Yesterday, protestors appeared at 2475 Potomac Plaza, the home of Mayor Williams, and symbolicly broke ground for a new shelter at his home. This was after the morning protest that disrupted the Mayor's speech at the stadium groundbreaking.
Food service was cut off or severly reduced to Washington DC's homeless shelters on the same day that city officials broke ground in Occuped Southeast for the Nationals baseball stadium project. This being so, protestors went all-out to shame the city into resotring food service, and provided meals ourselves at Franklin School Shelter, the one opened 4 years ago because of our efforts.
At the mayor's home we broke ground with the keys to our homes, with our bare hands, with anything available. This is in stark contrast to the golden shovels at baseball's Money Pit in Occupied Southeast!
As Mayor Williams will soon be leaving office, he will by doing so be laying the foundation for repairing our broken social service networks in DC. Replacing him will be our one chance to stop "New Communites" and blunt the wholesale use of eminent domain to ethnicly clease DC of entire populations.
Meanwhile,the situation with the shelters is looking not as bad as at first, but plenty nasty. A company called Nutrition, Inc has a contract to serve a few meals, but the food served by members of DAWN turned out to be very much needed.
The first audio piece continues in our "No Sleep for the Wicked" series, but in addition to our direct coverage of the protests includes two exclusive interviews.
The first interview is with a participant in the protest that made the Mayor "visibly slump" according to the Washington Post at baseball's groundbreaking. The second is with Jim Macdonald from DAWN, concerning the weird situation with Nutrition, Inc and the city's attempt to privatize food service at shelters in teh usualy Structural Adjustment model.
After the interviews, we cover the evening "groundbreaking" at Potomac Plaza and the usual police harassment that started about a half hour into the protest.
The other audio piece points out that the O st and S Capitol St area is not the Mayor's, nor the developer, last territorial claim to the lands of the people of the District of Columbia. The area bounded by Ga Ave, North Capitol St, K st, and Fl Ave appears to be next in line as part of the Mayor's "New Communities" initiative.
This would demolish essentially all housing in that area to replace it with "mixed income" communities. Sursum Corda is being threatened with eminent domain, and Bush Construction(!) wants to evict all residents of Temple Courts next year for condos. Ironically, Bush Construction's proposal is a competitor to New Communities, so it also has drawn an eminent domain threat form Williams!
MAYOR WILLIAMS-The KING of Eminent Domain and Komissar of Baseball and starvation...