Greetings troublemakers... welcome to Trouble.
My name is not important.
These days, it has become nearly impossible to ignore the destructive impacts on our oceans,
rivers, land and atmosphere wrought by two centuries of industrial capitalism.
The consequences have been devastating for all forms of life on earth.
Around the globe, forests are disappearing at a frantic rate, giving rise to the fastest
rate of species extinction in the past 65 million years.
Meanwhile, more than 10 kilometres below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, the rocky depths
of the Mariana Trench have become a graveyard of discarded plastic and other forms of packaging
for mass-produced commodities.
Human societies have also been hit hard.
Just this year alone, historic droughts have ravaged numerous East and Southern African
states, putting tens of millions at risk of famine... even as torrential flooding has
laid waste to parts of West Africa and the South Asian subcontinent, washing away
entire villages.
Record-setting wildfires have ravaged California and the Pacific Northwest, producing apocalyptic
scenes of destruction that look like something out of a Hollywood disaster flick.
And then, of course, there was this year's unprecedented hurricane season, which saw
multiple category five storms smash into the Caribbean and Gulf Coast, and the first ever
reported hurricane off the coast of the UK and Ireland.
But while these natural disasters have produced terrible scenes of human suffering and death,
they have also provided opportunities for some truly inspiring acts of solidarity
and mutual aid.
In areas where people have been abandoned by state and NGO relief efforts, decentralized
networks of volunteers have popped up to coordinate food and supply distribution, arrange for
temporary housing and help communities rebuild local infrastructure.
Over the next thirty minutes, we'll highlight the voices of several individuals as they
share their experiences working with decentralized mutual aid disaster relief networks, circumventing
bureaucratic non-profits like the Red Cross, and making a whole lot of trouble.
I was working with Common Ground in New Orleans in the Lower 9th.
I got there two years after Katrina, and when I got there I was really shocked to see
cement blocks where the houses had been washed off the foundations.
And the government was fining people for not cutting their grass when their houses were
totally washed away.
I was out in Queens when Sandy came in.
And we thought “surely this can’t be that big of a deal, right? It’s not even a hurricane.”
What amazed me was how powerful the storm was, and how it just flattened Staten Island.
I mean there was just nothing.
To see the subway close down for the first time in over a hundred years,
because this catastrophic storm
had hit New York City, was truly terrifying.
And I thought, man, if this just starts happening everywhere...
what is our world going to be like?
Not good.
Believe me, not good.
The Carribbean has just been getting hammered.
The strongest hurricane in history to make landfall.
Prayers are needed for this area.
Anytime it rains, people are re-traumatized. They’re afraid.
The flooding was severe and they’re having to adjust to the fact that their lives are
very different now.
Their lives are not ever going to be the same again, because of this storm in some very
negative and long lasting ways.
The west side and the central area in Puerto Rico have been really heavily affected.
There’s like 400 miles out of 5000 miles of traversable roads.
There’s bridges that have collapsed.
The death toll that’s being reported is, like, grossly underestimated.
It came in through the southeast and it created a lot of damage in the area, and a lot of
damage in the mountains, and then it exited towards the northwest, so basically
the whole island was hit.
Communities you know, vary in different degrees of damage.
But it’s been immense.
When you’re unable to go about your day to day life and people are unable to go to
their jobs, when children are unable to go to school, when folks are unable to get medical
care, when people literally die of infections... that’s catastrophe.
There’s a great deal of damage.
Homes are in disrepair, there’s trash in the streets, there are dogs roaming the streets
that are hungry because the people that they were previously relying on to take care of
them are no longer able to feed or care for them.
There’s a lot of displaced folks.
People who were homeless prior to the storm are still living in shelter environments, where
they are revictimized and retraumatized on a regular basis by these large international
disaster relief organizations who come into the city and often times do
more harm than good.
My name is Debra. I am one of the co-founders of Bayou Action Street Health,
which is a street medic collective in Houston.
BASH formed right before Hurricane Harvey and has been doing disaster relief
and mutual aid work since the storm.
