Street SpiritJ U S T I C E N E W S & H O M E L E S S B L U E S I N T H E B A Y A R E A

Volume 17, No. 09 September 2011 $1.00

A publication of the American Friends Service Committee

by Carol Harvey

West Coast social justice groupsfrom San Francisco, Portlandand Los Angeles rallied with

New York and Chicago allies at UnionSquare in a protest led by poor and work-ing-class people on August 5.

Demonstrators angrily protested BigFinance’s theft of billions of tax dollars,nationwide home foreclosures, attacks onworkers’ unions, and record rates of crim-inalization and incarceration of poor andhomeless people.

This protest, organized by the WesternRegional Advocacy Project (WRAP), waspart of a two-day Community Congress ofcivil rights and housing workshops heldon August 5 and 6 at SEUI offices, 350Rhode Island in San Francisco.

The goal of the Community Congresswas to broaden state, regional and nation-

al coalitions working for economic justiceby laying the groundwork for a movementof immigrants, unions, homeless andhousing groups made up of impoverished,marginalized and homeless people.

WRAP Director Paul Boden said thatthis movement will address “the corporategluttony and political corruption” “pitting

us against each other to the point wherewe are all drowning in the sea of trickle-down economics.”

At Friday’s protest, Boden spoke toenergetic crowds, including tourists, “Wehave destroyed 600,000 units of afford-able housing and built 800,000 jail cells.”He pointed an accusing finger at corporate

offices. “There’s your answer!”From Union Square, hundreds of

chanting marchers took part in what orga-nizers labeled “The Great AmericanTARP Tour,” demonstrating loudly out-side the offices of the “biggest culprits.”The fired-up marchers proceeded from the

Spirited Flashmob Invades S.F. Financial District

The Brass Liberation Orchestra led hundreds of protesters through the S.F. Financial District. Carol Harvey photo

See Flashmob Invades Financial page 14

Condemning Big Finance’stheft of billions of dollars,protesters marched on theunion-busting Hyatt Hoteland financier CharlesSchwab, then shut downWells Fargo bank.

by David BaconBERKELEY, Calif. — When the cur-

rent wave of mass firings of immigrantworkers started three years ago, they werecalled “silent raids” in the press. Thephrase sought to make firings seem morehumane than the workplace raids of theBush administration.

During Bush’s eight-year tenure, poss-es of black-uniformed immigrationagents, waving submachine guns, invadedfactories across the country and roundedup workers for deportations.

“Silent raids,” by contrast, have relied oncooperation between employers and immi-gration officials. The Department ofHomeland Security identifies workers itsays have no legal immigration status.Employers then fire them. The silence,then, is the absence of the armed men inblack. Paraphrasing Woody Guthrie, theyused to rob workers of their jobs with a gun.Now they do it with a fountain pen.

Silence also describes the lack of out-cry on behalf of those workers losing theirjobs. No delegations of immigrant rightsactivists have traveled to Washington,D.C., to protest. Unions have said little,

even as their own members were fired.And undocumented workers themselveshave been afraid. Those working fearedlosing their jobs. Those already fired wor-ried that immigration agents might comeknocking on their doors at night.

Over the last few months, however, awave of protest is starting to break thatsilence. In Berkeley, workers facing fir-ings at Pacific Steel Castings, the largeststeel foundry west of the Mississippi,have sought community support in a fightto keep their jobs.

City councils in Oakland and Berkeleyhave passed resolutions asking HomelandSecurity Secretary Janet Napolitano toback off efforts to force the company toterminate the workers. Churches andimmigrant rights activists have sent herletters with the same demand.

In Los Angeles, 1400 janitors marchedamong the Bunker Hill skyscrapers,blocking downtown traffic at lunch hour.They protested a wave of similar firingsby Able Building Maintenance,California’s largest privately held buildingservices contractor.

Fighting the Firings and the Workplace RaidsUnions have said little, even as their own memberswere fired in “silent raids,” and immigrant workershave been afraid. Over the last few months, howev-er, a wave of protest is starting to break that silence.

Thousands of Los Angeles janitors and their family members have heldhuge protests and sit-ins in resistance to the firing of immigrant workers.

David Baconphotos

See Fighting the Firings page 15

September 2011ST R E E T SP I R I T2

by Linda Ellen Lemaster

PeaceCamp2010 started on theFourth of July weekend last yearoutside the Santa CruzCourthouse, and lasted until a

few days past Labor Day. When I firstvisited the camp in July 2010, I wasmoved to offer my support to the ever-changing group of protesters.

People I met in the first week weretotally focused on bringing attention tothe public about the insidious criminaliza-tion of sleeping, camping and lodgingused to banish homeless people from anypublic areas and force them into hiding.

After sheriff deputies banished thedemonstration from the lawn in front ofthe courthouse, the sleep-protestersreturned to City Hall, intent on renewingthe primary message of the demonstra-tion: to show that the Santa Cruz ordi-nance that criminalizes sleeping andcamping in public is too broad, too pro-hibitive and too dangerous.

I had recently testified in court as an“expert witness” about homelessness inSanta Cruz, so I had already met some newfriends who also turned up at this Fourth ofJuly demonstration, which ultimately kepton going like the energizer bunny.

In early July of 2010, nobody I metrealized that PeaceCamp2010 would con-tinue for several months, and then beabruptly terminated by Santa Cruz Countysheriff deputies working in four-personteams. Joining the peace camp carried aprice. On Sept. 19, 2011, I go to trial forgetting a ticket claiming I broke the Stateof California’s lodging law, 647(e).

PeaceCamp2010 located itself right infront of the Santa Cruz County SuperiorCourt, where citizens traditionally gatherto share ideals and to bring concerns totheir government.

Local attorney and philosopher EdFrey was deemed a hero by many home-less people who found their way to the

demonstration in support of the right tosleep even while homeless. Frey, with thehelp of long-standing homeless ally PaulLee, had found the means to provide aporta-potty nightly at the peace camp, andmounted the rented utility on a small trail-er behind his pickup truck.

Frey had been listening carefully toreveries of homeless folks and their allies,hoping to figure out all the “health andsafety” issues in advance. His conclusionwas right-on: “potty” was the missingingredient for sustaining many earlier pro-homeless and anti-sleeping-ban rallies,marches and demonstrations, includingseveral held at this very location.

PeaceCamp2010 was like a livingkaleidoscope. While a number of folksstayed with it — the regulars, you mightsay — a majority of faces at the campchanged every few days. It was run asthough we were all adults — mostrefreshing. Sure, leaders emerged, reced-ed, emerged again. Yet there was a “liveand let live” air to this sleep demonstra-tion that seemed to welcome all comers.

Once publicity about the camp began,an average night might find two dozenfolks sleeping there, though at timesPeaceCamp2010 exceeded 50 folks withblankets and sleeping bags unfurled onthe lawn and concrete plaza.

MASS MEDIA FUELS STEREOTYPESThe demonstration received abundant,

even front-page, press coverage. Most of itwas negative, in my view: the press wasfeeding off stereotypes and playing to theresentments of the general housed popula-tion. The television news was gentler —vague yet visually honest. PeaceCamp2010denizens responded by cultivating SocialMedia to get their message out.

Later, tensions began to build aroundantagonisms and fears of County employ-ees and citizens on business at the Countyoffices, many of whom did not appreciatehaving to see the artifacts of homelessnesswhile on their way to work.

It was apparent that holding a “sleepdemonstration” as a legitimate message ofprotest went far over the heads of mostpassers-by. We were following a long tra-dition that reckons sleep in this context asa necessary form of free speech.

So many other venues for protest hadnot worked locally, and some even back-fired — as evidenced by troll-busting mur-ders and assaults in Santa Cruz, by the ever-growing numbers of anti-homeless lawsand regulations, and by the broadeningacceptance of those overt haters of visiblypoor and presumed homeless folks.

I believe our inability to get our messageshared in the media, without extreme distor-tion, in the past 25 years also helps fuel thisgrowing “blame the victim” mentality.

Ultimately, the last few determined,demonstrating sleepers were flushed off thecampus of City Hall by the police. Becauseof the protest, political officials and the citypolice continued to tighten the rules aboutbeing present at City Hall and the SantaCruz Library. Police were ruthless at bestregarding our signs and the personal prop-erty they confiscated.

Santa Cruz officials made it functional-ly impossible for demonstrators to gettheir belongings back once confiscated,and the police grabbed people’s posses-sions several times a night.

From Albany, Calif., to Orlando, Fla.,most homeless people can’t turn theirbacks on their belongings for a minute,and police pose as many risks as thievesand desperados. I note the propertydestruction because over and over home-less people have been protected by thecourts on this issue, only to have this “jus-tice” conveniently forgotten when politi-cal protesters enter the picture.

CRIMINAL ACTS OF SLEEPINGDemonstrators had formed the peace

camp specifically to protest the laws thatcriminalize anyone found asleep in publicat night. Ironically, during the final days,they were cited and displaced by policeusing the very laws they were protesting:the State of California’s lodging law, andthe City’s sleeping ban ordinance.

Santa Cruz officials continued attack-ing the remaining few demonstrators forcamping on the sidewalk at night. Theyused many new tricks, including klieglights and a huge blaring generator thatspewed toxic exhaust all night, until final-ly neighbors a block away complained.They confiscated our protest signs as fastas we could create new ones.

The hostile attitude toward any publicpresence of homeless people is not newhere. It continues despite what now eventhe courts have ruled is true: a person can-not live without sleeping. Enforcing thesleeping ban while no other alternativesexist is destructive and life-threatening.The County’s purpose in citing demon-strators for sleeping and lodging was tostifle our political expression.

Gary and Star were the troopersthroughout the final stages ofPeaceCamp2010, stoically enduring until

Busted and Jailed for ‘Sleepcrimes’ at Peace Camp

Star, a homeless woman in her 70s, is issued a citation by SantaCruz police. as she sits with her blankets at Peace Camp 2010. Star was one of five defendants found guilty of “sleepcrimes.”

Laying down for the right tosleep is dangerous in SantaCruz. The jurors found allbut one of these “sleep crim-inals” guilty. Actually, it wasa homeless man’s dog whowas found not guilty.

See Santa Cruz Prosecutes Sleep page 14

Photo credit:PeaceCamp2010

by Kisha Montgomery

Iam watching him sleep in the corner. He is slumped over abook in the children’s section and you cannot see his faceunder the series of greased curls that extend to his shoulder.

His hands are spread flat on the book and the dirt under hisnails give the impression that he has dug his way through life.He is breathing heavy — asleep, hunched over the book like aguardian, a keeper of a sacred text — a keeper of the book.

The management employees don’t ask him to leave. I feelthe humanity in their decision to let him be, even though cus-tomers are looking at him warily. They pass through the sec-tion, giving him a wide berth or skipping the section completelywhen they see him.

He snores deeply, and wakes himself up into a frenzied scanaround the room. He is a cornered cat, ready to defend his rightto be there. The wild look in his eyes says it all: “I am reading!My book is open! No one can say that I am not reading!”

He is looking to see who is looking at him, because heknows his right to rest, to warmth, to shelter, is tentative.

He knows that a frown or a raised eyebrow by a customercan translate to a loose tongue, a whispered complaint. “I meanI feel sorry for the guy, but” the loose tongue speaks and eyeswax compassion, but it is the unspoken that is the loudest. “Ifeel sorry for the guy, but ... (unspoken) he is compromising myprivilege to not be bothered by what is ‘out there.’”

He finds sanctuary in the written word, praying it can hold

him, until it can’t. He knows that too many frowns or raised eye-brows will translate to a small tug of his jacket, a kind or maybenot-so-kind tap on the shoulder and small words with large reper-cussions: “Sorry, but you have to go,” or “Alright buddy.”

But for now it has not happened. He can escape from realityin the written word — just like everybody else.

He slowly nods forward, snorts awake, twists his head inhypervigilance, turns a page in the book, flattens his hands andfalls asleep again. Is he the keeper of the book or is the book akeeper of him? It doesn’t matter.

He is buying time, even though he is unable to buy the book.

Keeper of the BookTHE BEARING WITNESS CHRONICLES

Art b

y Ch

rista

Occ

hiog

ross

o

September 2011 ST R E E T SP I R I T 3

Editorial by Terry Messman

Some of Berkeley’s most powerfulbusiness leaders are attackinghomeless people in their efforts to

remake this once-progressive city in theirown image as a place where profit andbusiness interests are sacrosanct, and thepoorest human beings are disposable.

Berkeley’s long-held peace and justicetraditions are being kicked to the curb,along with the homeless people targetedby powerful business associations.

First, Roland Peterson, head of theTelegraph Business Improvement District,led an attempt last spring to banish home-less people — especially homeless youth— from downtown business districts bycriminalizing the act of sitting.

No sooner had the creative protests ofthe Stand Up for the Right to Sit Downcoalition beat back that heavy-handedeffort at repression, but Peterson was backwith an equally inhumane proposal toforce the University of California to drivehomeless people out of People’s Park.

THE TELEGRAPH BIDOn August 9, Peterson sent an official

letter conveying what he called “theapproved position of the TelegraphBusiness Improvement District” to UCVice Chancellor Ed Denton.

Peterson’s letter is a reactionary andcrude blast at the very existence of home-less people in People’s Park. He claimsthat Telegraph merchants and propertyowners widely believe that People’s Parkis “a detriment to both the business andgeneral community.”

That sweeping statement is a manipu-lative ploy to claim that Peterson isn’t justspeaking on his own behalf, but for allbusiness owners, and the entire city aswell. In Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm,some of the animals are “more equal thanothers.” This letter makes it clear thatbusiness interests are far more equal thananyone else in Berkeley when it comes todictating the fate of People’s Park.

Peterson writes: “The Park is viewedprimarily as a homeless campground,” acenter for the illegal use of drugs and alco-hol, and “as a focal point for various activi-ties which attempt to serve the destitute,substance abusers and the mentally ill.”

