MONDAY, JUN 30, 2014 02:10 PM EDT

GOP losing women again: Hopelessly backwards contraception politics make comeback

The new Hobby Lobby ruling sets up another political fight over contraception, which Republicans always lose

SIMON MALOY

TOPICS: REPUBLICAN PARTY, SUPREME COURT, HOBBY LOBBY, CONTRACEPTION, REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS,REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH CARE, WOMEN'S HEALTH, JOHN BOEHNER, MITCH MCCONNELL, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE, ERICK ERICKSON, RICK SANTORUM, MIKE HUCKABEE, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, SAMUEL ALITO, EDITOR'S PICKS, POLITICS NEWS

Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee (Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

The Supreme Court’s ruling today in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which said that employers with religious objections cannot be impelled to pay for contraceptive coverage for its employees, has reignited one of the more lopsided political fights of the current era: the War on Contraception. Given the gusto with which Republicans and conservatives dive into political fights surrounding contraception, the casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that the issue has been a winner for them in the past. The precise opposite is true. It’s toxic for the GOP.

But they keep going back, again and again, owing to the conservative base’s ideological rigidity and the party’ overriding animosity towards the Affordable Care Act.

The top officials and organs of the Republican Party all put out statements this morning celebrating the Hobby Lobby ruling and taking shots at the Obama administration. The Republican National Committee cast the decision as a victory for “religious freedom” over government intrusion. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said “the Obama administration cannot trample on the religious freedoms that Americans hold dear.” And Speaker John Boehner, who is currently planning to sue the administration for government overreach, said the decision is “another defeat for an administration that has repeatedly crossed constitutional lines in pursuit of its Big Government objectives.”

The real driving force behind these fights is the conservative sexual morality that casts contraception as an enabler of sinful licentiousness. Professional Republicans try to disguise this by reframing the fight as one of religious liberty or government tyranny, but activists and pundits who don’t have to care what other people think of them are far less guarded and happily give away the game.

Salon’s Jim Newell points out that over the last four years, ever since the Tea Party ascendance, the Republican Party’s performance with unmarried women has been increasingly terrible. It’s a problem that Republicans themselves are sensitive to – RNC chair Reince Priebus said in Marchthat “we basically have a single-women problem under 35-ish.” Part of the reason they have this problem is that they keep starting fights over contraception, and they keep losing.

Back January 2012, Republicans and conservatives started an election-year fight over Obamacare’s contraception mandate, calling it a threat to religious liberty and government tyranny – the same sorts of statements we’re hearing today. The problem they faced then is the same problem they have now: the public, by and large, approves of access to contraception andtends to view it more as a women’s health issue than a question of religious liberty. This left them wide open to Democratic “War on Women” attacks, and Republicans, wary of alienating voters ahead of the election, quietly backed off.

There’s not a whole lot to lead one to believe the issue will be any better for Republicans this time around. Young, unmarried women still generally hate the GOP, and the reemergence of the contraception fight could get them politically reengaged ahead of the midterms. And there’s always a tone-deaf Republican waiting in the wings to say something boneheaded and turn himself into a mascot of Republican antagonism towards women (think Mike Huckabee and “Uncle Sugar”).

The big difference is that now the Republicans have a Supreme Court opinion to wave around in defense of their anachronistic take on the politics of contraception, though I suspect Sam Alito’s take on reproductive health won’t be any more palatable than Rick Santorum’s.

3 Lies About Birth Control That Were Just Reinforced By The Hobby Lobby Ruling

BY TARA CULP-RESSLER ON JUNE 30, 2014 AT 2:49 PM

"3 Lies About Birth Control That Were Just Reinforced By The Hobby Lobby Ruling"

  

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A protester outside of the Supreme Court on Monday

CREDIT: THINKPROGRESS

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of two for-profit businesses that object to covering certain types of birth control, determining that family-owned companies should be able to seek exemptions to Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate based on their owners’ religious beliefs. The reproductive rights community is condemning the decision for setting a dangerous precedent for women’s health care.

