Tag Archives: American economy

InCity Voices, Rosalie's Blog

Driving with a friend through Worcester’s inner-city neighborhoods …

By Rosalie Tirella

… my pets, back at the shack, waiting for me …

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pics: R.T.

… my pal and I running my errands in all the old familiar places … zipping back and forth over the inner-city Worcester streets I know so well … I got it. Fresh. Like I did the first time. Because on this day I was playing tour guide and seeing my spaces through my friend’s “tourist” eyes. On this day I saw just how “HARD HIT” half of “balkanized” Worcester – my side of town💗 – really is! Grafton Street, South Worcester, Webster Square, Main Street, 4 Corners, Piedmont, Green Island, lower Vernon Hill … once sturdy, blue collar neighborhoods that provided poorer/immigrant Worcesterites with a boost up the first rungs of the AMERICAN DREAM ladder, now engulfed in poverty, the Section 8 cheats, the drug takers and the drug pushers, …

… malnourished little kids, the morbidly obese, the rampant garbage-dumping …

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in the front yard of an Endiott Street multi-family – shameful!

… the ranters and ravers…

It was all there for the two of us to see as we drove around paying bills, buying milk. Not to mention the unseen but simmering-just-below-the-surface shit: the guns, the assault rifles, the bags of smack, the used syringes. In my years of living in Worcester, after returning here from sojourns in Hartford and Springfield, I’ve come up against all these devils. It’s funny: the Worcester of 2017 – in the old neighborhoods, at least – now reminds me of the Hartford and Springfield of the mid-1990s – the mid-sized cities I fled: dangerous, impoverished, dirty, gun-infested.

Which is why I left those cities in the first place and headed back to my hometown!

Worcester! The city that works! More working people here – purposeful folks adding to community life – fewer folks living dangerous, alternative lives on the periphery.

But that’s changed.

The poverty and despair of the Springfield and Hartford of my younger self have caught up to Worcester! At least on my streets! The many good jobs of yester year for the average joe and jane are NO longer in Worcester – in all the mid-sized and small cities throughout the land! The economy has changed, despite what Pez Prez Donald Trump, wants us to believe. Often times, our smart and resourceful but “uneducated” kids shun the McJobs here and figure out they can make a great living selling drugs! And they do just that until the authorities – or gang bangers warring over turf – catch up to them. And maybe kill them.

Bang bang …

I know, I know, I sound negative, doom ‘n’ gloom. According to the Worcester Police Department, our crime stats show that homicides are down in Woo, the murder rate plunging. But it feels like the violent crimes are up! It can feel so dark and foreboding here!

In the cold, gray afternoon light with winter’s rawness still engulfing the city and the now dirty snow still clinging unmelted to sidewalks and our souls, I found myself making excuses for my part of Worcester to my friend, who lives in one of Woo’s well-heeled suburbs.

Well, you know, I said to her, it’s the snow, the tail end of winter … that’s why things look so rough. The city is bound to look a bit bedraggled, frayed at the edges …

Or: Let’s get out of here – I don’t wanna get us in the middle of a deal… (I did not say the word “drug” before “deal”!)

The Misfortune Parade was overwhelming! The old alcoholic guy in the liquor store, the panhandler with cardboard sign, stumbling …

“He doesn’t look so good,” my friend said, as she reached down into her pocketbook for loose change for the panhandler.

Yes, I was making excuses for my city’s poverty and all the sad, violent social ills that get toted along with it. I didn’t want this suburban gal pal – of course, she knew! – to see the Worcester I see every day. I didn’t wanna make us both wince! And yet I wanted to tell her stuff, recall the scenes that make me feel this city isn’t “home” at all:

1. The Kid in the Worcester Dumpster.

Yep. As I was illegally throwing my little bag of crap into a dumpster in the ‘hood I came upon – in the dumpster! – a 10-year-old boy wading in the garbage.

A kid, who should have been in school learning, chest deep in shit – expressionless as he was making his way through it, looking for receipts, possibly with credit card numbers on them…??? There was a man sitting in a car a few yards away waiting for the boy. He obviously deposited him in the big dumpster to look for receipts and goodies. The boy was in the middle of doing his “job” when I stumbled upon him.

The man just sat in the car waiting, as I stared at him and back at the boy. They most likely had other dumpsters for the boy to dive into. They probably had a route. This was income-generating.

Surreal. In my city, Worcester.

2. The Kid Being Pushed Out of a Van to Sell Lollipops:

Then in Greendale, on West Boylston Street in Worcester: A guy pushing a little boy – another little boy! – out of a van with a bouquet of stale looking big round lollipops. To sell to people. Two bucks a pop, according to the little sign stuck amid the big jaw breakers. The kid looked positively miserable yet robotically did what was expected of him. I watched him as he entered each store in the strip mall – lifeless, on task – so unlike your average 10-year-old boy. He would go to the person at the cash register, asking if they wanted to buy a big pop for 2 bucks, like his little sign said. There was no non-profit or worthy cause he was plugging. Just himself. He looked pale, hair unwashed … jeans hanging from his skinny waist. He sold a few pops. People felt sorry for him. The few donations came his way – just like his boss, the creepy guy in the van, had expected.