His letter concludes that People’s Park“should not be the homeless encamp-ment” and the “national destination fornomadic youth that it has become.”

It is an amazingly heartless document.Not only must homeless people be ban-ished from the Park, but acts of compas-sion and charity as well. Evidently, in thehallowed name of profit, we must stopcaring about the poor. This is aimed notonly at homeless people, but also at theCatholic Workers and Food Not Bombsfor feeding hungry people in the Park.

Almost simultaneously with Peterson’sletter to the UC Vice Chancellor, anotherbusiness leader, Craig Becker, owner ofthe Caffe Mediterraneum and incomingpresident of Telegraph BusinessImprovement District, convened a groupof business leaders to press UC officials,in only slightly more diplomatic language,

to take action against People’s Park.Arthur Fonseca has done volunteer work

at People’s Park for more than 15 years,and worked with Food Not Bombs since1991. He said, “Roland Peterson is usingthese incredibly prejudiced terms againstpoor people and characterizing the Park as ahomeless campground. If he were sayingthese kinds of things about people of colorhe would be considered a racist. Our econo-my is in the toilet and the richest people inour community are trying to discriminateagainst the poorest people.”

THE SPIRIT OF BERKELEY

These attempts to drive homeless peo-ple and charitable meal programs out ofthe Park are an assault on the very valuesthat gave birth to People’s Park in 1969.

People’s Park is so much more thanjust another municipal park. It is a livingsymbol of the fact that it is possible tofight the powers that be — all theentrenched power of the police, the corpo-rations and the university — and win.

It is the spirit and history of Berkeleyitself, as a renowned center of the anti-warmovement. It embodies the spirit of a timewhen people deeply believed in the coun-tercultural ideals of peace and justice.

People’s Park is the still-living dreamof a place liberated from corporate controland reclaimed for the common people,including the homeless people who them-selves are victims of an unprincipled eco-nomic system run by corporate power.

The Park is the legacy of thousands ofactivists who dreamed it into existence inthe first place.

It is a visible reminder of a time whenpeople cared so much about justice thatthey risked jail sentences, police clubs andbullets and carried out massive protests inthe face of overwhelming governmentalfirepower and repression.

It is the courage of tens of thousands ofdemonstrators who defied the police andRonald Reagan’s heavily armed NationalGuard to build a park for all the people.

It is the blood of James Rector and theeyesight of activists who were deliberate-ly shot, maimed and murdered by out-of-control police. More than 100 people wereinjured by police firing shotguns into theprotesters and Rector was killed by policein the struggle for the Park.

It is the commitment and perseveranceof hundreds of volunteers and gardenerswho kept the dream of the Park alive forthe next decades.

It is the brave idealism that inspired hun-dreds of people to risk arrest the last timeUC officials tried to remake People’s Parkin the image of some suburban vision ofvolleyballs and sunbathing students.

Fonseca said, “I’ve seen the corporatetakeover of America, and People’s Park isone place that has managed to resist cor-porate domination. It was founded in themiddle of the Vietnam War as a protestagainst the military-industrial complex,and it continues to be an important sym-bol as a protest against the militarizationof our society.”

The key thing forgotten by RolandPeterson and the bullying crowd of busi-

nessmen intent on evicting homeless peo-ple is that People’s Park was liberated byactivists struggling against the VietnamWar, poverty and racism. It was built bypeople who gave a damn about protectinghuman life from corporate interests.

For self-appointed business “leaders”to say we should now abandon our broth-ers and sisters who are homeless, and ban-ish them from the park “in order to savethe park,” shows that the leaders of theBusiness Improvement District neverunderstood People’s Park at all.

TEARING OUT THE HEART

Compassion for the poor was one ofthe foundational ideals of the peace andcivil rights movements that createdPeople’s Park. Tearing out that legacy ofcompassion for the poor would tear theheart out of People’s Park.

Many otherwise well-meaning peoplefail to understand this. Wouldn’t the Parkbe more appealing if only the homelesspeople who clutter it up were moved out?

Yet the activists who love People’s Parkare not just committed to preserving thegrass and trees and open space. They arededicated to preserving the spirit of peaceand love that gave birth to the Park.

It has always amazed me that activistsreally see this connection between thecountercultural ideals that gave birth tothe Park, and the compassion for the poorand hungry that was inextricably interwo-ven into the movement of the 1960s.

I always fear that when push comes toshove, the poor will be sold down theriver in order to preserve People’s Park.Instead, Berkeley activists have beenunwavering in their incredible commit-ment to defending the Park and the poor.

“Roland Peterson has been making afine living persecuting the poor andhomeless,” said Dan McMullan, a long-time homeless advocate and founder ofthe Disabled People Outside Project.

“He is directing a little group of brownshirts that have done nothing to help anyof the problems in Berkeley and are actu-ally damaging and killing off Telegraphbusiness by destroying the culture thatpeople come to experience.”

Perhaps these business leaders shouldrecall that Shelley once said that “poetsare the unacknowledged legislators of theworld” — poets, not businessmen.

In that spirit, consider T.S. Eliot’spoem, “The Rock.” A Stranger arrives

unannounced in the city and asks its resi-dents if they live huddled so closely togeth-er because they love each other — or onlyto make money from each other. The ques-tion is a prophetic warning to the mastersof commerce that if they worship onlyprofits, they’ve lost their very souls.

Every rotten piece of anti-homelesslegislation they propose hangs over theirheads as an indictment of how the greedof the business class has driven them tosacrifice the humanity of their poorestneighbors on the altar of commerce.

Perhaps that is the deeper reason whyPeople’s Park is always under attack bybusiness interests. For it keeps alive therebellious spirit of the counterculture, andreminds us that peace, love and justice arehigher values than money and real estate.

Street Spirit onlineSee our colorful andcreative new website:http://www.thestreetspirit.org

Street SpiritStreet Spirit is published by AmericanFriends Service Committee. The ven-dor program is run by J.C. Orton.Editor, Layout: Terry MessmanWeb designer: Ariel Messman-Rucker

Contributors: Judy Andreas, DavidBacon, Claire J. Baker, Sandow Birk,Jack Bragen, Buford Buntin, Leon Carlin,Lynda Carson, DeWitt Cheng, DickCorten, Cassandra Dallett, Carol Denney,Lydia Gans, Whitney Gent, MaureenHartmann, Carol Harvey, Adam Itkoff,Judy Jones, Linda Lemaster, Tom Lowe,Joy Bright McCorkle, Zainab Mohamed,Kisha Montgomery, Eric Moon, ChristaOcchiogrosso, Arnold Passman, SueEllen Pector, Margot Pepper, MaryRudge, Jos Sances, Sandra Schwartz,Norman Solomon, George Wynn

All works copyrighted by the authors.

Contact: Terry MessmanStreet Spirit, 65 Ninth Street,San Francisco, CA 94103E-mail: spirit@afsc.orgPhone: (415) 565-0201, ext. 18Web: http://www.thestreetspirit.org

Protesters face rifles and bayonets during the battle for People’s Park in Berkeley.Photo by Dick Corten. See more photos at the People’s Park website: http://www.peoplespark.org

Defending People’s Park andthe Spirit of Peace and Justice

GLIMPSESOF THESPIRIT

September 2011ST R E E T SP I R I T4

by Lydia Gans

It wasn’t so very long ago when peo-ple with mental health problemswere generally stigmatized by soci-ety and subjected to all sorts of psy-

chiatric tortures in the name of treatment. People who were powerless, the poor

and homeless, and people of color, wereparticularly victimized by the mentalhealth system. Eventually they revolted.

Sally Zinman is the executive directorof the California Network of MentalHealth Clients. In 1985, she helped startthe Coalition for Alternatives in MentalHealth, also known as the Berkeley Drop-in Center.

“When it started, it was a vision of ex-psychiatric people at the time, mostly fromthe Network Against Psychiatric Abuse,”Zinman says. “We chose Oregon Streetwhere it was first located because we want-ed to be more culturally responsive. Soinstead of having people come to us, wewent to what was at that time predominant-ly an African American community.”

In the early 1990s, they moved theDrop-in Center from the Berkeley UnifiedSchool building on Oregon Street to 3234Adeline Street, although not withoutencountering expressions of NIMBYism.The Not In My Back Yard syndrome canstrike even in avowedly liberal communi-ties like Berkeley.

In this modest storefront, the BerkeleyDrop-in Center has several small officesand rooms for private conversations, anarea with computers, a room with com-fortable furniture for resting quietly, amulti-purpose room for meetings ormovies, and a patio for parties and occa-sional barbecues.

It is not a large space and it is impres-sive how many activities it accommodatesand how many services are provided.Here, people with limited resources helpeach other manage the many problemsinvolved in surviving and struggling toget stability in their lives. About 100 peo-ple dealing with drugs and alcohol ormental illness come in each day for help.

The Drop-In Center is open to every-one who needs support services. When aperson comes in, he or she is asked to reg-ister to become a member. There areabout 2,000 members now.

Staff person Catherine De Bose explainsthat every client is registered as a newclient, no matter how long they have been amember. She says they are asked four basicquestions; “Where you are with alcohol andother drugs? Do you have chemical depen-dency? Do you have mental health issues?What is your financial status?”

Members can drop in at any time to gethelp with immediate needs, for mail andmessage services and computer access,transportation help, to participate in sup-port groups and NA meetings or angermanagement class.

“So we have things in place to addresswhatever issue they might have,” says DeBose. “Drugs and alcohol, homelessness,mental health issues, life issues. We dohave members who come in and just talkabout life stuff.”

For specific issues requiring moreattention, members can make appoint-ments with a staff person who can workout a solution or provide a referral. Thefive full-time staff people are memberswith connections and long experience inthe community which they are serving.

They can act as advocates to helpmembers get SSI, General Assistance orother financial benefits. Often, peopleneed help with paperwork or an appeal or,De Bose says, “they just need somebodyto go with them, to give support.”

A staff person can help members withmoney management, and provide payee

services. And they can act as peer coun-selors or give a member a referral for pro-fessional help.

The over-arching issue dealt with inthe Drop-In Center is the way homeless-ness is increasing, particularly among thismore vulnerable population.

Many of the members and staff havethemselves experienced periods of home-lessness. To deal with this, the Drop-InCenter has coordinators who are constant-ly searching for affordable housing andvacancies in supportive housing unitsthroughout the area.

Staff member Emmet Hutson reports,“Finding housing for people with lowincome is getting harder and harder. Mostprograms are full or have long waitinglists. Another difficulty that we have isnot only the income situation but a lot ofour people have mental health issues andit’s hard to keep them housed once they’rehoused without help, because people takeadvantage of them. It’s been hard for us tobreak through subsidized housing.”

The Berkeley Drop-In Center was aforerunner in what is a growing trend inmental health services. “There’s a wholenew model called recovery wellness cen-ters,” Sally Zinman says. “What wealways called a Drop-in and AdvocacyCenter was always our vision.”

Michael Diehl, a community organizerwith BOSS and a longtime supporter ofthe Drop-In Center, has recently beenappointed to its board of directors. Hetalked about the importance of the Centerin the community and as a model for othersuch centers that are being established inmany cities throughout the country.

The concept of the wellness model, ofpeer help and advocacy, is a welcomealternative to the powerful drug industry’sproliferation of psychotropic drugs fortheir newly invented mental illnesses.

Along with the five full-time coordina-tors that comprise the staff, there are eight

former clients who have been volunteer-ing at the Center and are receivingstipends. Jeff Ingram is a volunteer whohelps people use computers. WhenIngram came to the Center some yearsago, a staff person suggested he takeadvantage of the free computer-skillstraining programs offered directly acrossthe street at Inter-City Services (ICS). Hetook classes there for two years.

Ingram says he realized that it wouldtake a lot longer to “really get trained” buthe learned enough to come back and showclients how to use the computer for jobsearch, resumes, setting up e-mail accessand such. He is homeless, as are many ofthe members.

Cindy Foscarini is a volunteer whotakes care of the mail, and does generaloffice work. “I’ve been a client for 11years or so,” Foscarini adds. “At first (itwas) a place to hang out. I started helpingout because I wanted to give back.” She isalso working to upgrade her skills. “Iwant to get certified in Word program atICS,” she says.

Every day, more than 100 people comeinto the Berkeley Drop-In Center. “Wepretty much serve everybody that comesin the door,” says De Bose. “They comein for something.... A lot are coming fromhomelessness, either drugs and alcoholand mental health issues. It’s hard to geteverything together at once.”

Diehl reflects on the effects of therecent budget cuts that have eroded sup-port services and reduced the income ofpoor and disabled people.

Diehl says, “Things are more intensenow because of the general economy, butfor a lot of folks that have been on the bot-tom, it’s like well, it don’t feel much differ-ent than it did before. We’ve been on thebottom before and we’re still there. (But)it’s harder to get out of the situation.”

In spite of drastic budget cuts and anever-increasing need, the Berkeley Drop-

in Center continues to be a community ofpeople helping each other survive thechallenging issues in their lives. MichaelDiehl, with his many contacts, his knowl-edge of funding sources and organizingexperience, expressed his commitment tothe Center in saying, “I want to make sureit thrives — not just survives, but thrives.”

Zinman, who is currently a consultantwith Alameda County Behavioral HealthCare Services, speaks of her pride in theCenter. “They have not changed,’ she saysof her colleagues at the Drop-In Center.

“The world around them has changed,even the self-help peer support programshave changed, and become more like thesystem and more hierarchical, but theyhaven’t. They’ve just stayed true to theirroots, what they were meant to be.”

An Alternative to Psychiatry and the Drug Industry

Catherine de Bose, a staff person of the Berkeley Drop-In Center,coordinates services for people dealing with drug and alcohol issues.

