<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Here’s an interesting article from the NY Times that was sent to me by a Mennonite friend.<div class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><font color="#000000" class="">Part of the article states:</font><br class=""></blockquote></div></div></div></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_quote">The call to defund the police is often accompanied by a call to shift <br class="">resources elsewhere, to education, housing and health care. The pandemic <br class="">has put on display the spectacular contradiction such appeals reveal. We <br class="">have no guaranteed health care, wages, housing or food; we can’t even <br class="">provide personal protective equipment. These failures have devastated <br class="">Black communities in particular.<br class=""><br class="">But then, in response to Black Lives Matter protests, the police show up <br class="">in high-tech gear and military-style vehicles to arrest, gas and <br class="">bludgeon protesters, demonstrating where our tax dollars have gone <br class="">instead. The demand for defunding shifts power and our imaginations away <br class="">from the police and toward a society rooted in collective care for <br class="">ordinary people. It brings into sharp relief who we have allowed <br class="">ourselves to become and offers a vision for who we could be.</div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div>For your reading pleasure;</div><div>Allan</div><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(11,83,148)"><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" class=""><font size="6" class="">NY Times Op-Ed, July 11, 2020</font></span><br style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small" class=""><br class=""></div><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">---------- Forwarded message ---------<br class="">From: <strong class="gmail_sendername" dir="auto">Darrel Furlotte</strong> <span dir="auto" class=""><<a href="mailto:darrel.furlotte@gmail.com" class="">darrel.furlotte@gmail.com</a>></span><br class="">Date: Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 1:46 PM<br class="">Subject: The Left Is Remaking the World<br class="">To: <br class=""></div><br class=""><br class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><br class="">
<br class="">
NY Times Op-Ed, July 11, 2020<br class="">
The Left Is Remaking the World<br class="">
“Defund the police” and “cancel rent” aren’t reforms, but paths to <br class="">
revolution.<br class="">
By Amna A. Akbar<br class="">
<br class="">
Ms. Akbar is a law professor who studies leftist social movements.<br class="">
<br class="">
The uprisings in response to the killing of George Floyd are far <br class="">
different from anything that has come before. Not just because they may <br class="">
be the largest in our history, or that seven weeks in, people are still <br class="">
in the streets (even if the news media has largely moved on). But also <br class="">
because, for the last few years, organizers have been thinking boldly.<br class="">
<br class="">
They have been pushing demands — from “defund the police” to “cancel <br class="">
rent” to “pass the Green New Deal” — that would upend the status quo and <br class="">
redistribute power from elites to the working class. And now ordinary <br class="">
people are, too; social movements have helped spread these demands to a <br class="">
public mobilized by the pandemic and the protests.<br class="">
<br class="">
These movements are in conversation with one another, cross-endorsing <br class="">
demands as they expand their grass-roots bases. Cancel the rent <br class="">
campaigns have joined the call to defund the police. This month, racial, <br class="">
climate and economic justice organizations are hosting a four-day crash <br class="">
course on defunding the police.<br class="">
<br class="">
Each demand demonstrates a new attitude among leftist social movements. <br class="">
They don’t want to reduce police violence, or sidestep our <br class="">
environmentally unsustainable global supply chain, or create grace <br class="">
periods for late rent. These are the responses of reformers and policy <br class="">
elites.<br class="">
<br class="">
Instead, the people making these demands want a new society. They want a <br class="">
break from prisons and the police, from carbon and rent. They want <br class="">
counselors in place of cops, housing for all and a jobs guarantee. While <br class="">
many may find this naïve, polls, participation in protests and growing <br class="">
membership in social movement organizations show these demands are <br class="">
drawing larger and larger parts of the public toward a fundamental <br class="">
critique of the status quo and a radical vision for the future.<br class="">
<br class="">
Consider the appeal to defund and dismantle the police, championed by <br class="">
almost every major social movement organization on the left, from the <br class="">
Black Visions Collective to Mijente to the Sunrise Movement, and echoed <br class="">
on the streets.<br class="">
<br class="">
Defunding, part of a strategy to eventually abolish the police, <br class="">
challenges the prevailing logic of police reform: the idea that police <br class="">
brutality is caused by individual bad apples acting without sufficient <br class="">
oversight and training. This idea undergirds the familiar panoply of <br class="">
reforms: body cameras, community policing, implicit bias workshops. If <br class="">
officers are properly equipped and controlled, there will be less <br class="">
violence, its proponents argue — despite no significant evidence to back <br class="">
that up.<br class="">
<br class="">
Defunding suggests the problem is not isolated, nor is it a result of a <br class="">
few officers’ attitudes. It challenges the power, the resources and the <br class="">
enormous scope of the police. Whether they are responding to a mental <br class="">
health emergency or deployed to a protest, their training and tools are <br class="">
geared toward violence.<br class="">
