2011

The PNN "Reality" TV Shows were created in PeopleSkool's Revolutionary Video & Theatre Action Class of 2011

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En el nombre de la seguridad de la comunidad se quiere aplicar una nueva ley que afecta a la comunidad inmigrante en Estados Unidos, pues si un inmigrante es arrestado por cualquier causa la policia comparte la informacion de la persona detenida con ICE que actua rapidamente y deporta a la persona detenida.

Los trabajadores y trabajadoras inmigrantes pueden ser afectados por una nueva ley que los hace mas vulnerables  para que pisoten sus derechos y sean explotados al maximo.

Para citar un ejemplo tenemos lo que hace unos dias sucedio a Juan y Chico.

Bajo frio viento del mes de Mayo iniciaron un nuevo proyecto para Mr. Frank Kafca ,quien en forma amigable los recibio en su casa  y acto seguido les mostro todos los problemas al rededor de la casa.

“Pero empezemos en el patio” dijo Mr. Frank con el proyecto de agregar mas altura a la cerca al rededor de la casa.

Se  acordo el precio del trabajo por hora y Mr. Frank lloro al maximo  “Amigos alludenme yo no tengo mucho dinero y puedo pagar 18 Dolares a cada uno, y seran mis amigos por siempre”

Al estar comprando la Madera y en la tienda Mr. Frank, dijo “tengo una llamada importante, me tengo que retirar, pero les dejo un cheque a nombre de Juan Perez para que compren , adios.” Y acto seguido Frank desaparecio como volando.                                                       Al

El dia siguiente, Mr. Frank despues de ser una persona amable que afirmaba a cada momento, “que bonito, me gusta su trabajo muchachos” Al estar el trabajo finalizado Mr.Frank Kafca se transformo de una persona amable y agradable, a una gran cucaracha y cuando abria su boca todo lo que expulsaba hera desagradable.

La razon de esta incredible transformacion es que no estaba dispuesto a pagar y cuando finalmente entrego el cheque le faltaba dos cientos dolares.

Cuando Juan y Chico vieron el faltante de doscientos dolares trataron de razonar y arreglar el mal entendido, pero Mr, Frank inicio a gritar y decir “fuera de mi casa llamare a la policia” y al ver que su plan de robar daba resultado se transformo en un ser desconocido con sus gritos, “llamare a la policia!” 

Las comunidades seguras es un plan que afectara en forma negativa a las personas mas desprotegidas.

Afortunadamente personas como Mr. Frank no existen muchas en esto dias, pero en un medio ambiente apropiado puden multiplicarse.

English Sigue

In the name of “so-called” safe communities legislators have created a new law that has a direct and very serious impact on all of us migrant peoples in the United States.

The law states that if an immigrant is arrested for whatever reason, the police will be required to share the information of the person detained with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) who acts quickly to detain and deport that person.

The immigrant workers can be affected by this new law because it makes us more vulnerable to rights abuses and exploitation.

For example, this is what happened to my friends Juan and Chico a few days back.

Low cold winds in the month of May initiated a new project for Mr. F, who in an act of kindness, let my friends stay in his home and continued to show them all the different problems surrounding the house.

“But let’s start in the front yard” said Mr. F, with his project of adding height to the fence around his home.

He remembered the price of the job for today and Mr. F cried, “ Friends Please help me, I don’t have a lot of money and I can pay 18 dollars each, then you will be my friends for life.”

While buying the wood in the store Mr. F said, “I have an important call, I have to leave for a bit, but here is the check in the name of “Juan P.” So you can purchase the material, bye.” Immediately Frank disappeared like a bird.

The following day, Mr. F after being such a nice agreeable person that reaffirmed constantly, “oh how lovely, I like your work guys”--upon completion of the project-- transformed from a nice person to a cockroach and when he opened his mouth everything that came out was an expletive.

The reason for this incredible transformation is because this person was not willing to pay my migrant friends and when he finally handed over the check it was short 200.00 dollars.

When Juan and Chico saw that they were underpaid 200 dollars, they tried to reason and fix the misunderstanding, but Mr. F began to scream “get out of my house or I’ll call the police” and when he saw that his plan of stealing was giving him results he became someone unrecognizable with his screams, “I’ll call the cops!”

Secure Communities is a plan that will affect negatively those people that are most unprotected. Fortunately there are not too many people like Mr. F these days, but  with this kind of legislative support, they will multiply.

Kaya Carine Gabriel explains: We wanted to represent and inspire people with disabilities in some way. While we were brainstorming ideas for the video, we came up with the idea to have several people who use wheelchairs join us. We reached out to the Dancing Wheels School and to several friends we knew in similar situations and asked them to join us for a day of fun to shoot the video. It turned out to be such an amazing day. We all got together to share in the creativity and we were blown away by how amazing the dancers were. We definitely plan to do more projects like this in the future.

Deacon Burns: (Answered my question: can you add your feeling of seeing people in music videos playing like they are in wheelchair users?)"It disgusts me! People that can walk acting like it's cool to be in a wheelchair are not cute to me. It reminds me of the rich kids in the suburbs that think it's cool to live in the ghetto, when everybody in the ghetto is trying to get out of it."

From Removal to Reparations......From Houselessness to HOMEFULNESS…
From indigenous lands stolen to budget crumbs thow-en-
From  affordable housing in name only to rights to a roof by any means necessary…
From the cult of independence to the Revolution of inter-dependence…
From poverty-pimped housing po-lice to
Revolutionary equity for all Realized…!!!!.

After 500 years of removal, GentriFUKation, Anthro-Wrong-ology, akkkademik studies and philanthro-pimped capitalist compromises, and consumerist destruction POOR Magazine's family of landless, indigenous elders, ancestors, mamas, aunties, uncles, fathers and abuelitos, daughters and sons will be realizing the revolution that is Homefulness.  Its first resting place/its first creation space is located at 8032 MacArthur Av in Oakland

How did this finally happen?

Revolutionary Change Session launches true Change......Crumbling the Myth of The Gift — Deconstructing Donor Denial & Dismantling The Non–Profit Industrial Complex... One Outcome at a Time

Launched on Juneteenth of 2009 the POOR Magazine Revolutionary Change Session was a moment in herstory, a poor people-led/indigenous people-led teach-in for conscious folk with race, class and/or education privilege who were interested in exploring. implementing and practicing truly revolutionary expressions of giving, equity sharing and change. 

At this herstoric event poverty, in/migrante, race, elder, youth, disability and indigenous skolaz presented curriculum on the kkkriminalization of poor peoples and public space, local and global poverty, ableism, welfare, border fascism/false borders, systems abuse, underground economic strategies, po’lice brutality, profiling, globalization, gentriFUKation, indigenous removal and more.

At the culmination of the Change Session we launched the Declaration of Interdependence and the Manifesto for Change – two documents birthed in the hearts, minds, and revolutionary eyes of Mama Dee, Tiny, Ken Moshesh, Joseph Bolden, Lauren X, Maria Lopez, Kimo Akaha and other indigenous, landless poverty scholars existing in doorways, on street corners, in welfare offices, in SRO hotels, in shelters, in HUD housing and in cars.

The Revolutionary Change Session birthed POOR Magazine’s Solidarity board

POOR Magazine’s Solidarity board was formed by conscious young folks with different forms of race, class and/or akkkademik privilege whose perspectives were skooled by Poverty Scholarship at the Revolutionary Change Session and other teachings, action and prayer that grew from that space. From this skooling each  became interested in POOR Magazine’s analysis of reparations and resistance and began to work on decolonizing their resources. Click here to read excerpts of the solidarity boards personal reflections on race, class and akkkademik privileges in family, society and self.

Two years later, POOR Magazine’s solidarity board gathered enough of the blood-stained Amerikkkan Dollaz to facilitate a “purchase” of stolen land on Turtle Island to begin the healing of our mama (pachamama) to begin the healing of our communities suffering from the violence and pain of poverty, racism, budget genocide, paper trail theft and GentriFUKation, to begin the healing of our children and our families, ancestors and elders through equity redistribution, dekkkolonization, prayer and ceremony

To be clear, POOR Magazine the organization, is still Po', we only barely get by on donations by you, our families and ancestors and friends support to do the revolutionary poor people-led education, media and art. But for the first time in our herstory we have the access to create/realize a poor people-led/indigenous people-led take back of stolen land to move off these grids of plantations, po'lice, poverty pimps, corporate and government control to true liberation. 

To ask permission, to cleanse, to pray, to meet, to heal…

In the ways of our ancestors first we must walk softly on our (Pacha)Mama and in this East Oakland  community, where many of POOR Magazine’s family members have been gentrified out of, or currently dwell houselessly or in different forms of at-risk housing, we must introduce ourselves to the land and the peoples of this intentionally blighted,  scandalously speculated on, po’lice brutalized, and long ago forgotten community in poverty and ask permission in ceremony to build the Revolution that is HOMEFULNESS.

The 1st HOMEFULNESS site includes sweat-equity co-housing for 4-10 landless, houseless/landless families in poverty, as well as a site for PeopleSkool, a multigenerational, multi-lingual school based on an indigenous model of teaching and learning, POOR Magazine peoples media center, Uncle Al & Mama Dee’s Social justice and Arts cafe and tierra madre garden where we will hopefully grow food for the whole community. 

The process to dream and build HOMEFULNESS will be a community-led one with indigenous scholars, lived scholars and formally edukkkated scholars respecting and working together to create a re-mix of design, sustainability and off-grid self-determination.

Celebrate Inter-Dependence Day With Your help, Your time, Your Prayers, Your Equity

In 2006 the landless mamaz and babies in poverty of MamaHouse launched Inter-Dependence Day - a day to challenge the myth/cult of independence promoted by Amerikkkan bootstraps lies that work to separate and deconstruct  indigenous and cultural practices of sharing, love and care-giving. The Inter-Dependence day of art, action, care-giving and revolution seems like the perfect way to begin a relationship with this land and community - So please save the date- Saturday, July 2nd and get involved.

