The War on the Poor

by Tiny/PNN

The war on the poor is in full Ef-fect!!

The war on the poor is in full Ef-fect

From frisco and Oakland to

The phillipines and iraq

But Now theres a new from of house to house

Com-bat

The soldiers are social workers, police and politi-shuns

Creating deadly legislations, and

con-tracts

Speaking from the knowledge of a poverty skolah

born from the endless struggle to hold onto a dollah –

I must re-state

The war on the poor is in full ef-fect

otherwise,How can a man backed by Gettys harass people who barely have a bed to

con-nect with

…..Excerpt from The War on the Poor by Tiny/Po Poet

How do you define help? If you provide someone with help does that mean you have the right to take it away?… The Day after the second hostile corporate takeover of Amerikka by BUSH/Cheny Inc. and the Haliburton boyz these questions floated through my mind as I spit my poem the War on the Poor at a protest and march for healthcare, economic justice and voter justice that began at Justin Herman Plaza at 9:00 am on Wednesday, November 3rd and wove through the streets of San Francisco throughout the day and into the night

As a very low-income, formerly houseless Bay Area resident who has lived homelessly in the streets of San Francisco and Oakland since I was a child, and was now marching for justice with hundreds of folks through the soon to be "cleaned-up" tenderloin ( read; all the poor and homeless folks kicked out, locked out and starved out through displacement , redevelopment and incarceration) stopping at the soon to be closed Tenderloin Self Help Center, I was reminded of our original thesis at POOR Magazine which attempted to raise awareness about the very real connection between poor peoples all over the world. How we as poor folks, indigenous folk and communities of color have been so successfully sold a bill of capitalist goods about where we should get our "help" i.e., our food, shelter and services that we are unable to establish them for ourselves or when we try to create innovative models of food production, land use and health service provision we face a struggle just to maintain what we manage to create.

"In some kind of way, The city managed to shift the administrative body that ran this center from the Department of Health, which is what it should come under seeing as it provides very important health services for people, to The Department of Human Services, and then before we knew it they put the contract out for bid and we lost it and now the new version of this place will be a resource center", Poverty Scholar, Self-Help Center board member and lead organizer for the Civil Rights Project of the Coalition on Homelessness LS Wilson outlined the most recent example of this kind of political shell game to hit a very innovative, very grassroots, community based drop-in center known as the Tenderloin Self-Help Center established 19 years ago to provide everything from free lunch, a safe place to sit out of the cold, telephone use, bi-lingual employment services, housing advocacy, counseling and substance abuse services for homeless and/or disabled folks in a non-invasive, peer-based, anti-institutional model which is sometimes referred to as Harm reduction.

" This is the third time in the last three months in which the City has taken a health based service center and turned it into a "resource center" and its all to support Care Not Cash initiative to make the author of that initiative (Newsom) look good" LS went on to explain that people had to fight the same bait and switch with Conard House, which caused two people to die in the process.

LS concluded, "When you are turning everything into a resource center what is happening to the people on the streets that you are pretending to help " LS was speaking about the highly problematic legislation known as Care Not Cash brought in to being as part of Gavin Newsoms' anti-poor people Mayoral platform which has done much more harm that good in its troubled implementation.

Readers of PNN and The Bayview will remember PNN's intensive media organizing and resistance of the legislation in collaboration with POWER, The Coalition on Homelessness and many more organizations, which reduced the welfare grant from the already meager $345.00 Per month to $59.00 a month and prioritized the City's shelter beds for welfare recipients leaving disabled elders and the working poor without a bed. In fact, the main point of this legislation is to make it more difficult for poor and homeless folks to reside in San Francisco which once again is part of the class supremacy agenda that pits poor against poorer and eventually makes it impossible for anyone but the very wealthy to exist in San Francisco at all.

"It’s a place for those of us who have nowhere to go, to come and talk to people, to get some lunch, to get some counseling, cause if you have somewhere where people can go it’s a way they can stay away from drugs", Francis Terry, a 67 year old African Descendent woman explained the reasons why a harm reduction model like The Self Help Center which was created by the community itself, works so well

" The Self-Help Center is where people can go if they want to make a change, a common ground, a place where we can change our lives," Myra P. Wilson, a disabled young African Descendent woman spoke over the sounds emanating from the Center on the middle of Womens' day at the Center

"When people ask what we do, I answer, whatever people need us to do" I spoke to Vicky Johnson, the soft-spoken program manager for the Self-Help Center about what the Center provides for the community. She continued, "they want to turn this place into an invasive medical model where they collect peoples' fingerprints, ID, and blood tests, rather than our model of meeting people where they are and giving them what they need, a model that empowers people to help themselves"

How do you define help? And when we create it for ourselves are we gonna let the system take it away?

To fight the wrongful closure of this very important center which was done without any community input please call, fax or send a letter to Mayor Newsom @ 554-6141! And tell them to keep the peer based, drop-in center Tenderloin Self-Help Center open For postcards or more information: Contact Hospitality House - 290 Turk Street - 749-2113. To read more work on Care-Less Use of Cash written by the poor folks directly affected by it go on-line to www.poormagazine.org and click on Care Not Cash Resistance