Spare Change News

Tag: Issue 8-14-2013

  • Radio

    While I was working at the needle exchange, there was a couple I still cannot get out of my mind. They were in their early 60s, homeless, and they had come up for the warmer weather. They liked Massachusetts best, but they wintered in Florida. Snowbirds. That’s the expression people have for those who have…

  • Where Will It End?

    In the last issue of SPARE CHANGE NEWS, there was a news article by Alex Ramirez on sequester cuts: how will they affect federal funding for programs that service the poor and the homeless? For one, housing vouchers (like Section 8) which subsidize rent for those who cannot afford the full price, will be greatly…

  • Power and Privilege in the Anthony Weiner Sex Scandal

    From looking at mainstream coverage of Anthony Weiner’s ongoing scandals, it would seem there are only two possible positions to take on the embattled politician. On one side are those who denounce Weiner’s sexting and lies as disqualifying him from office. On the other are those, mostly liberals and progressives, who argue that Weiner’s behavior…

  • Politics as Unusual: Mayoral Candidate Dan Conley’s Troubling Record of Clearing Cops Who Kill Minorities

    Word on the street is that the acquittal of George Zimmerman might catalyze a meaningful dialogue about race and power. In cities coast to coast, a conversation has already manifested, with the biggest protest crowds since Occupy uniting to express outrage and to honor the memory of Trayvon Martin. Around the Hub, it’s anybody’s guess…

  • Before Trayvon Martin

    “Fruitvale Station” directed by Ryan Coogler Significant Productions, 85 min., in theaters now The award-winning film “Fruitvale Station” shows the true story of 22-year-old Oscar Grant III on the day of his death. The timing of this movie could not have been better. Following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin,…

  • When Art Imitates Life and Gets It Right

    “Orange is the New Black” created by Jenji Kohan Netflix, 51–61 min., 13 episodes The moving Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” is based on a memoir of the same name by Piper Kerman—the fictional Piper Chapman on the show—a highly-educated woman in her 30s who was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison…

  • Three Poems

    A Good Man quietly inside of me remembering — always remembering the capon my mother cooked to please the man she loved, a man that came home every night put on his slippers and smoked his pipe they’d sit and chat and watch TV Gunsmoke, Ed Sullivan, Lawrence Welk and always Dad’s favorite – Edith…

  • Turning Up the Heat on Coal Power in Massachusetts

    SOMERSET, Mass.—Henry David Thoreau, that famous son of Massachusetts, famously wrote, “If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” Climate activists across the commonwealth have been taking those words to heart. On 7 January 2013,…

  • Manning Found Not Guilty of Aiding the Enemy, Guilty on 19 Other Counts

    FORT MEADE, Md.—Pfc. Bradley Manning has been found not guilty of “aiding the enemy” by leaking hundreds of thousands of classified national security documents that implicate the United States in war crimes to WikiLeaks in a verdict announced Tuesday by Judge Col. Denise Lind at a military base in Fort Meade, Maryland. He has been…

  • The Costs of Coal

    Camilo Viviero grew up in Somerset, Mass., in the shadow of two coal-fired power plants. “For years growing up, you would hear around midnight this air horn. That’s when they would send out the plumes of toxins. In the middle of the night, while we were sleeping,” he says. One of those plants was decommissioned…