International Women's Day Strike! - Santa Cruz

Happy to support "an end to gender violence, [holding]rapists and sexual harassers...accountable, an end to ICE raids and deportations, an end to police brutality, free healthcare for all, full access to reproductive and gender-affirming care, free, community-centered child care and elder care, full and free access to education, affordable housing and a living wage."

Glad to hear you're in solidarity with "Black Lives Matter, the struggle against police brutality and mass incarceration, the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the demand for open borders and for immigrant rights and for the decolonization of Palestine."

I'm wondering how this movement stands regarding the local issue of institutional terrorizing of homeless people through the park curfews, the Sleeping Ban, the Downtown Ordinances, and local selective enforcement driving the unhoused out of Public Spaces? This issue is usually a taboo subject for Democratic (and Republican) party politicians and the establishments that support them.

Homeless women are a particularly abused and disadvantaged group. The nighttime Sleeping Ban in Santa Cruz denies everyone (particularly impacting vulnerable women) the right to sleep in safer groups, in well-lighted areas, or to use (if they dare) local police services. I'd hope that local organizers for the International Women's Day Strike would insist Decriminalizing the Homeless Locally be clearly and loudly included in the righteous litany of injustices.

The issue has long been buried under false "public safety" rhetoric and other toxic mythology here in order to maintain the City's progressive veneer. Demanding action locally on these issues--such as holding local police, the jail, the sheriffs, accountable for the deaths they have caused is a vital part of this--and one systematically sidelined or trampled by local courts, mayors, and legislative bodies.

Increasingly, the (5 woman, 2 man) Santa Cruz City Council, for instance, demonizes those forced to live outside because of their own "affordable housing" policies. 24-hour permit parking only signs have appeared in the streets surrounding the Homeless (Lack of) Services Center on Coral, Limekiln, and Fern streets in the Harvey West area. Councilwoman Richelle Niroyan's nighttime ban on RV's--expanding Councilwoman Cynthia Mathews relentless push to use permit parking laws to drive homeless (women) out of town--has prompted the County to pass its own vicious copycat law.

City Council passed a toothless Sanctuary ordinance last Tuesday, with most of the public locked out of Council chambers and officers lining the aisle and blocking the doorways. There has been no accountability for the the SCPD's collusion with ICE/DHS, nor any release of the documents that might clarify the truth of Chief Kevin Vogel's claims that he "knew nothing" about the raids--even with an imbedded ICE officer in his own department.

There's been no action to release the witness accounts in the Sean Arlt murder last October. Simply the usual endless time and publicity given to Official Accounts justifying the slaying. If light (and heat) is not thrown on the insecurity women (and men) feel about a "shoot to kill" SCPD police policy, then of what use are grand protests that do not hold local officials and institutions accountable?

I would ask the organizers to raise these issues and reassure poor women (and the rest of us) that their concern is both specific and local.

After weeks of planning political kids' activities for March 8 at Louden Nelson playground, the liberals associated with the Women's March have threatened to evict children from the playground of the local public park proximate to the space they rented for their celebratory brown bag lunch, after already threatening to call cops on our efforts to organize free brunch and childcare a number of times because we are framing our organizing as "anti-capitalist" and as a "gender strike." We've been continually antagonized by these local democrats and tomorrow morning we will be there in the playground with kids down to occupy and distribute free food and if these liberals try to kick us out or call the cops they'll have to do it in front of as many camera phones as we can get, because they are the ones being divisive, classist, anti-feminist, and anti-children, and we will make those contradictions loud and clear and widely publicized, hopefully with your help... see you at 9:30 at Louden Nelson.