Unity March Highlights “Don’t Care” Attitude Toward the Poor
Submitted by Brian Dolinar on October 3, 2009 - 6:48pm
Despite the dreary day, about 75 people came out for the sixth annual Unity March on October 3, 2009. The event is a unique coming together of black, brown, and white people from both the campus and the community. This year’s march addressed the growing economic crisis, the need for health care and housing for all, and the criminalization of the poor.
The march kicked off from the Champaign city building. The Champaign city council has repeatedly been negligent in protecting its most vulnerable citizens, failing to adequately fund the Township office which provides for the poorest of the poor, refusing to penalize the owners of Gateway Hotel which displaced 200 poor people when it closed, and enforcing its zoning codes to shut down the Safe Haven tent community of homeless men and women.
The march proceeded through downtown Champaign on University Avenue. From the bridge where the historic train tracks pass over University Ave., a banner was hung that quoted Champaign Mayor Jerry Schweighart. When asked at the city council meeting on May 12, 2009 where the homeless were supposed to sleep this winter, the Mayor responded, “I don’t care.”
Crossing over Wright street to Urbana, marchers passed by Carle Hospital which several years ago was stripped of its non-profit status for turning down treatment to the poor and in some cases sending people to jail for failing to pay their medical debts. The marchers chanted, “What do we want? Health care! When do we want it? Now!” A group of people standing on their front porch joined in the chant.
As we passed by a Subway restaurant, workers came out to see what was happening. When asked, one worker told us he had no health care. He raised his fist in support.
In downtown Urbana, the crowd passed by the downtown jail where Sheriff Dan Walsh also has his office. There have been several deaths in the county jails under Walsh’s watch: three suicides within six months in 2004, Quentin Larry died of a drug overdose in 2005, Janet Hahn died of diabetes in 2007, and most recently Toddy Kelly committed suicide on June 25, 2009. Marchers walked around Walsh’s jail shouting, “Vote Walsh out!”
The Unity March concluded with a rally at the Champaign County courthouse under the new $6.8 million clock tower. Father Tom Royer of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, where the Safe Haven community now resides, addressed the crowd and expressed the need for us to appreciate the “dignity and equality of each individual.” He called for Champaign city officials to sit down with the members of Safe Haven to find a solution to the current lack of affordable housing.
Aaron Ammons, poet and emcee of the Krannert Art Museum’s SPEAK Café read a poem he had written for the occasion.
Lastly, the marchers convened for a reception at the Independent Media Center. Some purchased books from the Books To Prisoners book sale taking place the same weekend.
Unity March Poem from Aaron Ammons
Gateway through people on the street even though they paid their rent
They won’t even let us live in a tent
You can’t just look the other way
Your silence gives consent!
These brothers are sleeping in the park
That closes after dusk, or is it dark?
Sometimes it rains and it gets cold at night
This is not the time for a debate about wrong and right
It’s time to fight!
Time for everyone to become their own leader
And that’s how you become your brother and sister’s keeper
It’s a slippery slope that gets steeper and increases the tension
I don’t know if I’m a socialist, but,
How can we have homeless citizens while crooked trustees and politicians retire with a pension, show no remorse or repentance?
Hard working grad students get pennies for their assistance because
The cycle of greed is vicious,
The cycle of greed is vicious
The cycle of greed is vicious!
From free-cycle, the bicycle and common group Co-op
From IMC, CU Citizens, I-Resist to S.T.O.P.
These are some of our outstanding residents
By the way
S.T.O.P. stands for; Students Telling Off the President
They say to rear a child, it takes a village
So we have to address housing, poverty, health care
Race, Class, and Privilege
If not, we sentence our Nation to a variety of things
Amongst them are American dreams that never come true
Festering hatred
Battles between the right and left
And a population that sees death
As sacred.
Do you see now how you can become what you fear
Why we have to prepare everyday of every year, for the inevitable,
Can you live together, build a house, sew some clothes and grow a vegetable or two?
That’s called intelligent and it shows respect
Those of us who live check to check
Know we are a bad day away from poverty, too!
At what cost are people working their asses off,
Not for a select few to play tennis and golf,
While other citizens can’t get help for a nasty cough!
Where’s the trough for the community?
I know I’m responsible to contribute to a public hospital,
What about rich white collar criminals who get immunity?
They consistently avoid prosecution
Juxtapose,
Homeless citizens are jailed if they can’t pay fines, court cost and restitution!
ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!
Did they rape, rob, or attempt to kill,
Did they sit on their hands and get rich from expensive medicines that don’t heal?
I mean let’s keep it real man,
You’re arresting me, a homeless citizen
For using somebody’s garbage can?
Are you serious, or delirious?
I mean, what are you thinking?
Have you been drinking?
I don’t know if you knew,
Cops drink and drive too!
They just have a different view of justice,
They think they’re on the inside of a circle of vultures
We must recognize the two different cultures and face it,
It is what is and that’s how it stands,
It’s the very reason we have to stay united
Because power concedes nothing, without a demand!
Poverty
You need to remember that poverty is a two edged sword. Everyone wants to help the less fortunate... everyone. Some people, however, refuse to do anything about their situation. Many of the homeless have just dropped out of society. It is good to have a shelter in every city, but the homeless want to be left alone. Some families are second and third generation welfare statistics. When are these people going to take responsibility for their own lives? No one (and I mean no one) wants to see anyone suffer or go hungry. No one is refused medical treatment in this country. Anyone can go to the Emergency Room of any hospital when medical help is needed. casino online
Let The Bums Have A Flop
by Nobody, the founder of the Homelessness Marathon
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The reason nothing gets fixed in this country is because the problems are more profitable than the solutions. And it's usually not hard to figure out where the profit lies. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that many industries find it's cheaper to pollute than to clean up. And you don't have to be an industrial polluter to see that scientists make more money building rockets than working for peace.
But it's a little harder sometimes to see the profit in homelessness. After all, who makes money off the homeless besides drug dealers and distilleries? Isn't that the cause of the problem, that they all drink and drug too much and, oh yeah, some of them are crazy? No, that's not the cause of the problem, but this myth certainly keeps us from looking at what the causes really are.
Let's start with the bums. Yeah, that's right, let's not call them homeless, let's just call them bums like we did when we were kinder to them. Back in the old days, there used to be flop houses. I grew up in Manhattan, so I know first hand that in the early 60's it used to cost 25 cents for a flop except in the more upscale "Lyons House" where it was fifty cents. I know this because they had their prices displayed right outside.
Today, Manhattan's flop houses are gone, and I have it on the reliable testimony of a former New York City junkie that the cheapest hotel rooms in the city cost about $35 a night. Even if a couple of people split the room, that still means the price of a bed for a drunk has gone up 70 times in 40 years. That's like a $200-a-month apartment becoming a $14,000-a-month apartment. If sober people had faced hikes like that, even more of them would be on the streets too.
Where did the flop houses go? In city after city they were victims of urban renewal, as were the SRO's (single room occupancy buildings, where you could get a cheap room on a monthly or yearly basis). Why did the flop houses go? Because in city after city the powers that be decided more revenue would be returned to the tax base (i.e. they'd make more money), if the cheap housing was torn down and replaced by office buildings, stadiums and convention centers. Me, I'd have said, "Let the bums have a flop," just like people said for generations, but that's not the way it is in America anymore. The cities like to talk about the millions they spend solving homelessness, but not the tens of millions they made creating it.
Of course, there are plenty of homeless people who aren't bums, by which I mean, they're clearly not doing everything they can to stay in the same miserable situation. Think of it this way. More than 750,000 people are homeless at any given moment, which represents as many as 3.5 million people cycling on and off the streets every year, which represents at least 20 million people homeless since the early '80s when the crisis began. Just do the math.
750,000 represents less than four percent of 20 million, which means that more than 96 percent of all the people who have ever been homeless have gotten out of homelessness (as will most of the people on the streets today). That's a statistic you won't hear from Bill O'Reily who regularly portrays homeless people as unable to get their lives together. Maybe because once you've heard it, you have to wonder how come this obviously motivated more-than-96% wound up on the streets in the first place.
Does anyone remember the name Sam Pierce? He was Reagan's HUD secretary, and two things happened under his aegis. First HUD got out of the business of building housing, which is why there's a critical shortage of affordable housing today. In the peak years of the 1970s, we were spending over $60 billion a year on all the Federal housing programs. But under Reagan and Pierce, that figure plummeted to the point where we're spending less than $30 billion today. If we'd stayed at the pre-Reagan/Pierce levels, an aggregate of well over $500 billion more would have been spent on housing. Can anyone doubt that we wouldn't be in the pickle we're in if it weren't for those cuts? Well, someone else got the $500 billion, so we know exactly what this policy change was worth to them.
