What's New: Spare Change News for 9/25 - 10/8/08

Can People Adapt to Homelessness?

Leslie Bosworth

People can learn to adapt to stressful situations, so does homelessness, too, become easier over time? A new study shows otherwise. For example, the study found that people who had been homeless for a longer period of time (more than two consecutive years) had more difficulty finding regular meals than people who were transitionally homeless. Research shows that the challenges facing the long-term homeless are very different from those facing the transitionally homeless. 

The Creedon Outreach Market

Robert Sondak

The Creedon Outreach Market is a new farmers market selling farm-fresh, locally grown produce near Waltham center. The market is part of Waltham Fields Community Farms (WFCF), which partners with community organizations to provide underprivileged clients with vouchers good for a bag of fresh produce. At the Creedon Outreach Market, Waltham families can fill a brown paper bag with produce for just $5. Shopping at one of WFCF's markets is a great way to support your community and join the local food movement. 

Homes for Families

Brittaney Kiefer

Homes for Families is a statewide advocacy organization committed to ending family homelessness. They fight the stereotype that most homeless people are men on park benches with a mental illness or drug problem. In Massachusetts alone, there are at least 2500 homeless families, and the average age of a homeless person in the state is 8-years-old. The organization is unique in its approach to advocacy because they include the families they advocate for in every aspect of their work. At least 50 percent of their board of directors and 5 out of the 7 staff members have experienced homelessness. With Homes for Families, homeless people are empowered to advocate for themselves and break down the wall between their lives and government policy. 

Voices from the Streets: Four Short, Radical and Necessary Reforms

Raymond Avrutis

1. Put Bread Lines Outside Welfare Offices and Homeless Shelters

2. Help Poor City Residents Find Available Suburban Jobs

3. Put Homeless People into Empty Homes

4. Make Bread Not Bombs

Preview of New Issue: 9/11 - 9/28/08

Iran & Iraq: U.S. Approach to Both Countries Eerily Similar
Lindsey Medeiros



The Center for Public Integrity has accused the Bush administration of telling 935 "false statements" about Iraq in the two years after September 11, 2001. The "false statements" included accusations that the Iraqi government had chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities, had ties with Al-Qaeda, and had been seeking yellow cake uranium in Niger.

Now it is five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq last estimated that there were 34,452 Iraqi civilian deaths and 36,685 wounded Iraqi civilians in 2006 alone. Since 2003, the U.S. military deaths in Iraq have exceeded 4,000. The outlook is not positive.

The administration is, yet again, feeling threatened by a second-rate military in a third world country with a shoddy civilian nuclear program. President Bush contends that Iran is a nuclear threat to its allies in the region. Strangely, his fears of a nuclear Iran contradict the key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released in December 2003, which reported, among other things, that "Tehran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it's less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we had been judging since 2003... Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously."

Despite this report, last year the Bush administration requested to increase the budget for its covert operations in Iran. This apparent contradiction within the upper echelons of the U.S. government is an echo of polices that are 'so 2003,' the same policies that lead us into war in Iraq.


On the Rise
Eliza Dryer

"On the Rise is everything a woman needs to get her identity back," one guest says. "They accept us as we are," another adds. I frantically scribble down their words, nodding. My visit to On the Rise is as comfortable as I've ever been and probably ever will be in a room full of strangers. On the Rise may be a social service provider, but it feels more like a house full of friends, sisters and mothers. "Coming here -- it's like going to your own house," one woman says.




Voices from the Street: 911: Hello, This is the USA Calling
Marc D. Goldfinger

This is the last September 11 that George W. Bush will be president. I still can't capitalize that title while he remains in office. I hope he's snorting cocaine and eating pretzels today. We've come a long way, baby.

It's seven years since the planes hit the Twin Towers, since people leapt from the building holding hands and screaming, since the buildings fell, killing firemen, police, and other innocents who just happened to work there.

Seven years later and the policies of George W. and Dick Cheney have isolated the U.S. from the rest of the world. We're lucky if many people from other countries know that the majority of us don't agree with these idiotic policies.

George used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq. This is now costing the U.S. more than $11 billion a month. The Iraq war needs to be cut off at the knees and all our men and women brought home immediately. No excuses. It's a disaster if we stay, and because we went, it's a disaster if we come home. That's the way it is, whether we like it or not. Even if all our soldiers are brought home immediately, the medical costs will continue. There's nothing we can do about that. But we can cut our losses and that's all.