I called the Worcester cops after witnessing this city scene: IT’S SLAVERY, I TELL YOU!!!!! I screamed into my cell phone, totally bent out of shape. IS HE MOLESTING THE BOY??? I SEE STUFF LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME!!! I yelled at the police officer, screaming into my cell. I sounded unhinged because I was unhinged! I had connected the dots and I was terrified for the boy – all little boys!

PLEASE! GET DOWN HERE ASAP! I yelled at the police officer over my cell. Please!

The WPD police officers, I imagine, have seen it all. So maybe they thought: YES, THIS DISTRAUGHT BROAD IS ON TO SOMETHING. Or: HERE IS A POOR GUY, A POOR DAD, USING HIS SON TO MAKE SOME EXTRA DOUGH – THE WRONG THING TO DO, BUT TIMES ARE TOUGH. This broad is over-reacting.

I chose to believe the officers took down the information I gave them over the phone and investigated the incident.

Or maybe the cops just thought I was … nutsville. Which I was, at that moment! Because I saw the pain in that little boy’s wan face!

And I remembered the 10 year old boy I saw wading in the dumpster not so long ago.

And I had had an epiphany: THIS SORT OF THING IS HAPPENING TO LITTLE KIDS ALL THE TIME! In my America!

3. The Plant Girls

Then there are the girls walking outside Worcester strip malls selling small, anemic plants to anyone who’ll buy … but maybe selling more than their half-dead plants. Some of the “girls” look older than 18, some really look like girls – about 14 or 15 years old. I remember, I told my friend while driving around with her running my errands, seeing a guy every week sitting alone in a car in a Worcester strip mall parking lot, facing the street, looking straight ahead, as if waiting for something … just as the plant girls were making their rounds selling their half-dead little plants.

It upset me to think that I had just “figured it out” then, at that moment, in my friend’s car, as we drove around: that blow jobs were what was selling those days – way faster than little plants.

You see Worcester’s future in our kids. You see the country’s lopsided economy that has left so many parents behind. And yes, if you’re young and rich and educated and fueled by the Internet, the new Worcester and American economy is for you. But if you’re not – like half of us here – it’s very hard to survive.

It was all so clear to me on a gray March day, running errands with my friend.

Green Island Grrrl, Rosalie's Blog

Some thoughts on “Ma,” President Trump and his (my???!) America

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Rose and George.       pics: R.T.

By Rosalie Tirella

Tonight I’m holding tight my late mom’s George Washington calendar from the 1940s (above). Like many young poor folks of the Great Depression and World War II – kids who knew they were lucky if they were eating a square meal a day –  my mom was resourceful. For example, she collected her own “art” from the free or inexpensive advertising lit all around her: With trusty scissors in hand she cut out and saved grainy black and white photos or colored illustrations (often muted – not very colorful at all!) from school and church calendars, Hollywood movie fan magazines and sheet music cover pages, church prayer cards – even Polish Christmas wafer wrapping paper  – anything  that captured her young imagination. My mother loved music and drawing. She was very good at sketching! She used to draw pictures for me and my sisters when we were little kids. We’d sit and watch Ma as she quietly created her art for us with an old number 2 pencil: a little girl with pigtails, a little kitten with ball of yarn, a cherub perched on a cloud … the cliches of her day, beautifully  rendered. I remember in our Lafayette Street flat, in a closet  – now lost forever! – the huge poster Ma drew in pencil of one of her beloved Boston Red Sox batters in mid-swing!  She was 12 – a total baseball freak! – when she drew it and it was a fine sketch! But I have none of my mom’s big sketches – usually made for a St. Mary’s School project – only lots of her “clipped art” – all in pretty ok shape for gussied up scraps of paper three quarters of a century old!

Ma made good use of her finds, like the sleek, smart crow who weaves bits of shiny gold ribbon into her cozy nest … She taped some of the art to her bedroom walls, used some pieces as book marks for her prayer books and sent some pictures to friends, instead of store-bought greeting cards. But mostly she saved her paper jewels – a poor girl’s dreams – in a  small, wooden brown chest in her family’s Green Island Bigelow Street tenement and later in our Lafayette Street flat. The contents became mine when Ma died.  I gave the small painted brown chest (painted by my grandfather) to one of my sisters.

