Epic battle

The battle to stop construction of the proposed militarized police training facility being referred to as “Cop City” in the Atlanta Forest has many components.

Militarized policing	At this time of endless instances of militarized policing the last thing we need is a facility to train police to use these tactics. To train police from all over the country. International?
	Training will be provided for urban warfare. Including helicopter pads and a mock city.
	Of course, the location chosen was right next to communities of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Where men, women and children who are already traumatized by policing would hear all the shooting from the training facility.
	Police from multiple agencies have continually harassed tree defenders. Manuel Teran (Tortuguita) was killed by police.
Indigenous rights	“You must immediately vacate Mvskoke homelands and cease violence and policing of Indigenous and Black people in Mvskoke lands” (Atlanta Forest)
Civil liberties	As is occurring all over the country, civil disobedience and protest is being threatened by elevating charges to domestic terrorism.
	66 Organizations Urge that Domestic Terrorism Charges Against Defend the Atlanta Forest Protesters Be Dropped
Environment	Trees are more important now than ever to pull carbon dioxide out of the air.

DEFEND THE ATLANTA FOREST
an autonomous movement for the future of South Atlanta

We call on all people of good conscience to stand in solidarity with the movement to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta.
DEFEND THE ATLANTA FOREST

MY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, a group of Mvskoke Creek activists interrupted a Regional Commission meeting and attempted to give an eviction notice to the Atlanta mayor.

MVSKOKE CREEK ACTIVIST 1: Objection. Objection. We have a letter being delivered from the Mvskoke Creek Nation on behalf of Mvskoke Creek spiritual leadership in opposition to Cop City.

MVSKOKE CREEK ACTIVIST 2: I came all the way on the Trail of Tears to deliver this letter to you folks.

UNIDENTIFIED: You’re welcome to leave.

MVSKOKE CREEK ACTIVIST 2: We want you to know that the contemporary Mvskoke people are now making their journey back to our homelands and hereby give notice to Mayor Andre Dickens, the Atlanta City Council, the Atlanta Police Department, the Atlanta Police Foundation, the Dekalb County Sheriff’s Office, and so-called Cop City, that you must immediately vacate Mvskoke homelands and cease violence and policing of Indigenous and Black people in Mvskoke lands. We also ask for an independent investigation into the assassination of our relative Tortuguita and that the charges be dropped against Weelaunee Forest defenders.

Opposition Grows to Atlanta “Cop City” as More Forest Defenders Charged with Domestic Terrorism

A number of people and organizations are calling for the cancellation of “Cop City”
Students of the Atlanta University Center Denounce the Building of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center
Forest Defenders Vow Resistance After Court Okays Phase I Of ‘Cop City’
Detroit ‘Cop City’ rally held in solidarity with Atlanta environmental defenders – BridgeDetroit
CrimethInc. : The Forest in the City : Two Years of Forest Defense in Atlanta, Georgia
Sign the petition: No massive police training complex. Stop Cop City!
CITIES ACROSS THE US TAKE PART IN ‘WEEK OF ACTION’ AGAINST COP CITY
RALLY IN SOLIDARITY WITH RESISTANCE TO COP CITY IN AVON, MASSACHUSETTS
Elders Say Stop Cop City!
Multiple State and Local Police Agencies Violently Raid Weelanuee Forest Music Festival, Week of Action Perseveres

On 1/31/2023, a number of people who are involved in justice work in central Iowa gathered at the offices of the law firm that represents Corporation Services Company. Which in turn represents U.S. Multifamily Capital Markets at Cushman and Wakefield. John O’Neill is the President of U.S. Multifamily Capital Markets. He sits on the executive committee board for the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is building “Cop City” in Atlanta. Where Manuel Teran (Tortuguita) was killed by police who were clearing tree sitters from the proposed construction area.

Following are some of the photos I took at our action that morning.

See more about “Cop City” here:
https://quakersandreligioussocialism.com/?s=%22cop+city%22

An Alternative to Capitalist Hierarchies

I previously began to describe the Cecosesola Co-op (See: http://bit.ly/3mrdtop). I had been doing research to find examples of large mutual aid communities when I started to see stories about Cecosesola. This InfoGraphic from Venequelanalysis shows there are one thousand three hundred people involved.

**Basic information about Cecosesola (Venezuelanalysis)**

On September 29, 2022, Cecosesola received the Right Livelihood Award, a Swedish prize often known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” This award honors people and organizations that encourage social change. According to a statement issued by the Right Livelihood Foundation, the prize was given to Cecosesola for “establishing an equitable and cooperative economic model as a robust alternative to profit-driven economies.”

In what follows, we talk to three of the cooperative’s associates – Lizeth Vargas, Ender Duarte, and Gustavo Salas – about their project which serves hundreds of thousands of people and is a model for non-hierarchical organizational practices.

