Category Archives: Freedom

Desperate Freedom

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He yearned for escape with a desire that was near to insanity; awake and asleep it was his obsession; and he thought his heart had stopped when Squad-Leader Aras Dilley muttered to him, as Doremus was scrubbing a lavatory floor, “Say! Listen, Mr. Jessup! Mis’ Pike is fixin’ it up and I’m going to help you escape jus’ soon as things is right!”
–It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
  • Biography from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

A Free, Inquiring, Critical Spirit

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He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.

“More and more, as I think about history,” he pondered, “I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”

–It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

  • Biography from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

Automating the Forced Removal of Children in Poverty

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Where the line is drawn between the routine conditions of poverty and child neglect is particularly vexing. Many struggles common among poor families are officially defined as child maltreatment, including not having enough food, having inadequate or unsafe housing, lacking medical care, or leaving a child alone while you work. Unhoused families face particularly difficult challenges holding on to their children, as the very condition of being homeless is judged neglectful.

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The AFST sees the use of public services as a risk to children. A quarter of the predictive variables in the AFST are direct measures of poverty: they track use of means-tested programs such as TANF, Supplemental Security Income, SNAP, and county medical assistance. Another quarter measure interaction with juvenile probation and CYF itself, systems that are disproportionately focused on poor and working-class communities, especially communities of color. The juvenile justice system struggles with many of the same racial and class inequities as the adult criminal justice system. A family’s interaction with CYF is highly dependent on social class: professional middle-class families have more privacy, interact with fewer mandated reporters, and enjoy more cultural approval of their parenting than poor or working-class families.

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We might call this poverty profiling. Like racial profiling, poverty profiling targets individuals for extra scrutiny based not on their behavior but rather on a personal characteristic: living in poverty. Because the model confuses parenting while poor with poor parenting, the AFST views parents who reach out to public programs as risks to their children.

–Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks

First They Came for the Poor

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…one day in early 2000, I sat talking to a young mother on welfare about her experiences with technology. When our conversation turned to EBT cards, Dorothy Allen said, “They’re great. Except [Social Services] uses them as a tracking device.” I must have looked shocked, because she explained that her caseworker routinely looked at her purchase records. Poor women are the test subjects for surveillance technology, Dorothy told me. Then she added, “You should pay attention to what happens to us. You’re next.”

Dorothy’s insight was prescient. The kind of invasive electronic scrutiny she described has become commonplace across the class spectrum today.

–Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks

Dragons Shudder to Think

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Essini’s parents had fled South to Yorbik Island where they were set upon by bandits and murdered for their paltry possessions. The bandits abandoned Essini in the rajal-infested interior forests, but an old Brown Dragon had found her and brought her to a Human enclave. They promptly about-faced and peddled the child to slave traders, who passed her from hand to hand until eventually a married couple from Gi’ishior, rug merchants who had no child of their own, purchased her out of pity. Now, she was as loved as any person could wish.

Auli-Ambar sighed. At least Essini’s story had turned out well, but it could have been much worse. Bandits and slavers were not known for their kindness to children, and Sazutharr had told her darkly, the fate of some children was so terrible, it made a Dragon shudder to think upon it.

The Dragon Librarian (Scrolls of Fire Book 1) by Marc Secchia

International Sorry Day: Grandpa Learns his Native Tongue

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Paul tells me he’s learning the Tlingit language so he can believe the stories of his people, not just know the plots. When he was young, missionaries and the government prohibited Alaskan Natives from speaking their language and living traditionally. They often took Tlingit children from their homes and families, placing them in boarding schools as far away as Washington and Oregon. Now Paul is a grandfather and is committed to relearning a way of living that he says is not lost but rather hiding, just below the skin. He is proud of Duane and watches for a moment as his son helps his wife. “When I sing the old songs,” Paul says, “it’s like my chest is opened up and my heart is showing.” Paul’s words are poetry. I know because there is nothing I can say afterward. I just watch him resume his carving and try not to look too closely at the eye sockets of those dried fish.

