Hurricane Katrina, 20 Years Later and "the long slow history of disaster..." w/ scott crow (G&R 413)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Green & Red – "Hurricane Katrina, 20 Years Later and 'the long slow history of disaster…' w/ Scott Crow (G&R 413)"
Date: August 30, 2025
Hosts: Bob Buzzanco & Scott Parkin
Guest: Scott Crow

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Episode Overview

This episode marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and brings together hosts Bob Buzzanco and Scott Parkin with returning guest Scott Crow, activist, author, and co-founder of the Common Ground Collective. The discussion centers on the catastrophic aftermath of Katrina, the failings of government and large nonprofits, the radical organizing and mutual aid efforts spearheaded by Common Ground, and the enduring lessons for grassroots and climate justice organizing. The conversation weaves together personal anecdotes, reflections on disaster response, critiques of institutional responses, and a call to embrace liberatory imagination and action.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Founding and Early Days of Common Ground Collective

• Scott Crow recounts the urgency and improvisation behind forming Common Ground:

  • Motivated by government inaction, Scott and others rushed to New Orleans to find friends and provide direct aid within days after Katrina (02:49–10:58).
  • They were inspired by principles of mutual aid, direct action, anarchism, and lessons from previous movements like the Black Panthers and the Zapatistas.
  • The situation on the ground was chaotic, with police and militia violence, widespread devastation, and immediate needs unmet.

  “There had been white militias driving around in Malik's neighborhood threatening to kill him... The police were killing people. There were dead bodies in the street that weren't drowned. They were full of bullet holes. So who killed them? ... It's chaos, it's a war scene, except that one side is basically unarmed and desperate.” —Scott Crow [07:13]

• Common Ground bridged existing activist networks:

  • Drew in street medics, legal teams, Food Not Bombs, and more (09:33).
  • Operated on solidarity-not-charity, aiming to foster autonomy over dependency.

2. Government & Institutional Failures vs. Grassroots Response

• Law enforcement prioritized property and control over people:

  • Police and National Guard were often violent and impeded grassroots relief (11:10–12:42).
  • Systematic racism exacerbated suffering, as highlighted in the Gretna bridge incident where police shot at Black evacuees.

  “They wanted to restore law and order. They were not there to help people... The police armed up against them and started shooting at people to stop them from coming in...” —Scott Crow [11:25]

• Big nonprofits were largely ineffective:

  • Organizations like the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity raised millions but did limited, narrowly focused work (13:32–15:13).
  • In contrast, Common Ground addressed multiple urgent needs simultaneously despite far less funding.

3. Navigating Race and Organizing in New Orleans

• Experiences and complexities of mostly white volunteers in a Black city:

  • The dynamic was “messy” and sometimes perpetuated racism, but other times involved deep solidarity (15:29–17:28).
  • “Lead by asking” became a principle: listen to residents about their needs rather than assume.

  “Sometimes we are...perpetuated the racism and sometimes we worked awesomely side by side... At the end of the day...two of our core tenets for us were solidarity, not charity... and to lead by asking. Don't assume that people need this...” —Scott Crow [15:29]

• Addressing systemic neglect:

  • Katrina revealed New Orleans' longstanding inequalities, treating it as a “banana plantation of a city” with entrenched racism and poverty.

4. Impact on Modern Organizing & Climate Justice

• Lasting influence of Common Ground:

  • Common Ground became a template for grassroots, non-profit-led disaster response (18:48–20:33).
  • Organizers who cut their teeth in New Orleans later played pivotal roles in Occupy, Standing Rock, and mutual aid responses to hurricanes, COVID-19, etc.
  • The approach moved beyond protest toward building alternative structures—even “dual power.”

  “It was beautiful and accidental to see it to start to happen... Showing up in Haiti, showing up in...Occupy Sandy happened... None of those things would have happened like they did if Common Ground hadn’t put the other pieces together.” —Scott Crow [18:48]

• The necessity and evolution of mutual aid:

  • Mutual aid is more than service work, it's a refusal and a starting point for deeper liberation.
  • Crow cautions about losing the “liberatory aspect” and urges keeping disruptive, visionary thinking at the center (20:33–23:04).

5. Reflections on The "Long, Slow History of Disaster"

• Disasters aren't only acute catastrophes—poverty and neglect are slow disasters:

  • The systemic marginalization of the poor, especially in the U.S., is a continual, less visible disaster (26:03–28:25).
  • Class analysis is crucial and often sidelined by current left politics.

  “The long slow history of disaster is often about class, which is never talked about anymore… Those are the long slow histories of disaster.” —Scott Crow [26:03]

6. Struggles and Tactics for Today

• Direct action, civil disobedience, and the limits of 'old' tactics:

  • Recognizing that neither elections nor courts will save us—organizers must embrace resistance AND building new systems (29:48–34:33).
  • Organizations must avoid institutionalizing at the expense of radicalism.

  “If we do not reimagine and start to imagine the worlds we want, we’re not going to get it. Because the Christian nationalists and tech bros...have visions for the future… We don’t have any of that imagination on the left.” —Scott Crow [29:48]

• Rural strategy and the crisis of imagination:

  • The left has all but abandoned rural America, leaving fertile ground for right-wing organizing (39:38–41:08).

  “Go into areas where those people are and make it relevant to them. Do this shit in areas where it's difficult. Not in the Bay Area where it's fun and easy... but fucking in the place where it's hard and dirty and they... You're an outsider until you fucking prove yourself to them.” —Scott Crow [39:38]

• Critique of liberal/progressive attitudes toward rural America and the perils of dismissiveness.

7. Emergency Hearts: The Individual Spark for Collective Action

• On the meaning of 'Emergency Hearts':

  • Crow explains it's the compassion that propels action in crisis, vital for catalyzing mutual aid and activism (41:43–43:11).