Lydia Gansphoto

Mission Statement of theBerkeley Drop-In Center

“The Drop-in Center is a multi-purpose community center run byand for past and present mentalhealth clients and persons under-going significant emotional dis-tress. The Center is a safe, infor-mal place for people to meet andsocialize, share peer and groupsupport, take part in recreationalactivities, and get help in obtain-ing basic survival and other lifeneeds. The mission of the Centeris to empower mental health clientsand thus help them improve thequality of their lives by providingthem with a support network.”

The concept of the wellness model, of peer help andadvocacy, is a welcome alternative to the powerfuldrug industry’s proliferation of psychotropic drugs for their newly invented mental illnesses.

Venomous Reptileby Cassandra DallettSunrise finds me grimybut lucid.I swallow infection,regret,all shit under the freeway.

Papa’s alcoholand mine,delicious going downburns coming up.Rotten oil leaks from my poresdetox hurts.I think of her roomsspotless and cozy.She brought meals to bed.

Denied me nothing,a lizard I slithered away.

Donate or Subscribe to Street Spirit!Street Spirit is published by the American Friends Service Committee. Homeless vendors receive 50 papers a day for free, earnincome and educate the community about social justice. Please donate or subscribe to Street Spirit ! Help us remain a voice for justice!

! I enclose $25 for one year's subscription.! I enclose a donation of ! $100 ! $50 ! $ 25

Name: __________________________________________________________Address: ________________________________________________________City: ________________________________ State:______ Zip: ___________

Send Donations to: AFSC65 Ninth Street,San Francisco, CA 94103

September 2011

Observation at V.A.Clinic (Martinez, CA)by Claire J. Baker I stroll the tidy lawnlike groundsengaged in careful observations:remember war is mostly grounded infear & greed, those lowly stations.Many patients carry a cane,others all but driven insane.I see it as a major goal —with loss of limb to hone the soul.

September 2011 ST R E E T SP I R I T 5

by Eric Moon

“Corrections,” the name usedfor the prison system, is afield of politics in which

changes have, historically, come slowly.Activists for prison abolition and reformsoon learn the need to keep on keepingon. After all their days and years anddecades of perseverance, a recent Tuesdayin August will shine far down the longcorridor of that struggle.

Inspired by a three-week hunger strikestarted at the Security Housing Unit ofPelican Bay State Prison in NorthernCalifornia, and quickly supported by morethan 6000 prisoners in a dozen additionalprisons, Assemblymember TomAmmiano, chair of the Assembly PublicSafety Committee, convened a publichearing for oversight of the CaliforniaDepartment of Corrections SecurityHousing Units (SHU).

The Prison Hunger Strike Solidaritycoalition supporting the strikers wel-comed the Sacramento hearing andworked with Assembly staffers to sched-ule witnesses: former SHU prisoners,their families, criminology researchersand activists.

The California Department ofCorrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR)was represented by Undersecretary forOperations Scott Kernan.

The three-hour hearing by the Statelegislature commenced with two panels ofSHU critics, followed by Kernan, andclosed with a long queue of “public com-ment” from family members and activists.On the first panel, Rev. Will McGarveyspoke for the Bay Area ReligiousCoalition Against Torture, drawing com-

parisons between California SHUs andprison abuse at Abu Ghraib andGuantanamo Bay.

Readers who derived their images ofsolitary confinement from films like“Cool Hand Luke” or “ShawshankRedemption” — where an exceptionalinmate screws up and is brutally isolated,for a limited time, to “get his headstraight” — have a lot to learn about mod-ern use and abuse of solitary. Modern-dayDepartment of Corrections doles out soli-

tary confinement on an industrial scale, ina movie more like some horror flick: peo-ple check in, but nobody ever checks out.

Nearly 4,000 inmates in the SHUs inCalifornia’s prisons endure harrowingconditions of extreme isolation in sound-proof cells measuring only six feet byeight feet, leaving only to exercise forabout an hour a day in windowless “dogruns.” Ninety percent of SHU inmates areconfined in these concrete tombs, notbecause of any misbehavior in prison, butbecause of a one-time administrative deci-sion labeling them “affiliated” with one ofsix large gangs.

And they stay there. Once so labeled,they leave the SHU cells only by dying,by paroling, or by snitching (i.e., provid-ing information about alleged gang ties).

And they stay there even longer. AtPelican Bay State Prison, 435 inmateshave been locked down in the SHU formore than a decade, and 78 have been in

for more than two decades. In the second panel of witnesses, Laura

Magnani, regional director of theAmerican Friends Service Committee,followed up Rev. McGarvey’s critique,quoting the United Nations conventionagainst torture (to which the U.S. is a sig-natory): Torture is “any state-sanctionedaction by which severe pain or suffering,mental or physical, is intentionally inflict-ed for obtaining information, punishment,intimidation, discrimination.... No excep-

tional circumstances whatsoever, whethera war or threat of war or political emer-gency ... may be invoked as a reason fortorture.”

When his turn came, UndersecretaryKernan, who had met with hunger strikerepresentatives before they suspendedtheir strike on July 21, seemed decidedlydefensive: “I’m not talking about havinganother study,” Kernan said at a legisla-tive hearing. “I’m talking about havingsome substantive changes. And I’m talk-ing months, not years.”

The exceptional excuse that CDCRofficials like to cite is their federally insti-gated and funded war on gangs, a warproven so disastrous as to invite compari-son with the federal “war on drugs.”Kernan volunteered that yes, there proba-bly was more gang activity today than in1989, when Pelican Bay State Prisonopened.

Contrary to the UN convention, the

CDCR assumption seems to be that hav-ing once labeled someone a gang member,there is pretty much nothing the statecan’t do to him. It is time for Californiavoters and taxpayers to decide whether weshare that assumption.

As we monitor CDCR’s “substantivechanges” over the next “months, notyears,” we need to see fundamental, notsuperficial concessions. The followingreforms are vitally needed.

(1) A bill enabling press access to anySHU prisoner, not just those picked toagree with CDCR officials. Sunlight is thebest disinfectant, as the old adage goes.

(2) Regulations providing due processrights to prisoners before gang labeling.This decision is currently made by a sin-gle CDCR staffer.

(3) Regulations limiting the length oftime any prisoner can be consigned tosolitary, before getting a chance todemonstrate changed attitudes andactions.

(4) Procedures whereby someone canbe transferred out of the SHU that will notrequire snitching on others.

(5) No retaliation by the CDCR againstprisoners who did engage in the nonvio-lent action of going on a hunger strike.Already, the CDCR has issued discipli-nary notices to hundreds of participants,saying their involvement in the hungerstrike constituted a “disturbance.”

Readers are urged to contact their leg-islators asking that no such retaliation beallowed, and that implementation of thechanges is the best way to assure justicein the face of these harsh conditions.

Eric Moon is the Healing Justice programcoordinator of the AFSC.

The Department of Corrections doles out solitary confine-ment on an industrial scale, in a movie more like some hor-ror flick: people check in, but nobody ever checks out.

Reforming Solitary Confinement at Pelican Bay Prison

Concertina razor-wire surrounds a watchtower at Pelican Bay State Prison.Activists in California demonstrated in solidarity with Pelican Bay’s hunger strikers.

by Lynda Carson

One of Oakland’s largest nonprofithousing developers has violatedthe rights of its tenants by using

notices that were not legal to enter the ten-ants’ apartments. It owes an apology to allthe tenants who had their rights violated.

In a shocking admission of wrongdo-ing, Lynn Newton, a property manager ofthe East Bay Asian Local DevelopmentCorporation (EBALDC), admitted onAugust 19 that the notices EBALDC usedto demand entry into the tenants’ units inthe apartment building at 829 East 19thStreet in Oakland were not legal.

Under California state law, all noticesto enter apartments of tenants are requiredto have a firm date posted on the “24 hournotice” when a landlord or its agent wantsto enter an occupied rental unit on a speci-

fied day. A landlord is required to serve a“24 hour notice” in advance for each andevery day the landlord wants to enter thetenant’s apartment.

The bogus notices served to the resi-dents at 829 East 19th Street stated thatthe landlord wanted entry into their units“on or about” a certain date, meaning thatthe landlord may try to enter the apart-ment a day early, or a day later, or not atall, or who knows when. The bogus “onor about” notices are not legal noticesunder California law.

In response to the bogus notices, ten-ants posted “Do Not Disturb” notices ontheir doors pursuant to California CivilCode Section 1954, to reserve their lawfulright to privacy. On August 8, about 25percent of the residents received noticesthreatening them with eviction. The ten-ants were falsely accused of denying

EBALDC entry into their apartments. The tenants received notices warning

that they had seven days to correct theviolation or they may face eviction byEBALDC. Copies of the warning noticeswere placed by the building manager intothe tenants’ files, and copies were sent toOakland’s Rent Adjustment Program, andthe Oakland Housing Authority.

Despite the admission of wrongdoing,EBALDC refuses to send follow-upnotices to Oakland’s Rent AdjustmentProgram and the Oakland HousingAuthority, to clear the names of the ten-ants that were falsely accused of denyingmanagement entry into their apartments.

After being reminded that the tenantswere still fearful of receiving an evictionnotice in the mail, EBALDC propertymanager Newton stated that he did notwant to put anything into writing that

would legally put EBALDC in jeopardy,but wanted the tenants to pass the wordaround to one another that they were nolonger facing an eviction threat.

On August 19, building manager DannyChen admitted that it was his signature onthe notices threatening the tenants witheviction, but added that the notices wereactually filled out by his supervisors LynnNewton and Janice Yan of EBALDC.

As one of Oakland’s largest nonprofithousing developers, EBALDC has wellover 1,000 rental units. Property managerNewton stated that EBALDC will changethe “24 hour notices” being used in all oftheir residential rental properties to comeinto compliance with state law.

Note: Lynda Carson is a longtime residentat 829 East 19th Street in Oakland. She may bereached at tenantsrule@yahoo.com/

Oakland Tenants Wrongly Threatened with Eviction

September 2011ST R E E T SP I R I T6

by Carol Harvey

An estimated 500 to 600 peoplefrom across the Western statesand California packed MissionHigh School on Saturday,

August 20, for the first San Francisco BayArea “Care Congress: Caring AcrossGenerations.” The event succeeded inreaching across generations, with all agegroups from infants to elders in atten-dance, along with people with disabilities,their advocates, and caregivers.

James Chionsini, an organizer withPlanning for Elders, told the gathering,“Earlier today I was looking outside, andthere were more people in here than therewere in Dolores Park.”

Billing itself as a town hall meeting,the mission of the Care Congress was toprevent “a social crisis of immense pro-portions.” This looming crisis is beingtriggered by calamitous federal and statebudget cuts, the critical shortage of jobs,the urgent need for a massive increase insupport services required due to an explo-sive increase in aging Baby Boomers, andthe exclusion of domestic workers fromthe protections other workers enjoy.

Gordon Mar of San Francisco Jobs WithJustice was a key organizer of the CareCongress. Pam Tau Lee, of the ChineseProgressive Association, and Jazzie Collins,of the Senior Action Network, served as themasters of ceremonies.

The Care Congress was held to launcha “bold new campaign for quality care andsupport and a dignified quality of life forall Americans, across generations.”

Acknowledging that “older adults holdlessons and our historical memory,” orga-nizers of the Care Congress declared theircommitment “to take collective responsi-bility for upholding the right to a dignifiedquality of life for our elders and peoplewith disabilities,” and their caregivers.

In the face of massive federal and statebudget cuts, Caring Across Generationsproposes “a federal policy solution withfive interdependent components — thefive fingers of the Caring Hand.” Thisfive-fold proposal calls for creating andimproving jobs, supporting workers ingaining citizenship, protecting andimproving Medicare and Medicaid, pro-tecting Social Security, and helping fami-lies of disabled adults and the elderly.

The aging Boomer population is “pro-jected to grow from 13 million in 2000 to27 million in 2050” and this will mean animmense rise in the need for supportivecare for millions of elderly people. Onlythree million support services workerscurrently exist to meet the growing needsof disabled adults and elders.

The present economic crisis, with highunemployment rates and swiftly disappear-ing jobs, could leave an ever-diminishingworkforce to care for this huge and vulnera-ble population. Disabled and elder peopleand families may be confronted with soar-ing financial burdens as they attempt tomanage their care on their own.

Long-term caregivers provide qualitycare to elders and people with disabilities.Direct-care workers are often compelledto work under “strenuous, highly vulnera-ble and often exploitive conditions.”Similarly, domestic workers are withoutpathways to appropriate training, careeradvancement or citizenship.

Danielle Feris, the national director ofHand-In-Hand: Domestic EmployersAssociation, described the mission of theCare Congress as “connected caring” —people reaching across generations to coop-erate in realizing a dignified quality of life.

The congress called for the creation oftwo million new jobs in home care tomeet the growing need. It demanded thatstronger labor standards be enacted to

improve the quality of these jobs, raisewages, provide better access to healthinsurance, and protect the right to orga-nize and form unions. It also called forbetter job training and certification pro-grams to improve the quality of care pro-vided to disabled and elderly recipients.

Caring Across Generations also calledfor new pathways to citizenship by creat-ing a new visa category for workersenrolled in training and certification pro-grams for these caregiver jobs.

A major goal of the Care Congress wasto preserve and expand Medicaid andMedicare, and improve the access to carefor low-income recipients. Also, unpaidfamily members should receive help fromSocial Security so they can support dis-abled adults and elders at home.

California Assemblyman TomAmmiano was a keynote speaker at theevent, and championed his vital legisla-tive proposal, AB 889, the DomesticWorkers Bill of Rights. It would extendthe labor protections that other workersenjoy to domestic workers in California.

The next speaker, San FranciscoSupervisor Eric Mar, said that officialsneed to make it a high priority to providebetter support to the aging population. Hepromised to follow up assertively at CityHall on Care Congress issues.