–If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska by Heather Lende

Today is National Sorry Day in Australia – it seeks to repair events that also occured here in the United States

A Feedback Loop of Injustice

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Marginalized groups face higher levels of data collection when they access public benefits, walk through highly policed neighborhoods, enter the health-care system, or cross national borders. That data acts to reinforce their marginality when it is used to target them for suspicion and extra scrutiny. Those groups seen as undeserving are singled out for punitive public policy and more intense surveillance, and the cycle begins again. It is a kind of collective red-flagging, a feedback loop of injustice.

–Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks

Six Forms of Slavery

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As I spoke to more people who had been caught up in slavery I was amazed to learn that there are at least six distinct types of slavery in Eastern Congo: forced labor by armed groups; debt bondage slavery; peonage slavery; sexual slavery; forced marriages; and the enslavement of child soldiers. All of these types of slavery, in one way or the other, also support the destruction of this rich and unique environment. The most well-known slavery, related to me time and again, is forced labor at gunpoint.

–Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World by Kevin Bales

Military Slave Children

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Another type of slavery is less about profit and more about supporting the rule of terror and exploitation by the militias. This is the enslavement of children to turn them into fighters. During raids on villages young boys, and sometimes girls, are kidnapped by the armed groups and trained to kill. As part of their brainwashing they are often forced to rape other children or young people or to murder members of their own family or village. Brutalized, traumatized, and often drugged, the children will soon obey any order.

–Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World by Kevin Bales

Slavery and Human Trafficking: Nebraska

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January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Awareness Month

 “This no longer looks like ‘street walking.’ Present day sex trafficking looks more like a young teen going to a hotel room after school where he or she is bought and sold for sex multiple times. The next day, it starts all over again,” says Meghan Malik, trafficking project manager for the Women’s Fund of Omaha.

During the most recent legislative session, the Women’s Fund worked with State Senator Patty Pansing Brooks to introduce LB 289, a measure that increases penalties for trafficking and solicitation. It also increases protections for trafficked individuals with a particular focus on minors. The bill passed 48-0.

In July 2016, the Women’s Fund released “Nothing About Us Without Us,” a research report focused on the insights of survivors of sex trafficking in Nebraska. The research shows that preventing, identifying and serving survivors of sex trafficking – and addressing demand –  requires a multi-system, coordinated and collaborative approach.

Sex trafficking widespread in Nebraska; no ZIP code is immune, Omaha World Herald, BY WOMEN’S FUND OF OMAHA Jun 16, 2017

“I think there’s still an idea that this happens but not here, not in our own backyards,” she said. “There’s kind of a shock factor to shining the light on what’s happening in our own state.”

Creighton study of Backpage.com finds signs of human trafficking throughout Nebraska, Omaha World Herald, By Mara Klecker / World-Herald staff writer Feb 22, 2017

Researchers found that 75% of the people trafficked in Nebraska, are from Nebraska.

“So it’s our own youth, our own population, our own citizens that are being exploited,” said Brewer.

Men and women exploiting strangers; and even parents selling their own kids right here in central Nebraska.

Sex for sale in Nebraska: Human trafficking hidden in plain sight, NTV ABC, by Ifesinachi Egbosimba Tuesday, February 7, 2017

  • Nebraska Human Trafficking Hotline: Call 1-888-373-7888 ( TTY: 711)|Text 233733
  • Nebraska Family Alliance: Human Trafficking
  • More information about local resources and how to “Realize, Recognize and Respond” to sex trafficking is available on the Coalition on Human Trafficking’s website at www.NoTrafficking.org. 
  • The S.A.F.E. Center offers free human trafficking awareness training for anyone who is interested, including church groups, civic groups, and clubs. Educators will help you know how to spot human trafficking and what you can do to help. To set up a training, call the S.A.F.E. Center at (308) 237-2599.
  • Human Trafficking Search: Resources