THE INTERNING OF AMERICA’S HOMELESS
August 17, 2025
Will we be silent about our neighbors being removed from our communities?
Yes, that time I have been warning of since 1985 has arrived: prison camps for the homeless. Nearly four decades of demonizing the homeless as sub human drug addicted mentally ill “useless eaters” has provided the justification needed to intern those who cannot afford housing.
Thankfully many Americans have compassion for their homeless neighbors. Many of us have family on the streets or are struggling to keep housed and appreciate the difficulties tens of thousands of us are experiencing.
My wife and I owned a graphic design company in Kenmore Square. We designed ads and publications for companies in our neighborhood including the Boston Red Sox and local retail shops who were members of the local business association. The vice president of the Kenmore Association invited me to his stuffy second floor office to ask me to design another publication.
“Keith, the Association wants you to take a photo of that black guy that stands outside Captain Nemo’s Pizza and make a poster with a red circle with a line through it over his face like a no parking sign. The poster should say “Wanted out of Kenmore Square.”
I refused to make the poster, volunteered to share food behind Fenway Park before each game and suggested it would not be possible to drive the homeless from Kenmore Square since the crowds of Red Sox fans and college students made it the perfect place to panhandle. I also explained that “that black guy” was loved and had a name.
A few weeks later my wife Andrea called me over to her desk at our graphic design business to show me the Kenmore Association newsletter.
“Keith look at this.” pointing to page 2 of the October issue of the Kenmore News. The typewritten newsletter of the association mostly reported on the news of the Security and Maintenance Committee.
“The Security & Maintenance Committee encourages all KA Members to assume an active role in cleaning up Kenmore Square. In order to prevent the attraction of streetpeople (especially the “rough element”, new to Kenmore Square), the following guidelines were suggested at the breakfast meeting…
Please don’t give free food to these streetpeople.
Please lock all dumpsters. Unlocked dumpsters will be cited by the City inspectors and all infractions will be subject to fines. Open dumpsters attract streetpeople looking for collectibles and food.
Please refrain from throwing returnable cans and bottles in public trash receptacles. The streetpeople find Kenmore Square a profitable location for collecting on these cans and bottles.
Start calling the police if certain annoyances persist and keep a record of your calls (ie. date, time of day and response time).
We stopped what we had been doing and typed out a response to the business association.
“As members of the Kenmore Association we object to the dehumanizing statements against those living on our streets made by the Security & Maintenance Committee in the October newsletter.”
“These people are our neighbors, friends and family and deserve our compassion and support.”
“Dehumanizing people in this manor smacks of Hitler’s Germany. The association is showing a total disregard for people being people. We urge the Association to support efforts to help our neighbors instead of adopting policing to drive them out of the community.”
“There is no evidence that their presence is having any impact on business. We should celebrate the unique qualities of Kenmore Square that make it attractive instead of seeking to become a second Newbury Street.”
Sincerely,
Andrea and Keith McHenry
24 hour residents of Kenmore Square
We shared our life with our homeless friends. The most visible and lovable of our street friends was “that black guy” Mr Butch who could be found outside Captain Nimo’s Pizza with a blue electric guitar slung across his chest welcoming the streams of Boston Red Sox fans chugging through Kenmore Square. Harold Madison Jr could have been Jimi Hendrix’s double.
The war against America’s homeless had begun.
As the number of Americans who were not able to afford housing increased business districts and municipal governments started to enact laws deigned to remove the homeless from sight.
After eight years of Reagan’s trickle down economics the number of homeless Americans had grown to more than 750,000 people. Cities started to pass and enforce what they called “quality of life” laws designed to make it a crime to be unhoused citing the pseudo science of the Broken Windows Theory to justify their dehumanizing campaigns.
Demonizing the homeless took another ugly step after I had relocated to San Francisco. Mayor Dianne Feinstein held a press event in my Richmond District neighborhood praising the city’s homeless-proof Muni bus stops. Her replacement, former social worker Art Agnos continued her anti-homeless programs including arresting Food Not Bombs for sharing meals at the entrance to Golden Gate Park at the end of Haight Street.
But that was nothing when compared to Mayor Frank Jordan’s “Quality of Life Enforcement Matrix Program”. In the first months Jordan order the police to confiscate the shoes off of people living outside.
Jordan would brag that Rudy Giuliani had adopted his program to clear Manhattan of their homeless.
The next mayor of San Francisco continues the repression. Mayor Brown asks to borrow the Oakland Police Department night vision-equipped helicopter to locate homeless people illegally sleeping in Golden Gate, but Oakland refuses to help. Sweeps of the parks continues anyway and the quality of life enforcement continues with 23,871 tickets issued to people living on the streets in 1999. Brown orders the police to charge people with shopping carts with a felony.
When Gavin Newson was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors he initiated the ballot measure Care Not Cash which would change San Francisco’s General Assistance from $395 per month to just $59 per month but came with a guarantee of housing and food for the homeless. The promise of housing and food failed to materialize but the cuts in assistance was implemented.
When Gavin Newsom took the mayor’s office in 2004 he launched “Operation Outreach,” a special police unit that responds to 911 calls to rid the streets of the homeless, claiming he would be placing people in rehab or mental facilities, but with the lack of services people were just arrested or ticketed. Newsom claimed his program would eliminate the chronically homeless from San Francisco by 2014.
The cruel criminalization of the homeless got a new ally in 2016 when the billionaire co-founder of CIA In-Q-Tel funded Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, started the Cicero Institute. He provides model legislation to states banning “unauthorized street camping.” The Cicero Institute also provides model legislation on civil commitment of the homeless saying that “states should amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves”.
The Cicero Institute succeeded in getting states to pass their legislation. Their Safer Kentucky Act started to be enforced in July 2024. Anyone cited with the offense for the first time can be fined. Subsequent offenses are Kentucky Class B misdemeanors and can bring more fines or jail time. Under this law, if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is uncooperative they can shoot the homeless person under a stand-your-ground provision.
With Joe Lonsdale’s help Tennessee made it a felony to camp on most state-owned property. Having a felony conviction will make getting housing even more difficult.
In September 2022 Governor Gavin Newsom started the first of his Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Courts, opening a way to force the state’s homeless into involuntary mental health treatment.
Governor Newsom’s Proposition 1 passed in 2024 providing funding for facilities for those forced into state conservancy.
Two close homeless friends of mine were forced into civil commitment in 2023. Both were happy and no danger to themselves or others. All they required was enough money to afford an apartment.
The County of Santa Cruz removed one friend from a COVID hotel a week before everyone else was evicted in the Benchlands homeless camp. He was held in a psychiatric unit for months. Both of his cars were junked and he lost 30 years of crystals and drums he had in storage because he was blocked from paying for his units or his website, losing his life’s work. His once magical life was crushed.
My “rainbow family” friend was captured and forced into the mental facility and made to take psych drugs against her will. She died a couple of weeks after being released when she stopped taking the SSRIs.
On July 25, 2024, Newson signed the Executive Order N-1-24 calling on all state agencies to clear encampments. “With the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v Johnson, local governments now have the tools and authority to address dangerous encampments and help provide those residing in encampments with the resources they need.” He also told counties and cities who failed to clear homeless camps that the state would cut their funding.
Two months before Newsom signed his executive order the State awarded the City of Santa Cruz a $4 million “Encampment Resolution Grant” that provides two years of funding to remove the homeless from the streets around the Housing Matters homeless shelter. There is a claim that the grant will provide 55 people with a place in a tiny house or apartment. We will see.
The weekly sweeps scatter people to the woods and doorways until the police force them back to the relative safety of the camp outside the shelter.
In June 2025 San Jose, California passed a law making it illegal not to go into a shelter. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan stated, “Homelessness can’t be a choice” when pushing for his Responsibility to Shelter Initiative. Those refusing shelter three times will be arrested for trespassing on public land. The San José Spotlight points out that the county only has one shelter bed for every three unhoused people.
Trump continues the drive to criminalize those who cannot afford housing with his “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” executive order essentially plagiarizing Newsom’s 2024 anti-homeless executive order.
A month after signing his order he spotted several people living in pup tents as he traveled to play gulf in Virginia, writing on Truth Social platform, “The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capitol” ordering the unhoused residents to leave the US capitol or face eviction and vowed to use officers to make arrests.
Trump also federalized the District of Columbia’s police ordering them to enforce the anti-homeless laws passed by the liberal Democrats.
On August 12th White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt took questions about President Trump’s takeover of the Washington, D.C.police force and the Trump administration’s plan to remove homeless encampments in the city, responding that, “The Police Department, with the support of the new Federal agencies who have been surging on the street of the District of Columbia, are going to enforce the laws that are already on the books here in Washington DC. For far too long, these laws have been completely ignored in the homelessness problem, has ravaged the city. So D.C. Code 1307 and D.C. Municipal Regulation 24-100 give the Metropolitan Police Department the authority to take action when it comes to homeless encampments so homeless individuals will be given the option to leave their encampment to be taken to a homeless shelter, to be offered addiction or mental health services and if they refuse they will be susceptible to fines or to jai time. Again these are preexisting laws that are already on the books.”
The New York Post reported that, “In the past five months, U.S. Park Police have removed 70 homeless encampments, giving the people living in them the same options, she said. As of Tuesday, Leavitt said only two homeless encampments remained in district parks maintained by the National Park Service and would be removed this week.”
Associated Press reporter Meg Kinnard notes that “Trump said this week that homeless people will be moved far from the city in his crackdown on crime. But details of the plan to do so are unclear”.
The number of Americans facing homelessness is increasing as rents and the cost of food continue to rise, families face cuts in SNAP food stamps and other social safety nets. With the potential of tens of thousands more people being forced onto the streets US officials may believe they need to be prepared to deploy the National Guard across the country.
When we speak of the homeless people of Santa Cruz “being moved far from the city” there may already be a plan. Former Mayor Donna Meyers and former County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty were quietly proposing during their 2 by 2 meetings that people could be sent to the Camp Roberts California National Guard Base outside the tiny village of San Miguel in San Luis Obispo county.
Is this what Trump means, that America’s rapidly growing homeless population will be moved far from the city ?
War is a powerful way to justify the implementation of an authoritarian police state so why was Indivisible silent?
Consider this. Israel attacks Iran and Iran returns fire starting a world changing war. A war that could become a world war. A war that is likely to increase oil prices and increase economic suffering of the American people. A war where nuclear power stations are being bombed. A war started on Trump’s watch.
According to Indivisible, “Millions of Americans marched in over 2,000 events across all 50 states—protesting Donald Trump and his fascist administration,” as Tel Aviv and Tehran burned and dozens of children were being slaughtered in Gaza.
The NO KINGS DAY rallies could have mobilized all those “millions” they bragged had attended to take action against the most important event of that day which was the war against Iran. Every sign could have said NO WAR WITH IRAN – END THE GENOCIDE but there is a reason those signs were few and far between if at all.
This should clue you into the main goal of Indivisible and its billionaire funders who dumped millions into this project and that is to control the opposition to Trump and silence the threat of an anti-war movement in the United States. It’s no accident that there are always Ukrainian flags at Indivisible events since some of the main funders of Indivisible like the Open Society Foundation also donated hundreds of millions to western NGOs to build support for the 2014 coup.
Their secondary goal is to build support for the Democratic Party. Democratic political leaders are crowing about how successful the NO KINGS DAY campaign rallies were. “The Democrats sure came out today” one of the faithful Tweeted in her celebration of NO KINGS DAY.
As hypersonic missiles rained down on Israel and F-35s were bombing oil refineries in Iran Senator Chuck Schumer posted “I was so proud to be in New York City today supporting Americans making their voice heard at No Kings protests and pushing back on Donald Trump’s authoritarian push to rig the economy for his billionaire buddies.” We should push back on the slide into fascism. But it’s obvious that war is a powerful way to justify an authoritarian police state. Not a word about the horrific war between Israel and Iran.
During the first years of Indivisible their solution to the “fascism” of Trump was to ask everyone to vote for Hillary Clinton. She promised during the campaign that, “I want the Iranians to know that if I am the president, we will attack Iran.” Their solution to the “fascism” of Trump is to ask their supporters to vote for Biden and before long they will be asking us to vote for what ever genocidal warmongers the Democrats place before us.In April, Indivisible held campaign rallies called HANDS OFF which included the poster Hands Off NATO, a reference to the fear that Trump might keep his promise to end the regime change war against Russia. This should have been a red flag to anyone who opposes war.