S.F. Labor Council Executive DirectorTim Poulson said that the labor movementis committed to supporting the CareCongress in demanding improved workingconditions and, ultimately, unionization fordomestic and home care workers.

Hand-In-Hand’s Danielle Feris said,“We are pitted against each other under theillusion of scarce resources,” leading to clo-sure of adult day health centers, criminal-ization of immigrant workers, and employerwage theft. Feris asked everyone to closetheir eyes and imagine what it would looklike if we all trusted each other, and collab-orated “across sectors and communitieswith open hearts.” How would our familiesand homes then look? She invited the groupto listen carefully as speakers described thevision of the Care Congress.

Maria Guillen, an activist renowned forher commitment to the community,proudly announced the impressive arrayof sponsors for the Care Congress, begin-ning with her own organization, the S.F.Department of Aging and Adult Services.Other sponsors include Jobs With Justice,the National Domestic Workers Alliance,California Domestic Workers Coalition,Hand-In-Hand: Domestic EmployersAssociation, Planning For Elders, SeniorAction Network, the Gray Panthers, SiliconValley Independent Living Center, SEIU1021, S.F. Labor Council, the ChineseProgressive Association; the Filipino

Community Center, and more.James Chionsini, interim director of

Planning for Elders, spoke in support of alawsuit (now delayed until a Novemberhearing) against Gov. Jerry Brown’s June30th legislative closure and statewideelimination of Adult Day Health CareCenters, leading to 35,000 to 50,000elders losing services, instead of corpora-tions paying more taxes. “There is a littlehope that these things can be restored.Don’t pull the trigger on us!” he said.

Nikki, an advocate with Hand-In-Hand: Domestic Employers Association,spoke in support of the CaliforniaDomestic Workers Bill of Rights. Sheemphasized working together because,she said, “We know that if domesticworkers are oppressed and disempowered,then people with disabilities will also beoppressed and disempowered.”

Jessica Lehman, a longtime communi-ty powerhouse, said she is unable to workfull-time without her attendant. Shestressed that disabled people must keepfighting to block cuts to In-Home SupportServices (IHSS) and Medicaid, or becomeunable to live independently, ending up innursing homes and institutions.

Veronica Lozano, a domestic workerfor ten years and a member of MujeresUnitas Activas, stressed that, “For morethan 50 years, domestic workers havebeen excluded from basic worker protec-tions” against employer abuse. “We wantCalifornia to (pass) the next DomesticWorkers Bill of rights.”

Matilda Vazquez, a member of theWomen’s Collective, spoke on immigrantresidency rights and described Ammiano’sstrong support for AB 1081, allowingCalifornia counties to opt out of SecureCommunities and S-COMM, a federal pro-gram in which people are stopped for noreason and their fingerprints sent to

Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE),thereby causing deportations for minor orno infractions and subjecting immigrantfamilies to devastating separations of par-ents and children.

Then, the spirited Shaw San Liu of theProgressive Workers Alliance victoriouslyannounced a new San Francisco ordinancepenalizing employers who punish immi-grant workers for defending job rights.

Next, came small-group discussions atmore than 40 tables set up in the hall.Each table had between eight and ten par-ticipants, a mix of employers, domesticworkers, and elder or disabled recipients.

Donna Willmott, Planning For Elders,said that, at her table, people shared “ourstories and visions of what we hoped carewould look like in this country.” Groupmembers told their stories of being care-givers, recipients, or advocates for care.

“There was a lot of emphasis on wantingbasic respect from employers,” she said.

Willmott said that the basis of thesevery personal caregiving relationships wascaring, concern, love, and mutual respect.One person kept repeating, “Love and car-ing are the foundations of this kind ofwork,” Willmott said.

Willmott said that the energy at thisCare Congress was strongly grassroots.Ultimately, all the groups focused onoffering feedback to the National CareCampaign and describing their under-standing of the Five Fingers of the CaringHand concept. They were invited to giveresponses and ideas for the local CareCouncil forming soon in the Bay Area.

At the end of the event, many child par-ticipants proudly paraded their CaringCongress artwork on a banner beforeapplauding parents and Congress members.

Then, the Brass Liberation Orchestrarocked the hall and danced the celebratingassemblage to a delicious catered dinner.

The Care Congress: Caring Across Generations

At the Care Congress, children proudly posed on the podium for applauding parents and Congress members. Carol Harvey photo

Members of the Care Congress held dozens of discussion groups. Carol Harvey photo

September 2011 ST R E E T SP I R I T 7

by Norman Solomon

The negative trends in thenation’s capital are mostly dueto extreme GOP ideologues inCongress. But they’ve been

enabled by too many Democrats whokeep giving ground while Republicanleaders refuse to give an inch.

Many a political truth can be spoken injest, and that was the case with a mocknews item that appeared in The Onion. “Aday after signing legislation that raised thegovernment debt ceiling and authorizedsteep budget cuts,” the satirical magazinereported, “President Obama thankedDemocrats as well as Democrats for theirwillingness to make tough, but necessary,concessions during negotiations.”

The Onion went on: “Obama addedthat while it may look ugly at times, poli-tics is about Democrats giving up whatthey want, as well as Democrats giving upwhat they want, until an agreement canultimately be reached.”

Compromise is one thing, but capitula-tion is another, especially when core prin-ciples of decency and fairness are at stake.

We must stand our ground on behalf ofseniors, children, the disabled and othervulnerable Americans. All the rhetoricabout “shared sacrifice” rings hollowwhen the vast majority of us are beingsacrificed to the financial benefit of bigbanks and large corporations.

There are plenty of sensible and effec-tive ways to reduce the deficit — includ-ing a transaction tax on Wall Street, clo-sure of tax loopholes for big companies,an end to the Bush tax cuts for the verywealthy and a major reduction in the mili-tary budget. Instead, the bipartisan deal-makers in Washington are slashing thesafety net that’s essential for vast numbersof Americans.

One of the most dangerous aspects of

the recent budget deal in Congress is thatit explicitly sets the stage for futureactions to undermine Medicare. This sce-nario strikes at the heart of precious val-ues. I’m committed to defending SocialSecurity and Medicare.

I fully agree with Congresswoman

Lynn Woolsey’s explanation for why shevoted against the new budget deal.Woolsey pointed out that the deal “putsvirtually the entire burden on workingfamilies and the middle class while askingnothing from billionaires, millionaires andcompanies that send jobs overseas.”

In Washington, job one should be cre-ating jobs. That won’t happen by continu-ing to give tax cuts to the wealthy whileimposing benefit cuts on the rest of us.

Corporations are sitting on huge quan-tities of cash. But rather than expandingthe workforce, they’re hoarding themoney — and stretching workers in thename of “productivity” — while oftenposting record profits.

Three years ago, I wrote a columnopposing the Wall Street bank bailoutthen being debated in Congress.Unfortunately, my concerns were borneout by later events. Banks took the bailoutmoney and largely used it to buy otherbanks — instead of making loans to smallbusinesses and helping homeowners keeptheir homes.

With the new budget deal, Congressagain acted in the financial interests of therich instead of the vast majority of us.

With chronic unemployment at historichighs and personal savings in the tank,fewer and fewer Americans have the buy-ing power that can pull the economy outof its deep ravine.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe inthe vital lessons of the New Deal. Manymillions of good jobs must be created, andthat will require well-funded federal jobsprograms on a large scale.

Trickle-down economics, relying onthe tender mercies of powerful corpora-tions, won’t get it done.

Democrats Cave in to Right-Wing IdeologuesCongress shreds the safety net for the benefit of big banks and corporations

Art by Christa Occhiogrosso

The rhetoric about “sharedsacrifice” rings hollow whenthe vast majority of us arebeing sacrificed to the finan-cial benefit of big banks andlarge corporations.

by Whitney Gent

On August 24, in an official reportto the United Nations HumanRights Council, a top UN investi-

gator said that the United States’ failure toprovide homeless persons access to waterand sanitary facilities “could ... amount tocruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment.”The report was issued by UN SpecialRapporteur on the Human Right to Waterand Sanitation Catarina de Albuquerque.

“The Rapporteur’s report is the latestin a series of condemnations by interna-tional experts of the criminalization andmistreatment of homeless persons in theU.S.,” said Eric Tars, human rights pro-gram director at the National Law Centeron Homelessness & Poverty which helpedfacilitate her visit. “Earlier this year, theU.S. committed itself before the HumanRights Council to doing more to protectthe rights of homeless persons. Where isthe action to follow the words?”

Albuquerque visited the United Statesin February and March 2011, and wasstruck by the “extraordinary lengths”homeless persons had to go to just toremove bodily wastes. During a visit tothe Safe Ground tent community near

Sacramento, California, she met a manwho called himself the community’s “san-itation technician.”

The man, “Tim,” engineered a sanita-tion system consisting of a seat overtop atwo-layered plastic bag. Every week, Timcollects bags of human waste, weighinganywhere from 130 to 230 pounds, andhauls them on his bicycle several miles toa public restroom. When a toilet becomesavailable, he empties the contents of thebags. Following the disposal, he securesthe dirty bags in a clean one, which hethen places in the garbage, before washinghis hands with water and lemon.

He said the job is difficult, but that he

does it for the community — especiallythe women.

The UN Special Rapporteur’s reportstates: “The United States, one of thewealthiest countries in the world, mustensure that everyone [has access] to sani-tation which is safe, hygienic, secure andwhich provides privacy and ensures digni-ty. An immediate, interim solution is toensure access to restroom facilities in pub-lic places, including during the night. Thelong-term solution to homelessness mustbe to ensure adequate housing.”

In June 2010, the U.S. InteragencyCouncil on Homelessness adopted itsfirst-ever comprehensive plan to end

homelessness, including a section promot-ing constructive alternatives to criminal-ization. However, the criminalization ofhomelessness by communities persists,and to date, the Justice Department andother agencies have done little to conveythe unconstitutionality of these practicesto local policymakers.

“This adds to a growing record of bothdomestic and international law stating thathomeless persons cannot be criminalizedfor basic life-sustaining acts when thecommunity provides no legal alternative,”said Maria Foscarinis, executive directorof the Law Center. “But ultimately, wemust remedy this situation because we, asAmericans, believe that no persondeserves to be treated this way.”

Whitney Gent wrote this article for TheNational Law Center on Homelessness &Poverty. The Rapporteur’s Report is available at:http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcoun-cil/docs/18session/A-HRC-18-33-Add4_en.pdf.

UN Expert Condemns Cruel Treatment of Homeless in U.S.

Tim engineered a sanitation system for the homeless community. Every week, hecollects heavy bags of waste, and hauls them several miles to a public restroom.

Art by Christa Occhiogrosso

Massive Inequities by George WynnWith more foreclosuresthan in Great Depressionwith no solution to unbearablehomeless lives and the massive redistribution of wealthdiminishing collective mental healthwith a President who plays it safeat every decisive moment for changekeeps the generals and Wall Street happythere's going to be more and more homeless children and huddled masses

The UN Rapporteur’s reportis the latest in a series of con-demnations by internationalexperts of the criminalizationand mistreatment of homelesspersons in the United States.

September 2011 ST R E E T SP I R I T 9

Review by DeWitt Cheng

In 1930, John Heartfield, the GermanDadaist and a Communist who foughtNazi fascism with brilliantly mordant

photomontages, created the image of a sol-dier in uniform with his head completelybandaged like a war casualty (or like H.G.Wells’ invisible man), or helmeted in metallike a knight, accompanied by the caption,“Those who read bourgeois newspaperswill remain blind and deaf. Away withthese debilitating bandages!”

We who remember the complicity ofAmerica’s mainstream media in variousfinancial and military shenanigans anddebacles over the past several decades arelikely to agree with Heartfield’s judgment— even if his target at the time, threeyears before Hitler gained power, wasconsiderably to the left of our current cen-ter of the road: Socialist newspapers seek-ing an alliance with the Communists.

If Heartfield was wrong about thatissue, as it now appears, he was rightabout Nazism — and about the power ofan unfree press on an uninformed, mal-leable public — lessons that Americanswho apparently see shouting and march-ing as acts of existential assertion shouldtake to heart. Democracies need dissent tokeep them honest. America’s origin mythsof easy money and Horatio-Alger individ-ualism are still powerful, even as theirfinancial and moral failures become moreevident daily. The recent kerfuffle overthe deficit ceiling makes clear the ideolog-ical blindness of those who parrot thebuzzwords of demagogues.

Heartfield proved that visual art couldbe an incisive cultural weapon, and manysocially concerned artists (some of them,socialists) followed his example duringthe Depression and after, although theyhave been relegated to the sidelines of arthistory since World War II.

A new book by the San Franciscoactivist artist, Art Hazelwood, Hobos toStreet People: Artists’ Responses toHomelessness from the New Deal to thePresent, examines the legacy of politicalartists from the Great Depression to theGreat Recession. It also serves as a concisecatalogue to a traveling art exhibition of thesame name sponsored by Exhibit Envoy,

and funded by the James Irvine, LEF, andFleishhacker Foundations, on view nowuntil Dec. 4, 2011, at the de SaissetMuseum in Santa Clara University.

The show is an eye-opener to those toolong blinkered by America’s capitalistcargo cult. So is the book, which serves as akind of remedial civics lesson for studentbadly served by mainstream mythology.

Hazelwood’s political convictions areclear, but his prose is mercifully free ofleftist rhetoric. The facts speak loudlyenough for themselves, after all.

In 11 chapters, he provides the essentialinformation on Bonus Marchers,Hoovervilles, the New Deal, Glass-Steagall,NAFTA, Aid to Families with DependentChildren, and the responses of artists, whichwere for a time — it’s almost inconceivablein today’s political climate — supported bythe federal government through the WorksProgress Administration and Farm ServicesAdministration.

