Legal Evictions Are Banned During The Pandemic, But ‘Invisible’ Evictions Are On The Rise

PART OF THE AFFORDABILITY DESK
Ally Schweitzer
DCIST | OCT 15

In D.C., evictions can’t be legally carried out during the pandemic. That didn’t help Denis Gallegos, whose landlord locked him out after he lost his job.
Tyrone Turner / WAMU

Denis Gallegos was two months behind on rent when he came home to find his locks had been changed.

The 34-year-old immigrant from Honduras was sharing a townhouse on Trenton Place SE with a young family, paying them $500 in cash each month for a small room. But when the pandemic hit in March, Gallegos lost his job at an upscale restaurant in Georgetown. He couldn’t afford to pay his rent. Neither could his roommates. The landlord started turning up at the house, insisting they pay or move out.

“I told him I couldn’t go because we were in the middle of a pandemic,” Gallegos says.

So the landlord called the authorities.

A police report shows that the landlord, Abiyot Hirui, called to report a burglary at the townhouse on June 17. Police entered the home late and found Gallegos inside. He told them he was a tenant, not a burglar, and that Hirui had been harassing him and his housemates for weeks. The police informed Hirui that evictions were a civil matter and there was nothing they could do, and left.

The following day, Gallegos says, he found the locks changed at the house. All of his belongings, including his HIV medication, were inside.

Gallegos says he slept at Casa Ruby, a safe space for at-risk LGBTQ youth, that night. On June 19, he filed a complaint for wrongful eviction in D.C. Superior Court. The judge ordered Hirui to give Gallegos keys to the house that same day. But Gallegos didn’t want to stay there, he says, and he soon moved out. He’s now crashing at a friend’s home in Northwest D.C., occupying a small room off the back of the house, not sure where he’ll go next. And he’s still shaken from his experience.

“It was a very ugly thing for me,” Gallegos tells WAMU/DCist through an interpreter. “I had nightmares. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat.”

Hirui did not respond to a request for comment, and his attorney referred WAMU/DCist to transcripts of his court hearings.



Denis Gallegos, who was locked out of his home in June, now lives in the back of a friend’s house in Northwest D.C.Tyrone Turner / WAMU

Lawyers who represent low-income renters in the D.C. area say they’re encountering more stories like this as the pandemic lurches into its seventh month.

The reason, they say, is the extreme economic uncertainty wrought by the crisis, combined with waning government assistance. The region’s jobless rate was close to 7% in August, unemployment benefits are running out, and as many as 715,000 renters in D.C., Maryland and Virginia are now at risk of eviction, according to the Aspen Institute. Some landlords have become desperate to replace out-of-work residents with new ones who can pay the rent. Consequently, more are evicting tenants without court orders, which is illegal.

There are restrictions on evictions during the pandemic. A sweeping national mandate from the Centers for Disease Control halts evictions for renters who earn less than $99,000 annually until the end of the year. In D.C., landlords are barred from evicting tenants for any reason while the city remains under a state of emergency. But these measures only prevent legal evictions. Landlords who choose to evict tenants illegally may not have gone through the courts anyway, advocates say.

Tracking, and stopping, illegal evictions can be challenging. Eviction filings in Northern Virginia were down 85% earlier this year compared to 2018, according to the RVA Eviction Lab, likely because the state’s high court issued a series of temporary eviction bans through September. But the data don’t capture evictions that take place outside the courts. A recent national survey of legal aid and civil rights attorneys showed widespread reports of illegal lockouts. Some advocates call these “invisible evictions” because they don’t leave a paper trail.

“We’re hearing stuff like this pretty steadily now,” says Elaine Poon, managing attorney at Legal Aid in Charlottesville. She says her office received three calls about illegal evictions just last week. “It’s kind of at an all-time high.”

In one case brought to Poon’s office, a renter reported that after their landlord lost his eviction case in court, he threatened to come to their house every day until they vacated the property. Poon suspects that many renters facing intimidation from their landlords simply move out to avoid a fight.

“What ends up happening is a lot of landlords get away with it,” she says.

Invisible evictions, Poon says, often affect immigrant households.

Renters facing intimidation from their landlords will often move to avoid a fight. “A lot of landlords get away with it,” says attorney Elaine Poon.

“They don’t always know what the law is here, and it might be that in [their] home country, there isn’t a lot of protection,” the attorney says. “They just assume, ‘I’d better get out of here.’”

Immigrants and other vulnerable renters are also affected by what’s known as self-eviction. That’s when a tenant moves out after receiving their first eviction notice, even though they’re not legally required to. Anecdotal evidence suggests self-eviction is on the rise during the pandemic, too. When Legal Aid staff recently visited the homes of Charlottesville residents slated for legal evictions, Poon says, they often found they had arrived too late.

“Almost every single time, a huge percentage of the people had moved out already,” she says.

The D.C. Council passed a temporary ban on issuing tenants eviction notices in September after hearing stories of self-eviction from advocates in the District. There’s no such ban in Virginia or Maryland. And the protections that do exist in those states aren’t perfect, advocates say. In order to seek protection under the CDC mandate, renters must sign a declaration affirming their lack of income and other details, and present it to their landlord. That requires a certain level of know-how, says Matt Hill, an attorney with the Public Justice Center in Baltimore.

“The biggest problem [with the CDC order] is that folks really don’t know about it,” Hill says. “We see a real lack of outreach and education.”

There’s also a significant loophole in landlord-tenant law that isn’t addressed by the mandate, Hill says. In Maryland and Virginia, landlords can simply terminate the leases of renters who fall behind on payments, then seek to evict them for overstaying their lease. (D.C.’s “just cause” eviction law bans this practice in the city.) Hill says these “holdover” tenants aren’t necessarily covered under the federal eviction order.

“There’s an open question, at least to some judges, about whether the CDC order applies in those cases,” Hill says. “The order isn’t drafted as clearly as we would like.”

Regardless of how renters get evicted, they often wind up in one of three different situations: They move in with friends or family, often in crowded living conditions; bounce between temporary accommodations or shelters; or wind up on the streets. None of these outcomes are ideal under normal circumstances, let alone during a pandemic, Hill says.

“We know that evictions lead to homelessness,” he says, “so we need to do everything we can to stop evictions.”

“Landlords don’t want to evict anyone, ever, let alone evict in the winter,” says Patrick Algyer with the Northern Virginia Apartment Association.

Landlords and their surrogates don’t necessarily disagree, says Patrick Algyer, executive director of the Northern Virginia Apartment Association. He says most property owners view eviction as a last resort.

“Landlords don’t want to evict anyone, ever, let alone evict in the winter,” Algyer says. “That’s just a horrible time.”

Still, Algyer says, landlords who have gone months without some or all of their rental revenue have to pay their mortgages, bills, maintenance expenses and taxes and without relief from local or national governments, they’re reliant on tenants, who are often struggling. Rent collection at professionally managed buildings across the country has fallen slightly during the health emergency, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council. Small, independent landlords have anecdotally reported losing rental income, too, though there’s no comprehensive data on rent collection at properties owned by “mom-and-pop” landlords.

Without income, some landlords — especially small ones — risk defaulting on their mortgages. To avoid foreclosure, some may decide to sell their properties to condo developers, taking housing out of the already strained rental market.

Like D.C. and Maryland, Virginia has committed millions of dollars to help struggling tenants pay their rent. But Algyer says Virginia’s $50 million rental assistance program — paid for by the CARES Act — hasn’t gone nearly far enough. At first, funds were only available to tenants, not landlords, so property owners had to wait for tenants to navigate the process of applying for, and receiving, payments. And because Virginians owed an estimated $169 million to $211 million in missed rent as of September, according to the RVA Eviction Lab, the assistance won’t reach everyone who needs it.

