Operation Kill the Poor
An attack on Camp Echo Park Lake
Yasha Levine
Mar 25
My daughter was born last week, so I've been a bit preoccupied with
parenting and sleep and not much else. But I finally got on the feed
yesterday to find out what's been going on in the world, and one of the
first things I see is the city of Los Angeles mounting a surprise armed raid
on Echo Park Lake, a spot where Evgenia and I go a lot.
The op was being masterminded by Mitch O'Farrell, a very liberal city
council member who represents the 13th District, which runs from Hollywood
to Dodger Stadium and spans a stretch of the Los Angeles River. The
objective is to destroy a unique homeless camp that had taken life on the
western flank of the park by kicking all the residents and then building a
Trump-style border wall so they can never return.
This scheme - which has clearly been in the works for a while - has been
driven by a bunch of locals who've been worried about their real estate
values and their views, and who've been clamoring for law and order. They've
been organizing behind the scenes, and Mitch O'Farrell has been all too
willing to do their bidding.
Last night, the city deployed millions of dollars worth of muscle - multiple
choppers, hundreds of patrol cars, buses filled with riot police standing by
in reserve - to kick a few dozen poor people off a lawn. The cops shot
people with "less than lethal" rounds and broke a journalist's hand in the
process. The the scale of the op reminded me of the raid on Occupy LA. And
they're doing all this in the middle of a pandemic.
Kenneth Mejia @kennethmejiaLA
Probably close to 400 LAPD officers spread out all throughout Echo Park
Lake, over 100 police cars (packed w/ 4 cops each), 3 busses, 2 helicopters,
& other city departments getting ready to throw people's belongings, etc.
Tax dollars spent to criminalize poverty. #EchoParkRiseUp
March 25th 2021
3,147 Retweets5,263 Likes
Evgenia and I have spent a lot of time at Echo Park Lake ever since we moved
back to Los Angeles. We've seen the homeless camp there grow from just a few
random tents to an impressive commune-type arrangement - with outdoor
showers, a pantry, a place where people can donate and take clothes and
tents and other necessities. At some point, the place began to feel more
like a self-organized refugee camp, which is exactly what it was - a camp
housing people displaced by economic and political warfare.
A lot of great people have helped make the camp at Echo Park Lake a reality.
Early on, right before the pandemic, activists helped defend the camp from
police and sanitation" raids. And they have since helped it grow and achieve
stability. Although Evgenia and I haven't been involved, we've donated a few
things over the months to people living here.
Some will scream at you about the encampment being an eye sore or dangerous
or unsanitary. But I think the camp's made the park much better - turning a
largely decorative space into a livable habitat. If someone has to be
homeless, living in a park - with lawns, trees, and wide open spaces - seems
so much better and safer than being forced into the dirty and toxic margins
of Los Angeles society: into gutters, next to freeways, under overpasses, on
onramps. All parks should be used this way - as staging areas for temporary
housing for the displaced. There's a war going on - and it's incredible that
people think they're entitled to stroll comfortably around well-manicured
public green spaces, with their views uncluttered by the reality of the
poverty and squalor of the society they inhabit.
The camp at Echo Park Lake is unique. So of course the political response by
this liberal, Democratic Party city is to destroy and scatter it, to push it
out of sight. There's nothing strange about it. I remember that back when
Trump was around, Los Angeles' mayor was in talks with his administration,
cooking up a plan to build homeless camps on federal land somewhere far out
of the city - concentration camps most likely in the Mojave Desert, where
there is plenty of federal land. The attack on Echo Park Lake is this same
strategy just on a smaller scale: don't address the problem, simply push it
out of sight.
Emily Alpert Reyes @AlpertReyes
I'm in the park. Valerie compares their situation in the fenced park to "an
open air concentration camp."
March 25th 2021
151 Retweets419 Likes
As it stands, Echo Park Lake has been fenced off and the cops say they are
returning tonite in force to finish the job they started.
-Yasha Levine
PS: I hope to make it out to the park later today. In the meantime, I want
to repost something I wrote a year ago about the concepts and language we
use when talking about homelessness: "Soviet Jewish refugees like me, Syrian
refugees, Iraqi refugees, Bolivian refugees, and, hell, even Ukrainian Nazi
collabos fleeing justice at the hands of the Red Army - all these groups are
allowed to be seen as victims of external forces outside their control. But
the homeless are given no such privilege. Their homelessness and misery and
victimization is supposed to be their own fault. It's all tied to personal
choices they made - choices that exist completely outside of external
political forces."
