I don’t feel particularly bad about the fact that Ephraim Cruz lost his job with the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol should not exist at all, and the men and women who decide to join it are, whether they realize it or not, violently inflicting injustices on innocent people every day, as an essential part of their job duties. Cruz seems to me like a basically decent man with an acute conscience, and it will be better for him now that he has to find an honest line of work.

But Jenn’s interview with Cruz at reappropriate is still powerful, and important to read, because of what it tells us about the institutional culture of policing in general, and border policing in particular. It should be no surprise that the Blue Wall stays in place when the uniforms change from blue to green; if anything, it is worse, because abusive border cops can rely on getting away with even more than abusive ordinary cops can. Their usual victims have no formal standing as citizens, often cannot speak English well, have few advocates with high profiles in the media or the legal system, and are about to be forced out of the country, far away from anyone who might do anything about their mistreatment.

Ephraim Cruz, a former patrol agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, tried to do something about Border Patrol agents who abused captured and imprisoned immigrants. Here are some of the things that he saw while he was stationed in Arizona:

Ephraim was also amazed to find cells were frequently filled to two or three times their posted capacity, while neighbouring cells were not being utilized at all. Not only was this a clear violation of fire codes, but Ephraim feared this practice could pose a serious health risk for detainees.

… But, most heart-wrenching for Ephraim was the observation that detainees were frequently going twenty to thirty hours at a time without food. In his March 21, 2004 memo, Ephraim recounts how he watched a young ten-year-old boy — whom his mother described as in good health — break out into red bumps after going more than twenty hours without a meal. Later that same day, Ephraim remembers how a young girl went more than thirty hours without food, and complained of feeling faint. These were hardly isolated incidents: Ephraim remembers countless children and pregnant women who went without food for two or three shifts at a time.

According to Border Patrol spokesperson Andy Adame (quoted in archived Tucson Citizen article Border Agent Claims Detainees Mistreated in Douglas, written by Luke Turf, published May 22, 2004), Border Patrol policies state that all detainees should be fed at 6am, noon and 6pm and ... crackers and juice are always available for immigrants. However, Ephraim writes in an August 5, 2004 memo (Memo from E. Cruz to R. Bonner, SUBJECT: Ongoing Mistreatment of Illegal Aliens and Processing Issues):

The integrity of those meal times are habitually violated, and crackers and juice are not always available. Furthermore, when crackers and juice are indeed available, it is not readily provided to the detainees... It is station policy that we feed all illegal aliens held beyond six to eight hours. Many illegal aliens easily go two to three times beyond that time frame without one meal.

In that same memo, Ephraim recounts how on July 31, 2004, he approached the control room that 220 meals would be needed that day, only to be told that 70 meals would be ordered. Most likely, Ephraim opined, two-thirds of detainees at the facility went hungry that day. According to Ephraim, the Douglas station also went weeks at a time without replenishing their supply of juice and crackers, and even when such items were in stock, they were not always made available to detainees. In one incident, Ephraim left some juice and crackers near the door of a holding cell only to have a fellow Agent remove the food moments later, muttering to Ephraim that by leaving it within reach of detainees, they might assume the food was for them.

Ephraim further notes that there was a distinct lack of concern for detainees amongst Agents; an almost dehumanization of the UDAs [Undocumented Aliens –R.G.] that helped perpetuate the mistreatment. Ironically, the Agents — who were predominantly Mexican American — looked down on UDAs as if to say that they, as legal Mexican Americans, were better than the Mexican detainees. Many seemed to feel that detainees deserved their mistreatment; Ephraim recalls how in one instance, while denying food to a detainee, one agent remarked that [the illegal aliens] knew they were coming, they should have brought food with them.

The dehumanization extended in one case to abuse reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib scandal (which ironically occurred only a few months after Ephraim began writing his memos). On March 1, 2005, Ephraim wrote a memo that included a recount of an incident he observed(Memo from E. Cruz to M. Nicely, Chief Patrol Agent, Tucson Sector) :

[I] informed FOS Jeffrey Richards and FOS Ignacio Luevano, in the presence of SBPA Robert Marrufo that SBPFA Marrufo directed BPA Jon Gleber to put an undocumented alien in our custody in a stress position. The incident took place about two weeks ago on the north side of the processing floor and to the knowledge of other agents. The stress position consisted of the alien performing the chair which entails leaning against the wall with both legs at a 90 degree angle and both hands straight out. They had the alien remain in that position until he buckled and cried.

