Carewashing and the Right to Public Space w/ Tracy Rosenthal (05/09/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Tracy Rosenthal about the pending Supreme Court ruling that could dramatically strip the rights of unhoused people in the US, how politicians frequently invoke a rhetoric of “care” to promote expansions of the carceral system, and how the laws at the center of this Supreme Court case are the same being used to police and sweep solidarity encampments across the US.
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Tracy Rosenthal 0:01
What is being leveraged against protesters in public are time, place and manner restrictions on our constitutional rights to assembly and speech. And like the legal frameworks for criminalizing speech and for enabling the policing of speech and the removal of people from public space are the same as those for living in public, and that the police are tasked with that assignment, making people out of place, subject to forced removal, like who does and does not belong here.
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:59
Welcome to the Death Panel. To support the show and get access to the second weekly bonus episode, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod.
This week's patron episode is a fantastic conversation with two law scholars, Karen Tani and Katie Eyer, about an extensive and truly groundbreaking article that they co-authored called Disability and the Ongoing Federalism Revolution. The article is about the role that court cases involving disability played in laying the groundwork for something called New Federalism, which is the political philosophy at the core of the conservative movement to restore power to the states. This began as a campaign during the Nixon administration and carries through to current fights over education, abortion, trans care, the Medicaid unwinding, police and prison abolition, and COVID.
So many connections to what we're going to discuss today as well. So if you're here for that, and you want to become a Death Panel real head and go deep on federalism, catch that bonus episode with Karen and Katie, and the entire back catalogue at patreon.com/deathpanelpod.
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So today I am joined by a really great guest and dear friend of the panel, Tracy Rosenthal.
Tracy is a writer and tenant organizer. They helped start the LA Tenants Union and are the co-author of the hotly anticipated forthcoming book called Abolish Rent from Haymarket. Abolish Rent reorients the politics of housing around tenants themselves and not the physical property that we call housing. Tracy and their collaborators and the resurgent tenants movement have pushed the meaning of tenant in really important ways that are really exciting, expanding the frame to include nursing homes, sites of federal and state incarceration, etc.
And I asked Tracy to come on the show to talk about a piece that they just wrote for The New Republic called The New Sundown Towns, which is about a current legal fight that has made it all the way to the Supreme Court that could either set or remove limits on just how far cities, municipalities, and towns can police unhoused people.
Tracy, welcome back to the Death Panel.
Tracy Rosenthal 3:16
Thanks so much for having me again. It's really great to be back.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:19
Now, as I mentioned at the top, the piece that we're talking about today is called The New Sundown Towns. This was published in The New Republic.
And at the core of this piece is a Supreme Court case called City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, which asks a question, does the city's policing of public space and criminalization of poverty violate the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment, which is basically just a faux neutral way to say can cities legally banish people and punish them physically, administratively, and financially for being poor in public? How far can criminalization and privatization of public space go before it constitutes torture in the eyes of the law?
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for this case in mid April, and we are now awaiting the court's decision, which will come at some point before the term ends in maybe June, late June, early July. I forget the exact deadline that they have to release them by, but it's right around then every year. And this case hasn't gotten a lot of the attention that I think it's due.
The stakes for Grants Pass v. Johnson are quite high and ultimately speak to the broader point that you're trying to draw the reader's attention toward in this piece, Tracy, which is the intensification and expansion of legal regimes, targeting "homelessness," which police and criminalize the use of public space, from sweeps, to fines, to banishment, to the redirection of funding from housing and shelter towards coercive and often weird or religious treatment and rehabilitation schemes.
And of course, this also relates to the police repression and assault on student encampments, you know, organizing against the genocide in Gaza, demanding Palestinian Liberation and an immediate and permanent ceasefire, most of whom have had the police called on them by the university's own administration. So this is really the policing of public space. The use of tents, it's been top of mind for people. And so I hope that what we can get into today, people can sort of start to see student repression as part of this bigger whole that we're going to talk about.
So that's all just to say, you know, the Supreme Court case at the center of this is where we're going to start today. And this case is just a tiny part of this larger picture.