Many of these socially consciousartists were printmakers and illustrators,employing both fine-art and commercialmethods of reproduction to disseminatetheir images. Victor Arnautoff, Richard V.Correll, Fritz Eichenberg, Rockwell Kent,Dorothea Lange, Giacomo Patri, AntonRefregier, Bernarda Bryson Shahn,Herman Volz and Paul Weller may befamiliar names to fans of political art (andif not, they should be).

Contemporary artists who continue tocarry the torch, many from the politicallyprogressive Bay Area, and well-knownwithin political circles, include DavidBacon, Jesus Barraza, FranciscoDominguez, Eric Drooker, Ed Gould,Christine Hanlon, Art Hazelwood, DougMinkler, Claude Moller, Rachael BellRomero, Jos Sances, Robert L. Terrell andJean McIntosh, and the S.F. PrintCollective. The 57 images in the book arewell chosen to supplement the text, andnicely printed. The clear layout makes thewealth of information easy to take in.

During the Depression, one of BenShahn’s wealthy collectors joked that thepaintings would protect her Fifth-Avenuemansion from the anger of the dispos-sessed. The art was never put to that test,of course.

Homelessness in Art from the New Deal to the Present

“One Third of a Nation,” by Leon Carlin. Screenprint for Federal Theater Project.One-third of the nation endured poverty and poor housing in the Great Depression.

(Freedom Voices, 2011), Hazelwood’sclear history joining the two periodssheds light and hope on our own times.Workers have had their backs against thewall before and they have fought backand moved the scrimmage line forwardquite a bit to gain many of these rights.

Unlike Obama’s administration,Roosevelt was responding to avert rebel-lion — general strikes and collective self-help actions by the unemployed, unionsand tenants facing evictions.

The Depression-era working class wasfar more organized than at present, eitherthrough unions or self-help groups whowere intent on helping themselves withoutgovernment support, like the unemployedminers in Pennsylvania. Teams of minersillegally dug and mined coal on companyproperty and sold it themselves below thecompany’s commercial rate. Local juriesrefused to convict them and jailers refusedto imprison them.

In A People’s History of the UnitedStates, Howard Zinn wrote that FDR’sreforms “had to meet two pressing needs:to reorganize capitalism in such a way toovercome the crisis and stabilize the sys-tem; also, to head off the alarming growthof spontaneous rebellion in the early yearsof the Roosevelt administration....”

The goal was to stabilize the economyand to keep the lower classes “from turn-ing a rebellion into a real revolution.”

It was a time when the working classbegan to identify with the previouslyvagabond or destitute; a time when theDepression-era artists in this show unit-ed, not with the ivory towers of the elite,but with the displaced working class towhich they actually belonged.

But red-baiting flared up as blowbackto the worker-centered organizing of the1930s and 1940s, followed by rampantMcCarthyism, under which hundreds ofsocially conscious artists, educators,

union members and government employ-ees became the subject of aggressiveinvestigations and questioning.

Those issued subpoenas to appearbefore government panels were requiredto name alleged communist sympathizersor end up on a “do not hire” list depriv-ing them of their livelihoods. Sadly, therepercussions of the Blacklist continuesto silence political art, film and literatureto this day, redefining art with socialcommentary as crude or mediocre. Themodern-day artists featured in Hobos toStreet People are a bold example of thosewho have remained true to their visionsin spite of attempts to marginalize them.

In addition to the Blacklist, the post-war boom had the effect of enticing moreaffluent artists to refocus on problems ofaesthetics instead of those plaguing theirown class. The emergent middle classwas housed at the expense of the poor,fragmenting the alliances that had formedduring Roosevelt’s time.

More than half a century later, thecampaign to stigmatize and divide theformerly working poor from the activeworking class has succeeded. The publicseldom blinks when the media scapegoatand deride homeless persons.

Hobos to Street People underminesthe mass media’s effort to demonize thepoor by making it impossible to see thoseof us whose options have been reduced tobelongings in a shopping cart through thesame old dehumanizing lens.

It unites the viewer with workers ofpast generations who overcame unjust eco-nomic conditions. It reunites us with ourdispossessed counterparts by reminding usof our own historic political vulnerabilitiesand losses — but also, what justly belongsto all citizens of civilized societies.

Building this unity is the first steptoward the genuine change falselypromised by a regime that talked NewDeal, but has only delivered — to thoseof us who do not have corporate person-hood — a Rotten Deal.

“Holiday Home,” mixed media painting by Jos Sances, 2002.This painting by Berkeley artist Jos Sances offers an ironic contrast to ThomasKinkade’s painting of a Christmas celebration. While a wealthy family holds aholday celebration in their elegant home, just outside the door, a homeless manendures a lonely holiday in the bitter cold as he pushes his cart of meagerbelongings down the wintry streets, unnoticed by the affluent residents he passes.

from page 8

Hobos to Street People

September 2011ST R E E T SP I R I T10

by Jack Bragen

Those who hate the poor are oftengood at using rationalizations todefend their attitudes. The beliefthat people are homeless

because they have chosen it, and the con-clusion that that they have brought theirpredicament on themselves, is one way tojustify doing nothing to help.

In fact, this rationalization allows soci-ety to consider the homeless person as anuisance, one from whom we all need tobe protected by law enforcement. Thosewho deride persons who do not have ahome may lack the facts to support theiropinion. One way of obtaining the truth isto interact with those without a home.

When I was 17, I was fired from one ofmy first jobs, and after I was let go, one ofmy coworkers also was fired. He wasnearly of retirement age, and becamehomeless after losing his job.

Later, I spotted him in several places inConcord, and could see that his luck hadchanged for the worse. At the time, I wasgoing through my own drama of beingintroduced to mental illness, so I didn’thave the wherewithal to try speaking to thisman. But I remember thinking that he was abit old to be forced to endure homelessness.

Once a person is homeless, and downon his or her luck — and is possibly expe-riencing symptoms of mental illness ontop of that — who is going to hire them?

Those who scoff at the homeless mayprescribe work, saying that they should pickthemselves up by their own bootstraps. But,realistically, who is going to employ thedestitute person living on the streets? Whensomeone is hiring, they are naturally goingto choose the best specimen out of thosewho apply, not the one who is down andout. That’s the reality.

As I grew older and began to interactwith a wide variety of people, I met somewho didn’t walk to the beat of the well-off

and proper. I began to realize that manypersons down on their luck were moreinteresting to talk to and sometimes had akinder attitude toward me, compared tothe wannabe business tycoons who super-vised me in jobs where I disliked the workas well as the supervisors.

Many are not successful in the workworld because they don’t fit in. They maynot have been thick-skinned enough, ormay have been more creative or morethoughtful than those who succeeded. Ibegan to realize that success in societyoften hinged upon making oneself into adrone, and not upon being the most intel-ligent person.

Certain homeless people may haveended up living on the streets through aseries of bad decisions. However, maybethey didn’t benefit from the same privi-leged upbringing as did the haughty peo-ple who judge them. Maybe they didn’thave the clarity that would have enabledthem to anticipate the consequences of thebad decisions they were making.

It isn’t safe to say that a person is alwaysto blame for where they end up in life.Many simply fall through the cracks. Noteveryone has the capacity to hold downemployment. Out of those who don’t, notall are able to get government benefits.

A person could argue these things untilblue in the face. However, my point isthat the rich aren’t necessarily better peo-ple, morally or in other terms, becausethings have worked out for them. Many ofthem began with social and economicadvantages not available to those whohave fallen behind in the rat race.

I was vulnerable to homelessness inone phase of my life, just after youngadulthood. What prevented this plungeinto homelessness was that I had familymembers who were there to help in mytime of need. I had made a series of baddecisions, and also I couldn’t work at ajob any more. With the help of family

who were willing to provide materialassistance, I got past that phase until Icould figure out more lessons about prop-erly handling my affairs.

Some become homeless because oflosing their job, either due to becomingdisabled or because fate has given theman unhappy surprise or a sudden illness.

It is not safe to assume that anyonewilling to work can get a job. Millions ofjobs have been lost to outsourcing, whileother jobs have disappeared entirely dueto advances in technology.

Furthermore, if one’s background is notpristine, it can be very hard to get hired.Now companies are performing back-ground checks on people who apply for ajob flipping burgers, or sweeping floors.

The prospect of starvation may forcemany into illegal activities; and then peo-ple end up with long jail sentences. The

jails have become repositories for millionswho have done minor “crimes” and couldnot afford an expensive attorney.

If your environment is such that youare in constant danger, you are not able toslow down and think about things.Sometimes, clarity of thought comes after,not before, some recovery time from trau-matic events. Hindsight is the fertilizer inwhich grows the flower of foresight.

People who must learn from the schoolof hard knocks are on a harder path thanthose who have been guided by parents orother role models. Those who start on amistaken path do not always find their wayback. It is not safe to assume that one issomehow a better person because of being a“success.” Those blessed with material suc-cess ought to be grateful for it, and shouldnot cop an attitude that they are moreworthwhile than those less fortunate.

Are People Real lyHomeless by Choice?The belief that people are homeless because they havechosen it is a way to justify doing nothing to help.

Art by Christa Occhiogrosso

Reflection by Judy Joy Jones

It is time to create a brand new world!Where did my dream for a newworld come from? The news. As Ilistened, the following questions

started coming to me:Why is the news of the day about our

President playing golf and attending cere-monial dinners with dignitaries and aboutOprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, WarrenBuffett, and all the other billionaires —with not one mention of the 16.5 millionhungry children in the United States?

Are Apple computers, Facebook,Twitter, Microsoft and the other megacor-porations’ yearly earnings really moreimportant than the 1.5 million homelesschildren in the United States?

The United States spends enoughmoney in two weeks on war that wouldfeed, house and clothe every person onearth? Why?

When 10.6 million children in thiscountry don’t have health insurance, why

does the world applaud Donald Trump’snew multimillion-dollar contract with atelevision station?

Is winning the lottery the only hope forgetting food for a baby screaming in thenight from starvation?

Who will get more money by takingaway Medicaid and Medicare from thepoorest of the poor?

Is prayer really against the law and isGod only for the stupid? If churches andGod are evil, as the news says on a dailybasis, if caring and loving are lookedupon as weaknesses, and only the profitsof the corporations are applauded, if wehave no more safety nets for the neediestamongst us, who do we turn too?

I am living in a country that is nolonger civilized.

The U.S. government puts mentally illpeople on the streets — making themhomeless, leaving them to fend for them-selves — or puts them in prisons. How canthis country explain why it has more peoplein prisons than any country on earth?

Why are nearly 200,000 juvenilesincarcerated in this country and why do30 percent of the youth in the UnitedStates never graduate from high school?

Why are children subjected to bothillegal and prescribed drugs? Could it be away for them and us to forget they arehomeless and hungry?

It is time to create a brand new world!And I am going to do it. People that hug,touch, laugh, cry and reach out to help oneanother will be the number one news storyand those that help feed hungry childrenwill be given special medals of honor!

The switch from the idolization of“The Money Changers and MoneyLenders” can and will happen!! All ittakes is one person, with one idea tochange the world. Wanna help me?

Instead of people standing outside anApple store all night to get the latest prod-uct, they will be sitting by the side of ahomeless baby or child dying in a hospitalwith no family. The world I am creatingwill have prayer and houses of worshipthat include every faith on the earth!

I recall how, in the aftermath of thedevastating Japanese earthquake, weasked world spiritual leader, Dr. MasaruEmoto, to be our special guest on the JudyJoy Jones radio show I used to do. Heimmediately said yes and called in fromhis home in Japan to be live on the show.

You may know Dr. Emoto from the

popular film, “What the Bleep Do WeKnow.” Dr. Emoto wanted to talk about aworld prayer ceremony he was holdingthe following day for the victims of theearthquake. He offered the listeners hope,inspiration, and deep love and within twohours of the show, it had more listenersthen all the other 150 shows put together.

It proved that we are hungry for love. Itis a beautiful thing to care for one another,and the only reason we are alive.

Dr. Emoto offered exactly what theworld was crying for at that moment —hope. A simple and very humble man wholives his life in prayer, Dr. Masaru Emotooffered a world peace prayer for the suf-fering. He said he will return lifetime afterlifetime to keep sharing his message oflove, hope and peace.

When every person on earth has ahome, food, medical care and an educa-tion, then Mother Earth will breathedeeply, singing songs of gratitude whichwill be heard all over the world. They willbe so beautiful, all earth’s skies will light-en at night from the heavenly sounds.

After all, a mother cannot rest whenany of her children are suffering. Andwhile the new world is being formed,Mother is spreading her rainbow-coloredwings around all of the earth includingeach of us, guiding and protecting as webravely reach for our highest star!

We will have a new world!

Time to Build a New WorldWhen every person on this earth has a home, food,medical care, and an education, then songs of grati-tude will be heard all over the world.

September 2011 ST R E E T SP I R I T 11

by Judy Andreas

Ihave always had a fondness for animals.Staring into the eyes of a dog, honestyand warmth stare back at me. Cats have

been my favorite. I am not sure whether itis their grace or their independence of spirit.

But I love animals. However, when Iturned on the nightly news and saw whatresembled a deer with the proverbial“caught in the headlights” stare, I was a bittaken aback. Then, on second glance, I real-ized that this was no deer but, instead, a“dear.” I looked incredulously at the wide-eyed female and wondered why she hadtampered with a perfectly lovely face.

I love the deer and it pains me to see oneoccasionally riding on the top of the hoodof the car or lying moribund by the side ofthe road. I have encountered Bambi on sev-eral occasions, motoring down a dark coun-try road, and yes, I’ve admired the beautyof the animal. However, I must confess thatI’ve never had the desire to look like one.

Has aging become a crime in theUnited States of America, punishable by ashot of Botox or various and sundry tucks,snips and pulls?

