​
January 29th , 2016 Back in Texas

Imagine a shelter without churches, you could go to this shelter and have full constitutional rights, regardless of creed.  Back in Texas, no less a dreamer than Ross Perot imagined something like this. The good businessmen of Dallas agreed.  No more will we pawn of the welfare clause of our constitution to the churches when it come to the poorest of our poor.  
    No longer will our homeless be prey to the church staffers, devil's soldiers from god, an elite trained crew of the minions determined to cram the name of Jesus down your throat. Who abuse and humiliate the weakest among them.  No longer would the fearful, sunburned, dehydrated, frightened homeless person covered with ant bites be greeted with shame from God on high for the conditions of his skin!  Back in Texas, Ross Perot had a better idea -
build a shelter where the homeless could face a compassionate, professional with a code of ethics to follow.  There would be effective recourse constitutionally guaranteed fairness that the churched could never provide. 
Well, Hallelujah, god dog, we thought! We danced in the streets, except for one little thing.  You had to prove you were homeless.  So dig this, here's what they did. You show up shivering, like a mother-lover (it’s a wet cold in texas) and to prove you're homeless. 

==============================================================

Next Edition of Back in Texas:
    Will cover 20 years of false diagnosis and abuse in Texas Mental Health care system, costing our taxpayers $100,000 for nothing. Beta at Stout clinic says insane.
Future Columns of Back in Texas:
    May cover Chief David Brown - an 80% drop in police brutality complaints.  But with death threat from cop unions all over the nation.  Bad cops are angry and quitting.  
    911 reforms: cussing 911 operators on tape and getting away with it.  Zoo calls
    Who knows maybe a Klan rally back in ‘87 where I was congratulated by a Republican judge in front of a black prosecutor and communist attorney for throwing horse shit on the Klan accidentally hitting a pig.  

===================================================

So you are crowded onto a bus
Sleet pouring through an open roof
To a chained in jail 8 freezing bumpy miles away where you have to listen to 20 minutes of catholic shit followed by 20 minutes or protestant shit, followed by 20 minutes of evangelical shit.  
Shivering coughing
January in Texas, swine flu
Everyone sick 
Everyone captive 
This was supposed to be a government run shelter.  
Where the fuck are we?
Herded into 
Gulping fast
Almost nothing to eat. 
Hurries, shoved deeper into the bowels of the churched dungeon
Down a dark hallway. 
Scared and scared to show it.  
Black, white, brown, together
All strangers
Angry at catholics
Protestants 
Evangelicals 
Gay and straight
Together homeless
Take off your clothes
You are locked in.
Put your clothes in that locker 
Move it! 
Move it!
40 men. 
8 showers
(slippery, wet and exciting contact unavoidable) 
Move it.
Move it. 
Coughing and scared
They hand you a robe and say shut up 
Mother-fucker lights out.  They bus you back in the morning, but don't give you the slip to prove you’re homeless. 
Ross Perot, this is Michael up in Denver.  How much blood has flowed down the drains at the union gospel mission on Irving Blvd.  
 
=================================================

Informal Note
    At senior support services will and Leonard grabbed at a phone, are heard on 911 telling me to hang up. Threatening to cut off the phone. Cornered me, couldn't let me out of their office.
          ALL FOR CALLING 911!    
The police come and I asked them to investigate esp the 911 tape of the 911 call to prove that I had been intimidated and that the 911 operator sided w/ those trying to grab the phone from me violently! Julie Romero knows what happened. I wanted a guy who had threatened to kill me for supporting Sanders to say it again proudly on my phone.
    But he never really wanted to kill me. The 911 operator got caught siding with people grabbing at my phone I told them don’t touch me.
Mike