Tracy Rosenthal 5:28
Yeah. So, the occasion for the piece is, as you said, a Supreme Court case that comes out of Grants Pass, Oregon, and that's a town of 40,000 people. And that town of 40,000 people could possibly rewrite the scripts of homelessness policy for the entire United States, and unleash widespread criminalization and sweeps across the board, basically giving permission to cities that have been blocked under the terms of Eighth Amendment from issuing blanket bans, blanket criminalization, on sleeping in public, even when people have no place else to go. And so this was the occasion for the piece. And then in some ways, the bigger story -- like I went to the town and it is like, obviously -- it's a really interesting -- and interesting is a euphemism. The city has two states secessionist movements. During the 2020 uprising, there was an open carry guard around the town's American flag, like 140 foot American flag that's at the center of town, and people were patrolling the local Baskin Robbins with guns. But at the same time, it's actually a kind of like flag flying conservative and like lawn sign liberal place. And I think actually what is revealed when I went there is it really encapsulates this like bigger national, bipartisan backlash against homeless people and against the very policies that have been proven to house people long term. And so basically, in this town of 40,000 people, there are about 500 people who live outside. And the city had designed its ordinances against what they call this vagrancy problem. And they designed it in a very particular way, that one counselor described as like, you know, the point is to make people move on down the road, right. So like, banishment was the point of how they designed their ordinances to criminalize people living outside. And in 2018, an unhoused person, Deborah Blake, a 59 year old woman who had been living outside for about five years and was living in Grants Pass for more than 15, sued the city and won. She won her case. And both the Oregon District Court, and then the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, you know, these city ordinances constituted cruel and unusual punishment against people who were engaging in, I think, in the court's words, right, the "unavoidable life-sustaining activities of sleeping and resting," right. So that ruling put the city under an injunction to allow people to rest in its parks. And the city was just simply unsatisfied with that. So they took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. And now that case could basically determine what cities can do everywhere across the country. And you know, I think it's also important to know that like, when I went there, the city was under the injunction placed there by the courts, but actually -- and what I found was, you know, people, even in this context, where they are supposedly protected by the Eighth Amendment, unhoused people have to move every 72 hours, they're subject to a host of ordinances that were designed very specifically to limit their activity and to criminalize their activity despite the injunction. And then, I mean, just for context, right, there are two police officers in the town whose entire role is to police people living in parks. And this is a place where there are only about six people on patrol, six officers on patrol at any given time. And policing itself takes up a third of the city's budget, of the entire city's budget, right. So like, you can see the amount of resources and policing that are driven towards people trying to survive outside because they have no place else to go. And so I think what came up in the context of the piece, both what was the sort of bipartisan project of seeking even further criminalization, even further powers to banish people and punish people for the crime of not being able to afford rent, but then also what came up is just that kind of, you know, like what is usually cruel, which is the policies that we're in now, and even Grants Pass, under the injunction, sort of showed that. So that's sort of the basis of the piece. And then I think, you know, some really important threads that even surprised me as I was researching and writing it was the centrality of rhetorics around treatment and addiction that really sort of inform a lot of these decisions. And then, I mean, what didn't surprise me but what I think is really important to continue to note is that this is a bipartisan project and as much as we want to like foist the kind of -- like foist this idea of cruelty on to Republican politicians, on to like right-wing vigilantes, what we see is that a Democratic Governor, Gavin Newsom, the liberal cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and like 13 California cities, and more, all jumped on the bandwagon to send amicus briefs to the Supreme Court to beg them to take up this case. And we know what the Supreme Court is, in this stage, we know that they've restricted abortion, we know that they overturned eviction moratoriums, limited the powers of the EPA. We know who this Supreme Court is. And so the fact that, you know, these so-called liberal cities were turning to an institution controlled by the right-wing to grant themselves the powers to police their own jurisdictions, I think really reveals exactly what kind of powers they want, who they're aligned with. And I think that that's also really sort of at the center of this piece is that even if it has sort of nuanced rhetorics, and maybe what I would call carewashing, that like there is a broad alliance among politicians to criminalize people who live in public when they have no place else to go. And part of that project is really about neutralizing the threat that homelessness poses to the status quo of our housing system and our economic system more broadly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 12:27
So well put, Tracy. I'd love for us to get into some of the details of the set of ordinances that Grants Pass had set up. And there's a quote in your piece from Blake's lawyer, who's the original person who sued the city, Ed Johnson from the Oregon Law Center, who told you quote, "The set of ordinances made it illegal to survive on every inch of public land 24 hours a day." And you describe some of these quotes and comments that came up during this roundtable that happens in 2013, where city officials hold this roundtable on "vagrancy problems," and you talk through some of the meeting minutes, and you talk through the kind of ideology of, if you stop feeding them, they will stop coming, where you sort of talk about deterring wildlife from a garden, right, or from a public park. That mentality is very much top line for these city lawmakers and administrators. And I'd love if we could just get into some of the details of exactly the regime that they set up that, again, these sort of liberal Democrats -- I love the framework, the lawn sign liberals, perfect, right -- that the lawn sign liberals and the anti-state conservatives can find quite a lot of common ground on.
Tracy Rosenthal 13:51
Mhm, mhm. And what's interesting, too, is there are these two rounds of criminalization. There's a round of criminalization that happens in -- after 2013. And then there's another one that happens in 2023, after the city is under injunction, and they find ways around the injunction to criminalize people. And that itself is a really -- and I can explain this further.
But basically, what they do there is -- it sort of shows us what liberal cities have done all across the West, you know, so maybe we'll start in the context of some of these rhetorics of deterrence, this fantasy that you can -- that criminalizing homelessness has any kind of penological function at all, that the idea that you could deter people from living outside when they can't afford rent, and that in and of itself, right, is a thread that comes through so many places on both the left and the right here. I think that that's one central idea. The other is this -- you know, this sort of, if you build it, they will come.
The idea that any sort of provision of resources, whether that's food, whether that's needle exchange, which as we know, can severely reduce the spread of hepatitis C and HIV, and is a harm reduction measure that saves people's lives, right, but -- and even housing itself, right, like even housing itself is posed as a kind of -- as a way of encouraging people to like -- in the right's frame, it would be like continue whatever lawless behavior they were engaged in, you know, and so I think that this -- that idea of, as if the state provision of resources would enable homelessness, rather than mitigate it, is like one of the central themes that we see, that comes throughout.
And that happens both in 2013, when Grants Pass designs its ordinances, and then in 2023, when they're trying to find a way to like -- they're trying to find a way to criminalize people, despite the fact that they have been, in some small ways, limited by the courts. And I should say that this -- like the only thing that was blocked by the courts is a blanket ban on homelessness, on living outside 24 hours a day in every place. And so this -- you know, basically Grants Pass was limited in the same way that cities across the West were limited by this 2018 case, Martin v. Boise, which is -- it sort of became famous as like a whipping post for liberal cities, pretending that they had been constrained by the courts and thus couldn't like unleash widespread encampment sweeps.
And what that decision said, and which was the decision that was reflected in the Grants Pass decision was that it was -- it constituted cruel and unusual punishment to institute a total ban on sleeping in public. However, the case made very clear that cities could still issue time, place and manner restrictions on sleeping in public. And what we've seen across -- across Los Angeles, San Francisco, all across California, Seattle, Portland, and in Grants Pass itself, that cities have so many tools to continue their project of banishment, despite this bare minimum protection that unhoused people were offered under the Eighth Amendment.
