IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING HERE
July 27, 2024
Santa Cruz and the theater of hypocrisy, carnage and suffering
The “Buzz Windrip” type characters of Santa Cruz planned to read the 1935 dystopian political novel written by American author Sinclair Lewis. A Good Times cover story promoting Bookshop Santa Cruz’s reading of “It Can’t Happen Here” warned that if we didn’t vote for the political party waging a genocide in Palestine and arming far-right Nazi groups in Ukraine that Trump would come to power. The fascist dictator Buzz Windrip of Lewis’s text.
Before that July 19th The 418 Project event featuring Congressman Jimmy Panetta and Mayor Fred Keeley I visited my friends on the levee handing out some of the last of the announcements for that evenings “It is Already Happening Here” protest. As I walked up to one group perching along the levee I could hear two Santa Cruz Police officers chatting with several tent occupants about providing pizza. Once the officers moved on I asked about this pizza donation. They explained that the police claimed they would give you pizza if you took a drug test. They were not sure if that offer was still good if you tested positive.
Joe Shultz of India Joze met me at the Trader Joe’s parking lot delivering ice tea for the 6:00 pm rally. We set up the table with pastries, sandwiches and cold drinks on the River Street sidewalk. The first of those from the levee joined us for a snack. I saw a few people assembling outside the front door of the theater so not wishing to waste the last of my flyers I ambled down to share them with the people waiting to hear the congressman and mayor. A security guard dashed out of the venue and thrusting two white envelopes at me as he mumbled something about my being banned from the area. I shared that I didn’t care and continued passing out flyers until he summoned one of Santa Cruz’s police officers. To avoid a pre-protest arrest I wandered off to retrieve my bullhorn returning to blast my message to those in my banned area. “It’s already happening. You don’t need to wait for Trump. A genocide sounds like fascism. Arming Nazis in Ukraine sounds like fascism. Sweeping the homeless also sounds like fascism”.
It wasn’t long before a crowd of protesters arrived and I suggested they could move from the sidewalk and take the action directly outside the entrance to the event. Before long several dozen people arched around the people lining up to get in. I gave my bullhorn to one of the Palestinian activists and joined the group holding our “Stop the Sweeps” banner defying the threat of arrest.
Wallace Baine writes in Lookout Santa Cruz “Several dozen protesters, armed with bullhorns, drums and flamethrower passions, ringed the theater, creating a din that the ‘actors’ inside had to nearly shout over. On top of that, a few protesters found their way into the audience and, at least five times, interrupted the play reading with loud denunciations aimed at the panelists.”
After the spoiled political theater ended it was clear from their distressed looking faces that Keeley and Panetta were desperate to flee their free speech circus.
I opened those two envelopes the next morning discovering that The 418 Project executive director Laura Bishop’s letter that I was “persona non grata” adding “person not welcome” until August 1, 2034. You read that right, a decade long ban “at 155 River Street or any event held elsewhere by The 418 Project.” The second letter also banned me from the Galleria Mall for 10 years.
Sinclair Lewis’s novel warned that Buzz Windrip was an enemy of free speech, adding an interesting twist to my pre-ban letters seeking to silence the protest. This is not too much of surprise. The event’s host, Bookshop Santa Cruz commemorated “Banned Books Month” while owner Casey Coonerty-Protti’s husband Michel Protti directed the unit at Meta that silenced medical professionals who were critical of Trump’s COVID policies, posts detailing the arming of far-right Azov Nazis by the Biden administration and the ugly truth of the genocide in Gaza.
Fascism is a family affair for the Coonerty folks. Casey’s brother is former county Supervisor Ryan Coonerty. A 2012 Monterey Herald article titled “‘Predictive policing’ gets capital boost” reports that “Attorney Caleb Baskin and Councilman Ryan Coonerty have taken the experimental ‘predictive policing’ program used by the Santa Cruz Police Department and created software that they hope to sell to law enforcement agencies around the nation. The duo, who founded the co-working business NextSpace, say they’ve raised more than $1 million so far to fund their newest venture.”
The article continues, “The program has gained international media attention — and the attention of law enforcement agencies nationwide, many asking how they can get the program.”
“Based on such requests, Zach Friend helped coordinate a meeting between Mohler and Baskin and Coonerty to discuss the idea of creating a business.”
“Baskin, 36, and Coonerty, 38, say investors who’ve helped fund their venture include Plantronics CEO Ken Kannappan, former eBay executive Rob Chesnut and Coonerty’s brother-in-law Michel Protti, a vice president at Yahoo.”
