Yes, I think about that each time I read about this kind of thing and about the
businesses that have turned into workers' co-operatives. But I also wondered,
when I read this article, and when I was reading all about Occupy Sandy five
years ago, where people got the money that was required to travel to the sites
of devastation, I mean the people who didn't live there. And although many
folks have donated things and money, where does the money come from to support
all of these individual efforts? You know about all the podcasts I've been
listening to? Well, most of them are funded solely by donations, or at least,
that's what they say. There's a website called Patreon.com to which all of them
direct people to go to donate money. The website was started by , if I remember
correctly, a wealthy Libertarian, in order to fund individual art projects.
Then there's The Real News Network. It does an amazing job of covering all
sorts of news stories both here and in other countries, from a leftis point of
view. One of the first things you see on its website and its daily emails is an
announcement, "No Advertising", and I haven't encountered any fundraising
either. Where does its money come from?
In the same way that I can't believe in religious doctrine, I tend to be
suspiscious of what sound to me to be, magical answers to very pragmatic
questions. Roger told me yesterday, that the organizing takes place so that
when Capitalism implodes, the people will be ready for socialism. But when
Capitalism implodes, the people might just as readily turn to a Fascist leader.
It's a vast country with many kinds of people, and a lot of people would have
to be doing a hell of a lot of organizing in every community to help the people
transition to a decentralized, cooperative, non financialized way of life,
plus, you'd have to have a way of disbanding and neutralizing the militarized
police and the Military.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, September 02, 2017 2:11 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Antifa and Leftists Organize Mutual Aid and
Rescue Networks in Houston
So Miriam, maybe this article helps your search for how we build a People's
Government. Small groups of people, each working in their own corner, joining
hands during these more and more frequent disasters, and beginning to realize
that we, the common American People, are able to put together a superior
support network than can the Empire's Ruling Class. Once we get past fussing
over the names of all of these small clusters, and stop buying into the
Empire's propaganda that these are Terrorist organizations, maybe then we'll
wake up to the fact that we really don't need the Billionaires. Then we will
find that we no longer need to listen to their Fake News, or to their annoying
commercials. Remember, Freedom rises up from the Ground. Oppression comes
from the top down.
It's taken a long time to get into this mess, so it will take some time and
patience before we can see the other side. But this "natural disaster"
and the Human Beauty that has come shining out, from so many caring, selfless
people joining hands and serving without question, without discriminating or
needing to report anyone to the authorities.
All my earlier glum posts aside, I do believe that Americans are waking up!
Carl Jarvis
On 9/1/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Antifa and Leftists Organize Mutual Aid and Rescue Networks in Houston
By Candice Bernd, Truthout | Report
Members of the West Street Response Team in Houston, Texas. (Courtesy:
Andrew Cobb)
"It's been a hell of a few days," says Andrew Cobb, whose house in
Houston's Fifth Ward was spared the brunt of Hurricane Harvey's flood
waters. His decentralized, grassroots relief effort called the "West
Street Response Team" started with a simple scouting mission to a
nearby flood plain across Highway 59 on Sunday.
After he and his roommates arrived at the location, they began
coordinating with neighbors from the area on social media to find
specific addresses of people needing rescue. They paddled more than
two miles out in an inflatable kayak to make their first rescue of a
mother and son, who they brought back to their own home to shelter for
a few days.
"We posted about that and there was just a huge response, with some
videos from that. And so, people were like, 'What can we do? What's
up?' And I was like, 'We need boats. We need trucks. We need to get out
there, and ...
people just responded in a big way," Cobb tells me over the phone
after nightfall -- the only time when his team isn't actively on
rescue dispatch
-- earlier this week.
The group started formally raising money, and their house has since
been transformed into a volunteer dispatch base running several rescue
operations each day, including the rescue of a woman who was low on
oxygen, whom they paddled and drove across town to another set of
volunteers who got her across the final leg to a home with an oxygen
concentrator.
Cobb's team's activities aren't limited to rescues. They have also
been working to drop food, water, clothing and dog food for stray
animals to shelters and to certain drop-off spots at cross streets in his
area.
Cobb is just one of many Texans braving Houston's rapids from sun-up
to sun-down to organize decentralized rescues in the early days of
Hurricane Harvey's devastation. Pre-Harvey, he organized with a local
Food Not Bombs chapter and with the Society of Native Nations to
oppose Energy Transfer Partner's Trans-Pecos pipeline in far West Texas.
His work providing homeless people with food via Food Not Bombs has
amplified his disgust for the journalists and city officials
ridiculing Houstonians for providing for themselves during a time of crisis.
"Calling it 'looting' is just such an absurdity when you have no food
in the neighborhood. So, people were getting what they need, but we
were hearing that supplies were limited, and the closest real grocery
store was Fiesta, and there was a four-hour line to get in," Cobb
says. "It's a food desert in normal times, and right now it's even
more so."
