Street Spirit

CEOs to Workers: Much More for Me, Less for You

News
It’s no accident that wages are down while corporate profits are at record highs. U.S. wages are at a 50-year low relative to company sales. CEOs make more in a few hours than workers who care for children, the ill and the elderly make in a year.

Deadly Budget for the Poor and Elderly

Opinion
Can a civilized nation accept the draconian cutbacks being proposed by the U.S. Congress at this very moment? Can anyone with a spark of humanity support a budget that allows the most destitute to die on the streets all over the nation, rather than helping them?

Time to Reclaim a Society Ruled by Corporate Greed

News
People from community organizing and immigrant right communities, from union, homeless, health, and housing groups, are getting together and laying the groundwork so this movement can grow. We will all be marching, dancing, and dropping in to say hello to our “friends” in the financial district.

Heroes in Our Midst

Commentary
Many nonprofit service providers are working to alleviate the ever-worsening symptoms of poverty by meeting the needs for shelter, food and services. But very few go the extra mile to stand up in defense of the human rights of the poor, or to take part in protests against structural injustice.

Historic Hunger Strike Launches a Movement

News
The strike’s magnitude was historic, with 6,600 prisoners fasting in 13 prisons. Many prisoners around the world, and many people on the outside, fasted in solidarity. The movement to end the tortuous conditions of long-term solitary confinement was revitalized.

Help us Expose the Corporate Greed of Big Finance

News
Join social justice groups for a protest tour of the S.F. Financial District. March in the Great American TARP Tour, August 5 at 4 p.m., Union Square, San Francisco. Big Finance has swindled hundreds of billions of dollars by begging for an unconscionable bail-out via the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP.

An Inside View of a Housing Occupation

By Carol Harvey on
News
On a high-flying journey from the streets to the rooftops, activists in San Francisco carried out their latest direct action campaign by taking over the vacant Sierra Hotel, demanding it be used to house homeless people.

"I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY!"

Poetry
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York was a disaster of legendary horror that killed 146 people, mostly young immigrant women, and helped galvanize the labor movement.

July Poetry of the Streets

Poetry
Her first steps are a stagger-limp/ a block, a mile to go!/ On the grimy street stage,/ she still tries to play a part,/ mutters moving lines/ but few hear them at all/ or hear them as true.

South of Silicon Valley, Hunger Haunts Hollister

Features
In a terrible contradiction in U.S. poverty, the farm workers who spend their working lives producing the food consumed by millions in cities all over the country often don’t have enough to eat themselves. Hunger haunts agricultural workers in Hollister, in the very shadow of Silicon Valley’s unparalleled affluence.

AARP Sells Out the Elderly, Poor and Disabled

News
Even as 1.3 million elderly and disabled Californians had their SSI benefits slashed below the federal poverty level, the American Association of Retired Persons made national headlines after it double-crossed the elderly poor by joining right-wing members of Congress in supporting budget cuts to Social Security benefits.

Another Anti-Homeless Ballot Measure? Really?

News
Berkeley’s business improvement districts continue to obsessively pursue anti-homeless measures in an attempt to cleanse the downtown sidewalks of homeless people. Yet the last thing Berkeley’s small businesses need is another highly politicized and self-destructive campaign about how terrible it is to shop in Berkeley.