Just as the national movement for a universal health care system in the United States seems to be growing to new heights (though public sentiment has been in favor of universal health care for a while now), the state of Georgia is attempting to roll back what little public care is available. The state is withholding funding for Grady Hospital, the internationaly renowned hospital, which is known, at least in Atlanta, for treating the poor and uninsured.

State bureaucrats don’t want Grady to close, but instead they want to transfer the board from public hands to a non-profit. Of course, they promise that Grady will still continue to serve the uninsured.

Activists groups, like Jobs with Justice and the Rainbow Coalition, are working hard to keep Grady public. Whether they, along with other concerned citizens are able to stop this takeover will likely determine whether the uninsured in Atlanta will continue to receive emergency care (without accumulating unsurmountable debt), but just the fact that residents are forced to struggle to have a say in this decision is indicative of the state of democracy in this society. If Grady is a public hospital, funded and controlled by public resources, shouldn’t it be up to citizens to decide what happens to Grady? If there are a significant number of citizens in Atlanta or Georgia that were interested in privatizing Grady, then perhaps a referendum would be in order.

That’s not how democracy functions in the United States. Instead, government and corporate beauracts set an agenda that pleases corporate interests. Democracy happens when outraged citizens organize and take to the streets in protest, and sometimes they win a measure of control over decisions. When protest is the only option, institutional democracy is broken. Everyone knows it’s broken though.

Viewing Grady as a crisis in democracy may give activists the best shot of saving the public hospital. Activists in favor of keeping Grady public seem to focus their battle over the issue of whether or not Grady should be kept public (they argue that we must fight to keep it public). But this stance actually pretends that citizens have a say in the decision.

Perhaps the more important question to raise is who should decide what to do with Grady? Should it be the people who have used and might at one point use Grady, the the people who work there, and the taxpayers that fund this hospital? Or, should the fate of the hospital be decided in a “secret meeting” by “the Grady board, the Fulton County Commission, the offices of the governor and lieutenant governor, the religious community and the corporate world.”

Everyone knows it’s the latter group that will make the important decisions. It is no surprise then that the AJC reports that “consensus is growing for the idea of putting daily Grady operations under the auspices of a non-profit corporation.” This statement is true if you disregard Atlanta citizens and just look at the relevant opinions, that is the opinions of the decision makers.

Advocates of keeping Grady public should not just defend the hospital’s current structure, but instead should organize around the idea that we can win real democratic institutions that give people authentic control over resources like Grady. It’s not enough to just fight the corporate takeover, we need to replace the system that would encourage such a takeover.

State senator Kasim Reed explains the situation a little more succinctly, “Everyone understands that he who pays the piper calls the tune.” Of course, Reed has no problem with this situation as the AJC explains thats he thinks “seats on the board should be distributed, proportionately, among the institutions that end up financing the new Grady.” Therein lies the true essence of American democracy: one dollar, one vote.

• Provide an alternative model to the landlord-renter relationship. Instead of building up equity and providing profit for someone who doesn’t live in the house, the tenants will build up equity in the cooperative, and no one profits off rent.
• Grow our own food. We can use our lawn as a vegetable garden. Given enough space, this garden could involve the neighborhood as well.
• Be a center for activist organizing in the neighborhood. We can support the neighborhood in fighting against gentrification, institutional racism, or whatever struggles the neighborhood deems important. It would be helpful to have a meeting space for these fights, as well as a house full of energetic, caring folks.
• Provide an alternative to the traditional division of chores across gender lines. Instead we will share all types of tasks equally, to the extent possible.
• Provide a positive alternative to racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination by being home to a diverse set of people.

A few other things I would enjoy about living in a cooperative:

• Having communal meals regularly. It sucks cooking and eating alone. Plus, eating in will keep us healthier and save money since we can purchase as a group.
• Holding community events. We could screen movies, have dinner parties, or hold meetings.
• Support each other like family (minus the hierarchy). Isolation plagues Americans, and it is true that it is almost impossible to accomplish anything on your own.

I have been looking to buy an affordable, larger house in order to jump start this housing cooperative. I don’t think that is the ideal way for it to start. Certainly you won’t everyone’s ownership to be equal– but this is a much harder task. There is really a lot of work that has to be done to setup the structure. Instead of waiting, my idea is to buy the house, start the cooperative, then sell the house to the cooperative within a couple of years.

West End:

Several houses had this design feature.

This is the Hammonds House.