Trump supporters posted warnings of nationwide riots using Indivisible’s NO KINGS DAY map of boomer campaign rallies as proof. While MAGA claims that the tens of thousands who attended the NO KINGS DAY campaign rallies were paid by George Soros to riot this is clearly not the case.
The people who went did so willingly, horrified by Trump. I too am horrified by the Trump administration. It angers me that the Democrats would use my participation and the participation of other anti-war activists to claim they have mass support for their pro-war, pro-genocide candidates. I can’t let my good name be used to endorse their agenda of slaughter.
While George Soros didn’t pay people to participate in the rallies, his foundation did provide millions to help promote the campaign. A financial statement for just one of Indivisible’s three organizations states that they had raised nine million dollars in 2024. The website opensocietyfoundations.org/grants lists the grants to one branch of Indivisible by the Open Society Foundation. Other billionaires also pitched in to support the NO KINGS DAY events. Other oligarchs like Walmart heiress Christy Walton promoted a planned nationwide protest against President Trump. She paid for a full-page advertisement promoting the Democratic campaign rallies in the New York Times on Sunday.
The roots of this astroturf organization start with two former Democratic Congressional aides Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin who founded the Indivisible Project and its affiliated organizations in 2016. They still run the organization. Greenberg held various advisory, fellowship and public affairs positions in the Obama administration at the Departments of State and Defense. After that she worked in the House of Representatives for Democratic Congressman Tom Porriello. Porriello was the officiant at Greenberg and Levin’s wedding and after leaving the Congress Porriello became the “top man” at Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Leah’s father, Mark Greenberg, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress founded by John Podesta and is currently lead by Neera Tanden. A pro-war think tank connected to the Democratic Party.
The other co-founder and leader of Indivisible, Ezra Levin worked in Congress as Deputy Policy Director for Rep. Lloyd Doggett, and as field director for Doggett’s 2010 re-election campaign. He then jumped to the Obama White House in 2012, working “directly with the Deputy Assistant to the President and with other senior White House staff” as part of the White House Domestic Policy Council. After Levin’s time in the Obama White House he became Associate Director of Federal Policy for Prosperity Now, a non-profit advocacy group with close ties to the financial industry, federal agencies and NGOs. Its many donors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Bank of America, Citi, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, PayPal, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Wells Fargo. You can’t help but get the impression that Indivisible is not really an organic grassroots movement considering their funding and connections.
By the time you read this the war Indivisible ignored may have already killed and injured tens of thousands more people and crashed the global economy.
Those who innocently participated may wake up and realize they got played. This will be very painful for those whose family members and friends might be sent off to die in the war they could have been protesting against had Indivisible made Trump’s war against Iran a priority.
It will also be very painful for the millions of Americans who will be forced to survive what could be an economic depression more dire than that of the 1930s. That is if these psychos in Tel Aviv and Washington DC don’t kill all of us in a nuclear conflict.
It seems that Indivisible’s billionaire funded NO KINGS DAY might have been successful so far at its primary goal of killing opposition to the war with Iran, Russia and the genocide. But we shouldn’t let them.
It’s time to stop letting those in power organize and fund our protest movement and initiate our own resistance to fascism outside the Democratic Party.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – menu@foodnotbombs.net
NO KINGS DAY – The tragic missed opportunity to protest against the war with Iran.
War is a powerful way to justify the implementation of an authoritarian police state so why was Indivisible silent?
https://keithmchenry.substack.com/p/no-kings-day-the-tragic-missed-opportunity
HUNGER IS NOT A GAME
May 16, 2025
When a billion people go hungry each day, how can we spend another dollar on war?
We need Food Not Bombs more today than at any point in our 45 year history. President Trump has proposed the first trillion dollar military budget an increase of 13 percent to $1.01 trillion in Pentagon spending while also proposing 22% in cuts for social services. President Ronald Reagan 2.0.
The lines of people seeking meals at Food Not Bombs grow longer month after month. American seniors call me all day long distressed that they have no food.
“I worked my whole life and always paid my taxes but now I am forced to beg for help. This is embarrassing” Jim said adding that all the pantries in his area have closed because they couldn’t keep up demand. I could hear his tears over my phone. Hour after hour calls of desperation. One has not eaten in three days. Another is eating cat food. All one woman has left is a box of Cheerios. It is heartbreaking that often all I can do is suggest they call their local 211 help line.
But nothing can match the shear horror of Israel and the United States starving two million Palestinians reducing thousands of children to skin wrapped skeletons.
On October 9, 2023, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, pledging that “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”
Thousands of truckloads of food have been blocked for over 70 days sitting but a few miles from these desperate mouths. the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report saids nearly 71,000 cases of acute malnutrition among children under five are expected between April 2025 and March 2026. We have gone from witnessing drone video of the February 29, 2024,Flour Massacre killing over 100 Palestinians as they struggled to grab food for their families to images of starved sunken eyed children breathing their last breathe.
When Food Not Bombs started during the May 24, 1980 Occupation Attempt of Seabrook Nuclear Power Station the eight of us could not have imagined that four and a half decades later that we would have provided billions of meals with the hungry. Yet the wars would also continue. Wars of famine and wars of genocide. A billion dollars in naval forces, lost F 18 Super Hornets and US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drones lost in one month this year defending Israel’s right to exterminate the families of Gaza.
The idea that Food Not Bombs volunteers would be sharing food in Moscow, Russia would have seemed impossible in those days when we were busy organizing for protests like the June 12, 1982 March for Nuclear Disarmament where over a million protesters walked across Manhattan to the Great Meadow that day. A world without a Soviet Union was unimaginable.
Food Not Bombs started when my friend Boston University Law student Brian Feigenbaum was arrested during our May 24th attempt to stop the nuclear power station on the New Hampshire coast. We found someone who could bail out Brian and that evening as we chugged back to Boston we agreed to raise the funds needed to repay his generosity by holding bake sales.
Well that was not at all lucrative but we did have a moving company called Smooth Move and one of our customers was discarding a yellow and green poster that said, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” It was a light bulb moment for our little collective. We bought surplus military uniforms, mounted the poster on cardboard, dressed as generals and headed out with our baked goods asking pedestrians to help us buy a bomber. We had stumbled onto an effective way to get an otherwise distracted public to hear our message.
While we were pitching our baked goods for bombers we also learned of planned protests in Germany against the deployment of the Pershing II nuclear weapons on their streets. In solidarity, Food Not Bombs and Cambridge City Council organized an October 10, 1981, march from City Hall to Draper Nuclear Lab. A tiny story in the Boston Globe that week noted that nearly 300,000 people took part that day in Bonn West Germany. Our march only attracted about 100 people but it was an important step in our campaign to mobilize for the nuclear disarmament protest in New York.
Later that month on a drizzly Halloween night Vice President George HW Bush spoke at MIT about those protests. About 3000 came out to the protest that ended with many of us dancing around a bonfire of wooden police barricades in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue.
“It is one of the exquisite ironies of our times that the United States should find itself in this position,” Bush said. ‘The Soviet disinformation apparatus is as disquieting as it is dishonest, but it has not been unsuccessful. These protesters are not only the most recent ones to have been attracted by the argument that the world has more to fear from America than it does from the Soviet Union.”
“Most of the people who turned out to demonstrate against NATO’s nuclear forces are well-intentioned men and women,” he continued. “Many of them are young, too young to have had first-hand knowledge of World War II. I don’t question their idealism.”
Even though Bush portrayed our call for an end to the cold war as naive our campaign for nuclear disarmament would play an important role in pushing President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987easing the threat of a nuclear conflict.
The Trump administration withdrew the United States from that treaty in August 2019, and Russia reciprocated by suspending its participation.
Now the US plans to deploy the Tomahawk Block IV cruise missile systems in Germany returning to the days when the Pershing missiles lumbering across the cobble stone streets. Maybe it time to launch another mass mobilization against the nuclear threat.
After we started our “bake sales for bombers” street performances the original Food Not Bombs group began organizing against the banks that were investing in the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station and were profiting from the nuclear weapons industry.
We organize a theatrical soup line outside of the Bank of Boston’s stockholders meeting on March 26, 1981. I designed a flyer to show the connections between the bank and the military contractors with a warning that Reagan’s policies and those of the banks could lead to a future where Americans would have to seek food at soup kitchens.
Our friends were invited to dress as Depression Era hobos but as we were preparing a huge sixty quart pot of stew we realized we had not recruited enough people to have the shock value of a real soup kitchen. At around midnight I went to the Pine Street Inn Homeless Shelter and gave a speech about our protest and invited them to join us. One man excitedly responded, “cool, a protest like we did in the sixties.”
Nearly everyone I had spoken with at the shelter showed up. The first man we shared our soup with responded with “God bless you,” gently bowing his head. One by one they stepped forward for their cup of warmth offering a heart felt thanks. A young business man expressed alarm that Reagan had only been in office for a month and people were already standing in line to eat. The guys who ate with us suggested we share food everyday since there was no place for Boston’s homeless to get a free meal. It is difficult to imagine now but in 1981, homelessness in America was not a thing.
That evening we agreed to give our bosses two weeks notice so we could focus full time on recovering and delivering food while preparing meals to share at Harvard Square or outside Park Station Subway Station on the Boston Commons. I was a produce worker at Bread and Circus Natural Food Grocery and had been taking the food I was discarding to the mothers at the pubic housing projects on Portland Avenue. My boss agreed to let me continue to recover the discarded food.
One morning while dropping off food to the projects the women who I had been helping pointed out that a new building had just opened across the street. The women said scientists were designing nuclear weapons in the new offices, inspiring us to adopt the name Food Not Bombs.
I moved to San Francisco in 1987 with my wife Andrea and our Afghan Hound Bear. One morning we hear news that Veterans For Peace activist Brian Williams had been hit by a munitions train at the Concord Navel Weapons Station in the East Bay. He was participating in a campaign to stop weapons shipments to the wars in Central America called Nuremberg Action. Food Not Bombs had supported Brian and the other Veteran’s For Peace activists during their fast in Boston and I was stunned by reports that Brian’s legs had been severed so Andrea and I were moved to attend the protest that weekend. When we returned home and switched on the TV to watch the news reports on that day’s rally Andrea suggested I start a second Food Not Bombs group.
We pulled together a few volunteers meeting at a Chinese restaurant on Haight Street and agreed to share our literature and meals at the entrance to Golden Gate Park at Stanyan Street. We learned that there were no free meals in the Haight on Mondays we agreed to fill that day.
A hippy looking man stopped by our meal and suggested we could get a permit from the Recreation and Parks Department. I wrote Director Peter Ashe on July 11, 1988 requesting the suggested documents. Police officers would pass by our meal each Monday and ask if we had received a permit yet and I would walk over to the parks department office to find out the progress. No one there knew what I was talking about but agreed to take a message.
On August 15, 1988 the San Francisco Tactical Squad marched out of the woods and arrested nine of us. Local photographer Greg Garr took pictures of the police blocking people from getting food. His photo appeared with a UPI story of the arrests in Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle inspiring outrage.
A week later a couple hundred people marched down Haight Street many banging spoons on pots while others carried buckets of stew and fruit salad or cases of produce and bagels. We set up at the entrance to the park. The police arrested 24 volunteers and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force took notes sending a memo on August 29th to the San Francisco Field Office claiming that Food Not Bombs was “a credible national security threat” even though we had just three chapters and a total of 30 volunteers.
The August 22nd arrests made CNN, the New York Times, The Times of London and several other news outlets. People started to send request for information on how to start their own chapter in defiance so I took my notes on how I formed the San Francisco group and made a flyer called “Seven Steps to Starting a Local Food Not Bombs Group.” I still mail copies out to people wishing to start their own local chapter.
The San Francisco Police made a total of 1,000 arrests over eight years. News of these arrests would inspire others to start chapters in their cities. We organized our first International Gathering to coincide with the indigenous community’s protest against the 500th anniversary of Columbus invading the Americas. The national celebration was held in San Francisco since the city had the longest running Columbus Day parade in the United States. During our two day gathering we agreed on our three principles.
