Month: September 2015

Humanize Not Militarize: Resistance to Militarism

Opinion
FROM FERGUSON TO GAZA, militarism directly impacts all of our lives. The American Friends Service Committee’s new poster art exhibit examines the effects of militarism in both foreign and domestic policy, and highlights alternatives and positive nonviolent solutions.

This Is How Homelessness Happens: Luxury Hotels in Berkeley

Features   Uncategorized
Nobody buys the hype about insanely tall buildings somehow saving the whales or solving the housing crisis. Insanely tall buildings full of luxury housing fill up with insanely wealthy people who rarely wonder why a town which once had a thriving black community now looks like a white country club.

Santa Cruz Police Violate First Amendment Rights

Features   Uncategorized
The Freedom Sleepers are determined to rouse the conscience of the city against the Sleeping Ban. They plan to return to the park every week in increased numbers to press the community to support restoration of civil rights for homeless people. And they intend to force police to withdraw or arrest them.

Support Grows for Freedom Sleepouts in Santa Cruz

Features   Uncategorized
“In our view, the situation in Santa Cruz is legally indistinguishable from the situation in Boise. We believe that the Freedom Sleepers are working effectively to bring attention to these important issues and to protect significant constitutional rights.” — Peter Gelblum, American Civil Liberties Union

One Dollar, One Vote: Big Business Subverts Democracy

Features   Uncategorized
Grossman offers a frank opinion of why BIDs aim to move homeless people out of business districts. “It’s a customer service district. They don’t see the homeless people as customers... If they don’t see you as a customer you are in trouble... You are either a customer or a contagion.”

Many Barriers to Healthcare for the Homeless Community

Features
Time and time again, we hear stories of people on the streets needing medical services being turned away from emergency departments; being “dumped” onto county hospitals by private entities; or being forced to use emergency rooms as their only source of medical care for significant or routine medical needs.

Court to Los Angeles: ‘Stop Destroying Homeless Belongings’

Features   Uncategorized
Nine homeless individuals just whipped the City of Los Angeles in court. It’s a narrow ruling, and it was not unanimous, but it helps protect homeless and poor people’s property, including “medications, legal documents, family photographs, and bicycles that are left momentarily unattended in violation of a municipal ordinance.”

Street Spirit Interview with Shelley Douglass, Part 2

Features   In Dialogue
You age and die on death row if they don’t electrocute you or murder you in some other way. One of the men had a stroke and had to be taken care of. Leroy was one of the major caregivers for him. Leroy was never an angel, but he became a very compassionate person.

Street Spirit Interview with Shelley Douglass, Part 1

Features   In Dialogue
The whole point of the arms race is to protect what we have that really isn’t justifiably ours. As long as we remain complicit with that, then to that extent we’re complicit with weapons like the Trident. So we were trying to withdraw our cooperation as much as we could.

Remembering Hiroshima at Livermore's Holocaust Laboratory

Features   Uncategorized
“The killing of civilian noncombatants for political purposes is terrorism and mass murder — nothing else. It should not have happened. It did not need to happen. It should never happen again.” -- Daniel Ellsberg, speaking at Livermore Laboratory on the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing