Visualize It!

March 22, 2009

The war is over. In honor of the Spring Solstice and in recognition that spring is the time when life begins anew, the new President elect of USA orders immediate transport of all troops to their homes. The UN passes a unanimous resolution to provide necessary food and medical aid to help rebuild war torn Iraq. The U.S. cancels all contracts with Halliburton and its subsidiaries. Cuba agrees to send doctors to the war torn country.

The new U.S. President signs into law the GI Recovery Act of 2009 mandating free, full, and prompt medical and dental coverage for all veterans for life. In addition Congress introduces a bill that will pay housing subsidies for all veterans to make home ownership affordable regardless of the soldier's financial situation or state of domicile. These benefits are retroactive to the beginning of the Iraq War. The President is expected to sign the bill.

The President issues a Declaration of Native American Sovereign Nation Recognition that recognizes the sovereign status of all American Indian Nations. He pledges to henceforth honor all treaties with American Indians, saying "We should never lose sight of the fact that America has an indigenous people, and everyone who settled here after them are immigrants. In cooperation with them we, as immigrants to this great country, can make it a better and stronger homeland for all of us."

Cindy Sheehan is appointed head of the newly established Department of Peace.

In partnership with Jobs With Justice and other national labor organizations, the President signs into law the New Millenium Sustainable Jobs Program. The new program will create jobs in Green Industries, including Green Construction, Sustainable Agriculture, Organic Farming, Bridge Building and Rehabbing, Building Trades, Windmill and Solar Panel Manufacturing Plants. The government further establishes an Office of Documentary Filmmaking, providing jobs and internships for those interetsed in those fields, and will provide funding for the establishment of independent community radio stations and newspapers. In addition, the government will fund studies on the uses and effects of Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine, Ayurvedic Medicine, acupuncture, and exercise and physical medicine in the treatment of a wide variety of illnesses and conditions.

This summer the President and the UN will send diplomats to the Middle East to broker a legally binding agreement that will result in the chartering of permanent homelands to both the Israeli and the Palestinian people. The borders of the new nations will establish once and for all the sovereignity and right to self determination of both the Israeli and Palestinian people.

The President establishes the Americans in National Service Initiative. Upon reaching age seventeen, and before reaching age fifty-one, every American will be required to devote a year to civilian service-- either in one's home state, or elsewhere in the country. Al Gore accepts his appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency for life.

The President appoints a formerly homeless couple, Juan and Cristina Rojas, as co secretaries of Housing and Urban Development. In his Inaugural Address the president declares that "From this day forward it shall be illegal to evict any citizen of the United States or any non citizen working in gainful employment in the United States, from his or her housing. He directs the governors of every state to appoint local mediation boards to settle landlord tenant disputes free of charge to the tenant.

July, 2009. The U.S. Government establishes universal health care. It will be paid for by a federal sales tax, abolishing state sales taxes. Property tax is abolished. The government establishes a federal Housing Insurance Bureau to issue insurance policies for property owners in all fifty states.

A new amendment to the Constitution permanently establishes the 2009 Federal Fair Wage, and replaces the minimum wage. The new wage is permanently tied to the combined costs of housing, energy, food, and transportation in a given region. Food Stamps are discontinued, as it is no longer necessary to supplement poverty wages.

The president outlaws all predatory businesses, including collection agencies, payday lenders, human trafficking, and poverty pimping. All of the above are upgraded to felonies. Marijuana is legalized, regulated by the FDA, standardized to purity, and taxed. It is sold only to those 18 and older with proof of age. Tax revenues raised from the legal sale of marijuana wipes out the federal debt by the end of 2009.

Hundreds of new federal judges are appointed, and in April 2009, the Social Security Administration announces it will immediately begin testing and hiring thousands of disability analysts in every state. Average wait time for approval of a disability claim drops to six weeks by the end of 2009. With the president's new UniverSal Health, Medicare and Medicaid become a non issue.

The government announced that by the end of the year 2009, it will hire 10,000 new USDA food inspectors. It will increase hiring and training of food inspectors every year until the food supply is 100% safe.

A worldwide boycott of the Olympics in solidarity with the people of Burma brought unprecedented economic devastation to the games. A world wide walkout of all workers on day one of the Olympics threatened to topple stock markets around the globe. The UN quickly passed a resolution declaring all war and exploitation to be hazardous to human health, and in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Thousands of unarmed Buddhist monks and supporters, including Hollywood stars, former Olympics gold medalists, Sylvester Stallone, a contingent of VietNam War veterans, and political leaders from around the world stormed the guarded compound where pro democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi has been held under house arrest for fourteen years, and pushed down the barbed wire surrounding the freedom fighter's house. As the fence came down, Myanmar soldiers set their weapons on the ground, and stepped aside, saying: "We are tired of this unjust government." A teenager with a camera phone sent images of the liberation to news agencies around the world.

