Gavin Newsoms’ Campaign against the Poor
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by Ed Willard It was an uncomfortably hot Saturday morning in June as I walked up 7th St in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, towards the offices of People Organized To Win Employment Rights (POWER). About to enter the building, I pulled up short when I heard my name being called, "Heats ‘goin kick our asses today, Ed". It was my homeless friend, Joey who had set up a sort of flea market of goods for sale at the entrance to the adjacent alley. "Oh man, you got that right, Joey! How you doin’ today? "Not too bad but I do hear there’s a chance our GA benefits will be cut. You know anything about that? "In fact I’m just now meeting with other POWER members to talk about that, so I don’t have much time but just briefly, yeah, there’s a member of the San Francisco board of Supervisors who is trying to push through a proposal that’ll hurt folks on GA. I’ll get back with you later with more news, Joey. Hey, maybe you can even help out, huh?" "Yeah maybe, Ed, I’ll be here". Upstairs, 7 other POWER members were already assembled and we spent 40 minutes locking brains to come up with a way to interfere with Gavin Newsome's kickoff campaign to collect the 15,000 signatures needed to get his measures to slash GA benefits onto November's ballot. As an organization that has been fighting to get better conditions for folks receiving assistance here in SF, POWER seemed a natural to fight Supervisor Newsome’s campaign. After our short meeting we descended the stairs back out into the hot street to walk the short distance over to Local 88 on Market St. We arrived at a scene of hustle and bustle. A channel 5 news van was parked outside and the entrance to the upstairs meeting hall was a mob of people. Showing up dressed as we were, we supplied a sharp contrast to this young republican looking crowd. At least four of us had worn our POWER T-shirts, I had mine on under my leather jacket, and when I arrived, director of POWER, Steve Williams quickly took me aside. "Ed, we need a spy up there in the meeting!" As the only white boy amongst us, I was elected. Quickly I pulled my long scraggly hair back into a pony tail and, despite the heat, zipped up my jacket, hiding the T-shirt with the picture of the angry African-American woman with raised fist. Nervously looking around for any possible security, I entered the building and climbed the long flight of stairs. Suddenly my hair, clothes and everything about me seemed grungy and I had to forcefully dismiss from my mind the sure conviction that I'd be recognized, challenged and ejected any second. When I arrived at the top of the stairs I spotted a table set up in the lobby for volunteer sign up, but after a moment's scrutiny I saw that people were passing by this freely into the main hall and I did the same. The scene was disheartening. A LOT of people, (I estimated 150), had turned out for this thing! Nervously I began to mingle, walking around the perimeter of the big hall and soon I got the information I was looking for. Posted on the wall roughly in the four corners of the room were big pieces of butcher paper with locations, (Cala Foods at 18th and Castro, Safeway at the Marina, etc.). I jotted these down. Soon a man acting as MC grabbed a microphone and began addressing the crowd, introducing speakers, first a doctor from the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic followed by Newsome himself. It didn't take me long to get the picture. This guy was supplying credibility to Newsome's main justification for cutting the GA cash, ground that former SF politicians and lawmakers have tread, ad nauseam: People on welfare can't be trusted with cash, they'll just use it for drugs. The doctor told his story about how, ".........just when we'd be starting to get somewhere with people, the 1st or the 15th, (checkdays), would roll around and we'd lose them........." Then Newsome was up and he got out his violin to tell the "heartrending" story of the long struggle he had with his conscience before finally................ reluctantly............. coming to the conclusion that the only humane solution was to take the cash out of GA recipients hands. Gagging, I hurried out of the place. Outside I received pats on the back for my successful spy mission. We started to plan how best to split up to go out to the different signature locations. By this time our group had been joined by a couple of members from the Coalition on Homelessness and the press had started to notice us. The different news stations interviewed POWER members Larry Latimore, Willie Garner and Jason Negron. The next day Larry's interview was aired on TV supplying an opposite viewpoint to Newsome's lies, chiefly that ...........NOWHERE........... in Newsome's proposal is there any guarantee of the housing or services that the thing is purporting that it will give to people in exchange for the cash they are getting now. Newsome’s propaganda would have the public seeing it like this: Most everyone getting General Assistance is a totally irresponsible chronic drug user that can't be trusted to make a decision on her/his own. Since the city is giving people a handout, it can do so in any form it sees fit. An essential condition this flawed viewpoint ignores is that everyone receiving the GA stipend has to WORK for the money, sweeping the streets or cleaning city buses. Over the last couple of years, due precisely to the work of POWER and other advocacy/activist groups the situation with workfare has changed but before this, and going back nearly 20 years all the way to the institution of workfare under Mayor