An Alternative to Capitalist Hierarchies: A Conversation with the Cecosesola Co-op. A Venezuelan cooperative network that recently received the “Alternative Nobel Prize” tells its story By Cira Pascual Marquina – Venezuelanalysis, Nov 20th 2022.

Can you tell us the story of Cecosesola?

Gustavo Salas: Cecosesola was born in the 1960s when the Centro Gumilla [a Catholic investigation center for social action] promoted the organizing of cooperatives in the most precarious barrios of Barquisimeto [Lara state, center-western Venezuela]. That is when poor, working-class people began to set aside a bit of money every month to build their own cooperatives.

In other countries, co-ops have a middle-class base, but many Venezuelan cooperatives have a working-class one: that is, co-ops here often begin to take shape in the poorest barrios.

The first cooperatives in Barquisimeto were founded by people with a great deal of commitment to social work and community work. They eventually came together in Cecosesola, a co-op center or a co-op of co-ops [the acronym stands for Central Cooperativa de Servicios Sociales de Lara]. The first Cecosesola project was one that addressed an immediate need of the people: funerary services.

This first iteration of building the community didn’t succeed. Interestingly, it was a bus boycott that re-initiated Cecosesola, which brings to mind the Montogomery bus boycott of 1955-56.

National coverage of the boycott and King’s trial resulted in support from people outside Montgomery. In early 1956 veteran pacifists Bayard Rustin and Glenn E. Smiley visited Montgomery and offered King advice on the application of Gandhian techniques and nonviolence to American race relations. Rustin, Ella Baker, and Stanley Levison founded In Friendship to raise funds in the North for southern civil rights efforts, including the bus boycott. King absorbed ideas from these proponents of nonviolent direct action and crafted his own syntheses of Gandhian principles of nonviolence. He said: “Christ showed us the way, and Gandhi in India showed it could work” (Rowland, “2,500 Here Hail”).

On 5 June 1956, the federal district court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and in November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Browder v. Gayle and struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses. The court’s decision came the same day that King and the MIA were in circuit court challenging an injunction against the MIA carpools. Resolved not to end the boycott until the order to desegregate the buses actually arrived in Montgomery, the MIA operated without the carpool system for a month. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, and on 20 December 1956 King called for the end of the boycott; the community agreed. The next morning, he boarded an integrated bus with Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Glenn Smiley. King said of the bus boycott: “We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation. So … we decided to substitute tired feet for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery”
Montgomery Bus Boycott, Stanford University, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

A few years after the foundation of Cecosesola, in 1974, there was a feeling of dissatisfaction brewing among workers and members. Enthusiasm and hopes had vanished, and Cecosesola was now closer to a capitalist enterprise than a social movement or a community-based organization.

As it happens, Cecosesola was immersed in an internal debate. At the time, people of Barquisimeto were on the streets en masse, protesting a hike in bus fares. That is when the Cecosesola bases, those who were pushing to reinstate the original grassroots logic of the organization saw an opportunity to rekindle the cooperative project. Following Cecosesola’s early footsteps and grassroots mission, we built a transportation project that would keep fares down. There were no bosses in this project, which thus reactivated our on-the-ground work. In the end, we ended up assuming many transport routes in Barquisimeto.

Even though the transportation initiative was associated with Cecosesola, it didn’t reproduce the existing hierarchical order. The project became an opportunity to reorganize things and do away with bosses. In fact, the transport initiative would hold massive meetings on a regular basis, and all 300 associated workers would participate in each meeting!

In the beginning, the whole thing was very chaotic: collective decision-making isn’t easy when society is completely based on hierarchies. However, as the transport project became consolidated, it began to leave its imprint on Cecosesola. Eventually, we displaced the conventional top-down model with a system of direct participation that integrates workers and associates alike.

That is how Cecosesola, including its funerary services, was returned to the community, to its origins. Now we have an open administration without intermediation and with direct participation.

What are the principles behind Cecosesola’s modus operandi?

Ender Duarte: Rather than principles set out on paper, we have a set of ideas or principles that organize and regulate our day-to-day practices.

Our key ideas are mutuality, respect, and transparency, which are all important to building relationships of trust. In other words, mutual care and solidarity are our driving forces.

These practices guide our day-to-day activities, be they funerary services, healthcare, or food production and distribution. If we break away from our fundamentals, we would break the relationships of trust that we have been developing with so much care and love.

As we work, we are doing away with relations based on exploitation and domination. Ours is an organization without bosses. Over the years we have learned that the ever-present shadow of hierarchies can only be abolished with mutual respect and trust.

What are the main teachings that Cecosesola can share with people about how to make a better world?

