poverty

By Rosalie Tirella

Yesterday, driving around, running my biz – new issue of InCity Times hits stands this Friday – I had the chance to talk with lots of folks. Some interesting nuggets of information:

One fellow and his wife were pretty frequent visitors to one of the big Indian casinos in CT. One year they spent $80,000 gambling. They did not spend their mortgage/bill money, but extra dough. At the end of the year, if you are a high roller at a casino, they send you a letter, a print out telling you how much $$ you spent. Because this man spent so much money, he earned a lot of casino POINTS. These points were like free dollars to be spent at the casino’s restaurants and retail stores. All casinos and slots parlors do this. The guy said he never paid for a meal. The dinners were always free because of the points. Drinks too. Even clothing and other goodies at the shops. One year they did all their Christmas shopping at the casino’s mall with all the POINTS they had earned.

The man said you are given points to keep you gambling in the casino. You are fed and watered and everything else so you can lose …$80,000 in one year. At the casino.

Sometimes the man and his wife would not take the highway, but as a kind of scenic jaunt, drive the backroads between Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, explore the towns between the casinos. NO STORES, RESTAURANTS, DINERS -anything – could be found in these towns. All commercial life was dead. The casino had sucked the life out of all the neighboring downtowns. Ghost towns, as far as commercial activity went.

The man said, within a five mile radius of the casinos, NO COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY.

Points also got him free nights at the hotel owned and operated by the casino. Well, one night his points earned him a room, a room so huge, with a living room area, dining room, baths, seating area, it felt miles long. Luxury room. Free. To keep him and his wife gambling spending … $80,000 in one year.

Something to consider: WHY THE HELL ISN’T THE CITY OF WORCESTER HEALTH DEPT CHIMING IN ABOUT THE PUBLIC HEALTH PROBLEMS CAUSED BY GAMBLING. WHERE THE FUCK IS THE NEW PUBLIC HEALTH DIRECTOR, DEREK BRINDISI?

Probably kissing his bosses’, especially the city managet’s ass. Too afraid to speak the truth about gambling addiction. Too afraid to come out and say how a slots.parlor will affect the nearby Green Island families and homes. Hell, his office is right on Meade Street, practically across the street from the slots parlor site, Wyman Gordon. How ironic in a pathetic sort of way.

If Dr. Morse were still the director of Worcester’s public health dept., you can bet he would be at the vanguard of protests. In his very polite, sweet way he would disagree with his bosses and take the stand closest to his doctor’s heart.

Not Brindisi. A pointless twerp. Nothing more than a municipal p.r. flak and yes man. City Hall is filled with ass-kissers like Brindisi who will shut their pieholes at times like these to keep their $100,000-a-year jobs.

Dr. Morse broke the mold.

Brindisi is mold.

By Rosalie Tirella

So many people have come up with other creative uses for the Wyman Gordon site in Green Island. For years the people of Green Island have been clamoring for a supermarket for that site, a full service grocery store that offers its customers FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLES, fresh fish, etc. Years ago, we had Supreme Market and Buellar Brothers Market and a fruit store – all on Millbury Street. Long gone. For these past four decades we’ve had freaking Honey Farms on Millbury Street. Canned Spam, canned crap, high prices. Depressing. And unhealthy for many Green Islanders who do not own cars and are forced to do their grocery shopping at a CONVENIENCE STORE.

Then there was a call for a bank branch and maybe a Walmart. Residents wanted a place to shop and, seeing Walmart is now in the grocery business, buy their groceries at a reasonable price.

Those Wyman Gordon dreams also bit the dust.

Now we have Rush Street Gaming breathing hot and heavy over the site. Slots dreams. What a pathetic joke to play on the people of Green Island, people who need the basic amenities – and have not gotten them.

Now here is my Wyman Gordon site dream. Piggy backing on Deb Cary’s idea, I am suggesting a SUPER FAMILY FUN PARK. A Whalom Park/Water Park/Miniature Golf/Batting Cages PLUS a family style restaurant for the site. A bonanza of fun for kids of all ages! A rollercoaster, The Scrambler, The Whip, Bumper Cars, The Spider, a haunted house, a lovely ephemeral Merry-go-round. Huge brightly colored water slides and spray park water flourishes, batting cages, fun wall climbing, game stands, concession stands, a sit down family restaurant. The Wyman Gordon site could accommodate all of this stuff. It would draw thousands of people from Worcester and Central MA and Metro West. Possibly even beyond ….

