2011

When the Gilgamesh epic's clay tablets were drying in the sun, the first Egyptian pyramids were being built (4,500 years ago), and the first Ohlone (or Water People) buried the first generation of their ancestors on the west coast of Turtle Island (what was later labeled America), the Ohlone shell mounds were begun.   

When King Solomon's Temple was built the shell mounds were still in use, and the people of Mt. Shasta traded with the Ohlone, the Sacramento River connecting the communities.  When Caesar took the reins of power in the Roman Empire, and fought this poverty skolah's Celtic ancestors (and the son of a carpenter, known as Jesus, started getting famous), the shell mound had grown to two acres in diameter.   

When Constantine was Emperor in Rome, rewriting the Christian Bible, the Ohlone traded with everyone who called the Pacific Coast home.  When Rome fell to the Visigoths, Glen Cove/Sogorea Te was still going strong.  William the Conquerer forced my ancestors to learn some French.  The Vikings visited Turtle Island, unsuccessfully, getting on the bad side of the native people via lactose poisoning in their favorite alcoholic beverage.   

When Christopher Columbus was looking for a job, and got one with a little help from his friends (and Queen Isabella), and arrived in the "New World", the Ohlone's shell mound was much, much bigger.  This poverty skolah wouldn't be surprised if the Inca, the Maya, and the seven nations of the Iroquois knew of them.

As the barbarian Conquistadores were forcing Turtle Islanders to join the carpenter's religion, the peaceful Ohlone must have been working hard to broker some kind of settlement with them.   

By the time the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence, the holy site of the Ohlone was doomed.  As my home country tries to figure out what it really is (Democracy?  Republic?  Empire?  Bankrupt, economically and spiritually?),

Vallejo, a city that is technically bankrupt, cutting their last public infrastructure (Fire and Po'Lice Departments) to pieces, wants to create a parking lot and an out-house, paving over all that spiritual and community history.

Editor's Note: See other PNN-TV and PNN- on-line indigenous peoples media rep-ports on the resistance to the desecration of Sogorea Te by clicking here:

A gang of crows woke me up, screaming the news that Osama bin Ladin is dead.

"Ah! Ah! Ah! The SEALS got that bad boy!"

I yelled out my window: "Shut Up! I'm tryin' to sleep!"

"Ah! Ah! Why such a grouch!?!" one of them shrieked on my window ledge. It cocked it's head left and right, looking like an anorexic Groucho Marx (and he was a thin dude too...) getting ready to put a verbal smack-down on and I was just the right doodyhead to take the medicine.

"Why should I care about some dead rich Arab 10,000 miles away?" I asked, "do I get some of his money? I'm still on Welfare. Lots of folks I know are too. I could use it..."

"Ah! Ah! Ask a question, get an answer!" the crow, you know, said it loud: "NO! YOU! DON'T!"

"That's what I thought", I muttered, sticking ear thingies in as deep as they would go. I started playing Paradise Jahfree Love's "I Love Everything About You...But You!"

I do want the truth to wake me up. It's better than coffee or energy drinks. I didn't get the crows' names. I knew they'd be back to tell me more.

I'm out here on this windy, windy corner selling Real Change papers.  Man, some of the all out things a street paper vendor has to do to keep the business alive.  I still like selling street papers like a racer like sport cars.  They get in the wind too.  My customer handed a dollar bill to me and the wind got hold to it and blew the bill down the street.  Now I'm almost out of breath from chasing a dollar bill in the wind. Again like a racing car driver, I am trying to make it to the finish line for the month of march.  Keep your engines turning and churning.  Spring gonna be real nice.

Every 2 minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted In criminal law, rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse against another person without that person's consent.

Monday, February 15, 2010;

People protest the treatment of sex workers

Voices shouted out on Polk Street near Sutter Street in San Francisco. Organized by Rachel West of US PROS (US Prostitutes Collective), a group gathered to protest the treatment and plight of sex workers. This is a highly vulnerable and easily exploited group that now faces further oppression by an increasingly aggressive SF Police force.

Since January 1st, 36 women and 15 men have been arrested for soliciting. This intensified policing has caused a number of unfortunate consequences including pushing sex workers into more isolated areas, which places them in far greater danger. Rachel also said that Police stings send the message to violent men that sex workers are fair game. Lori Nairne, a nurse, said that killers often start with sex workers and go on to kill other women.

