Who Controls City Hall? Cops Move To Evict Occupation, Camp Calls For Support

Austin Autonomedia: Keeping Austin Criminal

Earlier today, City staff  and the APD goon squad (a group of notoriously awful cops who patrol downtown) showed up at the City Hall Occupation. According to an Instagram stream by the Little Petal Alliance, they issued a Criminal Trespass Warning to the entire camp and gave them until 10 PM tonight (June 13th) to move.  Little Petal has asked people to come down and support them against this eviction threat.

Continue reading “Who Controls City Hall? Cops Move To Evict Occupation, Camp Calls For Support”

Call for Decentralized, Autonomous May Day Actions!

A flyer of white background with black text. Text reads: "Decentralized & Autonomous Action. Against Displacement, Police, & Property. Find your COVID Pods, Affinity Groups, or Vaccinated Friends. Act Together. May Day 2021. Center of the flyer has a black & white photo of someone dancing in frot of a burning car during a protest.

An Anonymous Transmission

The Message

More than a year and a half into a set of escalating crises–a global pandemic that has bled the poor and working classes dry while enriching the ruling classes, a globalizing insurrection against anti-Black police violence, a State whose violence has not ceased with a simple change in the figurehead–we remain at a crossroads. The way things are is not sustainable. We feel this deeply in every aspect of our lives: physical, spiritual, social, emotional. We reject the tyranny of working long hours to barely meet our basic needs. We denounce the extraction, exploitation, and hoarding of the land’s precious gifts. We deny the manufactured necessity of police, prisons, and surveillance.

The experiences and struggles of the past year–from mutual aid networks & rent strikes to riots & autonomous zones–have fundamentally transformed us and our local conditions. One the one hand, the growth of local organizing networks and the explosion of insurgent strategies has expanded the window of possibility for autonomous activity in the city. On the other hand, the weight of over a year of furious organizing, the heigtening of internal contradictions and conflict amongst organizations, and the slowing down of the waves of local insurgency have sapped much of the energy that propelled us last year. Finally, we look ahead to an oncoming struggle around multiple proposals to criminalize homelessness, heigtening antagonism to the police and the regime of property they serve, and a summer which many predict will be hot and riotous. It is amidst these conditions that we offer this proposal for May 1st.

Continue reading “Call for Decentralized, Autonomous May Day Actions!”

WorkQuest’s Cruel “Solution” Sweeps Poorest Under The Rug

Austin Autonomedia: Keeping Austin Criminal

Over the past 6 months, the long standing war on the homeless in Austin has seen some massive escalations. After a coalition of progressive groups got Austin City Council to decriminalize acts like sitting, lying, and camping, a counter-coalition of business interests–associated with groups like Take Back Austin, the Republican Party, and the Downtown Austin Alliance–whipped up a fervor and fought back. This set the stage for our present moment, in which regular sweeps carried out by TXDoT alongside daily harassment from APD further marginalize those who have already been dispossessed and displaced by a city . While we could open this piece with a deeper explanation of the events that led us here, that work has already been done by organizations like Homes Not Handcuffs and Stop the Sweeps Austin. Our interest is not in just recounting this history, but in offering an intervention to inform and motivate action to impede these forces. There are a whole litany of forces at play here, all of which have different vested interests and weak points. While we hope to dive into some of these forces in the future, right now we offer this investigation on one of the primary forces enabling the sweeps of homeless camps: a company named WorkQuest.

Continue reading “WorkQuest’s Cruel “Solution” Sweeps Poorest Under The Rug”