Indeed, by siding with Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties, the country’s highest court effectively validated some of the plaintiffs’ problematic arguments about contraception. Monday’s ruling affirmed three claims about birth control that simply aren’t true:

1. Birth control is the same thing as abortion.

The entire legal challenge against the Obama administration was based on thefundamental lie that certain types of FDA-approved contraception can end a pregnancy. The plaintiffs in this suit took the unscientific stance that pregnancy begins at fertilization and certain types of contraception, like the morning after pill and IUDs, are “abortion-inducing” because they prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg. But according to thelegal definition of pregnancy, a woman is not actually considered to be pregnant until a fertilized egg is implanted in her uterine lining — so anything that inhibits ovulation, fertilization, or implantation is defined as birth control. And on top of that, there’s evidence that those types of contraception don’t actually prevent implantation in the first place.

The justices who joined the Court’s 5-4 opinion didn’t appear to be concerned about scientific evidence, however. Monday’s decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito, simply allows the business owners to follow their own definition of abortion. “The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients,” he writes. “If the owners comply with the HHS mandate, they believe they will be facilitating abortions.”

Without challenging the plaintiffs’ definition of what constitutes an abortion or an abortion-inducing drug, the Supreme Court has essentially allowed unscientific beliefs about birth control to carry the weight of the law.

2. Birth control should be separated from other types of medical services.

Hobby Lobby opponents have been concerned about the case’s implication for services beyond contraception, pointing out that other companies might cite their religious beliefs to refuse coverage for vaccinations, blood transfusions, or services for transgender individuals. The Court briefly attempted to quell those concerns, specifying that Monday’s decision “concerns only the contraceptive mandate” and shouldn’t be interpreted to apply to other services like vaccines.

That’s perhaps well-intentioned, but it brings up questions about what exactly makes birth control different from those other health services. Why should it be singled out? Why do female employees need a workaround to access their reproductive health care? Why are employers allowed to refuse coverage for services that solely affect women, but not other medical interventions that serve the public good, like vaccinations?

“It is completely inappropriate and unacceptable for women to be expected to look to some special out of the usual way of accommodating what is a core and basic health care need,” Marcia Greenberg, the co-president at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement provided to Vox regarding the Hobby Lobby decision.

This artificial divide already exists between abortion services and the rest of women’s health care, and it’s something that has effectively undermined women’s access to abortion. Segregating birth control in this way threatens to have similar consequences for the 99 percent of U.S. women who use contraception at some point in their lives.

3. It’s easier for the government to pay for people’s birth control so that companies don’t have to.

In his opinion, Alito suggests that the government could simply “assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives to women unable to obtain coverage due to their employers’ religious objections.” That may sound like a reasonable compromise. But in the context of our current insurance system, it doesn’t necessarily make much sense.

First of all, as Amanda Marcotte argues in RH Reality Check, separating out everyone’s birth control coverage from the rest of their private insurance plans actually could make things much more complicated within our employer-sponsored insurance model. Insurers would need to implement new billing processes. Women may need to make a special “contraception only” trip to the doctor to get their government-funded prescriptions filled. The myth that birth control is somehow different from the rest of women’s health care would become even further entrenched.

And, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg writes in her dissent to Monday’s opinion, the government’s safety net system for affordable contraception can’t necessarily accommodate more women. The Title X program is currently the publicly-funded family planning program that’s supposed to help low-income women afford their reproductive health care. But it’s been plagued with rounds of budget cuts in states across the country — often led by Republican lawmakers who oppose the idea of taxpayer funded birth control — and it’s struggling to provide care for all the women who need help. As a result, unintended pregnancies have become increasingly concentrated among poor women who lack access to birth control.

JUNE 30, 2014

A VERY BAD RULING ON HOBBY LOBBY

POSTED BY AMY DAVIDSON

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“The Court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a strong dissent from a 5-4 ruling, issued by the Supreme Court on Monday, in favor of Hobby Lobby, a for-profit corporation that runs a chain of craft stores and wanted an exemption from part of the Affordable Care Act because it was, its owners said, against their religion. In particular, the owners were unwilling to pay for coverage for certain contraceptives. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that he had “no trouble” concluding that this sort of insurance coverage “substantially burdened” the owners of Hobby Lobby—burdened them morally, if not financially. The government, he wrote, needed to find another way; Hobby Lobby could ignore the law.