===============================================

​    What we really need in this country is to socialize the real estate market.  This is an international problem faced by all wealthy nations. Under regulated capitalism, the real estate sector can not provide its products in an efficient manner because the contradictions of capitalism prevent free or fair market housing.  
    The ideal capitalist model cannot be achieved by a capitalist real estate market.  Why not? The answer is simpler than you think.  To create false value, inflated value, in the housing market, greedy capitalists employ a variety of measures, but one of the most important is to put a bottom on the housing market.  An artificial bottom to the housing market atop of which the great builders construct their house of cards.   
    While conservatives gripe about taxes the far bigger rip off and far bigger input to the U.S systems comes from false value accruing to the already wealthy is to wrest control of the home-ownership investment scam which is killing capitalism as we knew it and leaving us with perot-trump fascism.  Obamacare delayed the socializing of medicine, but it was a start.  
    Tiny homes, more intelligent housing codes that admit substandard and save lives (at least in cold cities like Denver) and all that will chip away at the false floor that lifts all home values, rents, cost of living, misery and inefficiency in a competitive world… dig? But that's just the beginning, when we pull out the rug the house of cards tumbles down and then we live affordably on the ruins of a stupid housing scam.
    Tel Aviv, in one of the most conservative right-wing nations on Earth. 
    Homeless people have the answers.  Always have.  Roommates, tiny homes, squatting, sharing, living and breathing and trying to pull the (false) bottom out of the real estate market.  All the homeless efforts at alternatives are met with restrictive laws, police brutality, unchecked homeless staffer brutality and the like.  
    When a shelter staffer causes such sick insecurity on the part of the homeless, it helps put a bottom on the housing market.  People will either camp out, die or lose toes because if the churches let shelters be a nice place to stay, it would take the bottom out of the housing market.  Just as surely as allowing tiny homes, urban camping, sub standardized dwellings if they are better-than nothing…. Dig? 
    If churches trained staffers to be more “christ like” people might opt out of the real estate market.  BUT the real estate market and our contributions are, for capitalists, the dues we must pay to be part of society.  No bums allowed, it would screw up the housing scam.  Socialize housing.  The only way we can reduce rampant inefficiency caused by mortgage and rent.  Renters pay the home owning sector whose home values climb artificially.  It like getting money in the mail.  Oh, and especially in Denver.  Cool move.  Be so hip and cool, people flock here, get high and pay whatever they have to to live in a cool place.  SO all the cool people who have lived, worked, and toked here for years can no longer afford to live in their own home town! 
    Let’s not blame the pot industry.  That's going nationwide and soon the pressure will be off the front-line states in the “drug” war.  But the problem with jacked up home prices won’t fade so easily. 
Prohibitive home prices brought half a million protestors to the streets. 

By JC

    Build a shelter where the homeless could face a compassionate, professional with a code of ethics to follow.  There would be effective recourse constitutionally guaranteed fairness that the churched could never provide. 
    Well, Hallelujah, god dog, we thought! We danced in the streets, except for one little thing.  You had to prove you were homeless.  So dig this, here's what they did. You show up shivering, like a mother-lover (it’s a wet cold in texas) and to prove you're homeless.


