Wealth inequality in the U.S. has continued to widen during the pandemic.
Archive for category: Uncategorized
On the evening of October 31, 2020, Steve Bannon told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night—even if he was losing. Trump knew that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for him in key states. His “strategy” was to use this fact to assert that he had won, while claiming that the inevitable shifts in vote totals toward Joe Biden must be the result of fraud, Bannon explained.
“What Trump’s gonna do, is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon, laughing, told the group, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
“He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner.”
“As it sits here today,” Bannon said later in the conversation, describing a scenario in which Trump held an early lead in key swing states, “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that.’”
Trump’s plan to falsely declare victory while tens of millions of votes were still being counted was public knowledge even before the election. Axios reported on the scheme at the time. Bannon himself discussed the idea on November 3—Election Day—on his War Room podcast. Weeks earlier, Bannon had interviewed a former Trump administration official who outlined how Trump would would use allegations of fraud to dispute an electoral defeat and would seek to have Congress declare him the winner. Last month, the congressional committee investigating January 6 detailed how Rudy Giuliani convinced Trump to go ahead with a victory declaration after 2 a.m. on November 4, over the objections of campaign staff. “Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump insisted in that infamous news conference.
The nearly hour-long audio obtained by Mother Jones is new evidence that Trump’s late-night diatribe—which came a few hours later than Bannon had anticipated—followed a preexisting plan to lie to Americans about the election results in a bid to hold onto power. The new recording stands out for the striking candor and detail with which Bannon described a scheme to use lies to subvert democracy. Bannon also predicted that Trump’s false declaration of victory would lead to widespread political violence, along with “crazy” efforts by Trump to stay in office. Bannon and his associates laughed about those scenarios at various points in the recording.
Bannon and his attorney, Robert Costello, did not respond to questions about the recording.
After election day, Bannon became a prominent booster of Trump’s bogus election fraud claims. The Washington Post reported Monday that Bannon’s “vociferous support” for those lies helped convince Trump to grant him a last-minute pardon on unrelated fraud charges. Speaking to Mother Jones, Costello questioned that reporting. He said that as far as he knew, “Trump never made any such statement” linking the pardon to Bannon’s election rhetoric.
Bannon refused last year to cooperate with a January 6 committee subpoena. The Justice Department later charged him with two counts of contempt of Congress. This weekend, he claimed that he now wishes to testify before the committee. But federal prosecutors argued this about face was “irrelevant” to the charges that Bannon had already broken the law. A judge ruled Monday that the trial would go forward next week.
“Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting shit out: ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’”
The pre-election audio comes from a meeting between Bannon and a half dozen supporters of Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese mogul for whom Bannon has worked. Bannon helped Guo launch a series of pro-Trump Chinese-language news websites that have promoted an array of far-right misinformation, including a video streaming site called GTV. The meeting was intended to help GTV plan its election night coverage.
Though he did not attend, Guo arranged the confab, which was held in the Washington, DC, townhouse where Bannon tapes War Room, according to a person who was present. That source recorded the meeting and recently provided the audio to Mother Jones. The attendees included Dr. Li Meng Yan, a virologist who had made unsubstantiated claims that Covid was designed by China as a bioweapon—claims Bannon had helped to propagate. Also there was Wang Dinggang, a GTV host who had helped to spread false claims about Hunter Biden.
Speaking to this group of mostly Chinese immigrants, Bannon explained US electoral processes—and Trump’s plans to exploit them—in some detail. He emphasized that in 2020, Republicans were more likely to vote in person, casting ballots that, in many states, would be counted first. Democrats disproportionately voted by mail. Their ballots would take days to tally in a number of states. That meant that when it came to public perceptions about who was winning, Democrats would “have a natural disadvantage,” Bannon said. “And Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.”
“So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm,” Bannon continued. “You’re going to have antifa, crazy. The media, crazy. The courts are crazy. And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting shit out: ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’”
It’s not clear how much influence Bannon, who had previously been Trump’s top White House strategist before being ousted, really wielded over Trump at this time. But Bannon has suggested that he was a key architect of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results and has reportedly asserted that he convinced Trump to make January 6 a moment of reckoning in that bid. Bannon was also among the Trump associates who gathered in a set of rooms and suites in the Willard Hotel on January 6 to advise on the president’s attempt to remain in power.
