Story Archives 2003

by Joseph Laqua Youth in the Media Intern and Tiny/PNN

Faces….. "This war is not now nor has ever been in our name"

Flow like rivers into Downtown Frisco, LA, Washington and NYC …..

thump..boom taca boom thump…. drum beats for peace in each and every cit-eee

"red paint smeared on unclothed protestors "

this is how war looks like

their faux blood says

And I breathe in resistance…

For I know now it is not only me

Exhaling for one moment

as I am surrounded by the possibility that everyone is not now nor has ever been ok

with an overwritten science fiction story penned by drug store tabloid authors and disgruntled
insurance salesmen by the names of GeeW.Bush and Mr. Chain-eeee

And the lies filter through corporate airwaves – licking the corners of an intentionally numb America –

Certain that oblivious imperialistic perfection will continue unfettered

Untouched - that money and capital will flow through the barren trees

That fish will swim through polluted waters

That humans will live, grow and BUY no matter if they can’t breathe

no matter if they die

Because, like I was told by a salivating capitalist; even in death you are a consumer

even in death

you can buy....

This has never been in our name by Tiny/Po’ Poets Project

Thousands of people swarmed into downtown San Francisco this weekend as part of the Not in our Name resistance movement, in tandem with several thousand folks in Washington DC, New York and Los Angeles. The turnouts in each city were large and powerful. Locally it included the sounds of youth from the Mission district with the amazin’ Loco Bloco, as well as scholars, activists, poets and artists; Rev Cecil Williams, DJ Malik, Yuri Kochiyama, Ismael Manur, Boots from The hip hop group The coup and many more amazin’ folks.

As I walked away from the minions of strong voices resisting this absurd call for"war" I wondered if these thousands of people would ever be properly "heard" through the corporate media filters, I remembered the voice of Davy D who had spoken at the rally, "Watch what the corporate media doesn’t show you..watch and listen"

by Connie Lu/PNN Youth in the Media Journalist

It was ten years ago when my cat, Cubby became a part
of my life. I am at home watching T.V. on a cool
autumn night when I unexpectedly hear the doorbell
ring. Feeling uncertain who it could be, I turn on the
light and move the curtain aside to see that it was my
grandma, holding a kitten in her arms. I flung open
the door with excitement, as I hovered over the small
kitten with adoring sounds of, “Aw, how cute!” Her fur
is soft under the palm of my hand, as I gently pet the
narrow white stripe on her head above her pink nose.
The rest of her body is a swirled mix of brown and
black, except for her legs and paws that are white.
Her eyes are a beautiful shade of dark green jade with
widened slits of black pupils.

As soon as my grandma puts Cubby down on the carpet,
my cat quickly darts underneath the closest couch. I
look under the dark couch only to find a pair of
glowing eyes filled with fear of being in an
unfamiliar place. As we wait by the couch for her to
come out, my grandma explains how she found Cubby that
night in a parking lot at church, where my cat eagerly
jumped into my grandma’s car. My grandma said Cubby
wasn’t wearing a collar and looked pretty skinny, so
we concluded that she was homeless.

My family and I were more than happy to have her live
with us. Later that night, I attempt to coax Cubby out
from under the couch with some food. I could sense
that she was still wary, as she cautiously approached
the light. But her hunger eventually overcame her fear
as she quickly swallowed the food on the plate, while
looking up at me with a little more trust.

Her trust in me grew stronger as weeks turned into
months and months became years over time. I would
always look forward to seeing her wait for me next to
the door and play with her right after school. We
shared a close bond with each other. I didn’t just see
her as a pet, but as my friend.

Clyde W. Ford, author of “The Hero with an African
Face” also expresses the strong intimacy that exists
between human and animal spirits through his book
about African folk history and myths. He refers to the
animals as being “master animals” that are deeply
revered and sacred. He also describes the relationship
between humans and animals to be extremely close and
interdependent. “Rather, a mutual relationship is to
exist between the two: the village takes care of him,
[referring to the buffalo] and he takes care of them
by assuring the supply of buffalo for the hunt. The
life of the master animal and the life of humans are
intertwined and dependent on this arrangement” (Ford,
p. 97). The life of the animal is truly valued by the
Africans. There is a certain sense of symbiotic need
between humans and animals for existence.

Through the internship program at POOR Magazine, I
have also learned the importance of depending upon one
another, as opposed to being independent from family
and friends. The American culture emphasizes
individualism and having your own car, house, and
phone. However, POOR has taught me the value in having
a sense of community and empathy for others, instead
of separating yourself from your family as an
independent individual.

The friendship I shared with my cat was also built
upon this same idea of interdependency. My cat depends
upon me to provide her with food and shelter, but we
depend on each other for friendship. I still remember
Cubby gently nudging me with her soft forehead on my
cheek to comfort me after I had fallen down in my
backyard. She would also keep my feet warm in the
winter at the foot of my bed.

These are just a few fond memories out of the many
that I have now of Cubby since she died just a few
weeks ago. The veterinarian said she had nose cancer.
My family and I decided that it would be best to put
her to sleep because the cancer had spread to other
parts of her body already, which would make it
difficult to treat. The morning before the vet came to
put her to sleep was spent on petting her frail, weak
body. I cried seeing her in so much pain, as I said
goodbye to her.

Later that day, my brother and I looked through old
photo albums in search of pictures of Cubby, which
brought on more tears of sadness. But at the same
time, it also gave me a sense of closure in seeing and
remembering what she looked like when she first became
a part of my family as a stray cat without a home.

The previous state of her homelessness and her old age
also reminded me of the elders who can’t afford
medical attention, let alone a place to live. As
their condition worsens, the pain that they endure
becomes harder to bear with each day that passes. I
also recall an article by Valerie Schwartz,
PoorNewsNetwork Community Journalist and Poverty
Scholar, called “A Mama’s Love…”, which was about a
homeless African American elder named Lula Bell
Seymour, aka Mama, who passed away a few weeks ago in
the Tenderloin. Mama did not have much, but she
always shared the little she had and encouraged
everyone around her through prayer.

After Cubby was put to sleep, I felt like there was an
irreplaceable hole of pain in my heart because I had
lost a close friend that I literally grew up with for
over 10 years of my life. But I also felt relief
knowing that she did not have to keep suffering and
enduring the pain. I will always treasure our
memories together and remember her comforting purr
vibrating against my arms around her soft coat of fur.

by Joe B.

Today, at work on Tuesday, Oct, 8, 2002 I’m
listening to Congressmen/women arguing for and against War In Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein.

I’m half hearing what’s said so I’m not real clear but this pro war drum beat with little few people on the other side is frightening.

Saddam Hussein has already been whipped, the country still in ruins and rubble, many innocent civilians killed, wounded, or maimed and homes destroyed – an entire country’s economic infrastructure completely wiped or barely there.

The old conflict rears his head and that love-hate of my country resurfaces yet again.

Home grown terrorists like the Klu Klux Klan and Para military organizations were let loose like so many vicious animals on people only wanting to participate in this country.

There are counterparts for us rainbow folks going through parallel.

No horrible Middle Eastern leader did not have a policy of systematic genocide for all types of rainbow folks.

Its good old apple pie ‘n’ ultra violent America and its still being done.

America is suppose to be superpower number 1
how come our economy is tanking?

Could it be that making bombs, guns, weapons of mass destruction is not conducive to economic growth?

PAC’s America is suppose make American citizens
safer, give them longer lives, and better education’s not set their children men and women, boys and girls, both parents in wars!

Maybe the ‘Prez and his cabinet knows more than we do but do we have to do war’s death dance.

21st century war over one leader who’s biggest victory was surviving America’s might by hiding in a fortified caves.

What happened to all the black ops secret monies that was expressly for these situations?

No power on earth can stand when smaller powers gather to combat it.

When a Tiger steps on red fire ants home in Africa, the tiger huge size will not help as its devoured, stripped from flesh to clean white bones.

If America, a standing colossus go unilaterally like a rabid, rampaging, red eyed beast.

In time smaller nations may think or do now "Rogue Nation" and could in time take us out by inches not in large gulps.

Any ideas people?

Please send donations to

Poor Magazine or in C/0

Ask Joe at 1448 Pine Street St. Street,

San Francisco, CA. 94103 USA

For Joe only my snail mail:
PO Box 1230 #645

Market St. San Francisco, CA 94102

415- 626-4405

Email: askjoe@poormagazine.org

by Joe B.

