Don’t let them evict us!

Federal Judge Dabney Friedrich threw out the federal ban on evictions May 5. The Trump-appointed judge claims the Centers for Disease Control had no authority to impose the moratorium under the Public Health Service Act of 1944.

The coronavirus has already killed 3 million people worldwide, including 580,000 in the United States. What’s more important to public health than stopping millions of families from being thrown on the street during this pandemic?

For the capitalist class and its judges, profits always come before human lives. Children being kicked out of their homes mean nothing to the Alabama Association of Realtors and real estate agents in Georgia that filed the suit against the eviction ban.  

Behind these brokers and even the biggest landlords are the banksters who own the mortgages. The big banks can lend billions to build luxury housing while almost no affordable housing is being built.

It’s the real estate industry and financial institutions that enforced Jim Crow housing segregation. Real estate profiteers led bombing campaigns in Chicago to drive Black homeowners out of white neighborhoods.|

Between 1978 and 1983, 55 people were killed in fires in Hoboken, N.J., in order to drive out poor people. Half of the Latinx community was driven out of the city.

Now these criminals want to drive millions of people out of their homes with the blessing of a federal judge.

Evictions can be stopped

Tenants’ groups coast to coast, like the Crown Heights Tenant Union in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been organizing 24/7 to stop evictions. They need support from the labor movement and all progressive people.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Unemployed Councils in cities like Chicago stopped evictions. People surrounded sheriffs conducting evictions. Furniture that was dumped on the street by cops was put back into people’s homes.

Because of struggle, laws were enacted that protected millions of renters, homeowners and small farmers. We can do it again!

One of the first acts of the Cuban Revolution was to limit both rent and utility bills to no more than 10 percent of a family’s income. While over 22,000 children are homeless in New York City, the capital of capitalism, not a single child is homeless in socialist Havana. 

We need what Cuba has. Housing is a right: fight, fight, fight! A fightback by millions can stop the wave of evictions that the slumlords and banksters are plotting to carry out.