RC Blog
Our economy, explained in song
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Looking for a quick explanation for our current economic mess? But wait, you’ve only got five minutes? Oh, and you’d like a little something to dance to at the same time? Look no further. Musician Tay Zonday has put together a song breaking down our broken economy over a pretty catchy synthesizer-driven jam in a track called “Mama Economy.”
How would you balance the state budget?
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Think you can do a better job at balancing the state budget than the governor or legislature? The League of Education Voters has an online calculator that helps you visualize the $1.7 billion budget hole and how to fill it. A scale on one side shows apples representing state services tipping the scale to one side. You can either remove the apples by selecting programs to cut or add dollars by approving new revenue sources.
Click here to try it out.
Here’s one scenario you can try out: Skip everything else and click the option close to the bottom of the list titled “Increase tax for high earners.”
Did you hear that?
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The following the the poem of 2011 Vendor of the Year, Cat Condeff. It is featured in the paper this week. Real Change first ran this 15 years ago, and it is worth revisiting!
Did You Hear That?
I’ll never forget it.
I was surrounded by cement.
And I burst out
With a pent-up
built-up
monstrous scream
So loud
It echoed off the walls
So full of anguish …
The echoes lingered in my ears
And then I wept
bitter tears
from an empty heart
with a voice
that was now, barely there
No one came by
the walls served as silent sentinels
in the war that I had lost …
… Or so it seemed
I screamed
again
This time, my jaw yawned wide
like a python about to devour
the minutes that had to have been hours
Yet this scream was a silent scream.
It erupted from the basement
floor of my soul
Angels in heaven
were awakened by the agony
They heard
Even a few of those in hell
cocked their heads
for a moment and paused to … listen.
Then, it was Back to Business
(This was nothing new to them)
Once, I said to another, I said,
“I have two guardian angels — because one has to rest
while the other angel is on duty”
And then I laughed.
Yet, now I know.
There must be two.
And the one who was sleeping
Was paid for overtime later
For when that silent scream
Was heard by him (or her)
He (or she)
Had no shoes to grab, Yet
He (she) came running.
Come be a Part of Surviving the Streets!
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Surviving the Streets is a giveaway event aimed at serving those who sleep outside with gear that they need to survive the winter. Three years ago, the husband and wife team of Patti Dunn and Mike Grabham partnered with Real Change to make the event even bigger and gain a greater reach in the homeless community. At a time of ever-decreasing funding for homeless services from both the city and the county, personal donations are needed now more than ever. That’s why we are partnering with over a dozen businesses, community groups, and schools to hold survival gear drives for Surviving the Streets. Last year we served 175 participants from the Real Change, Bread of Life, and Compass Center communities—this year, we aim to serve 250. In addition, we hope to expand the event by offering hot food and flu shots (provided by Public Health nurses) to participants.
Please consider donating any of the following items in new or gently used condition for this event:
Sleeping bags
Mens’ jackets
Mens’ socks
Mens’ fleece jacket liners
Warm blankets
Backpacks
Duffle bags
Tarps
Ponchos
Gloves
Hats
Check out www.survivethestreets.org to find out where the nearest donation drop-off is. Donation collection will run until November 20, 2011.
All volunteer positions for Surviving the Streets are full at this time. Please call or email Jenn Pearson, Volunteer Coordinator, if you would like to volunteer to hold a gear collection drive in your business, church, or school. Jenn can be contacted at 206-441-3247 ext. 212 or volunteer@realchangenews.org.
Summertime
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Real Change vendor Reggie Thompson posted on the International Network of Street Papers Blog yesterday. Check it out!
Reggie’s Corner Rap-Summertime
Summertime…….chimes……..bells are ringing. Uh Huh, my little summer hiatus is about over …..zip…….gone like a toronado. The celebration was great, now back to my writing station.I am inspired to say I had time to recharge my mind and to find a key to increase my sells back to par. I remember my old sales manager’s advise, “Activity increases production, don’t get locked-jaw”.Ask and you will overcome fear of the “no syndrome”.Give a prospect to benefit and feel good about helping a good cause. Well done!
Now, let me get back to what little summer I have left to enjoy.I got a few BBQ’s to attend.There is going to be a lot of activity at the grill. I can smell delious steaks, hambugers, and all that. Locked-jaw is to be the last thing at the party and the last thing on my Realchange turf. That’s for REAL.
!
The Courage of Our Convictions
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The 470 Real Change supporters at our October 4th Breakfast gave a standing ovation this morning to the event’s closing speech, delivered by Real Change Director Timothy Harris. The 2011 Breakfast raised a record-breaking $102,165 to support our work.
Every year, when I stand up here, and look out upon this amazing community of supporters, I feel a bit overwhelmed. By the depth and breadth of our support, by the importance of what we do, and by the difference that we make.
These are very hard times, and what we do is so essential. Just a few weeks ago I asked at a vendor meeting who hadn’t worked a steady job for three years or more. More than half the room raised their hands.
We create the opportunity for our vendors to be valued, to be proud of what they do. There are people in their lives, lots of people, who affirm who they are. Who care that they exist.
That matters. It matters a lot.
A few weeks ago, I went to a memorial at Seward Park PCC. The Leaves of Remembrance Project was cementing an engraved bronze leaf onto the sidewalk that read “Robert Hansen, 1951-2010.”
I wonder how many people in this room knew Robert?
Robert had been a vendor since 1995. He loved people and people loved him back
And when he unexpectedly died, our community’s sense of loss took us all by surprise
So sixteen months later, there I was, standing with forty other people outside the Seward Park PCC on a Sunday morning, remembering this man that had so touched our lives.
There were two ministers. There were his friends from SHARE/WHEEL and his friends from Real Change. There were his friends from PCC and his friends from downtown. The City Attorney was there, and two City Councilors, who also live in Seward Park and shop at that PCC.
There wasn’t a person there to whom Robert, more than a year later, was not present.
This, this thing called Real Change, and the community that we create of it, is a tremendous gift.
We live in very mean times, and sometimes, it feels like we’re supposed to just get over it, and accept homelessness, and the human degradation that comes with it, as an unsurprising fact of life.
Last year, I’m not sure, I can’t keep up, the State Legislature changed the name of General Assistance – Unemployable, to Disability Lifeline. The theory was that maybe they had to cut it. But if they called it Disability Lifeline it would be safe from elimination. It’s looking like that’s probably not true.
We’re supposed to accept hat the economic restructuring that is the end game of nearly forty years of widening inequality — they call it “the New Normal” — is inevitable.
It is not. And Real Change is a reminder to us all that we’re much better than that.
Last year, about this time, I was part of a citizens panel convened by the Mayor to consider the question of homelessness in Seattle and whether we should allow a Tent City. Like, oh, say, Nickelsville.
And this panel, which included institutional heavyweights like the Office of Housing, United Way, the Committee to End Homelessness, DESC, Compass Center, and Archdiocesan Housing Authority, came to an astonishing admission.
We’re not doing enough. Two shelter beds for every three homeless people doesn’t cut it.
We agreed that this is no typical recession that we’re in, and that things are likely to get a lot worse before they get better. That the services upon which poor people depend are going to take some big hits right when they’re needed most.
We agreed that we need to support homeless people’s self-organized survival activity, and not hinder it.
We said that even with a city-sanctioned encampment, only about one in ten unsheltered homeless people would live there, and that we also need to support car campers and others who exist outside the formal shelter system.
It was a moment of courage and clarity, where we stood together and said we’re not in Kansas anymore and have to do things differently.
Where we acknowledged that continually rearranging the deck chairs according to non-profit best practice just isn’t good enough.
Not much, really, has changed since then. But it could. Given that we find the courage of our convictions and rise to do what is called of us.
This is the reminder that I’d like to offer as we close out our breakfast this year. That the beloved community that Dr. King spoke of, consistently and continually, is real, and it is the essence of Real Change.
But that this vision of community demands, especially in these extraordinary times, that we be extraordinary.
That we see clearly. That we speak truth. That we do justice. And, as our friend Craig Rennebohm would be the first to say, that we walk humbly alongside the poor, to build a new world that has love enough for us all.
You believe this too. That’s why you’re here. That’s what brings us together this morning. To celebrate our community, and the possibility that it brings.
So thank you for being here, and for your support of our work. Let’s all leave here today, and go do something extraordinary.
Reflection on the Blessing of the Totem Pole
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This essay was written by 2011 Vendor of the Year Cat Condeff, who attended the August 30th Blessing of the Totem and John T. Williams Memorial.
The weather couldn’t have been more perfect. The forecast for the day had been for gloomy, old clouds, but the universe and the heavens had other plans, plans of their own. There were no clouds obstructing the view of the sky, and as I have no doubt that John-John (my nickname for John T.) could look down on all of us just as easily as we could look upward toward him.
If I had to pick just one word to describe the ceremony, it would be “somber.” Sure, there was the celebratory regalia, as Natives from as far away as Alaska came to this event, as well as folks dressed in their finest Indian clothing, as well as people dressed in just plain ordinary garb that you see everyday folks and tourists alike wear all the time. I was about the only one that I saw who was wearing black. I thought of The Women In Black as I got dressed that day, as I do every time I wear my black velvet dress. I even wear black underwear as my own small, yet significant way of showing my solidarity with them. Perhaps the most impressive individual there—to me, anyway—was the tribal dancer, who wore a massive array of eagle feathers and bands of bells on his wrists, arms and ankles. There was one woman who had a top on the said “police” in large block letters, but it wasn’t a typical Seattle Police Officer uniform, and I don’t know as to what capacity it was that she was there, but the presence of uniformed city servants in blue were noticeably ABSENT. Perhaps it was just as well. The mayor showed up about 1/3—1/2 of the way through, but didn’t speak. KOMO news was there, and photographers aplenty.
Pier 57 was absolutely packed with people, mostly standing room only. The chairs that were available were occupied by the elders, mostly—as it should be, and in keeping with the Native American tradition that calls for the utmost respect of those who have come before—and some were occupied by Natives who were visiting from out of state, some of them women with children in their arms. The area above the Pier 57 setting was filled with onlookers—two or more deep, depending.
The ceremony itself lasted about ten minutes. Most of what went before was honoring John-John’s memory and several different tribal leaders giving speeches about whatever they thought was appropriate for the occasion. There was no “Birk bashing.” There was no mention of how unfairly John T. Williams life was cut short at the hands of a trigger-happy pig. Just that he had had a hand in the making of the Totems posthumously because the design of the kingfisher was his, and was used especially to honor his life—as well as his father’s and grandfather and also his living survivor-brother Rick. John-John’s other brother was there,but didn’t speak. Rick spoke about the making of the poles and how the money had been donated by (?) to pay for the raising and the maintenance of the two gorgeous totems. They lay quietly, side by side during all this, I don’t suppose minding too much the snapping of photos and all the attention. I’m pretty sure that it was sage that was lit, and after the speeches, and the drumming and the prayers were said, Rick and one or two others (i couldn’t see—), one of whom was an honored drummer, paced slowly around the two poles, chanting prayers and anointing them with the music of the drum and the burning incense.
There was a city councilman who spoke—I’d remember his name if you said it—and there was a raffle for the miniature replica totem pole as well as some turquoise jewelry and a few other handmade items—like a beautiful basket—The buy-in was $20.00 a ticket, but these sacred items were/are priceless.
After all this, it was made known that the ceremony itself was over, but that the mic would be open to anyone who wanted to share stories /or memories of the late Master Carver, determined by his own grandfather to be the best carver of the bunch. Part of me wanted to go up there and say something, but it was just too personal of a thing for me to go up and say how I knew him in front of alot of people I didn’t know, who were then starting to disband, and wouldn’t have been much of a captive audience at that point. They/we were throughout the ceremony, however.
I’m still not all that familiar with the camera that I was blessed with, but I did take a short movie during the drumming. The still shots were kinda disappointing, but I wasn’t gonna go barging around to get a better angle like some of the others with cameras with massive lenses apparently feel they have the right to. No offense.
The main sensation that encompassed me as I made my way up the Pier’s plank walkway was that we did The Master Carver, John T. Williams—John-John—proud. And I had the distinct and unmistakable feeling that he was watching everything, hearing everything, even smelling the sage, maybe…that he was with us and that he was grateful that we came together not only as a people—family, friends and onlookers—but that it was a serene event, devoid of hatred or malice or revengefull words. Absent of blame and shame. A sacred, holy blessing that occurred without any unwarranted incidents, that helped the Totems to rest quietly, until their big day in February, 2012, John T.‘s birthday—the 27th—I think—when they will be raised and set in their permanent place. Mary Alice—one who has been very devoted to this whole totem pole project, as well as to Rick Williams and other members of the family and the other carvers, etc.,—was there the next day and said that there was an unmistakable sense of the poles “sleeping.”
Like I said at the outset of this, the word to describe The Blessing of the Totem Poles was/is somber. Suitably, painfully so.
Submitted respectfully by
Catherine M. Condeff
“Cat” to some, including J.T.
Vendor #149
Remembering Robert Hansen
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Please join us this Sunday, September 18th at 2 pm to remember inspirational Real Change Vendor Robert Hansen as the Tree of Remembrance Project places a bronze leaf on the sidewalk of Seward Park PCC (5041 Wilson Ave. S.) to memorialize this extraordinary life. Below is a eulogy that was read at City Hall Plaza memorial event in 2010, and a link to a wonderful remembrance we published on the anniversary of his passing.
Robert would have loved this.
Seeing you here. In City Hall Plaza. Looking like a protest rally.
But we’re not here to protest. We’re here to celebrate our friend, Robert Hansen, and the things he stood for.
Robert was always there to support the various poor people’s issues Real Change fights for. He was driven in this, I think, not by any sophisticated analysis of urban poverty issues or belief that the world would actually one day become more just.
He was there because it was the right thing to do. Robert Hansen was a good man. An honest man, who was loyal to his friends and kind to everyone.
There are things that I know personally that Robert believed in.
Robert believed in both Ford and Chevy pick-up trucks, although he preferred Chevy’s. Robert believed in Econoline vans.
Robert believed in hot drip coffee and cigarettes.
Robert believed in the power of bad jokes to make people laugh.
Robert believed in work, and in making himself useful.
Robert believed in fairness, and that everyone should have a shot at a decent life. Robert saw the value in all of us.
And Robert believed that people are good.
I say that Robert believed in work.
He put in more hours than most people selling the paper, and would always be there for us to do what needed to be done.
He called Real Change from Swedish a few days before he died to apologize that he wouldn’t be there to help unload the new papers Wednesday morning, like he always was.
Not long ago, someone asked me what I though about those who “choose” to be homeless. Who make the calculation that being a wage slave sucks and drop out of regular work altogether.
I said that this struck me, for those who are forever consigned to the worst jobs at the worst pay when they can get them, as entirely rational.
I said that the bigger mystery for me, the bigger source of wonder and amazement, are those who, despite the fact that work doesn’t pay — that our social contract of an honest days work for an honest days pay has been long broken — continue on working, or at least trying to work.
Robert was one of those people.
I remember around six or seven years ago, when Robert thought his ship had finally come in.
He’d been working a lot of hours under the table at an auto junk yard. They liked him and saw that he was good with a wrench and knew his way around cars. I’d never seen him look better. He dropped a lot of weight and even got kind of buff.
They offered him a regular job. He was elated. Twelve bucks an hour. Vacation benefits. Health care. He said he’d still sell the paper sometimes, because he loved his customers, but he wouldn’t be around very much.
Then came the background check. There was a nine year-old felony, expunged from the record in one place but not another. They said sorry, deal’s off.
His desperate attempts to explain went nowhere. My phone call to vouch for him had no effect. My recommendation helped get lots of former interns into grad school, but it couldn’t get Robert his dream job at the junkyard.
The business was under no obligation to give Robert a chance, so they didn’t. They just hired someone else.
I think this was the only time I ever saw Robert in anything like despair, which, in itself, was kind of amazing.
No matter what was going on, whether he was losing a cheap apartment and living in his truck, or sick, or tired, Robert didn’t complain.
He was happy. Robert Hansen was a happy man. I think maybe he was born that way.
Robert never stopped believing in work. In the months before he died, he’d often show me the ID card he received for completing Washington State road flagger training. He was really proud of that. He thought that maybe that would be work a 58 year-old man could do.
The last time we talked about it, he’d pretty much figured out that his badge wasn’t going to get him a job. He was less disappointed this time, but part of him still hoped.
Robert never stopped hoping.
A few days ago, I was talking with one of Robert’s good friends about the extraordinary community response to Roberts death. The spontaneous memorial where he worked the Seward Park PCC. The full obituary in the Seattle Times. A column from Nicole Brodeur. The many expressions of condolence and grief we’ve received at Real Change.
She reminded me that our work is to love. She said that if we just love, the change we need to create will follow.
She said that this is why her Jesus means so much to her. That he loved, and he loved unconditionally. He had one commandment, to love one another, and that if we could do this, we’d create his kingdom here on earth.
I’ve never been able to accept my friends Jesus. That’s my issue. I certainly have nothing to say to the Jesus who condemns sin and worships material success. The Jesus of the powerful and the Jesus of the powerless and frustrated.
But I believe in the power of love, and I believe we are called especially to love those who aren’t always easy to love.
And I believe in what Robert Hansen believed in. I believe in people, and in caring for each other. And in taking the time to share a joke and a smile to let someone know that they mean something to you.
I picked the poem for the front of Robert’s memorial flyer. It’s a nice poem. It’s a nice thought. But I don’t know that I believe that either.
I’m probably not going to be thinking of Robert every time I feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. If he’s part of the Universal All, that’s great, but it won’t help me much when I stop to remember that he’s gone.
But I do think he’s with us. He’s in the memories of hundreds, if not thousands of people. He’s there with us on Wednesday mornings, when the new papers come in.
He is here, in the faces of all the people I know who knew and loved him.
Robert Hansen has inspired me, and reminded me again that universal, unconditional love isn’t some overwhelming burden of which only a few Saints are capable. It’s in the small, everyday acts of kindness. It’s in taking the time to smile at someone and say hello. It’s in knowing that everyone, EVERYONE, is worthy of human dignity and respect, and taking the risk of living that truth into your life.
Robert did that. And if Robert did that, so can we all.
http://www.realchangenews.org/index.php/site/archives/5524/
Real Change Volunteer Opportunities
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Here are February’s volunteer needs at Real Change!
Real Change needs dedicated volunteers to help run every aspect of the organization. Check out our FAQ to learn more about the general opportunities we have to get involved and how to sign up for an orientation.
Editorial
(please note, samples of your work are required before acceptance as a volunteer for all editorial positions)
Illustrators: Editorial is looking for 1-2 more illustrators or graphic designers to contribute to the paper on an on-call basis. You would be given an assignment 2-3 weeks in advance and would need to meet strict deadlines.
Writers: Interested in reporting on local politics and human interest stories? Real Change is always looking for fresh reporters to submit articles for our weekly paper.
Editorial Committee: The Editorial Committee is made up of vendors, staff, volunteers, and community members who discuss current issues that might be good content for the newspaper, decide on poetry and creative submissions, and report meeting notes to the Editor. The EC is open to the public on the last Thursday of the month, at 2:30pm; membership on the EC is determined by existing members.
Committee Facilitator: The Editorial Committee is in need of a volunteer who is trained in facilitation to spend their Thursday afternoons with the group to ensure a productive meeting.
Vendor Services
Vendor Sales Training Facilitators: Deliver a sales training for Real Change Vendors in order to boost circulation and improve vendor retention. The training that we offer was developed by a volunteer at the end of 2011. It is currently in the form of a simple PowerPoint presentation. We are looking for volunteers who are willing to lead at least one training per month for an initial period of three months. Volunteers for this position should have previous sales experience, group facilitation experience, and familiarity with issues of homelessness and poverty.
Sales Desk Substitute: Interested in doing some direct service with Real Change vendors? Come volunteer on the paper sales desk! Right now we have a need for Sales Desk substitutes who can come in on an on-call basis for a 3 or 4 hour shift Monday through Saturday. The Sales Desk volunteer assists homeless/low-income Real Change vendors when they come into the office, and acts as receptionist for our Pioneer Square office. Your specific duties would include: interacting with vendors, cashiering, minor data entry, explaining and enforcing vendor rules, and light office tasks such as typing, filing, and filing mail items. This is a chance for you to meet and interact with a variety of people who are poor/homeless, and learn to understand the importance of creating more advocacy and opportunity for the low-income and homeless community.
Contact Jenn Pearson, Volunteer Coordinator, if you would like to find out more about one of these available volunteer roles!
206-441-3247 ext. 212
volunteer@realchangenews.org
Real Change’s 17th Annual Breakfast is coming up soon!
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Our 17th Annual breakfast is coming up soon, and we would love to see you there!
Our program this year includes:
• Keynote Speaker Rev. Craig Rennebohm, Chaplain with the Mental Health Chaplaincy and author of Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Streets.
• Real Change’s 2011 Vendors of the Year, Catherine Condeff and Kenneth Chow, who will be honored for their work and will share their Real Change stories.
• Presentation of Real Change’s annual Change Agent Award.
• Hosted by Rosette Royale, Real Change’s Assistant Editor.
When and where?
Tuesday October 4, 2011
Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center
7:30am- Check-in and Networking
8am – Program
Interested?
Register here, or contact us at events@realchangenews.org; 206-441-3247 x206
We look forward to seeing you there!
Real Change Vendor Saves the Day!
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Earlier today, while Real Change Vendor, Robert Surles, stood selling papers at his usual spot on 1st Ave and East Yesler Way, he noticed something very, very wrong.
What exactly was so wrong on a calm, Monday morning in Pioneer Square?
Well, it happened to be an 18 – wheeler turning right onto 1st Ave from the east side of Yesler Way. As the 18 – wheeler made its tight turn the side of the truck hit against the metal, sidewalk protection pole, ripping its bolts out of the cement and dragging the heavy, metal pole almost 3 feet until it hit into the base of the historic, glass and iron wrought pergola that stands on the corner.
Robert saw that the driver had not noticed the collision and was continuing to press down on the gas to clear the corner, only pushing the metal protection pole harder against the outer most support pillar of the iron pergola.
Realizing that any more pressure could potentially bring down the pillar – which would fall onto those seated nearby and cause the structural integrity of the entire pergola to fall onto those seated and walking under it – Robert began shouting at the truck driver to stop. Hearing Robert’s shouts the driver finally stopped and realized the danger he was putting the surrounding people in who were seated under the pergola.
To show the gravity of this situation and to put it into perspective, a similar incident occurred in January of 2001, when a large truck hit into the pergola causing the 1909, Victorian-style structure to come crashing to the ground in a pile of iron cast destruction. With much painstaking work the pergola was restored in August, 2002.
