In late July, after President Trump issued an Executive Order that would further criminalize the unhoused, WZZM 13 ran a story about how Grand Rapids, and specifically GRPD Chief Winstrom, was responding to that Executive Order.
Winstrom said that the GRPD has removed 4 cops from the Homeless Outreach Team (HOT), stating: “We had to remove those officers just simply to respond to 911 calls, because we saw the time people were calling 911, it was taking 15 minutes for officers to respond.”
Not having GRPD cops interact with unhoused people is a good thing, since we know that cops aren’t trained to provide community care and they generally respond with force in those interactions.
Winstrom then goes on to say:
“I think there’s some grant information in there involved, like the federal government was going to look to give grants to different municipalities looking at that, but I think we’re doing a pretty good job here in the City of Grand Rapids, supporting our unhoused community, and I don’t see it having a big impact.”
Chief Winstrom might be referring to the 100 campaign that Grand Rapids has been involved in, but that is somewhat of a show piece response in Grand Rapids, one that was primarily motivated by removing unhoused people from downtown Grand Rapids in order to minimize their interactions with people who are spending money in downtown GR, especially when it comes to tourism.
More importantly is the fact that the WZZM 13 reporter completely ignores the Grand Rapids ordinances that were adopted two years ago that already criminalized the unhoused in Grand Rapids. Those ordinances were promoted by the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce and the downtown business community that sought to rid downtown of unhoused people by criminalizing them.
WZZM 13 fails the public miserably on the issue of the unhoused in Grand Rapids. First, they do not provide proper context by excluding any information about the Grand Rapids City ordinances that already have criminalized the unhoused. Second, the channel 13 reporter only provides Chief Winstrom’s voice to the exclusion of those who are unhoused and those who are advocates of the unhoused. Essentially, Grand Rapids adopted policies to criminalize the unhoused 2 years prior to the recent Executive Order from President Trump.
It has been 22 months since the Israeli government began their most recent assault on Gaza and the West Bank. The retaliation for the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, has escalated to what the international community has called genocide, therefore, GRIID will be providing weekly links to information and analysis that we think can better inform us of what is happening, along with the role that the US government is playing. All of this information is to provide people with the capacity of what Noam Chomsky refers to as, intellectual self-defense.
Information
The Accursed Fate of Palestinians in Israeli Prisons
Hundreds of Former Israeli Spies Are Working in Big Tech, Database Shows
The Christian Zionist View of Foreign Policy Is Holy War
Gaza Exposes the Bankruptcy of Western Liberalism
Senior Israeli Commanders Openly Contradict Netanyahu Claim On Gaza Destruction
Airdrops kill starving people with rotten food
‘Blatant and Premeditated Attack on Press Freedom’: Israel Assassinates Five Gaza Journalists
ISRAEL’S BIGGEST US DONOR NOW OWNS CBS
The New York Times Continues to Give Netanyahu the Benefit of the Doubt
Analysis & History
Trump’s Gaza Famine w/ Akbar Shahid Ahmed
Senior Hamas Official to Trump: We Are Ready to Make a Fair Deal
Free Speech and Gaza: Norman Finkelstein in Conversation with Cornel West and Nadine Strossen
Image used in this post is from Code Pink https://www.codepink.org/armsembargonow.
GRIID is taking a break til next week sometime
Just taking a short break for a little rest and relaxation. However, I will be back sometime next week to continue doing the media watchdog work, monitoring systems of power in Grand Rapids and documenting movement organizing in West Michigan.
Too often movement work, particularly of BIPOC organizers gets ignored, overlooked and misrepresented, so there is always a need to document what is happening from the ground up.
Chinga La Migra!
Far right Trump cheerleader Charlie Kirk, who spoke in Grand Rapids in 2020, is also endorsing US military occupation of cities across the US
MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk celebrated President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” takeover of the nation’s capital by calling for the Trump administration to unleash a “full military occupation” of other large American cities “once we liberate” Washington, D.C.
During his podcast on Monday, Kirk – one of the president’s most loyal media acolytes and founder of the MAGA youth organization Turning Point USA – urged Trump to send more American military forces into other cities in short order, claiming it would create favorable press coverage, according to an article on The Independent.