For folks who are interested in supporting this powerful poor people-led equity revolution that is HOMEFULNESS, please consider making a revolutionary donation or becoming a monthly revolutionary donor.

For folks with indigenous, or learned knowledge of architecture, building or skills with constructing or time or thoughts please let us know if u would have time or energy or resources to add to this project.

For gardening, farming or land-cleansing skills please let us know if u can help

For folks who would like to perform, have a table at and/or help with the upcoming Inter-dependence Day Ceremony – please contact us at poormag@gmail.com

Young African Descendent Filmmaker and visionary launches a tour to listen and support young people of color across the Bay

“Hunters Point is home- its what’s made me and what nourished me, its where I have been poor, policed harassed, ignorant, and struggled with gang violence, its where I’ve learned everything I know and everything I need to un-learn.” Said Jamal Modica, founder of Tough House Project on Malcolm X’s Birthday at the launch of the Standing Up for Ours Tours at POOR Magazine’s indigenous news-making circle.

The Standing UP for Ours Tours is a vision of neighborhood dialogues created by James to listen, speak and engage with young folks in communities struggling with gang violence, police harassment and poverty across the Bay Area. His vision includes collaborating with multi-racial, multi-lingual and multi-generational communities and community organizations in struggle who desperately need to be heard.

 "I am the rose that grew from the concrete jungle of the Bayview Hunters Point, I have witnessed over a dozen funerals of children under 12 years old, I have also filmed and witnessed over a dozen graduations of middle and high school students who weren’t supposed to make it,” said Jamal who is himself a young African-Descendent filmmaker and  a symbol of  community-led resistance and revolution

“Standing Up for Ours Tours is so important because right now our communities are on life support and we must re-boot our minds,” said, Queenandi, African Descendent poverty scholar, teacher and reporter with POOR Magazine. Queenandi’s comment was referring to the lies our young people are always taught in Amerikkka skkkools and like we say at POOR Magazine,  we need to re-educate our young folks of color on their inherent cultural power and beauty.

“The system is set up so these turf wars remain in place so our young folks think, “Im from Fillmo so I cant go to Sunnydale or im from HP so I cant go to the mission,” said Ruyata Akio McGlothlin, poverty scholar, poet, artist and reporter for PoorNewsNetwork/POOR Magazine and  a resident of Hunters Point. Ruyata was referring  to turf war lies that falsely breed hate for our fellow brothers and sisters of color in Frisko, Oakland, LA and beyond

POOR Magazine/PoorNewsNetwork is a poor people-led/indigenous people-led media, art and education organization rooted in many poor communities of color  across the Bay Area. We facilitated the Standing Up for Ours Tours press conference and as  well will be joining Jamal on his first tour because we believe first and foremost that we don’t need a poverty pimp, a savior or an insitution, we must de-colonize ourselves from this plantation grid of Prisons, Poverty Pimps and Saviors and truly lead ourselves out from under this oppression to liberation.

“Too many of our children are dying, and we wont have a future if our children keep dying,” Jewnbug, mama and poverty scholar, poet and teacher spoke on the necessity of a leader like Jamal to help other young folks of color re-insert a revolutionary code of conduct.

“What the so-called officials want to do in our poor communities of color neighborhoods to “fix” the problem is bring in the gang injunction,” Muteado Silencio, poverty scholar, teacher, poet and reporter for POOR Magazine, spoke on the lie of criminalization which is how Amerikkka plantation grid always decides to “fix” anything having to do with us poor peoples and peoples of color.

“The purpose of this tour is to give a space for young folks to speak, to engage, to have fun and be heard, to lead, that’s very important when so often young people are never heard at all,” said Jose Cuellar, teacher and La Raza scholar and artist.

“Society only wants to use us, the poor, the communities of color, to mythologize us so they can profit off our exploitation, said, Jeremy Miller, organizer with Education not Incarceration and the Idriss Stelly Foundation 

Speaking for my ancestors, elders, family and children who have barely survived 500 years of kkkolinzation caught up in criminalized lies and racialized hate, with resources stolen, I concluded the press conference with these words for the Jamal’s vision “POOR Magazine family is proud to join The Standing Up for OURS Tours, as it is an example of revolutionary people-led solutions grown in the communities it is speaking with and for, solutions like POOR Magazine and all of our efforts to ensure that our young folks and families are truly heard,”

The first Standing Up for Ours Tours is planned for Sunday, June 26^th  from 1-5pm  in Hunters Point and will feature Hip Hop,spoken word, food, games, information and fun for young folks of all ages. Jamal is hoping that community organizations come out with outreach and provide their liberation solutions. After the Hunters Point  tour Jamal hopes to come to three poor neighborhoods of color in the Bay Area over the next six months

Stay Tuned to PNN- HP Location to be announced

June 4, 2011

I thought as an Afro American parent I made the right decision in putting my son in private school. I believed the public school system would damage my son. I see the struggles of substandard education, discrimination and harassment Afro American children go through. The problems don’t only affect our boys but our girls too. My son was very outgoing and smart and loved to learn. I decided to enroll him in St. John's Catholic school in San Francisco—I was advised St. John's is one of the top Catholic schools in San Francisco. I was happy when my son was accepted.

I believed St. John's Catholic school would challenge my son mentally; however I had a rude awakening. All of a sudden normal childhood behavior became ADHD, or as we know it behavioral problems. I remember my son's kindergarten teacher telling me, “I’m receiving my Ph.D in psychology, and I thought your son may need medication as he is a black boy, but now I don’t think so.” I was shocked. AS I had conversations with other Afro American parents, and apparently the kindergarten teacher told them the same thing. Every time I went to pick up my son from kindergarten it was always, "your son did this, your son did that." The kindergarten teacher accused my son of robbery and threatening another kid with physical harm. I had enough, just to find out later the other kid was lying about my son.

The interesting part of it is I thought the problem was only focused on my son. Yet as I started interviewing more Afro American and Hispanic parents, the majority said they were having the same problems with St. John's, that the teachers were all Caucasian and had no connection with the children of color.

Still I kept my son in St. John's until the first grade. "Wow," I thought, "a new start.” Boy was I wrong. Apparently my son carried a reputation from kindergarten that passed onto the first grade. I couldn’t believe now his first grade teacher wasn’t trying to educate him, but a matter fact he was always in detention and was ignored by his teacher. My child was now labeled AS a problem child with behavior and learning problems. I was in a desperate battle with my son’s principal and teachers.

I decided to investigate; I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing. I saw my son's first grade teacher yelling at him, the teacher strongly disciplining him; I watched as my son asked for help while the teacher walked away from him; I watched how the teacher took her time with the Caucasian children, but the children of color were constantly ignored, and were put into a smaller groups for behavioral problems. More and more I observed the teacher totally not educating children of color, but accusing the children of color of being substandard. The teachers at St. John's forced children of color to fear learning and being kicked out of school, yet St. John's teachers and principal poisoned parents to believe our children are below reading and math levels.

I realized at that point I had a battle on my hands; the interesting part is the harder I advocated for my son, the more the principal and the teacher treated him poorly. More and more the teacher accused my son of being a thief, disrupting the class, fighting, not doing his work in class. The principal's statement was, “Well you know he had this same problem in kindergarten." I couldn’t believe it. Most Afro American parents either left their children in St. John's or transferred them to a better school. Afro American parents said we just want our kids to pass to the 2nd grade, and all the harassment will be over.

Well I transferred my son to another school; I thought the behavioral problem label would disappear. The principal emailed me and threatened to slander my name to my son’s new school. Here’s a section of the email sent from the principal: "I will inform the new school where Mark Anthony is attending of your balance." Meaning they were going to tell the new school my financial info.

I chose to stop paying St. John's due to the harassment and discrimination of my child, yet the damage is done and the principal of St. John's contacted my son’s new school and told the principal, ‘’he has a behavior problem, and the parents are intimidating." I was shocked again. I wondered why am I going through this battle just for my child to receive the proper education.

Due to St. John's failing my son, I home school him part time. Please parents of color fight for your children; the educational system is set up to fail them.

Revolutionary worker scholar I am--that's what POOR Magazine calls me--and I am out of work again. You might remember an article I wrote a few months back where I spoke of the non-profit organization in the city that gave me the boot after a year of altruistic service to my fellow man and woman. The organization is still there--in fact I saw the woman who fired me. She came through the front door of a donut shop on Market Street. I darted to the rear of the donut shop like a mouse. All the verbs and adjectives and expletives I'd saved for a chance meeting with this woman disappeared. I waited for her to leave. She took her time. Some revolutionary worker scholar I turned out to be.

Funny thing about being unemployed is that I keep running into the people I used to work with--people I helped get jobs. I see them on the streets. To be honest I try to avoid them but I can't escape 100% of the time. It's not that they are not pleasant, good, personable human beings--they are but they ask me inevitably if I have found a job yet. I tell them no and they start telling me of positions that might be available. They take out napkins and wrinkled business cards, scribbling on them with pens low on ink. One fellow gave me the phone number of a friend who runs a towing service in South City. "You'd be good at it" I was told. "Be good at what?" I asked. "Towing cars" he replied, incredulously. This was a guy I had helped get a job as a janitor in a church. He was cleaning the toilet in the house of the lord and giving me a tip for a job in hell. I took the number and tossed it.