PredPol is based on an analytics model developed by a group of researchers, including mathematician George Mohler of Santa Clara University and Jeff Brantingham at UCLA’s Department of Anthropology.
In 2018 theverge.com posted, “Jeff Brantingham is as close as it gets to putting a face on the controversial practice of ‘predictive policing.’ Over the past decade, the University of California-Los Angeles anthropology professor adapted his Pentagon-funded research in forecasting battlefield casualties in Iraq to predicting crime for American police departments, patenting his research and founding a for-profit company named PredPol, LLC.”
A June 2021 article “Stop LAPD Spying Sues LAPD to Uncover Communications with UCLA Professor Who Founded PredPol “ reports on opposition to this dystopian racist police state software started by Ryan Coonerty.
In 2019, a group of 68 UCLA professors and graduate students sent a letter to LAPD condemning Professor Brantingham’s work on “predictive” policing technologies. And in June 2020, over 1,400 academic mathematicians joined a public letter condemning mathematical research that contributes to racist policing. The letter singled out Professor Brantingham’s work with LAPD and named PredPol’s “racist consequences.”
Posted on datasmart.hks.harvard.edu in 2013, “Dr. George Mohler could not have foreseen the deluge that descended upon him at Santa Clara University, shortly after local police adopted his groundbreaking algorithm in July 2011 and media reported that his new software program was taking criminals off the streets.”
“It may seem a stretch, but the model of post-earthquake temblors is very similar to that of criminal activity,” Dr. Mohler says. “Criminals want to replicate their successes, they go back to similar locations, they repeat their crimes — it’s almost identical to how aftershocks roll out after earthquakes, following predictable fault lines and timetables.”
“In 2010, Dr. Mohler took his seismology theory north to Santa Clara University, where he joined as assistant professor of mathematics and computer science, married and started a family. Then serendipity struck — he met Zach Friend, a public information officer and crime analyst with the Santa Clara police. Friend was intrigued by the potential of predictive analytics; soon he and Dr. Mohler were brainstorming how the latter’s algorithm to track earthquake aftershocks could be adapted for police work.”
“We met several times and decided to try for deployment with the Santa Cruz police,” Dr. Mohler says. “I wrote the prototype software and gave it to the police in July 2011. It turns out Zach was a media mastermind — he’d worked in the press office of the 2008 Obama campaign. Once PopSci and The New York Times picked up the story, it was off to the races.”
It was fitting that someone supporting the genocide in Gaza and the arming of Azov far-right military units in Ukraine would be reading a play warning of fascism. His April 20, 2024 post on his blog announced his support for more war as he writes, “The package would deliver critical support for Ukraine in its efforts to push back against Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression, safeguard Taiwan from an advancing China, and ensure the security of the nation of Israel in a volatile Middle East.”
“The $95 billion national security package includes; $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel, $8 billion to bolster defense capabilities in the Indo-Pacific, and $9 billion for global humanitarian assistance.” Meanwhile the City of Santa Cruz is getting $4 million to clear the homeless from outside the homeless shelter.
Bookshop Santa Cruz is not shy about hosting war criminals. They invited a former CIA Director to speak on the need to expand the war on terrorism on September 10, 2018 at Peace United Church. Several of us who protest Panetta’s call for more war were banned from Bookshop Santa Cruz for life but Casey changed her mind realizing I was helping organize an event with Chris Hedges and she had already ordered copies of his books.
Panetta has been a solider advancing the agenda of the Empire for decades. When Panetta was Clinton’s chief of staff the administration’s sanctions and no-fly zone killed more than 560,000 children according to a study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
A December 12, 2011, Voice of America report noted “U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is on a surprise visit to Afghanistan, where he says 2011 will mark a turning point in the 10-year-old war.” Panetta would denounce Biden’s hasty evacuation 10 years later after tens of thousands of Afghans had been killed.
The locally owned Bookshop Santa Cruz is not the innocent free speech defender of democracy as it likes to project. Like others in Santa Cruz who seek to project a “do no harm” image many are direct participants in the creation of a frightening dystopian digital panopticon complete with robotic warfare.
An officer of the anti-homeless hate group Take Back Santa Cruz is the husband of Google’s general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado. We received a snap shot of Manuel’s emails between himself, City Manager Martin Bernal, Mayor Donna Meyers and Republican City Councilperson Renee Golder coordinating efforts to rid Santa Cruz of the homeless.