Kirk was saying that “we have a big teenage problem of crime in our country,” and suggested that teenagers get long prison sentences for auto theft. Kirk, who in many ways is a younger version of Donald Trump, who engages in all sorts of outlandish rhetoric, but has a populist following of primarily white youth.
People might remember that Charlie Kirk was in Grand Rapids in 2020 stumping for Trump at a rally in Rosa Parks Circle hosted by Students for Trump.
Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012, according to SourceWatch. Turning Point USA makes the following claim on their website:
Since its founding, Turning Point USA has embarked on a mission to build the most organized, active, and powerful conservative grassroots activist network on high school and college campuses across the country. With a presence on over 2,000 campuses, Turning Point USA is the largest and fastest-growing youth organization in America.
According to SourceWatch.org, Turning Point USA has ties to the Koch Brothers, the fossil fuel industry and the Trump family.
However, the most overt aspect of Turning Point USA and its founder, Charlie Kirk, is their use of racist propaganda and its relationship to White Supremacists groups across the country.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, in one article, documents several examples of Turning Point USA leaders making racist comments:
TPUSA’s flirtation with racists and racism is well documented. In a December 2017 expose in The New Yorker, reporter Jane Mayer was provided screenshots of a text message from TPUSA’s (now former) national field director, Crystal Clanton, that read, “i hate black people. Like f— them all… I hate blacks. End of story.”
Kirk himself has been criticized for his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tweets, and he habitually tweets out racist dog-whistles with statements like, “It would take 40 years worth of blacks killed by cops to equal the number of black [sic] killed by other blacks in one year.”
In an article for Newsweek, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk rails against Black Lives Matter and their unfounded use of rioting in response to the police murder of George Floyd.
In another public talk, Kirk said that there is no such thing as systemic racism in police departments. In fact, Kirk says, “cops are more likely to be shot by Black people,” as stated in this video.
In this brief exchange, Kirk talks about why he likes Immigration and Customs Enforcement and in yet another video Kirk defends building the Wall along the the US/Mexican border. In both instances Kirk uses false information.
It is worth noting that when Kirk was in Grand Rapids in 2020, there were, according to the Turning Point USA Chapter Map, TPUSA chapters at Forest Hills Eastern High School, Forest Hills Northern High School, GVSU, Hope College and West Ottawa High School, all predominantly white schools.
On Saturday, MLive posted an article entitled, 23 Michigan counties lean on a little-known immigration fund. It’s getting more money.
The irony is that one of the reasons the funding for this “little-known immigration fund” is because the commercial news media has not reported on it. While this MLive article is welcomed, they don’t explore the significance of what is known as Operation Stonegarden.
According to Homeland Security’s Grants Office, “Operation Stonegarden (OPSG) supports enhanced cooperation and coordination among Customs and Border Protection (CBP)/United States Border Patrol (USBP), and federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies to strengthen border security.”
The MLive article provides some information on how Operation Stonegarden funds are being used by counties in Michigan that either border or are near the US/Canadian border. However, the MLive reporter limits their article to only talking to local law enforcement entities, particularly in the Upper Peninsula. In other words, MLive doesn’t bother to speak with immigrants about this so-called border security funding program, nor do they talk to groups like Movimiento Cosecha. GR Rapid Response to ICE, No Detention Centers Michigan, the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center and any number of organizations that are doing immigrant justice work in Michigan. The only perspective in the article is from law enforcement and their perspective is that they are delighted with the extra funding on immigration related matters.
The MLive article does provide a link to the Operation Stonegarden program of the Department of Homeland Security, but they don’t spend much time on looking at what one might find at this link https://www.homelandsecuritygrants.info/Grant-Details/gid/21875.
At this link you will find a report from FY 2024 regarding the funding for Operation Stonegarden (OPSG). “OPSG provides $81 million to enhance cooperation and coordination among state, local, tribal, territorial, and federal law enforcement agencies in a joint mission to secure the United States’ borders along routes of ingress from international borders, to include travel corridors in states bordering Mexico and Canada, as well as states and territories with international water borders.” (See Table 3 here on the right.) Based on the table, Michigan received the 7th largest amount of funding through the Operation Stonegarden program, a total of $1,686,000.
