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Outline:

S: This is Sprout

C: and this is Charyan, and we are the hosts of Molotov Now!, thank you for joining us on this episode of the podcast.

S: Today we are examining the piece from The Harbor Rat Report titled Aberdeen and the Non Profit Industrial Complex: How the national system of poverty management manifests in our local non profit sector.

C: We’re looking forward to talking about some of the aspects of what we’ve seen as a destructive elements in institutional non-profits, including those in and around the Harbor. Our hope is to provide a critique that is useful for people working in this industry, to call out the system itself, rather than the individuals working within the system. These care workers are often some of the most dedicated, hard-working, and underpaid set of workers in the economy. Burnout is a real phenomenon as well, leading to a high turnover rate and all the difficulties that result from that.

S: These bureaucracies exist everywhere, and for a lot of people they are the mediators between them and many social services. Unfortunately, these institutions are often more concerned about their own perpetuation than delivering the service they claim to provide. Funds go to growing the organization and paying salaries rather than going to the people they exist to help.

C: We here at Molotov Now! are very interested in reporting on the ways this manifests in both urban and rural environments. We imagine things can look quite different in certain aspects and similar in others. There is likely lessons to be learned from each other in this regard.

S: We will examine the industry, it’s effects on those it serves and those it employs, and touch on some possible other models to charity-based non profits, such as mutual aid, radical solidarity, and cooperation. Our hope is to point to the underlying systemic issues that the industry faces, and not to undermine or minimize the efforts of workers. We have our monthly radical news roundup up next, but first a quick word from our sponsor.

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Monthly Radical News Roundup:

Welcome back to Molotov Now!

In local news:

Aberdeen Sweeps & Homeless Conference

After a recent partial sweep of our local homeless encampment, the WADOT placed small boulders in and around the rest of their property which surrounds the camp, preventing any further tents from being laid down nearby. In response to this sweep we at Sabot Media signed onto a joint statement with other local organizations in town, such as Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network, and Food Not Bombs. This statement included a call for a week of action in solidarity with the Atlanta forest defenders, action against the City of Aberdeen for their callous treatment of the unhoused. The statement reads as follows:

We here in Aberdeen are all too familiar with the violence that the State inflicts upon those it deems threatening, surplus, or distasteful. Police are the enforcement mechanism of the City, and they cost people their lives in a multitude of ways every day. In the same vein of State sponsored violence we experience here everyday, on January 18th in Atlanta law enforcement shot and killed Manny Teran, aka “Tortuguita or little turtle”, during an early morning raid of the forest encampment to defend the Welaunee aka Atlanta Forest and to stop CopCity. In response to this killing of Tortuguita, the movement called for a week of action March 4 – 11 in solidarity with forest defenders. Read their statement and learn more about their struggle at defendtheatlantaforest.org/solidarity.

In light of the recent sweep of the unhoused encampment, a move that included placing large boulders in and around the small area that remains in order to prevent future expansion of the camp, we at Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network want to bring together a coalition of voices in the community who oppose this move, and the various hostile moves the City has made against it’s unhoused and vulnerable residents. We also want to call for actions to be taken in defiance of the City and it’s intentions to eliminate our friends and family. To this end we have crafted the following statement that all are free to sign onto and pass along.

We are asking community leaders and organizations to endorse the following statement by emailing crmutualaidnet@riseup.net. Multiple autonomous and community organizations have already endorsed. For personal endorsements, please list your name and any relevant roles, titles, or affiliations (if needed, we’ll make clear you are endorsing in personal capacity only). We hope to announce an initial list of endorsers by the end of February.

Statement published at sabotmedia.noblogs.org/solidarity

When law enforcement struck this blow against the movement to stop CopCity in Atlanta, they did what our police here in Aberdeen do every time they move along or “sweep” unhoused individuals. They inflicted State violence against peaceful people just trying to resist the worst effects of our capitalist system. The City is constantly making moves against the unhoused which cause the needless deaths of people every month. It is incredibly difficult to maintain an existence when the City threatens your stability on a daily basis. From removing the public restrooms around town, to demolishing people’s homes and belongings, the City of Aberdeen is active in sabotaging the efforts of the unhoused and mutual aid volunteers in bettering the lives of these people. The combined crises of mental health care and addiction make it even harder for certain individuals to access the care they need, leading to many interactions with the City’s police. All of this instability caused by the City serves to make it harder for people to survive the long wait list for a housing unit. Many of the people living on the streets are there because of the lack of available affordable housing units, not because they are not trying to seek assistance or shelter. It can take years to get into housing in this county. This is real violence committed by our City government against the most vulnerable residents of our community.

For too long the City of Aberdeen has pushed around the community of unhoused individuals within it’s borders. It is time for our community to organize itself, become familiar with the so-called legal protections afford them, and fight for justice above and beyond the system. This grassroots coalition is calling for a week of action against the City of Aberdeen’s treatment of the unhoused, in conjunction with the week of solidarity actions already planned for March 4-11. To this end we will be holding a Homeless Rights Conference in the Aberdeen Library parking lot on Sunday March 5th. This event is for our local community to come together and try to come up with a plan of action regarding future City sweeps and unhoused harassment. We will be discussing the community’s response to the continued threats to our unhoused comrades and making sure that everyone is well informed of their legal rights. All interested parties are invited to attend, but nothing about the unhoused will be solved without participation and guidance from the unhoused population themselves, and their voices will be centered.

For us it is important to show solidarity with the struggle in Atlanta, for we all experience violence at the hands of The State, and a show of solidarity with our street comrades here and those fighting to stop CopCity lets them know we are with them, and lets authorities know that we will not let this violence go unanswered. These actions against our City will be our show of solidarity with those defending the forest in Atlanta. It is important to uplift the voices of the marginalized and oppressed in this time, let the tactics you bring to the party be diverse and creative. Go out and meet someone who lives on the streets, form a protest against the City sweeps, join us at the Homeless Rights Conference, or smash back at the system in your own creative way. Any action, big or small, can help to break down the barriers the City builds between us.

If you too agree that the City has gone too far in it’s mistreatment of the unhoused in town, then please join us in signing this statement announcing that our community will no longer tolerate this without taking action. You can also show your solidarity by joining us at the conference or by taking your own autonomous actions against the City during the week of March 4-11. We vow to continue to take action every time the City sweeps the unhoused of Aberdeen.

Seemingly in response to this statement, the City of Aberdeen delivered notices to every tent at camp that they must remove themselves and their belongings in order for the City to come and destroy the structures that have been built, and remove what they call trash, much of which is actually just people’s belongings that don’t fit in their residence. This follows a weekend of extremely cold weather that brought over an inch of snow to Aberdeen. The WADOT also fenced the areas previously only blocked from camping with rocks this week. It seems the squeeze is being put on camp, despite it being the middle of winter with no cold weather shelter this year. This is disgusting display of power by the City that should be viewed as the attack it is. It is time to strike back.

City hall has become a nexus of hate against this community, those most vulnerable to attack. But how do we fight back against a City that doesn’t give two shits about it’s residents lives? When your City is literally trying to kill you, what can you do? What the City cares about is money. Anarchists should then concern themselves with actions that cost the City money. They shouldn’t be allowed to do what they are doing without something happening. It needs to cost them something when they act like this. We must be careful to not be reactionary though. We need to meditate on what is effective and strategic, not what makes us feel the coolest. We can turn their profit motive against them by showing them that these attacks against the homeless are literally not worth it.

