#health and safety eviction

[utterentropy]

Soul being a cat to start your day 😌

[newsfrom-theworld]

Sudanese gfm

These are some Sudanese gfm that need your attention and their profiles; i will update the post if I find new fgm for Sudan.

FAMILIES WHO NEED TO FLEE THE WAR

1: Help Aalaa's family escape to safety

Aalaa's twitter accaunt

2: Help Abudjana rebuild after war

3: Help Mohamed leave Sudan

His twitter accaunt

5: Help Asjad and her Family Escape War in Sudan

Her twitter accaunt

6: Help Randa's Family flee war in Sudan

Her twitter accaunt

@rnd8

7: Help Asala and her family evacuate from Sudan

8: Support a community in Sudan

Twitter accaunt

9: Help support families in Kassab IDP camp

10: Help Jameela and her family escape the war in Sudan

11: Help a family escape the war in Sudan: one member suffers from Dystonia

12: Help Sai's family escape the war in Sudan

Twitter Accaunt

13: Help a family of eight to escape the war in Sudan

14: Support South Sudanese Evacuation from Sudan

15: Emergency funds for a family

16: Support Sakina's Family's Journey to Safety

Twitter accaunt

17: Help a mother and her two children escape the war in Sudan

18: Help-15-families evacuate El-Fashir, Darfur

19: Help a Sudanese family escape from war

Twitter accaunt

20: Help Ahmeds family to escape warzone in Sudan

His Twitter accaunt

21: Help a sudanese family with two autistic children escape war

22: Help a family of six escape Sudan

23: Help a family with two children evacuate from Sudan

Twitter accaunt

24: Help Rama Haran's family escape the war in Sudan

25: Help two sisters escape the war in Sudan

26: Help Family in Sudan Find Urgent safety

27: Help a Sudanese medical student finish her last year of med School.

28: Help Sudanese students become the future doctors

SUPPORT PEOPLE ON THE GROUD

1: Support Families impacted by the war

2: SUPPORT THE KHARTOUM KITCHERN

Twitter accaunt

3: The Save El Geneina initiative which aims to provide services to all Sudanese

4: Help  Eman Abdel Rahman rebuild his life after his home was destroyed (@emooz-8)

Twitter accaunt

5: Help a family rebuild after war

6: Help Displaced Sudanese Families Pay for Food and Medicine

7: Assist a Sudanese family in covering basic needs

8: Support a Community Stuck In Sudan

9: Help Save AlGineina’s health clinic in Adré Refugee Camp

10: Support Sudanese organiser to secure housing

11: Support survivor of sexual violence in Sudan

Venmo: BSonblast

SUPPORT REFUGEES

1: Help Sudanese refugees stranded in Olala forests, Ethiopia

2: Help a young Sudanese woman avoid eviction

3: Help Sukina's Father's Fight Against Cancer

IF YOU CAN'T DONATE PLEASE REPOST, THEY NEED TO GET OUT

Keep Eyes On Sudan

GFMS FOR OTHER COUNTRIES PLS CHECK

Palestine

Yemen

Congo

All the countries ( my most important post)

Haiti

Hawaii

[detroitography]

Detroit Rental Map

In an effort to improving living conditions and ensure all landlords were compliant with city ordinances, the City launched a mass hiring of building inspectors and ZIP code by ZIP code inspections of registered or suspected rental housing. Many advocates were concerned that this might lead to an inadvertent mass eviction crisis, but eviction is already too commonplace in Detroit. The effort has…

[mysillycomics]

My partner and I are moving in together this Saturday. Everything we have been working towards for almost two years is finally coming to fruition. The future is so clear and certain now. I get to be with the one I love forever. Never again do I have to say goodbye and not know when I could see them again.

A new chapter of my life, of our life, is beginning.

I have said this so many times over but thank you. Thank you all so much for every thing you have done for me, not only in regards to this but for every like, share, comment, follow, order, everything to do with mysillycomics. My life changed for the better because of all of you.

What keeps repeating in my head is the realization that we are going to be ok. My little family is going to be safe and comfortable and warm and fed and ok. I don’t have to constantly worry about Ollie’s safety and his health. Tiger Fluff will be in a nice quiet place where she won’t have to be scared anymore. We can handle whatever life throws at us because we are together. We have an incredible support system who care about us. We’re going to be ok!

A special thanks goes to everyone who donated or got something from my shop. When Ollie got evicted, all of the support we got made it so we didn’t have to worry about the cost of getting them here, just logistics, and I can’t overstate my gratitude. That was huge. I will never forget that.

