The Perfidy of Loaves & Fishes

The 1st page of Loaves & Fishes' July 2011 newsletter. [Click pic to enlarge.]
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The 2nd page of Loaves & Fishes' July 2011 newsletter. [Click pic to enlarge.]
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The 3rd page of Loaves & Fishes' July 2011 newsletter. [Click pic to enlarge.]
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The 4th page of Loaves & Fishes' July 2011 newsletter. [Click pic to enlarge.]

They are Stinkers and they Stink. It is astonishing. It is utterly amazing how Loaves & Fishes’ unillustrious leaders can’t manage to ever have a single ethical moment. They dish out their 99^44/100 % pure bullshit without regret or guilt. They deliver their con job with not a thought that is honest, accurate and fair. There is only one conclusion that can be reached: They are psychopathic racketeers. They are the Gargantuans that stomped on Tokyo. They are Beavis and Butthead. [It is perhaps an act of Cosmic Justice that an anagram for the name of one of the administrators is Urban Joke. And for another it's Brazenly Inserted Fibs.]

You know, I have prayed to God and asked if I could get a good seat in the grandstands when the L&F Administrators meet their Maker on Judgment Day. And you know what He said? “Yeah, sure, Tom, I’ll mail you some front-row tickets so you can come and bring a few friends. Come early so you can be there when the hinges to the trapdoor are being oiled.” And I told Him, “Thanks a lot, God! What a Pal!” ¹

Loaves & Fishes appears to have stopped posting their newsletter to the Internet. Instead, in an apparent effort to escape notice of their shenanigans from The Knowing, they stealthily, slyly just mail the damn thing to their ‘marks,’ the moneyed targets of their perfidy.

A picture that tops the front page of the July newsletter shows two people shaded by a tree. The caption reads, “Two of our many guests enjoying the cool shade.” Hello? On July 4, Independence Day, when the stores are universally closed, so was Loaves & Fishes’ Friendship Park, a place on that difficult-for-us-homeless holiday when we are in the most need of a place to be. I am told that two staff members at L&F were there at the park but wouldn’t open Friendship Park because of a claim that three staff members where needed for that purpose.

Perhaps one-fourth of the homeless population is higher functioning than every member of the Loaves & Fishes operation. Easily, one person could have been deputized as a temporary staffer/volunteer to allow the Park to be opened to save all those suffering from the extreme heat on July Fourth. But no. Whereas in the past – pre-Fernandez – the Park would always have had skeletal staff on holidays in recognition of the special degree of misery that holidays bring to the Sacramento homeless [sometimes with a closed day the subsequent day], that doesn’t happen any more at always-unreliable L&F. O, the gall, the dastardliness of treacherous Loaves & Fishes to suggest they are generous in supplying shade to the homeless. Truth is, the homeless aren’t shaded and it is Loaves & Fishes administraitors who are shady.

Also on that first page of the newsletter, Isaiah 58:10 is prominently quoted [embolded words, mine]: “If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday sun.” The lightless Loaves & Fishes administrators are there to take donors’ money and do minimal for the homeless, leaving homeless people to roast in the noonday sun. Woe the intense hypocrisy of L&F to dare to use that quote.

And THEN, in a “letter” addressed to their “Friend and Supporter” Loaves & Fishes dares to seek to saturate its new $1.5 million building in faux Godliness. All that money was spent while Loaves & Fishes did NOTHING extra to aid the effort to help the poor in Sacramento during a particularly cold and wet winter. They call the building the “new Welcoming Center and Warehouse” and do not mention that it is also new office space for the corroded administration. And that homeless people are near-fully barred from the building. It’s a welcoming center for contributions and money and debutantes and Richie Rich. Its down the street from the where the homeless are allowed to be.

Hilariously, on the second page of the newsletter, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day and St. Francis of Assisi are evoked. Hey, with that line-up, I’m sure St. Paul and Jesus are disappointed to have been left out. And where’s Batman and Glenn Beck, for crying out loud? But what makes it a 10-on-a-scale-of-10 absurdity is that the picture that runs with it IS A FAKE. Pictured are what recipients of the newsletter are led to believe are homeless people being served a meal. [In the text it says “You who stand at the serving tables each day and serve the food are twenty-first century Dorothy Days.”] But, I'm told, the picture HAS NO HOMELESS PEOPLE IN IT. It’s a staged picture with volunteers and L&F staffers. Loaves & Fishes is incapable of having any honest period of time that lasts even so long as the snap of a camera shutter.

On the backpage, the Genesis program at Loaves & Fishes gets special notice. Readers are led to believe that Genesis – which was started by Libby Fernandez, by the way – helps “the most vulnerable and yet the hardest to help.” That is radically not true. The most-in-need homeless are unserved, unsought and unhelped by Loaves & Fishes and the toity Genesis program. The great tragedy of homeless services in Sacramento is that there is no one tasked to save people who are severely mentally ill, many of whom sleep in their excrement at bus stops and in doorways. Loaves & Fishes not only does not help these people, they do not hire people who could help these folks because open positions at the charity are reserved for friends and family and friends of donors.

Woe the Endless Perfidy of Praise-Unworthy, Empathy-Barren, Malodorous Loaves & Fishes.
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footnotes:
1. I am not meaning to take God's name in vain, but to mock the way Loaves & Fishes chooses to drag God around on a leash and how they shamelessly slather themselves with the butter of Jesus.  Loaves & Fishes management thinks it is the holy be-knighted when to the clear-eyed they are the wholly benighted.  On the first page of their newsletter they unabashedly post filthy crap like this:  "Almighty God, I do not want to be irreverent but while your Son with five loaves and two fishes fed five thousand, this Loaves & Fishes community has fed six million!"  In other words, "God, your son Jesus was a piker.  We're over a thousand times mightier and more holy!"  But it's worse than that: Libby Fernandez's record keeping is so slovenly L&F has certainly not served the six million meals over a period of 26 years, as is claimed.  Of course, Safeway feeds probably 30 million people each day, so in orwellian LoavesThink, you could say that Safeway is The Biggest, Meanest, Mightiest Jesus of All!!  Huzzah!   [Elmer Gantry and Lonesome Rhodes have nothing on the arrogance, vanity and effrontery of Loaves & Fishes.] Also germane here: "The Power of Mockery."