In previous episodes we told you about Queer Satanic, the four former members of The Satanic Temple who have been getting sued by the Salem, Mass.-based Temple since April 2020 had won their federal district court lawsuit with a final dismissal in January. Unfortunately, TST has appealed their latest court loss and announced in a filing to the Ninth Circuit that they plan to re-file a new case utilizing Washington’s state courts. Any financial assistance you can provide to our comrades to help them continue paying their legal defense
bills would be appreciated, and you can find them online as @QueerSatanic and QueerSatanic.com

The parents and young daughter of a 36-year-old man who killed himself while detained in the basement of a southeast Washington courthouse have filed an $8.5 million claim, alleging Kyle Lara’s body wasn’t discovered for 18 hours and that officials “twice served food to Mr. Lara’s corpse.”

“This is the worst case I have ever seen,” said Ryan Dreveskracht, the family’s Seattle attorney, also a member of the state agency responsible for establishing standards and certification guidelines for Washington correction officers.

The family’s claim, filed Wednesday, alleges county officials erred in placing the distraught Lara in solitary confinement and provided wildly insufficient supervision, leading to the man’s death. The county has 60 days to answer the claim, after which the family intends to file a civil-rights lawsuit.

Lara had been booked into the jail on suspicion of domestic violence March 23 after deputies arrested him over a fight with his girlfriend.

County officials chose to place him in a dingy solitary-confinement cell in the basement of the courthouse, which was built in 1901, disregarding concerns he might hurt himself, according to the claim.

Lara had expressed “suicidal ideation” after he had gotten into an altercation with another person in the jail and punched a wall, breaking bones in his hand, the claim says. He had also made similar statements during previous bookings, according to the claim.

Dreveskracht cited federal precedent stating that housing potentially suicidal people in isolation cells “is like throwing gasoline on a fire,” and documents from the claim reference data showing half of prison and jail suicides occur among a “single-digit percentage” of people kept in solitary confinement.

Garfield County Sheriff Drew Hyer didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment Thursday.

Lara’s family and their lawyer claim he died because of a lax monitoring system.

While the county’s jail policy calls for frequent interaction with people detained there and increased supervision of those in solitary confinement, the claim alleges that the jail is not staffed by corrections officers.

Dreveskracht said that alleged practice violates state law.

The claim also alleges that the county’s dispatchers, who often work alone, are required to “monitor, serve meals, and administer medication” to people in jail, in addition to standard duties like answering 911 calls, dispatching deputies and firefighters, and entering warrants and protection orders into the court system.

The claim alleges the county had no policies instructing dispatchers on how often they were to conduct “video safety checks” or telling them what to do if something seemed amiss. Instead, county officials told dispatchers to use their “common sense” and call one of the county’s four deputies if they need to check on someone in the jail, the claim says.

Dreveskracht said such a video-check policy is “explicitly prohibited by federal law.”

“Under the law, all pretrial detainees have a right to direct-view safety checks,” he said. “That doesn’t happen at the Garfield County Jail and Kyle Lara died as a result.”

In other News:

After release of video, lawsuit claims Alabama man froze to death in police custody, was ‘likely’ placed in jail freezer

WALKER COUNTY, Ala. – The mother of Anthony “Tony” Mitchell, a Walker County man who died in police custody in January, has filed a federal lawsuit against multiple jail officials, including Sheriff Nick Smith, alleging that authorities deprived the man of his constitutional rights by leaving him in the jail’s walk-in freezer “or similar frigid environment” for hours.

“This is one of the most appalling cases of jail abuse the country has seen,” the 37-page federal lawsuit begins. “On the night of January 25 to January 26, 2023, Anthony Don Mitchell (“Tony”) froze to death while incarcerated at the Walker County Jail.”

Lawyers for the family wrote in the complaint that the case “raises an appalling question: how does a man literally freeze to death while incarcerated in a modern, climate-controlled jail, in the custody and care of corrections officers?”

The suit alleges that Mitchell was “likely… placed in a restraint chair in the jail kitchen’s walk-in freezer or similar frigid environment and left there for hours.”

Only with the release of an internal surveillance video recorded by a correctional officer did what happened to Mitchell begin to come to light, according to Jon Goldfarb, a lawyer representing Mitchell’s family. That correctional officer was later fired by the sheriff’s department, according to the lawyer.

A surveillance video obtained and first reported by CBS 42 shows what the family says appears to be their loved one being carried into the loading area of the Walker County Jail. In it, Mitchell is limp, his head and feet dangling as uniformed personnel — “Sheriff” emblazoned on one of their vests — lay his body just outside a marked police SUV. In total, four uniformed officials then work to put him into the police vehicle.

The video contradicts an earlier statement from the Walker County Sheriff’s Office claiming Mitchell was “alert and conscious” when he left the jail for transport to a local hospital.

“The cause of his hypothermia is not clear. It is possible he had an underlying medical condition resulting in hypothermia. I do not know if he could have been exposed to a cold environment. I do believe that hypothermia was the ultimate cause of his death.”

Screenshots from additional surveillance video included in the lawsuit show that Mitchell was naked during his detention. He was placed, the suit said, in a concrete isolation cell for the duration of his two-week stint in the jail.

“The cell lacked a bed or other furnishing,” the suit said. “There was only a drain in the floor that could be used as a toilet. The cell was bare cement, the equivalent of a dog kennel. But unlike a dog, Tony was not even given a mat to sleep on.”

At least five hours passed from the time Mitchell was removed from the “frigid environment” until he was transported to the hospital, according to the complaint.

In addition to their initial written statement, the Jan. 13 post by the Walker County Sheriff’s Office included an unedited, full-body photo of Mitchell, whose face appeared to be spray-painted black.

One of Mitchell’s family members said that the photo shocked her.

“I hadn’t seen him in two years, and that was the first time I’d seen him — and the last,” she said.

The photo, which was shared hundreds of times across social media and in multiple news outlets, garnered significant public push back by those criticizing the “sensationalism” of the post.

According to Facebook records, the sheriff’s office edited the post later that day, cropping the photo to exclude Mitchell’s face.

Court records show that Mitchell was brought before a judge the day of his arrest but was listed as being “unable to sign” paperwork by court officials.

“We knew he was in jail, and we thought that was the safest place for him at the time,” his family member said. “But it turned out to be the worst place for him.”

https://www.cbs42.com/regional/after-release-of-video-lawsuit-claims-alabama-man-froze-to-death-in-police-custody-was-likely-placed-in-jail-freezer/

Florida Executes Man Used As ‘Political Pawn’ By Ron DeSantis

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/florida-executes-donald-dillbeck_n_63f7c0ace4b04ff5b488d4cf

In London Two schoolchildren have been charged with murder following the death of a 16-year-old transgender girl in an English village.

A boy and a girl, both aged 15, have been charged with the murder of Brianna Ghey, who was found dead in a park in Warrington in the country’s northwest.

Members of the public contacted the emergency services at 3.13 p.m. that day after Ghey’s body was found on a path in Linear Park, in the village of Culcheth, police said. She was found with fatal stab wounds, police told CNN.

Police initially said there was no evidence to suggest the circumstances surrounding Ghey’s death was hate related, before later adding that all lines of inquiry were being explored, “including whether this was a hate crime.”

After news of Ghey’s death broke, her family issued a heartfelt statement through Cheshire Constabulary, the police force investigating the crime.

Than life character who would leave a lasting impression on all that met her. Brianna was beautiful, witty and hilarious. Brianna was strong, fearless and one of a kind.

“The loss of her young life has left a massive hole in our family, and we know that the teachers and her friends who were involved in her life will feel the same.

“We would like to thank everyone for their kind words and support during this extremely difficult time. We would like to thank the police for their support, and witnesses for helping with the investigation.

“The continuation of respect for privacy is greatly appreciated.”

We would also like to reiterate the family’s request for privacy at this extremely difficult and distressing time for them.

This is all following a growing tidal wave of anti trans and drag proposed legislation in both the UK & US meant to target the trans community such as in a wild new bill in Florida that rolls back defamation protections, making it legal defamation to accuse someone of transphobic discrimination. HB 991 states that

Defamation, False Light, and Unauthorized Publication of Name or Likenesses; Provides that journalist’s privilege does not apply to defamation claims when defendant is professional journalist or media entity; revises provisions concerning venue for certain actions; provides for attorney fees & costs to prevailing plaintiffs in certain actions; specifies certain persons may not be considered public figures; provides certain allegations are defamatory per se; provides statutory damages to prevailing plaintiffs who are subject of such allegations; creates presumption that statement by anonymous source is presumptively false; provides public figure does not need to show actual malice to prevail in defamation action. This would result in any instance of an individual or group within Florida to be sued for $35k by the the party who engaged in the transphobic discrimination.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/991

In Oklahoma Drag bans are now pushing beyond “sexualization” rhetoric and are now explicitly targeting drag queen story hours as a front for targeting the trans community. Oklahoma HB2186 was heard this month. It explicitly spells out drag queen story hour and says they would be banned. As written it explicitly bans “reading to kids in flamboyant makeup.”

https://legiscan.com/OK/text/HB2186/2023

Kentucky has apparently created a new bill, House Bill 470, that is basically “All of the anti-trans bills in 2023 in one bill.” Birth cert bans, gender affirming care bans, name change bans, forced outing, targets insurance coverage…. It has everything.

https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/23rs/HB470.html

There have been roughly over 330 of these bills proposed to various degrees of severity and success roughly 200 of these were in February alone and counting. So-Called Allies need to understand where we are at, how the groomer rhetoric has put words to action with these bills and acts of terrorism against the Queer Community, its eliminationist, it is the groundwork for genocide. People like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who just lost a 3.3 million dollar lawsuit against 4 of his former staffers for corruption and who’s lawyer has tried to push that bill on the tax payers might I add, wants lists of trans people who have changed their names in Texas so he can reverse all of those decisions

Ron DeSantis wants lists of college students who have sought gender affirming care so he can de-transition them by force. As you have heard in this and prior episodes multiple states have passed or will pass bills that target the Trans community in anyway they can including bans on legal name changes, barricades and bans for healthcare including medically safe puberty blockers for children, rollbacks on discrimination laws, or slipping language into anti drag bills that ban anyone displaying, presenting, or dressing outside of their genders assigned at birth in public. There was even a bill proposed in North Dakota with questionable language about “DNA gender”

This is all about legally and morally mandating trans people out of existence. Plain and simple, its about making sure trans people can not exist. Period. Its not about reactionary calls for medical restrictions or “save the children” Rhetoric. It’s about eliminating the Queer community from public life and then eliminating them from private life until their is no options left but conformity or death.

Trans people are not a political football that the right will give up on in a few election cycles. This wave of backlash against the Queer community comes from singularly focused reactionary ideologies, they don’t give a shit about the marketplace of ideas, they don’t give a shit if they get mocked on twitter and late night shows, they don’t care if anyone outside of their target who might also be hurt in the crossfire.

They Only care about one thing:

Power.

Gaining and wielding enough of it until they can meet their goal of genocidal elimination of trans people, then the gays, women who don’t conform to their gender stereotypes, etc…

As the poem goes, they used to say “First they came for the communists” but this does not reflect the entirety of what happened then, and it doesn’t reflect the entirety of whats happening now.

Both DeSantis and Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ+ rights have escalated as they look to gain momentum for their presidential campaigns.

As Republicans increasingly move to ban books with content involving race and sexuality, enact stronger controls over sex education and bar trans youth from participating in school sports that align with their gender identity. I would ask people to look into what happened in Germany in 1933. Germany was a cultural hub for the queer community and in fact one of the best places in the world you could be if you were part of the queer community. It was in Berlin, Germany where the Hirschfield Institute of Sexual Science was founded and innovated in gender studies and the first medical transitions in history, Magnus Hirschfield and the Institute were very involved with activism in Germany for Queer Rights such as working to get homosexauality legalized in Germany. But this is Germany in the 1930s and you already know where this is going, Already in 1921 Magnus Hirschfield was assaulted in the street by far right for their activism and their prominent status as a gay activist, and in the 1930’s he was forced into exile in Switzerland after a lot of far right magazines were using him as an example of the quote “degenerate jewish side”. The Institute now lead by Hirschfields partner Carl Geist, who in 1933 witnessed the Nazi’s take power, and in may of that year a bunch of Nazi supporting students followed by the members of the SA led a raid on the institute taking papers, documents, scientific studies, and many, many more documents. The institute was initially occupied by The German Student Union, who were a collective of Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later, on the 10th of May, the entire contents of the library were removed to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square. That night, along with 20,000 other books across Germany, they were publicly burned in a symbolic attack by Nazi officials on their enemies in front of members of the institute where many members were assaulted. In a time before the internet this resulted is a unfathomable loss of information that is still being rediscovered today. Among the texts thrown onto the bonfire at the Bebelplatz was Heinrich Heine’s Almansor, in which the author noted:

‘Where they burn books, in the end they will burn humans too’.

Audio of Donald Trump Speech

https://rumble.com/v27v5a0-president-trumps-plan-to-protect-children-from-left-wing-gender-insanity.html

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of all of this is that they wouldn’t need legislation to do most of this. DeSantis in particular has used administrative processes to try and ban gender affirming care. They’ll weaponize the administrative state and turn it into an arm of the reactionary far right. If Trump or DeSantis are elected in 2024, they will politicize and weaponize the FDA to pull the authorization and ban HRT.  They’ll weaponize Homeland Security and the Department of Education to eliminate all discussion of queer people from federally funded entities, Including Private Organizations.

Now more than ever we must do everything we can to protect marginalized communities, Marginalized people are often excluded by proxy from being able to safely access the same gun stores and ranges as their Cis-White-Hetero counterparts. So if you have the means, please, offer free weapons training and courses to your community and purchase a gun and give it to a trans or other marginalized people. If you need help in organizing these type of events please reach out to the closest chapters of the John Brown Gun Club, The Socialist Rifle Association, or a handful of other more politically diverse gun clubs ran by marginalized communities such as the Pink Pistols.

