We Can Stop the Kent County Sheriff Department’s “Bag a Fag” policy action planned for Tuesday, December 13
It has been known for the past year that the Kent County Sheriff’s Department has been targeting gay men at public parks in the area and arresting them. The ACLU became involved earlier this year requesting documents from the Sheriff’s Dept. The ACLU has discovered that no formal complaints have been filed against men wanting to meet other men. The Sheriff’s Department had agreed months ago to meet with the ACLU to discuss this matter. However, to date, the Sheriff’s Dept has failed to make themselves available for that meeting.
Therefore, we are asking as many people as possible to join us Tuesday, December 13 at 9:30 am at the Kent County Commission meeting to voice our opposition to this policy of harassing and arresting gay men.
Here is a link to a document that the ACLU sent to the Sheriff’s department, which lays out why their policy of targeting gay men is unjust and a violation of people’s rights.
In addition, there is an excellent report written by Rudy Sera on the history of “Bag a Fag” operations in Michigan, which you can find on the LGBT People’s History Project site.
The Kent County Commission meets in the County building, room 310. Everyone has an opportunity to speak about this issue during public comment, which is at the beginning of the meeting. Please help us spread the word and join us if you can to speak out about this injustice in our community.
We Can Stop the Kent County Sheriff Department’s “Bag a Fag” policy action
Tuesday, December 13
9:30 AM
Kent County Building
Room 310
Downtown Grand Rapids
The two-week UN Climate Conference taking place in Durban is at mid-point and its prospect for success is not looking bright.
The political leaders have started to arrive to confront a range of problematic issues. It is likely that compromises will be worked out and a few successes will be claimed. The reality is that they won’t be enough to tackle the worsening climate situation on the ground.
On the ground over the weekend there were numerous protests held, including one outside the US Embassy in South Africa. At that protest, people confronted the US on its role as the primary polluter and policy maker that is the major obstacle to climate justice.
“We won’t let the U.S. off the hook,” says Ahmina Maxey of the East Michigan Environmental Action Coalition, a lead organization of GGJ. “As members of communities disproportionately affected by U.S. pollution and land grabs, we will be holding dirty U.S. corporations and the State Department accountable for the global mess they have made.”
The major protest involved a march of roughly 12,000 people, a march led by the Rural Women’s Assembly. The Rural Women’s Assembly released a statement about rural women in Africa and climate justice that people in the US need to read. The statement says in part, “Women produce 80 per cent of the food consumed by households in Africa. Seventy per cent of Africa’s 600 million people are rural. Financial support for women farmers must be commensurate to their numbers and crucial role.”
On Sunday, there was an educational forum hosted by TimberWatch. The forum was entitled Fake Forest Day and featured numerous sessions that critiqued both plantation style tree-planting programs and the idea of a green economy, which is the ideological justification for tree plantations and agro-fuels.
Lastly, here is a follow-up interview with the former Bolivian Ambassador to the Un, Pablo Solon with his assessment of the Climate Summit so far.
Drag Show this Saturday is a fundraiser for the LGBT group Tolerance, Equality & Awareness Movement (TEAM)
This Saturday, there is a fundraising event for the Tolerance, Equality & Awareness Movement (TEAM) at the Pyramid Scheme in downtown Grand Rapids.
T.E.A.M. is a human rights organization that seeks to eradicate discrimination against those of different races or sexual orientations. T.E.A.M.’s mission is that a 21st century human rights agenda begins with the creation of environments of diversity, inclusion, and acceptance.
When asked about what the funds will be used for, TEAM founder Chris Surfus responded, “some of the funds will be used for our Diversity and Inclusion program.” Other funds, according to Surfus will be to make TEAM merchandise as a mechanism to generate an ongoing source of funding.
Saturday’s event will feature several bands along with numerous performers, including Britney Storm, Dalylah Desmond, Ariez Iman, and Kaurora Fox who will be performing a drag show for the event.
Saturday, December 9
8:00 PM – 1:30 AM
Pyramid Scheme
68 Commerce SW, Grand Rapids
$5 suggested donation
Grand Rapids LGBTQ History Project: Video of the 1988 Pride Celebration in Grand Rapids
The Lesbian and Gay Community Network of Western Michigan, along with Dignity and Aradia organized the first ever Pride Celebration in Grand Rapids in June of 1988.
The event featured speakers, poetry, music and numerous Lesbian and Gay organizations, which were tabling at the event. The Pride Celebration was held at the old Monroe Amphitheater in downtown Grand Rapids.
In this video you will hear Bryan Ribbons read a proclamation, since the Mayor at that time, Gerry Helmholt, refused to recognize and support the first ever Pride Celebration.
The video also documents that there were a small group of religious extremists, which came to the event to harass and intimidate those who came to celebrate with pride.