It’s a loose collective of people from around the city and around the country who come and
help out for whatever predetermined amount of time
that they want to come and be here.
We advocate for people who have been locked out of the Red Cross shelter, we help with
mucking and guttering of the homes that were flooded.
We are doing mold remediation, clothing distribution, food distribution, supply distribution,
along with street medic training, mental health training, peer-to-peer counselling training,
and regular old street medic-ing.
In times of crisis I think it’s natural for people to look around and see
how they can help.
We saw a lot of it in Houston, and we saw it happen very quickly.
We saw Mutual Aid groups come together in the blink of an eye.
Communities that we’re working in, the lower socio-economic status, the homeless, the poor,
the working poor- sometimes they need other people to come in and give them a hand.
They know what needs to be done.
They don’t need to be infantilized or objectified or tokenized, but they just need access to
resources, and if you have access to resources, then it’s your duty to provide those resources
to those who don’t have them.
The water was not water, it was sewage, and it was overflow from the superfund sites,
from the chemical clean-up sites, and it was toxic.
Houston is one of the petrochemical centres of the Gulf Coast.
So when the storm came, we had fuel spills, we had sites that were flooded that were already
contaminated, so that water flowed through the city.
What we already know happens in those areas are large concentrations of upper respiratory
and lung diseases, cancer clusters, fetal death, premature birth, deformities
- not only in the short term, but the effects of the Petro-Chemical industry
- that’s a a long term problem.
We may not see those effects for five, ten, fifteen years from now.
But eventually we’re gonna see them.
There’s looting in Houston in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
That’s according to local police officials.
There’s been numerous reports of looting by storm survivors.
Neighbours here... they’re not messing around.
I know of one grocery store in Houston after the storm that was broken into
because people were hungry.
They took eggs, they took milk and they took bread.
The media was out, and a reporter called the cops. And his reasoning was we have to keep
order in place, otherwise there will be total chaos.
Well of course the government wants to criminalize disaster victims because it does the same
with poverty.
It has to be part of the discourse and the narrative.
And it’s also very racialized.
There were all those images that came out of Katrina, um, there’s one in particular
where it’s a photo of a white person with a bag full of groceries, dragging it through
the floodwaters.
They were portrayed as being beneficial to their family and their community.
And then there’s another photo of a Black person, basically the same situation, - ‘looters’
you know, ‘ ravaging the city’.
It’s a game.
They’re the same people, doing the same thing, for the same reason.
Especially with Puerto Ricans being the ‘second class citizens’, if you may, these people
who enjoy some rights, but are colonized by the US.
Then you also have to promote this idea of criminalization,
this idea of incapacity to run a government.
But we have the conditions that we have because US imperialism
and colonialism has created the situation.
What should people do?
Should they die?
Should they allow their children to die?
We should all be considering very deeply what it means when a society values things
over human life.
Cuz with the way our society is unraveling and how rapidly it’s unravelling, one could
easily find themselves swimming to the corner store in search of food.
Despite what the oil industry lobbyists and die-hard climate change skeptics may say, it's a widely-accepted
fact that greenhouse gas emissions are trapping more of the sun's energy within the earth's
atmosphere, causing a spike in global temperatures.
2016 was the hottest year ever recorded, for the third year in a row... and 2017 is currently
expected to come in a close second.
But while people on dry land have been sweltering through historic heatwaves, the effects on
ocean temperatures have been even more dramatic.
And just as climate scientists have longed warned us would happen, warmer surface temperatures
in the oceans are producing more frequent and powerful storms.
This year's hurricane season was unprecedented, with three separate mega-storms, Harvey, Irma
and Maria making landfall in the Caribbean and areas along the US Gulf Coast.
The islands of Dominica and Barbuda were completely flattened, and the UK and US Virgin Islands
sustained heavy devastation.
But nowhere was the scale of damage worse than in Borike, or as it’s known by its
gringo overlords...
Pweeerto Rico.