“As this continues to snowball, we really have to start providing the landlords with more relief to help them get through this,” Algyer says. “All we’re doing with this program is just kicking the can down the road.”

Landlords have lobbied Congress for economic relief, but they’ve hit a wall with Senate Republicans, many of whom oppose another coronavirus relief package. Real-estate interests have also mounted legal challenges to eviction bans on the state and federal level. In one high-profile federal suit, landlords argue that federal agencies lack the authority to waive state laws, and that the CDC eviction ban encroaches on private property rights. Advocacy organizations including the National Housing Law Project and Legal Services of Northern Virginia have urged the court to deny the motion.

But landlords and tenant advocates agree on at least one thing: the importance of large-scale rental assistance. Without it, they say, both landlords and renters will continue to struggle. Elaine Poon with Legal Aid in Charlottesville says renters temporarily saved by the CDC order could still become homeless once the mandate expires Dec. 31.

“They will be evicted New Year’s Day in the dead of winter, and I doubt the pandemic will be gone by then,” she says.

Denis Gallegos says his lockout experience was traumatic, but he thanks God that he had somewhere else to go.

“It’s not comfortable,” he says. “But I’m inside.”

Martin Austermuhle contributed Spanish language interpretation to this report.

This article is part of our 2020 contribution to the DC Homeless Crisis Reporting Project, in collaboration with other local newsrooms. The collective works will be published throughout the day at DCHomelessCrisis.press. You can also join the public Facebook group or follow #DCHomelessCrisis on Twitter to discuss further.

This story originally appeared on DCist.

No Really, What is Anarchism?

Eric Fleischmann
October 7, 2020

The terms ‘anarchist’ and ‘anarchism’ are returning to the center stage of political lingo in the twenty-first century. To quote my own article on Center for a Stateless Society:

“President Donald Trump has repeatedly attempted to associate Black Lives Matter with anarchists and anarchism. He has tweeted such threatening posts as just the phrase ‘Anarchists, we see you!’ with a video of a man dressed in black at one protest, and he has referred to protesters in Portland, Oregon as ‘anarchists who hate our Country’ and called for Governor Kate Brown to ‘clear out, and in some cases arrest, the Anarchists & Agitators in Portland.’

It is certainly true that many anarchists—such as myself—have been involved in Black Lives Matter protests, but it is obvious that President Trump is not making an objective ideological observation but rather is attempting to use anarchist as a ‘dirty word’ intended to make protestors out to be terroristic criminals.”

“Joe Biden employed a similar tactic in the following statement: “‘I’ve said from the outset of the recent protests that there’s no place for violence or destruction of property. Peaceful protesters should be protected, and arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted, and local law enforcement can do that.’”

The mainstream media’s understandings of anarchism since (at least) the nineteenth century have involved a desire for chaos, disorder, and destruction. In early twentieth century North America, anarchists were depicted as bearded, often-foreign men with bombs, knives, or other weapon threatening symbols of the United States, liberty, or civilization. Modern day examples might include psychopathic terrorists like Solomon Lane from “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Fallout” who, as Villains Wiki explains, seeks to create “a new world order based on unstoppable accidents and terrorist attacks that will actually turn the entire world into a massive terrorist superpower.”

Or, more generously, there is the character Zaheer in “Legend of Korra” (voiced by punk rock legend Henry Rollins) who seeks to bring down all governments, prompting the protagonist Korra at one point: “The idea of having nations and governments is as foolish as keeping the human and spirit realms separate [a reference to a previous season’s plot]. You’ve had to deal with a moronic president and a tyrannical queen. Don’t you think the world would be better off if leaders like them were eliminated?”

The latter example is a tad kinder to the ideology, but media depictions of anarchism rarely give a full view or even the benefit of the doubt. There are numerous schools of thought — generally differentiated by their economic models — that fall under the descriptor of anarchism ranging from anarcho-communism to individualist anarchism (and even ideologies that claim the title to the dismay of almost all other anarchists such as anarcho-capitalism and the racist, crypto-fascist national anarchism), but I would like to semi-informally compile some quick (unfortunately largely Western) information to hopefully help anybody begin to genuinely answer the question “what is anarchism?”

I am no expert in etymology, but according to (may a higher power forgive me) the Internet, it seems that ‘anarchy’ is derived from the ancient Greek anarkhia (‘without a ruler’) — composed of an- (‘without’) and arkhos (‘ruler’) — which was used first recorded as having been used in 404 B.C.E. in reference to the Year of Thirty Tyrants in Athens during which there was no one ruler or archon. This transformed into the Medieval Latin anarchia and French anarchie (both meaning roughly the same thing as the Greek). Thus, for numerous centuries ‘anarchy’ was used to refer to confusion in the absence of authority.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the first usage of the term ‘anarchism’ as opposed to ‘anarchy’ was in 1642. However, it is popularly accepted that the first usage of it as a political ideology in itself is by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who wrote in 1840, “Anarchy, — the absence of a master, of a sovereign, — such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating.” Thus, Proudhon adds the -ism—stating in a hypothetical back-and-forth “‘What are you, then?’ — ‘I am an anarchist.’”— to denote a deliberate political ideology.

Proudhon acknowledges that “[t]he meaning ordinarily attached to the word ‘anarchy’ is absence of principle, absence of rule; consequently, it has been regarded as synonymous with ‘disorder.’” Then he rejects these previous understandings, stating that “[a]lthough a firm friend of order, I am (in the full force of the term) an anarchist.”

A formal and ‘mainstream’ definition of anarchism can be found in the 1910 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, in which Pyotr Kropotkin writes that anarchism is “the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”

Furthermore, it must be added that many thinkers have identified anarchism as the libertarian branch of the much larger socialist movement. Mikhail Bakunin—the famous anarchist rival of Karl Marx—identified anarchism as “Stateless Socialism” and writes that “freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice” and that “Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”

Continuing, in Anarchism and Other Essays, Emma Goldman writes that anarchism is “[t]he philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary” — which might be a commonly accepted definition by students of politics, who may not be deeply knowledgeable on the subject.

But two more contemporary thinkers, David Graeber and Noam Chomsky give definitions that, when coupled together — deepen an understanding of anarchism: Graeber, in The Democracy Project, writes that “[t]he easiest way to explain anarchism…is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society — and that defines a ‘free society’ as one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence.” Noam Chomsky says, in an interview with Harry Kreisler, that…

“The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can’t prove it, then it should be dismantled.”

There are many questions left to be asked of anarchism: how will individual violence be handled? How will a stateless society protect itself from neighboring states? What economic formations will take shape in the absence of a state? However, these are not questions to be answered here.

The most salient concept demonstrated is that anarchism is not an ideology of violence (or at least it is significantly less so than those ideologies that call for concentrations of violence in the state and its cronies) but one which opposes violence at a systemic level and seeks liberation and voluntary interaction in all spheres of life.

About the Writer
Eric Fleischmann,

1A 

What Is Anarchism?
NPR October 12, 2020

An anarchy symbol is viewed after it was spray painted on a window during a demonstration by Occupy Wall Street and other groups in downtown Chicago on the eve of the NATO summit in Chicago, Illinois.Spencer Platt/Spencer Platt/Getty Images

We've been hearing a lot about anarchists lately, especially from the president.

President Trump tends to bring them up in his descriptions of the recent protests for racial justice that have happened across America.

And in September 2020, a White House memo deemed Seattle, New York and Portland "anarchist jurisdictions" and ordered a review of the federal funding for these cities.

