Tag Archives: Homelessness

Free Press Advocates Slam ‘Blatantly Unconstitutional’ Conviction of North Carolina Reporters

“Reporters shouldn’t be arrested for doing their jobs,” said one First Amendment advocacy group.

By Brett Wilkins. Published 6-17-2023 by Common Dreams

Body camera footage showing Asheville Blade’s journalist Matilda Bliss’ press pass. Bliss and colleague Veronica Coit were convicted of trespassing for recording police evicting unhoused people from a public park shortly after the park’s closing time. (Photo: Freedom of the Press Foundation)

Press freedom and civil liberties defenders on Friday condemned what legal experts called the unconstitutional conviction of two Asheville, North Carolina journalists for violating a public park curfew while covering the police eviction of unhoused people on Christmas night 2021.

An Asheville jury deliberated for two hours following a weeklong trial in the case of Asheville Blade reporters Matilda Bliss and Veronica Coit, who were found guilty of misdemeanor second-degree trespass for remaning in Aston Park after closing time. The journalists were ordered to pay $100 each plus court costs, the Asheville Citizen Times reports.

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More Than 8,000 Kroger Grocery Workers Strike in Colorado

The strike began a day after a report showed 14% of Kroger workers have experienced homelessness in the past year.

By Julia Conley.  Published 1-12-2022 by Common Dreams

Photo: Chimi Chi/Twitter

On the heels of a new report showing significant financial insecurity, including homelessness, among workers at Kroger grocery stores, more than 8,000 of the chain’s employees in Colorado went on strike Wednesday to demand fair wages and better healthcare benefits.

Amid a recent wave of successful strikes at companies including John Deere and Kellogg’s, the work stoppage is taking place at nearly 80 King Sooper grocery stores, which are owned by the Kroger Company, across the Denver metropolitan area. According to the Colorado Sun, 10 additional stores in Colorado Springs could also go on strike in the coming weeks. Continue reading

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After 7 Years, Anti-War Group That Fed the Hungry Wins Fight With Fort Lauderdale

“We outlived and outmaneuvered the old mayor, city manager, and city attorney, who were all intent on policing us and the homeless out of existence,” said the local chapter of Food Not Bombs.

By Kenny Stancil  Published 1-5-2022 by Common Dreams

“It took seven years, but Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs’ federal civil liberties lawsuit against Fort Lauderdale for banning food sharings is finally concluding,” the group said on January 3, 2022. (Photo: Ft. Lauderdale Food Not Bombs/Facebook)

Anti-hunger and anti-war activists in Florida have reportedly won their protracted legal fight against the city government of Fort Lauderdale, which agreed to compensate the local chapter of Food Not Bombs after spending years trying to prevent the group from sharing free food with people in need at a downtown park.

“It took seven years, but Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs’ federal civil liberties lawsuit against Fort Lauderdale for banning food sharings is finally concluding,” the group said Monday in a statement. “After we won our second appeal in August 2021, the city has accepted a settlement that admits they were wrong to enforce the park rule against us and will pay us a small amount of damages. They will also have to pay our lawyers a great deal more!”

Last August, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th District ruled unanimously that “a rule limiting food-sharing inside Fort Lauderdale parks is unconstitutional as applied to Food Not Bombs’ hosting of free vegan meals for the homeless,” the Courthouse News Service reported at the time.

According to the outlet:

A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based appeals court overturned a Florida federal court’s summary judgment in favor of the city, finding that a rule which banned the sharing of food as a social service in city parks without written permission violated Food Not Bombs’ First Amendment rights.

Fort Lauderdale Park Rule 2.2 requires city permission for social service food-sharing events in all Fort Lauderdale parks and allows officials to charge as much as $6,000 for the permitting process.

In a 64-page ruling issued Tuesday, the panel determined the rule cannot lawfully qualify as a “valid regulation” of Food Not Bombs’ expressive conduct due to its “utterly standardless permission requirement.”

In its statement, Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs said that the favorable settlement is “on top of the victories this lawsuit already accomplished in years’ prior, including the 2018 appeals ruling that ruled that the original sharing ban law was unconstitutional—[…] creating a strongly worded precedent about sharing food as protected free speech.”

“We had to bite our tongues a lot over the years to see how this would play out, but no more,” the group continued. “We outlived and outmaneuvered the old mayor, city manager, and city attorney, who were all intent on policing us and the homeless out of existence.”

“Let’s not forget multiple FLPD chiefs and captains who sent their goons to stalk and arrest us, all gone now!” the group added. “Nuts to all the narrow-minded fools who wanted to be rid of us.”

Decrying government efforts to crack down on those who feed the poor, Keith McHenry—co-founder of Food Not Bombs, which uses surplus ingredients that would otherwise be thrown away to provide vegetarian meals to people in more than 1,000 cities in 65 countries across the world—told the Institute for Public Accuracy on Wednesday that “sharing free food with the hungry is an unregulated gift of love.”

McHenry—currently in Houston, where another local chapter is risking arrest by refusing to comply with a city ordinance that seeks to move meal distribution from outside the downtown library to a parking lot near the courthouse—noted that in addition to worsening poverty, the coronavirus crisis has made obtaining assistance more difficult, underscoring the importance of Food Not Bombs.

“While most indoor soup kitchens shut down during the pandemic,” he said, “Food Not Bombs continued to share with the unhoused.”

