Ron Russell and Summerhills Realty

Readers of this blog should be aware that I am receiving some information that Summerhills Realty and someone named Ron E. Russell is using this blog as a reference in an effort to scam homeless people.  Be aware that Mr. Russell and his business is cited as a possible perpetrator of fraud by a website called Ripoff Report.  See this webpage.  Also, there is this claim of fraud against Ron Russell Properties at the website BizClaims - Latest scams, frauds and complaints. Please be aware that the information of being 'ripped off'' may be coming from only one source is coming from multiple sources, with perhaps as many as twelve persons/couples now pursuing legal action after paying thousands of dollars for services and receiving none of the services that were promised/contracted.

While I know neither Mr. Russell nor Summerhills, I do know that an inordinate number of “in links” from readers of this blog have come via summerhillsrealestate.com for quite some time.  I haven't known what to make of it, nor that there was anything I could or should do about it.

Be aware that Sacramento Homeless blog [aka, SacHo] has no affiliation with anyone named Ron Russell nor an organization named Summerhills.  Neither do I know anything about Mr. Russell's activities nor the nature of his business.

Be very, very careful out there, my homeless and poor friends! It is a dangerous, scamming world.

I will post again on this matter as I learn more.

If anyone reading this blogpost knows anything about this matter, please contact me or post a comment.

-- Tom Armstrong

UPDATE: I now see that at summerhillsrealestate.com , there is a link to a SacHo blogpost.
FURTHER UPDATE:  I've sent a letter to Haven for Hope regarding Ron Russell and his activities, to inquire if Haven for Hope does, indeed, have an association with the man and his businesses, as the summerhillsrealestate.com website claims.  Note that, suspiciously, the summer hills website does not call Haven for Hope "Haven for Hope," but, instead, "Haven of Hope."
UPDATE 9/2/10:  I've used an additional route to contact Haven for Hope [no response from those folks, as yet], and I've submitted a crime tip to the FBI, via the internet.  Apparently, summerhills attempts to interest poor people in buying Sacramento homes, via their service, which they promote as a money saver.

Moments of reprieve

"Hungry ghosts," according to some Buddhist teachings, is a segment of life whose inhabitants are achingly empty, constantly hungering for things outside themselves, without being fully there for others.

This is from Gabor Mate's book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction:

In writing about a drug ghetto in a desolate corner of the realm of hungry ghosts, it's difficult to convey the grace that we witness — we who have the privilege of working down here;  the courage, the human connection, the tenacious struggle for existence and even for dignity.  The misery is extraordinary in the drug gulag, but so is the humanity.

Primo Levi, the insightful and infinitely compassionate chronicler of Auschwitz, called moments of reprieve those unexpected times when a person's "compressed identity" emerges and asserts its uniqueness even amid the torments of a man-made inferno.  In the Downtown Eastside [of Vancouver, Canada] there are many moments of reprieve, moments when the truth of a person arises and insists on being recognized despite the sordid past or grim present.

Joan Burke evokes Rosa Parks at Aug 24 City Council session

Many homeless people and executives with homeless-services nonprofits came to the city council meeting, yesterday, to express their opinions regarding the Sacramento City Council’s determination, last week, to move the period when citizens make two-minute comments to the council from the beginning of the weekly sessions to the end of the sessions.

Sentiment by most yesterday in the public-speaking period, were intolerant of the decision to move ‘public comments’ and expressed no understanding of the logic in doing so.

Tamie Dramer, Executive Director of SafeGround Sacramento, called the action of moving the comment period one of “disenfranchisement” and accused the council of punishing the whole of the public in an act endeavoring “to sideline a group of already marginalized people.”

Joan Burke, homeless-services nonprofit Loaves & Fishes executive, said that the message of moving the speaking period is the “same, exact message when you told people you have to go to the back of the bus.”

Burke’s sentiment, evoking an iconic moment in the civil rights movement, would be hilarious if it wasn’t so insensitive and odd.

