Disorderly conduct arrests faulted by NYC's Picture the Homeless

They're tired of being targeted, ticketed, jailed and fined under the banner of New York City's Disorderly Conduct statute, and they're doing something about it-- launching a civil rights campaign..

Members of Picture the Homeless, a grassroots organization founded and led by homeless people, last week held a civil rights summit with other community groups to discuss how this "overly broad and ill-defined law"  is used as a way of making money for the city.  Meanwhile, the lives of people who can least afford it are disrupted as they accumulate arrest records and default warrants if they can't pay the $150 fine.

PTH members talk about their experiences and why they're involved in this campaign on video.  It's not a slick production but bear with it and you will hear real people, obviously weary, who haven't had it easy, stand up for themselves and each other.

The Indypendent has coverage of this forum, at at PTH's blog, the administrator says, "We appreciate the Center for Constitutional Rights for hosting -- and much appreciate the participation of George Bethos of NYC AIDS Housing Network / VOCAL NY Users Union, Lalit Clarkson of Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the courageous Juanita Young of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality and Parents Against Police Brutality.  Within PTH, we thank Maria and Salaam for running the show, and Carlos for his always-blazing poetry."
 Photo: Picture the Homeless members

The Future is in Your Hands

1964 NAACP comic book on the importance of voting. From Comics with Problems, a collection of public-minded comic books-- most of them odd, unintentionally hilarious, touching, repulsive..

You take my homeless, and I'll take yours. Yeah, sure.

Colorado Springs officials think they can reduce their unsheltered-- that is, camping out-- population of homeless people by about 10 percent by putting them on a bus and sending them home.

The police department’s three-man Homeless Outreach Team will be working with people who have family members or friends in another city willing to take them in, and who just don't have a way to get there.  The team is hoping some 25 to 30 homeless people will take advantage of the offer, which is funded by the Salvation Army through a grant.  Some 300 to 500 people are estimated to be "camping out" in the Colorado Springs area.

Lancaster, California, a small city of 145,000, operated a similar program last year.  The city's mayor felt as if the City of Los Angeles, an hour to the south,  was sending their own homeless to overwhelm Lancaster's homeless.  But most of the homeless people who took advantage of the offer were local people who chose to go somewhere else.

For every touching story of a daughter who discovers her long-lost father in a homeless shelter and welcomes him in to her loving home, there are ten homeless people who can't go home again.  Maybe there is no home to go to, parents and siblings dead, or scattered to the winds.  Maybe families are why a person is homeless in the first place-- shelters have their share of the young, runaway victims of abuse.  Sometimes homeless peoples have slammed the door shut themselves, or had it slammed on them because of their own behavior.

But what if every homeless person went back to the city in which they were born?  Or in which they'd spent most of their lives?  The affluent communities, the small towns, the capital cities: what would you do if all the homeless people came home?

Photo from DavidX Zhang's photostream at Flickr.

Make seedling pots, grow dishcloths, amaze your friends

Living in New England I've never tried to grow loofahs because they have a fairly long growing season-- about 150 days from planting the seeds till harvest-- but this may be the year I give it a try.  A good, sunny trellis growing against a western or southern-facing should do it.  Garden Guides has some good tips.

A home-grown loofah makes a great gift, but I really want to try making my own dishcloths from loofahs!  Tipnut tells how to prepare a loofah after harvest  to make dish and other cleaning cloths.  Sounds worth it!

But no matter what you'd like to plant this spring, it's time to start making seedling pots out of old newspaper.  Ancient Light actually sells a nifty little tool to make it  really easy,   But you can do it with a regular drinking glass or a jar; and eHOW has a video to shw you how.

You can plant your pot right in the ground and the newspaper will dissolve.  Use only black and white sections of the paper, though, unless you're sure the publisher uses only soy-based inks.

Those clever, clever dolphins (and their "accidental" art)

Thanks for the tip, Cute Overload!