Originally from Thursday, 10/11/02.

Today Monday, Oct. 14, 2002.

Well, its Indigenous People’s Day where a certain Captain Columbus gets lost at sea, "finds a New Land," with people living on it and says "its now discovered.

Calls the inhabitants "Indians" setting into motion bloodshed, disease, and death.

‘Yeah, he is sorry, he dies broke while descendents of the New World still go through colonizing hell.

Sure its not that simple but happened historically.

Now to what I wrote pre holiday.

I’m glad The House of Representatives are still arguing over going to war in Iraq Thursday, Oct. 11, 2002.

Yeah, I said Congress instead of House of Reprentatives oops by me also another error I made was talking about the WWW (World Wide Wrestling) WWO which is World Wrestling Organization instead of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment).

For everyone within those organization the wrestling champion’s, challengers, wife’s husband’s, boys, girlfriends and fans supporting them and this venerable sport.

I sincerely apologize for my ignorance.

"Smack Down, Raw, and other events live, on television is an adrenaline rush I chose to indulge as a guiltless pleasure.

Finally there’s someone I haven’t spoken to in years and only now after four years my promise is kept.

Its 1998, my work in Goodwill Industry as a sorter 7 to 8 hours standing up, with gloves, saving, tossing out donated items from clothes, records and tapes to everything from a to z.

Mr. Scott Douglas, a 6 foot or taller, auburn haired man worked near where I am.

We conversed a lot over a few months before I my job at POOR Magazine freed me of the place.

Before I left he gave me a bit of brown paper after telling me about writing one or more screenplays and if my being an office manager could help.

If I can help send his name or contact someone in LA.

That was almost five years past with delays, assignments, losing Scott’s paper finding again.

I can finally pay a long dept I owe him.

This is a call to all director, producers, exec. Dir., Prod., and anyone able to help Mr. Scott Douglas who’s probably by now a successful Screenwriter in Hollywood by now.

Since I’ve no clue its all moot to me.

For Hollywoodscott@hotmail.com

415 –885-9692

575 – 2170
Goodwill.

These phone numbers may have changed over the years.

And if Scott has moved and any of the readers know how to contact him please do.

Tell him Joe wishes him all the best and have fun in Hollyweird but not too much.

Remember the couple in "The Eagles "Life In The Fast Lane."

Whew, that’s a lodestone gone now back ye old column again.

If anyone is offended by what I write next… Tough, life sometimes sucks, deal.

One guys are is another’s worthless junk.

In our new office on Pine Street Dee, Co creator, lead editor of POOR Magazine had place an old 1920’s or late 30’s photo of a nude guy on ice skates.

Its tasteful not gross.

At the same time in my SRO complex on 6th and Market Street another piece of art work is being displayed in the lobby of the building.

I’m not the most observant person on the planet so for a day or two.

I didn’t notice but hear lots of people having problems with the art work portrayed there.

Dee’s fuming about the photo being a rare photo set in a glass frame and wondering why someone would take it.

A few names came up and also the day before our office was full of people including the landlord and two air condition repairmen because that went on the blink.

New people sign up applications to learn about multimedia, Graphics Arts, or whatever they want.

There is a meeting while the "Show Time" is on.

One guy talking loudly while others begin same ruin movie time so before signing the petition.

"Joe, why you doing this, put that thing somewhere else."

I didn’t know what he was talking about which I simply asked.

There is another guy name Joe who also does photography but I haven’t been taking shots (photographs) for weeks sometimes months.

I know its not me doing it but could if I wanted shoots and frame it the way it looks.

But I’m into so heavy art look of the finished photo as the other Joe is.

At least not at this time.

I finally see what all the fuss is about.

The artwork is a picture in a clean if not new gold frame, its crisp white boarded sets off the color photo perfectly as light reflects of glass brightens it.

It shows our building in background, while in foreground a man in a dark dirty sweat shirt and jeans sleeping in the street.

The artist is next to men "What do you think?"

I better not tell him what I really thought being tactful is comes in hand sometimes.

"Nice beautiful gold frame."

Then I slip away, into the movie room to sign the petition to have the artwork taken down.

It’s a great piece art however placing it where people are daily struggling to be off the street, escape homelessness, drink, drugs, and or sexual addiction.

Some people do not wish have a daily reminder of where they are, were, and continue to struggle freeing ourselves over time and avoiding falling back or to relapse as its better known.

"I’m an artist." he said.

Well I go to the store by orange juice, ice cream
clean water and I return to see if the art photo but it has been taken down.

I guess the other Joe hears so much flack that he worries his art might suffer an "accident" so he quickly takes it down.

At POOR’s sleek new office the missing nude Ice-skating man is still gone I don’t who took it or why it was taken but I sure didn’t.

All I did is acknowledge its presence and go about my business.

I hope its found but if it stays lost – oh, well.

If anyone has rare framed photo’s they want to give away please send it if you can. Bye.

PS. We found the Leo Saxone as (Brth) Superman rare framed photograph circa 1939. (Brittish) above the small fridgidare on the left side scottch taped on the wall.

Either the repairmen placed it safely there while they fixed the air conditioning and was noy returned to its original place. -

Missing artwork was never lost just misplaced
mystery solved.

Please send donations to

Poor Magazine or in C/0

Ask Joe at 1448 Pine Street St. Street,

San Francisco, CA. 94103 USA

For Joe only my snail mail:
PO Box 1230 #645

Market St. San Francisco, CA 94102

415- 626-4405

Email: askjoe@poormagazine.org

by PNN Staff

A. Faye on the plight of the Haitian refugees….

A Massacre it was told…

Captives of the Caribbean from the African shores

Haiti has a bloody history

A Massacre it was told, under the whips and chains of the French

The French who flew to New Orleans

After the Haitian battles broke the chains bondage

Poverty sends its people knocking at United States door

Across the Atlantic just 27 miles away

People searching for food and freedom along the American shore

The Boat People are once again captured

But now they are not chained, but instead are sent away

But Lite-skinned and European immigrants cross these borders

So it is just blatant cruelty

That turn these Black People away…

The Written Word …

The Po’ Poet Laureate on "All the Other Poet Laureates and their needless
persecution..

The written word, passed on from ancestors to their descendants

From the beginning of conversation

Spoken words between lovers, family, and friends

Until hatreds begin, now your enemy, now your friend

The word, spoken as music and song, is magical

The swaying forms dancing in heat is a mystical song

Poetry is the Blues, is singing from your Soul.

Jazz blown, is a form of this

The written word, the meeting of minds,

Should never be denied

Slaves denied Liberty is tying up the Soul

When the freedom of speech is denied, It is tying up the Mind.

The Americas live under a Banner Of Lies

The United States, Constitution guarantees

The right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness

I guess I didn’t get a warranty

Slaves coming from Glory Island, were denied the freedom of Life

Mournful Souls, thrown over board

I am drawn to the Oceans

You hear them in the waves, they were denied all freedoms

The freedom of Speech

Listen to the Whales Wail, they are the witness to this flight to Hell

Too deny the Freedom of the written word

Is to deny my right to The Pursuit of Happiness

To take the Wreath upon my Head

To chop off my Tongue

They marry me to my enemy

They alienate me from my kinfolk

To murder the Truth!

Some folks like to write white lies, myths, and tall tales

I like to dance in the Rain, and burn with passionate Fire

I like to read, and write the truth

So may I read?

Some One, Blew up America

Hilter’s Nazi murdered the Jews

European Nations enslaved the Colored People of the World

The San Francisco Giants Lost the World Series

Can I read, Big Brother!!!!!

A. Faye Hicks on Prop N;

PROP N, MY FRIEND? …..NO

A Noose around our necks

Pressure

Political Prowess

Power

Tighten your belts, rise your taxes, a political blow

Blow-up Bomb, Iran, Iraq

All tied with homelessness, Yes

The Billions has to come from somewhere

Tighten the noose around our necks

Poor people are tough, They can with stand starvation

With our Shelter plus Care

Shit! They withstood slavery

Pressure

Power

We can’t have the Rich paying taxes!