The chest, I believe, was a kind of hope chest for Ma, a love song to America in which she kept all her American dreams. America was new to her family – her parents were Polish immigrants who experienced the promise –  and ugliness – of America. My grandfather worked like a slave in a textile mill in Douglas and, to relax once he got home, played the harmonica and smoked the unfiltered cigarettes he rolled for himself using his own little white square smoking papers and little cig rolling machine, a funny looking little contraption that Ma used to work in the mornings, to roll her Dad’s cigs before he went off to work. Cigs he could smoke during break … My mother’s mother, my “Bapy,” raised five kids, cooked everything from scratch, prayed every hour on the hour, went to mass EVERY day, but outside her Catholic faith and family, was lost in America. If not attending church or friends and relatives’ Polish weddings she stayed home. Praying and cooking.

Ma was the baby of the family, and the apple of Bapy’s eye. So she grew up an optimist and focused on the bright spots: special memories from her Polish immigrant church by Kelley Square, like her First Holy Communion prayer book which I have! (below), …

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A photo of Rose’s mom with her First Holy Communion children’s prayer book! (Cece got a hold of its back cover and Lilac ate it!)

… postcards, prayer booklets and stamps from her 10-year stint in Springfield as a housekeeper for the Bishop of Springield, pretty little gifts that her big brother – my Uncle Mark – brought back from Japan after he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. I especially love the calendar cover my Uncle Mark gave Ma (from his ship – probably taped above his bunk): a sexy Miss America hanging from a huge American flag. A gorgeous but stern Lady Liberty wearing an oooh la la blue diaphonous robe that showed her perky little breasts and “mound”! My uncle was pretty good looking and a bit of a ladies’ man. Ma teased him when he came home from the war with blond hair. She believed he dyed it – he said the tropical sun bleached it. This Lady Liberty was right up his alley! – worth fighting for! I ended up with the picture and crudely framed it a few years back. Saint Lady Liberty – the patriotic pinup gal proudly wearing her Virgin Mary-blue sheer gown over shaved pussy! AMERICA = #1!!!😄

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But I digress! Back to GW! My mom was a huge George Washington fan because she was born on his birthday – February 22! And because he was America’s first President – perfect to her –  America’s God, back in the days when the ideas of America and God were entwined in complex, beautiful, dangerous ways. My mom, true to her generation, and I, like all Baby Boomers, grew up hearing the George Washington grade school lessons/myths, almost Biblical: George Washington at Valley Forge in the winter, leading his troops …they wore torn boots, their frozen feet wrapped in cloth…The young George Washington chopped down the cherry tree when he wasn’t supposed to but said: I CANNOT TELL I LIE! IT WAS I WHO CHOPPED DOWN THE CHERRY TREE!

Ma and I were getting the boiled-down-for-the-plebs American history lesson: George Washington had a TON OF INTEGRITY. What we didn’t know: When some of the colonists clamored for him to be King of America for years and years – because he was such an outstanding military leader and first President and the times were so chaotic – Washington said: No way! That’s not what this country is going to be about! There are no kings here!

At the bottom of my mom’s George Washington calendar picture, it reads: “The love of my country will be the ruling influence of my conduct.”   –  Washington

Wow.

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Can you imagine these words coming out of the mouth of our new President, Donald Trump?  Can you imagine the IDEA even blooming in that narcissistic, almost insane brain of his? (Neither can I!) He is someone who wants to buy America’s love, on his terms only. LOVE DONALD – OR ELSE!

For me, Trump’s inaugural speech was Hitler-esque. Dark, foreboding, fist-pumping, military might-extolling, self-aggrandizing, self-idolizing … maniacal. I’d never read or heard an inaugural speech where America, the land of George Washington and Mrs. Tirella!, was painted in such ugly terms – “American carnage” and “tombstones” stretching from sea to shining sea! No wonder wife Melania chooses to live in NYC – and keep her little boy safe by her side. To live with such a sick man always peering into the abyss (or is it just a pose, a con so that Trump can trash America only to lay claim that he saved her? ), a husband with such a soul-shrivelling world view, dipped in Trump gold!, is too much! I predict Mrs. Donald Trump will be a sexed-up version of the late Mrs. Harry Truman: No thanks, White House, I pass! I’ll live somewhere else. Mrs. Truman was the epitome of post-WW II frumpiness; Mrs. Trump is the epitome of 21st century foxiness. But they’re cut from the same cloth: at heart, small town girls freaked out by the prospect of living in the hub of the world’s Super Power. War. Peace. Laws of the land. It all begins with the stroke of the Presidential pen. Scary, for some people.