The other thing that happened under Pierce was that there was a mammoth scandal about HUD funds being misappropriated to finance pet projects for the clients of highly-placed Republican consultants. Pierce didn't go to jail, himself, but some of his associates did, indeed, wind up living in government housing aka the pokey. And just which money do you think it was that they misappropriated? It was some of the surviving funds (about $10 billion worth) for low-income housing. So let us not be too polite to remember that the homelessness crisis was created, in part, by people who weren't too proud to rob the poor box.
And let's also not forget that when we're talking about low-income housing, we're talking about housing for people who do, in fact, have an income. Why do these people make so little money that they need low-income housing to begin with? O'Reily notwithstanding, the answer has much less to do with choices they made than with choices they didn't make.
For example, the Social Security Administration says that in 2001, there were 2,649,523 people getting SSI and no other form of Federal benefit except maybe food stamps. These people were, by the requirements of the program, blind, disabled, or over 65 years old but for some reason not eligible for regular social security. These were surely among the people Ronald Reagan called the "truly needy," the ones he said would not be allowed to slip through the social safety net.
But these SSI recipients couldn't decide for themselves how much money they would get. That decision was made for them in Washington, and in Washington they decided that the average monthly payment (as of Dec. 2003) would be $435.38. Some of the states kick in another $200 or so, but this is why every year on the Homelessness Marathon I find myself talking to disabled people who don't get a check from the government big enough to let them afford housing.
Let's do some more math. Let's just suppose we gave the otherwise destitute aged, disabled and blind an extra $500 a month, which might be enough to give most of them a little fiscal dignity. That would be an additional $6000 per year for 2.65 million people or, approximately, $16 billion a year. In other words, leaving some of our neediest citizens to rot, frees up $16 billion a year for people who couldn't possibly need the money as much, if at all.
On the other hand, there are plenty of people with low incomes who actually do work, but they just don't make much money at their jobs. The original idea of the minimum wage was to keep these lowest-paid workers from sinking into poverty, but the real-dollar value of the minimum wage has fallen to the point where it doesn't do that anymore. And as the wage floor has fallen, it has taken with it the real-dollar value of the wages pegged to be a little above the minimum or a little above that. Whose fault do we think this is?
Do we think it was the minimum-wage workers, themselves, who lobbied Washington and insisted that they be paid too little? Or do we think the process is a tad more influenced by the wealthy employers? Well what was it worth to the employers?
According to the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, 13,677,000 people are working for $7.14 an hour or less. If we gave them all an extra dollar, the ones at the very top would be getting about the purchasing power of the minimum wage in 1968. And the ones at the bottom still wouldn't be making enough, but at least they'd be better off. That one dollar would cost employers $13.6 million dollars an hour. That's $544 million a week (for a 40 hour week) or more than $28 billion dollars a year.
In other words, every dollar that low-wage workers lose represents a $28 billion subsidy for business -- annually. And, of course, when the lowest wages are depressed, the wages in the middle are too, freeing up the globs of cash that today's titans of industry use to reward themselves with historic largesse. But even this is not enough.
You just can't make an American job cheap enough to keep someone with expensive tastes from shipping it overseas. And what is it worth to American corporations to have the remaining American workers so scared that they'll accept give-backs and cuts and be afraid to unionize much less strike? The bosses don't have to hire Pinkertons when they can hire Congress to strip away labor's protections and threaten workers with becoming homeless if they raise a peep.
Add to this the billions of dollars that are made by the for-profit health-care industry which has no compunctions about bankrupting people, driving them into the streets and then denying them proper care when they get there. This mega-industry's profits would be lost if we had national health care like almost every other industrialized nation.
And of course, unless something changes, the enormous Federal budget deficit will be paid for in no small measure by reductions in aid for the poorest Americans. That's how Shwarzenegger is fixing California's deficit. Has anyone heard of a different plan for the national debt? And how was that debt created? With massive tax breaks for the rich. So how greedy is that? They've even stolen from tomorrow's poor. Couldn't they at least have had the decency to leave some poor for future generations to rob?
No wonder we're supposed to think homelessness is just a matter of personal responsibility. It's a money gusher for the people who really create it, and they're the ones who never take responsibility at all.
http://www.homelessnessmarathon.org/index.html
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