My favorite cartoonist auctioning work for Haiti

I discovered the Laugh Out Loud cats on BoingBoing a couple of years ago...don't know why they tug on my heartstrings so much

but they do.  If you go to Hobotopia, you'll have a chance to bid on the cartoon in this post and all proceeds will go to benefit relief work in Haiti (and you'll get to discover the great drawings and characters created by Adam Koford).

The law of unintended consequences as applied to the hole in the ozone

Some people remember exactly where they were the day the first men walked on the moon; I happen to remember exactly where I was when I first heard there was a hole in the ozone layer: summer, 1985, sitting at a picnic table at Nickerson State Park in Brewster, with my radio tuned to All Things Considered..  A hole in the ozone?  Inconceivable!

How quickly we can become accustomed to truly bad news, especially if the consequences are not immediately apparent-- although the nearly 1,000,000 U.S. residents who discovered they had skin cancer in 1985 would certainly disagree with me.   1985 was also the year that President Ronald Reagan declared the first National Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention Week, although he'd spent the first three years of his administration fighting regulation of chlorofluorocarbons, the chief but not sole cause of ozone thinning and, at the time, ubiquitous in aerosol sprays and air conditioning units.

So who's kept track of the hole in the ozone layer, which at times can be nearly twice the size of the continental U.S.?  (This is not a tidy little hole, by the way, with clear margins, but instead manifests as gradations in thinning.) Many of us remember the slow phase-out of  chlorofluorocarbons; we hoped the ozone layer could begin to repair itself.

That repair is slowly happening, although at the current rate, we won't reach pre-1980 levels until at least 2060.  But it turns out this good news has its dark side: in the Antarctic, high winds caused by the hole created moist, bright, fluffy clouds which also shielded the Antarctic from some of the effects of global warming, according to researchers published in today's Geophysical Research Letters,  The New York Times covered this report on January 25, as well as that of a dissenting voice, who feels that the effects of global warming itself will keep the high winds blowing, protecting the Antarctic.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  Gee, can't we have it all?  A repaired ozone hole and a reduction of global warming?
Graphics from The Ozone Hole

What kind of playhouse do you want?

I couldn't find a price for this table turned playhouse (link at Inhabitots timed out) but would guessing $750+ be excessive?


At the risk of sounding extremely ancient or extremely crabby , when I was a kid, the best playhouses came when you could talk your mom or your auntie into letting you throw a sheet over the kitchen table or four chairs-- although the chairs were often arranged to make the seats of a car..

Here's a link to pretty easy instructions for making a cardboard playhouse for your kid-- or yourself; I won't tell.

Photo and directions from Make Baby Stuff.

If you intended to murder an infant

If you intended to murder an infant and you had roughly three hours in which to accomplish that deed, what method would you choose?

(I can barely stand to read these words as I write them.)

Would you decide to plunge the infant into cold water, set him naked in front of an air conditioner and then hope for the best?

I'm writing, of course, about the dreadful death of a six week old baby in West Springfield's Clarion Motel in the first hours after midnight on Sunday.

According to MassLive, West Springfield police received a call from the infant's mother, 22 year old Erica Luce, requesting assistance, about 3 am. The baby was taken by ambulance to Baystate Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

The mother told WWLP she had been visiting a next door neighbor while her three year old son and infant son slept, checking on them every fifteen minutes, but then she dropped off to sleep in her friend's room, awakening with a bad feeling. that she found her baby naked, wet and in front of the air conditioner.

So why am I writing this post?  I'm writing this in part because of a conversation my daughter and I had yesterday afternoon about this baby's death..  I'd said that something about the situation just didn't feel right,  but that I probably wouldn't write about it because I didn't know enough.  She'd said, Why not?  It doesn't stop you from writing about the cops when you think that something doesn't seem right.  And she was completely on target.


A few weeks ago, I wrote the following:  I know from experience how hard it can be to criticize one of "your own kind."  You already know there's a set of stereotypes that will instantly kick into play and which will go far beyond the specific person to castigate an entire group.  And you already know too much about how hard life can be for that kind of person, and that very  few people who haven't lived that life will be capable of  taking that into consideration.