And what we've seen is in Los Angeles, for instance, which actually -- I mean, I think it's important to know, right, that the first case that unhoused people use the Eighth Amendment, this protection that we have in the Constitution from cruel and unusual punishment from torture, the first state where that happens isn't Idaho, it's California. It's a case in 2006, that blocks Los Angeles' 4118, which is a total ban on camping supposedly, like on sleeping, sitting and lying in public. And that the courts determined that that constituted cruel and unusual punishment. And then by 2018, in Los Angeles, they passed exclusion zones. So this is not technically a blanket ban, but they exclude areas around parks, schools, libraries, underpasses, even shelters and temporary housing facilities. And this is like an effective if not technical ban. And so this kind of skirting of the court ruling is entirely possible here.
And so I think too, we really see in the context of unhoused people's daily lives, just how little restraint has actually been put on cities by the courts, and just how much power they have. And again, it's like the rhetoric around this criminalization push is often about environmental health hazards or criminality in some other form that it has been constituted. But none of these bans have prevented cities from policing those laws, and even the -- even Grant Pass’s lawyers have to admit that.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:33
I think that what you're speaking to now is incredibly important, which is the kind of issues being raised. I mean, the Biden administration is weighing in with neutrality on the Supreme Court case, pretty much saying that in some ways, they do support states to, on an individual basis, make decisions about who is deserving of compassion and who is deserving of policing, which has wild connections to frameworks that we see in other negative rights based frameworks like the ADA, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act.
But what's I think important here that you're pointing to is what is California defending, right? What is Gavin Newsom, writing this letter, like, oh, we need to preserve this, solidarity with Oregon, right? Solidarity with this town policing 500 people, torture -- literally torturing 500 people, trying to run them out of town, explicitly talking about how this is their goal, who are thinking through this in terms of using force and coercion as deterrence, as a threat, to say you're really not welcome here, and ultimately, again, around the fundamental sort of crime of not being able to afford rent, right?
And so what you're pointing to is that all of this grief, right, and all of this incredible defense that we're seeing across the aisle, in particular from liberals like Gavin Newsom, London Breed in San Francisco, right, is that they are -- they are defending just one small aspect of this entire house of cards of the policing of homelessness and the policing of public space, and the designation of who the public space is for, ultimately, and who is welcome in it and who is not. And what I think is important is that to politicians who are -- and state lawmakers and the kinds of people who are pushing these policies, they see any attack on the scope as potentially destabilizing to the whole, right?
But ultimately, what is being destabilized, even if this ruling were to be upheld by the Supreme Court, and the city's petition for this to go away is denied, there's an entire regime that has been left intact this entire time that was not even touched by the injunction, that isn't even affected by the outcome of this case. Because it's just one small piece. It's not even like a keystone of the foundation in some capacity, right? This is just one component of not just a sort of policy and an ideology, but an entire regime and focus of policing, and of the orientation of the political economy, ultimately towards the identification, sorting, and punishment of people who, for whatever reason, can't afford to pay rent.
Tracy Rosenthal 22:34
Mhm. Yeah. I think that's really -- I think that's really well said. And I think that for me, one of the things that I really wanted to try to get across is the way that this case is also part of these revanchist pushes on both the right and the center.
And I think that one of the things that I wanted to make clear, right, is that the lawyers who are defending Grants Pass in this case, also defended Chevron against a widespread class action pollution suit. They defended the Dakota Access Pipeline. They won Citizen United, unleashing unlimited campaign spending. They were the law firm that secured the White House for George W. Bush by denying a Florida recount, right. So I think just making sure that we understand who the players are here is I think really important to situating the case. And then also just zooming out just a little bit to this context of an organized project on the right of criminalizing homelessness.
And you know, we've seen that these players, right, like Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale helped start this institute, this think tank, right, an arch conservative think tank called the Cicero Institute. And they have been pushing their template legislation to criminalize homelessness across the country.
And we've seen them succeed or begin, in at least 12 states and beyond this, right, you know, like Florida just passed a camping ban. And as I write in the piece, it happens while DeSantis is standing in front of a sign that says “don't allow Florida to become San Francisco.”
And in Kentucky, what is on the agenda is a law that will enable everyday people to use deadly force against people who trespass on private property. And this is the law that has been attached to their camping ban, right. So this is a -- this is a law that makes it legal to murder an unhoused person for being on private property. At the same time, Trump in his campaign ads has promised a national camping ban, right, and all of these efforts will be supported by a ruling in Grants Pass' favor in this case.
And I think that just making sure that we understand that project. And then I also -- you know, I think part of what I'm trying to do in the piece is also pick out like the specific rhetorics that are underlying that project. And what I found, right, was the Cicero Institute is promoting treatment first, not housing first, right? They're trying to undermine the policy, the federal framework of housing first, that is the provision of housing with like voluntary mental health care, but the housing is unconditional.
And they're trying to reverse that framework and promote treatment, and in some cases, involuntary treatment for mental illnesses and substance addictions and framing those things as the causes of homelessness, rather than as I said, the sort of basis of our economic system in which cities increasingly rely on property values for revenue, homeowners on their property values going up for any kind of future financial security, and tenants rely on like starving or doubling up to pay the rent. And as this -- of course, as we see, homelessness is a result of these fundamental economic conditions. And what the right and increasingly the center are engaged in is a project of stigmatizing homelessness, neutralizing it, and trying to blame it on the behavior and choices of individuals. And I think that that's where the Department of Justice made an intervention in this case. And that's actually a very rare move that the Department of Justice contributes at oral arguments in a Supreme Court case.