Marrufo then suggested that the alien be placed in the forward leaning rest position, a push-up position, to give him some exercise, however I don't know if Agent Gelber followed through with the suggestion.

— Jenn @ reappropriate (2007-11-05): The Price of Conscience: An Interview with U.S. Border Patrol Agent Ephraim Cruz

In 2004, Cruz, believing that a man's conscience is God's voice, began to write memos and letters to try to make his supervisors, politicians, and the media aware of violations of policies, training, state laws, fire and health codes, and illegal aliens' civil and human rights within [the Douglas, Arizona] processing facility. Here is what happened:

Ephraim writes in his March 21, 2004 memo (Memo from E. Cruz to supervisors, 2004):

This culture... reflects a disturbing level of complacency and lack of accountability and is coupled with responses... that this is the way things are done.

Ephraim describes this culture of complacency as fostering the sentiment that, management condoned [the mistreatment] and Agents knew that management knew and [were] not correcting it. Therefore, Ephraim says, Agents asked themselves why should I rock the boat?

… Despite his 117 letters, Ephraim received little support from the Senators and Congressmen he contacted. Andy Adame, Border Patrol spokesperson, told the media that the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) would conduct a generic investigation of Ephraim's accusations, but a recent article by the Tucson Weekly reports that this investigation — though supposedly having found Ephraim's claims to be unsubstantiated — may never have actually taken place.

— Jenn @ reappropriate (2007-11-05): The Price of Conscience: An Interview with U.S. Border Patrol Agent Ephraim Cruz

After he began speaking out, Cruz found that his employee review scores suddenly plummeted. One supervisor encouraged his co-workers to take care of him for the accusations. Then, in 2005, he was brought up on federal charges for transporting an illegal alien across the border. He and some friends had gone across the border into Agua Prieta after work, and on his way back he gave Maria Terrazas — a waitress who lived in Douglas and who was dating one of his colleagues at the Border Patrol — a ride back across the border to her home in Douglas. Later, in an unrelated criminal investigation against her boyfriend, it turned up that she didn’t have her papers. Cruz, who had no way of knowing this at the time, was brought up on federal charges. Nobody else involved in giving Terrazas the ride was charged. If he had been convicted, Cruz could have been sentenced to up to 20 years in a federal prison for this non-crime. As it turns out, the jury found the prosecution baseless and acquitted him on all charges. But that didn’t stop the retaliation. Last month, he received a letter from the U.S. Border Patrol stating that he would be fired on administrative charges — the same charges that a federal jury had already acquitted him of. He has been forced to resign so that he could avoid having this baseless smear go on his record; he could not afford a lawyer to fight the dismissal in court.

When it comes to cases of corruption or abuse, it’s often said that cops will protect their own. That’s close to the truth, but it misses the mark in one important respect. Cops — and this manifestly includes border cops, too — will try as hard as they can to intimidate, harass, defame, abandon, hurt, fire, imprison, or even kill any of their own who speak out against their colleagues’ crimes.

That isn’t cops protecting their own. It’s cops protecting their power. And they’ll do just about anything to absolutely anybody who endangers it. Ephraim Cruz is the latest of many victims to get the long knife treatment.

Left libertarians, like all libertarians, believe that all State control of industry and all State ownership of natural resources should be abolished. In that sense, libertarian Leftists advocate complete and absolute privatization of, well, everything. Governments, or quasi-governmental public monopolies, have no business building or running roads, bridges, railroads, airports, parks, housing, libraries, post offices, television stations, electric lines, power plants, water works, oil rigs, gas pipelines, or anything else of the sort. (Those of us who are anarchists add that governments have no business building or running fire departments, police stations, courts, armies, or anything else of the sort, because governments — which are necessarily coercive and necessarily elitist — have no business existing or doing anything at all.)

It’s hard enough to sell this idea to our fellow Leftists, just on the merits. State Leftists have a long-standing and healthy skepticism towards the more utopian claims that are sometimes made about how businesses might act on the free market; meanwhile, they have a long-standing and very unhealthy naïveté towards the utopian claims that are often made on behalf of government bureaucracies under an electoral form of government. But setting the substantive issues aside, there’s another major roadblock for us to confront, just from the use of language.