Gustavo Salas: If we want to transform our society, we have to do away with hierarchies. When Cecosesola was born, it generated a great deal of enthusiasm and passion. However, when a conventional, top-down administration emerged, that flower wilted. The hierarchical structure separated people from the organization and they went back home. Why? Even when a boss or leader figure has good intentions, the other vanishes: he or she is erased.

When Cecosesola was re-initiated, we did so by going back to the basics. We rebuilt an organization where everyone has a voice and everyone counts. If we really want to live in a more just society, we have to break away from the prevailing logic, and we have to find new organizational models.

Capitalist enterprises are not a model for us; the same goes for governmental enterprises. At Cecosesola we are exploring a new model based on mutuality. The model works, so now we are working hard to perfect it.

Process as Solution

When I’m overwhelmed with complexity and questions, I try to express things visually. Following is the most recent iteration of something I’ve been working on for years.

The most recent change is the red line, representing how failing and corrupt institutions, authoritarianism, and environmental chaos, are blocking solutions like LANDBACK, Black Liberation, Abolition, and Mutual Aid. The forces being used by empire to crush dissent are escalating rapidly.

I still believe Mutual Aid, Abolition, and all the pieces of the Red/Green New Deal are how we will continue to build just communities. Those are the ways we will address the rising forces of injustice. But rather than just the goal of the Red/Green New Deal, they are also the means by which we defeat the forces of empire.

Authoritarianism

It has been apparent for decades that rapidly escalating environmental chaos would overwhelm the resources of our government and society. What I hadn’t given enough attention to was how rapidly authoritarianism would spread.

That is exactly what the idea is here, as it is with all these laws. It’s not just just about bloggers or kids or books. It’s about a strategy. That strategy is blitzkrieg. Again, a classic fascist maneuver. See how hard and fast these laws and bills are coming? You can scarcely catch your breath before there’s another one. The very same day news broke of the “we’re going to keep a file on you if you write about us” bill, news also broke of a bill to give women the death penalty for the crime of…miscarriages.

The point is to overwhelm the system, society, institutions. Sure, maybe all these bills won’t pass. But a few just might. And where they do, they set precedents. Those precedents are like cracks in a dam, that open whole fissures, and eventually — the deluge. This crackpot legislator, tomorrow, can point to that precedent, in that state. This lunatic lawyer can use to it to appeal, when a court strikes down some law.

The idea here is to accelerate. Propose a thousand crackpot bills. Pass maybe three. But those three become precedents, footholds, spearheads, for nine. And those nine become fifty. And those fifty become…and so it goes. This is a classic form of destabilizing democracy, loved by fanatics and extremists, who’ve failed at using hard power — open violence, like Jan 6th. They resort to a kind of blitzkrieg from the ground up, where a top down approach — storming Congress — failed. Accelerate the breakdown of democracy. Just one crackpot bill passes — and the precedent is set for another hundred.
Welcome to the GOP’s Vision for an Authoritarian America. The GOP’s Blitzkrieg of Hate on Peaceful, Innocent People — And Why It’s Fascism by umair ahque, Medium, March 4, 2023

The question is, how are we living today? Are we comfortable with a status quo based upon white superiority, materialism, militarism, and oppression, i.e. empire? To do nothing is to support this status quo.

I’ve been writing about a new campaign from the Climate Mobilization Network that hopes to build a movement of movements, a network of Mutual Aid groups.
(See: https://quakersandreligioussocialism.com/?s=climate+mobilization)

This collective visioning, movement incubation and learning gathering will equip you with space for reflection, new ideas, inspiration, and next steps to participate in this new campaign.

Together we will build relationships and explore:

How survival and mutual aid programs can grow the movement
New, creative approaches to taking action against fossil fuels
Ways to integrate healing into our work
And how to create space for reflection, intentionality and strategic clarity

**https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/**

Pause and Transform

I recently attended a Zoom meeting hosted by the Climate Mobilization Network. I was interested because I’ve been following the Climate Mobilization Network’s work for years.

They articulate what has not been working and that they are looking into different strategies that might be successful. I was especially interested to discover their emphasis on Mutual Aid programs.

This collective visioning, movement incubation and learning gathering will equip you with space for reflection, new ideas, inspiration, and next steps to participate in this new campaign.

Together we will build relationships and explore:

How survival and mutual aid programs can grow the movement
New, creative approaches to taking action against fossil fuels
Ways to integrate healing into our work
And how to create space for reflection, intentionality and strategic clarity

Why We Decide to Pause and Transform our Strategy

Congressional failure to take meaningful action on climate
The slow pace of local climate programs where policy change is severely limited by what’s considered politically possible
Rising inequality amid continued neoliberalism
Escalating climate disasters that are hitting global and US-based frontline communities the hardest and will continue accelerating rapidly!
And widespread cultural and generational concern about climate change has not yet been tapped into effectively by a mass movement.

