[Announce] A new plot against the poor in Oklahoma City

[Robert Waldrop]

A new plot is afoot in Oklahoma City against the 
poor.  Rich and powerful medical research 
corporations are casting covetous eyes on the low 
income neighborhood south and east of the 
Presbyterian Health Foundation medical research 
complex in northeast Oklahoma City.  Below is a 
comment I sent tonight to the officers of the 
Presbyterian Health Foundation, as well as to the 
various politicians who are responsible for 
approving this latest attack on the poor in 
central Oklahoma.  RMW

To whom it may concern at the Presbyterian Health 
Foundation:
The proposal to destroy the neighborhood around 
the hospital district in northeast Oklahoma City 
using eminent domain and TIF funding is the latest 
"reverse Robin Hood" scheme of the rich and 
politically well connected to steal from the poor 
and give to the powerful. The constant destruction 
of housing by government for a wide variety of 
economic development schemes leads to higher rents 
and that causes serious economic problems for low 
income people, who are already suffering because 
of high energy costs. Economic stress is a 
well-documented driver of violence against women 
and children, drug and alcohol abuse, divorce, 
crime, and abortion. None of these costs will be 
accounted for by the medical research corporations 
that will profit from this expansion at the 
expense of low income housing, but the 
externalized costs will nevertheless be paid in 
full, the price will not be cheap, and it will be 
paid by the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

We are told that the glorious end of medical 
research justifies this unsavory means.  These 
poor people that have to get out of the way of the 
medical research expansion are just, you know, 
collateral damage.  It's sad but somebody has to 
suffer so that the glorious end of big profits 
through industrialized corporation medicine can 
prosper.  (Notice how it is always poor people who 
are the collateral damage in these economic 
development schemes, it is never the wealthy and 
the prosperous.)  In any event, rich white doctors 
and their medical corporations have a long history 
of stealing land from the poor (and from African 
Americans in particular) in Oklahoma City, so we 
shouldn't be surprised that the best idea they 
could come up with involved destroying even more 
low income housing.

Some people believe that economic development 
trumps all considerations of morality, but if that 
is true, perhaps we should  legalize child 
prostitution and promote Oklahoma City as the 
pedophile tour capital of the world! That is a 
shocking and scandalous thought, but there is no 
moral difference between promoting sex "for 
economic development purposes" and destroying the 
neighborhoods of low income people "for economic 
development purposes". Both actions are morally 
wrong, but we destroy low income neighborhoods all 
the time and don't even think twice about the 
consequences. That moral carelessness is a measure 
of the demonic strength of the culture of death 
here in central Oklahoma.

Bob Waldrop

Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House, 1524 NW 21st, 
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73106, 405-613-4688

www.justpeace.org + www.bettertimesinfo.org + 
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