitalized Portland
Gray Panthers group seeks to halt
this HUD “fire sale” of gargan-
tuan rent hikes, threats and evic-
tions. The chapter is meeting on
Saturdays at 4 p.m. at Portland
State University’s Chit Chat Café,
located at 1907 S.W. Sixth and on
the Green MAX, next to Hot Lips
Pizza.
Tenant advocates have worked
over the past two years with low-in-
leave, a violation of landlord-tenant
law and a criminal offense. That
manager was then fired.
With the help of the Tenant
Rights Project and activist PSU
students, Gray Panthers organizers
also gave a landlord-tenant work-
shop to undergrads at Reed Col-
lege, and Reed generously donated
$300 to the effort. The meeting was
disrupted, however, by a represen-
tative for a downtown landlord
who falsely represented himself as
a lawyer.
scrutiny.
Working with the National Gray
Panthers network, Justice in Ag-
ing and CarsonWatch -- Portland
tenant rights organizers plan to
counter Carson’s tone-deaf rent
hike proposal with news confer-
ences, pickets, demonstrations and
a letter writing campaign.
Like Trump’s budget cut pro-
posals for Medicare, food stamps
(SNAP), National Public Radio, the
Environmental Protection Agency
and other programs that benefit
people throughout our country --
the HUD rent hike proposal is one
more step in a Trump-Carson at-
tack on folks who have worked all
their lives, who may be disabled,
who may be women or mothers
with children, and on many com-
munities across our land.
Writing almost two centuries
ago, Karl Marx might have been
thinking of the Trump era when
he said”... passions without truth,
truths without passions; heroes
without heroic deeds, history with-
out events; development whose
sole driving force seems to be the
calendar, wearying with constant
repetition of the same tensions and
relaxations...”
In other words, Trump, Carson
and their ilk simply seek to wear
folks down, and, hope by hope,
Twitter by Twitter, to silence dis-
sent and opposition. While not
every tenant has read Karl Marx,
many have heard the reframe from
a more recent civil rights organiz-
er, Malcolm X, to fight the powers
that be “By Any Means Neces-
sary.”
Lew Church is coordinator
of Portland Gray Panthers and
founding publisher and editor of
two activist Portland State Uni-
versity papers, the Rearguard and
the Agitator.
Starbucks Needs to Work with the Community
Diversity
training not
good enough
p hillip J aCkson
If Howard Shultz
wasn’t the founder of
Starbucks, he would
have been one of the
boycott
protesters
with us. He said he
was
“embarrassed”
and “ashamed” by the
arrest of two black
men in a Starbucks store in Phil-
adelphia who were taken away by
police and subsequently held for
nine hours in jail for the crime of
sitting in a Starbucks store and not
ordering coffee.
Starbucks is widely known as
a good operator and an overall
good guy in American business
circles with its clean stores, open
meeting spaces, free Wi-Fi; strong
community relations, and its great
business model consisting of good
jobs with fair benefits.
But the Starbucks decision to
fix this public relations problem
by
with “diversity training” is not the
Howard Schultz or even the Star-
bucks way. Rather than work with
the black community towards a
solution to this potentially inter-
national issue, Starbucks turned
to themselves and created a
program for diversity train-
ing that includes closing their
stores for one day and hiring
the highest-priced diversity
trainers money can buy.
The black community want-
ed to know, “How will we, the
black community --aggrieved
by this incident and aggrieved
every day -- how will we be better
because of your “diversity train-
ing”? The only answer Starbucks
could give was, after the training
“You will be better because we will
be better.” Sorry! Not good enough!
Numerous studies by Harvard
University, MIT, Tel Aviv Univer-
sity and others show that diversi-
ty training doesn’t work and can
produce the opposite of intended
outcomes. These studies conclude
that decades of cultural, racial and
environmental bias and prejudice
cannot be eradicated with one or
50 or 100 “diversity trainings.” In
fact, such “trainings” can cause
those hard-wired feelings to be-
come more deeply entrenched
thus resulting in the opposite of
the sought-after effect.
In Chicago, The Black Star
Project organized a 12-store boy-
cott of Starbucks. During the
boycott, no anger was displayed.
No one was arrested. No windows
were broken. No stores were fire-
bombed. Instead, there was plenty
of dialogue. Dialogue is the Star-
bucks way. There were reports of
Starbucks’ employees offering the
boycotters free coffee and stand-
ing with the protesters.
The Chicago boycott organiz-
ers are now planning community
forums at more than 300 black-
owned or managed coffee hous-
es, as well as at faith-based and
community-based organizations
across the U.S. These events
will serve as “Black Economic
Empowerment Forums” where
attendees will develop plans to
improve the economic vitality of
their communities.
We wanted Starbucks to be part
of this initiative. So far, they have
said no. But working with the
community will only make them
better. It’s important to understand
that even with over 9,000 stores
throughout America, Starbucks
shops are really only guests in
these communities.
Howard Schultz, founder and
executive chairman of the Star-
bucks Board of Directors does un-
derstand Starbucks culture and he
understands America. He knows
that the Starbucks success is tied
to communities’ success.
In 2015, Starbucks tried to con-
vene a ‘Race Together” dialogue
through its stores. America was
not ready then. In 2018, America
is coming apart racially, socially
and religiously. America is now
ready for Howard Schultz’ ideas.
But this effort cannot be owned
by Starbucks alone. Other corpo-
rations, government agencies at
all levels, foundations, faith-based
and civic organizations along with
social institutions and others must
partner with Starbucks to make
America and the world better.
Starbucks, well established in
business history, now has a chance
to establish itself in human history.
In the words of Mr. Schultz:
“…if we think about the country
today — and I’m not talking about
politics — I think the country
needs to become more compas-
sionate, more empathic. And we
can’t speak about the promise of
America and the American Dream
and leave millions of people be-
hind. And it’s my view that —
leave Washington aside and all the
politics aside — businesses and
business leaders need to do a lot
more for the people we employ,
the communities we serve, and we
can make a significant difference.”
Schultz says that he knows the
Starbucks chain “won’t bridge the
racial divide on its own” and that
a coffee company “can only do
so much.” However, he hopes to
keep pushing forward and pursue
initiatives that matter to him with
the “same vigor he pursues corpo-
rate profits.”
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
that changed America forever last-
ed 381 days. The Starbucks Boy-
cott is only 33 days old. Only 348
days to go.
Phillip Jackson is founder and
chair of the Black Star Project in
Chicago.