 We have a dear friend of mine organized for a long time with me, or I have with him. He is pretty much the head of a lead organizer with San Pedro neighbors for peace and justice, which is a group that started right after the second invasion of Iraq and has been done many things, but has been on the corner in downtown San Pedro for over 850 Fridays after our invasion of Iraq, speaking truth to power and peace in the streets and the 98 year old woman that I mentioned before, Julia Scoville, she was right there along with them for years and years and years. So Chris Venn will speak on a very, very important part of the Cold War. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Frank. Thank you for this opportunity. I'm going to speak on the housing crisis, land accumulation and Cold War ideology, and I'm going to focus on Ronald Reagan and his and the part he played. Under Reagan, the number of homeless people went from something so little it wasn't even written about a rightly in the late 1970s to more than 2 million when Reagan left office. The single most devastating thing Reagan did to create homelessness was when he cut the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development by three quarters from 32 billion in 1981 to 7.5 billion by 1988. I want to step back from my remarks. As Rachel mentioned, we're a group called San Pedro Neighbors for Peace and Justice. So we've been on the street corner as Rachel mentioned for 850 Fridays. We stopped because of the COVID pandemic out of concern for our fellow activists and also not to give the wrong impression that somehow as peace activists, we wanted to display any casual attitude toward this horrible pandemic. So as social justice activists, we belong to a group, by the way, we're in California, part of Los Angeles. We're part of a group of 37 different organizations called Services Not Sweeps. It refers to actions by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Department of Sanitation to attack and destroy unhoused encampments throughout the city. To share with you, Los Angeles has the largest unhoused community for a city in the country. So that's kind of why Rachel asked for this presentation about Ronald Reagan. So as I mentioned, the Department of Housing and Urban Development dropped by three quarters from $32 billion in 1981 to $7.5 billion by 1988, all like Reagan's urging. The Department of Housing and Urban Development was the main governmental supporter of subsidized housing for the poor. What led to this was Reagan's overhaul of tax codes to reduce incentives for private developers to create low-income homes and you had a major crisis for low-income families and individuals. Under Reagan, the number of people living beneath the federal poverty line rose from $24.5 million in 1978 to $32.5 million in 1988, all under Reagan's watch. Also under his watch, the income gap between the rich and everyone else in America widened. Wages for the average worker declined and the nation's home ownership rate fell during Reagan's two turns in the White House, which were boom times for the rich. The poverty rate in cities grew. Reagan also presided, so this isn't simply a question of the loss of housing, but just the whole restructuring of government under Reagan. Reagan also presided over the dramatic deregulation of the nation's savings and loan industry, allowing SNLs to end their reliance on home mortgages and engage in an orgy of commercial real estate speculation. The result was widespread corruption, mismanagement, and the collapse of hundreds of thrift institutions that ultimately led to a taxpayer bailout that cost hundreds of billions of dollars. By the end of Reagan's term in office, federal assistance to local governments was cut 60%. Reagan eliminated general revenue sharing to cities, slashed funding for public service jobs and job training, almost dismantled federally funded legal services for the poor, cut the anti-poverty community development law grant program, and reduced funds for public transit. The most dramatic cut in domestic spending during the Reagan years was for low-income housing subsidies. Reagan appointed a housing task force dominated by politically connected developers, landlords and bankers. In 1982, the task force released a report that called for free and deregulated markets as an alternative to government assistance. Advice Reagan followed. In his first year in office, Reagan had the budget for public housing and section eight to 17.5 billion, and for the next few years, he sought to eliminate federal housing assistance to the poor altogether. Sorry to be so wonky. I wanted to just give a plug for this wonderful book that has been the source of some of these remarks called Mean Streets, a book recently, 2020, released by Don Mitchell. Just a real eye-opening look at kind of the history of wholeness in this country, which goes back, you know, over 100 years. So just finally to summarize, and again, it's such a pleasure to be here. With the Reagan Revolution, 10 cities returned, already declining during the Carter administration. These 10 cities were declining. The public housing budget was cut in half in the first Reagan budget and slashed and slashed again over the years that followed. The city and mental health support budgets were likewise slashed and had the horrible legacy of Reagan cutting mental health support in California. And the inevitable effects of unsupported deinstitutionalization quickly made themselves in cities. And just so finally, deindustrialization played its role. Loss of jobs, closing of factories, eliminating jobs and livelihoods, leading to foreclosures and sending thousands of workers and their families out on the road looking for better opportunities. All these processes hit people of color in the hardest. And thank you so much. Thank you, Chris. Hi, Kathy. Thank you for your testimony. And I would just say to a capitalist, perhaps the greatest crime of socialism is the idea that housing is a human right or that land is a human right. So all of the land reform movements around the world that tried to come after, you know, World War II that were crushed as communists. That's one of the worst things you can do is give land or housing to someone. Thank you so much. Free, my goodness.