It really is a signal that this is like a very important issue. And they issued a "neutral" statement. But what they asked for in that context was permission for police discretion to make what -- their words are "particularized inquiries" and "individual determinations" of unhoused people's unique circumstances as individuals. So what they want is basically [Beatrice laughing] -- exactly. What they want is to be able to evaluate people's choices. And this, I think, is such an important rhetoric that we see from the Democratic side is this fantasy of service resistance, of homelessness as a choice or a lifestyle. And this kind of paternalist logic that says we need to police unhoused people into making better choices.
That's so much of a part of this story. And I think really obviously so deeply relates to everything you guys talk about all the time. And I think it's really important that we consider what it means for the Department of Justice to basically question the personal, you know -- as they have, right, I should make it very clear that this is a long standing project, right. But it is a project of undermining the personal agency of the poor.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:26
Absolutely. And I think what's really important also is, as you're sort of pointing to, this is in one sense sort of coordinated both by deliberate intent and also by mutual interest. And it's, I think, important to bring in the fact that, for example, the sort of government that runs Grants Pass, Oregon, right, you do a little bit of really interesting sort of detail work, flushing out what the city is like.
And for a long time, they have been essentially negotiating a shift in the economy of the town from an industrial economy to a tourism based economy. And that has involved shifts in the real estate, that has involved shifts in the understandings of private space, the understandings of the town, who it's for, et cetera.
But in a sort of bigger sense, you have the really interesting sort of confluence, right, of both lawn sign libs and conservatives who have "seceded," right, I mean, they have these like sort of anti-state movements. And ultimately, what these people are sort of advocating for is to continue to devote resources, a tremendous amount of resources from the budget, right, which there is not much to go around, right, and as you're saying, this is a third of the budget already, on really just targeting and torturing people, fucking up their stuff, making it so that they can't find any rest anytime, they're moving every 72 hours.
The real targeting is so aggressive and so extensive. And when you write about this town and talk about the people in it, it's just like you can feel how little they fucking care that this is happening to people, like you could really feel how little they fucking care that they are payrolling a constant, ruinous, torturous presence in people's lives, when they're essentially in their minds trying to deter them from being within the town limits. And I don't know if it's worth sort of getting into what the kind of dynamics of some of like how that ideology played out in terms of how people were even speaking to you about trying to communicate about what was going on. I mean, they knew they were talking to someone who was writing about this, right.
And in some mind, they must have been self aware of the fact that they might come off kind of -- you know.
Tracy Rosenthal 31:15
You would be so surprised the things that people told me, that they -- you know, I think one of the things that I've learned as like a fake journalist or whatever, is that when you look someone in the eyes, they might -- they might interpret that as your agreement with them, when really all you're doing is listening. And it's -- the things that people told me are --- you know, like, I mean, some of them are pretty unbelievable.
But I think one of the reasons why I found it so interesting is because for me, it really did illustrate this kind of dynamic, and maybe like I can just pull out some things that demonstrate this, right? Like on the right in the town, one of the city council people has basically been on a mission to privatize all of the parks such that police will have -- will finally have permission to remove people.
And the town's only shelter for years, and its biggest shelter, is the Gospel Rescue Mission, which also sent a brief to the Supreme Court saying we want the criminalization of people in the park, we want stricter rules and what the Gospel -- I mean, this is a pray to stay facility where you can't even use nicotine, you have to go to church services under the dictates of the Apostles Creed, and you have to exist at all times in line with your birth gender.
And what comes up is this kind of demand for treatment, rehabilitation, that then, as I tell the story, I learned that there was this struggle on behalf of the the center, you know, it was like represented by the mayor and by this team of volunteers who wanted to open up a sanctioned encampment, which is like a low barrier shelter facility. And according to the courts, only low barrier shelter facilities can count, if you want to criminalize people.
And what we -- what I see in this case, right, is that like, it really exemplifies how in the sort of liberal framework, shelter capacity is not being open for like humanitarian reasons, but for expedient ones, right? That the idea is that according to the courts, you can only criminalize people if there are enough places to put them, if there are what the courts call adequate alternatives, right?
And so the expansion of shelter capacity in these sort of liberal frameworks is a containment strategy and a strategy that is then -- it's deeply tied to the unleashing of the police. And the two of them have been interconnected, such that we have a shelter system that is a carceral system with deeply infantilizing rules that are a lot like prisons, that are -- you know, that have curfews, limitations on belongings, and this kind of like imbrication of coercion and the provision of a social need. It's really like -- I think that -- you know, which I wrote in my last feature on the homeless industrial complex, right, like I really talk about that idea, but it is sort of -- here we see, right, like it's this cold calculation of shelter beds versus tents, right?
Like putting people in shelter as a means to unleash the police and clear the parks, clear the streets. And I think that we see this in the kind of liberal embrace of resources being devoted to the police. Like Biden accusing Republicans of defunding the police and announcing new funding for 100,000 more police officers.
Screenshot of White House “Briefing Room” website post from March 25th, 2024 reading “FACT SHEET: 80% of House Republicans Propose Defunding COPS as President Biden Insists on Funding the Police.”
And we see this too in, you know, like Gavin Newsom, I think is like -- it's really important to track his career and his record on homelessness is treatment, is this -- is continuing this sort of neutralization and medicalization strategy, that you can treat a systemic problem by forcing individuals into mandatory drug or mental health treatment.
And he's done this, you know, he like inaugurated this project of CARE Courts, in which judges can assign people into treatment and basically intern them. And like Susan Mizner of the ACLU said that this is a deprivation of civil liberties, second only to the death penalty, right? This is something that he has been pursuing as his sort of main strategy. And in what we just saw in the last round of ballot initiatives is treatment, not tents.