Despite my ducking and dodging and meandering ways I ended up finding a job at another non-profit organization (a temporary assignment). My title was vocational rehabilitation counselor in a job-training program serving people with various mental and physical disabilities. On my first day I walked into the bathroom. Inside was a Chinese guy at the urinal with his pants down at his ankles letting it go. He stood with his hands on his hips staring at the ceiling whistling that US Marines tune:

From the halls of

Montezuma

To the shores

Of Tripoli

I turned around and walked out thinking, my God, what have I gotten myself into? My job was teaching job skills to the participants--about 25-30 of them--some of who were monolingual Chinese speakers. My co-teachers were young, in their 20's, and I wondered if they had ever been fired from a job. We covered various topics such as job interviewing techniques, skill assessment and how to make a good impression at a job interview. I would be at the front of the class, giving my bullshit lecture, drawing from my bullshit experience that really wasn't bullshit at all. I would watch the reactions of the participants. Some of them--no, most of them would doze off. I didn't take it personally though. I just figured that these folks were tapping into their subconscious minds; perhaps they were cultivating solutions to the world's problems such as houselessness, police brutality and world hunger. Rather than rudely and abruptly wake them, I watched as they dreamed.

The job-training program included hands-on work in the warehouse where participants sorted through boxes of mosaic tiles destined for hobbyists who use them to spice up bland picture frames or make coasters for frosty libations. I watched as the workers counted mini tiles that resembled cheez-it crackers into cellophane packages. Some folks weighed the tiles and others heat-sealed the cellophane packs while others stuck labels on cellophane packages. The division of labor was concise and everyone did their jobs. On occasion, a worker or two would break into a fit of laughter out of the blue. I would watch these folks from the corner of my eye, laughing inside. I caught the eye of a fellow in the midst of a laughing fit; I smiled at him in a display of laughter solidarity. He quickly lost his laughter and asked me, "what the hell are you laughing at?" I turned away and tried to walk with a supervisory gait (which generally means, without grace).

The workers were paid piece rate. Some had not worked in decades and some had been in the training program for a decade.

Initially I was told that I would be filling in at this program for a woman on maternity leave. My job was to end upon her return--which was scheduled for December 24th, Christmas eve. I began to enjoy the job and the people I was around. The guy I saw in the urinal on my first day whistling the US Marines anthem turned out to be a pretty revolutionary guy. He blurted out the following one day in class: Just because you were born in America or have a job in this country doesn't make you better or your work more valuable than anybody else's. I thought, here's a guy with some balls; how often do you ever hear that on a gig?

Another participant of the program going by the name of Big Mack approached me and asked me if I were a client. I told him that I was the new trainer. He then asked me if I liked old school music. I answered in the affirmative and he reached into his pocket and produced 3 cassette tapes. He told me of his side business making "mix tapes". "Yeah man" he said, "I got the stylistics, Blue Magic, Switch, Bobby Womack, all that shit". He offered me a deal--3 tapes for 5 dollars. He had that look in his eye that told me music was his life. I signed up for 6 tapes. He informed me that the other tapes might take a little time to produce because he is buying a new cassette player to replace his broken one. He told me what songs he was going to put on that tape and I could taste that music as he spoke. It didn't matter that I no longer listened to cassettes or I hadn't owned a cassette player in years--it was in his eyes, the music of life. He asked me to loan him a dollar for cup o' noodles. My tapes are pending.

I spent some of the classroom time reading poetry. I read Langston Hughes, Bukowski and a little bit of Raymond Carver. It was hit and miss. Sometimes the poetry went well and sometimes folks dozed off. Some of my coworkers probably wondered what poetry had to do with a job-training program. It had everything to do with it. Making a poem is the hardest work of all. All those cellophane bags stuffed with poems; all those heat sealed bags filled with poems; all those punch presses punching out poems--what a beautiful thing.

One funny thing I remember were the stickers that were used on the cellophane packages destined to hold those mosaic tiles. The stickers were small, like the kind you see on bananas. They read: Made to be broken. I got into the habit each day of putting that sticker on my chest above my heart (and occasionally on my forehead). My co-workers laughed and I'm sure the clients thought I was crazy. I sat among the workers, some laughing to themselves, some swaying and rocking back and forth. I fit in like a puzzle. Never had I known such peace at a job.

Christmas Eve finally came. I was summoned to the boss' office and told how much they liked me and how they wished they could retain my services. The woman who I filled in for had resigned but due to the budget crisis at city hall, the organization had been forced to eliminate the position.

I bid everybody farewell. I never got my mix tapes and to be honest I never would have played them anyway. What I got was something better: laughter and poetry and true revolution on the job with folks who supposedly had mental/physical disabilities. They were among the most sane I've ever met and on a job that's rare to find. I left that place with my discharge letter and my final check. As I approached the door for the last time I peeled the "Made to be broken" sticker off my chest. I went outside.

Seniors (60 or above) or Low Income Households

Do you have legal Questions?

The Asian Law Caucus and the Manilatown Heritage Foundation Offer Free Legal Clinics

Consultation and referrals provided on housing, public benefits, immigration etc.

When:  10:00 am to 12 Noon, last Tuesday of every month

Where:  Manilatown Center (SOMA), 953 Mission Street, Suite 30.   San Francisco, CA  94138

Next Clinic: May 31, 2011 10 am to 12 noon

RSVP at 415-777-1130

Bring your ID, proof of income and any documents relating to your question

Americans With Disabilities Act rules for Service Animals changed in March 2011 at the Federal level.  Only dogs or horses count as service animals-- for people with PHYSICAL disabilities.  This doesn't affect San Francisco (yet) because the city and county benefits from California state rules. 

How long until the Feds challenge the CA law?  Bill Clinton had a service dog!  Being the President is both the cushiest and gnarliest job imaginable.  Times change...

I'm on this because I saw the driver of the last MUNI #49 bus (of the night several months ago) to my 'hood (Van Ness Avenue and Eddy Street) refuse to allow a young woman with a service dog to ride his bus--he wanted to see papers stating the dog was really a service animal.  Another MUNI driver told me the other guy was wrong because nobody has to "show papers".

After that experience I had a conversation with one of the desk clerks at my SRO hotel, a very politically conservative guy, who told me about the change in the law.  He loved it.  The San Francisco Examiner recently wrote about the change.  They quoted someone who uses Seeing Eye dogs who also liked the change, because it makes life "simpler" for many people.  The Examiner, being a very kkkonservative paper, liked it too.

Why is this important (other than for the fact that quite a few people having trouble coping with fast-paced harder-than-ever-edged life in any big city you care to name--not just San Francisco--deal with their challenges far better with an animal that both depends on them for food, shelter, etc {plus giving up some mostly unconditional love})?  Ever see a houseless man or woman with a dog, a cat, or a bird?  Know any housed poor people with a pet?

Those animals are companions, sharing the challenges of houseless or poorlife.  Guards of property and psychological well-being, they are incredibly important.  Many people who aren't poor deal with animals better than other humans too, so the injustice bleeds over quite a bit of territory here.

There is a hugely profitable Animal Industrial Complex (not just the Agricultural Industrial Complex, which raises a lot of our meat-flesh food in conditions none of would want to live in) devoted to breeding, raising, feeding, pampering, selling and doing other things for and to animals considered pets.  Murdering the ones that become surplus, unwanted, is just as big an industry, or side-effect.  Disposable animals, disposable material goods, disposable people.

Service Animals must be kicking the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex in the balls pretty hard, or they just don't wanna give up any itty bitty potential profit to be squeezed out of any nook and cranny of the world.  Or both.  No profit to be made when cats, dogs, and birds heal souls better than psych drugs do.

At my SRO hotel, there's a guy who lives at the other end of my floor who was pretty much a lost soul when he moved in.  He said a few things to me that might have set off a bar brawl-style fight if I hadn't been instantly aware that he is/was one of those people we use euphemisms for to dance around the "lack of a full happy meal or a deck of cards" when we want to be semi-polite about talking about mental illness.

Soon after that he got what I call an "ankle-biter" dog.  A very small dog.  He said he was holding onto it for a friend, but I have a different opinion about that.  He slowly changed into someone who can talk to other people without making them want to be somewhere else.  We were just talking about a "Homer Simpson Lookalike Contest" (I said I'd look it up on-line, which hasn't happened yet...) in the line for our Wednesday afternoon SRO-tenants food pantry.

I know what I know.  I have all the proof I need that some folks in the Federal Government have lost what's left of their tiny little minds; they need a dog themselves, at least, so they can chill out and stop making life difficult for the rest of us.

The Protest

We left the San Francisco City College Mission Campus at 12 Noon, heading up Highway 80 to Sakkkramento.  We took sleeping bags--our plan, if everything went in our favor, was to have someone rush them into the state capitol building at the last second.  Along with teachers, college and high school students went to the protest.

Two protesters had already started the action when we arrived, so the California Highway Patrol (CHP) was already on high alert.  People were also posing with the massive $100,000 bear sculpture that Arnold Schwarzenegger bequeathed to the hallway outside the Governor's office. 

Six p.m. came quickly.  Two other random acts of demonstrating about budget cuts happened before we officially got going.  Zero hour came.  This poverty skolah is large, and can sneak more stuff in than a skinny person (including a CA Teachers Association banner...).  It is forbidden to bring banners inside the capitol building.

Let me explain why I gave the teachers union an "F".  The union, which called for the demo, began forcing teachers to leave while the official protester teachers were threatened with fines. 

"Education should be free!"  "K to PHd should be free!" were two of the protest chants.  I believe I saw the same camera man 12 times as we marched past the statue of Eureka, a goddess on the state seal.  The Highway Patrol began telling us we should leave, it was our last chance to leave freely before being arrested.

We began a teach-in.  I was sitting listening at first.  I asked the students: "Who wants a free education at any of the state's colleges?  That isn't a myth--it was real when I was your age.  It was real during the Depression!  Charging a 1% tax on any corporation, partnership, or person that earns $1 million or more a year would not hurt anyone and make college/university educations free again.

The Highway Patrol gave us 5 minutes to leave or go to jail.  The citation they gave me cites "602Q PC: Failure to leave a state building".  The situation began to feel like a Woody Allen movie ("Take the Money and Run"). The senior officer present made sure his CHP officers were as non-violent and polite as possible.

Why Do You Have To Get Arrested To Get Decent Health Care?

Sitting on the ground outside the CHP station was hard for me.  I was given a chair--other Po'Lice departments haven't been that courteous and nice, treating protesters like cattle. 