Puerto Rico was hit by two separate storms, Irma and Maria, causing massive flooding,
knocking out the country's electrical and telecommunication grids, and leaving millions
of people without access to clean drinking water.
This natural disaster was made all the worse
by the man-made disaster that is the Trump administration
All appropriate departments of our government
from Homeland Security to Defense are engaged fully in the disaster.
and the island's status as a hyper-exploited US colony.
But while Trump has used the disaster as an excuse to work on his paper-towel 3-point game
and yet another opportunity for delusional self-glorification,
When you talk about relief, when you talk about search, when you talk about
all of the different levels. And even when you talk about lives saved...
I give ourselves a ten.
people in Puerto Rico have responded to the situation with an incredible level of resiliency,
and outpouring of collective solidarity.
Puerto Rico has been undergoing a crisis for over 11 years,
starting in 2006, dramatically, and obviously the hurricane just deepened that crisis.
The state government and many municipalities have either collapsed because they don’t
have the capacity to operate emergency because of the lack of resources
that we have on the ground.
And also it’s been kind of like a hands-down, let FEMA come in and take care of us.
But FEMA’s been withholding aid and deploying people into assignments but they’re
not going really into the communities.
They’ve lied about the access to communities.
So in the absence of state and federal government, people are starting to come together.
The bureaucracy and red tape and protocols on the ground set by FEMA and Red Cross have
been creating a lot of difficulties and barriers between the people and the resources that
they need.
I think a lot of the times before NGO’s go in to do an action they have to consider
how it’s going to fall upon the ears and the sensibilities of their keepers
- of their funders.
We don’t have that responsibility.
We think about the way the thing that we’re seeking to do is going to impact the community,
who’s going to benefit from it, and if there is an actual need.
If we can come to a consensus that that is true, then we go and we do the damn thing.
Everywhere we go throughout the island the stories it’s the same; people on the ground,
neighbours coming together to clean their neighbourhoods, to help feed other folks in
their neighbourhoods when the aid is not coming in.
Trying to pool together resources to have collective kitchens and collective meals and it’s been
an incredible amount of solidarity both from outside Puerto Rico
but also especially within folks in the communities
because it’s based out of need.
So now you have to talk to your neighbour because you have to share the rice and the
beans so you can cook something together and you happen to be the one with the gas stove.
So this has resulted in some spaces that are called Centros de Apoyo Mutuo, centres of
mutual support that vary from social kitchens or collective kitchens where folks come to
eat, to places where people can come to drop off stuff so it can get distributed to communities
that have little to no communication.
Even FEMA had mentioned the model of Common Ground relief collective that
-as that being, like, that decentralized model being a way to get mass resources to people like
quickly, immediately, rather than waiting for government bodies to respond.
So there’s decentralized groups on the ground now that are distroing food and getting supplies
out to people because FEMA’s reporting that they give out 200,000 meals a day
in a place where there’s millions of people.
And that’s like 1 meal a day for 200 000 people.
So they’re sorely failing.
So we’re like daring to believe that we could render the state and these NGO’s unnecessary
by just being on the ground and responding to people directly.
So in that way decentralized methods are - like we’re able to circulate more easily,
we're able to get intel around the island better, we’re able to communicate more directly
with people rather than treating them like they’re passive receivers of aid like they’re
consumers, and treating them like they’re human beings and listening to them.
It’s been a challenge, the lack of communications so we have to actually go to places.
It’s been a challenge also for us the lack of transportation- the fact that because we
are poor and working class, we really don’t have adequate vehicles.
So we’ve eventually gonna rental, and try to get to places and take stuff directly to
folks that we haven’t heard from yet who are the ones in most need.
But the challenge is in transportation, communication, and also money- the fact that we can’t ask
even with donations.
We can’t ask because it’s so hard to get money even from the banks.
The mail is practically paralyzed or working at a very very low level because of the damage
of the hurricane and the systems are down.
So even the mail is an issue and we’re an island, so people with money fly in planes with
aid, but working class folks can’t do that.
So it’s really been about pooling resources- what do we already have?