His team is already working with outside groups from Austin to
coordinate resources, including acquiring more technical gear for
rescues, in the coming days. It's a sign of the emerging coalitions
among leftists, radicals and anarchists, including those involved in
antifascist organizing, that are beginning to solidify in the wake of
Harvey. While Cobb says his response team opposes facism and supports
a diversity of tactics, they do not identify specifically as antifa.
But many other leftists, including those who do identify as antifa,
are poised, ready and waiting, for the water to recede to begin
providing direct relief.
According to Scott Crow, anarchist, author and cofounder of the
decentralized Common Ground Collective that provided relief and aid to
those most in need almost exactly 12 years ago during Hurricane
Katrina in New Orleans, grassroots distribution centers and clinics
for Harvey victims are already cropping up.
Moreover, he says, a lot of people in antifascist networks have acted
as first responders, including activists with groups focusing on rural
areas like the anarchist-inspired Red Neck Revolt, who are working to
build distribution centers in Houston's Third and Fifth Ward.
Organizers with Austin Common Ground Relief, who helped build the
original Common Ground Collective in New Orleans, went into Houston
with boats this week to bring in gasoline, water, food and other
supplies, and are currently coordinating more volunteers each day.
"This is how we build liberatory communities, because we can't rely on
the government," Crow tells Truthout. "Disasters show us the failures
of government and large entities like the Red Cross every time. ... It
creates a crisis, and what you see is, the government cannot fill the void."
In Houston, that void is not just being filled by radicals like Cobb,
but hundreds of everyday Houstonians conducting search-and-rescue
missions using personal boats and kayaks. Whether or not they know it,
they too are engaging in mutual aid and direct action.
The autonomous coalitions already forming across Texas are set to grow
into the type of coordinated effort that occurred after the
government's disastrous response to Hurricane Sandy, the largest
hurricane on record for the Atlantic coast. In response to the storm,
activists built the grassroots disaster relief network Occupy Sandy.
Now, organizers with Occupy Sandy are raising money for water
filtration systems to be deployed in Houston in the coming days.
"This is not to just fill in for the state, where it's failing, but
actually to begin to take control and self-determine our lives again
in each of these communities," Crow says. "[Mutual aid] creates spaces
where people can take the power back. Decentralized grassroots efforts
are one of those ways. You can go, 'We don't need to wait on somebody
to rescue us.' You build a search-and-rescue base, and then we begin
to rescue ourselves."
Crow told Truthout that what he saw when he initially went to Houston
just after Harvey made landfall looked a lot like what he saw in New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: hundreds of miles of inlands flooded,
a patchy and failing response from the government -- and anarchists
and radicals diving in.
"You have all these anarchist networks that have existed before
Katrina, strengthened through Katrina, and have continued after
disaster after disaster in the United States, and now they ... are
ready to be the boots on the ground," he said.
One of those anarchist groups is Houston's Anarchist Black Cross
(ABC), whose members have been acting as first responders, and working
to share resources and information. ABC has also been leading a
"call-in" drive to prisons and jails on behalf of prisoners and
families affected by Harvey, including those from county jails that have not
been evacuated.
"[Prison officials] were just relocating prisoners deeper into a
mandatory evacuated county," says ABC member and Houstonian Lena M.
She requested her last name be withheld, fearing potential targeting
over her anarchist organizing. "While we've been stuck in our houses,
we've been reminding people not to forget about the prisoners because
you're doubly vulnerable if you can't move voluntarily."
Lena and other organizers stressed that Harvey has united various
factions of leftist activists to work together to keep one another
accountable, and to ensure that donations and funding are kept within
the communities that need them the most, rather than going to support
overhead for large aid organizations like the Red Cross.
"Lots of groups that have had issues in the past, just personality
conflicts, are coming together right now because it's better to have a
fund run by somebody that you know, and that you can hold accountable
whether or not you interpersonally like them. I think we all recognize
that there's a lot of big groups that are coming in and setting up
these funds and we don't know where any of that money goes," she said.
According to an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, the American Red
Cross only built six homes for displaced Haitians after the earthquake
there in
2010 despite raising a half a billion dollars. The organization has
been similarly criticized for its poor track record and lack of
transparency after Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Isaac. In fact, the
organization's reputation has become so tarnished that Facebook has
even decided to steer donations toward other charities on its platform.
"Groups like Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, United Way and all the
big groups ... don't really look at those most marginalized --
immigrant communities, rural communities, prisoners," says Crow. "So,
the decentralized efforts, especially the ones that are much more
liberatory or anarchist-inspired, they are putting those communities
at the forefront of what they are doing, and it's all different kinds
of people who are coming into those communities who are directly
affected right now. There's a difference in that. It's not savior mentality.