1. The food would always be vegan or vegetarian and free to anyone, rich or poor, stoned or sober.
2. That each group is autonomous and uses a process of consensus to make decisions. There are no leaders, presidents or directors, and no headquarters.
3. Food Not Bombs is not a charity but is dedicated to using nonviolent direct action to change society so no one needs to stand in line to eat at a soup kitchen.
After the gathering we joined the protest at Aquatic Park witnessing the indigenous elders push the official Columbus back out into the bay as we shared breakfast with the protesters before heading to Civic Center Plaza to feed the main rally against the 500 years of exploitation.
The Savings and Loan crisis was raging that across the country that same year tossing families out of their homes. That November the San Francisco Tenants Union and Food Not Bombs held a film showing in the Tenderloin about the squatters movement in Europe to inspire our own squatters campaign.
One participant agreed to pretend to be interested in buying the decrepit old building that once housed an X rated movie theater and would ask the real estate company for a key to check it out. We also planned to sneak into the gutted hotel across the street from the Glide Memorial Church soup kitchen the night before Thanksgiving knowing that the Mayor would arrive to do his annual photo op of serving a slice of turkey to a homeless guest.
When Mayor Jordan arrived we emerged from the glassless windows hanging a banner saying “Homes Not Jails” and blasted our disdain for the Mayor’s brutal “Quality of Life Enforcement Matrix Program” of homeless sweeps.
At the same time we had moved several families into the second floor of the movie theater. According to the book “No Trespassing” by Anders Corr we had placed locks on 400 buildings left vacant as a result of the corruption of the Savings and Loans industry and we had people living in as many as 100 of those buildings.
In 2008 another housing crisis forced over 5.5 million families into foreclosure. When Obama opted to bail out the banks, leaving millions of Americans to fend for themselves, thousands of people responded to the Ad Buster Magazine’s call to Occupy Wall Street on October 17, 2008 and took to the streets. Food Not Bombs volunteers swung into action helping set up kitchens to provide for their local Occupy Camps. That Thanksgiving Obama’s Homeland Security, the FBI and local police departments started to crush the protest.
The United States wasn’t the only country suffering from the 2008 economic crisis. I was invited to speak in England in 2010 and found that the least expensive flights to the British Isles were on Icelandic Air. The airline encouraged its passengers to spend as much time in the country as you wished with no increase in airfare so I spent a week visiting the local Reykjavik chapter of Food Not Bombs. I joined them at their weekly meal where they described how the conversations at their Saturday lunches often turned to a discussion about the corruption that had resulted in their own 2008 economic crisis. At one point the weekly conversations turned into a weekly march to the Parliament Building.
I was invited to speak about the history and philosophy of Food Not Bombs at a local community center. During the question and answering period a reporter asked me how I felt about Food Not Bombs initiating the uprising against the bankers and central government. I was amazed. Food Not Bombs had initiated a movement that toppled a government.
The Grapevine Magazine reported “Ever since the Prime Minister’s so-called ‘Disaster Speech’ on October 6, where he outlined the crash of the Icelandic economy, a crowd has gathered outside the parliament building every Saturday afternoon to voice their discontent and demanding the resignation of the government, the Central Bank directors, and other key figures associated with the collapse.”
A young Food Not Bombs activist, Haukur Hilmarsson, climbed up onto the roof of the Parliament building and raised the pink pig emblazoned flag of the Bónus food chain where the Icelandic national flag usually flies. Bónus is a part of Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson’s Baugur investment empire, which owns the majority of the country’s food stores as well as most of the media, and is widely seen to be one of most powerful men in the country, and a key figure in the economic crash.
Local news outlet Fréttablaðið calculated that in the past few years after the economic crisis the Icelandic judiciary had sentenced 36 bankers to a total of 96 years in prison. All of the criminal cases are linked to the notorious crash of the Icelandic banking system in 2008.
In 2011, Iceland rewrote its constitution using a uniquely open process. It reshaped the dialogue on how a population can use available technology, consensus building, and civic engagement when reinventing the governmental processes supporting the needs of their constituents.
As the global economy faces another economic crisis possibly more dire than those in 1992 and 2008 and the horrific genocide and wars continue to kill and maim, the work of Food Not Bombs has never been needed more than today.
Our 45th anniversary is a good time to consider strategies not only to meet the growing need for food but also how to use our global network to force a redirection of military spending towards funding healthcare, education, local infrastructure and social services. I believe we are creative enough to organize a coordinated campaign to disrupt the techno-fascist seeking to implement a totalitarian digital control grid with their Stargate AI warfare and surveillance. Our freedom and humanity is at risk. The bonds we have made at Food Not Bombs can provide a foundation for this resistance. This task might be more difficult than the removal of the Icelandic government but we have every reason to try.
I will be encouraging the audience at our 45th anniversary celebration in Santa Cruz to join us in initiating another mass movement against war and austerity.
The Santa Cruz chapter of Food Not Bombs is hosting a free concert Soupstock 2025, on Saturday, May 24th at the Duck Pond Stage in San Lorenzo Park, Santa Cruz starting at high noon. This fun party features six bands, arts and craft displays, information booths, face painting, dancing and free food.
I hope you will join us in taking nonviolent direct action to not only provide meals with the hungry but to disrupt the political and economic system to force an end to the suffering. Hunger is not a game.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – www.foodnotbombs.net
CONTROLLED OPPOSITION
April 18, 2025
Let’s build a movement against fascism outside the control of the genocidal pro-war Democratic Party
While progressive Senator Cory Booker was giving his 25 hour Democratic Party infomercial on the Senate floor a Palestinian father could be seen on social media emerging from clouds of concrete dust in Gaza holding his headless child to the heavens. Two days later in another theatrical stunt designed to secure progressive loyalty to the Democratic Party Bernie introduces a bill to block $8.8 billion in arms sales to Israel which Booker voted against. Where was Bernie when he was voting to silence anti genocide protesters and backing Biden’s arms sales?
Capitalizing on the understandable anxiety of a Trump victory the Democrats are once again deploying their astroturf movement Indivisible. Since the mythology of the Democrats is that they are the party of the left they need to attract support from those who desire a progressive agenda. The party was trounced out of power for refusing to end the genocide or provide for the needs of the American people. The Republicans employed a similar strategy and used the fear of an Obama administration to launch the Tea Party to counter the perception that their party had moved away from their conservative roots. This is one method the billionaire class uses to tamp down any threat to their power.
After spending 18 brutal days in the Orange County Jail for the crime of sharing meals with the hungry I was released into the arms of Food Not Bombs volunteer Eric Montanez and handed a Tupperware of the best vegan Mac and Cheese I have ever tasted. News helicopters whirled above but they were not there for me. Socialite Casey Anthony, whose daughter was found dead as she partied was also being released from the Orlando jail at the same time as myself.
I was one of nearly 30 food servers arrested in the summer of 2011 after an appellate court ruled Florida’s most liberal city had the constitutional right to ban the sharing of meals with the homeless when Food Not Bombs appealed the Orlando groups first arrest.
On April 4, 2007, at the conclusion of an Orlando police undercover investigation that, according to the Orlando Weekly, cost taxpayers $65,000, Food Not Bombs volunteer Eric Montanez was arrested. When Food Not Bombs lost its appeal of the city ordinance volunteers defied the order and continued to provide the meals at Lake Eola Park picnic grounds.
When I finally was able to access my email one message included a call from Ad Busters to “Occupy Wall Street” on October 17th in a campaign to protest Obama’s bailout of the banks instead of coming to the aid of the 5.5 million families who lost their homes to foreclosure.
I supported the strategy of occupation and delivered hundreds of pounds of rice to New York and Washington DC and cooking equipment ready to help feed the protests. By Thanksgiving I had participated in over two dozen camps when the Obama administration aggressively started to crush the Occupy Wall Street movement.
A year after Occupy Wall Street was smashed Naomi Wolf wrote in the Guardian that, “FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF)… reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country.”
Many of us started organizing to ReOccupy the camps on May Day. As we were building our campaign a group calling itself 99% Spring asked San Francisco Bay activists to join them at a meeting in the Mission District. Nearly a hundred people sat around a conference room listening to the facilitators and watched their 20 minute inspirational film.
After the video people started to ask questions about why was there no mention of Obama’s bail out of the banks or his wars. The organizers dodged our questions and moved on to their plan. When it was suggested that many of us had already been planning to start the occupation on International Workers’ Day they claimed they had already picked their day in April. The presenters were clearly uncomfortable and deflected our questions. Nearly half of those attending walked out at lunch and never returned realizing that 99% Spring was just another Democratic Party front group designed to co-opt our movement.
The resulting confusion from their heavily promoted 99% Spring made organizing an independent return to the streets difficult. Masked people trashed areas of Seattle on May Day posing as a Black Block and news broke of a May first plot to bomb a bridge. The FBI had entrapped five of the 2011 Occupy Cleveland cooks including three young Food Not Bombs activists in a plot to use plastic explosives to topple the Route 82 bridge spanning Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park on 30 April 2012. Media reports of these events made sure that we didn’t continue the occupations.
The controlled opposition of the 99% Spring was only one of such subversions used to suppress threats against the Democratic Party from the left. MoveOn.org and Common Cause are among the well financed “grassroots” groups like Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution designed to “sheepdog” people they fear might dedicate their energy to organize against corporate power and war redirecting them back into the dominate political system.
I signed up with Our Revolution in 2016 when Sanders was running against Hillary Clinton. Since he supported military contracts like the F-35 I was skeptical that he would bring the change he was campaigning on but I gave him a chance. It seems that contact list is still being used for the purpose of corralling those who might be a threat to their agenda from the left into their orbit. Bernie asked us to vote for the cackling about Libyan Open Air Slave Markets Hillary Clinton. He would go on to ask us to back genocide Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. That list was an important factor in drawing so many people to the Hands Off and Anti-Oligarchy Democratic Party rallies.
Those lists were also used to send out a Cory Booker fundraising text shortly after the Senator voted to stop Bernie’s theatrical attempt to cut arms shipments to Israel. Messaging intended to mobilize people still gullible enough to believe that the Democrats could be a progressive challenge to the madness of the Trump administration. The Pussy Hat distraction of the first Trump administration has become the Hands Off of Trump’s second term.
In their all out effort to protect their system of exploitation and empire they also launched the AOC/Bernie Anti Oligarch tour, started another group, 5051 to attract those who had become wise to the Indivisible scam, and made much of the Cory Booker 25 hour content free yapathon. We are sure to see even more seemingly progressive groups emerge but none will be opposed to the genocide, war or corporate power.
In 2016 when it became clear that Trump would win the election two Congressional staff members, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, initiated Indivisible “publishing a twenty-three-page document drafted by a handful of former Democratic Congressional staffers in the days after Trump was elected. The subtitle: “A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” with the intention of harnessing the fear many rightly had of what might happen during his first administration. It is no surprise that when the Democrats returned to power they made no effort to reverse some of the most damaging of Trump’s policies like the tax cuts for the wealthy, the mass deportations of migrants or even move the US Embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv.
The August 18, 2017, issue of the Progressive Magazine writes, “Indivisible has, in a very short time, emerged as the public face of citizen resistance to Trump. Like the Democratic Socialists of America and Our Revolution, the official outgrowth of Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign, Indivisible has received a surge of interest post election. Unlike those groups, it didn’t exist beforehand.” The Tides Foundation provided $350,000 to help them start.
The article goes on to say, “The former staffers, including Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, now the group’s executive director and chief strategy officer respectively, had seen the Tea Party kneecap their bosses” attempts to pass progressive policies during Obama’s first term.”
One core member, Peter Dreier, claimed, “the goal of Indivisible was to “save American democracy&” and “resume the project of creating a humane America that is more like social democracy than corporate plutocracy.”
Anyone following the Democratic Party knows the last thing they support is democracy, otherwise for example, Bernie Sanders would have been their nominee, they wouldn’t have sued to keep the Green Party off the ballot in state after state and they would have held a primary in 2024. To claim the political party that refused to increase the minimum wage, presided over an economy that caused a 30% increase in the number of Americans who became homeless during their four years in power and armed the genocide of Gaza as “humane” seems a stretch.
Indivisible’s website states, “We’re a grassroots movement of thousands of local Indivisible groups with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda.”