Take the Loot from Welfare, Workfare

Take the Loot from Medicare

What is the Back Lash

Care not Cash

Political Prowess

No! Prop N! Is Not our friend

A. Faye Hicks on: The Thurgood Marshall "Incident"

Keepin’ your Mind off the true foe

School days, School days

Those happy, carefree days

This is a beautiful melody

But these days , you need to "bite the bullet"

These days Schools are shadowed in Terrorism

Youth power, student power! Is a threat to authority

Ancient History Authority

The knee in the back authority

With break your Spirit Tactics

Before you drop out or forced out; the powers to be

Are hindering your graduation

Hindering your future potential, as citizens of America

Racking up juvenile crimes

Racking up crimes of innocence

Gangs created, and age old tactic

Confusion created, to keep your mind off your true foe

The Po,Po!

A. Faye Hicks on: Homelessness, Halloween and Gavin Newsome

THE HALLOWEEN HOMELESS

Happy Halloween, Happy Halloween

Little children, Skeleton dancing, skate board, flashing

Up and down the stairwells

Shouting and laughing at the top of their lungs

Once a year the magic is clear

The black cat crosses your path

On all Hallow’s Eve

Eyes bugged out, All this for candy?

Our first addiction , Then alcohol, weed, and the drug of your choice

Trick or Treat, Don’t fool me

NO! This is all for "Monee"

It’s a Capitalist gain, a Commercial thing

Lites out behind many doors

Windows boarded up, Oh, so forlorn

Do we dare !

Tiny whispers; spooked, Is anybody home?

Little squeals in the Nite, Is any body home?

Where have all the people gone

Been herded out, locked out, locked in County Jail!

A Pumpkin Head, a wizard, a black witch, and a tattered sheet ghost

Safeway’s bag’s quivering in tiny little hands

Dressed up in Walgreen’s funnery, barely missing police man gunnery

Where have all the people gone?

Trick or Treat, It’s Halloween

And we want some Candy!!!!!

Yahoo, Yahoo

A piercing scream in the Twilight!

Beaded sweat on foreheads

Whew, what a relief

It’s just the Paddy wagon!

Rounding up the homeless drunks & and the drug addicts

Trying to get a Trick or Two, and some got damn candy!

A Celtic Holy Day, Transformed

People behind card board boxes , eating chocolate Mars bars

A wrinkled ole bag Lady, with a shopping cart, giving out some coins

And a pitiful amount candy, God bless her kind heart

Open your shopping bags and collect your Loot

Happy Halloween!

Running feet, black ski mask, purse snatch, your life trashed

It’s halloween, You crazy educated dope fiend

Liquor stores got their Candy Bowls ready

For the tricksters, the gangster, and the Buggy Crew

Now let’s go visit the haunted house

You mean this dirty old city is haunted?

Let’s take a ride on my witches broom or do you prefer muni

Let’s ride over that Black and Gold Dome

For within the hallowed hall, reside monsters, who don’t need mask

For they are Gavin Grusome and sidekick , the Mayor!

by Joe B.

What would happen to anyone with a few centuries under their belt?

How would any of us learn, grow, change given these extra years?

Yeah, I’ve been pondering if I myself had those excess decades or an century or two.

First given the extra time would have a calming influence.

I's start something mundane like saving money for a special trip to Nevada to pay lots of money.

The soul purpose: being taught how to really please 'n' pleasure girl friends or a future wife in oral sex.

To learn the best way both lesbians and straight women have it done, what they really, really, really want (shades of Spice Girls) on the subject.

Since they are the true foremost experts on such an intimate subject.

The ultimate test of graduation would be a pleasing a lesbian, bisexual, and straight women to the point of them tearing, sobbing, blitzed out in joy.

After wiping their eyes I’d thank them and leave with this hard won, difficult but ultimately pleasurable lesson.

I seems stuff like that gets stuck in my head somewhere in the back of my mind and is released when needed.

(This is why I have a 3rd. party reading my column for approval oh, well.)

Time to savor life, learn, love, have friends, cultivate hobbies, be at peace work out emotional, physical traumas.

Really get into Yoga, Tai Chi, The Karma Sutra, Tantra, Sex, all those mental constructs for two or three decades.

Relationships would not be fraught with is it me, is it her problems.

Take up dance, languages, travel, being more culturally aware.

Collecting music books, Erotica not pornography.

To open all those doors of perception in my mind, to change my physical appearance and perception of self over time.

This is the first fifty years in a two hundred year journey.

Would I be the same after the next fifty years?

I’d have full range of my emotional states.

Instead of wondering why my tear ducts still work when hearing new, old songs or movies that touch me emotionally.

As for sexual orientation I’ll probably stuck in my hardwired heterosexual mode but still able to nurture children which curiously I’ve found I have the capacity and patience for.

Now that’s odd and scary, knowing I could be a better nurturing mother than women who are more equipped to give birth but then be raised by a strong black woman and other female relatives it seeped into me. May be it helps explain why certain songs and movies make my eyes brim over.

After the first century I may have married or gotten divorced.

I don’t think my body and mind will be quite the same because of genetic manipulation of my bone structure, my small hands are stronger but less delicate looking and I might become a Masseur and learn to be a Chef and finally facing my math phobia.

The next century would be full of concerts, travel, love, adventure, astronaut training, writing, and lots of funerals of family, friends, and famous folks I never met. To be at home where ever I am and use to technology or able to leave it living a balanced life.

As for younger and older women knowing when and when not to bring baggage (experience) to the relationship and letting go of son’s and daughters lives though watching over them as a parents do.

If 250 year pass and I’ve regained some youth and perspective I would be able to be student, instructor, wondering philosopher.

As Ms. Margaret Chow’s show "I’m the one I want" I’d finally be the man I was suppose to be and though it takes a century or more it would be worth the wait to work out all my problems.

To live alone or with another soul without the worry of being alone or loneliness being the dread that it is to many folks women do it and thrive men are learning too.

I guess what I’m saying is while we live whatever time is left we must be good to ourselves first before having others in our lives.

An as for the oral sex instruction in Nevada fantasy this is doable; all I have to do is save money for the trip and really be healthy and ready to learn all I can and graduate with crying colors.

It may not change my romantic plight (I still have to relearn how to dance.)

But I’ll have hidden confidence in my new found abilities.

I might pick up other pointers beside the main lesson which is like extra credit.

This is the only time I’ll go for extra credit because the benefits out way the lessons learned.

Its your turns girls and boys what kind of person would you be in 250 years or more – I know, its hypothetical (humor me) what type(s) of person would you be?

Please send donations to

Poor Magazine or in C/0

Ask Joe at 1448 Pine Street St. Street,

San Francisco, CA. 94103 USA

For Joe only my snail mail:
PO Box 1230 #645

Market St. San Francisco, CA 94102

415- 626-4405

Email: askjoe@poormagazine.org

by Joe B.

I’m over a flu virus or whatever made me sick for a couple days it feels like being in heavy dense fogged in cloudbank that has finally cleared.

There was thinking time in stuffed up, no sense-of-smell numbed taste buds, upset stomach, sore throat, and slow-motion reaction time.

Its great when people know not only what they are good at but also what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

The slow torture is either not reaching their goals or being so close they can taste it but not able to eat it.

It must put one in physical, mental ecstasy when finally achieving it.

I know when I finally saw my picture, a little of my believe system and finally all my words written down, over the intangible, invisible, cyberspace known as The World Wide Web.

I shortern Internet to I-net.

This was literally a century ago in the late 1990’s I’m still making grammatical errors but people seem to understand what I'm trying to say.

Of course there is one more goal that’s as author of various works of fiction, science fiction, adventure, maybe romance.

Some of my columns get published as a first dip into the pool of publishing.

I even thought of writing Pornography but I’m not real good at it I tend to write too graphically not being subtle when writing it.

Writing Erotica is more satisfying because it’s a slightly different genre from the other.

Both have to be handled gently, diligently, with feather touched care though many porn writers are consummate artists at their craft.

Maybe Writing Erotica can help me with other kinds of writing.

Besides I’m not a roughneck guy to me Pornography is way rougher than Erotica it does not mirror my personality as Erotic does at least in fantasy.

So I am near my first best destiny as author, novelist, whichever fits the art of composition.

Other pieces of destiny also tug at me.

Lately I’ve been humming notes,and lyrics; only problem is they are not on the radio!

I don’t think singing is in my future, oh God I hope pray its not.

One reason I cannot read music, don’t have a trained voice, don’t play an instrument.

But if this is an omen, an alternative part of my overall destiny because writing is involved then I should follow where the muse leads.

It would be sardonically ironic if I actually end up singing my own songs on some stage with people of all ages who love my songs if not me.

This also means I’d have to get into shape,dress in better clothes, and hide whatever self loathing I feel being on stage.