This was his ballot project to fund inpatient treatment facilities. And it was framed, you know, really, he framed this as -- to voters, as the homelessness crisis really goes back to the closing of state mental hospitals. And that was his pitch to voters. And so I think that when we see the kind of overlap between Gavin Newsom's demand for treatment and the Gospel Rescue Mission, right, that once again, that this perpetuating project is really part of a project of banishment and containment.
And that has to do with the maintenance of an economic system which continues to benefit landlords and produce more homelessness, eject people from their homes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:46
Absolutely. And the last time you were on the show, we talked about that other piece that you wrote, on LA's homeless industrial complex. And in that conversation, we talked about the eviction of Echo Park Lake. And you know, how in that encampment eviction, what you're seeing is really the kind of best example of this framework of essentially justifying the sweep by saying we have the license to essentially remove people from public space, because there is this availability of shelter that people could take up, right.
And that availability is what essentially creates the kind of legal wiggle room, so to speak, or the moral justification, whatever you want to call it, the kind of grease on the gears is this idea of the availability, the possibility of accessing shelter being essentially, in and of itself, enough justification to remove anyone who is not availing themselves of that access.
And that's why that episode is called Forced Alternatives, because we talked about what these shelters were actually like, the kind of conditions that are being offered. And you talk about that also in this piece, you know, it's things like okay, well, you can come to the shelter, but it's pray to stay and it has fucking ridiculous, horrifically, fucked up, biased rules, or you can't take your dog with you, or, you know, you can't -- like whatever.
There are so many sort of alternatives that I think people just sort of think exist, right, like, surely there must be something. And I think that there's a sort of similarity here to the stories people tell themselves about the healthcare resources that must exist out there somewhere to support people when they fall through the cracks, like, surely people with serious cancer can get their treatment paid for, right, like they have really serious cancer. Like what do you mean people die all the time because they can't afford treatment for cancer? What are you talking about?
I think that there is a similar assumption, that, oh, well, there's no excuse for sleeping on the street, because all of these things exist, and this is part of the kind of liberal bureaucratic state that we live in.
And the incongruence of that belief with reality is so stark, and really kind of at the core of a lot of these frameworks that say that, you know, this is a kind of personal choice. This is a moral failing. This is a social sickness that's going to infect society, and we have to work against it. It's a similar logic that you see leveraged against the idea of malingerers too, where you have the idea of punishment and deterrence existing as a threat that's supposed to sort of be made an example of in order to keep other people in line.
Tracy Rosenthal 37:16
To me, that just made me think about how homelessness itself is deterrence, right? Like this idea that if you do not survive in the capitalist system, you do not exchange your labor for a wage, you do not force yourself to work the equivalent of four full-time minimum wage jobs it would take to afford the average two bedroom apartment, right, that if you don't survive in the system, homelessness itself is a punishment, right? It's being held up like -- and it's the perpetuation of homelessness, I think, is part of that like maintaining a class of people who have truly nowhere to go, besides public space or jail, is actually really a part of maintaining the whole system. And I think that that's just so important too, to like think about the ways that homelessness itself is a disciplinary tool for all of us to like figure out how to make rent all the time.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:46
Right. And then as you're saying, then the criminalization and the regimes of policing and banishment leverage additional dings on your record or whatever, that then prevent you from even being able to take on that fifth job to afford rent in your city, you know, that sixth job, whatever.
There's such a, I think, parallel to the kind of misunderstandings around Medicaid is really what I was just going to add there, which is like lawmakers thought that Medicaid would essentially kind of put itself out of use, right, that if simply you could sort of provide preventative health care for poor people, that they would be able to then get healthy enough to raise themselves up by their bootstraps. And instead what you have is essentially a program that has become a subsidy for employers that pay low wages and do not provide benefits for their employees.
And that falls on the state's "budget line" instead and you have lawmakers who, and people just in general, who still believe this original ideology of Medicaid will make itself go away, because we will just sort of health care people out of poverty, right? And it ignores the kind of cyclical relationship of health to poverty, right, of health to shelter, of health to access to care, right?
And access to care does not equal care. And care does not equal the right care or the amount of care, right. So you have all these sorts of caveats, and yet what stands in for it is this very sort of sanitized, euphemistic like idea of services for the poor, right. And that perspective, I think, is just so important to always really drill down, interrogate, and really disembowel whenever you encounter it, because it is at the core of both liberal and conservative sort of ideology and real hatred and antagonism towards poor people.
Tracy Rosenthal 42:45
Yeah. I think -- I mean, this reminds me, you know, like Paul Boden, of the Western Regional Advocacy Project has said, told me, he was like, yeah, the more programs that you name, the more resources that people think are available, but if you -- like you could name 100 programs, but if you don't fund them, if they don't challenge the economic system, if they don't stop more people from being evicted, or falling into homelessness, like it doesn't matter how many programs you name, but it is part of this project, this fantasy of there are resources available. And if people don't take them, it's a choice, and they should be policed.
And I think too, just to say, like Chris Herring, someone that I talked to about the strategy of policing on demand, right, this idea that housed people can call the cops and say, like deputize themselves to police homeless people, but you know, one of the things that he talks about is that one of the choices that unhoused people make is like getting rid of all of their survival gear for one night in a congregate shelter, right? Like, that these are the kinds of choices that unhoused people are facing.