In 2023, the amount that Michigan received was $1,886,500.
In 2022, the amount that Michigan received was $1,902,500.
Keep in mind that the funding for these three years was during the Biden Administration. We cannot forget that the Biden Administration deported some 4 million people and that funding for Immigration and Border Security was at an all-time high. However, with the passing of the Big Beautiful Bill, the Trump Administration will expand border security, funding for ICE and private detention facilities with an additional $170 billion.
Commies of Grand Rapids wants to be edgy, but in reality they just promote White Supremacy and love to blame the unhoused
Just because some people attack the government, doesn’t mean they are revolutionary or edgy in their thinking. This is true of the new Facebook page called Commies of Grand Rapids.
They claim to be non-profit news company, one that is associated with Capital Media Labs, but neither of these claims are true. Some people might think this is merely a spoof page, especially because of the name of the page, but the ideas and images they present are harmful and normalize ideologies like White Supremacy.
Commies of Grand Rapids started posting on July 31st and already have several dozen posts. The content is short, weak and primarily relies on using information or images from other content creators. Their positions are nothing more than opinions, since they do not provide any sources to support their claims.
Now, I don’t believe for a second that Commies of Grand Rapids is a new entity, rather it is the project of those who embrace White Supremacist values and have nothing but contempt for the unhoused. Here are some examples.
Just a fews days ago, Commies of Grand Rapids posted the above image, where they point out that in the document the term BIPOC was used 23 times. No one is doubting that the Canadian wildfires are creating a problem for people in Grand Rapids, but the document they are making fun of is about what the City of Grand Rapids can do to practice a more sustainable Climate policy. It just so happens that the reason why BIPOC is used frequently in this document is due to the fact that BIPOC organizers pushed for language in this Climate plan that would recognize that BIPOC communities are disproportionately impacted by Climate Change. Pointing out the number of times BIPOC is used is the same mentality that led to All Lives Matter as a response to Black Lives Matter.
Other examples are the use of images of Black men with commentary about how these Black men are going to get their charges expunged. Commies of Grand Rapids never uses images of white people with negative commentary, only Black people.
Then there are some posts that shit on the unhoused. In one image they make the claim, “This is our parks look like now,” referring to the Heartside Park in downtown Grand Rapids. The images is from several years ago, shortly after the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. The folks at Commies of Grand Rapids failed to note that shelters during COVID were a breeding ground of disease and that in December of 2020, the GRPD forcibly evicted unhoused people from Heartside Park and threw away most of their belongings.
In another anti-unhoused image they try to make the link between fentanyl use in Grand Rapids, the unhoused and “river equity”, which is a dig on the rhetoric that the City of Grand Rapids has been using about the development along the Grand River. The image on the left is the from the same unhoused encampment at Heartside in 2020, just a different angle.
What Commies of Grand Rapids doesn’t talk about
One way you can tell whether or not something or someone is a fake populist, is by their rhetoric. Commies of Grand Rapids takes pot shots at local government and the things they are bad at, which apparently leads to people being unhoused, the drug problem, BIPOC people as the problem or the fact that they are trying to develop Climate plans that are stupid because they don’t address Canadian wildfires.
Another way to tell that Commies of Grand Rapids is not interested in a real or structural change is by what they don’t talk about. The Grand Rapids Power Structure, the DeVos family, Grand Action 2.0, the GR Chamber of Commerce, the Right Place Inc., are never discussed by those who use the hammer and sickle symbol. There are no critiques of the use of public funds for the Amphitheater, the Soccer Stadium, the City’s ordinance that criminalized the unhoused, the GRPD murder of Patrick Lyoya, the GRPD assaulting and arresting Black community organizers or how the GRPD treats grassroots organizers in general. Commies of Grand Rapids also don’t talk about the cost of housing and the cost of rent, nor the millions in subsidies that have been provided to apartment and condo projects, like the DeVos/Van Andel 3 Towers project, which are unaffordable for the majority of the population.