Funny, but here on Ward Street these past couple of days, it felt like the kind of America Donald Trump painted in his inaugural speech. Very different from the Ward Street my mom walked down as a young girl with her Polish mother as they made their way to their Polish church, Our Lady of Czetchowa, a church that still stands and which I can see from my kitchen window …

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These days Ward Street is Heroin/drug Central of Worcester. Last year I wrote about the big drug bust next door (complete with confiscated cash –  40K! – and weapons – machine gun!!!) But we’ve got the low-level drug runners, too, here in our ‘hood: Kids (usually boys) 15 and 16 years old who hop on to their beat up bikes to pedal to our inner-city backyards to do drug deals. In like 5 seconds! These kids don’t live in our houses, just use our backyards as office space! – out of the way, hidden places to sell packets of heroin. A quick sale. Money exchanged for smack. Then they put their ear buds back into their ears and  hop on to their bikes and pedal away wicked fast! The deal goes down in seconds!

A few days ago I saw such a speedy transaction occur in the yard adjacent to ours. The kids, both boys, about 16 or 17 years old, were there during school hours. They had come on their bikes and I had come upon them! They looked and acted hard and business-like in a way many of our neighborhood kids don’t look and act. Lots of kids in my neighborhood are sweet, skinny, sad, fun loving. They’ll smile at you and tell you about their little adventures or pets. But these two kids? Uh uh. It was so easy to see.

One of the kids looked surprised and miffed to notice me at the periphery of his deal. The other kid, scrawny and tall, looked frightening in his hardness. When he saw me, he unzipped the front of his thin jacket and his hand went to a shirt pocket. I thought: He’s going to shoot me now.

So I chatted him up. Played the un-hip, oblivious middle-aged lady. The box that society puts you in.

“Don’t be afraid of my dogs! They’re friendly!” I said, smiling.

With a cold, dead-already face, making perfect eye contact with me, he said, direct and serious: “I’m not afraid.”

Chilling.

A day later I saw the  same kid, his pale ghoulish face smiling as he rode away lickety split on his bike, being chased by a police cruiser in the middle of our downtown. The cruiser’s siren was off because it was the middle of the afternoon, but all its lights were pulsating.

The kid was in the middle of a gang of kids – 20 or more youths – all on bicycles! Three or four of them wore Halloween masks, pale, scowling ghost masks that covered their entire faces. Lurid and other worldy… Four or five of them wore cotton bandanas over their faces – right up to their eyes – so you couldn’t see their features. They looked like they had rolled straight out of some sci-fi Western! But they weren’t galloping through Dodge on horses – instead they were riding, herd-like and hard, on our Main Street, yards away from Worcester City Hall, on ramshackle bikes! Laughing! Free! Most likely – at least a few of them – armed!

I was mesmerized by this dystopian image coming straight at me (I was in my car driving by the Hanover Theatre), straight out of the Donald Trump playbook. I pulled over and the group of kids – they filled the entire street – rode past me. They were laughing and talking easily among themselves, as the police cruiser chased them. I saw and heard my ghoulish kid barking out something to the other youths. He was smiling. High on an adrenalin high. He felt safe – and cocky – in the herd.

Had they just robbed somebody? Mixed it up with another bandana-, mask-wearing group of kids? Or were the cops just pursuing one kid? – a definite challenge when he’s in a large pack of kids, all on bicycles. Bikes are the perfect getaway vehicle – they  can easily go up and down one-way streets, go off and on sidewalks, sail through back yards and city parks, be carried up flights of stairs and stashed in apartments …

As I watched this wild little spectacle, I saw how these kids showed ZERO fear. They acted like outlaws! And like their Wild West counterparts, they  were indeed misfits – unhealthy outsiders, bedraggled and maybe unloved – still riding to their next adventure. With a few firearms thrown in for good measure.

The herd sailed right by me, then the police cruiser.

I found myself rooting for the kids. Their nihilism was so honest! They were America … America’s underbelly. Her lack of love for her poor, especially her poor children. One in five kids go hungry in America! That means Worcester, too. … The Worcester factory jobs are gone for their un-skilled parents – men and women who read at the third or fourth grade level. Minimum wage jobs don’t begin to pay all the bills. Parents feel trapped, go MIA. Our public schools sometimes become holding pens for these kids, a safe place to eat govt funded, free breakfast and lunch and, sometimes, a place to rest or sleep, if there’s violence/drugs in the family.

Trump’s America! The one he says he wants to save! Here in Worcester! Here on our Ward Street and Main Street!

His solution to a deep, generation-spanning societal ill, often sealed with depression, PTSD or other mental illnesses? More police. Good paying jobs.

I don’t think two –  or even three – Worcester police cruisers chasing the masked kids through our downtown would have changed the narrative. Saved the kids.

Maybe good paying, WPA type infrastructure jobs would help. Young people or their parents working on rebuilding our bridges and highways a la Franklin D. Roosevelt for good pay … Yes, that may make things better. So that our families, instead of developers or investors, can buy and live in the three deckers in our  old blue collar neighborhoods. Like it used to be on Ward Street, Perry Ave, Endicott and Sterling streets – all over lower Veron Hill and Green Island! Homeownership 101. The rhythm in all our Gateway Cities for most of the 20th century. The American Dream!

