Social Justice
The sad fact of this matter is that every year Oklahoma City looks more and more like a Victor Hugo novel. Extreme disparities of wealth and poverty are becoming the norm, and the middle class is caught between a rock and a hard place. The due process of law is often perverted in Oklahoma City to take the land and property of people of modest means for highways, shopping centers, upscale housing developments, hospitals, and schools. If you are poor, your property is constantly at risk of the greed of redevelopers and politicians. The City claims that a fair price is paid, but “fair price” is in the eyes of the beholder. Furthermore, the destruction of thousands of units of housing in low income communities over the last 30 years has caused these rents to rise faster than would have been the case if the housing had not been destroyed. Less supply equals higher prices, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that. The impacts of neighborhood destruction are well documented, and are very similar to the impacts caused by destruction during war. Thus, although nobody would admit this at City Hall or the State Capitol, a direct result of city and state policies over the past 30 years has been to increase the economic and psychological misery of poor and working class Oklahomans. This is never good public policy, because financial and psychological stress are well documented drivers of problems such as violence against women and children, juvenile delinquency, family failure, drug and alcohol abuse, crime, abortion, and dropping out of school. These costs are never accounted for on the balance sheets of redevelopment agencies, but just because corrupt politicians ignore them doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. They impact all of us in the form of higher crime rates, higher expenditures for government social services, lowered participation in the workforce, all of which leads to higher tax bills and bloated government debt levels. No community that deliberately throws families behind for the wolves to devour in this way can expect to prosper in the coming years.
•I support a living wage for city employees and employees of contractors with the city.
•We all need to work with the school system to ensure that school support personnel, who are presently paid embarrassingly low wages, receive just and living wages. The situation of school support personnel is much worse than that of teachers. Our schools could not function without these support personnel, and it is bad public policy for the school system to exploit people’s desperation for jobs by paying such low wages to these important employees.
• An effective, multi-modal public transportation system is essential as a matter of social justice. The most practical thing the government can do for poor and working class people is to provide a public transportation so that these households won’t have to maintain an automobile.
• By working with state government, we can ensure that our county jail is not our mental health facility. This is a moral and a practical necessity for our continued development as a city.
• The City can do its part to ensure that poor families do not choose abortion out of economic desperation. Abortion is, of course, a controversial issue, but I believe that both pro-choice and pro-life people can agree that no woman should be coerced to have an abortion based on economic desperation. There is much that local governments can do to ease the economic desperation of the poor, and this will benefit everybody.
• Resources must not be taken from poor neighborhoods and used to subsidize upscale development in the suburbs.
• More funding is needed for insulation and weatherization programs for housing that serves the poor. Natural gas production in North America has peaked and is in decline. The largest drilling effort in history over the past 2 years has not reversed the decline. Natural gas prices are high and will go higher. While additional funds are needed to help people pay bills, it is more practical to reduce the need for the bills in the first place. Radical energy conservation measures can greatly reduce the need for cash to pay electrical bills.
• One way to help the poor is to help them create their own jobs. The City can use Community Block Grant funds to provide training and resources for “micro-entrepreneurs” to start small, part-time businesses that could, with work, grow into full-time businesses. One such business that can be started with very little capital is market gardening. The demand for fresh, locally grown, organic produce in central Oklahoma is much larger than the supply. Raising vegetables can be like growing money in your back yard.
• Food processing is another market activity that low income people can participate in if they have access to tools, training, and resources such as community kitchens that are licensed by the health department for production of food products for sale to the public.
• City ordinances regulating and licensing street musicians should be immediately repealed.
• I favor reinstating the Oklahoma City Commission on Human Rights, empowered to hear complaints and reports about human rights violations in Oklahoma City.
• The City must immediately stop destroying the neighborhoods of the poor using public domain under various economic redevelopment schemes. The City (and the State, in the case of road projects) must apologize for its previous attacks on poor neighborhoods, such as the due process pogrom which destroyed the Deep Deuce area. The history of these events should be researched and it should be determined whether the City actually paid fair market prices for the properties taken from the poor or whether institutional racism caused lower than market prices to be paid. If the latter is true, compensation can be made to the dispossessed owners or their heirs.