January 29th , 2016 Back in Texas

    Im some a shelter without churches, you could go to this shelter and have full constitutional rights.  Regardless of creed.  Back in Texas, no less a dreamer than Ross Perot imagined something like this.  The good businessmen of Dallas agreed.  No more will we pawn of the welfare clause of our constitution to the churches when it come to the poorest of our poor.  
    No wonder will our homeless be prey to the church staffers, devil's soldiers from god, an elite trained crew of the minions determined to cram the name of Jesus down your throat.  Who abused humiliate the weakest among them.  No longer- would the fearful, sunburned, dehydrated, frightened homeless person covered with ant bites be greeted with shame from God on high fo the conditions of his skin!  Back in Texas, Ross 
    He a nice place to stay, it would take the bottom out of the housing market.  Just as surely as allowing tiny homes, urban camping, sub standardized dwellings if they are better-than nothing…. Dig? 
    If churches trained staffers to be more “christ like” people might opt out of the real estate market.  BUT the real estate market and our contributions are, for capitalists, the dues we must pay to be part of society.  No bums allowed, it would screw up the housing scam.  Socialize housing.  The only way we can reduce rampant inefficiency caused by mortgage and rent.  Renters pay the homeowning sector whose home values climb artificially.  It like getting money in the mail.  Oh, and especially in Denver.  Cool move.  Be so hip and cool, people flock here, get high and pay whatever they have to to live in a cool place.  SO all the cool people who have lived, worked, and toked here for years can no longer afford to live in their own home town! 
    Let’s not blame the pot industry.  That's going nationwide and soon the pressure will be off the front-line states in the “drug” war.  But the problem with jacked up home prices won’t fade so easily.  
    Prohibitive home prices brought half a million protestors to the streets 
(can't read next line cut off) 
Tel Aviv, in one of the most conservative right-wing nations on Earth. 
    Homeless people have the answers.  Always have.  Roommates, tiny homes, squatting, sharing, living and breathing and trying to pull the (false) bottom out of the real estate market.  All the homeless efforts at alternatives are met with restrictive laws, police brutality, unchecked homeless staffer brutality and the like.  
    When a shelter staffer causes such sick insecurity on the part of the homeless, it helps put a bottom on the housing market.  People will either camp out, die or lose toes because if the churches let shelters (missing)
False value accruing to the already wealthy is to wrest control of the home-ownership investment scam which is killing capitalism as we knew it and leaving us with perot-trump fascism.  
Obamacare delayed the socializing of medicine, but it was a start.  
    Tiny homes, more intelligent housing codes that admit substandard and save lives (at least in cold cities like Denver) and all that will chip away at the false floor that lifts all home values, rents, cost of living, misery and inefficiency in a competitive world… dig? But that's just the beginning, when we pull out the rug the house of cards tumbles down and then we live affordably on the (missing) stupid housing scam.  
    What we really need in this country is to socialize the real estate market.  This is an international problem faced by all wealthy nations. Under regulated capitalism, the real estate sector can not provide its products in an efficient manner because the contradictions of capitalism prevent free or fair market housing.  
    The ideal capitalist model cannot be achieved by a capitalist real estate market.  Why not? 
    The answer is simpler than you think.  To create false value, inflated value, in the housing market, greedy capitalists employ a variety of measures, but one of the most important is to put a bottom of the housing market.  An artificial bottom to the housing market atop of which the great builders construct their house of cards.   
    While conservatives gripe about taxes the far bigger rip off and far bigger input to the U.S systems comes form 