Great idea. Rush Street Gaming could build it – they are in the game biz after all, n’est ce pas?

Well, FORGEDABOUTIT!

The only reason Rush Street Gaming and the owner of the Wyman Gordon site are doing something with this mammoth brownfield is that with slots they make BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. With the super amusement park, they would make dough, BUT NOT ENOUGH. NOT THE KILLING THEY KNOW THEY WILL MAKE WITH SLOTS. THE GREEN ISLAND HOOD BE DAMNED. It is not about the people. Not about Worcester.

A friend of mine, a well-off friend, told me she and her hubby went gambling at Mohegan Sun. She lost the $500 her husband gave her to spend in about 10 minutes. He lost his $500 shortly after she did. He gave her some more dough to gamble away and she lost all that $$$ real fast, too.

That is what slots and gaming are made to do … Take a ton of your money real fast. The amount of cash slots will bring in, millions of dollars per slot machine, can never be equaled by the lowly amusement park cum water slides. That’s why Rush Street Gaming is here! To make billions of dollars, easily, quickly, consequences be damned. How quaint of us to think Rush would go for Merry-go-rounds and exercise for city kids!

Rush Street Gaming is bent on economic rape. And if the voters of Worcester approve their plans, we will be taking it up the ass, without wanting to, FOR DECADES.

By Rosalie Tirella

I suppose if you do not live on Lafayette, Lodi, Meade, Grosvenor, Scott or Langden – the streets ACROSS from the old Wyman Gordon – the proposed slots parlor looks like a pretty good deal to you.

After all, city movers and shakers have gotten the city a hotel and other downtown amenities as a big thank you from the gaming guys. A big bribe for Worcester to sweeten a horrible dish – a slots parlor, for the Wyman Gordon site in Green Island. A slots parlor with 1,200 computerized slot machines that take credit and debit cards. A slots parlor, the kind of attraction no city or town wants.

When I was a kid growing up on Lafayette Street I was keenly aware of the fact that I was living in one of Wusta’s tuff neighborhoods. Not so much as a child, attending nearby Lamartine Street School, but as a teenager attending Providence Street Junior High, and later Burncoat Senior High. All my junior high and senior high pals were great, but I always cringed whenever they picked me up or dropped me off in their cars to go somewhere. At the beginning of Lafayette Street you had a strip joint (today, true to its stripper roots, a Hurricane Betty’s). Millbury Street, where my mom worked and my family shopped, was home to almost a score of seedy bars, places out of which men and women would stumble, drunk and bellicose. Lafayette Street had two bars, for Cripe’s sake: Ben’s Cafe and the old PNA club.

I was awash in booze!!! But I had a great mom who kept her girls straight – school every day, church every Sunday or Saturday eve,The Girls Club in summertime, after school jobs as soon as we turned 14 and a half years old (kids got work cards then). Summer and weekend fun with my aunts and uncles and their kids.

I was too busy being raised by Mrs. Tirella to sink into the world around me, even though my sisters and I were real neighborhood girls. We played with the neighborhood kids, walked to church, walked to Millbury Street every day for after school treats like burgers and cokes at the old Peter’s Dairy Bar or Messier’s Diner or even a bowl of clam chowder with our mom at Charles Restaurant – heaven! We were totally part of our urban environs. I saw lots of good and bad things. Stuff that delighted me, stuff that scared me. But out my mom and sisters and I went every day into what I now realize was a very rich, complex urban environment.

In a way, the Wynan Gordon site, then the Wyman Gordon factory, kind of anchored my world. It was where people worked, worked hard. It was a gated, no-fun place for me as a kid. A place that was noisy with machines and guys in hard hats worked hard. Big steel tubes were stacked in pyramids. They sparkled in the sun. I was kinda proud of the factory. It was always busy, it was always safe to walk by it as we made our way to the Worcester Public Libray on Salem Street. A City of Worcester Fire Station was right across the street as we made our way under the concrete over-pass. Urban, hectic, noisy. Sometimes unsafe, even violent. My old neighborhood.

Does Green Island need more noise, more social ills, more pain?

editor’s note: I have made some sentences bold.