I will close donations on the GoFundMe after the weekend. It will still be public to read any and all updates.

Thank you. 💜💚

[djuvlipen]

A 6yo girl died of electrocution in a Romani camp in Italy last month. this is what racialized poverty looks like; children are always among the first victims. may she rest in peace

04 March 2024

The Saturday before she was due to start school, six-year-old Michelle died by electrocution in the Roma camp in Via Carrafiello di Giugliano in Naples. Despite desperate attempts to resuscitate the girl, who had brushed against exposed electrical cables, she was pronounced dead at about three p.m. on the 13 January 2024. 

Allegedly, distressed family members caused a disturbance at the hospital and were accused of attacking health care personnel and police. This ‘chaos’ quickly became the focus of local media attention, and coverage of the tragic death of a child quickly morphed into an issue of public order and security.   

Deputy Francesco Emilio Borrelli of the Alleanza Verdi Sinistra, weighed in by describing the Giugliano camp “populated by violent people whose lifestyle is many times beyond the law” as one of many “outlaw settlements where children are abandoned to degradation”; and declaring his solidarity with the emergency room doctors and the police. 

After a meeting of the committee for public order and safety, the prefect of Naples, Michele Di Bari, set the objectives for the local administration “Clean the camp from waste in the next few weeks and start the transfer of a Roma family of around 40 people, to an asset confiscated from organized crime.” 

The authorities responded with a blitz on the camp coordinated by local police, and supported by Carabinieri, military personnel and employees of the water company. Waste was removed, electrical cables made safe, vehicles seized, and the water supply was disconnected, leaving about 450 Romani people without access to water by 25 January. Behind the expressions of concern about the safety of children, the official stance is – to borrow a phrase from Matteo Salvini – one of “Legalità, ordine e rispetto prima di tutto!” (Legality, order and respect before all).

The reporter from Avvenire tells a different story, of bereaved families, wrongly accused of affray at the hospital, routinely scapegoated and repeatedly evicted. After the seventh eviction they ended up on this long-abandoned industrial site, amongst the rubble and mud, without water or electricity, except for illegal connections – an ‘informal settlement’ in officialese. In reality, a squalid and precarious site, where 200 Romani children subsist in conditions that do nothing to nurture “an atmosphere of happiness” for the “full and harmonious development of his or her personality”, envisaged in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In a submission to the UN Human Rights Council back in 2014, ERRC research revealed that Romani children raised in camps across Italy were prone to a number of severe and debilitating conditions: they suffered from high levels of anxiety, were more frequently born underweight, and became ill with respiratory disease in greater numbers. They suffered more often from poisoning, burns and accidents at home. There was a greater incidence of “diseases of poverty”, such as tuberculosis, scabies, and lice.

The roots of the crisis can be traced back to official policies in the 1990s which placed Roma in segregated ‘nomad camps’. Things worsened with Berlusconi’s illegal declaration of a State of Emergency to combat the so-called ‘Roma menace’ in 2008. This overtly racist demonisation of Romani people heralded a prolonged period of mass evictions and destruction of camps, harassment, expulsions, mob violence and pogroms against Roma communities. Up to this day, the legacy of this illegal state of exception still afflicts Roma, as successive governments have failed, or simply refused to honour the commitment to ‘get beyond the system of camps.’ 

For its part, the European Commission chose to remain silent in the face of mounting and overwhelming evidence of systemic anti-Roma discrimination, forced evictions and camp segregation. On 6 April 2017, The Financial Times reported that the European Commission had repeatedly blocked publication of a report which recommended sanctions against Italy for mistreatment of its Roma minority, in an attempt to avoid a damaging public row. Seven years later, little has changed in Brussels, and the Commission has consistently kept schtum on this issue.

On 20 May 2019, in response to an emergency case was brought before the court by Associazione 21 luglio and the ERRC, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Italian Government to provide suitable accommodation for the 73 Romani families who were forcibly evicted from Giugliano the previous week. The court recognised the right to family unity and the need to provide adequate housing to the 450 Roma who had been evicted, and were camped in an area with no shelter, and were forced to sleep inside cars or outdoors, despite the difficult weather conditions, without access to electricity, clean water or toilets. And this is where Michelle and her friends spent the next four years.