In a December 18, 2020, email Manuel thanks Martin for the week before’s zoom meeting writing about striping Delaware where many living in vehicles sleep, stepping up enforcement of all parking rule “(not just 72-hour limit)” and this “- Update on why some folks such as Keith McHenry (parked on McPherson) and Alicia Kuhl (parked on Delaware) have not been towed despite receiving so many tickets.” It is a relief to learn that their intelligence on my parking locations and ticket reality is so inept.
Google is one of many companies advancing slaughter in Gaza with their product Project Nimbus. This $1.2 billion joint contract between Google and Amazon signed in 2021 provides cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military.
A staff person who attended the 2 by 2 meetings between city and county officials shared the Halimah DeLaine Prado exchange with County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty and Mayor Donna Meyers. Meyers and Coonerty talked about busing the homeless to Camp Roberts California National Guard Base in Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties.
Facebook is another local CIA linked member of the national security state. Investigative journalist Whitney Webb’s April 12, 2021 article “The Military Origins of Facebook” writes”Facebook’s growing role in the ever-expanding surveillance and ‘pre-crime’ apparatus of the national security state demands new scrutiny of the company’s origins and its products as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was essentially analogous to what is currently the world’s largest social network.” According to Meta’s website Ryan Coonerty’s brother-in-law Michel Protti is the head of privacy at Facebook.
Webb writes “In mid-February, Daniel Baker, a US veteran described by the media as ‘anti-Trump, anti-government, anti-white supremacist, and anti-police,’ was charged by a Florida grand jury with two counts of ‘transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure.’”
“The communication in question had been posted by Baker on Facebook, where he had created an event page to organize an armed counter-rally to one planned by Donald Trump supporters at the Florida capital of Tallahassee on January 6. ‘If you are afraid to die fighting the enemy, then stay in bed and live. Call all of your friends and Rise Up!,’ Baker had written on his Facebook event page.”
“Baker’s case is notable as it is one of the first ‘precrime’ arrests based entirely on social media posts—the logical conclusion of the Trump administration’s, and now Biden administration’s, push to normalize arresting individuals for online posts to prevent violent acts before they can happen. From the increasing sophistication of US intelligence/military contractor Palantir’s predictive policing programs to the formal announcement of the Justice Department’s Disruption and Early Engagement Program in 2019 to Biden’s first budget, which contains $111 million for pursuing and managing ‘increasing domestic terrorism caseloads,’ the steady advance toward a precrime-centered ‘war on domestic terror’ has been notable under every post-9/11 presidential administration.’”
Palantir was in the news the night Congressman Panetta and Mayor Keeley read “It Can’t Happen Here”. Palantir’s co-founders Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel announced that they would be supporting Donald Trump and JD Vance. Peter Thiel is the puppet master behind JD Vance’s career from setting him up in his Mithril Capital hedge fund, his book and movie deals, the US Senate to his rise as Trump’s Vice Presidential running mate. The “Swamp” is already in Trump’s tent. Another Thiel associate, the military contractor Elon Musk also pledged support for the Trump ticket assuring the wars will continue no matter who is elected.
While Palantir is donating millions to Trump’s campaign they are also bragging in their ads that their AI software was used by the FBI to nab nearly 1,000 January 6th Trump supporters.
Palantir serves as a contractor to all 17 of the U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as many other U.S. federal agencies including the Pentagon. It was largely funded into existence by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the CIA was Palantir’s only client from 2005 until 2008, during which time the CIA was a key part of directing Palantir’s product development.
James Bamford writes in the April 2024 issue of the Nation, “ Earlier this month saw a continuation of that effort, with the targeting of three well-marked and fully approved aid vehicles belonging to World Central Kitchen, killing their seven occupants and ensuring that the food would never reach those dying of starvation. The targeting was precise—placing missiles dead center in the aid agency’s rooftop logos. Israel, however, said it was simply a mistake, similar to the ‘mistaken’ killing of nearly 200 other aid workers in just a matter of months—more than all the aid workers killed in all the wars in the rest of the world over the last 30 years combined, according to the Aid Worker Security Database.”
“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. “We stand with Israel,” the Denver-based company said in posts on X and LinkedIn. “The board of directors of Palantir will be gathering in Tel Aviv next week for its first meeting of the new year. Our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.” As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, with ties to the CIA, Palantir’s ‘work’ was supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities—the precise capabilities that allowed Israel to place three drone-fired missiles into three clearly marked aid vehicles.”
