A video and some thoughts on school lunch and child poverty in the U.S.

Moving to another country can change how you see your homeland. One of the changes, for me, was the horrifying realization that I had under-estimated the degree to which everything in the United States is set up to funnel money to an ever shrinking number of aristocrats. I knew that that was the case, but I guess maybe I just hadn’t fully realized what that meant. Part of that change was just me learning more about politics, history, and how the world works, which wasn’t due to the move, but I hadn’t expected just how much the lack of worry over medical bills would change my life. It was your standard “weight lifted from my shoulders” situation, but I hadn’t even realized the weight was there. There have been a couple other moments like that, though not as life-changing as universal healthcare, and I also think the pandemic did a great job of forcing our rulers to show how little they valued our lives.

There were, however, some exceptions. Even as pundits and politicians ranted about how important it was for people to “get back to work”, a couple measures were passed that nearly cut U.S. child poverty in half. The bigger one of those was an expansion to the child tax credit, which gave parents monthly checks to help with the ever-rising cost of having children in the Land of the Free. The smaller one was an expansion to the free school lunch program that made it universal. Both of those are now expiring, and child poverty could be about to just about double as a result, back to where it was pre-pandemic. It’ll take some time to figure out exactly how much harm this will do, but we already know that the rough answer will be “a lot”.

For the first time in half a year, families on Friday are going without a monthly deposit from the child tax credit — a program that was intended to be part of President Joe Biden’s legacy but has emerged instead as a flash point over who is worthy of government support.

Retiree Andy Roberts, from St. Albans, West Virginia, relied on the checks to help raise his two young grandchildren, whom he and his wife adopted because the birth parents are recovering from drug addiction.

The Robertses are now out $550 a month. That money helped pay for Girl Scouts, ballet and acting lessons and kids’ shoes, which Roberts noted are more expensive than adult shoes. The tax credit, he said, was a “godsend.”

“It’ll make you tighten up your belt, if you’ve got anything to tighten,” Roberts said about losing the payments.

The monthly tax credits were part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package — and the president had proposed extending them for another full year as part of a separate measure focused on economic and social programs.

But Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, from Roberts’ home state of West Virginia, objected to extending the credit out of concern that the money would discourage people from working and that any additional federal spending would fuel inflation that has already climbed to a nearly 40-year high.

I think Manchin does own a lot of blame here, but it’s worth noting that Democratic leadership has proven wholly unwilling to play hardball with Manchin. They could fund pro-labor campaigning in West Virginia, which would undermine Manchin’s power, but they’re not pro-labor, so they won’t do that. They could run political ads about how Manchin’s daughter was personally involved in jacking up EpiPen prices, and how the whole family routinely hurts West Virginians for personal profit, but they don’t want to, for some reason. Whatever their reasons, they’re apparently more important than ending child poverty in “the richest nation in the world”. I’ll have another post up today that will look at one of the reasons why that might be, but regardless, the people governing our country, as a group, have chosen that more children need live in poverty and go hungry, and they have chosen to increase the uniquely USian problem of school lunch debt.

You know those snickers ads? Some person is out of place – Betty White on a construction site, or a bigfoot at a business meeting – and then they’re given a snickers, and they’re just a construction worker or office worker. The tagline is something like “you’re not you when you’re hungry”? It’s an acknowledgement of the well- known fact (as part of trying to get some of your money), that doing just about everything is harder – physically and emotionally – when you are hungry. That’s especially true for children, both because they are actively growing, and NEED those calories to literally build functional bodies, and because their perception of time is so different – an hour of a child’s life is a much, much larger proportion of their total experience than an hour of an adult’s life. Spending a whole school day hungry, and being required to focus, work, and behave, is damned close to torture in my opinion.

As usual, Beau of the Fifth Column has some good thoughts on the issue:

Let’s be clear – there is no choice here. Parents are required by law to have their kids in school, and they are required by our economic system to spend most of their waking hours working, usually for someone else’s profit, just to cover food, shelter, and other necessities. Why should they also be required to pay for food, especially at a public school? There is no good reason, but there are some bad ones. “Personal responsibility” is probably the most vapid, with some form of eugenics being the most sinister, but I think it’s more that school lunches are a way to funnel money from everyday folks to the eternally greedy upper class, and those at the top sincerely believe that they need to use poverty to motivate people to work.

I suppose that’s true, to an extent. You do need some form of coercion to get a person to spend most of their energy and waking hours working for the profit of someone else, be it the violent enclosure of the commons that created and enforced the modern default of selling labor to a rich person for survival, or the current threat of poverty or houselessness, and the lowered quality and duration of life that come with both.

I want to leave you on a rather grim note. You know how the U.S. is increasingly putting cops in schools? And how that is causing a lot of harm to kids in general, and disproportionally to black kids? Now add more hunger to that. I talked earlier about how hunger affects people, children included. Short tempers, physical discomfort, tiredness – it all comes from a lack of fuel. The body literally does not have the materials it needs for you to function well. And we are dramatically increasing the number of children who will be hungry, in schools that have been dramatically increasing their use of police to deal with the fact that children are children. It’s as if they are deliberately creating conditions that they know will lead poor, non-white, and disabled kids in particular to be criminalized for even minor “behavioral problems”.

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If you want something to do this weekend, Atlanta forest defenders are asking for solidarity

I meant to write about this a couple days ago, but I just completely forgot about it until I sat down to go through my open tabs today. Still, better late than never, I guess? Last month I wrote about Atlanta forest defenders being arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism”, for the heinous act of sitting in trees that the cops wanted to cut down. The people working to stop the destruction of the Atlanta Forest for a massive, militarized police training facility are calling for demonstrations of solidarity around the country:

It’s Going Down has the following list of events being planned for this weekend, as of a day or two ago:

Roundup Of Solidarity Events

January 14th, Savannah, GA

Solidarity rally to defend the Atlanta Forest & Stop Cop City! Saturday, Jan 14 – 2pm – Wright Square. Atlanta is known to many as the “City in the Forest” for its extensive tree cover, which protects the city’s residents from flooding and extreme heat. Despite calls from residents to defund, demilitarize, and even abolish the police following the 2020 police killing of Rayshard Brooks, the Atlanta Police Foundation, Deklab County officials, and Blackhall (Shadowbox) Studios are attempting to bulldoze the city’s largest urban forest to build a militarized police training facility and Hollywood soundstage in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Brasfield & Gorrie LLC, the progect’s general contractor, has a construction site near Wright Square right here in Savannah. Amidst growing concerns of police violence and climate catastrophe, thousands of Atlanta residents have organized to protect the forest and stall construction of the facility for over a year! An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. Let’s show our solidarity with ATL forest defenders and demand that Brasfield and Gorrie drop the contract! Savannah DSA

January 14th, Brooklyn, NYC

January 15th, New Haven, CT

January 15th, Atlanta, GA

January 16th, Decatur, GA

January 28th, NYC

As you’ll note, some of these things are not happening this weekend. While having a lot of actions happening on the same day is a tactic to get more attention on the issue, demonstrations and other events happening spontaneously over time and across the country can also serve that purpose. This is a long-term fight, not just because the backers of Cop City are still intending to build it, but also because even if we do win this fight, there will be new ones for as long as we’re dealing with a system like the one we’re fighting to change. If we ever want to have real democracy and freedom, it will require this kind of sustained effort both to create, and to maintain the world we want.

