Taking advantage of the distraction caused by the U.S. government’s war, deportation practices, harassment, and clandestine internment of citizens, immigrants and political dissidents, multimillionaire Supervisor Gavin Newsom has played his first card in the race for mayor on the backs of elderly, disabled, and homeless county assistance recipients. Hell-bent on his obsession with what poor San Franciscans do with their trifling $320-$394 per month cash grant, Gavin Christopher Newsom is still ramrodding his “Care Not Cash” legislation through our Board of Supervisors, which would be much more appropriately occupied focusing on more pertinent budget items, such as forcing corporations which operate in San Francisco to pony-up their fair share of taxes for schools and infrastructure improvements.

The slick presentation of Prop N to a wellmeaning but ill-informed populace caught in the throes of an uneasy political climate is cynical at best. Under the language of Proposition N as it was presented to the voters, treatment, medical care, housing, meals, and shelter were to be provided to the 2400 or so individuals and families who now depend upon county assistance to survive. Hypothetically, these services were to replace cash assistance. However, the reality of the situation is that there is no infrastructure in place to support such a broad and monolithic county expenditure, as City Budget Analyst Harvey Rose concluded in his June 9th report to the San Francisco board. Mr. Rose’s Department, which oversees all budget expenditures considered by the board, issued a scathing 28- page indictment of Newsom’s political shell game, as nothing more than a needless and costly money pit where both young and old students, workers, and disabled will find themselves out in the cold. A baseline $16,390,000 annually will be exhausted to intimidate city and county residents into fleeing San Francisco. This is in addition to the estimated 1.5 million or more which has already been squandered on biometric laser fingerprinting and phototechnology.

Judge Ronald Quidachy’s May 9th decision to strike down Care Not Cash unfortunately only applies to 1000 of the 2400 homeless County Adult Assistance Program recipients. The other 1400, who are disabled, elderly, working mothers, and mentally ill residents, are still slated to have their checks cut to $59, effective July 1st. This is contingent upon Monday’s emergency session of the board, when Prop N will be discussed and voted on once and for all to decide if it is truly feasible, not to mention ethical, to deny assistance to so many without a safety net to assure that county recipients will not be left with, no housing, no shelter beds, and no other options. (Prop N was passed from the Rules committee to the full board with “no recommendation” as a “professional courtesy” to Newsom on June 24th. – ed.)

A tiny .025% or less of the families, workers, and disabled Americans in San Francisco are homeless and currently receiving General Assistance in the form of cash grants. These people do not need to read the fine print or letter of the law to spell opportunism. It is outrageous that this cruel circus of homeless musical chairs has been dubbed ‘Care Not Cash’ by an individual who has never worked an honest day in his life, considering the fact that Mr. Newsom and his compadres on the Board just voted themselves a 300% raise. So even though there’s no care, we do know where the cash went.

So to those of us who have personally experienced the kind of care that Newsom and his minority ilk have in store for the poor of San Francisco, have no illusions that anything less than steppedup police violence, alienation, and the curtailment of our human and civil rights is what is actually in store for us. During the recent anti-war protests, many people who have never known the experience of being homeless got an idea of just how brutal and indiscriminate the SFPD can be when doling out the will of the bourgeoisie.

One point, which I’ve not heard addressed once by Gavin Christopher Newsom in his entire monologue to the wealthy constituents of District 2, is personal freedom of choice. If I am, for example, a cash grant recipient under the CAAP programs, and want to attend a trade school, or rent a space on a friend’s sofa with my monthly stipend; if I want to put an outfit together and look for work as a barback or waiter, or even if I choose to (GOD FORBID!) join a young lady for dinner or a movie, under Ordinance N, my personal choice in this matter is completely stripped from me. What this debate is all about is human dignity. If implemented as currently crafted, Ordinance ‘N’ will expel a minimal 610 current shelter residents, cost the city millions in needless expenditures such as biometric imaging technology, police enforcement, property damage and loss of life, not to mention creative and human capital damage. It will, however, fatten the pockets of shelter overseers, the DHS, the DPW, the drug dealers who use the shelters as fronts, and other county parasites as they continue this game of homeless bait and switch.

And, as Supervisor Newsom likes to say with such gleaming pride, “This is only the beginning.” So we must ask ourselves, do we really want to simply join the ranks of racist, oppressive, and shortsighted cities such as Houston, Salt Lake City, or Los Angeles, whose hate crime statistics against homeless people are disgusting? What all of this amounts to is a demonstrative increase in the number of homeless men, woman, and families in our city and county, all due to multimillionaire debutante Newsom’s egomaniacal assault on the poor.

Take, for example, Chicago, Illinois, which eliminated their public assistance for adults in 1993. According the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, last year between 120,000 and 160,000 more men and women became homeless. Also, according to the Chicago Tribune, a five-month pilot study of homeless deaths identified 54 homeless deaths. However, only Chicago’s houseless residents who did not make it to the hospital were counted. So why not put ourselves in the moccasins of the displaced and forgotten and allow the poorest San Franciscans to fully blossom, and in doing so, add so much more color, integrity, and inner strength to a city reeling with federal invasiveness and a general absence of equinimitable accountability on the part of coddled multi-national corporations such as Bectel, Starbucks, PepsiCo, Gap Inc., and Chevron?

These are a few suggestions, which may offer pragmatic and real solutions to the challenges homeless men and women face in an overgrown and out of control capitalist market.

1. Close all shelters, thereby removing from the equation fat cats and parasites like Cecil Williams, who, entrusted with the well-being of tens of thousands of human beings, often have little or nothing to show in return for the astronomical amounts of money, resources, and commodities which they receive.
3. Utilize existing housing and urban development funds as matching funds to assist private, non-aligned groups such as Homes Not Jails in opening up empty building and units to squatters, students, and low-wage workers.
4. Create a liaison between the city and squatters enhancing squatter’s rights at a time when housing will be most crucial.
5. Compartmentalize funding allocation so as to ensure against extensive city and county bureauracratic expenditures and cronyism.
6. Be pragmatic and real about freedom of personal choice. Don’t ask of others what you would not be willing to do yourself. Forcing a person to sacrifice 75% of their only income is inhumane and cruel. Personal choice is a right, after all, and exercising the basic right of personal choice is often the only real way poor people can improve their lot. A good example of this would be two, three, or more individuals or families pooling their resources to make ends meet or pay rent for a living space.
7. Don’t increase bureaucracy but rather inspire the effectiveness of as few targeted expenditures as possible. It is my belief that proposed or implemented cuts in the area of housing/welfare for the poor ought to never be balanced on the back of innocents. There are, after all, plenty of genuine offenders about: welfare fraud, graft, and globalized capitalism manifested, for example, in Starbucks replacing your local coffee shops, have, after all, become quite a common disease in San Francisco.
8. Waive S.F. City College tuitions for homeless students so that those willing to try to improve their lot can do so.
9. Phase out traditional institutional entitlements with Habitat for Humanity-type models encouraging self-sustainable and long-term success.

Sapphire

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