It was a cold Sunday in December

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Staff: Paul Colvin, May May Gong, David Kirschner, Hayden Perry, Socialist Action (ISSN 0747-4237) is published monthly for $8 per year Francisco, CA 94110. Second-class postage is paid at San Francisco, Calif POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Socialist Action, 3435 Army RATES: For one year (12 issues)—U.S. 2nd Class: $8, 1st Class: $12; Canada and Mexico 2nd Class: $12, 1st Class: $15; All other countries 2nd Class: $15, 1st Class: $30. (Canada money orders or checks should be in 2 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1989 It was a cold Sunday morning in New York. A good day, perhaps, for breakfast in bed—for reading the funny papers and for sipping something hot.

On that cold Sunday morning, the body of Daniel Burgos was found in a junkyard. He was lying next to the Chevrolet Caprice he called home-frozen to death. Number_K881087 in the Kings County Hospital Morgue.

That was Sunday. Fourteen shopping days until Christmas, said the newspapers. By Thursday, four other homeless people had died on the streets of New York. A death a day.

There are some 3 million homeless people in the United States, the statisticians say. Some die of exposure, some of malnutrition. Many are murdered. Thousands are beaten and robbed. Thousands of homeless women are raped.

Nothing "specific"

Does anybody care? This season, to be sure, stories about the homeless displaced Scrooge and Tiny Tim in the daily newspapers' Christmas editions. Preachers declared from the pulpit that the Virgin Mary herself was homeless when she found "no room at the inn."

Even George Bush told a news conference that homelessness is "a national shame." But, he quickly added, "I have not gotten into that specific yet."

Everybody "cares" about the homeless. But nothing "specific" is being done.

Last year, Congress budgeted $550 million to help pay for shelters and other aid to the homeless. That's the price of one Stealth Bomber. But it doesn't begin to tackle the job of rebuilding America's cities-—which must be done to solve the plight of the homeless.

The only solutions put forward by Bush & Company sound like they've been ripped out of a novel by Dickens. They call upon the wealthy to remember charity: "Don't forget to let something trickle down to the poor!"

On Dec. 19, Bush appointed New York Congressman Jack Kemp as the new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Kemp, for those who have blotted out any memory of his presidential campaign, is the veritable high priest of voodoo economics, the man who (according to his own telling) tutored Ronald Reagan in the ABCs of the "trickle-down theory."

Kemp's latest lecture, as Head Master of Housing, concerns "urban-enterprise zones," which would give federal tax reductions and other "incentives" to businesses that agree to relocate into depressed inner-city areas.

"Redevelopment?"

The course that Kemp proposes is merely an extension of the local urban-redevelopment schemes of the last few decades-which had disastrous results. Entire working-class neighborhoods were demolished. The banks, industries, and developers were offered lucrative "incentives" to erect office towers, convention centers, and luxury hotels in their place.

But experience showed that tax breaks were not enough for the big corporations. They wanted the whole kit and caboodle-including free city services and sweetheart union contracts—in exchange for not moving to the suburbs or to a foreign country.

In the end, working-class city residents paid more in taxes to support the corporations; in return, they received only a handful of new job opportunities at low wages.

As for the people who were displaced from the showy "redevelopment" projects, where did they go? Most of them were relegated to other slums, to city-run shelters— or onto the streets.

What is needed is the exact opposite of Kemp's "urbanenterprise" tax giveaway. The large corporations should pay much more in taxes, not less. We should open the capitalists' account books to public view to see how much they have stolen from working people over the years; they would then be taxed accordingly.

The taxes would be collected on a nationwide level, so the corporations couldn't escape them by Editor: ALAN BENJAMIN Asst. Editors: MICHAEL SCHREIBER JOE RYAN Kwame M.A. Somburu, Sylvia Weinstein.

Business Manager: KATHY SANDS St., No. 308, San Francisco, CA 94110.

U.S. dollars.)

Signed articles do not necessarily These are expressed in editorials. moving to the suburbs.

The tax revenue would finance an emergency Conservation Corps to rehabilitate the inner cities. Youth and the unemployed would be put to work at union wages building and maintaining housing, clinics and hospitals, schools, and masstransportation facilities. Unskilled men and women would be trained and supervised by union workers.

This proposal would go a long way toward eliminating homelessness and the other effects of poverty. It can be done!

Closing date:

Dec. 30, 1988 represent

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UNITED SKINS

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