Bannon’s remarks to Guo’s supporters indicate that he was working with a group, led by Giuliani, that wanted Trump to take particularly aggressive steps to contest unfavorable election results. Other advisers have said they opposed these steps. Bannon said during the October 31 meeting that he was collaborating closely with Giuliani, who was preparing to oversee Trump’s planned legal efforts.
Bannon’s meeting with Guo’s associates occurred a few weeks after Bannon, working with Giuliani, had provided the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop to the New York Post. Bannon acknowledged in the recording that he had also helped supply Guo supporters with this material. As Mother Jones has reported, Guo then directed his backers to put sex videos and other salacious content from the laptop online. Bannon praised Guo’s effort during the meeting, saying it had helped slow Biden’s momentum. That left Biden with little prospect of a resounding election night victory that Trump wouldn’t easily be able to contest, Bannon added.
As a result, any chance for a “peaceful resolution of this is probably gone,” Bannon said. “Because the other three alternatives [are], either Biden’s up slightly and Trump says he stole it, right, and he’s not leaving. Or it’s undefined and we can’t figure out who’s leading, and Trump’s saying he’s stealing it, and he’s not leaving. Or, Trump’s leading, which is the one where they’re gonna burn the city down.”
Bannon expressed the belief that Trump actually winning would lead to violence by the left. But he also said that Trump falsely claiming he’d won—a strategy Bannon was cheering on—would probably cause violence too. And Bannon emphasized that election night would mark the start of a battle for power in which Trump would try to stop the votes of people who opposed him from being counted, while Democrats would try to use invalid ballots to defeat him. Democrats, Bannon claimed, “steal elections all the time.”
Election Day 2020 would not be like others, Bannon said. “This is a revolution,” he explained. “This election just triggers more fighting.”
Bannon also said during this meeting that once the voting was done, Trump would be unencumbered by electoral pressure. “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again,” Bannon said. “He’s gonna fire [Christopher] Wray, the FBI director…He’s gonna say ‘Fuck you. How about that?’ Because…he’s done his last election. Oh, he’s going to be off the chain—he’s gonna be crazy.”
Bannon also said he expected that Trump would quickly fire CIA Director Gina Haspel, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Heath and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right there and say, ‘They stole it. I’m directing the attorney general to shut down all ballot places in all 50 states,’” Bannon said. “He’s not going out easy. If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.”
By Greg Woodfield, June 24, 2022
“Pro-abortion ‘terror group’ Jane’s Revenge – which has vowed a ‘Night of Rage’ over the repeal of Roe v. Wade – is most likely a loose-knit assembly of ‘anarchist’ cells, according to a security expert.
The shadowy group relies on inciting people to vandalize and torch pro-life clinics and facilities through calls to arms on its website, says Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, a Washington, DC-based think tank.
Jane’s Revenge has already firebombed crisis pregnancy centers in the wake of the the Supreme Court draft opinion leak last month that revealed the court planned to overturn a woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion.”
Monday, Fox News host Martha MacCallum put up a graphic of the latest 2024 presidential poll from the NY Times/Siena College between President Biden and Trump showing Biden is ahead.
MacCallum asked Devin Nunes about the latest numbers to gauge his reaction.
“This is the poll for the 2024 presidential election, if it were held today who would you vote for, 44% Biden, 41% Trump,” MacCallum noted.
Nunes, a supreme Trump sycophant, refused to answer her question, instead veering off into proclaiming that no other candidate could beat him in a Republican presidential primary.
That’s not what MacCallum asked so it must be hitting a sore spot for MAGA. And Ron DeSantis may have a say in who runs in 2024.
There’s not a lot of good news in the latest poll for the Democratic Party, either party really, with the country still reeling from COVID systemic shortages and supply chain issues.
But I still found this very interesting
Yet, when all voters were asked to choose between Biden and Trump in a hypothetical matchup, Biden nonetheless held a small lead over Trump, 44 percent to 41 percent.
When governments make decisions, economic considerations often trump everything else — human well-being, social connections, the health of the environment. According to a new report from the United Nations, this imbalance is driving the global biodiversity crisis and the human suffering associated with it.
