The loss of a vital culture in the English world has left us with a dirth of voices that could move the population in times of societal brutality. The conservatives claim that it is the Religious folks who are the consciences of the society. In some way that probably relates to the fact that so many of the people who humanized the Industrial Era were non-conformist Christians and stateless Jews (remember Meyer Rothschild?) hated by the conformist Aristocracy (remember Hitler?).
So here in America we have the term "Judeo-Christian" as a term for societal spirituality and goodness, since so many of these folks constituted the "wretched refuse" of Emma Lazarus's poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. They were the 80,000 per month who came through Ellis Island to find a life here. The people that demoralized the successful Sioux General Red Cloud when he was brought to Washington to sign the treaty for having successfully evicted the U.S. Army (for a moment in time) from the Sacred Black Hills. He said that "they were like the leaves on the trees" and gave up once he got back home. The next year Custer successfully took back the Black Hills in spite of that treaty. (George Bush is in that tradition with the ABM treaty.) I contend therefore that it was an accident when the religious folks were truly the conscience of society. It wasn't the Christians, Jews or any other religion that stopped the Vietnam war. It was the war photographers who put their lives on the line to keep the American public aware. There were obvious religious leaders like Martin Luther King and the Barrigans who protested the war but the overwhelming majority of Ministers, Priests and Rabbis supported American involvement as patriotic and necessary to defeat the "pagan" communism. I was there. What stopped the war was that the eyes, ears and heart of the public was kept wide open by the artists of the country, whether commercial, as in the news, or Avant Garde. Below is an example of Journalism or commercial literature. Bush and the yahoos may be on top today but the public is fickle and will soon grow tired of patriotism. Especially when the threat is gone. At that time, in pursuit of underdog heros and heroines the movies will begin, in the search for novelty to sell their product, to write about the poor, the disaffected again and when they do, historians, who have been shameful thus far, will be shamed into writing about the whole and not just the jingo. At that time, old cultures who stink from collaboration, will be abandoned by their children who need to "separate and individuate" in order to become their own version of adults, and the heros of the moment will be as fragile as Stalinist statues in the new Russia. It is the Artists who are the senses of society. Only when they are alive and healthy do we not have these manic-depressive swings. And until we once more have a healthy sensing mechanism we will continue to operate under the insane rules that I saw Friday in the Jobs Arbitration panel and that are listed below in today's NYTimes. The Arts, Harry, Keith, etc., never were about consumption and so you can't take them or leave them anymore than you can take or leave your eyes. They are about the Rawness of Truth and the Ideal of Grace that only grows from a wise society. It was Plato who first introduced the poor vision, of those locked in the cave of their personal histories, to the Western world. It was also Plato who placed the development of the perceptions through Art at the base of his theories of education. That is still rare to non-existant in the West, but, in my mind, is just as important as the freedom of any "Market" in your mind. If you don't like Plato or are lost in his theory of forms rather than the simple story, try Robert Sternberg's "Metaphors of Mind, Conceptions of the Nature of Intelligence" (Cambridge) for contemporary Psycho-metrics version of the same. The world is slowly surrounding the economists. And they are circling the wagons but until they are integrated into the whole we will have such attrocities as the below happening to our societies. Yes Ed, Marx was an economist and the USSR was the first baby of the Science. The bottom line isn't money but the whole of humanity. That is my rant, cant etc. Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- December 17, 2001 N.Y. REGION As Welfare Comes to an End, So Do the Jobs By NINA BERNSTEIN The subway cars on the W line snake from Queens through the heart of Manhattan and on to Brooklyn, collecting dirt and debris from thousands of riders. At the end of the line, on an elevated platform in sight of Coney Island's Ferris wheel, a dozen people in green vests sweep, scrape and swab the grime away. Transit-system employees doing the same tasks on a neighboring platform earn from $11 to $19 an hour, with union benefits. But the "green vests" are not working for pay. Like 300 other people cleaning subway cars and stations for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, they are recruits from New York City's workfare program - by far the largest in the nation - laboring in exchange for a welfare grant and the hope of being hired. Daisy Torres, a 34-year-old mother of three who was raised on welfare, gets a subway car's floor so clean that her supervisor swears you could eat off it. James Howard, 42, a 10th grade dropout who did odd jobs off the books to supplement his family's