Climate Mobilization Network

Movement Analysis

We reached out to more than 20 leaders across the Just Transition movement to guide our strategic planning process – we asked them about what learnings, gaps, and critical takeaways they saw emerging in their movement work. The opportunities that interviewees identified our movement needs to build on included:

We need more support for escalating, disruptive direct actions
We need work building a movement of movements
We need local organizing & base building as a foundation for larger mass movement
We need solutions outside of government
We need a more coherent, clear, and unified narrative strategy and message
We need more training on healing and community care as the center of our movements – and a politics of empathy and love at the center of our movements

Climate Mobilization Network

Climate Mobilization’s 2023 Pilot Programs: Political Education on Climate Survival, Healing Justice, Movement History and the Need for Escalated Direct Action

After processing our movement analysis, as well as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges of our current focus campaigns and Network – and realizing the need for more radical and inventive approaches to addressing the climate emergency – we decided to build for our pilot program to focus on building out a transformational, motivational and commitment-driven political education training program that builds understanding, alignment and action around the need for climate survival programs and escalated, coordinated, and creative direct action.

This includes:

Direct action strategy and tactics from Indigenous struggles, from the Global South & from history, encouraging participants to develop their emergent ideas
Why and how to start mutual aid based climate survival programs – pulling case studies for effective models of sustained community resilience
Mass movement history & state of current climate / need for climate survival
Healing Justice organizing practices addressing burnout, trauma, climate grief at the root cause; integrating organizing and healing justice approaches into one, making climate organizing a more joyous, community-oriented, accessible, and sustainable practice for all peoples to get involved in – with a focus on building out leadership of resilience of frontline communities

Why This: Political education is movement connective tissue and a key resource for organizers to become more resilient, effective and reflective. Climate organizing in the US is particularly disconnected from the important resources offered by movement history rooted in global context.

Why Now: This program addresses several emergent movement needs:

Burnout is at an all-time high, a signal to reflect, rebuild resilience, shift organizing practices across the movement to center healing, and re-root our organizations in movement history.
Climate groups’ interest in direct action remains high, while increasing numbers of groups working on other issues will be trying to add climate programs. We will provide a container for this work.
We’ve also heard concerns that the direct action toolbox and strategy need to be expanded and strengthened.

This program will forge common ground among a burgeoning climate survival movement that brings together climate and non-climate groups. Alignment and political education around direct action, healing justice and mass movement history is an unmet need across sectors; the training will also provide an appealing, approachable framework for groups new to climate work to launch climate survival programs. The focus is on moving people to launch direct action and climate survival programs, change their organizing practices (to incorporate a climate survival focus and become more healing justice centered), and access improved resilience in the work they are already doing.

Climate Mobilization’s New Direction for 2023

Here are the slides from the presentation

final-slides-for-feb-28-workshop Download

#NoCarbonPipelines #NoCO2Pipelines #MutualAid

Changing course

How straight has the course of your life been?

During my life I’ve changed course many times. Sometimes a change was forced upon me, sometimes a voluntary change. Sometimes both.

I grew up on farms and in small towns in rural Iowa. I hadn’t lived in any cities prior to moving to Indianapolis in 1971. That was a culture shock. I had a tough time seeing how many cars there were and could see and smell the auto exhaust (prior to catalytic converters). I had a Spiritual vision of my beloved Rocky Mountains hidden in clouds of exhaust. That vision played a huge role in the rest of my life.

In one way you might say my vision was wrong. The Rocky Mountains have not, yet, been hidden by smog. Although they are engulfed with greenhouse gases.

In the late sixties we traveled to California. As we approached Los Angeles, our eyes began to water, and we coughed a lot. We were told we would get used to it. And the mountains and hills around Los Angeles were veiled in auto exhaust.

I’d always had objections to people owning personal automobiles. Why own a complex machine that sits idle most of the time? Vast amounts of land became covered by highways. Those in large cities routinely sat in traffic for a long time each day. All the traffic and parking infrastructure, and police. Interstate highways cut through the middle of communities. Little or no mass transit was being created.

I’d also always been interested in science. I learned how fossil fuels were formed, how long that took. And, most importantly, that meant fossil fuel sources needed to be protected, because they were not renewable. Our profligate waste of fossil fuels was energy stolen from future generations.

When I first moved to Indianapolis, it was to join the Friends Volunteer Service Mission (VSM). There, wages from one year of working were saved to support yourself to do service work in that neighborhood the second year. So, there was no money for a car. At the end of those two years, I tried to avoid having a car. But the Metro city bus schedule did not always extend to the hours I was working, nor always run in the neighborhoods I lived in. When someone in the neighborhood offered to sell me his used car for $50, I bought it.