How do people do it as part of their daily lives?

Then go to the famous Apollo Theater New York City, where I was born before moving to California.

The audience there will tell me by cheers or jeers if I have "It"

For now its only nebulous thoughts in my head but like writing columns was in my head until I started doing it.

One roadblock is my age if a black guy in his late 40’s rapidly approaching 50 could be accepted as a new singer even if he does have a half way decent voice?

But it’s not up to the audience but the hapless scared guy on stage to give his best and hope the people in the dark like it or not.

I don’t think I’ll have groupies, I’d be more worried about how to keep the inspiration going and if it should come to sudden stop… Well, at least there won’t be regrets in that area because I not only tried but did the best I could while I was in that field.

That’s what I was thinking during my flu.

If I follow this muse to its end no one will be more surprised than me.

Isn’t that what life is about striving to do-be more?

Any readers follow or didn’t follow their inner drives, destiny?

I’d just like to know from readers after the fear, laughter of friends, family, lovers.

What happened when you did follow your own road to success or failure what happened?

Please send donations to

Poor Magazine or in C/0

Ask Joe at 1448 Pine Street St. Street,

San Francisco, CA. 94103 USA

For Joe only my snail mail:
PO Box 1230 #645

Market St. San Francisco, CA 94102

415- 626-4405

Email: askjoe@poormagazine.org

by Diallo McLinn

Now that society as a whole can reproduce anything, everything is being made for the purpose of the consumer market. Everything has become a commodity to be bought or sold. The personal meaning of events have become lost in the process of a buyer/seller type of society. Everything that is made or manufactured is sold. If we walk down most streets, we can find them jam packed with people buying gifts for friends, love ones, co-workers, and pets. Most people don’t even do it out of love. Or I should say that that fact has become secondary to the fact that we have been conditioned to buy simply for the fact that that is what we are suppose to do around this time of year. I make sure that every year around Christmas time that I say,"Happy Holidays," to as many people as possible. I have only heard that about four times this year. Twice the people who said it were trying to get change to eat with. Both people were trying to get money for so that they could make it through the holidays. I have though, seen so many ads advertising things to buy, things to say, and vacations to experience, if a person had the money or means. Now its not a bad thing that we have the ability to know what’s out there to buy for a loved one or whoever, but the things that are available to buy should in no way over-shadow the reason behind the holiday. We have lost the reason behind the holiday to the consumer.

"It is not just that the relationship to comodities is now plain to see-
commodities are now all there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commity...With the advent of the so-called second industrial revolution, alienated consumption is added to aliened production as an inescapable duty
of the masses....A cycle is thus set in train that must be maintained at all cost:
the total commodity must be returned in fragmentary form to a fragmentary individual completely cut off from the concerted action of the forces of production. pp111 reader

with the modern world here, the edges of a post-modern society begin to surface. We as a society are no longer blind. We have seen and have the ability to see all that any individual or organization can fathom. We are now in a time where images and experiences are everything; are bought and sold; are killed for in the outside world. Images are understood out of context and out of real events. The mystery is gone. The newness, and uniqueness of events can not be added into the matrix of experiences. The experiences are now weighted by other such experiences. The individual now lives in a world fragmented from everyday experiences. She or he is forced to look at their personal experiences in terms of their culture, and other such cultural experiences. Modern society has taken the individual out and away from the personal journey, separated the two, only to sell it back.

For, example, theirs the dead-head, drugged-out, hippie experience. In the past, a person would have to go live the dead-head life; have the dead-head beliefs and mentality. But now in a post-modern society, society knows and has rules to this identity. Everyone now knows what a dead-head is suppose to do, and think. This you can find by frequenting haight street. A person can buy shirts, and caps, and other odds and ends which are suppose to go with the identify of the dead-head experience; that go along with their preconceived idea of how such a experience is suppose to happen. Media has shown, or perhaps taught society how to view society. And yet media does not show us the dead-head, and say ‘this is a dead-head, look for the signs and remember.’ No, media shows us just the symbolic representations and characteristics that we know to be traits of dead-heads.
And then, media sells these ideas back to us, the consumer with the idea that we will transform ourselves into that idea. ‘I want that life I see. I want to have that experience, that knowledge, that whatever that goes with being a dead-head.’

Now if that’s not your thing. There are other things that society has made to sell back to you the consumer. There’s the pet rock, orange juice, apple juice, peach, pear, and banana juice too.’that cool refreshing taste. The taste of the next generation’ You can have a near-to-death experience by hand-gliding, rock climbing, swimming with sharks in Hawaii, buy a fire walk, or go on a Vision Quest with Outward Bound, or another group that does such a thing. Or if Travailing is not your thing, a person could sit at home and never leave. That person could simply ‘reach out and touch someone’ via the phone, fax, e-mail, regular postage mail, internet. We as single members of society can bring the words, images, objects, and ideas of all society to our doors instead of searching the world for such experiences.

Everything physical has been broken down. By this, I mean that modern day technologies can reproduce almost all images. Modern day society can reproduce almost all sounds that
are audible to the ear. Modern day society has put everything on a timeline. We wake up in the morning at 9:00 am. More precisely, the alarm that we bought at Cosco wakes us up
at nine-o’clock am. One hour til we have to be at work.( By we, I am referring to you the reader, and me the writer.) ‘let’s see,’ we say. ‘What can we do in the next hour before we have to jump in our car and make it to work?’ And yet, this is just an average scenario of an average person going to work In the morning. We know this routine. we know this routine through watch our parents, watching T.V., and Sunday morning cartoons such as the Flintstones or by reading Blondie. We too can see how the existence of white-collar working man, or blue-collar stone age man might live. We know because we see it, because we experience it.

And yet, are eyes truly windows into the soul? Can we trust what we see to be real, or at least any more real than a sound that comes from the closet of a melodramatic five year-old boy? Brian Swimme says in the forward to Thomas Berry’s THE DREAM or EARTH

"But Earth in an earlier time, some six hundred million years ago,
when the seas were rich with life, and the continents, after eons as storm
swept granite, now grew mossy and green.

"Around this time, the eyes come into earth’s life. Up until then life had developed, even over billions of years, without eyesight. We contemporary
humans identify so strongly with our visual elements of consciousness that we have some initial difficulty conceiving of a time when life proceeded without any eyes, but so it did...And nowhere was there a vision of waterfalls, nowhere the experience of the blue sky , or the desert colors awakening in their first rain." ppvii

Image is now everything. T.V. is everything too, right? I mean that if it can happen on T.V. it can also happen in real life? Now let us not look at the extreme situation, but one that could happen, but just never did. John doe walks to the corner store and sees a
beautiful all white poodle sitting in the entry way of the store. In T.V. land, John doe reaches down to pet the dog. The dog loves it. His tail wags to and fro and he barks out of enjoyment. The dogs owner ( ? ) hears and... the ending does not matter. What matters is that little Amber watching T.V. sees this to be true. She believes that what she has just witnessed on T.V. has actually happened when in reality that incident never existed except in T.V. land, a land full of words and images put together to communicate.

Since this incident has never happened, but still could, lets say it did. And let us say that it happened to little Amber who walked to the corner store for an afternoon snack. Now her conscious knowledge of what is happening has been drastically changed by the fact that she has seen what she is doing. Little Amber now has a choice of what do;Number one, go about her way and not enact this day as she saw it on T.V.. Choice Number two, pet the dog, and meet the owner. Though little Amber might be fully aware that T.V. is not real life, and that things do not happen in the same way as they do in T.V. land, many things do. Art mimics life, and life mimics art. Yet, in this case, art mimicked little Amber’s future experience. The walk to the store is no longer new, or unique. The incident is no longer sacred to the individual.

And what of sounds? What of the sound of the faint breeze rustling though an autumn morning in Portland Oregon? well, that can be recorded and played back faster than it would take to drive up there from San Francisco. Hey, and if its digitally mastered, the quality will even hold up forever; This is, if technology holds up.

Sounds are everywhere. From the time we are born- or even up to seven or eight months prior- we hear. For some reason we latch on, and begin to trust that first voice we hear while in mommies belly. We can sense that this voice is on our side, or at infant level, is us. Until the age of around one years old, babies consider everything self. They have no distinction between the Id and the everything else. Everything to them is the is the Id.
‘I’m hungry, where is my dinner "waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"I’m hungry.’ Sounds help us locate ourselves and everything else; to everything else. sounds help use determine if what we see is true. They help us communicate with all that is not us. We can buy audio instruction tapes, and learn to knit, fix a car, learn a new language, or get rocked to sleep by a trance mix, put together to relax our minds, or bodies, or even shakra’s, so we’re told.