On that note, I also think you should check out this interview that the Youtuber F.D. Signifier did with commentator and activist Kamau Franklin about the issue:

As Franklin describes, “Cop City” is intended to have, among other facilities, 11 firing ranges, and a mock city for police to train in crowd control. As he says, this seems far more about general control of the populace and of any movements for change, than it is about any concern for public safety. It sure seems as though the police and ruling class looked at the BLM movement, and decided that they had to be able to just outright crush anything like that. It wouldn’t shock me to learn, down the road, that some of this is about the increasing popularity of left-wing thought and political tactics in the U.S.. Bolstering this interpretation is the fact that U.S. police often train with the enforcers of Israeli apartheid, working to develop tactics for controlling the population through force. With worsening inequality, rising fascism, and a warming climate, this should worry you, as should the ever-increasing U.S. military budget.

The movement towards authoritarianism is not unique to the Republican Party. The Democrats have been on board every step of the way, from pouring cash into the Pentagon, to developing the humanitarian nightmare that is the U.S. carceral system. It is Democratic mayor Eric Adams that wants to declare houseless people insane and lock them up. I don’t think the Dems are full-on fascist like the current GOP, but they do very clearly value capitalism more than democracy or freedom. They have been on board through the bloody history of U.S. interference with left-wing governments and movements around the globe. They have been on board with supporting the genocide being waged in Yemen, and the ethnic cleansing in Palestine. This is why we need organizing that’s separate from political parties and the electoral system. This is why we need direct action like the work of land and water defenders – because both parties in power serve the ruling class, and actively work to suppress working class power. It’s evident in Democratic policy over the years, in the people from whom they seek advice, and in the many corporations supporting the development of this facility, to the tune of $60 million of the $90 million budget.

And white supremacy is absolutely a part of that, both within the United States, and in its actions around the world.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but the communities in which this monstrosity is being built are majority black, and have not been consulted on this project that will destroy a forest for the sake of building what amounts to a military training facility for the same cops who have been brutalizing and murdering black people in Atlanta and around the country. Kamau Franklin and F.D. Signifier have a much better discussion of the racial issues here than I’m able to summarize, so I recommend you watch the video. It provides a good overview of the problem from a systemic perspective. If you want to help out, Franklin pointed people to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, Community Movement Builders, and Stop Cop City, and even if you can’t do anything this weekend (sorry again for dropping the ball on this!), it still helps to get “stop cop city” in front of people, be it signs, bumper stickers, or you could even organize your own demonstrations just to get attention.

Hate-Blinded Bigots Legislating Language

As you may or may not remember, right-wing guru Jordan Peterson rose to fame by pretending, loudly and angrily, that Canada’s bill C-16 amounted to government-compelled speech. He told anyone in earshot about how bravely he would stand up to this oppression, and would hold his breath until it stopped. The bill, to be clear, just added trans people to the list of protected groups, meaning you can’t just harass them. None of the arrests Peterson predicted came, and it was always pretty obvious that they wouldn’t. Unfortunately, it may be that conservative projection is the most reliable weathervane in politics, and so as part of this national trans panic, Republican state legislatures have been trying to mandate speech, in addition to their efforts to ban trans healthcare. The most ridiculous and invasive version of this to date comes from North Dakota, where Republicans have decided they want businesses to be forced, by law, to use pronouns based on a person’s DNA. I have to say, I’m not sure I’d be willing to work for a place that required me to submit a DNA sample, or equivalent information. I’m assuming that this is based on the XX/XY binary that they pretend exists, but this feels like another one of those situations where they’re so eager to hurt people that they hate, that they’re just sort of flailing around and making life worse for everyone. Intentionally or not, there’s no way this will be functional legislation.

 The fact that the drafters of this bill include “determination established by deoxyribonucleic acid” shows that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of both biological sex and pronouns. We do not have “he” and “she” encoded into our DNA, and human biological sex is not binary. One would wonder how a bill like this would treat intersex people with nonstandard DNA profiles. Would people be forced to submit to mandatory DNA tests in order to determine what pronouns we should use for them? The implications of this bill are absurd.

The idea of “biological pronouns” is something that comes up sometimes in anti-trans spaces, and every time it does, transgender people point out that there is no such thing as a “biological pronoun.” Pronouns are human inventions and cultures have a variety of pronouns that are not necessarily attached to gender. This does not stop many states from trying to establish that such a thing exists. A Utah rep this year sent a letter to all Utah schools saying they should follow a school resource guide from Transgender Trend that mandates the use of “biological pronouns.” A federal judge in a free speech case cited “biological pronouns” in their decision-making. A Fox News story recently reported on a Tennessee bill that they state would allow teachers to use “biological pronouns.”

I’m reminded by a quote from the fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker:

You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

That’s literally what we’re seeing unfold here. It’s an effort to erase trans people, all because the bigots apparently can’t cope with their existence. Some of it is through the campaign of stochastic terrorism, as I’ve discussed before, some is through laws making it illegal to get trans healthcare, and some of it comes through literally legislating speech to fit their simplistic and inaccurate understanding of the world.

Bills like this would write discrimination into the law of North Dakota and would compel North Dakotans to harm their trans peers or risk facing fines of $1,500. There is no compelling state interest to force employers and government agents to misgender trans people. It is clear that freedom of speech is not what the far right desires in its treatment of transgender people – elimination of all legal recognition is the end goal and they are willing to go as far as to force it on transgender allies. This bill must be stopped – despite its blatant unconstitionality, the damage it can do should it pass would severe. The bill has three sponsors in the senate and three in the house: Senators Clemens, Vedaa, and Weston and Representatives K. Anderson, Schauer, and Tveit.

As Dan from Three Arrows pointed out, this hate campaign isn’t actually popular in the United States. It’s not a “winning issue”, but they’re pushing ahead with it anyway, because they actively want trans people to stop existing, and as part of that, they want every aspect of society to be as hostile towards them as possible, including massacres like the Club Q shooting. Cis people standing in solidarity with trans people is an important part of fighting back, because the ones who are pushing this hate are depending on most people just not caring enough to stop them. That means keeping informed on the issue, not just to know what’s going on, but also to be able to confidently call out transphobia when we encounter it. Be on the lookout for ways to help, and groups local to you that are organizing for community defense.