In the end, Commies of Grand Rapids is just the rantings of another fake populist(s), with commentary that normalizes White Supremacy and blames the unhoused for whatever they see fit.
Arrogant and Ignorant: When white Christians think they are doing the Lord’s work in Grand Rapids
On Saturday, I was volunteering with GR Rapid Response to ICE to provide some crowd safety at the Glimpse of Africa festival at the Calder Plaza. The organizer’s of this event asked GR Rapid Response to ICE to have a presence in case Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up to intimidate and apprehend members of the African diaspora community, African refugees.
While doing crowd safety, I noticed early on that a group of about 15 young white people, likely high school or college age, had walked passed me several times. Eventually, the group planted themselves in front of the main entrance to the Calder Plaza and then put up their large anti-abortion signs, all of which read…..”Human Rights begins in the womb.”
I thought to myself, how arrogant and ignorant it was for these young white Christians to stand at the entrance of a festival that was specifically for members of the African diaspora to celebrate their culture, their heritage and to let people in West Michigan know that they too make up part of the West Michigan community.
These young white Christians could have been part of Protect Life Michigan or Grand Rapids Right to Life, but ultimately that doesn’t really matter, since they seemed utterly clueless about the lived experiences of those who had organized the Glimpse of Africa festival, those who had information booths, vendors and those who came to support them.
Why would these young white Christian anti-abortionists make it a point to hand out their propaganda to people who were already marginalized in the White Supremacist West MI Nice culture and people who are feeling increased anxiety because of the Trump Administration’s anti-immigrant policies?
Ultimately, these young white Christians are practicing and perpetuating a form of White Supremacy. Those young white Christians clearly are oblivious to what White Supremacy is. If they took the time to learn what White Supremacy is and then examine their own beliefs and behaviors, they would never be standing near the entrance of a festival organized by people who are part of the African diaspora.
In addition, if these young white Christians were interrogating themselves around White Supremacy, they might begin to think about why people from Africa are now living in West Michigan and how US foreign policy contributes to that dynamic. A quick look at recent research and analysis tells us some of the following important points about US Foreign Policy and Africa:
From the Quincy Institute – “Technically, the United States is not at war in Africa. But the practice and terminology of the US-led War on Terror has changed, making the US military’s involvement more difficult to trace. In the past 15 years, the US government has quietly expanded its military footprint across the African continent, engaging in “special operations” with African troops in the name of security. Since the 2007 establishment of the Africa Command (AFRICOM), the defense department’s regional combatant command for Africa, the US has adopted a military-first approach to securing its interests on the continent. This has had disastrous effects.”
From a recent article in The Guardian – “A decision by the US government to incinerate more than $9.7m (£7.3m) of contraceptives is projected to result in 174,000 unintended pregnancies and 56,000 unsafe abortions in five African countries.”
An article from the long time Africa analysis Nick Turse – “A new Pentagon report offers the grimmest assessment yet of the results of the last 10 years of U.S. military efforts on the continent. It corroborates years of reporting on catastrophes that U.S. Africa Command has long attempted to ignore or cover up.”
Lastly, I am not simply pointing out my disgust at these young white Christians and their White Supremacist practices, I believe that as white people we need to constantly interrogate our own perpetuation of White Supremacy and refute the notion that if I am a Liberal, a Progressive or a Democrat that I am not internalizing and perpetuating White Supremacy in one form or another.
It has been 22 months since the Israeli government began their most recent assault on Gaza and the West Bank. The retaliation for the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, has escalated to what the international community has called genocide, therefore, GRIID will be providing weekly links to information and analysis that we think can better inform us of what is happening, along with the role that the US government is playing. All of this information is to provide people with the capacity of what Noam Chomsky refers to as, intellectual self-defense.
Information
Israel abducted starving children at Gaza “aid” sites, then tortured them.
