After months of debate, Congress still has not been able to pass a bill (H.R. 4213, The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010) that would extend Unemployment Insurance and would help support Medicaid and affordable housing programs.

The California Employment Development Department reports that as of June 22, 2010, there are 205,000 Californians who are in danger of running out of Unemployment Insurance benefits or who have already received their last check.

Not only do we need to advocate for the extension of Unemployment Insurance, medical care, and affordable housing funding, we have to tell Congress not to pay for these programs by cutting other vital services, like anti-hunger programs!  (One of the ideas floating through the Senate last week was to pay for the Unemployment Insurance extension by cutting $9.5 billion from the Food Stamp program!)  It’s unbelievable to me that the Senate would consider making this type of “Sophie’s Choice”, but I guess I feel that way because I work here at St. Anthony’s, where we take a holistic approach to helping people through rough times by offering free meals, employment assistance, medical care, free clothing, and more.

The Senate is expected to take up H.R. 4213 again after the Fourth of July recess.  Once again, we have the opportunity to tell our Senators that we need to take action to promote the common good and help our struggling friends, neighbors, and community members.

Our friends at NETWORK: A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby have an email form here that makes it easy to contact your Senators and ask them to support H.R. 4213.

The U.S. Senate is currently considering a bill that would have a profound effect on unemployed, uninsured, and low-income people nation-wide.  The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act (H.R. 4213) is now being heard before the Senate.

According to the California Economic Development Department, San Francisco County currently has a 9.6% unemployment rate, with 43,500 people unemployed.  Help support them and other low-income members of our community by contacting our Senators and urging them to support the following items in H.R. 4213:

Our friends at Network: A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby have an easy-to-use customizable email form at their website.

Congress will soon be making an important decision on whether to continue funding a program that has helped put thousands of Californians back to work and has provided emergency assistance to thousands more.

The U.S. Senate is currently working on a jobs bill that will assist unemployed workers nationwide by extending emergency Unemployment benefits and COBRA health insurance subsidies.  Tomorrow, March 9, 2010, the Senate is scheduled to vote on an amendment to the jobs bill, the Murray/Kerry amendment, that would extend TANF ECF funding for an additional six months (until March 0f 2011).

TANF ECF supports struggling California workers and their families with subsidized employment, basic cash assistance, and work supports.   California gets an 80% match from the federal government on all TANF ECF programs.  At a time when California is experiencing unprecedented budget deficits, TANF ECF has served as a lifeline for struggling Californians and for the state’s economy.

If you’d like to let your Senators know how you feel about extending the TANF ECF, visit The Center for Law and Social Policy’s website.  They have an action alert here that gives you information about the TANF ECF and connects you to the U.S. Senate’s website, where you can contact your Senators.

If you’re interested in knowing how the TANF ECF has helped California so far, check out this report from The California Budget Project.

Did you know that COBRA health insurance subsidies and emergency Unemployment Compensation are set to expire on February 28, 2010?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, California had a 12.4 % unemployment rate in December 2009.  That means that there are currently 2,254,381 unemployed people in our state.  Around 150,000 of them stand to lose their unemployment benefits and nearly 1 million stand to lose their COBRA health insurance subsidies at the end of this month.

As California Healthline reported in December, the average COBRA premium is $1,107 a month in California, about $720 of which is covered by the federal subsidy.  The average unemployment compensation benefit in California amounts to $1,349 per month.

Our friends at NETWORK: A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby have a nifty form on their website that makes it easy to advocate for an extension to Unemployment benefits and COBRA subsidies.  Visit NETWORK’s website to find out more.

Our Friends at Ntework: A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby have a nifty form on their Website that makes it easy to advocate for an national extension to Unemployment benefits.

An estimated 154,000 people in California will exhaust their Unemployment benefits by the end of 2009.  California has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, at 11.9%.  HR 3548 would provide 14 additional weeks of benefits to jobless workers in all 50 states. Those in states like California, with high unemployment rates (a three-month average rate of at least 8.5%) would get another six weeks of benefits, for a total of 20 weeks.

Christine Owens, the Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project, says:

By extending benefits 14 weeks to every state, and an additional 6 weeks to those states hit hardest by the recession, this legislation is an essential component to economic recovery and could not come at a better time.

Go to Network’s Web Site to find out more.

Today is pay day at St. Anthony’s for our 35 guests and clients who were hired by Caltrans for the bridge closure program. Workers met with Tenderloin Tech Lab staff at St. Anthony’s to pick up their hard earnged wages and celebrate with Pizza.

“I plan on spending the money to renew my driver’s license and maybe get a few things after I move into a place.” Said Gabe, one of the 35 participants who were paid today.

Program participants from St. Anthony’s flyered at Bay Bridge entrances in the days leading up to the closure and redirected traffic over Labor Day weekend. Many participants have been actively seeking work for months.

Frankie and Laurel’s recent posts have me thinking . People die of curable diseases because they can’t afford the cure. Even in San Francisco they die. I know such a person.