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Letter from LA: The homeless are internal refugees - victims on the run from
neoliberalism
Yasha Levine . Mar 23, 2020
Ever since we moved back to LA, I've been shocked and horrified by how bad
the homeless situation here has gotten in the years that we've been gone.
And while everyone here is aware of this "problem," no one with any real
political power is willing to do anything about it - because to do so would
require totally reconfiguring the way our society operates. Instead, the
only thing that people here agree on is that it's probably best to ship the
homeless to gulags far away from the city. Way before corona hit, this been
big area for agreement between local anti-Trump liberals and the Trump
Administration.
Now with corona and the shutdown, the homeless "problem" has been pushed to
forefront - with the Los Angeles Times doing cover story after cover story
on the threat the virus poses to the unhoused and, by extension, the general
population of LA. But again, other than cramming people into makeshift and
poorly equipped shelters - shelters that could very well become a breeding
ground for the virus - no one's really doing anything. And while the city is
on lockdown, there are reports from all over LA that city officials are
still pushing the homeless out of their camps and seizing their property.
And I won't be surprised if, in the end, the city uses the corona crisis as
cover for its partnership with the Trump government to ship the homeless out
of the city and into quarantine gulags.
Does that look like 6 feet between cots to you? I'd say 3 feet max - if
that.
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But there's that word: the homeless.
As a refugee myself - and as someone who's been studying the history of
refugees and "displaced persons" - it's become clear to me that
"homelessness" isn't the best word to describe what's happening here. It
makes the whole thing seem so disembodied and abstract.
The truth is that homelessness is fundamentally a refugee crisis - an
internal refugee crisis caused by economic and political warfare. The United
Nations has a pretty good bureaucratic term to describe the tens of
thousands of homeless here in LA: "internally displaced persons."
Internally displaced people (IDPs) have not crossed a border to find safety.
Unlike refugees, they are on the run at home. IDPs stay within their own
country and remain under the protection of its government, even if that
government is the reason for their displacement.
Naturally, the UN leaves out economic policies as a driver of IDPs and
mostly restricts its definition to wars and natural disasters. That's
expected in our neoliberal world - where economic power has been written out
of the everyday realm of politics and remade into an immutable law of
nature. But put economics and politics back into the realm of human warfare
(where they belong) and there's just no getting around how well "IDP" fits
the homeless.
The fact is our government and our society has been directly responsible for
the internal displacement of these people. On just about every level - from
local to state to federal to cultural and personal - our establishment has
waged a political war against its own society on behalf of corporate and
private power. The vast majority of us have been on the losing side and
everyone's been dealing and coping with this assault in whatever ways they
can. The poorest and most vulnerable among us are just the most visible
casualties of this war. They have nowhere else to flee, nothing to retreat
to. So they're scattered all over the streets here like human wreckage.
The coronavirus is exposing this political war like nothing else I can
remember - and it's gonna simply decimate the homeless.
Echo Park, Los Angeles
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So the homeless are internal refugees - victims on the run from
neoliberalism. But there is one big difference between the homeless and
other "accepted" IDPs and refugees: the homeless are not allowed to have a
sympathetic narrative.
Soviet Jewish refugees like me, Syrian refugees, Iraqi refugees, Bolivian
refugees, and, hell, even Ukrainian Nazi collabos fleeing justice at the
hands of the Red Army - all these groups are allowed to be seen as victims
of external forces outside their control. But the homeless are given no such
privilege. Their homelessness and misery and victimization is supposed to be
their own fault. It's all tied to personal choices they made - choices that
exist completely outside of external political forces.
This narrative denial makes sense. Our political elite can't smugly say that
homelessness here is the fault of communism or that it was caused by the
undemocratic policies of some bad authoritarian government. It can't blame
it on something foreign and external. And it can't weaponize the homeless in
service of its own ideology and power - like my fellow Soviet Jewish
refugees and I were during the Cold War.
Our society is to blame for this disaster. It's the one that's waging war
against its own people. And those in power today - whether liberal or
Trumpist - do not want to stop it.