This semester I’m teaching Poverty Law at Seattle U. Law. It has been a fun and challenging task to put together a syllabus and decide what should be included in a class covering such a broad topic. So much of what is taught in law school I would consider rich people’s law and so much of what poverty lawyers do in the day-to-day is not covered in law school courses or tested on the bar exam. Trying to create a class that might address all the enormous constant legal issues faced by poor people (eviction, criminalization, child welfare, public assistance, old age benefits, immigration, low-wage work, Medicaid, consumer rights, credit, gentrification, etc.) and all the ways that the law structures our economic relations to create poverty is daunting. Continue reading “Teaching Poverty Law”
CR10 and creating alternatives
I’m still coming down from CR10, which was huge and great and filled with more amazing things than I could have possibly absorbed. I ended the conference feeling inspired and tired and reminded of how important it is to incorporate prison abolition into all the social justice work we do.
There were a lot of highlights, but a big one was the opening plenary – which had an amazing lineup of speakers and performers including Andrea Smith, whose speeches always feel like a really good chiropractic adjustment for my brain (everything coming back into alignment with really intense sensations but it feels SO good); and Destiny Arts, who RULED the stage so hard with their tight dance moves after Andrea Smith’s amazing talk that I was kind of having an out-of-body experience from the excitement of it all. Also Miss Major made me so proud of queer and trans social justice organizers everywhere and Suheir Hammad made me (and everyone around me) cry.
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Returning class action funds to the global justice movement
Thanks to Emily Nepon for sending me this link last week (which I forgot to post in the craziness of economy drama and CR10):
Money to Movements: Distributing Class Action Funds to Global Justice ProjectsÂ
Protesters arrested in Seattle during the 1999 WTO protest created a fund to donate the settlements they received to social justice organizations.
David Solnit, A co-founder of the Direct Action Network and an organizer of the nonviolent direct action shutdown of the WTO’s opening day said, “These funds were won from a struggle for global justice. We wanted to make sure that a portion of those funds were put back into those struggles.” Â
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Scarcity Art
I thought others might enjoy this video documenting a recent performance of one of my favorite artists, Emma Hedditch, which touches on issues of scarcity, public/private, collaboration and support.
INCITE! on LaBruzzo and the economy
Check out this response to Representative LaBruzzo (the rep I wrote about yesterday who wants to sterilize poor women) from the New Orleans Women’s Health and Justice Initiative and the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic. (affiliates of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence) It breaks down the scapegoating of Black and poor women as a distraction from the real issues that force people into poverty in the first place:
Even if sterilization is voluntary, POVERTY IS NOT! Poverty, economic insecurity, and lack of sustainable livelihood can cause a woman to consider this aggressive sterilization incentive a viable option.
LaBruzzo talks about poverty as though it were an infectious disease—a though poor people will eventually make everyone poor—rather than a condition people are condemned to by Louisiana’s lack of investment in education, employment, affordable housing, and quality health care programs, services, and resources.
LaBruzzo uses a myth of scarcity to argue that if economic resources are shared with everyone, no one will have enough. The reality is that if the lion’s share of our economic resources stopped being used for unnecessary military spending and corporate welfare, such as the Wall Street bailout, then all our communities would have access to the resources and opportunities they need to survive and thrive!
Welfare for corporations, eugenics for poor people
I’m in California tonight for the Critical Resistance conference that starts tomorrow, preparing for this amazing event while also consuming a ton of media trying to understand what’s happening with the economy right now. Â
I’ve found useful resources and action alerts on United For a Fair Economy and United for Peace and Justice, and I’ve been thinking about how important it is to understand our economic situation. The media is telling us that the circumstances leading to this massive corporate bailout are too complicated for us to grasp and trying to scare us into going along with the Bush administration’s incredibly unjust plan. There’s a lot I want to learn about how all this went down – but corruption, theft, and increasingly extreme inequality are simple enough to understand.
Continue reading “Welfare for corporations, eugenics for poor people”
On gentrification and homownersexuals
Check out the new piece we just posted over in the articles sections -Â Reflections from a Homownersexual: Buying and Selling a House with Anti-Capitalist Intentions, by Emily Nepon. Nepon writes about the process of co-purchasing a house in a Black, working-class Philadelphia neighborhood as a white radical queer, living in it collectively with a rotating group of friends for several years, and then later selling it; and explores the challenges and contradictions of doing it all with anti-gentrification and anti-capitalist intentions.
A grassroots response to support New Orleans evacuees
I wanted to follow up on the last post I wrote – particularly the part about funding grassroots organizing in New Orleans – by sharing a really cool experience I had this week.
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Continue reading “A grassroots response to support New Orleans evacuees”
New Orleans on my mind.
I’ve spent a lot time in the past few days thinking about New Orleans. Yesterday was the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – three years ago, major parts of the Gulf Coast were under water, people were stranded, drowning, and dying of thirst, and the government responded with violence and military occupation. Â Â
Notes from a Wealth Redistribution Consciousness-Raising Dinner Party
Last November, Jess and Dean worked on putting together a dinner party that would function as a kind of group consciousness-raising session about wealth redistribution. We invited a number of friends, several who did not know each other but were connected socially through us and others. The group we invited included people from a range of class experiences and current circumstances. We created the event based on the idea that a key way to make change around wealth redistribution is to start conversations in our intimate circles that are overtly aimed at being non-judgmental and where people can address fears and concerns and teach each other models and ideas for addressing them. Continue reading “Notes from a Wealth Redistribution Consciousness-Raising Dinner Party”