One student had food and shared it.  The CHP officer managing the students cut her plastic cuffs and said he was happy to let her do that as long as she (wink-wink) didn't escape custody.  One of the teachers said some of the officers have kids the same age and understood how to behave with them.

There was a Sacramento Po'Lice officer present who wasn't so nice.  A CHP officer showed up with a drunk yuppy who was driving a BMW.  The drunk guy was rude, as was a Sacramento Po'Lice officer who happened to be there--the CHP officers on duty at the station weren't.   

I started out in plastic cuffs, graduating to metal ones (which I, and most people would prefer to wear if circumstances require them...) so I could go the bathroom.  We were taken to see a nurse, as everyone arrested by the CHP does.  My foot was infected from cuts that happened earlier in the week.  The nurse was very concerned when she saw this.

She ordered the CHP to take me to a hospital and have me released.  I was taken to UC Davis.  Why do you have to get arrested to get decent health care in Amerikkka?

I was at UC Davis for six hours before having my foot looked at and treated (in a brand-new hospital).  I was given an antibiotic shot and two different pills.  On the way to downtown Sacramento I called Tiny.  I took Amtrak back to San Francisco and slept for 16 hours. 

Reno, Nevada-
“He is my favorite fighter,” Santiago, 7, looked up at me. Not a young man of many words, that’s all Santiago said and then showed me a color photograph of him with his father, small hands covered in boxing gloves bigger than him. Through Santiago’s eyes, I saw the love and hope of thousands of Mexicano young boys and their fathers in diaspora, past the lies of Amerikkka false borders, and low or no wage work, to the dreams of the first Mexicano heavyweight boxing champion to be, Chris Arreola, from Riverside, Ca, by way of East La

“Arreola was the aggressor,” said POOR Magazine Revolutionary Worker Scholar Tony Robles. Tony was the only reason that for the first time in my life, I was witnessing a deeply corporate (ESPN) boxing match between Chris “The Nightmare” Arreola and Kendrick,”the apostle” Releford. Tony concluded,“Arreola threw the most solid punches, telling blows, the fight should have been stopped earlier.

We arrived in Reno on a windy Friday night to begin a very cheap and very rare mini-vacation, courtesy of Tony. The boxing championship was at the Reno events center and included all the requisite sexist and corporate trappings, women dressed in micro-bikinis repping Corona beer and men drinking from an omnipresent river of alcohol supplied by the on-site bar. There were also a lot of young children, mamaz, elders and workers flying Mexicano flags filled with anticipation for the their favorite boxer in ESPN’s Friday night fights

We witnessed five fights, most were “under-card” fights as Tony referred to them, fights which were really just stepping stones to other fights, a process that seemed crazy to me, so you got seriously –f-ed up just to get the privilege of getting seriously f-ed up again!
“That’s boxing,” Tony reminded me.

“From Washington DC, Tony “the tiger” Thompsen versus Maurice “Sugar Mo” Harris ” , said the announcer in old-skool style over the PA system. This fight was such a clear example of a corporate promotional “set-up” at least in my eyes, Tony, the tiger” “knocked down” Sugar Mo, without even trying, almost WWF style and then before there was even a fight at all, “the tiger” somehow “won”. This whole travesty promoted me to ask Tony “the Bear” Robles what happened.

“You cant say that for sure, these guys weigh 270 pds, if you were hit by a punch with that force you would go down too’, he concluded with his own kind of verbal punch.

I thought about my meager experience with “boxing” at the hands, or gloves, as the case may be, of Tony’s cousin Eric Robles, an amazing boxing teacher and athelete in his own right who held a boxing class a few months ago until a back injury took him out of commission. In one class, one meager workout with boxing, I got a work-out harder than I had ever gotten in my whole life and I work-out all the time.

Men Do Cry- and African Flags

The main or co-main fight of the night was between Arreola and Releford. Both fighters arrived sporting beautiful outfits, Tony keeps reminding me that outfits arent’t important, but I'm from LA and style, contrary to what Tony says, is always important.

Arreola’s body was a portrait of LA Raza cultura, bringing me back to my East LA born Xicano stepfather and me and my mama’s herstory in East LA, Compton, Wilmington and East Hollywood. His shorts claimed Men do Cry, which I thought was a beautiful and telling message about his character and soul. I found out later it’s a reference to a previous fight with Vitali Klitschko, for the heavyweight championship of the world where his trainer, Henry Ramirez threw a towel into the ring to stop the fight in the 10th round because Arreola, who fought valiantly in an attempt to become the first Mexicano Heavyweight Champion of the world--was absorbing much punishment at which point Arreola famously began crying in the ring. This latest win over Releford gives Arreola a 4 fight winning streak and a likely return championship fight against Klitschko.

Releford, with his smooth ebony skin, crown of mid-length dreadlocks, and tasseled shoes was wearing shorts that were a re-mix of the African flag.

Arreola, who is the son of a boxer from Mexico is also a big fan of Julio Cesar Chavez, from Culican Mexico, and has a big following in Southern California with Mexicano gente.

In the end, Arreola did “slaughter” Releford which truly made me cry, the pain inflicted on Kendriks face and head was way beyond ok, even though I do “understand” its an inherent part of the sport.

After the fight was over Arreola, who recently re-dedicated himself to becoming heavyweight champion of the world, didn’t just walk out the back of the auditorium, like all the other fighters pushed by their corporate handlers, instead he jumped out of the ring to sign multiple autographs culminating with arguably his most important autograph,

“Check you out young brother," Arreola said to Santiago after Santiago approached Arreola with the picture of him in boxing gloves, and Arreola responded with an autograph and a lingering high five. Santiago's entire face became a smile, The ESPN cameras were off and the handlers were trying to get Arreola away from Santiago and his father as quick as possible.  "Keep it up young brother", Arreola said as he was whisked away.  As I watched Santiago's face filled with pure joy, I realized, this was truly a moment in PNN, not ESPN, herstory.

On Libyan-Tunisian border, it’s back to the future with refugees

Djerba, Tunisia, June 3-4, 2011 – During the last air sanctions against Libya, imposed by the United Nations in 1992 over alleged Libyan involvement in the bombings of PanAm 103 and UTA 772, many Libyans traveling to and from Tripoli were forced to fly through Tunisia, traveling overland to and from the Tunisian border to their homes in Libya. With European Union sanctions now imposed on Libya, the old travel regime is back in force.

However, there is a new dimension to the air embargo on Libya. Attracted to the Libyan-Tunisian border by refugees, most African guest workers from sub-Sahara and pan-Sahel African nations, fleeing the fighting in their country, scores of international aid workers now occupy the tourist hotels of Djerba, the once popular Tunisian resort that has fallen on hard times after tour operators canceled excursions following the Tunisian revolution earlier this year.

Today, prior to crossing into Libya, this reporter is witnessing representatives of the “misery industry,” young international aid workers with groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross, EU and International Organization for Migration lounging around the tourist hotels mingling with German and French pensioners eager to take advantage of the special travel packages being offered by a depressed Tunisian tourist industry.

Not only is war good for the weapons industry, but refugee crises brought about by Western-implemented wars fatten the wallets of NGOs anxious to cash in on the human misery created by Pentagon and NATO overt and covert military operations. Meanwhile, here in Djerba, near the Libyan frontier, it’s poolside and cold Heinekens for the NGO community here to “save” the Libyan refugees.

Western Libya portrait is not what is being painted by the Western media

Tripoli, Libya, June 4-5, 2011 – Western media reports continue to indicate that Libyan rebels trying to oust Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from power, backed by daily NATO air strikes, are gaining ground in western Libya. During a six-hour drive from the Tunisian border to Tripoli, the Libyan capital, this reporter saw no signs of Libyan rebel successes in western Libya. In fact, I witnessed a spontaneous pro-Qaddafi demonstration on the main Tunisia-Tripoli highway in a town about one and a half hours west of Tripoli.

The DIGNITY Delegation witnessed a spontaneous pro-Qaddafi demonstration on the main highway from Tunisia to Tripoli. – Photo: Wayne Madsen

The green flag of the Libyan Arab Jamahiryah not only adorns flag poles in towns from Tripoli to the Tunisian border, but a number of private residences are flying the green flag from their rooftops, on flag poles, and even from outside of top floor windows in medium size and small towns alike along the main highway.

There are some telltale signs of previous fighting in the western part of the country – bullet holes in the walls of some buildings and even some more extensive structural damage – but there are no signs that the rebels, backed by the United States, NATO and the European Union, have any substantial support in western Libya.

The one major sign of the Libyan civil war lies not in western Libya but across the Tunisian border where several refugee tent cities have been set up to accommodate thousands of refugees, most of them Black African guest workers from sub-Sahara and Sahel nations who were set upon by rebels who said the workers were “mercenaries” brought to Libya by Qaddafi to fight on his behalf.

In fact, there is a strong anti-Black racialist element within the Libyan rebel movement that used the mercenary meme to justify heinous war crimes by rebel units against Blacks from other African nations, as well as native Libyan Blacks.

While many of the refugee camps on the Tunisian side of the Libyan frontier are sponsored by the International Committee of the Red Cross, one is funded by the United Arab Emirates, one of the nations participating in President Obama’s “coalition of the willing” that is waging a war on behalf of the Libyan rebels. From our hotel on the Mediterranean coast, we expect to see and hear the attacks conducted against military and some civilian targets a further few miles inland in downtown Tripoli.

The EU and NATO sanctions on Libya are being severely felt by Libya’s civilians. Petrol stations are rationing gasoline and long lines of cars sit waiting for gasoline to be delivered to the pumps.

The NATO, EU and U.S. policy of “collective punishment” of western Libya’s civilian population is being compared to Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. In fact, many Libyans believe that Obama’s crippling sanctions on western Libya were crafted by Israel’s lobby in Washington, which pressured the Obama administration into adopting them.