This video is archived on the Grand Rapids LGBTQ People’s History Project site and is 90 minutes in length.
What’s Next for the Occupy Movement?
This commentary by Brian Tokar will appear in the winter issue of Broadcast, the newsletter of SEEDS, the Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School, based in Seattle and Vashon, Washington.
Since mid-September, actions inspired by the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York have awakened the imaginations of people worldwide. Just as the movement approached its two-month anniversary in mid-November, several of the founding Occupations across the US fell victim to apparently highly-coordinated police raids. While the coming of winter was long-predicted to shift the focus of the Occupy movement, the expulsion of iconic tent encampments in New York, Oakland, and other cities has invigorated and intensified discussions about the movement’s next steps and its longer-term strategies.
Inspired in part by the Arab Spring events in Tahrir Square and beyond, the Occupy movement initially focused on the physical occupation of public space. But it’s always been about much more than that. The transcendent quality of the physical occupations was elaborated in a recent commentary by the Cincinnati-based author/activist Dan LaBotz, originally written for the journal New Politics. He described in rich detail how this fall’s Occupations resonate with the long history of popular revolts and occupations of public squares that, since ancient times, were often rooted in the utopian dimensions of the city itself. His outlook strongly resonates with social ecologist Murray Bookchin’s efforts, beginning in the mid-1960s, to reclaim the city’s historic legacy of freedom for today’s revolutionaries.
“We are witnessing something that goes beyond the symbolic,” LaBotz wrote, “something that both threatens the deep foundations of our social structure and, equally important – no, more important – something that touches our deepest spiritual yearnings. The occupation is utopian in the best sense. Whatever its political program, its practice says: ‘We will no longer live in hatred and competition. We will live in love and community.’”
Even the Occupy movement’s oft-criticized resistance to focusing on achievable, short-term “demands” speaks to its long-range, utopian character. Rolling Stone reporter and long-time critic of Wall Street’s excesses, Matt Taibbi describes how, after some initial skepticism, he was soon won over by Occupy Wall Street:
“Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become… We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.”
For some 30 years, the progressive Left in the US has been on the defensive. Against a unified, ideologically-driven assault against all of the social progress of the twentieth century, we’ve learned to fight one battle at a time, to “frame” our issues carefully and often circumspectly, and to try not to rock the boat too much. We have been up against a sometimes frightening confluence of neoliberal economic policies – privatization, deregulation, shredding safety nets, reorienting economies toward global trade – and a fundamentalist “culture war” that has mobilized significant numbers of disenfranchised people in a reactionary crusade to defend “traditional values.” We’ve insisted that “another world is possible,” but often only believed it in the most abstract of terms.
Now, for the first time in decades, the terms of the conversation are shifting. People are fed up, and no longer too timid nor too defeated to speak out loudly against the status quo, and for a different kind of society. We have learned that we can challenge financial elites, defend labor rights, call to overturn capitalism, and our numbers continue to grow. In cities large and small, we experience the exhilaration of direct democracy, of reclaiming public spaces, and of reinventing our future. And we know that we are not going to disappear when elites respond with too many police, or even with small victories.
This movement, with its unbounded creativity, is going to decide its own future. Some trade unionists, Move-On bloggers, and people tied to the Democratic establishment want it to be about the 2012 congressional elections and about reclaiming the long-discredited “American dream.” Some movement participants will, understandably, choose to become involved in the elections. But, for the first time in recent memory, the election may not turn out to be the center of our attention. Instead of a movement narrowing its sites to elect candidates, the candidates may just have to listen to the much farther-reaching demands of this movement. If they don’t – if they instead continue to harp on deficits, budget cuts, and reforms constrained by the demands of Wall Street – they’ll simply make themselves irrelevant.
Occupy Wall Street and its counterparts across the country and around the world have exposed the underside of an economic system that only benefits the wealthiest 1 percent – or less – and begun a new, potentially revolutionary conversation. With the coming of winter, it will evolve in many directions: toward occupying abandoned urban spaces, confronting politicians and CEOs, intervening against foreclosures, organizing university campuses, and more. The movement – and its emerging vision of a different kind of world – will continue to grow and evolve.
In a recent ZNet column, activist scholar Marina Sitrin described what it’s like in Spain today, in the aftermath of their summer 2011 uprising. “[W]hile the indignado movement no longer has encampments, its presence is felt everywhere,” she wrote, most notably in a new flowering of cooperatives in all spheres of life. It has evolved “to the point that in some places in Spain it is almost possible to live without having to depend on the resources hoarded by the 1 percent.” Perhaps not since the anti-nuclear power actions of the 1970s have we seen a movement so dedicated to uniting the oppositional and reconstructive dimensions of radical politics. As snow begins to blanket the North (and the rainy season arrives in the Northwest), we can already feel the anticipation of the Spring awakenings to come.