“Despite the diversity of nature’s values,” the report says, “most policymaking approaches have prioritized a narrow set of values at the expense of both nature and society, as well as future generations.” It calls for elected officials to take into account a much broader array of values that prioritize sustainability and human thriving.
The far-reaching assessment comes from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES. The group of 82 experts periodically collates research and makes recommendations to stem the accelerating loss of nature, much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does for global warming.
The IPBES’s latest report, written over four years, represents a unique attempt to evaluate the varied lenses through which humans view the natural world. Many of these so-called “values of nature” exist outside standard economics, like nature’s well-established psychological benefits. But the report finds that these values have been overshadowed by a shallow set of profit-and-loss considerations: “market-based instrumental values of nature,” as the report puts it, citing nature’s capacity to produce massive quantities of food as an example. Nearly three-quarters of all the studies that IPBES reviewed, published between 2010 and 2020, focused on these market-based values.
Ignoring nature’s broader benefits has helped plunge the world into a biodiversity crisis, the report says. More than 1 million species of plants and animals are at risk of extinction, and deforestation caused the annual loss of nearly 250 million acres of forests each year between 2015 and 2020. A separate report released last week by the IPBES suggests that these losses could have profound consequences for people, as wild species support the lives and livelihoods of more than half of the world’s population.
Although the most recent report doesn’t focus on any one country, snubbing nature’s nonmonetary benefits has stymied U.S. environmental action, too. When the Congressional Budget Office began providing cost-focused analyses on legislation for the environment, poverty, and health in the 1970s, it eroded the moral justification for such efforts. By the 1990s, this approach had opened the door to fossil fuel industry-funded research that made environmental action look prohibitively expensive.
To change the paradigm, the IPBES authors recommend four broad ways of considering our relationship with the natural world: “living from,” “living with,” “living in,” and “living as” nature. These frameworks encourage decision-makers to take into account not only what nature can provide to humans, but also the way it fosters a sense of identity and spiritual fulfillment. “Living with nature” also recognizes that other species have a right to thrive, regardless of any “value” they provide to humans.
“Shifting decision-making towards the multiple values of nature is a really important part of the system-wide transformative change needed to address the global biodiversity crisis,” said Patricia Balvanera, a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a co-chair of the assessment, in a statement. “This entails redefining ‘development’ and ‘good quality of life’ and recognizing the multiple ways people relate to each other and to the natural world.”
One illustrative example comes from South American Indigenous communities, whose notion of Buen Vivir — “good living” — has informed rights-of-nature movements to protect rivers, forests, and wild species from development. Just this March, legislation in Panama recognized nature’s legal right to “exist, persist, and regenerate its life cycles” and to “be restored” after people have damaged it
The report comes amid growing recognition of the need to prioritize varied worldviews. Last year, a report commissioned by the U.K. Treasury found that an excessive focus on yardsticks like economic growth is putting the world at “extreme risk” of ecological breakdown. Separately, U.N. climate scientists have begun to incorporate Indigenous perspectives into their influential assessment reports, recognizing the role that Indigenous people can play in the global effort to ramp down greenhouse gas emissions.
For the IPBES report, the authors drew from more than 13,000 references, including scientific papers as well as from Indigenous people and local communities. “Recognizing and respecting the worldviews, values, and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples and local communities allows policies to be more inclusive, which also translates into better outcomes for people and nature,” said Brigitte Baptiste, a biologist at Universidad Ean in Colombia who co-chaired the assessment, in a statement. The report calls for increased “citizen engagement” to help people articulate and realize more values than monetary ones.
The group’s findings come ahead of the next meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty, scheduled to take place in Montreal, Canada, in December. There, negotiators from 193 countries will set the next decade of nature goals that they can bring back to their governments.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nature is in crisis. A UN report says short-sighted economics is to blame. on Jul 12, 2022.
BlackRock’s in-house research arm is dashing any hope for a perfect economic outcome in the U.S. as more than two decades of relative stability ends.
“Seems bad that the U.S. conservative movement has so wholeheartedly embraced a foreign autocrat who successfully dismantled democracy in his home nation,” said one observer.
Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority just last week took the next step in a little-noticed, but extremely dangerous, project: attempting to jam into law a radical misinterpretation of the Constitution’s elections and electors clauses, which, if successful, would create electoral chaos across the country. Before next summer, and well in advance of the 2024 presidential election, the Court could strip state courts and state constitutions of their ability to check and balance state legislators when they make laws for federal elections, giving partisan majorities near-total control over how voters cast ballots and how those ballots are counted. And it would make the current Court—which already has a horrible track record on voting rights—the ultimate judge of whether the legislatures’ actions are legal.
The notion at the core of their project—the so-called independent-state-legislature theory—is on the fringes of American jurisprudence, so far out there that its few proponents have struggled to dredge up even the barest scraps of case law and history to substantiate it. But its supporters on the Court seem to believe they’ve found a shortcut around all of that with a case named Moore v. Harper, which they’ve just added to the Court’s docket for its term starting this fall.
The appeal traces back to this February, when the North Carolina Supreme Court undid an extreme partisan gerrymander of the state’s congressional map that would have given Republicans a large advantage in races for House seats. Several Republican state legislators asked the Supreme Court to restore the biased map for this spring’s primary elections. Their emergency filings claimed that the North Carolina state supreme court didn’t have the power to even review the legislatively drawn congressional map, despite the fact that the map violated several guarantees in the state’s constitution, because, in their view, neither state courts nor state constitutions should have a say in how federal elections are run.
[James Piltch: North Carolina is a warning]
If the legislators’ theory sounds radical, that’s because it is. It’s based on a stark misreading of the constitutional provisions that assign responsibility for regulating federal elections. Those clauses give that power to the “legislature” of each state (while reserving to Congress the ultimate power to set the rules). Fixating on the term legislature, proponents of the theory insist that the clauses grant exclusive and nearly unlimited power to those legislatures to run federal elections. The ordinary checks and balances of democracy—such as executive officers vetoing laws and courts reviewing and striking down the legislature’s acts—fall by the wayside. The theory would create a vacuum of lawlessness in the most dangerous of places: elections.
Unsurprisingly, the theory was a crucial instrument for would-be election subverters hunting for any lever to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. It was a prominent talking point in President Donald Trump’s public campaign to undercut the validity of the results. In interviews following the election, President Trump himself invoked the theory, saying that “the legislatures of the states did not approve all of the things that were done for those elections.” And it was a key element of the litigation challenging which ballots should be counted in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The Supreme Court rejected these challenges in the fall of 2020, and that should have been the final word on the theory. But Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, wrote a “statement” validating the theory, in addition to dissents and concurrences to similar effect. And they sent the theory back out into the world with new momentum for a quick return. In doing so, these justices had, by the sheer power of their office, converted nonsense hastily cobbled together for desperate legal challenges into a litigation position that wouldn’t lead to the lawyers getting sanctioned. And they emboldened the North Carolina gerrymanderers to try their luck with the U.S. Supreme Court after they struck out with the North Carolina Supreme Court.
In March, the Court declined the legislators’ emergency petition with an unsigned order. But Alito—again joined by Thomas and Gorsuch—issued yet another dissent that all but asked the Republican legislators to file a full appeal to put their gerrymander back in place after the 2022 elections. (A concurrence from Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested much the same.) The legislators obliged just 10 days later with a petition to the Supreme Court citing Alito’s dissent with its own meager citations as their justification. The Court has now repaid the favor by taking their appeal up for argument.
As is true with most decisions to grant a case a hearing, the justices did not explain their reason for taking the case. But Alito’s earlier dissent sheds light on the basic dynamic driving this dispute forward: a few justices actively stumping for an opportunity to turn their musings into law, as soon as possible, no matter how transparently baseless those musings are.
Alito’s dissent framed the theory at the core of the legislators’ appeal as an “exceptionally important and recurring question”—the sort of issue that the Court is normally supposed to step in and decide. But, to the extent that the theory is a “recurring question,” that’s only because these same justices keep talking about it. Indeed, the eight citations Justice Alito offered to support his call to take up the theory don’t show any recurring questions—other than ones that Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch are asking themselves.
Four of Alito’s eight citations were to orders in 2020 election cases, but none of them supports the theory. Three of the four citations point to lawsuits that were based on the theory and were rejected, and the fourth had nothing to do with it. None contains even a shred of language suggesting that the theory might have merit or pointing to legitimate questions about its correctness. The fifth citation was to a concurrence (read: not even the majority view) in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case that the Court itself essentially said should never be cited to resolve any future cases. That concurrence was hastily buried by the Court and lay untouched for decades, until Kavanaugh threw it into a footnote in a concurring opinion from a 2020 election case. The other three were dissents and concurrences from various 2020 elections cases … written by Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch.