Armed Minorities Keep Our Communities Safe

February 1, 2023 Jackson Heights NYC Drag Story Hour Draws Defenders, Homophobes
February 3, 2023 Mississippi Police Arrest Protesters Seeking Transparency in Police Killing of Teenager
February 3, 2023 U.S. Department of Interior Halfway through “Road to Healing” Tour
February 6, 2023 Jordan Peterson’s Visit to Minneapolis Draws Criticism
February 7, 2023 ​​The Case of Marvin Haynes – Part One
February 7, 2023 Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Terán’s Family Seeks Transparency in Police Killing
February 8, 2023 Dakota 38+2 Run Commemorates Hanging of Dakota Ancestors
February 8, 2023 Atlanta PD Releases Bodycam Footage from Deadly Jan. 18 Forest Raid
February 9, 2023 Harris County Jail Crisis in Houston, Texas Kills Dozens
February 10, 2023 Families in Gaza Live Among the Dead
February 10, 2023 Jury Convicts Robert West for his Role in Dismembering Ricky Balsimo
February 13, 2023 ‘Like the Doors of Hell Were Open’: East Palestine Train Disaster Casts Toxic Cloud Over Future of OH/PA Region
February 15, 2023 Temple University Grad Student Union Strikes; Rally on Campus
February 15, 2023 Family of AJ Stewart Speak on Patterns of White Supremacy That Led to His Killing Over a Parking Spot
February 17, 2023 Indigenous People Demonstrate at Super Bowl Demanding Kansas City Drop its Team Name ‘Chiefs’
February 18, 2023 ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ – Iran is Undergoing a Revolutionary Process
February 19, 2023 An ‘Arsenic Plume Rests Beneath The Surface’ of the Upcoming Roof Depot Demolition
February 20, 2023 Over 100 Families Occupy Abandoned Apartment Complex in Brazil
February 21, 2023 Minneapolis March Connects Roof Depot Demolition Resistance to the Atlanta Forest
February 21, 2023 Indigenous-Led Occupation Begins at Roof Depot Site Demanding City Call Off Demolition
February 22, 2023 ‘No English, Don’t Shoot’ – Saint Paul Police Kill Elder Hmong War Hero
February 23, 2023 The Case of Marvin Haynes – Part Two: The Murder of Randy Sherer​​
February 24, 2023 Supporters of ‘Cop City’ Opponents Rally in Philly
February 24, 2023 ‘Community’ Committee Cheers Police Violence as Authorities Repress Resistance to ‘Cop City’
February 25, 2023 Atlanta Activists Say Prosecutors Plan to Indict them on RICO Charges
February 26, 2023 FBI Harasses Activists in Florida; Two Indicted on Federal Charges for Jane’s Revenge Actions
February 28, 2023 Activists Fight Against Criminalization of Homelessness in New Haven

Music:

Segment one –

Welcome back to Molotov Now!

S: So, Charyan, have you had to deal with CCAP for housing vouchers, rental assistance, help navigating state services, or any other non profit or state services like food banks, food stamps or anything like that?

C: Not personally other than food banks and food stamps, i have major issues navigating state bueracracy, but i have watched so many in our community and on our streets who do interact with these entities and services on a daily basis such as the Coastal Community Action Program. i have to say, despite what services they offer the community and what good they have offered the impoverished in hard times, it is more often than not a system built to exploit workers and filter who in the community gets access to those very services, often preventing those most in need from life saving support.

S: Yeah, you gotta do that means testing. Figure out who really “needs help”. So what were your experiences in getting those food access services?

C: Well that’s just the thing Means Testing is its own evil but even if you have passed the tests you face other barriers, do you have an inability to go into the office and need to do your food stamp application remotely? They’ll give you the option but ill be damned if Ive ever gotten them to answer instead i have to go to their office and wait 4 hours in the lobby. There are lots of ways they can install artificial barriers while giving the impression that progress is being made.

S: Especially with housing and rental assistance even if you are a “Ideal Candidate” you can still be waiting for years before actually receiving any assistance if at all, all while constantly being told that your next on the list.

C: Even if you are at the top of their list you can wait for years and years which can often be a death sentence for those with no where to wait but the streets. Ive personally watched people who wasted away on the streets and passed away due to exposure after years of “Being on top of the list” because of this neglect by Non Profits like CCAP.

S: I can think of too many examples

C: One of our good friends, who had been on the streets a long time before we met him, died waiting on that list. He was an Old Timer that had been here since before the days of the old River Camp which was torn down in 2019. He had already been waiting for housing from CCAP for sometime before the Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network had been doing what they could to assist him.

S: They helped him get around as he was wheelchair bound, including nightly rides to the Cold Weather Shelter in operation last year. They provided heaters for his tent and were always helping to clean and bandage his feet which suffered from years of untreated frostbite while wasting for housing.

C: He met with his case manager regularly and was old and disabled enough to be at the very top of their list when a housing unit came through. But that’s what is lacking around here, available affordable housing, and he suffered immensely in that camp behind city hall waiting for a unit. Just as he died, one became available.

S: It was horrible knowing that he was about to get that place just as he died.

C: Unfortunately stories like this are far too common, where those who did all that was asked of them die because help was provided too little too late.

S: Well, I’m glad we’ve grounded the conversation in our local reality, and the fact that this is a life and death issue for people. The article we’re covering today is by Possum, from the Harbor Rat Report and it is titled: Aberdeen and the Non Profit Industrial Complex: How the national system of poverty management manifests in our local non profit sector. Let’s begin:

Humans are, to our core, cooperative creatures. The anarchist and anthropologist, born Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, more commonly called Peter Kropotkin, charted this fundamental human instinct, the “mutual aid instinct” throughout human history and into his modern day, the turn of the 20th century. Arguing against Social Darwinian logic, he demonstrated how cooperation provided the true evolutionary advantage. He demonstrated how it has, and continues to, aid in humanity’s continued survival and advancement as a species.

C: Is Social Darwinism supposed to be distinct from biological evolution?

S: Yeah and whereas Darwin’s theory of biological evolution is considered accepted science, the application of the biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to social, economic, and political realms is seen as pseudoscience. The Social Darwinist holds that the rich and powerful have their elevated status by means of selection by natural processes. These ideas originated in the 1870s in the Western world and influenced such ideas as eugenics, fascism, racism, and imperialism. It was a large influence on the Nazi party, and thus largely was discredited along with their fall.

C: It turns out you cannot apply biological frameworks to social constructs like hierarchy.

S: In contrast mutual aid shows us that humans are social creatures who value cooperation and prioritize the well-being of the community over any individual within it. Everything else is the artificial imposition of a human construct. The article goes on:

Over time, humans have been increasingly alienated from this true nature. We are pit against one another in arbitrary competitions for artificially scarce resources, yet still mutual aid continues, often most visibly amongst the most oppressed. This continues to be true wherever there are oppressed and impoverished communities, or communities in a state of emergency.

C: As we have seen over the last few decades the State will not provide for it’s citizen’s needs, it is up to us to provide for each other, outside the traditional avenues of commerce. This has been shown to be our true nature, anarchic and cooperative. Everything else is a human construct meant to imbalance this egalitarian nature towards mutual aid. This nature is corrupted by the individualist ideologies of modern Western thought, such as the  logic of capitalism, which makes a person “earn their living”.

S: What a horrible saying that we take for granted. The basic necessitates of life should be free to all. The article goes on,

In the wake of the George Floyd uprising and the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of independent grassroots mutual aid efforts were started by organizers all over the country that saw the need that wasn’t being filled by the corporate nonprofit agencies. This need was apparent when George Floyd called out for his mother as the knee of Derek Chauvin bore down on his neck, because police are called to all manner of incidents where they don’t belong, where community intervention and deescalation would suffice. It was apparent when people took to the streets in the wake of the killing only to find the streets of our cities are already full of unhoused people, cast out after our national housing crisis. The need was apparent when fires broke out on the West Coast and there was no institutional help for thousands as they were displaced or affected by smoke. The need became perhaps most apparent when the pandemic hit and our so called leaders did nothing to stem the virus. During all of these manufactured crises there were everyday people willing to lend some aid to their fellow human. People stepping up to make masks or sanitizer, cook and distribute food, and come up with ingenious ways to protect themselves and their communities from these threats.

