PPUF June 03 Newsletter




			Poor People's United Fund

					645 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02116 (617) 262-5922 • (617) 262-1381 fax e-mail: kip@ppuf.org


	Boston's Spare Change Community
						June 2003

	Dear Sisters and Brothers, Recently, about 300 of us had the honor of attending a memorial service for Senator Jack Backman, a former chairman of the Human Services Committee and one of the most ethical, moral and decent public servants any of us ever had the privilege of working with. In honor of Jack, we decided to set the theme of this newsletter on "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable," the dual role Jack did as well as anyone we know. We have also included Renee Loth's editorial which was published in The Boston Globe at the time of Jack's death. Also, we have included a letter to a state legislator from another man of great character, Matt Dumont, a psychiatrist at Westborough State Hospital. One has to wonder if Governor Mitt Romney's much touted "core mission" is to "leave no CEO behind," for the weapons of mass destruction currently being fired upon the most vulnerable citizens of the Commonwealth must, indeed, be looked upon with shock and awe. As the late Judge, Joe Walsh, said to the red baiting Senator Joe McCarthy during his infamous Communist hearings in the 50's, "Have you no shame at all, sir?" We at the Poor People's United Fund have been spending some time attending the hearings at the State House concerning the lame, the halt and the blind, and what will become of them as a result of the proposed tax cuts. We've included the text of my testimony on page four. However, one wonders who is listening. On another note, there have been two ironic and amusing moments in American politics recently. One is the unveiling of William Bennett, the prince of virtue, who gambled away $8 million at the tables in Las Vegas - $500,000 in one weekend alone. As he pointed out, he didn't hurt his family or dip into the egg money or anything vulgar or unethical. But, it does give one pause concerning self-styled ethicists, doesn't it? And, then, there is the group of Texas State House Democrats who left the chambers rather than sign on to a re-districted Texas, the brainchild of Tom Delay of Washington, not Texas. But, more importantly they were not about to sign on to a budget that would make sweeping cuts to human services without raising taxes. Of the 62 Democrats, 59 absented themselves from the chambers and left the state. The Texas Department of Public Safety asked the public to help find the legislators. In New Mexico, Attorney General Patricia Madrid issued an all points bulletin to "be on the lookout for politicians who favor healthcare for the needy and tax increases for the wealthy." The great escape was as amusing as it was noble _ even sounding a little like something out of La Mancha. Now, why don't the Massachusetts Democrats do something like that? Elsewhere in this newsletter, we thank you, Rebecca Parris, and Gallia restaurant owner Cindy Eid for the great jazz nite we had. It has been a busy season for us and now we need to take some time to scratch up some food money for Boston's hungry. In struggle and in hope,

				Kip, Fran, Georgia, Liz and Celia



		Jack H. Backman by Renee Loth


				I last saw Jack Backman at a forum on women's issues at the University of Massachusetts in Boston in May. I told him the state could use him back in the Senate, where he had served for 16 years, and I meant it. Jack H. Backman, who died Friday at age 80, represented not just his constituents in liberal Newton and Brookline, but an entire population of otherwise disenfranchised citizens: prisoners, mental patients, street people, drug addicts. Concern for the less fortunate has become so marginalized in state politics that social spending is usually connected to a "sympathetic" interest group, such as children, or politically sophisticated groups such as the elderly or women. But Backman, whether in flush times or lean, represented causes for which there is no obvious political reward. With characteristic clarity, he once said he found it "morally abhorrent" that the dispossessed had no voice in government. So, he gave them one.
	During Backman's tenure in the House and Senate (1965 to 1987), Massachusetts was at the national forefront of social reform, much of it tied to his efforts. His legislation created the first Office of Children, the first lead paint removal act, and a guaranteed annual income for the blind and the disabled. He helped fund and implement the groundbreaking consent decrees that US District Judge Joseph Tauro ordered to improve conditions at state facilities for the retarded. He led regular tours for freshmen legislators of the state's maximum-security prison at Walpole. He pushed to pay welfare mothers a living wage, to divest state funds involved in the apartheid regime in South Africa, to reinstitutionalize juvenile justice, to give prisoners rights to education and training. He worked with a calm persistence some found maddening, using the Committee on Human Services (then called the Social Welfare Committee), which he chaired, as a pulpit for hearings on society's ills. He annually filed one bill _ to appropriate $100 million in housing construction funds _ for at least 11 years, mostly to illustrate the housing woes of the poor and elderly. Philip Johnston served for eight hears with Backman on the Human Services Committee. "He always took the view that it was his role and our committee's role to push the envelope on social justice," Johnston said. "He felt that someone needed to articulate what was right and let others decide what was feasible." In 2002, elected officials are reviving the chain gang and charging prisoners a day rate for room and board. The Legislature just passed a budget that eliminates health care coverage for 50,000 low-income and disabled adults. We really do need Jack Backman _ dreamer, believer, humanist, optimist _ back at the State House. He was the rarest of politicians: someone whose heart was bigger than his ambition. This editorial was first published in The Boston Globe July 23, 2002.