Groups like the Orb play with sounds which relate to the inner structures of the body, not necessarily the ear or ear drum. Base and drum beats are used to soothe the body, and the physical parts there of. Like the drum or heartbeat, people are moved and gain a yearning to move. Most Latin dances like salsa use drums and other base sounds to inspire dancers to move. Treble moves the mind and tends to take us into our heads. The tones tend to resonate with our minds, and not so much with our bodies.

When I was in Hawaii, my friend and I would play a little game. It was called." shall we stay or shall we go." When we wanted to leave the place that we were in, we would add more base to whatever music was playing. This tended to make people antsy and what to move about. If we were comfortable, we would put more treble in the music that was playing. This tended to relax the listeners who would usually get in a talking mood.

Smells are stored and sold too. Incense can be bought almost at any store a person might look. Perfume, deodorant, rose water, condoms, (some are now scented), and scratch and sniff stickers and just a few examples of smells.

Nothing is original. Fredric Jameson states:

There is another sense in which the writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds-they’ve already
been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible.

There still exist some places in the world where commodity is not everything, like parts of Hawaii and Australia, but those places are commodities themselves. People buy their plane tickets hoping to find rest from this buyer/seller world that they helped create.
Places like Hawaii help people realize that there still exist a place untouched and unchanged by the human hand, but these places are numbered. Soon though with over-population and the fact the pollution will soon destroy what little nature we still have left, man and women must look elsewhere to find a little rest and recuperation from all that we cal civilization. So the question is raised;" where do we turn to now?" Maybe the answer lays in the technology that we have created to take the human condition to a brand new level. Enter the computer. And with the computer comes a new kind of reality, a cyber-reality in which everything that can be imagined can be created in this reality we call the computer.

Man and women can now weave their existences in and out of this virtual cyber world. She or he can communicate with people that are half way across the world. She or he can exist in this world and network out to thousands of people without leaving the comfortability of their homes. He or she can even talk to non real people if they like, or act out someone that they are not. My friend was on her computer and was talking to someone through her computer; she made a date with the person on the other end, and even found out about that persons life, if that person on the other end of the computer was telling the truth. what if that person never really existed? What if that person never really existed but in the mind of the person that created the persona?

Post modernism has fragmented the individual into pieces of that individual, into pieces of the id. Each aspect of a person can now be seen separate from the whole of that persons life. "This is Mike. Hear Mike’s voice on audio tape. the voice you hear is Mike’s right? See Mike on video tape. Looks like Mike. Must be Mike. Feel Mike’s pain through his poetry. Now you too can know what is going on in Mike’s head. Mike now exists even if the real Mike does not, or so a person might argue. In a way if that person thought that this was actually Mike, that person would not be entireally wrong, or right.

But what about the real person? What of the flesh and the blood which pump through Mike’s veins? What of the spontaneity and randomness, the uniqueness of Mike’s life which make his existence his and his alone? This is both good and bad. The good is that we can now trade facts and ideas without having to be present. The good is that we ‘can’ know Mike without ever having to cross paths with him. We as members of society can learn through watching and communicating with the ideas that he once put out.
But the individual is lost. The individual has surrendered himself to society, a society which wants to have and learn, but which has separated itself from nature.

We no longer live in nature. Man and women now cross the line, leaving the body behind, to pursue the mind, the id. We urn for the owning of and the knowledge of, but we have pasted the steps to truly understand that which we have obtained. Only a few of us have put ourselves on the path to understand how commodity relates to life inside and outside of this digital cyber-reality that is now present in almost all of our existence. And what of Mike?

Mike now is a representation of himself. His true existence has been broken apart, torn apart at the edges of his existence. Each instance and aspects of his life have been dissected and looked at not in the entirety of his life, but looked at in how it relates to a society which tries to categorize and understand. Mike as an individual has been fragmented from the unity which ties the existence of his life together.

Mike is not unique even in his fragmentation. All of us who choose to live in this Modern Society have been fragmented by our culture. We now live in and out of this Cyber-reality. Society and how it exists not takes it’s turn with the new cyber generation.
Each member of society weighs it’s existence against the existence of a virtual world that would and could not exist without technology. We have all been fragmented through this Cyber-reality.

What is Cyber-reality? Cyber-reality is a reality that tries to document and/or reproduce life, or aspects of it. Phones, fax machines, photographs, advertisements, postcards, computers, and maybe even fast food and proscription drugs can be put into this category. Cyber-reality is a reality which number one places human existence and consciousness on a linear plane. It places that fragmented parts of are lives and judges them not on the merit of the individual, but in relationship with the whole. The experience is now weighted against the other experiences. The maps have all been laid out. The instances and events have already happened. There is nothing new about what Mike or Ill Amber can do except experience the things themselves or not.

If in modern society all the scenarios have been played out and/or fabricated, the only option left is to play the scenarios over again, but this time as a different character. And why not? There is no reason that I can think of. Cyber-reality has given us the tool and the map to dictate where we go, and what ending our paths will carry us. We can go anywhere, do anything, and create it if we can imagine it. And yet with all of this, the only thing we cannot do is understand it.

What does all of this mean? Why would a person what to go through the motions? And can a person really understand something if that person does not actually experience it for real, in real life, not simulated or stimulated?

Enter the Creation generation. After post modernism, and after the wave of consumerism dies down; when all that can be bought and sold, are bought and sold; and everyone has as much as they can handle, people will begin to question the importance of what they have acquired. Man and women will begin to ponder the purpose these things create in their lives. Experiences will be weighted by their personal importance. for you see the majority of what we buy is not sold by the thing itself, but by the lifestyle that accompanies that object. Joe Smo who thought that he could become a hippie by buying the hype that was sold to him by advertisements, must realize the truth behind the image. He must realize the reality behind the myth that was sold to him by a society that buys, sells, and trades dreams as if they could be bought or sold. But something is missing. And that something is belief. That something is relationship to life. That something is the reality which exists even when the power has gone out because of a cold, stormy winters night.
Joe Smo must now give meaning and purpose to all that he has obtain. Joe Smo must now believe in all the things which occupy his humdrum life full of dreams and images of how he would truly like to live. It now becomes apparent that just having the objects and the knowledge are not enough. They are not enough unless they been something to the person who has obtained them.

Thus, at the end of this cycle of consumerism that the world now inhabits and embodies, comes a need to give "rhyme to reason." There will come a time in the near, or distant future to give purpose back to the things that we have.

Post Modernism is allowing us to fragment our identities.

by Clive Whistle and Reginald Williams/PoorNewsNetwork

As very low-income black folk, who have historically sufferred from institutional racism and classism which manifests in Government and Corporate policies such as Redlining, Redevelopment and Police harassment, leave the Bay Area in droves, the mainstream media would like us to believe this is due to their desire to "move up and out of poverty". Unfortunately, that is sometimes the case for middle and upper class black folk, but for very poor people who are already close to the financial edge of stability and were houzed in recently demolished or "redeveloped" public housing projects and given a piece of paper (i.e.voucher) in exchange for their apartments - and/or were residing in gentrified neighborhoods like West Oakland, The Bayview and The Mission District and have now been evicted (such as POOR Magazine contributors; Mama aka Lula b. Seymour and The Sloan Family of Oakland) these folks have dropped off the face of statistics and counts and are now some of the poorest homeless and/or vehicularily housed Bay Area residents. In other words these folks are not being heard and are now at the mercy of new and exciting forms of racism and classism such as Proposition N. This is our response to this recent assault on our civil and human rights.

Prop N is racist – there I said it.. and I’ll say it again, Prop N is racist and classist – it is targeted at very poor folks SUB-sisting on welfare in San francisco and the reality is that most of us very poor folk are people of color – and the people bringing this legislation on are very rich, mostly white folks who have a racist,classist agenda to "clean" us out of town – now what’s different bout that? – that’s been happening in the country since the beginning of time – once poor folks are no longer "useful" we aren’t wanted – or better yet, once we are taking up space that rich folks want we are kicked out.