  “The emergency hearts is just an idea... when your heart kicks into action with a lot of passion and compassion to do something.” —Scott Crow [41:43]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Government Failure:
  “At the time when it happened, we couldn't believe that the government in the US would fail so hard. Maybe now we see it again and again, but at that time it had. It was one of the greatest failures of the government at all levels, city, county, state and federal.”
  —Scott Crow [06:59]

• On Police and Racism:
  “And just be to be clear too, they're going after black people. They're not going after the white people who are driving around with guns.”
  —Scott Crow [11:25]

• On Charity vs. Solidarity:
  “We're not treating it like charity. We're treating it... we're in this together as much as we can be.”
  —Scott Crow [15:29]

• On the Dangers of Institutionalization:
  “If organizations get established, they want to stay established, they want to keep getting funding so they get less radical as they go... I think we have to throw that shit out the door too.”
  —Scott Crow [33:56]

• On the Crisis of Left Imagination:
  “But we don’t have any of that imagination on the left. We have nothing. And that’s why we end up with milquetoast politicians... We're not ready to do what we think because there is no imagination.”
  —Scott Crow [29:48]

• On the Urgency of Today:
  “We're in the biggest political disaster in the United States since probably the Civil War.”
  —Scott Crow [20:33]

• Bob’s closing affirmation:
  “I think it's as good a response as I've ever had to something like that. We've read Chomsky, and you name it, everybody but the students just were captivated by that. And to a large degree, I think it's because they didn't understand you could do something like this in America, which is foreign to us, that people are out there in these situations, and they're taking kind of power and control into their own hands.”
  —Bob Buzzanco [43:37]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:49–10:58 — Scott Crow’s detailed account of the founding and first actions of Common Ground
• 11:10–12:42 — The true role of police and the state during disaster
• 13:32–15:13 — Critique of major nonprofits and contrasts with grassroots mutual aid
• 15:29–17:28 — Navigating race and solidarity in a crisis context
• 18:48–23:04 — Common Ground’s impact on later organizers and movements
• 26:03–28:25 — The "long, slow history of disaster" and why class analysis matters
• 29:48–34:33 — Direct action, dual power, and radical organizing lessons
• 39:38–41:08 — Rural organizing, abandonment by the left, and possibilities for radical projects
• 41:43–43:11 — The concept of "Emergency Hearts" and its significance in activism
• 43:37–44:31 — The power of example and inspiration for students and organizers

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Final Thoughts & Call to Action

Scott Crow’s narrative is equal parts warning and inspiration: government and mainstream NGOs will fail society’s most vulnerable, but imaginative, liberatory organizing—rooted in solidarity, direct action, and mutual aid—cannot just meet needs, but transform lives and movements. The episode closes on a call to wrench open the possibilities of the future through imagination and bold action.

“If it's bad, then we... have to do nothing and hide our head in the sand or to stand up and fight. The future is wide open... We're standing on the edge of potential at every moment. So how’s it going to look for all of us?”
—Scott Crow [45:25]

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For more:

• Scott Crow’s book: Black Flags and Windmills
• Forthcoming piece: Insurrectionary Utopias: Ideas Towards Liberatory Mutual Aid
• The Common Ground Collective and its legacy
• Podcast links and social media for further resources

Transcript

[Scott Crow]

Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics for Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics. Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.

[Scott Parkin]

Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red Podcast. I'm your co host Scott Parkin in Fort Worth, Texas today. And as always, I am joined by Bob in Ohio.

[Bob Bozanko]

Niles, Ohio and so this week is.

[Scott Parkin]

We have a very special show. We have a very special guest. We're very excited to be talking to you today. One of our longtime homies, you've been on the show more than once before. Our comrade Scott Crow is joining us. Welcome to the Green and Red Podcast.

[Scott Crow]

Thanks for having me on again.

[Scott Parkin]

Yeah.

[Scott Crow]

And we're having the show.

[Scott Parkin]

It's the 20th anniversary of when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the on the Gulf coast. Today actually today, August 29th is the day the levees broke in New Orleans. And so we're going to be talking to Scott about that. Scott is a international speaker, author and storyteller. He is the producer of a record label called Emergency Hearts. But what we'll be talking about today is he is also the co founder of the Common Ground Hurricane Relief. He's also the author. I just wanted to actually promote your book which is, he also wrote a book probably 10 or 12, 13 years ago called Black Flags and Windmills, which is a little bit of a memoir and actually goes into stuff that happened in New Orleans. So Scott, we're really excited to have you back on the Green and Red podcast.

[Scott Crow]

Oh, thank you guys. I'm glad to be back. That was fun.

[Bob Bozanko]

Yeah.

[Scott Parkin]

And so folks, the Common Ground Collective actually brought thousands of people into New Orleans over multiple years from all over the world to help rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina had killed more than 1800 people and forced more than a million people to evacuate and then also stranded tens of thousands of others who had limited resources and aid. Common Ground was one is the largest anarchist inspired organization, at least in modern times and did this relief work in, in New Orleans and did everything from bringing relief to people who were impacted by the storm, built a health clinic, did food distribution, reopened schools, all that sort of stuff used under the themes of like mutual aid, direct action, liberation, liberatory politics. And maybe we could actually just talk a little bit. We'll just start because we're a little bit of a history podcast and so maybe we can just actually talk a little bit about the founding of Common Ground. Could you actually just tell us a little bit about.

[Bob Bozanko]

Sure.