It is rare to see a grassroots movement receive millions in donations from wealthy foundations like Open Society Foundation that gave $3 million to one arm of Indivisible in 2023; $1,135,000 in 2022; $500,000 to one account in 2021 and $375,000 to another account also in 2021; $1,750,000 in 2019; $500,000 in 2018 and $350,000 in 2017. The Open Society Foundation has not posted how much it donated in 2024 and it is not clear how many millions more was provided by other foundations to the other Indivisible units like Indivisible Project, Indivisible Civics, and Indivisible Action. Open Secrets reported that one of the sections of Indivisible raised $9,922,930 in 2024. Hardly grassroots.
Indivisible isn’t the only Democratic Party project that was funded by Soros. In the second quarter of 2020, his organizations gave at least $500,000 to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, becoming one of the campaign’s largest donors. Soros was the country’s largest donor to political campaigns in 2022 donating $128.5 million to support the Democratic Party in that election cycle. While Soros’ Open Society Foundation was financing the Hands Off rallies Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury happens to be Soros Fund Management partner Scott Bessent.
The Democrats are employing the same Color Revolution strategy they used to topple the elected governments of Ukraine and Georgia. Build a system of controlled opposition in defense of US centric corporate power. The Soros funding of regime change programs in Georgia was considered by Georgian nationalists to be crucial to the success of the Rose Revolution coup. Alexander Lomaia, secretary of the Georgian Security Council, is a former executive director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation (Soros Foundation), overseeing a staff of 50 and a budget of $2.5 million. The Biden administration was still seeking to subvert the democratically elected government of Georgia with a second color revolution as he left office. Like most of Biden’s policies Trump is continuing the effort to replace that government with a US compliant puppet.
I echo CodePink’s Medea Benjamin in strongly agreeing with most of the demands listed on publicity for the Hands Off rallies, Hands Off Medicare, Hands off Social Security, Hands Off Education, Hands Off Public Lands, Hands Off Immigrants and Hands Off LGBTQIA+.
But what suggested to me that these Hands Off rallies have another goal other than to stand against the terror of the CIA linked vultures hovering around the Trump administration was what was absent in their messaging. Their publicity didn’t include Hands Off Gaza or Hands Off Yemen even while US bombs were tearing children to shreds as people gathered for the rallies. Horrors that were beyond anything we have ever witnessed raging at the exact time these rallies were taking place.
Even more telling was that one of the institutions they want to protect is the organization directing the regime change war against Russia. The “Hands Off!” rally’s website even offers a pdf of a “Hands Off NATO” sign for activists to print and bring to their rallies. The website also quotes MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting saying, “This peaceful movement is powered by everyday people.” Does that include the dozens of “everyday people” who have been calling me nearly everyday for the past two years desperate for food often remarking that it makes them angry that we can fund a war in Ukraine but we can’t provide for our own people here in the US.
While most of those who join these rallies have the best intentions, some even came holding handmade signs against the genocide in Gaza or waved a Palestinian flag, it is unlikely that Indivisible intends to unite with the massive protests against the murder of Palestinian families. Their message of peace was drowned out by all the Ukrainian flags supporting the deadly war against Russia and their support of the political party that just spent 15 months slaughtering Palestinian babies.
It is understandable that people would join the Hands Off rallies. The stunning cascade dismantling our rights and social supports is frightening. Legal residents being snatched off the streets and deported, the privatizing of social services and threats to donate our National Parks to Trump’s billionaire friends for mining and oil extraction couldn’t be more terrifying. Americans are leading busy lives, struggling to pay their bills and base their political perspectives from limited information served by the same corporate media that supports the agenda of the war state and naturally joined the rallies in desperation. Had I not been following Indivisible since their founding and realized their organization was designed to kill any opposition to the system I would have also participated. I just can’t join rallies where it’s ok with the organizers for people to wave the Ukrainian flag. I don’t want to be seen as supporting war let alone one led by supporters of Stepan Bandera.
When rallies get such positive national news you know they have the support of those in power. You won’t see dozens of Democratic Party officials participating in protests that threaten the economic and political system. Insider trading success Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi spoke to her fawning supporters in the swing state Pennsylvania. Former vice presidential running mate Tim Waltz screamed to his supporters that the Democrats were back. The ghoulish anti-homeless YIMBY California State Senator Scott Wiener gloated over a video of himself he shared on Facebook that opened with a fluttering Ukrainian flag outside San Francisco City Hall. Wiener came to Santa Cruz on April 5, 2019 helping launch the luxury high rise condominium craze that is turning our community into a 15 Minute Smart City hell-scape.
Santa Cruz Indivisible is dominated by our city’s worst West-siders and pro development politicians. Their Facebook site includes supporters like anti-homeless Take Back Santa Cruz activist and former city councilperson Richelle Noroyan. One of the first members is the founder of the Predictive Policing Software Ryan Coonerty now used by CIA contractor Palantir to target Palestinians. Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Casey Coonerty-Protti’s husband Michel Protti helped finance this program when he was Vice President of Yahoo.
Those who waved their Ukrainian flags most likely believed that Russia’s military actions were unprovoked and feared Trump’s claims of making peace with Putin were real. Nothing says provoked like the torrent of western leaders spending the last 20 years threatening to topple the Russian government. On March 26, 2022, Biden continued those regime change threats during a speech in Warsaw saying of President Putin that,”For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
The Hands Off events share the same Zionist sponsors as the current regime so it’s no wonder there was silence about the bombings of Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Trumps threats to attack Iran. In a January 2024, article, “I don’t belong”: A Jewish student leaves Occidental College over wartime protests” the Forward writes, “Dreier, who identified himself as a “committed Jew” and has taught at the school for 30 years, acknowledged that “there are Jewish and Arab students feeling traumatized by what is happening in the Middle East.”
The Bernie AOC billionaire funded Anti-Oligarch tour is a second major front after Indivisible in the campaign to absorb those who might otherwise participate in an authentic movement against fascism into their dead end project. Police arrested Pro-Palestine protestors that had unfurled a banner saying “Free Palestine” at the Nampa, Idaho, rally as Sanders repeated his “Israel has a right to defend themselves against terrorism&” Zionist mantra followed by “I am doing my best to demand not another nickel for Netanyahu’s war.” Bernie is careful to accuse Netanyahu and avoids placing blame on Israel or his own record of voting for the genocide. Many in the crowd chanted Free Palestine as they removed the protesters. Non-Binary Artist in Recovery Blakeley posted a video of the tour saying “Bernie continues to claim “Israel has a right to defend themselves against terrorism” 18 months into a fucking genocide is actually fucking grotesque and you can’t call yourself pro-Palestine if you think this is okay or excusable.” Even though the Idaho crowned chanted Free Palestine Bernie ignored them and continued with his speech.
Of course he turned his back on his supporters.In 2023, as the genocide was reaching its most murderous levels, Bernie Sanders voted for a Senate Resolution condemning anti-genocide student protesters and organizations as “antisemitic, repugnant, and morally contemptible”. AOC and Bernie are not likely to travel to the Louisiana Detention Center where Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil is now being held.
This could spell disaster for our future as the US threatens to start a global war while the economy collapses. Two aircraft carrier armadas, six to ten B 2 stealth bombers capable of dropping nuclear weapons, and dozens of heavy transport planes, air defense systems are set to attack Iran if they fail to bend to Trump’s demands. At the same time Ukraine is increasing its attacks on Russia while it is reported that Moscow strikes a meeting with NATO officers in Kyiv and the global economic system crashes, threatening to force millions of Americans into financial ruin. Yet none of this was even a blip on the agenda of the Hands Off or Anti-Oligarch rallies.
Indivisible helped smother any possibility of using the terror of Trump’s first term to build a massive movement. Their solution was more war, austerity and a genocide.
If we have any hope of the change required to defend ourselves from the onslaught of the End Times Techno-fascists implementing their Stargate AI digital future we had better stop falling for the two party illusion. We urgently need to build a movement independent of the Democratic Party. A movement that threatens power.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
https://open.substack.com/pub/keithmchenry/p/controlled-opposition
FOOD NOT BOMBS – OUR BERLIN CONNECTIONS
March 31, 2025
The New England chill was starting to warm into a pleasant spring morning in 1980. Food Not Bombs cofounder CT Butler and I coasted through Harvard Square in our old Dodge van on our way to Brattle Square to set up our daily literature and food distribution when we caught a glimpse of an addition to the square.
A new character in the theater of our Cambridge streets stood near Out of Town News dressed with a bright colored poncho depicting a Russian bear and American eagle embracing. The white bearded man balanced a pole topped with a weather balloon painted to look like the Earth. After setting up our equipment I walked over to greet our latest addition to the carnival.
He introduced himself as John Runnings and gave me a copy of his flyer about his “The Odessa Odyssey”, his plan to travel to the Soviet Union for a person to person type détente. He shared that he had bought a boat back in his home in the state of Washington with the intention of sailing to Odessa Russia. He described how he would have docked in some seaside town, stepped onto shore and greeted the first people he came upon with a message of peace from the Americans. Unfortunately the person repairing ship stole the vessel so his new plan was to board a plane in Boston for Berlin and attempt to cross the wall to meet East Berliners
He slept in his van outside the Food Not Bombs house using our restroom before heading down to promote his dream to the pedestrians of Harvard Square. After a few months he recruited the Food Not Bombs volunteers to help him in his plot to sneak onto a Lufthansa flight to the divided city.
We lifted the slight man over a plastic wall that guarded the gangway to the plane but he was never able to board a flight without a passport so he gave in and flew legally to his goal. Once in Berlin he scaled the wall banging a chuck out of its rim, walked along the barbed wired top and dropped into the GDR side where he was arrested. A website tribute to his work says, “He then became the first person in history to have gone over the wall from west to east and back to the west again, all without a passport.” The piece of wall that he hammered free on one of his 1986 walks between worlds is displayed at the “Checkpoint Charlie Museum”.
Around the same time we had first become friends with the “Wall Walker” the Food Not Bombs collective organized a solidarity march with the German people who were protesting the deployment of US Pershing Nuclear Missiles. In October 1981, 300,000 protesters assembled in Bonn, West Germany.
We marched that same October from Cambridge City Hall to Draper Laboratory where they were designing nuclear weapons. Our name Food Not Bombs comes from our learning of the lab while we were donating produce to the mothers at the public housing project across from Draper. That evening I dialed International phone operators in Germany seeking to find an operator who could pass on the message that we had a protest in the United States in support of their campaign against the Pershing missiles. After a dozen or more calls we found one man who promised to let the German Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament know about our protest.
Food Not Bombs helped organize a protest against newly elected Vice President George H Bush who was set to speak against the Pershing Missile protests in Germany. Sue Eaton and I made the first Food Not Bombs banner before the action and she suggested the fist in the logo should be purple to honor all races. A friend borrowed the car of Food Not Bombs co-founder Jo Swanson’s to use while wheat pasting posters for the rally and along the way he spray painted the popular slogan “Shot Bush First” on the wall of the MIT Student Union inspiring the Secret Service pay her a visit but thankfully her roommate who answered the door sent them away. Jo went into hiding to avoid arrest. We brought torches as well as hot food. The torches were used to start a bonfire of wooden police barricades in the middle of Mass Ave. People drummed and danced around the fire and we provided psychedelic mushrooms to all who wished to enjoy them.
George Bush told his audience of MIT alumni that, “Most of the people who turned out to demonstrate against NATO’s nuclear forces are well-intentioned men and women. Many of them are young, too young to have had first-hand knowledge of World War II. I don’t question their idealism”. He continued,”That alone really ought to give these demonstrators pause. Pacifism and Soviet ideology are as incompatible as sheep and wolves, but the latter always fashions clothing out of the former’s wool.” History may be repeating with the new US attempts to deploy short range nuclear missiles in Europe as part of NATO’s current regime change war against Russia.
On the sidelines of the July 2024 NATO summit in Washington DC, Germany and the US announced plans to deploy missiles capable of being nuclear armed. The September 2024 issue of “The Arms Control Association Newsletter” said, “U.S. Army forces in Germany will field the multipurpose Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile, and a hypersonic missile that is still in development in ‘episodic deployments’ as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future,” the joint announcement said. These weapons will equip the army’s Multi-Domain Task Force based at Wiesbaden, Germany, which the army first activated in September 2021.” My father was stationed in the same armored unit as Elvis Presley at Wiesbaden and thus I was born in Frankfurt in May 1957 in the US occupied Luftwaffe Hospital that featured huge concrete swastikas on its cornices.
