Story Archives 2011

Hey! Misaligned nation in a candy-coated thumbscrew
Who's gonna bring the REAL news to you?
Sometimes homeless humans, finding lucrative jobs
Significant employment, the system otherwise robs
Inspecting the issues, taking a stand
Providing needed insight, impact by demand
Making a difference, one paper at a time
For the reader AND the seller--just spare a dollar (not a dime)
 

...will add audio later...

When I was fifteen I dreamed about being 21

Couldn't wait for that freedom

My own place would be so much fun

But when I left my gardenland of childhood bliss

You know I never thought I

Would have so much to miss...

Chorus:

Why didn't anybody tell me

All those things I needed to know

Why did they fill me

With meaningless innuendos

I coulda done so much better

If I'd've only known what I was doing

It only hurts us all

Who are they fooling?

When I left high school

I still had the better part of my dreams

Only three years later

I was falling apart at the seams

Well, did I know the year

--they wanna know

Did I know who was President

(like it really mattered)

Did I know who I was--ha!

I hardly knew how to pay the rent---

Chorus...Bridge...

Oh, I was

Too smart to die

I was too dumb to see

That if I had a baby

The government would take them

Away from me

They said I didn't know how to handle

Re--spon--si--bil--it--y

I'm just a bit too unorthodox--

--in the end, they took all three------

from me...             (scream)

So, for those of you who're

Out   there   now

With young minds and young dreams

Don't get hooked on the future

Because it might not be as great as it seems

On one rainy night Jan. 2011, my eyes was wide open like pan fried eggs. My pupils burned like hot sauce and fogged up like steamy shower doors. Apartment tenants slammed doors all night long to early morning hours when the birds started to sing. Loud voices of party prowlers penetrated the paper thin walls. Thump! Thump! Thump! the sound of heavy feet running over head shook me out of what little three minute sleep I manage to steal. SCREAM! How did a once nice peaceful studio apartment turn to a horrilble hub of hell? I FEEL THE FIRE OF THE SLUM LORD MILLIONAIRE SPELL!!!        

Wikipedia's definition of slumlord:

"A slumlord (also spelled slum lord) is a derogatory term for landlords, generally absentee landlords, who attempt to maximize profit by minimizing spending on property maintenance, often in deteriorating neighborhoods. They may need to charge lower than market rent to tenants. Severe housing shortages allow slumlords to charge higher rents.    " Wikipedia definition for millionaire: "A millionaire (originally and sometimes still millionnaire^[1]) is an individual whose net worth or wealth is equal to or exceeds one million units of currency. It can also be a person who owns one million units of currency in a bank account or savings account. Depending on the currency, a certain level of prestige is associated with being a millionaire, which makes that amount of wealth a goal for some, and almost unattainable for others."

Mis management and slum lord practice goes together like freezing temperatures and icicles. The slum lord only care about collecting the rent money.The tenants safety, security and privacy are put in the hands of an unqualified, arrogant, and dishonest apartment managers. The slum lord hires the jerks to save money. It will cost him more to hire a real qualified manager with a good record.One dreary day I fell to sleep while I was watching television,I was woke up by a snooping female apartment manager who had the master key to all of the apartments, I was woke up to the noise of her opening my door. She didn't knock on my door at all. When I asked her what was she doing she just said, " sorry "! Then like a psycho, she slammed the door hard.  That was scary as a Stephen King stalker. I was as happy as the three stoogies when she quit and ran off to cow girl heaven.

The happiness didn't last too long, her left behind boyfriend from hell became the new manager.. His management skills stank like dead skunk breathe. Constantly the toilet, shower,washer,or dryers stayed broken down so much it became a habit ,expect bad news anytime.Party purgers threw up on the bathroom wall and floor,it took hours before the jaintor came to clean it up. Janitors was hard to keep on the job . They blew away like dust in a storm, maybe the bad -mouth graffitti on the walls scared them off in the sunset. I knew that one day things would get out of control like a loin in New York steak house.

Many times I came home from work and noticed that my apartment had been searched. I knew I wasn't the only one when an african american tenant yeled at the manager about his room being violated. Later many other tenats spoke of their apartments being searched while they was out working.    When I reseaarched the law about the landlord entering your apartment it stated:
"He is supposed to notify you 24 hours in advance if he needs to enter your home for any business connected to the renovation/repair of his property. If he does not notify you, you need to notify him IN WRITING that he is violating the privacy laws and that you can and will take him to court to prevent his "snooping" in your personal/private affairs. I would be certain, however, that he is indeed the one who is responsible for releasing personal information without your consent."

3AM one morning, I was woken up by some one click-click-clicking my lock to my apartment door. I sat up and yell, " You got the wrong door! " The click-click-clicking got more insane. I yell, "You got the wrong door!" The click-click-clicking went into overdrive. finally my patience RAN OUT LIKE COLD BEER at a frat house party. I snatched the door open, there stood a 6'4" frankenstien home invader who push my door open, babbling " this my roooor ooom. "I snapped into survivor mode and slamed the door. Some how he stuck his head in the door jamb . I increased my strenght and his head was crushed vice-like. His eyes gut big and then he dashed off down the creepy hallway. I told the manager abouy the incedent : he ignored me, He never tighten up srecurity for the tenants safety.