Hobby Lobby’s defenders have emphasized that this is a very particular case: the Greens, the company’s owners, are devout, and they are only objecting to four contraceptives. Alito noted that churches and other religious non-profits already have an exemption from this aspect of Obamacare; he figured there were ways for the government to make sure the women working for Hobby Lobby got contraception without making the company pay. What could be the broader harm in letting these pious people off the hook?

To start with, who else is off the hook, or will be? What other companies can ignore which other laws on what real or dreamed-up religious grounds? That is something the majority decision in Hobby Lobby leaves shockingly undefined. Ginsburg called it “a decision of startling breadth,” one that could allow for-profit corporations to “opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.” Alito, in his opinion, denies this; so does Anthony Kennedy, in a concurrence. But neither does so persuasively: their reassurance about the protections against what Ginsburg calls “the havoc the Court’s judgment can introduce” come down to, in Alito’s case, shrugs about how nothing alarming has shown up on the Court’s docket yet and, in Kennedy’s, the belief that everyone will be sensible about this. But if there hasn’t been a wave of cases there also hasn’t been a precedent like this—and now there is. And good sense has never been much of a reliable restraint. This suggests that the majority is either being disingenuous about how broad its ruling is or is blind to its own logic. As Ginsburg notes, religious objections to, say, vaccines are neither as theoretical nor as easily put aside as the majority pretends. Nor is science much of a constraint. Hobby Lobby is really asserting two religious beliefs: that abortion is immoral and that the kinds of contraception it doesn’t want to pay for are, in fact, a form of abortion, even though the scientific evidence says they are not. The majority defers to both of these beliefs.

Can a for-profit corporation even have religious beliefs—can it be a person acting out of sacred conviction, in the sense of either the First Amendment or the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (a law Hobby Lobby cites)? Alito doesn’t see why not; it doesn’t seem fair to him that the owners of a business should have to forgo either identifying its religious rights with their own “or the benefits, available to their competitors, of operating as corporations.” But corporations create a legal separation between owners and businesses that protects them in many ways; why is the upside a presumptive right and not any downside? The decision is limited to “closely held” corporations, that is, ones for which five or fewer owners control more than fifty per cent of the stock, but that is not much of a limit; as Ginsburg writes, “closely held” is not synonymous with “small.” Cargill is closely held, and it “takes in more than $136 billion in revenues and employs some 140,000 persons.” And anyway, Alito writes, there is nothing here that precludes a publicly held company, of any size, from bringing a suit making the exact same claim: since Hobby Lobby and another company involved in the case, Conestoga, are not in that category, the Court didn’t make a judgment on them either way. That may be next.

Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—whose Constitutionality, frankly, seems dubious if it means what Alito says it does—the government has to show that it has a compelling interest in the law despite the burden on the religious, and find the “least intrusive means“ to accommodate believers. Alito says that this test would leave laws against racial discrimination in employment in place, even if someone claimed a religious objection (but, notably, does not say the same about discrimination based on sexual orientation). In the case of contraception, though, it strikes Alito as an easy thing to give for-profit companies the same option that religious non-profits have, which involves insurance companies paying for the coverage themselves. The idea is that access to contraception will mean that women are pregnant less often and generally healthier, so it won’t really cost the insurance companies anything. (The potential hall of mirrors: an insurance company with religious objections.)

But, tellingly, Alito would have given Hobby Lobby what it wanted even if that option didn’t exist. The “most straightforward,“ least intrusive means for accommodating companies like Hobby Lobby, as he sees it, would be for the government to pay. There is plenty of dispute over how much this would cost: "It seems likely, however, that the cost of providing the forms of contraceptives at issue in these cases (if not all FDA-approved contraceptives) would be minor when compared with the overall cost of ACA,“ Alito writes. With that note of cheerful sourness, one sees another factor at work here: lingering conservative anger with Obamacare.