public assistance grant in years past, had almost perfect attendance. They were striving to join the 122 subway car cleaners who had gone on to permanent jobs with the authority, out of hundreds who began the program. But after many assurances that they were on a list to be hired, Ms. Torres and Mr. Howard were among dozens who got a double dose of bad news last month. Because of the deepening recession, the authority had imposed a hiring freeze. And, under federal law, the city's Human Resources Administration informed them, their welfare benefits were at an end. They and the other "green vests," recruited over the past 18 months, are only a few among the thousands who have participated in the Work Experience Program that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani made the centerpiece of his welfare overhaul. But their circumstances illustrate both Mr. Giuliani's extraordinary success in reshaping the city's safety net around work, and the new pitfalls, even for those who have followed the rules, as time limits and bad times converge. In states from New Hampshire to Hawaii, the first welfare families are reaching the five-year federal limit just as the economy slumps. But New York City has by far the largest number of people working for their benefits, and nowhere else are so many of them reaching the cutoff at the same time. Although state law has spread a safety net of sorts for those losing federal benefits, some may already be falling through it. In a welfare office in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where signs declare "Your Clock is Ticking," and "Make an Effort, Not an Excuse," Mr. Howard veered between fatalism and anger. "I made lots of efforts," he said. "Working out there, freezing, wearing three pairs of socks and two coats, just to get the job. And now they won't even give me a chance." Ms. Torres, fingering a stack of "outstanding" job evaluations and scary welfare notices in the family's one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, clung to hope. "My struggle and my goal is all about my kids," she said, eyeing Guillermo, 12, Elisa, 8, and Giovanni, 6, as Christmas lights twinkled from the fire escape. Its champions say that workfare, which evolved under the commissioner of the Human Resources Administration, Jason A. Turner, into an elaborate mix of work assignments, job training and job searches, has been a way for welfare recipients to give back to the city and a path to real jobs for many. Its critics contend that it has been a dead end for many poor people in need of education and training, a way to cut and divert people from public benefits and create a tide of cheap labor that has swept thousands of paying jobs from city payrolls. The authority's program provides evidence for both arguments. Hailed as a national model when it was announced in 1996, it started two years ago in a more modest version. Of 9,509 people sent to the subways on workfare since December 1999, the authority said, 4,400 showed up, and 301 have been hired, 122 of them as subway car cleaners. The authority's director of labor relations, Gary Dellaverson, said that hiring record compared favorably with those of other workfare sites in the city. "I'm proud of the project," said Mr. Dellaverson, who negotiated it in collective bargaining with the transit workers' union six years ago. Gabriella Bello, a single mother of four with little knowledge of English and less education, is an example of how well the authority's workfare program turned out for some. After many years on welfare and four months of cleaning subway cars at the 179th Street terminal in Queens in exchange for her family's grant - at a cost to the city of about $1.80 an hour - Ms. Bello was hired in October of last year. Her hourly union wage rose to $13 this month, and she also receives the full $200 in monthly child-support paid by the younger children's father, rather than the $50 that the city passes through to mothers on welfare whose grants average $594 a month. "I feel free," said Ms. Bello, who left school in the Dominican Republic at 9 to work as a housekeeper for her mother. "I feel happy because I work to get my money." But many of those assigned to the subways by the city had the worst of work and welfare. New leadership of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 faults its predecessors for agreeing to a workfare program that a local vice president, Neil Persaud, said leaves welfare recipients without a paycheck and under constant threat that their benefits will be cut off - "at the mercy of the boss," Mr. Persaud said. In his zeal to be hired, Mr. Howard, for example, became the Coney Island terminal's designated cleaner. He was called to dispose of bodily waste in subway cars, to heave garbage from the dank station below the tracks, to scour an employee bathroom that he was not allowed to use. "This job would do wonders for my family," he explained the day after Thanksgiving, when he still hoped he might be hired. Exactly what workfare recruits were told about the chance of being hired is a matter of dispute. City officials say that no promises were made, and that hiring is dependent on vacancies - which dwindled this year as turnover slowed in a souring economy. But in spring 2000, a Human Resources Administration memo to contract agencies called the subway program "an excellent opportunity" for recipients being prepared to