Israel Bans Palestinians From Gaza Sea, Cutting Off Yet Another Food Source
Gaza’s Starvation, Israeli Lies and the Tail that Wags the Dog
HUNGER IN GAZA CAN’T BE EXPLAINED AWAY BY PREEXISTING CONDITIONS
Jewish-Led Protest Outside Trump Hotel Demands End to US Support for Gaza Genocide
Trump Admin to Withhold Disaster Aid from Any State or City That Boycotts Israeli Products
NYT Suppressed Genocide Discussion When It Could Have Made a Difference
“Out, Damned Spot!” The Actively Complicit Try to Launder a Genocide
Analysis & History
New report from Israeli Human Rights Group B’Tselem – Our Genocide
Rashid Khalidi on Genocide Complicity, From Columbia to the White House
Israel’s Gaza War Is One of History’s Worst Crimes Ever
“Tightening the Chokehold”: Amjad Iraqi on Israel’s Plans to “Empty Out” Gaza and Annex West Bank
Image used in this post is from Doctors Without Borders.
On Wednesday, August 6th, MLive posted an article entitled, Christopher Schurr wants records from high-profile murder case destroyed.
The article partly rehashes a vague and misleading narrative about what happened the day that Christopher Schurr shot and killed Patrick Lyoya. Since Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker has refused to re-try Schurr, as has AG Dana Nessel, Schurr is free of any legal consequences of his actions that resulted in Patrick Lyoya’s death. The MLive article then states:
Now, defense attorneys Matthew Borgula, Mark Dodge, and Mikayla Hamilton are asking the judge to remove Schurr’s arrest record from ICHAT, which is the Michigan State Police’s Internet Criminal History Access Tool.
The motion requests any entry related to the murder charge be removed from the Law Enforcement Information Network, or LEIN.
Attorneys are also requesting any arrest records held by Michigan State Police and the Grand Rapids Police Department be destroyed.
Becker told MLive/The Grand Rapids Press on Wednesday, Aug. 6, that his office has no grounds to oppose the motion.
The Kent County Prosecutor once again demonstrates his loyalty to power, by not objecting what Schurr’s lawyers want to do. However, the main issue is what Schurr’s lawyers are hoping to do, plus the significance of their request. GRIID has been documented the actions of Schurr’s lawyers, ever since Schurr retained them in June of 2022. I want to revisit what I have written, primarily to demonstrate that the current request to have any record of Schurr’s brutal killing of Lyoya is consistent with how his lawyers have acted over the past 3 years.
From the very first story about Schurr’s lawyers in June of 2022, they attempted to control the narrative about Schurr’s killing of Lyoya, which I wrote about here.
In a September 2022 article I noted that one of Schurr’s lawyers had previously represented another GRPD cop who was found not guilty of intentionally discharging his firearm when approaching a Black man.
In October of 2022, I wrote about ongoing news coverage of the hearing about the Schurr case, which not only relied heavily on what Schurr’s lawyers had to say, but the witnesses they had speak during the hearing.
In January of 2023, Schurr’s lawyer submitted a 45-page legal brief to argue that Kent County Circuit Judge Christina Elmore should dismiss the case.
In February of 2023, Schurr’s lawyers demanded (and were granted) a delay in the trial date. There were two reasons submitted by Schurr’s lawyers as to why the trial should be delayed:
- They needed more time to, “mull over more than 30,000 pages of files in the case.”
- Matthew Borgula, one of Schurr’s attorneys, explained to the judge that one of the members of their trial team recently died, and his co-counsel also recently lost an immediate family member.
GRIID also noted how Schurr’s lawyers continued influence the local news coverage leading up to Schurr’s trial last April. At the time I wrote: The legal team representing Schurr was definitely on the offensive with their own public statements and Press Releases, with MLive being the primary news agency to generate stories based on Schurr’s legal team.
Seeing how Schurr’s lawyers have operated from the very beginning, helps us to understand exactly why they are now calling for the the judge to remove Schurr’s arrest record from ICHAT, which is the Michigan State Police’s Internet Criminal History Access Tool, and for any arrest records held by Michigan State Police and the Grand Rapids Police Department be destroyed. All of this tracks, since from the time that Schurr retained these lawyers in June of 2022, they have made it their mission to not only justify Schurr’s killing of Patrick Lyoya, they have also attempted to re-write the public narrative about what happened.