There is something called privatization which has been a hot topic in Leftist circles for the past 15-20 years. It has been a big deal in Eastern Europe, in third world countries under the influence of the IMF, and in some cases in the United States, too. Naomi Klein has a new book on the topic, which has attracted some notice. Klein’s book focuses on the role that natural and artificial crises play in establishing the conditions for what she calls privatization. But privatization, as understood by the IMF, the neoliberal governments, and the robber baron corporations, is a very different beast from privatization as understood by free market radicals. What consistent libertarians advocate is the devolution of all wealth to the people who created it, and the reconstruction of all industry on the principle of free association and voluntary mutual exchange. But the IMF and Naomi Klein both seem to agree on the idea that privatization includes reforms like the following:

• Tax-funded government contracts to corporations like Blackwater or DynCorp for private mercenaries to fight government wars. This has become increasingly popular as a way for the U.S. to wage small and large wars over the past 15 years; I think it was largely pioneered through the U.S. government’s efforts to suppress international free trade in unauthorized drugs, and is currently heavily used by the U.S. in Colombia, the Balkans, and Iraq.

• Tax-funded government contracts to corporations like Wackenhut for government-funded but privately managed prisons, police forces, firefighters, etc. This has also become increasingly popular in the U.S. over the past 15 years; in the case of prisons, at least, it was largely inspired by the increasing number of people imprisoned by the U.S. government for using unauthorized drugs or selling them to willing customers.

• Government auctions or sweetheart contracts in which nationalized monopoly firms — oil companies, water works, power companies, and the like — are sold off to corporations, with the profits going into the State treasury, and usually with some form of legally-enforced monopoly left intact after privatization. One of the most notorious cases is the cannibalistic bonanza that Boris Yeltsin and a select class of politically-connected Oligarchs helped themselves to after the implosion of Soviet Communism. Throughout the third world, similar auction or contract schemes are suggested or demanded as a condition for the national government to receive a line of tax-funded credit from the member states of the International Monetary Fund.

• Yet Another Damn Account schemes for converting government pension systems from a welfare model to a forced savings model, in which workers are forced to put part of their paycheck into a special, government-created retirement account, where it can be invested according to government-crafted formulas in one of a limited number of government-approved investment vehicles offered by a tightly regulated cartel of government-approved uncompetitive investment brokers. This kind of government retirement plan is supposedly the centerpiece of privatization in Pinochet’s Chile, and has repeatedly been advocated by George W. Bush and other Republican politicians in the United States.

Klein and other state Leftists very claim that these government privatization schemes are closely associated with Right-wing authoritarian repression, up to and including secret police, death squads, and beating, torturing, or disappearing innocent people for exercising their rights of free speech or free association in labor unions or dissident groups.

And they are right. Those police state tactics aren’t compatible with any kind of free market, but then, neither are any of the government auctions, government contracting, government loans, and government regulatory schemes that Klein and her comrades present as examples of privatization. They are examples of government-backed corporate kleptocracy. The problem is that the oligarchs, the robber barons, and their hirelings dishonestly present these schemes — one and all of them involving massive government intervention and government plunder from ordinary working people — as if they were free market reforms. And Klein and her comrades usually believe them; the worst sorts of robber baron state capitalism are routinely presented as if they were arguments against the free market, even though pervasive government monopoly, government regulation, government confiscation, government contracting, and government finance have nothing even remotely to do with free markets.

I’d like to suggest that this confusion needs to be exposed, and combated. In order to combat it, we may very well need to mint some new language. As far as I know, privatization was coined by analogy with nationalization; if nationalization was the seizure of industry or resources by government, then privatization was the reversal of that process, devolving the industry or the resources into private hands. It is clear that the kind of government outsourcing and kleptocratic monopolies that Klein et al condemn don’t match up very well with the term. On the other hand, the term has been abused and perverted so long that it may not be very useful to us anymore, either.