​by Lance Cheslock

​  I’m  concerned about the epidemic of ordinances being passed across our country that aim to criminalize panhandling.  
    All across the nation, communities are passing laws that prohibit, restrict, or even require licenses for beggars or panhandlers.  Merchants are worried that nearby beggars will discourage tourism and deter their customer base.  Pedestrians are turned off or even threatened by the approach of a beggar. Parents worry about the safety risks posed to their children.  Now, my own community is considering an array of restrictions for beggars.
I feel uncomfortable at times when I encounter a panhandler.  At the end of one hard work week I went to the video store to rent a movie for my family.  Nearby a gentleman I did not recognize was begging for money.  I inwardly resented the intrusion into my peaceful evening’s journey, after a long week at La Puente.  
    After thinking about it, I realized that encountering a beggar makes me feel guilty about my own wealth and privilege in a world where so many are struggling to survive. Not a welcome thought when I’m trying to relax at the end of my day!  
What seems forgotten in all of this is that begging is often an act of desperation.  Many beggars view it is their last resort.  The roots of begging are tied to inescapable poverty and destitution.   The act of begging starts out as a horrific indignity.
    “The poor will be with us always,” we are told, and begging for alms is a sacred and universal practice as old as humanity itself.  Being poor is not a crime.  And asking for help should likewise not be criminalized.  Our society’s safety net is frail and tenuous for people who hit hard times.  Sometimes, the final safety net for someone is simply begging for help.  I cringe when I think that a person’s basic last resort is being taken away.
    Alan lives out in the country in an old mobile home, and works odd jobs to try to support his wife and kids.   They are a proud family, with Christian values.  Alan tries everything in his power to find work, but sometimes work is not forthcoming.  Near the end of a day, Alan wants to bring something home to feed his family.  He will sit for a couple of hours near Walmart, and hold a sign which says “Will work for food.”  
    I’ve talked to Alan on many occasions.  He knows he can have a meal at La Puente.   He and his family often stop by when they are in town.  He simply hopes his sign‘s message will bring him a few dollars, perhaps the opportunity to earn money, or a gift of some food.  I asked him what he does with the money he receives from panhandling.  Alan commented that he may buy food, or he may get some gas so he can use his truck to get to a job, or sometimes get medicine or other needs for his family.  “I spend it the same way I would spend a paycheck.”  Alan does not drink or smoke, a concern of pragmatic philanthropists.  When he’s at the very end of his resources, begging is his final resort.  
    When I talk to someone about my concern with the welfare and rights of beggars, the conversation usually turns to stories about all the “unworthy” folks that are pleading for help.  There’s the panhandler that was aggressive or abusive, the one that used the money to support their addiction, or the one who was not really that needy and used the ruse of being “poor” as a way to make a lot of money off of panhandling.  No doubt, many of these stories are true.
    Yet it seems that once someone has read about or experienced one “unworthy beggar” story, it becomes sufficient evidence to solidify the justification to never give to another beggar, so as not to be taken advantage of.   
    All this contributes to society’s critical regard towards beggars.  The undeserving panhandlers, in effect, are stealing from those who have no choice but to beg.  They are abusing the safety net meant for others, thereby cheating those with the greatest need.  Furthermore, their actions instill a cynicism in the hearts of those who might otherwise give.
    In Baghdad, a tribal leader named Laila owned a beautiful Arabian horse.  A tribesman from a neighboring village named Omar was eager to buy the horse.  He offered many camels in exchange for it, but Laila would not part with the animal.  This so angered Omar that he decided to get the horse by trickery.
Knowing that Laila would ride his horse along a certain road, he lay down beside the road disguised as a beggar who was very ill.  Now Laila was a kindhearted man so when he saw the beggar he felt sorry for him, dismounted and offered to carry him to an inn.
    “Alas!” cried the beggar, “I have been without food for days and do not have the energy to rise.”  So Laila tenderly lifted the man onto his horse, meaning to mount after him.  No sooner was the disguised beggar in the saddle than he galloped away with Laila giving chase on foot, shouting to him to stop.  After Omar had put a safe distance between his pursuer and himself, he stopped and turned around.  
   “You have stolen my horse,” shouted Laila.  “I have one request to make of you.”
   “What is it?”  Omar shouted back.
   “That you tell no one how you came into possession of the horse.”
   “Why not?”
    “Because some day a man who is really ill may be lying be the roadside and, if your trick is known, people will pass him by and fail to help him.”                       Anthony DeMello         
    Helping someone in need is a spiritual act.  
The intent of giving to a beggar is to practice compassion.
As uncomfortable as it may be, perhaps it is important to have reminders that there are people suffering in our midst, even if we are unable or unwilling to help them.  It provides an opportunity for compassion to take root and grow in a society so terribly afraid of being taken advantage of.
To see someone begging should stir up the question,” Why is there poverty?”  When considered thoughtfully, the reasons for poverty are enormously complex, encompassing culture, education, birthrights, genetics, situational circumstances, personal choices, and much, much more.  The victims of poverty usually only have a limited perspective on how they arrived in their state.  Desperation can cloud logic and understanding.  And if a desperate person is not allowed to beg to meet his need, then will he turn to something more desperate?
    The late Fiorello LaGuardia, the longtime New York mayor for whom the airport was named, first served as a police judge.  And there came before his court one day a sad-eyed man accused of stealing a loaf of bread. The man said he'd had to steal; his family had nothing to eat.
    And LaGuardia said:  The law made no allowances for that; the man would have to pay a $10 fine.
  But then LaGuardia fined every person in the courtroom 50 cents "for living in a city where a man has to steal in order to feed his family."
   When the fines were collected, there was enough to pay the defendant’s fine...with some change left over for the next few loaves.
The next time you encounter a beggar, if you want to help and have a dollar, consider it a spiritual exercise. Practice compassion. If you have nothing to give, don’t avert your eyes, but offer a smile or a hello.  Beggars can feel they are invisible in a sea of people. And if you don’t want to help, just say no.  Given that I’m a panhandler of sorts for La Puente, please know that it won’t be taken personally!
    Lance Cheslock is executive director of La Puente, a major nonprofit organization providing shelter, food, clothing and other services to people experiencing poverty and homelessness in Alamosa and the San Luis Valley, CO.