Of course there are those that want control public narratives around policing and there are those that want to suppress any record of state violence. What these systems of power don’t realize is that we will never forget what Christopher Schurr did to Patrick Lyoya, nor what the GRPD did, along with Grand Rapids City officials did to minimize and justify the shooting of Patrick Lyoya.
The Zapatista movement in southern Mexico says, “Estamos en una guerra en countra el olvido,” “We are in war against forgetting.” The systems of power and oppression in Grand Rapids do not want us to know what happened to Patrick Lyoya and we can’t let them win by forgetting what happened. We need to re-member, to put back together again, to make whole what happened to Patrick Lyoya and how that has impacted his family and community. Re-membering is resistance, re-membering is community care, re-membering is love. Never Forget! #Justice4Patrick
After 6 months of opposing Trump Administration policies where are we now in terms of resistance work?
It has been an intense six months since the Trump Administration began with the Executive Order promoting mass deportation on January 20th. Further attacks on public education, medicaid, DEI policies, environmental regulations, trans students, people with disabilities, and people publicly opposing the Israeli genocide happening in Gaza. I say “further attacks”, since under the Obama and Biden Administrations, some of these same attacks were already happening, although to a lesser degree or a lesser known degree.
People have shown up to numerous large rallies throughout the country and in Grand Rapids, whether it was International Women’s Day, the Hands Off rally or the No Kings rally. In Grand Rapids there have been several thousand at each rally. There have also been several other smaller protests, usually weekly at the Tesla dealership on 28th St., at the Social Security office, the Veteran’s facility and various bridge protests, located at overpasses throughout Grand Rapids.
Then there have been several protest actions at the offices of politicians, during Town Hall meetings and when it is know that elected officials will be in public spaces. There are weekly campaigns to call elected officials to either pressure them or thank them for certain votes, plus there is already efforts to work on getting candidates elected in the 2026 mid-terms.
Lots of awareness has been happening around what policies the Trump Administration has implemented over the past 6 months. However, little of what has happened has reduced or slowed down the onslaught of what we have all been experiencing since January 20th. Congress continues to adopt repressive policies, often with Bi-partisan support, which includes massive wealth and cost transfers, such as large tax breaks for billionaires, while Medicaid is cut, plus $170 billion that will no go towards immigration enforcement and deportations.
The Democratic Party has been either silent on some of the harm being implemented by the Trump Administration or has made statements condemning the policies that has increased hardship for millions. Statements do not equal resistance. There have also been some new proposed legislation from Democrats, like the legislation to make ICE agents have ID and not cover their faces, but such proposals do not alter the immigrant family separation and trauma caused by ICE, which the Democrats do not oppose. In addition, since the Democrats do not control Congress, they will propose all sorts of progressive-appearing policies because they know they won’t get passed, but it makes them look like they are listening to the public outrage. This has been a standard practice of the Democrats for decades, but we need to not be fooled by their fake legislative proposals.
So, over the past 6 months, a great deal of energy has been spent on rallies, marches, sign holding, online petitions, calling politicians, scolding politicians and talking about candidates for the 2026 election. These are the tactics that are the default tactics that people employ, either because it is all they know, because they ideologically think that working within the current political system is the most effective, or because they are unwilling to take risks and engage in more resistance work and Direct Action.
Resistance that matters
To be clear, I am not saying that people shouldn’t hold rallies, marchers, or hold signs in public, but those things by themselves will never work if we really want to resist systems of power and oppression.
We really need to develop strategies and tactics that will challenge, confront and potentially dismantle what we are fighting against. However, we can’t just be about resistance work, without developing ways of living in the world that are outside of these systems of power and oppression. For years I have been encouraging people to read Stephen D’Arcy’s essay, Environmentalism as if Winning Mattered: A Self-Organization Strategy. D’Arcy talks about a resistance phase – how we fight against systems of power and oppression, and a transition phase – how we build autonomous communities outside of Capitalism, Colonialism, Fascism and all other isms that brutalize us.