After the elections, Suu Kyi was reinstated as President of newly renamed Democratic Republic of Burma. Gen Than Shwe and his cohorts were assigned permanent duties in work camps rebuilding the long neglected country.

This is a work in progress. I'm still in the idealism stage. I don't have all the answers, or even most of them. I do know, like a lot of other Americans, that CHANGE is needed--and soon. If you have some answers, please comment. Like Bobby Kennedy, one of my childhood heroes, I visualize what could be, and ask: WHY NOT?

P.S. "You might think I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." (props to John Lennon)

I Know What I Saw

It goes back to the question asked of then Florida Governor Lawton Chiles by a radio reporter. Twyla told me she'd asked the governor, "Why is there poverty?" He never answered her.

The reporter, who has since gone on to change her name to an African one, and additionally changed her career---which is the media's loss-- asked the million dollar question. There is only one answer to that question: there is poverty because there is immense wealth concentrated in the hands of relatively few. An extreme example is the diamond drenched wedding attire of Myanmar general Than Schwe's daughter, while the majority of the Burmese people can barely afford to buy food. Don't think for a New York minute I'm advocating a communist redistribution of wealth. I've heard too many horror stories from people who've fled those countries. A competitive economy is a good thing. It fosters innovation and improvement. Real competition, that is.

I started writing this blog a little over a year ago. Its broad theme was poverty. If poverty was a river, its tributaries would be homelessness, low wage jobs, poor health and unaffordable/inadequate health care. The blog became a journey. I traveled and blogged about what I saw and people I met. I'm not a statistician. There are agencies that collect data and spit out numbers and pie charts. I was interested in the human faces of homelessness, so I focused on a couple of people, real people. I spent some nights in homeless shelters, and some days sitting on sidewalks and in parks, and riding subways. I lived in the cheapest possible accomodations I could find in New York City, a place where I was bitten by bed bugs, and shared bathrooms and showers with ten or more other women, a place where you have no kitchen, no refrigerator, and no microwave. Living this way in the capital of the world is a lot more common than you might think. When New Yorkers are burned out of their homes, and they lose everything, a room in the YMCA is often where the lucky ones wind up--for months, if not years.

There was a delay in the beginning of this journey. Overly long, it seemed to me at the time. In retrospect that delay may have been benevolently intended. Or maybe unintended. The questions-- posed at the beginning, and now answered at the end--I had to find my own answers to. Some people, maybe knowing the answers or sensing the outcome, tried to divert the journey. One was a mentor, I realize now. A mentor who didn't give me any fish but sorta taught me how to fish. By throwing me into the ocean with the right bait.

Write about us, said the women in the Manhattan homeless shelter. The world needs to know. After meeting these women, I knew I had to write about them. Read about them in Refugees of America, In the Chairs, Gimme Shelter, and Ladies and Gentlemen...

I laid this blog to rest in May, one year after its birth. I've made some improvements since then, but with the exception of a few things I get fired up about--most notably the incarceration of Aung San Suu Kyi by the criminals in control of her country--this blog was over in May '07. It was then I understood with no doubt whatsover that home is where you hang your heart. Home is not a geographic location, or even necessarily the place where you were born.

In the past year, I've hung up my coat in many places: in closets, lockers, on the backs of chairs, and on hooks screwed into the wall. A few times, I even slept in my coat. I went back to a city that was my home in the 1970's. It was where I lived, worked, gave birth to my son, and freed myself from a self destructive habit. In our last apartment, on 93rd Street and Second Avenue, we stepped through our front door every morning and passed a disheveled man sleeping on the stoop next door. It was the same man every day, sleeping off a drunk. It was remarkable and memorable because he was the only one. In a city bursting with heroin addicts and methadone clinics, drug dealers, and taverns, I saw very few people sleeping on the streets. I never heard about homeless shelters then. This was New York City in the late 1970's.
In 1979 my lease was up. The landlord sent over his new lease, raising the $170 rent on our studio apartment to more than $400. I had an opportunity to move upstate, when I still had family living there. With my child, we left NYC.
I came back throughout the 1980's to visit a good friend. Her rent, on East 116th Street was $425. She had one bedroom, in a 5th floor walk up. The bathtub in the kitchen with a hinged board covering it, doubled as a kitchen sink. The toilet was in a closet size room with a chain pull flusher. Heat was often nonexistent. It was better than her previous apartment, she said, where two dead bodies had been found in the building. Still, she wouldn't let her two children play outside, where drug dealers sold heroin and crack on the front stoop.
(A side thought: why are so many kids overweight? Maybe because they can't play outdoors as kids used to do.)