Trump is right: The global economy has left behind thousands and thousands of neighborhoods like mine. Millions of working-age adults who live in them! I don’t believe in all the Moral Majority crap: poor families are Godless and gone to pot – that’s why their neighborhoods are “bad.” Most parents in my neighborhood try to love their kids – I see their love displayed daily, despite the harsh circumstances! – but the pressures keep mounting on them –  from all sides… . Families implode.

Good paying jobs for our people will help. Tremendously, to use a Trumpian word!

Maybe the Donald is onto something. If only he’d drop all his nefarious baggage…

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Fashion

Steve M.’s columns – always in style!

InCity Book Review

Too Dumb to Fail

By Matt K. Lewis

Reviewed by Steven R. Maher

This book, “Too Dumb to Fail,” subtitled “How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections (and How It Can Reclaim its Conservative Roots),” displays the Republican establishment’s mindset as presumptive nominee Donald Trump gears up for the general election. The book’s major flaws are it ignores the catastrophic Presidency of George W. Bush as the main reason for the Republican party’s current predicament, excludes how the party’s business elites deindustrialized America in pursuit of profit (giving rise to Trump), and how “supply side” economics drowned the country in red ink.

Published in January 2016, five months ago as this review is being written, the book’s title is derived from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail,” about the financial crisis of 2008.

Supply Side economics

Ronald Reagan emerges as the hero of this narrative. Lewis paints a picture of Reagan that some will find unrecognizable. Under Lewis’ narrative, Reagan was an intellectual, deeply read in history and economics, who cleverly concealed his in-depth knowledge of political issues behind an “everyman” facade. He even cites a Saturday Night Live skit portraying Reagan in this fashion.

Lewis credits the late Congressman and NFL star quarterback Jack Kemp with converting Reagan to “supply side economics.” Under this theory, tax cuts pay for themselves, spurring economic activity and broadening the tax base. “Previously, Reagan, like the entire GOP, had been a ‘green eyeshade party’ – pessimistic bean counters worried about deficits and balanced budgets,” writes Lewis. In practice, under Reagan and George W. Bush, supply side economics led to trillions of dollars in deficits and the income inequalities which has shrunk the middle class and given rise to Donald Trump’s economic populist candidacy.

It is notable that two Presidents who put balancing budgets above tax cuts for the wealthy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bill Clinton, had economic booms during their second terms. Americans were much better off with the ‘green eyeshade party’ running the country than the supply side crowd.

If Reagan is the hero of the story, writes Lewis: “[T]here are villains such as Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, Scam-PACs [political action committees set up to defraud donors], and others who are (in my view) moving us in the wrong direction.”

The Vultures

In his analysis of how the GOP went wrong, Lewis saw the Republicans making the South their political stronghold by appealing to the racist inclinations of white Southerners as the start of the decline. He leaves out, of course, Reagan’s announcement of his 1980 Presidential candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan. In a chapter entitled “The Vultures,” he goes over how the GOP “made the mistake of building up, or reflexively defending” hucksters such as “Joe the Plumber,” who tried to monetize his 15 minutes of fame questioning candidate Barack Obama; George Zimmerman, who shot to death the teenage African-American Trayvon Martin; and Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who was glamorized by the GOP for refusing to pay the federal government over grazing rights, until Bundy made several racist remarks about African-Americans.

America’s changing demographics appear to trouble the author of “Too Dumb to Fail” most. He writes that the natural adherents of the Republican Party, white male voters, are rapidly decreasing as a percentage of the over-all electorate. He writes that Republican Presidential candidates should be trying to expand their party base by appealing to Latinos and African-Americans. Donald Trump’s negative ratings among these two groups is currently in the stratosphere, hovering above 80%. Short of resurrecting Martin Luther King or Cesar Chavez to be his running mate, Trump’s practice of attacking minority voters is likely to doom his White House ambitions.

Lewis ends his book by urging readers to get involved in Republican politics as bit players, self-educating themselves the way Reagan did, and support the billionaire Koch brothers (yes, those Koch brothers), who have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns at all levels, and received afterwards legislation favorable to their financial interests.

InCity Voices

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders comes to North High School January 2

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Kudos to Worcester’s North High School students, staff and the City of Worcester!

By Gordon Davis

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is coming to North High School January 2.

This is a good thing for North High School and Worcester. Although it is not quite on the level of President Obama visiting Worcester Technical High School on graduation day, this is a very big deal!