Film will explore response to hate crimes & violence this Wednesday in Grand Rapids
A coalition of community groups are hosting a PBS produced film entitled, Not in Our Town, this Wednesday in Grand Rapids. The film looks at how communities of people have responded to hate crimes and violence, by devising creative, community-based initiatives.
After the film, there will be a facilitated discussion about what is happening in Grand Rapids and what could be done to respond to hate.
Wednesday, December 7
5:30 PM
Grand Rapids Community College – Applied Technology Center
151 Fountain St. NE
This film/event is free and open to the public.
Reporting and not reporting on EPA standards in Michigan
This morning, MLive reported that the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) is running radio ads in Michigan calling on lawmakers to adopt tough EPA standards on mercury emissions from coal burning power plants.
The article sources both a spokesperson from the EEN and the EPA and briefly touches on the Obama administration’s position on EPA regulation.
The radio ads are targeting Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow to “embrace new EPA rules aimed at reducing mercury emissions from power plants.”
However, the article falls short on numerous points that would have better provided the public with what is at issue.
First, the EPA recently released a watch list of companies and municipalities that are the worst polluters in the US in terms of violations of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Hazardous Waste Act. None of this information, which included companies from Michigan, was mentioned in the MLive story.
Second, the article does not source any local environmental groups that have been working to reduce coal burning and fighting the proposed construction of several new coal burning power plants throughout the state.
Third, there is no acknowledgement of which communities are disproportionately impacted from mercury contamination. It has been known for years that Native communities have been impacted the most from mercury contamination in Michigan, both because of proximity and because of fish being a large part of their diet.
Fourth, there is little context for the larger issues on mercury poising in Michigan and what this means for human health and environmental protection. SourceWatch has some good information and data, which would give people the opportunity to further explore the seriousness of mercury poisoning in Michigan and regulatory issues.
Lastly, since the add campaign from EEN is targeting Senator’s Levin and Stabenow, it would be useful for the public to know what their track record is on coal regulation up to now. VoteSmart.org has voting records for all members of Congress and you can search how Senator Levin and Senator Stabenow have voted on these issues.
Resisting the Pornification of Women
This article by Gail Dines and Julia Long is re-posted from ZNet.
“Sexualization” has become a much-debated issue in recent years, and a noticeable feature is the assumption that feminists who oppose sexual objectification are generating a “moral panic”. Ever since sociologist Stanley Cohen introduced the term in 1972 it has been used as a shorthand way of critiquing conservatives for inventing another “problem” in order to demonize a group that challenges traditional moral standards.
So apparently feminists are now the conservatives fomenting unnecessary panic about the proliferation of “sexualized” images while the corporate-controlled media industry that mass produces these images is the progressive force for change being unfairly demonized. What a strange turn of events.
To suggest feminists who oppose the pornification of society are stirring up a moral panic is to confuse a politically progressive movement with rightwing attempts to police sexual behavior. We can, of course, identify just such a conservative strand in current debates in Britain: interventions of the coalition government include calls for girls to be given lessons in how to practice abstinence and attacks on abortion rights. But feminists who organize against pornification are not arguing that sexualized images of women cause moral decay; rather that they perpetuate myths of women’s unconditional sexual availability and object status, and thus undermine women’s rights to sexual autonomy, physical safety and economic and social equality. The harm done to women is not a moral harm but a political one, and any analysis must be grounded in a critique of the corporate control of our visual landscape.
The left has a long history of fighting capitalist ownership of the media. From Karl Marx to Antonio Gramsci to Noam Chomsky, leftist thinkers have understood the corporate media to be the propaganda machine for capitalist ideas and values. By mainstreaming the ideologies of the elite, corporate-controlled media shapes our identities as workers and consumers, selling an image of success and happiness tied to the consumption of products that generate enormous wealth for the elite class. Alternative views are at best marginalized and at worst ridiculed.
No one in progressive circles would suggest for a moment that criticism of the corporate media is a moral panic. Chomsky has never, as far as we know, been called a “moral entrepreneur”, yet those of us who organize against the corporations that churn out sexist imagery are regularly dismissed as stirring moral panic.
The industry-engineered image of femininity has now become the dominant one in western society, crowding out alternative ways of being female. The clothes, cosmetics, diets, gym membership, trips to the hair salon, the waxing salon and the nail salon add up to a lot of money. Even in these dark economic times, when women are experiencing the most severe financial hardship, the UK beauty business is booming.
Women’s self-loathing is big business, and supports a global capitalist system that, ironically, depends heavily on the exploitation of women’s labor in developing countries. Adding insult to injury, many of these underpaid women are spending a significant proportion of their wages on skin-whitening products that promise social mobility out of the sweatshops.
