In New York last week General Petraeus and his wife Holly were honored for their work with homeless veterans by HELP USA (my employer):

He delivered a sensitive and yet powerful message about the intolerable number of veterans who are homeless. It was appropriate.

Veterans constitute one third of the nation's homeless population according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA estimates that on any given night, 300,000 homeless vets are on the streets and in shelters. The VA acknowledges that many more veterans are dangerously close to becoming homeless or are living in poor conditions. That's 10 times the amount of service men and women that we just approved to send to Afghanistan over the next year.

Without even mentioning the expected surge in numbers related to PTSD in the aftermath of middle east combat, these numbers raise serious questions about how we are managing the homeland we are so fiercely protecting abroad.

If we agree that this scenario is disgraceful, what needs to be done to remedy it? How high a priority should Homeless Veterans be on the national agenda? Should homeless veterans be a higher priority than other people who are homeless?

Imagine that you are a New York City resident and the victim of theft. You ask the police for help, but because the thief who stole from you returned your property, they say their hands are tied. You press charges, but the judge tells you the same thing.

Sounds far fetched, doesn't it? Think again. This exact scenario is being played out right now in NYC Housing Court. The role of the Thief is being played by a landlord, Laurence Gluck of Stellar Management, and the role of You is being played by, well, YOU. Your understudies are the tenants of Independence Plaza North, who have been fighting for what's right for years now. They have been fighting, the way the tenants of Stuyvesant Town fought. The way those at Starrett City fought. And Co-op City, too. They fight for themselves and for their stolen stabilized rents. But they fight for you too. And for a city that may become unrecognizable in a decade or less if someone doesn't speak out.

The long story short is that Gluck took J-51 tax abatement money from the government and then went ahead and destabilized the rents at Independence Plaza North. This is illegal. Once caught, he tried to give the money back. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development apparently helped him do just that. They went in and retroactively changed the paperwork to make it look as if the landlord gave the taxpayer money - your money, OUR money - back at an earlier date. Something that might be called aiding and abetting.

But for Laurence Gluck, a landlord hell-bent on getting the poor and middle class out of his buildings, HPD bent over backwards to change the paperwork. And change it they did, there's no question. If not for a group of intrepid IPN tenants who smelled a rat, Stellar and HPD might have gotten away with it too. But not so fast. These tenants, many of them paying fair market rent, brought a lawsuit against Gluck. They knew that he wasn't allowed to take tax abatement money AND destabilize rents at IPN. And so the battle was joined. The sides were clear: Tenant vs. Landlord. But who would these housing agencies, the ones that are supposed to PRESERVE and DEVELOP housing units in our city, support in this fight? The man who stole from them or the people he stole from?

Former HPD Commissioner and YOUR Housing Secretary under Barack Obama, Shaun Donovan, looked at the same evidence I just outlined for you and wrote that it would be a "disaster" for landlord/tenant negotiations going forward if the rents at IPN were to be stabilized because of Stellar's illegal actions. What?! The only disaster is that Donovan's pro-landlord-at-all-costs stance cost many good, hard-working people their homes. Donovan's HPD is the actual agency that GAVE Gluck the money - YOUR money, OUR money - they drove the getaway car - and then he turns around and says, Well, it's OK. Is it OK with YOU?

And what did The Division of Housing and Community Renewal determine? They determined that they have no say in this and passed the buck, but not before saying that Stellar didn't steal the money, in their estimation, because when he was frisked he no longer had it on him. What?! These determinations defy all law and all logic. Ya know, if we didn't know better, we might draw the conclusion that these Government Agencies defend Stellar's stealing ways because in the end, they don't want affordable housing in NYC. Hmm...

So back to Court it goes. Now for a trial. A final battle in this long war. Meanwhile, the casualties pile up: those evicted because they couldn't pay the illegal rent increase imposed by Stellar (which was allowed by HPD and DHCR), those who moved out after their rents were raised, and those who died, seeing their apartments go back to the landlord and to illegal fair market rates.

There is a new development in all this, beyond the tenant's battle. It seems that the Feds are now involved. Apparently, some of that HPD money Stellar stole belonged to them. The Feds don't like to be stolen from and they are now investigating the landlord. You can steal from citizens. You can steal from ineffectual city agencies. But don't steal from Uncle Sam. Maybe that's the lesson of this tale.