I cannot say I agree with U.S. Senator Sanders on everything, but I agree that the excesses of capitalism need mitigation. Mr. Sanders, who represents Vermont and is an Independent who leans social/progressive Democrat, is trying to reduce the economic disparities of the American profit system in order to save it from itself. Although he thinks this is revolutionary, it is not. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the New Deal in the 1930s to save capitalism from collapsing in a crisis similar to the Great American Recession of 2008.  Saving capitalism is almost a traditional or conservative political agenda.

I disagree with Mr. Sanders in that I do not think the profits system, economic disparities, and their superstructure of racism should be saved. Generation after generation, we go through an economic crisis of one sort or another. It is time we had a system where American corporations are not legal persons and money is not speech.

Getting back to the issues of Senator’s Sanders visit to North High School: For years North High students have been the butt of color-blind racism. I remember when the old North High School on Salisbury Street was closed and the kids from the East Side had to go to a remodeled middle school building, the former Harrington Way Junior School.  Students and families on this side of our city did not have a new high school for 100 years!

In the 1990s the City of Worcester had an opportunity to build a new high school. There was a discussion whether to build a New North High School or a new vocational school. Some people suggested that the two high schools be combined. This discussion did not go far, as many of the Worcester Voke Alums seemed to look down on the students from North High as not quite as good as the Voke students. I have no other explanation for not combining the two schools except a sort of color blind racism.

Even after the new North High School was built, I remember Worcester City Councilor Konstantina (Konnie) Lukes complained about the bad kids at North High School. She quipped: “Maybe it was not a new building that they needed.” I am even more upset that some of the teachers have taken the attitude of the need for full-time Worcester police officers in the Worcester Public Schools because of the “bad” kids. The hurtful words of the Marine who headed up JROTC comes to mind. Even the EAW says that the teachers need police protection because of bad students. All of this is hurtful and discouraging to the students. 

Our children are no different than children elsewhere. I think color blind racism is a factor behind these comments and policies.

Kudos to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders for choosing to come to this inner-city school whose students have in many ways been emotionally and verbally abused by so many!

May this Bernie Sanders event be the start of a great new year for North High School, all of the children in Worcester, the City of Worcester – and Bernie Sanders!

Green Island Grrrl, Rosalie's Blog

This is the way Massachusetts makes “welfare queens”!

By Rosalie Tirella

Mary Rondeau lives at 48 Ward St., Worcester. She has her section 8 housing voucher which means free rent for the rest of her life. She has the rest of the Massachusetts package: food stamps, fuel assistance, free health insurance, free electricity. Mary goes to food pantries to supplement her free food stamp food. You would think with all the heavy lifting done for Mary by the state and federal governments, by society, that Mary Rondeau would be grateful, humble even – or at least have more than enough time on her hands to have been able to raise an outstanding son. Or at least a non-criminal one. Nope. The elderly landlord has told me Mary’s son has been in prison. So Mary’s progeny, courtesy of the American taxpayer, has been taken care of, too: fed, clothed, sheltered, healed when sick. For Free, on the taxpayers’ dime.

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Here is Mary Rondeau’s car, underwritten by the American taxpayer! Mary usually parks over the yellow line into the other parking space because she feels the tenant on the other side “can’t drive” and she doesn’t want her car nicked, even though the other tenant can barely get into his/her car with Mary’s car parked two inches away from the driver’s car door. It is Mary’s societal FREE RIDE that has enabled her to feel entitled to break this rule and flout dozens of other rules society has set up so we can all live under the same sky without slitting each other’s gizzards.

Having her entire life underwritten by the American taxpayer has ENABLED Mary to develop ZERO SOCIAL SKILLS FOR LIVING IN A CIVILIZED SOCIETY. Mary cheating the government big time gives her the feeling that she is ENTITLED TO CHEAT IN OTHER WAYS, BREAK OTHER RULES. It’s the mental health version of THE BROKEN WINDOW THEORY. All niceties thrown out the window – the broken window!

But I’m getting ahead of myself!

Mary Rondeau gets a Free Ride through life, while the rest of us bust our humps to pay our bills, our mortgages, etc, because she has asthma…is disabled. This enables her to get her package plus a monthly disability check from the government.

But if Mary Rondeau has asthma, then why does Mary Rondeau, $$ courtesy of the Worcester/Massachusetts/American taxpayer, buy and smoke weed incessantly? LIKE ALL THE TIME. I mean the entire three decker front hall and other apartments reek of marijuana. How can some one with debilitating asthma, asthma which she lists as the reason for her inability to work/pay her bills, the reason she gets her life paid for by the government, smoke so much freaking pot? Even during my hippy UMass undergrad days the proud Mary didn’t keep rolling the way it rolls at Mary Rondeau’s! Mary’s pot bought and paid for by the American taxpayer!!