And finding solidarity with some, even some sympathizers at all levels, from business
owners to truck drivers, to folks that are ready to help us and us being able to have
the connection because we’ve been with the folks that do the front line work.
And it’s been a challenge but it’s been a necessary challenge cuz if not, nothing
would get to a lot of our communities because of the way they’re not connected
to the political structures of the island.
People at first were waiting for the government to- you know, thinking that the government
would come and respond to their needs but once they saw that it wasn’t coming,
they started joining together, organizing kitchen, you know, getting community aid out and then
connecting with other networks that were, you know, trying to get the word out of what
people in their areas and rural municipalities were in need of.
There’s this like fear mongering that society’s gonna break out and we’re gonna have to
have the government come in and police us.
I mean, well that’s absurd, because the government when they come in, they’re usually
taking and not giving.
And what I've seen here is people giving to each other.
From the airport- every single place that I’ve been in, I’ve seen people pouring
out the milk of human kindness to each other.
So yes, the solidarity has been immense.
And it’s the first steps of a popular power that’s gonna build because of folks coming
together in absence of a state and a military occupation by the US.
Early in the morning of September 19th, 1985, Mexico City was struck by a devastating earthquake.
In the span of minutes, thousands of buildings collapsed into piles of rubble, including
hospitals, factories, schools and entire apartment blocks.
An official death toll was never produced, but it's generally agreed that somewhere between
ten and thirty thousand people lost their lives.
The government of President Miguel de la Madrid responded to this national tragedy by ordering
a news blackout, and sending the military into the streets to impose a curfew.
Outraged by the state's incompetence and authoritarianism,
the Mexican people spearheaded the rescue efforts themselves,
pulling survivors from downed buildings and helping to organize emergency
shelter for the hundreds of thousands of people rendered homeless by the quake.
In September of this year, Mexico was hit by two more earthquakes.
The first, and more powerful of the two struck near the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca
on Sept 7th, and the second hit near Mexico City on September 19th... exactly 32 years
to the day after the ‘85 quake.
This time around, the Mexican government has attempted to avoid the negative press that
plagued its predecessor, by cynically using the tragedy as a way of
increasing its domestic image.
But the majority of people in Mexico have long since stopped believing in the legitimacy
of their government, and in recent years, their values of solidarity and mutual aid
have grown stronger.
More or less the official number is 40 collapsed buildings,
but there's easily a thousand buildings that cannot be used as housing.
There's a lot of people that are in the streets, and many of them don't know
if they can return to their to their homes, because no one can tell them.
And of course they always want to go back to retrieve their belongings,
but that puts their lives in danger.
And the authorities are not competent.
After the earthquake happened, the general response was to go to the most affected areas.
There was no immediate response from the government.
It was civil society, and since the earthquake in '85 it has been always civil society
the ones who are going to the sites and starting aid,
especially removing all the debris from the area.
The autonomous brigades, here in our school emerged from the restlessness
of asking ourselves: "What can we do?"
The first thing we did was to open a center of supplies and aid.
Later we started an information verification project, because of the massive amounts of messages - real and false.
Some things that had already happened, other things that had not.
So then we concentrated reousources, and from here bicycle brigades would leave
to take aid to the places that needed it
- be they shelters, disaster zones or damaged buildings.
When they came back, they would give us a report
on the status of the situation.
If other things were needed,
or if heavier things required a car to be transported,
bikers would come that would support us
in moving insulin.
Some taco delivery motorcycles
helped fit a cooler of insulin in the box of their motorcycle.
After the civil society started working on the sites,
the government also sent special forces, but that included the military, police groups,
and some engineering teams, but the feeling was
that they were not really trying to help and save lives,
but just in general control the situation at all the sites.
On Thursday night it seemed like
material necessities were taken care of,
so we asked ourselves: what more could we do to help?
What came next?
We put our energies into the school here, with the documentation brigades
- who interviewed people that were affected by the quake
with a list of questions.
Asking them how they were doing, how was their home?