This action drew at its peak more than a dozen protesters and about a dozen members of the media and police. At one time, there were at least five simultaneous video-graphers documenting the event including one from KGO and another from our local NBC network affiliate.

Another purpose of this rally is to voice opposition to our city's proposed plan to post arrested client mug photos online. This helps no one. It just hurts everyone involved. It will also needlessly break up families, damage social networks, cause job loss and as secondary fallout, leave even more children unsupported and traumatized.

Additionally, Rachel said that the enforcement of solicitation laws produces a disproportionate impact on minorities. Black women are seven times more likely to be arrested. Men of color also make up 40% of the men arrested. Most tragically, immigrant women are routinely targeted for both arrest and then deportation which often separates them from their families.

Rachel stated how San Francisco's politicians blame sex workers for the increasing visibility of street prostitution while conveniently forgetting that we are in the middle of the worst economic recession since the great depression. The fact is that about 70% of all sex workers are mothers trying to support their families. It is even more tragic that of the millions in city funds spent on prostitution enforcement, our city is robbed of the same amount of money that could have been used to help lift people out of poverty. In 2005, San Francisco spent 11.4 million on enforcement. Spending has only gone up since then.

Many countries (e.g. Germany, Australia, Netherlands, New Zealand, etc.) have decriminalized prostitution and as a result have enjoyed many societal benefits. These include lower rates of all types of sex crimes and markedly safer conditions for those who work or purchase services in their sex industries. These countries benefit from significantly lower rates of rape, sexual assault and other sex crimes.

Rape doesn't just traumatize its immediate victim, often for life, but often transmits and reverberates its trauma throughout the victim's social network. Children, spouses, parents, siblings and friends of the victim are also severely impacted, often for years or decades.

A single rape can result in an unending multi-dimensional severe form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for every person that cares for or depends upon the victim. Therefore, if a society possesses knowledge of how to reduce its frequency of sexual assaults, it can and should do everything possible to act upon this knowledge. To not act is a crime of both omission and negligence. Easier access to prostitution reduces rape. This has been found in every country that tried it.

In 1996, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors established a task force on prostitution. This resulted in a two year examination of the impact of prostitution laws and policy in the city. This study made a number of significant findings. They included the following.

a) San Francisco's enforcement of its prostitution laws marginalizes and victimizes prostitutes making it more difficult for those who want to get out and also more difficult for those who remain to claim their civil and human rights.

b) Once a person gets a rap sheet as a known prostitute she/he is trapped and stigmatized for life, unable to pursue other jobs.

c) Prostitutes are afraid to call the police when they are crime victims, for fear of being arrested themselves.

d) Enforcement targets those most vulnerable, including African American, transgender and immigrant women and rather than reduce prostitution, it just pushes them from one place to the next.

This report recommended shifting spending from law enforcement to services and alternatives for the prostitutes themselves.

In 1998, a public hearing by the Commission on the Status of Women reported some very troubling findings. They included:

a) While prostitutes suffer an extremely high incidence of violence they are least likely to report violence and rarely seek crisis support services.

b) Police do not take violence against prostitutes seriously. Rather, they are typically treated with disregard and contempt. Also, police misconduct and violence against prostitutes is commonplace in San Francisco and that women on the streets believe they are at risk of sexual assault and other abuse from members of the San Francisco Police Department.

c) Prostitution is inextricably linked to poverty, limited employment opportunities and the challenges of being the sole support for one's children.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors' Mitigating Violence Against Prostitutes Resolution passed in 2000. Its task force recommendations included:

a) Criminalization of prostitution only forces prostitution further underground and increases incidents of violence against prostitutes . . . such as coercion, extortion, rape, battery, robbery, attempted homicide.

b) Many of these women have children and must rely on prostitution to support their families. Prostitution often results from rejection by family, poverty and homelessness.

This resolution was supported by our city's Immigrant Rights Commission, the Youth Commission and our Human Rights Commission among many other groups and individuals.

It should also be noted that in 2008, while Proposition K, the attempt to decriminalize prostitution, failed because of a well funded campaign of disinformation and misinformation, it still won 41% of the ballot vote.

Peoples attitudes continue to change. More and more believe it is time for our society to stop living by antiquated puritan values. Many now believe it is also a self-evident Human Right to decide for ourselves what one can or cannot do with their own bodies.

This includes the right to rent them out. People already legally rent out their minds, hands and legs. Renting one's body is seen as a basic issue of personal liberty. Until enough citizens stand up for this basic right, this war of oppression against sex workers will not stop.