Years ago, when I helped coordinate the adult religious education class in my church, we had to deal every year with the question of theodicy. Why does God let bad things happen to good people? Who is bad enough to deserve death by starvation, plague, earthquake, tsunami?

It’s an old and difficult question. But it gets a lot easier when you eliminate the long list of “natural” disasters that are caused or made much worse by the conscious decisions of human beings.

Examine the list of famines caused by war: burning of fields, mining of rice paddies, troops fighting in large open spaces where the crops are grown.  Study the plagues caused by the intentional contamination of a people’s water supply to force surrender in war or the unconscious contamination by people upstream who have no choice about what they put into the water for the people downstream because they have no other means of washing and dumping. The knowledge and resources exist, but the political will does not.

Earthquakes, of course, are natural. But the disaster is often man made. In Afghanistan, poor neighborhoods were devastated while wealthier neighborhoods incurred very little damage because buildings in poor neighborhoods were flimsy while buildings in other neighborhoods were earthquake resistant.

As Frankie and Laurel point out, it’s not the disease, it’s not even lack of healthcare; it’s lack of access to healthcare.

The United States suffers from the disease of poverty. In our business, we often see the causes of poverty listed as “lack of job skills, lack of work history, physical disability, mental illness, alcoholism and addiction.”

But these are not the causes of poverty. The causes of poverty are lack of job training, lack of job mentorship, lack of accommodation and training for people with disabilities, lack of residential recovery programs, lack of services and supportive housing for people with mental illness, lack of affordable housing for the underemployed.

Why don’t we have enough of these things? Is it because we can’t afford them? In the United States? In CALIFORNIA? As a homeless activist I used to know said, “This is not a poor country. Someone is making a decision.”

We need to re-examine that decision. We need new priorities.

With the announcement of the resignation Alaska Governor Sarah Palin last weekend, I’ve been reminded of times in my life when I’ve considered quitting.

My first try at college was in 1992, and I found out pretty quickly that it’s almost impossible to be in an abusive relationship and do well in school. My abuser lived on campus with me and much of my freshman year was spent in terror. The next year, I decided to drop out and move home to live with my parents. I remember feeling like a failure and wondering if I would ever go back to school. Two years later, I experienced one of the worst days of my life when I found out that my college boyfriend had killed himself. A few months after his death, I decided to quit my minimum wage job and go back to college.

My transition back to college was not a smooth one. My transcript was marred with bad grades. The admissions representative said that I could take classes for one semester on a conditional basis and if my grades were good enough, I would be accepted as a degree-seeking student. After one semester with a 3.925 grade point average, I was in.

Four years later, I graduated with honors. A few weeks after my graduation, I had the most severe episode of panic disorder that I’d ever experienced in my life. It was absolutely debilitating. I felt like a shell of my former self and I was afraid that I would never be able to function again. I was waiting to hear about a few grad school applications, and was afraid that I was going to be too sick to start grad school in the fall.

An acceptance letter from a grad school in New York City arrived in the mail at the same time that an acceptance letter for a grad program from my hometown college arrived. I decided to quit living in my hometown and to move to New York City so that I could study social work in an urban setting.

During my 3rd semester in grad school in Manhattan, I experienced something that shook me to my core: September 11, 2001. (more…)

So…what’s up with the recession?  Economists, stock traders, hedge fund managers, bookstore clerks, the bagger at the grocery store, even the random dude standing at the corner of my apartment building screaming about the end of the world all seem to be putting forth their two cents on this topic.

A couple of weeks ago, forecasters polled by the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) generally sounded optimistic – keeping in line with views held by the Fed – predicting that via a bumpy recovery, the U.S. recession should end very soon.  This recession has been termed by many as the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression with majority of the optimists expressing opinions that it should end by the third quarter of 2009 and the remaining advocating for either the last quarter of this year or else the first quarter of 2010.

Now before I proceed, I would like to clarify my stance on the comparison of this recession with the Great Depression.  The real estate price boom between 2000 and 2007 largely is the culprit for the most recent crisis.  Economic historians have written several papers in the last year discussing such comparisons and the major similarity would appear to be the sharp drop in the stock prices in the first year following the peak of the market.

There was a drop in the Dow of 48 percent in 1930 and a drop of 37 percent in 2008.  Yet the issue in the 1920s seems to have been propelled by a quantity boom as opposed to the more recent price boom.  The latter period was fueled by low interest rates stemming from a loose monetary policy and some so-called innovative methods for breaking down discriminatory lending practices as folks with bad credit or folks who didn’t put down much in the form of down payments were allowed to take out loans.  Even those who had credit but no real source of income were allowed to take out large mortgage loans.  The background checks and good lending practices were thrown to the wind as loans were granted left and right.  Good old Fannie and Freddie proceeded to purchase huge chunks of such loans between 2004 and 2006 and we all know what happened shortly thereafter.

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