<br class="">
The demand for defunding suggests, as the police and prison abolitionist <br class="">
Rachel Herzing often says, that the only way to reduce police violence <br class="">
is to reduce police officers’ opportunities for contact with the public. <br class="">
The protests have forced us to rethink state-sanctioned violence as our <br class="">
default response to social problems, to reconsider the hundreds of <br class="">
billions of dollars we have spent on prisons and the salaries of more <br class="">
than 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers.<br class="">
<br class="">
The uprisings have also expanded the space for a reckoning with the <br class="">
failures of liberal reforms and with the possibility of doing things in <br class="">
radically different ways. Tinkering and training cannot fix our reliance <br class="">
on police officers to deal with routine social problems through violence <br class="">
and the threat of it.<br class="">
<br class="">
The demand for defunding calls into question the fundamental premise of <br class="">
policing: that it produces safety. It urges us to take collective <br class="">
responsibility for collective care, repair and redress. It shifts our <br class="">
vantage point on persistent problems: for example, to guarantee housing <br class="">
for all rather than to continue to arrest and cage this country’s more <br class="">
than 567,000 homeless people.<br class="">
<br class="">
The call to defund the police is often accompanied by a call to shift <br class="">
resources elsewhere, to education, housing and health care. The pandemic <br class="">
has put on display the spectacular contradiction such appeals reveal. We <br class="">
have no guaranteed health care, wages, housing or food; we can’t even <br class="">
provide personal protective equipment. These failures have devastated <br class="">
Black communities in particular.<br class="">
<br class="">
But then, in response to Black Lives Matter protests, the police show up <br class="">
in high-tech gear and military-style vehicles to arrest, gas and <br class="">
bludgeon protesters, demonstrating where our tax dollars have gone <br class="">
instead. The demand for defunding shifts power and our imaginations away <br class="">
from the police and toward a society rooted in collective care for <br class="">
ordinary people. It brings into sharp relief who we have allowed <br class="">
ourselves to become and offers a vision for who we could be.<br class="">
<br class="">
Taking money away from the police is not the sole demand. Consider the <br class="">
push to cancel rent. It asks the state to abolish tenants’ obligations <br class="">
to pay their landlords each month. But rent is the product of a private <br class="">
contract about private property: the foundation of our social, economic <br class="">
and political order.<br class="">
<br class="">
So when organizers make the demand to cancel rent, they are conjuring up <br class="">
a state whose primary allegiance is to people’s needs instead of profit. <br class="">
The demand raises the possibility of a world where housing is an <br class="">
entitlement rather than a commodity. It aims to shift power from <br class="">
landlords to tenants, in the service of visions of housing for all.<br class="">
<br class="">
Or consider the environment. The Green New Deal does not merely call for <br class="">
less pollution. It requires that we restructure our economy so we can <br class="">
move to clean, renewable energy sources and net-zero greenhouse gas <br class="">
emissions.<br class="">
<br class="">
To get there, the Green New Deal calls for enormous investments in <br class="">
public transit, universal health care, free public college tuition and <br class="">
millions of high-wage green jobs. It emphasizes that everyone ought to <br class="">
carry out its projects, with a central role for working-class people of <br class="">
color. The bill’s vision is so counter to the actual practices of the <br class="">
state, and to the talking points of the Democratic and Republican <br class="">
Parties, you have to stretch your imagination to understand it. And that <br class="">
is the point.<br class="">
<br class="">
Organizers often call these demands “non-reformist reforms,” a term <br class="">
coined in the 1960s by the French socialist André Gorz. Reform on its <br class="">
own is a tired continuation of liberal politics and legalism, <br class="">
expert-driven and elite-centered. Even now, policing experts are <br class="">
grasping to turn the energy around ‘defund’ toward the same old reforms, <br class="">
and mayors are endorsing superficial budget cuts, diluting the bold demands.<br class="">
<br class="">
The way to respond is to stay focused on building mass movements of <br class="">
ordinary people who are serious about restoring and redistributing <br class="">
social wealth, as the Red Nation’s Red Deal puts it, to those who <br class="">
created it: “workers, the poor, Indigenous peoples, the global South, <br class="">
women, migrants, caretakers of the land, and the land itself.” Here, <br class="">
too, you see the connections — among Indigenous resistance, <br class="">
environmental justice and more.<br class="">
<br class="">
Leftist movements today see our crises as intersectional. Police <br class="">
violence, global warming and unaffordable housing are not disconnected, <br class="">
discrete problems; instead, they emerge from colonialism and capitalism. <br class="">
Organizers recall these histories, and tell stories of freedom struggles.<br class="">
<br class="">
And whatever you think of their demands, you have to be in awe of how <br class="">
they inaugurate a new political moment, as the left offers not just a <br class="">
searing critique, but practical ladders to radical visions. These <br class="">
capacious demands create the grounds for multiracial mass movements, our <br class="">
only hope for a more just future.<br class="">
<br class="">
<br class=""><br class="">
</div></div>
</div></div>
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