The US PROStitutes Collective phone number is 415-626-4114.

Their contact address is PO BOX 14512, San Francisco, CA 94114.

Two additional informative websites include:

http://allwomencount.net/

http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/

POOR Magazine the publication arts and education project was started in 1996 by an indigenous, landless mother and daughter who struggled with extreme poverty, incarceration and criminalization in the US. POOR Magazine, the organization, is a poor people led/indigenous people led non-profit, grassroots, arts organization dedicated to providing revolutionary media access, arts, education and solutions from youth, adults and elders in poverty across Pachamama.

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We used to be here

Living, working and keeping families near

Then Land and lives were stolen

Through paper trails and legal theft

We the original peoples must get clear

We must resist ...

...excerpt from Walking Softly on our Mama (Earth)

The boards were up. Tall, thick, plywood boards, standing upright, like the multiple lids of coffins. Coffin lids covering vast plate glass windows that fronted the used to be thriving but now-dead Van Ness Bakery, the furniture store, the restaurant, the hotel,  and within a few months, the homes of 11 disabled elders in poverty who reside in the Single Room Occupancy Hotel rooms on the block of Van Ness to Geary to Polk. An entire block was dead and a hospital killed it.

The Block was “Killed”  by the Sutter Health Corporation and its affiliate, California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC)in a move of intentional blight to a thriving neighborhood by CPMC in order to garner building permits to construct a huge corporate hospital complex which hasn’t received planning commission approval yet a hospital built to serve rich people who don’t even live in the surrounding Tenderloin neighborhood.

“Many people in the Tenderloin rely on Medi-Cal and charity care services and are concerned that CPMC has one of the worst records of serving the poor in San Francisco,” said Nella Manuel, a Tenderloin resident and Medi-Cal patient who lives just a few blocks from CPMC’s proposed new hospital at Van Ness and Geary.  Despite record profits, CPMC has some of the lowest records in the City of serving charity care and Medi-Cal patients.

The Van Ness Bakery employed nine poor migrant women. Nine daughters, aunties & mothers. They were paid a living wage by the immigrant family who owned the shop. They had a steady and loyal business. The furniture store,  restaurant and hotel employed several hundred people . All of these workers’ are now unemployed

From our first day in San Francisco, while in and out houselessness and deep poverty, my disabled mama and I  always found a hospitable space in the Bakery to sit and drink pre-corporate, diner-style coffee and munch on chocolate iced cake donuts. Since my mama’s passing in 2006 and later, PNN co-editor Tony Robles’s Uncle Al Robles, my son and I still went in daily to get coffee, remember my mama and get her and Uncle Al’s donuts to place on their altars as an offering, always given to us for free by the staff of humble, indigenous diasporic daughters who worked at the Bakery to support families in struggle.

Monday, March 28^th 2011 was the Bakery’s last day open. POOR Magazine staged a grief rally outside the Bakery. Myself and fellow poverty scholars from POOR, Muteado Silencio, Charles Pitts, Bruce Allison and Carina Lomeli laid our bodies down on the sidewalk, while Marlon Crump, “playing” a character called, Corporate Death, covered us with a black sheet, a staging by POOR’s Theatre of the POOR to mark the death of a neighborhood by a corporation and its subsequent criminalization of the poor people who dare to sit, stand, congregate or lie on the now-empty block.

We used to be here

Walking Softly on Mama Earth

And then there were red-lines, bread-lines, outcomes

And paper trails

All leading to the stealing of our, land, jobs and homes

The Controller is the Shadow Master of the Senior and Adult Services Agency, part of the Commission On Aging and Adult Services, managing the budget of seniors, the disabled, and Welfare recipients.

The budget that you see is actually conceived three years before it is fought over in public and made policy.  Tweaking, adding or subtracting taxes, goes on while the back-door pulling of hairs out of heads happens.  If you want something done, you go to the Controller's office as soon as a budget is signed into law.

This poverty scholar has been in the Shadow Master's lair.  It's like being in Charles Dickens' universe back in the day.  Buried in the catacombs of City Hall are row after row of accountants.  They don't wear green eyeshades and sit hunch-backed over ledger books, they have computers destroying their eyesight. 

You make your way through a maze of office workers sitting at cubicle-less desks to get to Mr. Controller.  Once there, after greeting him you say, "We need X, Y and Z.  What can you do with the budget to get this?"