It was hit again in September 2008 by another truck, making the same right hand turn as the truck today. That incident resulted in minor scraping and caused the City of Seattle to install a metal, sidewalk protection pole to safeguard from any future tragedies. And that’s the very same metal, sidewalk protection pole that had its bolts lifted out of the cement today and dragged into the base of the pergola, helping to nearly topple it for a second time. So much for an effective safeguard.
If Real Change Vendor, Robert Surles, had not been there to save the day there’s a good chance that the pergola would not be standing today and a lot of lives could have been lost. The City of Seattle owes him an incredible amount of thanks for being vigilant, for being proactive, and for being a hero. Also, the city worker responsible for having that sidewalk protection pole installed owes taking Robert out for a nice lunch for saving his or her job.
Thank you, Robert!
- Andrew Shahamiri, Vendor Services Intern
(Photo Credit for Pergola: http://www.seattlecaraccidentlawyerblog.com/2008/09/seattles_historic_pioneer_squa.html)
Homeless Couple Stops Robbery
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A homeless couple prevented a robbery from succeeding last week in Georgetown on the corner of Airport Way South and South Lucile Street.
The couple noticed a man dragging two 3’ x 6’ tin sheets, the kind usually used for roofing, from a metal scrap yard. The husband, who is a part-time employee of the scrap yard, approached the suspect and told him to return the sheets to the metal yard.
This bold and courageous move was met with hostility as the suspect’s temper rose, screaming, “This is my shit!” He then dropped the contents in his hands and began throwing large rocks at the couple. These rocks had been placed nearby by the railroad company for railroad track stability. The police report notes that, “The suspect had an infinite number of these rocks available and he was throwing them at the victims wildly.”
The woman received a compound fracture from the rock throwing. The SPD report indicates that her “right arm appeared to be broken at the forearm and it was bleeding from where a portion of the bone appeared to be protruding from the skin.” Her husband sustained some head wounds as well. He indicated to the police that in the tumult he had begun throwing rocks back in defense.
Once the rock throwing ceased the suspect yelled at the wife, threatening to take her life the next time that he sees her, and then fled on foot without the two tin sheets. Police were unable to find the suspect and Seattle Fire Department treated the couple.
While the names of this couple have not been released let’s congratulate them on stopping a robbery-in-progress. How many of us would have the courage and awareness to stop something like this ourselves?
Thanks to Paul Holmes from the Stranger’s Slog for originally reporting this. Article found here.
- Andrew Shahamiri, Vendor Services Intern
Happy Vendor Appreciation Week!
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This week is Real Change’s First Annual Vendor Appreciation Week. Our vendors make up a group of 350+ individuals who have spent their lives in a series of odd jobs and careers, ranging everywhere from construction and carpentry to Alaskan fishing boats to military service. Most of them have faced homelessness at some point in their lives; many of them continue to work against these odds. They have now all come together as a part of the Real Change community, and each have become important parts of our individual communities throughout the Greater Seattle Area. This week is the time to show our appreciation to them for all of their hard work!
The issue hitting the streets today is a Vendor Appreciation Special Edition. Pick it up to learn more about our vendors and the work they do. And ask your favorite vendor about another special treat today- an “I Love my Vendor” sticker, for customers like you to wear to show your support! Other appreciation activities this week include buying a coffee and saying thanks to your vendor tomorrow (Thursday 8/4), and writing a small note of gratitude to pass onto your vendor on Friday (8/5).
Thank you for your support and kindness to our Real Change vendors, and I hope that this week you will join us in thanking them!
- Adrienne Brown
Vendor Services Intern
Alicia and Kathy
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This story was emailed to us by new reader Alicia Winski, a writer living in West Seattle. Thanks for taking the time to share your Real Change story Alicia. And thanks to Kathy for being such a great vendor.
Alicia In Wonderland aka Reality Check
Like so many others these days, I’ve been living dime to dime, hoarding what little I have and trying to make it stretch. So it was a good day, indeed, when I found myself with a few dollars to spend at the market. Checking prices and weighing brand names, I combed the aisles for good bargains, then smugly sashayed out of the store, bags in hand, change, and three cans of the favorite tea I splurged on.
Like many Seattle residents, I use public transportation; gas is pricey and parking ridiculous, so I headed out to the corner to catch my ride. Nearing my bus stop, I had to walk around what I assumed to be the obligatory homeless person, complete with sign and hopeful look that seems to be the “norm” these days. Avoiding her eye, I mouthed, “no change” and proceeded to settle down onto the stop. Eagerly pulling a precious can of tea out of my bag, I glanced at the woman and suddenly realized that the sign I thought she held, was in fact, a small paper that she appeared to be selling. Again, making assumptions, I guessed she had probably emptied the newspaper rack out and was trying to resell them for unsavory reasons. But still, it WAS a hot day …
Mentally kicking myself in the ass for the perceived sacrifice I was about to make, I called out, “Ma’am, I don’t have any change, but would you like some cold tea?” Walking over, she said, “No, thank you, that’s alright. But it’s ok, if you want a paper, you can have one”, and handed me the one she was holding. Shamefaced, I took it. Giving me a broken-toothed smile, she walked back to her corner. Feeling obliged, I sat down and started reading. The paper was entitled “Real Change” and it appeared to be geared towards the hunger, healthcare and housing issues suffered by so many these days. Being the half-assed Liberal I am, I’ve always been interested in those issues so continued to read through to the back page where I found a donation form and notice. The notice read as follows:’
“The vendor who sold you this paper works. So does Real Change”. Hmm. Flipping back to the front of the paper I found, located at the bottom, THIS message:
“Your vendor buys this paper for 35 cents and keeps all the proceeds. Please purchase from 2011 badged vendors only”.
Oh, oh. My assumptive, snobbish ass had just been bitten. And it hurt.
Truly feeling sub-human at this point, I made a quick pretense of going through my bag. Slyly opening my change purse, I pulled out a handful of change and called out, “Ma’am? Look at this! I just found change at the bottom of my bag! Here, you go!” Bright eyed, she smiled once again as she said, “That’s ok. You don’t have to do that”.
Oh, yes I did. Really.
Making guilty small talk I asked, “So, you buy these papers? And resell them? Tell me about that.”
“Yes, I do. Times have been awfully hard for a lot of us”, she said, “It’s getting harder and harder to make a living, but since I’ve been selling this paper, I’ve been able to earn a few dollars and it’s been a godsend”.
Much like Alice in Wonderland growing smaller and smaller before her eyes, I continued drinking the potion as I asked, “Do many people buy from you?”
“Not a lot, no”, she said. “Most assume I’m begging for drug or alcohol money. (Sigh) Granted some of the people are the street are doing that, but a lot of us just want to earn a living like everybody else”.
“Sure! Sure, of course!” (Feeling on eye level with her knee caps about now) “Well, I have to say, I certainly understand that. I’ve had some hard times myself over the past two years and I have a college degree (hoping an Associate’s degree counts).
“I have a four year degree in accounting” she said. (Oh, god, just shoot me now) “I’ve been living in a place with no electricity for a couple of months. But thanks to this job, I was able to make a partial payment on my electric bill this morning and tonight I can take a bath without having to boil water!”
“Well”, said I, in my ‘I’m just like you’ voice, “I know what you mean!” No I didn’t. But I wasn’t going to let her know that. “What’s your name? I’m Alicia”.
“Wow, my name is Kathy, Alicia. Nice to meet you. I’m blown away. It’s rare that someone takes the time to acknowledge me, much less ask my name”. (Oh, holy hell). “You know, a lot of people just assume we’re lazy. (Yep.) But, I’ve been trying to find a job for over a year now. The problem is that the people doing the hiring are half my age, and of course, I’m missing my front tooth because I couldn’t afford a dentist, so that’s just another strike against me. (Oh, I just can’t take this anymore-the guilt is too great) “But when someone like you stops and smiles, it makes my day. I’m going to think about this nice conversation and enjoy my tea”.
Wanting nothing more than to go home and stick my head in the microwave, I saw my rescue from shame pulling up next to my grocery bags.
Practically throwing money at her, I said in caffeine-quick-speed, “Oh, look, there’s my bus. Take this change and please, PLEASE take the tea. It’s hot out here”.
Jumping onto the bus where I slithered into my seat, I contemplated this encounter as well as all the whining I’ve done recently about my own financial situation. I don’t buy luxuries anymore. I haven’t purchased new clothes in a year. I’ve spent the last four months eating food I wouldn’t have given my dog in another lifetime. But tonight, generic, boxed macaroni and cheese is going to look pretty damned good. After a good nights sleep, I’ll wake up to a hot shower and coffee. And next time I go to the market, and see someone on the corner holding out a paper, I’m going to smile and buy it. Because that handful of change might be the difference between a cold and hot bath for someone like Kathy.
Thanks for the reality check, Kathy.
Last of the Last
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This post was written by RC vendor Reggie Thompson, a writer for the Poor News Network. Reggie is Vendor of the Week in this week’s paper. You can read more of Reggie’s writing on the INSP Vendor-Powered Blog.
Ha, Ha, Ha! Rumors, Rumors, Rumors on television, internet; spilling over like the Niagara Falls. May 21, 2011, the apocalypse, the end of the world. Where did all that false information come from? It’s the middle of June, I’m still selling Real Change paper because people want and need trust-worthy news. So come on people, break out the barbecue grill and put on some hamburgers hot dogs or maybe a big juicy steak or Alaskan salmon. What is life without ice-cold lemonade?!
Life is real, no time for false information, that’s why I sell Real Change paper. I encourage all of the people to read the whole paper because it give them the whole picture of what is really going on and also what is about to go on if we stay silent.
Maybe it’s not the end of the world for false information media. But as street vendors we keep it real with real information, we got a lot of work to do. We got to give the people what they need, real information, hot off the press. Just like we did last summer!!!!
The Real Truth: John T. Williams
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For almost a year, Real Change vendors have had the opportunity to contribute to a blog set up by the International Network of Street Papers (INSP) here at the Real Change office. Real Change is endeavoring to get more vendor voices heard through social media. This blog post was written by a Real Change vendor, Cat Condeff, along with other participants of the Community Journalism class taught by members of the Poor News Network.
The Real Truth: John T. Williams
By Cat Condeff, E Duplessis, Pesha and Lola Bean
Two days before he passed away he gave me a couple DOLLARS, HE SAID “I BELIEVE IN HELPIN FOLKS OUT.” Yes those were the last words he spoke to me. He handed me two dollars the last time I saw him.
PNN correspondent, street and museum artist, loyal street vendor and friend of John T. remembers John T. Williams as he was, transforming ordinary to extraordinary. He was a creator, red sun in the Montana sky, moon rising up from the eastern horizon, the sound of crashing water, brought things to life that appeared dead, resurrection, sound of justice/a cloud of rain. He still rains down on us today and that’s how we know he’s still here/an eagle of art and justice. He carved the silence away from wood to set free stories. His knife brought beautiful things into the world.
To see more posts by Real Change vendors on the INSP Vendor-Powered Blog, click here.
Karaoke+Real Change
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It is amazing how you can live in a city your whole life yet still discover places you never knew existed. Last night was such a night for me as I made the rounds through Noise for the Needy (NFTN) locations to drop off Real Change swag and information. First stop: The Bus Stop, a small bar on Olive Way where DJ Toast would later that night spin at the NFTN Preview Party. Next Stop: the Christmas tree light bedazzled Crescent just down Olive Way from the Bus Stop. I have lived in Seattle since I was a small child but never knew about this little spot, which boasts 7 night a week Karaoke. There I found hundreds of cupcakes and jello shot waiting to be sold at Karaoke for the Needy, a new event for NFTN this year. Last night, all proceeds from PBR, cupcake and jello shot sales went to NFTN and of course, all proceeds from this year’s NFTN benefit your own Real Change. I spent my time mostly up at the Bus Stop chatting with Noise for the Needy volunteers and I had to get home somewhat early on a school night. Which is really too bad, since I apparently missed the best of the karaoke, including NFTN Artistic Director Jeff Henry.
Girl in a Coma
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With such a full sound emanating from such a small crew, it’s no wonder the Austin trio Girl In A Coma comes with the stamp of approval from punk legend Joan Jett. The band signed on with Jett’s Blackheart Records in 2006.
Since then, they’ve played shows with an eccentric range of musicians, from experimental underground acts like Xiu Xiu to big-name alt-rock pioneers like Frank Black and Morrissey — who’s The Smiths track “Girlfriend In A Coma” inspired this Austin band’s name.
See them at the kick-off show of Noise for the Needy Tuesday at Neumos at 925 E. Pike Street. And expect a dynamic range of sounds and influences, from driving Jett-inspired punk anthems to gentler ballads. You can buy tickets here. Proceeds of the entire NFTN festival go to benefit Real Change.
24 hours to go till Noise for the Needy 2011 Kicks off
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In just a day, Noise for the Needy (NFTN) starts a 6 day music festival with all of the proceeds this year coming to the work of Real Change. The NFTN ad that is in this and last week’s issue will get you $2 off the ticket price for the 2 shows at the Underground Events Center:
Friday, June 10: Soft Metals, Ononos, The Tempers, Sports, Spurm, USF, Fly Moon Royalty, DJ’s Gin & Tonic, DJ Up Above, and DJ Floyd Beastie
Saturday, June 11: Akimbo, Wildildlife, black Queen, Princess, Vultures 2012, Smooth Sailing, Whiskey Tango, What What Now, DJ Blazon Stone and DJ Nik C
For the full list of events check out the calendar of all 21 shows here.
Real Change would like to thank everyone at Noise for the Needy, which is an all volunteer endeavor, for setting this up and picking Real Change as this year’s beneficiary.
Stay tuned to this blog, as all this week guest blogger Aaron Burkhalter, will be blogging about the various bands playing for NFTN.
Yesler Terrace adds 100 more units for Seattle’s poorest
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The Seattle Housing Authority’s board of commissioners voted last night to approve a $300 million plan to reinvent the old Yesler Terrace housing project as a mixed-income, high-rise community of up to 5,000 units.
The final plan, however, adds 100 more very low-income units than SHA previously identified.
The housing authority had already said it would replace all 561 of the public-housing units that stand on the 30-acre First Hill site today. But SHA Commissioner Kollin Min, who works for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, asked SHA staff for more. All 661 units will all serve renters in the income bracket that Yesler Terrace serves today—those at or below 30 percent of area median income, or $25,700 for a family of four in Seattle.
SHA won’t build the extra 100 units itself. Instead, the agency expects nonprofit housing developers to. SHA spokesperson Virginia Felton said the housing authority will sell them the land at a discount and provide 100 rental vouchers to help support operating the additional units. (HUD pays two-thirds of a voucher recipient’s rent.) Look for more details on the possible downside of that in the next issue of Real Change.
The 100 extra units are a nice gesture, Yesler Terrace Community Council member Kristin O’Donnell said. But the commingling of classes that was supposed to benefit the poor at SHA’s other mixed-income redevelopments—Holly Park, High Point and Rainier Vista—hasn’t happened, she said.
In the meantime, O’Donnell told the commissioners during public testimony, the residents of Yesler Terrace want to see SHA put a solid plan in place for building the replacement units before it moves residents out and tears down their beloved community.
“It’s kind of special to be six blocks from downtown and have a backyard,” said O’Donnell, a Yesler Terrace tenant for 38 years. “We are a neighborhood, we are a family, and we are going to miss it.”
Homeless moved on for parked cars
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The terrible punchline to the blog I wrote yesterday on the state transportation department clearing homeless people and their tents from a lot under Interstate 5 is that it was, of course, for cars. This morning, Republic Parking signs stood at the entrances to the former city carpool lot. It was already half-filled with cars.
WSDOT evicts homeless under I-5
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Terrence and Alicia Belanger hugged each other once last time before the eviction started this morning under Interstate 5.
First, the Washington State Department of Transportation trucks pulled up. Then came two or three state patrol cars and a crew of orange-vested workers from the Department of Corrections. They got out and started the clearing the parking lot while Terrence and a half-dozen other homeless people packed up their bedrolls and tents to leave.
WSDOT posted notices on Friday, the 13th, giving everyone at the site 72 hours to move. Terrence said he’s spent the winter in the parking lot, which borders the Cherry Street on-ramp to I-5 between Sixth and Seventh. Until recently, the city leased the lot from WSDOT for carpool parking. That stopped and, within a few weeks, the lot became a tent city of about 30 people, Terrence said.
It was a good place to get out of the rain, he said. Now he’s not sure where he’ll go.
Al Poole, director of the City of Seattle’s homelessness intervention program, said he sent a team of outreach workers to the site to offer people shelter and services before WSDOT evicted them. But some people, like Terrence, would rather be outside.
Terrence said he’s tried shelters, but, for some reason, it never works out and he has to leave anyway. Luckily, Alicia has a room at the Morrison Hotel. Terrence used to come and see her there, but the building’s managers no longer allow it.
Alicia is 35 and first became homeless when she aged out of foster care in Wyoming. She’s disabled now and can’t work. Terrence, 41, used to work in construction, but hasn’t had a job since 2002.
Lately, he’s stopped applying for work because he has no identification. He lost his ID card from Oregon, but when he tried to get a new one here, presenting a Social Security card and a birth certificate did him no good, he said. The state worker told him he had to show some kind of picture ID.
“I’ll go until I stop, drop and roll, I guess,” Terrence said. “But this was great for the winter.”
Justice lawyers draw 30 to El Centro
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Jeffrey Dale said he gained a whole new perspective on the police last summer after a Seattle officer slammed his head against a car.
“A lot of them can be dicks at some point,” the 14-year-old told reporters this morning outside El Centro de la Raza. 
The father and son came to El Centro with 30 others to give statements to U.S. Department of Justice civil rights attorneys. The DOJ is investigating the Seattle Police Department’s use of force in the wake of high-profile incidents that include an officer caught on video kicking a Latino suspect and the shooting death of native carver John T. Williams.
Two years ago, Dale, a resident of Northgate, said he took up “parkour,” a French sport that involves jumping, scaling or traversing whatever structures happen to be at hand, such as a planter, fence or, in Dale’s case last summer, an auto repair shop across from the apartment where he lives.
It was seven in the evening and the shop was closed, but the owner was still inside, Rick Dale said. When he heard Jeffrey Dale on the roof, he called police.
An officer arrived and young Dale fled. He jumped off the roof, ran up some planks bordering a fence and bounded over a set of trashcans on the other side, his father said.
The officer pursued, but wasn’t so lucky. The cop plopped into the trashcans and got stuck. It makes twisted sense, then, that once the teen ran out to the street, stopped and put his hands up, the officer charged him with the ferocity of a humiliated bull.
He slammed Dale’s his head against the side of a parked car, took the 95-pound boy down and cuffed his wrists so tight that the teen had marks for a week, Rick Dale said.
One year and a lot of chiropractic care later, Rick Dale said he’s just happy the DOJ and reporters are listening. He never filed a complaint with Seattle police, he said, because he believed they would just “round file” it.
Yayah Daramy said he didn’t file a complaint, either.
Daramy is an African-American and city employee. In July of 2007, Daramy said a Seattle police car made a sudden U-turn in front of him without any lights on and he hit the vehicle.
Two weeks later, Daramy said an officer assaulted him and Tased him three times in the back for no reason. While he was sitting in the patrol car after the assault, the officer specifically mentioned his involvement in the U-turn accident.
Chief John Diaz announced last week that officers who make racial slurs will be subject to firing. What’s more important, El Centro Executive Director Estela Ortega said, is that Seattle Police Guild President Rich O’Neill assured her the union will not object to such firings.
SPD, however, has a long way to go, civil rights activists say. Ortego said the department is starting to roll out new officer training on undoing racism. But Rick Dale and others said that’s not likely to tame the unbridled anger and bad attitude they’ve seen many Seattle officers exhibit.
“They’ve got this attitude, this mightier-than-thou demeanor,” Dale said, “that makes them think they can do whatever they want.”
Volunteers Needed!
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On-Call Sales Desk Volunteer Position
Interested in doing some direct service with Real Change vendors? Come volunteer on the newspaper sales desk! Right now we have a need for Sales Desk substitutes who can come in on an on-call basis for a 3 or 4 hour shift Monday through Saturday.
The Sales Desk volunteer assists homeless and low-income Real Change vendors when they come into our Pioneer Square office for newspapers. Your specific duties would include: interacting with vendors, cashiering, explaining and enforcing some vendor rules, and light office tasks such as data entry and filing mail items. We want vendors and other program members to feel welcome and safe when they come into the Real Change office, as sometimes this is the one place they are treated with dignity. This is a chance for you to meet and interact with a variety of people who are poor/homeless, and learn to understand the importance of creating more advocacy and opportunity for the low-income and homeless community.
Skills required: Experience with computers is a must; familiarity with Mac OS and FileMaker Pro, or the ability to learn to use them quickly, is a plus. Since you will have regular contact with people who are homeless/poor, strong communication skills are a must. Must be able to multitask and work well without supervision. Patience and the ability to work both under pressure and during down-time is required. Retail/cashier experience is helpful in this position.
Hours: The on-call sales desk position is based on your availability. The sales desk shifts are 3 or 4-hours long (9am-1pm OR 2pm-5pm) between Monday and Saturday (Saturday openings are infrequent). We ask for a minimum commitment of 12 weeks. You must be able to commit to showing up on time and stay for the whole shift. If a shift opens up regularly, on-call sales desk volunteers are typically the first to be offered a weekly shift.
Interested? Contact Jenn Pearson, Real Change’s Volunteer Coordinator, at (206) 441-3247 ext. 212 or e-mail volunteer@realchangenews.org to schedule an orientation.
New group seeks justice for John T. Williams
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After a Seattle police officer shot and killed totem carver John T. Williams on Aug. 30, 2010, it was clear, says Millie Kennedy, an attorney with the Northwest Justice Project, that the Native American community didn’t have a civil rights group to speak up for it the way African-Americans can expect the NAACP to.
So Kennedy and a group of Native Americans decided to do something about it. They held a rally in Williams’ honor on Feb. 19 and have now filed articles of incorporation and formed a new nonprofit called NDNs for Justice. The group announced itself yesterday with a rally at the Pike Place Market’s Victor Steinbrueck Park, aka Indian Park.
One major goal of the event: to let Native Americans who use the park know that they can help force change at the Seattle Police Department by sharing any story of abuse or brutality that they believe Seattle officers have subjected them to in recent years. An NDNs volunteer at a table took notes from individuals. The group will forward the stories to local investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice.