While I and the great majority of homeless people would appreciate more and urgent action from the city council at enacting laws, or waiving some laws, to make homelessness less of a miserable and dangerous condition, the spectre of homelessness in Sacramento is not the equivalent to the effort to address rights relating to racism in the 50s and 60s.

Furthermore, SafeGround has been heard by the city council, and will continue to be. The members of the organization are more resourceful and have greater access than they pretend. Indeed, they have easy access to the ear of the mayor and other council members. Their persistent complaining is what is damnable, since it is harmful to the ends they claim to want to achieve. SafeGround’s effort to filibuster and annoy is childish. The group, in particular those who are, themselves, homeless, fail to even attempt to consider the needs of others that would make achievement of progress to address homeless misery most likely.

One very visible difference between the civil rights movement and the SafeGround effort is "the opposition" during the civil rights period were fervid racists with snapping German Shepard dogs. The Sacramento City Council is wholly composed of bright, nice and reasonable people who, for the most part, want to find ways to make the city a happier place for everyone.

Another difference is that the civil rights movement had the character associated with heroic people hoping to expand everyone's sense of the arena of humanity: Leaders included Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Roy Wilkins and attorney Thurgood Marshall. Meantime, SafeGround whines, endlessly, about victimization and has the characteristics of Libby Fernandez, Joan Burke, Tamie Dramer, John Kraintz and Tracie Rice-Bailey and attorneys Mark Merin and Cat Williams.

Woe, to be homeless in Sacramento.

This was not the first time Ms. Burke has evoked Rosa Parks as a suitable allusion to the SafeGround effort. Making a connection such as that is fanciful, ridiculous and truthy … and Ms. Burke should knock it off. Who does she think she is, Glenn Beck??

But there are features that campaigns for civil rights; gay rights; women's rights; rights for disabled people, and the effort to integrate homeless people into the community have in common: each expands the reach of humanity, making us all less tribal or insular. But success is always achieved if people understand the other's wariness and concerns.

Unhappily, the group of people in the far-far-Leftist homeless-services nonprofits, who are promoted as the homeless leaders in the vapid local media, promote victimization and denial of "rights" as the reason for their "protests via being annoying." Sheesh.

The Tradesman as Stoic

The block of text, below, is from philosopher Matthew B. Crawford's thoughtful book on the topic of 'work,' Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.  While the quote, here, concerns young people, I think that it can easily concern people more broadly, very much including homeless men seeking to rejoin the workforce in an occupation that will fully absorb their interest, turn them away from their addictions, and provide a sound basis for meaning in their lives [Emphases in the quote are mine.]:

The basic antagonism of economic life: work is toilsome and necessarily serves someone else’s interests. That’s why you get paid. Thus chastened, we may ask the proper question: what is it that we really want for a young person when we give them vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible. What I have tried to show is that this humane and commonsensical answer goes against the central imperative of capitalism, which assiduously partitions thinking from doing. What is to be done? I offer no program, only an observation that might be of interest to anyone called upon to give guidance to the young.

Since manual work has been subject to routinization for over a century, the nonroutinized manual work that remains, outside the confines of the factory, would seem to be resistant to much further routinization. There still appear developments around the margins; for example, in the last twenty years pre-fabricated roof trusses have eliminated some of the more challenging elements from the jobs of framers who work for large tract developers, and pre-hung doors have done the same for finish carpenters generally. But still, the physical circumstances of the jobs performed by carpenters, plumbers, and auto mechanics vary too much for them to be executed by idiots; they require circumspection and adaptability. One feels like a man, not a cog in a machine. The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction, but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. This is the stoic ideal.

So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Matthew B. Crawford is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

We need to live differently in the 21st Century

I credit William Harryman of the stupendous blog Integral Options Cafe, and my already-developed interest in RSAnimate for this video find.

This viddy makes the bold, yet rather evident, claim that the world is highly stressed and needs to think differently than we have been to meet our collective challenges.