In the west, cosmetic surgery is increasingly normalized. Last year in the UK, almost 9,500 women underwent breast augmentation surgery, and the number of labiaplasties has almost tripled in five years. One plastic surgeon helpfully explains on his website that labiaplasty “can sculpture the elongated or unequal labial [sic] minora (small inner lips) according to one’s specification … With laser reduction labiaplasty, we can accomplish the desires of the woman”. If this is not evidence of living in a sexualized culture, what is?
The emotional cost of conforming to hypersexualization is enormous for girls and young women who are in the process of forming their gender and sexual identities. We construct our identities through complex processes of interaction with the culture around us, but today images of hypersexualization dominate. Where is a girl to go if she decides Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Rihanna or Britney Spears aren’t for her?
An American Psychological Association study on girls’ sexualization found that it “has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality, and attitudes and beliefs”. Some of these effects include risky sexual behavior, higher rates of eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem, and reduced academic performance. Of course, there are girls who resist, but there are real social penalties to be paid by those who do not conform to acceptable feminine appearance.
This weekend feminist campaigners are hosting a conference on the pornification of culture. In the buildup, mass protests were held outside the London Playboy Club and Miss World beauty contest to highlight the relationship between corporate interests and the objectification of women. The fight against the increasingly narrow and limiting image of femininity is inextricably connected to the progressive fight for democratic ownership and control of the media. This is a political struggle. Feminists are rightly concerned, but we’re not panicking. We’re organizing.
Active resistance to the countries of the world that refuse to significantly reduce carbon emissions and those that promote reformist positions continued at the United Nations Climate Summit in Durban, South Africa.
Activists and organizers recognize that part of the problem with a lack of any substantive change in global carbon reduction is that financial institutions still fund projects that are inherently built on ecological destruction and growth.
The World Bank is one of the main culprits in the financing of global warming, so people occupied the World Bank meeting that was taking place at the Climate Summit. The occupation was led by activists dressed as clowns, which called themselves Corporate Clowns. Armed with noisemakers the clowns called for the World Bank to get out of Climate Finance. The clowns issued a statement that read in part as:
“The role of private investment in financing climate activities must be decided at the national and sub-national levels in line with countries’ priorities, not corporate bottom lines. The move to allow the private sector to go directly to the Green Climate Fund for money undermines the possibility of a democratic, participatory process for meeting the needs of communities struggling to fight climate change.”
Some good analysis articles have also surfaced in the past day. One of those stories was from Reuters, which pointed out that there are many countries who have bought into the notion that nuclear energy is safe and a viable way to reduce coal consumption.
Another solid article can be found on Science for Peace, written by Patricia Hynes. Her article looks at how militarism is one of the main global warming culprits. Here are some alarming facts Hynes presents:
- The projected full costs of the Iraq War (estimated $3 trillion) would cover “all of the global investments in renewable power generation” needed between now and 2030 to reverse global warming trends.
- Between 2003-2007, the war generated at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)4, more each year of the war than 139 of the world’s countries release annually.5 Re-building Iraqi schools, homes, businesses, bridges, roads, and hospitals pulverized by the war, and new security walls and barriers will require millions of tons of cement, one of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
- In 2006, the U.S. spent more on the war in Iraq than the entire world spent on renewable energy investment.
- By 2008, the Bush administration had spent 97 times more on military than on climate change. As a presidential candidate, President Obama pledged to spend $150 billion over 10 years on green energy technology and infrastructure — less than the United States was spending in one year of the Iraq War.
We also came across some amazing educational resources for anyone wanting to do climate justice work. The first is a great online zine that identifies those who benefit from the UN program known as REDD – Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation. While the name sounds like it is committed to climate justice, indigenous groups and farming communities around the world have exposed REDD as another corporate-friendly project. The Indigenous Environmental Network and Carbon Trade Watch have put together this fabulous resource, which you can download here.
Lastly, there is an amazing documentary called The Carbon Connection, which takes a close look at the fallacy of carbon trading. Carbon trading is just another scheme by global capitalists to keep polluting and pretend to actually reduce carbon emissions. You can watch the film online here.
Public Health Concerns, Urban Neoliberal Racism, Mass Poverty, and the Repression of Occupy
This article by Paul Street is re-posted from ZNet, which has all the sources cited in the article.