16.6 Percent of Households in Worcester Area Reported in 2012 Inability to Afford Enough Food

Boston  – 15 percent of respondents – or more than one in seven people – in Massachusetts reported in 2012 not having enough money to buy food that they or their family needed at some points during the prior twelve months, according to a new report released by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).

This report provides data on food hardship – the inability to afford enough food – for every region, every state, every Congressional District, and 100 of the country’s largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), including Boston-Cambridge-Quincy; Springfield; and Worcester MSAs in Massachusetts. The report found that nationally the food hardship rate was 18.2 percent in 2012. Among states, Mississippi had the highest food hardship rate (24.6 percent) and North Dakota had the lowest (10.9 percent).

For Massachusetts it found that:

• 15 percent in the state in 2012 said they were unable to afford enough food.
• For the Worcester MSA, the food hardship rate for 2011-2012 was 16.6 percent, compared to 12.7 percent in the Boston MSA and 18.3 percent in the Springfield MSA. Click to continue »

By Rosalie Tirella

… wouldn’t have shut down the city’s inner-city swimming pools. Healthy families who don’t have a lot of money, use neighborhood swimming pools during school summer vacation.

… City Manager Mike O’Brien wouldn’t endorse an affordable housing policy that caps affordable housing in the city at 10%. By creating tough rental situations for families the city makes sure poor families spend more of their money on rent and less of it on healthy food, or food in general. Or maybe heat during winter months. Not very healthy.

This public relations we-will-be-the-healthiest-city-in-New-England bull shit campaign that the city is touting to Worcesterites is just that – bull shit.

If we truly wanted to be a healthy city …

… CM O’Brien and his development team would push for a Trader Joe’s to be built in the Worcester Public Library parking lot so that families living in downtown apartments, families that may not have cars to drive to supermarkets, can buy fresh produce and other healthy foods at this great super market chain. For low prices! Instead, we get the WBDC leading the charge, talking hockey rinks for the local college kids, most of whom have had all the advantages and you can bet are strong and healthy. How is that advocating for healthy ways for our city kids and families? A Trader Joe’s would so complement the library!

If we were a healthy city…

… City Manager Mike O’Brien wouldn’t be driving a stake through the heart of community development corporations, nonprofits that create safe, affordable housing for working class and poor families. No apartments with bad plumbing, heating, landlords for our CDCs. A healthy living space, safe neighborhoods for our city families. CDCs create HEALTHY NEIGHBORHOODS! O’Brien wants to eviscerate the CDCs. He’s listening to a couple of developers who know nothing about keeping inner-city families healthy. No experts in social services are these guys. And yet O’Brien gets lead by the nuts by a couple of developers who don’t get that good safe affordable housing is the foundation on which to build healthy families,, healthy communities, especially immigrant communities who are new to this country and may not know their rights as tenants, or are too timid to demand those rights.

A healthy city wouldn’t have let CSX come in with all their noise and air pollution.

A healthy city would know that economic justice is equal to environmental justice. There would be more trees in our inner-city neighborhoods, less bitching by DPW and Parks head Bob Moylan wouldn’t bitch about having to replace the city’s antiquated water pipes!

By Rosalie Tirella

…. when it comes to its panhandlers and street folks, Boston is trying something innovative and compassionate. And way cool.

Ever hear of Panera Bread? We have a few of these bakery/coffee shop type franchises in the Worcester area. Well, it seems like Panera cares about the homeless because they have built several Panera Cares bakeries all over America. Including one in Boston, near city government, smack in the middle of bustling Boston. Panera Cares feeds EVERYBODY. Pay what you can, and if you can’t that’s Ok. You can still eat. Especially if you are hungry.

Brilliant!

Open-hearted!

Very cool! This is why Boston is a first-tier city and Worcester is a third-tier city. It has so much to do with spirit, courage, the willingness to take big risks.

It works this way: It is a regular Panera Bread with all fresh soups and bakery items and beverages, including coffee. If you want to buy a loaf of bread, it is less expensive but also day-old, taken from other Panera Bread cafes/shops. Not bad, seeing most of the bread you buy at the supermarket is a day old and then some if you buy the packaged stuff that is trucked in.

So. How is Boston’s new Paneras Cares doing? How are America’s Panera Cares faring?