[Larry Diamond and Edward B. Foley: The terrifying inadequacy of American election law]
What’s more, Alito’s dissent cites no opinions from trial courts or appellate courts endorsing the theory or demonstrating a conflict among courts about its correctness—one of the most common grounds for the Supreme Court taking a case. And the dissent is devoid of other authorities, such as law-review articles, that a justice might reference to show the outline of a new, but valid, theory.
No wonder. In the two years since these justices have started touting the theory, a flurry of scholarship has debunked it from every conceivable angle: the plain meaning of the Constitution’s text, undisputed history of the founding era, a century of unbroken practice and precedent, and common sense. And there’s no meaningful difference of opinion among the lower courts. The legislators attempted to talk around these issues and beef the theory up in their filings, but their case is no stronger for it.
There’s no good reason, in other words, to believe that a case based on the theory can win. Except a few justices’ assertion that it might.
So when Alito writes that the Court “will have to resolve this question sooner or later,” he isn’t making an observation about the state of the law or some inevitable wave crashing upon the Court. He’s foretelling a crisis he’s creating.
If the Court follows through with transforming the legislators’ theory into law, American democracy will suffer. The theory wouldn’t just give broad license to extreme gerrymanders that would allow politicians to entrench themselves permanently against the voters’ will. It could also create pathways to invalidate basic and essential regulations created by state election officials to ensure that the machinery of elections works and that people can vote securely in emergencies. It could similarly undercut long-running state constitutional protections that shield people from discrimination at the ballot box and let them cast ballots in secret. It would place all the authority for future rule-making in the hands of state legislatures, among the most radically partisan political actors in the country today. It would hobble state courts’ authority to interpret these laws, limit state courts’ ability to review them for lawfulness under state constitutions, and put state courts under the superintendence of the country’s revanchist Supreme Court. That mayhem would result is an understatement.
The Court can still reject this dangerous theory. Only four votes are required to decide to hear a case, but five public votes are necessary to make law. Thus far, the justices have been moving their project forward through its below-the-radar and comparatively barebones emergency-appeals docket. Going forward, though, the case will be on what’s known as the Court’s merits docket, attracting everything that entails: full briefing by the parties (and this case has many of them) and friends of the court, public argument, and months of scrutiny in the press and on social media.
Any justice ultimately seeking to write an opinion in favor of the independent-state-legislature theory will struggle to produce a credible one in the face of the overwhelming facts and law opposing it. Any such opinion will be even more transparently judicial fiat than even the Court’s recent roundly, and rightly, derided opinions expanding gun rights and eliminating constitutional protections for abortion rights.
The task now is to expose the baselessness and the radicalness of these justices’ latest project, as the public awakens to just how dangerous this Court really is, and its reverence for the Court plummets. Then perhaps the justices who have been asking how far they can push things will start asking a different question: How long can they keep propping up the insupportable?
More than two years after ad-hoc networks of collective care sprouted from the cracks of state neglect during the pandemic, mutual aid organizers across the U.S. are convening in Indiana this July to prepare these networks to face crisis, disasters and survival for the long haul.
“To the extent that we engage in this work only as an emergency response, it’s doomed to stay a Band-Aid,” said Shannon Malloy, who is helping plan a “Dual Power 2022” gathering from July 29-31 at Indiana Dunes State and National Parks. “It’s our long-term, larger-scale interconnectedness that makes it more of a long-term viable solution, as opposed to just a way to stop the bleeding.”
Malloy described building mutual aid networks as a tactic in the strategy of constructing “dual power,” defined by the Black Socialists of America as “[a] situation where there are two powers — a democratic one developed by poor and working-class people (defined by direct democracy), and the other one capitalist (defined by domination) — coexisting and competing for legitimacy during a transition away from Capitalism.”