[Scott Crow]

So the Common Ground was Built out of necessity and relationships. Basically the disaster that was unfolding called Hurricane Katrina. Even in the first couple of days, I could see from Texas that it was already that there was going to be government failure to respond to it adequately. So about three days after that, another person and I drove down to look for an old friend of ours, Robert Kennedy King, who is one of the Engela 3, one of the longest held. He's a former member of the Black Panther Party and was on one of the longest held people in solitary confinement in modern US history. I had been supporting him and been a friend of his since he got out of prison in 2001. And we had helped him tour around the country and just been friends with him. He's like a family member and stuff. And so he was. He had stayed during the storm. And so we were like, hey, we should go and try to find him. Because we knew he had stayed and we'd been on the phone with him until the power went out. And so we ended up there about two days after the storm. And I could see as it was unfolding, all the problems that were happening. There was hundreds of boats with people like us, with boats that were willing to go in and start doing search and rescue and helping people even if we weren't trained. The need was so great and we could. And what they were doing was bottlenecking because they wouldn't let us go because they couldn't control all the boats. And you talk about hundreds of people are ready to do this, and a lot of us just spit off and started going out into our boats and start trying to help people, try to find people. We tried to get to King. So that became the impetus to start this organization. And so what happened was that when we were looking for King, which we didn't find him the first time and which was devastating to us, a lot of things happened. And this is all covered in my book Black Flags and Windmills. But I connected with Malik Rahim, who was in Algiers neighborhood, which hadn't flooded, and he was lifelong friends with Robert King. They had both been Black Panthers at different times in the same organization. Malik had also had served prison time, but he was a longtime organizer in New Orleans, and he had tried to start up a little bit of relief work there. And we got to him because it was dry land and used it as a jumping off point to go find King, got King back finally. This all. This is all happening so fast in the first couple of days. And you have to understand, the devastation is phenomenal. Like it's unimaginable how much devastation is. And I guess it is not so unimaginable now. But at the time when it happened, we couldn't believe that the government in the US would fail so hard. Maybe now we see it again and again, but at that time it had. It was one of the greatest failures of the government at all levels, city, county, state and federal. And sitting at the table, I'd had all these ideas rooted in mutual aid about how we could start to build organizations and networks that were loosely based on really some simple ideas of, like anarchist ideas of direct action and collective liberation and autonomy and really just taking care of ourselves. And some ideas like the Zapatistas. That came from the Zapatistas, the EZLN in Mexico, where they were like, lead by obeying, like just basic organizing things. And some of the stuff really that the Panthers had, the good parts of the Black Panthers, which was like the survival program's pending revolution. The idea that if you can help people meet their basic needs, then you can. Then they can begin to build that. They can build off of that to build their own autonomy. So basically I just started drawing up this stuff, talking to Malik and Sharon and a man named Brandon Darby who was there. He wasn't founding the organization. He was just there because we had got comfort to sound the rescue stuff. And later he would come out to be an FBI informant with. We jump ahead in the story but. And almost destroy the organization. And. And we don't know how long he worked with the organization. I don't want to give him any more space, but. But he was. He and I were the first ones to go in and we were willing to go do all the search and rescue stuff. And we ended up. And you have to understand, like, things are chaotic and they don't want rescue organizations. They don't want relief organizations there. So what we're doing is we are breaking the law by being there. So there had been white militias driving around in Malik's neighborhood threatening to kill him, driving around with trucks. They looked like the Klan, except they didn't have any hats and they were driving around drunk with rifles. There were. The police were killing people. There were dead bodies in the street that weren't drowned. They were full of bullet holes. So who killed them? Was it the cops or was it the militias? This is what we came into. So just to know. It's chaos, it's a war scene, except that one side is basically unarmed and desperate. And that's the pop. The populace of New Orleans And. And then the other side is just a small minority of people who are racist. And we ended up in an armed standoff with the white militia. We ended up facing off with the cops multiple times. This is all in the. This is just in days. This is all happening. When I think about it now, like, this is not, like over months and months. This is like in the first couple of few days, all this stuff is happening and the police raid us. They do all this stuff. But through that, I started to figure out that we could. We could start. We could build on alternative globalization networks and start to bring down street medics, we could bring down legal teams. We could bring down all these different networks, Food not bombs, to start to these networks that were already there. We just needed to get them there and funnel them in. And so we started that. So I went back to Austin again, started making all the calls and started doing all this. And Malik was calling all the people that he could when his phone would work. And then we just started bringing people in. And like, I think in the first three years, I think over over a hundred thousand people came between 2005 and 2008. And mostly white volunteers, everybody from. But they came with the ideas of solidarity, not charity, that we weren't running a charity organization. We were running a network that was helping people build autonomy. And the goals were simple. It was dual power. We were going to resist oppression and exploitation on one hand, which was fighting with, stopping with the cops. If they said, you can't feed people here, we would just ignore them and go feed them anyway. And then at the same time, to rebuild infrastructure that had either collapsed over the long history of disasters or to create new things that were there, like the community gardens. There had been so many community gardens in New Orleans over the decades. And so we helped to rebuild those things so people could have food security in their deserts and stuff. And then, like, from that, it just kept going. It's like, first one clinic, two clinics, three clinics, four clinics, five clinics, and then mobile clinics. And then it was like we spread out of New Orleans and started working in the whole Gulf coast coast region to Vietnamese communities, indigenous communities, all these communities that were just forgotten about in regular life, but just ignored during this disaster. And so we ended up with going to these regions in boats still to. To be the first medical responders, the first people to give food and things like that. This is. And this is not telling a heroic story. This is all an incredible trauma, all of this things happening. So we're fighting against our. For our existence. And the existence of the people that live there on one hand. And at the same time, we're trying to build and do all of these things. And it was. And so that was impetus. But what we did, the main piece of what we did was we said, we want to do it all. And in 2005, we had our Project 2025 for the good, which is like we, we were like, let's do all of these things. Let's build these clinics, let's open schools, let's build new free schools. Let's do all these things in a radical way from below where people can have control. Now, did all that happen? No, that was a mixed bag. Some of it was just service work and some of it was challenging, but that's what that was, the impetus for it and what came out of it, the larger idea was that we took the ideas of mutual aid that are long standing, anarchist mutual aid ideas, which is just basic cooperation at some level, and we added them, we reinterpret them or remix them into this idea of doing it after disasters. Because disasters are going to be coming more and more. Not just climate disasters, but wars and economic disasters that affect regular people. Because people we started to see will rise up to do things when necessity really hits. And so that's really. And then that is how we got. That's how we got there.

[Bob Bozanko]

Just to reiterate and reinforce, you've referenced the role of the police and authorities there. I think, because people have this sense that call the police, right? They were there to protect property. They're shooting at people who are trying.

[Scott Crow]

To get at food.