Westview Neighborhood:

This is a 6 bedroom foreclosure being sold for $99,000. This house is a great candidate for the housing cooperative we want to start. We need a large, affordable house for the co-op, and these two neighborhoods provide some good options.

The Westview Cemetery borders the neighborhood to the West.

One thing we didn’t capture in photograph is how bad the streets were. On Ralph David Abernathy which goes through the heart of historic West End, the road was almost unbearable with all of the potholes and bumps. The streets in Westview were slightly better. All streets in Atlanta have some problems, but it is no surprise that Atlanta neglects this part of town while working to improve street conditions for the rich, white parts of town. Keeping roads in horrible shape is a way of shifting costs back onto the general public as it increases the cost of upkeep on your car, and it acts like a regressive tax since it hurts the working class the most.

Although not as serious as other public resources, the deterioration of roads is symbolic of the way the city has treated all publicly funded resources. You can see the same deterioration in MARTA, public housing, Grady, and Atlanta public schools. In all these cases the government shifts costs to the general public to free up funds for various types of corporate welfare. This is the essence of class warfare in America, and the capitalists and coordinators are continuing to beat down the working class.

Likewise, those who aid and abet the homeless must be shut down as well. Either you’re with us our you’re against us. McMahel states that they plan to “increase pressure to close or relocate two nearby enabling facilities – Ponce de Leon’s Open Door Center and Atlanta Community Outreach Center.” Poncey-Highland’s solution to homelessness? Stop enabling the homeless. Take away their food, take away their last refuge of shelter. Then maybe they will just disappear. A tried and true approach to the age old problem of how to expel the untouchables of society.

What do homeless people have to do with home burglary? When rich people get their stuff stolen, someone has got to pay the price. An easy target is homeless and poor people. If you can criminalize the homeless you can get rid of them. And if you can get rid of them you set an example that this neigborhood reacts with an iron fist.

It’s not that Poncey-Highlands hates homelessness or even the homeless per se, they just don’t want to have to see such vulgar expressions of poverty so close to home. In other words, having homeless people sleep or eat in the same zip code as you is about as bad as having your stuff looted while you’re at work, so it makes sense to lump the two crimes together.

Respectfully yours,
Jim McMahel
PHNA, President

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
-Gandhi

I shudder to think of what change McMahel wishes to see in the world.

The full e-mail follows.

From: Jim McMahel [mailto:---@---.net]
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 12:06 PM
To: —
Subject: Poncey-Highland Public Security Initiatives

Hello Poncey-Hi North Ave Residents:

You may already know about a multi-home robbery that took place in two areas of Poncey-Hi just after folks left for work in the morning – this happened about 3 weeks ago.

Several residents in the neighborhood have come together to get serious about tackling crime in Poncey-Highland. As a North Ave resident I have volunteered to contact home owners on the south side of North Ave through Poncey-Hi about initiatives to increase security in our
neighborhood.

Here is a short list:

1. Increase security patrols by hiring off-duty police – see attached document.

2. Create Neighborhood Watch program with street captains and phone/email trees. This creates more awareness by all Poncey-Hi residents who join the program of their need to watch for suspicious behavior or activity.

For example a few Williams Mill residents saw the robber of 3 homes ‘case out’ the street to see when residents left in the morning, but they didn’t call 911 or tell the man he was being watched, or let their neighbors know because they thought they were being paranoid. An active Neighborhood Watch program could have prevented the robberies by just
letting the man know he was being watched and contacting others in their tree of this incident.

3. Create groups of 10 volunteer neighbors who go into the park to photograph and phone 911 at ‘urban campers’ hideouts in Freedom Park before and after park open hours to drive this element out of the park. Also, weekend clean-up days to cut out underbrush and shrubs they are using to ‘urban camp’ in. This would affectively get the police more involved in keeping the park free of urban campers as well as send a powerful message to the campers they are not welcome and will be driven out.

4. Increase pressure to close or relocate two nearby enabling facilities – Ponce de Leon’s Open Door Center and Atlanta Community Outreach Center on Druid Hills Baptist Church property – through organized contact with both centers and city officials.

5. Coordinated and consistent pressure on city officials to increase police force for zone 6 and specifically in our neighborhood. We need to let the city know this is how we want more of our tax money spent.

Please email me back if you are interested in joining the neighborhood watch, and paying for increased security patrols in Poncey-Highland. Don’t forget to look at the attached document!

–
Respectfully yours,
Jim McMahel
PHNA, President

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
-Gandhi