Sure enough, much of the comments on the news story about this baby's death-- I don't even know the poor baby's name-- have been drawn from the stereotypes people have about welfare, single mothers and poverty.

So let me say some of what I know-- some from my own experience and some from years of observation-- no, that's not the right word, let's say thirty years of relationships with other poor, single mothers on welfare.

Tolstoy said that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way but I've found there's much that ties us together.  So I will generalize, knowing there are exceptions, and also leaving out whole categories of families on welfare such as those for whom relying on public assistance comes after a long fall from the working or middle class (and yes, there are a lot of them).  I am deliberately writing about the mothers on welfare that seem to most closely fit the stereotypes. 

Almost every girl and young woman who has an unplanned pregnancy, or a pregnancy without a solid plan for the future,  lacks a deep sense of self-worth.  We think we know what we're doing but we don't.  Still, most of us are ready to make the best of the situation, and most of us have grand plans for our children's lives, and how they'll be different from our own.

But it's hard, harder than we'd ever guess.  It shouldn't be impossible to raise children well in a single parent household and mostly the problem comes down to money.  The level of economic insecurity that comes with living on welfare is almost impossible to conceive-- housing always at risk, utility shut-offs looming, the constant and energy-sapping tension that comes from not knowing the face of the next disaster waiting around the corner.

Having more children usually makes things much worse.  But a second pregnancy comes along because we think we've found a relationship that will last until our children are grown up and can fend for themselves.  And nine times out of ten, we're wrong.

So getting a good job and getting off welfare is what makes the most sense, right?  But here's what I've seen in the last thirty years and every reader knows this is true: there are just fewer and fewer good jobs out there.  As a young mother, I worked in two factories; they are long closed.  I worked in two bookstores; now we don't have a single bookstore in the city.  I have aunts that worked at Forbes & Wallace selling gloves and hats and actually retired from there.

Still, the vast majority of mothers on welfare will eventually enter the workforce.  Welfare reform has "worked," if you want to call it that.  In 1997 Massachusetts had a 3.2% unemployment rate and a welfare caseload of  80,000; the monthly cash assistance for a family of three was $579.  Now, in January 2010,  we have an unemployment rate of 9.4% (or 17.2%, if you go by the "underemployment" rate) a welfare caseload of 50,500 families; the monthly cash assistance for a family of three is $618!   (That's less than a 7% increase in 13 years.)  Where is everyone, you might ask, if they're not on welfare and not working?  But maybe you really don't want to know about the kind of life that goes with the poverty they're experiencing.

Some mothers find alternatives to welfare because they have a child with a disability.  The vast majority of these disabilities are real  but there are also those parents will grasp at any straw to find a way to have income.  Maybe they're pushed by their kid's school into complicity with pathologizing their children.  Maybe they willingly and with relief accept some explanation for their children's behavior  because without that explanation, they feel like failures even more than they do already. 

Getting an education can really help a single mom leave welfare-- but childcare is hard to come by, transportation costs money, and a sick kid can throw everything into chaos.  And there still have to be jobs available at the end of the process.  Just how many cosmetologists do we need, anyway?.

There is no room here to make a summary of all the other ills that can affect poor families, and many of those ills, like domestic violence and addiction, cut across all class lines.  It's just if you're a poor single mom, it's like being hit when you're already down.

I can hear the voices now:  Throw them off!  Make them self-reliant!  But we're not exactly talking about the pioneer days, with wagon trains,  homesteading and subsistence farming.  We have to fit into the structure that already exists.

And this is where I feel like throwing up my hands because we are so completely going in the wrong direction.  According to Webster's, a society is " a highly structured system of human organization for large-scale community living that normally furnishes protection, continuity, security, and a national identity for its members."  Society has to work for most of us-- the regular people with regular lives who deserve to be able to get by.  Instead more and more of us are being left behind.

Some will call my attempt to place welfare moms in a larger context the same as making excuses for them. I would never deny the power of an individual to change her whole family's life for the better, because it happens every day.But why do we have to build our lives in the heart of a hurricane?