So let’s begin by shattering a few myths, first of all poor people like myself who receive that little bit of money from General Assistance are WORKING for every penny – I wake up at 6:00 am two days a week to do my street cleaning job to EARN that little bit of nothing, $320.00 per month, (which Newsome proposes to take down to $1.84 per hour). I used to clean Muni Buses til my arms couldn’t do it no more. These and other GA jobs are union jobs that used to pay union wages of $15.00 dollars and above until they were turned into this new form of slavery; WORKFARE,

Finally, people harass me cause I spend my Workfare wages on alcohol – well, like my editors at POOR say, its my business what I do with my wage- I mean did they take Michael Milkins’ wages away cause he spent most of it on cocaine? Do they question a ceo at Enron on what he does with his wages…I am a very poor worker with a low-wage job and what these rich folks like Diane Feinstein, Gavin Newsome and the CEO’s of the GAP and The Restaurant Association ( all backers of Prop N) want to do is put us poor folks in mini-prisons like the ones that that Mayor Guiliani of New York City helped to establish – where instead of a GA check you get a shelter bed, have to work 8 hours a day sweeping the streets and if you don’t check in by 6:00 pm every day with a clean piss test you are kicked out and you don’t get a second chance- I know, I was there. all I am saying is folks – there are many reasons that very poor people and people of color like myself are homeless, beat down and living on welfare and most of it has to do with Institutional racist, classist policies like redlining, redevelopment and downsizing that cause gentrification, homelessness and joblessness for very low-income communities this legislation which proposes to take even the little I get now and drop it down to $59.00 dollars per month is just another example of life in Amerikka for poor folk like me.

by Carol Harvey, Street Spirit/ POOR Magazine October 2002

"Some of our opponents are pretty smart - smart enough to figure out that if you change who lives here, you change
who votes here, thus you can change the politics." - Chris Daly, S.F. Supervisor, D6

I stood holding groceries in the parking lot of the California-Fillmore Pacific Heights Molly Stone’s. I was
chatting with a man who was gripping a clipboard and fashionably dressed in a green L.L. Bean jacket. He was
collecting signatures for Care Not Cash, the homeless stipend reduction proposal.

A blonde woman in a gray coat buttonholed me, assuming I too was a petitioner. Inches from my eyes, her intense
stare pinned me in place. She angrily announced, “On my low teacher’s salary, I can’t afford a house in San
Francisco. My only choice is to turn my apartment into a condo. I want HOPE.”

She turned abruptly and marched up the ramp into the store. Blind with high emotion, she assumed erroneously that
I was opposing HOPE, the condo conversion Prop. No time to respond. All I could give her was my respectful
attention. Then she was gone.

I turned to Mr. L. L. Bean. "I gather you are also getting signatures for HOPE, and she knew that?"

"Yes," he said.

"I've just been tarred (and feathered) with the same brush," I said.

My non-connection with HOPE was not clear to her, but the connection between
HOPE and Care Not Cash became crystal clear to me. 'There are a lot of people like her,' I thought. 'What will
happen when she, and they, learn the truth?'

So, Mystery woman who hopes to buy a home. I am writing this for you.'

The most magical, integrated and cosmopolitan population on the North American continent

Calvin Welch, an affordable housing expert from the San Francisco Information
Clearinghouse, wrote in May 2001, "San Francisco is a profoundly immigrant City with wave after wave of economic,
ethnic, racial, cultural, political and sexual immigrants washing over each successive wave, building the most
magical, integrated and cosmopolitan population on the North American continent... That's the San Francisco dream."

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/id236.htm

That dream began eroding when a high-rise boom changed the economy of San
Francisco in the 1970s. Blue-collar union jobs in shipping, warehousing, and manufacturing were replaced by
"new-collar" clerical, business support, and retailing jobs, "moving low-income people of color out of San Francisco
to make space" for corporate offices. The first wave of gentrification in the 1980s, then a second wave during the
1990s dot-com boom, roared in like tsunamis, leaving higher and higher rents in their wakes.

"The cumulative effect of these forces has been to make the stock of existing rental housing in San Francisco
ground zero for attack after attack," Welch wrote. "Desperation grips a wide section of the middle class, once content
as tenants, to transform their current unstable living situation and seek out the supposed security of home ownership
no matter what the social cost.

"The latest desperate round in this battle of property owners against renters and the poor is the deceptively named
HOPE proposal, championed by conservative S.F. Supervisor Tony Hall on the November ballot. HOPE allows a new
category of apparently tenant-initiated condo conversions, removes the 200-unit-per-year limit, and eliminates
restrictions on building size.

Currently, in a building with more than six units, landlords can't convert to condos. Tenants are protected by rent
control and have relatively secure housing. HOPE would remove those restrictions and put all tenants at risk of condo
conversion evictions, unprotected by rent control, with landlords selling off units one by one. Landlords can get 25
percent of the tenants to sign a paper saying, "I want to buy my unit." Once signed, the tenant can't rescind it.
Landlords can easily collect signatures, pay tenants to sign, and include themselves if they live in the building. If
you move out, your signature still counts.

San Francisco's super rich paid the Committee on Jobs to fund twin ballot initiatives to accomplish their ends.
Using mayoral contenders Gavin Newsom and Tony Hall to front the Care Not Cash and HOPE proposals, they play on the
two deepest fears of voters: "Will I lose my home? Will I end up on the street?"

Newsom, the voice of Care Not Cash, "guarantees" phantom services for the lost
souls holding cups outside Mollie Stone's, an upscale supermarket in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights. Tony Hall, the
mouthpiece of HOPE, promises a "Home Ownership Program for Everyone." The super rich hope that fear and prejudice will
influence voters so that San Francisco voting blocs will be changed and rearranged with populations more amenable to
their interests.

The Strategy of the Super Rich

Sharon Stone, Danny Glover, Madeline Albright (who comes to visit her daughter and buy antiques), and others at
stratospheric socioeconomic heights mingle and shop with the less rich and famous at Mollie Stone's. Donald and Doris
Fisher of the Gap with their $2.1 billion, reside in a Pacific Heights high rise three blocks away. Close by, the
family mansion of oil tycoon Gordon Getty, worth another $2.1 billion, overlooks the Bay from Pacific Avenue.

Other top ten San Francisco billionaires who shop at upscale stores are Robert
Goldman of Levi Strauss ($1.5 billion); Stephen and Riley Bechtel ($3.5 billion each); Susan Buffett of Berkshire
Hathaway ($2.4 billion); Robert Niafy, movie theaters ($1.7 billion); George Roberts, leveraged buyouts ($1.4.
billion). Housing activists say the super rich have an agenda. And they have hired the Committee on Jobs to carry it
out.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/1...
20251.DTL

Some San Franciscans with world-class wealth have multinational corporate connections that stretch to New York and
circle the globe. That these local big fish swim in national and international high seas becomes evident upon looking
at the New York City Doe Fund Board, the group Gavin Newsom visited in the spring of 2002 to investigate their Ready,
Willing, and Able program to get homeless people off the streets of New York.

Newsom is the new forelocked stallion in the Getty-Burton stable. He is backed
by their vast wealth and the considerable funding of the Committee on Jobs. He owns wineries and restaurants with
Gordon Getty's son.

The New York homeless activist, Anthony Williams, describes the Doe Fund as
one millionaire's (McDonald's) collusion with another millionaire (Giuliani's) to feed the voting public a program
which appears to get the homeless off the street, but simply exploits their work or runs them out of town.

Anthony Williams, is co-founder of "Picture The Homeless," which organizes unsheltered people on the streets of New
York.

http://www.gvny.com/columns/lamb/lamb01-11-02.html

In Spring 2002, Williams told me that RWA pays their laborers $5.50 an hour for jobs like “sweeping and bagging
garbage,” working next to city employees earning “quadruple for the same work. People untrained for living wage
employment later recycle back into poverty.”

http://www.poormagazine.com/index.cfm?L1=news&story=726

In the same way, Care Not Cash would reduce the wages of homeless San Francisco workfare street sweepers to $1.84
an hour while their DPW counterparts earn many times as much.

