The Panelists

The morning session of the "Scholar and Feminist" conference had addressed the question, "Why?: Feminist Analyses of the State of the World." By the afternoon, the question had become, "How?: What Can We Do About It?" And so the afternoon session brought together four feminist activists whose work in a range of contexts and struggles repeatedly reminded the audience that feminist activism at the beginning of the twenty-first century addresses concerns extending far beyond traditional "women's issues." Globalization, neocolonialism, environmental degradation, incarceration and other forms of state violence and constraint, militarism, poverty - all are the objects of contemporary feminist analysis and activist response.

The participants in the "How?" panel were

• Winona LaDuke, the Green Party's vice presidential candidate in the 2000 U.S. elections. LaDuke lives in the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota and works on restoring the local land base and culture. In 1994, Time magazine named LaDuke one of America's 50 most promising leaders under 40 years of age. She is the author of several books, including Last Standing Woman and All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. She is currently at work on a writing project about the massacre site at Wounded Knee.

• Daphne Wysham, the coordinator and founder of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Network (SEEN). SEEN is a project of the Transnational Institute of Amsterdam and the Institute for Policy Studies, where Wysham is a fellow. Wysham has worked on environmental and development issues since 1985, focusing primarily on environmental issues as they affect people in the Southern hemisphere. Currently she focuses on equity and sustainability as they relate to international financial institutions, export credit agencies, fossil fuels, indigenous peoples, women, human rights, and climate change. Through SEEN, Wysham has coauthored numerous reports, including, Enron's Pawns: How Public Institutions Bankrolled Enron's Globalization Game, The World Bank and the G-7: Still Changing the Earth, and A Climate for Business. On the 50th anniversary of the World Bank, Wysham was the coauthor, with IPS director John Kavanaugh, of Beyond Bretton Woods: Alternatives to the Global Economic Order.

• Kate Rhee, the director of the Prison Moratorium Project, a multiracial group of young activists, community members, and formerly incarcerated people. The Moratorium Project works to stop prison expansion and mass incarceration, and is dedicated to reinvesting resources in the communities most affected by criminal justice policies, promoting educational programs, alternatives-to-incarceration initiatives, housing, and sustainable development.

• Cheri Honkala, the executive director of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a multiracial organization of, by, and for poor and homeless people. Honkala was named among the 100 most powerful people in the region by the publicationThe Philadelphian. She played a leading role in the Economic Human Rights Campaign, the March of the Americas, and the first-ever summit of 100 antipoverty organizations.

Political exigencies and pressures were not only topics for discussion on the panel, they also affected the panel's makeup, for Daphne Wysham was a gracious latecomer to the panel, a last-minute replacement for Annie Brisibe, the head of Niger Delta Women for Justice. Brisibe had been invited to speak on this panel, but was subsequently denied the visa that would have allowed her to enter the United States. Wysham offered testimony to the importance of Brisibe's work and provided a framing context for understanding the U.S. government's denial of Brisibe's visa. Brisibe is "one of the most amazing women in the Niger Delta," Wysham observed. "She was elected by her peers - most of whom were men - to be the head of the Ijaw Youth Council. The Ijaw are the largest ethnic minority in the Niger Delta, and it had never happened before . . . that they would include a woman in their discussions, much less elect her to be the head of their organization. So she has enormous respect in the Delta." As many at the conference knew, the Niger Delta had been the site of a spectacular protest in the summer of 2002, when a group of several hundred women took over oil platforms in the region to protest the catastrophic environmental and economic effects of the extraction projects of multinational oil corporations there. As Wysham described it, "It was interesting to watch how things played out last year when the women . . . took over the oil platforms. What was alarming was that . . . the newspapers in Nigeria started to blame her [Annie], who was in Canada at the time, through innuendo, [saying] that groups in Canada were inciting these women to take over these oil platforms. And within a few days, the home of her sister and her family . . . was invaded by troops. And they beat up her family, with no evidence that she had anything to do with the protest, although perhaps she did. Is that a crime?" Wysham concluded, "So it's no surprise to me that they've denied her a visa."

Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke was the first of the four activists to address the audience. In a wide-ranging presentation, she began by emphasizing the central role of colonialism in shaping the experience of indigenous communities in the United States. "The reality is," she said, "to talk about colonialism in North America, you must talk about native people. And you must recognize the relationship between development and underdevelopment. Somebody got rich, and somebody got poor. That is the history of this country." She went on to point out the deep-seated irony embedded in the historical roots of the wealth of the United States as a nation. "This country became so wealthy because it appropriated somebody else's land and resources - that would be ours. And there is a direct relationship between the fact that today native people - although we are landed people, we are the landed people of color on this continent - are the poorest people on the continent. That would not seem to make any sense. Really, theoretically, we should probably be the richest people." The current state of affairs for indigenous people is, LaDuke argued, the result of the interconnectedness of institutions, policies, and practices that have systematically impoverished and devastated native peoples. "It was multinational corporations and public policies and the military and genocide" that have produced the current reality.

