Enough

This video gave me a little excitement about local actions, thought I’d pass it along.

From Indu, a message about how to donate and what is going on:

**please forward widely**

14 million people have now been affected by the flooding in Pakistan. Recent reports state that the carnage is worse than the 2004 Tsunami and the earthquake in Haiti.

The situation is getting worse by the hour as monsoon rains continue and water is washing down from the Himalaya Mountains. The international response to the flood is underwhelming, the UN has launched an appeal for $459m, to date, five countries – Britain, the US, Australia, Italy and Kuwait – have committed or pledged more than $5m in new funding. Currently, the amount of international aid that is committed does not scratch the surface of the need on the ground. (more…)

I thought this PBS story about people living in small houses might be of interested to some. It is a rare opportunity to see discussion about the difference between “need” and “want” in the media.

My colleague at Seattle University, Tayyab Mahmud, was featured at a symposium in Cleveland.  You can watch his presentation by scrolling forward to 1:02 in the video. His slides are packed with interesting information and statistics, they are slides 832-938 and you can scroll through them on the right.  One quote of particular interest that he included:

“The 2008-2009 bailout ‘has turned out to be one of the largest redistributions of wealth in such a short time in history…’” (quoting Joseph Stiglitz, slide 905).

Hello! Did anyone else feel a little demolished by Detroit? Amazing but exhausting. But I underwent a transformation at the U.S. Social Forum (at first I thought it was just regular emotional meltdown, but now I’m reconceptualizing it as transformation in honor of the USSF), a result of not eating or sleeping enough, doing too much, and extending myself far beyond my limits. The nonstop intensity was punctuated by moments of deep awe and inspiration, and since coming home I’ve been thinking so much about care and healing and community-building and how important they are as tools for movements. I was confronted with some important truths about my body’s capacity, in a space where I also got to be amazed by incredible organizers and healers and workshops about trauma, somatics, healing justice, accessibility and disability justice, and building communities of support and care. Exposure to all that amazingness can change a person! I’m landing back home committed to prioritizing those things even more, both in my life and my organizing. And not in a lip service-y way – in a real way.

I’ve been having great conversations about the multiplicity of forms that capitalism (patriarchy/ableism/colonization…) takes in our lives - like how easy it is for many of us to push ourselves too hard, to value tangible productivity over art, creativity, emotions, healing trauma, building relationships. I was talking the other day with my wonderful friend Susan about shifting paradigms, building communities rooted in interdependence. She observed that as much as we all now talk about interdependence, most of us don’t fully experience that in our current society – we get to taste pieces of it that leave us with questions and ideas. A lot of our work right now is about turning those ideas into tools and building them into strategies, practicing living the way we want to live in the world we want to live in.

For now, in the interest of ideas, I want to share some links that have been inspiring me lately:

First, I’ve been very obsessed with the Storytelling and Organizing Project website – they have tons of amazing audio recordings about community interventions in interpersonal violence. So important.

And Tiny’s piece about POOR Magazine’s time in Detroit:

In the U.S. we are all conditioned on the capitalist notion of independence, which demands separation of families from their elders, children from their parents and youth from their cultures…Our work as mamaz and fathers and grandfathers and grandmothers isn’t honored or considered. Our abilities to grow our own food, build our own houses, or comfort our folks, practice our traditions, honor our ancestors, take care of our elders – these aren’t considered “legitimate” forms of labor or real forms of work.

Also this recent post on Bilerico about building intersectional queer movements:

…collectivizing our movement strategies to get to the root of these issues is going to require that we share power, resources and remain authentically and deeply invested in one another’s individual and collective liberation. A tall order indeed when movement organizations and leadership are tied to a corporate funding system designed exquisitely to keep us from engaging in the hard conversations and ally building across communities that would bring us in strategic concert with one another.

And I’ve been wanting to link to this piece by Mia for so long but I keep forgetting. Everything she writes is amazing: Interdependency (exerpts from several talks)

We believe and swallow ableist notions that people should be “independent,” that we would never want to have to have a nurse, or not be able to drive, or not be able to see, or hear.  We believe that we should be able to do things on our own and push our selves (and the law) hard to ensure that we can.   We believe ableist heteronormative ideas that families should function as independent little spheres.  That I should just focus on MY family and make sure MY family is fed, clothed and provided for; that MY family inherits MY wealth; that families should not be dependent on the state or anyone else; that they should be “able-bodied,” essentially. We believe the ableist heteronormative racist classist myth that marriage, “independence” as sanctified through the state, is what we want because it allows us to be more “independent,” more “equal” to those who operate as if they are independent—That somehow, this makes us more “able.”

My favorite sociologist just sent me this link to an animation of part of a speech by David Harvey. Fun to watch. I wish someone would animate all the best speeches and articles so that more people would access them and enjoy them.

Also, here’s an article I wrote for the queer issue of Tikkun about the wealth redistribution and queer politics.

I just learned about this site which seems like a nice tool for starting conversations about wealth distribution and class. It doesn’t address stored wealth (like, I can imagine college students who don’t have jobs and are supported by their rich families and stand to inherit a lot putting in their income to happily discover that they aren’t rich), but it still seems like a useful intervention.  Also, I just stumbled across this new comic book about the economic crash.  I read it cover to cover in the bookstore cafe, thinking about whether it would be good to assign to my Poverty Law students since it both covers a lot of ground in terms of economic policy and describes social movement resistance work.

I’ve seen more cops on my block in the past 24 hours than I have in months – a series of fights and muggings have brought them out in ever-increasing force, reminding me vividly that I have been wanting to write about violence, about crisis and trauma in communities, and all the ways we deal with those things. I’m thinking about this in the context of the US Social Forum and the Allied Media Conference on the horizon, the convergence of so many queer/POC/women-led groups doing powerful anti-violence work (lots of links embedded towards the end of this post), and also in the context of my own relationship to violence and safety as a white person, as a trans person, as a person with class privilege, as a person read as female, as a survivor. (more…)

Hello! I just got back from the Bay Area where among many things I had the pleasure of co-hosting a house party for POOR Magazine, and it reminded me that I should post that interview/conversation I did with Tiny in the last issue of make/shift. So here it is! Though you should really buy the magazine – you get lots of other amazing articles, plus an extra cute and dorky picture of me and Tiny.

Hi friends, I wanted to pass along two links.  First, this article that talks about how the gap between Black and white household accumulated wealth quadrupled from 1984 to 2007.  Second, this link to the Democracy Now coverage of the ongoing strike at the  University of Puerto Rico.