The Doe Fund's corporate and foundation sponsors include: Bloomberg News,
Bloomingdale's, Business Week, Canon, Chase Manhattan, CIBC World Markets, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Fannie Mae
Foundation, Forbes, Inc., Goldman Sachs, Kiplinger Foundation, Lehman Brothers, Newsweek, New York Junior League, New
York Times, People Magazine, Reader's Digest Association, Soloman Smith Barney, Charles Schwab, Time Inc., Toyota,
U.S. News & World Report, World Bank.

http://www.doe.org/

The Doe Fund website displays photos of the "generous donors" of their exclusively male Caucasian 11-member board.
Global banking and financing representative, Mike Gantcher, Director of Investments Middle Market Group, CIBC World
Markets, stands next to his blonde wife, Christina. ." All 'generous donors,’ their family members, and RWA staff are
repeatedly and fully identified under several photos that omit the names of all seven anonymous smiling homeless
partygoers standing beside them. RWA staff are named. RWA participants are not. “Generous Donors” are white. RWA
staff and participants are people of color. (Click on the invitation to view "two participants in the women's
program," and five "RWA trainees enjoying themselves at the University Club.) "The homeless," all people of color,
are merged into an undifferentiated mass of insignificant nonentities in these RWA photos.

http://www.doe.org/events/donors/

Other board members represent chemicals and biogenetic foods, Manhattan real
estate, media conglomerates, venture capital and corporate finance, and global
investment bankers like Citigroup.

CHEMICALS/ AGRIBUSINESS: Timothy P. Andree, Senior Vice President of Communications; BASF world’s largest chemical
company, agribusiness (biogenetic foods).

REAL ESTATE: Jeff T. Blau, President, The Related Companies, LP; Real estate; develops manages and finances “the
most desirable residences in New York City,” ”the world’s finest real estate developments.”

PUBLISHING: Richard Burgheim, Consulting Editor, Time, Inc.

VENTURE CAPITAL: P. Benjamin Grosscup, Senior Vice President, Munn, Bernhard & Associates, Inc.; investment
management company, corporate finance.

GLOBAL INVESTMENTS: Jon Harris, Alternative Investment Management; Global Investors who “wish to be part of the
global network;” sponsoring members: Citigroup; CIS, Euronext, Fortis.

MANHATTAN REAL ESTATE: Peter Resnick, Managing Director, Jack Resnick & Sons, Inc.

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS IN SILICON VALLEY/ CALIFORNIA COMPUTERS AND INTEGRATED CIRCUITS: Craig Lucas, General
Partner, Zimmer-Lucas Partners LLC.

Board member Leslie Hawke has Hollywood and Eastern European connections. Her son is actor Ethan Hawke, married to
Uma Thurman. Her People Magazine story, "Mother On A Mission," recounts how she left the boredom of her life to join
the Peace Corps in Bacau, Romania, after John F. Kennedy, Jr's plane crash. Using her connections on the Doe Fund
Board, she set the mothers of gypsy beggar children to work in a Bacau Ready, Willing, and Able program. Perhaps
fellow board members from the corporate media like Richard Burgheim, Consulting Editor, Time, Inc., which publish
People magazine, made possible the presentation of this puff piece.

http://www.doe.org/news/articles/

Doe Fund board member Craig Lucas, of Zimmer-Lucas Partners, invests in
biopharmaceutical and computer firms in Tustin, Costa Mesa, Sunnyvale, and Richmond, which develop high-density
electronics, miniature cameras, and integrated circuits. And so we come full circle around the globe and back to
California.

http://www.doe.org/about/board.cfm

With so many high-powered business interests focused on homeless people, it
raises speculation as to why they haven't been rescued from the streets long ago
to affordable homes of their own.

The Broken Windows Theory

The conservative social policies of the super rich, represented by Newsom in San Francisco, are made clear by a
look at the ideas of the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank in New York City. Anthony Williams explains,
"During the Dinkins Administration, the Manhattan Institute developed the Broken Windows theory, a way to deal with
social ills which says, 'If you clean the dirt, the homeless will be swept out of sight, out of mind' - like shards of
glass from a storefront window after a riot.

"In his keynote address at the 1999 Livable Cities Conference in Washington, D.C., Giuliani said, "The Broken
Windows theory, probably our first big success... is being applied in cities across the country."

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cb_17.htm

Indeed. Besides Bacau, Romania, the RWA program has expanded to Harlem, Jersey City, and Philadelphia. What a coup
for Newsom if he can bring it to San Francisco!

Under Giuliani, the NYPD became a repressive force acting out the Manhattan
Institute's Broken Windows agenda. After a thief attacked a woman named Nicole
Barrett, and was falsely labeled homeless, Giuliani decided "to get those crazies off the street." Since 1999, police
hostility has been directed at homeless people for quality of life crimes such as sleeping, loitering, urinating,
obstructing benches. Giuliani claims the homeless have disappeared from Manhattan. Activist Anthony Williams says
they are hiding in plain sight, running in terror from the police and possible incarceration in shelters and upstate
prisons. Lately, however, homeless people are re-emerging from Manhattan shadows. Giuliani is gone.

Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash resembles the Manhattan Institute's Broken Windows theory. Homeless activists insist
the cash-reduction plan is void of compassionate caring services. They say the real agenda is to sweep the homeless
out of the city by making it too expensive to live here on $1.84 an hour, the workfare stipend reduction to be
presented to voters in November. Newsom's trip to The Big Apple to check out McDonald's Doe-funded Ready, Willing,
and Able program exposed the Getty-Burton New York connections.

Researching the right-wing Manhattan Institute and Giuliani's approval of McDonald's attempts to use the homeless
to "sweep" New York City clean, exposes the agenda of the equally right-wing San Francisco super rich to turn San
Francisco into a little Manhattan owned by the top ten percent of extremely wealthy people. They believe in the
Manhattan Institute studies that have claimed that discipline and punishment, not homes, are the solutions to
homelessness.

As Welch puts it that homeless and lower-income tenants alike are to be treated as supplicants, not full citizens
of the community. These victims, like newly jobless dot-commers, fall into a gap between lowered wages and soaring
rents created by the super rich, who victimize and judge them unworthy of having their fall broken by a social safety
net.

Welch called HOPE "a sugar-coated poison pill."

Welch and S.F. Tenant Union Director Ted Gullicksen concur that the super rich
wish to change the dream of the multicultural melting pot in which "separate and distinct immigrant populations can
first meet and settle and then mingle and mutate" in a city in which housing is as flexible as the population" -
meaning "both apartments and homes."

Said Welch, "Land use is the essence of politics in San Francisco."

Incredibly, Welch and Gullicksen say that the San Francisco super rich want this seven-by-seven-mile city for
themselves, transforming the City into the exclusive preserve of the affluent. Welch said, "Their definition of
multiculturalism is where you can go to any restaurant featuring a variety of the world's cuisines." They plan to use
HOPE to run the tenant population out of rental spaces in the City and change San Francisco voting patterns. They have
even figured out how many years this will take.

Just as they plan to use Care Not Cash to make homeless people disappear by
attrition or death, they have created HOPE as a condo-conversion scheme to control who lives here and who works here,
and to transform San Francisco to a City of the Rich in 25 years or less.

Committee On Jobs

Welch reported that he has heard Nathan Nayman say as much. Nayman is the executive director of the Committee on
Jobs, the organization funded by the San Francisco super rich and big businesses to lobby for their interests at City
Hall. Nayman and Mark Mosher, the main lobbyist for the Committee on Jobs, represent the interests of the likes of
The Gap's Don Fisher, Walter Shorenstein, Levi Strauss, Macy's, Bank of America, and various presidents and CEOs of
big corporations. Every high rise in the financial district is a member of the Committee on Jobs, as is every big
landlord in the city. The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), representing big commercial and residential
landlords, is notorious for low wages and for fighting tenant initiatives. "BOMA always puts a big chunk of money
against anything tenants put on the ballot," said Gullicksen.

According to Welch, the enormous effort currently under way by the Committee on Jobs, BOMA, the Golden Gate
Restaurant Association, and the hotel owners to get HOPE on the November 2002 ballot is explained by the November 2000
election of the new district-based Board of Supervisors. This election caused a major shift in political power in San
Francisco, dramatically reducing the influence of business elements.

"Corporate San Francisco's agenda is to remove the disparate, unruly, incredibly diverse, populist culture that has
given San Francisco much of its flavor and political history in the last 50 years," said Welch. These corporate
interests need the power of the Board of Supervisors to remove the "economically irrelevant" population from San
Francisco and replace it with businesses and affluent residents.

It is troublesome to Corporate San Francisco that the Board of Supervisors can
approve or disapprove million-dollar developments, and that they must go through
an election process that can be hijacked by this cacophonous crowd. Because the big-business interests lost in 2000,
they now realize they can't defeat each supervisor in their districts. Welch has actually heard Nathan Nayman say,
"What we're going to have to do is change the San Francisco voter."

