ERASING US

The longest night of the year promised to be another cold struggle for our homeless friends. A new row of pup tents is bracing against the downtown Santa Cruz Post Office metal fence. A bright pink Christmas Tree stood triumphal outside the first tent.

It’s a sad day. Not only because of the damp frigid night before us but this is the night we are thinking of all our friends and neighbors who died homeless over 2025. One of the most moving parts of our annual December 21st Homeless Memorial is the reading of the names and ages of those that passed in the streets. A faint gasp could be heard when a friend’s name is announced. But this year it was different.

After I welcomed those gathered I explained that Santa Cruz County officials had only provided the first names and initial of the last name unlike in the past when we were provided with the first and last names and age at their passing.

Helga starts to read the names over our little loudspeaker, “KATELYN, DANIEL, ABBIE, JESUS, YESENIA, MATTHEW, OMAR, JOHN and JOHN until she finished the first third of the names of those who died outside. Our hearts sank as we realized we couldn’t identify our dead. Another erasing of those who did not matter to Housing Matters and the County of Santa Cruz.

More homeless lives will be erased with the January 29, 2026 Point-in-Time count when it omits hundreds of people from their census. Hundreds of people never counted because to those who profit from the homeless industrial complex they don’t.

Those who cannot afford housing are just money to make and numbers to be managed.

In the June 4, 2024 email, “Thank you - Coral St.” message from Housing Matters CEO Phil Kramer to the city managers and Mayor Fred Keeley he writes, “Hi all - Thank you for your work to create a more welcoming and safe Coral Street for shelter guests, day service participants, staff, and partners. I appreciate what a large undertaking this was and understand there is more infrastructure work (fencing, etc.) coming soon.

The sidewalks are stained and reek of urine. Is it possible for City staff to do some sidewalk powerwashing? If you give us authorization we might be able to do some of this cleaning work ourselves, or hire it out. Please let me know.

Thanks again,

Phil

Santa Cruz Assistant City Manager Lisa Murphy responds.

“Hi Phil,

Thank you for recognizing the incredible undertaking this effort took to accomplish. We had nearly 20 employees out at the location on Monday, and we will continue to have our team in that location. We still have lots of work to do to try to break the cycle of people returning to that space. Our team is scheduled to power wash the sidewalks, and may have already done so by now. It may need multiple washes. I will let you know what the status is of the cleaning.

I look forward to working with Housing Matters as a valuable partner to help those individuals in and around Coral Street with our recently awarded Encampment Resolution Grant. This will help keep this location clear.

Lisa Murphy

Yes you read that correctly, “ We still have lots of work to do to try to break the cycle of people returning to that space.”

Our homeless friends are not the only people being erased. While the county may have been able to erase our unhoused neighbors they couldn’t stop us from reading the full names of those killed with US weapons in Gaza. The names of Palestinian babies under age one murdered by Israel took nearly two hours to read during our September 5, 2025,“Know their names” memorial on the steps of the county building. The names of the one year olds took another two hours to read. Over 2,700 entire Palestinian bloodlines erased.

Santa Cruz is home to the erasing of Palestinian voices on Instagram and Facebook. The owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, Casey Coonerty-Protti’s husband Michel Protti is the head of “online safety” at Meta. Casey says her husband is one of the most powerful executives at Meta. According to her he is even more powerful than Mark Zuckerberg. His department permanently deleted the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine’s main Instagram account containing roughly 124,000 followers.

An officer of the anti-homeless hate group Take Back Santa Cruz was the husband of Google’s general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado. We received a snap shot of Manuel’s emails between himself, former City Manager Martin Bernal, racist Mayor Donna Meyers and Republican City Councilperson Renee Golder coordinating efforts to rid Santa Cruz of the homeless.

In a December 18, 2020, email Manuel thanks Martin for the week before’s zoom meeting writing about striping Delaware where many living in vehicles sleep, stepping up enforcement of all parking rule “(not just 72-hour limit)” and this “- Update on why some folks such as Keith McHenry (parked on McPherson) and Alicia Kuhl (parked on Delaware) have not been towed despite receiving so many tickets.” It is a relief to learn that their intelligence on my parking locations and ticket reality is so inept.

Google is one of many companies advancing slaughter in Gaza with their product Project Nimbus. This $1.2 billion joint contract between Google and Amazon signed in 2021 provides cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military.

Halimah DeLaine Prado’s 2019 Form 700 notes she had more than a $ million dollars worth of stock in Alphabet Inc. the company that owns YouTube. YouTube deleted David Rovics’ entire catalog of original music in January 2026 erasing his valuable collection of much loved music. It seems his songs in support of the Palestinians may have provoked the mass deletion.

These monsters of the Epstein class may believe they are unstoppable, able to remove the “useful eaters” from interfering with their grand plans to maintain global dominance but they may be underestimating our power.

The power of millions who are waking to the reality that the entire system is corrupt and that it is time to withhold our participation and focus on building a community free of the demonic cruelty of those that creep around the halls of government and their corporate sponsors.