Mary vacations three weeks each winter in warm, sunny Florida, courtesy of the taxpayer. I guess it’s possible to skip Worcester’s brutal winters if you’re not tied to a job, have all your bills paid by someone else (us!!) AND if you have a boarder who pays you rent under the table, which Mary does. The boarder furnishes Mary with fun money! The boarder does this by working her 2 or 3 low-paying jobs ALL THE TIME TO PAY MARY RENT. The boarder works hard to also pay for her cute little car, clothing and her little cat, which she adores and is proud to say she has paid $159 in veterinarian bills to get healthy (the kitten was a rescue). This is what my late mom and all working poor folks do: WORK THEIR TAILS OFF JUST TO HAVE THE BASICS and a teeny bit extra. I give props to this lady because, outside of being a hallway smoker, which Mary demands, she does everything that every able-bodied welfare cheat should do but refuses to do: WORK HER ASS OFF, BUY CLOTHING, BUY GROCERIES, OWN A CAR, PAY RENT, contribute to society … keep it all going and best of all, BE PROUD TO BE ABLE TO KEEP IT ALL GOING. Just like my late mom was … to FEEL ENGAGED because to feel engaged IN LIFE is to feel FREE.

Back to Mary: This exemplary boarder enables Mary to be a bigger welfare cheat: Run and profit from a side business, the boarding house biz, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

Just so you all don’t scream racism: MARY IS WHITE, THE COLOR OF MOST FOLKS receiving government assistance. Not all of these folks are blatant cheaters, robbers really, like Mary Rondeau. Lots are tiny, frail, malnourished kids … and the kids break my heart because they are usually saddled with loser parents like Mary!

Then what?

The cycle perpetuates itself, America’s under class grows bigger by the minute! Ignorance supplants education, fear trumps hope, a life lived fully becomes mere existence – sitting in front of the TV set smoking weed .., AND THINKING THAT IS OK, NORMAL, ACCEPTED BY SOCIETY.

Because it is.

Mary “lets” – and I put the word “lets” in quotation marks because Mary feels she is entitled to entitle someone else – her boyfriend park his car on the sidewalk by 48 Ward Street – two wheels on the sidewalk EVERY DAY!!! Two wheels on the sidewalk, practically up against the bushes when everyone else in the neighborhood parks in parking lots or on the street – all four wheels of their vehicles touching Ward Street. Here’s a picture of his car:

CAM00620

Now why do all of us here on Ward Street, old and young, black and white, handicapped and able bodied, sober and buzzed, smart and befuddled, cocky and meek, follow the parking laws and rules of Worcester? Why do all of us park in designated parking lots/spots or on the street, all 4 wheels on Ward Street?

Because we don’t feel we have the privilege, are entitled, to park whichever damn way pleases us.

This would mean chaos in a Worcester inner-city neighborhood that has experienced guns, shootings and more this summer. Maybe Mary feels THE HOOD IS GOING TO HELL IN A BREADBASKET anyways so WHO gives a shit ABOUT THE PARKING?!

WE DO,Mary!

Parking in designated parking zones/spaces is part of living in a city, in a city governed by laws and rules created to ensure that every citizen can lead his/her daily life. If people see you flout the laws, they’ll jump in, too. It’s human nature. Cops call it the BROKEN WINDOW THEORY, that, theoretically, if a broken window in the ‘hood is allowed to go un-repaired, then people think its ok to break another window. After that happens, it feels normal to dump garbage on the street under the broken window, or speed down the street with the garbage and busted panes because … look at the god forsaken street! …who really cares about this dumpy Worcester neighborhood, anyways?!

BUT IF YOU ARE LIKE MARY RONDEAU – NOT A FUNCTIONING ADULT, NOT A CONTRIBUTING MEMBER OF SOCIETY – your values are skewed. You do whatever the fuck you want to do – and your friends do, too! Then others follow your twisted lead and our urban core grows meaner.

Questions: Why does someone who snoops into the hood’s business – we’re talking Mary Rondeau here – SHUT HER MOUTH AND NOT DIAL 911 WHEN SHE SEES SEVERAL KIDS NEXT DOOR WITH GUNS?

Because Mary is a coward.

How does her boarder, a smoker who smokes in the community hallway because Mary is ok with her place smelling like marijuana but not ok with her place reeking of cigarette smoke, see a gun lying on the front stair to the building and not dial 911? Just walk over it and go to Mary’s apartment to … smoke OUTSIDE the apartment?

Because she has given up on the neighborhood.

Which is a tragedy because she is doing everything (except for the hallway smoking) right! Society should feel safe for a woman who has fulfilled her side of the social compact!

But the rules don’t apply to Mary and she’s made money, her living!, by flouting the rules! And she’s proud of the fact, proud that her tiny – actually pretty pathetic – life, can purr on – that she, unlike the rest of us, is immune to job loss, higher rents, the rising cost of food or natural gas, inflation, deflation … the everyday worries and bumps and bruises of every day life.