For those of us who live in this society and carry certain privileges – class, gender, racial, legal status, religious affiliation, etc., we really need to think about the communities of people who are most impacted by the current systems of power and oppression, build relationships with them and engage in resistance work together. The reality is that BIPOC, immigrant, queer, trans, those with disabilities, those subjected to poverty, etc. are being brutalized no matter which political party has power in this country or this state. If you aren’t aware of that reality, then you aren’t paying attention.
In any sort of social movement or radical politics, we need to participate in disruptive actions, actions that are disruptive to systems of power and oppression. Instead of just holding signs outside of Social Security offices, why not go inside and disrupt their ability to do what they do? Instead of holding signs on highway overpasses, why not occupy the offices of members of Congress….all members of Congress?
Disrupting systems of power and oppression often means attacking either their ability to make profits, conduct business as usual and perpetuate harm. Capitalism is an insidious economic system that is based on profits and constant growth, but it is also rooted in exploitation and destruction, both of the exploitation of humans and ecosystems. This is why the South African Anti-Apartheid campaign had as one of its strategies a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign to not support businesses that were profiting off of racial apartheid, robust boycott campaign targeting some of the largest perpetrators of racial apartheid, divesting funds from banks, pension funds, etc, and to call for governments to impose sanctions. This campaign involved a great deal of resistance, and lots of civil disobedience. The current Palestinian BDS campaign is built around the exact same model.
Another form of disruption is when we throw a monkey wrench into systems of power and oppression to conduct business as usual. During the End the Contract campaign that happened in Kent County in 2018-2019, the campaign that sought to get Kent County to end their contract with ICE, those involved in the campaign engaged in all kinds of disruptions. In fact, the kickoff to the campaign in late June of 2018, began with some 200 people showing up to the Kent County Commission meeting and shutting it down. The campaign disrupted numerous county meetings over the next several of months, but it also involved in taking up space in the 4th of July parade, going in to the Kent County Jail and making so much noise that those working the phones had a difficult time hearing callers. After the GRPD called ICE on Jilmar Raos Gomez, the campaign shut down several Grand Rapids City Commission meetings, and on numerous occasions it disrupted traffic. You can read about this campaign here. The County never ended their contact, but ICE did in September of 2019, primarily because of all the bad press and bad PR the campaign had generated!
Lastly, disruptions can mean engaging in actions that reduce harm that is being perpetrated by systems of power and oppression. This can look like what animal liberation groups have done by liberating animals from cages to destroying the machinery of those systems of cruelty. Harm reduction disruptions can also look like Indigenous people blockading fossil fuel corporations from continuing to build oil pipelines. According to a report put out by the Indigenous Environmental Network in 2021, Indigenous-led resistance campaigns against pipelines in the US and Canada have reduced greenhouse gas pollution by at least 25% annually since these campaigns began.
Resistance work in Grand Rapids
Look at the grassroots work of groups like Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE. The work of these two groups – which work collaboratively – has been with undocumented immigrants to provide training on what to do if ICE shows up, along with broader solidarity work and political campaigns to get the City of Grand Rapids and Kent County to adopt Sanctuary policies. In addition, Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have been doing direct intervention work to reduce ICE attempts of family separation, using the hotline (616)-238-0081, by providing accompaniment for immigrants and by doing patrols in the Grand Rapids area to monitor ICE activity and directly intervene when possible.
These groups are being strategic and using tactics that not only reduced the possibility that ICE will separate families, they also provide the necessary community care and Mutual Aid that moves us to relying more on each other than on systems of power and oppression.
We take care of each other
The immigrant-led group Movimiento Cosecha GR often says, “what we need is already right here in our community.” What Cosecha organizers mean by this statement is not just material needs, but ideas, vision and radical imagination. Radical Imagination – imagining that another world is possible, that we don’t have to settle for what systems of power and oppression give us. As the great Puerto Rican poet, Martin Espada once said, “No change for the good ever happens without it being imagined first, even if that change seems hopeless or impossible in the present.”
Mutual Aid has been a practice in many communities and culture for a very long time. Mutual Aid project are essentially a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on representative, but by actually building social relationships that are more survivable. Check out this video, which provides a wonderful popular education framework for what Mutual Aid is.