Hopefully when the final word in this case is written and the courts do their job, there will be one more lesson: That stealing is stealing, no matter how many bureaucrats look the other way and say it isn't. Maybe then and only then will tenants who've committed no crime be given the justice they deserve. Maybe then will a small part of our city be ours again. Maybe.

At least that's what Quansa Thompson is trying to claim. She's a smart cookie exotic dancer from Washington, DC who is suing her former "employer" for not paying her and her fellow dancers a wage. I put employer in quotes in this context because the owner of the club claims that "he treats dancers as if they were patrons, charging them $20 admission, then letting them keep whatever they earn without any additional fees."

No matter what your stance is on strippers or exotic dancers, I hope that you agree that they are working. They are providing entertainment that draws people in to pay real money to enter an establishment and buy food and drinks. Sure they get paid a lot (at least the ones in the WaPo article do) to entertain, but that doesn't mean that employers should get off the hook. Thompson says that she might start a magazine; I think she should enroll in law school. There are a lot of other women out there who need a gutsy woman like her, who is willing to speak out for her rights as an employee, to stand by them!

And thanks WaPo for an educational and entertaining article. I can't figure out if my favorite line was about Warren Buffet or the safety net.

[Image: Washington Post]

Is Ushahidi the new paradigm in humanitarian work? The small Kenyan-born organization is, in the words of The New York Times, "Africa's Gift to Silicon Valley." Ushahidi, which means testimony in Swahili, started in the wake of Kenya's disputed election in 2007. It uses common mapping software usually used for social purposes for targeted humanitarian work. From The Times:

A prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, Ory Okolloh, who was based in South Africa but had gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election, received threats about her work and returned to South Africa. She posted online the idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people anonymously to report violence and other misdeeds. Technology whizzes saw her post and built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend.

The site collected user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths and plotted them on a map, using the locations given by informants. It collected more testimony -- which is what Ushahidi means in Swahili -- with greater rapidity than any reporter or election monitor.

Since then, Ushahidi's mandate has expanded dramatically. What started as a wiki tool allowing people to anonymously report election irregularities is now used as a crisis map in natural disasters, track votes in the Indian elections, and following medicine shortages. Because cellphone penetration is heavy even in the third world, the rapidly evolving Ushahidi's dev community has developed a mobile strategy. Ushahidi has become a humanitarian force -- albeit digitally -- in both the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes, where victims text messages to better organize relief. In the new paradigm, according to the Times, "victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response."

Ushahidi, which had no venture-capital backing and uses open-source software, is tailor-made for re-engineering to each particular crisis in the developing world. The question that inevitably arises is: How many more *Ushahidi's* are possible should young people in the developing world received a better tech education? Can technology -- and, more important, a technology education -- lessen the gap between the Haves in the West and Asia and the Have Nots in the developing world? What do you think?

My third, last and happiest update on the women of the WASPs...They finally got their gold:

Can you pass a tissue? Look at that photo...those hands. Delicate as my late grandmother's, yet you know the history behind them. Those hands are representative of "1,100 young women, all civilian volunteers, [who] flew almost every type of military aircraft -- including the B-26 and B-29 bombers -- as part of the WASP program." Some women were too short for the program but somehow slipped through by standing tip-toe.

Yet because the women were civilian volunteers working to support the government, the government did little to support the 38 who died in the line of duty:

[26-year-old Mabel Rawlinson from Kalamazoo, Mich. ] was coming back from a night training exercise with her male instructor when the plane crashed...the military was not required to pay for her funeral or pay for her remains to be sent home. So -- and this is a common story -- her fellow pilots pitched in.

"They collected enough money to ship her remains home by train," says Pohly. "And a couple of her fellow WASPs accompanied her casket."

And, because Rawlinson wasn't considered military, the American flag could not be draped over her coffin. Her family did it anyway.

Now we know where the women got all their moxie from, eh?

But whether or not they lived to receive their Congressional Gold Medals, scores of us who learned all about how the Greatest Generation was composed of sacrificing baseball players and Rosie the Riveters, now know that there were also a group of Fly Girls who did things like tow "targets to give ground and air gunners training shooting -- with live ammunition."

And to have the awarding of their medals happen in March, Women's History Month, whose theme this year is "Writing Women Back into History," well, it's a little too much for this writer to comprehend without another box of tissues.

[Image: Columbia Missourian]