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		Matthew P. Dumont, M.D. May 6, 2003 The Honorable Anne Paulsen State House Boston, MA 02133 Dear Representative Paulsen, I think I already know how you stand on these issues, but I wanted to add a sense of urgency to your thinking about them. In my thirty three years with the Department of Mental Health I have not seen such blatant disregard for the well-being of our patients as I see currently. And worse is promised. I am still working full time on a locked unit of Westborough State Hospital. I deal with the most disturbed and violent patients in the hospital; probably in the state. The consequences of the closing of Medfield State Hospital have been profound and devastating. There is a new set of administrators at Westborough who seem indifferent to the effects of staff reductions and patient relocation. They are most preoccupied with "productivity," time units which reflect documentation for the purpose of billing Medicare, rather than actual patient care. The so-called "open rehabilitation units" which are unlocked and designed to prepare patients for discharge are so inadequately staffed that instances of intoxication, elopement, and assault are commonplace. And the staff on locked units where unstable, dangerous, or sexually predatory patients reside are often unable to monitor them and intervene safely in a crisis. Staff are now rarely able to engage patients in rehabilitation or recreational activities which might prevent such crises. Staff members have been repeatedly injured during "take-downs," and increasing numbers of patients complain that they feel unsafe. Highly valued, experienced, and enthusiastic social workers, nurses, and mental health workers have been laid off, and units of the hospital increasingly rely on "float staff," i.e. temporary workers who do not know the patients. If Worcester State Hospital were to close, there would be even more staff reduction and dislocation. As with Medfield's closing, those patients who could not possibly be discharged before the "consolidation" would be among the most regressed, disorganized, and, often, criminally dangerous ones. Our admissions are increasingly transfers from the criminal justice system instead of the severely and persistently mentally ill patients we were trained to treat. Our new administrators seem more concerned with "risk management," i.e. defensive documentation, than good clinical care. For the first time in my professional experience I find administrators overriding the carefully considered judgements of clinical teams who continue, somehow, to work diligently. I am no longer in the community, but I learn informally from colleagues that many of our former patients have been lost track of and are probably homeless, dead, or in jail. Otherwise, they are caught up in an endless series of clinically destructive and very expensive short-term readmissions to private hospitals. Nevertheless, there are enormous pressures at Westborough to "get people out." As the only remaining psychiatrist actually in a state block (and with union protection), I am usually the one to speak up about these issues at staff meetings. My colleagues, like our administrators, are under contract through the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. These contracts are renewable every year, a condition which exerts a "chilling effect" on free and open discussion. But we are all witness to the withering away of our resources and the encroachment of privatization. The Pacheco-Menard Law is our last and only hope for retaining some remnant of a safety net for our patients. Please do what you can to keep it intact. Also, please accept my best wishes and hopes that you continue to stand up for our embattled values. Sincerely, Matt Dumont

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		Testimony Before the House and Senate Ways and Means Committee Kip Tiernan March 28, 2003 Senators, Representatives, Members of the House and Senate Ways and Means Committee, Honored Guests, Advocates, Brothers and Sisters _ Thank you for the opportunity to share a few thoughts with you today. Over the years I have started, or helped to start, a number of alternative human services structures, when the ones we had in place so many years ago were no longer adequate for the growing need. This Easter, we at Rosie's Place will celebrate our 29^th anniversary. We have yet to take a dime from the city, state or federal government, so I'm not here today to ask you for any money. It seems to me we advocates, over the years, created an ethic to meet all those desperate and growing needs, rather than acknowledging the need for a more substantive ethic _ one that would preclude the necessity for shelters and soup kitchens and other human services alternatives that became less and less of a priority to our government. How well I remember the Chair of Sociology at Emmanuel College saying to me, "Alleviating the suffering is OK, but as advocates, we must also help to eliminate the causes of the suffering." (I had, by then, started Rosie's Place and the Greater Boston Food Bank.) Hunger and homelessness were serious problems in the seventies. Administrations come and go, and, depending on their concerns and agendas, we find that the increasing needs of a larger number of people are not always being met, despite the rhetoric of "compassion" and "core mission." (Compassion is the deep feeling of sharing the pain of others, together with the inclination to show mercy.) On a more pragmatic note, if you don't diagnose a disease early enough, it may metastasize into something much more complicated, and end up costing much more. This is the situation we find ourselves in today. It is the unintended consequences of our actions I am concerned about here today. I have learned to listen to those whose realities are created for them by those in power. You have that power _ to give or take away, and, as elected officials, you must know your obligations as protectors of the public and, hopefully, as surrogates of the advocate community. Much of what you do or don't do has unintended consequences. For instance, what do we do now with the elderly who can't get glasses or hearing aids or prescriptions for their illnesses? Start still another alternative? What do we do with the traumatized kids who no longer have psychiatric care? What do we do with the fifty thousand citizens in MassHealth's care, who as of April 1, have no coverage? And, what do we do with a growing population of citizens who can't get into a shelter any more because they are not a priority? Vaclav Havel, former prisoner of the Czech Republic, and later its President, has this to say regarding civility: "The best laws and the best conceived democratic mechanisms will not, in and of themselves, guarantee legality and freedom or human rights if they are not underpinned by certain human and social values….in the somewhat chaotic provisional around the technical aspects of building the state, it will do us no harm to remind ourselves of the meaning of the state, which is, and must remain, truly human, which means it must be intellectual, spiritual and moral." My dear sisters and brothers, where is it written that the quality of life and the quality of mercy must travel different paths, so as to construct a new, and maybe, questionable way of addressing and assessing the needs of the total community by state government? And, then, of course, the great lawyers' question, "Cui Bono?" Who benefits? And the accompanying question, "Who sets the terms of the debate?" Here in Massachusetts, the so-called safety net has become instead, a funnel through which thousands of our citizens are being hurled, and I think we have a lot to atone for _ and I certainly include myself, as a tax payer _ for the legislated dismissal of hordes of vulnerable people, in the name of fiscal management. I have no illusions about the future of the already dismissed people who are suffering today. But I do have hope, which is the wellspring of all human activity. I also truly feel that if you don't stand up for something, you'll fall for anything. I believe that