Necessary Evil?

But all this weighed on me spiritually. I knew it was not right to have a fossil fuel-based society/economy. And yet, I began to think having a car was a “necessary evil”, as so many people told me. But how could “evil” be “right”?

After a few years, my car was involved in a traffic accident. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the car was totaled.

I clearly remember a Spiritual leading, telling me that this was an opportunity to find an alternative to a necessary evil. I had put a lot of prayer and thinking into my discomfort in having a car all during the time I had one.

I had been making some changes that made this look possible now. I moved nearer downtown, since that is where the Medical Center where I was doing research was located. I had to be within walking or running distance of work in case the bus schedule changed. Or more commonly, to get to work on the weekends when the bus schedule was scaled back.

I also made sure a laundromat and grocery store were within walking distance. I had been learning how to shop in a way that I could carry everything home.

Opportunities

My grandmother, Lorene Standing, said the will of God is often revealed in a series of small steps. The above is an illustration of that. With the pieces now in place, I wondered if the accident provided a new opportunity to try to live without a car. I remember a feeling of unease, whether I could really do this. At the same time, there was a much greater awareness that this might be the time. If not, I feared I would fall into the trap of owning a car. There was the fallback possibility, to get a car if this experiment didn’t work out.

Many adventures resulted from making the decision to give up a car. It lifted the burden of the spiritual weight of having a car. It showed me and others that having a car was not a necessary evil. A witness.

Just because you can’t make a difficult choice at one point in your life, doesn’t mean the opportunity won’t come around again.

Changing Course

At the beginning I said sometimes change is forced upon us, sometimes a voluntary choice, sometimes both. Perhaps what we thought was forced upon us was actually a spiritual leading. If that is true, shouldn’t we be paying more attention to the Spirit in our lives?

How did we get here?

I often reflect upon how I don’t know what I’ll end up writing on any given day. I thought I’d be writing about a Zoom meeting I attended that was hosted by Climate Mobilization, an organization that has been going through changes in their approach to call attention to our climate emergencies. I’ve been following their work for years.

Tuesday night was an introduction to Climate Mobilization’s change of course that I’ll be writing more about. I was fascinated to see the emergence of a national/international plan to prepare for climate survival. And to see the pieces that have been coming together for me over the past five years are the same that Climate Mobilization has been going through.

You can see these points in the diagram below.

Emphasis on working locally
Mutual Aid
Indigenous sovereignty
Abolition
Prefigurative solutions
Healing
- Emotional
- Spiritual
- Physical
- Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs)

No Cop City Anywhere

Simultaneously, as the climate warms, as storms and disasters worsen, as infrastructure crumbles, and as more and more people are left jobless and houseless, the true reason the political class pumps ever more resources into militarization is being revealed: It’s not to protect against some so-called “crime wave” the corporate media constantly fear mongers about, but instead to police the very collapse of capitalism itself.
BENJI HART, In These Times

There are many efforts emerging to address the racism, militarism, and violence of policing in this country. These efforts are growing because they are at the intersection of capitalism, white supremacy, racism, militarism, authoritarianism, ongoing environmental devastation, and police and prison abolition.

A monumental struggle is currently taking place in the Weelaunee Forest in DeKalb County near Atlanta, Georgia.

The local government plans to level 85 acres of the forest to build a $90 million police training facility. The natural environment that would be lost is not only a precious recreational resource for Atlanta residents, but a crucial bulwark protecting against flooding and other climate change-related disasters, which are on the rise. Despite city leaders’ commitment to ramming the project through undemocratically, a decentralized campaign known as #StopCopCity is fighting back.

The movement is connecting police and prison abolition with environmental justice, and uniting organizations and individuals from across the political spectrum in demanding the city divert resources away from militarization and towards fighting climate change and protecting Black and brown lives.

The threat of a militarized megadevelopment, and the intersectional, multiracial coalition mobilizing to resist it, bear some striking parallels with the recently-opened police academy in Garfield Park, Chicago — and the youth-led #NoCopAcademy campaign that fought its construction nearly six years ago.

Simultaneously, as the climate warms, as storms and disasters worsen, as infrastructure crumbles, and as more and more people are left jobless and houseless, the true reason the political class pumps ever more resources into militarization is being revealed: It’s not to protect against some so-called “crime wave” the corporate media constantly fear mongers about, but instead to police the very collapse of capitalism itself.

Keeping poor and working people at bay while their communities are dismantled, their lands are poisoned, and their lives deemed insignificant can only be achieved through brute force. We are witnessing the robber barons barricade themselves in, sealed away from the catastrophes they created, with the same resources they stole from the people on the other side of the wall.