I would also recommend that people read the book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this crisis (and the next), by Dean Spade. Spade, who is a long time activist/organizer, proposes four criteria for evaluating the success of a mutual aid effort:
- Does it provide material relief?
- Does it leave out an especially marginalized part of the affected group (i.e., people with criminal records, people without immigration status?)
- Does it legitimize or expand a system resistant left movements are trying to dismantle?
- Does it mobilize people, especially those most directly impacted, for ongoing struggle?
There are several groups that have been involved in Mutual Aid work in Grand Rapids over the years. The Bloom Collective hosted several of the first Really, Really Free Market events around 2007-2008. Really Really Free Markets are where people bring items they no longer need and then people take what they need, which means no one is buying or selling.
In 2017, GR Rapid Response to ICE started practicing Mutual Aid, by providing material support to immigrants that were impacted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violence. GR Rapid Response to ICE continues to practice Mutual Aid in the present. There are other groups, like the the West Michigan Care Collective and Grand Rapids Pullover Prevention. The Grand Rapids Area Mutual Aid Network, which was create at the beginning of COVID in March or 2020, also does amazing work in this community and has provided lots of material aid, including raising several hundred thousand in dollars of Mutual Aid for primarily BIPOC, queer, trans, those with disabilities and immigrant neighbors in the greater Grand Rapids area.
There have also been amazing Mutual Aid Projects that have been created to respond to a particular crisis over the last decade or so. Some inspiring examples are how quickly grassroots mutual aid groups responded to Hurricane Sandy and those that formed with the fires in Los Angeles last year.
Throughout history there have also been fabulous examples of communities practicing Mutual Aid. One of the most overlooked is the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). The BPP is inaccurately represented by systems of power and oppression as simply being gun-wielding thugs, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The BPP was part of the lager Black Freedom Struggle and began in 1966 with their Ten-Point Program, which provided a framework for what they wanted. It is true that the BPP engaged in armed self-defense, but they saw that as only one of their Survival Programs. The BPP’s Survival Programs were Mutual Aid Projects and they developed over 60 of them during their short history. People are somewhat familiar with the Children’s Breakfast Program, but most people don’t know that they had their own ambulance service, free commissary for prisoners program, free clinics, their own newspaper and Liberation Schools. Click here to see the entire list.
These kinds of autonomous Mutual Aid Projects need to be explored and practiced if we want to develop real people power. The history of social service programs that make up the larger US government safety net, particularly the programs that began after the Great Depression did not come out of no where. In fact, there were two primary factors that determined much of what we often call the New Deal programs. First, the New Deal programs that provided material support to families deeply impacted by the Great Depression were modeled after the people-created projects that came directly out of those most impacted. (See Dana Franks book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression?: Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times)
Second, the New Deal policies that the FDR Administration put in place was a direct response to the massive public pressure from working class people and organized labor. In the early 1930s there were over 1,000 labor strikes happening on an annual basis across the US (See Jeremy Brecher’s book, Strike!). The US government was forced to create New Deal programs because of the massive resistance to economic conditions that were brought about by the Capitalist Class. If the FDR Administration not passed New Deal policies, the public would have been in open rebellion against the government. And just to be clear, the New Deal policies did not benefit everyone, especially the poorest, Black communities, Mexicans and other groups that were hit the hardest from the Great Depression.
What I have been attempting to communicate in this article is that if we just want to get rid of Trump then we will continue to perpetuate systems of power and oppression. We have to come to terms with the fact that the current political system, the Neoliberal economic system, which is also driven by US imperialism abroad, a system which is bi-partisan, is the very system that produced the likes of Donald Trump.
I don’t want to go back to normal. Normal in the US leaves us with mass incarceration, the climate crisis, a housing system that is rooted in profits, police brutalizing Black, Latinx, immigrant and trans people, plus a political system that is antithetical to anything resembling real democracy. The system ain’t working for most of us, so instead of just hoping for mild reforms and lesser of evil politics, why don’t we practice solidarity, mutual aid and fight like hell for collective liberation.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 