No beating around the bush, you'll either get a "Yes", a "No", or a "Get the hell out of my office!"  If you ask why he can't do something for you, he may give you TMI (Too Much Information), but it won't be said in million dollar wordage requiring a 20lb dictionary to decipher what he meant. 

Maybe that's why he isn't a Supervisor, or Mayor?  He's too honest.  He may tell you to go see a Supervisor to get this or that city ordinance changed, to get what you want if he had to say "No!"--and he'll tell you not to use his name when doing so or he'll having spoken to you at all.

An example.  In 2005 Elder San Franciscans needed extra money for food, medical care, and other necessities.  The Controller suggested taking 25% of the money that parking lots are taxed and transferring that to the part of the budget subsidising elder needs.  This was a "scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours" plan, which would include setting up a mechanism for figuring out how much money the parking lots actually gross and net annually, since there wasn't a set-up for that then and any figure the parking lot people stated was taken for truth. 

The result:  for two years there was new money going to senior needs.  Other city departments, including the SFPD, went to court challenging the legality of the deal because they were looking for money to put in their budgets.  The SFPD has been sucking money out of MUNI's budget, via over-time and other tricks, thus they figured out their own back-channel means for beefing up their budget.

What you hear about the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors running the City of San Francisco is partly true.  The powers behind thrones produce the blueprints for the structure of our lives.  Sometimes heroes, sometimes villains, they are rats in The Amazing Race to keep the city from falling apart completely. 

This poverty skolah concludes this chapter of CrumbWatch.  We're always watching the people who trickle down the crumbs.  We always will.

In poor magazine we believe in reclaiming our roots, culture and indigenous languages we use the Spanish and English languages at all time, even do at the end they are colonizers languages,Linguistic Domination is the idea that only English and Spanish are the dominant languages.

Cleaning Lady

By RWS

Chinatowns of america--run from coast to coast, from Trinity county to sisikyu mountains, from locke california, to king street seattle, from stockton to San Francisco hidden cobblestone alleyways, from canton to fairfield. leongs, lims, chins, wongs, laus, lees, choys, toms fill the chinatown landscape. gung yan rise like winter storms. steel rails whip around gold mountain. --From "Chinatown Blues for Blues poets" by Al Robles

For some reason I look forward to seeing her.  I am a doorman. I sit at a fancy marble desk as classical music is piped in through the overhead speakers.   The apartment complex is much like a museum.  I spend much time cleaning the marble counter with a cloth and purple colored solution.  The floor tiles sparkle and I buff the countertop.  I see my reflection along with the reflection of the chandelier.  I buff rigorously, using circular motions.  I buff over my image, my face—trying to make it disappear but all I get is a shinier version of my own face and cleaning solution mist in my lungs.

She walks in.  She smiles to hide her shyness.  Hello, she says, carrying a vacuum, broom and bucket filled with cleaning supplies.  “I’m here to clean MS’s apartment”, she says.   MS, the CEO of some kind of marketing company.  I’ve nicknamed him “The whale” for his resemblance to that marine mammal.  I picture him floating, his back hovering over the face of the ocean looking into an endless sky, a small bird landing on his barge-like belly pecking away until it pops.  The bird flutters away and so does MS, like a big balloon farting away all that air, launching into oblivion among the heavens, only to create a blip upon hitting the water below.

I open the vendor book and ask her to sign it.  I look at her hands.  Her skin is the skin of a poem, a history of a people who built a civilization, railroads, and Chinatowns in Amerikkk.   Her skin is slightly burnt in the bursting sun and cool in the turquoise water of memory.  She signs the book and I tell her that someone from the maintenance department will let her into the apartment she is scheduled to clean (since the whale is not home to graciously welcome her with a cavernous belly full of kindness).  I call maintenance on the walkie talkie.  The supervisor, a burly Latino man who I’ve affectionately nicknamed, “Buffalo meat”, responds by saying that I should call someone in the leasing office to let the cleaning lady in.  I call the leasing office—no response, probably busy on the phone.  I want to call Buffalo Meat back on the radio to ask him to open the unit but he is gruff, with a tendency to grunt his thoughts as well as his afterthoughts, and, heaven forbid, that I make him grunt unnecessarily.  I call leasing again and again there is no answer.  The cleaning lady is standing there, on the clock—the clock on her—with a limited amount of time to complete the job—at a minimum rate of pay.  I look at the security monitor and see Buffalo Meat leaning against a wall talking to a coworker.  The cleaning lady smiles a nervous smile.  Is her time not worth anything to these people?  We wait.

