It’s true that giving people money directly is an important piece of the puzzle. There is a bill before the Minnesota state legislature to create a rent assistance fund. But those kinds of funds take time to set up!
An eviction moratorium keeps people in their homes until they can access resources.
Frey is taking all the wrong lessons away from the pandemic era eviction moratorium. Namely:
1. There is a presumption that all economic harms from 2020 are the result of one policy—not the crisis itself!
2. Instead of seeing an intervention as not enough, he’s assuming that it was too much.
That’s a part of the conversation happening in Minnesota right now.
But I’ll say that any action is better than none. State-level interventions would still split the expenses more evenly than a donation-based model.
I’m keeping a close eye on the Minnesota legislature, which has promised to prioritize economic recovery this session.
But I think it will take pressure to direct those efforts toward the communities impacted instead of the corporations.
I agree with this and it's something for which community groups should already be developing concrete plans. I think reparations are already due.
Also, the expense of ICE detention is a big part of how the government is deporting people with every legal right to be in the U.S.
They don’t have to reshape immigration and citizenship policy if they just make it too expensive for people to access their rights.
We need reparations for ICE victims.
Anything short of that is setting the stage for a massive wealth grab from people of color that will re-entrench racial disparities for generations.
It’s so much money. I know this article is about a family in Florida, but $25k would be a year’s rent in Minneapolis.
A lot of the discussion around the eviction crisis in Minnesota is focused on lost wages from families needing to shelter in place.
But another huge part of the problem is that ICE detention is expensive. ICE illegally abducts and detains people and makes them pay their way out.
“Their kids are still traumatized by their father’s absence and the fear that he could be deported to Mexico, where he is originally from. The family is fighting every day to stay afloat and keep the home they bought a decade ago.”
This kind of bureaucratic red tape is infuriating and not unique to Trump.
Capitalists convinced us to trust large corporations more than people. As if large corporations haven’t done more harm to our communities than literally any of our neighbors.
I’ve been posting a lot about surveillance tech this week and the irony is that the people you’re surveilling are overwhelmingly neighbors you could get to know.
Meanwhile, the companies capturing the footage of your front porch ARE strangers and are sharing those videos with more strangers.
The stranger danger myth has really taught a lot of people to fear their neighbors.
But building community and trusting our neighbors is a huge part of how Minneapolis resisted (and continues to resist!) ICE and other government oppression.
This response assumes that the biggest violent threat is stranger danger.
Which is actually the least common form of violence in our society.
We keep saying this—but power based in violence is inherently weak. And war is no exception to that.
This has been pointed out many times (including by Evan!), but it bears repeating that this is the same playbook used to sow suspicion on vaccinations and the existence of climate change.
The good news is that if we lose in Iran and create horror across the region then Jesus comes back and fixes everything. Hegseth Doctrine.
jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-...
Dear community, I am calling on Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to sign on Pause Eviction, Safe Lives.
If this policy does not pass, please expect to see our vulnerable community members enter the court process.
A lot of what people lump together with NIMBYism is actually built on the infrastructure created by environmental racism organizers
plantationstopollution.selc.org/memphis-tn/
A study of the landscape of data center organizing covering a one year period. This is fast. Data center organizing is local because politics is local. But local doesn’t mean small.
www.datacenterwatch.org/report
Resist the temptation to address society-wide problems with individual solutions.
At best, they isolate and exhaust everyone who cares until many of them abandon the cause. At worst, they reinforce the very problem we wanted to solve.
You clearly haven’t read my work.
They also indoctrinate you into specific forms of paranoia and feed your anxieties (which you might not have had without them in the first place) instead of assuaging them. You're not buying safety, you're buying fear.
Any chance you’d cancel it now?
These surveillance systems are being used to hurt our neighbors. The footage shared isn’t something that can be taken back.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the research on the risks of gun ownership for women is similarly grim to the research on surveillance systems.
This is exactly right.
And wow. The distinction between virtuous and powerful is so useful.
I do work in Canada too.
The US has some specific problems and challenges, but the impunity granted to perpetrators by the state is a problem in all patriarchal societies. It’s part of why #MeToo went international.
It’s depressing and enraging, isn’t it? Even in cases where a perpetrator is essentially confessing—and bragging!—about what they’ve done, any intervention is the bare minimum.
This story is actually really consistent with what I found in my research.
If the media comes directly from a perpetrator, police are much more likely to consider it valuable evidence than if the exact same footage had come from the victim.