Photos from Gabba Gabba Hey!'s photostream at Flickr.,House Of Sims' photostream

5 more Springfield cops under investigation for alleged beating

On the face of it, police officers Jeffrey Asher and Danilo Feliciano couldn't be more different.

Jeffrey Asher has been involved in a number of unsavory incidents, including, most recently, the caught on tape beating of suspect Melvin Jones III.

Officer Feliciano, on the other hand, has helped to stop a woman from jumping out a window, helped save the life of a four year old who'd fallen into a motel swimming pool, and helped save a two year old who had stopped breathing after falling out of his crib.  MassLive.

But Feliciano has now been indicted for assault and battery,  and he and at least four other officers are under criminal and departmental investigation.

Here's what appears to have happened: Feliciano's niece came to the Springfield, MA police station September 24 to file a complaint against her boyfriend, Rolando Rivera, saying he had assaulted her.  She was advised to seek a restraining order and on the next day, officers went to Rivera's apartment to serve the restraining order.  Now, the police department arrest record for Rivera was written by an Officer Pedro Mendez, and he says in his report that Rivera took a swing at him and then a violent struggle ensued, during which he struck Rivera several times with his police radio.  Eventually Rivera was subdued and arrested for assault and battery on a police officer, taken to the station, and then served the restraining order.  Officer Feliciano's name is not mentioned in the report.

On October 4, Rivera filed a complaint against Feliciano and on January 22, the Westfield District Court found probable cause to issue a criminal complaint of assault and battery.  It does not require a very deep reading between the lines of the arrest record and the criminal complaint to get a sense of how the incident unfolded.

Wouldn't it make good sense for an officer with a family member who says she was assaulted NOT to be among the team serving a restraining order to the assaultee?   Mendez says he was unable to call for help on his radio, which he was using in other ways, but he was able to click the radio key open.  Is that why other police showed up?  Or, more likely, were they all there from the beginning?

Meanwhile, Mayor Sarno said last week that he expected to hear back from City Solicitor Ed Pakula with a proposal for a police citizens review with disciplinary powers. I'm reserving judgment,  but I'm already concerned because of the lack of citizen input. Some organizations in this city, including Arise for Social Justice, have been working on the issue of police accountability for a long time.  We never fail to speak up and we are never paid more than lip service.   Will this time be different?

From junk to survival gear for the homeless

Social Earth has one of those stories that helps you to realize solutions are out there.  Industrial designer Nate Bastien is turning our so-called disposable items into backpacks and shelter for the homeless.  It's quite a story and until we can figure out how to make our goods more durable, re-use is the next best thing.

Frank Keough not the only crook in the shelter system

Former homeless shelter Francis Keough III was ordered back to prison this month for breaking into a house he used to own to steal furniture no longer his.  He'd just finished serving two years in federal prison for conspiracy, extortion, mail fraud, witness tampering and perjury charges, but apparently was willing to risk even more prison time while on parole to retrieve a kitchenette set.  Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees!  This is the same Keough who, when running the Friends of the Homeless shelter, reimbursed himself $165 for a pair of shoes he'd ruined while exploring the flood in the shelter's basement where homeless people stayed.

Keough is not alone, of course, in treating the homeless as his personal cash cows.

Earlier this week the former executive assistant of a youth crisis shelter in Los Alamito, California was sentenced to four years in prison for embezzling nearly half a million from the shelter and spending it on remodeling her home, going on vacation, and buying lots of new clothes.  LA Times.

Two years ago, a shelter director and the CEO of  City of Angels Medical Center in Los Angeles were indicted (and have since pled guilty) to a $1 million fraud scheme where they offered to pay homeless people to pretend they had received medical treatment at the hospital.

While personal gain does seem to be the primary motive for shelter fraud, one Detroit shelter director and his bookkeeper had "higher" motives: they funneled $750,000 of the shelter's money into a shell company that then contributed to Democratic Party candidates and causes. Debbie Schlussel.