Everyone is in it together.
That's where the mutual aid comes in."
Among the grassroots organizations focusing on communities of color is
the Dallas-based Black Women's Defense League (BWDL) -- "a
revolutionary womanist coalition that provides political education,
self-defense training, and resources and rescue to abused, underserved
[B]lack women and marginalized genders."
BWDL is working with its sister organization, World on My Shoulders,
to gather donations and supplies from the Dallas-Fort Worth area and
deliver them to communities of color in Southeast Texas.
"What we're doing is making sure those donations are being centered
and focused on communities of color, and communities that are often
left without or aren't really targeted as much. We're dealing with a
lot of folks in Port Arthur [a city east of Houston] right now," says
BWDL Founder Niecee X, who also worked to provide relief to people in
New Orleans after Katrina.
She says BWDL has been directing crews and teams to conduct rescues,
and will be setting up in neighborhoods of color this week to provide
supplies like diapers and hygiene products. "A lot of times the issues
that women are dealing with are not really put to the forefront in
rescue situations, and so we're going to be out there with hygiene
products and all of that, but also just with a nice face," she told
Truthout.
Other grassroots groups are focusing on the undocumented communities
who have been rendered even more vulnerable after the Texas
Legislature's passage of SB4. While a federal court recently blocked
the law from taking effect today, it may still ultimately be upheld.
Among the groups providing crucial support to these communities is the
Fe y Justicia Workers Center, LatinaTransTexas, RAICES and the South Texas
Human Rights Center.
Additionally, street medic teams, which traditionally work to provide
first aid during protests, are readying themselves. Debra Elliff, a
street medic with the Houston-based Bayou Action Street Health (BASH).
She tells Truthout that members of the medic collective are working to
coordinate incoming street medics and EMTs from across the US and
Canada, and plugging them into areas where they are needed.
According to Elliff, BASH is actively coordinating with Cobb's West
Street Response Team in the Fifth Ward, as well as the BWDL and World
on My Shoulders. In the coming weeks, she says, it's likely they will
work to set up temporary clinics where medics will work to ensure
Houstonians have access to their prescriptions and to doctors, and
will provide first aid and preventative care.
Elliff herself has been busy giving rides to dialysis patients,
checking blood pressures and blood sugars, and making sure her
neighbors have their medications.
"Right now, it looks like the main need is, and always has been, in
lower economic status, predominantly and historically Black
communities that are underserved in general," Elliff says. "This is a really
long-term project.
A
lot of people come in, and they get that charge from that initial, 'I
pulled somebody from the water. I rescued this person, or that
person,' and that absolutely needs to be done, but when the waters
recede and the homes are devastated and the people are devastated,
that's when the long-term healing and recovery work begins. So, medics
stay."
Radical organizers Truthout spoke with expressed nuanced views on the
government's response to Harvey, calling Houston Mayor Sylvester
Turner's decision not to evacuate the right move, but condemning his
emphasis on preventing "looting." They also condemned the federal
government's response to the disaster -- from its decision to keep
border checkpoints open during the storm to President Trump's recent visit.
Cobb and others suspect the government's response has been stronger in
wealthier areas of the city, mirroring what happened 12 years ago
during Hurricane Katrina. At the same time, he is "extremely grateful
for whatever government response was there because we could do fuck
all against what was needed."
Still Cobb says he's been amazed to witness the compassion and
strength of his neighbors and of average Houstonians amid the ongoing crisis.
"Looking at our current government that's building walls and borders,
and overtly supporting white supremacy, it's amazing ... just the
conversations on boats and in the waters and in the car. People have
been so happy and gracious and just like, 'This is what we need. We
need each other. We don't need all this noise, and all this hate. We
just got to look out for each other,'" he says.
Lena M. echoed his sentiments about what she has witnessed in Houston.
"It's anarchists who take care of each other and who don't worry about
how things are going to get paid for and to value people's lives over
property,"
she said. "With the chain of command disintegrating with these
volunteer relief efforts ... that is anarchism, that is mutual aid.
... It's been a really gorgeous sight even in a lot of heartbreak, a
lot of death and a lot of fear."
For a more comprehensive list of decentralized groups working to
provide relief in southeast Texas, visit "A Just Harvey Recovery" from
Another Gulf Is Possible.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Candice Bernd
Candice Bernd is an editor/staff reporter at Truthout, and a
contributor to Truthout's anthology on police violence, Who Do You
Serve, Who Do You Protect? With her partner, she wrote and produced
Don't Frack With Denton, a documentary chronicling how their hometown
became the first city to ban fracking in Texas, and its subsequent
overturn in the state legislature.
She
received the Dallas Peace and Justice Center's "Media Accountability
of the Year" award in December. Follow her on Twitter: @CandiceBernd.
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