Each time I visited NYC through the eighties, I noticed more and more people at subway stations or around parks asking for change, a little help, apparently homeless. It was in the 1980's that I first saw the so-called "bag ladies;" women pushing their worldly goods around the city in shopping carts, or trudging through the streets of New York loaded down with plastic shopping bags. This did not exist on such a scale prior to the eighties. So what happened?

Rent happened. I considered moving back to New York in early 1981. I went down to the city, bought a newspaper, looked at the rents and took about two days to decide the bridge had collapsed, washed away in the current, and there was no way to go back. Conventional wisdom is that the homeless are homeless because they are: lazy, mentally ill, drug addicts, drunks. Let me explode a few myths.

Homelessness is not for the lazy. It take tremendous energy and resourcefulness to live as a homeless person. Try it sometime: dragging your essential belongings around all day, including important papers; keeping yourself--and your clothes--clean, avoiding robbery, avoiding arrest, charging your cell phone--if you have one, getting adequate sleep. Read "In the Chairs," August 2006.

There are mentally ill people among the homeless, but with affordable rent, and community based clinics, the mentally ill wouldn't have to be living on the streets. Poor drug addicts live on the streets. Rich drug addicts live in their own homes. Some people become drug addicts after they become homeless. And "drunks:" I'll never forget the young people living on the streets of Gainesville, Florida who said they drank rum to keep warm at night. Which came first: sleeping outdoors or drinking?

If you are interested in the stories of people who are invisible to the celebrity obsessed mainstream media (msm) but are literally right in your face, and under your nose, scroll back. Read Dawn. Addicts, alcoholics, and sick people have always lived in New York City and in every other city and town in America. The difference is that in the 70's a low wage worker, a retiree or a disabled worker, and that includes veterans--did they not work for all of us?--all could afford a home even if only in a rooming house. Now, even middle class workers like cops, firefighters and teachers have to live in outer boroughs or in New Jersey because only celebrities and millionaires can afford Manhattan rent. Like post-Katrina New Orleans, Manhattan is closed to us commoners. Our tourism dollars are still welcome, however.

Corporate America is not going to raise the pay of American workers to keep pace with skyrocketing rents and mortgages. Does our government have the will to create more subsidized housing --maybe built by unemployed workers who could learn construction trade skills at the same time--so that America's lowest paid workers, disabled workers, homeless vets, and low income retirees can have homes?

Stay tuned.

Banned in Burma

In the pro democracy demonstrations led by Buddhist monks in Burma last month, soldiers fired into the crowds of peaceful marchers. A Japanese photojournalist was killed; shot down on the street. Monks were beaten, hauled off to prisons, and monasteries were turned upside down and then locked down. The military regime, which I won't dignify by calling it a government, says 10 protesters were killed in the crackdown on free speech, while pro democracy activists say the number is much higher. If any of Burma's military reads this, I want to ask you: do you share the same Buddhist faith as your country men and woman and do you believe in Karma. After shooting innocent people and Buddhist monks, what will your karma look like?



Aung San Suu Kyi, beloved 62 year old freedom fighter and pro democracy icon, remains under house arrest as she has for about twelve of the past eighteen years. UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari met with Suu Kyi twice last week as well as with the Than Shwe and his gang of despotic generals who have maintained an iron grip on Burma since 1990, when they ignored the landslide election victory for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party. The military has controlled Burma for 45 years. Despite a wealth of natural resources, the regime, through incompetent management and greed, has turned Burma into one of the poorest Asian countries, where there is forced labor--slave labor--of not only men, but women, children and the elderly.


With world attention now on the brutality of Burma's regime against its own people, and against the revered Buddhist monks, General Than Shwe has finally consented to a meeting with Suu Kyi, the rightful leader of Burma-- but only if Suu Kyi "gives up her confrontational attitude. "


Although the regime renamed Burma "Myanmar," it should have called it Bizarro. Confrontational? Shooting and killing Buddhist monks is confrontational. Shooting down a journalist armed only with a camera is confrontational. Beating peaceful demonstrators is confrontational. Locking down a woman who has devoted her life to democracy and freedom for her people at the expense of her personal life is confrontational. It's beyond confrontational. It's wacko, it's inhuman, it's bizarro.