These are the kinds of resources that are claimed to be available when people are policed, right. And so I think, yeah, I mean, I just think it's so important to say like that -- that line of like, yeah, you could have 100 programs. If they don't do the thing that they say they're supposed to do, then it's like they don't -- then it doesn't matter that they exist.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:54
Yeah, absolutely. And in the piece, you talk about the 2018 Gavin Newsom special, which was the Care Not Cash program, that literally like took money from people's welfare checks to redirect it towards shelter beds that came with tons of restrictions and preconditions like that. And you talk about one of the ads for this program that is a sort of montage of people who are like, I take your cash and I buy drugs.
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Care Not Cash Ad [Link] 44:54
I took your cash and I bought drugs. Crack. Heroin. Alcohol. I take your cash and snort it up. Do you care? Do you care? What I needed was care, not cash. Care, not cash. What I need is care. Do you care?
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Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:09
That I felt like that was just such a perfect example of also how the kind of direct relationship of property ownership, property valuation, direct taxation, is always leveraged here to kind of create the idea that this is a zero sum game of like a fixed amount of resources that are either going to go to "responsible" community member property owners or free riders, right? The unhoused people who are always portrayed as not working, which is largely untrue, as not responsible because responsibility and membership in the body politic is relative to an understanding of your contribution as a taxpaying citizen, and as a property owning citizen, right? This is the core --
Tracy Rosenthal 46:02
Completely.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:02
Of liberal democracy, as ultimately a kind of each for their own, and everybody carries their own weight and anybody who is not part of that group and that body politic, right, is framed as an outsider, as a free rider, as a threat to the "national interest," which is, of course, this kind of white supremacist, ablest, nationalistic fantasy of a perfect body politic, you know, always in the process of construction, right? The kind of perfect liberal and conservative world is really what I think people pretend that these programs are, which is something to "fix the problem."
And the problem is located in that person, right, not in the -- not in the society, not in the political economy, but in that specific individual who maybe has the only problem of being in the sight line of London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, while she's having lunch.
Tracy Rosenthal 47:03
Yeah, I mean, just this idea that, right, you have a -- you have a policing system where like the mayor is texting her police chief to sweep people in her line of sight. I mean, you know, and then -- and then just to go back to your point too, about it's like, you know, something else, like London Breed now passing a policy to drug test welfare recipients, right, like that there are these retrograde policies. Like I think we're really living through a moment of regression in terms of like what demands are placed on people to access the meager resources that could possibly benefit their life, right.
And I think that this -- it really comes from this idea that you were talking about, about like property citizenship, you know, that to not have property, to not have a place indoors, is really to not have access to the rights of citizenship. And, you know, it's like, I -- God, there were so many -- I watched so many hours of public comment.
And there were so many quotes that I would have loved to include in the piece, but the one that made it in was this woman who would say, you know, like everybody has to earn their rights, you know? And this is like -- and the idea, and you know, it's like you hear this in Donald Trump, the homeless have no right to squat and do drugs, to turn every park into a place where they can squat and do drugs.
Like this idea that you have to earn your rights is actually like -- I mean, the erosion of even the -- what we're seeing, in this case, is the erosion of even the last line of defense, right, like the Constitution is the bare minimum, like the least thing that a municipality can do is not violate the constitutional rights of its residents. And yet, like what we're seeing is the erosion of even that, and it comes, I think, from this -- exactly what you're talking about, like this notion of who is constituted as a citizen, and even as a human.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:15
Mhm, absolutely. And it actually reminds me so much of this thing that the Socialist Patients Collective writes about in their manifesto. We talk about this in Health Communism, which is the idea of the sick proletariat, which is really sort of tied into the ways that class is inscribed in the body through both labor relations and property, and that is translated into a measure of health versus illness. And you know, SPK is obviously very concerned with policing.
They're thinking a lot about the ideas of deviancy and what role deviancy as a charge plays in a fascist liberal society, and they write that a sick proletariat:
namely has no rights, possesses nothing with which it could exploit alienated labor power, be it house, car, refrigerator, nothing which is not every time under the command of the capitalist forces. Muscles, nerves and bodies never belong to the proletariat, for their functions are pre-programmed in a manner which starts from the basic relations of capitalism, which puts its mark into every proletarian person, even long before being born or having been born, everybody thus being programmed for the best possible exploitation.
But it's the kind of understanding of health and property ownership and responsibility is such a theme in the motivation behind these decisions.
And the real kind of dogma and ideology that essentially says like to fix this problem of political economy, we need to police, restrain, banish and remove people using coercion, threats and intimidation, who cannot sort of submit themselves to that vision of the "we" in the society. It is, you know, something that we're seeing across "mental health" policy, calls for public safety, policing, education, and parks, right? This is about privatization.
And ultimately, this kind of idea of the threat of vagrancy, right, the threat of the outgroup coming for the in group, and the kind of rhetorics that underlie it, right, from inscribing a kind of identity of a spoiled identity, an identity of vagrancy on individuals, and sort of creating regimes of policing, to the whole sort of industries that pop up and the kind of maybe mom and pop religious treatment centers that you might close if you change strategies, right?
It becomes a moment where people who are unhoused become reclaimed by the state in the same way that you see that reclamation of people who are not submitting their labor power, are for whatever reason incarcerated, whether that's in the context of charges in the judicial system, or people who have no control over their space, place and movement, because they are under conservatorship and in long-term care or nursing home.
Ultimately, what we're sort of talking about is the way that that relationship to property is ultimately coming more and more in both a social, conceptual, ideological, but also legal sense to define membership in society.
Tracy Rosenthal 49:47
Yeah, no, I mean, I'm just like reflecting on what you said. Yeah. I think that's completely right. And I think that, you know, I mean, at the same time, I think it's also really important to note that unhoused people aren't like ceding the Constitution to people who would see them banished. And I think that even in this moment of extreme repression, you know, one of the things that comes through in the people that I talk to, and the lawyers that I talk to, you know, is there is resistance at every turn.