There is another Berlin connection. A cold San Francisco wind chilled the small ACT-Up rally against Anthony Fauci that I was attending in 1994 outside the Social Security office at United Nations Plaza. A friend named Michael saw me and hurried my way. “Keith, it’s great to see you. Heinke and I did a small tour to highlight your case. We even made T-shirts,” he told me. I had been framed by San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan in his attempt to crush Food Not Bombs and was facing a prison sentence of twenty-five to life.
He was excited. His partner Heinke had booked a popular Kreuzberg pub during Michael’s visit to Berlin and organized an event to build interest in my California Three Strikes case. The threat of a twenty-five to life sentence for crimes that included feeding hungry people and “stealing” milk crates must have been intriguing to a Berlin audience .
He described meeting an activist who had been sitting in the back of the bar listening to their presentation. The activist approached my friends and introduced himself as Manolo. He told them he was touched by my plight and suggested they join him in Spain. He offered to organize a couple of speaking events. Michael spoke warmly of his new friend Manolo. He was a serious radical and well connected in European circles. Michael would give me several news clippings about their presentations in the Basque country and an X Large T-shirt with “Free Keith McHenry” silkscreened across the chest at our next meeting. I felt honored. I would join Manolo on a tour of Spain and host him and two other Spaniards on a two month tour of North America that we called the Unfree Trade Tour, seeking to build resistance to the globalization of the economy by organizations like the Word Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum.
We showed the video “Fifty Years is Enough” about the impact of the economic policies that came from the 1944 the Bretton Woods Conference in the US and the intentions of those same financial vultures to expand their control. The movie showed peace, labor and environmental activists united in protest the introduction of Euro and the European Union warning it would bring in economic and environment damage to Europe. I had participated in a giant protest against the formation of the European Union organized by labor unions, communists, socialists, anarchists, peace activists and environmentalists in Bonn, West Germany and attended a two week long convention against the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. This coalition also tried to disrupt the World Economic Forum in Davos each year seeking to build opposition to the slavery and destruction caused by these globalization programs. It was shocking to return to Europe as the Euro was transitioning from the local currencies. The introduction of the Euro was already driving down wages while increasing prices. The contrast from the relative economic security of the pre Eurozone days and the financial struggles of Europeans after the Euro was heartbreaking. My friends no longer had the time to spend their days with me as they were now too busy meeting their financial expenses.
The UnFree Trade Tour featured one of our low-watt FM radio stations which let us broadcast the program over the airwaves. We shared literature not only on the threat to labor rights and damage to the environment that could happen if the policies of these global organizations were not stopped. We also provided details on how to start your own low-watt radio helping build the Free Radio movement across the US and Canada.
We proposed that people organize a massive protest against the World Trade Organization in the event that they were to hold one of their economic summits in North America. A year later the World Trade Organization announced its summit in Seattle to be held the last week of November 1999. A coalition of left groups united in a campaign to block participants from entering the summit. Since Food Not Bombs had formed the first IndyMedia Center in San Francisco during our second International Gathering in 1995 spreading the idea across the globe and by the time of the Battle of Seattle we had IndyMedia centers all over the world. An IndyMedia center in Australia had written code that let us post videos, sound, photos and text on our IndyMedia sites much like people can on Facebook or other social media platforms today making it possible to share uncensored news of the protests.
While global capital was busy tricking the public into supporting their wars and austerity plans Food Not Bombs chapters were also springing up all across the world in defiance. Food Not Bombs activists joined in anti-globalization protests across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
The Gothenburg European Council meeting was held on June 15-16, 2001, laying the groundwork for EU enlargement while addressing what the corporations called “sustainable development”, as well as economic and social issues, and external relations. The presence of US President George W. Bush at the EU-USA Summit attracted a huge crowd of protesters.
CBS News reported that “Up to 25,000 activists from dozens of anti-EU, anti-U.S. and anti-globalization groups have descended on Gothenburg. About 1,500 people appeared to have been involved in Friday’s rioting.”
The Guardian report of June 15, 2001 said “Anti-globalization protests spilled over into serious violence at the EU summit in Sweden last night as two people were shot and wounded by police apparently overwhelmed by demonstrators. Police in the southern port city of Gothenburg confirmed that two people had been shot when street fighting broke out after a day of clashes. Twelve police officers were injured and 600 people were detained.”
Gothenburg Food Not Bombs co- founder, Hannes Westberg was shot in the chest by police, suffering multiple injuries. According to a hospital spokesman, he had a damaged kidney and liver and is ‘critically ill’. Surgeons had to perform a series of complicated operations in a bid to save his life. I recall that he spent some of his time as a prisoner in a coma. I was honored to play Father Tomte for Hanne’s child on his son’s first Christmas when I visited Sweden on one of my European speaking tours.
My work against the centralization of the global economic system has never stopped. I joined a bus caravan at the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City and headed to the 2003 protest against the World Trade Organization protest in Cancun. Several Food Not Bombs volunteers from Australia had rented a house on the edge of the old town. My Mexican Food Not Bombs friends set up a camp in a park downtown where we provided meals for the protesters. The first day we shared food outside the Ritz Carlton on the beach front. That area was closed to the public soon after. Tens of thousands of us marched outside the security fences. I was less than ten feet away when Lee Kyung Hae, a South Korean farmer, scaled a fence and stabbed himself to death with a penknife while wearing a sign that read “WTO kills farmers.” A few minutes after he fell to the street the police started to toss chunks of concrete at the demonstrators. I joined a friend under the nearest car as blocks of cement rained down around us.
Our history of organizing against the exploitation by the financial institutions has been at the core of our actions from our founding. Our first soup line was a theatrical event outside the Bank of Boston’s stockholders meeting outside the Federal Reserve Bank in March 1981. The night before our noon meal I spoke at the local homeless shelter and invited the twenty or so men to join our protest. They showed to our protest suggesting we share food everyday since there were no free meals for Boston’s hungry. We handed out literature warning that the policies of the bankers and President Reagan could lead to a future where people would be forced to line up for meals at a soup kitchen. Pedestrians were surprised to see people were already queuing up for food just a month after Reagan had taken office.
That evening while cleaning our cooking equipment we made the decision to give our employers two weeks notice so we could dedicate all our time to recovering and sharing food. We all had to seek work after six months when our landlady reminded us that we has not paid rent for half a year but she was so impressed with our work that she reduced our rent from $600 a month to $400 and asked us to start paying at the first of the following month. Our humble beginnings sure have blossomed into a strong global community of compassion in an often very brutal world.
It’s been 45 years since we started the first Food Not Bombs collective after our friend Brian Feigenbaum, was arrested during the May 24,1980, occupation attempt of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station construction site in New Hampshire. During these four decades our volunteers have join relief efforts after cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and wild fires. Our volunteers initiated the campaign that toppled the banker government of Iceland, shared vegan meals outside MacDonalds on the annual McLibel protest each October and during the Millions Against Monsanto marches in May. The Anarchist Against the Wall campaign in Palestine started after the Tel Aviv chapter of Food Not Bombs has helped provide meals during a two months long Peace Camp on the West Bank. We have supported indigenous sovereignty movements in the Americas, Australia and across Asia. As a worldwide movement Food Not Bombs is in a position to initiated global days of action against the cruelty of the emerging totalitarian digital dystopia. And of course we have filled the bellies of the hungry millions of times and will do so for decades to come.
The crisis of war, state repression and poverty is greater today than at anytime in our history. Thankfully we have a global network of over 1,000 chapters to provide mutual aid, emotional support and solidarity.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 – http://www.foodnotbombs.net
FOOD NOT BOMBS IN THIS TIME OF TECHNO-FASCISM
March 17, 2025
CIA funded Billionaires publicly take control of the United States while we organize our resistance to their digital dystopian panopticon.
“…one suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted…” Peter Thiel, February 21, 2024
The eight college aged antinuclear activists who started Food Not Bombs in May 1980 imagined a time when we would need to respond to a time like we are living through today. We thought President Reagan would be the Trump of our time but thankfully it’s taken four more decades to arrive at this dystopian moment.
We could have never imagined there would be nearly 1,000 autonomous chapters of Food Not Bombs in over 65 countries when we started. But we did consider a number of strategies of survival.
If faced with the repression of a totalitarian police state our vision was to build our own communities outside the system with a focus on meeting the basics of water, food, shelter, free expression and friendship.
We had planned to coordinate days of actions with what we at the time dreamed might be a network of dozens of Food Not Bombs chapters spread across to United States. Our first multi-city action happened on October 15, 1988, when all three groups that existed at the time participated in a protest against the US war in El Salvador. The Boston group helped organize and shared meals outside the US Capital in Washington DC while chapters in San Francisco and Long Beach provided meals with those protesting to end the war in their own cities.
This vision of creating a community outside a totalitarian society was experienced in a condensed version by over a thousand people who participated in the 1995 International Food Not Bombs Gathering held in San Francisco during the 50th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This ten day event may offer suggestions on how to build a community of sanctuary from the dystopian digital prison being implemented by the DOGE transfer of the US government’s assets to this junta of techno-fascists. Programmable digital currency linked to your biometric facial digital ID connected to the internet of bodies could be our future if their plans become reality. The Stargate of electronic control and warfare.
The hours of preparing and sharing free vegan meals together built many strong friendships. Smuggled plastic buckets of stew and garbage bags of pastries and bread were quickly shared at United Nations Plaza at noon before the San Francisco Tactical Squad marched in to make the daily felony conspiracy arrests. Over 130 were cuffed for serving food in violation of a court order. We were released a day or two later in to the welcoming smiles and hugs of our fellow Food Not Bombs activists.
At a meeting of about 200 people we came to consensus that we would continue to unite around our three principles that we had agreed to during the first International Gathering held in San Francisco before the October 1992 protests against the 500th anniversary of Columbus invading the Americas.
1. The food is always vegan or vegetarian and free to anyone rich or poor, stoned or sober.
2. Each group is autonomous, there are no leaders, directors or headquarters and decisions are made by consensus and we strive to include those eating with us in our meetings.
3. We are not a charity but instead we are dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action to change society so no one is forced to sleep in the streets or seek food at a soup kitchen.
The assembled also agreed that we would never request or accept a permit from the government to share meal with the hungry. Sharing the gift of food is always an unregulated act of compassion.
Our decentralized horizontal philosophy of organizing is our strength. A strength that could save us under the current conditions.
While these meals and meetings were getting underway people started to pass through our tiny convergence center in an office we rented for the occasion on the fifth floor above one of the Off Broadway theaters on Market Street. Those staffing the office registered over 1,000 names of those who came to attend our second world gathering.
The first Indymedia Center ever was housed in that same office. We broadcast news of the gathering from a low watt pirate radio station whose antenna was mounted on the theater’s roof. That got busted after just a few days but we were also broadcasting on Free Radio Berkeley and San Francisco Liberation Radio. Stephen Dunifer held workshops on how to build your own low-watt free radio transmitter and radio station. Participants took these plans home and set up their own stations. I had the honor of being a guest on many of those stations while on tour. You can see our diagrams in the book Hungry for Peace.
By the time of the blockade of the first World Trade Organization Summit in Seattle in November 1999 there were Indymedia Centers in cities all over the world. Activists in Australia wrote code that made it possible to upload news, photos and videos of the action globally. Massive protests like the blockage of the 1999 WTO Summit rarely made the news outside the city where they were happening before Indymedia. A protest against the first war on Iraq attracted nearly a million people in San Francisco yet few outside the Bay Area had any idea this took place. People are still surprised when I tell them about the Rodney King Uprising in San Francisco and the implementation of martial law assuming that it had only happened in Los Angeles.
As part of the gathering the group Homes Not Jails invited activists to help take over the abandoned officers quarters at the recently decommissioned Presidio Military Base. The housing was in perfect condition and could have housed more than a hundred homeless vets but since it has one of the best views of the Pacific in the city they were not about to sacrifice the property to the poor. Federal police arrested the occupiers hours after we seized the buildings. Even so Homes Not Jails also occupied other housing San Francisco left empty by the Savings and Loan Crisis and was providing shelter for dozens of formerly homeless people.