LaDuke focused on the sustained social and economic legacy of colonialism on the native peoples of the United States, effects that touch every aspect of individual and community life for Native Americans. "Anywhere you look in terms of the native community, everything you do not want to have - we have. The highest rate of unemployment - 65 percent, my reservation. 50 percent of the people at or below the poverty level. Indian arrest rate? Seven times that of non-Indians. . . . The highest rate of violence? That would be ours. Domestic abuse. Everything. Just all the bad stuff. We have that. Is that because we are stupid? No. It is because we are in a state of social dysfunction, and we are in a state of colonialism and neocolonialism." Characterizing the psychic cost of this history, she said, "We have something that we suffer from. It's called unresolved historic grief. . . . It means that in our community's context, it means that you have this grief that is not acknowledged as being valid."

Central to LaDuke's presentation was attention to the historic and ongoing impact of the military on the lives of Native Americans, an impact that is simultaneously material and symbolic. Having recently visited South Dakota - "one of the most racist states in the country for Indian people; they've got that terrible Mount Rushmore stuck in the middle of it, which is such a blasphemy" - to work on a writing project about Wounded Knee and the massacre site there, LaDuke spoke about the deep tensions and contradictions represented by the U.S. military's role in Indian country. She offered the especially poignant example of the medals of honor awarded to U.S. soldiers in the wake of the Wounded Knee massacre, linking this particular example to the broader issue of the ethical and political responsibility of the U.S. government to redress historic wrongs. "Do you know that there were 23 medals of honor awarded for the Wounded Knee massacre to the United States military, by the Army? Now what does that contrast with? Think about this. In World War I, there were 60,000 people from South Dakota that served in the war. Three medals of honor were awarded out of the 60,000 for South Dakota. Now isn't that kind of a strange statistic? And the thing is that we cannot get the medals of honor revoked. They have not revoked them or removed them in any way. And that is kind of the tip of the iceberg in America. Issues of reconciliation. Issues of apology. [We] never even got an apology bill out of Congress . . . . They got an 'Expresses Regrets' bill. Why? Because apology might mean compensation. Apology might mean . . . - they actually said it in Congress - . . . [that] 'other Indian people might come and say we did something wrong too.'"

But the military presence is not simply a historical issue but an ongoing legacy of neocolonialism. ("We can call it neocolonialism, right?") As LaDuke explained it, "Almost every military base in the west is an old fort. And it is located right next to an Indian community. That is the reality. They say that the great Sioux nation, the Lakota nation - if honoring the 1868 treaty would occur - would be the second-greatest nuclear weapons power in the world. Because they have the entire strategic air force command within their territory." Citing Alaska as an especially profound example, LaDuke argued that the military's presence deeply affects the economic circumstances of communities at the same time as it radically alters the environment. "You have the historical issues of oppression related to the military. You have the continuing economic depredations of the military in your area - the taking and seizing of your land. The seizing of your civil rights. The seizing of your constitutional rights. [There are now] exemptions from pretty much any law, under the guise of 9/11. The military in Alaska does not have to report its toxic releases because of 9/11. . . . The United States military is the single-largest polluter in the world. Don't forget that."

She went on to discuss the profound environmental concerns affecting Indian communities. With so many resources to be found in native territories - two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on Indian reservations, along with significant measures of coal and petroleum - energy policy and the corporate interests that shape that policy have a deep impact on Indian lives. She cited the construction of hydroelectric dams on Indian lands, and the particularly devastating effects of the nuclear waste problem, a problem to be solved, LaDuke noted, with "the 'dumping on the Indians' strategy. Yucca Mountain, Skull Valley Goshutes - both of those communities totally proposed to get dumped on for nuclear waste. Ninety thousand shipments of nuclear waste driving across the country. So that is where we are strategically in terms of the military industrial complex."

LaDuke joked about the relationship between native communities and the corporate and governmental forces pressing on them and about the challenges involved in trying to negotiate with these powerful forces: "At this conference for Indian people, this Canadian Indian guy said [that] sitting down and talking to the Canadian government about land or natural resources is kind of like sitting down and talking to a cannibal. You sit around and you can make as much small talk as you want, but in the end you know exactly what that cannibal is after."

A recent threat to native peoples, where economics and the environment intersect, comes in the form of what LaDuke called "biocolonialism," which threatens the ecological/biological diversity that exists in the environments of indigenous peoples around the world. She cited the efforts of community activists in South Asia to challenge attempts by corporations to file patents on the genetic structures of indigenous trees or basmati rice. "Almost every indigenous community is looking at similar challenges," LaDuke explained. She went on to speak about the patents filed by corporate interests on wild rice, which is indigenous to the northern plain states and an important resource in her own community on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. Calling this attempt to privatize genetic strains of plants "biocolonialism" and "biopiracy," LaDuke observed sardonically, "I am someone who fundamentally believes that patents are for toasters, not for living things."