[Bob Bozanko]

Just mention that briefly. Talk about what you saw there, because I think you can't stress that enough like that. The state's role, which should be to help you in these calamities, is actually quite different. Quite opposite.

[Scott Crow]

No, they wanted to restore law and order. They were not there to help people. I'm not saying individual police didn't do things, but the system itself was absolutely enforcing. And just be to be clear too, they're going after black people. They're not going after the white people who are driving around with guns. They weren't stopping them from happening. And the police also, one of the, one of the most egregious episodes was the Gretna bridge episode where black people were trying to walk to Gretna, which is a town in. It's like a suburb of New Orleans. And droves of people were desperate. They'd been out sitting on bridges for two weeks needing food and water and no place To. To shit and no place to. There's no medical services. And the police armed up against them and started shooting at people to stop them from coming in there because they didn't want them. And it, and they made it sound like it was hordes of people, but it was just people who were desperate, who were walking. You're talking about grandmothers and children and babies and families, and they were just desperate. And everywhere we went, law and order was trying to be restored and trying to. They were trying to stamp out anything. There was no, you guys are doing good with this and go ahead and take care of that. They were like, you stop doing this. Stop. Everywhere we went. And. And it sounds far where they tried to kill us.

[Bob Bozanko]

So it sounds on a different level, obviously, like Gaza, the stories that are.

[Scott Crow]

Coming out of Gaza, it is. It is just different scale. And I guess it wasn't shocking to me, but I think it was shocking to the people who were desperate in New Orleans. And then the area that would happen, that the police would drive by and shout at them, but not do anything to help them, you know, to go.

[Scott Parkin]

Along with that, besides the failure of the state to help people. And then where the state is trying to patrol and control and restore law and order, quote, unquote. And we also saw the National Guard and other military forces and private contractor. Private military contractors as well. But there.

[Bob Bozanko]

But the.

[Scott Parkin]

Another part of the story, which I think is really important is the contrasting common ground with the big nonprofit industrial complex. Because we actually saw a pretty big failure of the Red Cross and things like that there as well.

[Scott Crow]

Yeah. And I was even, I would say all of the big nonprofits, there was a failure of them. And it wasn't because it wasn't just the government organizations, the nonprofit organizations. One, they weren't. They couldn't scale up and mobilize. But also they would just do one thing. Like Habitat for Humanity would raise millions of dollars. And as we know, Red Cross raised billions. They raised $2 billion and, and like $500 and tons of volunteers doing way more work than they were direct support, direct aid at that moment. And. But as the time went on, more and more and larger nonprofits, like I mentioned, Habitat for Humanity came in. Sure, they built some houses, but we built more. We built houses and we fought the police and we, we went to protest and we ran clinics. They just did one thing and they raised more money than we could ever do to do that. And if I can just say, if I could toot our horn for a second, there were culture People recognized what we were doing and came and gave us support. There was so many celebrities, air quotes that came to really. They saw what we were doing and gave us huge amounts of support knowing that we didn't have a bank account and that we were not a registered nonprofit. And so that bolstered us to. That we were on the right track as well as all the small donations like schools were sending in donations everywhere and stuff. We raised millions of dollars over the first two or three years. And. And for an organization that wasn't a nonprofit, that hadn't existed before, that was a pretty, pretty fair amount of things. And when we talk about scale, just understand we had a hundred or two hundred projects going on any given week with thousands of people involved in them over the time.

[Bob Bozanko]

This is more kind of a. Of an organizing question but you said most of the people who came in were white, right? Predominantly African American city. How did that dynamic work? Did people embrace you? Did they think you were there to they. Were they distrustful?

[Scott Crow]

How do you go into a community.

[Bob Bozanko]

Like that and make people feel comfortable.

[Scott Crow]

And work together eventually it was complex and it. And there was no one one way it happened. It was messy. That's really the. What I would say is that sometimes we are. We can perpetuated the racism and sometimes we worked awesomely side by side with communities and then other times we took the lead of. Totally took the lead of communities because everybody knows shit's bad but everybody doesn't know what to do. When you've had agency taken away from you for so long or you've relied on. You relied on large governments really are indifferent to you or just overwhelmed because they want to do whatever they're doing. So there's so I think so some people, they all know it's bad but not everybody knows what to do. And so we could offer frameworks for we can't do everything but we can't save your. Your neighborhood completely. But we can try. We had. It was just diff. It was a big spectrum is what I was going to say of that. A perpetuation of racism. And then. And then also just awesome working together. And I. But I think at the end of the day just because one of our. The two things, two of our core tenets for us were solidarity, not charity because we're not treating it like charity. We're treating it. We're in this together as much as we can be. Even as all the students are coming in. But the. But at the same time to lead by asking don't assume that people need this because that's what all that everybody else was doing. Just ask them, what do you guys need right here? Because sometimes it'd be mundane and small and sometimes it was so large you couldn't take it up. But we did overwhelm people because like we could have hundreds of white kids coming from colleges working on a project and that and there might be like 10 residents on the project. So that's overwhelming at the same time. But because the need was so great, it wasn't just the storm and the government failure. That city has been shit on for a hundred years easily. They treat it as a banana plantation of a city. The economic disparities and racism there are. It's like the bad old days still.

[Scott Parkin]

It's. As a person who's worked in the climate movement and seen different phases of the climate movement, like we can talk about this sort of. There's the nonprofit led sort of climate stuff that happened in the early 2010s, and there's like the green, the reformist green New Deal iteration. And I think one of the sort of important contributions, the people who I've seen do like hardscrabble organizing in places where not everyone agrees with them. Places like Appalachia or the Gulf Coast. A lot of the, what I would call like the political culture or the politics actually partially comes out of common ground. Like what people went and did and like lots of, I guess you could say veterans of Common ground met in these different backcountry campaigns which are part organizing, part direct action. And I think common ground is actually also. These politics existed before. And you mentioned how you really drew on anti corporate globalization sort of networks at the time. This bring people being people in. But I think there's been this huge influence on the climate movement from this like more grassroots, like not nonprofit led, not government led effort. And I'm just. You influenced a generation of people who work on climate, climate justice issues. And I'm curious how you see some of that as played out in your experience. There's my experience and I'd just like to hear what you think about that.