But what exactly does it mean to be an anarchist? And what would an "anarchist jurisdiction" even look like?

To find out, we talked with anarchists Kim Kelly, William C. Anderson, and Ruth Kinna.

Analysis |
Egypt's 'Anarchists' Are Once Again Calling on Sissi to Resign, but This Time It's Different

The president must contend with a protest that has spread for the first time to the countryside, just before elections where his parliament's legitimacy is at stake


Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi on a visit to London in January 2020.

Credit: Henry Nicholls / AP

Zvi Bar'el Published on 10.10.2020

Five bullets from a policeman’s gun ended the life of Owais al-Rawi of the village of al-Awamiya in Luxor province in southern Egypt. His father and neighbors rushed to his aid and loaded him into a car to take him to the hospital, but he died on the way. All he wanted was to free his younger brother, who had been detained by police, but other officers chased him down.

For many hours, the police held Rawi’s body to use as a bargaining chip with the villagers for the release of three security personnel who had been abducted during demonstrations in the village on September 20. Rawi isn’t believed to have been among the abductors, but the police suspected that he knew about the abduction plan because on social media he encouraged his followers to protest against the regime.

Neighbors told journalists that Rawi was an ordinary man who would simply go to work and come home, and was awaiting the birth of his third child. He worked at the international hospital in Luxor and was barely able to scrape by.

Millions of Egyptians are in a similar situation. According to the World Bank, more than 60 percent of the country’s 100 million people live below the poverty line. The government says this figure is too high by half, though the government determines the height of the poverty line at will.

The precise statistics are of no interest to the people who are well aware of their situation; after all, they’re the ones bearing the costs of the reforms of President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi – the gas prices that rose sharply after the fuel subsidy was canceled, the soaring cost of getting to work by subway, the cost of medication that skyrocketed even before the coronavirus hit, and the cost of vital private medical services, given the inferior public health services.

On September 20, Egypt was shaken by riots that erupted in rural areas, too, for the first time. This is a historic date for Egypt. Last year on September 20, massive protests erupted in the wake of videos published by businessman and actor Mohammed Ali about corruption in the military and by the president and his family. Huge throngs took to the streets calling for Sissi’s resignation and a purge in the army.

Open gallery view

A man walking in front of demolished buildings along the agricultural road leading to Cairo, October 4, 2020. Credit: Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters

According to Ali, Sissi built himself lavish palaces and mansions in Egypt’s New Administrative Capital being built next to Cairo. Also, military leaders are receiving hefty kickbacks from multimillion-dollar projects, and money that’s supposed to go for public services is being pocketed by the president’s associates. None of this is new for Egyptians, but it’s hard to think of another time under Sissi when this phenomenon had gained such publicity.

Hundreds Detained as Egyptian Police Quash Protests, Says Human Rights Group

More than 4,000 people, including journalists, lawyers and political activists, were arrested on charges of violating the law on demonstrations, harming national security and membership in a terror group; that is, the Muslim Brotherhood. The regime was shocked by the scope of the protests, which were the biggest since Sissi was elected president in 2014, and top intelligence officials were held to account for mishandling of the demonstrations.




This time, too, the regime says the Muslim Brotherhood is behind the protests, and thus the government has contradicted itself. On the one hand, it claims that it put down the Muslim Brotherhood, and on the other it acknowledges that the movement can still bring crowds onto the streets.

A small fortune for the people

Although the demonstrations this time were much smaller, with some as paltry as dozens of protesters, the participation of rural Egyptians underscored the nature of the new threat.

The reason for the protests this time was a new law enabling people convicted of construction-related offenses to pay fines and avoid having their homes or home additions demolished. Originally, a more draconian law was passed in 2017 stipulating that all illegal construction would be demolished in keeping with the regime’s zero-tolerance policy for illegal building and its plan to move people out of slums and makeshift homes.



But amid public pressure this law was amended to say that a “ransom” ranging from 125 to 5,000 Egyptian pounds ($318) per square meter could be paid instead – often an unattainable sum.

Open gallery view

A boy walking past a demolished building in Egypt's Qalyubia province, October 2020.

Credit: Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Reuters

These regulations aren’t just aimed at tycoons and real estate sharks. They largely hurt low wage earners with large families and migrants from the countryside who moved to cities decades ago and later expanded their homes without a permit.

This law is a continuation of the government’s decision to freeze construction of new private homes for six months, during which the owners must present business plans that conform to the new construction law and obtain approval.

This is ostensibly a revolutionary decision aimed at regulating the construction industry and reclaiming some of the land the state has lost to illegal building. But Egyptians view the plan as just another means of sucking funds from the people and exerting direct control over their property.

This feeling is heightened by parliament’s assessment that the government could collect 300 billion to 500 billion Egyptian pounds ($32 billion) from the fines and building fees alone, and that the government will increase tax revenues because it will have updated information on homeowners and the size of their properties.

Forceful seizure of property is nothing new to Egyptians. It occurred under Gamal Abdel Nasser, who also removed thousands of Egyptians from the Aswan Dam area, falsely promising that they could return when construction of the dam was complete.

And under Sissi, “for security reasons,” thousands of people near the Gaza border were forced out of their homes – which were then razed – and were required to relocate to El-Arish and other Sinai cities. They received very meager compensation. Such moves have harmed the public’s trust in the government – and the public doesn’t believe the president’s promises now.

Sissi makes threats

Open gallery view

Supporters of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi holding banners celebrating the 47rd anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Cairo, October 2, 2020. 

Credit: Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Reuters

In an article on the Mada Masr website, Egyptian scholar and journalist Ali al-Rajal outlines the differences between the Mubarak and Sissi eras in this regard. He says the construction violations and the way they were ignored in President Hosni Mubarak’s time were part of the social contract that arose between a government incapable of solving the housing shortage and the public that had no choice but makeshift construction.

It’s true that in Mubarak’s time as well, corruption flourished and major contractors profited handsomely from the lack of regulation, but Sissi’s program that’s being violently implemented isn’t offering solutions. No one knows where the millions of people whose homes have been razed will go and how they’ll make a living. After all, a majority of these structures are in the big cities, and if these people are forced to leave for the countryside, they’ll have no way to support themselves.

Government figures show that only 100,000 homeowners have applied for approval so far, a tiny number far below the government’s expectations. Infuriated by this, on September 27 Sissi gave an angry speech warning that the government would use all means to implement the program. He also threatened the mayors and other officials who must implement the law that “anyone who fails to uphold the guidelines will be gone.”

Stormy responses ensued, so the following day the government released 68 children who had been arrested on suspicion of taking part in the demonstrations. But many others remained in custody.

Later Sissi denounced the protests and harnessed the famed institution for Sunni Islamic scholarship, Al-Azhar, to support the plan. The president’s relations with Al-Azhar are tense due to Sissi’s decision to curb the religious center’s monopoly on issuing religious edicts and undermine the fragile balance between religion and state.

Still, Al-Azhar said in a statement it was “following the destructive movements intending to undermine the public order, undermine our beloved Egypt’s security, spread chaos and disrupt the atmosphere of development and investment.” Similar statements were made by the Arab Spring protesters in 2011.

“Anarchists” and “chaos spreaders” aren’t an Israeli invention, and the size of the demonstrations doesn’t necessarily reflect the scope of the people’s distress, frustration and anger.

The president’s son, Gen. Mahmoud al-Sissi, has been tapped to quash the protests, but he must do it in a way that won’t mar the parliamentary election that’s due to begin this month and last a week into November.

Sissi has been praised by foreign banks, Egypt’s foreign currency reserves have increased in the past year and the pound is more or less stable. But Egypt still needs loans from the International Monetary Fund, foreign direct investment has plummeted to $5 billion, tourism is still frozen and natural gas production from the huge Zohr site isn’t yet funneling cash to the state coffers.