A video and some thoughts on the recent power grid attacks

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about an attack on the power grid of Moore County, NC, apparently planned and carried out to shut down a drag show happening at a theater in the town of Southern Pines. Attacking the power grid is not a new tactic, either for right-wing extremists in the United States, or for paramilitary and revolutionary groups around the world. In the time since that post, there have been several more attacks around the country, not all associated with particular events the way the Moore County attack was, and it seems like that pattern is going to continue. This video from Beau of the Fifth Column goes into the thinking (and lack thereof) behind these attacks, why they won’t work for their probable intended purpose, and why they’re a problem anyway. It also goes into some tips for preparing for this to happen to your part of the grid.

Basically, there are three goals that attacks like this have historically had three goals, which don’t apply to the current situation. I’ll try to summarize below for those who can’t watch the video.

  1. To provoke a security clampdown. This is designed to anger the general public against the government forces clamping down. It has been successful, in some places, in getting more of the local populace to take up arms against an occupier. The U.S., however, is not being occupied by any outside force. The U.S. is also extremely good at controlling its populace, and because security clampdowns would be done by many different agencies (local police, state police, national guard, state and local governments, federal government), there’s no single target against whom to unify the people. The U.S. also pioneered understanding of this particular tactic, and so has literal instructions about avoiding the kind of clampdown in question.
  2. To blame the people in power for the grid failures, to turn the general public against them. The problem with this is that it requires the propaganda/political wing of the movement to repeatedly blame the people in power for what’s happening, but given that the “mainstream” right and the “extreme” right in the U.S. are so intertwined that moderation algorithms may not be able to tell the difference, so very few people will buy that the Democrats are to blame for these attacks. It’s more likely that the GOP will be seen as being on board with the attacks. Beau mentions that as with the first goal, this goal usually applies to occupied countries.
  3. To do a “reset” – knock everything out, and use the chaos to take control of the country by force. This would require them to have popular support, which they don’t. Absent that, they’d need the numbers, resources, and organization to occupy and control the entirety of the “lower 48”. Beau said he’s not sure that the U.S. army, which is the one force on the planet that might be able to pull that off, would be able to. The U.S. is simply too big. Maybe they’re hoping that the military would do it for them, but in my own opinion, there’s no way that happens without the GOP already having total control of the federal government, or something very close to it.

The bad news is that these attacks still cut off power to thousands of people. Beau compares this to January 6th – virtually zero chance of success, but still very destructive. Lost power can mean lost heat, spoiled food and medicine, shutdown of medical devices, shutdown of municipal water systems, and much more, depending on where it happens and how long the damage takes to repair. That means that to whatever degree you are able, you should probably prepare for power outages if you live in the U.S..

You know how I’ve written about the synergy between the threats we face, and the actions we need to take to prepare or remove those threats? You know how my direct action post couples the dangers of a warming planet and rising fascism? In both cases, I think it’s reasonable to expect more power outages, which means doing what you can to prepare for that. At the more expensive end, that means getting a generator (which should always be used outdoors, even if it means you have to crack a window for the cable. Please don’t gas yourself), or having a solar or wind setup with a battery, as well as something for purifying water. Again, at the high end that might be a powered purifier, and at the low end, we have stuff like iodine tablets or the filters lots of people use for camping. At the low end for power, there are cheap cell phone backup batteries, less cheap solar chargers, or you can look into the devices sold to jump-start cars, and get one that has a normal outlet as well as the car cables. Beau also mentions car inverters, that let you use your car as a generator. I’m not providing any links because I don’t want to recommend any particular products, but if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you have the capacity to search the internet to see what’s out there.

Obviously, different people will have different needs, and in the U.S. it’s pretty common for those who need powered medical devices or refrigerated medicine, to also be short on resources to buy things like big backup batteries or generators. If you have the means to “overprepare”, you might want to consider doing so, expressly for the purpose of offering help to those around you who don’t have the means. If they’re open to it and you can, help others prepare. Also, in general, be on the lookout for random opportunities to help – it may well come down to luck and landscape. I have relatives who’ve been the only means of communication for their neighborhood, because their home just happened to be a bit more elevated, so the storm surge didn’t reach them.

It absolutely sucks that this is where we’re at, but in addition to extreme weather, we also need to prepare for the violent outbursts of a group of obnoxious people eager to fight to the death against largely imaginary enemies, in the name of the pettiest, most boring, and least stable fantasy of a utopia that bigoted cowards have ever devised. The danger is real, even if the effort is doomed to failure, and the overall threat of fascism is, in my opinion, still extremely high. The one silver lining, tissue-thin though it is, is that our course of action should be the same regardless. Build collective power. Organize, train, and prepare for disasters, both natural and man-made. It’s a very, very old formula, but it’s one that seems to be affective across the ages.

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Community defense works

I generally try to maintain a balance, in my content, between confronting the grim realities of our world, and building hope for the future, and contributing to a map of how to get there. I honestly have a hard time telling how well I find that balance, but I feel like I tend to err on the side of being a bit too grim. I’ve talked some about the hate campaign being directed against LGBTQIA people in general, and trans people in particular, but I think it’s important to note that communities are not only rallying to defend themselves, they are doing so successfully:

Christo-fascists in Kansas City, MO gathered near the Midland Theater to protest “A Drag Queen Christmas.” The group “Conservative Moms of KC” organized a small gathering across the street from the Midland, where they attempted to harass incoming attendees to the show and film those going in. They were organized by Rachl Aguirre, a one-time candidate for District 8 of the Missouri State Senate. They kneeled on the concrete and tried to pray the gay away, screamed, “Repent!,” at those across the street and sent members to harass and film attendees. The local branch of The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) was also in attendance. The TFP is a self-described “Counter-revolutionary” Catholic organization classified as a “virulently anti-LGBT group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Local leftists received intelligence of their upcoming protest roughly 24 hours before the show, and were able to organize a robust community defense team in less than a day. Local anti-fascists braved the cold to stand in solidarity with the performers and attendees, forming a defensive line outside the theater to deter harassment by the fascists and safeguard guests as they entered the venue. Representatives from the Kansas Trans Guard, People’s Spark and other organizations held the line against attempts by far-Right protesters to personally approach the venue and film attendees, blocking their line of sight and pushing them back as necessary.

The Kansas City Police Department was, as expected, completely useless in protecting the event and its attendees. Though officers had initially instructed “Conservative Moms of KC” to remain across the street, they refused to intervene when Rachel Aguirre and other protesters crossed the street to verbally harass incoming attendees and film them without their consent. KCPD actively tried to prevent the anti-fascist organizers from blocking her way, stating, “She has a right to walk on the sidewalk.” The defenders closed ranks and held the line, retorting with, “Well, we have a right to stand where we want. If she wants to walk, she’ll have to go around.” Malicious compliance prevailed, and the protesters eventually withdrew back to their side of the street. KCPD also allowed TFP to set up their protest line on the sidewalk immediately bordering the venue, where attendees were lining up to enter the show.