So here’s my proposal for linguistic reform. What we advocate is the devolution of state-confiscated wealth and state-confiscated industries back to civil society. In some cases, that might mean transferring an industry or a resource to private proprietorship (if, for example, you can find the person or the people from whom a nationalized factory was originally seized, the just thing to do would be to turn the factory back over to them). But in most cases, it could just as easily mean any number of other ways to devolve property back to the people:

1. Some resources should be ceded to the joint ownership of those who habitually use them. For example, who should own your neighborhood streets? Answer: you and your neighbors should own the streets that you live on. For the government to seize your tax money and your land and use it to build neighborhood roads, and then to sell them out from under you to some unrelated third party who doesn’t live on them, doesn’t habitually use them, etc., would be theft.

2. Government industries and lands where an original private owner cannot be found could, and probably should, be devolved to the co-operative ownership of the people who work in them or on them. The factories to the workers; the soil to those who till it.

3. Some universally-used utilities (water works, regional power companies, perhaps highways) which were created by tax money might be ceded to the joint ownership of all the citizens of the area they serve. (This is somewhat similar to the Czechoslovakian model of privatization, in which government industries were converted into joint-stock companies, and every citizen was given so many shares.)

4. Some resources (many parks, perhaps) might be ceded to the unorganized public — that is, they would become public property in Roderick’s sense, rather than in the sense of government control.

Now, given the diversity of cases, and all of the different ways in which government might justly devolve property from State control to civil society, privatization is really too limiting a term. So instead let’s call what we want the socialization of the means of production.

As for the IMF / Blackwater model of privatization, again, the word doesn’t fit the situation very well, and we need something new in order to help mark the distinction. Whereas what we want could rightly be called socialization, I think that the government outsourcing, government-backed monopoly capitalism, and government goon squads, might more accurately be described as privateering.

I’m just sayin’.

Further reading:

• GT 2004-06-07: Property to the People: the Leftist case for privatization
• GT 2007-10-25: Radical health care reform

Someone must have slandered Jean Gambell, for one morning in 1937, without having done anything truly wrong, she was arrested. Gambell, a poor working girl in England, was falsely convicted of stealing two and a half shillings from her boss. She didn’t steal the money, and in fact the money was later found, but by then it was too late. She had already been convicted, and, more to the point, she had already come under the eye of State psychiatry. Declared feeble-minded, this fifteen year old girl was locked up in English psychoprisons for seventy years over a trivial crime that she never committed. Her family desperately tried to get her released, but could not. Eventually she simply disappeared into the system, and her brothers no longer even knew whether she was alive or dead. Jean Gambell herself repeatedly told her prison guards in a care home that she had family she could go to, but they kept her locked up, because she had been officially declared crazy and stupid and could, therefore, be dismissed as a liar. All for her own good.

Jean Gambell finally escaped the talons of the therapeutic State last month–at the age of 85, with a lifetime stolen from her–when her brother finally learned that she was alive and confined in Macclesfield Mews Care Home.

Seventy years locked up in institutions hardly seems to be a punishment that befits the crime of stealing half-a-crown.

However, it is just such a fate that befell Jean Gambell when at the age of 15, in 1937, she was falsely accused of stealing 2s 6d (12.5p) from the doctor’s surgery where she worked as a cleaner.

She was sectioned under the 1890 Lunacy Act and even though the money was later found, she has been moved from mental institution to mental institution. More recently, she went into a care home and has been lost to her family, who thought she was dead.

But last month, by chance, her brother stumbled across correspondence which led to the discovery of her existence and the family was reunited.

Her brother David Gambell, 63, who still lives in his mother’s old home in Wirral, Merseyside, received a questionnaire addressed to his mother from Macclesfield Mews Care Home.

I thought it was just a survey for old people and I was about to throw it away when I saw Jean’s name pencilled in on one corner, he said yesterday.

I couldn’t believe it. I suddenly realised that my sister was still alive. I rang the care home straight away and they confirmed that our sister was there. He and his brother Alan, who had last seen their sister as small children when she was allowed to visit home with two wardens as guards, travelled to the Macclesfield home.

They were told by staff that their 85-year-old sister was deaf, could only communicate in writing and was very unlikely to remember them.

A little old lady on walking sticks came in, said Alan. She looked at us and cried out: Alan…David. Then she put her arms around us. It was very emotional.