Cicero Institute’s Joe Lonsdale
Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s corporate profile says he is a technology entrepreneur and investor. He is the managing partner at 8VC, a US-based venture capital firm that manages several billion dollars in committed capital. He was an early institutional investor in several technology startups including the Santa Cruz military contractor Joby Aviation. Ryan Coonerty’s investor Ken Kannappan sold his Plantronics building to Joby Aviation in November 2022. The Joby Aviation website noted in April 2022 that the U.S. Air Force’s Agility Prime program would net more than $45 million for the Santa Cruz company.
“Building on more than five years of engagement with defense agencies, the expanded contract leverages Joby’s years of research and technology development and will include new testing to evaluate Joby’s advanced technologies. It brings the potential value of the total contract to more than $75 million.”
Joe Lonsdale also started the Cicero Institute, a policy group that delivers “entrepreneurial solutions to public problems.” The Cicero Institute campaigns for laws that allow private competition in government areas such as health care, housing, and education.
The Cicero Institute provides legislative templates to states and cities.
His website on homelessness starts, “States should ban unauthorized street camping.”
“Street camps are dangerous to the public and the vulnerable homeless alike. They are often hotbeds of violence, especially against women and children— especially those who are homeless themselves.”
“The public widely supports enforcing ordinances against dangerous street camps and moving individuals into emergency shelters.”
He goes on to write, “States should amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves — and keep them out of prison” adding, “Many street homeless suffer from chronic and untreated mental illness. For those that are a public nuisance or a danger to themselves or others, there must be a third option besides prison and abandonment.”
So far the Cicero Institute, has placed ten bills in at least eight states including Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Wisconsin. Texas became the first state to pass such a law in 2021, and Tennessee and Missouri followed in 2022.
Cynthia Griffith wrote about Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 on the Invisible People website, “Concentration camps and secret committees, out-of-state lobbyists, and flat-out lies — as unbelievable and terrifying as it sounds, this is a glimpse into what’s happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.”
And it gets even worse. “Kentucky GOP’s New Bill Decriminalizes Use of Deadly Force Against the Unhoused” writes Zane McNeill for the January 17, 2024 edition of Truthout.
“Republican lawmakers in Kentucky introduced a bill last Tuesday that would criminalize homeless encampments and expand the state’s Stand Your Ground law to allow property owners to confront unhoused people with a gun. The bill, dubbed the “Safer Kentucky Act,” already has received more than 45 Republican co-sponsors and the Kentucky State Fraternal Order of Police has committed to testify in support of the legislation when it has a committee hearing.”
The Cicero Institute website notes, “On March 20, 2024, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365 / SB 1530, which will make Florida a leading state in the fight against the failed homelessness policies that have wreaked havoc on so many American cities.”
Joe Lonsdale writes in his blog, “It has been a momentous few weeks for homeless policy in the United States. As you may know, this has been a keystone policy area for us since founding the Cicero Institute, and we have become the leading organizational voice for reform, as well as a resource for state leaders who want to take bold action. In Florida, we were proud to work with lawmakers on a legislative package that meets the needs of the state and emphasizes the incentives & accountability model that we pioneered at Cicero.”
Joe Lonsdale had another win on April 22, 2024 with the US Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v Johnson letting localities impose criminal penalties for acts like public camping and public sleeping without violating the Eighth Amendment — even if they lack sufficient available shelter space to accommodate their unhoused population.
Democratic mayors and governors pushed to have the meager protections of the Grants Pass case overturned. “Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court provides state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets,” Newsom said in a statement after the ruling, “This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.”
The bipartisan march to criminalize America’s homeless doesn’t need to wait for the election of Trump and Vance. It is happening now in Santa Cruz.
The city of Watsonville began to clear out a homeless encampment along the Pajaro River Levee on Monday July 22, 2024. It’s a process that is expected to last through August 2, 2024. The Santa Cruz Police posted eviction notices on tents throughout the Pogonip telling those who fled the sweeps at Harvey West and Coral Streets they had to remove their belongings by 9:00 am on July 29, 2024.
Jessica York writes in her April 19, 2024 Sentinel article “Santa Cruz receives $4M to address Harvey West, Coral Street homeless encampments”
“In April 2024 the city of Santa Cruz has been awarded a two-year $4 million state homeless encampment resolution grant.”