Demonstrations where Sissi’s portrait is burned and he’s called on to resign aren’t a threat to his regime, but they unnerve domestic and foreign investors. In the political sphere, Sissi can rely on the election to give him an obedient parliament that’s no different from the current one, but the legislature’s legitimacy depends on voter turnout.

If in the 2015 election voter turnout was meager to disgraceful, reaching only 10 percent in certain districts, this time the protests could erode parliament’s legitimacy even further.

Sissi, who has been criticized abroad for bullying his rivals, is trying to calm things down. He’s offering compensation to evicted families, and he has ordered clay bricks for state projects despite their inferiority to cement blocks.

He’s doing this because most of the production is in the Giza industrial zone, where stormy demonstrations took place, and according to some Egyptian commentators, Sissi might even put off implementing the construction law that’s inflaming the streets. But this would only be a respite in the government’s campaign to reconquer Egypt

WE CANNOT TRANSCEND MENTAL ILLNESS IN THE CONTEXT OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM

By Anuhya Bobba  Sep 24, 2020

HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS IN THE UNITED STATES PLACE THE ONUS OF HEALING ON INDIVIDUALS AND FOCUS ON SELF-OPTIMIZATION IN SERVICE OF INHERENTLY VIOLENT CAPITALISM.

TW: mentions of suicide, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and forced institutionalization

Every suicide prevention day, week, or month, I once conveyed the same message, regurgitating advice that, at the height of my battle with depression, had been readily proffered: “Reach out.” On Facebook and Instagram, on a domain that I purchased for my writing, to friends and family. Reach out.

I would share a highly personalized experience of my depression and later PTSD, my attempted suicide, and reassurance that it does become better. That if people were to embark on a journey of self-care, through counseling, therapy, or medication, their efforts would reach fruition.

But, when I adhered to my own advice, I always seemed to fail. And fail again. I reached out. I attended therapy. I started medication. I attempted to disclose my diagnosis to workplace after workplace, in hope that I would be accommodated in my debilitating anxiety and panic. I continued to commit to X or Y task, because external measures of productivity demanded that I do so, and then I would fail to meet said commitment. At each turn, I only felt overwhelmed, rarely did I feel assured in my capacity to transcend mental illness.

Central to neoliberalism is individualism. Testimonials are inherently individualistic; they speak to an individual’s experience. At first, my testimonials (from social media posts to essays) acted as a means to recover a sense of control and to place trust in my subjectivity after extensive childhood trauma. But, I also understood that testimonials like mine — which utilized a depoliticized “I” and proffered triggering detail, exclusively through the lens of unexamined anger, rage, and self-destruction — existed comfortably in the confines of the capitalist system. Especially because my narrative would culminate in a journey of healing and recovery independent of histories of oppressions and the material realities that they create for people diagnosed with mental illness.

My narrative(s) would be grounded in self-care and would end in my return to “self-optimization” or readiness to function again — this time, properly — in capitalism.

In Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times, Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese write, “Self-care is thus popularly associated with self-optimization, or a way of preparing individuals for increased productivity in demanding workplaces, when, in reality, things like chronic illness are incompatible with capitalist productivity and even visible forms of activism: it is difficult to join street protests if you are a caretaker, suffer from depression or anxiety, or cannot get out [of] bed.”

Plainly, I did not have the capacity to see beyond myself, in my experience of mental illness. I wallowed in self-alienation. I could not see that the struggle for many (including myself) is not “reaching out,” but the struggle is inextricably tied to the system that we occupy — a system that pathologizes our condition, and a system that is not designed to serve the common good.

When I was diagnosed with depression and later PTSD, I was introduced to a system of care that placed the responsibility of my healing in my hands, and my hands only — as if I am the arbiter of all the circumstances that would unfold in and influence my life.

RECOMMENDED: Please Stop Telling Depressed and Suicidal People to “Reach Out”

Integral to this system of care is therapy. My first experiences of western therapy acted as if I existed in a vacuum, separable from the circumstances that I inhabited. The objective of each session had been self-optimization. Not for myself, but to function better in the neoliberal university or the future workplace. My sense of alienation only strengthened after therapy. I could not explain why it did not work; but I knew that it did not.

In On Mental Health and Psychotherapy in Late Capitalism, Richard Lichtman describes therapy as a “mode of conformity to the prevailing system of corporate and state domination.”

“There is no designation in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for the incapacity of individuals to recognize the malevolence of the system that exploits their labor, then turns it back upon themselves as alienated but ‘natural’ domination,” he explains.

Lichtman continues, “Therapy reinforces the basic assumptions of capitalist culture in regard to its definition of the self and its boundaries, the system of its needs and the material relations it establishes among social members. Its gravitational pull is insular, ‘deeper’ within the individual, personal relationship, or family. These considerations explain one of the major functional paradoxes of therapy; its capacity to ameliorate the conditions of individuals or of small groups while simultaneously strengthening the larger system of social control.”

My attempted suicide — the one that resulted in my institutionalization — took place three years after my first session of therapy. My institutionalization demonstrated the carceral response to mental health undertaken by psychiatric care facilities.

I was transferred to an emergency unit, where I was told that “the State of Colorado” is responsible for my forced institutionalization. Once I arrived at the psychiatric ward, my phone was confiscated. I could not leave the ward, and outdoor time consisted of 30 minutes on a heavily fenced balcony. The speakers that visited to motivate us — us, the pathologies of late capitalism — were people who could function (i.e. work) after the onset of X or Y illness. After one such speaker, my body started to twitch. I hurriedly left the room, only to faint and slam my head onto the door handle. As the nurses inserted IV or attempted to take a blood test, I protested. I knew that each pill, each injection only cost more money. The bill amounted to $6,000 for a four-day stay, itemized by pill, injection, and meal.

RECOMMENDED: 

I Am Tired of Overcoming Trauma: Does Healing Exist For Queer People of Color?


My present understanding of my mental health in relation to capitalism only occurred once I left the United States for Europe.

Before Europe, I relocated to New York City, where I worked a desk job at a local nonprofit. I decided that I would disclose my mental health to my employer because I am not the “normal” worker. One week after signing my contract, I disclosed my PTSD. They feigned understanding, but eventually, they grew increasingly frustrated at my inability to fulfill the eight-hour workday. Their sole accommodation remained a two-hour lunch break each Thursday when I would rush to the Upper East Side to see a therapist for 45 minutes. I would have triggering conversations and revelations, only to return again to my desk, to function like “normal.”

But, there had been an unspoken caveat: if I am provided two hours to attend therapy on Thursday (two hours that I would work to cover past 5 PM), then I could not show signs of neurodivergence elsewhere. The exasperation that I would see on my supervisor’s face, if I observed an onset of a panic attack and notified her, caused panic in return — I dreaded work.

I left New York City to live in France, in order to move closer to my then partner and also because I had burned out. I waitressed and took French lessons at the local university, but even as I occupied a service position, I became introduced to affordable health care. Buying my medicine or attending psychiatry, as a non-citizen, did not break my bank. I was provided a housing allowance that reduced my rent in half because I had been a student. I was offered subsidized lunches, again as a student, where I paid 3 euros for an entree, a main meal, and a dessert as well as coffee. I paid 15 euros for unlimited, monthly transportation (in comparison to $120 in New York City). Out of the 800 euros that I made monthly, the fear of more and more debt did not loom as it had in the United States.