Despite the availability of EU funds, the precarious living conditions endured by the Roma remained unresolved. On 12 January 2021, the Campania Regional Council approved the "Abramo" project worth €846,000 for a path of housing, work and social integration of the Roma populations of Giugliano in Campania. As is all too painfully evident, no tangible progress had been made on housing, and as Avvenire noted, in the aftermath of this latest tragedy “now the focus is on the reuse of houses confiscated from the Camorra.” As part of the education path of the Abramo project, “Interventions on school integration have started and yesterday Michelle would have gone to school with the apron and backpack given to her.” Instead, on that first day at school for the cohort of Romani kids, one desk remained empty.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

In two 5-1 opinions, the court built on a 2019 decision in which it said the state’s Constitution protects abortion rights and that lawmakers seeking to restrict abortion must meet a high “strict scrutiny” test. The decisions cement Kansas' role as a key abortion access point for patients across the broader region.

The Kansas Supreme Court struck down two laws restricting abortion on Friday, affirming its prior interpretation that ending a pregnancy remains a constitutionally protected right in Kansas.

In two 5-1 opinions, the court built on a 2019 decision in which it said the state’s Constitution protects abortion rights and lawmakers seeking to restrict abortion must meet a high “strict scrutiny” test. When Republican lawmakers asked voters, in 2022, to amend the constitution to stipulate that it does not protect abortion rights, Kansans overwhelmingly declined to do so.

“We stand by our conclusion that section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights protects a fundamental right to personal autonomy, which includes a pregnant person’s right to terminate a pregnancy,” wrote Justice Eric Rosen in one of the majority opinions.

A decision against abortion providers would have been monumental, not only for Kansans but for the thousands of women across the region who now travel to Kansas each year to get abortions that have been banned in their home states. A large majority of patients at Kansas abortion clinics now come from Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and farther afield.

The court’s majority upheld lower court rulings that two laws restricting abortion — passed several years ago by Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature — were unconstitutional. One law, passed in 2015, banned an abortion method frequently used in second-trimester abortions called ‘dilation and evacuation.’ The second law, passed in 2011, imposed licensure restrictions on doctors who provide abortions that exceeded those imposed on other medical providers.

Neither law had been in effect because of permanent injunctions by lower courts.

In his decision striking down the dilation and evacuation ban, Rosen wrote that the State of Kansas does have a compelling interest in “promoting respect for the value and dignity of human life, born or unborn” but said that the law is not narrowly tailored to that interest.

The clinic restrictions “do not survive strict scrutiny and are constitutionally infirm,” Justice Standridge concluded in the second majority opinion.

The decisions were both 5-1, with Justice Caleb Stegall — the only justice to dissent from the 2019 decision — dissenting and Justice Keynen Wall not participating in the decision.

Stegall wrote that he dissented from the Friday opinions for the same reasons he dissented in 2019.

“The majority’s imagined section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights bears no resemblance at all — in either law or history — to the actual text and original public meaning of section 1.”

Stegall also criticized the majority’s use of the term “pregnant person” instead of “women.”

“I cannot help but notice that pregnant women have been quietly — decisively — evicted from this court’s abortion jurisprudence,” he wrote.

The Center for Reproductive Rights represented the Kansas doctors who challenged the laws. Nancy Northup, the organization’s president and CEO, commended the court’s opinions.

“This is an immense victory for the health, safety, and dignity of people in Kansas and the entire Midwestern region, where millions have been cut off from abortion access,” Northup said in a news release. “We will continue our fight to ensure Kansans can access the essential healthcare they need in their home state.”

Kansans for Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion organization, rebuked the decisions.

“Adding insult to injury, extremely liberal judges of the Kansas Supreme Court have now overturned basic health and safety standards for abortion facilities,” KFL spokesperson Danielle Underwood said in a press release.

“It hurts to say, ‘we told you so,’ to the many Kansans who were misled by the abortion industry’s assurances that it would still be ‘heavily regulated’ in our state if voters rejected the 2022 amendment,” Underwood added.

Several new abortion laws took effect in Kansas earlier this week, but one of them — a law requiring doctors to ask patients getting abortions their reason for doing so — is being challenged in court. A Johnson County judge said Monday that doctors could add the law to a larger lawsuit they brought against a handful of older state abortion restrictions, including a 24-hour waiting period. The judge agreed to temporarily block the older laws while the case proceeds.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment told providers it will “not, for now” enforce the abortion reasons law, providers said Monday. The health department has not responded to requests seeking to confirm that.