Lest I give the impression that only shelter directors are crooks,  when Keough went down, after a U.S. Justice Department investigation began in 2004, so did the head of the Springfield Housing Authority Ray Asselin and nearly his entire family including his son, a former state representative, Carol Aranjo and her husband and son for stealing from (and destroying) the Edward G. Wells Credit Union, former Police Commission Chairman and head of the Mass. Career Development Center Gerald Phillips for fraud, and former Albano mayoral aide Anthony Aldolino and his brother Chet, a former police officer, for fraud and filing false income tax returns.

I bring this up today only so we can remind ourselves that no one in a position of public trust deserves to go unexamined.


Photo from 10b travelling's photostream at Flickr.

One more for the dogs

Thanks, Cute Overload!

From politics to puppies

Satisfying story over at Birmingham News about a puppy found frozen to the railroad tracks.  Read it here.

Well, we're really screwed now: corporations given the right to buy elections

"Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."  Abraham Lincoln
 
OK, this is going to be all over the news, but this morning the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations can spend as much as they want to get a candidate elected, and that restraints on their spending are violations of the 1st Amendment right to free speech.

Labor unions and other organizations were also given the right to spend freely, but I do think we'll be a little outclassed, don't you?

I imagine U.S. Chamber of Commerce members will be dancing in the streets.  The chamber recently spent $2.5 million in the state of Maine to oppose federal health care legislation, even though no local ballot question was pending, but that state is represented by moderate Republicans Sens. Olympia Snowe, considered to be possible swing votes in the Senate battle.  ABC.   They're also claiming part of the credit for getting Massachuetts' Scott Brown elected, and plan to spend $100 million more to defeat health care reform.  Think Progress. 

Now, clearly there are lots of Massachusetts folks opposed to the current version of health care reform who voted for Scott Brown, but ask yourself:  do you think you might have been overly influenced?  (You'd never admit it to me, so just be answerable to yourself.) 

The Chamber is also launching a campaign against the creation of a new federal agency to protect consumers from financial abuses. Denver Post. 

I won't continue giving examples about the Chamber of Commerce.  Let's look at some upcoming ballot questions in this November's Massachusetts election.

One question would protect Massachusetts forests from overlogging.  Certainly the timber industry will spend big in on this one.  Another question would eliminate renewable energy credits for biomass incinerators, making it nearly impossible to run profitably.  Which corporations will spend big on that one, I wonder?

 

Corporations are innately conservative, and their charters require them to make profit for their stockholders as their most sacred duty.  What chance will a grassroots candidate who opposes factory farming have when his or her opponent is funded by McDonald's?  How about the candidate who want to promote wind and solar power?  How about the candidate that would like to rein in prescription costs?  Or who promotes bank reform?

 

One core problem is that corporations are considered persons under the law.  Can we act legislatively to prohibit corporations from having as broad free speech rights as you and I by removing their personhood??

For those of us who think big money already plays too large a role in elections, the news couldn't be worse.  Do we really want the U.S. to be a country where you can only have democracy if you can buy it?

This picture makes me happy

A tourist took this picture of a skateboarding monk at  the Emei Teple in Sichuan Province in China and apparently, as it made the rounds on the Internet, some people were not happy and felt it was disrespectful.  I disagree.  Ananova.

Anyone walking about Chinatowns in America will observe statues of a stout fellow carrying a linen sack. Chinese merchants call him Happy Chinaman or Laughing Buddha. 

This Hotei lived in the T'ang dynasty. He had no desire to call himself a Zen master or to gather many disciples about him. Instead he walked the streets with a big sack into which he would put gifts of candy, fruit, or doughnuts. These he would give to children who gathered around him in play. He established a kindergarten of the streets. 

Whenever he met a Zen devotee he would extend his hand and say: "Give me one penny." And if anyone asked him to return to a temple to teach others, again he would reply: "Give me one penny." 

Once he was about his play-work another Zen master happened along and inquired: "What is the significance of Zen?" 

Hotei immediately plopped his sack down on the ground in silent answer. 

"Then," asked the other, "what is the actualization of Zen?" 

At once the Happy Chinaman swung the sack over his shoulder and continued on his way.  Ashida Kim.