Ginsburg notes that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act specifies that there has to be a substantial burden on a person’s religious freedom for this discussion to even begin, not just any one. Ginsburg writes:

It is doubtful that Congress, when it specified that burdens must be “substantia[l],” had in mind a linkage thus interrupted by independent decisionmakers (the woman and her health counselor) standing between the challenged government action and the religious exercise claimed to be infringed. Any decision to use contraceptives made by a woman covered under Hobby Lobby’s or Conestoga’s plan will not be propelled by the Government, it will be the woman’s autonomous choice, informed by the physician she consults.

Here is where one hears women’s voices, but, as far as the majority is concerned, it is as if they come from another distant room. Alito sees all the substance in how put-upon the owners of corporations feel. In oral arguments, Kennedy openly worried that companies would somehow be mixed up with abortion, and one suspects that his sense that abortion is a distinctly volatile, morally charged subject was part of why he acquiesced here, and why seems to believe, against all reason, that this decision is narrow. Women’s health is treated as something troublesome—less like other kinds of health care, which a company should be asked to pay for, than as a burden for those who have to contemplate it. That is bad enough. But the Hobby Lobby decision is even worse.

Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP.

The 8 Best Lines From Ginsburg's Dissent on the Hobby Lobby Contraception Decision

—By Dana Liebelson

| Mon Jun. 30, 2014 11:32 AM EDT

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Charlie Neuman/ZUMA

On Monday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg penned a blistering dissent to the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling that the government can't require certain employers to provide insurance coverage for methods of birth control and emergency contraception that conflict with their religious beliefs. Ginsburg wrote that her five male colleagues, "in a decision of startling breadth," would allow corporations to opt out of almost any law that they find "incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs."

Read more: In Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court chooses religion over science Jay Mallin/ZUMA

Here are seven more key quotes from Ginsburg's dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby:

• "The exemption sought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would…deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs access to contraceptive coverage"
• "Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community."
• "Any decision to use contraceptives made by a woman covered under Hobby Lobby's or Conestoga's plan will not be propelled by the Government, it will be the woman's autonomous choice, informed by the physician she consults."
• "It bears note in this regard that the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage."
• "Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah's Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations[?]…Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today's decision."
• "Approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be 'perceived as favoring one religion over another,' the very 'risk the [Constitution's] Establishment Clause was designed to preclude."
• "The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield."

You can read the full dissent here. (It starts on page 60.)

