Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every We're here to take care. It's going well. And I want to thank you for coming out. Thank you, everybody. What a crowd. What a turn out. I will tell you, this is historic. It's epic what happened, but you know what?

It happened in Texas, and Texas can handle anything.

Trump famously bragged about his crowd size while touring disaster struck Houston and

gave himself an A-plus for the government's response to Hurricane Harvey.

But when I was in Houston one month after the historic storm,

I saw entire neighborhoods where people were living in gutted out, moldy homes.

Residents who I spoke to told me that they were denied all aid,

despite Congress authorizing $15 billion for Harvey victims.

So how is the void filled when these relief institutions are clearly failing millions of Texans

with volunteers, thousands of them, who spontaneously came to help?

To learn more, I sat down with Scott Crow, anarchist co-founder of the Common Ground Collective.

Let's talk about Hurricane Harvey. We're in Houston right now.

What are some of the actions that decentralized groups have done with disaster relief

here in the aftermath of the hurricane?

Well, basically rebuilding civil society from the search and rescue in the immediate aftermath,

even getting ready before that, and then moving to the rebuilding phases.

So you had a disaster response and then you moved to the rebuilding.

So people have been at all levels.

They've been running clinics, they've been doing food distribution, the basic things to help

people get a leg back up again.

And then additionally, one of the things they've been doing is they've been using the solidarity networks

that have been built around the country after Hurricane Katrina.

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