February Poetry of the Streets
The wizards in old tales/ used to bury their hearts in secret places./ And unless you dug up the heart and / destroyed it,/ they were invulnerable and heartless./ Part of my heart is buried in People’s Park.
Month: February 2012
Finding an Escape from the Streets of Broken Dreams
Mitch suffered the double whammy of a pink slip and divorce from a red-haired beauty half his age. After months of depression and passivity, he arrived in the Golden State and wound up sleeping on the cold concrete of Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco.
Homelessness Means Being Cast Out of Civilization
If we become homeless, we find that the police aren’t here to protect and serve. Instead, they have become the strong arm of the law that tells us where we can’t be. It is the same arm that could punish us by taking us to jail for panhandling, trespassing, and disorderly conduct.
Liberated Ads Confront the Foreclosure Crisis
The corrected ads were released just prior to the nonviolent shut down of San Francisco’s Financial District on January 20 by Occupy SF. January 20 also marks the one-year anniversary of the controversial Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted First Amendment protection to corporate political expenditures.
Federal Voucher Reform Bill Will Harm Poorest Tenants
The federal government is about to remove the cap that limits the amount of rent that can be charged to the poorest of the poor. Yet, there are no caps on how much money the executives in the so-called affordable housing industry can grab for their often excessively high salaries and wage compensation.
Domestic Workers and Their Children March for Rights
The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights would affect the 200,000 people who work in California domestic service, who are almost entirely women, and immigrants or people of color. Domestic workers face substandard conditions and low pay, even though many are the sole source of income for their families.
National Day of Action for the Right to Exist
The sit/lie law that Seattle passed in 1993 is nearly verbatim the same sit/lie law that San Francisco passed in 2010. The sit/lie law that San Francisco passed to use against homeless people is the same law that San Francisco police now use to harass Occupy protesters.
A Modest Proposal for Building Community in People’s Park
After all of these years of police repression in People’s Park, is it not glaringly apparent that the City of Berkeley treats People’s Park like a pariah, and University of California officials would just as soon get out the tear gas and the truncheons?
UC Berkeley Officials Desecrate People’s Park
That University of California officials carried out their vandalism against People’s Park without once notifying any of the many volunteers who had worked on that project about their plans, although they themselves had required the volunteer activists to go by the letter of the book, was a rape.
Berkeley Food and Housing Food Project Faces New Challenges in Overcoming Homelessness in Berkeley
“Every night now the shelters are full,” Terrie Light said. “Zero vacancies. Emergency beds are full. We often put out cots, and then they get full.” When the overnight shelters in Berkeley are overloaded, many homeless people are forced to sleep in their cars or on the street.
Bulldozing People’s Park Is Not User Development
University of Calfornia officials are trying to erase history. The incursion is a test to see if the People will hold this place as the sacred ground we liberated from the folly of UC officials in 1969 and have held all these years. Bulldozing is not user development.
Serial Killer Stalked Homeless Men in Orange County
Evidently, the authorities place very little value on the lives of homeless people. Orange County offered the same paltry amount of reward money for the conviction of a serial killer of four homeless men as pet owners in the same affluent area offer for finding a lost dog or cat.