Mary Rondeau is a queen.

An American welfare queen.

***********

At the check-out line at the Dollar Store

Writing the above reminds me of the below!!:

I was at the check-out line of a local Dollar Store waiting to pay for a bunch of doggy toys for Lilac (my new 6 month old hound mix). The salesman at PetCo said: Why buy our pricier plush doggy toys for your Lilac when she rips them up in 20 minutes? Go to the Dollar Store and buy them there! Just remove plastic eyes and other small parts before letting your dog play with them.

So there I was, in the Dollar Store buying toys for Lilac, while Jett, my husky mix, and she waited in my car.

It was a warm day and the air conditioning was not on in my car now that I was out of it, in a store.

I found myself, at the check out line, behind two people, a middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman. They had about a billion autumn doo-dads, knick knacks, paper plates, wall hangings, you name it. They had just paid for, with their EBT/welfare card, some Dollar Store food. Now, with cash, they were paying for all that crap.

I thought: Here I am buying five $1 dog toys with cash I earned cuz that’s all I can afford. Here are these two, with their welfare card, buying crap food and with cash, $32 worth of paper frou frou goods! 32 dollars worth of plastic gourds and orange napkins and paper maple leaves … while I – and other blue collar working folks – would NOT – could not! – SQUANDER 32 bucks on crap.

Before they were about to be rung out I hinted that I had two dogs in the car, it was warm and I just wanted to get a few things. I’d be out of their way in two seconds.

Not happening. The lady, heavy, the fat falling over her pants waist band said: Dogs? Well, I got my dog waiting! She said this while winking at the guy, her husband. He smiled back stupidly. She was saying: WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT YOUR DOGS? I’LL JUST TAKE MY SWEET TIME … And she proceeded to give every teeny doodad, every paper good to the cashier who looked closely at each paper product, as if inspecting it, and smiled before she rang up each one …

Angry at myself and them, fretting about my dogs in the car, I blurted out: Well, at least one of my dogs is smarter than your dog!!!! (I meant Lilac, of course)

The woman dropped her jaw.

Her husband looked at me and said ONLY IN AMERICA.

Then I said, to the woman, who was white: ONLY IN AMERICA WOULD I SEE TWO ABLE BODIED ADULTS in the middle of the day not working, ON FOOD STAMPS but buying, and I bit my tongue, but still said: ALL THIS crap!

That’s right! she said. On welfare for 38 years!!!

We were mixin’ it up at the Dollar Store!

She had said 38 years so defiantly that it felt like being hit in the head with a hammer.

She looked to be in her early 50s.

I said: My late mom worked her whole life for minimum wage. For decades!! Something is wrong in America! The system is broken!!!!

Then the woman behind me in the check outline chimed in! She said: I worked my whole life, too! I’m 54. I worked 20 years in one job. Then five years in another. I was always glad to have a job. Now I’m retired. I’m glad I’m retired.

She had about four items she was checking out at the Dollar Store.

I looked at her: she was wearing the tiredest clothes. Her face was all red and mottled and rough, half her teeth were gone, one of her eyes was red and swollen shut,the other eye half open. She was smiling, like some Dollar Store Quasimodo.

Here was my ally! Here was a fellow worker bee! Another American who believed in the good old American work ethic! We were a team!

YES! I said, looking at her, smiling as warmly as I could. Yes! I wanted to grab her hand and squeeze it tightly.

The woman looked so beat up…the way my late mom did (without the eye problems) at the end of her working life!

It is wrong that a person who worked hard in America should look this way, courtesy of the American economy … end up so broken down for contributing to society, working a job.

It is wrong that Dollar Store patron #1 has sucked off the Massachusetts welfare state for years, just like Mary Rondeau, and has no desire to achieve self-sufficiency. EVER.

Why should she?

She was able to buy way more stuff at the Dollar Store than me and D.S. patron #2!!

Cockeyed American economy!!!!

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The Twinkie Manifesto

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Great Op-Ed from The New York Times’  Paul Krugman – R. T.
 
The Twinkie Manifesto
By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times
Published: November 19, 2012

The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.

Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s – the Twinkie Era – do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity without demeaning workers and coddling the rich.

Consider the question of tax rates on the wealthy. The modern American right, and much of the alleged center, is obsessed with the notion that low tax rates at the top are essential to growth. Remember that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, charged with producing a plan to curb deficits, nonetheless somehow ended up listing “lower tax rates” as a “guiding principle.”

Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.

Nor were high taxes the only burden wealthy businessmen had to bear. They also faced a labor force with a degree of bargaining power hard to imagine today. In 1955 roughly a third of American workers were union members. In the biggest companies, management and labor bargained as equals, so much so that it was common to talk about corporations serving an array of “stakeholders” as opposed to merely serving stockholders. … “

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