Gullicksen confirmed Welch's view that "the reason the Committee on Jobs are the ones putting all their funding
money, a million dollars, on Proposition R, the HOPE initiative, is that they know they are stuck with district
elections, and initiatives that pass, and all they have left is to change the population of the voters. Their goal is
to displace and get rid of all the low- and moderate-income tenants in the City."

Commented Welch, "Care Not Cash tries to transform San Francisco by altering the way it provides services to poor
people. HOPE would dramatically increase the potential for renter households in rent-controlled apartments to be
displaced by people with more money. The super rich/ Nayman /Committee on Jobs position is that, ‘If we want to
change the politics of this Board of Supervisors, we have to first remove their electoral base. We do that by going
after rent control and social services.’

From this point of view, Chris Daly is supervisor because nonprofit service providers and low-income tenants in
rent-controlled buildings voted for Chris. Since we can't beat Chris with somebody else, we've got to remove his
electoral base. "The real connection between Care Not Cash and HOPE is precisely that both are aimed at changing the
City's electoral base by driving away low-income residents.

The essence of Care Not Cash is to break the solidarity and the equal footing between the person in need of a
social service and the person providing it. The
assumption behind Care Not Cash is that poor people are different because they
are needy; if they do not have money, they are not to be considered full citizens.

"That is the same line being touted by HOPE," said Welch. "There's this intense image of tenants as parasites." The
Committee on Jobs stokes the perception that
only homeowners give to communities and neighborhoods, and care about the future of our children.

Gullicksen agrees, saying, “Whenever Nancy Tucker, a landlord activist working for small property owners, or Joe
Capko, a tenant spokesperson for big landlords, have been at an event I attended, they look at me and the other
tenants there with absolute hate in their eyes. It's very odd."

"Welch said, "The vilification of tenants by the supporters of HOPE is really quite astounding. It is, in essence,
a denial of common San Franciscan citizenship." Their belief system is that if you're homeless, or if you're a
tenant, you're not a San Franciscan.

The Committee on Jobs is pumping up the emotion behind the reactionary
supporters of these initiatives.

HOPE seems to represent explicit class warfare. At the present legal limit of 200 condo conversions per year, it
would take many centuries to evict every San Francisco tenant. HOPE would allow landlords to evict tenants faster
because it increases the number from 200 to approximately 3,400 a year. That would enable property owners to sell off
the units to the rich, and San Francisco could be ethnically and economically cleansed.

"That's absolutely correct," stated Gullicksen. "In 25 years, this measure will get rid of half of the rental units
in the City. They will keep the 3,400 conversions. That's good enough. They don't have to get rid of every single
last tenant, just half of them. When you think of the massive change we are talking about - 25 years to completely
transform San Francisco into a city for the super rich - it's actually a very short time.”

Their sheer amount of money makes the Committee on Jobs formidable. Viewing their financial filings on the Ethics
website reveals a ‘bottomless pit of money.’ They paid a high price getting HOPE on the ballot, using paid signature
gatherers who earned $2.00 per signature and collected the bulk of them.

"But," said Gullicksen, "The Yes on R people fought the endorsement war part of the campaign, and lost. On August
21, 2002, the Central Committee for the
Democratic Party came out against HOPE."

So, the Committee on Jobs has gone a'courting by working on various interest
groups to subtly change their perceptions - Chinese voters in the Sunset/Richmond, select African-Americans with
business interests, the wealthy gay men of the Plan C. Board, the Fang's Examiner and editors Frank Gallagher and
Nancy Tucker, who has the double advantage to the Committee on Jobs of being an original member of the Small Property
Owners Association.

Welch explained, "The business community has courted the Chinese community as a natural ally... The Examiner, and
the Fang newspapers, including Asian Week, project the image of the Chinese as solidly middle class. Reading these
papers, one would not know that the overwhelming majority of Chinese people in San Francisco are tenants."

They have failed in their attempt to project the gay community as this upwardly
mobile, middle-class population with no political reason to make allies with people of color or environmentalists." A
look at voting patterns in the gay community reveals political support for common issues with lower-income people.

Supporters of HOPE and Care Not Cash, the Plan C Board of Directors is predominantly upper-middle-class gay men.
Plan C is of pivotal importance as a group that has narrowed its focus from sexual orientation to money. Thus, they
are able to support Tony Hall, a right-to-life proponent, in his class-war initiative, HOPE. Welch thinks that Sup.
Tom Ammiano must be full of consternation, wondering how it can be that, in the end, all politics is reduced to class
based on money.

The Committee on Jobs, along with Getty-Burton interests, appears to be using
both the Chronicle and the Examiner, with the Fang's blessing, to attack nonprofits like the Coalition on
Homelessness, which defends the rights of the homeless poor, and the Housing Rights Committee, which defends rent
control and the interests of low-income tenants.

Last fall, 2001, The Examiner hired Frank Gallagher, formerly employed by Solem and Associates, a public relations
firm that has represented landlords, developers, and PG&E. In an apparent attempt to get the Housing Rights Committee
defunded, Gallagher wrote articles suggesting the organization was misusing taxpayer money to work for ballot
initiatives favoring the interests of tenants.

(http://www.sfbg.com/36/43/news_housing.html )

According to Gullicksen, "The City did an audit and gave HRC a clean bill of health." A similar attack on the
Coalition on Homelessness has led to the loss of some of their funders.

The vociferous desperation in the fight to realize the dream of property ownership and control over San Francisco
housing stock is captured in the personality and behavior of one of the more colorful characters of the pro-landlord
forces: Nancy Tucker, founding member of the Small Property Owners Association. Tucker, who claims she has a 30-year
journalism career, mainly at the Army Times, edits the op-ed page for the Examiner, motivated by pure zeal. Housing
activists speculate she trades stories back and forth with Examiner columnist Frank Gallagher. Gallagher does hit
pieces on nonprofit agencies and progressive Supervisor Chris Daly. Nancy Tucker promotes HOPE.

Small property owners are landlords of buildings with two to four units, not impacted by HOPE. HOPE will impact
only the larger buildings. Gullicksen said he believes their difference with tenants on land-use issues is simply a
matter of "plain old conservative ideology." They want tenants gone. The SPOSF would vote conservatively on issues
like bonds and taxes as well as social issues.

Tucker has come to symbolize for me the high paranoia gripping San Franciscans who are searching for fool's gold in
a new rush to vote out rent control and convert their apartments to condos. A rent-controlled apartment would allow
them to save for a home, but when HOPE effectively repeals rent control, rents will skyrocket. The very wealthy know
that only they will be able to afford a space in San Francisco. The trick within a trick is that HOPE will do exactly
the opposite of what it says.

The SPOSF share with the super rich a vision of San Francisco as "the largest
gated community in the country." The Committee on Jobs promotes the SPOSF vision of San Francisco as a suburb with
suburban values, conservative fiscally and socially. Said Gullicksen, "People with lots of money. No homeless lying
on sidewalks. No poor people. Not even tenants. Just a nice place where you can raise your children" in a
freestanding house with a green yard and a picket fence.

Property owners are less inclined to vote for tax increases or bond measures. They vote against adequate funding
for homeless services or affordable housing, and in favor of measures that drive homeless people out of town because
their very existence brings down property values.

Tucker's career as a pro-landlord activist reveals a person obsessed with property rights and anger and hatred
towards marginalized groups she believes are stealing her little piece of San Francisco. This attitude is widely
shared by the pro-landlord forces trying to force low-income people out of the City altogether.

The case of Lola McKay shows the cruel extremes to which landlords will go in their vendetta against renters.
McKay, an 83-year-old woman, faced an Ellis Act eviction in the last days of her life. She received anonymous letters
saying, "Get the hell out," and "Go buy cat food if you can't afford rent." Greatly distressed, Lola showed these
letters to Raquel Fox, a lawyer for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, who participated many times in pickets in front of
Lola's house and knew the elderly tenant personally. Fox said she believes this trauma contributed to Lola McKay's
death just before she could be evicted.

McKay's fate shows the inhumanity of this effort to drive low-income people out of San Francisco. Care Not Cash
would reduce homeless GA recipients to abject poverty and misery. The HOPE initiative would result in the eviction of
countless renters. Paired together, these twin initiatives threaten to recreate Lola McKay's tragic fate a thousand
times over. And so, Blonde shopper who buttonholed me in Molly Stones parking lot adamantly claiming your right to a
home, I fervently hope you will not be one of these.