To this end, Woodbine, an experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens, hopes to promote dialogue and cooperation between mutual aid groups for building dual power. In May, Woodbine hosted a regional gathering on “Autonomy and Survival” alongside Symbiosis, a network of grassroots organizations building a democratic and ecological society. Participants agreed to wear masks and take COVID-19 tests prior to attending to eliminate the risk of transmitting the coronavirus. The gathering provided organizers with space for reflecting, sharing and strategizing together to strengthen their projects locally and regionally.
“I think there was a real need for people to finally be able to gather in person to meet new people that they didn’t know or weren’t working with for the last few years to hear about different people’s experiences doing mutual aid work,” said Matt Peterson, a cofounder of Woodbine. “Political organizing, or transformation, is going to occur with real people in a real space. People that know each other have trust. They can talk to each other. They can learn.”
More than 200 people from across the country shuffled in and out of the gathering for a weekend of panels, discussions and parties. A mutual aid panel featured organizers from groups born out of the pandemic or uprisings, including the Atlanta Survival Program and Bushwick Ayuda Mutua (BAM), Washington Square Park Mutual Aid, and others that had already been established, like Woodbine, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief and Distribute Aid, a grassroots organization specializing in providing logistical support for aid shipments around the world. Attendees learned about groups’ varying organizational styles, historical contexts, and about how the pandemic altered the trajectory of their work.
“Just in terms of New York City, it was interesting because we had BAM from Bushwick, which is just right next door to Ridgewood, and then we had Washington Square Park, which is in Manhattan, and then Woodbine,” said Peterson. “We’re all in New York City, but we have three very different organizational forms, very different approaches in terms of what we’re doing, very different ways of relating to each other internally.”
For its part, Woodbine underwent major organizational changes during the pandemic. Their physical hub transitioned from an events and meeting space into a full-time aid hub. In collaboration with Hungry Monk, a homeless outreach organization with some Woodbine-affiliated volunteers, neighbors began distributing hundreds of bags of fresh food — mostly obtained for free through partnerships with farms and businesses — on Wednesdays and Fridays.
“After two years of COVID, we’ve built trust and we maintained it,” Peterson said. “We didn’t do it for a few Instagram photos. So that builds more trust and new trust and that enables us to meet more people and meet different people and hopefully, expand the types of work we want to do or can do in Ridgewood, or throughout the city.” Peterson noted their ability to respond to the pandemic depended on infrastructure that members of the collective had built during previous disaster relief efforts, including 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008 and Hurricane Sandy.
In December 2020, Woodbine used funds it raised throughout the year to move into a space three times the size of its original location. Its pantry runs on Mondays and Wednesdays, with people lined up around the block well-before doors open. The new space is large enough to accommodate donation-based yoga twice a week, film screenings, an open gym with certified trainers, reading groups, Sunday night dinners and large-scale events.
A variety of other models of mutual aid organizing have emerged across the country. In Manhattan, Washington Square Park Mutual Aid formed out of rowdy battles against police evictions of the park. The collective sets up a free market with food, clothes and toiletries each Friday and distributes food and water to protesters during political demonstrations. On June 24, the group distributed free water, pizza and tacos during protests against the overturning of Roe v. Wade. BAM has operated a volunteer-run hotline for neighbors in need of food, masks, diapers, and other items for more than two years.
In Richmond, Virginia, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Richmond (MAD RVA), a group that allocates micro-grants and ran a free supply drive in the state during the pandemic, raised thousands of dollars to transition toward opening a physical space for a free store. People will be able to come in and take whatever they want for free, a mutual aid model collective members say provides people with autonomy over their choices.
The Atlanta Survival Program, a free food delivery initiative that launched in Georgia’s state capital during the pandemic, is supporting the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, an abolitionist struggle against the construction of a new police training facility in the South River Forest, by dropping off resources to people occupying the forest. Nimble forest defenders rely on donated goods to live communally while helicopters and police drones buzz overhead, and riot cops stumble through the woods to destroy their camps. Resources are distributed freely amongst one another according to need, without bosses or hierarchies of any sort.
Woodbine and Symbiosis’s “Autonomy and Survival” gathering facilitated connections between disparate mutual aid organizers for building power regionally.
Taylor Fairbank, Distribute Aid’s operations director who recently moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after coordinating aid shipments across Europe for years, said the gathering helped him feel more attuned to the mutual aid landscape in the U.S.