[Scott Crow]

It was an accidental thing. When we were building these models, of course you. Or when we were reinterpreting these models, of course you want it to be able to expand. You were like, hey, this stuff works. What if we started to scale these things? And then it happened and two things, and for two reasons. One, because we, we were meeting needs in a different way that was beyond just protesting, which had been happening for decades, where mostly people were Just trying to do protests to stop things, stop corporations. And we were like, hey, let's build in addition to doing those things. And then the second thing is just by the sheer number of people, if you have a hundred thousand people come through, that's a lot of influence that you can have. And like, it was beautiful and accidental to see it to start to happen. Showing up in Haiti, showing up in. And then when Occupy came, like core organizers from, like, Lisa Fifthian from Organ, from Common Ground were there at the beginning when Occupy Sandy happened. And then all the movements out of that. And I will say I'll stand on this, is that none of. I don't think any of those things would have happened like they did if Common Ground hadn't put the other pieces together. And I don't mean to say that we're so important, but we were an important nexus at that time to change, to begin to move these ideas in a different way, especially after disaster relief, like using disaster as a thing. And then as we kept moving on and we started to see more and more like Covid and all the things, now it's become integrated in these radical subcultures. And that's a really beautiful thing to see. And the ideas have gone far beyond whatever I wrote down or whatever we all developed together. And it's been pretty amazing to see the only.

[Bob Bozanko]

The.

[Scott Crow]

Like, I. I've watched academics build their careers are writing about us now. I watched. I've watched. I've watched influencers build their careers, authors build their careers on this that weren't there, but they're like, that's. That shows influence. And like, even if I could be honest, like, I don't feel like I. Like as far as political movements and activism and anarchy and stuff, I don't have any ideas to add beyond what we had already done besides reflecting on this stuff, because they have gone so much further in the last 20 years. And it's a beautiful thing to see these ideas take root because they're so necessary. We're in the biggest political disaster in the United States since probably the Civil War. I don't know, Bob, because there's way more historian than I am about that, but I'm just saying. And so these liberatory mutual aid ideas are so relevant and so important for small communities as the United States unfolds and begins to un. Unravel in different places. And some. The need's gonna be greater in some areas and less so in other areas. But I think that's an important and important thing. And thank you for recognizing that and saying that about stuff. Like, it's. It's validating because I'm so far removed from those things now to see that. And I'm not trying to build a career on it or anything, and I'm not promoting that stuff. But the light, the lives that it's taken on have been really good. The only thing I want to say is that I'm really. I really hope that the liberatory aspect doesn't get lost, because, like, a lot of times, mutual aid is considered service work. Right. But that's really just the beginning. That's the refusal to give in. So that's. It's another form of refusal is by saying, we're gonna. We're gonna feed people, we're gonna do these things. That's only the first step. We. I think we have to keep a liberatory analysis radical thinking about, outside of activism. I don't care what language you use, but how can we build it for the longer term? How can you make this immediate thing last longer than just the few weeks or the few months after it happened? Because it's going to be necessary for us to do that. And I could see how we could begin to reimagine our cities and stuff. And actually, there's an author named Adam Greenfield who I highly recommend. He has a book called Lifehouse that kind of draws these connections. And he talks about how do we build lifehouses in our communities and with our friends and with our. And stuff outside. And he's not speaking to activists. He's talking to regular people in that. And so I like those ideas. I didn't think about that. Like, it just kept building more and more. So anyway, I'm rambling.

[Bob Bozanko]

No, I actually, I was going to ask a question, like, something. Just follow up a little. But you've answered much of what I was thinking of anyway. Because when I was thinking about this, and I remember at the time, this was the height of neoliberalism, you know, it emerged in the 80s. And then what we saw. What I saw, what struck me was that obviously it failed, but that people recognized that. And for the first time in decades, people were talking about the state and capitalism. And you mentioned how people took the kind of stuff you did in New Orleans and, like, in Occupy. But at the time, did you have a sense of being part of something bigger? That this wasn't just about feeding and housing people in a particular location, but in creating something bigger?

[Scott Crow]

It was. I could totally tell, despite all the trauma from it and everything at the time I could tell, I admit, I don't want to sound so self important, but I could see its influence being like the Zapatistas or the Panthers, I hate to use that. Or I could name anarchists like Emma Goldman or something, but, but the iww, I could see it having that kind of influence. I knew that at the time because I'd been in movements since 1985 and I could see all. I've been through all kinds of arcs with it and I could see what, where we were at. Like I was nationally and internationally engaged and stuff before Katrina and I could see what was happening. And this was something completely different than any anything. It was a synthesis of all the things that were happening at that moment. And yeah, I knew it was going to be big, but I didn't, I didn't know if it was just going to like a wave just come to the shore and then just go away, anticipate, or if it was going to just keep coming. And what happened was it just kept coming and keep. And it keeps going. It was the. It's something. Even though it's one of the most difficult things I was ever part of and had so much, had so much, so many people with so much trauma from it that people are still caring today, 20 years later. It was still, it was still a beautiful thing. And you could see that something was going to come out of it, if that makes any sense. And I'm like, okay, this is great. At least I didn't leave the world with a shitty Tesla cyber truck and some asshole. I'm like, that's your legacy, fuckhead. But my legacy has gotta be something else. I don't know what it is. Nothing. And if it's nothing, I'm okay with that too.

[Scott Parkin]

The one thing, you referenced this before and you actually, I forgot to mention this, you have a new piece coming out called Insurrectionary Utopias Ideas Towards Liberatory Mutual Aid, which I think is important in this moment. But you talk about the, the long, slow history of disasters and there's natural disasters and there's climate fueled natural disasters, but there's a lot of other disasters as well. And you talk about that in the piece. Could you actually just talk about that for a moment? Because we see a lot of climate disasters like Los Angeles, just even recently where we, and we saw a lot of. All of my anarchist friends and activist friends in LA went automatically into mutual aid mode. But you're talking about something bigger and I'm wondering if you could speak to that for a moment.