Also, we now can use the guidance of a far better understanding of how humans think and operate than we've ever had.

We have learned, for example, that we are "very very bad at predicting what will make us happy.  And we are even bad at predicting what made us happy in the past."  Thus, we can now be very aware of human frailties and use this information to better construct society, but in a way that retains individuals' autonomy and freedom.

In many, many ways, the world is a far better place than it's ever been!  There is less individual violence.  We are opening opportunities to everyone, with diminishing (and, likely, disappearing) restrictions on people because of their race, gender or sexual preferences.  Human empathy has expanded greatly since, say, the 1950s, though some of the progress, lately, has seemed to have slowed or regressed.

Matthew Taylor tells us in the viddy that "the stock of global empathy has to grow if we are to reach agreements which put the long-term needs of the whole planet ahead of the short-term national concerns."  Taylor insists that we must "foster Empathic Capacity" to achieve a better world and meet the serious challenges we all have.

Joan Burke understands the issue, but misses the point re SafeGround addressing City Council

Joan Burke, Loaves & Fishes' advocate for enlarging Loaves & Fishes, wrote an Action Alert to those subscribed to L&F's mailing list which reads in part thus [emphases, hers]:

Dear Friend of Loaves & Fishes,

Loaves & Fishes is concerned about a proposed change regarding City Council meetings. Currently, people wishing to address the Council on items not on the agenda may address the council (for 2 minutes each) at the 6 PM start of the evening’s agenda. The Council has voted to move the open comment period back to the very end of the agenda-which is sometimes very late at night, and discourages people from bringing their issues before the elected body that is supposed to represent them. This action is directly targeted against Safe Ground’s homeless activists who have been speaking before the Council every week about the need for Safe Ground and yet another attempt to disenfranchise Safe Ground’s homeless activists, and others with little power. It will impact all organizations and citizens who also use the public comment period to raise timely issues with the Council, and awareness about their concerns.

I think Joan is absolutely right, that the reason they moved the open-comment period to the end of the session is to discourage comments. But I would say that it was done to discourage frivolous comments, specifically those from SafeGround who show up each week, usually with nothing new or interesting to say.  Indeed, most often SafeGround comes to goof on the city council.

The idea of speaking before the City Council is to say something helpful or enlightening or important.

Understand that I am not saying that SafeGround shouldn't speak to the city council, it is just that they mostly now do so in an act of wasting the council's time.  If the group has something new to impart, they should come, and have one member say something succinctly and artfully that imparts what's important.

It has been SafeGround's strategy to alienate those that disagree with them instead of trying to engage them and find solutions that meet everybody's needs.  They should change their strategy, embrace the idea -- for a period of time -- of having the session when the public speaks to the council be later at night, and try being kindly, wise, and thoughtful. 

There is no Empathy in Heaven, but it's what's important HERE

It is our suffering and the certainty of death and the whole dukkha package that brings us empathy and compassion and all that which makes us feeling and appreciating humans.

There'll be none of that good-feeling-for-others stuff in heaven, which is why we must bring the idea of heaven to earth for us and every creature. Hey! Let's do it! Let us make earth a friendly place. It'll be FUN, for one thing, in both the effort and in the steps of success!

Putting the profit motive and purpose motive together

Here, another video [based on the work/research of Dan Pink] that is in many ways contrary to the Slavoj Žižek video of the prior post. The economic insight, here, is to do exactly what Slavoj Žižek despises: Putting the profit motive and the purpose motive together in organizations.

But it's different, too, since Pink is looking at what goes on inside the organization, as opposed to Žižek who looked at consumer culture and greedheadedness of capitalism.



Pink uses a universe of research that shows that in cognitive tasks, 'pay' fails as a incentivizor to improve performance.  Instead, for people involved in 'thinking' jobs, being given autonomy, mastery and purpose are what's important to motivate better performance, so long as pay isn't unreasonably low.