Consistent with recommendations they received from experts in domestic population control at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, big city mayors and police chiefs across the United States have uniformly cited concerns for “public health” and “public safety” in justifying their armed force assaults on and evictions of the Occupy Movement in mid and late November of 2011. [1] This shared and coordinated pretext for urban repression reeks of bad faith and rich irony. The assaults themselves have been monuments to public un-safety, amounting in many cases to militarized state-terrorist raids on peaceful and democratic free speech and public space.[2] The Occupy Movements have been clean, peaceful (nonviolent), safe and healthy, reflecting their determination to prefigure a positive, people-friendly and cooperative future (beyond the rule of the rich and powerful, what the movement has famously labeled “the 1 percent”) and their knowledge that city officials have wanted reasons to close them down. To be sure, given the ubiquity of homelessness and extreme misery among a significant and rising share of the nation’s urban population and the refusal of many idealistic young Occupiers to simply shun the long-demonized urban “underclass,”[3] it was inevitable that the camps would attract a certain number of city residents plagued by addiction, criminal records, mental instability, chronic joblessness, and the like. Still, the Occupy Movement has dealt well and sensitively with the problems of these forgotten and oppressed people, problems that Occupiers hardly created and which Occupiers seek to alleviate and would like to end through positive government action.
Beneath the officially stated reasons for the often vicious and over-the-top, military-style municipal assaults on and break ups of Occupy’s camps lay a cold reality: city officials and police are beholden to overlapping metropolitan financial, corporate, and real estate elites, that is, to members, allies, and servants of the upper 1 percent that Occupy has with no small reason identified as the primary threat to public health, safety and democracy in the U.S. and the world. The masters and their metropolitan servants do not like to see enduring visible and attention-grabbing symbols of popular opposition to the nation’s “unelected dictatorship of money” (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson[4]), whose rule and austerity agenda (imposing increased poverty and insecurity on the Many while profits soar and wealth and power is further concentrated upward in the Few) is widely resented by ordinary U.S. citizens even if only a tiny share of the American populace is willing or able to camp out in cold and grimy city parks. The big city fat cats do not appreciate high profile symbols of how much their system has failed the American people (modern day “Obamavilles” that hark back to the ignominious “Hoovervilles” of the early Great Depression) or vibrant gatherings of energized people who seem to threaten to develop a life and culture beyond the wage- and salary- (and debt- and time-) slavery that is expected of the populace under the rule of capital.
If They Were Serious
City officials who were serious about advancing and protecting public health and safety would divert resources from the repression of their downtown Occupy Movements to meeting the needs of the rising mass of poor and deeply poor citizens stuck in ghetto neighborhoods that wallow in the shadows of urban America’s shining financial districts. A recent chilling study issued on the eve of the holiday season by the Brookings Institution paints a terrifying picture of deepening and increasingly concentrated destitution across the supposed national homeland and headquarters of global “freedom.” “As the first decade of the 2000s drew to a close,” Brookings researchers report on the even of the nation’s holiday season, “the two downturns that book-ended the period, combined with slow job growth between, clearly took their toll on the nation’s less fortunate residents.” Further:”Over a ten-year span, the country saw the poor population grow by 12.3 million, driving the total number of Americans in poverty to a historic high of 46.2 million [emphasis added]. By the end of the decade, over 15 percent of the nation’s population lived below the federal poverty line—$22,314 for a family of four in 2010—though these increases did not occur evenly throughout the country.”[5]
The researchers might have added that the 2010 Census reveals that a record-setting 1 in 15 Americans now lives in what poverty researchers have recently resorted to calling “deep poverty”[6] – at less than half the federal government’s notoriously miserly and inadequate poverty measure (that would at less than $11,157 for a family of four). Furthermore, a recent Census report commissioned by the New York Times shows that 1 in 3 Americans lives either in official poverty or in “near poverty,” either officially poor or at less than 150 percent of the poverty level.[7] Shockingly enough, half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black U.S. children now depend on Food Stamps at some point during their childhood.[8]
The Race and Geography of Extreme Poverty, Subprime Lending, and Depression Era Unemployment
Nothing is more consistently and positively correlated with poor health, crime, illness, educational failure – with threats to public health and safety – than poverty, a great destroyer of lives and opportunity. At the same time, poverty’s negative impact on its most immediate victims and the broader society is magnified and intensified by the extreme spatial concentration of the poor in high poverty neighborhoods. As the Brookings researchers note in their report The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s: “Rather than spread evenly, the poor tend to cluster and concentrate in certain neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods within a community. Very poor neighborhoods face a whole host of challenges that come from concentrated disadvantage—from higher crime rates and poorer health outcomes to lower-quality educational opportunities and weaker job networks .A poor person or family in a very poor neighborhood must then deal not only with the challenges of individual poverty, but also with the added burdens that stem from the place in which they live.” [9] Enduring poverty in a very poor neighborhood subjects poor residents to obstacles and difficulties reaching beyond the costs of individual poverty.