I am sure that what has kept her going all these years was the challenge of proving to the authorities that she had a family. The trouble was, nobody would listen to her.

The brothers spent much of their childhood in orphanages because their parents were so poor. They said that they had later discovered that their father had tried for years to get Jean freed after she was put in Cranage Hall mental hospital in Macclesfield for being of feeble mind, but was unsuccessful because her records had been mislaid.

She spent years, lost in a maze of instutitons and care homes, trying to convince people in authority that she had a family. But nobody would believe her.

— David Sapsted, The Telegraph (2007-09-29): Falsely accused woman freed after 70 years

There is one thing that is even more terrifying than the savage cruelty of the hangman State, and that is the dispassionate sadism of psychiatric State–the therapist armed with the law, the straight-jacket, the lobotomy, and a near-absolute entitlement to take your freedom and destroy your life, and call that care for your professionally-reckoned best interests.

(Link thanks to Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-10-21: The Coldest of All Cold Monsters and Anthony Gregory @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2007-10-21: Innocent Woman Freed After 70 Years.)

In Florida, a white prison gang brutally beat a Black 14-year-old named Martin Lee Anderson to death last year. Anderson had been sentenced to a juvenile boot camp prison in rural Florida as punishment for taking his grandmother’s car for a joyride and then violating the terms of his probation. Within hours of his arrival, gang members surrounded him, held him down, punched him, kicked him, and, while restraining him, held hands over his mouth for up to five minutes at a stretch. They went on beating him for half an hour. They kept on beating him even as he lay limp and unable to move. The attack was captured on tape in a surveillance video, and the autopsy report concluded that Anderson died of suffocation. But just a couple weeks ago, in spite of the video, in spite of the report, the thugs who murdered Martin Lee Anderson were acquitted by an all-white jury in Panama City, Florida. Why? Because when they battered Martin Lee Anderson to death, the gang colors they were wearing looked like this:

An uneasy sense of dèjá vu swept over Florida last week after an all-white jury acquitted seven juvenile boot camp guards and a nurse charged with aggravated manslaughter in the death of a black teen last year.

The shocking verdict came down despite a half hour of videotape that showed the guards hitting and kicking the 14-year-old, Martin Lee Anderson, and holding their hands over his mouth for as long as five minutes at a time, while the nurse stood by and watched. The jury seemed persuaded by the first and widely discredited autopsy report that blamed the boy’s death on a sickle-cell condition, even though a second autopsy ordered by the state had ruled Anderson died from suffocation (the Justice Department has since announced it will investigate whether federal civil rights violations charges should be brought in the case). It’s wrong! Anderson’s mother, Gina Jones, shouted as she stormed out of the Panama City courtroom after the verdict was read.

— Tim Padgett, TIME 2007-10-17: What’s Wrong With Florida’s Prisons?

(Story thanks to Alas, A Blog 2007-10-25 and The Bias Committee 2007-10-18.)

There’s more. Because there is always fucking more. For example, there are the repeated efforts by state and local officials to cover up the murder. Or there are the other cases.

The Anderson decision was reminiscent of another bewildering verdict five years ago, when three Florida state prison guards charged with stomping 36-year-old inmate Frank Valdes to death in his cell in 1999 were acquitted — even though the guards’ boot prints were found all over his back.

… The state is facing lawsuits alleging that its prisons subject too many inmates, including the mentally ill, to a prisoner “warehousing” culture of unlawfully extreme isolation and deprivation, usually with little or no rehabilitation efforts to prevent recidivism. Other suits decry what one calls excessive as well as malicious and sadistic use of pepper spray and other chemicals to keep mentally ill prisoners under control. In many cases the sprays have burned off inmates’ skin, according to the suit. Florida prisons still need to end this kind of outrageous conduct, says Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute in Miami, which is participating in a suit filed against the state’s current Corrections head, James McDonough, along with other department officials.

… In June of 2003, Omar Paisley, 17, an inmate at a juvenile detention center in Miami that was filled 135% beyond capacity, died when nurses ignored his pleas for help after his appendix burst. The nurses were later charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, to which they have pleaded not guilty, and their trials are pending. Prosecutors at the trial of Valdes — who was awaiting execution for murdering a Palm Beach County corrections officer in 1987 — contended that one of the reasons he was beaten was the letters he’d begun writing to the media about abuses at Florida State Prison under its then warden, James Crosby. That made it all the more surprising when Bush appointed Crosby secretary of the state’s Corrections Department in 2003. Then last year Crosby was convicted after a sweeping federal probe of corruption inside the state’s prisons — and he’s now serving eight years in prison himself.