S: This was the period of time in which Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network was founded. Food Not Bombs started delivering food to the autonomous zone in Seattle, then brought that abundance back to town and started serving in the park here in town shortly after. It is so awesome to see how much it has grown in that short amount of time, all that they have accomplished.

C: We have seen our own local instances of this manufacturing of crises: when all the public porta potties are removed and then human waste is the new complaint, when the river encampment was cleared and the new complaint becomes homeless people camping on the streets of downtown, when there are no dumpsters provided for trash, the new complaint becomes garbage accumulation. All of these are examples of the City of Aberdeen manufacturing problems to perpetuate it’s own existence. It exists to solve the problems it has created previously.

S: This insane cycle only serves to brutalize the most vulnerable and bolster the far right push towards eradication of the homeless population. Possum continues,

There is another more insidious form of aid though. One that makes itself seem charitable and good but actually does nothing but provide cover for the wealthy that impoverishes so many. It provides nothing but a veneer of giving to a system that, in actuality, does nothing but take from us. In the modern spectacle even this basic human instinct has become perverted to serve the wealthy. According to Forbes, the top corporate charities in 2022 are United Way Worldwide, Feeding America, and the Salvation Army. [1] For-profit corporations regularly donate to such charities for massive tax write-offs and to improve their public image. By donating large sums of money to nonprofit organizations they control, either through ownership or by being major donors, the wealthy are able to store their riches outside of the reach of the taxman.

C: Many large companies strive to pay as little in taxes as possible. They have multiple schemes to accomplish this including various types of tax shelters and tax havens. This includes non profit charities and foundations, off shore accounts, and shell companies. The profits from these companies are shielded from taxation by the United States as the profit often ends up in different bank accounts, not under the US jurisdiction. In 2011, ActionAid reported that 25% of the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index avoided taxation by locating their subsidiaries in tax havens. This increased to 98% when using the stricter US Congress definition of tax haven and bank secrecy jurisdictions. In 2016, it was reported in the current affairs magazine Private Eye that four out of the FTSE top 10 companies paid no corporation tax at all.

S: This is a crucial point to make, the connection between for profit corporations and non profits is where the real story lies. This is what creates the NPIC, the profit motive seeps into everything it touches. OK, back to the article.

Donors give out their funds through foundations in the form of grants, and charitable nonprofits are but one of 32 different kinds of nonprofit entities. Charitable nonprofits have to, by necessity, model themselves after for-profit businesses in to be more appealing to these wealthy donors in order to compete with other nonprofits for the funding. Naturally, nonprofits can’t do anything that remotely seems like it might harm their earnings. These grants dictate exactly how the money will be spent, typically by explicitly designing a new program or position to carry out the will of the wealthy donors and the foundations they control. This reality leads to things like our local nonprofit Coastal Community Action Program (CCAP) refusing to operate a cold weather shelter because it upsets local far right political interests, some of whom serve on the board of directors for the nonprofit.

C: The Mayor, an anti-homeless bigot, serves on the board of CCAP and the Union Gospel Mission, two of the largest homeless services institutions in town. CCAP has refused to host a Cold Weather Shelter for years after backlash from the far right due to manufactured concerns and performative outrage. Despite being the largest and best suited local organization to host a cold weather shelter, they bent to the whims of the most hateful people in town, leaving it to the small group Whole Harbor, who just run the farmer’s market and community garden, to pick up the contract last year. This year there is no shelter whatsoever, as the anti-homeless base rallied hard against a shelter in the Aberdeen city limits.

S: Non profits are subservient to those in power, whether their funders, their board, or local politicians. We need institutions and structures that are subservient to our will and not to those in positions of power. This is what mutual aid efforts are so good at, empowering local communities. We continue:

According to The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, by the radical feminist organization INCITE! [2]

“Foundations provide tax shelters for wealthy families and thereby take away tax income that could be used for social programs and entitlements. And then [the foundations] dole out little bits of money for nonprofits to replace the services that the government no longer funds.”

The book states, the nonprofit sector is

“A trillion-dollar industry, the US non-profit sector is one of the world’s largest economies. From art museums and university hospitals to think tanks and church charities, over 1.5 million organizations of staggering diversity share the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) designation, if little else,”

On the other hand, many for-profit retail and grocery businesses solicit donations from their customers by asking them to round up to the nearest dollar, giving them more tax-free money. The research of Katie Kelting, Stefanie Robinson, and Richard J. Lutz found, “consumers respond more favorably to a roundup than to a flat donation request, even when the requested amount is identical,” at a rate of about 21% more, according to a Marketplace.org article. [3] These additional charges allow companies to take on larger projects they might not otherwise have the resources or infrastructure to accomplish and make larger charitable contributions to write off their taxes. This, the article suggests, is because it gives the consumer a “warm glow” without the “painful financial loss” typically associated with donations, forging a sense of loyalty that builds customer retention.

Far from being purely out of the goodness of their hearts, these donations serve effectively as PR stunts that allow for-profit companies to raise their prices in a way that makes the customers happy. Soliciting donations with customers also creates loyalty through a psychological loophole wherein the customer feels enabled to do good in the world through the corporation, thus making them more likely to purchase more from that company. Customers feel like partners in the quest against poverty, hunger, or whichever issue they’re being solicited donations for.

C: These donations do nothing to stem the tide of poverty and just contribute to the same complacency that the rest of the system is designed to engender. People think they’ve done their part by giving this corporation a little bit MORE money. Yet it is the corporate profits that are the cause of the worker’s poverty. If people were to seize their workplaces and distribute the wealth of the company equally among the workers, then poverty would be abolished. All these charities do is maintain the status quo, and possibly push for small reforms in their niche area of concern.

S: I would argue that they don’t really even push for reform so much as adapt to conditions in an attempt to maintain the overall status quo. That’s worse in my opinion. They are active in oppressing the very people they claim to serve by handicapping attempts at real revolutionary change. The article goes on:

Dean Spade points out in his piece, Solidarity Not Charity, the ruling class uses only mere reforms to address the poverty and inequality caused by their wealth. “Many reforms, if they do provide any material relief, provide it only to those who are least marginalized within the group of people who were supposed to benefit from the reform,” he points out. [4]

“For example, immigration reforms that cut out people with criminal records or who are ‘public charges,’ or that make military service or college graduation conditions for relief, are likely to be accessible only to those least targeted by police, those who can pay tuition, those not pushed out of school by able-ism and racism. Reforms often merely tinker with existing harmful conditions, failing to reach the root causes.”

These charities serve as little more than the modern version of giving alms to the poor, purchasing indulgences to get into heaven regardless of one’s actual moral fiber or adherence to sacred tradition. They are how the wealthy both boost their public image, to be seen as good and noble, absolve themselves of any guilt they may feel for rising rates of poverty across the globe, and PR campaigns to make them seem like virtuous paragons who deserve their wealth, even at the expense of the rest of us. This is the insidious nature of corporate charity, it lets the wealthy feel good about being wealthy. When, in fact, it is their hoarded wealth that is the reason people want for anything. We have the means to produce enough for every person on this planet. It is the manufactured scarcity of capitalist markets that keep us from doing so.

C: So by avoiding taxes and sanitizing their public image the charity model actually works to keep people immiserated and poor, it helps some small percentage of them gain a small foot up, while keeping the overall hierarchy intact. The point of the system is to keep things stable for capitalism to grow it’s profits. The point is to keep people complacent, since if the full brunt of capitalism was felt by enough of the population, there would certainly be revolt. This is why the system is described as poverty management, it is not creating the poverty necessarily, capitalism does that, what the Non Profit Industrial Complex does is carefully manage the segments of the population that have been deemed surplus but who aren’t residing within the prison system. Everyone who is outside the bars, but under the boot, reliant on the insufficient social services available to them in order to survive.