I was then accepted to attend university in Finland, where I currently receive subsidised housing, meals, and transportation. I have access to universal health care; I was reminded by a senior student that I did not have to worry about calling an ambulance because the service is free. When a concerned friend had called 911 on me in New York City, I received a bill of $1600 to compensate the emergency personnel that arrived and stayed for 45 minutes, which was reduced to $800 with insurance.

The university here accommodates me and my PTSD as well. Once I had a severe depressive episode around the time of an examination, and I was informed that I have three retakes per final exam. I also work as an intern, and I am paid a hefty salary for a three-month contract, which includes 6 days that I am required to take off for rest or leisure.

RECOMMENDED: Surviving Capitalism Through The Protection of Community


My material reality shifted drastically from the United States to Europe. The system that I started to occupy was intended to support my basic needs — to a certain extent. The welfare systems of Europe are predicated on plundered wealth from colonization. And, my ability to relocate also could not have been possible, were it not for my U.S. passport and the financial stability that I come from. Even the safety guards that I now experience would not be so easily extended if I did not speak English, did not have degrees from American universities, or more generally, did not fit the criteria of a “skilled” laborer.

To be clear: I was able to leave the United States, so as to salvage my mental health. But, for many, the material reality created by late capitalism can not afford an escape; in order to renounce American citizenship, you have to pay $2,350. The United States increased the fee from $400 in March 2020.

The experience of the past two years, outside of the United States, thus also shifted my narrative of self-care to a narrative of radical care. I did not exist as a self disconnected from “particular histories and present situations of violence and vulnerability” but as a self grounded firmly in said histories and situations. So it is not enough to “reach out” in order to prevent suicide. The history and the present of the United States is violent, and it is not easy nor possible for the persons that exist outside of or violate “the structures of white, middle class respectability” to survive its capitalist demands.

DAWNING CLIMATE CATASTROPHE AND THE PARADOX OF GREEN CAPITALISM

By Jude Casimir  Sep 23, 2020

EVEN IN THE FACE OF PLANETARY DESTRUCTION, IT IS CAPITALISM AND CAPITALISTIC INTERESTS THAT DICTATE THE RESPONSE TO OUR CURRENT CLIMATE CATASTROPHE.

Flashback to September 2018: former California Governor Jerry Brown has a plan to save the world. He explains: “Plastic has helped advance innovation in our society, but our infatuation with single-use convenience has led to disastrous consequences […] Plastics, in all forms—straws, bottles, packaging, bags, etc.—are choking our planet.”

Who would have thought that climate change could be reversed by the simple behavior of consumers, discarding plastic, rather than the one hundred companies that account for the majority of pollution, including ExxonMobil and Shell. Thank God it’s that easy!

Wait.

It’s 2020. Jerry Brown is out of office. Starbucks is handing out paper straws. In California, the land is aflame. In Oregon, the sky is an apocalyptic red. In nearly every other state, the stench of smoke is filling our lungs, shepherded by gusts of transcontinental wind.

But what about the straws?

If this were a Hollywood film, a big-budget, end-of-the-world extravaganza, we’d be treated to billionaires and computer jockeys screaming at government officials, promising huge sums of money and brilliant, undiscovered solutions that could set the planet right. Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck would be taking a team of hard-working drillers with calloused hands to obliterate the fuck out of an asteroid. DJ Qualls would be slamming his knuckles down on early-2000s keyboards, promising to hack the planet before our core dies. If that sort of film was made today, we might even have Elon Musk building an armageddon-proof dome of stolen emeralds along with a magical machine that somehow rebuilds the ozone layer via dank memes. If it were directed by Jerry Brown, we might even have a beleaguered Kurt Russell running house to house, grabbing the guilty plastics in order to build an ark to save humanity.

Goddamn those straws.

But this is not a movie. There are no renegade scientific geniuses, no selfless astronauts, and no heroic billionaires to save us. Nor are there easy excuses that place the blame on people rather than the corporations and capitalistic interests that have brought us here.

We are here at the brink, looking off the edge of the world, as so many cling to a crumbling precipice, knowing that they will be the first swallowed. The capitalistic forces that once promised a better world are the same forces that are now boiling the planet alive while at the same time onanistically bragging about life-saving innovations, reinventing necessary infrastructure but more inept, more mercenary, and less accessible.

On the edge of oblivion, the richest among us have gilded their self-salvation and their complicity in the rhetoric of transformation. They won’t save us. In fact, we’re here, burning alive, specifically because of them.

RECOMMENDED: The Lasting, Racist Legacy of Colonialism on the Environment

Our current understanding of climate change and the solutions to it is divided into the investment in two separate saviors: liberal politicians and so-called woke billionaires. Unfortunately, close inspection of the blunt truth laid out in the previous half-decade violently refutes both of these fantasies.

Consider recent Democratic messiah Barack Obama. Before ultimately denying the final permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline, a move that might’ve been more for the ego boost than anything else, the former president delivered a statement about how the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe was making their voices heard, a statement that was no doubt lauded heavily by the media. But this was during the same year he would unleash the worst of what opposition had to offer on those same protesters. Law enforcement would readily and gleefully meet the protesters with tear gas and cannons of ice-cold water, releasing dogs and rubber bullets along the way.

Meanwhile, at the height of the 2020 election, as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi both spit in the face of the Green New Deal (which the latter has referred to as “the green dream, or whatever they call it,” after gleefully accepting campaign funding from the fossil fuel industry), the naked opportunism and hypocrisy of alarmist liberal rhetoric around climate is clearer than ever. Recent neoliberal martyr Ruth Bader Ginsburg stood with conservative justices in support of destructive pipeline projects. Current California Governor Gavin Newsom has been all too eager to tweet out warnings about the incredible dangers of climate crisis and pose for photoshoots in the wreckage of historic conflagrations with Kamala Harris despite approving 360 fracking permits as of July 6, 2020.

This performativity is both gut-wrenching and par for the course: emblematic of where these politicians’ allegiances lie. Even in the face of planetary destruction, it is capitalism and capitalistic interests that dictate the response to our current catastrophe.

And that doesn’t even get us started on the racial implications of the problem.

Just as the violence of capitalism and white supremacy are intertwined in other issues, the treatment of global warming and general ecological destruction is intensely racialized. Whether it’s the fact that politicians have treated the Flint water crisis as a sort of trivial infrastructure issue unworthy of real attention, or the blatant FBI infiltration of and police violence against the indigenous resistance at Standing Rock, the reality that climate change will hit poor BIPOC communities the hardest (and that they will receive the least support) is inescapable. Starting with Hurricane Katrina and continuing through the destruction of Haiti via earthquake (and the subsequent disappearance of promised humanitarian funds), all the way up through the devastation of Puerto Rico, there’s an undeniably white supremacist bent to the capitalist nonsense that defines how we understand what is looking more and more like the end of the world as we know it.

RECOMMENDED: Dismantling the Ideas of “Natural” and “Wild” in the Environmental Movement


Capitalists don’t have any real incentive to curtail this mess, not when they can further take advantage of natural disasters, especially in those places that have little to no power to fight back. In the aftermath of the continued devastation of Puerto Rico, for instance, we saw energy companies like Whitefish jump in to save the day at a hefty cost, with less focus on people than profit. TigerSwan, the security firm that was a fundamental tool of insurrection against the Standing Rock movement, has undergone an eco-friendly rebrand, now offering its services for good, for security measures in unsafe instances in disaster-stricken areas.

But the insidiousness of this is not always so naked.

Even when people like Elon Musk and others in the Silicon Valley bubble say they have an investment in stopping environmental collapse, they’re also only ever looking for the most exploitative ways to deceive you. Electric cars are quiet, clean, and stylish, but never mind, of course, that buying them brand-new might end up causing more air and carbon pollution in the long run. Never mind that any potential cleanliness these products boast depends mainly on the cleanliness of the country’s leading power sources. Don’t pay attention to the fact that these vehicles don’t simply come out of the ether and need to be manufactured before they hit the streets.