In March, the DOJ said it was launching two investigations into SPD. One will examine the department’s patterns and practices in regard to people of color, speaker Jay Hollingsworth, a member of an ad hoc group called the John T. Williams Organizing Committee, told about 40 people gathered at the event.
A second investigation will look into whether Ian Birk, the officer who killed Williams, deprived Williams of his Constitutional rights to life and liberty, Hollingsworth said. Last fall, SPD’s own Firearms Review Board found the shooting was unjustified, but King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg declined to file charges against Birk in the wake of a King County inquest.
With the DOJ investigation, Hollingsworth said, John T. Williams is getting a “second shot at justice.”
NDNs is routing a resolution to all tribes in Washington state seeking their support for the DOJ investigation, Kennedy said. The group is also supporting an effort by a committee of the American Friends Service Committee to pass a Washington State Indian Crafts Act, a law that would prohibit foreign-made knock-offs of totems and other tribal crafts from being passed off as originals. Thirteen states already have similar laws, speaker Sweetwater Nannauck said.
More information on NDNs for Justice is on Facebook or at the group’s website.
Meet the Editorial Committee
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[Clockwise from lower left are August Mallory, Wes Browning, Jihad Salaam, Joe Howard, Teresa Reeves, Mary T Andrews, and Anitra Freeman.]
Well, meet some of it anyway. People wonder how Real Change newspapers are put together. There’s an editorial department, run by our editorial manager Amy Roe, and including two reporters and a production assistant. Many volunteer writers accept assignments and some submit unsolicited work, which we consider. In addition to all that there’s the editorial committee, or the “EC.”
The idea of the EC is to provide grassroots input to the paper’s content. All interested readers of the paper may apply. The principal activity of the committee is to brainstorm story ideas for future issues. So the main qualification to be accepted as a member is an ability to work well with others while bringing ideas to the table.
Currently the EC has 13 members, of which 8 are fully active vendors, 2 are semi-active vendors, and one (me!) is a highly inactive ex-vendor. (I was highly inactive when I was a vendor, too.) In this particular meeting 7 of us were on hand.
Besides brainstorming, the EC also spends a little time in each meeting looking through the most recent paper for errors that might need correcting, or stories that suggest follow-up.
Then, every month or so, we go over those unsolicited submissions I mentioned above. These are confidential sessions. A volunteer has previously blanked out the author’s names on the submissions, so that we can vote to accept or reject blindly. Our acceptance is provisional—the editorial manager makes the final decision.
This particular meeting was almost all brainstorming. Ideas batted around the table involved an upcoming anniversary of the Frye Hotel, a future guide to being homeless for the first time, a death on the street in Ballard, the relationships between panhandlers and vendors, an upcoming “carve-in,” activities of neo-Nazi and similar organizations in the area, and the effects of budget cuts on ex-offender services.
Meetings are currently 2:30 to 4pm Thursdays in the Real Change vendor room, 96 S Main St. Guests and applicants are welcome the last Thursday of every month. Real Change vendors have preference and may apply at any meeting.
Serious Work at Real Change
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Here at Real Change we take everything we do seriously. One of the things we do is have All Staff Meetings every two weeks. Those are meetings in which all the staff sit around a table and meet. In our seriousness about these meetings, we decided to dedicate one of our recent meetings to the question “What are All Staff Meetings for?”
Our Vendor Staff Director, Tara Moss agreed to facilitate that meeting. To prepare us all for the discussion she sent around a link to a video talking about research into the “marshmallow problem,” ”—a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average?”
The marshmallow problem is explained in the video accompanying the link. As a mathematician, I couldn’t resist seeing not only whether I could build a reasonably sturdy tall tower of dry spaghetti, but whether I could build one entirely based upon the three Platonic solids having triangular faces. Would that support a marshmallow?
Yes. The picture, taken just before a tragic accident involving the tower and a coworker sitting upon it, proves it. That’s Tara Moss herself in the background.
“America’s Most Wanted” shoots in Pioneer Square
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It was a scene that made one passerby fear the worst this morning in Pioneer Square: A fire truck and ambulance parked on the street and, down the alley behind the Bread of Life Mission, men in suits looking into the trunk of a car.
“Is it a shooting?” he asked.
Only with cameras. The TV show “America’s Most Wanted” took over the alley between South Main and South Jackson streets this morning to shoot a scene about fugitive Brad Robinett, a former Marine who is wanted for bank robberies and car thefts in Washington state.
Robinett eluded a Bainbridge Island police officer in 2009 by stealing a kayak and paddling away. The officer had spotted Robinett in a stolen car from which police later recovered a handgun, ammunition and body armor, KING-5 News reported.
Malachi Burnes, a production assistant with the show, said the crew had already shot footage at the shop on Bainbridge where Robinett stole the kayak. In the alley, the crew was re-enacting a gun hand-off between Robinett and an accomplice. A Seattle police officer on the scene said he doubted the actual hand-off had taken place behind the Bread of Life Mission.
“It’s just a place to shoot,” Officer Chris Gough said.
The fire truck and ambulance weren’t part of the shooting. They were there for a real-life mishap. During the filming, Burnes said the show’s gun-handling consultant, a federal officer with the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco, took a fall and gashed her forehead. She was wheeled out of the alley on a gurney, head wrapped in gauze, looking a bit dazed.
Confession of a Bleeding Heart
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Speech delivered by Exec. Dir. Tim Harris at the Seattle Center Guiding Lights conference March 25, 2011.
I did something this morning I’m not proud of.
I’m driving my kids to school, and there’s a woman at the end of the I-5 off-ramp. She’s really overweight, wearing sweat pants. It’s cold and she doesn’t have a jacket. She looks completely miserable.
It’s 8 in the morning, and I’m thinking, “God, sucks to be her.”
She’s got a sign that has a lot of writing. It has “Homeless” up top and “God Bless” on the bottom, but I can’t really read it because I’m staring at the red light in front of me, waiting for it to go green, like that’s the most interesting and urgent thing on the planet right now, and requires my complete attention.
Every time I do something like that, I feel a little like I’ve just flunked out of Humanity 101. I know we all do it, but I’m the goddamn Director of Real Change. You’d think I’d be different, but I’m not. The only difference between me and anyone else on this is that at least I know I’m being a coward.
Someone said to me once that our ability to love is mirrored by our capacity for grief. That the depth of one is dependent upon the other.
That really being able to love is about being able to feel, and that love isn’t easy. That it’s not just puppies, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, and cheap dopamine.
That your heart can never really be open if you’re so afraid of it breaking that you never take it out.
Here in America, we’re tragedy-avoidant, and it makes us blind and stupid.
And so, the gap between rich and poor gets wider and wider, more and more of us are pushed aside into our prisons (one in 99 at last count), and our murderous wars of empire grind invisibly on and on and on.
And our numbness grows along with our detachment and distraction, and none of it feels very real.
After running Real Change for 17 years, I’ve come to understand that mass homelessness could not exist without dehumanization.
That homeless people are the visible wreckage of a society that’s given up on fairness or any kind of equality because it’s just “too hard.” And so we look away.
The most important thing Real Change does is to create the opportunity for people to see people as people.
One of our vendors told me once that the thing that pisses him off most isn’t when people act like he’s invisible, although he hates that too. It’s when people walk by and say “Sorry.” Sometimes it’s tossed out thoughtlessly. “Sorry.” Sometimes it’s more sort of cringing and annoying. “Sorrrry.” But it all pisses him off.
I thought about that. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. Not only is our liberal guilt useless. It’s offensive.
George Orwell said that it’s a constant struggle to see what’s under our noses.
He’s right. It’s hard to look grief right in the eye. To risk feeling something. But that’s where the revolutionary power of love begins.
This morning, I didn’t want to think about the person on the side of the road; to think about the public humiliation of her poverty. I just wanted to drive my kids to school and not have to deal with all that
As acts of courage go, what was required of me in that moment was hardly epic.
Eye contact. A nod of recognition. A two-fingered wave.
But that’s always how it is, isn’t it. We have choices to make. Sometimes we rise to the occasion. Sometimes we don’t
Social change is about acts of courage, large and small. Seeing what’s under our noses. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it’s hard.
None of us does the right thing all the time, but when we do, when we risk compassion, we grow just a tiny bit, and then the world becomes a better place.
A Poem for Real Change
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I wrote this for a contest where non-profits are asked to write a poem summarizing their mission or what they do in 6-8 lines. It won our blind internal contest and was submitted last week. If it’s chosen, Real Change gets $10K and I think a musician writes us a song around it. That would be cool.
Real Change? Have-a-nice-day. It’s what I do. It’s what I say.
I am poor and with you always. I will not fade, meek & weak, away.
My eyes meet yours and see my own, and we are friends, we say
Both so little and so much, as we walk, and talk, along our ways.
I am the one who wasn’t seen, who had no home, or place to stay.
I had no money. Had no respect. Not for me or we or they.
Now here I stand. My eyes meet yours. I live, I love, I earn my way
In this hard world, we break, we mend. We rise as one to a new day.
— Timothy Harris
Making Some Noise
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Sometimes things just sort of fall into the right place at the right time. For a long while, Real Change has kicked around the idea of a really great benefit concert as a fundraising effort and to reach out for new readers. But organizing something like that, well, it always takes the back seat that whole newspaper and being an advocacy organization. So it remained a “someday” project. This year, it just fell together for us when Noise for the Needy decided to pick up Real Change as their cause of the year. This means we get our music fundraiser for 2011 and can stay totally focused on our “day job”.
Noise for the Needy is an all volunteer organization that works within Seattle’s large local music scene to raise money for a different charity each year. Noise for the Needy came to Seattle in 2004 via LA, where they started 15 years ago with punk shows on college campuses, 5 bands for $5. They grew to attract some larger acts like No Doubt and The Black Eyed Peas and expanded genres to pretty much everything. And rather than the stand alone, single event benefit concert like we had fancied we might like to do, they totally kick it up by producing a full on festival at multiple locations around the city over five days, with many shows per day. These people work hard, put on great show featuring the best the local music community has to offer, and they consistently have supported organizations that are down with Real Change’s values, like TeenFeed, Transitional Resources and our neighbor, the Compass Center.
The kick off for this year’s festival took place last night at Neumos up on Capital Hill. Mad Rad, Junkie XL and Trunkasauras all played. That’s a lot of noise, but it was a lot of fun. A Godzilla sized amount of fun as a matter of fact.
With the kick off this good, we are all looking forwards to the actual festival in June. We’ll keep you posted with the schedule details as they become available- it is all planned to go down June 8-12.
A huge thank you to Jeff, Sophie, Amy, Rich and everyone at Noise for the Needy. We could not be more excited to have this support in 2011.
Outfoxing Fox News
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The pen, English playwright and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton noted in the 1800s, is mightier than the sword. But more troubling than either pen or sword might very well be the ability take words and twist them around. If that’s true, than Megyn Kelly may trouble like no other.
If you’re a regular FOX News viewer you know Megyn Kelly. If you’re not, well, she hosts the TV program “America Live,” where Kelly gets all hot and bothered about something.
On Feb. 28, her hackles got raised over Seattle’s “Race and Social Justice Initiative.” In a report where she stared at the screen with terrified eyes, she warned that the Emerald City’s initiative was racist. Why? Because, according to her, the city said that jobs that require college degrees are “racist [pause] because more white people go to college.”
Actually, this is what the “Race and Social Justice Initiative” says ():
“Institutional racism is when organizational programs or policies work to the benefit of white people and to the detriment of people of color, usually unintentionally or inadvertently. For example, job requirements that put undue emphasis on college degrees over work experience may eliminate qualified candidates of color, who face institutional barriers to higher education.”
She also warned that the city had stopped enforcing certain traffic and drug laws because “they’re too harsh on minorities.”
Really, what the city intends to do is only sentence those charged with driving while license suspended in 3rd degree for 364 days instead of 365 days. Why shorten the sentence? An undocumented citizen sentenced to 365 days gets the attention of the federal government, thereby facing deportation; trimming the sentence to 364 days would keep that same person off the fed’s radar, making deportation for the crime less likely.
Of course, Kelly would have been able to let her misinformation and sense of hyperbolic injustice fade into the digital landscape if it weren’t for one person: Pete Holmes. The City Attorney, Holmes agreed to a live interview with Kelly the day following her fevered warnings about racist Seattle. Usually, an invitation to be interviewed by Fox News is asking to be hung out to dry. But Holmes more than held his own. Actually, he was pretty dang good.
Take a look for yourself, and see how wily — and accurate — City Attorney Pete Holmes can be.
Danny, Danny, Danny, no
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It’s terrible what Danny Westneat had to say in his Saturday column in The Seattle Times. He knocks a move by the Seattle Office of Civil Rights to keep landlords from using criminal records as a reason not to rent to ex-convicts. He asserts that ex-cons need to earn equality.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is America. Serving out the sentence is the punishment. Once it’s over, people legally return to the equality guaranteed them by the U.S. Constitution.
Re-entry programs are not extensive, as Westneat claims—far from it. Contrary to Westneat’s statements, every ex-offender in the state of Washington who is finished with prison and parole can, in fact, vote—a fundamental right that is rightly restored.
He quotes a landlord who rents rooms to ex-cons and says one of his renters had become a Nazi in prison. Any landlord could end up renting to a Nazi who doesn’t have a criminal record.
Does this do anything to solve homelessness? Are we safer when the ex-con or sexual offender is homeless and desperate? That’s the part too few people think about.
Wow, we might just do this thing!
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There are times when the power of the Real Change community blows our minds. We have raised, with your help, $171,840 for our critical year-end fund drive. Nearly $110,000 has been received since December 15th alone. Most of this money came in $25, 100 and $200 increments. Here at Real Change, this amazing outpouring of support from over 800 different donations humbles us and inspires us to give our very best in 2011 to continue doing the work that must be done. Quality journalism brought to you by boots on the ground. Fearless social justice advocacy to stand up and say no whenever someone seeks to criminalize poverty. A hand up, not a hand out for the hundreds of amazing vendors who work hard and benefit from the concern and care of their community.
We might just do this thing. We only have $3,160 left to raise in order to complete this drive at our full goal of $175,000. We thought this was all but impossible just a few weeks ago. We are asking people who were unable to make a gift already to please make a monthly pledge of support now. $5 a month, $10 a month, $25 a month for 2011 will help us keep going all year long.
It is fast and easy:
Step 1: Go to our donation page.
Step 2: Select “I want to make a recurring donation”
Step 3: Select frequency “monthly”
Step 4: Enter needed information and press “Continue”
Step 5: Confirm your gift.
Or, if you prefer, make a one time gift.
This is a very happy new year for Real Change. The impact of this successful drive is going to be huge. We look forwards to continuing to work with you in 2011. Thank you.
Real Change Comes Full Circle
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As we enter 2011, I have reached a happy milestone of one year working here at Real Change as Development Manager. But the story of me and Real Change goes back much further. Two years ago, on December 27, 2008, I delivered my second son exactly one week after my mother’s final and last-ditch cancer surgery. After holding a tiny, fragile newborn boy with one arm and caring for an ailing, fragile mother with the other, it didn’t take but a split second to decide that I was resigning from my non-profit management position to stay home for as long as my mother and newborn son needed me. No one will ever look back on their life and wish they spent less time with their dying mother.
My mother‘s name was Teri Porch and her Real Change vendor badge was #3017. During the late 1990s, she was one of Real Change’s 600-club vendors. She was very proud of her reserved selling spot at the then new Green Lake PCC. Since I started working at Real Change, many readers and vendors have told me that they remember her. She was a memorable sort of woman, outgoing and giving, who was extremely tall with extremely long red hair. She most often wore a cowboy hat and a big brown wool poncho.
The life story of my mother Teri is fairly typical for a Real Change vendor. She was a smart girl from an extremely poor background who dropped out of school in 1964 at 12 years old to go to work. Before and after her marriage at age 26 and giving birth to three children, she worked at any job she could get: waitressing, bartending, different retail jobs, delivering newspapers, cleaning houses, babysitting, being a mall janitor. Over and over again from the ‘60s into the ‘80s prior to the passage of the American with Disabilities Act, employers fired her when they discovered she had epilepsy. As a result of this financial insecurity, my family was homeless during brief parts of my childhood. When my mom’s physical health worsened in the late 1980s and 1990s and she was no longer able to work any other job, she started selling Real Change to make enough money to get us through the month.
Those wads of $1 bills meant a lot to her and a lot to us kids, from urgently needed groceries and utilities to much-appreciated extras, like the Christmas presents she loved to shop for and, memorable to me, the $10 dress I wore to my high school graduation. She later stopped selling the paper in large part because she got into subsidized housing and because her children grew up and were able to support her. My brothers and I are the first people in her family to graduate from high school and I was the first person in her family to go to college.
Unfortunately for my family, my mom died at age 55 in June 2009 after a 15-year battle with leukemia and lung cancer. Her resilience was amazing. In the fall of 2009, I decided I was ready to look for my next position. By chance, I received an email from a friend of Real Change’s newly hired Operations Director who was searching for a fund development person. I knew immediately that I had found just the right position, and most importantly, the right organization at which to meaningfully resume my career in the wake of my mother’s death.
Real Change serves as an opportunity for people like my mom, who are homeless and people at risk of homelessness, to find personal stability and success. I am proud to work for an organization that impacted my own family’s life so significantly, helping my mother find the income we needed through a job that she excelled at and enjoyed doing.
Sadly, it is about to get harder than ever for people like my mother, at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. In January 2011, Disability Lifeline benefits will be from cut from $339 per month to $266 per month and Governor Chris Gregoire is calling the drastic cuts to social services that she has proposed “immoral.” This is what the “safety net” has come to. There isn’t much left. It’s going to get ugly.
Now more than ever, people who are homeless and low income need an opportunity like Real Change to be there when the safety net is not. We are gearing up to serve more vendors in 2011 and 2012, which will mean needing to sell more papers through wider circulation areas, enhanced marketing efforts and even more compelling, award-winning articles.
Earned income comprises one third of the Real Change funding equation. Individual donations make up the other two thirds. We can’t be there for our vendors without our readers and donors being there for us. Please join me, and the more than 620 other people who have already given to the Winter Fund Drive, in supporting Real Change. Please give all you can today, so that Real Change can continue to make the difference for people like my mother. Thank you for your support.
Writing for Change
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I’ve always been of the mindset that good journalism can happen anywhere. The original reporting that Real Change has produced has only strengthened this conviction. These stories are why I continued to buy the paper, then volunteered my time as a writer, and finally, applied to work here. I joined Real Change as Editor at the end of October. For someone like me, who is invested in social issues journalism, this is a dream job.
Look past the links and retweets of this internet news era and you’ll find enterprise journalism starts with boots on the ground. No journalist in this city is more knowledgeable about the plight of those who live in their vehicles than reporter Cydney Gillis. Her story on car campers was chosen as an editor’s pick by the Sightline Institute, and she has appeared on KUOW talking about the issue. This year alone, Cyd picked up three first-place regional Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) awards for stories on housing, arts and education.
There’s more to come. As part of Seattle University’s Family Homelessness Fellowship program, Assistant Editor Rosette Royale is following a homeless mother of a baby boy as she tries to find housing and deals with the aftermath of meth use and domestic abuse. The resulting series will be published in Real Change in early 2011. I can’t wait to read it because I know will combine the keen observations and lyrical prose for which Rosette is well-known. Rosette won a second-place regional SPJ award in the Personalities Reporting category this year; and in 2009 won the 1st place SPJ award nationwide for feature reporting.
Information may want to be free, but journalists need to be paid. While we benefit greatly from the hours committed by a talented group of editorial volunteers, our greatest costs are staff hours and newspaper printing. Having professional writers allows Real Change to follow issues over the long term, tracking changes in public policy and the impact they have on the lives of low-income and homeless people. Employing dedicated staff enables us to meet people where they are, whether that means knocking on doors of RVs or logging long hours at the courthouse as the subject of a story negotiates the labyrinthine legal system. This leads to continuity of coverage of ongoing, meaningful stories. Good journalism can happen anywhere, but good reporting takes eyes on the street.
A big thanks to the 547 of you who have already made a contribution to our Winter Fund Drive and the online donors who have exhausted the matching fund for December online donations. With this broad-based grassroots community investment we have already been able to raise nearly $90,000 towards our critical $175,000 year-end goal. Meeting this goal will ensure that we can continue putting boots on the ground and quality stories in your paper each week. With your participation today I am optimistic we can meet this goal in January. Please give.
Sustaining the Mission
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In the 2008 article published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle,” Ann Gregory and Don Howard write that “Organizations that build robust infrastructure — which includes sturdy information technology systems, financial systems, skills training, fundraising processes, and other essential overhead — are more likely to succeed than those that do not. This is not news, and nonprofits are no exception to the rule. Yet it is also not news that most nonprofits do not spend enough money on overhead. [Nonprofits] agree with the idea of improving infrastructure and augmenting their management capacity, yet they are loath to actually make these changes because they do not want to increase their overhead spending. But underfunding overhead can have disastrous effects.”
Underfunding overhead is exactly what Real Change had been doing for fifteen years. While we produced some amazing results, our organization’s foundation was buckling under the weight of our own growth. Our space was overcrowded, our technology infrastructure was crumbling, and our staff was experiencing high burnout and costly turnover. In the fall of 2009, a strategic decision was made to actively end our own nonprofit starvation cycle.
I was hired as the organization’s Operations Director at that time. Since then, Real Change has moved our offices, instituted financial controls, improved our IT infrastructure and support, and updated most all of our policies and evaluation systems. My job satisfaction at Real Change comes from seeing the direct impact of our infrastructure investments has on our program delivery. As examples:
* Vendor conflicts and confrontations, which were almost a daily occurrence in our previous overcrowded office space, have been all but eliminated in our new space.
* Staff morale and retention have improved significantly, meaning that more time and focus is spent on our mission.
* We have started to rebuild our own information technology infrastructure, which enhances our program work with increased vendor computer time and classes.
* Cost efficiencies in staffing, supplies, services, printing and rent have allowed us to invest more resources in our services for vendors, returning more of our donors’ investments directly to our mission.
Infrastructure priorities for the next year include building an operating reserve, doing a comprehensive review of our compensation, investing in a new database, and strengthening our board of directors. Although we were fully embroiled in the “nonprofit starvation cycle” a year ago, there is no longer any doubt at Real Change that investing wisely in infrastructure is the best way to ensure that we can empower and serve the over 350 homeless and low-income men and women who pass through our doors monthly.