S: That’s fucked right? And its another thing we see here locally. People in town who don’t know whats going on with the poor or homeless just assume that the social services exist in plenty and are not only available but easy to get. They don’t have any idea that the local charities are woefully insufficient at providing for the needs of the community. It stems from an ignorance of the issues. Possum continues:

These charities do good for individuals (for the mass of people who suffer in order to power capitalist abundance) but are only used as a tool, rather than as something that can actually resolve the issues these organizations address. On April 3rd, 2016, documents detailing the financial and attorney-client information of over 214,488 offshore entities with records going back to the 1970s were leaked to a German journalist, Bastian Obermayer, from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The leak names 12 current or former world leaders, 128 public officials and politicians, and hundreds of celebrities, businessmen, and other wealthy individuals from over 200 countries; in other words, the global elites. These “Panama Papers,” as they have come to be known, describe the methods through which the members of the global ruling class hide their wealth in trusts and foundations, making them less dependent on nonprofit charities for the same purposes. They describe how the elites increasingly use offshore accounts and shell companies to house their wealth, which has caused a steady decline in charitable donations. [5]

C: So wealthy people are using this system of charity less and less. So how do these non profits fund themselves, if no longer through donations?

S: They have found more productive and profitable methods for wealth hoarding and tax avoidance and no longer have to hide their money in charitable contributions or institutions. In the wake of the Panama Papers, more than 80 nations announced investigations that could lead to recovered money, criminal charges or other consequences. Iceland’s prime minister resigned following nationwide protests after revelations that he and his wife owned a company in the British Virgin Islands. Politicians in Mongolia, Spain and beyond also fell. In 2017, Pakistan’s Supreme Court removed from office the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, as result of the Panama Papers’ revelations about his family’s properties overseas. A year later he was sentenced in the case to 10 years in prison on corruption charges and fined $10.6 million. Countries have recouped more than $1.36 billion in unpaid taxes, fines and penalties as a result of inquiries sparked by the Panama Papers, according to ICIJ’s latest tally. This is likely a conservative count. ICIJ’s total counts only the recovered funds that we can verify through official responses from governments. Many nations choose not to publicize the amount of money that has been recovered — or comment on ongoing investigations at all.

C: Oh that’s definitely a low count.

S: Yeah, but can you imagine that amount of money being removed from the economy into the hands of wealthy people tax free? That’s incredible. The amount of good that could have been done with that money is staggering. Imagine if we re-appropriated all the wealth of these people. Anyway, we go on here:

The funding the charities receive comes in the form of grants. These grants offer money for specific programs and positions the nonprofit charity must adopt in order to receive the money they need to keep their doors open, lights on, and employees paid. It does not take any ill intent for this to corrupt the nonprofit’s original mission and slowly cause what is called in the industry, “mission drift.” They also tend to look to their grantors for guidance, and to seek to impress them. The charities then become little more than wound care, rather than medical professionals who diagnose the source of a problem and take steps to eliminate it. Without changing the underlying structural problems these companies simply become entrenched institutions maintaining the status quo. Our local non profit CCAP has become a major power player in town in it’s short history, gobbling up virtually every grant available and stifling competition. The Mayor of the City of Aberdeen is a board member of CCAP as well as serving as board president for the Catholic Union Gospel Mission. Mayor Pete Schave was elected on a platform of anti-homeless campaigns while serving on the boards of the two largest nonprofits dedicated to serving the homeless. This has influenced the decisions of both institutions to not pursue a low barrier shelter option in town. [6] The grants they go for determine their mission just as much, as they choose which grants to apply for based on local politics and power dynamics.

C: Mayor Schave was elected by the same fascist base that has now put many people on City Council as well. SOAP or Save Our Aberdeen Please, acted as a political campaign for those seeking political office from the far right. These people are what formed the electoral base for Pete Schave to get elected. Yet, he serves on two boards for organizations that are supposed to be helping the very people demonized by this base. This is a clear conflict of interest that gets ignored because of his status. People in positions of power wielding that power to attack their enemies is nothing new, but to see it carried out against the most vulnerable people in our society is truly disgusting.

S: So you might be asking what is so destructive about this system, other than the way it allows for wealthy people to avoid taxes and clean up their public image? I mean that doesn’t seem so bad in the grand scheme of things. The article says,

This creates a dynamic some researchers and activists have called, “The Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” The zine, Working for You, Me, We, Us, and Them: What is the nonprofit industrial complex and why should I care, defines this dynamic as, “A system of relationships between the State (or, local and federal governments), the owning classes, foundations, and nonprofit/NGO social service and social justice organizations that result in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements. The state uses nonprofits to:

“Divert public monies into private hands through foundations; manage and control dissent to make the world safe for capitalism; redirect activities and energies into career-based models of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society; allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through ‘philanthropic’ work; Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them.”

C: What really interests me is this piece about redirecting energies into career-based models instead of mass-based organizing. This is a disappointing thing to see in movement spaces, ultimately someone in the group will make the work they do into a career and end up leaving the organizing work to go further their career, as their efforts are recouped by the system.

S: We are never going to revolutionize society by going to work, our jobs exist within the system of capitalism and at best can create spaces of resistance in the workplace. It is what we do outside our jobs that really counts towards the movement’s success.

C: Career-based models prioritize working within the bounds of the system and promote the individual over the collective. In order to address our problems we must act collectively, not individually. We must work outside the system, not within it or with it. It is not a neutral tool that we can use to further our revolution. It remakes those who attempt to use it for this purpose, and inevitably corrupts the motivations of those participating in it.

S: So we can see how that manifests locally with the owning and ruling class serving on and directing the boards of the largest non profits in town. The same people who control the local politics control the local businesses and control the local charities. And they all serve the same purpose, the increased profits of those very people. Back to the article:

Charities must closely track how every dollar is spent, so service users are often required to provide detailed personal records and pieces of information, such as social security numbers, as a requirement of receiving services.  This information is then transmitted to the funders to track demographics, allocate funding, track service usage, and so forth. Many times this data collection element serves as a barrier to entry for many people trying to access much needed services and resources. Whether it is because someone is fleeing domestic violence or doesn’t have the proper documentation, people often would rather avoid these resources than deal with the identifying paperwork and data collections efforts of these agencies. [7]

“Of course these NGOs are helping people eat and survive,” states the zine. “But people should be able to survive on their own terms, not on the terms of the wealthy, Neo-colonial/imperialist countries who stole the resources and money in the first place.”

C: I think that’s really important, the idea that people should be able to determine what it means to survive for themselves. This is why the best models of wealth redistribution are direct giving, giving money straight to the people who need it and allowing them to choose what to spend it on. It is the hierarchical top down nature of charity that imposes the ideals of those giving resources upon those receiving it.