“During the two-year life of the Encampment Resolution Fund, granted via the state Department of Housing and Community Development, Santa Cruz would be expected to assist 55 people sleeping on the streets.” The city claims there are over 1,000 people living outside in the city and that is based on what seemed an intentionally poorly organize Point in Time Count.
In a June 4, 2024 email, Chief Executive Officer of Housing Matters Phil Kramer thanked Mayor Keeley, City Managers Matt Huffaker, Lisa Murphy, Larry Imwalle and Housing for Health Director Robert Ratner for clearing the area around the homeless shelter of the homeless.
“Hi all- Thanks you for your work to create a more welcoming and safe Coral Street for shelter guests, day services participants, staff and partners. I appreciate what a large undertaking this was and understand there is more infrastructure work (fencing, etc.) coming soon.”
“The sidewalks are stained and reek of urine. Is it possible for City staff to do some sidewalk powerwashing? If you give us authorization we might be able to do some of this cleaning work ourselves, or hire it out. Please let me know.
Thanks again,
Phil”
Deputy City Manager and girlfriend of Police Chief Bernie Escalante responds that afternoon by email.
“Hi Phil,
Thank you for recognizing the incredible undertaking this effort took to accomplish. We had nearly 20 employees out at the location on Monday, and we will continue to have our team in that location. We still have lots of work to do to try to break the cycle of people returning to that space. Our team is scheduled to power wash the sidewalks, and may have already done so by now. It may need multiple washes. I will let you know what the status is of the cleaning.”
“I look forward to working with Housing Matters as a valuable partner to help those individuals in and around Coral Street with our recently awarded Encampment Resolution Grant. This will help keep this location clear.”
The rush to remove the homeless got another boost when California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-1-24 on July 24, 2024, directing state and local officials to start removing homeless encampments stating that the recent Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v Johnson now empowers cities to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public.
“Today I announced an executive order to move the process forward. We’re done, it’s time to move with urgency at the local level to clean up these sites, to focus on public health and focus on public safety. There are no longer any excuses,” Newsom said. “We now have no excuse with the Supreme Court decision.”
So, yes it is already happening here and is likely to get even more repressive as the noose of biometric IDs and programmable digital currency, an AI driven World War and the internment of homeless Americans is implemented by those very same people who struggled to read, “It Can’t Happen Here” at the Bookshop Santa Cruz event.
Keith McHenry – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz, CA 95061 USA – 575-770-3377
A CLOCKTOWER CENTER OF CONTROL
June 12, 2024
Santa Cruz and the high-rise development of the dystopian digital panopticon.
Instead of enjoying the beautiful warm seaside evening I forced myself to log on to the Workbench Team’s webinar on the Santa Cruz Clocktower Center development, an 18 now 16 story tower “proposed” to be built next to where Food Not Bombs shares its meals every weekend to an increasing number of hungry and homeless people.
Online daily Lookout Santa Cruz reviewed the farce, “At 16 stories and rising to 192 feet, with 260 housing units and ground-floor commercial space, the Clocktower Center is a wholly new kind of project, in both scale and density, for Santa Cruz County; but it’s one which Workbench says is sorely needed in the most unaffordable housing market in the United States.”
Developers, government officials and their nonprofit shills across California often justify these projects claiming if they build more housing it will bring down the cost of rent but as anyone trying to rent an apartment in Santa Cruz can attest, the many completed projects have not reduced housing costs at all. A failed supply and demand argument.
Many people living in Santa Cruz may wonder why even though there is little public support for all these high rise projects and an organized citizen opposition to each project, every development is approved.
Lookout notes, “Twice, people asked whether the community could stop the project. Twice, Workbench’s co-founder Jamileh Cannon said no.”
“Is it possible to stop this project?” Keith McHenry wrote in the virtual Q&A chat box. McHenry leads Food Not Bombs, a local organization that hosts an open-air soup kitchen at the town clock on weekends.”
“It’s not possible to stop it, but we are very open to your constructive feedback and to making improvements,” Cannon replied.
Lookout writer Neeley links “open-air soup kitchen at the town clock” to a mostly fact free article fed to him by City Manager Matt Huffaker.