Job Hunters - Season 2 Episode 1: Aftermath

Red tagged and homeless

Red tagged and homeless by Michael Moore, Morgan Hill Times August 5th, 2011

The Velasquez family has lived in a van the last two weeks after the home they rented was "red-tagged" for unsafe building code violations. The Morgan Hill family of six, which includes four boys age 10 to 18, is seeking any assistance they can find in the local high-priced rental market. They have already sold almost all their possessions they don't need, exhausted the assistance they were eligible for through the city, and now rely on the kindness of relatives and friends to gain just a temporary roof over their heads. Earlier this week a hand-written sign on a piece of brown cardboard, tacked to a tree in the Church Street home's front yard read, "Thanks to the city of Morgan Hill we are homeless." On Wednesday the family, who has lived in the home about two years, tried to sell the last of their belongings in the latest of a series of recent moving sales. This time everything, including tools, an outdoor portable grill, clothing, furniture and two small television sets, was going for $1. Father Antonio Velasquez, 50, said he has already sold all his tools in an effort to raise money for a new place. They have nowhere to shower or cook. They have eaten at Togo's, where both parents work, almost daily since they were forced to move into their mini-van in the backyard of the property near the intersection of San Pedro Avenue. "I don't know what to do," said mother Evelyn Velasquez, 47. "I have to go look for a place, but the registration on my van is expired. My kids are traumatized." Antonio Velasquez added it's essential they find a place before school starts for the sake of the four boys who attend Morgan Hill Unified schools. The "red tag" notice on the home's front window - posted July 21 by the city's building division staff - lists a number of hazards making it unsafe to live in. "Unsanitary conditions" including a sewer leak, an illegal structural addition with substandard foundation and broken windows were listed as the reasons for the red tag. About "two or three times a year" a building in Morgan Hill is red-tagged for unsafe or unhealthy conditions, City Manager Ed Tewes said. It's part of the city's building code, and a red tag means the building is unsafe to occupy until the violations are remedied. "A red tag means there are serious public health or life safety matters," Tewes said, though he declined to comment on the specific facts of the Church Street case because it is still open. The property owner is responsible for remediation, which can consist of one of three options - make repairs, fence off the unsafe structure or demolish it, said Tewes. The property owner has not yet decided how she will correct the violations. Though the Velasquez' said they were given "30 minutes" to get their belongings out of the home when it was red-tagged, Tewes said the notice was preceded by a "yellow tag" for about two weeks. Per the city's building code, a yellow tag serves as a kind of warning, allowing residents to occupy the home only to remove their possessions. The Velasquez' tried to do that. They also received some help from the city, which offers emergency housing assistance for residents in such situations. That includes hotel vouchers, housing counseling and other services through Project Sentinel, Tewes said. The Velasquez' said they received a hotel voucher for only one night from the city. They can't afford to stay at area motels, which require them to rent at least two rooms because of their numbers. They have applied for rental units at apartment complexes, but those require an application fee of about $30, which adds up after multiple applications, Antonio Velasquez said. He tried to sleep in a tent in the home's front yard the first two nights they were homeless, but it quickly became occupied by spiders. They have also tried to reach out to churches in south Santa Clara County, but they are often met with skepticism and Gilroy service agencies are not responsive to Morgan Hill residents, said Evelyn Velasquez, who is a manager at Togo's in Vineyard Town Center. Wednesday night her sister-in-law put the family up at a hotel. The owner of the property, Lena Le, said the Velasquez' caused the building code violations. She said she has asked them to leave previously, but not through formal legal means. "They made a mess out of my house," Le said. "I don't know what to do. Right now we are working with some lawyers to see what we can do." She added that the tenants allowed more people to live on the property than she permitted. The tenants dispute those claims. Evelyn Velasquez said the backyard was cleaner Wednesday than when the family moved in two years ago, and the property doesn't have enough room to house anyone else. "I have four boys, and I know I shouldn't have anybody else living here. There's only one bathroom so it would be really crowded. Would I have people take a number?" she laughed. Antonio Velasquez added that his brother-in-law fixed the plumbing problems at the house, but the landlord refused to reimburse the tenant for the repairs. The family has not paid this month's $1,150 rent, and by California law they might have gotten away without paying rent as soon as the building code violations became apparent. When a rental housing structure is red-tagged and the property owner is at fault for the violations, the landlord is responsible for making repairs, according to California Apartment Association community affairs director Kirsten Carr. The tenant does not have to pay rent until the violations are corrected, Carr added. "A landlord has the responsibility to make sure a property or home is safe for people to live there, and it complies with all codes," Carr said. However, she added, many cases end up in dispute between the renter and landlord, and the CAA encourages mediation in such situations. Tenants left homeless can also seek relocation assistance from the Housing Industry Foundation, Carr said. In the meantime, the family is upset as they try to avoid getting mired in a circle of blame. Wednesday afternoon, as he was moving some of the family's things into the van on their way to the evening's motel room, Antonio Velasquez pointed to a corner of the back yard, tucked against the fence and equipped with a lawn chair with a sheet hanging above it for shade. "Some days all I can do is sit there and think, 'What am I going to do?'" Velasquez said.

Apartheid In Detroit: Water For Corporations, Not For People

ORGANIZE! CORPORATISM, DETROIT, WATER 
By Carl Gibson, www.occupy.com
June 20th, 2014

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Bill and Hillary Clinton were up to their ears in more than $10 million worth of legal debt at the end of Clinton’s tenure as president. Donald Trump was bailed out of four bankruptcies. But Detroit residents are having a basic human right – the access to water – cancelled for being late on bills of $150.