This 'undermines' the central reason for the "success" of capitalism: that people are motivated by greed (or money, at least) and that we can "use" that to make society function. In not-unusual situations, people are not motivated by greed; instead, it's being loosed to do outstanding work and to think for oneself that brings employees joy.  It's meaning and happiness that tickle us into upsurges of high productivity on the job.

BUT, this also puts the kabosh on the idea, out in the left wing of the Sacramento homeless-help industy, that some oppressive form of socialism is the key to a better society.  A "command" government, that the wacky five nonprofits in Homeless World Sac want, would necessarily be totalitarian, and thus freedom killing.  Very few thinkers would have autonomy, mastery or purpose in their workday.  And, as has been shown by the failure of dozens of countries in the 20th Century, unhappy, unmotivated workers would be key reasons for the failure of the system.

Žižek’s Cultural Capitalism

This from NellaLou of the blog Smiling Buddha Cabaret, in a post called "Zizek’s Cultural Capitalism, Trungpa’s Concept of Idiot Compassion and Lifestyle Activists Massaging Conscience" [though I've 'extracted' just Žižek's Cultural Capitalism part]:

We are encouraged to believe that tokens of charity benefit those who suffer. Rather than look at the cause of problems, an overbearing system, deluded social psychology, personal abdication of responsibility and faulty philosophical worldview all of which try to alleviate problems of it’s own making using the same methodology that creates and sustains these problems, we simply work the dysfunctional system harder and faster. It’s Ouroboros on every level. The circle gets smaller and smaller as the beast feeds on itself. As social, material, psychological and spiritual resources are consumed fear and panic rise which compels further rigidity and clinging to this outmoded and damaged methodology.

If you view the viddy below you get a general idea of Žižek's thoughts on capitalism as it is today with regard to charitable enterprise in Britain (with it being very very much the same in America.



I guess my complaint isn't with Slavoj Žižek's way of framing the problem, but with his failure to offer a solution. The solution from SafeGround [with its Movement], Loaves & Fishes, tiny SHOC, Francis House and Sacramento Housing Alliance [The communitarian five], is that they push (or support, passively) the CATASTROPHE that Zizek mentions, a do-again of 20th Century Communism. Truly, outside of regulating capitalism, I don't see the whiff of a solution, anywhere.

So, let us regulate capitalism better! Yes, we will need to put up with some hypocrisies and ongoing weirdnesses and inefficiencies and fake (or, idiot) compassion, but everything else is worse. MUCH worse.

Where we might improve things is getting the public better involved in understanding how charities operate, making it less culturally OK to give money without being aware of what's going on. The media, too, have a role in being courageous, which, in Sacramento, they certainly are not.

Understanding evil, Part I

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, [exhilarating]." — Simone Weil

I get "google alerts" and various "database alerts" on various topics that relate to my interest in Homeless World.

Of my interests, a few are goodness, meaning and happiness - but from all that, I also get alerted about new journal articles or recent books on evil, the opposite of what's good (which, from being the opposite, adds, necessarily, quite a lot about understanding The Good).

I'm very taken by Lars Svendsen's somewhat-new book A Philosophy of Evil. It was first printed in an edition in Svendsen's native language, Norwegian, in 2001, and has now been published in an English-language paperback edition, out just this year.  Svendsen's 2001 book is similar in many many respects to another 2001 book on evil I posted about [in Homeless Tom, over a year ago], Rush W. Dozier's Why we hate.  Both books find, from considerable research, that evil exists in shades of gray, and not in poles of black and white, as Christians are taught to believe.  Too, both books find that while evil acts can be horrifying, the motivations underlying evil are just sad, albeit devastatingly so.