​by AER Guyton

​    Last week’s “Right to Rest Act” turned down by the Colorado State legislature, also know of as the ‘homeless bill of rights’, typifies the problems surrounding a much larger issue at hand: Ghettoization as a post-9/11 national security policy.

       The 1970’s higher profile FBI COINTELPRO style
    assassinations of liberation leaders and other public figures
    are less common these days. Instead, there is a seemingly
    revised policy promoting disappearances – ghettoization
    instead of actual incarceration, internment camps, or
    assassinations. The 'Disappeared' is a term used in
    Argentina, Guatemala, and in Mexico, used to describe
    those persons whose deaths have been covered up by 
    right-wing governmental forces, as is the case with the 46
    students who recently disappeared in Guadalajara. 
      American disappearances are also occurring, but include 
    the recently impoverished middle class and the millions of
    recently created homeless people - shelter dwellers, car
    campers, couch surfers, tenters, perennial house guests -
    whose epidemic proportions throughout the states 26
    required Los Angeles' Mayor to recently declare a state of
    emergency.27 These ghettoized targets are also effectively
    ‘disappearing’ - from access to telecommunication, mail,
    work, police protection, voter polls, shelter, rest, and social
    networks as they also disappear from a political base
    previously known of as democracy.28

    Today’s transparently lethal combination of the USA PATRIOT Act, the PRECISE Act, the PRISM Act, and the so-called revised 2015 FREEDOM Act, garnished by annual Presidential Executive Orders reaffirming a state of 
national emergency, amplifies those same COINTELPRO techniques by creating a National Intelligence network of federal, regional, state, and local agencies and law enforcement officers tasked with performing identical socio-pathological acts of political violence against independent thinkers and leftists.
    The specific method that spreads this gestapo-style criminalization phenomena across the country is linked to an ongoing national security fear baiting campaign, cleverly disguised as a hunt for domestic terrorists. Local police, State Troopers, the FBI, and Joint Terrorism Task Force paramilitary contractors attend DT Conferences (Domestic Terrorist) where they share lists of names, surveillance techniques, and then collaborate on methods for brutalizing and fraudulently arresting innocent people.14 After being fed this libel and numerous falsified Suspicious Activity Reports, JTTF agents work with local police to patrol the communities where 'suspicious' targets live and work while deliriously following the commands of their national security superiors. DT's? That's a term for Delirium Tremors, as if phantom domestic terrorists are only in the heads of National Intelligence. 
    In an ongoing expansion of politically violent national security policies, municipalities across America are now escalating the criminalization phase of political dissenters and the homeless that Bush, Wall Street and the FBI previously ghettoized.12 13 Traffic arrests, trespassing arrests, and camping tickets are accruing for persons without criminal records, thereby furthering ghettoization policies since jobs, homes and even voting rights are negatively affected by criminal records. No doubt a nation-wide national security DT conference initiative, these surges in trespassing arrests are made as targets walk down streets, go into public buildings, lay on sidewalks or sit on park benches to rest, as evidenced in Sioux Falls where more than four hundred trespassing charges were filed in 2015 in contrast to the previous year's count of around thirty.15
    Additionally, the police are shooting or killing whoever they want these days as if they’re hyped-up on militarization fantasies of being Navy SEALs or DELTA Force members fighting in the middle east. Police murders within previously domestic ghettoized populations include a death count of 1030 this year, according to the RiseUpOctober web site: Michael Brown with multiple head shots in Ferguson, Eric Garner with a choke hold in Staten Island, Laquan McDonald with 16 body shots in Chicago, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, whose legs on video appear broken from a police beating before he even entered the van where he died. Twelve year old Tamir Rice was murdered while playing with a BB gun in a Cleveland park, a murder supported by FBI agent Crawford's subsequent investigative report. 