Simone de Beauvoir, the French exis-tentialist philosopher, writer and socialessayist, in her book, The Second Sexcalled our treatment of the aged “scan-dalous.” And though Ms. Beauvoir waswriting about women, men have also fall-en prey to the disease — the disease of

“outlook” not “aging.”Interestingly, however, this was not

always the case. The founding fathers, forexample, viewed the elderly as indispens-able in establishing the New World. Theelderly were looked upon as paragons ofvirtue. In pre-Civil War America, refer-ences to “venerable” old age were part ofeveryday parlance. White-haired UncleSam became the symbol of the New Land.

With growing frequency, after theCivil War, Americans began to changetheir favorable beliefs about the useful-ness and merits of age. Instead of depict-ing seniors as stately and wise, more oftenthan not, they were described as ugly anduseless. Instead of extolling the virtues of

the wisdom and practical sagacity of theaged, people developed the mindset thatthe elderly were incapable of contributinganything of value to society.

Ideas developed about the pathologicaldisorders that weakened the intellectualcapabilities and moral faculties atadvanced stages of life. “Youth” werethought to be most “in sync” with themodern needs of our society.

And today, how many of our elderlypeople have been warehoused in Old Agefacilities, doped up on a lengthy list ofpharmaceuticals? How many people arewaiting for the velvet darkness of death?

This turn of events is based, I believe,on our denial of death. Staring into the

eyes of an old person, one no longer seesinto the soul, with its vast wisdom andexperience. Instead, the reflection of theviewer’s own mortality obscures hisvision and the scream of fear silences hishumanity.

It is interesting that in other cultures,with a less materialistic perspective, peo-ple are not as terrified of aging. InTaoism, old age is taken as a virtue initself. Lao Tzu’s teachings set the age of60 as the moment at which a man mayfree himself from his body and by ecstaticexperience become a Holy Being. I con-tend that Lao was also talking aboutwomen, but who cares about political cor-rectness when we are dealing with life-and-death issues.

When my youngest son was two yearsold, we spent each Friday morning deliv-ering Meals on Wheels. One of our cus-tomers has deposited himself forever inmy memory bank. Fred was close to 90,yet he would walk to the library everyday. He was an avid reader and writer.

He dazzled me with stories about hisboyhood in Wisconsin and told me of thevarious jobs he had performed along hispath. He had even written a book, but stat-ed, sadly, that there was no demand for it. Iwas delivering the meals and yet this gen-tlemen was nourishing me.

I confessed my dismay to an Internetfriend. He responded with a beautiful let-ter in which he said, “Clinging to youthprevents one from entering the next stageof life, which traditionally is the elderstage. This is crucially important in one’sdevelopment. This is when we becometruly ourselves.”

Let us never forget the words of thepoet Robert Browning:

“Grow old along with me/ The best isyet to be

The last of life, for which the first wasmade…”

Art by Christa Occhiogrosso

“Grow old along with me/ The best is yet to beThe last of life, for which the first was made.”

Aging inAmericaHas aging become a crime inthe U.S., punishable by a shotof Botox or various and sundrytucks, snips and pulls?

A Personal Narrativeby Buford Buntin

Iwander into their store on GearyBoulevard in San Francisco, the thriv-ing health maintenance organization

which over the years has provided mewith much of my medical needs, that iswhen I’ve been fortunate enough to havea job that provided benefits.

Right now, I’m in sort of an overflowsituation from having had benefits a bitover a year ago on a temporary job with theS.F. Unified School District, so I carted mymember card into their eyeglass store andpresented my once very adequate eyeglass-es which now need major maintenance,along with my eyes themselves.

The long and the sort of it all is I’mlooking at $75 just to fix my current glass-es frames and their already jerry-riggedearpiece, where I used a piece of wire Icut with some toenail clippers from a spi-ral notebook and attached it between thelenses and the minute hole in the earpiece.I was unable, though, to put together theother earpiece and frames because a piecewith a hole to put wire through had bro-ken off.

So, I was unable to afford the $75because my rent ate up the eyeglass fee.Back when I had a full-time job, morethan three years ago, I could manage thatfee. Now, at roughly half the income of ajanitor/security guard at my alma mater,the late great New College of California,

there is no way.When I sounded as if $75 was a lot of

money to put a couple of screws intosome eyeglass frames, the enormouslysensitive eyeglass technician remarked,“Well, you could always put the glassestogether with tape.”

A private eyeglass company on MarketStreet is basically in the same ballpark fee-wise, so last night I watched the magnifi-cent San Francisco Giants in the free “knot-hole” section of the ballpark underneath theright field and right centerfield grandstandswith one eyeglass earpiece, helping cheerthe home team to victory.

I guess things could be worse....

HMOs Make Vision an Unaffordable Luxury Dental ProblemsAmong the Poorby Maureen HartmannA number of people,who come to the Sundaybreakfast in People’s Parkand the Men’s Shelter on Center,ask for soft breadbecause their teeth bother them.I suggested to one womanthat she get dental carethrough Berkeley Primary Care,that they would help her getinsurance if she didn’t have any.She said she didn’t have an ID.She apparently has fallenthrough the cracks,or at least thinks she has.

WINDOWS AND MIRRORSWINDOWS AND MIRRORS: Reflections on the War inAfghanistan is a traveling exhibit that makes a powerfulstatement on a nearly invisible reality. The 45 panels createdby international artists and U.S. and Kabul students help usimagine the experience of Afghan civilians – from death anddestruction to hopes for peace.

In Oakland: October 4-30 Islamic Cultural Center of NorthernCalifornia (1433 Madison Street)In San Francisco: October 6-30 University of San Francisco (K-Hall)Contact: SSchwartz@afsc.org to volunteer or arrange a group visit.

Shown at left: “Absence” — Art by San Francisco artist Jane Norling

Retreatby George WynnNothing is new to heron the street andshe is not afraid

Every year is adifficult one for the60-year-old ladywith pretty eyes

She's never stayedat a shelterwhen it rains she smiles as if it comforts her

Eight o'clock sharpshe arranges her blankets for the streetcar line nightand meditates asif she were ona little retreatand what virtuethere is in her silence

September 2011ST R E E T SP I R I T12

Traps of the Consumer Dreamby Zainab Mohamed How many times have we fell for your traps Fell for this “Consumer Dream”The utter words of contentment ....we are not your mouse to chase we are not your cat to chase either!

So why at the dawn of the day you wake to see if your propaganda has worked and brain-washed the old white man sitting at a lone trailer in the rag

filled towns of Virginia You have used My people My dreams

My life My hope My horizon My SUNSET!

Yet I pay my tax dollars to whom!? Ask yourself “why am I doing this?” Why is she willing to have her voice heard though her life is in the balanceYou will tell me that by publishing this I have a risen danger to my family, That right now my life is in my handsLike the globe of earth that fitsperfectly in the fist of a newborn baby. Yet I shake my head...A cold blanket of fog is left to wrap us in your evil!And an itch runs up your back...As I raise my hand to the sky “My life was never in my hands...but in my LORD’s” — Rahma Mahdi

Not Shown in thePaintingby Claire J. BakerWhen the street manbowed his head,lint like snowflakesfell from his lashes,the hole in his soleswhimpered like lambsheaded for slaughter,the monkey on his backjingled little bellsat the look-away crowd.The war vet's trustyweapon at his siderusted, nearly forgotten.

Gutter Punksby Joy Bright McCorkleThe gutter punks are trolling Pacific Garden Mall;like damaged biplanes in mid-flight fearing a stall.Eventually they fall into the system of care;Shrinks or courts will catch them when life’s too hard to bear.Like crows of ancient fables they chatter all their waking hours; veracious little beings wilting like hardy flowers.They rage, they rant, they chatter all to no avail;stoned eyes scanning life, believing they’ll prevail.None of them admitting they’re living on the edge of hell.One third of these homeless children “aged out” of foster care;No skills, no strong values; life’s lessons a hidden snare.Pot, speed, and heroin are very common fare.Being clean and sober are near impossible feats;Like lilies of the alley these children are blooming on our streets.

by David Bacon

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — More than1400 Los Angeles janitors, members ofUnited Service Workers West SEIU,protested the firing of immigrant workersby Able Building Maintenence. The com-pany fired workers whose immigration sta-tus the company questions, even thoughthe workers have been cleaning the build-ings where they work for many years.

In protest, workers marched throughdowntown Los Angeles at lunch hour inlate July, stopping in front of buildingswhere Able has the cleaning contract, andsat down in an intersection, stopping traffic.

Firings because of immigration statusdo irreparable harm to workers and totheir communities. At Able BuildingMaintenance and most other companies inthis wave of firings, workers have steady,well-paying union jobs and support manyother people in their families. Many haveworked in their jobs for more than adecade, and some for even longer.Marchers asked that Able Maintenancerespect their time on the job.

The janitors are not working for thelow wages that are common in the worstworkplaces. Union janitors make morethan minimum wage, and have medicaland other benefits. That’s what people aretrying to defend — jobs capable of sup-porting families. That is the goal of mostunions, and most working people.Immigrants are no different.

Undocumented workers did not takejobs from anyone. The jobs in these build-

ings belong to the workers who do them.An immigration check leading to their fir-ing does not create a single job.

Instead, it forces people into an under-ground economy where illegal wages andconditions are prevalent. It does notimprove wages and conditions in theworkplace. At Able, there already is aunion contract in place that guaranteeshealthcare and wages that can supportfamilies.

These immigrant workers didn’t causethe unemployment that plagues millionsof families. They didn’t close a singleplant. Big corporations did. They didn’tcause the economic recession or forecloseon anyone’s home. Big banks did.

They didn’t throw money at the bankswhile failing to establish jobs programsfor unemployed workers. The misplacedpriorities of successive administrations areresponsible for that. The money spent ontwo wars and the defense industry alonecould provide employment to everyone.

If undocumented workers are removedfrom their jobs, it spells economic disasterfor many people, far beyond the workersthemselves. Wages fall and the recessiongets worse. Employers and workers paytaxes that support local schools and ser-vices. The employers have supplierswhose businesses are also harmed.

Workers’ paychecks inject hundreds ofthousands of dollars into local economiesevery month, which support other busi-nesses and families. All this is placed injeopardy by mass firings.

Firing and terrorizing people only

weakens their ability to unite and fight forsomething better, as well as any union’sability to adequately represent people.Wages go down when unions and workersare weak. That hurts everyone

Under the Bush administration, armedagents took workers in handcuffs from

their workplaces. Immigration firings areless visible, but their impact is just as bru-tal. If our communities stand for equaltreatment for all residents, we should treatthese workers and their families with thesame respect and dignity that all of usdeserve.

Los Angeles JanitorsFight for Their JobsImmigrant workers didn’t cause the unemploymentthat plagues millions. They didn’t close a singleplant. Big corporations did. They didn’t cause theeconomic recession or foreclose on anyone’s home.Big banks did.

In Los Angeles, after Able Maintenance fired immigrant workers,1400 janitors marched to demand their years of work be respected.

David Baconphoto

People Who SeeThrough Walls by Carol Denneymy cell was emptydown the hall I could hear a laugh trackfrom the cell with the tvI heard the police technician saydon’t touch the tvthe women in that cellhad to have the tv on for dayseverything it was doing and playingand singing and sayingall day all night for four daysthe same commercialsthe same laugh trackin jailI heard them sing44 cable twelve44 cable twelve44 cable twelvewhen I met themin the custody vanon the way to courton Tuesday after the fireworksI knew their voiceswe introduced ourselves and thenI said 44 cable twelveand we laughed and laughedand the men in the van saidyou must be very dangerous womenand we laughed and we sang44 cable twelve

Up Against "It"by George WynnThe bureaucraticcomputer worldof the "It"doesn't give a shitabout you who areat the mercyof somethingimpersonalThe "It” wants youhelplessfrustratedThe "It” wants youto give upand far too manypoor people do.

September 2011 ST R E E T SP I R I T 13

Mister Nuclear Bossby Sue Ellen PectorProfit won’t countwhen everyoneyou buy fromsell to or rip offis dead,mister nuclear bossprofit won’t be wealthwhen no one’s leftto strut your billions forprofit won’tcook for you,tailor your clothes,clean your bathroomprofit can’t kiss and strokewon’t tuck you in afterhumankind is irradiatedto deaththere won’t be humansto save yoursorry scared selfmister nuclear bosswake up, mister.

Shimmering Treesby Sue Ellen PectorIt’s midnight,standing on my porchI recognize the homeless mansteadily wheeling his possessionsdown the street;cigarette fumesswirl through the ventstunning my lungs;outside, cold air andshimmering trees soothe.

Spinning Talesby Sue Ellen PectorThere is no pathof golden guidance,mirages glitterspinning tales.Swallowed whole by liesyou stagger in the beast’s gutand America laughs.

At Our Cleverestby Sue Ellen PectorPeace is tuckedsnug and safeinside justice,awaiting our arrival.Peace sends signals,due westthat’s better,steady now.Her missives subtlebut at our cleverestwe catch glimpses.

Balance(Three Vignettes)by Sue Ellen PectorA wild weedthis young one whosemother reproaches.I watch, weary andafraid to intervene.Destitute womanrelieves herself in the gutterbetween parked cars.America calls herworthless weed,I call her resilient.Sunk in despairI watch a burly man on the train,arms and neck coveredwith tattoos.His soft voice guides thefour-year-old boy beside him,“Hold on until you getyour balance.”