Thank you to those of you who have already made a contribution to our Winter Fund Drive. For those of you who have not yet given, remember that a matching fund from an anonymous donor will double gifts from first-time donors and will match all other donations at 50 cents on the dollar, until the fund is exhausted. With community investment we have already been able to raise over $63,000 towards our critical $175,000 year-end goal. With your participation today I am optimistic we can reach our goal by January. Our operating budget including vendor programs, editorial, infrastructure and advocacy depends on the success of this winter drive. Please join with hundreds of other donors now and sustain our work helping homeless and low-income people earn an income and find their voice. Thank you.
Communities Embrace Their Real Change Vendors
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Recently two vendors, Bruce Osman and Yvonne, have been recognized in their respective Real Change communities. On December 2, the West Seattle Herald published an article about Yvonne, who sells her papers outside PCC Natural Market on California Avenue. Affectionately called the “Lady in Red” for her brilliant all-red outfits, Yvonne showcased her writing skills at PoetryBridge night at C&P Coffee, showing her customers another side of this vendor they have come to love. This piece was followed by high praises for Real Change vendor Bruce Osman in the most recent PCC newsletter. The article tells Bruce’s story of how he has sold Real Change to pull himself and his family out of homelessness. He has become a familiar face in front of the Issaquah store, where customers look forward to buying a paper and sharing a kind word. These articles are only two examples of the many special relationships forged between Real Change vendors and their customers.
Click the links below to read Bruce and Yvonne’s stories:
http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/1012/editor.html#1
http://www.westseattleherald.com/node/176618
A special message from Real Change program staff
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In my 2 years as the Director of Vendor Services, I’ve seen amazing things happen in the relationships built and nurtured through Real Change. For many vendors these relationships are far more important than the dollar they earn from a customer. Human interaction is very powerful. Real Change provides an opportunity for vendors, people who are often ignored and treated as invisible, to reach out and connect with the community around them. Everyone benefits from these connections.
When Karen Norcross, a vendor of 12 years, recently passed away her son Jason called me soon afterwards to make sure he was able to thank the people who bought Real Change from his mom. Jason said “my mom liked being out and meeting people and seeing all her repeat customers and getting a chance to get to know them.” It was also through Karen’s relationship with her customers that Jason knew that Karen was proud of him. When he visited his mother at her selling location, customers would tell him that they had heard a lot about him. In this case, the Real Change community helped both a son and his mother.
The relationships that vendors make can also help keep them alive. When vendor Willie Jones was sick and diagnosed with MRSA in his spine and pneumonia this past summer, his customers called and visited him. That kept him going. Every time I talked with Willie, he would say he needed to get healthy so he could go out and talk to his customers. He didn’t want them worrying about him. I passed Willie on Monday, November 22nd in the freezing cold selling his paper on 3rd and Columbia. He was happy as he could be to greet his customers who were brave enough to make it downtown through the snow and ice.
Real Change vendors realize, bit-by-bit and day-by-day, that they are part of a community. Can you invest in this community today to help ensure that such important relationships continue? Remember, your contribution not only helps a vendor support themselves but also gives them, and you, a sense of community.
Due to the tremendous generosity of an anonymous donor, a matching fund will double online gifts from first time donors and will match all other donations at 50 cents on the dollar, until the fund is exhausted. Donate now. Help your dollars go further by donating with this match. With community support we have already been able to raise just under $50,000 towards our ambitious $175,000 year-end goal. With your support, I know we can reach our goal by January.
Sincerely yours,
Tara Moss
Director of Vendor Services
Real Change receives Seattle Human Rights Award for 2010
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We hope you will join us at City Hall this Thursday, December 9th at 7PM for an inspiring event hosted by the Seattle Human Rights Commission, where Real Change will receive the commission’s annual Human Rights Award for 2010.
To help Real Change celebrate this extraordinary honor, please consider making an online gift to support our Winter Fund Drive. Due to the tremendous generosity of an anonymous donor, a matching fund is available for online gifts in December. Gifts from new donors will be matched dollar for dollar, up to $250. Gifts from renewing donors will be matched 50 cents on the dollar. Stretch your funds by donating now, before the matching fund is exhausted. Over the month of November, our generous community of supporters has contributed nearly $44,907 toward our ambitious $175,000 year-end goal.
Your support of our work will enable us to continue defending the human rights of the very poor while we continue to offer a unique combination of opportunity and support that helps people meet their most immediate needs.
Real Change’s broad community support, engaged readership and fearless advocacy produces clear results. In the past several years Real Change:
* Led a successful campaign that organized around race, class and issue barriers to stop the City of Seattle from building a new jails to increase capacity for misdemeanor violators.
* Fought a three-year direct action campaign to oppose Seattle’s zero-tolerance policy toward urban poverty campers that has recently resulted in a policy shift of tolerance to survival camping and a permanent site for Nickelsville.
* Took a highly visible lead role in the coalitional effort that successfully beat back a recent attempt to criminalize panhandling and greatly expand arbitrary police power over the visible poor.
Real Change is focused on building a movement for economic justice that defends and support the rights of those who have the least. Please support this work during the Winter Fund Drive by visiting our website and making a generous donation today. You can share the news of the award and special event by sharing this blog post and this facebook event with your online friends.
For more information on the December 9th Human Rights Day event and awards presentation, please visit the Human Rights Commission’s website.
Thank you for helping us win this award.
Surviving the Streets a Big Success
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On Thanksgiving morning, the Real Change office was filled with coats, sleeping bags, and other winter gear, as well as a line topping 175 anxious recipients. Real Change vendors and other members of Seattle’s homeless community showed up early, despite the snow and cold, in hopes of receiving some community donations to make this coming winter a little less harsh. In the weeks leading up to the Surviving the Streets giveaway, put on by Real Change and sponsored by the Finish Company, donations poured in from local businesses and individuals. When those waiting in line that morning finally made it into the office, they were greeted with “personal shoppers”, volunteers who walked them through the office and helped them collect the gear they were most in need of- socks, gloves, hats, coats and fleeces, sleeping bags, blankets, boots, and hygiene kits. Umbrellas and scarves were handed out in line, along with coffee and breakfast. Throughout the morning, we watched from the office as other members of the community felt inspired by the giving spirit, showing up on the street to pass out food and blankets to those waiting outside. While Real Change staff and volunteers ran the event, the recipients made the day a real success by showing immense patience and gratitude despite early hours and freezing temperatures. Among the things that were distributed were: 92 sleeping bags, 3 sleeping pads, 57 blankets, 53 backpacks, 24 duffle bags, 60 pairs of boots, and 346 winter coats. This day proved to be a success, not only for those who received donations, but for the entire community that pulled together to make this holiday season a little bit warmer.
Bill Gates Sr. blows steam over defeat of income tax on rich
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Bill Gates Sr. doesn’t buy the idea of bowing down to wealth. He made no bones about saying so last night at a dinner held by the Economic Opportunity Institute.
Gates, father of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, supported Initiative 1098, a proposed income tax on those making $200,000 plus. Voters defeated the measure on Nov. 2 based on a notion that reducing taxes on rich people benefits the economy, he said. “Well, that’s just bullshit,” Gates bellowed.
There was a time, he said, when the country ran happily on a marginal income tax of 90 percent on income above a set threshold. Then it was 70 percent, he said. “Now we’re bitching about 35 percent. There’s no way that makes any sense at all,” Gates said.
Wealth is a matter of luck and living in the United States. But he said the rich have “this intense feeling about ‘my property’ and it’s appalling,” They should pay their fair share, he said, to support an essential public good that benefits everyone—quality public education.
I-1098 would have put $2 billion a year toward education and health care. Instead, Washington will remain stuck with a sales tax system that is one of the most regressive in the country, Gates said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about that because it doesn’t work on billboards too well,” he said. “But it’s a bad thing.”
Ballard residents don’t want homeless to wash clothes
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Sharon Lee didn’t get to say much about the apartment building that the Low Income Housing Institute plans to build in Ballard before some of the 40 residents at last night’s meeting at Swedish Ballard Hospital started talking over her.
Many questioned the “concentration” of poor people at 2014 N.W. 57th St., a site where LIHI and its executive director plan a 40- to 60-unit building for those with incomes at or below 60 percent of area median income, or $41,100 for a two-person household. Twenty percent of the units would be set aside for homeless families.
The real issue, however, was LIHI’s plan to put a shower and laundry facility for the homeless on the building’s ground floor.
It would be a smaller version of the Urban Rest Stop that LIHI has operated at a downtown apartment building for the past 10 years and is much needed, project supporters said, by Ballard and its growing homeless population. Neighbors along 57th countered that they’re all for homeless services, just not on their block. They said they don’t want to see the homeless lined up when the facility is closed, or the camping, drinking and fighting that some said leads to frequent police calls at the downtown Urban Rest Stop.
Not true, said a neighbor of the facility and its manager, Ronni Gilboa. Karen Tuff said she owned a condo in Belltown for 15 years and now lives in a building next door to the Rest Stop. She had more trouble in Belltown with nightclub patrons urinating and fighting, she said, than she’s ever had living next door to LIHI’s hygiene center. “What I’ve noticed is the people who frequent the Urban Rest Stop are not the problem people that I experience in other parts of the city,” she said.
But, “I think it makes a big difference if you choose to move into a neighborhood that has that versus having it forced on us,” said Rondi Susort of the Ballard Preservation Association, a group fighting another homeless building planned in Ballard by the Compass Center.
Resident Linda Scheidt said there’s a man and woman on her street who choose to live their car and that the Urban Rest Stop will only draw more like them.
“I have a tremendous fear that this is going to bring in a lot of people that will take advantage of the situation,” Scheidt said, “so unless you have round-the-clock, 24-hour security at this facility, you’re bringing a whole host of problems into our neighborhood.”
Hate crime at the ARCO: Two Muslim women attacked
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Maryan no longer wants to go out of her White Center home alone. She’s afraid she’ll be attacked again for being Muslim.
In the late afternoon of Oct. 16, she and her niece, Imaan, were stopped at an ARCO gas station in Tukwila when a woman drove up, caught sight of their head scarves, and suddenly started yelling “terrorist” and “suicide bomber” at them. She told them to “go back to your country,” walked up to their car and slammed the driver’s side car door on Maryan’s ankle.
She kicked and punched Maryan and pulled off her scarf. She knocked Imaan to the ground, then got in her car and tried to run her over. The whole time, Imaan told reporters at a news conference held this morning by CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the woman kept yelling that she was a disabled veteran and no one would do anything. And no one did. Even though Imaan called out to other patrons to call the police, she said, customers came and went as if nothing were happening. A truck with young men in it even pointed and laughed at them.
“We were scared for our lives,” Imaan said. “Everyone is looking at us, but no one is helping us at that point.”
Imaan called 911, but when two Tukwila officers arrived, they, too, were indifferent, she said, asking the women—who did not want last names used for fear of reprisal—what they expected them to do. Eventually, the officers arrested the woman, who has been charged with malicious harassment. Imaan said the police later told her the woman was drunk.
Maryan is an American citizen from Somalia. Her niece is a University of Washington nursing student who was born in the U.S. The two women said they want to see their assailant reprimanded. CAIR is asking the King County prosecutor’s office to prosecute the incident to the full extent of the law and has written a letter to the FBI requesting it investigate the matter as a possible hate crime, which the group says is on the rise across the nation and in Seattle.
“I don’t know why she went that far. I don’t know what she wanted from us,” Imaan said. “As Muslims, we’re human beings. We deserve the [same] respect as any other people.”
State to cut GAU disability grants by $80
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Holy cow. The Department of Social and Health Services announced yesterday that it’s cutting Disability Lifeline (GAU) grants from $339 to $258 a month on Jan. 1 because of budget cuts—and an Oct. 4 court order to stop cutting people off the program without a proper review to see if they’re eligible for federal SSI disability benefits.
The disabled and destitute who depend on the program—roughly 17,000 people in the state, including a lot of Real Change vendors—couldn’t live on $339 as it was. The announcement is here.
Bremerton property ‘not the place to house homeless’
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Everyone is for ending homelessness until the homeless move next door. That’s when ordinarily sane people go bonkers and do things like picket the Sunday services of Maple Leaf Lutheran Church because it voted to host a tent city.
A plan to put up plywood cabins on a Bremerton property apparently raised the same kind of hell at a meeting on Saturday night, when residents said—you guessed it—that their neighborhood is not the right place to end homelessness.
My advice to the residents is that they better roll up their sleeves and find “the right place,” because the home foreclosure wave has finally hit the great Northwest and they’ll want to know where they can go in the event they’re turned out of “their” homes. KOMO has the story.
Bruce and Rainee Osman’s Special Request
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It may surprise some people in the room that I have a college education. Rainee, my wife, is also educated with an Associate’s Degree from Bellevue College. Homelessness does not discriminate. There are people from all walks of life, all ages, all education levels who fall into homelessness. When Rainee and I met, it was love at first sight. The strength that we have given each other over the last 18 years as sustained us through some very rough patches.
When I was young, I grew up in a middle class home, though like many families we had our dysfunctions. Rainee’s story as a young child and adult is different yet similar. We both grew up in what we thought were average homes, though fathers with alcoholism impacted each of our families. I was a Boy Scout, and rose up to the level of Life Scout. Little did I know as a boy that those survival skills would later come in handy as a homeless adult. We had no idea that people like us could ever end up homeless.
Rainee and I met in Las Vegas. At the time, Rainee and I both struggled with drug issues here and there. We tried to detox her all at once on our own and that proved more than we could handle and we were not able to find the resources we needed in Las Vegas. On and off we were homeless for over 10 years in 2 cities.
We arrived at the Greyhound station on Stewart St in 1997. We had nowhere to go and only $60 in our pockets. The first place we went was Victor Steinbrueck Park in met some local people. The $60 only lasted us two days and we had no idea what we were going to do next. Rainee was already in withdrawal from the methadone she had been on. Homelessness is scary but we had each other. By chance we learned about Real Change.
Right away we had money in our pockets to figure out what we were going to do next. I was glad to have studied marketing and speech communications in college at it helped me start making money the very first time I tried selling the paper.
Real Change was young then and the vendors and Tim and everyone at the office were so helpful. They did not pity or look down, but instead showed respect and empathy for our situation. I got connected with CPC and was finally correctly diagnosed as bi-polar. The proper medication helped to change my manic depressive behavior in few weeks.
At this point a friend got me into the local 131 Carpentry union and I went to work, helping to build Safeco Field. The money was great, $600, $800, $1000 bucks a week. We got an apartment and thought our ship had come in. Unfortunately, we were both still battling addiction issues.
Then, miracle of miracles, we were shocked and delighted to find out that after years together, Rainee was pregnant. I was registered with THS and CPC and had rigid service schedules to follow which conflicted with the demands of my work schedule. The news of our pregnancy gave us the strength that we needed to finally make a lasting change. I stopped working and we focused full-time and being clean and sober. Until the pain of the addiction is greater than the fear of the change, you continue to do what you are doing. We knew that we could not spread the pain of addiction onto our child. Our priorities became apparent and ceased to seem unattainable. Selling the paper was a big part of what kept us going when we were trying to figure all of this out. We were able to have and keep our daughter in large part due to Real Change.
On 11/10/98 at Swedish Hospital Chandler was born. We were and are so proud of her. She lived with her grandparents with our blessing for 2 years while we got housing and made sure we could stay sober long term. I am proud to say that I have been drug free since her birth. Even though she lived with Rainee’s parents, we stayed involved and bought all of her clothes and provided for her in anyway we could. When our Section 8 Voucher came through after a 2-year wait, we were so proud to move her in with us.
Last year we were able to move from Kent to Issaquah, where Chandler is able to attend on of the best schools in the state. Not long after we first moved to Seattle, we stayed on the loading dock of Skyway Luggage and behind a dumpster at Seattle Art Institute. Now we have a nice 2-bedroom apartment in Issaquah that we afford with our SS, working selling the RC paper and because of our Section 8 Voucher. Without all of these things, we would not be able to provide a brighter future for Chandler. For 12 years now, selling Real Change has made the difference for our family. I am not going to stand here and say that RC did all the work for me- we did the work. But we got the tools and the income we needed and still need from Real Change. We sell outside of the Issaquah PCC not far from our apartment. We are proud of our home and community. We are proud to say that we plan to see our daughter to college.
You came here today knowing this is a fundraiser. So with that in mind, Table Captains, please distribute your pledge cards to the people at your table. I bet you came here today with an amount in mind to give. My wife and I came here today to share our story and to ask you to take the amount you had in mind and throw it out. Throw it out. Can you double that amount? Stretch as far as you can to give as much as you can. At a time with increasing number of people needing help, like me and Rainee, when shelters are full and the Section 8 program that took us 2 years to get on is not even able to take everyone’s name who needs help, we all need Real Change more than ever. Anyone can have the trouble we had and need a path out. All it takes is a job loss, an addiction problem or a health issue. Investing in Real Change this morning is a powerful statement that you believe that people can change themselves and their communities. No one in here can say they can’t give at least something. All gifts of $250 or more will be matched up to $500 until the matching pot is exhausted. We need your help right now and we need it to be a big help, Help that will make a lasting impact on folks in need like me and Rainee and our daughter Chandler. Please join in and make a big gift right now. Consider doing a monthly gift instead of a onetime gift to keep your investment working all year. Thank you for your time this morning and thank you for supporting Real Change.
Sable Verity loses job for blogging
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In case you were wondering what happened to Real Change’s new columnist, Sable Verity, who left us abruptly after only one issue, now we can tell you.
With apologies to Verity, an independent reporter and commentator whose real name is Sakara Remmu, this cat’s out of the bag: Verity was fired Sept. 2 by Tabor 100, a nonprofit city contractor, after a city employee identified Verity to Tabor as a blogger—one, more importantly, who has recently criticized Seattle’s mayor with entries on her blog such as “Mayor McGinn: Shit on Your Shoes, Or Blood on Your Hands” regarding public safety in Belltown.
The city employee who identified Verity as a blogger to Ollie Garrett, president of Tabor 100’s executive board, was a well-kept secret until today, when the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission posted a Sept. 30 determination letter in response to a complaint filed on the matter. In it, SEEC Executive Director Wayne Barnett says, in effect, that because no one at the city gained from Verity losing her job, no ethics were violated.
Barnett says Smith and Nancy Locke, director of the city’s purchasing and contract services, only told Garrett in separate phone calls that they were concerned about speaking at Tabor meetings in the presence of a blogger—something Garrett told the SEEC that Verity, a single mother, was terminated for because Verity had not revealed her blogging prior to starting the job on Aug. 11.
“The Deputy Mayor, Ms. Locke, and Ms. Garrett all categorically deny that any threats or ultimatums—either explicit or implicit—were issued,” Barnett writes in his determination letter, which will be discussed at an Oct. 6 meeting of the commission.
Maybe so, but it’s clear that Verity was fired for exercising her Constitutional right to free speech. That may or may not be within the SEEC’s purview to address, but it is no less troubling.
To read the letter, go to the bottom of the SEEC’s Agendas & Minutes page and click on Dismissal of Case No. 10-1-0908-1.
CORRECTION: Verity wrote two columns for Real Change, but did not leave permanently—she put the column on hold. Her column is now scheduled to return in the Oct. 20 issue.
McGinn on “political reality”
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Mayor Mike McGinn gave a mighty interesting speech this morning at Real Change’s annual fundraising breakfast. He talked about the Puget Sound Business Journal running a headline that read “In With McGinn” and how the downtown business establishment must have cringed at seeing who was in the picture—Real Change founder Tim Harris.
The story was about access to the mayor’s office and who has it, he said. Never mind all the town halls he’s had—the real issue, he said, is not access to him, but exclusive access—what the downtown business interests want. “It’s not that Tim Harris might talk to me,” McGinn told a crowd of about 500 at Seattle Center’s Fisher Pavilion, “but that I might listen to him.”
“Maybe,” he said, “they won’t get to do everything the way people who go to back rooms and makes deals want to do things.”
“Somebody has suggested that I’m pitting the haves against the have-nots,” he continued. “I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but it’s been going on for a while and the have-nots are getting their butts kicked.”
The conventional wisdom of “political reality” is that this simply cannot be changed, he said. But “the actual reality is that people are homeless and need help,” he said. “The actual reality is that our children need a better education [and] that historical race and social justice continue to affect us.” Political reality, he said, is “something we can change.”
Go, Mike, go.
But
The Brutal Humanist Speech
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I love my new tagline. Tim Harris: Brutal Humanist. Maybe I’m psychic and knew this was going to happen, because I have a brutal humanist speech.
Turning 50 is the kind of thing that gets you going on about the past, and I was thinking last night of my first protest to end homelessness, twenty-six years ago.
It was 1984, and Mitch Snyder visited my campus at UMass-Amherst. I don’t remember a thing he said, but whatever it was, it got ten of us or so to drive to Washington DC to get arrested.
Snyder ran the Community for Creative Non-Violence, and nearly three decades ago, as modern mass homelessness was really getting under way, they got a building from the city to turn into a massive homeless shelter. It was a hellhole.
Our protest was to get $4 million out of the city to remodel the building into a better hellhole.
They brought around 1,000 people to DC to sleep on church floors and raise hell in front of the White House. Around 90 of us did the choreographed arrested-in-DC-flexi-cuff thing.
We were arrested on a Saturday. Most people paid the $75 to bail themselves out, but we were college students and we were pure. We were going to gum up the system. Throw our bodies into the gears of the Machine. It turned out that the system was able to amply accommodate us. Monday was some kind of damn holiday, so we sat out three days in DC central cellblock, living on the bologna sandwiches and donuts they served at regular intervals.
After that, the nice judge dismissed our charges and the city coughed up the $4 million. We went to the CCNV house to celebrate and watch the news, but Snyder couldn’t join us. He’d been hospitalized.
We won on the forty-ninth day of Snyder’s fast. The nation’s most famous and militant homeless advocate had lost fifty-seven pounds.
When a reporter asked if he was afraid to die, Snyder said “No. It’s painful, but I have a greater fear of allowing people to languish like animals, and sometimes I’m afraid I’m not doing enough.”
That clear voice of moral outrage, that recognizes the deep violation of human dignity that homelessness represents, and draws a straight line to the unspeakable system failure involved, has been missing from our movement for too long
In the mid-eighties, people talked about there being a million homeless in America every night. Nobody really knew the number. Snyder pulled a million out of his ass. A million was just a way of saying too damn many.
We still don’t know how many. We don’t want to. If we wanted to, we would, but we don’t.
We do know that there’s more homeless people now than when our Ten Year Plan to End it began. We also know that the numbers aren’t likely to go down anytime soon.
Homelessness is about radical inequality and how we treat those who are no longer economically useful.
There is a world of ugly truth behind this that none of us, really, wants to see.
Much of our work at Real Change in recent years has focused on the criminalization of poverty. As cities become islands of affluence, the poor who also live there tend to get in the way.