move from welfare to work, and stated that after 90 days of successfully performing the work, "candidates who express an interest and have demonstrated initiative and a readiness to work (i.e. good attendance, punctuality, ability to follow directions, enthusiasm, etc.) will then be processed for hire" - that is, after routine paperwork and medical exams they would be moved into union jobs starting at $30,000 a year. Teachers at the contract agencies, where the cleaners spend two days of the work week in a supervised job search or in classes, said that as 90 days stretched into a year, vacancies were so scarce that some mothers broke down, torn by the needs of sick children, pressure for perfect attendance and looming time limits. Mr. Dellaverson called the memo "misleading." As for five-year welfare time limits, he said, they have nothing to do with the authority. Time limits had everything to do with the anxiety of veteran workfare cleaners at the end of the W line. "My time is almost up," Mr. Howard said in late November, gripping a broom with calloused hands. He looked back at the utility closet where he had eaten a bag lunch amid bottles of bleach, after cleaning the employees-only lunchroom upstairs. "I really thought I had the job," he said. "Now I don't know what's going to happen next month - I don't want to lose my home." During a prosperous decade, welfare policy focused so strongly on personal responsibility that the role of large economic forces and simple calamity almost disappeared from view - until Sept. 11. Now, those seeking to make the transition face a badly weakened economy. But hard times never really stopped for Mr. Howard. In the 1980's, he worked in factories that relocated to places where labor was cheaper. By the early 1990's, he said, he was doing whatever day jobs he found to help his disabled wife, Gaynell, raise their three children on public assistance. When she grew too ill to keep up with the new welfare demands, he became the official head of household and was responsible for fulfilling the workfare requirement. Eventually Mrs. Howard - diabetic, blind in one eye, and with a history of psychiatric hospitalization - qualified for a monthly $545 Supplemental Security Income check. "If I lose my benefits, S.S.I. is the only thing that's going to cover the rent," Mr. Howard said, holding the notice that said his family had been denied transition to Safety Net, the state-financed aid for which it was still eligible when welfare benefits ended, because Mr. Howard had failed to apply in October. But at the time, his documents from the authority corroborated, he was finally being "processed for hire." Ms. Torres, usually a beaming presence over her sudsy mop, said she had cried in the Safety Net office, begging to be allowed to keep the subway post, since the station manager was sure she would be hired in the next round. Caseworkers told her there was nothing they could do. Instead, like several thousand of 30,000 recipients who reached the limit of welfare benefits on Dec. 2, she was offered a temporary, subsidized position as a Parks Department laborer and told that if she refused, her family would lose all aid. To an extraordinary degree, Mr. Turner, the welfare commissioner, has succeeded in reorganizing a notoriously unmanageable bureaucracy around his work-first philosophy. City and state welfare officials point to recent studies finding that over all, the economic circumstances of poor New Yorkers improved substantially in the late 1990's, while the welfare rolls shrank to about 387,000 cases, half the 1995 peak. They insist that the transition to Safety Net went smoothly . But on Nov. 26, when Mr. Howard went to the welfare labyrinth for help in keeping his family housed and fed, a different reality awaited. At the Manhattan address listed on the Safety Net letter, he was sent back to his local welfare office, the Bay Ridge Job Center. As toddlers cried and tugged at parents, the line inched forward near a poster that declared, "Winners Make the Grade; Whiners Make Excuses." One woman was in a wheelchair, another on crutches. Some clutched threats of eviction, medical bills, printouts of bureaucratic error. When his turn came, Mr. Howard was sent upstairs, to wait for his caseworker - who could not help and sent him down to the line again . His wife joined him there, sent from her Supplemental Security Income office, she said, when she asked for help keeping food stamps. "It's too late," another caseworker told them later, directing Mrs. Howard to an office in downtown Brooklyn, and giving Mr. Howard a number to call to appeal; it was constantly busy. Later that week, on one of his last days working in the subway, Mr. Howard cleared 25 loads of trash from the station parking lot. When he paused to rest, a supervisor brusquely ordered him back to his mop. "I'm not a slave," Mr. Howard shouted. "I'm a human being." Ms. Torres is hanging on. A new notice postponed her Parks Department orientation, scheduled for Nov. 29, without explanation. She does not know what Safety Net benefits, if any, will arrive this week; when she reads her daughter's Christmas list, she said, "it breaks my heart." But she is still cleaning subway cars under the Coney Island sea gulls, praying that the work she does can become her job. Home | Back to New York Region | Search | Help Back to Top Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
