NOT communist or “professional squatter” as often flaunted by some elite scholars, technocrats, local politicians and the middle-class social climbers.
These people are so contemptuous of the poor that they always shamelessly blamed homelessness and poverty to poor people’s indolence and lack of education, and deceptively and skewedly argued that the series of government housing occupations by homeless people led by Kadamay are instigated by the communists.
They are wrong and stupid, of course.
Homelessness and poverty is a manifestation of social cancer–a society in the quagmire of hardships and violence, and where a majority of its people have insufficient means for a humane life.
In our contemporary society, to live homeless, penny-less, foodless and naked is humiliating and could turn one powerless, worthless.
Nobody wants to be in such condition, not even those already poor. All they want is decent life, one with prosperity and dignity.
It is obvious that our homeless brothers and sisters who attempted recently to occupy a big government housing settlement in Barangay Felisa, Bacolod City, were so exasperated by the repeatedly failed promises from government housing officials and national politicians.
When the series of occupations by organized homeless people in Bulacan erupted last year, followed by exposing of corruptions in the governing housing agencies, I already projected that more homeless people will do the same in other provinces.
The different national housing agencies have long been mired in controversies, corruption, and in-fighting. Countless government housing projects worth billions have been nothing, unhabitable, and milking cows of housing officials, politicians, real estate brokers and ravenous constructors.
Community Mortgage Program (CMP) and other mass housing projects have been the source of racket operations by housing officials and their field operations personnel.
I don’t know if Malacañang people see the severity of the housing problem in the country and the corruption in its several housing agencies. If they do, whether they are prepared and serious to give this a decisive solution or not.
Meanwhile, private land developers and constructors of low-cost housing units are having holidays putting housing hubs everywhere; thanks to the corrupt politicians and housing officials for issuing licenses and certificates left and right.
Together, they eat up the income and savings of OFWs on something that doesn’t really contribute to building the local economy.
So long as the government remains in the brutal framework of neoliberal economic development, and all its subprograms like national housing follow the same, there will never be an end to poverty and homelessness in the country.
And attempts to occupy unused, substandard, and graft-ridden housing projects, will continue now and then, until the homeless and the poor would have enough strength to resist successfully court orders and violent dispersal and ejectments.
Oh, to the heartless and filthy rich, if they were in the shoes of the poor and homeless, they would probably resort to the same; maybe even worst, if they were once rich and became poor.
I challenge them to integrate with the poor and homeless for a day or two, best even a week. And they will know why, and probably get angry at their fellows somewhere up there for being so amoral and politically insane.
(For feedback, email ombion.ph@outlook.com)