If we wanted charity to help the poor:

While charitable donations in the United States this year are expected to total more than $200 billion, a record, a big portion of this impressive sum — especially from the wealthy, who have the most to donate — is going to culture palaces: to the operas, art museums, symphonies and theaters where the wealthy spend much of their leisure time. It’s also being donated to the universities they attended and expect their children to attend, perhaps with the added inducement of knowing that these schools often practice a kind of affirmative action for “legacies.”

I’m all in favor of supporting the arts and our universities, but let’s face it: These aren’t really charitable contributions. They’re often investments in the lifestyles the wealthy already enjoy and want their children to have too. They’re also investments in prestige — especially if they result in the family name being engraved on the new wing of an art museum or symphony hall…

Robert Reich’s Blog: Why Charity Doesn’t Begin at Home

I am not as down on Cleveland as Jeff is with all this public urination stuff, because I have seen other cities. There is a war going on in most cities in America between homeless people and the municipal government. In Atlanta, they have a team of lawyers working on ways to make it illegal to be poor. In Las Vegas and a few cities in Florida, they have decided that feeding people only makes more people poor and so they outlawed the distribution of food on the streets. Cincinnati, Austin, and Los Angeles are all developing ways to make it difficult to exist if you do not have a home. I would not be surprised if all these cities were meeting on a regular basis to compare notes on the best strategy to make their homeless population disappear through law enforcement…

clevelandhomeless: Interesting Post on Public Urination

“we’re webcasting with the Mayor this morning“

As many of you that have met me in person know, I am an African-American. I grew up here in Cleveland, even though I live in Akron now. I just read Mansfield Frazier’s most recent article on Cool Cleveland, Race in America. In it, Mr. Frazier, who is also African-American, talks about how debate and converstation that isn’t specifially about race ends up with race in it. One example being his radio appearance with Ward 11 councilman Michael Polensek, who is white, over the letter that Councilman Polensek wrote to a law-breaking constituent of his ward.:

A few weeks ago when I first responded in print to the letter Polensek wrote (see the Cool Cleveland archives if you missed it) my point was — and remains — nasty letters alone will not solve the problem, but with that said, I honestly believe the best place for the young thug who sparked the debate is prison. According to government statistics he is twice as likely to die a violent death in the streets as in the joint. Nonetheless, people read and internalize what they wish, and gloss over the rest. More than a few White Polensek supporters wrote me to say how tired they were with everything always being about race. Polensek himself said on the radio show that he was “tired of this race crap.”

Mr. Frazier also says, and this is the line that should be on a poster somewhere:

If White folks think they are tired of race being the central issue in American culture, if they just think they are tired of hearing about race all the time, then they ought to try being Black.

From one of the campaign’s bloggers:

He began at Beatitude House, which provides housing and support to homeless women with children in the Youngstown area. Beatitude House opened in 1991 to “offer housing and support to any woman dreaming of better opportunities for herself and her children.”

The founder of Beatitude House, Sister Margaret Scheetz, saw a too-prevalent problem in Youngstown - a cycle of poverty and homelessness that many women and their children were caught up in. Believing that education was the best way out of poverty she sought to offer these women an opportunity…. John went from meeting with women just getting on their feet at Beatitude House to meeting with business leaders at the Youngstown Business Incubator. It’s a very different setting, but an organization working to do a very similar thing as Beatitude House - which is to create opportunity where there is none…

Was one of the topics we talked about on SoI’s this morning, in case you missed it.

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