[collapsedsquid]

Immigrants from Venezuela remain at the center of persistent controversy in Aurora, with four city lawmakers on Thursday offering commentary and narratives about gang members, flash-mobs and national immigration policy.  City officials notified residents that they must vacate their condemned apartments in the north-Aurora complex by next Tuesday, a moved that some city lawmakers, without evidence or details, say is the result of Venezuelan gang activity.  [...] A few days later, the owner of a northwest Aurora apartment complex and his public-relations agent told the media that Venezuelan gangs had effectively taken over his 99-unit complex. City officials countered the claim, saying that the complex is slated for closure next week after more than two years of neglect and mismanagement, creating a bevy of public safety and health violations that has left the complex uninhabitable. “None of us buy that story, that this is based on a code enforcement violation,” Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky said at the end of the committee meeting, referring to herself and fellow committee members council members Stepahnie Hancock and Steve Sundberg. “The three of us believe there is a huge gang problem.” While city officials have provided extensive city and court records documenting hundreds of unsafe living conditions and police calls to the building, police have not publicly said whether Tren de Aragua gang members are active at the complex and responsible for crimes. Sundberg said he’s convinced that the TDA gang is extensive, and that they have “taken over” multiple apartment complexes in the city.

[fatehbaz]

The New York State Urban Development Corporation saw in the piers a sacrificial milieu of impurity and devaluation. Rivera described the event as follows: “It’s called a sweep. Not even a fucking eviction. A sweep, like we’re trash.” [...]

The clearance operation of the piers took place under the New York Slum Clearance Commission and Law and its frothy utopian verbiage of “sanitizing” an environment [...] unsuitable for human life. [...] The demolition of the piers showed the violent clash of two confronting forms of urbanism. [...] [Manhattan’s] working class industrial base was transformed into a corporate and service-based economy and New York State Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, together with city planners, implemented policies to frame Manhattan as a place for work, but not living. [...] The rhetoric used by public and private officials to get rid of the piers was embedded in medical metaphors, [...] "blight" [...]. At the same time, these discussions were imbricated with racial depictions and xenophobic targets: most of the constructions beleaguered in this operation were inhabited or used by black people, Latin Americans, migrants, and displaced communities. [...]

---

The piers thrived with life. [...]

The notion of the piers as insalubrious areas that needed to be wiped out gained traction in the 1980s - during the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis [...]. This narrative concerning the piers was active in New York City until the early 2000s, until Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki opened the Greenwich Village segment of Hudson River Park on May 30, 2003. The highway was finally demolished [...] and a series of gates were erected to keep Pier 45 closed after 1am [...]. The previous residents of these spaces were just routine casualties. The new proposal opted for a unitary, straightforward, apparently open but constantly surveilled set of facilities, where constant circulation (by car, skate, bike, foot) was central, and framed the conception of the piers as a passing point. This contrasted the labyrinthic and fragmented former setting, with multitudes of hidden spaces that provided a sense of privacy and safety [...].

---

The history of the piers runs parallel to the history of the LGBTQIA+ movement in New York. This is where Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson decided to locate the first installment of [...] (STAR) in 1970 [...], a year after the Stonewall riots. [...] [D]uring the 1973 Gay Pride Rally [...], [Rivera] asked the movement to support [racialized, trans, gender non-conforming, homeless, and incarcerated people] [...] instead of just focusing on cis "men and women that belong to a white middle class club" [...] [which entailed] the negation of alternative forms of living [...].

Members of these groups were ostracized and deprived of typical considerations during the outbreak of an epidemic: protocols of announcement, transparency in information, research, and measure-taking. Meanwhile, the communities that congregated around the piers, and the piers themselves, helped spread information about AIDS, made transparent the available data, and offered care among affected communities. Groups and associations like STAR, Gay Men's Health Crisis, and Gran Fury were essential in this effort. [...] This environmental activism, where kin was formed [...], happened in places like the piers. [...] They were an escape from the constant scrutiny of authorities and from homophobic attacks [...].

---

AIDS' first name, GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), as well as the common “gay plague” and “gay cancer” epithets, strengthened the idea of a specifically gay disease related to a certain environment-specific villain. Journalists, following the views of public health authorities, blamed the epidemic on [...] the places gay people frequented. [...] Physicians thus described a spatial configuration located in downtown Manhattan [...] which [...] posed a threat [...]. This claim had terrible consequences for the activist spaces and urban fabrics that confronted the epidemic [...]. The remnants of Pier 45 were demolished. The activist history of these places was “cleared.” [...]