The workshops on the most effective way to squat abandoned buildings were a popular feature of our gathering. There were also classes on lock picking, making giant puppets and banners, consensus decision making, vegan cooking and other organizing strategies as well as the free radio workshops.
In contrast to the drama in San Francisco there was no threat of arrest for sharing meals at People’s Park in Berkeley where East Bay Food Not Bombs hosted playful events on the lawn and powerful concerts on the stage. Terri Compost shared her skills in what could be called a Food Not Lawns garden near the stage.
The closing event was a torch light march against the death penalty. Black Panther journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal had been sentenced to death in Pennsylvania and was set to be executed soon after the gathering. Hundreds marched from UN Plaza through the Mission with torches, banging drums, chanting, tipping over a flaming dumpster outside the Mission District Police Station as we marched past the precinct. Then the parade was off to the Castro where the police kettled the procession making the country’s largest arson arrest taking over 200 people to jail.
Our ten days of skill sharing and resistance inspired many participants to return home excited to strengthen the Food Not Bombs movement, start their own radio stations, plant vegetable gardens, organize Indymedia Centers and initiate local squatter campaigns. Consider reading our book Hungry for Peace to get an idea of how to start creating an outside the matrix community in your city.
The horrors of the techno-fascists who are now overtly seizing power may feel over whelming but thankfully we have the sanctuary of our Food Not Bombs community.
After 45 years of direct action and service many of us have the experience needed to respond to these terrifying days. We are more prepared than ever to welcome another wave of Americans who could be forced into homelessness under the policies of the privatization of Medicare, and SNAP food stamps. This crisis is not limited to the United States. European governments are removing many of their social safety nets so they can fund their war with Russia and a failing global economy is sure to increase poverty around the world.
Thankfully the Democratic Party’s phony astroturf “resistance” rallies calling for more war and genocide and our vote in the midterms are slowly evaporating as their political party commits a slow suicide. The fact that the share the same agenda as those they are protesting has become all to obvious.
At the same time the Palestinian and immigrant solidarity protests are building an authentic resistance to this totalitarian coup free of Democratic Party domination. Food Not Bombs activist are supporting those actions as well as participating with Veterans for Peace, local homeless unions, LGBTQIA+ diversity rights groups, anti racist activist, labor organizations, mutual aid collectives and environmentalists to build a movement to resist the tyranny of these cruel technocratic oligarchs.
As a Great Depression scale economic crash unfolds Food Not Bombs groups are in a position to use our decades of practice to ease the suffering. No such movement was in place when the world was ravaged by the impact of the 1929 crash. The Catholic Workers, anarchist and communist collectives had to start from scratch as the calamity unfolded. Our flexibility and history of responding to major crises like Hurricanes Katrina, and Sandy, the Covid Lockdowns and the Hurricane Helene floods provides us with an advantage when it comes to making a difference at this critical time.
Along with our regular sharing of food and survival gear we are able to offer our years of logistical skills to support a wider resistance movement. Logistics are what we do week in and week out. We could even initiate our own nationwide campaigns of protest, blockades and noncooperation to this dystopian AI dominated digital war and surveillance state of control. Our creativity is unlimited.
If you are not already volunteering with a local Food Not Bombs group I encourage you to do so. If there isn’t a chapter in your community you are welcome to start a group with your friends. We are happy to help. It could not only save your own sanity it can provide the infrastructure for the change required to protect our rights and wellbeing from the techno-fascist CIA contractors, hedge fund vultures and financial institutions who are seeking to impose their will on society.
Our 45th anniversary reminds us that Food Not Bombs is capable of accomplishing amazing things. If there ever was a time when the spirit of Food Not Bombs was needed that time is now.
Food Not Bombs documentary of the 1995 International Gathering – San Francisco
SOUPSTOCK 2025
Saturday, May 24, 2025 – San Lorenzo Park, Santa Cruz, California – Visit our website to find the celebration nearest you or email menue@foodnotbombs.net
https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
HOW DID I KNOW?
February 5, 2025
By Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry
“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” Oracle’s Larry Ellison – September 24, 2024
My mother’s father John Vanderpoole Phelan slowly rowed our family’s sky blue dingy into position across the placid waters of Middle Pond a few hundred feet from our beach on Cape Cod. My 5 year old frame sat on the bow bench armed with my first fishing pole. I faced my grandfather at the stern. He picked up a fresh water mussel from a pail, broke the paper thin shell, scooped out the slimy life and stabbed his fish hook into its grey flesh. I followed his instructions, skewed my bait onto my hook and dropped my lead sinker into the still waters. It wasn’t long before there was a tug on my line.
He instructed me to snap my pole to set the hook. A heavy creature fought as I reeled it to the surface.
“Unhook him and smack his head hard on the gunnel” he explained. “You don’t want him to suffer,” he added. I looked at those big perch eyes starring back at me, slid the hook from his gasping lips and smashed it against the wooden boat.
He continued with his lesson. “One day you may be asked to kill others. This is our duty. Those you kill will have no moral ambiguity. They will just be dead but for you it will be more difficult. This is the white man’s burden.”
He would repeat this lesson in one way or another for the next ten years often adding that I was born into a genetically superior family that was tasked to defend the rewards of capitalism.
My Grampy Phelan followed the path of many in the intelligence world attending Phillips Academy, Dartmouth College and Harvard Law. He was recruited into the US Army’s Office of Strategic Services, attended boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi, spent time overseeing the testing of Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress in Wichita, Kansas before being stationed in Burma where he directed bombing raids on Japan during World War II.
The 10 acre property on the Cape was our vacation home. My mother’s parents lived in Needham, Massachusetts in a huge two story white house with Dartmouth green shutters. My bed was down in their finished basement. I slept next to two metal file cabinets filled with the MIT formulas that my grandfather would sell to Ken Olson and became the foundation of Digital Electronics. A black and white photo hung on the wall next to my bed showing thousands of people in Burma smashing rocks with hammers or balancing reed baskets piled with stones as they toiled building my grandfather’s runway for his squadron of B-29s.
My grandfather’s first floor den was lined with 63 framed black and white photos that he snapped from 20,000 feet of his progress in the world’s most deadly bombing campaign,Operation Meeting House, the fire bombing of Tokyo.
I watched him pace under those photos arguing over the phone with General Curtis LaMay and then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara about the need to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi. We had to “send the Communists a lesson.” he insisted. Let the world know that the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a “one off” and that America had no limits to what it would do to defend capitalism.
My grandfather taught me about how the US provoked Japan with tariffs and naval blockade and ordered the Pacific fleet to line up at Pearl Harbor to maximize the impact. He claimed that even though US intelligence knew Japan was about to attack the naval facility they intentionally concealed this from the base commander. My grandfather explained that he and his friends set up the attack “because otherwise the American people would never support a war in the Pacific.”
During those days when my grandfather was arguing the logic of a third nuclear strike his good friend Curtis LaMay was trying to convince President John F Kennedy of the logic of bombing a shopping mall in Miami and blaming it on Fidel Castro to justify an invasion of Cuba in their Operation Northwoods plot.
Grampy explained that elections were designed to divide people so they won’t be a threat to those in power. The intelligence agencies had the responsibility of placing people in positions of power making sure the correct people came to office and that according to him this included the President of the United States.
This can be achieved in many covert ways. For example their claims that the Hunter Biden Laptop was Russian disinformation to make sure Biden won or making a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to hold the hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran in exchange for US weapons in an effort to sink President Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign.
Chuck Schumer told Racheal Maddow in a January 2017 interview, “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, so even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman [like Trump], he’s being really dumb to do this,” referring to claims by Trump that he would take on the Deep State. And sure enough the Deep State ate Trump and today we are witnessing the bitter fruits of a military dominated surveillance state free to overtly seize control of the government and confiscate its assets for their own benefit.
I spent the summer before high school living in that sweet little cubby in my grandfather’s basement while I attended summer classes at Needham High. He passed that winter.
My grandfather’s second wife held his funeral at the Congregational Church in Needham. The pastor claimed Grampy was a great and godly soul and would be remembered in heaven. I was stunned as my grandfather made it clear to me that he believed that God was a fiction and talked about his having belonged to a secret Satanic order.
When I was an art student at Boston University I had a part time job staffing Old South Meeting House on Milk and Washington Streets telling visitors about the drama of the Boston Tea Party, collecting the 50 cent entrance fee and selling post cards of the historic building.
During a lunch break I went to Boston Commons to eat and enjoy the warm spring sun. An older lady was standing on a milk crate telling a small audience of other elderly women about the threat of nuclear Armageddon and Mutually Assured Destruction. Her name was Dr Helen Caldecott.
After absorbing Helen Caldecott’s speech it occurred to me that I could use my skills as an artist to address what seemed to be the most important yet mostly invisible issue of our times.
I dropped into the offices of Mobilization for Survival in the basement of Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church to see if I could put my artistic skills to use. It wasn’t long before I was participating with the just formed Boston Alliance Against the Registration and the Draft. At first, nearly a hundred people were attending the weekly meetings but the number of participants started to decrease after a few months.
We had organized a plan where we would table outside the local high schools in the weeks before the students left for summer vacation to warn them of the potential danger of cooperating. Red Sun Press was going to give us a great price for the literature we intended to distribute. Once we were set to launch our campaign one of the leaders of BAARD announced she had spent most of our money on a first class plane ticket from San Francisco to Boston for Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and that he had agreed to speak at a rally on the Boston Commons after attending his child’s graduation at Harvard. We needed to raise more money for our printing.
Since the number of people attending our meetings was plummeting just when they were most needed my friend Frank and I called those on our phone list to see why they stopped participating. Most were disturbed about the jokes by some of the core members about “getting guns for the revolution” so we made a suggestion that we stop any reference to guns since the point of the organization was to oppose war. There was push back from the others so we agreed to take a vote at the next meeting.
When Frank and I arrived to the meeting a dozen or more people who had never attended before were there to vote against our proposal and the policy was not adopted.
After the meeting I returned to the street with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of flyers but I was arrested before posting the first flyer. Frank was still in the office and saw the woman who had spent all our funds on the first class plane flight for Ellsberg dial up the Cambridge Police. This event is described towards the end of Brian Glick’s book “War at Home” on covert actions against the peace movement.
The shock at learning that BAARD had been infiltrated and was intentionally sabotaging our efforts at tabling and plans for the July 21,1980 protest outside the Main Post Office inspired us to start another group we called AWOL. We organized our first meeting at the Clamshell Alliance office at 595 Mass Ave in Central Square and just as it was about to start members of BAARD arrived with rebar and started attacking us.
It was very disturbing to discover that many of those who you thought were friends were likely working for the FBI. I was no longer a virgin to covert state manipulation and disruption.
I would face years of FBI, CIA, Interpol, local police and corporate intelligence operations. I have survived over 40 years of honey traps, the confiscation of all my out going and incoming mail for months at a time, elaborate smear campaigns, wiretaps, police doubles dressed as me who did crimes that I would be arrested for and the trauma of learning that an FBI agent slept with my wife while I sat in jail facing 25 to life in prison.
On August 15, 1988, the San Francisco Police arrested nine Food Not Bombs volunteer at the entrance to Golden Gate Park for sharing meals without a permit, a permit we would learn did not exist. A week later another 24 of us were arrested at Haight and Stanyan. Fifty-five more food servers were cuffed and taken to jail on Labor Day. The pressure on Mayor Art Agnos to end the spectacle led to our negotiating an end to the arrests and the creation of a permit process. I had to take the City to Federal Court to force them to comply with the process but they revoked the permit shortly after issuing it anyway and deleted the permit a year later.
That Thanksgiving volunteers wearing the Food Not Bombs button on their coat were approached by uniformed members of the National Guard as they waited for flights home after the holiday. They remarked that they had seen the Food Not Bombs logo at that weekend’s Domestic Terrorism Workshop claiming we were “one of America’s most hardcore terrorist groups.”
In 2021 as part of a decade long Freedom of Information Acts Request effort by “Property of the People” we received a document that showed that the FBI- Joint Terrorism Task Force had watched the August 22nd mass arrests and sent a memo on August 29, 1988, to the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office claiming we were a “credible national security threat.” There were only three chapters at the time with a total of 30 volunteers combined.
