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Food or crack. The choice is yours.

That's the message one northern B.C. aid group has issued to people knocking on the door for help, saying they must now provide proof of financial need to gain assistance.

The requirement stems from bureaucracy — an audit of the Dawson Creek Salvation Army last year slammed the fact people didn't need to show what they were earning to gain free food — but now workers hope it could help break the poverty cycle.

Kim Mulligan, director of family services for the Dawson Creek Salvation Army, said blithely handing out assistance without proof of need was “enabling people to destroy themselves.”

“If you pay $700 rent and the cheque you get is $800, clearly you need us to help you. But if you've got someone who brings in their information and they're making $5,000 a month, I want to know where that money's going,” Ms. Mulligan told The Globe in a telephone interview.

“One guy today had $100. He could have bought food, but he bought crack. He didn't get anything [from the Salvation Army]. How are we to help if we continue to enable them?”

Drugs, particularly crack, are the greatest challenge. Workers at the Dawson Creek Salvation Army guessed that up to 90 per cent of people they see are choosing to buy drugs instead of food.

Meanwhile, soaring rent prices mean a rising number of families who simply can't make ends meet are also coming to the door.

In the end, the organization has to help those people who really need it, Ms. Mulligan said.

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Are we so classist (this is rhetorical, I know the answer is yes) as a society that the idea of judging a poor person's behaviour is accepted as the norm? The majority of the comments after the article were grotesque, just a bland fall-into-line "way to go Sally Ann kinda drivel.

Of course, this is the kind of "leadership" I expect from the Salvation Army, duh.

And of course this is the kind of story the Globe would run.

So yeah, what about Fidel's question about corporate welfare, or cronies/buddies getting multi-million dollar government contracts, or even the bad behaviour of people who are higher than middle class? Why are the poor continuously targetted for (lack of) morality? (Rhetorical again. I guess I'm in a mood )

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Originally posted by bigcitygal:
"A hand up, not a hand out" Give me a fucking break.

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If I require something out of them, they will require something out of themselves. What I want them to get in their heads is that they are worthwhile — they are useful human beings,” Ms. Mulligan said.

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Blame, condesension and humiliation are empowering.

[ 05 October 2007: Message edited by: remind ]

He was more or less paraphrasing Malcolm X's famous retort to an American journalist who asked him about the existence of "black gun clubs." Malcolm noted that gun clubs only became an issue of concern when they were black gun clubs, as it is quite evident that there are numerous white gun clubs.

Spike was quite frosty in his response to the inquiring entertainment industry journalist, probably because between the hundred odd music industry schmoozers gathered for his presentation there were numerous attendees coming down off cocaine highs from the night before.

[ 05 October 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

Three Bush family biographers "suicided" themselves, including Gary Webb, a highly acclaimed investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News. Webb's news story, Dark Alliance, pointed fingers at DEA and CIA compliance with flying drugs into the States as a way of supporting the anticommunist Contra mercenaries recruited from around the Caribbean and Central and South America in the 1980's. The CIA supplied dope dealers like Freeway Ricky Ross who raked in $2-$3 million on good business days according to him. When anticommunism is the game anything goes for the right-wing cabal.

[ 06 October 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

[ 06 October 2007: Message edited by: The Wizard of Socialism ]

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Originally posted by Michelle:
[QB]A good reason to never EVER donate to religious charities who provide social services.

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