No Cop City Anywhere. Chicago’s #NoCopAcademy campaign and #StopCopCity in Atlanta are part of the same movement: to end violent policing, protect the environment and defend Black and brown lives by BENJI HART, In These Times, FEBRUARY 22, 2023

As one example, solidarity is being built to support cities facing proposed construction of huge police training facilities. Some of these projects are referred to as No Cop City (Atlanta), No Cop Academy (Chicago), and Detroit Cop City (Detroit).

Since april 2021, police abolitionists and environmentalists have been engaged in a furious struggle to prevent the destruction of a precious stretch of forest in Atlanta, Georgia, where the government aims to build a police training compound and facilitate the construction of a giant soundstage for the film industry. In this essay, participants in the movement chronicle a year of action, tracing the movement’s victories and setbacks and exploring the strategies that
inform it. This campaign represents a crucial effort to chart new paths forward in the wake of the George Floyd Rebellion, linking the defense of the land that sustains us with the struggle against police.

CRIMETHINC. EX-WORKERS COLLECTIVE
CrimethInc. is a rebel alliance—a decentralized network pledged to anonymous collective action—a breakout from the prisons of our age. We strive to reinvent our lives and our world according to the principles of self-determination and mutual aid. www.crimethinc.com | USA, May 2022

Environmental Justice

The term “environmental justice” recognizes that environmental “bads” are not distributed evenly. Over generations, the effects of systematic racism concentrate environmental “bads” among the marginalized. Specifically, those cumulative effects concentrate the “bads” among people of color.

In June 2022, Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders told 11Alive News, “If you know anything about Atlanta at (all) then you know the places that flood the most are on the south side … In destroying the forest they’re going to exasperate those issues they’ve already had with peoples town flooding … It’s clearly not for us, it’s not for our community, and it’s going to be adverse to us and our people.”

“Cop City is a catalyst for further nationwide militarization of the police and the continued expansion of the surveillance state,” Defend the Atlanta Forest argues. “This development would remove a natural barrier to flooding and pollution for communities downstream … These [effects] would primarily affect BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] communities in Dekalb County that the city has chosen to ignore.”

The effort to save Atlanta’s Forests by Sean McShee, The Wild Hunt, June 14, 2022

https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/city-in-the-forest/city-in-the-forest_print_black_and_white.pdf

The campaign to defend the forest in Atlanta, Georgia has become one of the most vibrant movements of the post-Trump era, interweaving environmentalism, abolitionism, and the fight against gentrification. Yet as police shift to employing lethal violence and indiscriminate terrorism charges, it has reached a critical juncture. Participants explore how this struggle has developed over the past year, reflecting on the practices that have given it strength and analyzing the challenges before it.

Our society is at a crisis point. Decades of escalating economic pressure have created rampant inequality and desperation. Rather than addressing the root causes of these, politicians across the political spectrum continue channeling more and more money to police, relying on them to suppress unrest by force alone. This dependance has enabled police departments and their allies to consume a vast amount of public resources. Meanwhile, driven by the same economic pressures, catastrophic climate change is generating hurricanes, forest fires, droughts, and widespread ecological collapse.

In this context, starting in April 2021, a bold movement set out to defend a forest in Atlanta, Georgia, where local politicians and corporate profiteers want to build a police training compound and a soundstage for the film industry. The training compound, known as Cop City, would be the largest police training facility in the United States. It would devastate the South River Forest, also known as Weelaunee Forest in honor of the Muscogee Creek people who lived there until they were deported in the Trail of Tears.

The Forest in the City. Two Years of Forest Defense in Atlanta, Georgia, Crimethinc, 2023-02-22

The Atlanta Police Foundation has plans–backed by $60 million in corporate funding and $30 million in taxpayer money–to build an enormous police training facility over the city’s Weelaunee Forest.

Activists and forest defenders are calling the plan “Cop City,” as it will include a mock village (complete with a nightclub), a Black Hawk helipad, an emergency vehicle driving course, dozens of firing ranges, and an area for explosives training.

The neighborhoods that surround the forest are largely made up of lower-income Black residents. Cop City will decimate green space, which is already so rare in BIPOC communities, and replace it with a playground for the police to practice warfare tactics.

Communities of color live with police-induced trauma every day. Now this Atlanta community will feel and hear the presence of a training facility where cops learn new ways to enact violence against Black and Brown communities, right in their own backyard.

In addition to the terror of an ever-present police force, Cop City is an environmental racism nightmare. The Weelaunee Forest provides ecological relief for the people of Atlanta. It offsets stormwater runoff, which might otherwise push unwanted sediment into the drinking water. The mere presence of trees helps to keep the city cool during the long, hot, humid summers, and improves air quality by reducing carbon dioxide released into the air.

Cop City has been gaining nationwide attention, and for good reason. The city of Atlanta, its police force, and its corporate sponsors are actively cooperating to increase police power, at a time when police departments are under scrutiny for abusing that power.