Howard Zinn speaking for Spare Change!

Click flyer to view detail.

Spare Change News -- June 19th

A David versus Goliath battle between corporate America and a freethinking counterculture is about to wage in cyberspace.

When internet auction giant eBay bought a minority stake in the homespun San Francisco Internet start-up craigslist - a company so modest they don’t even bother using an apostrophe or a capital letter - most observers expected the classified ads website would be quickly swallowed up.

eBay Inc. operates the world’s most popular e-commerce site, has a globally recognized brand, and is valued at over $40 billion. Its website is one of the most sophisticated around, with barely a square inch of it not covered by some sort of paid advert.

By contrast, craigslist is heavy on text and looks much as it did in 1996 when early enthusiasts would have looked at it on their black and white screened Apple PowerBooks.

The company grew out of an email of events listings Craig Newmark used to send friends, occupies an old fashioned timber house in San Francisco, has a staff of around twenty, and the only logo it uses is the peace sign.

Yet it has become part of the American way of life. Local newspaper groups cite it as responsible for ripping apart their industry’s business model and cops regularly trawl its pages looking for services as diverse as stolen goods and prostitution rings while it remains for many the first place to advertise a church fete.

The Cruelest Art:
Dr. Darius Rejali on Torture in Democratic Societies

Waterboarding. Hypothermia. Stress positions. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. These “clean” tortures leave deep psychological wounds but few physical scars — and they have been used for decades not only by dictatorships, but also by democratic governments, including the United States.

After 9/11, Americans used these techniques on so-called “enemy combatants” detained in a system of prisons from Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib and the Pentagon’s detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to numerous CIA black sites. And according to recent reports, officials at the highest levels of the Bush Administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, approved the use of “harsh interrogation techniques” in questioning detainees.

In his massive study, Torture and Democracy (Princeton, 2007), internationally renowned violence and torture expert Dr. Darius Rejali writes that these “clean” interrogation methods not only violate international law, but they radicalize enemies, undermine credibility, and yield unreliable intelligence. They do not strengthen national security, but instead make us less safe.

New Issue - May 8-21

China's Tibetian Frontiers Rekindle Tradition of Defiance
Reuters

Zhuoni, China, April 9 - Across China’s mountainous west, armed troops watch over the Tibetan monasteries and towns that have emerged as hotbeds of protest kindled by traditions of defiance and newer economic grievances.

More than the Tibet Autonomous Region itself, where the upsurge of anti-Chinese protests and riots erupted in March, the historically Tibetan parts of neighboring provinces have defied efforts to smother unrest with troop convoys, roadblocks and patrols, and warnings of harsh punishment to lawbreakers.

In Zhuoni, a county in the northwest province of Gansu, protesters in mid-March torched a school, set up their own roadblock and trashed officials’ cars, residents said.

A recent trip along its tightly guarded roads showed the protests had stopped. Smashed windows of the local police offices and Chinese-owned shops had been quickly repaired, and traders were returning to dusty streets.

But Tibetans here and across south Gansu spoke of anger with the government campaign against the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, and with economic shifts they said favored Han Chinese migrants and Hui Muslim merchants in nearby towns.

“There are more and more Han here, so we can’t develop,” said Tsairang, a herder and farmer. He rejected the government’s claim that the Dalai Lama’s supporters orchestrated the violence.
“It wasn’t the Dalai Lama. He’s like a member of our family who isn’t allowed to come home. You can’t blame him.”



An Act For Change
Meredith Walsh

Amid sunbathers and baseball players on the Boston Common, a group of Suffolk theater students gathered on April 23 to perform a play in an effort to promote social justice and awareness for the issue of homelessness.

The play, titled Infinity, was student written, produced, directed, and acted. Rachel Kelsey was inspired to write the play after working with Neighborhood Action, a group dedicated to serving Boston’s homeless.

“I met some people at Neighborhood Action and it got me examining how we look at each other,” said Kelsey.

Director Purima Baldwin was drawn to the project by Kelsey’s insightful writing. “We wanted to do a final show before we graduated, something that had a social impact,” said Baldwin.
Baldwin’s life has been directly affected by homelessness. Her older brother, Dan, has been homeless for nearly twenty years. “He’s spent probably half his life on the street,” said Baldwin.