There are a number of reasons these unwanted monstrosities like the city’s library parking garage, the Front Street projects and the Cruz Hotel are assumed realities. Giant project after project each with limited parking spaces and claims that the high density towers are designed to meet the environmental goals of the city as described in their obtuse “Community-wide Climate Action Plan 2030.” The city’s website lists these actions in one of their powerpoint style reports,” Direct emissions reductions; 3 new Municipal Solar PV arrays + energy efficiency work; Rail Trail Completion; Public Transit / Active Transportation Improvements; Fleet Electrification Roadmap and Investments; New Building Energy Reach Code; Induction Cooktop Loaner Program with Library and Food scrap collection.”
Workbench’s webinar painted a wonderful upbeat picture of their tower where you can step out the first floor atrium and walk or bike to all your favorite places. A survey question asked the viewers if we own an electric car and if you required a car for work. It was suggested you could rent a Zip car if you required the use of a vehicle. When asked in the chat if this was a “Fifteen Minute Smart City” project they reported that they had not heard of this and would look into it.
Nothing to see here. Just happy people provided with all the Eco-friendly convenience of a walkable community. Foamy cafe lattes sipped in the sun on the 16th floor terrace cafe as your Tesla sits charging in the garage above the Cedar Street book-less digital library.
So why did “team member” and co-founder Jamileh Cannon say it was not possible to stop the project? Is this just the case of wealthy people making more money or could there be more to this sudden flurry of construction projects. Could there be any other reason for concern beyond a distaste for the ugly buildings and the elimination our local democratic process?
Or could it be because this massive construction bonanza is part of a global strategy initiated by the institutions controlled by billionaires like Bill Gates, King Charles, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg and their UN and World Economic Forum’s pleasant sounding programs like the, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.
There is a complex system that intentionally soaks the media and every other institution in this ecological affordability story of bliss that meets the interests of the board rooms that intend to reap the “rewards” of their dystopian digital panopticon. That system includes the mobilization of Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) or non-profits as a tool in nudging the policies that most benefit the hedge funds, banks and global financial vultures of institutes. It’s a strategy that was used effectively in shaping society before Obama’s 2014 coup of the democratically elected government of Ukraine and that the US is currently deploying in the effort to topple the Hungarian, Serbian and Georgian governments. The National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros and other foundations spent nearly $5 billions to fund pro European Union NGOs in their campaign to replace the Ukrainian government with US State Department’s choice Petro Poroshenko.
Our local NGOs such as Housing Matters perform the same function. They help foster the impression that the homeless are helpless through their “Smart Solutions” community meetings while promoting the myth that more development will lower rents in Santa Cruz providing housing for our homeless. I am sure many of the administrators and staff in those agencies want the best and believe the oceans of information asserting these dodges from reality will really help ease the “problem” of homelessness. I remember seeing Housing Matters Don Lane stride across the Trader Joes parking lot with his “No on Measure M” yard signs in hand out to support the predetermined policy allowing unlimited building heights and the suppression of local control. As soon as Measure M, which would have required a community vote on the height of downtown developments failed, the Clocktower Center was unleashed on the people of Santa Cruz.
The upbeat “we care” messaging of “sustainability” and “income-restricted” affordable apartment units expressed in the June 8th Workbench webinar joyously proclaimed such features as limited parking, Zip cars at the library garage, electric vehicle charging stations, pleasant cafes and attractive retail shops.
“I think it is imperative that we work to create as much sustainable housing in Santa Cruz… I think that the scale of Santa Cruz hasn’t changed in 95 years [since the city’s tallest building, the Palomar Hotel, was built] and that is a huge tragedy,” Workbench Team member Simon wrote at the webinar.
As the public relations webinar progressed it became clear that this project, maybe unknowingly to the developers, was just one piece in the puzzle outlined in the UN and World Economic Forum”s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their Agenda 2030. The Santa Cruz City website lists the high impact actions needed to meet this Agenda 2030. “Choose Renewable Electricity from Central Coast Community Energy; Reduce Air Travel; Eat more Plant-based Meals; Take Public Transportation; Buy or lease an Electric Vehicle; Electrify: Install Electric Heat Pump Water Heater or Space Heating; Use Active Transportation: bike, walk, skateboard, or scooter; Install Solar Panel.” I would normally be a big supporter of many of these aspirations if there wasn’t a hidden agenda that is much more sinister behind Agenda 2023.
The path from the seas of think tank white papers, World Economic Forum seminars, UN pronouncements and the legislation required to implement their Agenda 2030 is expressed in a brutal silent manipulation that trickles into state, county and municipal law by way of workshops hosted by associations such as the California League of Cities, business associations and foundations that fund cooperating university departments and non-profits like Housing Matters and No on Measure M buster Second Harvest.
