PHOTO/SARAH MENEFEE
SAN FRANCISCO — For the homeless and the housed. We are, ‘First they came for the homeless.’
Our summer of occupation began June 1 in San Francisco. A small number of homeless people began occupying the only San Francisco Staples location. The battle for the commons, the U.S. Post Office, has begun. For eight days we promoted a boycott of Staples, in protest of the unconstitutional privatization of the publicly owned Post Office, using near-minimum wage Staples employees with no background checks or training, handling the mail. The Post Office is not broke. They want to break it. So for eight days we said no.
On the ninth day we moved to Senator Diane Feinstein’s office. She and her billionaire financier husband, Richard Blum, have connections to Staples and have been pushing Post Office privatization. We held out there for four days against increased police pressure. At that point we went to the Federal Reserve. All hell broke loose. The last time we stayed more than a single night we occupied the sidewalk outside the Fed for nine months.
We were immediately targeted by DPW (Department of Public Works) and the SFPD. Numbering from two to six people, we stood against illegal, unconstitutional assaults by the SFPD. We even recorded a cop saying the Constitution does not cover protests.
What DPW did was worse. We recorded them using Simple Green, which is toxic (check the Internet), out of an unmarked bottle. They used bleach and pine. They used a water canon mounted on a tanker truck on us. This is policy from the San Francisco city government. It’s illegal, unconstitutional and against the Geneva Conventions. The city is guilty of crimes against humanity, which we have documented.
We lasted there one week. Unlike most of the homeless who are forced to endure the torture because they have nowhere to sleep but on the streets, we left.
We are currently protesting at the Staples location in Berkeley, CA. We have been here 19 days. Things are just starting to heat up. The police are acting illegally. We are documenting it. In the day we protest Staples, at night we protest for the right to sleep. The battle for the commons, and our human rights, continues.
You can follow us on Facebook at ‘First they came for the homeless.’
This is a wonderful article. You are right. We are fighting for the commons. You are on the front lines, first to engage in the battle. Everyone else will be forced to follow. They just don’t realize it yet.