---

When Sylvia Rivera shouted to the authorities “stay away from my house!” while being evicted, “house” not only referred to the physical construction of her home. She was confronting teleological progress with the project of a[n] [...] assemblage based on [...] mutual caring [...] and defying colonial narratives of race, sex, gender, and nature. The territorialization of epidemics, identities, and citizenship not only shape the built environment, but the built environment shapes them in return. Architecture thereby assumed the form of an expanded spatial practice [...].

When Rivera was trying to save her home from demolition, she said, “there’s so many fucking buildings in this fucking Manhattan.” What New York City was losing with the demolition of Pier 45 was not just a series of dwellings. It was losing a complex ecosystem of coexistence.

---

All text above by: Iván López Munuera. “Lands of Contagion”. e-flux Architecture (Sick Architecture series). November 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 20, 2023

Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety. 

One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government. 

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”

Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo puts it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”   

Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. 

Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)

Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism. 

MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does. 

“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.  

Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him. 

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” 

Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”

Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.

Finally, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who was a staunch advocate for the health and empowerment of marginalized people—and who embodied the principles Sunstein listed, though that’s not why I’m mentioning her—died yesterday at 96. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement. 

More to the point, perhaps, considering the Carters’ profound humanity, is that when journalist Katie Couric once asked President Carter whether winning a Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president of the United States was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me—I think that’s the most exciting thing.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[irradiate-space]

Why cities sweep homeless encampments

A mid-sized American city sweeps a secluded homeless encampment, tearing down the shacks and tents and trashing the residents' belongings, and arresting those who try to resist this seizure of their property. Why does this happen?

"To maximize property values," says the cynical Marxist, but I think that this analysis is incorrect. If the city wanted to maximize property values, the city would do things like zoning reform, or house the homeless.

"To punish the unhoused for the crime of being poor," says another, but I think that this analysis is incorrect. If the city wanted to maximize punishment-of-poverty, they would arrest all the people in the encampment, not just those who resist.

"To decrease crime," says the Republican, but I think that this analysis is incorrect, at least in a narrow sense. What crimes are cited? Theft and drug dealing, sometimes. More often it's the victimless crime of drug use and possession. Theft could be addressed with policing, or with direct provision of resources, instead of evictions and property seizures.

"To improve health and safety," says the nurse, but I think that this analysis is incorrect. If the city wanted to minimize human excrement runoff, they would provide port-a-potties and sinks and showers. And if they wanted to improve safety, they would provide security guards and cameras and perimeter lighting and lockers for valuables — or provide housing outright.

"To decrease liability for the property owner(s)," says the lawyer, who at least has been staring at laws long enough to think about how they work. This is why the city waited until the homeless started building permanent structures, instead of acting upon the tents, says the lawyer, who suggests that encampments which seek to avoid clearances should avoid permanent installations in the future.

"To maximize compliance with The Law," say I, because what is a government if not a creature of Law?

[house-of-crows]

You all know that I'm not the type to fund raise. I dislike asking my follower base for help. But there is someone I know who is very dear to me, who is struggling. And it's worse than what's in the link. It is so far beyond what you think...

The person in question is living in a very violently anti-LGBT+ area as a BIPOC Queer person. A lot of what they're going through with their parent is due to biphobia specifically, as well as transphobia.

The apartment they are currently in has had a mold problem since late last summer, and management has only just NOW gotten to "fixing" it. On top of the surgery and other issues, they are now also facing health concerns due to an unlivable environment now made more stressful by their abusive parent and a judge who seems hellbent on upholding an eviction despite paying almost all of what they've owed in back rent. (They came within 50$ by the court date, and now management of the complex is escalating for the next month despite them getting back on track.)

They are so close to having a safe place to land, but getting there in their current vehicle is going to be no easy task due to needing at least one new tire to be able to make it to and from their job to continue getting out of this hole.

Please. Please, if you can, even if it's less than a dollar, please- Help me save them from this situation. Please, please help me save this beautiful soul who never deserved any of this.

[catdotjpeg]

Six students have been placed on mandatory leaves of absence from the University of Pennsylvania for participating in the two-week long pro-Palestinian encampment at the school, according to an undergraduate student and encampment spokesperson, who said that one of them was evicted from on-campus housing.

The discipline came Thursday morning, after encampment members moved about a dozen tents from one side of College Green to the other, effectively taking over the popular graduation photo spot. That move happened Wednesday night in response to what the student organization UPenn Against the Occupation called “the administration’s continued bad-faith negotiations.”