Erase the fact that manufacturing doesn’t always have the greenest, most environmentally-minded roots. According to a 2016 Wired article, electric cars need to be light, which means they need to include a lot of high-performing metals, like lithium and other rare minerals. “Rare metals,” author Lizzie Wade writes, “only exist in tiny quantities and inconvenient places—so you have to move a lot of earth to get just a little bit.”

Elon Musk gets to sell you the easy comfort that comes with easy, largely symbolic gestures.

Even the aforementioned Green New Deal, the so-called progressive way out, serves only to give capitalism a greener face. Since it’s nonbinding, there’s technically no reason for any legislators to take action. And, since the resolution calls for “investments to spur economic development, deepen and diversify industry and business in local and regional economies, and build wealth and community ownership,” and these investments are going to be allocated from banks and “other public financing,” it’ll ultimately be at the behest of corporations and other interested parties, instead of the other way around. Dedication to growth is an inherent feature of capitalism, so any policy “solution” put forth by leaders of a capitalist society is bound to fall short of the actual needs of the situation.

In his 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Elliott wrote about “the dead land…the cactus land,” before predicting that the world would end “not with a bang but with a whimper.” These words seem to hold horrifically true now: portending an empty, self-aggrandizing, and impotent phalanx in the face of armageddon, a wasteland created by the slow encroaching inaction of a world unwilling to face disaster as it throws itself, unceasingly, against the door.

Though Elliott was speaking about the insanity and trauma of the First World War, his frustration and pessimism feel equally potent nearly a century later, as we watch the world crumble under the weight of environmental malfeasance, capitalist vampirism, and the empty gestures that feign compassion yet embolden cruelty. While we might imagine a doomsday defined by super volcanoes and biblical tempests, that apocalyptic bang will, ultimately, be ushered in the whimpering, equivocating, self-sustaining bullshit of corporations all too eager to suck the life from the flesh of the earth, and then turn around with Steve Urkel “ain’t I a stinker” sheepishness as the chickens come home to roost.

RECOMMENDED: Yes, Environmental Racism is Real and It Is Devastating.


Because this is the way in which liberalism and capitalism point us: towards market solutions, towards the band-aid over the bullet wound, while these systems themselves are simultaneously producing the bandages and firing the gun. Sure, we could go a step further in putting our faith in ecological modernization. We could lean into this idea that new and developing technology will save us and the environment, and that salvation will come in the form of solar panels and electric cars because the future is now! However, this idea doesn’t consider how little impact these solutions will ultimately have as long as capitalism keeps wantonly pillaging, no matter the banner of “green” conscientiousness the system uses to shield itself from scrutiny. Putting our faith in such companies is arguably the primary reason we’re in this environmental mess in the first place, and allowing them to privatize the solution while dodging accountability for the majority stake they hold in causing the problem will leave us with little more than clean vehicles via which to outrun the total collapse of security, health, and environmental stability when this problem finally reaches its horrific climax.

We can sit, watching for whatever happens next, waiting for straw bans to finally take hold, for the solar panels and the electric cars. Still, as we put our faith in some sort of corporatist Deus Ex Machina, we have to come to terms with which god we’re hoping for, and which machine we think will produce Him.

The flames that are engulfing the world and the smoke that’s choking our lungs will likely be coming from that very same machine.

The world is on fire. Long live industry’s inferno.

LUCY PARSONS HAS SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT 2020
By Reina Sultan  Oct 7, 2020

DESCRIBED AS “MORE DANGEROUS THAN A THOUSAND RIOTERS”, LUCY PARSONS’ WRITINGS AND SPEECHES WERE REFLECTIVE OF HER TIME AND CONTINUE TO BE RELEVANT TODAY.

The summer of 2020 was ~eventful~ in terms of political focus on anarchists and anarchism. I rolled my eyes every time an American politician blamed anarchists for chaos, showing clearly how willfully ignorant they were about anarchism as a philosophy.

With all that in mind, I wanted to delve more deeply into the history and words of Lucy Parsons. Her life was also marked with American politicians blaming chaos on anarchists, though this was in the late 1800s. Reading Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary ended up hitting way too close to home, considering it was about events that happened more than a century ago. I took a lot away from the book, but the biggest takeaway is how applicable Parsons’ ideology remains in today’s political climate.

I would be wrong not to mention that Parsons was far from perfect. Her views on sex workers and sexual liberation were antiquated—causing strife between her and Emma Goldman. That being said, I personally believe Goldman was afforded privileges Parsons never got because of race. Parson’s treatment of her son, who she had committed to an asylum, was also abhorrent. Still, reading about her life and her ideologies has been illuminating.

So, here are four Lucy Parsons quotes to turn to for the rest of this cursed year:
“If the Anarchists had thrown the bomb at the Haymarket they didn’t commit a crime nor violate any law. The Constitution gives the people the right to repel any unlawful invasion in any way they see fit.”

This just feels so pertinent when we look at the so-called violence and looting during protests this summer. I’ve written about it before, but fighting against oppressors is justified violence—it’s self-defense. Now I personally think the Constitution is relatively shitty considering who was included in drafting it, but I can’t argue with Lucy’s logic here.

“And some did rest their chins upon their clenched hands
And swear to help abolish the infamous system that could produce such abject misery…
And some did gnash their teeth and howl, swearing dire vengeance against all tyrants.”

To me, this so perfectly describes the organizers and revolutionaries who are working so hard to dismantle the systems that oppress us. We cannot forget that the uprisings of this summer came after years of organizing and struggling by mostly Black people, who have been working for liberation for centuries (and more recently, since Ferguson). The activation of people during this summer’s actions has hopefully produced a new group of people who “swear to abolish the infamous system,” whether that be capitalism, the carceral state, settler colonialism, or all of them (inshaAllah).

RECOMMENDED: Anarcha-Feminists of the Past and Present are an Inspiration for Today

“Will you deny that your jails are filled with the children of the poor, not the children of the rich? Will you deny that men steal because their bellies are empty?”

Prison and police abolition are undoubtedly having a moment right now. When we talk about abolition, the conversation isn’t only about what would be abolished, but also about what would be created. This quote by Parsons illuminates how so much crime in our country is caused by lack of resources and opportunity, where punishment by the carceral state does nothing but exacerbate the conditions that caused the crime in the first place. It feels as though more people are finally willing to accept that the system we’ve been told is meant to provide justice does no such thing. Rather, it is a symptom of a racialized capitalism, one that criminalizes poverty, especially when those who are poor are Black, brown, disabled, and/or sex-working.

“The present social system is rotten from top to bottom. You must see this and realize that the time has come to destroy it.”

This is the one that lights a fire under my ass (and enrages me). People have known that capitalism is untenable and immoral since the 1800s. We must resist the narrative that it’s the natural order of things and embrace the idea that no one person should control wealth in such a way that others are left without enough to live comfortably. It is far past time to destroy the systems that support cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, carcerality, and colonialism. So, let’s get to it.

Nagorno-Karabakh: 

An old conflict in a new geopolitical context
An interview with South Caucasus specialist Tom de Waal

Screenshot from a BBC video explaining the geography of the conflict



Global Voices
Oct 1 · 
By Filip Noubel

For over three decades, the war between Azerbaijan to Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has been mostly frozen, with long periods of stalemate punctuated by flares of armed confrontation, leading to death on both sides. The most recent of outbreak of violence began on September 27. This time, both combatants and analysts are predicting that the conflict will escalate, with unknown and potentially dangerous consequences.