Svendsen highlights research that shows that persons who commit deeds — that afterwards any of us would categorize as very bad or destructive, or greatly hurtful or harmful — almost always think of themselves as doing good and being good.  [This is, of course, fully contrary to what fictional stories and news accounts of crimes tell us.]  Quoting Svendsen, regarding violence:

A victim will talk about "unprovoked evil," while the perpetrator will usually refer to a specific, previous provocation.  In reality, so-called "unprovoked evil" is almost always brought about by mutual aggression, and there is often reason to blame both the victim and the perpetrator for the violent result.  A study of 159 murders, where each murder was unconnected to other criminal activity, showed that in most cases the victim acted aggressively and so contributed to the tragic outcome. The overall picture this study paints is supported by a number of other studies:  The descriptions of both victim and perpetrator are biased in the sense that victims tend to describe the situation as worse, and the perpetrator as better, than an objective witness might describe it.  It's a rare moment when those who do evil recognize their actions as evil.  In other words, evil is almost never found in a perpetrator's self-image.

Thus, the great perponderance of evil or bad is banal, or commonplace. There isn't this Satanic being behind the scenes doing evil for evil's sake and laughing maniacally at others' suffering. It's far, far, far less varying and interesting as all that we suppose. What underlies evil, even that on a grand scale, is the same-old, same-old:  Thoughtlessness.

Indeed, in the ways that Satan's complaint with God gets explained, even Satan isn't doing evil for evil's sake.  In Satan's eyes, he seeks freedom.  Freedom, to him, is the greatest of all good; evil "only" has instrumental value in rebelling against God. [See Svendsen re this.]

In the conclusion to his book, Svendsen writes this:

Our basic problem isn't a surplus of aggression.  Instead, it's a lack of reflection.  This lack leads people to accept and even participate in the most lunatic transgressions imaginable against their fellow men.  Pure egotism is a motivating factor in far fewer murders and assaults than an unreflective, unselfish surrender to a "higher" purpose.  However, simple indifference results in even more victims — and not just the ones who are out of sight and therefore out of mind.  Indifference, futhermore, is not just a factor in violent crimes, but is also a contibuting factor to the reality that 1.2 billion people continue to live in extreme conditions of poverty, and likewise that several million people die of starvation every year.  The evil in the world is not simply the sum of unjust actions committed by individuals against individuals, along with whatever natural catastrophes happen to take place.  Evil can also be found in social institutions.  Indeed, from this perspective, we could begin to talk about structural evil.  John Rawls's "norm of justice" suggests that economic and social differences should be organized so that the worst situated receive the greatest advantage.

I'll post more on structural evil, and the worst-of-the-worst, radical evil, which is the preserve of totalitarian regimes — like that that SafeGround, with its "movement," lawyers and allied charities would like to impose on all America — in an upcoming post.

For every being, the abundant cow, and for those who need a resting place, a bed.

Shantideva, an 8th-century Indian Buddhist scholar at Nalanda University and an adherent of the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna.

From somewhere in Shantideva's Entering the Path of the Bodhisattva (aka, The Bodhisattvacharyāvatāra):

May I be a guard for those who are protectorless
A guide for those who journey on the road;
For those who wish to go across the water,
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.

May I be an isle for those who yearn for landfall,
And a lamp for those who long for light;
For those who need a resting place, a bed;
For all those who need a servant, may I be a slave.

May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of plenty,
A word of power; and the supreme remedy.
May I be the tree of miracles,
And for every being, the abundant cow.

Like the great earth and the other elements,
Enduring as the sky itself endures,
For the boundless multitude of living beings,
May I be the ground and vessel of their life,

Thus, for every single thing that lives
In number like the boundless reaches of the sky,
May I be their sustenance and nourishment
Until they pass beyond the bounds of suffering.

Encourage the employment of low-wage workers

"We … need a program of tax credits for companies for employing low-wage workers. That may seem counterintuitive at a time when the Obama administration is pressing education and high-paying jobs, but we need to create jobs at all levels. Early last year, Singapore began giving such credits — worth several billion dollars — and staved off a recession. Unemployment there is around 3 percent."

— From an opinion piece in the New York Times, titled "The Economy Needs a Bit of Ingenuity," by Edmund Phelps, the 2006 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.