We are the 99%

Move Your Money!

Got an email from a friend this morning promoting this idea  and I think it's great and want to spread the word!  And do watch the video....funny...I've quoted some of these lines before.  Arise for Social Justice just switched its account to a community bank earlier this month.  Move Your Money!

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, a few friends were having dinner wondering what personal actions they could take to help limit the power of the big banks and create a more sane, stable financial system. How, they wondered, could they help end the era of Too Big To Fail? The financier at the table recommended that everyone could move their money out of the Wall Street banks and into community banks. Community banks are typically more conservative about how they manage their money, they’re more closely connected to the people and businesses who live near them, and they’re more inclined to make loans they know will get paid back. In other words, they have the values that more people would want banks to have.

The filmmaker at the table reminded the others of the story told in the classic film It’s A Wonderful Life — a tale about a small banker, played by Jimmy Stewart, who almost gets crushed by a big banker. In the end, though, the community rallies around the small bank and helps save it.

Three days later, the filmmaker made a short video, displayed on this site. The editor wrote a commentary about the idea. And others started pulling various resources together.

This site was set up as a modest home for the effort. A seed. But the idea will only have an impact if others take it from here.

How? For starters, you could move your money to a small bank. To do so, click on the button that says Find A Bank. But there are dozens of other possibilities: You can get your friends or organizations to do the same. You can use your online social networks to help broadcast the idea. You can look into where your town government keeps its money and, if it uses a big bank, you could try to get it to use a smaller bank. Start your own website (to improve upon or replace this one), dive into the research about smaller banks, and help give rise to a bigger, broader effort.

There is no official organization here. It’s a volunteer project. If you have ideas about how this idea can grow, send us a note and we’ll display the best ideas in the Updates section of the site.
We hope this idea will spread in a thousand different ways.
Thanks for whatever you can do.

Only the wealthy (and clueless) could think homelessness is chic

The NY Times reporter Guy Trebay has an article this morning on "homeless chic"-- the most recent infatuation of top clothing designers with the creative attire of the desperate.

From one designer:

“I’m not saying let’s glamorize the homeless,” said Ms. Wasson, who is often cited by fashion magazines as a style “icon” and a “muse” for Alexander Wang, a designer known for outfitting the kind of women who a couple of minutes ago were reverenced by fashion as “It” girls.

“It’s not like I’m saying, ‘Oh, God, that’s so inspiring — you got your clothes from a garbage can,’ ” Ms. Wasson said. What is she saying then? “When I moved down to Venice Beach, I found these people with this amazing mentality, this gypsy mentality — people that you couldn’t label and put in a box,” said the designer, perhaps forgetting that some of those very people live in one.

At the other end of the awareness spectrum is Frank Kelly, named the "Best Dressed Man in America" by Esquire magazine in 2007. He takes homeless people under his wing in his program Project Vacant Streets, helps them build confidence in their ability to get a job, then outfits them at Target. 33TV.

Let's all pretend for a moment that reincarnation is a fact of life (and death). Where will Ms. Wasson wind up on the ladder of existence? How about Mr. Kelly?

Bureaucratic barriers hide the real numbers of poor people

Sunday's New York Times reported on a curious phenomenon: poverty and unemployment are increasing, but somehow the welfare rolls are not going up-- the rate of enrollees from last year to this year is a statistically insignificant 0.3%. A few states had increases, a few had decreases, but it all balanced out.

The number of people receiving food stamps, however, went up in every single state, sometimes dramatically-- Florida's rate went up 16%.

So why the difference?

Since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act passed in 1996, public assistance, although partially funded by the federal government, is administered by each state with a great deal of latitude. The Food Stamp program, however, or SNAP as it is now called, is a straightforward federal program with a simple application form, and it doesn't cost the states a penny.

Therefore states have no reason to hide how many people are on the SNAP program, while much of public assistance, with its poor cousin homelessness, come directly from cash-poor state coffers.

Here in Massachusetts, public assistance administrators have a long history of keeping the family homeless rolls down by by creating regulations that disqualify families from shelter. If a family is not in a homeless shelter, that family can't be counted in the statistics.

This year, the line item that provides shelter for homeless families is facing a $3.36 million deficit. The Executive Office of Health and Human Services has figured out a way to reduce that deficit by $517,375 by instituting eight new regulations.

The advocacy organization Mass. Coalition for the Homeless has analyzed the impact of one of these regulations:

1. Denying eligibility to families who have been evicted or voluntarily left public or subsidized housing without good cause in the past three years. This represents a significant expansion of grounds for denial. Under current regulations, a family can be denied access to shelter if they have been evicted from public or subsidized housing for non-payment of rent, criminal activity, or destruction of property and that eviction is directly connected to the family’s current need for shelter.

Currently, this bar from shelter usually is in effect for no more than 12 months. It is unclear how broadly DTA will define good cause. In one estimate from DTA, this change would affect 20 families per month, although the actual number of children and families left without shelter may be much higher. In describing this change, DTA has said, “Families in this situation have already been granted and lost one of the most generous public benefits due to their own actions…Besides saving scarce EA resources for those who have not had this opportunity, this policy shift will be an incentive to those with subsidies to keep them.”

The Coalition does not believe that households purposely make themselves homeless knowing that they can obtain shelter or that housing authorities will change their behavior and work more closely with tenants to address problems before eviction because the family will be ineligible for this assistance. No child should be condemned to homelessness, and denied a basic safety net, for even a day, let alone three years.

Once again, poor people are in a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" situation.

During the Bush years, when the leaks in our economy had not yet become visible, there was no room for poor people to make a decent living. Now, when even the middle class is suffering, poor people are just supposed to suck it up-- times are tough for everyone, right?

I will be curious to see if the new stimulus plans will reach deeply enough to to offer hope for those at the economic bottom. But based on past history, I'm not holding my breath.

Hold up! Not ALL Dr. Martin Luther King's dreams have been fulfilled

I just saw Martin Luther King III interviewed on CNN, which has been doing a day-long program called From MLK to Today. It's been an inspiring program yet I've had a nagging worry that we will be too optimistic, so willing to look ahead that we overlook what's in front of us.

Barack Obama's being elected President is indeed a tremendous accomplishment and a significant blow to the wall of racism that has divided this country. But racism won't disappear on January 21. And poverty? Not one person will be less poor the day after the inauguration.

Therefore I was just relieved to hear Martin Luther King III say in an interview that his father's dream included economic justice for all, and that his father's dream could not possibly be considered fulfilled when 37 million people in this country live in poverty and 47 million live without health insurance.

CNN has a good report of civil right veterans speaking out on just this issue. Give it a read.