Category: General

Mr Nemeth, in Sunday’s T&G:

When the South Middlesex Opportunity Council took over PIP in early 2004, it unveiled a master plan: Downsize and eventually relocate the wet shelter on Main Street — a move critics have demanded all along — and serve recovering clients in five halfway houses and lodging facilities. That plan ran into vociferous opposition, fueled by fear, distrust and self-serving politicians. The turning point came when state Sen. Harriette L. Chandler abruptly stripped $200,000 in state funding she helped to secure for a group home for women SMOC planned to open on Catharine Street after she learned the facility would be shifted to a middle-class neighborhood on the West Side. Such punitive action by a nice liberal Democrat made attacks on social service providers not only acceptable, but respectable. It was no longer just neighborhood demagogues, such as Billy Breault, who went after SMOC.

Then there was the Mayor’s Social Service Task Force with proposals on how to lighten the burden social services place on the city. The Research Bureau issued a report with the same aim. The city conducted a silly, and ultimately fruitless, billboard campaign to eradicate panhandling. There is now a bill in the Legislature to regulate social service providers. However, none of these reforms calls for viable action to eradicate the source of the problem: homelessness, hunger, substance abuse and mental illness.

Rep. Robert P. Spellane, co-chairman of the mayor’s task force, chimed in with blatant fear-mongering. He announced that PIP seriously endangered the Main South neighborhood because 13 convicted sex offenders are being “warehoused” at the shelter. SMOC refuted the charge as “irresponsible,” which did not stop Mr. Breault from parroting them on television.

The message of Real Solutions has been that open discussion about our responsibility to the poor, and the pros and cons of social service programs, has been derailed by “fear, distrust and self-serving politicians.” Nice to see a similar opinion in print.

On an unrelated note, check out this ad featuring Niniane.

Some weeks Worcester Magazine makes such strides at transcending print that I don’t even italicize their name.

But this week, there was a lot of backsliding in regards to both paper and pixels.

Grabbing WoMag out of a newsrack on Main St, the first thing I noticed is how thin it’s getting. It’s about the size of the free weekly in Scranton.

The second thing I noticed: no Blog Log! To get the impact of this, you should know that WoMag’s website is totally 20th-century. No comments on articles, no permalinks to items in “Worcesteria.” Finding things in the archives is a chore. They could install WordPress and have an intern spend two hours each Wednesday cutting and pasting text, and they’d have a hipper website without spending a dime. So for WoMag, the Blog Log was their big connection to that Great Future Home of Journalism, the Internet. But this week, even the print-only InCity Times, with piles of URLs in the articles, was more net-friendly than WoMag.

Finally, they ran Zippy real small, in a box amidst the classifieds. If you’re willing to let the Pinhead spread out, he comes out so much better in print than on the screen.

Today I was telling NB about the newsblog h2otown, which seems to rule over the media landscape of little Watertown, Mass. She asked why Worcester Indymedia couldn’t accomplish something similar. I think it’s because the IMC site is run on sf-active, which makes contribution, adminstration, and navigation much harder than they need to be. I’m much happier blogging about the Golden Pizza fire on the obscure Pie and Coffee than on Worcester IMC, because it takes so damn long to post and moderate the article on IMC. IMC has many more readers, but for a minor post like this the effort is not worth it.

Weeks like this, I feel sure some entrepreneur will step in to rescue Worcester from the journalistic doldrums. It never happens. I guess I’m out of touch.

Here are three great things in Worcester.

The first: you can buy a whole, frozen durian! In fact, you can buy it at a store about 100 yards from my house.
Continue reading “Happy things in Worcester”

Last fall I criticized the Mayor’s Social Service Task Force Report because:

First, it doesn’t have a plan for getting beyond the current hostility between social service agencies and neighborhood groups.

Second, it provides no incentive for social service agencies to follow the “best practices” it outlines for siting social service programs.

This week, the City Council voted 8-0 to endorse the report. (City Solicitor David M. Moore convinced them that endorsing the report would not violate the law, despite clear indications that this report will get the city sued at some point.)

At a Council meeting last fall, I brought my concerns to the Council. They didn’t seem to think the report was vague at all, and thought that it was practically a Roadmap to Peace between agencies and property owners’ groups.

This morning, the T&G reports on last night’s meeting between the agency SMOC and some Main South people.

Despite the presence of “five city councilors,” “the third in a series of meetings between neighbors and SMOC” was “the most acrimonious yet.”

There’s a bumper sticker that says: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

The Worcester City Council needs to put out its own bumper sticker: “There is no way to peace.”

The idea that minimum wages lead to unemployment is so ingrained in a lot of people who think they’re intelligent about economics that it’s essentially taken on faith from first principles rather than backed up with research. This article in the Knoxville News Sentinel isn’t a controlled scientific study, but it does present some data that suggest that a higher minimum wage correlates with lower unemployment and a healthier economy in general. Continue reading “Minimum Wage”

Notes for Indymedia on the Beyond Broadcast conference.
Continue reading “Notes on Beyond Broadcast”

Real Solutions unveiled their new lawn signs today with a kick-off event at Newton Square.

The goal of Real Solutions is to “change the climate” of hostility towards the poor in Worcester. Among the signs they see of this climate are the city’s anti-panhandling campaign, the hatefulness of some views expressed on social program siting, and the city’s empty anti-PIP rhetoric.

The lawn signs say “Target Povery not People” and “We’re all Responsible.” (The capitalization here is a little weird, but at least it’s not as bad as the misspelled KNIT Worcester “Site Responsible” signs.)

Four people spoke at the event: Newton Square residents Barbara Kohin, John Ford, and Adria Bernardi, and Rev. Robert Batchelder of the Worcester Area Missionary Society.

Rev. Batchelder spoke of the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which sheltered Jews during WWII. When the police asked if the town was sheltering Jews, the minister of the town is said to have replied, “We don’t know any Jews. We only know men.” Rev. Batchelder said that Worcester should say we don’t know any deserving poor or undeserving poor, we don’t know any taxpayers or deadbeats, we only know people.

John Ford started by saying, “This issue to me is simple. It’s about social justice and compassion.” He then quoted Pope John Paul as saying that helping the poor is for the Christian not mere charity, but an encounter with Christ in the faces of the poor.

One of the people at the press conference told me that state Rep. Bob Spillane drove by, and when he saw the signs shook his head unhappily.

If you live in Worcester and want a sign for your lawn, e-mail pieandcoffee@gmail.com.

Postscript

Lead of T&G article:

While the majority of city residents are not against social services, the debate in Worcester is dominated by the louder voices of extremists, according to Real Solutions member Michael Benedetti.

Well, I never said the majority of people in the city are not against social services. I think I said something like: the majority of people in the city are not motivated by fear and ignorance, on this issue. But whatever. Perfect example of why, when speaking to the press with the expectation of being quoted briefly, you should repeat one or two sound bites over and over.