As a seasoned activist, LaDuke did not want to leave the audience simply with a laundry list of unresolved problems or a paralyzing sense of their intractability. "I told you a little bit about the state of affairs of native communities. What perhaps I did not impart is the state of resilience and what we have going for us." She spoke about a wide range of initiatives and organizing strategies within native communities: coalition-building at the international level and working for international accords, and codifying indigenous knowledge at the tribal level. She also highlighted the work that is taking place at every level to build and sustain the capacity to effect change, arguing that, "In some ways it's easier to organize in our communities, as crazy as some of our communities may be, [because] we are all related. And so you don't have to do a lot of introductions."

LaDuke stressed the critical role of all sorts of coalitions and the work they do across boundaries of every variety. Intergenerational relationships and trust within native communities are critical in shaping and sustaining organizing work. Moreover, the ability to leverage information, both independently and through strategic alliances, is central: "We got pretty adept at corporate research, and we've got friends who do better corporate research. So we get an idea of what exactly they are misrepresenting themselves as. And we are capable to build those alliances and to build our legal and community strategies out of that." In addition, the ability to link the struggles of native peoples in one part of the world with those of peoples elsewhere provides a sense of solidarity and shared goals. "We are . . . quite engaged in our analysis of the relationship between indigenous people's struggles here, and indigenous people's struggles elsewhere. For instance, whether it is the Ogoni [of Nigeria] or whether it is the U'wa in Colombia. Their situation is not that different than ours; it may be a different country, but exactly the same sets of dynamics."

LaDuke emphasized the need to work locally to find both the practical and the spiritual resources for sustaining the struggle. "You must shore up your traditional practices in your communities to ensure that that healing process is intact. That you are on your way to remembering who you are, and putting aside some of your sorrow and finding some resolve." Focusing on the epidemic of type 2 diabetes among Native Americans as an example of the need to tap into traditional practices and ways, LaDuke pointed out that one-third of the people over 40 in her community suffer from this disease. "What is the answer to that?" she asked. "There are two things that are the answer: . . . Answer number one is get your butt out, get some exercise. I don't mean to just say that, but that's the truth. Because if you used to garden and now if you ride around in your car, you're not doing anything. . . . The second thing is eat your traditional foods. That's the second answer. Because those traditional foods were genetically - we are intended to eat those foods. And the rapid transition from . . . buffalo meat, wild rice, seaweed, salmon to macaroni-and-cheese food of poverty . . . is what caused our diabetes." Her community's response to the epidemic includes everything from growing flint corn to distribute to elderly diabetics in the community to trying to "decolonize our kids' tastes" and growing food that is not genetically modified.

LaDuke closed her presentation with a lively account of her recent trip to the Pine Ridge Reservation, which has the distinction of being the most impoverished county in the nation. Its poverty stands in stark contrast to its resource richness - in this case, the presence of the renewable resource of wind. "It turns out that the Great Plains [are] the Saudi Arabia of wind power. . . . The Great Plains . . . lo and behold, the Indians communities on the Great Plains, those reservations are the windiest places on the Great Plains. Isn't that funny how that worked out? So I was out on Pine Ridge on Tuesday or Wednesday; I go out to Pine Ridge Reservation where we're putting up these two wind generators and . . . it's blowing and I can hardly get out of my car. And I was like - holy buckus, this is where you want to put up a wind tower! And that is exactly right. So it turns out that these Indian communities that have faced vast environmental injustices from past policies happen to be the windiest communities in the country. And there are 23 Indian reservations that have 350 gigawatts of wind potential. Gigawatts of wind potential. Now, I know you guys are saying, 'What the hell is a gigawatt?' But present U.S.-installed electrical capacity is 600 gigawatts. The wind potential of twenty-three Indian reservations: 350 gigawatts. That's a lot of power. Now, that doesn't mean we want to be a wind energy colony. But that means that there is something in there that we are talking about."

Daphne Wysham

"I've never followed a vice presidential candidate before," Daphne Wysham observed as she took the podium. "This is going to be a tough one." Wysham, who was replacing Annie Brisibe on the panel, provided some context for Brisibe's absence and then a few more comments about the protest by women in the Niger Delta in the summer of 2002. "In terms of oil spills," Wysham explained, "the Niger Delta has suffered ten times the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez. Now the Exxon Valdez oil spill cost us - what? $10 billion or so? - to clean up. So, if the people of the Delta were to get their due, these oil companies would be spending about $100 billion. Now, what were these women asking for when they took over the oil platforms? They were asking for a few jobs, for clinics, for health care, for education. And what I would suggest is that we need to get them to be a little more ambitious and maybe take these oil companies to court and get them to clean up. Not only to clean up, but to compensate them for decades of lost livelihoods, of impoverishment, and of their children being malnourished as a result of all of the pollution in the Delta."