Whenever these kind of atrocities happen, mainstream media sources routinely decry and marginalize them in the same breath, by describing the sadism and the violence as abuses within the prison system, rot within the corrections culture, etc. This admits the problem while not really taking it seriously. In fact, intimidation and violence are the currency of control in prisons as we know them, and these practices bear no meaningful relationship whatsoever to any defense against imminent threats: convicts are imprisoned and coerced whether or not their crimes were violent, whether or not their crimes were even particularly serious, and whether or not there is any realistic chance that they will pose an ongoing threat to anybody in the future, because the hangman State exercises its power in the name of after-the-fact deterrence of unrelated parties, in the name of rehabilitation, and sometimes in the name of punishment and vengeance. This is not a matter of some fundamentally humane institution being perverted, under the influence of corrupt individuals or a corrupt internal culture, into an abuse of power. The thing itself is the abuse.

Related:

• GT 2007-10-13: Gangsters in Blue
• GT 2006-04-07: Over My Shoulder #18: Barbara Deming’s A World Without Prisons (1970), from We Cannot Live Without Our Lives

Last weekend, a small group of anarchist mutual aid workers from Lawrence, Kansas traveled to Greensburg, which had been almost entirely destroyed the weekend before that by a powerful tornado. What they found was a town completely devastated by a natural disaster, which is now being hurt, not helped, by official government relief efforts. Just as happened with Katrina in New Orleans, they faced the sickening sight of government agencies forcing residents to desert their own homes, turning away independent relief volunteers at bayonet-point, and devoting most or all of their own resources to security and maintaining the continuity of government over a paramilitary-occupied ghost-town. Here’s what Dave Strano of Kansas Mutual Aid had to say about the situation:

Somewhere over the Rainbow: A report from a Kansas Mutual Aid member from tornado devastated Greensburg, Kansas

by Dave Strano

On Saturday May 12, four members of Kansas Mutual Aid, a Lawrence based class struggle anarchist collective traveled to the small South Central Kansas town of Greensburg. Our intention was to go as a fact-finding delegation, to report back to the social justice movement in Lawrence on what exactly was happening in the city.

On Friday May 4, 2007 Greensburg was almost completely destroyed by a F5 tornado. 97% of the buildings in the town of 1500 were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Nearly every single resident was left homeless, jobless, and devastated. At least eleven people died in the storm, and hundreds of companion animals, livestock, and wild animals were killed as well.

According to the 2000 census, 97% of the population of Greensburg was white, and the median income of the population was a meager $28,000. The city was and still is comprised of overwhelmingly poor, white working people.

Shortly after the tornado, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took control of the recovery efforts in Greensburg. The United Way became the coordinating organization for relief volunteers but, after orders came from FEMA, halted the flow of volunteers into Greensburg. FEMA demanded that Greensburg needed to be secured before the area could be opened to real recovery efforts.

So, as hundreds of recovery volunteers were told to not come to Greensburg by the United Way, hundreds of police from dozens of Kansas jurisdictions were mobilized to enter the city and establish control.

Reports coming from the recovery effort in Greensburg had been woefully short of information. We made multiple phone calls to the United Way and other aid agencies, and were told repeatedly not to come, that We don't need volunteers at this time. We were told that if we wanted to help, we should just make a financial donation to the Salvation Army or United Way.

With the experiences of Katrina and other major disasters fresh in our collective conscious, we decided to go anyway, to assess the situation and be able to present a better picture to those people in Lawrence that were rightfully concerned about the effectiveness of the relief efforts.

On the night of Friday May 11, in the spirit of offering solidarity to the working class population of Greensburg, members of KMA traveled two hours to Wichita and spent the night there. A mandatory curfew had been imposed on Greensburg, with no one being able to be in the city between 8pm and 8am. So after a nearly sleepless night, we piled into our vegetable oil burning car and made the final two hour drive to Greensburg, careful to not arrive before 8.