To understand why, I spoke with Tom de Waal, a Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe and expert the geopolitics of the South Caucasus, Russia and Ukraine. De Waal has traveled extensively in the region, and wrote an authoritative book on Nagorno-Karabakh, “Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War”.

Filip Noubel (FN) What is different this time in the escalation between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which started September 27?

Tom de Waal (TdW) We have seen violations of the 1994 ceasefire before, we’ve even seen small bouts of fighting, but we haven’t seen a sustained military offensive by Azerbaijan since the war ended in the 1990s. This is new, and so is the geopolitical context: Russia looks strangely impotent and seems unable or unwilling to impose a cease fire, while Turkey has dropped any pretense of neutrality and is now playing an active role. Finally, the US, which has had a strong role in this has been an extremely weak voice so far.

FN Both leaders are said to be both prisoners to the conflict, but also exploiting its narrative to fight opposition at home and ride a wave of populism. Would you agree?


TdW This is correct, but this is true of any leader: the whole nation is involved in this conflict, those two modern nations [following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991] were built starting in the 1990s around the claims on Karabakh, so a leader is bound to be a leader of this national idea around Karabakh as well. It is also useful in terms of domestic politics. This is more true on the Azerbaijani side, because it is an authoritarian society, so now the opposition has to go quiet. Indeed the opposition figures are supporting the army and being very patriotic and supportive. Azerbaijan had a lot of problems this year: falling oil prices, the COVID-19 pandemic, problems with political prisoners, yet now it unites behind this call. But this is also very tricky: if there is no success on the battle front, the nation can turn against its leader, and indeed two previous Azerbaijani leaders, Ayaz Mutalibov and Abdulfaz Elchibey lost power in large part because of failure on the Karabakh front.

FN During this escalation, Armenian authorities restated that they could recognize Nagorno-Karabakh. If this were to happen, what could be the consequences?


TdW In military terms, we are far from being in a full scale war. Most operations are concentrated in three regions around Karabakh, using long-range weaponry. To retake the territory lost is literally an uphill battle because Armenians control the mountainous terrain. This could mean heavy losses on the Azerbaijani side, which is not something the Azerbaijani leadership would want, nor their society tolerate. That is a restraining factor, but this [fight] could go on for a long time. Russia doesn’t seem to be able impose a ceasefire, thus there are many ways this could escalate. One is Armenia recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh. Then we would have more of a Cyprus situation, with no possibility to agree. Another one could be the use of heavy weapons to attack cities, which would be disastrous. Or if Turkey were to increase its involvement: for now it is not sending troops, it is helping at the edges. In the least bad scenario, the current fighting would continue for a few days, then both sides would be exhausted, claim some success, and agree to a ceasefire. But I am not holding my breath for that.

FN Turkey’s support is unprecedented. What do you make of the Turkey-Russia relationship, which has been swinging from sworn enemies to allies in past few years on several regional issues, including the Syria conflict.


Erdoğan and Putin are happy to have a fight using proxies, which is why I hope Turkey will avoid any incursion which would cross into Armenian territory, which Russia would have to respond to under its TdW military obligation with Armenia. So I don’t think they will come under direct conflict. Russia’s hands are really tied. They are the main mediator, they value their relation with Baku and Yerevan, so if they get too involved on one side, they would lose the other side. Russian can only provide support discreetly to Armenia, and there are reports of Moscow sending weapons via Iran.

FN What about the roles of Georgia and Iran, two other neighboring countries?


Georgia has a strong interest in this situation not escalating. It shares borders with both countries. It also has ethnic minorities of both Armenians and Azerbaijanis who have lived in peace for decades. But Georgia is very dependent on Azerbaijan economically. It has also expressed solidarity with Azerbaijan on the concept of territorial integrity [Georgia itself has parts of its territory that have declared self-proclaimed independence and are no longer under Georgian control: Abkhazia and South Ossetia]. Georgia has offered to be a mediator, but it would not be regarded as an honest broker by Armenia. And Russia certainly wouldn’t want Tbilisi to be involved [Russia and Georgia fought TdW a war in 2008]. Georgia could provide a neutral space for both sides to meet, and should be more involved but there are limits to their capacities.

Iran was a mediator in 1992, but then was shut out. But it has borders with both states as well. It has enormous stakes and any future negotiations in an international format must include Iran, despite US opposition.



Originally published at https://globalvoices.org on October 1, 2020.

ABOLITION FOR THE PEOPLE

Prisons Are a Public Health Crisis — and the Cure Is Right in Front of Us

The best way to curb pandemics like Covid-19 is to abolish the conditions that breed their spread

Kenyon Farrow

This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, which comprises 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

Aswe deal with the scourge of Covid-19, which has killed more than 210,000 people and rising, policy and public health experts are clamoring for strategies to stop the spread of the virus, in absence of credible and competent leadership at the federal level. Most of what works (without a vaccine or highly effective treatment that reduces transmission to others), is known — if unevenly practiced or implemented.

There is inspiring work happening in the U.S. and globally around how to reduce transmission of Covid-19 (or any future airborne pathogens) in settings like prisons, jails, and detention centers. Yet, much of what is being discussed seriously are meager reforms that would only slightly reduce the number of people in those settings or releasing people who have comorbidities such as old age, asthma, and heart disease that may make them more vulnerable to illness and death should they contract Covid-19. Some of the reforms, like the use of biometrics and regular temperature taking (despite knowing many people can carry and transmit Covid-19 even while asymptomatic), introduce more forms of surveillance into prison and jail settings.

Very few of these plans acknowledge that these spaces create opportunities for the spread of infectious diseases. If we know that to be the case, public health activists who are truly interested in social and racial justice should in fact be calling for the abolition of the prison industrial complex as part of a strategy to reduce the possibility of current and future epidemics.

On March 31, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons announced the next phase of a plan to help curb Covid-19 exposure in federal prisons. Those measures included a 14-day confinement in cells. The memo states that “to the extent practicable,” incarcerated people would be allowed to participate in some education and mental health services and provide labor in areas that required workers to keep the facilities running. The memo also noted that “asymptomatic inmates are placed in quarantine for a minimum of 14 days or until cleared by medical staff” and “symptomatic inmates are placed in isolation until they test negative for Covid-19 or are cleared by medical staff as meeting CDC criteria for release from isolation.”


It is forcing people into conditions of squalor — all intended to be part and parcel of the sentence itself. A sentence to violence, deprivation, illness, and sometimes premature death.

The original memo made no mention about providing masks or any other personal protective equipment to incarcerated people, nor medical treatment to those who tested positive for Covid-19, until several days after the CDC’s recommendation.

Di Hargrove in East Oak Lane, a neighborhood in the north part of Philadelphia. Hargrove was released from Riverside Correctional Facility in May through the help of the Philadelphia Bail Fund, a nonprofit, community organization that provides bail assistance to people unable to afford bail. Since the pandemic started in March, the Philadelphia Bail Fund has helped buy the freedom of 330 people awaiting trial behind bars. Photo: Sahar Coston-Hardy

Activist groups and some elected officials called for stronger measures to protect those in prison. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, advocated for the release of incarcerated people who are pregnant, older adults, or suffering from other conditions that would make them more vulnerable to Covid-19 complications and death. Attorney General William Barr subsequently issued such an order, but only focusing on federal facilities in Louisiana, Connecticut, and Ohio — all of which were already showing extremely high rates of Covid-19. (State facilities and local jails have all had their own protocols for testing, treatment, and early release.)