This work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

 

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2021 Was Deadliest Year for Palestinians Since 2014: Israeli Human Rights Group

According to analysis, Israeli forces and settlers killed over 300 people in the occupied territories and left nearly 900 homeless.

By Jessica Corbett.  Published 1-4-2022 by Common Dreams

Israeli strikes have destroyed buildings and infrastructure in Gaza. Photo: UNOCHA/Samar Elouf

A Jerusalem-based human rights group on Tuesday released new statistics revealing that Israeli security forces and armed settlers‘ violence against Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories escalated in 2021 to the highest levels in seven years.

Last year was the deadliest year for Palestinians living under occupation since 2014, when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge and killed thousands in the Gaza Strip, according to B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Continue reading

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‘Catastrophe’ Feared as 35 Million People Are Set to Lose Jobless Aid in 3 Days

“Millions will suffer as they lose this critical source of income and the loss of spending will suppress job growth.”

By Jake Johnson, staff writer for Common Dreams.  Published 9-3-2021

Members of the Georgia State Defense Force from across the state pack supply boxes at Second Harvest of South Georgia food bank in Valdosta, Ga. Photo: Georgia National Guard/Wikimedia/CC

Millions of jobless workers are set to lose critical unemployment benefits in roughly 72 hours—and neither Congress nor the Biden administration seem prepared to do anything about it.

Despite the ongoing threat posed by the highly transmissible Delta variant, the White House and Democratic lawmakers have provided no indication that they plan to prevent several pandemic-related unemployment programs from expiring on September 6, which—in a cruel irony—happens to be Labor Day. Continue reading

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Biden Admin Urged to ‘Prevent a Historic Wave of Evictions’ by Extending CDC Moratorium, Speeding Up Aid

“Far too many renters are struggling to access emergency rental assistance programs and are at risk of losing their homes when the moratorium expires,” said the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

By Kenny Stancil, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 6-15-2021

Photo: AFSC

The National Low Income Housing Coalition is calling on the Biden administration to “prevent a historic wave of evictions this summer by extending, strengthening, and enforcing the federal eviction moratorium and by implementing a whole-of-government approach to distribute emergency rental assistance more efficiently and effectively to those most in need.”

The national moratorium on residential evictions for nonpayment of rent—a life-saving measure issued last September by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to curb the spread of Covid-19—is set to expire on June 30. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that discussions are ongoing as to whether the agency will prolong its partial ban on evictions. Continue reading

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Wall Street Titan Gloats Over Pandemic Profits From Rentals as Eviction Tsunami Looms

“Blackstone was a huge winner coming out of the global financial crisis, and I think something similar is going to happen,” said the private equity firm’s billionaire CEO Stephen Schwarzman as millions brace for eviction.

By Kenny Stancil, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 12-15-2020

Diane Yentel of the National Low Income Housing Coalition said that the consequences of congressional inaction on housing relief “will be deadly and costly—for children and families, for communities, and for our country’s ability to contain the pandemic.” Stephen Schwarzman photo: World Economic Forum/flickr/CC

As the December 31 expiration date on the CDC’s federal eviction moratorium nears in the midst of the surging Covid-19 pandemic and freezing weather, an estimated 30 to 40 million working-class households in the United States are bracing for the possibility of eviction—but at least one Wall Street investor looking to capitalize on the crisis is bragging about what he sees as a golden opportunity to expand his real estate empire.

“You always have winners and losers—Blackstone was a huge winner coming out of the global financial crisis, and I think something similar is going to happen,” said the billionaire CEO Stephen Schwarzman. Continue reading

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With Rent Freezes About to Expire, Mnuchin Lobbies for More Wall Street Bailouts

As millions of Americans stand on the brink of economic annihilation, the money keeps flowing to Wall Street thanks to carefully contrived mechanisms to maintain a dying financial system afloat.

By Raul Diego  Published 12-4-2020 by MintPress News

Steven Mnuchin. Photo: White House

Many prophetic scenes depicted in a series of Mayan codices written in the early days of the Spanish colony, and translated and compiled in El Libro de los Libros del Chilam Balam, describe a world foreign to its original authors. But, one which was barreling down on them and their civilization even as the Mayan high priests recorded their visions for each stop on their cyclical calendar system.

The metaphors they leaned on to describe these new Western values and systems were accurate, despite having nothing comparable in their own cosmology or parallels in their relationship with the earth. In one of the most striking prophecies, the interpreting shaman warns of the days of “the golden club,” subtly alluding to the new paradigm of wealth and commercial imperatives being imposed on their world. Continue reading

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Oregon Can’t Fight Wildfires Because Its Helicopters Were Sent To Afghanistan

Many of Oregon’s largest firefighting aircraft are not available because the Department of Defense has sent them to Afghanistan to fight in the 20-year-old war.

By Alan Macleod. Published 9-11-2020 by MintPress News

Screenshot: KGW8

More than half a million Oregonians have been forced to flee their homes, as wildfires continue to ravage the West Coast of the United States. Amid record-breaking temperatures, the wildfires, which have charred one million acres of land, have caused the sky to turn a terrifying shade of red, with many comparing it to Mars, hell, or the apocalypse. Air quality in Portland, the state’s largest city, is currently the lowest in the world, below even that of infamously polluted cities like Delhi and Beijing.

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