The San Francisco Police made over 1,000 arrest in all for sharing meals ending in 1995. I was arrested 94 times, spent 500 days in jail and as noted before faced 25 to life in prison after being framed by the Mayor’s office. I was captured three time and taken to a dark room where my clothes were ripped off, was lifted by my arms and legs until my ligaments and tendons were torn and stuffed into a tiny Stress Position Cage. I spent hours in that cold dark cage struggling unsuccessfully to stretch my legs.
A parade of Food Not Bombs volunteers have been framed in FBI invented terror plots. Connor Cash on Long Island, Eric McDavid in California and three of the cooks at Occupy Cleveland, Douglas Wright, Brandon Baxter and Connor Stevens are among the many targeted.
While I find it frustrating when people express distress or support for the actions of Donald Trump suggesting they believe he is all powerful I understand they’ve had a lifetime of messaging that suggests that things like elections and the law are real.
I believe Trump was “hired” by the Deep State to perform the needed drama designed to implement the strategies formulated in think tanks, intelligence funded university research programs, the halls at the Pentagon and Langley and corporate boardrooms on Wall Street, in London, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley.
The choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate signaled that the Deep State was no longer going to play nice. When the PayPal Mafia of CIA contractors at Palantir took over power of the United States on January 20, 2025, it became clear to me that things are about to get very bleak and not just the ways the liberals have been crowing about.
At Trump’s first press conference of his second term on January 21st he announced the $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project called Stargate. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank and Larry Ellison of Oracle introduced their grand designs as though they were the masters of the Universe.
Larry Ellison stepped to the mic, “Okay. Thank you, Mr. President. We certainly couldn’t do this without you. It would simply be impossible. AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American. We’ve actually been working with OpenAI for a while, and with Masa for a while. The data centers are actually under construction.The first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building is a half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20, and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”
“Walking down a suburban neighborhood street already feels like a Ring doorbell panopticon.” writes Kenneth Niemeyer of Business Insider after Larry Ellison spoke at Oracle financial analysts meeting in September 2024.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
It appears that the United States government is about to be privatized and handed over to the techno-fascist oligarchs associated with the intelligence community. They seem to have the belief that their AI program has finally sucked up enough data that they are ready to implement a totalitarian terror state here at home and launch massive automated wars abroad to achieve their vision of global domination.
So when people ask me how I come to my unusual perspectives it is because I have nearly five decades of real world experience in the application of the grand lessons of my grandfather.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
POWER HUNGRY
January 23, 2025
By Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry
There is a growing realization that the left right divide is mostly a fiction and that we all share the same struggles of paying our bills and keeping our families safe. We have never needed unity more than we do today.
One suggestion that this is true is the response to the assassination of United Health CEO Brian Thompson. People across the political spectrum are starting to see the billionaire vulture class as our common enemy. The response in the comments on Ben Shapiro’s podcast in support of Luigi was epic. Class war is replacing the culture wars as it gets more difficult to survive realizing that we have more in common with one another than what is claimed by politicians and media.
The TikTok ban was another sign that the human spirit cannot be crushed so easily. Americans on both the so called left and right turned to RedNote as the days ticked towards the TikTok ban. Popular TikTok personalities invited their followers to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu with #RedNote racing across the American social media.
As the day of the January 19th ban grew closer people started to post their RedNote content on X and other platforms. Americans realizing that they had been lied to about China as the Chinese RedNote members welcomed the #TikTokRefugees.
I have been inspired by the posts. The app has an instant translation feature that makes it easy for people across the Pacific to talk. Chinese people express shock that Americans are charged for ambulance trips to the hospital. Americans and Chinese are showing one another the contents of their refrigerators and comparing prices. Chinese members expressed shock that the homeless crisis was not Communist Party propaganda. One gruff MAGA hat wearing fellow was almost in tears at what he had experienced on the platform in just a couple of days. He had been lied to about China.
If there is one person that has the pulse of public opinion it is billionaire CIA contractor Peter Thiel the man behind VP Vance. He owns what he claims is the world’s most powerful AI surveillance data company Palantir. He is worried for the survival of his economic class.
Thiel appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” where the host asked him, “to those who think this shooter is a hero because he did it, because he said this healthcare executive is presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them coverage. What would you say to them?”
After being speechless for nearly 20 seconds, Thiel offered up a halting answer, telling Morgan, “It’s, I don’t know what, what to say? I, I think I still think you have, you should try to make an argument. And I, I think this is, this is you should, you know, there may be things wrong with our health care system, but you have, you have to make an argument, and you have to try to find a way to convince people and and change, change it by by that, and this is, you know, this is not going to work.”
“I don’t know. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, yeah, I mean, all sorts of things I, I could say about it, but I don’t, I don’t think, and I again, I think, you know,” he added.
On May 9, 2024 Palantir CEO Alex Karp at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security in Washington D.C. expressed fear that the protests for Gaza meant that they were losing control. “We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show…If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.” They know the pitch forks are coming if we can see our fellow working class Americans as allies rather than fall for the false divisions of Democrats and Republicans.
The TikTok ban not only also demonstrates the possibility of class unity but it reveals what could be a central feature of our future. The CIA founded company Oracle switched off TikTok after the US Supreme Court ruled its elimination was not a violation of the Constitution only to turn it back on less than 24 hours later. When you logged back on millions of Americans were greeted by this message. “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.” It wasn’t long before people started to discover that you can’t post “Free Palestine”on the new TikTok.
On January 21, 2025 Trump, flanked by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Japanese CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son, announced the $500 billion AI total surveillance Project Stargate. “I’m gonna help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built. So they have to produce a lot of electricity. And we’ll make it possible for them to get this production done easily, at their own plants if they want.” Trump trumpeted.
And the outrage by Trump supporters at Larry Ellison’s glorification on the individual mRNA cancer vaccines made possible by AI was instantaneous on social media. Many in the MAGA crowd were already posting anger at all of his Neocon appointments, the prominence of billionaires like Elon Musk on his team and disappointment at Trumps support of the immigrant H-1B visa program.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said to investors in 2024. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
But what’s maybe even more important than the ability to implement Biometric Digital ID, programmable digital currency and total surveillance is warfare. Biden’s Jake Sullivan told Axios, “Regardless of what was said in public, every background conversation we had with President Biden’s high command came back to China. Yes, they had concerns about the ethics, misinformation and job loss of AI. They talked about that. But they were unusually blunt in private: Every move, every risk was calculated to keep China from beating us to the AI punch. Nothing else matters, they basically said.” AI targeting in Gaza, and autonomous swarm drone warfare is already being used on the battle field.
The Moss Landing Lithium-ion battery fire on January 16, 2025 provides a number of lessons that may bridge the artificially magnified left right divide. It is turning out that the UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals may not be so green as the toxic gasses and heavy metals raining down across “America’s Salad Bowl”, farm land that provides 70% of our country’s vegetables.
This mental struggle is apparent in the public statements of Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church who both supports the Green Agenda but wants the battery storage facility to be safe, saying to the media the morning after the fire started, “This is a Three Mile Island event for this industry” We really don’t know much about this technology.”
“There are a lot of really powerful forces in this state and in this country that want to see these batteries in place and going out here… and we don’t really matter,” Church told a public meeting at Prunedale Grange 388 on January 20th. The State of California adopted legislation on June 30, 2022, that allows state authorities to bypass local laws in permitting large-scale renewable energy projects.
The case of OpenAI whistleblower 26 year old Suchir Balaji found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, 2024, suggested Supervisor Church may be correct about what the community is up against. Suchir Balaji worked on the ChatGBT program and quit after Sam Altman turned OpenAI from a nonprofit to a for profit company. He started raising the alarm about AI’s use of copy written material to make OpenAI a profit.
In a new interview with KTVU his mother insisted there were things out of place in his “ransacked” apartment where his body was found four days before he was due to be called as a witness to the OpenAI case.
The New York Times wrote in October 2024, “But after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, he thought harder about what the company was doing. He came to the conclusion that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.” His mother claims flash drives were taken during the murder that San Francisco authorities ruled was a suicide.
Amanda Gerut writes in Fortune Magazine, “President Trump on Tuesday announced an eye-popping investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the U.S., funded through a joint venture called the Stargate Project. According to Trump, the investment is likely to spur an increase of 100,000 jobs and will be accompanied by a spate of executive orders to ensure new data centers built in connection with the investment will have enough energy.”
A Scientific American article of October 2023 reported, “A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption are set to lead to NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.”
The mantra of “saving the climate” may morph into “made in America” but America’s move to an electric future will march on. Robotic warfare preparation, digital surveillance and the production of autonomous vehicles will increase. Teslas will continue to roll off the assembly lines and the 15 Minute Smart City and the Internet of Things programs will advance. Essential features of the digital panopticon of Stargate.
We are facing an existential crisis and its time to unite the working class against this billionaire technocracy.
UNITED HEALTHCARE’S HUNGER GAMES AND THE MURDER OF BRIAN THOMPSON
December 4, 2024
United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed this morning in New York City. His net worth was estimated at approximately $42.9 million as of February 16, 2024, according to Wallmine.com, yet I spend my days talking with his clients who often haven’t eaten in days and are seeking groceries.
I get the first of what would be between 10 to 20 calls a day from seniors seeking food in February 2023. “Are you Community meals? United Healthcare gave me your number.”
It wasn’t but a couple weeks into this sudden flood of requests for food when I went on line and found the number for the CEO&’s office of United Healthcare to see if they could stop sending people my way and instead refer their clients to 211 or food programs in their local area. The women who answered each week were sympathetic and claimed they would correct the situation. But the calls continued to today.
At first people would say they had called the number on the back of the benefit card that United Healthcare had provided. The $100 on the cards had run out and they were confused thinking they would get $100 a month for food. When United Healthcare gave them the sad news they suggested they call Community Meals at 1-800-884-1136. I would try to see if a local Food Not Bombs group could help but often all I could suggest is to call 211, their county offices or United Way.
People called from Hawaii, California, Texas, Maryland, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Maine and all across the South East.
The stories were heart breaking. One older woman in Georgia was down to three cans of tuna and didn’t even have bread for a sandwich. A man in Florida hadn’t eaten in days but he sure was proud of his guns. He would call six months later.
An older lady called from rural Tennessee. She had just been housed after being homeless. She had a car but no money and not enough gas to get to town even if she could afford to buy groceries. She lived a two or three hour drive from our groups in Chattanooga, Memphis and Nashville. Too far for our volunteers to deliver groceries.
One of the most heartbreaking calls was from James, a man in his seventies who lived with his diabetic wife and disabled son. The food pantries in his county and the neighboring counties had closed down because they couldn’t keep up with the needs. He lived on $800 a month, was not able to afford the co-pay for his wife’s insulin nor his own cancer medicine. He said it was already 105 degrees outside and he couldn’t pay his electric bill so his two old window unit air conditioners wouldn’t be working by week’s end. He started to cry telling me he had worked his whole life and always paid his taxes. Like many others he was angry we could pay for war while turning our backs on the American people.
I had been off the phone for about five minutes when a senior from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina rings. She hadn’t eaten in three days and was desperate for help.
Many of those who call introduce themselves as calling from United Healthcare and have a senior on the line that needs home delivery of groceries. I suggest their client call that 211 number or their county offices. I also ask them to remove my number and direct everyone to the 211 service, the local United Way or county offices.
As of December 2024 United Healthcare has a market cap of $561.15 Billion USD. This makes United Healthcare the world’s 16th most valuable company by market cap according to CompaniesMarketcap.com.
With the billions United Healthcare makes they could have hired a team of social workers to investigate a realistic policy of directing the hungry to services that could help rather than sending people to a group that shares food with the homeless.
Keith McHenry
PO Box 422
Santa Cruz, CA 95061 USA
575-770-3377
keith@foodnotbombs.net
A DEMOCRACY OF TERROR
September 2, 2024
“As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Kamala Harris August 23, 2024
“I just saw the inside of a Palestinian baby’s head. What a day,” trended on X as Ana Navarro spoke to an enthusiastic crowd at the Democratic National Convention.
As the carnival of unreality celebrated “the best four years” in America’s history at the Chicago Democratic National Convention the pace of phone calls from desperate seniors seeking food was exploding like the bombs raining down on the children of Gaza while the current regime has brought the US to the brink of a nuclear war with Russia.