“I’m hoping maybe my brother will stumble across the Common that day, but I doubt it,” continued Baldwin, during an interview before one of the cast’s final rehearsals.

Kelsey and Baldwin hoped the production would attract the attention of people who are not ordinarily attuned to issues of homelessness and poverty. By performing in a public space, they were trying to reach a broader audience. “I just hope people walking by will stop and watch us,” said Kelsey.


Voices from the Streets: Connecting the Dots
Marc Goldfinger

Unfortunately for the human species and all the others occupying this battered planet, the dots are bigger than we think, and as fast as they connect, we disconnect them. So much is happening I don’t know what to talk about first.

First. We have this Presidential primary going on where the top two Democratic contenders are in the 11th round of a 12-round boxing match, both battered having been on the canvas a number of times. Yes, I like Obama, but so what? I’m watching Hillary and Obama in a fight where, at the end, there will be no man (or woman) standing.

I trust John McCain. I believe John McCain. By listening to him I realize that if he wins the Presidency (and that’s all too possible now) wars will go on, fuel prices will continue to rise, which means food prices will continue to rise and the death toll will rise, ever higher, ever higher.

What’s happening here? Does every politician so desire winning that they don’t care the human species sits on a humungous playground slide where at the bottom waits death and destruction on a scale that we have never known before? No one tells the truth because they all want to win.

Actually, I don’t know what Hillary believes, and I’m not really sure what Barack Obama believes, but I know that Deval Patrick fooled me and dammit, like the Who said, “I don’t want to be fooled again.”

Spare Change News: 4/24-5/7

Right or Right?

Editorial: John McCain has been labeled a “Maverick” for his apparent middle of the road politics. Don’t let this cloak fool you. He is really a neo-conservative hawk. To be fair, he does support the implementation of green technologies and has spoken out against the use of torture as an interrogation technique. However, one should always be weary of labels granted to politicians by mainstream media. The former platform is merely a middle of the road policy change, which at this point ought to be a mainstream issue. The latter is something one would expect of a Vietnam POW who is, himself, a victim of torture.

In February the Washington Post reported that McCain knowingly broke Federal Election Commission law. When his campaign wasn’t doing too hot in the middle of the primary season, he signed up to receive public funding, which also made it easier to appear on the ballot in many states. However, the matching spending limit set by the FEC is $54 million and McCain had already spent more than $58 million without legally pulling out of the federal program. He broke the law under the same federal campaign finance program he helped create.



Homeless Children Population Growing Steadily

Studies have revealed that a homeless child under the age of six may experience the same mental trauma as a soldier coming back from war. When we talk about a generation afflicted by war, families torn apart, and children growing up without fathers and mothers, we don’t look to the war brewing on our own streets.

Today there are approximately one million homeless children nationwide and the fastest growing sector is younger than school aged. The average person believes homelessness affects middle age individuals, not entire families. In truth, the average age of a homeless person is only eight years old. In Cambridge, it’s nine.

“No one wants to believe children are homeless,” said Sue Heilman, executive director of the Roxbury-based Horizons for Homeless Children (HHC). To help combat this theory, HHC presented the Third Annual Young Children Without Homes National Conference, which took place April 15-17 at Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Five hundred people from 33 states registered and attended the event in hopes for what Heilman calls “a better tomorrow.” Cities across the country are bracing for the fallback of the mortgage crisis, and Boston is no exception. “It may get worse before it gets better,” Heilman explained before the conference kickoff.

The conference brought together case and social workers, volunteers and altruistic individuals dedicated to erasing homelessness across the country. Participants engaged in a variety of workshops aimed to raise awareness, and share strategies and information on the subject.

Tales from the Curb:
When Will it End?

The other day I was talking with a Spare Change News vendor, one who has really benefited from our organization. Spare Change News enabled him to be productive and opened doors that were once closed. He has made friends within this organization and with customers, and become an important member of Spare Change News. Best of all he was recently able to obtain housing.

So why is an advocate he works with telling him to leave our organization? That’s right, this advocate told him to find a “real job,” to forget about the friendships he made, forget about all his success here and leave Spare Change News. Why would someone openly discourage anyone from working with an organization where that person has succeeded?