Wysham then shifted her focus to the history of the structural arrangements that govern the extraction of fossil fuels by multinational corporations around the globe, corporations whose work is often facilitated by the institutions of economic globalization. Pointing to the then impending war with Iraq (the conference took place in February 2003), Wysham cast a historical look back to the late 1970s when the first OPEC oil crisis resulted in consumers queuing up in long lines for hours to buy gasoline. As a consequence of this experience, one of the first things Ronald Reagan did, when he became president in 1980, was (through the Treasury Department) to instruct the World Bank to begin investing in oil and gas. "We have up on our Web site . . . documents that were leaked to us from the Treasury Department. The Treasury writes: 'We [the United States] would be suspect, as the home to the largest oil companies in the world, if we push this agenda, namely, for non-OPEC countries to begin to open up their markets for western consumers. We would be suspect.' The United States would be; therefore, we need the World Bank to press this agenda. The World Bank began, not only investing in oil and gas in countries that were outside of . . . OPEC . . ., but also they began pushing the agenda . . . of privatization and deregulation. Trying to get the oil companies out of the hands of the state governments. And it was no surprise, then, that we had what we called the Enron phenomenon.

"Everybody heard about Enron's collapse in the United States and all of the travesties that occurred as a result . . . . People losing their pensions, losing their jobs. The California energy crisis. Well, thanks to the World Bank and other public funds - [the] $7 billion that they gave to Enron over the last decade around the globe for Enron to operate in over 24 countries - Enron was able to pull California on the Dominican Republic, for example. Where they came in and managed to privatize the power sector in the Dominican Republic. Jacked up the rates, claiming that there was a power shortage. When there was rioting in the streets, people were shot and killed. Eight people were killed in the Dominican Republic, including an eight-year-old boy. This went on over and over again around the world, basically at the behest of the World Bank and the IMF. These institutions that are pushing this agenda of greater access for multinational corporations, many of them [were] virtually unknown until they got on the bankroll of the World Bank and the IMF.

"Like Enron, like AES. AES Corporation was actually on the verge of bankruptcy here in this country because they had been kicked out of communities in California and Maine for violating U.S. environmental regulations. They managed, through getting money from the World Bank, to become one of the largest coal-fire power producers in the world.

"So in terms of the actual money that has been invested by the World Bank in oil, gas and coal, we calculated that over the last ten years the World Bank has invested $25 billion in fossil fuels. And we calculated the greenhouse gas emissions that would be emitted from those projects. And we came up with the staggering figure of 46.7 billion tons of CO₂. Now, what does that mean? Every year the manmade greenhouse gas emissions are roughly 24 billion tons. So over ten years, the World Bank has financed the equivalent of almost two [years' worth of] all global greenhouse gas emissions. One institution. One bank based in Washington, DC, is responsible for two years' worth of greenhouse gas emissions over a ten-year time span.

"[Meanwhile,] OPIC and Ex-Im - Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the U.S. Export/Import Bank - over the same time period financed 35 billion [tons]. Again, not quite as high in terms of greenhouse gas emissions but equivalent to about two-thirds of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions; every year [these] are financed abroad by OPIC and Ex-Im.

"So not only is the U.S. the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. We also, with our taxpayer money, are the largest financier of fossil fuel projects in the world. The unfortunate reality is that at the same time as the World Bank is financing these fossil fuel projects to the tune of $25 billion, they are financing renewable projects which include geothermal and a few solar - but it's mostly geothermal and some waste energy projects to the tune of about $1 billion over the past decade."

Having drawn a portrait of the costliness of these various initiatives, Wysham argued that "we need to make fossil fuels as expensive as possible." In addition, she urged the audience to consider ways of "denying them the public funds they get from you and me. Not only at the gas pump, but through our tax dollars, through these institutions that are operating around the world." The costs, she pointed out, are not only at the level of diverted resources and impacts on the global climate. "There are enormous human rights and local environmental impacts in the Niger Delta and all over, wherever the World Bank invests. They don't even have a human rights policy, so they can't implement any sort of guidelines to govern their investments overseas. . . . [And] after 9/11, . . . they are trying to get twice as much oil and gas out of the Gulf of Guinea by the year 2015, as they were prior to September 11. The goal is to basically use these institutions like OPIC and Ex-Im as bargaining chips. In other words, if you go along with the IMF structural adjustment packages and all of the other conditionalities that they place on these countries, we will then provide all of this money for your oil and gas sectors.

"And then the U.S., of course, gets enormous returns on that in the form of cheap and continuous flow of oil and gas to U.S. markets. So we're seeing a rapid escalation in investments from OPIC and Ex-Im and the World Bank in countries like Nigeria, like São Tomé and Príncipe [in the Gulf of Guinea], where they recently discovered offshore oil and gas; like Equatorial Guinea. Angola is being targeted by OPIC for investment. And of course, the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, one of the most controversial pipelines in the world, has got both Ex-Im and OPIC, and the World Bank, invested in that particular project."