Cop City will do irreparable harm to the city of Atlanta, and inspire more play villages for cops across the country. But there’s hope. Cop City does not have the full funding necessary to scale the project from private entities, meaning there is still time to put pressure on these investors to halt all funding to the Atlanta Police Foundation and APF Support Inc.

Sign the petition to private investors: No massive police training complex. Stop Cop City!

Dozens of protesters made their way through downtown Detroit Friday afternoon before halting to a stop in the middle of Congress and Griswold, blocking traffic and prompting angry drivers to blare their horns.

“Stop Cop City!” the crowd chanted. “I am…a revolutionary!”

The march followed a rally with members of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, Michigan Liberation, Detroit Will Breathe and several other social and environmental justice groups in a show of solidarity with protesters in the Atlanta area. For nearly two years, organizers and activists in Georgia have been protesting against “Cop City,” an 85-acre, $90 million police training center being developed in a forested area near Atlanta. In recent weeks, the “Stop Cop City” movement has spread across the country after an environmental protester defending the Georgia forest was killed by state police, and more than a dozen protesters were arrested.

In Detroit, protesters Friday spoke in opposition to a similar situation in Michigan – the expansion of Camp Grayling, a military training facility in the northern part of the state. Last year, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources began notifying locals that the National Guard wants to lease 162,000 acres of state-owned land across several counties, more than doubling its current training grounds, reported Bridge Michigan. The Guard said it needs the land to make Camp Grayling a destination for year-round cyber, electronic and space warfare training.

Detroit ‘Cop City’ rally held in solidarity with Atlanta environmental defenders by Micah Walker and Jena Brooker, Bridge Detroit, February 24, 2023

This morning (1/31/2023) a number of people who are involved in justice work in central Iowa gathered at the offices of the law firm that represents Corporation Services Company. Which in turn represents U.S. Multifamily Capital Markets at Cushman and Wakefield. John O’Neill is the President of U.S. Multifamily Capital Markets. He sits on the executive committee board for the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is building “Cop City” in Atlanta. Where Manuel Teran (Tortuguita) was killed by police who were clearing tree sitters from the proposed construction area.

Following are some of the photos I took at our action that morning.

The real war

There is a lot of analysis regarding the war in Ukraine on this one-year anniversary of its beginning.

I have so many questions.

What role did the US and NATO’s increasing militarization of the countries near Russia play?
What about the role of increased sanctions against Russia?
How is it acceptable to pay Ukraine to fight a proxy war for us?
Where will the increasing escalation of armaments the US gives to Ukraine end?
In how many ways does tremendous pressure from arms manufacturers control foreign policy?
Why is the US President suddenly sounding so belligerent? Not only against Russia, but now China?
How can billions upon billions be spent on arming Ukraine at a time when so many in this country and around the world struggle to afford basic necessities?
How can we countenance making so many children orphans?

There are things I do know.

The Spirit is about peace.
War is Not the Answer.
All military activities must cease, because that is the main source of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
The real war, the existential threat, is humanity against Mother Earth.

CECOSESOLA: Building, here and now, the world we yearn for

I’ve been enthusiastically involved in Mutual Aid for three years. I’ve also been frustrated for those years, because I haven’t been able to tell others what a significant change Mutual Aid represents. Recently discovering Cecosesola will help with that, I think. “The theoretical frameworks for Protest and Social Movements are not sufficient to understand the emergent horizontal and prefigurative practices.”

The title of an article cited for this post, “CECOSESOLA: BUILDING, HERE AND NOW, THE WORLD WE YEARN FOR” is the definition of a term I recently learned, prefigurative.
(See: Prefigurative Societies and Mutual Aid).

What has been taking place in disparate places around the world is part of a new wave that is both revolutionary in the day-to-day sense of the word, as well as without precedent with regard to consistency of form, politics, scope and scale. The current frameworks provided by the social sciences and traditional left to understand these movements have yet to catch up with what is new and different about them. Specifically, the theoretical frameworks for Protest and Social Movements are not sufficient to understand the emergent horizontal and prefigurative practices. I suggest we think beyond these frames, and do so first by listening to, and with, those societies and groups organizing from below – and to the left.

…
People from below are rising up, but rather than going towards the top – ‘from the bottom up’, they are moving as the Zapatistas suggested, ‘From below and to the left, where the heart resides.’
Power over, hierarchy and representation are being rejected, ideologically and by default, and in the rejection mass horizontal assemblies are opening new landscapes with the horizon of autonomy and freedom.
Prefigurative Societies in movement by Marina Sitrin, Popular Resistance, December 21, 2022

Those who live in Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) communities have been on the front lines, building such communities for years. because they have never fully benefited from the systems of white superiority, dominance, and capitalism.