    A recent murder surge by the police of fourteen year old youths include Cameron Tillman in Louisiana, Radazz Hearn in Trenton, and L'Quante Riles in Chicago. Emmett Till was fourteen when he was lynched in Money, Mississippi. This pattern of escalating police state violence draws parallels to the civil rights era racially motivated assassinations, recently noticed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. 
    To illustrate national security’s political policies, review the history of Occupy Wall Street: A bold and non-violent movement comprised of people, college students and other dissenters spread across the nation and was organized to counteract this politically violent war waged against American peoples by George Bush, Jr.'s, administration and economic policies. Unlike Tea Party enthusiasts in 2010 that openly promoted an armed rebellion against the federal government, OWS was hounded, monitored and entrapped from its earliest days by collaborative efforts between banks, corporations and national security agencies as non-violent dissenters were gassed, arrested, ghettoized and thrown onto Indexes/Watchlists, since they weren't extremist Republicans like the Tea Party or future Donald Trump supporters. 
    In Texas, targeted organizer Sandra Bland of Black Lives Matters was killed in jail by police after being falsely arrested and brutalized, simply on her way home that day after a job interview. Police claimed she committed suicide. Additional people, also young and healthy, arrested for not paying alleged traffic citations or misdemeanors are also mysteriously dying while in custody, as Choctaw leader Rexdale Henry did in Mississippi and as pregnant Sara Lee Circle Bear did in South Dakota. Other recent inexplicable jail deaths include Jonathan Sanders, Troy Goode, Michael Deangelo McDougle, and Orlando Guyton, all occurring in Mississippi.
    Environmentalists, like Jeff Luens of Earth First!, have been absurdly relabeled as terrorists, while several others, such as Larry Gibson and Julie Bonds, recently died from complications that their friends say were due to toxic chemicals and environmental poisoning resulting from the coal industry's outrageous Mountain Top Removal raping system used near their residences. Judy Barri also died from complications, but after the FBI planted a bomb in her car that blew up while she was inside.
    Like the current policies of criminalizing the homeless, a telling pattern of subverted due process emerges among these above listed individual cases and includes entrapment, false affidavits and planted evidence, fraudulent charges, jail sentences incompatible with their alleged crimes, derailed investigations, efforts at defense thwarted and attorneys silenced, secret allegations, secret court hearings, false imprisonment, ghettoization, environmental poisonings, murder, orchestrated assisted-suicide efforts, and cover-ups by the FBI in defense of local police and likeminded private citizens. 
    In each of these cases, the real terrorists - individuals working within the national security network, neo-Nazi extremists inside and outside this network, and their corporate sponsors - join efforts to protect themselves, their political agenda and the interests of their funding sources. As another example, if the 2016 Oregon militia had been comprised of Muslims or Black Lives Matter protestors, they would have instantly been tear gassed and shot by a mass of local police and federal agents sporting Homeland Security grant funded military gear. 
    George Bush, Jr.'s, administration didn't create these methods of domestic political violence. In reality, similar
systems have been used to commit acts of genocide against Native Americans for more than 500 years, to subjugate peoples, steal their lands and rape the earth for its mineral resources.34 The Spanish with the help of Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortez, and Hernando deSoto, began the infection, enslavement and slaughter
of millions of indigenous peoples throughout the Caribbean and the Americas.35
    Similar methods of political violence have also been used for 400 years against enslaved African Americans and continued after Emancipation: Sexual and economic slavery, rape, maiming, arson, murder, and the resulting Great Migration of 6.5 million persons from the south to cities across America, only to find more white supremacists, continued segregation and ghettos. Similar to those political ghettos, Native Americans have referred to the reservation system as political prisons ever since they were established. 