Our work has, to be honest, been mostly defensive.
We camped out, over and over again, on the steps of City Hall, to protest the Seattle’s declared zero-tolerance of urban camping, and the sweeps of homeless encampments that came along with the condo-boom that changed our skyline.
We supported Nickelsville, and the right of homeless people who are radically underserved by a broken system, to create a survival community of their own.
We freaked when the City was going to build a damn jail and said that the real crime was the six-fold racial disproportionality in King County’s jail population. We said that we need to invest in people and communities and to stop throwing people away.
We stopped an aggressive panhandling ordinance that the Seattle Human Rights Commission roundly and unanimously rejected.
And these were real wins. We stopped a jail from being built. We mitigated the worst aspects of the homeless sweeps. We defended and supported Nickelsville. We narrowly averted some bad law aimed at the poor.
And all of that mattered. But none of this, really, is winning.
I have to tell you. I am sick to death of seeing more homeless people every damn year.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Winning will take the kind of commitment and heart that I first saw in Washington DC twenty-six years ago. It will take all of us asking the question, “Am I doing enough, when people are being left to languish, like animals.”
It will mean working with people who might have other priorities, but share our desperate need for a more just economy.
It will mean forgetting everything we think we know about what’s politically possible, and working together toward what we truly need.
Real Change, real, systemic change, means embracing uncertainty, taking risks, and acting together across race, class and issue barriers to build a no-bullshit movement for economic justice.
We need to sleep on church floors. Raise hell. Risk arrest. Maybe miss a few meals.
History shows us one thing very clearly. Economic justice isn’t for wimps.
What Real Change has done is impressive. We’re a powerful institution built upon a web of caring relationships. That’s an amazing thing. Everyday, Real Change is making things a little less desperate for people while we work to build the movement we all need.
But we have so very, very much more left to do.
I know that you’ll be there, stretching with us, expanding the possible, acting out of love, and creating new realities out of this broken, beautiful world.
Why Williams was shot four times
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I am dead. I was gunned down by four men in a car that broke down by the side of the road. I was offering to call for a tow truck when one grabbed a rifle. Another man popped out of the bushes and a third started shooting from the backseat.
Two other reporters also died. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee took a bullet on a routine traffic stop. A guy from the Times got shot after he confronted a man milling around on the sidewalk.
It was all play-acting with video, of course – just a few of the scenarios in the “shoot/don’t shoot simulator” that the Seattle Police Department let reporters try out Wednesday during a “media forum” on how Seattle officers are trained. Training has become a major issue since Aug. 30, when an officer shot and killed a native carver who had a pocketknife and piece of wood in his hands.
At a rally held last week in John T. Williams’ honor, Councilmember Bruce Harrell asked Native Americans gathered at City Hall to see the incident through the eyes of Officer Ian Birk – otherwise, he said, they couldn’t really ask the police to see it through theirs. Point taken. After stepping into the simulator – a trailer in which officers shoot fake rounds at a screen that records their speed and accuracy – I now understand that half-seconds separate life and death. I now appreciate why officers are trained to regard every human being as a potential threat.
And I still think Ian Birk had no business getting out of his car. There was no call or complaint that required detaining Williams on the street. There was no reason for Birk to put himself into a “shoot/don’t shoot” situation.
Once he did, he was already facing the choice to take Williams’ life. Officers aren’t obligated to use less force than they are threatened with, said Dallas Murry, SPD’s Taser program coordinator. And once they pull the trigger, firearms trainer James Thompsen said, they can’t count on one shot being “effective.” In one simulation run, Sgt. Sean Whitcomb fired three rounds into the chest of a burglar who reached for a gun.
None of the officers at the media forum said a word about Williams, but it’s clear to me now why Birk shot him four times. If an officer sees a weapon, he cannot ponder – he does, in fact, shoot to kill. SPD doesn’t teach officers that, Thompsen said; it’s entirely their decision. But after getting blown away in the simulator for being slow, I don’t really buy that.
“It still comes down to each individual officer and their perceptions and their understanding of what the law is,” Thompsen said. “We can’t come down and say you absolutely have to shoot because that would be unethical. I have to say you have to live with the consequences of when you shoot and [when] you decide that you have to take somebody’s life, because that is not a minor, minor thing. It really isn’t.”
CORRECTION: Jonah Spangenthal-Lee e-mailed to say that the woman in his traffic stop simulation did not, in fact, fire on him before he shot her—a mistake that may actually reinforce my point.
Native artist to mayor: “Can you find us a place to carve?”
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It could take months or years to resolve the issues around the death of John T. Williams, the native carver shot to death Aug. 30 by a police officer in downtown Seattle. About 200 people marched in the rain today to a rally in the lobby of City Hall, where Native Americans drummed on the steps of the City Council’s grand staircase. In between songs, there were calls for peace and for teaching the young to carve. The names of all those killed by Seattle police were also called out with the names of officers who have given their lives in service.
Toward the end, Mayor Mike McGinn appeared and was welcomed into the group with nary a jeer. Rally participant Dallas Singhurst wasted no time making a direct appeal to McGinn for something he’d been thinking about, something that potentially could have saved Williams’ life—a place for Native Americans to carve and sell their totems. Williams came from a long line of Ditidaht tribal carvers and had a piece of wood and a pocket knife in his hands when the officer confronted and shot him.
Singhurst told the mayor that he, too, is a native carver and, though he’s poor, he has a large collection of Native American art that he’s amassed over the years, including six totems made by the Williams family. He’d be willing to donate it all, he said, if the city or a property owner could provide a downtown space where native artists could work and display their art.
“I want tourists to come in and see us carving and weaving and beading and singing,” Singhurst said. “I want them to smell the cedar and the sage that we bless our bodies with, that we clothe and house ourselves with.
“It’s a tradition that we make things beautiful,” he said. “We want to share that with the world. In your endeavors, if you can find a way to support that, I’ll give up my collection to make that happen.
“We got an agreement?” he asked McGinn.
“We will talk,” McGinn said, shaking Singhurst’s hand. “We will talk about how to do this.”
Recession greases slide into poverty
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Forget the positive “economic indicators” you keep hearing about in the news. Statistics released from the U.S. Census Bureau today bear out the grim reality that many people are facing as a result of the Great Recession: More people slipped below the poverty line last year—3.8 million more—for a total of 43.6 million Americans, the highest actual number of people since the government started tracking poverty 51 years ago and the third straight year of increase.
That brought the national poverty rate to 14.3 percent in 2009, up from 13.2 percent in 2008, the bureau says. That rate is the highest since 1994, but not a record—it was 8 points higher in 1959, the first year poverty became a government statistic. At the same time, a record 50.7 million people, or 16.7 percent of the population, are now without health coverage, up from 46.3 million in 2008.
In the two years since the recession started in 2007, the poverty rate has gone up 1.9 percent—not as bad as the downturn of the early ‘80s but worse than the 1973-75 recession, according to the report “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009.”
The news was bad for nearly everyone but Asians, who saw no slip in median income or poverty rates between 2008 and 2009. The poverty rate among whites, however, rose 1.2 percent, from 8.6 to 9.4 percent. For Hispanics and blacks—already suffering roughly three times the poverty rate as whites—the number in poverty increased roughly 1 percent in 2009. Nearly 26 percent of black Americans and 25.3 percent of all Hispanics now live in poverty.
There’s so much more, but if you don’t have time to “drill into” the official 88-page report from the Census Bureau, click here to go to a recap from Economic Police Institute.
“It’s a plain murder is what it is”
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More Tasers. Body cameras. Racial profiling classes. A “Verbal Judo” de-escalation workshop.
Those are some of the things that Seattle Chief of Police John Diaz put forward at a news conference yesterday on his plans to change how Seattle police do business – particularly how they treat people of color like John T. Williams, the native carver shot to death by an officer on Aug. 30. The measures will include a review of department training and a new “neighborhood policing” program, which officers cautioned would not be the same foot patrols. But, other than Diaz shuffling around his commanders and repeating a vague slogan about all officers engaging in “community building” from here on out, it’s still not clear how he plans to change a police culture that condones incidents in which people of color, the poor or the homeless are beaten up or killed by officers.
“It’s a plain murder is what it is,” Robert Satiacum, a great great grandson of Seattle’s namesake, Chief Sealth, said of Williams’ death during a City Council hearing held yesterday afternoon. “We have a last-straw scenario here and these natives are restless, brother. We better come up with some answers.”
At this hour, a march in Williams’ honor is making its way from Boren Avenue and Howell Street, the site where Williams, who was deaf in one ear, was shot four times after failing to heed the officer’s commands to drop his pocket knife. The march concludes with a rally at City Hall from 4 to 5:30 p.m. (Donations to the family can now be made through a John T. Williams Memorial Fund set up at Bank of America.)
The shooting has shed light on a long history of beatings that Native Americans say they have suffered from police over the years, including the dozen people who stood up in council chambers yesterday when Jenine Grey, director of the Chief Seattle Club, asked for victims to rise. One of them was Alex Jackson, a 75-year-old man who used to carve but is now paralyzed on one side and nearly blind from 14 police beatings.
Grey said members of the Chief Seattle Club frequently tell staff the police have taken their identification and thrown it in the bushes. That made my blood run cold: We hear the same thing from Real Change vendors, many of whom are black. Add homeless to that and being robbed of one’s I.D. is more than a nuisance; it can be a death sentence for someone relying on shelters or public programs, as most require identification.
Things like this wouldn’t happen at all if keeping people of color and the poor at bay hadn’t been the traditional role of police. Making officers wear small cameras on their person (Diaz said he’s starting a small pilot) or encouraging them to get out of their cars and actually meet people in their neighborhoods—something citizens have demanded for years now—could improve accountability, but seem to fall short of the measures that tribal and community leaders are calling for to radically change police culture.
Among the measures, the Seattle Human Rights Commission is calling on the city to create an independent panel to review the shooting – one to include Native Americans and homeless and disabled individuals. It also endorsed adding more citizens to the police department’s internal Firearms Review Board, which currently has only one civilian observer. CANOES, an organization of Native American city employees, is also calling for educating officers in the nation’s history of racism and for the department to immediately implement practices called for in the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative.
“That policeman should be charged with murder”
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John T. Williams was deaf in one ear and couldn’t hear well out of the other, a friend says. He also had ear buds on as he was walking down the street, his brother says. So it’s not clear if he even knew the police officer who told him to “drop the weapon” Monday afternoon was talking to him before he was shot four times in rapid fire.
Witness accounts in the media vary. Some say he turned around. Others say he didn’t. Either way, no one saw him “lunge” at Officer Ian Birk, as the police first claimed. The four shots that killed him were still ringing in the ears of the 300 people who came to a vigil for Williams held outside the Chief Seattle Club last night and at a news conference this morning. It was four too many for a Native American walking down the street with a carving tool in a city named for Chief Sealth, tribal elders and community leaders said, and, this time, the police aren’t going to get away with it.
“I don’t want to hear somewhere down the road that it was OK what happened. It was not OK,” Duwamish Tribal Chair Cecile Hansen said. “This should never have happened.”
“We’re not going to allow this to [be] swept under the rug,” said Randy Lewis of United Indians of All Tribes. Lewis used to run a frame shop on Capitol Hill and gave Williams pieces of wood to carve the small totems that he sold at the Pike Place Market to get by. “I don’t think he had a malicious bone in his body,” Lewis said. “The only thing that could be threatened by John maybe [was] a piece of yellow pine.”
There is growing outrage, Lewis said, about the Seattle Police Department’s use of lethal force—something that he called on the city to re-examine and restrain. Police have been abusing and killing Native Americans for decades, he and others said, and they demanded an end to it, starting with a fair and open inquest into Williams’ killing. The Chief Seattle Club also called on Deputy Chief Nick Metz, in particular, to apologize for the ugly things he said about Williams at a press briefing on Aug. 31.
Williams had been homeless much of his life, but lived most of the past four years at 1811 Eastlake, a building run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center. Williams was on his way from 1811 to the Market when Officer Birk saw him crossing Boren Avenue and decided there was something odd about the 50-year-old and the three-inch carving knife and wood he carried in his hands. So he got out of his car and killed him. The next day, Metz tried to justify the shooting by characterizing Williams to reporters as a criminal and troublemaker, when Williams’ greatest “crime,” by all accounts, was extreme poverty and alcohol addiction.
“He was deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other. He was almost blind [and] he could hardly walk” due to arthritis, said Alexis Jackson, a 74-year-old elder and friend of Williams’ who rose to speak at today’s news conference and said he’d been beaten many times by Seattle police over the years. “That policeman,” Jackson said, “should be charged with murder.”
NASNA to lay off executive director
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In all the time he managed Real Change’s vendor services, I never once saw Israel Bayer on the brink of tears. But, then, he’s never had to tell a roomful of publishers and editors of struggling street newspapers that they’re about to lose one of the few resources they have at their disposal.
Bayer said yesterday that NASNA, an affiliated group of street newspapers sold by the homeless, is laying off its executive director and sole staff member, Andy Freeze. The news was rough on some members attending the organization’s annual conference this week at Chicago’s DePaul University and they pushed back.
Bayer is the board chairman of NASNA, the North American Association of Street Newspapers, which started 15 years ago to help support and launch similar publications. This year’s two-day conference has more than 80 participants from some of the 31 newspapers and magazines that belong to NASNA across the United States and Canada, a number of whom have just started or are preparing to start new publications.
In December 2008, NASNA hired Freeze as its first staff member and, a month later, opened an office in Washington, D.C. Since then, he has helped start three new papers—Toledo Streets, Philadelphia’s One Step Away and the Nashville Contributor—with others in the wings.
Bayer, executive director of Portland’s Street Roots, told conference delegates that NASNA is laying off Freeze at the end of August due to the recession and a lack of funds. The position had been funded with grants from the Ethics & Excellence Journalism Foundation that are now expended, with no new funds in sight to replace them.
In two days of meetings prior to the conference, Bayer said NASNA’s board members had come up with a plan for maintaining all of NASNA’s services and its website themselves, with the organization’s defacto headquarters to be Street Roots’ offices in Portland.
Many delegates expressed shock at the news, questioning why the board hadn’t let its member papers know sooner so that they could have raised money. They then passed an impromptu resolution demanding that the board come up with a dollar figure for what it would take to maintain Freeze’s position until year’s end—a number the board was asked to present in a meeting set later today.
To raise money, some delegates suggested that NASNA’s member newspapers—many of which are all-volunteer operations—pay higher dues to the organization. NASNA currently charges $50 to $2,000 a year for a membership, based on a newspaper’s income.
Even if money could be raised to keep Freeze on through year’s end, board member Serge Lareault, publisher of Montreal’s L’Itineraire, said it wouldn’t buy enough time to raise the real money needed—upwards of $150,000—to keep NASNA’s office open and staffed after January.
Bayer and others stressed that NASNA had existed for years as a volunteer operation and would survive. In the meantime, “we are trying to look for long-term sustainability,” Bayer said.
“I’m shocked to find you’re laying off your executive director. I’m shocked to hear that everybody from this side didn’t know that was happening,” said Bruce Gimbel, a minister and shelter provider who is starting a street newspaper in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. “That wouldn’t have happened at my organization because I would have notified all my constituents [that] we need people to step up.”
“I probably would have paid $1,000 to be at this conference in order to gain [the] $5,000 worth of information, which so far what I feel I’ve gained,” he said. “NASNA is our organization. If you don’t see value in NASNA like I see value, you need to go away.”
“I see a lot of people throwing a lot of punches and I respect that,” Bayer said, his voice cracking. But “we’re in the middle of a recession [and] homelessness is on the rise.”
“If we can come together as a group and there are some solid resolutions ... to help NASNA move forward, we’re all ears,” Bayer said. But “I just want to remind people that we’re all in this together.”
Midyear budget cuts spare human services—for now
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Mayor McGinn lowered the boom on city departments today, releasing a roster of $12.4 million in midyear budget cuts in an effort to close the general-fund shortfall that Seattle is facing in 2010 as a result of evaporating tax revenue.
The good news: The mayor is calling for $246,000 in cuts from the Human Services Department, but no actual service reductions are expected—at least not this year.
Next year, the city is facing a $56 million shortfall for which McGinn says he’s looking at cutting between 5 and 10 percent of the human services budget, along with 1-5 percent from the police and fire departments and roughly 10-15 percent from every other agency.
“Obviously, it’s the 2011 budget that’s going to be the challenge,” says Kip Tokuda, acting director of HSD. But, for now, “we’re going to get by relatively unscathed,” he says, by cutting back on travel and training without laying off any staff.
Overall, the city will cut a total of 13 people, representing 9 fulltime positions, as of July 20. Another 45 jobs will be left unfilled, including not hiring 21 planned new police officers—a move that saves $2.1 million but is sure to disappoint Belltown and Pioneer Square community activists who have called for more police on the beat.
The next biggest cuts will come from parks ($1.7 million) and libraries ($1.2 million). In addition to cutting the Parks Department’s travel and training budget—which raised controversy for now-resigned Parks Superintendent Tim Gallagher—there will be reductions in park maintenance and closures or shorter hours at wading pools. Libraries will take hits in staffing for public services, custodial and technology and lose $500,000 in funding for buying materials.
The mayor’s midyear budget update also says the Seattle Department of Transportation came up $6.6 million short this year. One reason is that SDOT depleted its gas tax reserves earlier than planned in 2009. The other? Apparently, the department has spent a bundle on homeless encampment cleanups that, needless to say, it could have saved if the city had left the homeless alone.
Where the cops have gone
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Alert readers of Real Change know that we have not run Streetwatch, our weekly catalog of police incidents involving the homeless, for a few weeks now.
Charles Mudede, the grandaddy of all police-blot watchers, notes with perfect accuracy that SPD’s new policy broadcasts only a teeny sliver of the massive volumes of paperwork generated by the department’s staff. The incidents posted online “represent an ideal of police work: cops and robbers.”
Our Streetwatch column, in its 10-year run, has been a place to air some of the various happenings, tragic and banal, that transpire for people on Seattle’s streets. One of its items germinated assistant editor Rosette Royale’s nationally award-winning three-part series. It’s seldom been pretty: in them, the homeless are victims of rape and assault. They are perps – most frequently, they beat or hit each other. And they are victims if not in fact than in circumstance: they are trespassed, trespassed, stopped on suspicion of lurking, and trespassed again. And the accounts provided are of course one-sided: they are the stories the police have set down.
For all that, Streetwatch has been the product of an open and progressive policy: the police would simply make recent incidents available on compact disc (they used to print it all out) for viewing by computer at the local precinct. I acknowledge the use of putting incidents online – but not of drastically narrowing the scope of what’s available.
We won’t publish a column culled from only a portion of the police’s work – it’s akin to looking for your lost wallet under the streetlamps.
Staff in the department’s Media Relations unit have assured me that more information would be posted over time. That’s not a satisfying response. What? When? Who’s responsible? What are the minimum standards for what gets posted and what is left offline?
For now, the new system has rendered Streetwatch untenable. I’m determined to bring it back again. So I’ll continue to request that the police re-open the filing cabinet.
Stay tuned for more.
Real Change a partner in organizing Seattle Unity Forum
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Seattle Unity Forum
Saturday, June 26th, 10 am - 2 pm
Seattle University School of Law, Room C1
(refreshments provided)
If ever there was a time for a strategic alliance of activists across barriers of race, class, and issue, it is now. Seattle’s potential for a series of broad progressive wins is greater that at any other time in recent memory.
Elected leadership has shown unprecedented willingness to challenge the downtown establishment. The Police Chief selection process has centered on the issue of who can best depolarize relations between communities of color and law enforcement. A bid by the downtown establishment to further criminalize homelessness was recently turned back by a broad coalition of groups led by Real Change, NAACP, and the ACLU, and hinged on the courageous and key support of Mayor McGinn and Councilmember Mike O’Brien, activists known mostly for their work on environmental sustainability.
Please join forum sponsors Real Change, United African Public Affairs Committee, Sierra Club (Seattle Chapter) and the Center for Global Justice and Access to Justice Institute at the Seattle University School of Law on Saturday, June 26th, 10-2, for an exploratory forum that brings together communities of color, sustainabilty, and social justice activists for an open-ended dialogue that results in achievable, immediate steps toward greater unity and political clout across what have too often been divergent constituencies.
PSCA Drops Appeal On Real Change Use Permit
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Today, Real Change and the Pioneer Square Community Association issued the following joint press release.
Real Change and the Pioneer Square Community Association (PSCA) are pleased to announce that they have resolved their issues related to the City of Seattle use permit for the New England Building in Pioneer Square. PSCA has withdrawn its appeal of the City of Seattle decision. The two organizations look forward to working together for the common benefit of Pioneer Square, supporting a vibrant neighborhood for all.
Leslie Smith, Executive Director of the PSCA, said of the settlement, “We had a constructive dialogue. Real Change listened thoughtfully to our concerns around the City’s use permit and agreed to work with us in a spirit of cooperation. We look forward to Real Change’s contributions to the vitality of the Pioneer Square Neighborhood.” Tim Harris, Executive Director of Real Change also welcomed the settlement, saying, “Real Change is happy to be past the conflict and to return full focus to our mission. We are proud to be part of the diversity of Pioneer Square and look forward to being engaged members of the community.”
Real Change is a 501 C-3 organization that creates opportunity and a voice for low income people while taking action to end homelessness and poverty.
The Pioneer Square Community Association is a 501 C-3 organization devoted to the betterment of Pioneer Square through advocacy, programming, marketing and community action.
Real Change staff earn journalism awards
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A longtime publisher from Port Townsend spoke at a Society of Professional Journalists awards banquet I attended a few years back, and he solemnly told the audience that the journalism awards given out that night weren’t won, they were earned.
You win the lottery, you win at the poker table. Earnings are what’s due for the work you did.
Real Change staff won earned four awards in the 2009 regional contest of the Society of Professional Journalists last weekend, which covers daily and non-daily newspapers, alternative weeklies, radio and television broadcasters and online media. The awards were announced at the May 22 annual banquet of the Society of Professional Journalists’ regional contest. Real Change competed against non-daily papers from Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.
Staff reporter Cydney Gillis won earned first-place awards in three categories: in Arts Reporting and Criticism for “Pike Place Market artists losing designated lofts” (April 8-14); in Social Issues Reporting for “Affordable Rentals takes $250 from homeless couple” (Aug. 5-11); and in Education Reporting for “Parents call changes at Seattle’s Indian Heritage School a whitewash,” (Sept. 30 – Oct. 4). Assistant Editor Rosette Royale won earned a second-place award in the Personalities Reporting category for “A fast for peace, recounted in number and deed” (Sept. 16-22).