On September 29, 2022, Cecosesola received the Right Livelihood Award, a Swedish prize often known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” This award honors people and organizations that encourage social change. According to a statement issued by the Right Livelihood Foundation, the prize was given to Cecosesola for “establishing an equitable and cooperative economic model as a robust alternative to profit-driven economies.”
An Alternative to Capitalist Hierarchies: A Conversation with the Cecosesola Co-op.
A Venezuelan cooperative network that recently received the “Alternative Nobel Prize” tells its story by Cira Pascual Marquina, Venezuelanalysis, Nov 20, 2022

I have been amazed at how my Mutual Aid community functions. The services to those who are houseless, jail and court solidarity, and our free food project are some of the things we do. With no government support.

Something new is happening – something new in content, depth, breadth and global consistency. Societies around the world are in movement
Prefigurative Societies in movement by Marina Sitrin, Popular Resistance, December 21, 2022

For a long time, I’ve been looking for stories about large groups of people who have established Mutual Aid communities. I haven’t been quite sure what that would look like. The Mutual Aid community I have been part of is pretty small. The free food project usually involves about eighty people. A dozen of us filling and passing out the food boxes, about fifty people picking up food boxes, and about ten people from the places that donate the food. All of these people are part of our Mutual Aid community. That’s one of the keys of Mutual Aid, we’re all in it together. Working to avoid hierarchy.

I also wanted to find examples of large Mutual Aid communities because, when I explain what I know about Mutual Aid to others, they see us as just another one of the usual small community service groups. And they don’t see how the ideas of Mutual Aid could scale.

Those are reasons why I’m excited to be learning about Cecosesola

Cecosesola

Cecosesola was established in Barquisimeto, capital of the State of Lara, in the central western region of Venezuela, as a cooperative integration organization on December 17, 1967. It is a meeting place where more than 50 community organizations are active, integrated in a network of production of goods and services that brings together more than 23,000 members from the popular sectors. Through this network, we develop a wide variety of activities such as: agricultural production, small-scale agro-industrial production, funeral services, transportation, health services, financial services, mutual aid funds, distribution of foods and household items. We are made up of about 1,300 associated workers who manage daily activities through participation that is open to everyone, without hierarchical positions.
Building, here and now, the world we yearn for by Cecosesola, Grassroots Economic Organizing, February 19, 2023, Popular Resistancs.org

Black and white photos

I came across these black and white photos from an earlier age. 1970 seems so far away.

Close to fifty years ago I had a life-changing vision related to mountains and air pollution. A horrific vision of my beloved Rocky Mountains hidden in clouds of smog, the very thing that did happen in an area near the Himalayas.

My vision was related to this photo of Long’s Peak rising above Moraine Park in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. I can barely bring myself to remember that vision of Long’s Peak hidden in smog.

Long’s Peak above Moraine Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

That vision determined the course of my life. From that day I sought the Spirit to guide me in ways to protect Mother Earth. That led me to live without having a car, and the myriad of things that happened as a result. The unintended consequences, most of them very good.

I developed the film and printed these photos in a darkroom I had set up in my bathroom. One reason I’m often reminded of this vision is because this photo was hanging on my wall

Here is a link to some of my posts about photography. https://jeffkisling.com/?s=photography.
And I have a website of my photos: https://jeffkislingphotography.wordpress.com/

These black and white photos remind me of the lyrics of the song “Blue” by Troye Sivan.

I know you’re seeing black and white
So, I’ll paint you a clear blue sky
Without you I am colour-blind
It’s raining every time I open my eyes
“Blue” by Troye Sivan

And Worldwide Beautiful by Kane Brown, who is multiracial.

You’re missing every color if you’re only seeing black and white
Tell me how you’re gonna change your mind if your heart’s unmovable
We ain’t that different from each other, from one to another
I look around and see worldwide beautiful
Kane Brown

25 songs of civil rights, social justice, freedom and hope for Black History Month 2023 by Ed Masley, Arizona Republic, Feb 1, 2023

FCNL: Reduce the Pentagon Budget

Yesterday’s post (When the government is incapable) was related to news stories that certain Congressional representatives want drastic reductions in social safety net programs. This comes after having approved yet another massive military budget, this year’s is $858 billion.

The Federal budget has always been a priority for the work of Quakers’ lobbyists in Washington, DC, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). Following is a letter FCNL and 58 groups are sending to President Biden, asking for a reduced military budget.

We reject pouring our dollars into outdated ships, malfunctioning planes, or record-breaking contractor CEO salaries while everyday people remain hungry, unhoused, in need of adequate healthcare, or seeking a living wage.
FCNL Joins 58 Groups in Calling on the President to Reduce the Pentagon Budget

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