The Race by George WynnYou see the same thingin all their eyes beforethey strike: How do we make it through the day?It becomes clear more and more people aredining on discardedfood in food courts and fast food placesPeople attack the foodbefore security guardsrace to escort them out

What a pity to witnessa divided city with thehave nots growing inunprecedented numbers

World of the Tenderloinby George Wynnaround noon and the brown-robed and gray-haired Franciscan Friar stands by the corner of St. Bonifaceshaking hands and welcomingpeople of the neighborhoodlike Mr. Rogers with a smileat the end of Golden Gate Avenuea cop writes out a ticket for an oldman jaywalking who pleads, "Itwas yellow going on red," to no availand continues walking up to St.Anthony's shaking his headand cursing under his breathto join the masses waitingfor a meal and he will be fed

Obituary by George Wynn The last time I saw the barefoot lady with swollen feet and scarred face she said life had lost all meaning "It's either survival or despair or death on the street People stare at me as if I were a creature Once it was different I could tell you stories" But she never did The obituary said she once sat for a famous photographer in Europe

Alliteration for a Dark Nightby Claire J. BakerWe are bound to bebound together,bonding in beautyand beatitude,believing ina better bed thanthis brief bench.

AN ALLYby Claire J. BakerTake this to your comfort,homeless friends:the night too is homeless —suspended over dawn & dayusing its energy to acceptwhatever the stars & moongive away.

Debt Deal Crisis Haiku by Arnold PassmanDebt deal crisis solvesPopulation explosionProblem — old, poor — die

******MultinausealsHaiku by Arnold PassmanMultinauseals have smashed the state, in case you have not noticed it.

A Girl Is Born In Amerikaby Adam ItkoffA girl is born in AmerikaWill live in AmerikaDie in AmerikaBecome AmerikaThe same Amerika that took her mother

Now the air outside is coldShe criesHer tiny limbs flail like she were fallingBut quiver with delight as the sun creeps forwardAnd finds her skin for the very first time

Another child of AmerikaOur lost empireGut hollowed with a plastic spoonFeigning the divineAs if God speaks English

Starving

The dog with three legsChases its tailAround and aroundAnd around

Might be funnyIf it weren’t so sad

Amerika

Flashes a sandpaper tongue and tired lipsSearching eyesAnd me’s and mine’s

A face so long that it drags all across the floorMoves to wipe its chinRest its weathered faceParade its crooked mouth

In Amerika the chemical sky burns foreverDrips orange and green and blueGarbage heaps like endless ant mountsGrow high into the skyAnd sting deep into the earth

A smile is nothing but teeth in AmerikaThe ego lays soft and swollen and alone

Waiting to radiate and float awayAmerika we singThe same damn songUntil our throats burnThe words mean lessAnd lessAnd finallyThere are no more wordsSo we cryBut find no solace in despairAmerikaRevolution is a whisper in the treesBeneath the soft beating of her heartA girl is born in AmerikaWith that first ray from the melting sunShe already knowsThat love will be all that remainsAfter the rest finally washes awayA girl is born in AmerikaShe sees its yellow mouthWaxing in disguiseSees its fearIts sad eyesThat hide behindA girl is born in AmerikaShe feels something growing in her stomachLaughs right into its gnarled faceKnows that’s all that’s left to doShe doesn’t know yetThe name of the juggernautThe sound of frictionThe atrophyThat is AmerikaBut she will soonIn AmerikaThe words mean lessAnd lessAnd finallyThere are no more words

A homeless man in Berkeley finds a place to rest on one of the few remaining public benches. Tom Lowe photo

September 2011ST R E E T SP I R I T14

after Labor Day. They and others werearrested and given many citations for try-ing to continue PeaceCamp2010. Layingdown for the right to sleep is dangerousin California.

Ten months later, tickets started crop-ping up on court dockets like mushroomsafter a spring rain. Some charges wereswept away, some traded out informallyfor “lesser” charges. Some who were citedduring the sleep-out have disappeared.

By April 2011, local judges had casual-ly determined that California’s anti-lodg-ing law, 647(e), would not be deemedunconstitutional despite the law’s contro-versial history and its current misuse. Fivehomeless defendants engaged Ed Frey astheir attorney. He also represented himself.

Three homeless men and one home-less woman, plus Frey, went on trialtogether; ultimately two defendants testi-fied on their own behalf during the four-day trial. Watching Frey interview him-self and then answer himself was a high-light of their trial in May 2011.

HUMANS GUILTY, DOG ACQUITTEDThe jurors found all but one of these

“sleep criminals” guilty. Actually, it wasa homeless man’s dog who was found notguilty, but the jurors let the man go freeon behalf of his dog. One juror wasunable to accept the fate of a dog in thehands of police, then the pound, due to acriminal homeless sleeper.

The homeless defendant (Bob is hisstreet name), would have had to pay sev-eral hundred dollars to avert the dog’sdeath, with almost zero turn-around time,if the court had convicted him for being“lodged” at our demonstration.

Shortly after the verdict, the jury fore-man said that a woman juror who lovesdogs hung the jury in relation to Bob’slodging charge. (The other 11 had notcome around to her viewpoint.) The otherfour defendants were found guilty.

Becky Johnson’s blog, One WomanTalking, describes the post-trial interviewwith jurors: “A homeless person shouldnot have to gas their dog, to use one ofour local homeless shelters for the night.Eleven jurors disagreed. No one cansleep well tonight in Santa Cruz County.”

Lucky for Bob this time — he will nothave to face six months in jail for beingasleep at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. at theCourthouse. Unlucky for Santa Cruz,where dogs seem to get better legal pro-tection than do its uprooted people.

The other four defendants, includingattorney Frey, were found guilty, basedpartly on the district attorney’s sleight-of-hand display of two theoretically potential— but not actually accessible — shelterbeds on a hypothetical night. Her carefulchart was developed to thwart an otherwiseviable Eichorn necessity defense.

I also question the value of the expertwitnesses selected by the district attor-ney, given their paychecks rely heavilyon City and County grants.

A month flew by, and Frey and Johnsonreturned to the scene of the trial for theirsentence. Early in June 2011, in a tensemoment, they were carried away in chainsto jail, where they were stuck for twoweeks due to a $50,000 bail. Each.

Attorney Peter Leeming finally gotSanta Cruz County Superior Court JudgeJohn Gallagher to reconsider the heftybail imposed on Frey, in that he was pre-sumed employed and not homeless by thelegal system. The $50,000 bail was

changed to $110 through this interven-tion, so the two men were released, pend-ing appeal.

I joined with PeaceCamp2010 to helpbring attention to the unsafe situationendured by homeless people on the vanish-ing margins of society, and to wake folksup about the criminalization of homelesspeople for ordinary behaviors, such assleeping, or being visible in public.

Now, I could be found guilty of the“criminal” act of lodging, like Ed, Gary,Star and Art, because I was cited whileallegedly sleeping when sheriff deputiescame to bust up the sleep demonstrationon August 7, 2010.

My trial is slated for September 19.Attorney Jonathan Che Gettleman isworking pro bono to defend me. I hopehe will be allowed by the court to focuson free speech rights so there is some rel-evant context with this lodging charge.

The trial of the PeaceCamp2010’sLodging Five prevented any explanationof the context of their demonstration,except for a hostile and untrue commentfrom the district attorney, suggesting thatgathering citations by protesters was a“competition or game.”

From my perspective, muffling the truereason for our demonstration by usinglegal maneuvers is an absurd misuse of thecourt system. I resent the way the legalsystem in burying our protest just whenpeople were beginning to engage in realdialogue about critical issues.

The legal system plays fast and loosewhen its targets are presumed homelessand thus powerless. Accuracy and truthbecome homeless when the power bro-kers are allowed to redefine social andpolitical events to suit their purposeinstead of sharing the history with itsrightful heirs — all of us.

from page 2

Santa Cruz Prosecutes ‘SleepCrimes’

union-squashing Hyatt Hotel, to the bro-kerage office of financier CharlesSchwab, then on to Sen. DianneFeinstein’s Montgomery Street office,finally ending at “Well$ Fargo,” wheremasses of protesters shut down the bank.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program, orTARP, is a federal government programwhich, after the sub-prime mortgage cri-sis, purchased assets and equity from thefinancial sector to bail out banks.

According to polls, repeated bailouts tothe biggest players on Wall Street haverendered American taxpayers ever poorerand more enraged. Boden said, “WhileWashington was engaged in a manufac-tured crisis over the debt ceiling, some 40million people are living in a real crisis,facing a choice between buying groceriesor paying the rent.”

“The spirit is here, and it’s angry!”said marcher Sara Shortt, executive direc-tor of the Housing Rights Committee, aSan Francisco-based renters’ group.“People are angry at the banks. They aretaking everything and leaving peoplehomeless.”

At the first stop, Mike Casey ofUNITE HERE Local 2 indicted the HyattCorporation as the same corporate inter-ests “driving this country into the ditch.”He charged the Hyatt Hotel with forcingnon-union immigrant workers to clean “asmany as 30 rooms a day.”

Casey said that, a year ago, after forc-ing these workers to train their replace-ments, Hyatt’s Boston branch fired 100workers en masse. Replacements came inat minimum wage without health care.

At the next stop, Hyatt Plaza, TheBrass Liberation Orchestra (BLO) rocked

a spirited flashmob performance of “ThisIs A Bad Hotel,” a parody of Lady Gaga’ssong, “Bad Romance.”

Next stop, Charles Schwab.Bob Offer Westort, an organizer with

the San Francisco-based Coalition onHomelessness, cited San Francisco’s newsit/lie law which bans sitting or lying onsidewalks, making it a crime “to sit downfor a moment’s rest.” Loud, sustained,“boos” echoed off skyscrapers.

“The campaign to pass that law spent412,000 dollars to ram (it) down poor SanFranciscans’ throats,” he said, reportingthat Charles Schwab himself invested$30,000, and his co-CEO $25,000 dollars,constituting an eighth of the campaign.

He added that the financial sector as awhole paid 72 percent of the $400,000 toget the sit/lie law passed.

“What they think they’ve learned fromthat is that money can buy our city. Canmoney buy our city?” he asked.

“No!” shouted the crowd.In Portland, sit/lie laws were twice

passed. Homeless activists fought it and

won, Offer-Westort observed.At the next stop on the TARP Tour,

Dianne Feinstein’s office, Chicagoactivist, Willie J.R Fleming said that“politicians have made some mistakes,”divesting from the nation’s commitmentto public housing at the same momentwhen millions of Americans are undergo-ing foreclosure.

“These banks and senators like‘What’s Her Name’ behind us, Feinstein,forgot about the people and bailed out thebanks,” Fleming told the marchers.

Fleming reported that Chicagoans rec-ognized that all those bank-owned fore-closed properties, paid for by taxpayers’money, belonged to the people.

They decided, therefore, to take back,“what was rightfully ours — the housesand the land,” he said. “We want theworld to know: If you won’t house thehomeless, and you can’t pay your rent,we’ll create a public housing system onour own for the people.” His message toall politicians, especially Feinstein, is thatthe land belongs to the people who

worked it, “and we the people are takingwhat’s rightfully ours right now!”

Booming boisterous chants, Portland’sSisters of the Road led protesters to thefinal destination, Wells Fargo’s MarketStreet entrance. There, SFPD officers sto-ically guarded the doors while protestersenjoyed New Orleans-style music as theBrass Liberation Orchestra backed theenthusiastic crowd in yet another spiritedpeople’s flashmob. “We’re fired up! Can’ttake it no more!” One woman held hersign two inches from an officer’s face asshe gracefully undulated in her dance.

The protesters forced Wells Fargo toclose its doors a half-hour early, shuttingdown its corporate profiteering for theday. There were no arrests. This nonvio-lent, yet action-packed protest renewedpeoples’ spirits and commitment, and itwas thoroughly enjoyed by all.

from page 1

Flashmob InvadesFinancial District

Demonstrators demand that homeless people be given house keys instead of being criminalized. Carol Harvey photo

THE SCREAMby Mary RudgeThey screamin my night dreamfalling to their deathout the windowor perish in flames.Their names?"They were just immigrants"—just those Jewish and Italian girlsfrom the ghetto. And poor Irish.Immigrants. Not really U.S., us.you know.Where can you get tofrom the ghetto?You think college, on that pay?A cottage, somedayfor fruit tree and rosesand chickens and children,a yard for play?Fresh milk every day, a cow?They would die anyhow,lint in their lungs from the cloth,breathing dust in the locked room,old building mold,brittle bones from bending to sewin the factory all those hours a day,making shirtwaists, stitch, stitch,go blind, have cancer, cough, TB,they were going to dieanyway.

Death’s Wicked Gripby Sue Ellen PectorGirls at sewing machinesworking long hoursbreathing lint-thick airlocked inincinerated orchoosing instead toleap outbroken windowsplummet intodeath’s wicked gripas the factory burns.

September 2011 ST R E E T SP I R I T 15

The two protest campaigns come aftertwo years in which dozens of otheremployers have fired workers in responseto demands by the Department ofHomeland Security (DHS). John Morton,head of Immigration and CustomsEnforcement (ICE), a division of DHS,has made serial announcements of thenumber of companies being audited tofind undocumented employees — citingfigures from 1000 to 1654.

There is no master list of how manyworkers have been fired. Over the last twoyears, however, several thousands have losttheir jobs. In Minneapolis, Seattle and SanFrancisco, more than 1800 janitors —members of SEIU union locals — lost theirjobs. In 2009, some 2000 young womenlaboring at the sewing machines ofAmerican Apparel were fired in LosAngeles. At one point, Morton claimed thatICE had audited over 2900 companies.

President Obama says this workplaceenforcement targets employers “who areusing illegal workers in order to drive downwages — and oftentimes mistreat thoseworkers.” An ICE Worksite EnforcementAdvisory claims “unscrupulous employersare likely to pay illegal workers substan-dard wages or force them to endure intoler-able working conditions.”

Curing intolerable conditions by firingworkers who endure them doesn’t help theworkers or change the conditions, however.Instead, the administration’s rhetoric hasfed efforts to blame immigrants for “steal-ing jobs” and for undermining wages. In abid to oppose support for Pacific Steelworkers, one local City Council memberwrote, “Every job given to an undocument-ed immigrant is a job denied to anAmerican citizen,” and “citizens won’twork for the low wages undocumentedimmigrants will work for.”