The outpouring of support from the event planners and attendees, however, more than made up for the cold and confrontation. Anti-fascist demonstrators worked in close coordination with event staff, helping to facilitate entry for incoming guests by keeping far-Right protesters back and guiding attendees around confrontations. Many attendees were quick to express their gratitude for helping keep the event safe. Their thanks, and the impotence, willful or otherwise, on the part of KCPD is a poignant reminder that we are the ones who keep us safe. Fascists will doubtlessly continue to protest drag shows and other LGBTQ+ spaces in the coming months. Yesterday is proof that deterrence goes a long way towards protecting those spaces, and ensuring that hate has no place in this, or any city.

Standing up to fascists isn’t guaranteed to work every time. They want violence, and they like starting fights, then playing the victim. The key is that they’re far less likely to start something if they think they’ll lose. As the article mentioned, cops are likely to help right-wing extremists than to protect anyone from them, but when a community stands together, it not only provides physical protection, it also provides much-needed moral support to the targets of this hate campaign.

If It’s Going Down isn’t on your list of news sources, it should be. It’s an anarchist publication with a mix of original content from various sources and anonymous submissions. It’s a place to find news and perspectives that are rarely seen in corporate media. A lot of the news there has to do with direct action like this, or like the work of land and water protectors.

I feel as though, when I’m writing about a successful effort to mitigate or prevent harm being done, it’s a gloomy sort of good news. There’s this outpouring of love and support, but it’s only happening because of an attempt to eliminate a group of people from society. It’s good that this went well, but it’s still awful that this action was necessary, you know?

There’s one other thing, though, that I believe turns this into better news than it might otherwise be. See, the “left” in the United States doesn’t have much political power. There are a number of factors at play here, but the primary one is the multigenerational effort, using both the power of the government and privately-funded propaganda, to crush the labor movement, and eliminate left-wing thought. What I see, in stories like this, is the same thing I see in the rise in unionization in the U.S., and the mutual aid groups taking care of people trafficked for political gain, is people realizing that they do actually have power, when they work together. It’s people doing things that the government ought to do, if it actually served the people. They say direct action gets satisfaction, and a growing number of people in the U.S. are finding that out for themselves.

These are dangerous times, no mistake, and direct action can itself be dangerous, especially when it’s standing up to fascists. Fortunately, as they also say, the union makes us strong. Our power, when we work together, is greater than the sum total of each of us as individuals, and the more people use that power, the more likely they are to be willing to consider a world with less and hierarchical systems. There are other ways to do things, and we can do them.

The horrors of mass incarceration demand abolition.

Over the last couple years, I’ve learned to expect good things from Teen Vogue. I’ll admit that I haven’t seen the bulk of their material, but they’ve put out a number of excellent and insightful articles on political and cultural issues, often providing perspective and analysis that put more “serious” publications to shame. Over the last few months, I’ve learned to expect good things from a commentator named Olayemi Olurin, who seems to be building a reputation as someone who’s willing and able to push back against conservative bullshit. With their powers combined, we get an excellent article about the cruelty, greed, and incompetence (deliberate or otherwise) of mass incarceration in the self-proclaimed “Land of the Free”.

If how many police we hire, prisons we construct, people we incarcerate, and billions of dollars we invest in the prison industrial complex translated to public safety, the communities with the highest police presence would be the safest, and America would be heaven on Earth. But it’s not — especially not according to the politicians who fearmonger about rising crime, all while asking us to keep investing in the same failed approach to addressing it.

This American system is a vehicle for maintaining racial, social, and economic inequality by criminalizing poor Black and brown communities, using them for labor, and saddling them with debt, trauma, and rap sheets with lifelong consequences that can rarely be outrun. This is deliberate and immoral, but the call to divest from police, prisons, and mass incarceration is about more than morality; it’s about results, and mass incarceration has failed to produce them.

Of course, it’s arguable that mass incarceration has produced the desired results of its architects, it’s just that they’ve been lying about their goals all along. We can acknowledge that clear material incentives that go into building and maintaining a system like the one the U.S. has, while also looking at the rhetorical façade that maintains popular consent for this ongoing crime against humanity. While the recent rise in open fascism and open white supremacy in the U.S., it’s getting easier to find people who will openly support discriminatory policies and practices, but the pretense of “solving crime” and “keeping people safe” remains, and while we have to dig into the deeper issues, it’s important to engage that rhetoric at face value at the same time.

In America, police arrest someone every three seconds, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. A 2020 review from University of Utah professor Shima Baughman, however, found that police solve just 2% of all major crimes. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  A 2020 report from the American Action Forum found that this country spends an estimated $300 billion on policing  and prisons yearly, a figure that has continued to increase despite record drops in crime. Political leaders and the media continue to sensationalize and manufacture crime waves to scare the public into feeling unsafe, so that we continue supporting inflated police budgets, militarized police departments, and incarcerating residents of the most under-resourced communities.

Nearly 2 million people are incarcerated in America, over 400,000 of whom have not had a trial or been convicted of any crime, according to the Prison Policy Institute (PPI). Nearly 60% of incarcerated people are Black or Latino, per PPI’s most recent numbers. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says that research shows some 65% of the US prison population has substance abuse issues. The vast majority of incarcerated persons earned wages below the poverty line before their arrest, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, and 43% of state and 23% of federal prisoners have a history of a mental health issue. Add to that, hundreds of people die in federal and state prisons each year. The leading cause of death? Suicide.

Our society constantly dehumanizes people deemed as “criminals”, and none more so than Black criminals. Even leaving aside dubious cases like the “suicide” of Sandra Bland, suicide is not a particularly surprising response to finding oneself in that trap. The U.S. carceral system has become famous for miserable and often lethal conditions, with rampant abuse from guards, debt traps, and little recourse for those who’ve been abused. It seems that the default is to believe that if the government has deemed someone to be a “criminal”, then they have no right to humane treatment, meaningful due process, safety, or any hope of a future.

These profoundly grim statistics extend to what the US asks of incarcerated people while they’re locked away. Incarcerated people, in public and private prisons, produce over $11 billion in goods for almost no income. A 2022 ACLU report found that, on average, most states pay incarcerated people between 13 and 52 cents an hour — of which the government claims as much as 80% — and seven states skip the pretense altogether and pay absolutely nothing for most jobs. Often, incarcerated people can’t afford the basic necessities for which they are charged, their families spend over $2.9 billion in commissaries each year, in addition to another $14.8 billion in costs associated with moving, eviction, and homelessness brought on by these cases.

And the debt doesn’t end there. Many people think “you do the crime, you do the time” and have no idea that criminal convictions also come with fines and fees. We are not only policing and incarcerating the poorest people in our society, we’re billing them for it. Per the Fines and Fees Justice Center, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people owe at least $27.6 billion in fines and fees nationwide.