    After WWII, interned Japanese Americans were apologized to in the form of financial compensation for their horrific experiences and losses which were valued beyond dollar amounts. Today, like those Japanese Americans from coast to coast, every person can be liable to be caught in the cross hairs of national security racketeering, Indexed, Watchlisted, and held as a virtual political prisoner by constant surveillance and ‘roving choke points'. Unlike after WWII, the federal government today refuses to acknowledge these gestapo tactics, refuses to acknowledge a national security policy of incarceration, assisted-suicide and ghettoization, and refuses, so far, to admit to the resulting crimes of cultural cleansing and genocide.
    Look at today's available statistics and draw similarities: 48 million people are on food stamps, 170 million adults depending on social services of one form or another, assisted-suicide rates up throughout age brackets, 1.6 million urban homeless people and counting, 1.6 million people actually incarcerated, and only 63% participation in the civilian work force, which means 36%, or more than 120 million of the able bodied civilian population don't have jobs. Meanwhile, President Obama just announced the current Department of Labor unemployment rate at 5.1%57, but that statistic obviously isn't correct for several reasons: Those who've been unemployed too long are forced off compensation and are removed from the DoL statistics (add untabulated amount); those people sacrificed by capitalism (add 4%) who've never worked aren't included in unemployment roles; those who qualify for food stamps (add a portion of 15%) cannot also receive employment income more than $1200 per month, meaning they don't meet full employment criteria; and, the previously self-employed, the 'new poor',58 never qualified for Unemployment Compensation since they worked for themselves and a vast majority didn't pay into Social Security's compensation system, thus were never included in these DoL statistics (add untabulated amount).
    These statistics are not fictionalized. Looking at similar statistics on Native reservations, inner cities like Baltimore or Detroit, or in southern towns such as Crawford or Brooksville, Mississippi, double or triple these rates.59 Understood in context, true figures such as these when linked to their political causes only reflect a hidden federal policy of disappearance 60 by way of ghettoization, of poverty and homelessness used as rightwing political tools,61 62 63 as they were in 'Manifest Destiny' America and in Nazi Germany.
    Billionaires like the Koch brothers, whose father happened to refined oil for Hitler’s regime, have been funding this right-wing coup while their financed GOP politicians reduce food allotments for the poor,65 promote violence against women,66 destroy medical care for veteran women and men after they return from war,67 and deny affordable college loan programs after which the Koch's foundation privately offer monies to African American college students with the hope that they become thankful right-wingers.68 Self-deportation measures which destroyed Mexican American communities and local economies throughout Arizona were promoted by those same GOP politicians. Then, the Koch's again privately offered food packages and aid to those remaining community members they had impoverished.69 
    Michigan's Governor Snyder's method was to declare a state of emergency in five African American communities before disrupting democracy by appointing managers to replace elected officials. These managers then poisoned the water in Flint, and disrupted schools and water supply systems in Detroit. Lakota and Navajo peoples in the Dakotas, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona are also being poisoned, but by uranium instead of lead, and have been since Eisenhower's administration through the help of private corporations, state environmental authorities, the Atomic Energy Commission, and elected politicians. 71 72 73
    The ghettoization of millions of Americans and the current criminalization phase of the homeless is not a local or individual state-wide phenomena, it is a policy of political violence with deep historic roots being waged, again, against millions of innocent peoples. This current reiteration of political violence must be discussed and recognized by every citizen and politician in order to destroy their ignorance of and blindness to this underlying politically violent phenomena which is destroying the very fabric of democracy.