There’s a musical quality to her voice.  When she speaks, the classical music on the overhead speakers fade—all that composition passed down through the ages—violins, oboes, cellos, harps, cymbals—all melt away when she speaks. I ask her where she's from.   I’m from China, she says, carrying her cleaning supplies”.  “I’m here to clean MS’s apartment”.  She’s conscious of her accent but not overly so.  Her voice is like the whisper of a bell, or the jazz notes of a vibe player whose sounds fill up a room with colors that only the heart can see.  Soon she is led to MS’s apartment, led by a leasing agent with a leasing agent’s voice, leasing agent’s walk and leasing agent’s talk.  She pushes her vacuum and balances her supply buckets and brooms through a world that is out of balance.  She is left to do her job.  She does it.  I’m at the desk doing mine.  Her name is in the sign-in book.  I close it, the classical music plays.  Suddenly I hear the vacuum cleaner and the sound of a broom brushing aside what needs to be brushed aside.  The classical music fades and i think of my father and uncles who did  janitorial work in the past, whose opportunities were limited but whose lives and songs resonate within me deeper than any symphony.  Their lives provide the music to which i write.  All is silent for a moment.  Then I hear the voice:  My name is Janice,  I’m here to...

Her voice fills this empty space for the moment.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Enid Conley from Johnson & Wales University. I was connected with her by a Ute elder, Kenny Frost.

He would tell me, you just have with her, you will love her! He was right of course, and this is the conversation that Enid and I had while I visited her. She talked about the use of language and defining one's self, and the history of Natives in a global perspective, and she schooled me on Natives from the Caribbean islands! I love her and i am so blessed to have met her! It won't be the last time, just the beginning of many times I will see her.

You can’t stay here no more
me being homeless again at thirtyfour
my sister let me move in for four days
than secretly kicked me out the door
one morning leaving I said
“I’ll see you later sister.”
She yelled “You can’t stay here no more”
She was refused by my payee for extra $
So I had to go
Now she say I can stay days weekly
Days maybe even four
RAM

 “From 1980, until this past year we did’nt have  the ‘Sit-Lie.” Ordinance”, says Bob Offer-Westort of  Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco Ca.
   Portland Oregon had four ‘Sit-Lie’ laws over the past decade”, he continues.  “The hatred of the homeless is really what this will become, this will lead to warrants which will block you for getting housing [in the futire]”.

Now politicians and businesses are trying to implement the ‘Sit-Lie Ordinance’ in Berkeley, Ca. The Sit-Lie Ordinance is going to appear on the next ballet mimicking Prop N and Prop O. Prop N and Prop O were set up in ’94 for drug dealers.Now it  would mean  getting rid of homeless people from their streets.

Teague Gonzalez announces “There will be 10,000 unemployed people in  downtown Berkeley, she continued, “
So with our country now in another recession, no jobs, no money, para las pobre, no honey. Now our government legalizing locking up people for being homeless/poor. “If you can’t afford no doors, still you cannot rest on public floors”.
                                                         RAM
 

HOME is a powerful song from the perspective of a person lost in the urban areas, as many of us Native’s find ourselves in living to survive in the 21st century.

The chorus is sung by Lihn Renkin in which she says “Home, I’m just trying to find my way home”. Lihn is a gifted vocalist, pianist and violinist. She offers an incredible sample of her vocal range on the outro of the song.

“We seen the world turn, our waters being burned, our mother being torn, industrial revolution. Steps forward or steps backwards? How we not listening to our elders, just cuz they don’t have a Masters (degree), who we fooling?, this living in excess and consuming, over population, pollution…” this is one of my favorite lines in the song because it came from an actual conversation I had with an elder,

Sunny Dooley, a Navajo elder and story teller shared her thoughts of her disappointment of the invalidating of knowledge of our elders because of their lack of western education. This she shared at the 2nd Elders Gathering I was honored to help facilitate at the banks of the Colorado River inside the Grand Canyon in May of 2010.

Sunny had said that “there are grandma’s out here that have an enormous wealth of knowledge to heal the world, yet their words are invalidated because they don’t have a Master’s degree, shortly after I wrote this song with those words in mind.