The expansion began around 7:30 p.m., when organizers began to take down barriers as nearly 200 people chanted “Disclose, divest, defend” — shorthand for the encampment’s demands — the Daily Pennsylvanian reported. On the Benjamin Franklin statue’s forehead, protesters then drew an inverted red triangle, which has conflicting meanings as a reference to a Palestinian flag and the target markers used in Hamas’ tactical videos, as police officers flanked the barricade.

“Penn continues to focus on the safety of our campus, including expanding security presence in response to the expansion of the encampment, despite our efforts to resolve this situation,” read a statement issued by the university Wednesday night. Penn has also announced changes to the commencement ceremony scheduled for May 20, adding airport-style checks before entry and prohibiting signs, posters, and flags.

A university spokesperson did not immediately provide additional comment Thursday. The triangle appeared to have been washed off of Franklin’s forehead by Thursday morning. It had been replaced by a whiteboard that encampment members have been updating with the death toll in Gaza, which has ticked past 34,000 Palestinians as Israeli forces prepare to enter Rafah.

[...]

The six students disciplined were mostly seniors, said the encampment spokesperson, who declined to give their name over retaliation and doxxing fears. Those placed on leave are among the 12 students who received disciplinary notices early in the two-week stint for violations of the university’s Guidelines on Open Expression, which govern free speech and protest on campus.

Those students are barred from entering academic buildings, being present on campus, or participating in university programming — including graduation, the Freedom School of Palestine — one of the groups participating in the encampment — said in a statement posted to X (formerly Twitter).

Two of the impacted students were on the negotiation team that met with interim Penn president J. Larry Jameson, the statement said. All six were “deemed by the University to be a threat to order, health and safety” the statement said, alleging that the group was not allowed the Penn equivalent of due process. The university issued trespassing notices one day after the encampment set up, and Jameson has repeatedly condemned the protest.

-- From "Six students placed on leave from Penn as pro-Palestinian encampment hits the two-week mark, organizers say" by Beatrice Forman, 9 May 2024 2:16 PM EDT

[anarchistettin]

something that kinda sucks but is also a kind of strength happens after you pass 40: you realize some traumas and discomforts are going to take a long time to recover from, and that you have to get through that time - you have to live it.

Someone just died, you just got evicted from your family home, you just got divorced, you just got a diagnosis and it ain't good news.

Something that's been quietly occurring to me lately is the dread of the time, roughly five years from now, when 12% or so of the moral tyrants currently pretending to be "woke" or "progressive" will come out of their stupor. It's happened so many times in my life that the indices of it are BLARING LOUD. An emotional response to a "correction" that says "I know that's true and in five years I'll stop revenging myself on you, maybe, but fuck you for suggesting my bloodthirst for hypothetical strangers is anything other than a very healthful coping Mechanism"

this kind of interaction didn't used to be perceived at that level - I'm pretty sure, in this society, that it's a consequence of regular web use - an inevitable outcome of being observed too much of the time, at a level of the brain that wasn't evolved for ever being under scrutiny.

natural sorting explains a lot about why tumblr didn't die when it didn't, who's using it, and what's happening to them over time - it's not a moral issue at this level, it's just a neuro/biological one

I'll have to make a decision about it! sucks to be isolated but it sucks worse to be involuntarily converted into a right winger all het up about HBO's latest cop/military propaganda, or Disney's latest love letter to cosmopolitan assimilation …

having life-or-death passionate feelings about fanfiction was funny five years ago; five years hence a fraction of its biggest victim/perps will just begin to start assessing the damage they've been doing to themselves and others. Oof they will have to write about it. Others will respond with equal or greater emotion; schisms of moral value will form, arguments will resume. Reaction - that thing that makes "reactionary" a bad thing to be - will continue to pile dirt on fucking comprehension.

Comprehension is, in the mind of the moralist, equivalent to perpetration. Childlike obedience to an unexamined (often vague) code will be instinctively viewed as morally superior to any philosophy, any impulse to argue, any sign of dissent or disagreement.

Moral tyrants never stop hurting people, because they believe they're doing it for your own good, and instead of getting tired, they get obsessed.

People who are already behaving online as if their toddler-level morality is religious law will need rehab, social support, and a lot of forgiveness if they ever come out of it. Unscientifically I reckon 12% or less will, just based on personal experience. I won't be able to give it to them myself, it will have to come from people willing to be viciously and repeatedly attacked for having the temerity to disagree with their fledgling (straight up fucking christian nazi) ethics.