But these measures have not been enough. In mid-August, the New York Times reported that the top 10 Covid-19 transmission clusters in the country were in prisons, jails, and detention centers. To date, about 233,000 persons incarcerated and staff at these facilities have contracted the novel coronavirus, and about 1,372 of those have died. As alarming as those numbers are, they are incomplete: Several states have not reported key data including the breakdown of infection rates among incarcerated people and prison staff, or demographic data like the race of those diagnosed.

“There’s no way to social distance,” Adamu Chan, an incarcerated person inside California’s infamous San Quentin prison, told the New York Times. “We all eat together. We have a communal bathroom. There’s no way to address a public health issue in an overcrowded facility.”

The disproportionate impact of Covid-19 in carceral settings, the incomplete reporting of data, and the minimal public health and health care standards being uniformly implemented is no surprise to anyone who has been inside a facility, has a loved one who is or was imprisoned, or works as staff. Prisons, jails, and detention centers themselves are well known to be incubators of infectious disease outbreaks. This is not the fault of those confined in carceral settings, but rather is a result of how societies view people whom they send to such places of forced confinement. To condemn one to such a facility is to judge not just their actions, but their person.

So punishment is not just taking away freedom of movement. It is forcing people into conditions of squalor — places that are overcrowded, violent, and without access to adequate (let alone high quality) health care — all intended to be part and parcel of the sentence itself. It’s a sentence to violence, deprivation, illness — physical and psychological, and spiritual — and sometimes premature death. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 40% of all people in prison reported having a current chronic health condition, while over half said they have had a chronic medical condition at some point in their lives. And 21% of people in prison and 14% of people in jail reported ever having tuberculosis, hepatitis B or C, or other STDs. HIV rates in prisons are five to seven times higher than in the general population.

At the state and local levels, public health officials most often have no legal authority to implement or enforce sanitation, medical care, food, water, and air quality inside facilities, despite what might be written into state law or the codes of operation for carceral settings. It usually takes lawsuits on behalf of incarcerated people to enforce medical care, basic sanitation, or other public health measures.

Federally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only provides guidelines for public health policies and procedures for carceral settings and have no enforcement authority over the Bureau of Prisons. These decisions about public health and health care mostly left to state departments of corrections — often down to the whims of the warden to implement or not. Medical staff are often part-time, and may not be qualified to provide care to people.

The recent scandal at an immigrant detention center in Southern Georgia demonstrates this. Dawn Wooten, the licensed practical nurse who worked at the center, is the whistleblower in the case against the facility where Mahendra Amin, MD, allegedly performed nonconsensual hysterectomies on scores of women. If true, not only is this a serious abuse of power, and in fact a violation of medical ethics and human rights, but Amin is not certified by any of the 24 member boards of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, according to news reports. While forced sterilization has a long history and has been fought primarily by reproductive and disability justice activists (mostly Black and Brown feminists), people in prisons, jails, and detention centers are often the most vulnerable still to these practices.

But this is not surprising. It is not uncommon for many facilities to employ doctors who do not have the training to perform certain kinds of medical care in carceral settings. Also, some doctors may take those jobs to abuse populations that have little power or access to systems of accountability. Wooten also alleged in her complaint that the conditions in the facility did not meet standards to best prevent the spread of Covid-19, nor did it even meet the standards for basic human decency. There is an unknowable number of cases of people who die in custody every year for being denied access to lifesaving care. In recent years several people with HIV in immigrant detention facilities were denied access to their antiretroviral medication, and subsequently died, most notably transgender activist Roxana Hernandez in 2018.

Di Hargrove in Mermaid Park in Wyndmoor, PA. Hargrove reflected on her time incarcerated at Riverside Correctional Facility, “A jail cell, that’s not a place for human beings, period. It doesn’t rehabilitate; it doesn’t correct — caging is a ritual of dehumanization, and with Covid-19, it could mean death. The only answer is freedom.” Di is an activist in her community for Black lives and LGBTQIAPK rights, as well as being an actor and comedian.


Whether it’s Covid-19, hepatitis, tuberculosis, or other infectious disease outbreaks that are regularly occurring inside carceral settings, we have to begin to think about these issues as constitutive of the prison industrial complex, not as aberrant. And the best strategy to help curb the spread of infectious diseases, and promote health among all people residing in the U.S., is to begin to put the same kind of energy, resources, and intellectual thought into what role a future without prisons can play in a future without Covid-19, or other pandemics. Bacteria and viruses will always exist and cause disease — but the conditions that breed pandemics are most often human-made.

Ending pandemics is going to take not only calls to defund the police or abolish the prison industrial complex, but to also plan for a new social contract. One that devises community-developed systems that provide for lives of dignity and joy, and minimize violence, greed, and deprivation. Our carceral system renders those who are locked in it as outside the parameters of citizens, of community members, and even outside notions of “the public.”

In order for public health to not ring as a meaningless phrase, we have to begin to tackle public health from an abolitionist framework, and not only expressed care or concern for the people on the outside who are not in prison now, or are not rendered as reasons for the carceral state to exist in the first place — Black, Latino, Native American, poor, homeless, queer, immigrant, transgender, sex worker, drug user, or dealer.

Our planning for future life should not end with our desire for the return of boozy brunches and taco Tuesdays. We should be planning for a future for human life. Prisons, jails, and detention centers are the antithesis of that by design.

Scottish Labour supports Daily Record's call for decriminalisation of drug use

Party bosses formally accept that drug addiction should be a health issue instead of a criminal one.

By Mark McGivern 16 OCT 2020

Needles strewn on the ground (Image: Tony Nicoletti Daily Record)


Scottish Labour has adopted the decriminalisation of drugs as official policy.

The moves by the party came after the Daily Record’s campaign to treat drug addiction as a health issue rather than a criminal one.

Since our bold front page declaration in July last year, the SNP voted at its party conference to adopt a similar stance.

Scottish Labour’s slow pace of reform frustrated senior MSPs like health spokesperson Monica Lennon and Neil Findlay, who have constantly argued for the party to adopt a strategy that treats addiction better and takes the best components from approaches in other nations.

Monica Lennon has made many passionate appeals for reform of UK drug laws

Daily Record has demanded action on drugs crisis - but things only get worse

The Daily Record has campaigned for the decriminalisation of drugs.

In May last year, Record journalist Mark McGivern joined MP Alison Thewliss in a walk around the side streets, alleys and wastelands between Glasgow’s Barras market and the Calton.

He also witnessed Peter Krykant’s efforts to reach out to heroin and cocaine users on the same streets in recent days.

Mark’s view echoes that of activists and politicians in progressive places he’s visited, like Barcelona and Lisbon, who believe it’s insanity to block facilities that help drug users at a time of huge crisis.

He said: "The drug scene tour in 2020 threw up images that would shock most people in Glasgow or anywhere else.

"After the Record’s story, a steady stream of journalists turned up from BBC to the Channel 4 to the BBC and various international media.

"They’d all come to see the terrible drug devastation for themselves in the world’s worst nation for drug deaths.

"But the outrage hasn’t resulted in any significant changes.

"The Scottish Government continues to throw miserly sums at drugs initiatives, with none of the promised radical responses either emerging or being acted on.

"And the deaths are soaring, possibly faster than ever, although our ongoing toxicology shambles means we can’t say until December this year what was happening in 2019.

"A generation of drug users continue to mix their methadone scripts with the heroin it’s meant to replace.

"There is barely a user to be found that doesn’t top up with the “street Valium” that kills the benefit of the therapy - and brings death in ever increasing numbers.

"The Scottish Government seems incapable of doing anything about it.

"Drug Consumption Rooms won’t solve Scotland’s drug deaths crisis.

"But blocking them underlines that the UK Government don’t really care that much."