S: That’s what has been found in studies recently. It’s so hard for wealthy people to do though, they always have this fear of being taken advantage of. It seems to denote a certain awareness that what they have is not rightly theirs. They know on some level that at any point it may be taken away from them. Possum goes on:

This is far from the reality on the ground. The rank and file workers who do the grunt work required for these organizations to function all, in the experience of this author, want to do good in the world and help others – manifestations of our shared mutual aid instinct. The problem is, however, how these workers are often not given the tools to truly solve the problems their “service users,” or “clients,” have, given the layered social conditions of these clients. The workers do try to honor the complexity of each individual, but can only do so much on a grant-dependent, nonprofit budget. The same can be said for the middle management, as many managers are still closely involved in the daily operations, often knowing the clients as well as the workers, and in many cases barely make more than the employees they manage. The rare exceptions are the workers who have reached burnout, just there to do a job, a phenomenon common enough in the field to be openly discussed. Many nonprofit managers work proactively with their employees to avoid such a thing. A vast majority of the case workers at CCAP are generous souls looking to give back to their community while they earn a living. Who can blame them? There really is no other game in town if you want to go into that line of work and CCAP is – for some reason – always hiring. The reason of course is the incredibly high turnover rate in the industry due to burnout.

C: Workers should be unionizing to make demands for better working conditions and pay from their employers. This would give them the leverage needed to make these places deliver the promise they are intended to fulfill. Then they would have the power to take their workplaces and run them collectively.

S: Can you imagine how much these places could accomplish if they had access to the resources of the wealthy and could run their workplaces themselves as they saw fit, without influence from donors or the State?

C: Its just the same as any other occupation really. People try to set it out like its a special sector of the economy, but its not. It could be unionized or outright seized by the workers and operated for the benefit of the revolution. This would also attract a great number of people to the industry who currently stay away because of all the downsides, including burnout.

S: Burnout is a dangerous state to find yourself in, it can often come on very quickly and can last indefinitely in some cases. Many people find themselves looking for jobs in other fields after just a short stint int the social services industry. The work is brutal and emotionally taxing, and the pay is garbage. Most the time workers are overworked and understaffed, this leads to incredibly high case loads, and less personal service to each client. The article continues:

Unfortunately the phenomenon of burn out is not unique to corporate nonprofits, many grassroots organizers experience this too. These organizers are typically unpaid volunteers, yet they face the same challenges that social workers do and with less resources at their disposal. Part of the reason grassroots organizers get so burnt out is in fact because they are left picking up the slack left by larger corporations. The limits imposed on these large institutions make them largely unresponsive to the public and their clients needs. This leaves a huge gap of services to be filled by mutual aid efforts. Many corporations know this effect well and factor this grassroots volunteerism into their budgeting. When they know we can and will step up they know that they can actually reduce services in that sector. Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network here in Aberdeen, WA has experienced this many times with our local non profit Coastal Community Action Program. CCAP case managers routinely give out their information as a resource to their clients, even going so far as to call CRMAN to help get them tents. This company gets millions of dollars each year and yet they rely on our volunteer labor time and time again. This is a type of exploitation that is not typically accounted for or discussed but one that negatively impacts grassroots organizations all over the world. These companies use our labor while taking millions each year in order to provide sub-par services and actually prevent the efforts of mutual aid organizers, who are trying to accomplish systemic change, not engage in careerism.

“The problem,” states the article, The Nonprofit Industrial Complex, “is that while providing for social change is the only long-term solution, short term services feel so good, both for those working in the nonprofit sector and for those funding them.” [8]

Paul Kivel is quoted in Working For You, Me, Us, and Them as saying, “The focus on the individual achievements of a few can distract us from looking at why there’s not enough affordable housing, educational opportunities, and jobs for everyone.”

C: This is what entices so many into the field in the first place, the desire to do something to help people. But without us working outside our jobs to topple the systems, all we are doing by becoming employed in the social service field is making ourselves part of the overall system of poverty management. We can actually be made to do counter-revolutionary work in this way, often without realizing it. For those who become employed in this field after coming from grassroots organizing can often find it difficult to separate the two and the one that pays their bills tends to take priority.

S: It is an unfortunate trend noted by many organizers. Those without a solid critique of the State apparatus can fall prey to the good feelings that come from feeling like your job is doing good for people in your community. But these good feelings will only last so long, and after that comes the cruel realization that they are a part of the very system they had started out to change.

Nearly every, if not every, social worker gets into the field out of a desire to devote their careers toward improving the world, to “giving back.” The existing system of capitalist nonprofit entities exploits this willingness to serve by often underpaying it’s staff. It is not uncommon for the workers at a social service organization to be below, or barely hovering above, the national poverty level, $13,590 a year for a single person household and $27,750 for a household of four. [9] Middle management at many nonprofit charities make little more than the employees they manage, and are pressed by regional supervisors to do more with less. This is, of course, all despite the already shoestring budgets these companies run on.

C: So it’s really probably not worth selling out your time to these institutions, it would be more effective to work on the outside trying to achieve real change rather than take their paltry wages.

S: Or like we said earlier, just start the process of seizing the workplaces for the cooperative operation by the workers. When run cooperatively a non profit can actually serve to cater to the specific needs of its community rather than serving the pockets of those in power. The models would fundamentally shift from being focused on making sure that only certain people get assistance, to getting as much assistance to as many people as possible. Continuing with the article:

Despite the fact that the majority of nonprofit managers are nearly always promoted from the pool of rank and file workers, new managers must adapt their foci from being exclusively on the service users to being on to managing the general well-being and continued survival of the organization. Given how tight their budgets are already, these managers have to then hunt for and attract additional funding in order to continue to pay their employees’ wages, along with the costs required for the continued operation of the site or project they manage. These pressures create natural blind spots, an inaccurate analysis of the issues, sometimes failure to consider the social conditions that give rise to the problems, and little-to-no ability to address these social conditions in a meaningful way.

C: Yeah they don’t have the time or space to analyze the overall system, when you are in it and your already overworked then it’s incredibly difficult to see the forest for the trees. This is a good reason to conduct listening sessions with the community you’re supposed to serve, so that you can hear from those outside the system about what they think about it looking in from the outside.

S: And this is why workplaces should be collectivized, so that they can be responsive to those needs. Instead of simply focusing on providing specific instances of aid to individuals they could engage in community building efforts and mutual aid to help build a system in which people are not in need in the first place. This is, after all, a symptom of a broken society. This whole industry only exists because the capitalist system creates so much misery and poverty. It is an extension of that system, and debatably cannot be reformed. We need to abolish the NPIC and move into collective care models of community-based organizing. We arrive at the conclusion of the article:

Even if the nonprofit managers share the same materialist analysis of social conditions like poverty that complicate naturally occurring conditions like disabilities, they cannot meaningfully change these systemic problems beyond what the organization’s lobbyists are able to do. They must instead focus on the individual cases of each client, becoming their allies and champions in the best of cases.

“Just as the military-industrial complex exists to link the military and industry in a self-feeding loop in order to perpetuate and grow, the nonprofit-industrial complex links nonprofits and those funding nonprofits in a likewise perpetuating and self-feeding loop,” states The Nonprofit Industrial Complex.

We here in Aberdeen need to be aware of these issues and openly and candidly discuss them. For a long time CCAP has been a black box for this town. Money goes in…services come out right? But people seem dubious, and rightly so, about both sides of that equation. There does seem to be a lot of money going in, but what services are being rendered for that money? Is CCAP the most effective way to help people in this town? As a local organizer you get asked all the time, “Well what about CCAP?” “Why do you need funds when CCAP exists” or the old standard, “Did you talk to CCAP yet?”. All of this misinformation floating around serves to scare some into being suspicious of the company while others become complacent thinking there are Grade A social services in town. Why contribute your time or money to mutual aid efforts when CCAP surely has all that poor person stuff handled, right? Well, they don’t. They are understaffed and overworked, they have serious structural issues with management, and they aren’t doing enough for the people on the streets. We need people to get involved in grassroots community building and mutual aid, so that we can begin to actually change the material circumstances of poverty and homelessness. We will never get out of this if we continue to turn to the very system that oppresses us for relief. We must collectivize and get organized to take what we need.