[Scott Crow]

It's the long slow history of disaster. I'm sorry, I can't remember the reference where that came from. I didn't come up with that idea. But, but basically it's what happens to the marginalized in a capitalist society. Or actually I would say in any civil society. I don't give a fuck if it's socialist or whatever, but it's the people who just can never make it or they're always seen as, as usable things to be thrown away, minors like in Appalachia or, or people not being able to get enough food for their kids. Those are the long slow histories of disaster. Not being, not just being in food desert, but I'm saying like if you're on SNAP or some kind of government aid and all you can get is shitty food or no food at all because you can't get enough of it because they cut your food stamps off or access to medical care. Like I know I've known so many poor people and I think actually if I could bring this up, it's related to this. Like the long slow history of disaster is often about class, which is never talked about anymore. Once we got into really essentialist politics in some ways. I'm not even trying to break this down, but we started, stopped talking about class. Like when I first came into anarchy in the 90s, it was red and black. It was always. Class was always there as in addition to all the things. Racism, sexism, homophobia and all the things. But somewhere along the way we just started to erase class out of it. But that's like all those people that I'm talking about in the long slow history of disaster are the people affected by, by that and they're all poor. Wherever they are, they're. It's going to be poor people and it's whether they have access to healthcare, whether they have access to education, they have access to transportation, to safe environments, or whether they live in the most marginalized areas because that they're the most flood prone areas or whether they live in the most fire prone areas. These would be the long slow histories of disasters. Like to me it's ones that don't immediately tug at your heart because it didn't just flash in your face, but it actually was like just long slow creeping health decline and death because of that. And so I think that's part of it. And New Orleans is a, is definitely a two tiered city like very much there's an elite group with a lot of money and that's tourists and all those people and there's the rest of the people who do not benefit from any of those things and actually suffer from a lot of that stuff too.

[Bob Bozanko]

In the article you mentioned a list of tactics or strategies, whatever you want to call them, mutual aid and civil disobedience and so forth. And right now what we're seeing, which is really the only resistance, right. Because labor and the Democratic Party have done pretty much less than nothing.

[Scott Parkin]

But we're part of what's happening.

[Bob Bozanko]

Yeah. What we're seeing, especially in LA or DC right now, other big Chicago, is people who are literally putting their bodies in front of ICE agents and going to immigration courts and so on. How do you talk to people and say, hey, you know this, no one's coming to rescue you, no one from the top is coming down to rescue you. How do you talk to people and say this is what we have to do? Because when we have these discussions, quite often you hear we're going to give them the 26 midterms or the courts are going to rule against them or whatever. And so how do we.

[Scott Crow]

That's working so well, isn't it?

[Bob Bozanko]

How do you make something like civil disobedience and direct action and monkey wrenching and all the stuff that we've talked about for decades. Right. How do you go to people and say this is what you have to do? Because this isn't. Despite Scott and I talk about this a lot, there's this romance of American resistance and the American left. We did this and we did that and we did that. Well, yeah, but you lost all the time too. And you were often co opted from the top, from the labor unions or from the political people or the media or whatever. How do you go to people and say, look, the old ways, noble as they are, haven't worked.

[Scott Crow]

Right.

[Bob Bozanko]

This is what we have to do?

[Scott Crow]

I don't know. That's an internal conversation with movements I've had for a long time and we're still stuck there. But I think that we have to. The thing is like, if you're going to people like again, like poor rural communities, I'm not going to tell them how to do shit, I'm just going to ask them. And then I'm going to use these tech techniques to help them build their own power the way they're going to. Hopefully it's for better and. But I think that within movements, I think talking about the failures of it, like I have been just in my own history, like I was investigated as a domestic terrorist for 10 years and couldn't I was on the object of.

[Bob Bozanko]

A New York Times but for the.

[Scott Crow]

People out here have staged article but so I was. I've been on all the spectrums of things like voting and to absolute direct action where shit didn't exist anymore after that. But largely all of that stuff was in some ways failures. Like I. I don't see myself as a failure or what I participated in. I don't. I have some regrets about things but shit's worse now than it was then. And so I think if we don't break from just resisting and that we ha. We don't build that nexus again. Like how does stopping ICE relate to migrant communities? What else do they need? They need other shit. They need childcare, they need support for their jobs. Food security. There's a bunch of things that happen. Health care. Oh my gosh, health care. Yeah. Safety and security. So I think there's things besides just resisting ICE that have to happen if we're going to do that. Resisting ICE has to happen. Resisting all these things has to happen. But if we do not reimagine and start to imagine the worlds we want, we're not going to get it. Because the Christian nationalist and the tech bros, they have visions of the. Even if they're dystopian and we're fucking terrified of it, they have visions for the future, they have plans even if they all don't agree and they're all going to fall out, I don't even care. But they're going to us all as we're going. But we don't have any of that imagination on the left. We have nothing. And that's why we end up with milquetoast politicians. People end up with no those politicians they vote in again and again. That's why we do these campaigns against corporations and we win. And then they change the laws 10 years later and they're back to doing what they do because there's. We're not ready for the. We're not ready to do what we think because there is no imagination. So I think starting there with imagination and the other thing is you have to get it out of the activist mindset of we're going to protest, we're going to stop this and then we're going to go on to the next thing. I think you got to root down and stay where you're at and organize there like it's old school organizing. But not again, not because it's. I'm trying to make a career off of it or do anything, but because I'm Rooted in those communities that mean something to me. And it means, and it means something. It's something meaning meaningful to them. Traveling around to go to each event to do all these things is necessary, but it is, it's not the thing. And that's the only mode that we have. And so I think we don't think in the ideas of what I call anarchist dual power because I know there's a communist whole, whole communist philosophy around it, but the anarchist one is like to resist and to build at the same time. We have to have those connected, they have to be interrelated. And if we don't, we just have this and this. The building part is just atrophied down and we can't. And so I think those are ways to do it. The other thing that I think we get stuck in is that often if organizations get established, they want to stay established, they want to keep getting funding so they get less radical as they go. Even if they started out really radical because they want to get funding in, they don't want to piss off the funders and stuff. So I think we have to throw that shit out the door too. In some ways this is not wholesale for everything because I think there's different things that have to happen. But I think at the radical levels and I think just looking at institutions that we build as what I, as I call like liberatory or insurrectionary, you build them for. And they only exist as long as they're doing the project that they're doing or the thing that they're doing. And when they become ineffective at it or funding or people keeping their jobs becomes more important, you destroy it and you say goodbye. You just say goodbye to it. And I think the other thing is like push the boundaries too. Like the community armed self defense. Community self defense is more and more important now than it was even fucking 20 years ago. Because fascism is not, we're not around with fascism now. It's not, oh, that person's a fascist. No, it literally is happening in places. And so people need. You can't show up at a gunfight with a fucking bat or a knife or mace. I'm sorry.

