On How White Liberal Elected Officials Don’t Care If Black People Freeze to Death
When Communists say that voting tends to do more harm than good and the bourgeois electoral arena should be dropped as a site of struggle unless there are very specific conditions developed by a correctly guided Marxist Leninist Maoist Communist party, we aren’t talking out of our ass. The types of people that run for office in the twilight years of the Yankee Empire tend to be the most duplicitous, callous, shark-like individuals in the history of humanity. One such individual is Jack Coatar, an individual that unfortunately attended the same university that I did and reminds me of many of my former peers. He is an alderman “representing” my city’s 7th Ward. He chaired the College Democrats. He worked on both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. He is a millennial. He’s an attorney who has previously worked in a prosecutor’s office and has locked up god knows how many Black people. Right now, he’s working at Spencer Fane LLC, a local law firm, with an interest in Litigation, Real Estate, and Governmental Affairs. He also participates in “restoration groups” and “community improvement districts”. He wants an MLS stadium here. Essentially, he’s a gentrifier.
Coatar is the very type of nauseatingly smug gentrifying liberal that, in the future, will call the police on a black person at Starbucks for simply being black and earn himself the name “Java Jack”. All bullshit aside, he’s a perfect example of why black people should not trust, vote for, or work with these white liberals. Currently, he is involved in a campaign to condemn and eventually take away property belonging to a member of the New Afrikan community, an elder, in his ward. There’s been a back and forth for the past couple weeks between this elder and this fuckboy over whether or not this property can be used as a warming shelter. I visited this building today to meet this elder and drop off some essentials with comrades from my organization and saw no reason why this place should be condemned — it’s cleaner than my room (sorry Marie Kondo — messes spark joy). This elder is a movement veteran and a well respected member of the community. He expressed joy at the fact that people are willing and ready to serve the people in the Panther tradition, right here in Saint Louis. He opened up his building as a warming shelter during the recent polar vortex which froze dozens of houseless people to death in Chicago and my city, Saint Louis. This is an obvious attempt to displace Black property owners, remove the overwhelming Black houseless population from the streets, and “clean up” neighborhoods for gentrification. As he expressed, “they want this building”. They meaning Jack Coatar and his real estate developer buddies. I saw a copy of the supposed justification for condemning this property without a thorough inspection — there were a bunch of spurious and vague rationales that I’m perfectly sure Coatar, as an attorney dealing in real estate, knows won’t stand. This is a tried and true harassment tactic intended to harass this elder off his property so some white developer can snatch it up.
The situation of the homeless in STL is being dealt with nearly entirely by volunteers. Every day volunteers are out preparing and delivering hot meals, bottles of water, offering basic medical treatment (I’ll never forget a comrade of mine helping a man who had been shot and discharged from the hospital and helping revive another individual who was literally on the verge of death from heat exhaustion), and other things to ensure that people do not die on the streets of our city. The City government, with its resources, offers little to nothing, yet Mayor Lyda Krewson is quick to rush and claim credit while her office and people like Coatar stymie efforts to assist unhoused people. The city does nothing to alleviate the houseless problem. No buildings are being repaired and made habitable. There are buildings on my very own block that are owned by the LRA and can be repaired with city resources and turned into shelters. There are huge abandoned buildings downtown that can be repaired and opened as community centers, free clinics, etc. I know comrades who can help administer and bring people to them. But the people who run this city do not want that. They want the houseless, most of whom are New Afrikan, to die, they want to snatch away land from Black property owners who use it to serve the people, and they want to break up concentrations of New Afrikan people and move us elsewhere so that our neighborhoods can be gentrified and destroyed by developers. Every person that freezes to death in this “liberal” run city is a murder laid on the doorsteps of the Democratic Party and its latte sipping, fuzzy mittens wearing, camel overcoat donning paragons of smug condescension and deep blue white supremacy.