In the spring, Detroit’s Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr ordered water shutoffs for 150,000 Detroit residents late on their bills. Orr is an unelected bureaucrat accountable only to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who appointed Orr and several other “emergency managers” in largely poor, black communities like Detroit, Benton Harbor, Flint, and Highland Park, to make all financial decisions on behalf of local elected governments.

Orr’s plan will shut off water for 1,500 to 3,000 Detroit residents each week. Neither Orr nor Homrich, the contracting company Orr hired to shut off residents’ water, answered calls for interview requests.

Detroit citizens have been protesting the decision on the basis that water is a human right that cannot be denied to families who need it for cooking, bathing and flushing toilets. Many residents facing water shutoffs are currently on monthly payment plans with the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), paying upwards of $160 per month as water rates continue to rise, and were given no prior notice that their water was about to be cut off. Last week, the Detroit City Council held a public hearing to discuss a proposed 4 percent hike in water rates.

“The families I’ve talked to in my neighborhood and others around the city are confused about why they’re being hit (in this way),” community activist Russ Bellant told the Michigan Citizen. “Some knew they were behind, but thought they’d have time to pay it. These are people who mow the lawn on the vacant lots next door (to them).”

As the Michigan Citizen reported, residents with delinquent water bills are losing their water while prominent Detroit corporations with much larger delinquent water bills are being left alone. The Palmer Park Golf Club owes $200,000. Joe Louis Arena, home of the Detroit Red Wings, owes DWSD $80,000. Ford Field owes $55,000. Kevyn Orr is arguing that the shutoffs are necessary to pay for the DWSD infrastructure – yet when Detroit raised $1 billion in bonds to pay for new infrastructure, $537 million of it went to banks like JPMorgan Chase, UBS and Morgan Stanley to pay off interest instead.

Community activists are placing blame on the structural, institutionalized poverty in Detroit that forces the people to foot the bill for corporate mismanagement. Detroit’s bankruptcy and urban blight is a direct result of the housing bubble that burst, putting over 60,000 homes in foreclosure and rendering thousands of families homeless.

Dan Gilbert, the billionaire owner of Quicken Loans who is financing much of the gentrified development of downtown Detroit, has been particularly blamed for his company’s role in exacerbating the foreclosure crisis through its intimidation of homeowners, pressuring them into risky subprime lending schemes.

“Instead of going after the corporate institutions who owe millions, they’d rather turn off the water for poor people,” said Demeeko Williams, an organizer with Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management.

To fight back, Williams and other community activist groups like Moratorium NOW! and the Detroit After Party are teaming up to create the Detroit Water Brigade, a mutual aid effort aimed at providing residents with water and stopping water shutoffs with nonviolent direct action. The Detroit Water Brigade has set up a bridal registry on Amazon.com inviting those interested to help purchase necessary supplies like water coolers, cases of bottled water, heavy-duty contractor bags, and orange safety vests.

Some of the more radical direct actions being promoted by the Detroit Water Brigade include distributing flyers instructing people on how to turn their own water back on after it’s been shut off, and how to pre-emptively stop contractors from shutting water for their home. The flyer reads:

“Step 1: If your water is off, have the neighborhood water person or a friend (not you) obtain a water key and turn it back on 1st. (If you expect your water to be turned off, go to step 2.)

“Step 2: Purchase ready mix cement from the hardware [store].

“Step 3: Fill lockbox pipe 3/4ths full with dry cement mix.

“Step 4: Add water to top off. Don’t use rocks because rocks can be sucked out.”

The Detroit Water Brigade is also meeting regularly to train interested residents in nonviolent civil disobedience. Residents are planning to form human chains putting themselves between water lockboxes and contractors hired to shut off water. The water brigade is counting on Detroit’s understaffed police department to not have the resources to arrest and jail everyone participating in the water shutoff demonstrations.

In response to sustained protests from Detroit residents, the DWSD has removed the “Water Shut Off” decals from its trucks.