[Scott Parkin]

And then PR take back or protests.

[Scott Crow]

On looks good, right? But I'm not saying that we like everything's shit bad and we're all like, it's all over, it's uneven, it's bad for some people and less worse for other people. The United States is a fucking huge landmass and there's a lot of people spread out a lot of Places, but it's uneven. But I think if we think about these ideas then we can keep the libertarian approach. And I'm going to pick on this one organization for a second. But I love them. Just know that food bombs have been around forever. Like they have had direct action and they've been super service oriented. But they're a good example and a bad example of like when the institution just keeps going and doesn't challenge the systems anymore. Like I, like I can't speak to every chapter or every. But just in the history of working with them off and on for 30 years, like many times it was just a liberal thing. Whereas yeah, we're feeding people when food wasn't the problem with what was happening. There's other issues that needed to be addressed much more than that. Cause there's Christian groups feeding them right next door, you know where. And so what could we do to reimagine those things and make it radical, make it revolutionary, make it insurrectionary even. And, but I think without, without the piece of the imagination of we're going to give up, we're just going to try to resist fascism. But we're not trying to imagine a world beyond fascism or well beyond what's happening now that we're always going to come to a dead standstill within movements.

[Bob Bozanko]

It's funny you mentioned Christians because something that I think the left either isn't aware of or doesn't want to deal with is that a lot of these right wing Christian churches really do have like fairly extraordinary in some cases programs for that.

[Scott Crow]

They totally go to people. They bring them clothing.

[Bob Bozanko]

If somebody's out of work, they bring them food. And it's not just charity because they're all saying come to church. And they're giving them this gospel of dependence and obedience.

[Scott Crow]

Absolutely.

[Bob Bozanko]

And we have nothing like that. They have gun clubs and they have churches and we've got like aerobics classes or say yoga. But I'm reading.

[Scott Crow]

Reading groups.

[Bob Bozanko]

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I think that's really crucial. Like they do in a sense meet people where they are.

[Scott Crow]

In Texas, I see Christian trucks and say mutual aid on the side of them.

[Bob Bozanko]

Yep, yep. And I tell people that these people are bad and nothing they do is good, but they're reaching out, not osteen. And it's ironic because one thing, like in the past decade, if anybody actually is doing the kind of stuff that you and so many others have talked about for decades, it's actually been the Trump people. They understood the anger and the sense of hopelessness. Out there. And they spoke to. Absolutely disingenuous. Not a bit of sincerity in it. He'll fuck you over in a minute, you know, he'll shit on you and charge you for a fork to eat it. But yes, they understood. People were pissed off and they were angry at the state and at the corporate world and everything else. And people on the left and not the left, the liberals and Democrats were put in the position of defending this system that everybody knew was corrupt and rotted down to its very beams. And so here we are. Yeah. And I know you've been on the front lines. Both of you have been on frontlines way more than I ever have. I don't know how to talk to people about this, because Trump, in a sense, they're not wrong. When I talk to people here, they're not wrong.

[Scott Crow]

No. But I, I hope that we embrace the class divide again, like in this stuff. And I, I'm a white dude saying this, but it's the truth. If we don't, we're just marginalizing another group of people who are angry and fucking have terrible ideas, and we're not.

[Scott Parkin]

Giving them good ideas. We're not. Like you're saying, embrace revolutionary imagination at all.

[Scott Crow]

Yeah. Like we're.

[Scott Parkin]

The strategy from the Democrats right now is just a roll over and play dead until the moment passes.

[Scott Crow]

That's always been there as far as I've been paying attention to politics. That's what they've always done. Wait till the storm is over, then we'll come back. I'm like, you guys never come back. You come back less and less every time.

[Bob Bozanko]

I've always been taken with that motto from Paris in 1968, be realistic, demand the impossible.

[Scott Crow]

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that we're culturally, that we are just that we have just lost imagination. We just fell into the thing like, bad shit's gonna happen, and we gave into it. And I think that's buying into capitalist narrative and tech, bro. Narrative, The AI disaster, the fucking political disaster, the. All the disasters. But I'm just like, but there's good pockets everywhere. And there's gonna be more and more pockets of the things. And if I could just spin off for half a second, I actually have a whole idea about the rural strategy, about getting back to rural areas. Let's get the fuck out of the cities. Not build communes and hippie shit like in the 60s and 70s, but maybe build some of those too. But go into areas where those people are and make it relevant to them. Do this shit in areas where it's difficult. Not in the Bay Area where it's fun and easy or fucking Houston, Texas or Austin, Texas or something, but fucking in the place where it's hard and dirty and they. And you're an outsider until you fucking prove yourself to them. Like we, we abandoned rural people a long time ago and this is spinning off the mutual aid stuff a little bit. But I think we could build liberatory mutual aid projects in dying town after town. Like I drive through them in Texas. They're dead everywhere. 80% of the people live in the three major cities in Texas and the rest of the towns are dying. But if you came in there in that small town of 1200 people and started doing things that mattered, my gosh, how much influence would you have? Because you're actually directly impacting somebody's life for real, where they can see it. You're not antifa. Trans. Something crazy they can't understand. They can actually understand that because you're talking to them like a real person. I think that one of the things.