And every place where people get together in public space, they build community, however fragile that is, and they figure out ways to defend themselves, however small they are. And I think that it can be really hard to imagine in this moment of deep rightward shift, and also in this larger political context of what seems sometimes like incapacitation, right, to then think about ways that people are fighting to stay put with whatever few resources they have, and with each other.
Yeah, I guess I should say, like one of the things that has been so on my mind this week, as we're seeing police remove tents from campuses, right, it's like the policing of unhoused people and of student encampments. And like, obviously, I want to preface, right, like the scale of what people face living outside versus voluntary participation in an encampment, I want to make sure that we're distinguishing there. However, I do think that we should see these -- see the policing of public space as part of this broad revanchist politics and like, you know, there are a few critical overlaps that I was thinking through before we started talking today.
You know, even beyond, right, like you can think of the university as a real estate developer. Like Columbia University is the largest landowner in New York City. They have like 320 properties. It's like a $4 billion portfolio and they don't pay taxes on it because they launder that through their nonprofit status as a university, right?
And then I'm hearing in the NYPD copaganda, right, they're saying, this is not a tent city, this is New York City. This is like a police deputy, and they're like, we did such a good job on this brutal sweep of an occupation, in which it must be said, right, like a deputy fired a gun into a space of -- in student resistance, right.
So like, the level of violence and repression that is brought to these encampments, I mean, it can't be overstated. You know, just being there and getting beat with a nightstick, it's just -- you know, I experienced it as much as I saw it. And, you know, I was reading that like Emerson actually used its anti-homelessness laws to sweep the encampment that cropped up in the alley behind the school.
And so I do think that like we should be thinking about the broad project of policing public space right now, and their relationships. And maybe, you know, one thing to think about is this idea of enclosure, like the increasing privatization of public space, right, like the way that NYU built a wall, Columbia locked its gates, and acted as a private landlord, right.
But then also to think about how what is being leveraged against protesters in public are time, place and manner restrictions on our constitutional rights to assembly and speech and like I think it can be distracting in some sense to make this a free speech issue.
But I do think it's important to recognize that the frame -- the legal frameworks for criminalizing speech and for enabling the policing of speech, and the removal of people from public space, are the same as those for living in public, right, like this idea that you can have -- like municipalities can issue time, place and manner restrictions on our constitutional rights, right.
And then, you know, in this larger sense of making people out of place, like subject to forced removal, like who does and does not belong here, right, and that the police are tasked with that assignment to determine who and who is not out of place. And in such a similar way, right, like the NYPD presented themselves as heroes for removing tents, and claiming sweeps as a political victory.
And that is so much a part of this dynamic of homelessness policy, where like the temporary fix of sweeps is really offered as political success. Like even if what ends up happening is you push people further into precarity, into more dangerous places, really continue to in so many ways perpetuate and like worsen the physical and emotional toll of living outside, but like those sweeps are recuperated by bipartisan politicians as political victories, just as we saw, like the mayor and the cops and the university presidents celebrating these violent removals of people.
And I do want to note, right, like I don't think that we should let it go that the one tent that NYPD is removing in its first video has the trans flag on it. And then another thing that I wanted to bring up, right, it's like how similar the strategies of deflection are for maintaining this militarized, banished public spaces, right? Like there's this construction of who's inside and who's outside, right, like in terms of unhoused people, right, you always have this fantasy that they're from somewhere else, right? Like, oh, like, you know, California is warm, and people just move here.
In Grants Pass, it's the same, like they're outsiders, right. But what data prove, it's like that's not the case. People lose their homes. They're ejected from housing, into the streets of the places where they're from. And I think it's the same here, right, like this idea that students, that they're outside agitators and like that idea of the outside and the inside is really sort of so animating into our notions of policing. I think same with this idea of like infantilization and criminalization, right?
Like on the one hand, students are like -- this fantasy that they're being puppeted or radicalized, and then on the other, they're deserving of the escalated charges, like felony burglary three, right, and that's actually the same charge that an unhoused person who is found squatting in a vacant building is charged with, right, like these are the same charges. And then, you know, also just thinking about the stigmatization and infantilization of homeless people, right, like this kind of paternalism of these policies, where we don't trust poor people to make choices, right?
Like we give them curfews, you have to give up your belongings, give up your community and force people into treatment, right? I think that this project of the infantilization of college students as kids, right, I think that they're like -- I don't know, I feel like that the rhetorics are so sick -- like I feel like that kind of infantilization tethered criminalization is really also a dynamic that's at play here, even if it's obviously very different. And then I think just the last thing I want to say, I know I've gone on for a really long time. But you know, I think we really need to talk about how in both cases, vigilantism is at play and working hand in hand with policing and the brutality of the state, right.
So what we saw at UCLA, right, like these harrowing scenes of Zionist vigilantes who have deputized themselves to beat people with wooden sticks, right, like that they are another side of the police violence that we're seeing to remove people who are demanding Palestinian liberation, right. And, you know, unhoused people are more likely to be victims of violence, they have been subjected to spates of murders, people like hosing them with bear spray, right?
When I was in Grants Pass, there was a homeowner who showed up at an encampment and threatened people with a gun and shot it into the air, right? Like these are vigilantes who are deputizing themselves with the power of the police to say who and who should not be in public. And then thinking about even in liberal cities, this kind of like policing on demand, that people are deputizing themselves with 311 calls, like 100,000 times in San Francisco in 2017, people deputized themselves to call the cops on people living outside.