NATO has conducted nightly air strikes against western Libya, including downtown Tripoli, since March 19. The attacks begin around 12 midnight local time and at the time of this report we are expecting another NATO bombing of Tripoli in a little less than an hour.

NATO war crimes in Libya exposed

Tripoli, Libya, June 5-6, 2011 – In the current NATO war on Libya, the citizens of European and North American NATO countries are being treated to the largest propaganda blitz by their governments in cahoots with corporate media outlets since the U.S.-led invasions and occupation of Iraq. The situation on the ground in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, could not more different from what is being portrayed by Western news networks and newspapers.

Col. Qaddafi's wife's handbag and some of her clothing were blown several hundred feet from the bedroom of her home when it was hit by bunker buster bombs fired from a U.S. warplane on April 30. – Photo: Wayne Madsen

The NATO missile attack that killed Muammar Qaddafi’s son, Seif al Arab Qaddafi, on April 30, was an attempt to kill Muammar Qaddafi himself. This editor visited the devastated home where Seif was killed, along with his friend and three of Muammar Qaddafi’s grandchildren.

The only reason Muammar Qaddafi survived the blast was that he was away from the main residence tending to some animals, including two gazelles, kept in a small petting zoo maintained for his grandchildren. Muammar Qaddafi escaped the fate of his son and grandchildren by only about 500 feet.

The residence was hit by bunker buster bombs fired from a U.S. warplane. One of the warheads did not detonate and was later removed from what remained of a bedroom in the home. Libyan authorities do not have the technical capabilities to determine if the warhead contained depleted uranium.

The Pentagon insists that the Qaddafi residence was a military command center. Perhaps the Pentagon mistook the above equipment for what the Pentagon brass trains on every day. – Photo: Wayne Madsen

NATO and the Pentagon claimed the residence was a military compound, yet there is no evidence that any military assets were located in the residence that was flanked by the homes of a Libyan doctor and businessmen. The Qaddafi residence actually is owned by Qaddafi’s wife.

The neighbors’ homes were also badly damaged in the U.S. air attack and are uninhabitable. Only a few hundred yards away from the Qaddafi compound sits the embassy of Cote d’Ivoire.

The presence of a foosball table and swing set in the yard of the Qaddafi compound belies the charge by the Pentagon that the home was a military target.

However, considering that Qaddafi was present in the compound during the attack, it is clear that President Obama violated international law and three executive orders signed by three past presidents – Ford, Carter, and Reagan – in trying to assassinate the Libyan head of state. In fact, while Obama’s order to kill Qaddafi was being carried out, the President of the United States was preparing to yuck it up with Washington’s illuminati and Hollywood’s glitterati at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington.

This is the garment Col. Qaddafi was wearing in the living room before he left for the backyard children’s petting zoo, where he was tending to the animals when the U.S.-NATO air strike hit the house. – Photo: Wayne Madsen

Obama’s order to kill Qaddafi is reminiscent of George W. Bush’s order to kill Sadaam Hussein at the outset of the U.S. war against Iraq, an assassination order that was also a violation of international and U.S. law.

Putting into context what occurred at Mrs. Qaddafi’s home and the aftermath, let one say that there is an unprovoked and surprise enemy missile attack on a secondary U.S. presidential residence, say Camp David. The world’s major media then claims that the attack was justified because the U.S. president was committing unsubstantiated war crimes, all reported from sketchy sources. A group of independent journalists and human rights activists drive to Camp David and are welcomed by a plainclothes member of the Secret Service’s Presidential Protective Division.

The Secret Service official then proceeds to show the delegation one of the bombed out bedrooms of the main residence and points out that one of the pulverized bedrooms is where the president’s daughter was killed in the attack. The delegation is then shown the First Lady’s singed handbag thrown several hundred feet away in the explosion.

This gazelle is one of the fortunate but still traumatized survivors of the children's petting zoo. – Photo: Wayne Madsen

Although the president was taking a walk away from the main residence, the delegation is shown a windbreaker bearing the presidential seal lying on the couch of the destroyed living room. A room said to contain military command and control systems is then found by the delegation to have a destroyed pool table and a shattered pinball machine.

The attacking nation claims that the Camp David compound was a security threat. But the American people rally to support their president and his family after the attack.

Now, you can begin to understand how the people of Libya feel after the U.S. attack on Mrs. Qaddafi’s house that killed her and her husband’s son and three grandchildren, along with a family friend.

The DIGNITY Delegation of independent journalists from across the United States is on a truth-telling, fact-finding mission to Libya. Headed by former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the delegation will be joined by former Sen. Mike Gravel and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. For more information, contact Don DeBar at dondebar@optonline.net.

"I just want to make sure that we are taking into account other policy priorities"
San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener

A 5/11/11 San Francisco Bay Guardian editorial asks the San Francisco Board of Supervisors not to wreck the city's historic preservation process.  San Francisco has lost a lot of its historic buildings in the name of 'progress'.  Seattle destroyed a classic old movie theater in the downtown core so a giant Nike Town (since closed...) could replace it, and there are countless similar stories about GentriFUCKating destructions everywhere in Amerikkka.

When POORMagazine began working on the first GentriFUCKation Tour, we wanted to ferret out the stories of the places the tour would visit--the anti-herstorical mostly single-word-named supposedly ultra-cool-chic invader restaurants no conscious economic justice-minded person would be caught dead or alive in.

Worker-skolah Tony Robles knew the herstory behind one location, knew who lived and worked there before it became something...other.  We sort-of knew one or two other stories, but the Redstone Building's history is the only place on the first GentriFUCKation Tour that is truly deep because so many people have fought, and are still fighting to preserve it.

Finding the stories about other places on the tour was an exercise in great frustration.  Elder skolah "Bad News" Bruce Allison and I trekked to City Hall and the downtown branch of the San Francisco Library.  The library staff couldn't help because the deep herstorical info we were looking for was forbidden to us by Federal law.

City Hall's paper records weren't much better, and the electronic versions had only one potentially useful avenue to pursue--but there were so many possible documents to look at I quickly realized it might take days we didn't have just to figure out if one address on the Tour list had been through some particular adventure in urban planning, defenestration, who-knows-what...or not...

Herstory, history, San Francisco's got story, we all have stories and we damned well should be better at recording it, preserving it, giving more than (Scott Wiener) lip-service to it.  The book and tv mini-series ROOTS generated an explosion of interest in Black American family histories (and Dr. Henry Louis Gates has done some truly fascinating work with PBS series' AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES and FACES OF AMERICA, tracing some families back into slave trade times). 

The Mormon Church has also become a major player in the movement to know one's family tree.  The internet has many ways to find that kind of info, mostly for a fee.

My relationship to my family's history has been an arms-length kinda thing.  I knew one set of grandparents and met another chunk of family when my father re-married in the 1970's--but, aside from his having a Kimes family tree book going back to some medieval "Baron Von Kime" I didn't (and still don't) know diddly and there weren't any details on the actual lives of the people on the branches of that tree.

You try googling Baron Von Kime.  I did.  Um...

I didn't really understand the importance of herstory, personal or institutional, when I was young.  That, along with anything else parents think is important for their children to hold dear, has to be worked into the family's psychic dna, someone has to care that younger generations know what is the what of the family.  I vaguely knew my maternal grandfather knew some big batch of people he regularly visited.  Before I could get really interested in that, he was dead, so I never did find out if those people were relatives--or just old buddies.

I learned in my 40's that my mother had the kind of upbringing you'd expect of a first-half-of-the-20th-Century white woman, with the added funk of being a sickly child and an adult with back and other physical limitations.  She told me once her family spent time around Princeton University and saw Albert Einstein out walking one day.

Interesting stuff I'd have loved to have heard, more than once, at a tenderer age, with more details--or just more.  More sense of a family with historical roots in this country, instead of just living in it.  How many other people out there have a similar story to tell of not knowing much about who their people are/were?

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the Mayor should unite to create a herstory/history preservation effort that makes it easier to know who lived or worked somewhere that is now or will become a supposedly cool new place to be seen to eat, get drunk, buy $100 shoes, or...twitter.

Many people would love to have a job doing that kind of meaningful cultural work.

DEPLOYMENT

TO AFGHANISTAN

We were doing 60 mph on 580 heading to East Oakland, me and one of my best friends  who came to visit; who I had not seen or heard from since he got deployed to the War in Afghanistan.  I am always hella happy to see friends from Melrose Elementary in Oakland.  I was happy to see him 'cause I knew he got deployed couple years ago. It was good to see him alive.  He asked about our homies (friends we knew) and the neighborhood so I broke it down, told him what I knew.

I felt my homie different from the homie I grew up with in elementary, who joked around a lot and laughed like clown. He seemed serious, more quiet, strict….I guess the basic training and war can make you a different person.

When my homie from 4^th grade told me he is getting deployed to Afghanistan again…I replied “ No chingues guey otra vez” “are you kidding”

I felt sad, anger.  As a writer we are supposed to show and not tell with words. I felt empty, anger--I don’t know how to explain it.  In my mind I said damn you military industrial complex.   I felt  like telling him to not go back to war. Have the sons and daughters of politicians who started the war go and fight. Rich people make war and poor people fight.

But I kept It to my self after knowing that by the end of this month he will be in Afghanistan.   I told him I disagreed with the wars that the United States had started, but I wished him well and to be safe and that I will write to him.