You can look over this PDF for the contest’s complete results.
City Council upholds veto of panhandling ordinance
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In a 4-4 vote this afternoon—apparently enough to do the job—the Seattle City Council sustained Mayor Mike McGinn’s veto of a panhandling ordinance that would have allowed the police to issue $50 tickets to aggressive beggars.
Real Change, the ACLU, NAACP and other organizations had argued that the ordinance, proposed by Tim Burgess, chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee, would have given the police a blank check to move along any beggar and that there was no reason to create a new law when Seattle already prohibits aggressive panhandling.
Councilmembers Nick Licata, Bruce Harrell, Tom Rasmussen and Mike O’Brien repeated their earlier votes against the measure. Council President Richard Conlin was absent.
Home free? Not quite.
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Imagine our sense of relief when on April 24th, the Pioneer Square Historic Preservation board voted to approve the use of our new home over the objections raised by the Pioneer Square Community Association (PSCA) who just don’t think that Real Change “belongs” in Pioneer Square. We were further relieved when on May 3rd the Historic Preservation Board again voted in our favor, approving the minor façade alteration necessitated by the construction of 2 bathrooms for our vendors. In April, a team from Real Change participated in the PSCA’s Pioneer Square clean-up. We will be good neighbors in Pioneer Square and our vendors will benefit tremendously from the new space. Moving boxes have arrived and our Belltown office is littered with the tell-tale signs of relocation.
Home free? Not quite yet.
Late last week, Leslie Smith, Executive Director of the Pioneer Square Community Association, filed an appeal to the Hearing Examiner on May 13 regarding the Pioneer Square Preservation Board’s decision to allow Real Change’s use of space on the first and second floors of the New England Building at 219 Main. You can read their appeal here.
We do not believe that the PSCA will prevail. We will move this weekend, as planned, and reopen in Pioneer Square on Monday, May 24. A support rally is being organized for 5 pm that day in Occidental Park. We’d love to see you there. Please RSVP on Facebook or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to let us know you are planning to attend.
More details for my detail oriented readers out there:
The appeal of our move, which could take up to 90 days to finalize, seeks to overturn an April 21 Preservation Board land use decision. At the April hearing, PSCA Board President and Samis Land Company Senior Property Manager Adam Hasson failed to convince fellow Preservation Board members that Real Change is a wholesaler, a prohibited use in Pioneer Square. The Preservation Board voted to approve Real Change’s use as office space. At a second Preservation Board hearing on May 3, to review a first floor window alteration associated with the construction of two bathrooms, Hasson cast the lone vote in opposition to approval, stating of our relocation “This is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.” He says that Real Change just does not belong in Pioneer Square.
The PSCA appeal argues that Real Change is a wholesaler of newspapers and thereby prohibited from locating in Pioneer Square and that planned skills-building workshops for vendors is also a prohibited use of space. Real Change sees no substance or merit to either argument. The PSCA appeal exposes Real Change to considerable financial risk. Hearing Examiner decisions are binding and final. More that $60,000 has been spent to remodel the space and Real Change is bound to a five-year lease at the new location. PSCA Executive Director Leslie Smith has rejected all attempts by Real Change to engage in dialogue regarding her concerns.
The Pioneer Square Community Association is controlled by real estate interests and does not speak for all of Pioneer Square.
“Ding dong, the jail is dead”
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Turns out the rumor was right: King County Executive Dow Constantine was joined by Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and elected officials from Shoreline and Kirkland this morning to announce they’re calling off plans for a new $226 million misdemeanant jail that Seattle had intended to share with the county’s North/East Cities.
Instead, the county is offering the cities a new contract for 150 beds a year at the King County Jail between 2017 and 2020. That would extend a deal struck last year in which the cities will lease 300 beds a year between 2012 and 2016.
One reason for the move, Constantine said, is the downward trend in the King County Jail’s population—something that jail opponents attribute to the success of jail diversion programs that offer people treatment and services at lower cost than incarceration.
“We heard you. We listened to you,” McGinn said of the public input. “You want us to be thoughtful, you want us to work together, you want us to work on alternatives to incarceration.”
That doesn’t mean a new jail won’t be built someday, but Shoreline Mayor Keith McGlashan said the environmental impact study that had been started on a potential jail site in Shoreline has been canceled. McGinn said he will recommend that other northeast cities where potential jail sites had been identified—Bellevue, Clyde Hill, Kirkland, Redmond and Yarrow Point—stop their jail siting processes as well, ending an effort that started when the county told the cities it would run out of room and stop housing their inmates in 2012.
By then, a group of seven South County cities plans to open a new misdemeanant jail that is already under construction. In the meantime, Constantine said, he’s launching a regional jail planning group in which the county will work with the cities on sharing jail space and resources to meet needs in the future.
“We are going to plan for the day when we need new jail space and we’re going to approach that in a rationale, methodical way,” he said. “I think the last process started because the county made a sudden declaration” that its jail beds would be full. “We don’t want that to happen again.”
The Regional Justice Center in Kent has room to build additional units, he said—something he said should be considered as an option for the future. In the meantime, Councilmember Nick Licata said, pre-booking jail alternatives such as Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion—the name for two pilot projects that The Defender Association’s Racial Disparity Project is working to launch this year in Belltown and Skyway—will keep jail numbers down. “With this extension to 2020, we have pulled the plug on the siting process and I can almost hear the cheers now,” Licata said.
Situation gets darker in Land of Midnight Sun
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Sometimes, reputations can come on as subtle as whisper. First people talk about someone — or some place — and, before anyone realizes it, that’s what you’re known for. Anchorage, Alaska may be going through such a moment.
Of course, most people associate Alaska with cold and being the largest city in The Last Frontier. Some even know that it ain’t that far from Wasila, Sarah Palin’s old stomping grounds. But these days, Anchorage is becoming known as the last place you’d want to be if you’re homeless a person who’s struggling with alcoholism. Last October, the NY Times printed “Homeless Deaths Rise, and Anchorage Copes,” which discussed the deaths of 13 homeless people from the spring of 2009 until last fall.
Now comes this: The number of deaths of homeless people there has risen to 21 in the past 12 months, according to the Associated Press’ “Anchorage outdoor deaths mount among homeless.” It’s one of those articles that makes you shake your head: It gives out sad information, which no one can really account for, though people try.
Part of the issue is the changing weather. Then there are alcoholism rates among Native populations. And then there’s a little bit of the NIMBY attitude.
But of local interest is significant (virtual) ink spent on praising the success of Seattle’s own 1811 Eastlake building, which offers housing to 75 homeless men and women caught in a downward spiral of alcoholism, a spiral that’s kept them either on the streets or in the ER.
Of course, Anchorage doesn’t have to be known as the City where Homeless People — especially Natives who are alcoholic — Keep Dying. Maybe a rep from the 1811 should pay a visit to Anchorage. And maybe some writer will go up there and spend some time and tell us a (sad) story from the land of the Midnight Sun. Maybe a story that shines a light on the dark times in the city will help change a rep-in-the-making that could start weighing Anchorage down.
Plans for new jail canceled, Shoreline group says
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Take it for what it is at the moment—an unconfirmed rumor—but a group called No Shoreline Jail is reporting on its website that King County Executive Dow Constantine will make an announcement Thursday that the county and its northeast cities, including Seattle, have canceled plans to build a new municipal jail, apparently for lack of need, something the anti-jail activists have argued all along.
Mike Hall in a new spot
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I was in the neighborhood today, so I stopped in at the gorgeously re-appointed Elliott Bay Book Co., voted with my dollars for independent booksellers, and had a nice chat with Real Change vendor Mike Hall, who’s straddling turfs these days between 1st and Main (our future destination) and 10th Avenue between Pike and Pine.
Mike recently earned one of the bookstore’s beautiful wooden stools on which he rests near the front door. “You’ve been here 11 years,” he was told; it was about time.
How’s business at the new digs? Good, he says. And he sees a surprising number of Pioneer Square neighbors up on the hill, coming into their longtime bookstore.
Word to the wise he shared with me: The red-striped curb cut right outside the bookstore’s front door may look inhospitable, but it’s OK to pull up to the curb. “People tell me there’s nowhere to park up here,” he says, but there is, steps away from Mike. And if you were any closer to the books, it’d be a drive-thru.
McGinn: It’s time to put the brakes on Seattle’s deep-bore tunnel
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Every week or so, Mayor Mike McGinn invites reporters up to his loft at City Hall for an informal Q&A. Today’s came with not one, but two visual aids, both aimed squarely at the deep-bore tunnel that’s supposed to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct in downtown Seattle.
One was a whiteboard scrawled, if you will, with a “tunnel timeline of no return,” which the mayor wants everyone to know is upon us, now, in May. There’s no exact date, but here’s the upshot: May 14 is technically the deadline by which the city need to finish negotiating an agreement with the state Department of Transportation so that WSDOT can start requesting bids. Once the agreement is done, it will codify, once and for all, who’s responsible for any cost overruns on the project, which our previous mayor just had to have, come hell or high water.
The City Council agreed with Mayor Nickels, passing an interim agreement to move forward with the tunnel, which is slated to be built under First Avenue largely along the area of the Pike Place Market. But councilmembers will still have to vote on the final WSDOT agreement sometime this month, and McGinn is hoping against hope that they’ll vote no if the document puts Seattle on the hook for overruns, which is how state legislators set it up when they allocated $2.4 billion for the bore.
McGinn, of course, is convinced overruns will come, to the point of overrunning the city’s entire budget. He used a second visual aid—a set of slides—to drive home the point with some startling numbers based on a study of 258 large infrastructure projects done by Oxford planning professor Bent Flyvbjerg. Just a few of the highlights, arranged Harper’s Index-style:
1) 90% of the “mega-projects” studied exceeded their budgets.
2) The average cost overrun on tunnels and bridges was 34%.
3) The cost overrun of King County’s Brightwater sewage tunnel so far: 24%.
4) The cost overrun of Sound Transit’s Beacon Hill tunnel: 30%.
5) The cost overrun of the downtown bus tunnel: 56%.
6) The more complicated the project, the higher the cost overrun.
7) Seattle’s 1.7 miles of intended tunnel is a long shot through a lot of unknown soil conditions.
8) A cost overrun of just 1% would be $31 million.
9) A cost overrun of 50% would be $1.5 billion—more than the entire city general fund that pays for police, firefighters, human services and everything else.
If the council approves the final WSDOT agreement, McGinn said he’d veto it. But the council could override that. But, given that state lawmakers would have to pass new legislation to completely remove Seattle’s liability for overruns—which the mayor said he’d like to see the state pick up (!)—a reporter asked McGinn if he wasn’t just trying to cover his know-you-what by saying the city can still back out.
“You see that?” McGinn said, pointing to a slide with an overrun figure of $1.5 billion. “I as mayor and the councilmembers will have to deal with that. I don’t get to cover my ass on that”—a disaster, he said, that can be foreseen and avoided if the council stands with him.
“Don’t you you wish somebody at WaMu had said, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t make those subprime loans?’” McGinn said of Seattle’s failed savings and loan. “This is our chance to be saying maybe we shouldn’t commit ourselves to paying these cost overruns, because the consequences are real and they’re serious.”
A budget earful: You can’t recreate if you can’t eat, homeless activists say
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Mayor Mike McGinn sat with city councilmembers last night in a joint budget hearing—the kind of thing that Seattleites never saw Mayor Nickels do. The news he shared at the beginning of the meeting, however, wasn’t good. Nor were the four hours of sad begging from members of the public concerned they’re going to lose their parks, pools, community centers and human services, with some sharp lines drawn between parents, children and seniors who don’t want to lose their parks programs and social services advocates pleading for the poor and hungry.
“I love my P-Patches, I love taking my daughter to the library,” said Laurie Eckardt, program director for Belltown’s Dorothy Day House, a 41-unit building for formerly homeless women, but “I think it’s our moral covenant to represent and support the most vulnerable in our community. We have an eight-month waiting list.”
Heading into midyear, the city of Seattle is already $12 million short on its 2010 adopted budget, McGinn said, which is going to require some immediate reductions. Things get worse from here. In 2011, the projected deficit is $56 million—a revenue hole brought to you by the Great Recession, with no end in sight: Compared to past downturns, “what we’re looking at is a much slower economic recovery,” McGinn told an overflowing cafeteria room at North Seattle Community College.
For the midyear course correction, the mayor said he’s asked all departments but police, fire and human services to come up with 3 percent in cuts. To prepare for the biennial 2011-2012 budget, McGinn said, departments would have to take a 6 to 7 percent across-the-board cut, but he’s considering “a mix of reduction in services and areas of tax or revenue increases”—an idea that speaker Fred Rowley endorsed in order to maintain funding for parks, which he said is often viewed as expendable compared with public safety services.
“It’s always been framed as an argument of guns versus butter,” Rowley said. But “it’s not a matter of police versus parks. We need a good robust parks program as much as we need police. Maybe we need to think about raising taxes. I’m good with that ... Let’s just do what we have to do.”
Robert Hansen, fighting hatred with humor
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Robert Hansen. What a good-hearted man with a wicked sense of humor. In the 5+ years I’ve been here, we had countless conversations punctuated by untold laughs and smiles. But we also talked, sometimes of serious issues, when I saw him at my neighborhood PCC in Seward Park, where he sold the paper. Occasionally, those convos centered on his interactions with solicitors for a certain political candidate who shared the sidewalk with him and who shall remain nameless: at least his last name won’t be mentioned. But his first name is Lyndon.
One day in April, solicitors for this candidate showed up at the PCC with a poster of Obama as Hitler. It’s a totally offensive image, made all the more so at this particular PCC since the store sits in a sizable Jewish neighborhood. Customers, rightly, complained to the solicitors about the image. One customer, taking civil disobedience — and a Magic Marker — into his own hands, went home and crafted a retaliatory sign. He returned, standing silently behind the solicitors’ table. Robert couldn’t wait to tell me that someone had fought offense with humor. He chuckled and smiled at the witty nature of a lone protester.
Someone took pictures of the protester’s sign and emailed them to Robert. Just last week, Robert gave me his email address and password so I could see them myself. I haven’t looked because I felt uncomfortable having access to his email account. But now, given that he kept prodding me on a daily basis to see the images, and that he’s left this mortal coil, I looked. And now I share them, aware that Robert would have a big smile on his face knowing that people saw what he saw, on that day when one man used humor to fight anti-Semitism and hatred.
Keep smiling, Robert…
Longtime vendor Robert Hansen, 1951-2010
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UPDATE: A public memorial service for Robert takes place Friday, May 14, 1-2 p.m., at the plaza in front of City Hall, 600 Fourth Avenue. We’re seeking customers and friends of Robert’s from Seward Park or downtown to share their memories. E-mail or call us, 206-441-3247 ext.207, to volunteer.
We learned today of the death of Robert Hansen, a longtime vendor of the newspaper downtown and in the Rainier Valley.
To read a 2007 profile of Robert, click here.
Hansen helped to sort out conflicts between Real Change vendors; he spoke to city and state officials about economic justice issues; and he led vendors in the weekly task of unloading a cargo van full of the new issue. He called Tuesday from Swedish Medical Center to let us know that he wouldn’t be making the Wednesday morning delivery.
Born in Seattle and raised in the Rainier Valley, after high school at Rainier Beach Robert spent 15 years hawking food and beverages in the stands at the Kingdome. Years later, he could still reel off the barks he’d use to attract business: “Ice cold beer! Freeze your teeth, give your tongue a sleigh ride,” he’d say as he strode through the stands with a tray of cups. He worked as a baker, a laborer, a meat processor and a cook. He sold newspapers throughout much of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Within six months of Real Change’s first edition in August 1994, he began selling the paper. He was a frequent presence at the Seward Park PCC, downtown near the seats of local government, and at the weekly Columbia City Farmers Market.
After a stint at Swedish last week for internal bleeding — it may have been his kidney, says his mother, or it may have been his prostate — he was discharged on Tuesday, April 27. Doctor’s orders prescribed seven days of bed rest. His body was found Thursday evening, April 29, in his pickup truck on Sixth Avenue South and S. Massachusetts Street, in the industrial SoDo district. The King County Medical Examiner estimates that he died Wednesday, April 28. Robert was 58. In addition to his mother, survivors include a son, Robert Jr., of Seattle and a younger sister in Grand Junction, Colo.
Teaching assistants threaten to strike at University of Washington
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Members of the union that represents 4,500 teaching and research assistants at the University of Washington voted last night to authorize a strike if they cannot reach an agreement in the contract negotiations that started in March.
The 4,500 employees, which include TAs, RAs, staff assistants and tutors, are represented by United Auto Workers Local 4121, which is seeking what members call a modest wage increase and protections against layoffs in the wake of a second year of state funding cuts to the university and a second tuition increase of 14 percent set to start this fall.
Last year, the university cut more than 700 employees. This year, union members say the UW plans to cut some 447 TA “quarters”—roughly, more than 100 year-round positions. With the UAW’s contract set to expire tomorrow, a campus group that supports the union, the UW Student Worker Coalition, plans a one-day campus strike on Monday to protest what the teaching assistants call unfair bargaining practices by the university.
At a rally held today on campus—which included students marching to UW President Mark Emmert’s office and delivering black balloons—union members said they had just learned that the university’s administration switched insurance plans in 2002. When it did, the university started overpaying its yearly premiums, said Devon McCurdy, a teaching assistant in the UW’s history department.
“Over the past eight years,” McCurdy told a group of about 20 grads and undergrads before the march started, “they’ve overpaid by about $10 million.”
“The wage increases that we’re asking for are comparatively small. They can be paid for with that $10 million,” he said, but “the university ... would rather give the money to the insurance companies than to some of its hardest-working, lowest-paid employees.”
Phil Neff, a research assistant in international studies, said the annual salary for TAs and RAs, who do the bulk of the university’s teaching, paper-grading and research work, is about $15,000, if they get an appointed to a position each quarter.
A spokesperson for the UW did not immediately return a phone call regarding the insurance issue. In a previous interview with Real Change on the UAW’s bargaining demands, UW spokesperson Bob Roseth said state funding cuts are making things difficult for everyone at the university.
“Nobody here is receiving pay increases,” Roseth said, “not the president, the faculty [or] the staff.”
We need help with our move
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We are going full steam ahead with our move now and would love a little extra help in a couple of areas.
If you would like to help with any of the following email Polly at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
1. People to help vendors call, email and send postcards announcing their change of address on Wednesday May 5, 12 and 19.
2. An unpacking team on Saturday, May 22nd at the new Pioneer Sq. site (snacks provided!)
3. A cleaning team on Saturday, May 29th at the old Belltown site (snacks provided!)
4. During the first week in the new space, May 24-28th, I’d love to have an extra volunteer per day, from around 10am-2pm just to help us all adjust to the new space and all the changes.
5. We’re going to have an extra vendor meeting on Thursday May 20th from 12:30-2:30 pm and it would be great to have a couple of volunteers to help vendors with change-of-address questions and process.
One of the great things about our new space is will we have more room to do classes and workshops with vendors, so if you have any skills you want to teach, let me know.
It really does take a community to move an office.
Thank you,
Polly
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Mayor McGinn vetoes aggressive panhandling ordinance
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It’s an interesting headline, but, as City Councilmember Bruce Harrell pointed out at the mayor’s veto ceremony today at City Hall, it does not mean that the four councilmembers who voted against Tim Burgess’s aggressive solicitation ordinance support street bullying.
To the contrary: Harrell, one of the four councilmembers who voted against the measure, said today that he wants to see an honest debate on the issue in the future. But that’s not what Seattle got, he said, from Burgess’s proposal, which would have allowed police to give people asking for money on the street a $50 ticket if the officers—or complaining business owners, say—deemed their behavior intimidating.
“I continue to believe the debate was a dishonest debate,” Harrell told a room of about 100 homeless and civil rights advocates at City Hall. Those who opposed the measure are just as interested in public safety as those who supported it, he said, but the proponents’ argument that Seattle’s current law against aggressive panhandling was insufficient just didn’t wash.
“This was a bad law,” Harrell said—one that isn’t quite yet dead yet, Rev. David Bloom said. Sometime in the next 30 days, the council will take a final vote in which it could override the mayor’s veto if any of the opponents change their vote. A last-minute change of heart by Councilmember Mike O’Brien, who did not attend the veto ceremony, is how Monday’s council vote came out 5-4, a split that lacks the two-thirds majority needed to countermand the mayor.
“We need to continue to support those [four] councilmembers, because they are under tremendous pressure” to change their vote, Bloom said. “All it would take, folks, is one vote.”
Remembering Michael Garcia: A vendor, an activist, a staff member
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This last week marked the 1-year anniversary of the death of a friend of mine, Michael Garcia. A vendor, an activist, a Real Change staff member; Michael was a man who tragically died suddenly just as all the pieces of his life came together and he was finally doing what he was born to do.
As a young teen in foster care, a fireworks accident blew off several of his fingertips. There were surgeries. Painkillers led to heroin, years on the street, and eventually, prison. While incarcerated, Michael decided to make something of himself and sought education. His dream, he told me, was to work in the field of waste water management and he was certified to do so while in prison.
There were, however, barriers after his release from prison. His poverty. His battle with Hepatitis C. His felony record. Michael was engaged in an epic struggle toward what, for many of us, would seem a humble goal.
He was deeply compassionate, quietly brilliant, and utterly committed to improving the lives of others. Michael was an amazing staff member, doing the work from a place of passion and understanding. “For most of my life, I was a fuck-up,” he said. “Now I’m making up for lost time.”
The Real Change movie, Turning Points closes with his powerful life story.
Michael drives it all home in his own words:
“I want to see some justice done to these people out here, not only because I’m one of them, but because we’ve all together in this thing called life and we have to look out for each other”
We are excited that as Real Change moves onto the next phase of our life and growth, that we have the opportunity to honor Michael Garcia with a lasting tribute. Our new Vendor Learning Center in Pioneer Square opens on May 24th and we are naming it after Michael. He would be thrilled. Please donate now to help fund this new resource for vendors and be part of a community tribute to a great man. And take a few minutes to think about the fragility of life and how we all need to, like Michael, do what we can, while we can.
Sincerely yours,
Timothy Harris Executive Director Real Change
Stimulus jobs at minimum wage? No way, protesters tell housing authority
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The smaller the room, the better to hear the protesters: More than 20 people crammed into the Tukwila offices of the King County Housing Authority this morning to give the agency’s board of directors a piece of their mind about how the agency is spending federal stimulus funds to weatherize its rental units—by filling the jobs with minimum-wage workers who make $8.55 an hour instead of the living wage they say the Obama Administration intended.
