Join more than 50 religious leaders from diverse faith traditions to influence San Francisco’s budget priorities for poor and homeless people.
Sponsored by Religious Witness with Homeless People.
Thursday, June 5, 10:30-11:30 a.m.
San Francisco City Hall, South Light Court
For more information contact Sister Bernie Galvin at 415.929.0781.
From May through July, most US taxpayers will be receiving $300-600 as part of an “economic stimulus package” passed by the Federal government earlier this year. The basic idea is that by spending that money on consumer goods, we’ll all pump a little more life back into the national economy, encouraging growth and countering the looming recession.
Back in the days of another great empire, Juvenal wrote that Rome was in decline because the people could be bought off with the promises of, “bread and circuses.” Over the past quarter century, the United States government has abdicated its responsibilities to its people by slashing public housing and income assistance, and reallocating necessary service funds to frivolous wars and corporate welfare. Now, as the past couple decades of economic policy are failing, the government is trying to buy the public off with a little bit of bread, while Fox and Clear Channel manage the corporatocracy’s circuses.
You could register your protest by, say, investing your stimulus check in the Shanghai Stock Exchange, but we at the Street Sheet propose a perhaps more productive means of protest: Invest in us.
Your economic stimulus check—or part of it—can help us to create a voice for more humane governmental economic and social service policies. Donations may be sent to:
Street Sheet Economic Stimulus Package
c/o Coalition on Homelessness
468 Turk Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
or you can donate on-line here.
Juvenal also wrote, “Honesty is praised and starves.” Your donation can cut a little edge off that starvation.
Friends and allies gather to listen to one of the speakers at Saturday’s celebration.
On Wednesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee voted 3-2 to deny $500,000 funding to Mayor Newsom’s Community Justice Center.
While many San Franciscans have been led to believe that the Center would deal with problematic misdemeanors and non-violent felonies, such as drug-dealing charges, the Mayor’s Office has repeatedly touted the Center as a piece of a solution to homelessness, focusing on “quality of life” citations, which, in San Francisco’s law books, include various kinds of sleeping in public, asking for alms twice, and jaywalking. At the same time that the City was asked to devote $500,000 now to an untested and almost undefined project that will cost millions each year to run, the Mayor is proposing cuts to the municipal budget which will eliminate some of the very service to which the Community Justice Center was intended to send citees.
While the ideal of using treatment instead of punishment in cases where treatment is wanted and useful is right on, this has to be applied intelligently (and without a published plan, with constant City bureaucrat confusion between “treatment” and “services,” with the bizarre idea that all panhandlers need some kind of treatment other than an income, we’ve got no reason to believe that it will be), and it cannot come at the cost of decreased services overall or decreased accessibility to services for those who seek them out without the stick of the criminal justice system. Any such plan needs to come with a clear plan, and with funding for the treatment it will mandate.
Carolyn Tyler covers the story for ABC here.
The SF Print Collective and the Coalition on Homelessness invite you to join us for a mural celebration to raise awareness about justice for homeless people.
Saturday, May 10, 2008, 12-4 p.m.
Clarion Alley, San Francisco (between 17th and 18th Streets and Mission and Valencia)
Poster and T-shirt printing
Food and music
For more information, call 510‧332‧7839.
98 we hate!
99 is fine!
Spread the word!
Vote June third!
I recited this cheesy poem for artist and videographer, T.J. Walkup, hoping its doggerel claws would sink into his brain. I wanted to warn him in an unforgettable way about the savagely deceptive ballot measure Prop. 98. No rock star Obama or Clinton appears on the June 3 ballot. There is strong concern that low voter turnout could result in Prop 98 permanently wiping out rent control across California.
“The California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act” seeks to prohibit governmental use of eminent domain to seize and transfer private homes to a private developer. However, the prop does not stop there.
Trolling the web, T.J. discovered a pro-Prop. 98 site linked to a “low-end” YouTube video. Comedian Drew Carey was paid to tell a “sad story” about a developer scheme using eminent domain to displace “poor Hispanic and Black kids” from a fitness center. The motive for this child abuse? These builders wanted to construct “mixed income housing.” To T.J. it suggested, “they were doing something for the greater good of the community, but taking the community out while they were doing it.”
“I’m not a lawyer,” T.J. told me. “[On the surface,] this looks harmless.
“The most evil thing about [Prop. 98] is that it’s written to deceive people who have reasonable intelligence or better. It presents itself such that a person like myself struggles for the logic [in] what’s going on.”
As San Francisco’s June budget proposal for the 2008-09 fiscal year looms ahead, advocates of public services must come together and assert our voices, demanding that the services, which benefit the most marginalized populations of the city, not be cut. The Mayor’s office projects a $300 million deficit, and, at this point, the budget lies in Newsom’s control.
As the City moves forward to shut down shelters and eliminate mental health services, we must intervene and demand that our supervisors stand up to the war being waged against those of us whose very existence depends on the services the Mayor wants to eradicate.
If the Mayor’s 2007-08 budget is any indication of what lies ahead, then the city can anticipate cuts and the elimination of programs that serve populations in need such as the homeless community, low-income families, people living with HIV/AIDS, low-income seniors, people caught in the justice system, and immigrants.
Ella Hill Hutch Community Center employees don’t know if—or when—they will be forced to close their shelter for homeless people. As of two weeks ago, the staff were bracing for a June 29 closing date, but no final decision on the Center’s fate has yet been made, said shelter manager Trina Johnson. This comes in the wake of the March 31 closing of Buster’s Place, the city’s only 24-hour resource center for homeless people.
I remember having a beer bottle keychain. It was heavy and metal and hard to lose. It opened up its fair share of longnecks and it would jangle my keys like chimes when I pulled it from my pocket.
I used to have a lot of keys. They’d weigh down my worn out jeans and poke holes through the pockets. They’d end up collecting trinkets—weird plastic chains with bottle openers or flashlights or cartoon characters dangled off of them. The bigger and heavier they were the better. That way, I wouldn’t lose them. But over time my key ring’s gotten smaller and smaller and it seems like I just can’t keep a hold of nothin’ but the bottle opener.