Be all you can be

We don’t need to go to war, to be all we can be

We can start here by helping our communities

We don’t need to show our manhood by carrying guns and

Taking others people land

We don’t need see those kids cry for their parents that lost their lives

We don’t need to see those kids die by missiles that struck their lives

I wont be part of that

I wont be brainwash by your college funds

I opposed to be part of the master plan

I wont kill people to secure your homeland

I don’t need to be in the battle field to knows how war feels

I can take look my own city and get sense and feel how war might

Feels

I trying to say is don’t need blood in our hands to become man

Am trying to say is stop this non sense

Of

Kids killing kids

Hate killing love

And

War killing peace

Despliegue a Afganistán

Veniamos como 60 (MPH) millas por hora en 580 en dirección Del Este de Oakland yo uno de mis mejores amigos que vino a visitarme, que yo no habia visto ni oído hablar de él, desde que lo mandaron a la guerra en Afganistán, siempre me hace feliz de  ver a los amigos de la primaria de Melrose, en Oakland. Yo estaba feliz de verlo porque yo sabía que lo habian mandado ala Guerra hace un par de años, fue bueno verlo con vida, Él preguntaba acerca de nuestros Homies (amigos conocidos) y el barrio, le dije lo que sabía.

Sentí que mi amigo hera un poco diferente, ya que el amigo que habia crecido

conmigo en la primaria, que bromeaba mucho, y reía como payaso, parecia mas serio, más callado, mas estricto .... Creo que el entrenamiento del ejercito y la guerra puede hacer que una persona cambie.

Cuando mi amigo del 4 º grado me dijo que lo ban a mandar ala Guerra en Afganistan otra vez le dije "No chingues guey otra vez" "¿Estás bromeando"

Sentí rabia, tristeza, como un escritor se supone tenemos mostrar y no decir con palabras, me sentía vacío, con miedo no sé cómo explicarlo, en la mente que me dije, maldito complejo militar-industrial, sentí decírle que no volviera a la guerra, senti decirle porque no los politicos que empezaron las guerras Mandan a sus hijos y hijas a pelearlas ellos., ¿Por qué los ricos hacen la guerra y los pobres las pelean?

Pero me lo guardé en mi pensamiento, después de saber que a finales de este mes estará en Afganistán, yo le dije que no estaba de acuerdo con las guerras que Los Estados Unidos habian empezado, pero le deseo lo mejor y que se cuide y que le hiba escribir.

From Marina Drummer

A3 Newsletter

International Campaign to Free the Angola 3

Transition of a Soldier

On 2 June 2011 we lost a soldier....geronimo ji jaga. It's no exaggeration to say that without geronimo's initial efforts, the Angola 3 Coalition would have never existed.  In 1997, Colonel Bolt, who had spent 20 years in CCR with Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King, went to geronimo's release party to talk to him about the Angola prisoners, and so the campaign to free the Angola 3 was born.  

From that moment on, the effort took on a life of its own, but geronimo ji jaga was always there to support. In 2001, geronimo provided us with a statement of support for the Angola 3 Coalition's first newsletter. It barely seems possible that just a few weeks ago, geronimo attended the commemoration of Herman and Albert's 39th year in solitary confinement in New Orleans.  

geronimo's generous nature and philanthropic efforts were given full reign during his fourteen years of freedom. His work through the Kuji Foundation, which he founded, and his deep ties to Africa are just two of the many highlights of what he contributed during his years in minimum security.   

We are thankful that his passing was swift and know that those of us whose lives he touched will forever keep him in our hearts. To the thousands of political prisoners in America's Gulags his contribution is an inspiration and his warrior spirit lives on wherever freedom struggles continue.

(*His way of being humble, geronimo never capitalized his name, so out of respect for him here, we spelled it as he did.)  

In 2001, geronimo issued the following statement in support of the Angola 3:

Robert King Wilkerson, Albert Woodfox, and Herman "Hooks" Wallace are very dear to me because they come from my home state of Louisiana. The Louisiana chapter of the Black Panther Party was one of the best chapters we organized and they were some of our best, most disciplined soldiers. They were the kind of soldiers who never cried out to anyone for help, even though they were facing life imprisonment.  

Understand that after being in that kinda situation for so long, I can personally attest to the highly disciplined and dedicated nature of these askaris. They endured, and they survived, over all the years, with very little help from the outside world. They are the kind of unsung heroes who we must come forward to help, because they never asked for anything from us in exchange for suffering what they have suffered.  

To Struggle for the People and not expect anything selfish in return is a rare thing and this is what King, Wallace, and Fox have personified throughout all those hard years. They most certainly deserve our strongest salute.

There will be a memorial service at 10AM on June 18 at the Morgan City Auditorium in Morgan City, Louisiana, geronimo's hometown. For more info call Jones Funeral Home at: (985) 384-8643.

There will also be a memorial service for geronimo at the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland on July 15th at 6pm. This is a celebration of the life of a Revolutionary. East Side Arts Alliance is located at 2277 International Blvd. For more info call  Billy X at (916) 455-0908. 

Urban myths hold secrets only revealed
by hidden cameras mandated by the state
while also underneath lies a vast underground so cruel

Our families can try to remain hidden in body armor
or venture forth with no weapon but trust,
a mission possibly ruinous
hiding in oceans swirling in hate propelled by
imagined flippers until we disappear
or to stay behind in smoking ruins, blacking out

There is no chance without maps, our only weakness denial

As for survivors we fathom these waves chancing on treasures
or a fetid corpse

There is little nourishment but hard tack left by others
who have drowned

Their fouled compasses left revealing lost chances,
in communal ruin.

Will you venture forth to stand your ground?

Monday, April 29, 2002;

Lisa "Tiny" Gray-Garcia and her mother, Dee Gray, take exception with the phrase "those people," as in those homeless people, or those poor people, or if only those people got their act together.
In their minds, this seemingly innocuous phrase divides society and diminishes the humanity of a set of people, particularly men and women who find themselves among the have-nots.
As founders and editors of Poor magazine, they have decided to tackle this expression and the thinking behind it. Setting themselves apart from mainstream media approaches to covering the poor, the duo reports and writes about poverty, and trains its staff to find the universal "I" in them, as in "those poor people." Hence, we.
"I stress that people write in the first person so they don't feel separate from the people they're writing about," explains Dee. "They may not have the experience of sleeping in the doorway, but they may have had the experience of being afraid to speak out or feeling like they couldn't speak out." Both experiences, Dee says, are a form of alienation that most can relate to.
Tiny, Dee and the San Francisco magazine's four staffers and 10 volunteers see themselves not only as journalists, but as advocates, challenging misconceptions about poverty and a system they believe does more to keep people in their place than to help them rise.
A variety of nonprofit organization and private donations provide support. They also get support from the San Francisco Department of Human Services, which sends a handful of welfare-to-work clients to the magazine's Journalism and Media Studies Program for training. Their budget last year totaled $85,000. This year, they're not sure if they will make it through the end of 2002.
Tiny, 30, says she and the staff live in constant crisis. Many of the staff are homeless or living in dire situations and constantly struggling to survive. Tiny tries to advise and support them. She and Dee always worry about the operation making it to the next month. In the midst of these crises, they manage to produce an online publication ( www.poornewsnetwork.org ) weekly and a glossy magazine. Mothers was the theme in the last issue. Others include, "hellthcare," "homefulness" and work. They have published four times so far, one a year.
" 'Poor' usually means we're the subject of the news," Tiny says. "We don't get to shape the news. Until we are heard, there won't be any real change."
From the time Tiny was in sixth grade to about five years ago, she and Dee shuffled from evictions to squatting in abandoned buildings to living in their car.
As a single mom, Dee had always struggled to stay afloat, but when she was struck with severe asthma, she was no loner able to work as a social worker. They were evicted from their apartment in Los Angeles. Tiny dropped out of school. They started living out of their car.
"Mom was an orphan. She had no family," Tiny says. "When you have no family, it's one tier from having no money. In some ways it's worse."
They trekked up to the Bay Area and, for many years, eked out an existence selling T-shirts and soliciting change for their street performances, which usually involve acting out issues related to homelessness.
The year she turned 18, Tiny landed in jail. She and Dee had racked up a bunch of unpaid parking tickets, citations for sleeping in their car, driving without car registration and failure to appear at the hearings on those offenses. Tiny calls those crimes of poverty.
The judge ordered her to perform community service. She hooked up with a Berkeley nonprofit called Community Defense Inc. The man running the operation, civil rights attorney Osha Neumann, asked her what she could do. She told him she could write. He told her to write a piece about being poor. She came back after a few weeks with a piece on the experience of being evicted.
"It was sort of surprising," Neumann says. "Many people say they can write, and you never know what you'll get. She was an incredible writer."
She submitted the piece to East Bay Express, which published it. Tiny calls it an intervention, one of a series that would ultimately take her to Poor magazine. "Oh, my God, I was alive," Tiny says. "It was like someone threw me a life jacket."
She felt the power of being heard and craved more.
Writing had provided a lifeline for Tiny from an early age. She has kept journals, written short stories and chronicles of her life. Being published buoyed her hopes, but the misery in her life continued. She wanted to avoid welfare - in her mind, then, it carried too much shame. But she broke down and applied.
She never gave up on writing, though. While in a Berkeley bookstore in 1996, flipping through the magazine rack, it occurred to her no one spoke about the lives of poor people. She got to work, raising money from artist friends and poor friends who sacrificed what they could. She and Dee conducted writing workshops in shelters, community based organizations and advocacy agencies serving poor people. Within nine months, they had raised $2,000 and enough material to publish a 65-page glossy issue of Poor, with color art, poetry and prose - and no advertising.
It cost $10,000 to print 1,000 copies. They forked over what money they had, and paid the remainder with magazine sales. The latest edition, a run of 3,000 copies published in December, cost $15,000 to produce.
As always, half the run was distributed free to low-income readers; the rest sold for $3.95 each at Modern Times Bookstore and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco and Cody's Books in Berkeley.
"We wanted to create a pretty product that yuppies would want to pick up," Tiny says. They also wanted a magazine that would raise the value of poverty issues to the status afforded mainstream magazines.
When the welfare-to-work program rolled out in 1998, case workers told Tiny she had to get a job, insisting that she apply for a receptionist position. She explained to the counselors her desire to become a reporter, but they kept telling her she didn't have the education. She told them she'd be willing to go back to school. She says she was told that would take too long.
Tiny developed her own welfare-to-work program. The Department of Human Services signed on. Now, Poor magazine staffers are training welfare recipients basic reporting, writing, graphic design, Web design, investigative reporting and advocacy at a South of Market union hall. It may be the only welfare-to-work training program that focuses on journalism. In the past four years, 15 people have completed the program.
Amanda Feinstein, a project manager for Human Services, says Poor and its media studies program gives clients skills that transfer to other jobs. Clients have gone to work as a desk manager, an administrative assistant and as a peer adviser for a juvenile-justice advocacy group.
"They've had some real successes," Feinstein said. "People get hands-on training in computer software and writing skills, which are helpful in a variety of ways, including self-expression."
From Osha Neumann's perspective, the magazine has a greater social impact.
"We tend to talk about the homeless as a collective noun, as a definite, generic homelessness or homeless condition," he says. "It's a political act to insist on individuality and humanity of a person. ...Tiny and Poor magazine (are) at the center stage of that battle. Giving voice to the poor is both a literary program and a political project."
The politics assert themselves at the start of each article. Every Thursday, Tiny and Dee lead a community newsroom meeting at the union hall. All are invited, especially anyone who has lived in poverty. About 105 people have taken part either in meetings or in producing the magazine.
"The establishment says it's wrong to be poor, and it's something to be ashamed of," Tiny says at the beginning of a recent meeting. The group listens intently. A Poor News Network promotion poster behind her head reads, "Driving While Poor, Part II." The folks at Poor want people to take pride in their ability to survive the toughest of circumstances. During the introduction, Tiny invites people to admit their poverty status.
Twenty people sit in a cramped circle. The group is a mix of races, ethnicities, ages and economic classes. Some participants are City College students or writers interested in social justice issues. Others are "poverty scholars" whose life experiences have made them experts on the subject. As introductions go around the circle, veteran staff members openly state their poverty roots or status.
They throw around story ideas, searching for the poverty angle in each one. The first is about coverage of a Free Tibet demonstration that overpowered an affordable housing protest on the same corner. The issue is finding the connection between the Tibetan cause and the affordable-housing movement. The consensus is that society seems to have more compassion for the oppressed in other countries than the oppressed in their own country.
They eventually map out an angle for the story, which ultimately includes the history of China's takeover of Tibet and draws ties between the Free Tibet movement and the struggles of poor people in the United States.
And so they jump from one poverty issue to the next: the disabled poor may lose their rights; medical marijuana clubs, which often serve the poor, are being shut down; San Francisco is set to renovate and expand a decrepit juvenile hall, in which many poor youth have been held. Every story gets assigned. In some cases, Tiny lets the subjects of the piece become co-authors of the article.
Isabel Estrada, 18, a media intern, has two stories in the works. One is a piece examining the "real" story behind the shooting death of Jerome Hooper in Chinatown in February by an off-duty cop. Though she may not be as poor as some of the other interns, she finds her universal "I" in this story. She tells how, as a child, she watched her mother get into a shouting match with a police officer over a parking ticket in the Mission District. He arrested her, and she went to jail.
"Since then, I'm scared of authority figures than most people, even though I don't do anything wrong," she says. Her distrust of the police pushes her to find answers in the Hooper case.
She also has been assigned a piece about an Oakland family that is being evicted.
A week after the meeting, Tiny and Estrada sit in the living room of Javlyn Woods. Woods and her father, Scott Sloan, recount the Byzantine story of how they got to the brink of eviction. Evidently, Sloan's mother owns the property, but the county took guardianship of her estate a few years ago. Now the county wants to evict the family since one of Woods' children got lead poisoning. Graying beige paint flakes off the walls. The stairs outside sag, and the wood floors are snarled and worn.
Tiny later explains that the interview is more like a conversation, a "crisis dialogue." Before Woods begins her story, Tiny sets the tone with a pronouncement:
"My mother and I were evicted on and off," she says.
Woods shows relief, as if she's found kin, someone who understands. After Woods and Sloan tell their tale, Tiny explains how she believes this is a pattern in Oakland: landlords evicting tenants for small reasons or none at all.
"We'll help you find and attorney and put it in the article that you need a lawyer," she tells Woods. "And we'll picket. We can take action."
Tiny says later: "That's what we mean when we say media advocacy. Connecting the dots for them and, in this case, for her getting an attorney. It means getting involved in her life as much as possible to solve the problem."
For more info
To read Poor Magazine online, subscribe or find out how to donate, visit www.poormagazine.org. Call for the time and location of the weekly community newsroom meetings. (415) 863-6306 or send e-mail to deeandtiny@poormagazine.org.