After detailing the complexities of the role of institutions of economic globalization in the efforts by the United States to obtain access to oil and gas resources, Wysham turned her attention to the gender implications of these concerns. "In virtually every developing country women are the energy managers. When I say energy managers, they are the ones who manage the energy for household consumption. They are the ones who gather the fuel wood for cooking. They are the ones who make sure that the house is lit, if possible, or heated, if possible. And yet, most of this investment that I've been talking about is focused on a completely different type of energy. It's energy for extraction and for export. It's energy for export-oriented industries. Women's energy needs are all but ignored despite the fact that if you read the literature of the World Bank, over and over again they will talk about these hovels that these women live in and how their children are breathing this really smoky air because they are dependent on fuel wood and crop waste and cow dung for their heating and cooking.

"Nowhere in the actual follow-up studies do you see any data on exactly how effective they were in addressing the energy needs of these women and children. They just sort of put it up there and said, 'It's an obvious need and therefore we need to throw billions of dollars at this problem.' When we keep pressing them on this, it turns out that they spend less than 1 percent of their total energy budget on addressing the needs of the 2 billion rural poor. And that's where the real energy crisis is. Of course, climate change, one of the consequences of continued rapid consumption of fossil fuel, has enormous implications for women.

"I keep thinking of that photograph of the woman in the tree in Mozambique. I don't know if you remember that one. The floods. I think she was giving birth in a tree and they had to helicopter her out. Women are walking further and further already for fuel wood. They have less time for things like economic opportunities. Certainly not education. Taking care of their own health or the health of their children. And now, with climate change, we will have an increase in vector-borne diseases. And of course, if women are nutritionally compromised as a result of climate changes that affect crop yields and all of that, then they are more vulnerable to disease. In places like the Niger Delta, then you have the added problem of rising sea water and rising ocean levels that are basically submerging a lot of these communities that have lived at the ocean's edge for centuries. And a lot of that water is heavily polluted."

Wysham, like LaDuke, sought to provide the audience with some hope in spite of the dire portrait she had painted. "Now that I've laid out some of the problems, I want to talk about some of the solutions and, also, some of the good news. Because despite the fact that we have these enormous institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and the WTO, that once you start working on them and you start analyzing them, you begin to feel like they've got control over every aspect of your life, the fact of the matter is, as I think it was the New York Times, which said it a few days ago, there are two superpowers. There is the U.S. and there is global civil society. And I think a couple of weekends ago, when there were these protests all over the world, we showed that global civil society is an enormous superpower to deal with." Wysham went on to offer a series of examples of some of the local, regional, and broader initiatives that have been making an impact on the current situation:

• A resolution passed in San Francisco, calling for a certain percentage of energy to come from solar power.

• A resolution by the governors of the states in the northeast United States calling for compliance with the Kyoto protocol.

• Initiatives harnessing wind power. Wysham's statement that, "There are some very exciting wind initiatives in Texas, of all places, where there is also a lot of wind," drew a wave of laughter from the audience.

• Developing consciousness among U.S. citizens concerning threats to global stability and peace: In response to a recent poll, when asked, "which country poses the greatest danger to world peace? Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or the United States?" 85 percent of Americans who responded answered, "the United States."

• Continuing protests against the World Bank.

• Global activism against carbon trading, a form of trade that represents "a very alarming development, . . . basically . . . enshrining the right to pollute, as opposed to the right to live free of pollution."

• Initiatives such as Cities for Peace, which have successfully persuaded over 100 city councils around the country (including Los Angeles and Chicago) to oppose a unilateral attack on Iraq.

• Initiatives to connect activists around the globe, linking indigenous communities and people threatened by gas and coal mining around the world (see the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network Web site).

Wysham closed her presentation with a call to boycott ExxonMobil. "Of all the oil companies, they have made it clear - not only do they not give a damn about Kyoto, [but] they are actively trying to undermine any effort to move the Kyoto protocol forward to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. And [they are] trying to pit the developing world off against the developed world. So, boycott ExxonMobil."

Kate Rhee

Kate Rhee from the Prison Moratorium Project followed Wysham, refocusing discussion on the forms of violence represented by the penal system in the United States. The Project, which she directs, promotes the abolition of prisons and "the prison industrial complex." Rhee emphasized that the work of the Project, a good deal of which is devoted to educational and organizational workshops, has to do with changing how participants view and understand prisons as institutions. "When we talk about the prison industrial complex," she observed, "[we argue] that the prison industrial complex is about everything else but prisons."

Rhee's analysis of the prison system emphasized the interconnectedness of practices of incarceration with a range of other historical and contemporary social institutions and practices. "You can't talk about prisons in this country without talking about slavery and how . . . prisons have continued the conditions . . . of slavery." The economic element of the prison system is not only reducible to its mobilization of unfree labor; the very logic of the criminal justice system is predicated on an argument about exchange: "You do the crime, you do the time. Think about it for a second. . . . You do the crime, you do the time, and somehow the crime is cancelled out. [As if] crime and time [were] fixed units." Such thinking effaces the fact that "crimes happen out of a certain context, out of certain social and economic conditions."