In reality, this new wave of DHS work-place enforcement is focusing, not on low-wage employers, but on high-wage, andoften unionized ones. Fired janitors aroundthe country are almost all members ofSEIU. Workers at Pacific Steel belong toLocal 164B of the Glass, Molders, Plasticsand Pottery Workers (GMP). Dozens ofworkers were terminated at a Sealy mat-tress factory, where they belonged to a fur-niture workers’ local of theCommunication Workers of America.

There is a long history of anti-unionanimus among immigration authorities.Agents have set up roadblocks beforeunion elections in California fields, con-ducted raids during meatpacking organiz-ing drives in North Carolina and Iowa,audited janitorial employers and airlinefood plants prior to union contract negoti-ations, and helped companies terminateclose to a thousand apple packers whenthey tried to join the Teamsters Union inWashington state.

But there’s another reason why unioncompanies are targets. They’re easier. Allemployers are required to have job appli-cants fill out I-9 forms and provide identi-fication and Social Security numbers,which go into the employees’ records. Inan “I-9 audit,” ICE agents pore throughthose records to identify undocumentedworkers. They then send the employer aletter listing the workers it must fire.

In garment sweatshops and small restau-rants, inspecting personnel records is time-consuming and laborious. On the otherhand, unions generally force employers tokeep records in good order, to ensure theyadhere to the pay levels, benefits and work-er rights in labor agreements. In those com-panies, immigration agents easily sweep inand build their case for firings.

Employers have often found advan-tages in demanding that their workers re-verify their immigration status. At Able

Building Maintenance, ICE targeted 475workers during an I-9 audit in SanFrancisco, and the company terminatedthem. Then, in Los Angeles, the companyused the process to lower its labor costs.

Every time Able took over a newbuilding from another janitorial contrac-tor, it demanded that the workers thereprovide new proof of their legal status.When some couldn’t, the company firedthem and replaced them with new hires atmuch lower wages and benefit levels.

These actions violated the intent of theunion’s contract. That agreement says thatwhen one building service company isbrought in to replace another, it must con-tinue to employ the workers who havealways done that work. The agreement pro-vides workers some job security in anindustry where contractors change con-stantly. Although companies competefiercely against each other, they can’t gainadvantage by firing high-wage workers andreplacing them with low-wage ones.

But that’s just what Able is doing, byusing immigration status as a pretext toterminate longtime janitors in L.A. high-rises. That’s why more than a thousandworkers marched through those samebuildings in protest. They fear, not onlythat Able will continue to fire them, butthat other companies will use the sametactic to lower costs, in order to compete.

Workers at Stanford University heldsimilar protests, when one union janitorialcontractor was replaced by another. Afterthe new contractor demanded that long-time employees re-verify their immigra-tion status, 19 were fired.

At Pacific Steel in Berkeley, ICE gainedaccess to the company’s I-9 and other per-sonnel records in February, and began itsaudit. But union contract negotiations hadbegun just weeks before. In March, thefoundry’s workers struck for a week, suc-cessfully defending their medical benefits.

Conducting an audit in the middle of alabor dispute violates an operating proce-dure dating from the Clinton administra-tion. In May, the union filed an unfair laborpractice charge against the company andICE, accusing them of violating the instruc-tion in order to punish union activity. Towin support for workers who might be firedas a result of the audit, GMP Local 164Band other unions pointed to the disastrouseffect it would have on the community.

“If these skilled workers are removedfrom the foundry, the operation of thebusiness will suffer greatly,” said JosieCamacho, executive secretary of theAlameda Labor Council. “If the foundrywere to close as a consequence, it wouldbe an economic disaster for the Bay Area.The company and the workers pay taxesthat support local schools and services,which cannot afford to lose money des-perately needed in these challenging eco-nomic times.”

In addition to city council resolutions,many elected officials, churches andimmigrant rights groups have written tothe Department of Homeland Securityvoicing opposition to the possible firings.

“These audits affect workers in manyother workplaces beyond Pacific Steel,”added Camacho. “They could deepenunemployment, and make recovery fromthe current recession more difficult. Thatshould concern the administration as itfaces a national election in 2012.”

Mike Garcia, president of UnitedService Workers West, SEIU, which rep-resents the Able janitors, suggests thatevery labor council survey unions in itsarea, to find out where the audits and fir-ings are taking place.

The Pacific Steel and Able protests marka new level of opposition in unions to the I-9 audits and firings. “The union is responsi-ble for representing and protecting unionmembers against any violation of human

rights,” said Ignacio De La Fuente, interna-tional vice-president of the GMP.

In its effort to encourage worker partici-pation in their own defense, Local 164Borganized an immigration clinic in which adozen attorneys from legal aid organiza-tions talked to employees one-on-one tohelp them resolve their status questions.And as undocumented students did in theircampaign to pass the Dream Act, someworkers began to speak out publicly.

A rising tide of labor opposition to I-9audits will make waves in Washington,D.C. Already the firings are causing someunions to question support for key elementsof the comprehensive immigration reform(CIR) bills that Congress has debated overthe past seven years, especially the propos-als for beefed-up workplace enforcement.

Almost all the CIR bills would increaseaudits and penalties on employers for hiringundocumented workers. They include man-dating use of the E-Verify database, and anational ID program, to make it easier forICE to find and fire people.

The Obama administration not only sup-ports the CIR approach, but it has imple-mented many of the enforcement measuresthose bills proposed. As a result, firingshave skyrocketed in the last two years, anddeportations total over a million.

When sanctions were passed as part ofthe Immigration Reform and Control Actin 1986, the AFL-CIO supported them,despite significant local opposition.Sanctions were justified as a means toforce undocumented workers to leave thecountry, and to discourage others fromcoming, a justification still used today.

Over the following 13 years, however,unions saw sanctions used by employersto threaten and fire workers when theytried to organize or enforce minimumwages and labor standards. After a grow-ing outcry, the AFL-CIO then reversed itsposition at its 1999 convention in LosAngeles. Its new position called for therepeal of employer sanctions, legalizationof the undocumented, and enforcing laborrights for all workers.

Under the Bush administration, howev-er, as comprehensive immigration reformbills were introduced with massiveemployer support, parts of the labormovement began to call for the “fairenforcement” of sanctions. Some unionssaw sanctions as a means to get rid ofworkers viewed as “low-wage competi-tors,” while others saw support for sanc-tions as a tradeoff that could lead to legal-ization for the undocumented.

The CIR bills, and their limited legal-ization proposals, all failed to passCongress. Firings of undocumented work-ers, however, increased dramatically. TheBush and Obama administrations did not

need Congressional approval for moreenforcement. Many unions were para-lyzed as a result, finding it difficult tosupport increased enforcement in CIRbills in Washington, and then oppose thatsame enforcement when it led to the firingof their own members. The Pacific Steeland Able protests are a sign of a growingchallenge to this paralysis.

Earlier opposition came fromMinneapolis, where SEIU Local 26 beganto organize opposition to I-9 audits and fir-ings, first of its own janitorial members,and then of non-union fast food workers atChipotle restaurants. It held meetings offired workers, and organized demonstra-tions that included a sit-in at a Chipotle out-let. Their campaign included in its list ofdemands that employers support immigra-tion reform. But what kind of reform?

Unions are starting to wrestle with thisquestion. The audits are a product of theemployer sanctions provision contained inthe 1986 law. Without changing that law torepeal sanctions, measures like audits, E-Verify, raids and firings are inevitable.

Labor councils in San Francisco,Silicon Valley and Alameda County havepassed resolutions in the past year callingfor the repeal of sanctions. The Alamedacouncil authored the original resolutionthat changed the AFL-CIO position at its1999 convention, 12 years ago. In a newresolution passed unanimously in June,the council “reiterates its support for theimmigration reform proposal it first pro-posed in 1999, which was then adopted bythe AFL-CIO Convention.”

The three resolutions, also passed bythe national convention of the LaborCouncil for Latin AmericanAdvancement, call for support for analternative to the CIR tradeoff, called theDignity Campaign. In addition to repeal-ing sanctions, it calls for an immigrationpolicy based on labor and human rights. Itincludes scrapping trade agreements thatlead to poverty and forced migration fromMexico and other developing countries.

The Dignity Campaign proposal is notviable in a Congress dominated by TeaParty nativists and corporations seekingguest worker programs. But just as it tooka civil rights movement to pass the VotingRights Act, any basic change to establishthe rights of immigrants will also requirea social upheaval and a fundamentalrealignment of power.

A janitors’ march in downtown LosAngeles, or city council resolutions inNorthern California, may be only steps inthat direction. But what counts is wherethose marchers are heading.

For more of David Bacon’s articles andphotographs, see http://dbacon.igc.org

Fighting the Firings and Silent Raidsfrom page 1

Entire families have joined the sit-ins to protest workplace raids. David Bacon photo

The Obama administration has implemented many of theenforcement measures aimed at immigrant workers. As aresult, firings have skyrocketed in the last two years, anddeportations total over a million.

September 2011ST R E E T SP I R I T16

by Sandra Schwartz

“No Human Being is Illegal—YCada uno Tiene un Sueno(Each One Has a Dream).”

That is the powerful theme of a new muralgracing the walls of the Friends Meetingand the offices of American FriendsService Committee at 65 Ninth St. in SanFrancisco. This strikingly beautiful muralis 100 feet wide and 30 feet tall.

For the past year, Pablo Paredes, youthoutreach coordinator of the AmericanFriends Service Committee (AFSC), hasbeen working with a group of high schoolstudents who have dedicated themselvesto bringing the voices of underprivilegedand undocumented youth into the debateon immigration reform by building com-munity, documenting their stories, build-ing alliances, educating potential allies,and advocating for change.

The group calls themselves 67 Suenosafter the 67 percent of migrant youthwhose dreams are not reflected in any ofthe common narratives regarding immi-gration reform. They coalesced as thenation was debating the passage of the“Dream Act.”

Many dedicated allies were campaign-ing for the passage of the “Dream Act”without knowing that the act had beenchanged, leaving an estimated 67 percentof undocumented youth no option for pur-suing a “pathway toward citizenship.”

This new mural — with its images ofindigenous symbols, the crosses of thosewho died while trying to cross the border,and a vibrant central image of youth lead-ing a renewed movement for justice — isa passionate statement from the youth thatneither politicians nor allies can ignore.

Pablo Paredes said, “Creating a strongpiece of art in a public space changes theconsciousness.” Certainly, for those of uswho worked on the mural, it has been anexperience that borders on the level ofmagic or even a miracle.

We didn’t have an auspicious begin-ning. Even receiving a key to gain accessto the vacant lot was a challenge thatrequired jumping endless hoops thatincluded securing certificates of insur-ance, signing a licensing agreement with alarge absentee landlord, and then waitingfor the delivery of the key.

The key allowed us access to a monu-mental wall in a lot littered with refusethat symbolizes a neighborhood inhabitedby people that many would like to forget.As we waited for delivery of the lift thatgave us access to the upper reaches of thewall, we picked up bags and bags of trashfilled with broken glass, needles, human

waste, and other detritus of urban decay. We thought things were looking up

when the lift/boom was delivered; wecould now paint the whole wall. But, toour dismay, as soon as we drove the liftonto the lot we found ourselves stuck inthe sand. When the delivery truck droveonto the lot to pull it out, the driver gotstuck as well. Over the next two days, fivevehicles mired themselves in the sand asthe company tried to prove that the liftwas appropriate for the site.

Eventually, we went to the lumberyardand bought multiple sheets of plywoodand used the boards to create a path tomove the lift to the wall. Once we got tothe wall, we felt enormous relief, but wesoon encountered another major problem.Our muralist was unable to produce animage that resonated with the group.

We were at the point of giving up.Then Pablo Paredes met Pancho Pescadorat the Berkeley Farmer’s Market. As theytalked, Pablo discovered that Pancho is anexperienced muralist who works withyouth in Oakland painting murals. He

thought he could produce an image fromthe notes that Pablo sent him about thegroup’s ideas.

Two days later, Pancho showed up atthe AFSC office with a drawing thateveryone recognized as the image theyhad been waiting to see. It also turned outthat Pancho was no stranger to the group.Rather, he was a beloved teacher from oneof the youth’s middle school and a mentorto her younger brother. From that pointon, we saw and experienced the magic.

We held a painting party that drewpeople from far and wide. Quakers camefrom Sacramento, Palo Alto, SanFrancisco and the East Bay to work on themural. Tourists stopped to ask if theycould help. One family traveling throughfrom Canada spent the day. Allies fromthe community painted, and individualswho recognized the images stopped to telltheir stories, including a young man whohad buried his friend in the desert.

As the weeks passed, endless numbersof people stopped to take pictures, yell theirappreciation, and offer to help. One young

man spent two weeks cleaning the lot, pick-ing up litter that was ground in but stillpotentially dangerous to volunteers. Someof our homeless neighbors became mem-bers of the daily painting team.

Finally, on Friday evening, August 26,we celebrated the unveiling of the muralwith hundreds of allies, well wishers,friends and families. The 67 Suenos wereradiant as they stood in front of the crowdas many cameras snapped pictures.

The young people excitedly describedthe process of creating art, and sharedtheir purpose and their dreams. They werepoised, articulate, and proud. They hadworked hard, putting in many more hoursthan could reasonably be expected.

They knew they were instrumental increating a piece of art that is not only beau-tiful, but carries a message that every politi-cian needs to hear and that everyone of usneeds to acknowledge: No Human BeingIs Illegal — Y Cada Uno Tiene un Sueno.

Sandra Schwartz is the peace educationcoordinator of the American Friends ServiceCommittee..

No Human Being is Illegal—Y Cada uno Tiene un Sueno

This new mural is a passionate statement from the youth that politicians cannot ignore. Itdepicts indigenous symbols, the crosses of those who died while trying to cross the border,and a vibrant central image of youth leading a renewed movement for justice.