Racial tensuon grew and tenants didn't respect their neighbors safety, security, or privacy.   On the internet, Criminal Justice Tntervention stated:  "  Harassment is a crime. If proven, depending on the severity and frequency of the conduct and the harasser's prior criminal record, harassment can be punishable as either a gross misdemeanor or a felony. Harassment can mean many things. It can refer to the actions of a person (or group) who is repeatedly sending you threatening letters, calling you on the phone, or repeatedly sending you unwanted gifts. It can also involve behavior such as following you, watching you, and coming to your place of work or home. This behavior is commonly referred to as "stalking". Harassment can also include intentionally exposing you to materials which the harasser knows, or has reason to know, are culturally offensive or intimidating to you."

The land lord becomeds a millinaire while the tenants dignity and morals fades and dissapears.

The srange thing is that I found more safety and security while living in a shelter. I get enough sleep at night and get to work on time.

And I save my money so I can find a better place to live in the future.  Here are some helpful links to click for more information.http://bit.ly/geboSF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"If I said I was going to kill 99 of your friends as opposed to 100, does that mean you'd be any less opposed to the slaughter?"--ex-San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, commenting on the proposed Twitter payroll tax deal

The new kids on the block on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors got there, partly, by appealing to the generic weariness of voters with endless fighting over, well, everything.  Ex-Supe Chris Daly became the poster boy for this change.

"Progressive" is the buzz phrase of the day too.  Everyone who wants to be thought of as a nice guy or gal is a "Progressive", has "Progressive" or "San Francisco" Values.  What are those anyway, when San Francisco has a Sit/Lie Law and a Top Gun ex-Po'Lice Chief District Attorney who also turned his coat from Republican to Democrat?  Gives me warm fuzzy feelings it does.

Nobody could or would define "Progressive", etc., nor can they now, nor can they demonstrate them because they fear corporations like Twitter (Zynga and others now rattling the Supes' cages) will leave the city if they don't continue manifesting some version of Gavin Newsom's old, tired hostile-to-taxes (or any other way of actually raising new revenues) attitude to counteract the All Budget Brawl In City Hall All The Time atmosphere. 

Perhaps I should be more optimistic?  After all, things were better when Tom Ammiano, Chris Daly, et al, were Supervisors.  We have been through a long, strange trip this 20-Odd years from 1990 to 2011, many moons, many Mayors.

Now we come to Twitterville Station, where we must temporarily or forever give up a 1.5%  payroll tax on the corporate vampires that feed on us or...they will take their fangs out of our necks and...go suck on someone else (in Brisbane...)!  Oh, God, No!  Say it ain't so, Mr. Grinch.

The tax deal would cut $22 million out of a city budget bleeding red in the hundreds of millions.  $22 million--for a corporation valued at $10 BILLION!!!  We seem to be a magnet for corporate bullies like Twitter and Amerikkka's Cup-obsessed Larry Ellison of Oracle. 

Twitter wants its own MUNI bus line.  Twitter wants the SFPD to provide more (foot patrol) security than they do for...well who do they provide it for anyway?  They were asked to participate in a Community Benefit District, a set-up that never benefits houseless or poor people.  No surprise--they apparently won't sign any dotted line on that idea--they want to MAKE MONEY, not spend it.

I live in District 6, near where this Twitterpated deal is supposed to go down.  POOR Magazine recently held a protest death ceremony for small businesses at Van Ness Avenue and Geary Street that will be destroyed to make way for the new Sutter Health hospital that will be built for everyone but houseless and poor folks.  Both ends of District 6 (including POOR Magazine's Redstone Building offices on 16th Street in the Mission neighborhood), plus everywhere in-between, are under intensifying pressure from developers, Twitter, etc.

My SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotel, the Elk, has a good neighbor, another SRO purpose-built by a well-known non-profit agency.  They a bad tenant, a cafe that many of us watched being put in--hoping it would be some form of coffeehouse.  It isn't a coffeehouse.  It's a karaoke bar.  My window looks out on the street behind it (where I get to listen to early morning massive noise from a meal providing non-profit I don't hate, though the noise has gotten worse in recent months), but a friend who does live on the Eddy Street side of the building gets to hear the music and the singing all night.

I may look warm and fuzzy (beards seem to do that to people...) but i'm not feeling warm and fuzzy about this. 

The Budget Brawl In City Hall will probably make the Progressive Happy Talk go away.  I must ask...what then?  Nobody wants to stick their finger in the dike because the corporate fishies might chew it off. 

To the Supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee:  Stick a finger in!  You've got nine more.  Each.  Show some spine.  Show you care.  Show you care about poor people.

To anyone wanting to help them do that, contact District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim at
jane.kim@sfgov.org
or at her phone number:
415.413.7525

or contact Mayor Ed Lee at
his phone number: (415) 554-6141
or at his e-mail address:
mayoredwinlee@sfgov.org