by Debbie Brady

​     Denver’s social experiment--the 10 year plan to end homelessness--has run its course.  Ten years ago in 2005, then Mayor Hickenlooper created a new City agency, Denver’s Road Home. This agency was charged with ending homelessness in Denver in ten years. This effort has proved to be a dismal failure. There are many more unhoused folks in the City now than there were 10 years ago.
     In fact, according to a recent Denver City Auditor’s report, Denver’s Road Home has spent $63 million and because of poor record keeping, has no idea of the results of this expenditure. Denver’s Road Home required all nonprofit agencies receiving money from the City to report regularly on the results of their efforts, but Denver’s Road Home failed to compile this information. As a result they have no idea of which agencies’ efforts were successful and which were not.
      How many housing units could have been built for $63 million?
     This is no way to run a railroad, let alone a City agency.
     Bennie Milliner, the Executive Director of Denver’s Road Home, said at a recent meeting of the Denver Homeless Commission, that the report unfairly pointed fingers at the service providers. I have read the report and if fingers were pointed, it was at Denver’s Road Home.  
    I was homeless in Denver for three years, from 2009 to 2011,  in the middle of this social experiment,  and I think I have a pretty good idea of where most of those millions were spent.
   Most of this money went to support what I call, “The Homeless Industrial Complex.”  While it is true that these service providers are nonprofits, the people in charge of these charities often earn fairly substantial salaries. They also employ many people charged with keeping the unwashed masses in line. By in line, I mean the homeless spend much of their time standing in line for food or shelter, while they must also toe the line for the often arrogant guards and officials who run these places or they get thrown out. There is very little incentive to end homelessness here, when the result of a successful effort would be the loss of employment for many of them.
    Those who are not up to surviving on the streets and are lucky enough to get into a shelter, are in many cases warehoused in bug infested and sometimes unsafe crowded  dormitories. There they languish with very little effort to move them from shelters into homes; some of these places more resemble prisons then safe havens. There are some exceptions that truly care and work to help move people move into homes and decent paying jobs.
   I’m not going to name names here, but if you work in either of these kinds of places, you know who you are.
    I spent one month in a prison-like shelter before a Veterans Administration caseworker moved me into one of the exceptions, where I spent seven months until I was able to move under a roof of my own. 
     I love my place and intend to die here. If not for the V.A. and HUD I would still be on the streets or in a shelter. I was lucky. I just hope my luck holds a few more years, that’s all I need, I’m an old lady and I’ll be gone soon. 
     I’ve seen the worst and the best of these non profit homeless shelters. One thing I noticed about them though was that most of  the staff drove some pretty nice cars.  You notice these things when you are standing across the street from the parking lot waiting for a bus.
     I’m not going to talk about the rest of my homeless experience, living on the streets and in the woods, because I think I may have broken some laws that the statute of limitations hasn’t run out on yet.
    The unhoused who cannot stomach living in shelters, brave the elements living on the street. These folks are regularly harassed by police and the business owners’ private cops who see them as a nuisance. In fact, laws have been passed that make it illegal to perform routine acts of survival in public. There are no public places where these folks are allowed to pee, poop, rest or sleep. They are considered outlaws because they dare to exist. The politicians and the tycoons who control them just want these people to disappear; they don’t care where they disappear to as long as they are not disrupting commerce downtown.
     Even for those folks who can stomach living in a shelter, according to last year’s Point In Time (PIT) survey of the homeless in Denver, there is only one shelter bed for every four homeless people living in Denver. We all know the PIT survey is always way low. This kind of reminds me of George W Bush in New Orleans after Katrina. I can just see him now, saying, “You’re doing a hell of a job Bennie.”
     Many business owners contribute millions of dollars to maintain this failed system. Why? These guys are supposed to be financial experts. Why don’t they demand more bang for their bucks?
     It has been proven in many places worldwide that the most inexpensive way to end homelessness is to provide the unhoused with homes, a place where they can perform simple acts of survival behind a locked door. Why is this so hard for these poobahs to understand? Instead, we have people getting thrown in jail for daring to try to survive in public, people languishing in shelters which are often bug infested and unsafe, and the business owners complaining about unhoused people costing them money by disrupting commerce downtown.  All of these so-called solutions to homelessness cost the city, state and federal governments a lot of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money. For what?
     One of the biggest issues contributing to this situation is our paltry minimum wage. Many of the people who are homeless work full time at minimum wage jobs, but are still unable to afford housing in Denver’s out-of-control housing market. Because of this, there are way too many families with children living on the streets or crowded into very small living spaces. If they are not trying to survive on the streets, they can find themselves camped out with relatives or crammed into overpriced motel rooms, where they are often unwelcome.
     This is again, no way, to run a railroad.
     I suppose I could go on and on, bitching about the stupidity of this mess, but the fact of the matter is, no one who is in a position to do something is listening.