Rhee urged the audience to consider the social function of criminalization - and crime - in the history of U.S. society. Rhee joked a bit at the expense of some earnest college students concerning the influence of Discipline and Punish, the now-classic work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, on the emergence of the prison as a modern social institution. "A lot of people, especially college students, . . . come to us and say, 'You guys really remind me of Foucault. And like, so how have you really applied Foucault in your work?'" After reminding the audience of the context in which Foucault wrote, and of the need to pay attention to local contexts in thinking about criminalization, Rhee turned to the current situation in the state of New York, a situation that increasingly criminalizes young people in schools. In New York State, this process of criminalization is embodied in the SAVE (Schools Against Violence in Education) Legislation (Chapter 180 of the Laws of 2000) signed by Governor George Pataki in July 2000. (For a summary of the legislation in a gubernatorial press release, see http://www.state.ny.us/governor/press/year00/july24_00.htm.) Rhee explained how parts of the legislation elevate certain acts of fighting in school from being classified as a misdemeanor to a D felony. The process of criminalization tends to move in a unidirectional trajectory, including more and more acts under the category of "the criminal." "Ten years ago that would not have been a crime," Rhee observed. "Now it is."

The Prison Moratorium Project promotes an activist agenda organized around themes such as "schools not jails," "education not incarceration." In doing so, the Project emphasizes the connections between intensified criminalization of sectors of the population, on the one hand, and claims about the purported interests of public safety, on the other. Stereotypes and threatening specters help to generate and sustain these connections. Rhee pointed to "the welfare mom" and "the superpredator" as products of policymaking research, as two sides of the same ideological coin, and as imaginary figures that help society rationalize concrete practices of social control and political constraint. Illustrating the point of how these two figures operate in both practical and ideological realms, Rhee gave two examples. In the first, a pregnant African-American welfare recipient was convicted of child abuse and was subsequently given a choice by the judge in the case between accepting Norplant (a form of contraceptive that is implanted under the skin) or enduring a longer prison sentence. Here, Rhee pointed out, a woman's reproductive rights became dangerously entangled in the machinery of law enforcement. The second example comes from academic research produced by the University of Chicago and Stanford University. According to the study in question, the researchers correlated the drop in crime rates in the 1990s with abortions by poor women of color. The study claimed that the rise in abortions by young, poor women of color during the 1970s had prevented the birth of unwanted children who would have gone on to commit crimes 15 to 25 years later. Rhee went on to speak about social-scientific studies that seek to project the potential for incarceration from various early indicators, such as fourth-grade reading levels. The role of academic research in the service of the prison industrial complex invites further critical analysis and engagement.

Rhee then cited some stark statistics: In the 1970s, there were 200,000 people behind bars in the United States. Currently, there are approximately 2 million people locked up. There are also 6.6 million people under the supervision of the criminal justice system, a number that reflects the ever-extending reach of the system itself and that also invites one to consider how many more people's lives are therefore touched indirectly by that system. She went on to argue that the prison system is a failure, its failure reflected in the high levels of recidivism (according to the Department of Corrections, between 50 and 75 percent). The recidivism rate, Rhee argued, shows that parole and probation are a set-up for reincarceration. By contrast, the recidivism rate for alternative-to-incarceration programs, which are primarily community-based programs, is between 5 and 25 percent.

Thematized throughout her presentation was the recognition of the racialized dimensions of the prison industrial complex, the construction of African-American and Latino communities as criminalized communities. The racist impulses that drive law enforcement have intensified in a post-September 11 environment, drawing on the enforcement powers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the extended reach of law enforcement under the U.S.A. Patriot Act and, more recently, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Rhee emphasized the stark parallels between the representations of "the criminal" and "the terrorist," and the racialized character of both of these specters of "the enemy." The so-called war on terror, according to Rhee, is simply an escalation of an already existing war against communities of color and immigrant communities.

Rhee closed with a rallying call to "stop the building of prisons." But, as she pointed out, "If we are really going to talk about a world beyond prisons, society without prisons, we really have to think about the community strategies to build within and the community resources [for effective alternatives] so that we don't always depend upon the police and the prisons. So that's my last word."

Cheri Honkala

Cheri Honkala, the executive director of Kensington Welfare Rights Union, began by making a tongue-in-cheek gesture toward the Forward Command Post installation - the burnt-out Barbie's dream house that had illustrated Lois Lorentzen's paper in the morning session of the conference. "I want to start off by making two quick points," she said. "[The first] is that, when I came in here and I heard that that was another kind of display, I thought that was a house in Kensington. And secondly, that hunger, unemployment, and homelessness are women's and feminist issues. And I just wanted to be clear about that today - just in case somebody didn't know that [they were]."

Honkala began with an autobiographical sketch "because those are my real credentials. I have yet to take time out to get my master's. However, I do have a lot of 'school of hard knocks' credentials, so I always like to put those out there. For after all, I went through those experiences and I want to get something out of them, right? I'm a survivor of domestic violence, a formerly-homeless mother on a couple of different occasions. I think I'm up to number 70 in terms of being incarcerated. I lost my father, lost my brother, lost countless numbers of people. Have been to seven funerals in the last two months. And I am still standing. Hello." (This narrative brought a hearty round of applause from the audience.)