Also the part of the waters being burn is from a video I had seen of a river in the Midwest that was so polluted that it caught on fire in the early 90’s. Also touched on the of the wars that are tearing our world apart and the destruction happening from strip mining that is leaving our mother torn, our mother the Earth. I'm really questioning whether progress are steps forward for mankind or not?

This song is a longing for the feeling of what it would have been like in yesteryear without the modern technologies and the modern social ills. Also a longing to return home on the reservation where my heart and soul is, yet like many Natives of today I’m stuck in the city to be able to pursue a living, for now.

In the second verse I say “we come from a place where sisters are mother and mothers are fathers, we need to be raising our own sons and daughter”. This is a look at a ill that is all too common in communities on color not only in Native communities of the situations where sisters are raising their nieces and nephew and mothers are both mother and father to their children.

“Disconnect and reconnect, disrespect and re-respect” I finish the song with words of hope and in those words share the guidance that has been given to me in these trying times. 

For more information, go to: http://www.yaiva.net or http://www.facebook.com/yaiva

Growing up ,I always thought going to college was impossible for people like me,yet at that time I was only partially aware who people like me really were.With my 0.7 gpa’s and behavioral problems,the list of names that counselors,administrators,and teachers had for me grew as I went from elementary to high school.If you were to put all of the students like me,in a room you probably would get a large number of black and Hispanics,or whatever name the big headed suits are classifying us as this year.In fact in my 5th grade year,at a private school,I attended since 1st grade,they pulled a bunch of us out of the school,citing disruptive behavior,dangerous to the learning enviorment.As I looked around I saw we all shared a non white skin tone,and the seven of us were sent off,like the next destination was to be a padded room.Coming from a family that thought school was important,that incident made think school was not for minorities and whoever would listen to this crazy idea I had would be ready to send me off to that padded room I mentioned earlier.That was in the 80’s and the 90’s,so today’s non white students have much more pressure with the increasing of overcrowded classrooms at the public school level and the racist,demonic nature of standardized testing,which in my eyes is like Eugenics for the education system.In 2009 over 6 million students between the ages of 16 and 24 dropped out of high school or adult high school with 70% being black or Hispanic.Now the number is higher and the portrait is slowly gaining color and we can see that academia was not designed with non white students in mind.A lot of educators like to debate that non white students,largely black and Hispanic are not genetically capable to succeed in the classroom.In 1994,the controversial book,The Bell Curve was released.Written by the evil mad scientist Charles Murray and a now deceased Harvard psychologist Richard.J.Hammerstien.,it explores the ideas that IQ differences are genetic which result in racial differences in intelligences.Their central argument is that intelligence is mostly influenced by both genetics and enviorment and a better predictor for where someone is going to be in life.Sounds to me like these guys drunk and horny off of their own power,wanted to pay tribute to their forefathers and crafted this ill philosophy,which is currently still damaging the futures of non white children across the country,since it was a best seller and educators and institutions swear by it as the bible in dealing with minority students.This concept of IQ classism has slid it’s greasy backbone all across the board as it was reported in the Trumbull County Conservative,that the city of Dayton,Ohio and the United States Department of Justice recently lowered the testing standards on their civil servant test for police officers to ’limit the exclusionary effect of the city’s test while enabling the city to meet it’s urgent needs and identify qualified candidates through individualized interviews” says DOJ spokesperson Xochiti Hinojosa.Applicants for the civil servant test,only need to score 58% damn guys what a democratic way to let folks know how you feel about them.Talking to some homies of mine,the collective response to school, and for the matter,college is it is not a priority.Taking it even further one comrade told me that out of a group of 14 of us we know personally,none of the group he thought could not make it in college.Recently enrolled in school this years I took offense and a debate ensued.After the smoke cleared I asked him if he felt these brothas were not smart enough for college,and he said ‘ No they just don’t have the discipline”,bringing it back to where I believe I hit a sweet spot in the education system in the idea that academia was designed to disrupt and halt success in young non white children.Taking them from their original nature and reprogramming them to assimilate to fit in the culture and industry of the White Man’s world.Returning to the classroom has enlightened as well ,due to being in a class of mixed age.Seeing the instructor isolate adolescent non white students and literally set them up to fail as if it is part of the cirriculum is horrifying.There is a subjective criteria the teacher uses based on his opinions ,experiences and attitudes towards race which seem to fall into the Bell Curve type of thought.The one new female student this quarter has not been to class in weeks,the instructor says she has called in sick,my mind thinks back to the first week of class when she ran out to vomit after the teacher giving a lecture at the non white students about the use of a certain word being used in class demostrations. He chastised yelling out “You cannot use the words Nigger Niggers Niggaz with a z or me and my niggerz or any form of the word nigga, because if you say it then I should be able to say it and I cant.say it.“The blonde girl looked at me in shock and teary eyed and shouted out No,No,No,before running to the door.The teacher said “Go on tell on me,I am trying to improve bad habits before they follow in the workplace.My feelings were of disgust yet an understanding of the devil and his strategies.The word didn’t bother me Richard Pryor one of my heroes sold that word to those crackers in Hollywood when we won the grammy in 1975 for comedy album of the year for his masterpiece “That Nigger’s Crazy”. What got to me was the obvious push he was giving to students like me to “get out of where you don’t belong” Thank the Most High that I wasn’t in a quitting mood that moment,yet I witnessed how it affected the Black students including two Asian youths and a white female to a point of disconection.As the weeks follow these students have fell back and damn near disassociated themselves in some way from his class ,showing up late or not interacting and he continues to discriminate,failing them as he smiles in their faces.As he told us in a lecture,”You must discriminate,that’s how you find out who’s good and who can’t do the job.”Hearing that from the lips of the reptile motivates me to infiltrate this system and raise a stone hammer above “The Bell Curve”and smash it to unrecognizable smithereens.