Let’s introduce another definition for this practice: Slavery is a system of bondage in which a person is treated as property, deprived of their freedom and personal liberty, and forced to perform labor for another’s gain. Mass incarceration is slavery. Not “modern-day slavery” or some other euphemism, just slavery.

It almost seems like it’s a system designed more for profit and social control than for “solving crime” or for keeping anyone safe. More than that, it’s a system for social control that has been shown repeatedly to have an extreme bias against non-white people, and especially Black people. It’s a simple fact of history that the modern law enforcement system not only has its roots in slavery, but also has maintained slavery to the present day with the explicit endorsement of the U.S. constitution. I also think it’s important to dwell on that last point – forced labor is not a necessary component of slavery, only ownership of humans. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like “forced labor” has been the focal point in most discussions of slavery that I’ve encountered. I’m a little ashamed to admit that that had, to some degree, supplanted “ownership of/bondage of a human” in my mind. It’s a good reminder that propaganda works on all of us, no exceptions.

Perhaps you think that holding people in bondage would be necessary at times, even in a perfect society. Perhaps you think that taking away a person’s freedom as a punishment is somehow part of building that perfect society. I don’t agree, but even if that were the case, I think it’s important to confront what it is that you’re supporting, rather than trying to obscure it with rhetoric. The U.S. has made progress over its history, but it still has a system of social control and subjugation that, when you look at outcomes, is largely based on race. Is that part of your notion of justice? If not, why make excuses for a system that manifestly does not serve the purpose for which we’re told it was created? The reason I support police and prison abolition, is that the current system is unjust to its core, and efforts at reform pretend otherwise. Abolition requires us to shift our focus to building something new that is just, rather than trying to whittle away the “bad bits” of something thoroughly rotten.

If you were confronted with the total abolition of police and prisons, what would you want to replace it? What roles do they really serve that you feel would need to be filled? If we recognize that poverty is, itself, largely caused by injustice, then clearly the first step should be to remove the incentives for crimes of desperation. We know that prohibition hasn’t worked to reduce drug consumptions, we know that the drug war was basically a project of destroying lives for political gain, and that the dangers posed by law enforcement are the root of the violence of the drug trade. We should decriminalize all drugs, an invest those resources in treatment, and meeting people’s basic needs. Assaulting, kidnapping, and stealing from unhoused people doesn’t reduce the number of people who can’t afford shelter under our system, so maybe we should focus on providing good housing instead.

There’s no question that that building a different system would be a slow and difficult process – of course it would. There’s no question that a different system would have its own problems and failures. “Perfect” is a conceptual goal to work towards, not an actual way of being. There are surely some things that need tweaking and reforming, rather than replacement, but with such a corrupt, cruel, and bloodthirsty system, focusing on reform merely delays necessary change, and during that delay, more and more lives are destroyed.

We need to stop being so afraid of big changes, especially when the people warning us of “danger” are those who profit most from the horrific way things are.

The history of policing and mental health show the pointless cruelty of forced “treatment” policy in NYC

I find it hard to trace a timeline of my views on mental health. I had a phase, in my teens, in which I viewed antidepressants and the like as bad, though I’m not sure I could have explained why. I also think there was a time when I just accepted “insane asylums” as just being a necessary part of life, and assumed the people running them and working at them were there to provide the best care they could. At this point, I consider that part of modern “mental health treatment” to be a part of the prison system, at least in the United States.

Some of the change comes from reading The Day the Voices Stopped, by Ken Steele, in college. I think there’s a degree to which, because we only ever experience the world from our own perspective, growing up requires gaining a real understanding of the fact that everyone else is a person, just like we are. In some ways, I feel our society discourages that form of personal development, and actively encourages us to see other people as not fully human, when they fall outside of “normal”. This absolutely includes the politics of race and gender, whether it was pathologizing Black people’s desire for freedom as “Drapetomania”, using the diagnosis of hysteria to medicalize and control women, or declaring queer people to be mentally ill. As well-meaning as I was, in hindsight there was a degree to which I saw people with some mental illnesses as being somehow broken, or less fully human. I don’t think I ever actually supported institutionalization – I had some awareness that there were problems there – but I don’t think I would have had a real answer for people who framed mentally ill people as a “burden on society”, or other such eugenical shit. I probably would have focused instead on a somewhat condescending view of having a duty to care for them. I also think that extended into other forms of disability, but again, I find it hard to remember exactly what I used to believe on this stuff.

Reading Steele’s autobiography changed my perspective, and made it impossible for me to ignore the horrors of mental institutions. I didn’t have an alternative in mind, but I no longer had any doubt that the way things had been done was bad. That was the point at which I began to understand the need to empower people with mental disability and/or illness to make decisions in their own lives. It feels bad to say that it took me that long, but I don’t think it occurred to me that someone with schizophrenia, for example, might have valid thoughts, opinions, and requirements for their own care and lives.

I’m far less sure at what point I came to understand how mass incarceration and white supremacy intersected with psychiatry, but I do remember the point at which I realized that it was so much a part of the fabric of reality in the United States that it barely got reported on. I was having a discussion-turned-argument with acquaintances who shall remain anonymous, and we were talking about racism in the U.S. criminal justice system. I brought up a case that I’d recently heard about, and the other person insisted that if it had really happened, they would have heard about it. After all, we live in a free country, right? People don’t just get locked up for not fitting a profile, and for stating plain facts about their own identities, right? Can you even imagine? It would be a national outrage if the cops just grabbed a “sane” person, locked them up, and drugged them against their will without even checking whether their claims were true.

Right?

Well, sort of. There was some coverage of it, because it really was a sensational story. In 2014, Kam Brock was pulled over “on suspicion of driving under the influence of marijuana”. People commenting on the story at the time noted that she was a black woman driving a BMW in Harlem, and that she was really pulled over for Driving While Black. This explanation is made stronger, in my view, by the fact that while they didn’t find any drugs on her or in her car, they impounded it anyway, and when she went to pick it up the next morning, they decided she was too emotional, handcuffed and drugged her, and threw her in a mental hospital.

Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out… I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.

She responded pretty reasonably, in my opinion. She told them who she was, and asked to be released.

For eight days.

They had the means to verify what she was saying, but instead they dismissed all of it as delusions, forced her to take powerful psychoactive drugs, and demanded that she convincingly lie about herself before she be released:

According to the New York Daily News, a treatment plan for Ms Brock at the hospital states: ‘Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.’

This was torture. They imprisoned a person, and for nine days they told her she was insane. They forcibly drugged her, and denied her reality over, and over and over again for days. And then, one day, they gave her discharge papers, and put her out the back door of the hospital. A few days later, she got a bill for $13,000 worth of “treatment”. The idea of holding anyone criminally responsible for this nightmare was apparently never even on the table, so she went with the option left to her – she sued them.

