Homelessness – a crime
Affluent college students set up tents, cardboard boxes and crates on private property housed in their makeshift “shanty town,” as a protest against the plight of homeless people. Living outdoors for a night – food, toilets and police protection readily available – this camping offers protection for a night spent in full view of the public.
A ragtag group of people huddles under a highway bridge, cars thundering overhead, setting up tents and a few belongings. They are waiting out a storm. It will likely be a few days before the rain finally stops, so they are grateful for the protection and a measure of privacy in a public place.
The first group will pass the night in relative calm after the TV cameras leave. The second group will be invaded by police, issuing citations before forcing them back into the storm to look for some other shelter, possibly leading to more tickets. Both situations describe people creating their own shelter. The reason they are treated so differently is economic profiling. Like other forms of profiling – targeting individuals for suspicion because of their race, faith or nationality – economic profiling uses the appearance of poverty as a basis of suspicion.
Auntie Imperial:
I put this up on Indymedia
This is MY War!
Where I’ve lived for the last thirty five years… Santa Cruz California, I’ve watched this city, via it’s housing and development policies, make it’s working class homeless, jobless, and criminalized the resultant social behaviors (camping etc) that occur when you displace people.
They are in the process of attempting to destroy some of the few activities that cross socio-economic boundaries as well.
I’ve had footage of that activity on YouTube for a while now, with my perspective on it in the information area.
I also have footage of what happened when they tried to break it up by force. (playlist)
They were NOT expecting that reaction at all, cornered against a wall by an angry crowd, and they did not try that again.
Take it easy… But TAKE it!
25 April 2010, 12:07 pmAuntie Imperial
Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:
America HATES the poor because the poor are LOSERS and AMERICA NEVER LOSES!!!
Also, we’re not really comfortable with what our own role in the plight of others is or might be.
I don’t know how well known the struggle Orlando Food not Bombs has had with the City (home to the “happiest place on Earth,” after all), but it’s redonk. Illegal to share food in a public park, and my friend Eric Montanez was arrested for *ladling*. In Dec, the case went to the federal appeals court in Atlanta, but we still await the ruling. We have won every time so far and the next step would be the supreme court, if they decide to hear the case.
Beating the State on it’s home court feels fucking good!!!
26 April 2010, 1:00 pmCurt:
Racism, Poverty, Welfare and The Lottery:
10 May 2010, 8:10 amRemembering>
When I was about half the age that I am now I was quite active in Libertarian Party activities. During this period I seem to only remember meeting one person in the LP who was explicitly racist. During this period I also now and then read the newspaper of the movement led by Louis Farrakhan so I had been exposed to the idea that almost all whites are racists even though some of them may not be aware of it. But the paper said that some whites are racist due to ignorance and some are do to I forget exactly how it was phrased but the point was that those who were racists due to ignorane were at least salvagable.
With that in mind I want to get to the views of many Rockwell and Rothbardian Libertarians concerning poverty and welfare. Government welfare programs destroy the human traits necessary to succeed (survive?) in a peacful society. To this day I am not sure that I disagree with that idea. When Russel Means ran for the nomination of the LP presidential nomination he did not disagree. A comment he made was the US government does so much wrong that welfare reform is just not the most urgent priority.
Yet even if government welfare is socailly destructive it certianly seems the lesser of the evils compared with private welfare in todays society. What about at some future point?
When I was working as a self employeed newspaper delivery driver I was annoyed. Annoyed by the fact that I was paying taxes and not seeing any benifit for me what so ever. Sure I benifited from the roads but then I had read more than once that the amount of money collected in gasoline taxes exceeded that which was spent for the maintenance and construction of roads. Due to my expierience in US public schools which were aledgedly among the best in the country I had decided that I was not going to send my daughter to a public school yet I did not want to send her to a barely affordable Catholic school either. In short felt that I was being unfairly used. Being self employeed in Maryland even made me inelegible for unemployement benifits. I was a mule for the society as a whole.
So I guess what I am getting to here is that I know recognize a conflict between the responsiblities of the rulers and the desires of the citizens. As a citizen I do not want to be milked. Both libertarians and leftist say that if a society were properly administered the need for welfare would be small. Then if you add to that the libertarian idea that user fees should finance most government serivices and lotteries those few that are left the need to burden a small citizen for the running of the society should be small to non exsistant.
Yet things seldom run smoothly. The rulers have an obligation to treat all their fellow citizens as thier own children. Now I do not know of any parents who have a child who becomes a surgeon who make the surgeon give a portion of his pay to the child who is a librarian. Yet all good parents will do anything they can to make sure that their children and grand children do not starve and do not suffer social indignaties from poverty. They will hopefully have raised their children to look out not only after their own children but to also do what is needed to make sure that their nieces and nephews are not left in an emergency situation. Yet there are limits even for our own children. If our relatives are addicts or criminals and are not making any effort to reform they can and should of course be treated differently. We have quite a bit of knowledge about what is going on in our families. Yet as citizens we have very little knowledge about what goes on in other families unless we spend a lot of time with them.
So a responsible citizen is going to have to recongnize that the rulers are SOMETIMES going to have to do things that will piss him off, IN ORDER TO SERVE THE GENERAL WELFARE OF SOCIETY.
Now back to lotteries and perhaps gambeling. If we have a Parecon society should lotteries and gambleing be allowed? The resources of the world are limited. Not every can live like a duke let alone a king. Some people could live like a Duke or a King. Should we allow some people to live like a duke or a king when not everyone can live like a duke or a king. Is this a dream that should be exterminated from the human mind? Is this a dream that should be kept alive even if the hope of such an outcome is extraordinarily small?
Does the damage that lotteries do to the poor outweigh the benifit to the society that is achieved by the state recieving a source of income that is not recieved by twisting anyones arm? Fraud does not twist anyones arm either, is the lottery a type of fraud? What about Casinos? Casinos in America seem to be Chief Joseph’s revenge. Or perhaps I am wrong about that. Perhaps casinos damage the native Americans as much as the European eindringlings.
Are these question irrelevent because a state can exsist forever on deficit spending? Is that the one secret that we can all learn from Vice President Lon Cheney?
You will have to fill in the blanks between the paraghraphs.