Interview with the Raven known as Yoazz

I caught up with a raven while walking home.  The raven indicated that he was a philosopher.  I told him I’d been trying to catch up with him for quite some time.  He informed me that his name was YOAZZ…and that he didn’t really want to get into my shit—but since I was being a rather insistent pain in the ass—he’d grant me a few minutes of his time.

Q: Nice day isn’t it?

A: What Yoazz know about a nice day?

Q: Ok, then it isn’t a nice day.

A: Yoazz gettin’ smart with me?  If you is…then I’ll put my foot in Yoazz

Q:  You mean you’ll put your talon in my ass?

A:  Oh…yoazz an intellectual, huh?

Q: No, just wanted to ask you a question

A: Go ahead…make it quick.  I ain’t got all day to wait on yoazz

Q: What do you think about Twitter?

A: A punk ass bird of the highest order.  Yoazz would mention that.  Twitter is the type of bird that just flew into town and think they own it—the kind that wants to fly but don’t want to pay the fiddler.

Q: The Fiddler?

A: Yeah, you know…payroll taxes.  Yoazz know what that is…right?  I think Noam Chomsky had a name for it…corporate welfare freak…that’s right.  Twitter is a welfare freak with a bit of punk ass bird mixed in.  They are a typical hipster, filled with entitlement and subcriptions of  7 X 7 Magazine that they recycle as well as their thoughts.  They hover around the cafes posing and prancing and displaying their bad art/bad tattoos and hipster ways, gathering about like a preponderance of flies swarming around mounds of horseshit left behind courtesy of  SFPD mounted patrol.  Basically a high-tech hipster that wants a free ride.  I'm just a low tech bird on another altitude--and this ain't no platitude--but i'm into solitude.   That's why I didn't want to get into your shit today.  But i'm just hanging loose, you know?

Q: I see.  What else have you been doing with yourself?

A: just flying around here and there. I see lots of guys that look like YOAZZ…gathering together like barnacles on a defunct ship.

Q: Where are they?

A: Yoazz know where they at…they at the mall, getting into shape

Q: Shape?

A: Yeah…mall shape.  Yoazz can't miss 'em coming and going out of the parking lots, big guts hanging out stuffing their faces with cotton candy, corn dogs, burritos and lemonade.  It’s a shame, a lot of them guys are in their late 20’s, early 30’s, the prime of life.  But all the fire is gone, replaced by fat.  With all the injustice and wrongdoing staring them right in the nose, their big concerns are car seat cushions, videogames and air freshener.  And don't get me started on their cell phones.  Eyes and ears on those cell phones.  Why don't they just put those cell phones between two pieces of bread, slap a little mustard on 'em and eat them, then wash it down with a Yoohoo or something?  When it comes out the other end, it'll, no doubt, be one long text message that says very little.  I just shake my head and ask myself, these are men? 

Q: What’s the answer?

A:  I wish I knew.  These folks got to get some fire somehow.  The sad thing is that most people are gone, shot before the age of 35.

Q: Shot?

A: Yeah…shot.  You know, like a fighter that just can’t do it anymore…or the elastic on a pair of underwear.  When it’s gone, it’s gone.  Kiss it goodbye.  No more fire.