It is one thing to be technically poor but live in a safe “middle class” neighborhood with well-maintained homes, good schools, green space, thriving shops, accessible quality health care, regular public transportation, full-service grocery stores, and other amenities. It is another thing to be poor in a dangerous, crime-ridden, high-poverty neighborhood with boarded up and dilapidated homes, where: the schools feel like jails; intact families are rare; nutrition is purchased under bullet-proofed plastic windows at inflated prices from combination food-liquor stores that lack fresh vegetables and specialize in starchy high sugar and salt items; gangs are prevalent; diabetes, hepatitis, and HIV are near epidemic; prison histories are more common than jobs; more than 40 percent of the men have been saddled with the lifelong mark of a criminal record; incarceration is an almost routine experience for young males; parks are scarce and/or too precarious to visit; doctors and dentists are absent and small shops are rare; taxies never go and public transit is irregular and hard to reach.[10] As sociologist Douglas Massey noted in 1994, “housing markets…distribute much more than a place to live; they also distribute any good or resource that is correlated with where one lives. Housing markets don’t just distribute dwellings, they also distribute education, employment, safety, insurance rates, services, and wealth in the form of home equity; they also determine the level of exposure to crime and drugs, and the peer groups that one’s children experience.”[11]
Massey’s observation notwithstanding, U.S poverty remains highly and (by the Brookings researchers’ finding) increasingly concentrated. After declining somewhat during the long economic boom of the 1990s, Brookings reports, the number of Americans living in “extreme poverty neighborhoods” – where 40 percent of the residents live below the poverty line – rose by one third between 2000 and 2009. Currently in the U.S., 10.5 percent of poor people live in such neighborhoods, up from 9.1 percent in 2000. New York City, where the financial titan turned Mayor recently spent $7 million repressing and finally evicting Occupy from the city’s affluent financial district, is home to 1,575, 032 officially poor people and to 174 extreme poverty census tracts that house 697,375 people, including 375,876 poor. Chicago, where the rugged hippie-punching corporate mayor Rahm Emmanuel (Barack Obama’s former White House chief-of-staff) has consistently denied Occupiers a campsite, is home to 593,000 poor people and to 124 extreme poverty tracts that together house 304,139 people including 140,574 poor. Los Angeles, where Antonio Villaraigosa recently evicted his city’s Occupy Movement over mass public protest, is home to 844,712 poor people and to 65 extreme poverty tracts that house more than a quarter million (264,888) residents. Philadelphia, where Occupy was recently evicted, is home to 352,265 poor people and 58 extreme poverty census tracts that house 222,434 people.[12]
The recently increased concentration of poverty reflects among other things the disastrous impact of two recessions (the most recent one constituting the biggest economic downturn since the 1930s). Unfolding due to the capitalist profits addiction[13] of the Occupation Movement’s official enemy the One Percent, the crises have taken a terrible toll on the employment prospects, net worth, and geographic mobility opportunities for the nation’s disproportionately nonwhite poverty population.
Racial oppression is critical here, beneath the movement’s sometimes simplistic division between the super-rich and “the rest of us” (the 1 Percent and the 99 Percent). The Brookings study’s online version includes a link to maps showing the location of the extreme poverty tracts dozens of American cities.[14] As is obvious to anyone familiar with the racialized geography of these highly segregated metropolises, the maps demonstrate that America’s zones of concentrated urban misery are very disproportionately black and Latino. And indeed, while blacks make up 12.6 percent of overall U.S. population, the Brookings reports that blacks comprise 45 percent of the population (by far and away the largest share) that lives in the nation’s extreme poverty neighborhoods.[15]
The mortgage crisis created by the financial elite and the collapse of the housing market has been particularly devastating in Black and Latino neighborhoods. This is because those households’ net worth is more proportionately tied up in home equity, thanks to the broad absence of financial wealth in the Black and Latino communities. As the leading wealth and power analyst G. William Domhoff explains on his Web site Who Rules America?: “In 2007, the average white household had 15 times as much total wealth as the average African-American or Latino household. If we exclude home equity from the calculations and consider only financial wealth, the ratios are in the neighborhood of 100:1. Extrapolating from these figures, we see that 70% of white families’ wealth is in the form of their principal residence; for Blacks and Hispanics, the figures are 95% and 96%, respectively.”[16] To make matters worse, the predatory home lending practices (carried out by the leading financial institutions owned and run by the One Percent) that did do much to precipitate the mortgage and financial collapse of 2007 and 2008 particularly targeted people of color. As David McNally notes:
“By 1998…subprime mortgages composed one-third of all home loans made to African-Americans and a fifth of those made to Latinos. And the numbers just kept rising. By 2005, 70 percent of all subprime loans made in Washington, D.C. went to African-Americans. A year later, African-Americans received 41 percent of all sub-prime mortgages in New York, while 29 percent went to Latinos. Women of color were especially vulnerable to subprime extortion Inevitably, as the mortgage rates kicked higher it became increasingly difficult for the borrowers to make payments, especially as job loss soared, especially among workers of color, reducing peoples’ capacity to pay.”[17]
Incredibly enough but consistent with longstanding racial patterns in U.S. labor markets, four of every ten black Americans experienced unemployment during the 2008-09 Great Recession. As McNally elaborates: “Throughout the first half of 2010, official unemployment among blacks was over 16 percent, while among Latinos, it hovered around 13 percent. In thirty-five of America’s largest cities, official jobless rates for blacks were between 30 and 35 percent- levels equal to the worst days of the Great Depression [emphasis added]….Not surprisingly, blacks and Latinos are almost three times more likely to live in poverty than whites.”[18]