And I think that these logics, right, I just think it's so important that we think about what are the logics, what are the rhetorics, what are the mechanisms that are going into removing people from public space? And I just think that in this moment, when we are with everything that we have fighting for Palestinian liberation, and against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, we recognize that the terrain is being shaped by a history of policing of public space, and that our struggle is also bound up with that of unhoused people in real material ways.
I think that there's something here that like we need to connect, even if the scales are really different. And you know, like, I wouldn't want to collapse them.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:02:53
Asbolutely. And I think it's also the patterns that are picked up on. I mean, this is actually kind of a theme of this week perhaps, because this is a conversation basically we have on Monday in the patron feed with Karen Tani and Katie Eyer, about this kind of pattern that they found emerging where disability law cases, because they kind of have this appearance of neutrality, have this under-known and sort of under-studied history as being some of the kind of pre-basis laying the groundwork for what then become very big shifts in states rights law and things like giving states sovereign immunity from being held to standards of shifting civil rights law, or shifting disability law, for example.
So I mean, that's been on my mind a lot as we've been talking, and there are so many connections there, because this is also kind of the moment in American history where the Supreme Court begins to take on this huge role that it's known for today. And that very much has been so top of mind as we've been talking, but the thing that I really can't stop thinking about that I think is so important about what you just raised is the fact that you have this kind of very scary moment in this piece, where you talk about the mayor of Grants Pass essentially kind of telling you to go talk to this guy in the context of sort of trying to, I guess, give you a sense of like how upset people in Grants Pass are and sort of what she's juggling.
And you know, he's someone who went to a park to point a gun at unhoused people and you know, that there are vigilantes who are in the town who drive by, "honk their horns, throw trash [at people], and yell 'carp,' meaning 'bottom-feeders,' from their cars. Residents circulate photos of unhoused people on social media; one Facebook group promotes citizens taking matters into their own hands, even 'final answers.'” So that part, this piece, as you mentioned at the top, this piece came out April 30th, morning of April 30th. Later in the day you were getting hit with a nightstick by the NYPD outside of the City College New York campus in New York City, as the NYPD were cracking down on the Columbia and CUNY encampments.
You know, as I was reading this piece, Artie was editing our episode with Charlie and Nicki, who were also at that encampment that night. And this moment of the kind of talking about the vigilante Facebook warriors who are driving by and throwing trash, like that stuck in my mind so much in the aftermath of Tuesday, as we saw things like, you know, Jessica Seinfeld and Bill Ackman throwing money at people showing up to fuck with the encampments in Los Angeles and colleges like UCLA, right, where they're funding Zionists to go out and fucking harass and assault people, right, where you have this kind of gleeful liberal join in, right, on the violence and policing.
And I kept thinking about things from your piece, as we sort of saw these like liberal Zionists, rich people, famous people like jump in on coming for students, on sort of infantilizing people, on leveraging all these frameworks that we've seen for 100 years now, in the rhetoric around why states, cities, towns, municipalities have the right to remove unhoused people by designating them as outsiders, from without the community.
There are just so many parallels that I couldn't stop thinking about as the events of last week unfolded, where I just kept thinking back to these moments in your piece, where we saw that kind of similar energy and enthusiasm behind the policing and criminalization of behavior in public, of being in public, of public space, of sort of designation of who space is for, these projects, they're absolutely united.
And as many people have drawn connection to, you know, they're also literally united in that there are people who were part of the Israeli occupying forces who are now part of the NYPD, you know, that there are tactics and training relationships that exist between the settler colonial occupying army and the United States' sort of police industrial military complex. And these relationships exist also in terms of technology, right. So it's that there is, I think, a unified logic and unified series of contradictions, that it's important to see the connections because these things are not happening in isolation, and our responses to them can't occur in isolation as well.
Tracy Rosenthal 1:07:46
No, I think that's absolutely right. And I do think that the struggle for unhoused people's sovereignty and self determination, like that is a land struggle on American soil. And I think that as we are in this moment where the groundswell of support for Palestinian liberation from settler colonialism, from empire, from the Zionist -- the brutal Zionist regime that is enacting this genocide, and has been for -- and has been, because this is not a new phenomenon. -- I think that in that moment, even as I would never want to like collapse settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing into gentrification and real estate development, I don't think they're collapsible, but I do -- but they are absolutely materially connected. And I think that as our movements grow stronger, those solidarities can only be enhanced.
And I feel -- you know, I think it's really been a week where I've been reflecting on that Mike Davis line about hope, is basically, you know, like he doesn't ascribe to this notion that hope is something that we absolutely need, but what we need to do is fight nonetheless, right? The line, I think, is you know, "Fight with hope, fight without hope, [but] fight absolutely." And I think that that notion of an absolute struggle is so essential right now as we move through these phases of the real true elation that I don't think that we should minimize, of people being in these encampments, and reinventing the university together, by living together. And then these moments of extreme repression, that is like three days later, after the encampment has been cleared, right? I think about this moment of hope, without hope, and yet the task is absolute. Like the task is absolute struggle.
Tracy Rosenthal 1:07:59
So well put, Tracy. And I really appreciate you going through so much of this piece in such depth. As I've said, I think that the sort of stakes of this are important. And it is important and ties into so many different topics that we cover here on the show. So I really appreciate you being so generous with what you're bringing to the table and offering to people today.
Tracy Rosenthal 1:10:22
Well, thank you so much, Bea. This fucking rules.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10:25
Likewise, Tracy. Thank you so much. Love and solidarity. Well, that's the perfect place to leave it for today. Patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show and get access to our second weekly bonus episode, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And to help us out a little more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us us @deathpanel_.
Patrons, we'll catch you Monday in the Patreon feed. For everyone else, we will catch you same time later next week. As always, Medicare for All now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
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