Q: Any last words?

A: Yeah, get yoazz outta my face before I lose my fire.

© 2011 RWS

You can thank billionaire Ross Perot, among others, for transforming the paper Food Stamps food assistance program into the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) plastic credit card-like set-up we have today. Now we are getting another euphemistic treat--the phrase "Food Stamps" is being down-sized, phased out because The Man is no longer dropping pieces of paper that dramatically (embarrassed) set us Food Stamps users apart from other shoppers in stores that take/took them.

The Feds call it SNAP: Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. These states also use that acronym: AR, CT, DC, GA, HI, IL, KY, LA, MA, MS, MT, ND, NE, NM, NV, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, VA, WV, WY.

Delaware, Maryland and Maine call it "Food Supplement Program". Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Utah call it SNAP FSP ("Food Stamps Program"). Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan and Ohio call it FAP ("Food Assistance Program"). Recently a Facebook friend invented a new curse word: Fap. I decided it was my favorite new word (although "oilcano" ties it...). Fap. Fap fap fap. It has a nice sound. Not.

San Francisco and the State of California call their piece of the Federal Food (Stamps) assistance program "CalFresh", to emphasize that a healthy diet includes fruits and vegetables. Duh. Arizona, Minnesota, North Carolina, Vermont, Washington State and Wisconsin are in the "other" category too.

Alphabet soup anybody? The infamous Blackwater, whose mercenaries soldiers blacked its eyes repeatedly in Afghanistan and Iraq, renamed itself "Xe". Everyone wants to reinvent themselves. Just call me "Bob" from now on. Really!

Why is this important? Brand name recognition is everything. "Food Stamps" was a universal phrase that everyone knew and used, and everyone will still be using (on the streets, at least, for a while, until we've been slapped around, I mean--made hip to the necessity of change.... Obama's favorite word). Bill Clinton dropped a big hammer on Welfare recipients, out-doing the Republicans endless zeal to demonize, fetishize, and traumatize poor people. Obama joined the parade. Big surprise.

Why do this (other than to confuse us even more about what to expect from The Man)? My main guess is so that all 50 states can confuse the Federal Government, and the Federal Government can return the favor, and the annual Budget Brawls in City Halls, State Legislatures, and on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC will continue to be excellent examples of lawmakers and lobbyists selling road maps to bridges to nowhere.

With the disasters that have hit Pacha Mama in the last couple years, it seems to affect poor people the worst--from the earthquake in Haiti, to the oppression in Egypt and the Middle East, violence in Mexico and now in Japan.

   I was not surprised of the little coverage devoted by mainstream media to those most affected by the tsunami in Japan--Poor people. The Majority of the people who live on the coastline of Japan are Poor people who depend on fishing as survival to eat and sell. This doesn’t happen only in Japan but in other so called “Third world countries” so when tsunamis, hurricanes and storms occur, poor people who live on the coastline suffer the worst compared with middle and upper class people who live in the downtowns or higher grounds.

    Poor people who don’t work in factories like Honda, Toyota, or in the technology industries which require some kind of education, end up as fisherman or living in poor areas next to coastlines.

   In a Article I read recently released by the BBC, it was mentioned how climate change will impact “underprivileged” the most.

   "It's the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

•    75-250 million people across Africa could face water shortages by 2020
•    Crop yields could increase by 20% in East and Southeast Asia, but decrease by up to 30% in Central and South Asia
•    Agriculture fed by rainfall could drop by 50% in some African countries by 2020
•    20-30% of all plant and animal species at increased risk of extinction if temperatures rise between 1.5-2.5C
•    Glaciers and snow cover expected to decline, reducing water availability in countries supplied by melt water
   From Africa to Japan over and over poor people are on the frontlines of disasters. It is sad that even in so called independent media, little is mentioned of the suffering of our poor people, the houseless, landless, jobless the elders.

   The elephant in the room that few want to confront is the Class issue. I remember hearing stories of Katrina and how people got stuck in New Orleans because they did not have a car to leave. It seems we poor people are destined to die.
Corporate media and Governments want to keep us silent but at poor magazine we resist, fight back, speak out, and shout.

By any means possible,

Being poor is not a crime
Then why get criminalized, brutalized,
For breathing
Left behind by society
All we trying do is to make a living
Is not about the color of your skin
Is about the class you belong
So I shout am brown proud
And love my poor gente