[Scott Parkin]

I've encountered within the nonprofit industrial complex, which is like very rooted in like coastal parts of the country, right. California, Bay Area, D.C. new York, things like that, is that I even for like I. I've also been part of left projects, left organizing projects in rural, white, rural parts of conservative Trump loving parts of the country and then been derided or not me personally, but I've seen people working in those areas derided by coastal leagues, like making fun of them. Oh, let's. It's a little bit. Bob and I talk about this a lot too. It's like the fuck around find out thing going on right now for rural parts of the country that are losing.

[Bob Bozanko]

Yeah, you voted for Trump. You deserve whatever you get like that.

[Scott Parkin]

I've encountered that a long time before Trump ever even came in about like coastal elites making fun of people in all my life.

[Scott Crow]

You grew up in Texas, man. We both did. We know. We didn't know.

[Scott Parkin]

Yeah, exactly. I think we're getting towards time. I have one other question. Probably have ended other interviews with you this question, but you've named your record label Emergency Hearts. It's a sort of theme with you. Could you actually talk about emergency Hearts just from. And then how you felt like your emergency heart was really activated when you decided to go. I also want to bring it back to Anniversary just in just how you felt like your emergency heart was activated when you decided to go to New Orleans.

[Scott Crow]

Sure. The emergency hearts is just an idea that I banter about basically. It's when your heart kicks into action with a lot of passion and compassion to do something. When you see a wrong and you're like, I am motivated. I feel that I want to do something. That is your emergency heart. When you're driven by passion to create art or any. Or anything, whatever that is your emergency heart kicking in. And it's a great kickstarter for things. And to me, it's this beautiful kind of heart. Like, it comes with care and compassion for taking care of things that need to be addressed, whatever that is, or because you feel like you need to do that. And so from that, I just have developed an idea, a set of ideas around it. And my emergency heart is what got me into activism. It drove my passion and compassion to make the world a better place. And then, specifically when Katrina happened, my emergency heart exploded because the need was so great. And I. And that's what I saw happening all over the country. It's like tens of thousands of people trying to come in because their emergency hearts are beating with this love and passion and compassion and empathy to do something for the rest of the world. Outside of the things, there's no reward in it, except the reward is that you're doing it together. There's no. It's just the start. You can't live on your emergency heart. But it is a great kickstarter.

[Bob Bozanko]

We saw that in Covid. We're seeing it right now. And I want to end on that, too. But the level of fear is, because you mentioned earlier, is this the worst since the Civil War? And I think you're right. I've never lived through anything like this. And even if you study the Great Depression, it wasn't like this. The level of fear is unlike anything I've seen before. And so what you just mentioned is, I think, is really critical. And there are people who are just ignoring that fear and going out and they're in the streets. And so I think the kind of.

[Scott Crow]

Stuff you've done, I keep going back.

[Bob Bozanko]

When Black Flags and Windmills came out. I assigned it in my classes. And you came to campus and you spoke to my classes. And I'm not just saying this to kiss your butt, but I think it's as good a response as I've ever had to something like that. We've read Chomsky, and you name it, everybody but the students just were captivated by that. And to a large degree, I think it's because they didn't understand you could do something like this in America, which is foreign to us, that people are out there in these situations, and they're taking kind of power and control into their own hands. They're fighting the cops and they're feeding people and all this kind of stuff. And I really appreciate that. I appreciate everything you've done over the years. And it's always great talking with you, and unfortunately, it's never over. We're always talking about the same stuff, and lately every time we talk, it's a little bit worse. But if you're out there and you want to read just a fantastic book, not just a memoir of this particular occasion, but how to Organize, I would. Black Flags and Windmills is as good as anything up there. It's really, really crucial to what we're doing.

[Scott Crow]

Thank you.

[Bob Bozanko]

I really do appreciate. I met you before Katrina when we were doing all of us. I think we're doing, like, antique corporate globalization kind of stuff.

[Scott Crow]

Yep. Yeah, we're doing.

[Bob Bozanko]

I forget, but we all met in.

[Scott Parkin]

30 South Earth first.

[Scott Crow]

Yeah, it was.

[Bob Bozanko]

I don't know, it may have still been the 20th century when we met. Right?

[Scott Parkin]

Yeah.

[Scott Crow]

The battle days. I could say one, one last thing. Unless you got. Scott, you wanted this? No, I was gonna do the rap. Listen, we know that, like, everybody. I'll leave you with this. Everybody knows shit's bad, but if it's bad, then we. There's a few options. We have to do nothing and hide our head in the sand or to stand up and fight. The future is wide open. You can do. We can do anything if we put our fucking real imagination, not some fucking bullshit imagination. Put your imagination to it. Like, how do we mechanize and make this thing go fight these fuckers, but also build towards the future. What I'm saying is that we're standing on the edge of potential at every moment. So how's it going to look for all of us?

[Scott Parkin]

I think we should.

[Scott Crow]

We're going to leave it there because.

[Scott Parkin]

I think that's a great way to close. Folks. We've been talking with our homie, our dear homie, Scott Crow, author of Black Flags and Windmills, producer of Immortal Emergency Hearts, co founder of the Common Ground Relief. And if you like what you're hearing, please check us out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Bluesky. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit that subscribe button. If you're listening to us on an audio platform, give us a rate and review. And if you really like us, go to greenredpodcast.org and become hit the support button. Or go to patreon and patreon.com Green Red podcast and give a lot of love to the Green and Red Podcast. Much love to you, Scott. Thanks for joining us.

[Scott Crow]

Thank you, guys. Love y'.

[Bob Bozanko]

All.

[Scott Crow]

It's such a good conversation. Thank y' all for having me again. Yeah, totally.

[Scott Parkin]

Always. And everybody else out there, make trouble and misbehave, and we'll talk to you again soon.