Multiple news agencies had reported that because of FEMA, all volunteers were being denied entry at the checkpoints set up outside the city. As we approached the checkpoint, we became really nervous, and tried to make sure we had our story straight.

We were stopped by an armed contingent of Kansas Highway Patrol Officers. We explained that we had come to help with the relief efforts, and after a quick stare and glance into our car, the officer in charge directed us to a red and white tent about half a mile into the town.

It turned out that on Friday the 11th, a week after the tornado destroyed Greensburg, the Americorps organization was finally given permission to establish and coordinate volunteer recovery efforts. Americorps members from St. Louis had set up their base of operations in a large red and white canopy tent that was also being used a meeting place for the residents of the city.

Americorps volunteers proved to be pretty reliable for information, and good contacts to have made while we were down there. Despite the hierarchical and contradictory aims of the national organization, the Americorps people on the ground were the only people really offering any physical recovery aid to the residents of Greensburg.

The four of us from KMA, signed in to the volunteer tent and were given red wristbands that were supposed to identify us as aid workers. We decided not to wait to be assigned a location to work, and instead to travel around the city on foot and meet as many local people as we could.

Our primary goals were numerous. We intended to analyze the situation and assess how our organization could help from Lawrence. If long term physical aid was needed from us, we had to make contacts within the local populace that could offer a place to set up a base camp. We also intended to find out what happened to the prisoners in the county jail during and after the storm, and what the current procedure for those being arrested was. In a highly militarized city, the police and military were the biggest threat to personal safety.

As we traveled further into the ravaged town, it became clear that the photographs I had seen had not done justice to what truly had happened here. All that could be seen was endless devastation in every direction. There wasn't a single building in this area of the town that had been left standing. The devastation was near complete. Every single house we came across in the first moments we entered the town had completely collapsed. Every single tree was mangled and branchless. Memories of watching post-nuclear warfare movies filled my head as we walked around the city.

This was a post-apocalyptic world. The city was eerily empty for the most part. National Guard troops patrolled in Hummers and trucks. Occasionally, a Red Cross or Salvation Army truck would drive by. Very few residents were there working on their homes.

After a short while, we met with several people evacuating belongings from their home. They told us that FEMA had been there for a week, and that all FEMA could offer them was a packet of information. The packet, however, had to be mailed to the recipients, and they had no mailing address! Their entire house had been destroyed. Their mailbox was probably in the next county. All they were left to do was evacuate what few belongings could be saved from their house, and then pull the non-salvageable belongings and scraps of their house to the curb for the National Guard trash crews to haul away.

No agency in the city besides Americorps was offering to help with the removal of this debris, or the recovery of people's homes. FEMA's mission was to safeguard the property of businesses in the area and offer low interest loans to property owners affected. The National Guard was on hand along with the local police, to act as the enforcement mechanism for FEMA, while occasionally hauling debris and garbage out of the city.

The only building in the city that FEMA and others were working in or around was the County Courthouse. When we approached this area, we quickly took notice of the giant air-conditioned FEMA tour buses, along with dozens of trailers that were now housing the City Hall, police dispatch centers, and emergency crews.

The media had reported that residents of the city would be receiving FEMA trailers similar to the ones in New Orleans. The only FEMA trailer I saw was being occupied by police.

At this location, we tried to formulate some answers as to what had happened to any prisoners being housed in the county jail during the storm, as well as the fate of the at least seven people that had been arrested since the storm.

Not a single person could offer us a real answer. As of the writing of this article, we are still working to find the answer to that question. We have ascertained that any prisoners that were in Greensburg during the storm were sent to Pratt County Jail immediately after the storm had subsided. However, we still don't know how many people that accounts for, nor do we know the fate of any arrestees in the week since.

Several of the arrestees after the storm were soldiers from Fort Riley that were sent in to secure the town. They have been accused of looting alcohol and cigarettes from a grocery store. The residents I talked to said that they had been told that the soldiers had just returned from Iraq. Is it a wonder that they would want to get drunk the first chance they could? The social reality of this situation was beginning to really set in. The city was in chaos, not because of the storm, but because of FEMA and the police.

