[P2P-F] Fwd: What if they sent in Social Services to Help the Occupy encampments instead of riot cops to bust heads?

Michel Bauwens michel at p2pfoundation.net
Thu Dec 1 18:53:54 CET 2011


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner, Network of Spiritual Progressives <
rabbilerner at tikkun.org>
Date: Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 3:37 PM
Subject: What if they sent in Social Services to Help the Occupy
encampments instead of riot cops to bust heads?
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com


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* What If They Sent in Social Services to Help Occupations Instead of Riot
Cops to Bust Heads?
Cities are cutting back on vitally needed social services, while at the
same time, buying expensive military gear for their police departments.





Occupations across the country have struggled to feed and shelter the least
fortunate among us, and then faced often violent police crackdowns at great
taxpayer expense. Pause for a moment and imagine what might result if
mayors sent in social workers to help people rather than riot police to
bust some heads?

In a society that tends to avert its gaze from the homeless, the hungry,
the addicted and the mentally ill, the Occupy movement's compassion has
become an albatross around its neck. “We don't exclude the people at the
margins,” one protester at Occupy Oakland told me. “We invite them in and
feed them.”

Around the country, occupations are struggling to provide a semblance of
social services that cash-strapped cities are failing to provide. “We were
a magnet for the angry poor, the homeless, the angry poor drunks,” a member
of Occupy Philly told
Salon<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=xbxiUk1HkiPJFCSzytwBK%2FBsW9VdbNDD>.
“And as the number of people here to absorb that part of it got smaller, it
just became overwhelming.” Another activist added: “We see somebody
sleeping, we throw a blanket over them...but there are people here who
really need help.”

Kip Silverman, an organizer with Occupy Portland, told
AlterNet<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ZQWJEow73i01XS8eCxTodvBsW9VdbNDD>
that
the majority of those at the recently evicted camp were “homeless or
disenfranchised people. We have folks that have just recently lost jobs,
lost their homes, and the Occupy encampment is all they have right now.”

Silverman added that the city might be contributing to the problem. “I have
heard from three individual sources that some of the city institutions that
help the homeless and disenfranchised are actually sending some people our
way because we have services that we’re providing that apparently others
cannot or will not,” he said.

With the influx of the homeless come various problems, and cities have used
them to justify sometimes violent crackdowns on the occupations. In
Oakland, a homeless man with a history of mental illness attacked several
protesters in an incident that officials touted as being indicative of the
“violence” surrounding the occupation.

In Burlington, Vermont, a homeless veteran killed himself in the camp,
prompting city officials to cordon off the park where the occupation had
been established. As *USA Today*
noted<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=gxVi%2B2ZoPP2lna5Kf1eVUfBsW9VdbNDD>,
“authorities cited the potential hazard of police not being able to see
what is occurring inside the tents as the reason for the tents' removal.”

Veterans' suicides are a national disgrace that we rarely talk about. A vet
attempts to commit suicide once every 80
minutes<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=0brQclFuMM1q1pUEkkx2JPBsW9VdbNDD>,
on average; 1,868 of them tried to end their lives in 2009 alone, and most
of them, one presumes, weren't in tents.

An overdose at Occupy Vancouver, one of the 47,000 drug-related deaths each
year in Canada, prompted that city to deliver an eviction notice.

Around the country, cities are cutting back on vitally needed social
services<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=GhSiSJTwyk1EXuhtxNRITvBsW9VdbNDD>.
At the same time, with the help of federal homeland security
grants<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Rz0PVWGfgcKLrqCpyFzRffBsW9VdbNDD>,
they're spending money on high-tech military gear for their police
departments.

As Stephen Grant, author of *Cities Under Siege: The New Military
Urbanism*<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=sgemEk%2B9pHcgPWnXAeNjffBsW9VdbNDD>,
told *D*emocracy
Now!<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=CFAFEMCpGQQzPWzw3jIeWPBsW9VdbNDD>
“there’s
been a longstanding shift in North America and Europe towards
paramilitarized policing, using helicopter-style systems, using infrared
sensing, using really, really heavy militarized weaponry.”

That’s been longstanding, fueled by the war on drugs and other sort of
explicit campaigns. But more recently, there’s been a big push since the
end of the Cold War by the big defense and security and IT companies to
sell things like video surveillance systems, things like geographic mapping
systems, and even more recently, drone systems, that have been used in the
assassination raids in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and elsewhere, as sort
of a domestic policing technology. It’s basically a really big, booming
market, particularly in a world where surveillance and security is being
integrated into buildings, into cities, into transport systems, on the back
of the war on terror.

Call Mayor Bloomberg of NYC, Mayor Jean Kuan of Oakland, or whoever is your
mayor and suggest that they support the Occupy movement by providing
encouragement to social workers, teachers, clergy and others to go down to
the Occupy encampments and volunteer time and energy to help those who
badly need this support!!

And this leads us to yet another obvious point: there are millions of
retirees or unemployed professionals who could volunteer their skills to
help reduce the burden on the public sector. It would not be very costly to
organize their talents to serve the needs of those who have been hurting
most in this economic crisis (even at the moment while Wall Street is
booming with peak earnings). Unions who fear that this effort will
undermine their desire to get more funds out of the cities' budgets must be
challenged by the ethos of community service so that they put the general
good over their own mistaken notions of the workers' best interests. The
truth is that the cities simply do not have the funds, and people are
hurting, and those who can help should be mobilized to help in all the ways
that they can. If we had a decent President, he or she would have already
done this along with a campaign to create paid jobs through a Civilian
Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration such as existed and
created millions of jobs during the New Deal. We need a NEW New Deal, and
we need it now, and yet that New Deal should not be counterposed to
organizing volunteer professionals (including those who are currently
employed during the day) to pitch in to help. The 1% can be more
effectively challenged when the rest of us are also using our talents in
the service of the common good, though in no way should we allow the !% to
get off without paying near confiscatory levels of taxes on incomes above
$1 million a year or wealth above $20 million. We in the Network of
Spiritual Progressives believe that this is the moment to call for a
fundamentally different orientation to government and to social values. We
call for "The Caring Society--Caring for Each Other and Caring for the
Earth."  in that simple way we can communicate what it is that the 99%
really wants!!!! You don't have to believe in God or be part of a religion
to be a "spiritual progressive." You just have to agree that we need a New
Bottom Line so that productivity, rationality and efficiency are no longer
measured only by how much money or power gets accumulated, but also by how
much any institution, social practice, corporation, government policy,
educational system or even personal behavior tends to increase the amount
of  love, caring, kindness, generosity, ethical and eoclogical sensitivity
in our world and to enhance our capacities to respond to the universe with
awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of all that
is! JOIN US.

Join the Network of Spiritual
Progressives--www.spiritualprogressives.org<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=I6b3FNJzaGTfGaE9Zfe2yp%2FJPo8lePrR>

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