And lost in 2019.

Several jurors said that Brock was less credible than three doctors — Elisabeth Lescouflair, Zana Dobroshi and Alan Labor — and NYPD Officer Salvador Diaz, who all determined she was in need of mental health treatment.

The jurors noted that Brock did not call her father or sister to the stand. Both, according to testimony, had told Harlem Hospital staff that Brock had recently been acting erratically.

“We view this verdict as a total vindication for the defendant officer and doctors who sought to help Ms. Brock through her troubling episode. The jury rejected any notion that the actions of these officials was anything but appropriate under the circumstances,” a Law Department spokesman said.

While at the hospital, Brock was injected three times with powerful anti-psychotics. The experience, she said, left her traumatized. She frequently broke down during the six-day trial.

Jurors deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. At the beginning of deliberations three were in Brock’s favor and five were against, Rella said.

Brock began sobbing as the verdict was read.

“It’s reasonable for them to diagnose me with bipolar even though I’m telling the truth?” Brock said through tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m crazy because of this verdict.”

In the United States of America, it is apparently legal for police to decide that you’re “in need of medical treatment”, restrain, drug, and imprison you, and for doctors to keep you prisoner, keep you drugged, and demand that you deny reality because they said so. Not only is it legal, it’s apparently barely newsworthy. I could only find two articles online that followed up on Kam Brock’s story, and I needed a VPN to read them because they’re geo-restricted to the U.S., like so much other “local news” that’s not considered worth a larger platform. How can this be?

Well, I suspect that, aside from the ever-present white supremacy in our law enforcement system, it’s because it’s considered perfectly acceptable to do all of that to “crazy” people. Solitary confinement, assault, sexual assault, some of the most powerful psychoactive drugs available – all are just routine parts of how our society deals with mental illness, to the point where all of this can happen, triggered by some cop deciding to hassle the black woman in the expensive car, and it’s barely newsworthy that a court, as Brock said, ruled that she was “crazy”.

It’s even more horrifying when you consider what this means for the rest of Brock’s life. It’s now a legal fact that she’s “crazy”. The torture inflicted on her was ruled by the courts to be just fine. That means that if this, or something like this happens again, there is legal precedent that it’s OK to imprison and torture this woman. Any legal dispute she’s in in the future will have this hanging over it. Any time she has a negligent or vindictive landlord, or a dispute with a neighbor, or is wrongfully fired, it could make that nightmare happen again. Crying seems like a pretty reasonable response.

Remember how we saw, over the last few years, the way white women have been able to weaponize white supremacy to sic cops on black people? Brock now has to deal with that, plus the legal declaration that she’s crazy. Practically anyone has the power to get her locked up at any time, for any reason, because some cop decided to pull her over. That doesn’t mean it will happen, but the fact that it can says very bad things about what sort of “freedom” people in the United States really have.

It’s made worse by the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, mental health has always had a political dimension to it, and just as white supremacy didn’t end when the Civil Rights Act was passed, the politicization of sanity and the stigma against people with mental illness – sanism – is also very much alive and well within the systems that govern the people of the United States.

All of this is worth talking about in its own right, but I also wanted it to set the scene a little. Our society dehumanizes people with mental illness, portraying them as anything from pitiable to demonic, so long as it’s not fully human. I think this is one of those prejudices that exists within all of us, at least a little, because of the society in which we live. It doesn’t help that the way the world is set up can make life extremely difficult for some neurotypes, making them into disorders or disabilities by context. This is very similar to how non-white races are often treated, and I think that establishing that connection, and giving the example of Kam Brock, is useful in going into this next story:

Rights groups are sharply condemning New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ Tuesday directive requiring local law enforcement and emergency medical workers to respond to the intertwined mental health and homelessness crises with involuntary hospitalizations.

“If the circumstances support an objectively reasonable basis to conclude that the person appears to have a mental illness and cannot support their basic human needs to an extent that causes them harm, they may be removed for an evaluation,” states a city document.

I don’t know how useful evil is, as a concept, but I’m finding it hard to think of a better description for this. Our society routinely and deliberately denies people access to their basic human needs, for money. An economic advisor who is respected in the U.S. government actually said that they should try to increase unemployment to curb “inflation” that seems to be mostly caused by outright greed. This is the context in which law enforcement and mental hospitals will be judging whether people who have been forced to live on the streets are mentally well enough to be allowed any say over their lives. “Evil” seems about right.

There are efforts to push back against this, but it often feels like the governing philosophy in the U.S., when it comes to those at the bottom, amounts to “the beatings will continue until morale improves”. The notion – put forward by Mayor Adams – that this is about helping people would be laughable if it weren’t so cruel. Being forcibly committed, drugged against your will,  and “treated” by people who will call you delusional for telling the truth, won’t make anyone’s health better, mental or otherwise. Part of me feels like that shouldn’t need to be said, but I know that I used to think it was at least somewhat OK.

I think it may even be that a majority of people still take the view that “sometimes it’s necessary”, but who decides what’s necessary? Why is mental illness – a category that we know has been, and continues to be politicized – something that can remove someone’s right to autonomy? If someone is a danger to others, then sure, the community can take steps to defend itself, but if they’re incapable of not being that way, then what’s the point of punishing them? And if they are capable of change, why the fuck would we think that incarceration and torture would help?

This new policy in NYC is horrific, and the more you know about the history and practices of the system carrying it out, the worse it looks. These are people. People who’ve been forced into about the worst situation it’s possible to be in, by a society that treats poverty as a moral failing. These are people who are routinely discussed as sub-human monsters. These are people who are routinely treated as sub-human, and this law is making that worse.

Yesterday, I talked about how each step on the path I want us to take involves making life better for humanity in the short term. This is an example of that. We’ve been taking the punitive/carceral approach to mental illness for centuries, and it has not worked. Likewise, relying on the grinding misery of poverty to get people to “do better” has never worked. A housing first policy, on the other hand, treats people as people, focuses on meeting needs, not demanding that people prove themselves worthy of existence, and it works.

Housing First Improves Lives
Study participants who were housed through HFCM showed substantial improvements across multiple dimensions of their lives:

High Housing Retention. Housing Retention was high overall (73%), but highest for those in housing first permanent supportive housing (HF PSH) (80%). HF PSH secures housing through a permanent subsidy and builds stability through the ongoing availability of wrap-around services.

Better Quality of Life.  Quality of life scores improved 30% after housing.

Fewer Mental Illness and Trauma Symptoms. Mental health symptoms decreased 35% and trauma-related symptoms decreased 26% after housing.

Reduced Substance Use. Housing first does not require sobriety or abstinence. However, after housing, the percent of housed participants that used any drugs fell 37%; and the number of days in the last month that housed participants used alcohol to the point of intoxication fell an average of 3 days more than it did for unhoused participants. Other substance use measures did not change, challenging criticism that housing first and harm reduction encourage substance use.