Quite well. There’s no class warfare g, oing on or panhandlers jumping the well off. Just a bunch of folks, Americans, eating lunch together. The middle class eat with the poor eat with the homeless. The folks who can pay full price for their lunches or snacks do. The folks who are short a buck or so pay what they can. Same for the homeless who eat with everyone else.

God bless Panera bread!

We mere mortals should pray for Worcester city council menbers and other city leaders so they too can grow hearts.

By Rosalie Tirella

… Menino last night. That’s right, Boston’s Tom Menino, the guy the more erudite like to poke fun at for his not so grand elocution, not so slim girth, and maybe his not so WASP or Irish background.

But Menino is all perfectly wonderful Italian American! Wears his Italian roots on his shoe soles when he goes into Boston’s neighborhoods to cut ceremonial ribbons, meet with neighborhood groups … and goes out into the cold Boston streets, blankets in arms, handing them out to Boston’s homeless men and women and urging them to seek shelter in one of greater Boston’s homeless shelters.

A first rate mayor for a first rate city. A great American mayor for a great American city.

I thought of Boston’s mayor last night when the news broke: That two Worcester city council subcommittees, puny in spirit, the exact opposite of Menino, voted to clamp down on Worcester’s panhandlers. As if hustling them off to the side would make us a great city. As if getting tough with Worcester’s weakest citizens would make Worcester great, a little Boston.

Forget about it!!

The city council is being lead by real estate developers, money people, etc … . The city council is not serving the people who live, struggle and work in the city. It is as if the council were getting Wusta all perty and clean for the people of Holden. All the suburbanites who they hope to lure to Worcester for fun, drinks etc. Forget about solving our very real problems, such as lack of good paying jobs for unskilled folks, clean, safe, affordable housing for our inner city families.

It is all about cognitive dissonance. Pretending what we have here in Worcester doesn’t really exist.

Maybe if we pretend the problems didn’t exist, they would disappear!

Wish our subcommittees had disappeared last night!

To add to my last posts. From the BBC. – R. T.:

3 December 2012 Last updated at 14:03 ET

Downward mobility haunts US education

By Sean Coughlan, BBC News education correspondent  

The idea of going to college – and the expectation that the next generation will be better educated and more prosperous than its predecessor – has been hardwired into the ambitions of the middle classes in the United States.

But there are deep-seated worries about whether this upward mobility is going into reverse.

Andreas Schleicher, special adviser on education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), says the US is now the only major economy in the world where the younger generation is not going to be better educated than the older.

“It’s something of great significance because much of today’s economic power of the United States rests on a very high degree of adult skills – and that is now at risk,” says Mr Schleicher.

“These skills are the engine of the US economy and the engine is stuttering,” says Mr Schleicher, one of the world’s most influential experts on international education comparisons.

Lack of opportunity

The annual OECD education statistics show that only about one in five young adults in the US reaches a higher level of education than their parents – among the lowest rates of upward mobility in the developed world.

A steelworker in Ohio in 1950 drives away his new Dodge, paid for with a $320 monthly wage. The steelworks have shut and the town is now in the “rust belt”

For a country whose self-image is based on optimism and opportunity, the US is now a country where someone with poorly-educated parents is less likely to reach university than in almost any other industrial country.

It’s the opposite of a Hollywood ending.

And about one in five young adults in the US are now defined in educational terms as “downwardly mobile” – such as children who have graduate parents but who don’t reach university level themselves. …

To read more, click on link below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20154358

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From the New York Times. R. T.:

Hunger in Plain Sight

There are hungry people out there, actually; they’re just largely invisible to the rest of us, or they look so much like us that it’s hard to tell. The Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program, better known as SNAP and even better known as food stamps, currently has around 46 million participants, a record high. That’s one in eight Americans — 10 people in your subway car, one or two on every line at Walmart.

We wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but as it stands, the number should be higher[1]: many people are unaware that they’re eligible for SNAP, and thus the participation rate is probably around three-quarters of what it should be.

Food stamps allow you to shop more or less normally, but on an extremely tight budget, around $130 a month. It’s tough to feed a family on food stamps (and even tougher without them), and that’s where food banks – a network of nonprofit, nongovernment agencies, centrally located clearing houses for donated or purchased food that is sent to local affiliated agencies or “pantries” – come in. Food banks may cover an entire state or part of one: the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, for example, serves 53 counties and provides enough food to feed 48,000 square miles and feeds 90,000 people a week – in a state with fewer than four million people.