And while the bizarro rulers in Burma continue their crackdown on free speech, and their attacks against human rights include internet blackouts and censorship, know this: blogspot.com is banned in Burma!



FREE BURMA! FREE AUNG SAN SUU KYI!

Just Freedom

Utica, New York

A Haitian friend, No name-devout Catholic--said this: "We are born free. God wants us to be free." It seems No name's Catholic God and the God of the Buddhist Burmese people are in collaboration here.


Freedom. It's not too much to ask for, is it? When you don't have it, it's just everything.

About 50 people gathered this afternoon in Utica to listen to a talk about Burma in the small park bordered on the west by Genesee Street and on the east by Park Avenue. A large tent canopy sheltered the speaker, who stood at a podium. To his left, a life size portrait of detained Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi leaned against the backdrop. Folding chairs lined up in neat rows on the grass. Most of the attendees were seated, but a number of people in the crowd stood in the back, including a Buddhist monk wearing saffron robes.
Some background: the military dictatorship took power in Burma, now called Myanmar in 1962 when General Ne Win and his officers overthrew the constitutional government. Since then, Burma has been engaged in a civil war between various ethnic groups. It's also become one of the world's poorest countries, despite many natural resources, including forests/wood products, natural gas fields, and seafood. Soe Htut, a Utica based pro-democracy activist said the "regime" uses profits from the country's resources and "buys all kinds of weapons."
Ne Win and his Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP) established a 1974 constitution without the people's consent. As the world watched, a nation wide democracy movement in 1988 forced the military to organize another general election in 1990. The National League for Democracy (NLD) won 80% of the seats in the May 1990 election, but the military ignored the results and has retained control of the country to the present. According to the fact sheet distributed at the rally, the military plans to draft a constitution that would legitimize military rule in Burma.
The subject of the portrait, Aung San Suu Kyi, is under house arrest in Myanmar, a condition she's endured for thirteen years with no end in sight.


"She was arrested because the government is afraid of her," said Name DELETED, an English speaker who emerged from the crowd to translate. "She (taught) people about democracy and human rights, and the whole country believed in her."

Name DELETED generously shared his cell phone with me, allowing me to speak with another activist, Nameless. Speaking from Ithaca, Nameless said they will march on September 21st from the Chinese embassy in New York City to the U.N. to demand freedom and democracy for the people of Burma and an end to the military dictatorship that has held the people in its iron grip since 1962. Nameless said he was a political prisoner in Burma for seven years. A former union leader, he was arrested because he led a demonstration against his country's dictatorship. He's now based in upstate Ithaca, but will continue to fight for democracy for his people. The march to the U.N. will kick off a nationwide effort to gain support for the Free Burma movement. Activists will visit forty U.S. cities, including (cities in) Connecticut, Chicago, and Washington D.C.
The info sheet provided to me included the following resolutions, in rough translation:

1. To solve current social hardships in Burma (imposed) by the miltary government.

2. To stop the crackdown with violence on all those who peacefully demonstrate, including civilians, students and Buddhist monks.

3.To release all those who (recently) peacefully demonstrated.

4.To release (Daw) Aung San Suu Kyi, U Tin Oo, U Khun Tun Oo, leaders of ethnic groups and all political prisoners.

5. To accept the meeting of tri; the military, NLD (National League for Democracy) party, and ethnic groups for (the) restoration (of) unity of Burma.

Forced labor is common in Burma, said Name DELETED, where slave labor is used by the regime for building roads and other work.

"Freedom," he said, "that's all we want."
"We don't call it government," he explained, referring to the country's rulers. "The regime doesn't want to give up its power." He said the government has been using civilians as paramiltary thugs-- spying on, harassing and beating fellow citizens. He described a peaceful demonstration a few weeks ago in which Buddhist monks were beaten while chanting prayers for the Burmese people. Burma is more than 80% Buddhist. The current protests are against fuel price hikes which saw prices rise 500% overnight, and corresponding price hikes in food.

"About 150 protesters have been arrested (in the August 28th demonstration) and nobody knows where they are," said Name DELETED. In the country he and fellow activists call Burma but known officially as Myanmar there's no due process, no rule of law, and as he described it: when people are in prison, anything can happen and nobody knows about it.

If you want to talk to Name DELETED and learn more/or get involved with the Burma/Myanmar democracy movement you can call 315-&&&&000. Do a search. Real names attract trolls.

More about Myanmar in Asia Times http://www.atimes.com/
If you have additional facts and/or updates to add, AND YOU ARE LEGIT please email me. No attachments. No links.