Obama Woos the ‘Economic Royalists’
The last thing we need is further acquiescence to the economic royalists. What we need is exactly the opposite: leadership to push back against the right-wing ideologues and the forces they represent.
Street Spirit
Creative Acts of Housing Liberation in San Francisco
Creative Housing Liberation would like to invite “all kinds of folks, including families,” to be involved in future housing occupations. Families are the largest new homeless group, a number that is skyrocketing since the housing foreclosure scandals and the economic crisis began.
The Government’s War on Disabled People
President Obama was supposed to redistribute the wealth, yet this looks more like stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. Once again, the poor and disabled have been shortchanged.
Ugly Laws, Bum Blockades and Sundown Towns
The Quality of Life ordinances enacted in cities across the nation to outlaw and banish homeless people from certain areas are our contemporary version of the vagrancy laws that have been with us for centuries. In the South, they were used to force freed slaves back to the plantation. In the North, they were used to instill a Protestant work ethic in indigent whites.
Confronting the JFK Assassination
Where do we find hope when a peacemaking president is assassinated by his own national security state?
Wall Street Has Already Voted for Rising Inequality
Wall Street plundered your livelihoods, homes and retirement funds — and now they want you to bail them out, again, with your vote.
Quality of Life Laws and Broken Windows Theory
by Paul Boden
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat images do the words “quality of life” bring to mind? A peaceful beach? A beautiful park?
World Homeless Day: Housing Activists Take Over Vacant Hotel in San Francisco
he Leslie Hotel is just one vacant building in a city that has hundreds of abandoned buildings on the streets where thousands of abandoned human beings languish without housing or shelter. While the Leslie Hotel has 60 vacant units that could provide housing to homeless people, the 2009 Census Bureau statistics show that San Francisco has an estimated 36,000 vacant housing units. With 6,000 to 15,000 homeless people on the streets of San Francisco, that seems unfair.
Poetry, November 2010
Who Would Believe
by Claire J. Baker
Who would believe that all
week at a slick Senior Center
in a
Exploiting Prejudice for Profit
A city’s welcoming attitude toward strangers, travelers and the poor might have its costs. But so does constantly cycling vulnerable people through the courts and jails. I’d rather give a dollar to a stranger than play any role in yet another unconstitutional law.
Rubicon’s Innovative Aid to Homeless Mentally Disabled
Rubicon is the name of a river which Julius Caesar crossed, and changed his life in the process. It is hoped that the clients of Rubicon can be helped to pass over obstacles in their paths and transform the course of their lives.
California’s Perfect Storm of Student Protest
A social movement is now growing across the country to defend public education. California’s perfect storm was at its leading edge, and contributed a new repertoire of strategy and tactics for building it.