What they needed...
and asking them to describe their interaction with the authorities.
When we decided to stop working as an aid warehouse,
we began to envision this work as a long term project.
So we developed new working groups,
like art brigades that deal with things that we are more used to, like graphic work,
to find ways to support with what we really know how to do....
to go beyond the moment of emergency and immediacy.
So we have various assemblies, in which we figure out
where we should put our energies - where to support.
Like creating a census of people who've been affected.
If we find camps that need things, if we have the capacity we bring them.
It was impossible for one single group to organize aid.
For example there was collaboration between the groups collecting or being able to buy
equipment, food, to send to Oaxaca.
People organized to make lists of what was needed where, and then there were other groups in
charge of finding what was the best way to transport all those things.
So in general, a very specific group got specialized in one part of the process and then it helped
a lot with previous organization knowing which autonomous groups were working in Oaxaca,
so those were very important connections to make.
We never got in one another's way. We never said: "You do this, and you go there!"
...like no one has to tell you what to do,
which was fuckin awesome!
In the wake of a natural disaster, local systems of authority break down.
The widespread damage to infrastructure, disruption of service provision and general sense of
panic and desperation associated with these events creates a sudden power vacuum.
Governments are well aware of this, and many have developed contingency plans that allow
them to rapidly move to reassert the rule of law, over often still-traumatized populations.
According to the cold logic of state power, containing threats to public order brought
on by a catastrophe is more important than actually saving lives.
This includes quashing threats to the sanctity of private property brought on by the necessity
of human survival.
For anarchists, and other enemies of social control, there is a flipside to this equation.
While natural disasters are horrific tragedies that cause immense devastation and suffering,
the collective trauma of these events can also serve to bring people together, and inspire
neighbours to build local networks of interdependence and mutual aid, in order to collectively navigate
situations where they’ve been abandoned by the state.
This brings to mind the well-known quote, by Spanish anarchist revolutionary, Buenaventura
Durruti: “We are not afraid of ruins.
We carry a new world, here, in our hearts.”
In the ruins created by climate catastrophe and natural disasters, new worlds are being built.
Small-scale experiments in local sustainability and the fostering of new
social relationships rooted in the values of autonomy and mutual aid.
In Lakewood, what happened during the storm was almost criminal.
They were told they were not in a flood zone, they were not priority evacuation, and as
the water started to rise from the bayou that encircles the neighbourhood,
they started calling up rescue and they couldn’t get any.
So, they helped themselves, they found the boats.
Some neighbours went around rescuing folks off their roofs,
and the community took care of itself.
They have always been a tight knit community, and now that they’ve gone through this together,
they’re even closer knit.
I think organizing around short term and long term relief for people has really helped to
demonstrate how communities can do the work themselves and render the state unnecessary.
That vision of community, mutual aid, horizontal organization and solidarity is coming to life
with people.
This charity vibe of the big corporations raising funds,
they do it so they can say, "I am this corporation, and I am going to help you
rebuild your home, because I am so good."
And I think that mutual aid doesn't seek recognition.
I think we have to be very careful about the politics about the groups that are saying
they are doing aid in Puerto Rico.
A lot of folks in the US, not necessarily the disaster relief folks, but other people
from the Puerto Rican diaspora or non profits have come in to try to colonize the efforts
and they can have influence on organizations usually based on identity politics.
So folks are like “oh these are the Puerto Ricans, so we gotta listen to them”, but not
all Puerto Ricans are on the same page.
Charity can be used as political capital
for other interests that don't interest us.
When you receive charity, other than probably clearing
someone's conscience, they can also profit politically from it.
Mutual aid doesn't pursue that.
The difference between charity and mutual aid in a disaster situation is charities like
the Red Cross- they’re set up along very specific lines.
They have CEO’S, they have vice-presidents of communication, they have all of these different
levels in their hierarchy and as you go up, each level is more authoritarian
than the one before.
So in order to make any decisions, in order to do anything, things have to follow a very
specific set of rules, they have to be done in a certain way, and if you try to contravene
those rules, then you get booted out of the organization.