Feinstein, the city had, year in and year out, from two to three thousand workfare workers doing identical jobs as city hired workers who were being paid union scale, (14 to 23 dollars per hour). ALL FOR MINIMUM WAGE, saving the city a whopping 30 million a year. All this by a bunch of irresponsible drug addicts who, (if we listen to Newsome), barely know how enough to get their own shoes tied right. So just who is this guy, Gavin Newsome? Let’s get a little background on him. Earlier in the year this City Supervisor introduced a number of measures to be voted on by the Board. These measures constitute an all-out-attack on San Francisco's poor and homeless. If it became law, one of these would make panhandling on median strips illegal and punishable by a five hundred dollar fine. The same would go for urinating or defecating in public, (this when there are increasingly fewer and fewer public restrooms in the city). But Newsome's most poisonous attack comes in the form of a slash to City and County of San Francisco welfare benefits. Currently those of us receiving General Assistance get about 320 dollars per month. If Newsome's proposal becomes law this cash will be cut to 59 dollars and the rest will be issued in the form of vouchers for services. The biggest chunk of these would be in the form of a housing voucher. This is a re-visiting of ground that other San Francisco politicians and bureaucrats have stomped over on a number of occasions. In the summer of '99 bureaucrat, Earl Rynerson introduced the infamous Prop E in a bid to get the laws changed so that 85% of the GA checks would be reduced to vouchers. At that time these vouchers would have made it possible for a person to get into one of the downtown flea bag, single room occupancy, (SRO), hotels for a couple of weeks per month. These SRO's were then and still are now, rat infested and the hangout of drug users and criminals. Even back in '99 there was a serious shortage of rooms in them, a situation which has worsened considerably now since 7 of these hotels have been destroyed by fire. When no rooms are available the only use for one of Newsome's vouchers would be at one of the city's shelters which are currently FREE!! No, you didn't read it wrong.................... if Newsome's plan becomes law, the city will be handing GA folks a voucher worth about 200 bucks with the right hand, only to snatch it back with the left, and anyone who's stayed in one of these shelters sure knows they aren't worth 200 dollars a month! Of course, the idea behind this nastiness is to make things extremely difficult for the poor so that folks will go elsewhere and the streets will be "cleaned up" for the attraction of tourists and the mega-bucks profit of downtown, big business interests. When POWER found out about Newsome's plans we launched a counter attack. Through these efforts we were able to win over to our side the support of the three Supervisors on the committee who would be voting on the measures. In conjunction with the Coalition on Homelessness, Poor Magazine and other advocacy groups we also organized a press conference where we made public Newsome's plans. The effect of all of this was that, a few days before the public meeting, (held at City Hall), where public comment would be heard and the proposal voted on by the Supervisors, chicken-shit-Newsome, smelling defeat, withdrew it. Newsome, who's been given the handle "pretty boy" because he's a tall, slim, glamour boy who gets written up regularly in the San Francisco society columns, is Willie Brown's hand picked successor for San Francisco's Mayor, (Brown has aspirations for higher office, probably Sacramento where he can move "up" to doing his insidious damage to the people on a statewide level). Newsome was Brown's appointee for Supervisor in 1997, (when a seat was vacated by State Assemblyman Kevin Shelly). He comes from silver spoon kind of old money wealth and has the support of others of the same ilk, (most notably billionaire Gordon Getty who's son Billy, Newsome is known to pal around with). Now, with the support of the Brown democratic machine Newsome is following in Willie Brown's footsteps, launching an offensive against the homeless that has enough of the earmarks of nastiness to put it on par with the mayor's long and vile record of similar crimes against the poor and working class. Newsome recently took a trip to New York City to study Mayor Guiliani's homeless plan, one facet of which is it's use of homeless people as dirt cheap labor that gets farmed out to corporations such as Toyota and Citibank. If Newsome and like minded individuals, (namely Mayor Brown and George Smith, director of the Mayor's Dept. of Homelessness), have their way, San Francisco's homeless will continue to live in shelters while doing slave labor to benefit downtown interests, while his measures that criminalize normal human behavior, (sleeping and the performance of bodily functions), will give the police force carte blanche to "sweep' the streets often enough to give the impression that something is being done about the homeless problem, (exactly the "solution" that Guiliani's plan has accomplished in NYC). Finishing writing this, I think back to this morning, the heat and my friend, Joey. Being homeless is no picnic, even on the warm days. A thought rolls through my mind, "Why, oh, why, is it that snakes like Newsome spend so much money on campaigns to take away what little some of us have when these same dollars could be put into affordable housing, living wage job programs and the like?" For information on how you can get involved to help us fight Newsome’s campaign, contact: Jason Negron at POWER. (415) 864-8372 |