". . . . But the fundamental thing that I see that I do on a daily basis is that I fight for the unity and the organization of the poor in an effort to commit themselves to be leaders in the fight to end, not manage, poverty here at home and abroad. Boy, that's a short job description, huh? But the thing is, is that the work that we do, it's really hard to explain to people what we do. People think like - 'oh, like you work at a nonprofit.' And it's like, 'no.' 'Oh, you guys are like an NGO?' 'No.'

"'Well, what are you like?' And through all the reading that I've done in my life, the closest analogy that I can come up with is that, similar to slavery, in which people just had to do what they had to do in order to stay alive . . . in the real physical sense - [but also in the] spiritual, moral, all those kinds of senses - that's how I kind of look at the work that all of us are engaged in on a daily basis. Because if you are a homeless mother in the United States of America, it is like a gaping wound. And you can't wait. And you either decide - if you don't have any place to sleep at night - you either get up and figure out how to organize, how to fight, how to deal with that situation, or maybe by the next morning, it will be written in some kind of newspaper that you died from hypothermia. Not because you were denied a basic human right, such as shelter, because you are a human being in this country. And so, no, we don't sit around and talk about, 'How do we?' . . . like slaves during slavery didn't sit around and talk about, 'How do we first write a foundation grant before we seek freedom?'

"'Cheri, that's not fiscally responsible.' 'The funders won't like that,' or whatever. So what we do is we say, OK, this is what we need to do and this is what we're going to do [in order] to do it. And anybody [who] comes into our organization has to commit to helping to build a movement to eliminate poverty, hunger, and homelessness here and abroad. Otherwise, they can go someplace else, if they're looking for a charity. Because we don't have time for that, and we believe that poor people are not innately messed up and can't think and move and act on their own behalf. Because we get told that all the time, 'oh, gee, your situation is so bad, you don't have time to work on it; let me write about it for you, draft out a plan, and tell you how you can seek freedom from that situation.'

" . . . I'm a thinker and I'm a reader, and I encourage everybody not to underestimate the importance of reading and study. As it was alluded to earlier, the idea of not being ahistorical is incredibly important, because this is too much work to do, so why make up a whole bunch of stuff that people have already written down and created in different parts of the world, that we can learn from?

"But a few things I want to start with. I want to talk very briefly about the current situation that we face in our real fight for homeland security. After all, I know a great deal about it since the guy [who] was put in charge comes from Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Ridge, who is in charge of Homeland Security. And I always get chills up my back because I think about the night I was with a group of homeless people and we were sleeping on the Capitol stairs. And it had been the coldest day in October, and the governor ordered the removal of the blankets from all of the families and the children. And they took the blankets, and we walked around all night to stay awake so that no one would die from hypothermia. We got cardboard and plastic from [a] grocery store. And then I thought to myself, Oh my God, this man has been put in charge of Homeland Security.

"And so, we have been able to have a lot of history with this guy. After all, we got it during the organizing of poor and homeless people . . . [when we] wanted to tell the whole world that poverty and homelessness exist, during the Republican National Convention. And we were the only group that wasn't granted a permit. And then we were sent a fax, on the day that one of my sons held a press conference [announcing] that the children were going to march with their mothers. And so we got a fax from the Department of Human Services, Child Protection, that they would take away the children of the mothers [who] participated in the Republican National Convention in the march.

"And of course, Ridge was busy practicing his Homeland Security at this time. . . . Throughout that march it was absolutely incredible because we were able to see that, regardless of the tremendous amount of fear, [there was] the desire to stay alive and to do something about the devastating situation that all of us face. Over 10,000 people came out from all over the place and marched, even though we didn't have a permit, and had a successful march. And then again, we got to deal with the man in charge of Homeland Security when we decided to march on opening day of the Winter Olympics in no less than Utah.

". . . They were running public service announcements: 'The homeless are coming! The homeless are coming to Utah!' Well, we were able to let the progressive mayor there know that, by God, we didn't have to go far to get the homeless because there's a whole lot here in Utah. And so then they started giving [homeless people] one-way tickets to Las Vegas and that kind of stuff. And Americorps . . . worked on building an additional shelter to house all of the homeless that were going to invade Utah. And they passed the terrorism bill, that if you were demonstrating, if you were participating in civil disobedience that that could be looked at as terrorism.

"And so we had to do some legislative activity in the mix, trying to organize for a damned march on opening day of the Winter Olympics, just to carry some simple banner with some nuns that said, 'Poverty Exists in the United States of America.'

"And don't worry about it, though, because billions of taxpayer dollars were spent with sharpshooters on all of the roofs. And I think we made it about three or four blocks towards where all the wonderful sledding events and stuff were taking place. And me and the nuns were locked up.

"And so, for two days or whatever, for the first day we were in this horrible building that gave me memories of a warehouse. Utah is a religious state, and they had pews in this warehouse. And they locked us to the pews. And we stayed there for about two days.

"I was with one nun who was about 70 years old - a dangerous woman, you know. And so they spent an incredible amount of money. I think we were the only people arrested during that really scary event in which we were trying to make sure that we were safe and secure here at home.