In today’s New York Times (I am writing on the morning of Thursday, December 1, 2011), liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof reflects on the recollections of former Chase Home Finance regional vice president James Theckston, who told Kristof how he won company accolades for high sales in 2006 and 2007. Theckston “says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans…These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up,” Kristof writes. “If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction,” Kristof comments, “it helps to listen to a former banker like Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.”[19]
Militarized Policing in the “Free Market” Era:
According to a recent Associated Press report, 18 U.S. cities including New York City spent 13 million taxpayer dollars on the policing and repression of their local Occupy Movements between the rise of Occupy Wall Street in mid-September and Bloomberg’s recent quasi-totalitarian police-state tear-down[20] of the original Occupy Wall Street (OWS) camp in the New York City financial district’s Zucotti Park.[21] Urban policymakers who were actually serious about protecting public health and safety would have spent that money (itself a small drop in the bucket of the vast taxpayer expense of public service to corporate and financial America[22]) instead on various forms of direct social service (health and child care, drug counseling, education, food and nutrition, recreation, and …the list of unmet needs to address goes on) to the many and growing number of primarily nonwhite extreme poverty neighborhoods that have been struggling for many decades in the invisible and painful shadows of the profits system – the system that Occupy has tried in its own imperfect ways to oppose. The needs of those communities and the broader mass of the rising American poverty and near-poverty populations do not jibe with the longstanding corporate neoliberal agenda that serves and protects “the One Percent” – the top hundredth of disproportionately Caucasian corporate and financial masters who own more than a third of the nation’s wealth and a larger share of its elected officials while an increasing share of the citizenry slips into the nation’s disproportionately nonwhite misery class.[23]
In the dominant public discourse shaped by that agenda, the nation’s “pervasive racial hierarchies collapse,” in the words of the prolific social critic Henry Giroux, “into power-evasive strategies such as blaming minorities of class and color for not working hard enough, refusing to exercised individual initiative, or practicing reverse racism.” Even as an insidious, increasingly invisible racism “functions” as “one of the deep and abiding currents in everyday [American] life,” this discourse works “to erase the social from the language of public life as to reduce all racial problems to private issues [of]…individual character and cultural depravity.” This “neoliberal racism,” as Giroux calls it, “can imagine public issues only as private concerns. It sees “human agency as simply a matter of individualized choices, the only obstacle to effective citizenship being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility” on the part of those most victimized by structural oppression and the amoral agency of those super-empowered actors who stand atop the nation’s steep and interrelated hierarchies of class and race. Under its rule, “human misery is largely defined as a function of personal choices,” consistent with “the central neoliberal tenet that all problems are private rather than social in nature.” [24] Government efforts to meaningfully address and ameliorate (not to mention abolish) sharp societal disparities of race and class are deemed alternately futile, counterproductive, and inappropriate. Government’s functions are progressively concentrated on “making war,” “enhancing opportunities for the investor class,” “suppressing wages for everyone else,” and “suppressing dissent.”[25]
Over the last generation, the dominant U.S. neoliberal ideology advanced by and for the elite has masterfully disseminated a fantasy struggle between the allegedly evil state and the supposedly virtuous (and supposedly free) “free market.” At its “conservative” (radically regressive) extremes, the ideology’s proponents have proclaimed a desire to “starve the [government] beast” and “cut government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” (leading Republican anti-tax guru Grover Norquist). Beneath quasi-libertarian discourse about the epic conflict between “stultifying government bureaucracy” (bad) and “free market” capitalism (good), however, neoliberalism’s corporate sponsors and beneficiaries have unfailingly sought to wield and profit from government policy of a particular sort. Consistent with a state-capitalist Western profits system and corporate order that has always relied heavily on government protection and assistance, they have only targeted certain parts of the public sector for malnourishment. They have de-funded and de-legitimized what the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state”: programs and services won by past popular struggles and social movements for social justice, equality, and inclusion. They do not wish to take the budgetary or policy axe to the “right hand of the state”: the parts that provide service and subsidy (corporate welfare) to concentrated wealth and dole out punishment (including rampant mass incarceration and felony-marking[26]) for the poor. They do not wish to dismantle America’s military-industrial and imperial complex, a form of massive public transfer to, and protection for “private” high-tech firms like Exxon, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Raytheon.[27]
State-capitalist neoliberalism’s disingenuous “anti-government” rhetoric cloaks the actual and core policy question. During the last three and half decade as through all of American history, the real issue is NOT whether government can or should “work.” It’s who government should work for: the US public and the common good or the nation’s leading centers of concentrated wealth and power?[28] Along the way, the not-so “free market” neoliberal era has hardly abolished the wealthy Few’s longstanding reliance on the state’s repressive functions to control the Many who must understand that they have no option but to rent themselves out at a properly profitable price to the capitalist employer class. As McNally notes:
“when capitalist market relations become widely normalized, states do not regularly have to behave in…blatantly brutal ways to keep their work forces in line. Much can be left to the quiet violence of the capitalist economy in which dispossession (owning no productive assets except for one’s ability to work) compels people to submit to the unyielding disciplinary regimes of wage labor.”
