The right to housing is also the right to shit in peace:

We build a latrine in a homeless camp

On Saturday April 5 four friends and I went to the homeless encampment in Sacramento, California and built a simple pit latrine. With all the media attention this camp has received, and all the sympathetic statements by the mayor and even the governor (who’ve both visited the camp twice in the past month) it seemed remarkable to us that something as basic as a latrine had not been built. At one end of the camp is the transmitting tower of KSMH, a Christian radio station considered to be the flagship of the Immaculate Heart Radio Network. And the camp is tucked in right next to Blue Diamond Almonds, a union-busting company that has the largest stake in one of the biggest cash crops in California. But these landmarks of charity and wealth only serve to highlight the deep contradictions that exist at the margins of our land of plenty.

"Public" Meeting at SF County Hall of Flowers

Last night, April 6, 2009, I experienced something inspiring, and even euphoric, in a city-sponsored meeting to present possible changes to San Francisco’s Botanical Garden & Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. The bottom line of the two suit-wearing bureaucrats from the Parks & Recreation administration was their proposal to follow nearly all of the other similar botanical gardens across the U.S. and impose a fee, of $5, for what has been free since it was created nearly 70 years ago. Their PowerPoint had a slide with a table that showed the botanical garden in Miami at the high end of the scale with a $20 admission fee and they made a huge point that the Brooklyn Botanical Garden had recently raised its fee to $8 after struggles had failed to keep it free back in 1996.

In a historic blow to workers’ rights, and working class solidarity in Hawaii, the members of the Hawaii State Teachers Association (HSTA) have been coerced into voting to relinquish basic rights to gain a needed pay raise. The contract they agreed to provides for 4% raises over each of the next two years, with other supplements amounting to an 11% pay raise over two years. The newly approved contract includes a mandatory random and reasonable suspicion drug testing clause.

Over the last few years, teachers have been deluged with red tape and paperwork, had arbitrary and rigid “standards” overlaid on their class rooms, and generally had their autonomy eroded. The streamlining of the educational process, designed to create passive, unquestioning, but efficient workers to meet the needs of the capitalist economy is now taking another step forward with the moral paternalism of invasive random drug testing, dictating what teachers may do in their free time.

Poet Maya Angelou dubbed it the "Los Angeles Rebellion." It not only ignited a four-day uprising in L.A., but also inspired hundreds of smaller demonstrations across the globe. Most media merely lip-synced the white suburban cliches of it being a "black riot" caused by "racial tension." Or, when the Rodney King verdict was taken into consideration, they described it as legitimate demonstrations hijacked by hard-core criminals and transformed into a maddened assault on their own community. Such superficial analysis ignores the facts and could not be further from the truth.

1988 "Near Riot" in San Francisco: 10,000 Workers Protest Rat Contractors Meeting
by Frank McMurray West Coast correspondent
*This first appeared in New York Hard Hat News, a rank and file construction worker publication:*