Every Spare Change News anniversary, I can’t help but think of the advocates who tried to discourage us from creating the paper. Some advocates don’t always have the best interests of the homeless at heart, for them it’s nothing more than a job. But for most, including the general public, it’s a case of ignorance.
The other day I read a letter in the Metro addressed to Mayor Menino regarding homeless people on the Boston Common. I’ll spare you the gory details, but the letter was nothing more than a rant against homeless people, complete with the drunk/mentally ill speech. The writer even suggested that the Mayor rid the park of homeless people so taxpayers like him could eat lunch there. Well, Joe Taxpayer, I have news for you. The Common is in such rough shape not because of the homeless people who sleep there. It is because of people who refuse to use trashcans, who feed those annoying pigeons, who walk their dogs and don’t bother to clean up after them. It is because of the drug dealers who openly ply their trade while families are walk by. These things are ruining the Common, not the homeless. There is still a lot of ignorance when it comes to homelessness, but when will it end? Some say more education and compassion is necessary. Will that be enough?

Spare Change News 4/10/08

AIDS Action Committee

Today, two to three people in Mass. will become HIV positive. In one year, more than 900 new infections will afflict the state. Between 24,000 and 26,000 people currently live with HIV/AIDS, but what’s more disturbing is that a quarter of them do not know it, and risk passing the virus to others.

AIDS Action Committee of Mass. (AAC) is a community-based, non-profit organization focusing on the prevention of AIDS in the Mass. population. The general mission targets AIDS prevention through education and advocacy while supporting those already infected. In addition, the organization lobbies for substantial AIDS policies at all levels. AAC boasts a staff of 70 dedicated individuals along with hundreds of volunteers, all passionate about erasing this deadly virus.



How Well Does the Boston Healthcare System Treat its Homeless Constituents? An Interview with Spare Change Vendor and Healthcare Consumer, Ed Larsen.

HJ Pound: What is the easiest way for a homeless person to obtain health care?
Ed Larsen: Honestly? Get yourself put in the hospital. Hospitals are also businesses that need to get paid. You rack up a high enough bill and they will do whatever it takes to get you MassHealth so they can get their money.
HP: Do you believe that everyone should have health insurance?
EL: There are pros and cons. Everybody deserves basic care, but there are consequences to socialized medicine. If everyone gets basic care here [in the United States] you will end up having to wait a really long time for specialist services like in Canada and Europe. Except for the rich. Unless we move to a single-payer system the rich will always have private insurance and get care faster.
HP: How has being homeless effected your health care?
EL: Well, I am on MassHealth for now, and I am happy. I do eventually want to get a job aside from being a Spare Change vendor though. Subsidized housing won’t be there forever, besides, I am not a big fan of the government. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate everything the government has done for me, I just don’t want to be at their mercy forever. The problem is, I don’t want to lose MassHealth either. Private insurance is great in some ways, but it doesn’t cover everything. [Private health insurance] used to be impossible to get with pre-existing conditions, and even now it only covers certain necessary services to an extent, which is crazy because it is so expensive. Plus, it already costs so much to live here, between transportation, housing, and taxes. And now, if you don’t have insurance you will get fined.



Four Arrested in Bank Protest

Four young women who chained themselves to a Bank of America in Copley Plaza were arraigned April 2 on counts of trespassing, disturbing the peace, and resisting arrest.

Candace Bollinger, 27, of Hicksville, New York, Adrienne Naylor, 23, of Dorchester, Mass., Laila Murad, 17, of Brighton, Mass.; and Elise Ansel, 20, of Sanderlan, Mass. locked their arms together using large cylindrical tubes, while Bollinger locked her neck to the bank’s door with a bicycle lock in protest of Bank of America’s investment in the coal industry. Their protest yesterday was part of an international protest called Fossil Fool’s Day, according to Climate Justice Now (CJN) spokesman Evan Greer, 22. He claimed over fifty people protested.

Naylor decided radical protest was necessary because, she said, “Holding signs and sending letters doesn’t change shit.”

Ansel agreed, “You can’t change the system by working in it.”

The women said they hoped to raise awareness about damage they claim coal mining inflicts on the environment. Ansel said, “450 mountain tops in Appalachia were blown clear off.”

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