The Biden/Harris administration made its intention to continue the genocide clear on
August 26th completing its 500th flight airlifting over 50,000 tons of weapons and equipment to the Israeli army for its over ten-month onslaught against Palestinians. As the joyous Chicago convention droned on the British Medical Journal reported that at least 186,000 Palestinians had been killed by the weapons the administration donated for the genocide. At the same time the US and NATO are bombing Moscow and other Russian cities in their mad regime change war. We have never been so close to a nuclear conflict as we are today.
As we teeter on the edge of a global war our people are suffering the terror of this democracy. The usual 6:00 am call rings while starting that morning’s pot of coffee. A soft spoken woman from Mississippi lets me know her insurance company gave her my number. She needs food. The $100 gift card United Health had provided has run out of money. She can’t see. Can I send someone over with groceries. Her church can’t help. I let her know we share meals with the homeless and that she might want to try calling 211, like 911 but 211 or possibly her county offices.
After a few more calls a 70 year old from southeast Texas named James dials me seeking both food and money. The pantries in his county and surrounding counties closed because they couldn’t meet demand. His power was about to be cut off ending the use of his two old window air conditioning units. He tells me it hit 110 degrees. James does not have the money to pay his copay for his cancer medication and his wife’s insulin.
I could hear him crying as he said he had worked his whole life, always paid his taxes and felt humiliated that he was seeking help.
I suggested as I do a dozen or so times a day, that he contact 211 or his county offices. He responded that he had called the Salvation Army, Community Action Network, Catholic Services, five or six other agencies and his own church and no one could help. He got my number from his health insurance company. He thanked me for at least listening and understanding.
A few minutes later I get a call from a senior woman in western North Carolina who shared that she had not eaten in three days.
Many who call tell me they are angry that we can send billions to fight wars in Ukraine and Israel but can’t help our own here in America.
The cruelty is not limited to starving our elderly. The Supreme Court ruling in April allowing cities and states to make being homeless a crime and Newsom’s Executive Order have given Santa Cruz officials a green light to step up their already horrific campaign of terror against the homeless. A $4 million “Encampment Resolution” grant along with other state funding sent tractors and dumpsters to the Pogonip to confiscate the property of those already clinging to survival.
The lines at the Food Not Bombs meal get longer each month. The frustration is electric. A mantra of “We have no place to go” hums around the plaza. Do you have a tent? A sleeping bag, the police took them yesterday.
Jessica York writes on August 14, 2024, “In the wake of concerns voiced by several community members, on Tuesday, the Santa Cruz City Council approved a $140,000 contract to clean up a scattered Pogonip homeless encampment.”
“The city voted to hire Santa Cruz-based Kenny Robinson Construction after officials had heard complaints about the estimated 40 active and abandoned camps along the approximately 1.5-mile Nature Loop, accessible off Golf Club Drive. Concerns included unleashed dogs, debris and fires, according to a memo to the council.”
At the same time Democratic mayors are claiming the Supreme Court Ruling and Executive order will not impact their anti-homeless policies. Mayor Fred Keeley is one of several California’s mayors whistling that tune. The Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v Johnson and Newsom’s Executive Order to clear all encampments will have no impact on our city’s homeless policies.
“‘Our focus on affordable housing and homelessness prevention is our North Star. We have to continue building on the momentum we’ve gained over the past two years, and we’re seeing real results from our strategic approach.’ writes the mayor.”
“One of those results is a remarkable 36% decrease in homelessness over the past year. This progress is a testament to the effectiveness of the city’s comprehensive strategies. The city has moved 184 people to more stable housing and provided 165 tent-based safe sleeping spaces.” Keeley claims.
You would not be surprised to learn that none of what he is reporting here is based in fact. If there really were a 36% decrease in homeless why would the city also agree to pay their friends at Kenny Robinson Construction $140,000 to steal our community’s poorest resident’s survival gear, hauling it off to the landfill? Would it be necessary for the city to request a $4 million Encampment Resolution Grant to confiscate and discard the property of those seeking to survive at Harvey West and Coral Street. You can see the failure of this system every day with your own eyes. For many of us we experience it every day.
It’s likely to get more dire for Americans as we head into a World War and an economic Depression. News that the Biden Administration had made an 800,000 person mistake in the employment numbers blipped from view during the convention. Forbes reports that a staggering 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet dumps $982M worth of Bank of America shares in August as he moves out of stocks into cash, suggesting to many that there will be a rocky economic future possible, even a Depression forcing more families into the streets.
Unfortunately claims by mayors like Keeley of progress in building what they call affordable housing is really not so affordable and even if real and construction started now it would not be enough to house the cascading increase of the 15,000 Americans who become homeless every day according to HUD.
So the plan to address this brutal crisis is the criminalization of America’s homeless. The CIA-linked Cicero Institute is pushing a “solution” to “the homeless problem” that could lead to governments coercing people into FEMA camps, camps not unlike those where our Japanese neighbors were sent during the last World War.
The Cicero Institute provides a “Model Bill” it calls “Reducing Street Homelessness Act” to state and city legislators. Billionaire Joe Lonsdale started the Cicero Institute in 2016. He also co-founded CIA contractor Palantir Technologies with several others, including PayPal’s Peter Thiel. Palantir’s first backer was the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. Peter Thiel is also the money behind JD Vance, Donald Trumps running mate.
The Cicero Institute’s model legislation has already been introduced or adopted in ten states. In Kentucky a “stand your ground” feature protects those who feel threatened by those homeless whose property they are trashing gives them the right to shoot the homeless if necessary.
Joe Lonsdale’s Palantir is providing AI targeting to the Israeli and Ukrainian militaries. Their products were most famously used to kill the World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza.
The Nation Magazine reports “Such horrendous “mistakes” are hard to understand, considering the enormous amount of advanced targeting AI hardware and software provided to the Israeli military and spy agencies — some of it by one American company in particular: Palantir Technologies.”
Palantir’s software, which uses AI to analyze satellite imagery, open-source data, drone footage, and reports from the ground to present commanders with military options, is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” according to CEO Alex Karp.
This suggests that Palantir is also providing the targeting inside Russia in the US regime change war against Moscow.
On August 31, 2024, Ukraine killed or wounded 46 civilians including 7 children in Belgorod Russia using the Czech Vampire Missile System and UK cluster munition. Videos of a missile obliterating a car into a fireball on a freeway in this city is chilling.
Journalist Patrick Lancaster has been reporting on the civilian crisis in Kursk. He interviewed the husband of a pregnant woman who was shot and killed by US backed troops as they fled their home. That was hard to watch. GoPro footage from an American rushing house to house in Kursk shooting at Russian civilians catches the voices of other Americans, Poles and French mercenaries yelling directions.
Ukrainians with the help of the US have been launching explosive drones at the Kursk nuclear reactor in Russia.
IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi wrote on August 26th “Given the serious situation, I am personally leading the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission to the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) in the Russian Federation.”
“Since new developments and increased levels of military activity in the vicinity of the KNPP, I have been closely following developments on the ground, especially with respect to the plant. It is important that when the Agency is called upon to fulfill its mandate to ensure that nuclear is used in a peaceful manner, we are present.” Just as was the case when he visited the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, he refused to note that it is Ukraine that is attacking these nuclear facilities. Unlike the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant which has been switched off, the Kursk Nuclear Power station is still operating.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issued a World War III warning to the U.S. on August 28,2024, saying that the West was “asking for trouble” by even considering Ukrainian requests to use American supplied weapons to conduct strikes deep within Russian territory. Discussions about using Western supplied missiles to strike Russia are tantamount to “playing with fire,” Lavrov told reporters in Moscow. The US has ignored this warning.
Russian TASS state news agency cited Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Sunday that Moscow had decided to revise its nuclear doctrine to reach a new balance in line with the escalation course adopted by the West.
“The work is at an advanced stage, and there is a clear intent to make corrections”, Ryabkov was cited as saying by TASS.
Like Iran and the Palestinian resistance, Russia is trying to thread the needle between deterrence and the very real possibility of providing justification for a direct nuclear strike by the US on their countries.
US and European leaders have made it clear that they intend to topple the Russian government. During a speech in Warsaw, Poland on March 2022, President Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal are among those in the West openly calling for the removal of Putin.
The “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” was approved by Biden in March 2024 according to top secret documents leaked to The New York Times during the Democratic Convention.
It is disheartening to say the least that few Americans seem to realize just how close the Biden/Harris Administration is to taking our country into a direct military conflict with nuclear armed Russia.
Many people have asked me lately about how I have come to my unusual opinions on current events. My mother’s father was in the Army’s Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War. The OSS was the precursor to the CIA. My grandfather directed the most deadly bombing campaign in world history, firebombing Tokyo in “Operation Meeting House”.
I watched him argue over the phone for the use of nuclear weapons on Hanoi, demanding his friends Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Curtis LeMay “send a message” to Russia and China. We couldn’t let them think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an aberration.
During the days that I was watching my grandfather argue with McNamara and LeMay his friends were plotting Operation Northwoods, a false flag attack in response to the Cuban Bay of Pigs disaster.
In the November 18, 1997, Reuters article by Jim Wolf on the just declassified files of this operation, “Pentagon Planned 1960s Cuban “Terror Campaign’” he quotes parts of the documents:
“The courses of action which follow are a preliminary submission suitable only for planning purposes,” Pentagon strategists said in an annex to a March 12, 1962, report about Cuba options to the military Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other cities and even in Washington,” they said in the document
stamped “top-secret.’’
During the decade that my mother’s father provided his wisdom he shared some of the most important lessons on “real politic” that would shape my understanding of how society is managed.
He explained that he and his friends had to instigate the Pearl Harbor Attack because the American public would have never supported a war in the Pacific otherwise. Sixty-three black and white glossy photos that he took from a B-29 of the firebombing of Tokyo hung framed around his Needham, Massachusetts den. Another framed photo of thousands of slaves in Burma using hammers and baskets to pave the runway for his bombers with stones leaned against his file cabinet that I slept next to in his basement. I would stare at those poor shirtless men wondering how that could be real.
He described why he shipped heroin from Burma to the US saying they needed to pacify the black community after the end of World War II because they were worried that the unequal benefits in the GI Bill could lead to civil unrest.
The reason he gave as to why I would grow up to aid in directing the world was that we were “genetically superior” and therefore the responsibility fell to us. He mentioned that god didn’t exist. I remember being annoyed when the pastor at his funeral spoke of him as being a godly man since he was proud of being a member of Satanic group. He told of joining one of the most secret of secret societies which he could have been invited into while attending Philips Exeter, Dartmouth or Harvard Law. Directing the destiny of our world was a burden our family and the elites we represented as members of the intelligence community had to shoulder. “White man’s burden” he called it.
“We would never let an election determine the direction of our society,” the retired Office of Strategic Services veteran instructed. The purpose of elections is to divide the people so they do not become a threat to those in power.
Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan speak that same language of the logic of unlimited carnage when required to shape events that I witnessed being expressed by my grandfather and his friends.
It has been difficult to write this essay as current events continue to point towards a global war between nuclear armed nations and whatever I publish today seems be out of date by the next morning.
I am not seeing any blaring headlines proclaiming that the US is seeking peace in their regime change war against Russia or in the expanding war in West Asia. No word of Ukraine surrendering. No end to the genocide in Gaza. This should be concerning to everyone as the current US administration continues to stoke both conflicts with money, weapons, fighter jets, carrier groups and satellite targeting.
I remember as if it was yesterday when I climbed under my tiny desk at Bethesda Elementary School in our Cuban Missile Crisis “duck and cover” exercises, laughing with girls about how insane adults must be to think this would protect us.
There has never been a more dangerous time than we are facing today. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis doesn’t even come close.
Even as I have been writing this the US and NATO have lobbed more bombs and drones at Moscow and Israel is on hair trigger alert with their undisclosed nuclear arsenal, contemplating their Samson Option as they wait for the response they provoked by killing Ismail Haniyeh the political leader and chief negotiator of Hamas in Tehran.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Americans will go to bed hungry tonight and many of those hungry people will be going to bed on our streets waiting to be moved and stripped of their last possessions by the police.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz, CA 95061 USA – 1-800-884-1136
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