The reality on Earth requires banding together. Vicious, small-minded, puritanical, and careless condemnation hasn't led to solidarity, safety, or capability.

The idea that crusading mobs of moralizing scolds "represent" the "future" is as dead as the idea that dems would form a barrier against fascism. "All the old people dying off" just leaves a gobsmacking number of proud violent fascists and bigots - who've convinced themselves they're "progressive" - and no one remaining who's skilled or experienced in any way at explaining why "ha ha making up a guy to get angry at" is dangerous behavior. Armageddon level shittiness.

[womenofnoise]

Moor Mother - Circuit City back cover

Transcript below cut

Reverse Gentrification of the Future Now

The present realities of housing for low-income people living in Philadelphia are located temporally-spatially near the one in Circuit City. We are experiencing an affordable housing crisis, and this crisis is exacerbated by the average of 22,000 eviction filings each year and the unknown number of illegal evictions.  In my work as Managing Attorney of the Housing Unit at Community Legal Services, where we provide legal representation and advice to more than 3,000 low-income tenants a year, I hear countless stories of tenants who face racial, sex, gender, family, ethnicity, and disability discrimination from landlords; stories of tenants intimidated into not complaining about substandard housing conditions that exacerbate health and safety problems; or tenants who received eviction filings from disgruntled landlords that have resulted in virtual blacklisting from future homes and opportunities for stability. Growing displacement and mass evictions of entire buildings of often low-income residents is a particularly vicious form of eviction that has widespread health and economic impacts, and destroys economic, cultural, and racial diversity in neighborhoods. Mass evictions, often unexpected, further aggravate the city’s shortage of affordable housing—existing affordable housing units are often lost forever, putting pressure on resources and housing stock elsewhere in the City and concentrating poverty in particular neighborhoods.

Compounding these issues is pervasive housing discrimination –  single mothers and their children, seniors, Black people, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and people living with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by evictions and lack of access to safe, habitable, and affordable housing.  Tenants face systemic and individual discrimination at every stage of the process – they are barred from getting into a new home for discriminatory reasons, and often kicked out of their homes for those same reasons.1 The ACLU, for instance highlights how “women of color bear the burden of eviction,” noting that women of color made up 62% and 70% of the tenants facing in eviction in Chicago and Philadelphia respectively.2 These and other instances of structural inequity related to housing disproportionately impact the City’s poor, Black and Hispanic populations live in racially concentrated poverty.3 This loss of housing has a distinct racial impact, where 63% of African-Americans live in project-based housing compared with 44% of the city’s population, and where African-Americans are disproportionately more likely to carry severe housing cost burdens in the city.

These types of inequalities are often framed in terms of spatial inequality and displacement from location. However, as Helga Nowotowny notes, “power, exercised by central authorities, establishes itself over space and over time.”4 (emphasis added). Hierarchies of time, inequitable time distribution, and uneven access to safe and healthy futures inform intergenerational poverty in marginalized communities the same ways that wealth passes between generations in traditionally privileged families. Sociologist Jeremy Rifkin says that “temporal deprivation is built into the time frame of every society,” where people living in poverty are temporally poor as well as materially poor.”5 For example, time poverty is routinely used to penalize marginalized people in the justice system, where being ten minutes late to court can mean losing your job, kids, home, and freedom. Time and temporal inequities show up at every step of the eviction process, for example, from the short or fully waivable notice requirements for termination of a lease agreement, to the time required for an evicted family to vacate a unit that is severely out of line with the time needed to secure new housing.  Inevitably, marginalized Black communities are disproportionately impacted by both material, spatial, and temporal inequalities in a linear progressive society, with many Black communities forced to occupy “temporal ghettos” as well as spatial ones.  