Like many other food banks, Oklahoma’s, says executive director Rodney Bivens, has made a commitment to serve every single person in need in its area; put that together with that state’s geography, and it might give you pause. Similarly, God’s Love We Deliver (not technically a food bank), which provides over a million cooked meals a year to sick people in the five boroughs and the Newark area, has seen its numbers nearly double in the last six years because, as Karen Pearl, the president and C.E.O. told me, “We are never going to have a waiting list and are never going to turn people away.”

And because poverty is growing.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs brought the poverty level down to 11 percent from 20 percent in less than 10 years. Ronald Reagan began the process of dismantling that minimal safety net, and as a result the current poverty level is close to 16 percent, and food stamps are not fully doing their job. “There was a time in this country,” says Maryland Food Bank president and C.E.O. Deborah Flateman, “when food stamps had practically eliminated hunger; then the big cuts happened, and we’ve been trying to recover ever since.” …

To read more, please click on link below: – R. T.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/art/1000511/28?sub=OneColumnist&col=63

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AND YET WE SPEND $$$$ ON WAR – $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. CLICK ON LINK BELOW: R.T.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raI25N-OoMQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

By Rosalie Tirella

As the develppers who want to weaken CDCs get even more intent on decreasing their numbers in Worcester, it’s important to remember this: Around half of Worcester residents are eligible for CDC housing. Many of our families our headed by working moms or dads and they still can’t find a nice apartment that is affordable. Our public school students are incredibly mobile. That is, a majority of our kids never graduate from the elementary school where they first began their student lives, the Worcester public elementary schools where they began kindergarten.

Why?

Because their families are always two steps ahead of landlords who are evicting them from their Worcester apartments because of nonpayment of rent.

Why?

Because $850 and $900 is a lot of money for a cold water flat. People are always looking for apartments in Worcester – and leaving them. If Worcester developers were doing such a great job of meeting Worcester’s rental housing needs, we would not have this HOUSING CRISIS. This FAMILY CRISIS. THIS POVERTY CRISIS.

Let’s go back to the families who are on the lam – with their kids in tow:

How can a child learn in school if there is a domestic crisis raging behind the scenes? A crisis that will also send him or her to another Worcester public school in another part of the city, where they will have to get to know routines all over again, make new friends all over again, miss old pals and, of course, be a grade or two behind other kids who are fortunate enough to be living in an OK apartment.

Also, more than half of our public school students are eligible for the Free Lunch program.

Where are these folks gonna go, if the CDCs wither on the vine? Do you think the developers will pick up the slack? No! They contribute to the problem.

We also need a JOBS DISCUSSION. WE NEED GOOD PAYING JOBS. WE NEED TO RAISE THE STATE MINIMUM WAGE TO $10 AN HOUR.

Let’s face it. Most of the factory jobs are gone – the jobs that paid good wages even if you couldn’t read or write or do math all that well. The jobs that created a solid working class. Jobs that gave the unskilled little homes in places like Lawrence, Lowell, Worcester. The kind of jobs that allowed for family stability – enough stability so maybe the kids could be the first to go to college.

Those jobs are gone. We have to pump up the McJobs. We have to pay folks more money so they are not living in brutal circumstances.

The CDCs slaying is just at the tip of the iceberg – the iceberg to make the lives of the working poor/working class harder.

We need a JOBS/WAGE discussion.

Then our housing  problem may solve itself.

By Rosalie Tirella

IOU – Ice Oval Update…

Drove by the ice oval at 5 p.m. today. Roughly the same number of people skating as yesterday eve. Thankfully, the police cruiser was now parked off the grass/oval area and on cement walkway off to the side.

The real crime seems to be the cost to poor families and the $25 you have to put down as a kind of security deposit if you want to rent a pair of ice skates. And you are timed. You can only rent a pair for one session, whatever that is.

Here is what is so disheartening: I just read two news stories. One was about how nearly one in eight Americans is eligible for Food Stamps. Another news article was about how the USA is now the most downwardly mobile of the industrialized nations. In the 1950s we were #1 – the most upwardly mobile nation in the world! Poverty and social stratification in America were given as prime reasons for our country’s decline.

Nice to know City Manager Mike O’Brien is contributing to America’s decline via his new affordable housing policy and, yes, even his ice oval.