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		somehow you good people of the Commonwealth will see your way clear to asking the questions that have not been asked. I think somehow you and I will be delivered to the truth about what is happening in the name of fiscal restructuring. You have a responsibility to all of us. Our news and information is interpreted very largely with a bias toward the dominant powers of society, and many of us have become manipulated into an uncritical glob by the use of myths created by others. And once again, there will be no room at the inn for thousands _ because they are too poor, too weak, too voiceless. In these days of despair I tend to favor some of those old testament prophets _ gutsy guys like Amos, who would refer to charity as the burnt offering he would refuse if presented. "No, let justice flow like a river that never runs dry." Or Jeremiah, the old curmudgeon who believed, as I do, that we are in a time of dying. He envisioned the death of a culture, a society, a tradition, and he felt the pain, but what pained him even more was the failure of his contemporaries to acknowledge or admit it. He couldn't determine if they were too stupid to understand or they were so dishonest that they engaged in an enormous cover-up. We, too, are in a time of transition. We are too busy, too sure, too invested, too ideologically committed. The political forms and the economic models of the past are increasingly ineffective. The value systems, the shape of knowledge through which we have controlled our lives, our own destiny, are in great jeopardy, I believe. Capitalism and democracy are clashing. Our systems have begun to unravel. Your responsibilities, as members of the Ways and Means Committee, are awesome, and, I trust, you will listen to your hearts as you make decisions around the lives of those citizens entrusted to your care. Thank you.



			PPUF Needs Your Help Now, More Than Ever! Like many non-profit human services organizations, the Poor People's United Fund has run into financial struggles -in other words -our funds are dipping perilously low. This is the second or third time in 23 years of service we find ourselves running out of funds to help Boston's most desperately poor citizens. The increasing need for food has reached apocalyptic proportions. (We give away almost $12,000 a year in food gift certificates.) The load has doubled during the last year, and there is no end in sight. In fact, we haven't even seen the worst of it, yet! Last year we had to stop providing utility, back rent and moving funds. And, as more and more people are being dismissed from public support, the phone never stops ringing. The dramatic increase in the need for basic services is peaking, and without you, we have no place else to turn. Please help us to help those dismissed from services - especially food. The need has never been greater than now. Thanks for your continued support.

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			Poor People's United Fund 645 Boylston Street Boston MA 02116		Non-Profit Organization U.S. POSTAGE PAID Boston, Mass. PERMIT NO. 57477


		April and Parris...A Big Success! Thanks to Cindy Eid, owner of Boston's South End restaurant, Gallia, a successful night of jazz and pops music was enjoyed by over 300 folks who want to help. The April 24^th Gallia Birthday Party and PPUF Fundraiser was hosted by Boston's reigning queen of jazz, Rebecca Parris, who brought her multi-talented crew in for the event, all donated to the Poor People's United Fund. Incidentally, Rebecca, Paul McWilliams, Marc Bellwood, Paul Broadnax and Peter Kotremis, all outstanding jazz artists in their own right, would still be entertaining us if we hadn't thought to douse the lights after three solid hours of extraordinary performance. We owe all of you a great debt of gratitude.