Circuit City considers both the implications of time and of space involved in privatization of public housing, gentrification, displacement, and redevelopment. There is no set year or place in the play, but instead a layering of multiple temporal spaces.  The residents of Circuit City  are integrating the time(s) of redevelopment, privatization,  and hyper-gentrification, into the pre-established temporal dynamics of the community, layered over and within the communal historical memory and the shared idea of the future(s) of that community. Nested within those layers are individual, subjective temporalities and the lived realities of the residents, at odds with the linear, mechanical model of time on which Circuit City and its external spatial-temporal constructs are etched.  It takes as its central provocation a practical strategy for achieving a Black flight, a reverse gentrification, and inverse displacement, and the conditions necessary for temporal autonomy and spatial agency.  Circuit City is presented using Black Quantum Futurism praxis as a critical framework, fusing Afrodiasporan philosophies and rituals with quantum physics, recovering artifacts of Black temporal consciousness, and dismantling oppressive social temporal constructs.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

In the US Supreme Court’s landmark ruling to revoke a constitutional right to abortion care, Justice Samuel Alito suggested that the “attitudes about the pregnancy of unmarried women” have changed.

“Modern developments” like medical leave for pregnancy and childbirth are “guaranteed by law” in many cases, medical care is “covered” by insurance, and “safe haven laws” allow people to drop off babies anonymously to give them up for adoption.

But such “modern developments” fail to reflect that the US has some of the worst economic and health outcomes for women and families, while only a fraction of workers get anything close to “guaranteed” leave, and eliminating access to abortion care can have devastating economic costs.

In a hearing on the far-reaching consequences of anti-abortion laws on 29 September, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that denying abortion access to millions of Americans is a “profound economic issue”.

“Forcing poor and working class people to give birth against their will, against their consent, against their ability to provide for themselves or their child is a profound economic issue,” she told the House Oversight Committee. “It certainly is a way to keep a workforce, basically, conscripted.”

In the 27 states poised to severely restrict or outlaw abortion without protections from Roe v. Wade, none have paid family and medical leave, and 18 have gender wage gaps above the national average, according to Center for American Progress.

Women live in poverty at rates above the national average in 22 of those states, and children live in poverty at rates higher than the national average in 17.

19 states also have not expanded Medicaid, the federal healthcare programme for low-income Americans, to provide care up to 12 months after giving birth.

Without a “robust federal and state” effort to strengthen the nation’s social safety net, people unexpectedly facing parenthood are “likely to fall even further through the cracks – with downstream effects on their children, communities, and local and state economies,” according to the report.

“The idea that abortion and access to abortion is somehow not a profound and central economic and class issue and class struggle is certainly something that I think a person who has never had to contend with the ability to carry a child – it belies that perspective,” according to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.

“Abortion rights are a class struggle too,” she added on Twitter. “When the powerful force people to give birth against their will, they trap millions into cycles of economic setback and desperation. Especially in a country without guaranteed healthcare. And desperate workers are far easier to exploit.”

One study found that patients who were denied an abortion experienced “a wide range of negative financial consequences,” including lower credit scores, increased debt, greater risk of bankrupty and eviction from their homes.

The study also found that those abortion restrictions were linked to a higher risk of child poverty and poor developmental outcomes among children.

Another study following two groups of women over 10 years – including one group that access abortions and another that wanted to but could not – found that people who were denied an abortion sank deeper into poverty as a result.

In 2021, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that restrictive abortion laws cost state and local economies $105bn from workforce reductions and earnings levels and increasing turnover and time off from work among women ages 15 to 44 years old.

Medical costs for birth are also expensive, even with insurance coverage. The average cost for vaginal deliveries in 2015 was roughly $4,300, and $5,200 for caesarean births, according to a study of more than 600,000 women between 2008 and 2015 who had health coverage through their employer.

“Policymakers and advocates must recognize that the fall of Roe is an economic issue and would be one more victory for the economics of control and disempowerment – low wages, little worker power, and rising disinvestment,” according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. “Reproductive justice is key to economic justice and protects women’s humanity, dignity, and the right to exert freedom over their own choices in the economy.”

[books-and-catears]

Hi. I'm so sorry for bothering you:c but I really need all the help I can get. I have a chronic heart condition that doesn't allow me to work my regular hours. Things got serious pretty fast and suddenly, I wasn't able to pay rent. I got evicted 28 days ago, and I'm trying to raise funds to pay off what I owe to my landlord and avoid getting sued, and hopefully find a little place while I get back on my feet.

You think you could help me reblogging my pinned post to spread the word a bit? Thank you so much in advance. And I'm truly, very sorry for having to recur to this.

Oh dear, it's not a bother at all. Of course, I'd really like to give you all the support and if this little blog of mine helps get the word out - I will happily do it. I'm so sorry about all this - you're being an absolute trooper okay, nothing to apologise for.

And yes I'll link your post here. And reblog it as well, I hope you can get all the help you need and as fast as you need. Wish you nothing but good health and success and safety.