“You can’t support a 3-year-old on $8.55 an hour,” Yirim Seck told the board at KCHA’s Tukwila offices. “We know this stimulus money is here. When can we get a piece of that?”
Seck and others in the group, organized by a Seattle nonprofit called Got Green, took two weeks of job training last fall through a program developed by Got Green and the Laborers Union aimed at getting out-of-work people ready for weatherization jobs anticipated via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed last year. The organization that the housing authority has contracted to do the work, Got Green says, pays minimum wage and provides no stepping stone to further advancement or career-building.
Got Green founder Michael Woo told the board that dollars for economic stimulus and job creation should work together and that the housing authority should apply language in HUD regulations that give hiring priority to low-income people and public-housing residents—something King County Housing Authority Executive Director Stephen Norman said the agency was working to expand.
CORRECTION: The weatherization tasks that Got Green’s trainees want to do are currently provided for free to the King County Housing Authority by the Washington Energy Corps, a stimulus-funded state employment program that pays $8.55 an hour.
O’Brien changes vote—panhandling ordinance is dead
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The Seattle City Council meeting is still in progress. Councilmember Mike O’Brien just stood up to say his piece. After soul-searching over the weekend, he said, he’s changed his vote—he’s voting against Tim Burgess’s anti-panhandling ordinance. When the vote is taken in a few moments, he’ll be joining Nick Licata, Bruce Harrell and Tom Rasmussen, who have already made strong statements against the bill.
That makes the vote 5-4. It passes, but the supporters no longer have the votes to override the veto that Mayor McGinn has promised. Opponents of the panhandling ordinance have won. It’s defeated.
Mayor says he’ll veto panhandling law regardless of council vote
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If you were already outraged at the idea of police ticketing Girls Scouts for selling cookies, let me make it worse: If the Seattle City Council votes this afternoon to pass the anti-solicitation ordinance put forward by Councilman Tim Burgess, even your Salvation Army Santa could get a $50 ticket.
If the hapless Santa didn’t have the money and tried to fight the ticket, he would not be entitled to a free lawyer. And if the notice for his court date didn’t reach him in time up at the North Pole and he missed his hearing, the court could issue a warrant for his arrest and, once nabbed, order him to take drug or alcohol treatment—all without Santa ever being put on trial or found guilty of committing a single, actual crime.
Those are just some of the points that opponents of the legislation, including Councilmember Nick Licata and civil rights attorneys from the ACLU and NAACP, made last Wednesday at a press conference where they tore the constitutionality of Burgess’s ordinance to shreds for the lack of due process and serious errors outlined in a report by the Seattle Human Rights Commission.
The good news is that progressive Seattle can be proud of electing Mayor Mike McGinn: Over the weekend, The Stranger’s Dominic Holden reported that McGinn plans to veto the measure regardless of the outcome of today’s 2 p.m. council vote – a change just from Friday, when he said he’d veto the measure if only five councilmembers voted for it.
“There’s potential for abuse of it,” McGinn told reporters at his office on Friday, and “I’ve been listening to the concerns raised.”
“The human rights commission voted 9-0 against it. A lot of voices have spoken up in the last few days saying that they believe it’s scapegoating the poor, that it’s not really going to address the problem, it’s more of a symbolic issue, (a) statement ... and just, on balance, I don’t think it’s the right path forward.”
The only people who would get the $50 ticket and ultimately be removed from the streets of Seattle, Licata and the civil rights attorneys said last week, are people of color and the homeless who have been reduced to begging—people who might as well live at the North Pole for all the political clout they have to fight Burgess and his backers at the Downtown Seattle Association, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
Burgess, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee, has insisted the statute won’t touch panhandlers or solicitors who are exercising their First Amendment right to ask for money, only “aggressive” types who ask at cash machines or parking meters, won’t take no for an answer or follow people down the street.
As ACLU Legislative Director Shankar Narayan pointed out on Wednesday, however, Seattle already has an aggressive panhandling law that prohibits this type of behavior. The difference is a complainant is required. Under Burgess’s law, police officers could write the $50 tickets based on whether a “reasonable person” would be intimidated by a panhandler’s behavior—with or without a “reasonable person” being there to actually complain.
Before Burgess started promoting the ordinance last fall, Licata said, e-mails to the council complaining about aggressive panhandling were “few and far between”—the exact words that I recorded David Dillman, chief operating officer of the Downtown Seattle Association, saying on Feb. 25 when describing to me how frequent aggressive panhandlers are in the downtown area.
But that’s the beauty of how Burgess wrote the ordinance: In its language and the survey data it cites of Seattleites’ views on panhandling – not necessarily aggressive panhandling – it completely confuses the constitutional right to beg with the crime of extortion, a masterful stroke that has brought Seattle to the brink of curbing everyone’s right to ask for a donation, sign up members for their organization or gather signatures on the street.
“This is being portrayed as a kinder, gentler kind of enforcement, but it’s really not,” Narayan said. “In fact, what we will have now is speed, certainty and severity” under a law that is “simply unsupported by the evidence.”
In San Francisco, which passed a similar law in 2004, Narayan said, the vast majority of tickets have been issued to people of color, with no perceptible impact on panhandling whatsover.
Burgess is not swayed. The surveys and e-mails from citizens fully document the need for the law, he says. “I find it ironic,” he said in a phone interview Thursday, that “when we try to lessen the penalties and move [aggressive panhandlers] out of the criminal realm, the circular argument is that you’ll charge some of them with criminal violations.”
“I just don’t buy their argument,” Burgess said.
Like McGinn, a lot of people in recent days have decided they don’t buy his. In addition to the Seattle Human Rights Commission, Democrats in the city’s 34th, 36th, 37th, and 46th Legislative Districts have passed resolutions opposing the legislation. Former Seattle Councilmember Jim Street, King County Councilmember Larry Gossett and state Senators Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Joe McDermott have also come out against the bill.
Besides Licata, Councilmembers Tom Rasmussen and Bruce Harrell are also expected to vote no.
“The subjectivity in this particular ordinance will be remarkable,” Seattle NAACP President James Bible said Wednesday. “It will justify inequitable treatment. It will justify officers approaching people without any real actual reason.”
“Due process is absolutely lost,” he said, and “yes, Santa Claus, could get a ticket.”
Tim Harris on NW Nights with Frank Shiers
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On Thursday night Tim Harris chatted with local conservative radio host Frank Shiers about Tim Burgess’ Aggressive Solicitation Ordinance, on KIRO 97.3 FM.
Click Here to listen to Tim Harris on NW Nights with Frank Shiers
The Aggressive Solicitation Ordinance has attracted significant attention, and is scheduled for a full council vote on Monday, April 19th. The ordinance would authorize police to give $50 tickets to those they observe begging from people at a cash machine or parking meter, using profanity or yelling, or following people down the street, among other behavior.
News from our sister streetpaper
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Portland’s Street Roots—a sister paper in a regional NW city to which Seattle bears some resemblance—has a great new issue, including a real coup: an interview with Jon Stewart, the “Walter Cronkite of the Onion generation.” You can see the first page on their well-done blog, which includes an exclusive interview with New York City. That’s right, New York City.
Sound unreal? Yes, it is, and so is the interview with Stewart himself.
It fooled me too at first: I asked SR editor Joanne Zuhl for permission to republish, and got this reply:
Sorry Adam, but check the date…. :) Yes, it’s April Fools!
.
SR has pulled one over on editors mightier than myself: last April’s imagined dialogue with George W. Bush prompted the Associated Press to call their office and ask how they had gotten to the former prez. The yearly spoof sells extremely well, says executive director Israel Bayer, and gives his staff some well-deserved rest from the newsgathering grind.
Congratulations to our Assistant Editor Rosette Royale
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Real Change Assistant Editor Rosette Royale was recently selected for a very competitive fellowship from the Seattle University Journalism Fellowships on Family Homelessness. Rosette will be producing a two-part print series and series of video diaries tentatively titled: “Invisible Life of an American Family.”
It is a three month fellowship that will explore the lives and experiences of a homeless family in Washington state. Funding for the fellowship is provided by The Gates Foundation through the Washington Families Fund.
Rosette has worked at Real Change for five years and was recently awarded a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his three-part feature story, “The man who stood on the bridge.”
Governor vetoes section of GAU reform bill
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An addendum to yesterday’s report on legislation that reforms the state’s General Assistance-Unemployable program for the disabled: The governor signed the bill, but vetoed a section of it that would have required the state to give those leaving or being dropped from the program priority to enroll in the state’s Basic Health coverage for low-income households.
Under GAU, which the bill renames the Disability Lifeline, the state provides $339 a month and medical coverage to those who are temporarily disabled and cannot work. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle), sought to put those leaving the program on the Basic Health Plan so as not to penalize them for getting better or getting a job.
With some 93,000 people already signed up for Basic Health’s waiting list, the governor saw it differently. In a statement she issued on the partial veto, she said, in essence, that the state can’t afford to cover extra people who are ineligible for the Disability Lifeline. That part of the bill, she said, “would limit the Health Care Authority’s ability to efficiently manage enrollment to the appropriated budget, maintain a balanced risk pool, and is detrimental to the longer-term viability of the Basic Health Plan.”
Excuse the interruption, but…
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One of the many undertold stories during the legislative session that keeps dragging on and on was college students’ visit to the State Senate, in the middle of business, with an updated rendition of Amazing Grace that reads quite well:
Song Sung by Evergreen College Students on March 4, 2010 from the Galley of the State Senate
Lyrics by Victoria Larkin
Amazing Grace no longer flows,
Dammed up by greed so crude.
I once could eat, but now I find…
I can’t afford the food.The bright young minds of our country
Now wake to meet their doom;
So why should we apply to school,
When close ahead lies gloom?What will we say in years ahead
When strewn across the land
Are wretches poor in heart and soul,
By greedy robbers damned?Remember, Aristocracy
Made bank from others’ toil.
I say we have the right to fruits
We’ve grown on Nature’s soil.Aloud, lament all ye who hope
To have a better life;
If our priorities don’t change
We all will end in strife.Awaken Creativity,
and doom we may waylay!
Let’s make a plan while we still can
And birth a better day!
The students were escorted out.
For the full story, check out this op-ed by a student organizer on the Olympia Newswire.
He’s so Heavy: Times Square’s homeless “holdout”
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Way back when I was en route to college, traveling from Silver Spring, MD, to Waterville, Maine, my family had a stopover in NYC. Total tourists, we visited Times Square. Men ran three-card monty games on upturned wooden crates; neon signs illumined x-rated book stores; pedestrians hurried from corner to corner in great rivers of marching legs. And on the sidewalks: homeless people. More than I had ever seen in one place. My aunt was shocked. Even now, when I mention New York, she talks about the homeless people we saw.
That was back in 1985. Now it’s 2010. And, if you were to go to the Big Crab Apple now, oh, what a different Times Square you’d see: Disney musicals, big-box stores and (relatively) clean streets. And, if the New York Times is to be believed, you’d only see one homeless person: a man named Heavy.
In a recent article, “Times Square’s Homeless Holdout, Not Budging,” the Times pointed out that “[a]s long as there have been homeless people sleeping in Times Square, there have been social workers and city officials trying to persuade them to leave.” Apparently, they’ve all but succeeded. Heavy won’t leave, even after countless attempts by non-profits and the city to get him into shelter.
The text of the article straddles a precarious moral fence: It’s good that people have shelter, isn’t it? Can’t Heavy stay where he is if he doesn’t bother anyone? Are people doing this to help New York City? Or Heavy? Or both?
All questions to ponder, brought about by Times Square’s last “holdout.” Who says homeless people don’t have power?
Gregoire signs General Assistance reform bill, 3,600 people to be cut
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It’s been a long, hard road, but Gov. Christine Gregoire signed a bill yesterday put forward by Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle), chair of the House’s Human Services Committee, that keeps the state’s primary safety-net program for those who are disabled and cannot work—General Assistance-Unemployable—largely intact and gives it a new name people can understand: Disability Lifeline.
The press release sent out on the signing by the House Democratic Caucus, however, notes that an estimated 3,600 people could lose benefits on Sept. 1 as a result of a temporary two-year benefit limit that Dickerson compromised on with the Senate and the governor to save the program. And it says another 1,100 people could be dropped by June 2011. That’s out of about 18,000 people on the program today, according to one GAU manager—the press release says 17,000.
Using the latter number, one third of all Disability Lifeline recipients could be cut. But Dickerson also wrote into the bill that the Department of Social and Health Services must review the cases of all recipients facing cutoff and move anyone who is eligible for federal disability benefits (Supplemental Security Income) into a related but separate program, now to be called Disability Lifeline-Expedited, that will continue paying them benefits while they wait for SSI.
OLYMPIA—Landmark reforms that aim to preserve and improve large parts of the human-services safety net in Washington were signed into law today by Gov. Chris Gregoire.
The reforms will save the state an estimated $25 million this biennium, according to Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, the lead sponsor of the measure signed today.
“The Security Lifeline reforms signed today will not only preserve essential parts of our safety net for low-income residents and people with disabilities, they will make some services more efficient and cost-effective than ever before,” Dickerson said.
The signing of the bill (House Bill 2782) was a huge victory for Dickerson, Speaker Frank Chopp and House Democrats, who fought to reform the safety net and save medical and income assistance for people who are unable to work because of physical or mental disabilities.
“We knew we had to reform the safety net to save it, and we did,” Dickerson said.
One Security Lifeline reform launches a public-private partnership to create a network of on-line “Opportunity Portals” in local communities. These high-tech portals will help Washingtonians gain access to federal, state and local services they are eligible to receive but are not getting.
Leading philanthropies have agreed to pay the start-up costs of the portals, which could bring hundreds of millions of additional federal dollars into Washington. For example, the portals could help low-income workers access more of the $140 to $170 million in federal Earned Income Tax Credits that are going unclaimed in Washington.
A second reform aims to expand the Basic Food Employment and Training program to three additional community colleges. The program currently serves about 2,000 participants in 12 community colleges in Washington.
The most talked-about reform in the new law will revamp the state general assistance program (GA-U) that currently helps about 17,000 people who are unable to work due to disabilities.
The reformed program, dubbed the “Disability Lifeline,” has time limits and emphasizes faster transitions to employability or federally-funded Social Security Income (SSI) benefits.
Under the new reforms, Disability Lifeline recipients must participate in substance-abuse treatment or vocational rehabilitation, when appropriate. They will also have to accept housing vouchers in lieu of cash grants, when suitable housing is available. Expedited case reviews will hasten transitions to employability or SSI.
The time limits in the Disability Lifeline reforms—benefits are limited to 24 months in a 5-year period—begin Sept. 1 and will be retroactive. An estimated 3,600 people could lose benefits when the time limits kick in. A total of 4,700 recipients could lose benefits by June 2011.
“I think the time limits are too short, but we couldn’t have saved the program without them,” Dickerson said.
House Republicans on the Ways & Means Committee had proposed to terminate the entire program—including medical assistance—on July 1.
“Ending the program altogether would have been a recipe for disaster,” said Dickerson. “More than a third of recipients have severe mental illnesses. Can you imagine the public-safety risks of taking away not only their income but also the medicines they need for their illness?”
In December, Gov. Gregoire had warned that the GA-U program could be eliminated if no new revenues were found to ease the state budget deficit. She later proposed continuing medical benefits but sharply limiting the cash grants, which currently average a little over $300 monthly.
According to Dickerson, about of a third of the people currently on the Disability Lifeline are homeless. Most of the rest are near-homeless.
Pioneer Square Community Association Says No to Real Change
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March 29, 2010
The Honorable Mike McGinn,
Mayor City of Seattle
Seattle, WA 98104
Dear Mayor McGinn:
Thank you again for taking the time to tour Pioneer Square on March 18th. Pioneer Square community members were encouraged by your comments and perceptions of the opportunities and issues facing our neighborhood. We look forward to working with your office on an ongoing basis to help revitalize the District.
As we discussed, Pioneer Square has been a generous host to numerous social service providers in our community. However, the neighborhood is extremely under resourced and a “fair share” saturation point of services was exceeded years ago. This fact has been acknowledged and a moratorium on new or additional services has been in effect since 1998 with the publication of the Neighborhood Plan. Unfortunately, Pioneer Square finds it must defend this position time and time again.
Presently, Real Change is planning to relocate to the Historic District. There are heightened concerns within the neighborhood that representatives of this organization have not approached the Pioneer Square Community Association nor have they conducted any outreach within the District.
We realize there are enormous needs, especially in this economy, and further we recognize that many clients may not have any other resources at their disposal. We have strong relationships with service providers in our neighborhood who work with community members to address problems when they arise. That said; Pioneer Square’s economic vitality is impacted by the publics’ perception of safety issues which are exacerbated by line queuing for social service organizations.
The Office of Economic Development, with numerous community stakeholders, is conducting a review to find ways to revitalize this Historic District. In 2002, Urban Preservationist and Principal of PlaceEconomics, Donovan Rypkema, visited our community after the Mardi Gras reveling resulted in a murder the previous year.
At that time, several points were made by Rypkema that referenced street disorder and the neighborhood suffering significant negative perceptions regarding public safety. In December of 2009 Rypkema returned and reiterated the 2002 summary and questioned the lack of progress.
Within the past few years, the neighborhood was tapped to accept the expansion of existing service providers and to absorb the expansion of services at the Morrison Hotel during the construction of Fire Station #10’s Command Center. Legitimate assessments of the projects predicted long term, negative impacts in the neighborhood. As a result the overall perception of safety in the square has diminished.
The moratorium of the Neighborhood Plan needs to be upheld in this case. We feel it is imperative that service providers seek out other neighborhoods of Seattle that have not exceeded their “fair share” of services. We urge you to respect and support our position on this matter.
We would like to work with your office on this issue by setting up a meeting with Real Change, MaKensay Real Estate and our neighborhood organization to provide assistance to Real Change to find other suitable offices outside the District. As the proposed move of Real Change is on a fast track, we hope to hear from your offices as soon as possible.
Sincerely, Leslie G. Smith Interim Executive Director Pioneer Square Community Association
CC: Darryl Smith, Deputy Mayor Neighborhoods Phil Fuji, Deputy Mayor Operations Sally Bagshaw, Council Tim Burgess, Council Sally Clark, Council Richard Conlin, Council President Jean Godden, Council Bruce Harrell, Council Nick Licata, Council Mike O’Brien, Council Tom Rasmussen, Council Steve Johnson, Director, Office of Economic Development John Diaz, Interim Chief, Seattle Police Department Stella Chao, Director, City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods Frank Buchanan, MaKensay Real Estate
Got A Dollar For Sex?
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Today I got a sample of what would soon be further criminalized under the Burgess panhandling ordinance.
The plan was to work from home, but a 9:30 reminder of a 10 AM meeting blew that. I jumped in my car and drove downtown as is: unshaven after the weekend, Real Change cap over dirty uncombed hair, dressed in sweatpants and sweatshirt. In other words, looking more homeless than half the homeless people I know.
I pulled into a spot near Real Change on 2nd Ave in Belltown at 10:05. The meter was about twenty feet away. As I walked around to get my parking, an African American man of around 50 stood on the sidewalk for no apparent reason. An idle man. Apparently the job market wasn’t treating him well.
We chatted as I slipped a debit card in the meter and got my ticket. “What happened to your window,” he asked, gesturing to the missing passengers-side rear wing. “Dumb-ass junkie break-in,” I replied.
“Someone broke into THAT!?” he asked.
My 92 Corolla doesn’t exactly inspire car lust. It looks like what it is. A functional shit box car with zero status appeal.
“Yeah. Asshole only got a disposable camera,” I laughed. “Hardly worth the trouble.” He laughed too.
“Got a smoke?” he asked. “AHA!,” I thought. “Strike one. Parking transaction foul.”
I gave him the cigarette and slipped my arm through the open window to unlock the back door and affix my ticket. The lock on the passengers door doesn’t work with my key anymore, so the busted window offers a certain amount of convenience. I may never get that fixed.
The door stood open to the sidewalk when a too-thin woman walked up and politely asked for $8.
“Strike two.” I thought. Man parking car here. Bubble in force. Bad panhandler!
I smiled. If I had $8 extra dollars, I’d buy my kid a toy. Not hand it to a desperate stranger. “Nope,” I said. Don’t have it. Sorry.”
“How about a dollar,” she asked, smiling. We were all smiling. Nonetheless, strike three. Asking again after I’ve said no.
“No, sorry,” I smiled. “No cash.”
The next thing out of her mouth was tragically unexpected.
“Not even for sex?”
I stopped and looked at her. Unusually pretty as Belltown crack hookers go, smiling. Playing with me.
“I’m an out of work hooker,” she explained. “Not even for sex?”
Whoa! Strike four!
“Sorry,” I smiled. “Not even for sex.”
We all laughed, she made one last half-hearted pitch (strike five) and I walked away, a little sad over this woman, who, given a different set of life circumstances, would consider what she just said unimaginable.
No one followed me. Our genial little exchange was at an end.
I imagine the guy that I gave a cigarette may have had a buck or two, and that they worked something out.
When drugs and poverty have reduced so many to this, there is no question that real solutions are called for.
But racking up tickets and rotting uselessly in jail isn’t one of them. That shit’s just mean and helps no one.
Had someone else parked in that spot, at that moment, in the squeaky clean new Seattle that lies just around the corner, there could have been citations. And yet, we were just strangers on a sidewalk, having a friendly talk about what we need and what we can do. People do what they gotta do. The rule should be no harm, no foul.
WHEREAS it is inhumane and immoral to punish people for living outside …
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As Cyd Gillis reports in the current issue of Real Change, Seattle’s homeless sweeps are quietly ongoing, and the city protocols that were to guide these are honored mostly in the breach, if at all. It’s not in the news, so it doesn’t exist. Not unless it’s your stuff that gets dumped.
So it’s nice to see folks noticing, especially now, with Councilmember Burgess conflating panhandling and thuggery and talking endlessly of how Seattle always does right by the poor and homeless.
The King County Democrats Central Committee approved the resolution below after it was brought to them by the 36th District Dems. It’s good to see people standing up to say what’s right.