"So that was our second encounter. And then the third continues. People began to talk about, 'My God, the violation of our civil liberties after 9/11!' And I'm saying to myself, Oh my God, we've been having, we've been trying to go to progressive forums and all that kind of stuff. . . . We don't like to talk about this stuff because it makes us sound paranoid but people that have shirts on that say the "FBI" come to our housing takeovers when we move homeless families in. Don't you think our civil liberties are starting to be violated now?

"And needless to say, that process has really continued, especially during the Republican National Convention, when they parked a Winnebago in front of our office for four months prior to the Republican National Convention. I think they were trying to send a message.

"And really raising the issue that, what is all this homeland security and what is this terrorism and talk of getting duct tape? Who are we really trying to protect ourselves from? And doing a great job at making this war that's taking place here at home [is] absolutely invisible.

"I'm sure none of you knew that any of us were arrested or that even a fly tried to do anything on opening day of the Winter Olympics. I think I talked to the Italian press. I spoke to more press around the entire world and absolutely nothing appeared here locally in the U.S. press. Yeah, there was a lot of U.S. press there, but of course, the next day came, and there was a small little article, and then nothing appeared on the rest of the media channels all over the place. . . .

"I think it's no accident that this is the five-year lifetime limit for folks who receive public assistance in our country, and with millions and millions of new people are entering our streets because they don't have a basic right to feed, clothe, or house themselves or to have healthcare anymore.

"And I think it's really interesting that we're all of the sudden deciding to go to war. We can't show that, even though I made a joke earlier, that I really wasn't kidding about that being a house in Kensington and it might not come in military fatigues and in tanks down the streets. But certainly the police presence, the direct correlation between the [increased rates] of incarceration [and] the dismantling of the social welfare system in our country. The direct correlation between the numbers of children that have been taken from their mothers [and their mothers having been] taken off of public assistance and not being able to pay their rent or to put food on their tables.

"You might be talking about a war taking place in Iraq, but certainly there is a war that is taking place here at home. It's just that nobody will ever hear about it or see it, unless we begin to do our work. The issue is that . . . [people] die as a result of this war, whether it's [caused by] food being taken from the babies or whether it's bullets or bombs that drop on Iraq.

"A person who is being denied a basic right to life and liberty and this pursuit of happiness is the same. And unless we begin to highlight what's going to happen here at home, we will continue only to talk about this war in the way this media wants us to frame it.

"And so our efforts at home - we are beginning to, every day of our life, we continue to document what we see as human rights violations. That if somebody dies as a result of not having health care, then we write it down. We see ourselves as human rights monitors. If they die because they had hypothermia, we don't say that they died because they had hypothermia. [We say instead,] 'She was a pregnant woman and couldn't get access to any form of shelter because she had felony drug convictions and therefore isn't eligible for any housing anymore, and froze to death.'

"So we're beginning to write all these things down [and to] call ourselves human rights monitors. And we have begun to link together efforts of anybody and their mother that wants to unite with one mission, which is the elimination of poverty with the poor spearheading a movement in this country.

"And we are also aware that this coming year is the 35th anniversary of the poor people's campaign. And we are going to try like hell to highlight the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King by redoing that march. People of all colors - from farm workers to public housing tenants to homeless people to welfare recipients - we're starting in Marks, Mississippi, on August 1st. We will be joined by the disability community around the entire country. And if we've got to throw ourselves on the rooftops or do whatever we have to do, and we can be accused of having too many marches. Believe me, there's a purpose. And that's that they are continuing to [draw attention to] the very real casualties of the war that are taking place at home.

"And we are determined that people know what is taking place here because we really believe that once people see what's happening, that the American people are good people, and they wouldn't allow it to happen. We believe that it's really a question of seeing.

"I want to wrap things up by saying a few things, as a seasoned organizer. In terms of how we can make a difference, there is an organization in New York that's called Make the Road by Walking. And I really believe that it's true. . . .

"Not to be ahistorical, but we should just begin to start doing something. We also need to begin to study and to begin to read more. And we need to take seriously that we do not have all the answers and we have so much more to learn every single day. And look out for that person who writes a book and ten years later stands by the fact that nothing has changed. It's OK to change your mind and your theory and your strategy. If something doesn't work, by God, throw it out. And write another book.

"And also, you are the leader that you are looking for. In the end, all we really have is each other. It's really about numbers. It's important for us to hold on to our identity, but man, we need a winning strategy and that means numbers if we're going to whoop their behinds.

"And no matter how morally correct you are - and by God, I've still been trying this one - it doesn't mean that you're going to win. We need smart people to take on powerful people. And we don't need pity. And we don't need guilt-trip white liberals either. We need power.

"Make plans and set your strategy, but remember that there is a real enemy out there. It's not abstract. And that enemy doesn't give a damn about a large segment of the people in this country, . . . whether or not that they live or they die.

"And please, if you're not in the boxing ring, don't tell that boxer how to fight. Thanks."