C: I really enjoyed this article. It was as informative as it was inspiring. I would love to see the workers of any industry collectivize, but the social service industry would certainly be a great resource to seize for the revolution. I think that making the industry more appealing to the slew of people interested in getting involved in care work, but who aren’t interested in throwing themselves into the grinder of the NPIC, just to become a cog in the machine.

S: Its a great point, the abolition of our current system and the raising up of a new collective form of care work would definitely attract a lot of interest parties. It would also be a good starting point since it resides at the bottom of the system, catering to lowest income individuals in society. So it would be easier to infiltrate and collectivize for grassroots organizers than a corporate board room or a Mayorship, for example.

C: Its hard to imagine changing a system from the inside though. We also need to be advocating for these changes from the outside. Thinking about what action of solidarity we can show with these workers, and seeing how the anarchist community can find affinity with care workers in their local communities. With the understanding that things aren’t working for those who are in need, and that needs to be changed.

S: The alternative seems to be death for the poor. Meager scraps metered out from the feast of the ruling class, the poor forever starving on the rations, but kept at bay with the promise of help, the tentative offers made by the system. We starve while their bellies are full. The structure is set you’ll never change it with a ballot pull. And now for some music from David Rovics, here is East Palestine, hit it!

Music:

Conclusion:

C: The state we find ourselves in is not natural. The hierarchies we inhabit are impositions. The people at the top of those hierarchies have a vested interest in maintaining their hold on power, and that comes at the cost of keeping the majority of the population content enough to not rebel. They do this through various systems of control such as police and prison, military attacks, surveillance, and of course poverty management systems. These so called industrial complexes are referred to as such because the nature of capitalism is to turn every sector of the economy into a profit making venture. When private businesses insert themselves into our social structures, they bring their profit motive to those structures, turning them into money making machines rather than institutions of public benefit.

S: What this means in the social sector is that large non profits actually make loads of money, “reinvesting” it into the growth and perpetuation of the company, rather than directing it to services. This leads to gaps in service that have to be filled by grassroots organizers and mutual aid efforts in the community. While this is technically fine, and in fact the model we propose would be the most effective at providing aid to those in need, without access to the monumental resources at the disposal of these large non profits, local grassroots organizers scramble to make up the difference and often fall short of what is needed. For these mutual aid efforts to be more than harm reduction, we must redistribute the wealth that these companies hold. We must take the workplaces to be run by the workers. These workers are the ones who know best what is needed, and their guidance is necessary for any successful vision of change. But this is not about reforming the system, or asking for more funding from it. This is about abolition.

C: We can see from this article the ways in which the State uses the non profit industrial complex to subvert and coopt efforts of grassroots organizers. They will happily let us fill the gaps left open by their shitty system, and then take those that it can back into itself by offering them jobs in the industry. But we must be willing to act outside of our jobs in order to accomplish the change we need to see. We cannot use capitalism to end capitalism, nor vanquish the State by participating in its institutions. While we must all engage with the capitalist system in one way or another to stay alive, we can not forget that the means must be the ends in this fight. It is by engaging in mutual aid and autonomous grassroots organizing that we will be able to topple the system. We must create our own structures that are not reliant on capitalism to survive.

S: Here in Aberdeen we struggle with the same dynamics, having just one behemoth social services provider in the county. Despite its incredible annual budget it still can barely manage to provide the services it is supposed to. Case managers are overworked and underpaid, with staffing shortages and turnover being a major obstacle. These stressed workers often burn out, turning to other occupations for income after draining themselves into the work. When this institution is liable to bend to the whims of local far right anti-poor politicians, that means that real lives are lost. It is not managerial incompetence that impedes the workers at CCAP, but direct malice from the fascist base and those in power who seek nothing short of the total eradication of the poor. The brutal order imposed on us is done so by people with names and addresses. People who live in our city and drive our streets. People who look down on the bedraggled as an eyesore in need of expunging, rather than neighbors in need of aid. They are not our community, they are our enemies.

Outro:

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Molotov Now! We hope you found it informative and inspiring. Our goal with the podcast is to reach out beyond our boundaries and connect the happenings in our small town with the struggles going on in major urban centers. We want to talk to you if your a big city organizer, we think we have a lot you can learn from, and we know you have much to teach us. If you would like to come on the show please email us at sabot_media@riseup.net with the header “Molotov Now!” and we will be in touch about setting up an interview and crafting an episode to feature you.

We want to give a shout out to our friends at:

• C: Queer Satanic, who come with Good news and bad news for our devilish comrades. The good news: the four former members of The Satanic Temple won their legal defense after nearly three years of TST suing them in federal court for online criticism. Congratulations on their victory! The bad news: the Temple has appealed their loss to keep extending this case and its expenses for the defendants, which in December exceeded $115,000. Any donations to their legal defense funds would be appreciated. Their website is queersatanic.com
• S: We want to thank The Blackflower Collective for their continued support and wish them luck in their fundraising efforts. To support them or learn more their website is blackflowercollective.noblogs.org.
• C:Thank you to Ryan Harvey for letting us use their song “If I Had A Rocket Launcher” and Thank you to David Rovics for letting us use their song “East Palestine” on the program today
• S: Kolektiva, the anarchist mastodon server, is growing faster than ever thanks to Elon Musk’s stupidity as many activists close their accounts for bluer skies as can be seen in the fluctuation of followers over on IGD’s socials, join at kolektiva.social (spell kolektiva) and follow us and other online activists on decentralized federated internet.
• C: Don’t forget to go to bit.ly/lakotalawicwa and sign the petition by the Lakota Peoples Law Project telling Joe Biden and attorneys for the Department of Justice to do everything in their power to protect the Indian Child Welfare Act and defend Secretary Deb Haaland.
• S: It is the heart of winter and we still are without shelter in Aberdeen, without intervention more and more of our homeless population are becoming casualties of the state, Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network is still running a winter fundraiser to buy warm weather gear for the homeless, To donate visit bit.ly/crmandonations.
• C: Don’t forget The Communique is looking for artist and author submissions, please write to sabot_media@riseup.net to submit your entry before March 6th for our Spring Equinox edition.
• S: As reported previously, Katey Hussey is facing imminent eviction and her court date is on March 8th. Please send any donations to Venmo @katyHussey or Cashapp $KatyHussey to help prevent them from being evicted or to support them should they do so.
• C: Thank you to Pixel Passionate for producing our soundtrack, please check out their website at www.radicalpraxisclothing.com and check out their portfolio in our show notes
• S: and finally IGD recently featured an interview with us on their podcast This Is America, discussing all the work that radicals are doing on the Harbor, for more info and to listen go to This Is America #180 on itsgoingdown.org

Remember to check out sabot media’s new website for new episodes, articles, comics, and columns. We have new content all the time. Make sure you follow, like, and subscribe on your favorite corporate data mining platform of choice and go ahead and make the switch to federated social media on the Kolektiva mastodon server today @AberdeenLocal1312 for updates on Sabot Media projects such as The Harbor Rat Report, The Saboteurs, Ask Annie, our podcast Molotov Now! and many other upcoming projects.

That’s all for tonight. Please remember to spay and neuter your cats and don’t forget to vote.
Solidarity Comrades,
This is Molotov Now! Signing off

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