Resolution in Opposition to the Demolition of Homeless Encampments
WHEREAS the Washington State Department of Transportation pursues a policy of demolishing homeless people’s encampments and throwing away their property when there is no alternative shelter; and
WHEREAS this policy fails to honor the rights of the homeless to their property, survival gear and documents, and fails to address the chronic and severe shortage of emergency shelters and services; and
WHEREAS homelessness is a national problem that will likely get worse in the current economy; and
WHEREAS the King County one-night counts for 2008, 2009, and 2010 found approximately 2600 – 2850 people living outside on winter nights when emergency shelters were at or near capacity; and
WHEREAS it is inhumane and immoral to punish people for living outside when there are not enough shelters or affordable housing;
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the King County Democrats call for the Washington State Department of Transportation and other jurisdictions to stop all non-emergency homeless camp sweeps and demolitions; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the King County Democrats urge the Washington State Department of Transportation and other jurisdictions to work with homeless advocacy groups to find more humane ways to address the problem of homelessness; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the King County Democrats send a copy of this resolution to the following:
* Washington State Department of Transportation
* Governor Chris Gregoire
* Judy Clibborn, Chair, House Transportation Committee
* Mary Margaret Haugen, Chair, Senate Transportation Committee
* Dow Constantine, King County Executive
* King County Council Members
* Seattle City Council Members
* Mayor Mike McGinn
* All legislators from King County
Panhandling Hearing Scorecard & Logos
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After closely watching yesterday’s Public Safety Committee hearing on the Seattle Channel, I have to say that my first impression of how things went was a bit off base. Power has had a long time to strategize this one, and we were out-organized and out-maneuvered.
For the first hour, people in favor of human decency and keeping urban fear within reasonable check held our own pretty well. Of the 36 who testified, 19 were on our side. Many strong testimonies were given.
Then, Burgess announced that testimonies should be condensed to a minute in recognition of the extended time and long list of speakers. That’s when the Seattle business and corporate interest blitz commenced, including two neighborhood associations, Seattle Monorail, Argosy Cruises, Seattle Hotel Assn., Seattle Metropolitan Credit Union, A mysterious Pioneer Square property manager named Dane, and Starbucks. Their speeches were tight, rehearsed, and with few exceptions, came in under a minute with no signs of the haste that usually accompanies a planned speech being cut in half. The pro-ordinance forces dominated the final 30 some minutes with 14 of 25 speakers.
As Dominic Holden noted at the Stranger SLOG, the opposition to the ordinance came from a broad cross section of citizens and public interests, while Burgess’ support was represented by the usual downtown crowd. I count 61 speakers, 31 of which supported the ordinance, with tactical advantage going to the home team, and helpfully assembled a visual, in case any of us were deluded that this is going to be easy.
News from the Poorhouse
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In a recent article in the Seattle Times light was shed on the lack of effectiveness of Washington’s Child Welfare system. A new study found that half the families in the system had problems securing housing and two-thirds were on food stamps. Steps are being taken to try and reform the Child Welfare system and the study – conducted by Partners for Our Children – was the first step in attempts at reformation.
Today obesity is more highly linked with poverty than being underweight. A new study, reported in the New York Times, has revealed that Bronx, New York, has the most severe hunger related problems of any place in the U.S.. 37% of people living in the Bronx lacked money to get necessary food, this is nearly double the nation’s average. The study also showed that people living in the Bronx were 85% more likely to be obese than people living in Manhattan.
It is hard being a veteran, and it’s getting harder. Reported by the Associated Press, The Labor Department recently released data showing that last year 21.1% of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan were unemployed. This is far above the national average of 16.6% for people in the same age range (18-24).
While things are bad all over the country, Baltimore looks like one of the hardest hit areas. In a recent poll that was taken it was found that Baltimore County’s homeless population jumped 25% last year and evictions are up by 21%. Experts say they do not see this trend radically reversing any time soon.
In Portland city leaders have been debating whether or not to legalize “homelessness camps” in city parks and on certain church properties. The proposal to legalize these camps is to be on the city council’s desk by the end of March. The move is hailed by homeless advocates as being a step in the right direction.
The Meaning of Immediately
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Recent events have led me to consider anew the jesuitical hair from which the unholy existence of the “safety bubble” hangs. This is, of course, the 15’ no-go zone that may one day extend omnidirectionally from any person engaged in a parking or ATM transaction. When the safety bubble crosses paths with a solicitor, be it Larouchie, Save the Children canvasser, or Real Change vendor (because this legislation, remember, is not targeted at anyone, especially panhandlers, and applies across the board), their act of solicitation becomes — poof! — aggressive, with each instance punishable as a $50 civil infraction.
Additionally, if the ask truly is “aggressive,” as opposed to this newly defined faux-aggressive, one could also be charged under the current aggressive panhandling statute, which remains in force as a misdemeanor that carries a $250 fine.
The safety bubble itself however, as previously belabored, delicately hangs from Section 2.A.4.f.iii
iii. immediately before or after conducting a transaction at an ATM or parking pay station, is handling in plain view any money, bank card, receipt, check or other document related to the transaction.
What is this “immediately?” Is it, as Burgess and staff insist, some nebulous instantaneous event, over nearly as quickly as it began? Or does it have legs? How far do those legs extend? Is it until said document is reasonably dispatched to its logical and “immediate” conclusion? Seeing, as how part of the definition is “direct; without intermediary,” that would seem reasonable. In a parking transaction, for example, one takes the ticket from the pay station and “immediately” affixes it to the curbside window of one’s vehicle. Right?
Unsure, I turned to my appallingly underused Oxford Universal Dictionary (1955), which weighs in on the bathroom scale at 8.4 pounds. The concluding example of medieval usage is a minor miracle of serendipity..
Immediately adv. (conj.) ME. [orig. to render. L. immediate adv. (cf. prec. 6).] 1. In an immediate way; by direct agency; directly 2. With no person, thing, or distance intervening in time, space, order, or succession; closely; proximately; directly 1466 3. Without any delay, instantly ME. b. as conj. (ellipt. for immediately that). The moment that 1839. 1. Canow .. was immediatly vnder the dominion of the Tartars HAKLUYT. I, holden of the Crown 1647. 3. He bade me goe immeaditlye 1500.
Call me crazy, but the safety bubble here follows the transaction, or, more basically, the person, even when circumscribed to the “immediate” transaction. So long as one is directly engaged in the transaction without interruption, the bubble exists. Burgess says no, but the language says yes.
Deal would save GAU but cut 1,200
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After weeks of negotiations on proposals that were far apart, the House and Senate have crafted a compromise bill to save the $339-a-month cash grant and medical coverage that the temporarily disabled receive through the state’s General Assistance-Unemployable program. But 1,200 people are expected to be cut from the GAU rolls on Sept. 1.
Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle), chair of the House Human Services Committee, said earlier today that she had reached an agreement with Sen. Jim Hargrove (D-Hoquiam) on the Security Lifeline Act, legislation that Dickerson originally introduced as House Bill 2782. The bill sought to reform the $188 million program, in part, by renaming it the Disability Lifeline and stepping up the state’s process for determining which recipients are eligible for federal Supplemental Security Income benefits for the disabled.
In the Senate, Hargrove, chair of Human Services & Corrections, amended the bill to turn the $339 monthly grant into a housing voucher, or partial rent payment, with recipients to get only $50 cash per month.
Dickerson declined to provide details of the new bill, saying those would come tomorrow after she and Hargrove meet with the governor to go over the bill’s components. But human services advocates familiar with the new 2782, which should be introduced in the House late Tuesday, say it involves cutting $24 million from the renamed Disability Lifeline program and imposing a 24-month lifetime limit on benefits.
The 24-month limit is retroactive and is expected to immediately cut 1,200 people from the Disability Lifeline rolls as of Sept. 1. Advocates call it a good compromise, however, because the bill would maintain full benefits for the program’s remaining 17,000 recipients.
The governor’s second budget, by comparison, called for reducing GAU grants to $250 a month and imposing a lifetime limit of six months. The two-year limit can be removed in the next legislative session, advocates say.
The compromise bill also includes language to step up transitioning people from GAU to General Assistance-Expected (or Disability Lifeline-Expedited in the future), a category for SSI applicants-in-waiting. Unlike GAU recipients, whose benefits are paid for entirely by the state, GAX recipients receive federal health coverage under the Medicaid program. Once they get SSI, the federal government then reimburses the state for the monthly cash assistance it paid out.
The legislation also incorporates Hargrove’s idea of a creating a new state housing voucher for all new GAU applicants who are homeless and chemically dependent or mentally ill.
Burgess Lied. The Anti-Panhandler Safety Bubble Lives.
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At last Tuesday’s Seattle Office of Human Rights forum to discuss Seattle’s new panhandling ordinance, I challenged Councilmember Tim Burgess to meaningfully back up his claim that there is no 15’ “safety bubble” that follows anyone engaged in a parking or ATM transaction, thus turning pretty much any commercial district into a dynamic no-go zone for solicitors of any sort, including Real Change vendors.
Burgess replied unequivocally. The ordinance language, he said, was revisited last week and changed. “There is no safety bubble,” he stoutly declared.
I checked. The safety bubble lives. I see it. Our lawyer friends see it. And yet, Burgess denies its existence. The law, he says, and the 15’ bubble, applies only to transactions immediately conducted at a parking station or an ATM, and does not travel with the person. He’s lying.
Here’s the most current version of the relevant section of the ordinance.
4. “Aggressive solicitation” means the act of engaging in intimidating conduct towards another person in a public place when such conduct is accompanied by an act of solicitation. The mere act of solicitation without intimidation is not aggressive solicitation. Aggressive solicitation includes but is not limited to:
a. intentionally blocking or interfering with a person by any means while making a solicitation, including unreasonably causing the person to take evasive action to avoid physical contact;
b. intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm to a reasonable person while making a solicitation;
c. repeatedly soliciting a person who has given a negative response to a solicitation while remaining within 15 feet of the person;
d. following a person who has given a negative response to a solicitation while repeatedly soliciting the person;
e. providing or delivering, or attempting to provide or deliver, unrequested or unsolicited services prior to or without the consent of the person to whom the service is provided; or
f. soliciting from within 15 feet any person who is using an automated teller machine (ATM) or a public or private parking pay station. For purposes of this paragraph, a person is using an ATM or parking pay station if the person:
i. is waiting in line for an ATM or parking pay station; or
ii. is conducting a transaction on an ATM or at a parking pay station; or
iii. immediately before or after conducting a transaction at an ATM or parking pay station, is handling in plain view any money, bank card, receipt, check or other document related to the transaction.
Real Change reporter Cyd Gillis had an email exchange on this with Nate Dozier, Burgess’ legislative assistant, last week. When she pressed him on the issue of whether the safety zone extends from the person or the machine, here’s what he said.
“Well my understanding of the way it’s now written is the 15 foot reference point is the person, not the machine. I think you could still not solicit from someone who is handling money or a parking sticker “immediately before or after” her or his transaction as that is part of the definition of “using.” I think your question might get into the definition of “immediately,” which I think leaves a pretty narrow window.”
This strikes me as a calculated misdirect. The safety bubble does not depend, as he says, upon some lawyerly distinction regarding the word “immediately.” The safety bubble exists in subparagraph f.iii as a whole, which says that so long as any document related to the transaction remains in one’s hand, that person constitutes a mobile no solicitation zone.
As to the word “immediately,” it obviously means more than 15’ after the center of the safety bubble leaves the parking meter or ATM, or there would be no reason for this clause at all.
To illustrate, say someone uses the Bank of America ATM at Westlake Center, exits right and walks, cash in hand, past the street kids that hang out near the sculpture on the way to the Starbucks across the street.. A kid asks for money. Does s/he get a ticket? Probably depends. That’s a bad law.
So, why the attachment to the safety bubble? Is it really worth all the obfuscation and legal vulnerability to the ordinance?
You’ll have to ask Councilmember Burgess, but here’s my best guess. The safety bubble makes the possible application of the ordinance nearly universal. Each of the 25 known panhandlers on the Downtown Seattle Association’s hit list, and anyone else that law enforcement cares to target, could easily be found in violation and ticketed. Repeatedly. Those tickets would default to misdemeanor warrants. There would be arrests, court appearances, and choices to be made.
The bubble creates options.
Just four of the panhandlers on the DSA list were identified by DSA’s own ambassadors as “aggressive.” With this new “tool,” that won’t matter. Any act of solicitation, when crossed with the safety bubble, becomes a civil infraction.
The ACLU and others are clear that this legislation creates intolerably broad restrictions upon free speech that will not withstand constitutional challenge. Burgess says the ordinance is extremely narrow and targets very specific uncivil behaviors.
My money’s on the ACLU.
Our tax dollars, however, rest with the city, which is too bad. Burgess’ response in a meeting last week to the question of whether litigation to defend bad law is a good use of city money was to say that the city already has a legal fund set aside for these exigencies, so, no problem.
It’s the classic bureaucrat’s dodge. “The money I want to spend on a stupid thing, being in that pile rather than this one, doesn’t really count.” It does. City dollars are city dollars.
This is bad law that will not, as written, withstand constitutional challenge. Burgess’ lawyers from the city think it will. The team of legal support and those who analyze laws like this regularly say they’re wrong.
There will be a legal challenge to this law whether the moving safety bubble lives on or not, but Tim Burgess should make good on his word. If, as he said in a televised public forum, the bubble does not exist as a matter of legislative intent, he needs to make it go away. Immediately.
“Panhandling” panel to talk Tuesday night, March 9
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By now, you probably already know: Seattle is considering a new law that will make “aggressive solicitation” — which includes yelling, following someone or asking for money within 15 feet of a parking meter or ATM — an illegal act, one that carries a $50 fine. Councilmember Tim Burgess proposed the ordinance in late February, basing it, he said, on a similar ordinance in Tacoma. Some people have praised the ordinance; others have denounced; still others are on the fence. But it’s hard to have a fully formed opinion if you don’t know the particulars.
So what does the ordinance actually say? And what does the ordinance really mean, not just for the panhandlers, but for the buskers, the Real Change vendors, the GreenPeace-niks and Girl Scouts? On Tues., March 9, from 7 – 8:30 p.m. you’ll have a chance to figure out.
That’s when the Human Rights Commission’s Public Safety Task Force will host a panel at Seattle University School of Law, Sullivan Hall, Room C5, 901 12th Ave. that will examine the proposals’ ins and outs. On board to speak will be Burgess; Jon Scholes, Policy Director of the Downtown Seattle Association; Anita Khandelwal, lawyer for the Defender Association’s Racial Disparity Project; and Real Change Exec. Dir. Timothy Harris.
It’s always impossible to predict what will happen at any panel, but here’s a safe bet: Burgess and Scholes will support the ordinance, Khandelwal and Harris will express grave doubts. And then there will be you, concerned citizen, who, after attending, will be able to put the whole situation into greater context.
Hundreds turn out to protest UW budget cuts
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Jessica Boone, UW student. Photo by Jane Austin
Coming around the corner from Red Square to the Quad, I was doubtful. Last year, in the midst of protests against budget cuts at the University of Washington, students and staff had turned out strong numbers in their protests, but, since last fall, continuing events aimed at calling attention to budget cuts have been a bit, well, anemic.
I was stunned, however, to see how many students had come out—perhaps 500 altogether—holding signs stating “No Layoffs,” “Tax the Rich,” and “R.I.P. Our Future.” After a few statements from the organizers, they marched around the lawned courtyard of the Quad, then into Kane Hall, across Red Square and on up University Way, chanting various slogans like “Who’s university? Our university!” and for a brief moment that WTO refrain, “This is what democracy looks like!”
The event was part of a National Day of Action to Defend Education that took place today on dozens of campuses across the nation, including Seattle Central Community College, Evergreen State College and Western Washington University. While the protesters didn’t shut down the campus the way students did today at UC Santa Cruz, it made this old alum very proud when, around 1:30 p.m., students in the top floors of the Art Building (of course!) unfurled a gigantic banner addressed to the university’s president. It read: “Emmert, Another Budget is Possible.”
Last year, in the wake of the Great Recession and state revenue shortfalls, the University of Washington’s budget was cut $73 million, leading the school to lay off 700 workers and increase tuition 14 percent. With tuition slated to go up another 14 percent this fall and more cuts expected, the protesters say the university has lost sight of its public mission—providing an affordable education.
Instead of raising tuition and cutting jobs, the school could start, say members of the UW Student Worker Coalition, which organized the event, by trimming the salaries of administrators who make more than $150,000 a year, with many participants calling UW President Mark Emmert’s $906,000 salary excessive. The coalition is also calling on the university to freeze tuition, halt the work speed-up that it says is affecting custodians (who had 39 positions cut last year, 17 of them direct layoffs), and provide real financial aid instead of loans that bury students in debt.
Jessica Boone, 20, said she is the first in her family to go to college and currently works two jobs to pay for her schooling, but is having a hard time keeping up. She wants to get a degree in sociology and go on to the UW School of Nursing, she said, but is considering enlisting in the Navy as a way to get her nursing degree.
“Mark Emmert makes over $900,000 a year,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll make that in my lifetime.”
Kayla Huddleston, 21, said she’s worried that further cuts to the university’s Office of Minority Affairs, which funds retention and mentorship programs, will deprive more people of color of a chance to get a college education. “If tuition goes up any further, it will be less affordable for those without scholarships,” she said.
“It’s ridiculous we’re balancing the budgets on the backs of students, workers and people of color,” said Steve Hoffman, an electrician at North Seattle Community College and member of the Washington Federation of State Employees, the union of the UW’s trade workers. “There’s a better solution, which is taxing the wealthy and corporate profits.”
News from the Poorhouse
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The New York Times reported recently that the Federal Government is overhauling the way it evaluates poverty. The standard formula, which measures only the income of a family, is being supplemented with other factors like the use of food-stamps and the existence of a mortgage. Poverty advocates have argued for years that the nearly 50 year-old poverty formula needed to be changed to more accurately reflect the true poverty numbers in the U.S.
A new study looking at the health of every county in the U.S. was recently released. The most unhealthy county in the nation turned out to be Orangeburg, South Carolina. It was found that the most key factors in determining a person’s lack of health, later on in life, were: Obesity, unemployment and childhood poverty. 22 percent of all Orangeburg residents were assessed as being in poor health 32 percent of all children were assessed as living in poverty.
John McClosky, a geologist at the University of Ulster, said recently that “…earthquakes aren’t killing people, poverty is.” He says this because, as is explained in the article written by The Daily Mail, the lack of earthquake-safe buildings and absent medical care are the cause of far more deaths than the actual events. The recent earthquake in Chili was nearly 1,000 times more powerful than the one which hit Haiti, however, it killed far fewer people because of the country’s more stable economy and infrastructure.
The rate of homeless youths attending public schools has risen in conjunction with the crash of the economy. In New York the situation is extreme with (as of February 26th) 15,495 families with children were living in shelters. The report, released by the NYC Department of Homeless Services, is a sharp reminder that often the people most vulnerable to poverty and homelessness are children.
The proposed “anti-panhandling law”
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Today Seattle City Council Member Tim Burgess proposed a law re aggressive solicitation. It will be a new section of the Seattle Municipal Code, 15.48.050. The law is available on his website as a pdf: http://www.seattle.gov/council/burgess/attachments/2010st_disorder_leg_aggressive_solicit.pdf
I’m glad that the law doesn’t call for any new licensing. Most of the provisions look reasonable to me, although I wonder why it is necessary to write a law specifically prohibiting solicitors from engaging in the activities covered. Why can’t these prohibitions also apply to non-solicitors? Why should it be OK for a non-solicitor to block my progress along a sidewalk?
But, never mind, for now. I’ll content myself to just complain about a couple of the provisions that bother me.
Part A. 4. of the proposed law defines some forms of aggressive solicitation. The introductory paragraph says it includes but is not limited to a number of activities that are then listed, 6 in all, a. through f.
The two that concern me are b. “intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm to a reasonable person while making a solicitation;” and f. which deals with soliciting within 15 feet of an ATM, pay station etc. The problem with b is that it isn’t specific enough and it’s open to abuses. It is a wide open invitation to class discrimination. The very sight of homeless people alarms some otherwise reasonable people. So?
The problem with f is that selling, say, a newspaper, within 15 feet of an ATM, could get you a fine, even if you aren’t even addressing your pitch to the person using the ATM. You could even be facing the other way! It’s too broad.
The IWW’s Revolutionary Culture
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I’m newly in love with the IWW after reading Nuclear Power - Clean Energy?
The first new nuclear reactors since 1974 are slated to be built in Atlanta, Georgia:
“The largest investment in clean energy history” promises thousands of jobs, reduced dependence on foreign oil, and an energy production process with zero carbon emissions. Sounds dreamy, doesn’t it? But how “clean” is nuclear power?
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A byproduct of nuclear power production is harmful radioactive waste that we currently have no effective means of storing.
Breakdowns in the power production process can expose workers, communities, and surrounding ecosystems to this radiation. While plant safety has improved since Chernobyl, accidents continue to occur.
Nuclear power is generated from uranium, a non-renewable, fossil fuel which is obtained through uranium mining. Uranium is obtained through open-pit and underground mining, often on land previously occupied by indigenous peoples, and produces radioactive waste. This process, too, poses risks, as one New Mexico community experienced “when an earthen dam, operated by the United Nuclear Corp., failed and let loose 94 million gallons of toxic wastewater into the north fork of the Rio Puerco on Navajo Nation lands.”
Uranium is enriched to be used as fuel for nuclear power. However, this capability can be a step toward the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons. Remember the debate around Iran? Our choice to approve nuclear power sends a message to other nations that constructing reactors is desirable, and in fact, the “technology of tomorrow.”
The technology of tomorrow will be paid for in taxpayer dollars, but what is the cost to our health and to the earth?
Black History Month, updated, in pix and vocals
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Well, it’s February, and you know what that means, don’t you? Some might claim it heralds the arrival of Punxsutawney Phil and his forecast (it was for six more weeks of winter, as the East Coast, victims of Snowpocalypse, will wearily verify). And that wouldn’t be wrong.
But it’s also Black History Month, that four-week period where elementary schools are rife with reports on people like Rosa Parks or (one of my personal favs) George Washington Carver. And even though there are some cracks to be made about how this country’s celebration of black history occurs in the calendar’s shortest month, some solid education and thoughtful reflection of how things of have changed — and haven’t — can still be found in these 28 days.
Take, for example, this photo essay from The New Yorker. In some 19 portraits, more than 30 people who played pivotal roles in the Civil Rights Movement — or who had relatives who did — are pictured. Charlayne Hunter-Gualt, the first black woman to attend the University of Georgia (and currently a journalist for PBS and NPR), the daughters of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, and Muhammad Ali are included. The list goes on. It’s an amazing photo spread. And better still, there’s audio with the pix. The whole spread is complemented nicely by an essay by editor David Remnick.
It’s a great testament to the strength and courage of those who stood up to fight when fighting could’ve meant you’d lose your life. And it’s enough to make you wish it was Black History Month every month. And Latino History Month. And Women’s History Month. And Queer History Month. And Native American History Month. And…
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