“Oh, my gosh, that was exactly what I needed at a personal and organizing level, it was so exciting and refreshing,” he told Truthout. “I got to meet so many people for the first time there and have an actual conversation — not just the occasional call or message in the group chat — and get caught up with what they had been doing in the states for the past few years, and just build those connections.”
Distribute Aid sent aid shipments to the Atlanta Survival Network months ago, and Fairbank said meeting some of its organizers in person helped build trust between them. Fairbank also met organizers with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) for the first time, and the two groups are already coordinating sending a truck-worth of water bottles to Florida to help with summer heat waves and to prepare stockpiles for hurricane season.
“I met them for the first time at Symbiosis. Boom, now we’re talking,” he said, of MADR organizers. “This wouldn’t have been possible without regional coordination that clearly exists in the U.S.,” said Fairbank, “and without these meetups and these events, you know, that heartbeat that keeps us connected and that place where we can tell each other stories and kind of dream of a shared future.”
Yet, many mutual aid projects that formed during the pandemic or uprisings have withered. Some suffocated under the weight of their own contradictions by replicating charity models, creating rigid leadership structures, or aligning themselves with local politicians. In the U.K., data suggests roughly 4 in 10 mutual aid groups that formed during the pandemic are still active.
Intentional spaces like regional gatherings push organizers to reflect on why some mutual aid projects wind up replicating the very systems many organizers hope to abolish. Durable and effective mutual aid networks tend to prioritize slowly building relationships around anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist values, says Payton, an organizer with MADR who attended the gathering and is making a documentary about mutual aid. (Payton preferred to only give his first name.)
“Mutual aid is contingent on relationships. It’s really difficult to just call a bunch of people in the room who have vaguely relevant values, or even conflicting values, and call it mutual aid,” he said. “I think we need to be a lot more scrutinizing. What do we want? What world are we building towards? How are we actually materially supporting each other and showing up for each other? Do I know you? Do I have your back? Am I in a long-term committed struggle with you? And this is where we start to develop real mutual aid.”
Mutual aid predates colonialism, Payton noted, but it didn’t need to be named as a concept. “It was just how people functioned,” he said. “We have to really think and be committed, and listen to the people who have been doing this longer than us, particularly the matriarchs and the people of color, or the people in our communities who are just doing the damn thing and not calling it ‘mutual aid.’”
For many organizers, mutual aid and abolition of the nation-state are intertwined because without police and politicians, or any type of carceral state apparatus to control resources, people could meet their own survival needs in an autonomous and communal manner on their own accord.
“White people who are interested in mutual aid really need to sit with what it means to come from a culture that has deprived the world of its ability to participate in cooperation and mutual aid and think critically then about what it means to live on the stolen land with infrastructure that’s been built by stolen bodies,” says Payton.
Once organizers establish democratic decision making structures and relationships around abolitionist values, they have a better chance of building robust federations, the organizational structure whereby autonomous groups build power locally, and then connect and support each other regionally according to set principles without a central authority.
Building federations and dual power is, of course, a tedious process. It won’t miraculously emerge out of a gathering — a difficult pill to swallow in the context of urgent, looming existential threats like the climate crisis.
“In the future, we may need to set up water purification infrastructure for whole communities, decommission nuclear power plants, or be an accomplice to the trees and help them reverse climate chaos, as only they, not us, have the wisdom and ability to do,” writes Jimmy Dunson in a forthcoming anthology Building Power While the Lights Are Out: Disasters, Mutual Aid, and Dual Power. “The skills, connections, education, experience, and experiments we learn and do now matter. Our exodus from the state and capital is not inevitable but rather hinges on our individual and collective choices. And there is no road map to where we are going. We make these paths by walking them.”
For Payton’s part, he warns against any attempts to replicate large-scale projects that organizers in the U.S. admire, including Rojava in North and East Syria or the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, which were built across generations of revolutionary struggle.
“A friend at the Symbiosis gathering at Woodbine shared the metaphor of an arch bridge,” he explained. “We can’t start with the keystone which is in the middle, and it’s suspended by gravity. It’s held together by the friction of stones that came before it. Those stones that come before are the on-the-ground long-term relationships and infrastructure that needs to necessitate the finality of the bridge, which is the federation.”
‘Perfect storm’ for developing economies triggers most severe net outflows for 17 years