“But while much can be left to the market discipline, not everything can. That is why law, police, prisons, and direct force remain omnipresent. Indeed, the intensified disciplinary regimes of the neoliberal period – punitive laws against panhandling or sleeping in parks, widespread incarceration of those found with small bits of drugs, harsher street-level policing and jail terms, and ever more people stuffed into prisons – are sharp reminders that the coercive powers of the state will be regularly mobilized every time the ‘work ethic’ and social discipline seem to be waning…..[Thus]…Under the guise of a so-called ‘war on drugs,’ militarized policing has been imposed on poor and racialized communities across the U.S. as well countries like Mexico and Columbia….imprisonment has become the preferred form of social control of largely racialized ‘surplus populations.’ It is prisons – not schools or even job training programs – that secure the disciplinary ethos of neoliberalism.”[29]
The punitive right-handed function of the state in relation to the mostly Black and Latino urban and suburban poor actually grows in proportion to the assault on the left hand of government. The less authorities are willing or able to offer inclusion and protection for those at the bottom of the nation’s steep pyramids of class and race, the more those authorities must respond to the “underclass’s” plight with the iron fist of repression.
“Government Writ Large is Not the Problem”
To its credit, despite the problematic presence in its ranks of some from the “libertarian” right, the genuinely populist Occupy Movement has never opposed government as such but rather the capture and control of government by the rich and powerful. The fake-populist “Tea Party”[30] and the broader reactionary trend of elite-managed U.S. political culture more generally directs popular ire (quite disingenuously) at “government” per se and trumpets the deceptive virtues of self-reliance and the unalterable rectitude of the so-called free market. As Time’s Ishaan Thoroor noted in a thoughtful early response to media commentators who quickly labeled OWS “the Tea Party of the left,” Occupy has sought not to demonize and destroy the state but rather to democratize government by taking it back from economic elites and building its positive possibilities from the bottom up:
“The answer, for many of the protesters I’ve spoken with, is never the wholesale dismantling or whittling away of the capabilities of political institutions (except, perhaps, the Fed), but a subtler disentangling of Wall Street from Washington. Government writ large is not the problem, just the current sort of government….. Occupy Wall Street, like most idealistic social movements, wants real political solutions. Excited activists in Zuccotti Park spoke to me about the advent of ‘participatory budgeting’ in a number of City Council districts in New York — an egalitarian system, first brought about in leftist-run cities in Latin America, that allows communities to dole out funds in their neighborhoods through deliberation and consensus-building. It’s the same process that gets played out every day by the activist general assemblies held in Zuccotti Park and other occupation sites around the U.S. To the outside observer, that may seem foolishly utopian — and impracticable on a larger scale — but it’s a sign of the deep political commitments of many of the motley protesters gathering under Occupy Wall Street’s banner. They want to fix government, not escape from it [emphasis added].” [31]
A democratic and participatory budgeting system in urban America would surely find something better to do with $13 million in eighteen poverty-ridden U.S. cities than the high-tech authoritarian-cleansing of youthful and populist dissenters on false public safety and health pretexts by the likes of Michael Bloomberg, the twelfth richest person in the U.S.
Given the corporate and financial stranglehold on U.S. urban governments, it is hardly surprising that the mostly white (but consistently non- and anti-racist) sleep-and eat-in-the-urban-park Occupy Movement has itself come face-to-face (well face-to-Darth-Vader-visor) with the right and militarized police hand of the repressive state that has been so ubiquitous in the nation’s urban communities of color throughout the long mass-incarceration-ist neoliberal era. Large numbers of young white progressive and radicals have been given an instructive new taste of what many Black and Latino youth have been experiencing for decades in the disingenuous name of “the free market.” Let the lessons be learned as we build toward ever more epic, multiracial and many-sided struggles with the rich and powerful Few who are crucifying, our cities, our civil rights and social justice ideals, and livable ecology[32] on a cross of capitalistic greed.
