Concerned w/ takes on defunding the police that suggest "fund social services instead." Public welfare programs - as they exist in the US today - are an apparatus of social control. They punish the poor for being poor, extract money fr struggling communities & criminalize poverty As I wrote in #AutomatingInequality: "The culture of policing wears many uniforms. And the state doesn’t require a cop to kill a person." Please don't suggest moving billions to support social service departments in the absence of input/control of the welfare rights movement.

Report fr @Alston_UNSR on the digital welfare state: "There is a grave risk of stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia....Big Tech operates in an almost human rights free-zone, and...is designing...significant parts of the dig welfare state." bit.ly/2IWkvet @Alston_UNSR (1/2) In the ‘digital welfare state’ "systems of social protection and assistance are increasingly driven by digital data and technologies that are used to automate, predict, identify, surveil, detect, target and punish."

"The United States remains the most unequal society in the developed world.” I know I'm late, but spending #July4th reading UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston's (@Alston_UNSR) scathing report on extreme poverty in the USA. Expect updates. undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/AD… "The policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship.” (Alston 2018: II. 5.)