Naomi Klein Fights For The Needs Of Vancouver’s DTES Drug Dealers & Poverty Pimps!

Naomi Klein speaking beside Harsha Walia at the rally

One of the more interesting events I attended in Vancouver was the Occupy Condos event led by Harsha Walia. I have, for months, been quite confused by this event. It was only recently what it has begun to make sense to me…

It was a story in the Globe & Mail that caught my attention- mentioning that the  Sequel 138 development was a threat to Vancouver’s DTES drug market. Suddenly, the whole thing made sense- Naomi Klein was protesting to defend the rights of Vancouver’s DTES drug dealers!

Members of the Vancouver Drug Users Association watching Naomi Klein’s & Harsha Walia’s speeches against building new condos…

So, I decided to research Naomi Klein a bit further and try to understand what makes her tick. The results were quite shocking!

The first thing I learned was that her brother, Seth Klein, spoke on the same stage as I did during the first day of Occupy Vancouver! Klein is also a Red Diaper Baby whose both grandparents were members of the Soviet Communist Party back in Russia during the first half of the last century.

Naomi is also a darling of the International Socialists, as you can see from this link where she speaks at the steelworker’s hall– which explains the connection to what has been happening in the Occupy Movement. It appears that George Soros and his International Socialists have their hands all-over everything Occupy!

Okay, the story about protecting drug dealers is juicy- but, if one looks beneath the surface, there is a whole lot more going on here…

Signs put-up by developer Marc Williams..

Directly across the street there is the INSITE clinic- a highly controversial safe injection clinic that’s been covered ad-nauseum by the Canadian press. Those of you who have been following my writing since the start may remember how they made a commitment to me and failed last November and how that resulted in the Over-dosage Death at Occupy Vancouver.

INSITE is operated by the Portland Hotel Society (PHS)- a major land manager in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side (DTES), and a major recipient of government grants for giving services to the homeless- a billion dollar industry in Vancouver.

I’ve heard many people refer to Portland as poverty pimps because of the huge amount of money they take-in from their grants. A fantastic example of this is a piece of informaton I learned from Michael Geller last year:

The PHS provide the city with the emergency winter “HEAT” Shelters. Curiously, they charge the city $2,800 per-month for each floor mat they provide for homeless people to sleep on. Yes, you read that right, $2,800 monthly for a mat on the floor!

Also, the PHS and other organizations provide a wealth of other services to their captive audience in the DTES. Food, medical, educational, drug rehab, family services, etc. So, you can see how gentrification could be problematic for them.

If the population of the DTES is distributed elsewhere, grant money will dry-up for organizations like the PHS and others. The poverty pimp industry will be dead!

What amazes me about this story is how the Globe & Mail, The Province and other mainstream media outlets seem to have totally missed the boat on this angle of the story. They always seem to get stories about Vancouver’s DTES wrong- is that because they are too scared to go there and dig-in to the story?

Or is there something more to it- because, this one is a no-brainer…

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