From Katrina, to Haiti, to Houston, they cause the same problems over and over again,
because their structures are inflexible.
We get to pick and choose what we wanna do, and in picking and choosing what we wanna do,
we let the community who needs the work done, direct us.
Mutual Aid just recognizes that we’re all in different places and we have to meet each
other where we are in order to keep moving forward.
All of this hand wrangling, all of this ‘will our funders renew that grant at the end of
the year’, is not an issue.
We’ve been creating affinity groups like medical crews, organizing short term infrastructure
like solar and water purification and we have a long term systems group
that’s coming in after.
We’ve been in contact with folks from Houston and Louisiana and Mexico who’ve been organizing
that same structure.
It’s open source open communication, it’s really accessible so community can get involved
where they have the most intel on what’s going on.
When you have an opportunity to rebuild systems so that they’re more people centered than
organizationally centered, then you’re doing real work, then you’re making a difference
that’s a long term difference because you’re letting people direct what it is that they
need rather than coming in and dictating to them and telling them what you will give them.
When disaster happens, it’s a crack in societal norms that the state has set up for us and
we can see through the cracks and exploit those cracks.
This is the time where we can seize power and we can act and really empower other people
to you know, to make our communities ours.
Liberalism is dying for a reason.
Watching Anderson Cooper and saying “oh my” is not activism.
If you believe that change comes from other means, you need to be
actually doing those things.
Just go out and fucking do it.
Get self organized, get affinity groups together, and start responding but respond through listening.
We already have to have plans in place when this happens because
the response has been too slow.
For comrades that are organizing in other spaces, I would say get out in the community,
get them involved in what’s going on,
start organizing projects around people’s experiences,
and then building from there.
Go find the people.
They’re there.
You see them everyday.
They’re the single mom who needs a child care co-op, or help setting one up.
I think that what you’re seeing is anarchists leading and saying “here are our options”
rather than waiting on the government to enact those options, we’re going to create
open source resources and allow the communities to have access to them
so that people are empowered.
It’s the future.
It’s where we’re going, and I am proud to be a part of the anarchists
who are leading the way on that.
In the days after we finished interviewing members of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief,
the church they were operating out of in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, was raided by a SWAT team.
These comrades were detained at gunpoint, asked if they were associated with antifa,
and interrogated as to whether or not they intended to overthrow the government.
Thankfully, they were all released without charges and were able to
quickly get back to work.
This act of ill-thought out repression clearly demonstrates that governments see relief efforts
that fall outside of the hierarchical control of state and corporate non-profits as a challenge
to their legitimacy, and a threat to their assumed role as the sole deciders of who gets
aid, how they get it, and when.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you that Trouble is intended to be watched in groups,
and to be used as a resource to promote discussion and collective organizing.
Are you interested in starting a local group to help support front-line disaster relief efforts?
Or just figuring out how people in your town could better apply mutual aid principles
to your local organizing?
Consider getting together with some comrades, screening this film and discussing what this
could look like in practice.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble at your campus, infoshop,
community center, or even at home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month, we’ll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show,
plus a screening kit featuring additional resources and some questions you can use
to get a discussion going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content for free off our website: sub.media/trouble.
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics, or just want to get in touch, drop us a line
at trouble@sub.media.
We’d also like to remind you that subMedia is still fundraising to try and grow our collective,
so that we can increase our video output and bring back the Stimulator
for a new weekly news show.
If you like what we do, and wanna see more of it, please consider going to sub.media/donate
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As a token of our appreciation, we'll send you some swag in the mail.
As always, we’re excited to see that people have been supporting and screening our work,
and wanna give a big shout to the hundreds of new sub.Media subscribers who signed up
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Also, we’ve been fundraising to send water filtration systems to Puerto Rico,
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To help us in this mission go to sub.media/puerto-rico/
This episode would not have been possible without the generous support of Natalie, Ita,
Avispa Midia, And Nicholas
Now get out there, and make some trouble!