A year or two ago the San Francisco-based The Bay Citizen flexed its muscles, joining the ever-growing on-line newsworld, with a nice mainline shot o' green from financier Warren Hellman. Now the “Bay Citizen” provides Bay Area news for issues of The New York Times that include our part of the world.

Minister of Information JR of the San Francisco BayView paper, and Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Robles of POOR Magazine, wrote, at the time, of the GentriFUCKation of the on-line wwworld—the Bay Citizen was one of their main targets. Warren Hellman, unsurprisingly, is not content to merely PAY for news content on computer, cellphone and other screens, he makes news too...and not in a good way.

The Bay Citizen's section of the New York Times recently covered an on-going bit of the all-the-time Budget Brawl In City Hall which resurrected a phrase I've never heard before: “The City Family”. People got tired of “brawling” in general in City Hall, or that's the story being sold on E-Bay these days, thus San Francisco ex-Supervisor Chris Daly is the blackest sheep in the city “Family”, the invisible elephant in the corner, made irrelevant by fiat.

The Budget Brawl seems to be mutating into “this is how it's gonna be, see”, aka “play ball by my rules or you'll see Hell before I do!”. Interim Mayor Ed Lee and others have gotten in bed with Twitter and are eager to get in bed with other devilish partners, among other things. It feels like I live in Chicago instead of San Francisco!

I've said it before, I've never had a union job. I'd love to have one, if there was a union out that with real sharp teeth. Unions have been hamstrung by politics since day one back in the day in the 1930's when they were raising hell for working folks' rights. They are constantly under attack in San Francisco and everywhere else. The MUNI bus drivers' union is constantly in the crosshairs, and City of San Francisco government workers have had bullseyes spray-painted on their backs for some time now.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi got into this particular aspect of the 24/7 Budget Brawl with a plan to take an axe to the pension plan of city workers, and he's still at it. Interim Mayor Lee and others have their own plan, apparently less hostile to workers than Adachi's, with Hellman on board as a big bucks supporter. Less hostile doesn't mean friendly.

Especially when the undead rise from the grave, aka the “City Family” thing. I don't really care who wins or loses in most of these Brawls, the winners and losers tend to not be friends of the poor—except that Adachi has been doing really good work defending SRO hotel tenants from the San Francisco Po'Lice, who have been performing illegal home invasions and stealing property from tenants and getting caught on video tape doing it.

Adachi has been threatened with Chris Daly-like irrelevance if he continues to push his pension plan. Is the campaign to stop the SFPD's abuse of SRO hotel tenants (among others they routinely abuse) the real reason for the attack on him?

City. Family. No family is “normal”, no family is without its own disagreements. Words are important. If you're gonna use those two words together, best not to leave anyone out of the family, best not to attack and hack 'n slash away at the crumbs doled out to the family members on Welfare. My yahoo and facebook identities are “redbeardedguy”. Coming into this story I felt like a storybook character who wanders in from the woods to an empty house with three steaming bowls of porridge on a table: one bowl marked “Hellman”, one marked “Adachi”, the other marked “Lee”. Which one do I eat?

It's a new day, bohemian breakfast was like a work of art. Ooh, the coffee crowd is on the way, ready to read.  Aah, try to stay mellow, like cinnamon, yellow sun or gray rain, it don't stop. Straw hat or umbrella.  It don't stop.  Hear the train sang, hear the ferry sang, hear the bus sang.  There a loyal street paper vendor calling out in exstacy and pain. "Fresh off the press. Get your paper today."  Like a merry-go-round.  The vendor's musical mind spin on real-time, hyped up on hot coffee from bitter grinds. On a hope and a mission to help the homeless. It's showtime to survive in the month of May and Beyond!!!

LA Times
Monday, July 23, 2001;