Making this approach the default in the U.S. would not solve all of our problems, but unless you view the maintenance of this hierarchy, complete with those being crushed at the bottom, as a good in its own right, then this is an obvious step to take. This isn’t some kind of “too good to be true” con, it’s just a way to do things that is, quite simply, better. Would it cost more money, when you account for all the long-term impacts of the policy? Who the fuck cares?

It’s not like we’re short on resources. Congress just increased the Pentagon’s budget again, and we’re going to pass one trillion dollars per year soon, not even including the less direct ways money is funneled into the military-industrial complex. Elon Musk is currently burning billions of dollars in an apparent effort to prove the meritocracy wrong, Bezos is trying to get infrastructure rebuilt to fit his “super-yacht”, and Bill Gates screwed with the education system because the arrogant jackass thought he knew better than people who study education.

We are not short on money. We are not short on resources. We know how to make the world better, it’s just that the people in power don’t want it to get better. Not if it threatens their power. Why should we care how cost-effective it is to meet people’s basic needs? Why is that treated as a valid question, in the face of society as it exists, not to mention the money that will be spent kidnapping, assaulting, and drugging unhoused people in NYC?

But, since it’s relevant in the world as it is, I’ll also mention that there’s evidence that a policy of doing the right thing also happens to be “economically sound”, in that it won’t cost rich people anything.

I’m angry about this, in case you couldn’t tell. Everywhere you turn, there’s another way in which the world is set up to cause immense suffering for no damned reason, other than the shitty ideas of shitty people. There are folks fighting back, of course, mostly through local organizing. Sometimes it’s standing up to the cops to stop them from “sweeping” an encampment, sometimes it’s feeding people, but a key part is listening to the people in question, not making decisions for them.

The current political momentum in our world is pushing us towards a future that is both much worse than our present, and also much worse than it needs to be. Policies like this are, of course, an attack on both unhoused people, and mentally ill people, but it’s more than that. It will also almost certainly hurt black people more than other groups, and non-white people more than white. It will be weaponized against trans people, who are more likely to be unhoused because of bigotry that cops tend to share. It will be used, to justify horrific abuse of anyone the cops don’t like, just as they’ve done with every other tool, weapon, and policy they’ve been handed. It seems designed to “solve homelessness” by warehousing people, and using drugs to make it easier.

I wouldn’t call the Democratic Party fascist, the way I do the GOP, but bipartisan U.S. policy around houseless people has always leaned towards eugenics (when not just going there outright). Combine that with the current fascist movement, and this feels similar to the detention immigrant detention facilities that were set up under the Obama administration, and expanded and made worse under Trump. This new policy is bad, but it can get much, much worse, and instead of trying to avoid that, Democrats like Eric Adams seem to be trying to move things farther in that direction.

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Atlanta land defenders charged with “domestic terrorism”

Back in May, I wrote a little about the movement to defend the Atlanta Forest. This is a grassroots effort to stop a section of forest to make a fake city for police training. From what I can tell, a facility like that is generally used for tactical training – group exercises that amount to training to wage war on everyday people. In my view, this would be a bad use of even a reclaimed landfill, let alone land that is currently a forest.

The struggle is ongoing, and of course it’s one-sided. Fighting back against the police would allow them to escalate through their bloated armory, so all the people can do is put their bodies in the gears of the machine, to try to stop it from rolling over the forest. They’re camping out in the trees, because that makes it less likely for the trees to be cut down. For this, they have been called terrorists:

Five people arrested at the planned site of Atlanta’s new public safety training center have been charged with domestic terrorism, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced Wednesday.

What’s happening: State and local law enforcement clashed Tuesday with protesters occupying the DeKalb County forest where Atlanta wants to build a public safety training center.

Why it matters: The confrontation is the latest in the long-running occupation aimed at blocking the Atlanta Police Foundation’s proposed complex, which activists have dubbed “Cop City.”

Details: Accounts differ as to what took place in the deep woods off Key Road in unincorporated DeKalb County. Sean Wolters, a media contact for the resistance effort, told Axios that as of 10:30am activists camping in trees were being hit with tear gas and pepper balls.

  • The Atlanta Community Press Collective, a news outlet supportive of the resistance effort, posted a video apparently shot by one of the activists and reported police firing “chemical irritants” in their direction.

An Atlanta police spokesperson said officers and “local, state, and task force members removed barricades blocking some of the entrances to the training center.” He provided no additional information.

  • Alison Clark, a local resident who leads a group advising the center’s development, told the AJC the activists shot fireworks at first responders and then law enforcement entered the property.
  • Wolters denied this account to Axios, saying an apparent operation by APD to remove people from the trees sparked the clash.

As the Axios article notes, this situation is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. I write often about how ecosystem health is key to our survival, and we’re still very much in a system that doesn’t even see it as a factor to consider. If someone with money and power wants to clear-cut an area for pointless, or even harmful reasons, the question asked is whether they have ownership of that bit of land. The only time there’s a delay on it is if there’s a protected species there (which became protected because of political activism), or there are people there, standing in the way.

I support the effort to stop “cop city”, but I fear that there will be more violence from the police; at the end of the day, violence is their main point. Even so, these confrontations are necessary if we want real change, and I think this highlights how the priorities of our society must be changed, or we’ll be carried to destruction by the momentum of the systems we currently have.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: History alla PragerU

All my energy today has gone into prying a couple lines of fiction out of some crevasse in my brain, so here’s a video. It’s not new, but I find it interesting and a little entertaining, and hopefully you will as well. It’s about how conservative propagandists use history in their work.

Edit: Managed to get the crowbar down in between a couple brain wrinkles, and actually found a couple thousand words of the novel hiding in there, so that’s nice.

Charges over Flint Water Crisis dismissed on procedural grounds

The Flint water crisis of 2014 happened as a result of a Michigan democracy crisis that had started years earlier. Flint was one of the primary victims of the way the auto industry abandoned Detroit, and had been struggling financially for years. Rather than actually working to alleviate poverty and build up the community, Flint’s Republican governor decided to go with the too-popular lie that authoritarianism is more efficient and effective than democracy or other forms of self-governance. In an act of open defiance of democracy, the Michigan legislature passed a law, which the governor signed, re-instating the emergency management powers that the people of Michigan had resoundingly and directly voted to remove:

Following his election in 2010, Snyder and the Republican-controlled state Legislature expanded the powers of emergency managers. Michigan voters, through a November 2012 ballot proposal, repealed the controversial law.

But less than two months later, Snyder signed replacement legislation that he said improved upon the former law. It offered four pathways for struggling schools and municipalities: A consent agreement, Chapter 9 bankruptcy, mediation or emergency manager.

