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Encountering a Broken Health Care System

Features
“I know that a person can be broken, but the system can be broken, too. I may be seen by others as a broken-down body with a broken-down mind. But I see a broken system in the mental health and medical field, from the front lines.”

Counties Cancel ICE Detention Contracts

Features   News
Most cancellations are motivated by public outrage over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance,” under which every migrant crossing the border without papers is criminally charged and held in detention centers. Over 3,000 children have been torn from their parents and thousands of others have been incarcerated.

Attacking the Poor in a Full-Page Newspaper Ad

Features   News
Imagine if all poverty and need were forced into the shadows based on the perceptions of danger by imaginative wealthy people. We would have what we have now; housing built predominantly for the well-off, with so little housing for the poor that the rest of us huddle under overpasses.

Joy in the Midst of Sorrow in Santa Maria Orphanage

Features
This amazing priest not only housed 300 orphaned children from the streets of Mexico City, but he also took care of 20 homeless elders in his own house and started a home for children dying of AIDS. Father Norman also ran a soup kitchen that fed many people in the village.

Tragic Death of Oakland Tenant Mary Jesus

Features   News
Being evicted felt like the end of her life. As a disabled woman, she saw nothing ahead but a destitute life on the streets. She told a friend, “If I’m evicted tomorrow, I have no choice but to kill myself. I have no resources, no savings, no money, and nowhere to go.”

GOP Seeks Massive HUD Budget Cuts

Features   News
Despite the severe shortage of affordable housing, the GOP is seeking massive new cuts to HUD’s housing programs. Their budget would also result in nearly $6 trillion in catastrophic budget cuts over a decade to our nation’s federal domestic programs, not including the military.

How Big Growers Exploit and Intimidate Farm Workers

Features   News
The lawsuit says managers routinely threatened to send farm workers home if they failed to meet the quota, and to blacklist them afterwards, preventing them from returning to the U.S. to work in subsequent years. One manager told them, “You came here to suffer, not for vacation.”

My Back Pages: Kerry's Kids, An Undying Dream

Features
Oakland pediatrician Dr. Karen Kruger said, “Kerry’s death was so sudden and seemingly purposeless and shocking that I think there was a need for people that loved her to carry on her memory in a way that she would look down on from her cloud and be happy about.”

My Back Pages: A Song for Miss Kay

Features
She softly sings the soul anthem “Stand By Me.” It is a song for Miss Kay, a song for all of us. Her life, with its music and joy, followed by a downward slide into homelessness and death, tells us something deeper than words about the human condition.