Home Edition 
Section: Southern California Living 
Page: E-1
SAN FRANCISCO

Dee Gray would probably want this story to start with the word "I". Dee thinks the best stories are told in the first person. Her daughter, Tiny, doesn't always agree.
This is what it might look like, if Dee had her way:
I first heard from Lisa Gray-Garcia, also known as Tiny, in a long, long message on my voicemail machine about living poor in America's most expensive city. "A lot of us are affected by gentrification and poverty and how that translates to having to leave this area," she said, in a voice somewhere between nasal and squeaky. "Oftentimes, poor families are the ones who are leaving."
Other mothers and daughters may wrangle over literary license, current events and how the media shape the news, but their ruminations don't often make it into print. Dee's and Tiny's usually do. You can read them online at http://www.poornewsnetwork.org/, a weekly news service with the motto: "All the news that doesn't fit."
Or in the pages of POOR Magazine, where they write under headings like "Editors' Statement by Dee and Tiny." You can catch them on the last Monday of every month on the Bay Area's KPFA radio, if you wake up really early.
Or, if you are on welfare in the San Francisco area and fortunate in your misfortune, you can listen to them in person as part of their New Journalism/Media Studies Program. Many media and public-policy experts believe the program, which receives some funding from San Francisco County, is the only journalism welfare-to-work effort operating today.
Tiny and Dee—30 and "I'd rather not say," who describe themselves as "formerly homeless, currently at risk"—have a few goals. They want to change how the mainstream media portray poor and homeless people. They want to give voice to those who have long been silent, or at the very least not been heard. They want to change how the government gets people off of public assistance and into jobs. And they'd like to make the rent.
They are as likely to march in a demonstration as cover it. They regularly lash out at the institutions that they feel harm poor people in the name of helping; Child Protective Services is Dee's current favorite target, although Pacific Gas & Electric, the welfare system, the California penal code, most police departments, and City Halls on both sides of the bay come under regular attack too.
Their work—and articles by other PoorNewsNetwork reporters—appears in other alternative publications and has graced the op-ed pages of this city's two mainstream newspapers. The star graduate of their first year in welfare-to-work has a job writing regularly for the San Francisco Bay View, a small community paper covering the region's African American population.
Their brand of journalism favors advocacy over explanation. But if there is a place in the american media for the likes of conservative commentator William Kristol and his Weekly Standard, there's a place for Tiny, Dee and POOR.
The question, of course, is whether taxpayers should foot the bill for teaching poor and homeless people to be writers, when most welfare-to-work programs stress far more basic job skills. Not surprisingly, Tiny and Dee say yes. And San Francisco County agrees.
With funding from the county Department of Human Services, which administers welfare benefits here, the Media Studies Program trained eight people over the last year and will likely train another eight in the next fiscal year, says Amanda Feinstein, the agency's project director for work-force development.
"They're tutoring and mentoring one person at a time," Feinstein says. "It's small. We expect it to be—small and intensive for the right type of person."
Mother, Daughter Spiral Into Homelessness
Berkeley, 1993. Tiny spent three days in jail for driving without a license, having too many unpaid parking tickets, no registration for the car in which she and Dee were living, and failure to appear on similar earlier charges—what she now refers to as crimes of poverty.
She was eventually sentenced to hundreds of hours of community service, which she worked off at a small nonprofit called Community Defense Inc. Osha Neumann, who runs the organization, asked her what she wanted to do. Survive. He asked her what she knew how to do. Write. Had there been a Media Studies Program at the time, Tiny would have been a perfect candidate.
"She was struggling at that point to just keep it together and needing every moment of her time to try and survive with her mom," Neumann recalls. "I said, 'I tell you what. Why don't you do that writing as your community service for us?" We do advocacy for homeless people. She wrote this article. I read it and realized that this is a really good writer."
A surprisingly good writer for a young woman who had dropped out of school in the sixth grade as she and her mother spiraled into homelessness. Dee was a social worker who lost her job, became disabled and then couldn't work. Their savings ran out in three to four months. Dee was an orphan who had been raised in a series of foster homes and institutions. Tiny's father was long gone. They had no money and no family.
They were evicted 21 times in Los Angeles and Oakland, Dee says, recalling a time in which they had just enough money to get an apartment but never enough to pay the rent for long. Each time their welcome would wear out, they would look for another temporary home. Lisa, too young to have a bad credit rating, would do the hard part. "I would dress Lisa in a dress and gloves at 13, say she was 18 or 20, and she'd get us an apartment," Dee says. "We'd stay as long as we could and save enough money to get another apartment. We moved up here, and it wasn't much better."
Tiny's first article was about being poor, and it was published in an East Bay alternative paper, an event that became a turning point. "Not only was I heard as a writer and an artist," she says, "but I was heard about this."
Standing in front of the magazine rack at Cody's Books in Berkeley one day, she realized there were no publications that talked about the lives of poor people—the kind of revelation that would happen only to a person with little interest in advertising revenues.
So, Tiny got together a small group of financially stressed people with artistic or literary bents to meet each month and figure out "how to make literary art out of our lives." With the help of a group of artist friends, she raised some seed money and POOR was born. One Theme Per Issue
Vol. 1 of the intentionally glossy, almost-annual magazine came out in 1996.
Vol. 4 hit bookstores in April. Each edition explores a single theme—"Homefulness", "Hellthcare", "Work", "Mothers"—through art, fiction, poetry and first-person narrative. Each is an effort to define, and suggest solutions for, the obstacles facing poor people. The writers are poor people. The artists are poor people. The experts are poor people.
Like the Web site, which is updated weekly, the magazine has a mix of harrowing accounts of life on the street and sad tales about the lengths to which men and women are pushed simply to "Survive." In these pages, the word is often capitalized, a sacred verb, a statement.
The journalism training program for welfare recipients evolved out of the "Work" issue and Tiny's own experiences on welfare in the years after the Clinton administration passed welfare reform legislation. It was 1998, and San Francisco had implemented its Personally Assisted Employment Specialist program to move men and women from welfare to work in part through skills assessment and counseling.
Tiny was told on several occasions that she would make a fabulous receptionist. She had told various job counselors that she really wanted to be a reporter or writer and that, although she lacked formal education, she would be interested in pursuing a college degree program. The response, she wrote in an article eventually published on Poor-NewsNetwork, was that given her lack of education, earning a degree would take too long.
"'And besides, is that really a practical career choice for someone in your position?' I don't know ... was it?" she wrote. "My mother and I were endlessly battling homelessness—we were deeply entrenched in the so-called cycle of poverty ... one crisis snowballing into the next until you are never really able to fix any one problem, because you are just catching the last one, barely."
While still receiving welfare herself and working on POOR Magazine, Tiny dreamed up her own welfare-to-work program, which eventually was funded by the San Francisco Department of Human Services. At its heart are the mother-daughter team's strong beliefs about what is wrong with welfare today.
It is impossible, they say, for extremely poor people--especially those grappling with homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness—to learn any really useful skill in the short time most government training programs allow. That same government, they say, shoves poor people into any job that comes along just to get them off of welfare, whether there's a future in it or not.
Their welfare-to-work program includes a lot of basics: reporting, writing, grammar, graphic arts, Internet design, desktop publishing. And some more advanced skills, such as investigative and advocacy journalism with a focus on race and class.
Along the way, they lecture daily on what they call "poverty scholarship"—the belief that poor people who have lived it are experts in it. And they insist that their students write from their own experiences, acknowledge their own homelessness, banish their own shame.
For Dee, this means using the word "I".
"Some write in the third person," she complains. "They don't have the confidence to tell their story. They write about poor people as if they weren't one of them. We want to hear their voice.... We teach first-person narrative rather than poverty voyeurism—people from the outside writing about being poor." 'Povery Voyeurism' by Mainstream Press
Alan Weil of the Urban Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, believes that the folks at POOR and the Media Studies Program are right about a lot of things, among them that most states emphasize moving people from welfare to work as quickly as possible, "which means [take] the first job you can find."
"I think they're right in a different way, which is that our society's attention to the reality of life for poor people is very shallow," Weil says. "If they can offer a more complete picture of that life, then they are doing something that not really anyone else is doing."
Most publications put out by poor and homeless people—among them the 40 members of the North American Street Newspaper Assn.—share a single, central goal: reframing the news, because their staff members believe that the mainstream media either patronize or ignore poor people.
To Dee, it is "poverty voyeurism". Chance Martin, editor of Street Sheet in San Francisco, argues that stories about poor and homeless people in the traditional press tend to be formulaic, with the ones that actually talk to the homeless as "the most offensive".
"They serve to reinforce the personal deficit model," which says that poor people are broken and need to be fixed, argues Martin, who is on the executive committee of the newspaper association.
Gray, Gray-Garcia and Martin argue that such a model ignores the complexities of lives lived in poverty. The mainstream media, they say, have a responsibility to report those lives fully—whether or not poor people vote, shop or take vacations—and that everyone from employers and teachers to legislators would benefit.
The personal deficit model, they say, emphasizes the failures in poor people's lives, instead of their tenacious coping. It ignores the fact that those living on the edge might be late for work because old cars break down and buses are unreliable, not because of slovenliness. That poor parents might not show up for parent-teacher conferences because they have multiple minimum-wage jobs, not because they don't care.
What about the stories that don't talk to the poor but simply talk about them? In a January report, the Harvard Family Research Project evaluated more than 2,000 articles on health care and welfare issues from 29 electronic and print sources between 1999 and 2000.
The most frequent welfare issues discussed included job training and declining caseloads. The media's most common sources were researchers and policymakers, the project reported, but current and former welfare recipients were among the "sources rarely or not used".
Shawn Fremstad, a senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, looks at the Harvard report as evidence that the media need to improve their coverage of poverty. If POOR's Media Studies Program succeeds, he figures, it can be only a positive thing both for its students and American readers.
"The tricky part," he says, "is to what extent can this deliver in terms of someone ending up in a job in the journalism field?"
Many Struggles for Program Participants
On a purely philosophical level, the people in the program believe that any time a poor person speaks out in print, it is a small success in its own way. On a more practical level, the program is probably too young to judge. It has been funded for only one full year, and its students face many hurdles. Some are struggling with homelessness, some mental illness, some substance abuse and past incarceration. They have a lot to learn about work and journalism.
In this second year of their publicly funded effort, Dee and Tiny want taxpayers to shell out $8,600 to cover training costs for each future journalist in the program. And then they want those fledgling reporters, photographers and graphic artists to get paid $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, for a year as apprentices.
Feinstein didn't bite for the whole package; it is, after all, a Cadillac request from a government with a used-Hyundai budget. But San Francisco funded them once and will likely fund them again at some level. Feinstein believes the Media Studies Program offers "just the start some people may need."
Benny Joyner, 51, pen name Kaponda, was the star graduate of the Media Studies Program's maiden year. POOR taught this former legal secretary and former prison inmate how to write a story, and he learned well.
For various POOR publications, Joyner has written about California's "three strikes" law and covered a recent demonstration against lodging laws that forbid sleeping outside in public places.
And now he has job writing for the San Francisco Bay View, a small community paper focusing on the Bay Area's African American population. He has written about environmental justice, police issues and a local black micro-radio station. His biggest accomplishment? Probably the story, based on recent census data, about how San Francisco's black population has dropped 23% in the last decade. Joyner's story came out May 29. The San Francisco Chronicle followed Joyner two weeks later.
Joyner is happy; his new boss is delighted.
"This is not fluff, not society news, not feel-good news," says Mary Ratcliff, editor of the Bay View. "This is real, important hard news, and we're just thrilled.... We really need good news coverage. Benny is our lifeline."