In the immediate recovery after the storm, FEMA and local police not only worked to find survivors and the dead, but also any firearms in the city. As you pass by houses in Greensburg, you notice that some are spraypainted with how many weapons were recovered from the home. This is central Kansas, a region with extremely high legal gun ownership. Of the over 350 firearms confiscated by police immediately after the storm, only a third have been returned to their owners. FEMA and the police have systematically disarmed the local population, leaving the firepower squarely in control of the state.

Later in the day we traveled with an Americorps volunteer that turned out to be the sister of one of the members of the Lawrence anti-capitalist movement. She gave us a small driving tour of the rest of the devastation that we hadn't seen yet, and then deposited us in front of a house of a family that was busy trying to clear out their flooded basement.

Two days of rain had followed the tornado, and with most houses without roofs, anything left inside the house that may have survived the initial storm, was destroyed or at risk of being destroyed. The casualties of the storm weren't just structures and cars... they were memories and loved ones, in the forms of photographs, highschool yearbooks, family memorabilia and momentos. People's entire lives had been swept away by the storm.

We joined in the effort to help clear the basement, and listened to the stories of the storm that the family told us. They explained that they had just spent their life savings remodeling the basement, and now it was gone. It had survived just long enough to save them and some neighbors from the storm.

We removed whatever belongings were left in the basement, and sorted the belongings into five piles. The smallest of the piles by far, as the pile of things that were salvageable and worth keeping. The other piles included one for wood debris, one for metal, one for hazardous waste, and another pile for anything else that needed to be removed. From under one of the piles, a scent of rotting flesh wafted through the air. The family was afraid to look and see what may be hidden under the metal.

As we were preparing to leave the work site after clearing the entire basement, we were thanked heartily by the family and their friends. Next time, one of them said, bring fifty more with you.

Next time we will. It should be obvious to most by now, that the federal, state, and local governments that deal with disasters of this magnitude are not interested in helping the poor or working people that are really impacted. Only through class solidarity from other working people and working together with neighbors and community members will the people of Greensburg be able to survive and rebuild.

Kansas Mutual Aid is in the midst of organizing a more permanent and structured relief effort. We are continuing to make contacts to secure a base camp for our work. We hope to have things organized and solidified by Memorial Day Weekend when we plan to travel back with as many people, tools, and supplies we can take.

Our goals are three fold:

1. To provide direct physical relief support to the residents of Greensburg by being on hand to help salvage their homes, and provide any other physical support they ask of us.

2. To offer solidarity and aid in any future organizing or agitating efforts that will be needed to retain possession of their homes, or to acquire any other physical aid they demand from the government or other agencies.

3. To provide support and protection of human rights during the police and military occupation of the city. We will work to document arrests and ensure that human rights of arrestees are protected.

If you live in Eastern Kansas, or are willing to travel, we need your help and experience. We also need a laundry list of supplies including:

• Money for fuel for our vehicles
• Respirators and filtered face masks
• Headlamps and flashlights (none of the city has power, and there are a lot of basements that will need to be worked in)
• Shovels, pickaxes, prybars, crowbars, sledgehammers, and heavy duty rakes
• Gloves, boots, goggles, construction helmets and other protective clothing
• First Aid supplies
• Water and Food (non-perishable) for volunteers heading down
• Chainsaws and Gasoline
• Portable generators
• You and your experience

Please, if you have anything you can offer, or want to help in the relief, e-mail us at kansasmutualaid@hotmail.com.

We will be hosting a presentation on Monday May 21st at the Solidarity Center in downtown Lawrence (1109 Mass Street) at 7pm on our experiences in Greensburg, and on our plans to offer relief in the form of solidarity and mutual aid, and not as charity. Please join us if you can.

There seems like there is much more to say, but with the experience fresh in my mind, it's hard to keep typing. Action and organization is needed more than a longer essay at this moment. In love and solidarity,

Dave Strano
Kansas Mutual Aid member
Lawrence, Kansas

Those of you in the vicinity of Lawrence, Kansas may be interested in attending the information/organizing meeting this Monday at 7:00pm. For those of you who are out of the area, I’ve contacted Kansas Mutual Aid to ask what the best way for us to send money and/or supplies is. I’ll post an update once I get an answer back.

Further reading:

• Neille Ilel, Reason (December 2006): A Healthy Dose of Anarchy
• Kansas Mutual Aid website