Michigan’s emergency manager law is facing scrutiny in federal court, where plaintiffs argue that the law is unconstitutional because it disproportionately targets black communities and continues a “narrative of structural and strategic racism.”

Emergency managers were given near-total power over their jurisdictions, and could outright ignore local elected officials. This was the setting in which the decision was made to switch Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, to save money, resulting in the poisoning of thousands of people, and potentially permanent brain damage for an entire generation of Flint’s children:

 

While it’s still difficult to know for sure, it seems like the decision to ignore warnings about the need for treatment to prevent corrosion was also apparently made to save money.

“As we all know, the water plant itself is operating fine, but without corrosion control chemicals, it had a detrimental impact on the lead pipes,” Adler said.

The city “made the decision” not to use corrosion controls “because they didn’t think they needed it,” Adler said. The state Department of Environmental Quality failed to ensure the chemicals were added, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency didn’t alert the public when an employee first raised a red flag.

“It was a failure at every level, all along the way. This was a perfect storm of bureaucratic mismanagement of a public health issue,” Adler said.

A previously released email showed that Flint water plant supervisor Mike Glasgow was also concerned about the conversion to Flint River water just days before the city would formally close a valve that had delivered Detroit water for nearly 50 years.

“If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple weeks, it will be against my direction,” Glasgow wrote in an April 17, 2014, email to officials at the state Department of Environmental Quality, suggesting management above him had its own “agenda.”

When we hear this person talking about “a perfect storm of bureaucratic mismanagement”, I think it’s worth noting that this was a spokesperson for Republican governor Rick Snyder. The GOP has a long-standing hostility towards the general concept of “government”, and they lean heavily on the notion that bureaucracy is both always bad, and only a government problem. Pretty much any time I get into an internet fight about healthcare systems, I have to explain to fellow USians that all the paperwork they have to deal with from health insurance corporations is also bureaucracy. With the USPS, the deliberately unpleasant tax system, under-funded schools, and many other areas of government, conservatives have a record of using sabotage not just to allow their corporate overlords to get away with harming people, but also to support their antigovernmental rhetoric by making the government worse on purpose. They like when there’s a huge government catastrophe like this, because it’s tailor-made for their perennial antigovernmental talking points.

And as always, the only parts of the government they actually dislike, are the ones that make life better for the general population. What’s more, their constant efforts to spread corruption and dysfunction also provide a degree of protection for themselves. There’s a quote that I’ve shared before:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

It’s from a comment by a composer named Frank Wilhoit, and while I don’t know how I feel about the broader argument he was making, this definition is useful all by itself. The conservative project of dismantling government, and then using the dysfunction they have caused to advocate for further dismantling, serves to both remove protection from the out-groups, and remove bindings from the in-groups. This was a crime of conservative, authoritarian governance, for which thousands of people will be paying for the rest of their lives. All of it happened under the authority and supervision of Rick Snyder, the Republican governor who signed the law bringing back the emergency management system his constituents had just rejected.

And a judge has thrown out charges against Snyder on procedural grounds:

A district judge in Genesee County tossed a pair of misdemeanor charges levied against former Gov. Rick Snyder for his involvement in the Flint water crisis, citing previous court rulings that state prosecutors incorrectly used a “one-person grand jury” to indict Snyder.

Snyder, who was governor in Michigan from 2011 to 2019, was charged with two counts of willful neglect of duty by a public official. Genesee County Judge F. Kay Behm signed an order remanding the charges Wednesday.

Behm’s order technically does not dismiss the charges, but sends them back to a lower court for dismissal.

Behm cited a Michigan Supreme Court ruling from June which stated government prosecutors erred in 2021 when they had a circuit judge serve as a “one-man grand jury” to indict Snyder and the other officials. She also noted circuit court rulings to dismiss charges against other former state officials which cited the Supreme Court ruling.

Snyder is the latest former official to have charges tossed related to the Flint water crisis, although state prosecutors, led by Attorney General Dana Nessel, have vowed to continue seeking charges related to the case. In October, charges for seven other former state and Flint officials were dismissed, although the state’s prosecution team has indicated it will appeal the decision to dismiss the charges.

In a statement, the prosecuting team said it plans to appeal Behm’s order.

“As we have reiterated time and again, rulings up to this point have been on process alone — not on the merits of the case,” the unattributed statement says. “We are confident that the evidence clearly supports the criminal charges against Rick Snyder, and we will not stop until we have exhausted all possible legal options to secure justice for the people of Flint.”

Snyder’s lawyer, Brian Lennon, said in a statement the prosecution efforts have been “amateurish and unethical.”

“The state has already wasted millions of taxpayer dollars pursuing meritless misdemeanor charges and this case should now be considered closed,” Lennon said. “The prosecution team’s statement saying it will appeal this ruling is further proof that they intend to continue their efforts to weaponize the court system against their political enemies.”

They always claim persecution, but I can’t help but note that the United States will hold people for weeks, months or even years without trial, often over petty shit like suspected shoplifting, but poisoning thousands of people? Well, that is generally done by members of the in-group, whom the law protects, but does not bind, and years later, the “criminal prosecutions” section of Wikipedia’s water crisis article shows an awful lot of dismissals.

More and more, I’ve been realizing that the United States is a conservative country, in that it is set up, at every level, to maintain racial and economic disparities. It’s not just the legacy of redlining, or environmental racism, or civil asset forfeiture, or white supremacy in law enforcement, or racism in the courts, or racism in legislation – it’s also a parallel infrastructure designed to smooth the way for those at the top (who are almost all white men). When you’re at the bottom, when the system screws up, you pay the price. At the bottom, you can spend years in prison even when everyone in the legal system agrees on your innocence. At the top, you can steal millions, and get a finger wag as you’re gently told to give it back.

And race is absolutely a part of this. Flint, MI is a predominantly Black city, and that fact is a big part of how this whole situation came to be in the first place. The system does actively harm poor white people as well, of course, but they are much more likely to be treated as part of the in-group that gets protection and exemption from the law, if their crimes and conduct merit honorary membership. That option is generally not available to people who aren’t white (though exceptions are sometimes made for wealth, power, or allegiance/usefulness to wealth and power). I think George Zimmerman – the man who murdered Trayvon Martin – is a good example of that. He had no authority, and not much in the way of political and economic power, but he adopted the role of being a member and defender of the in-group, and is therefor in the clear. Kyle Rittenhouse also comes to mind. There’s always some reason. Zimmerman was probably over-charged, given the available evidence. Was that an honest mistake by the prosecutors? Who can say? But the overall pattern is suggestive, to me, of more than just coincidence. They say justice delayed is justice denied, and it seems like we’ve seen nothing but delay on this case.

I’m glad to hear that prosecutors will keep trying, but the fact that this is where they’re at, so many years later, demonstrates the degree to which our “justice” system exists to serve and maintain hierarchical order, not any meaningful notion of justice.

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