Not only did Second Harvest encourage a no vote on Measure M they also paraded around the county to their agencies a state mandated presentation that touted the ecological virtues of accounting for each pound of discarded food recovered, an illogical burden that seemed more about surveillance of the food supply than an effort to reduce the threat to our climate as advertised.
It is easy to understand why people would embrace the “reasonable” concepts promoted in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In principle the idea people being able to walk or ride a bike to obtain all you need sounds wonderful. Promises of clean air and water, safer streets, housing for everyone, streamlined digital healthcare system and a slowing of the climate crisis all sound worthy.
But looking more closely at who is driving these utopian promises and it will reveal some very disturbing features. Journalists Iain Davis and Whitney Webb write at Unlimited Hangout that, “Many of these goals sound nice in theory and paint a picture of an emergent global utopia – such as no poverty, no world hunger and reduced inequality. Yet, as is true with so much, the reality behind most – if not all – of the SDGs are policies cloaked in the language of utopia that – in practice – will only benefit the economic elite and entrench their power.”
They continue, “This can clearly be seen in fine print of the SDGs, as there is considerable emphasis on debt and on entrapping nation states (especially developing states) in debt as a means of forcing adoption of SDG-related policies. It is then little coincidence that many of the driving forces behind SDG-related policies, at the UN and elsewhere, are career bankers. Former executives at some of the most predatory financial institutions in the history of the world, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America to Deutsche Bank, are among the top proponents and developers of SDG-related policies.”
These policies of a Santa Cruz filled with an “Internet of Things,” high density car free housing and Smart Meters comply with the SDGs pushed with the objective of implementing the social control designed to increase the power and wealth of the master class. Why would giant military contractors, global banking and investment interests, high tech firms, oil and coal companies be at the forefront of initiating this Sustainable Development agenda? Ending war is never on the climate solution map even though it is the single largest contributor to every environmental crisis. More war is in fact at the core to the success of implementing Agenda 2030.
Is it possible that the recent purchase of license plate readers that record every vehicle entering Santa Cruz and small fleet of surveillance drones are more than innocent public safety measures? Could they be another step to normalize the total social control described in the SDGs and other UN, World Bank and Bill and Melinda Gates publications.
Even though you might get the impression from what you have read so far that I am opposed to protecting the environment but that could not be farther from the truth. I grew up in a family of environmentalists. My father’s father Donald McHenry was the Chief Naturalist at Yosemite National Park before retiring to the Santa Cruz mountains. He started the tidal pool walks at Natural Bridges State Park. My father, Bruce McHenry followed in his footsteps also spending his adult life as a naturalist in the National Park Service, was a world-renowned pioneer of the environmental education movement and cofounded Association of Interpretive Naturalists. I was thrilled when he took me to the founding convention of Earth Day.
The roots to my radical environmental activism started during my childhood while living in America’s National Parks. I was blessed to spend time in those sacred lands of the Hopi witnessing the Corn and Snake Dances, the majesty of the red canyons dotted with Anasazi cliff dwellings and the vast northern Arizona landscape before it was desecrated by Lake Powell, Peabody’s coal mines, and the high tension power lines. I recall that day when I was 16 sitting atop the Wasatch Mountains looking down at the black smoke drifting up the valleys of southern Utah from the Navajo Generating Station. Right then and there I decided to dedicate my life to dismantle the political and economic system that was willing to inflict such horror.
We really don’t know how far back intelligence agencies, think tanks and the billionaires that direct them have been working on the creation of the Fifteen Minute Smart City idea that is currently devouring our seaside community. The rewriting of our history by Google makes it difficult to search for that which they wish to conceal. But I do know that I rented office space from a pioneering AI start up in Boston in the early 1980s and without AI it would not be possible for these Smart Cities to work, suggesting its roots may go back to the development of the internet by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
IBM launched its “Smarter Cities” marketing initiative called Smarter Planet in 2008, which included the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge. Two years later Cisco Systems, with $25 million from the Clinton Foundation, established its Connected Urban Development program in partnership with San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Seoul. In 2011, a Smart City Expo World Congress was held in Barcelona, in which 6000 people from 50 countries attended. During that event the United Kingdom proposed to invest £140 million in the development of smart cities and the Internet of Things.
According to Earth Island Journal the 15-minute city concept was the idea of Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno who found that urban life involves large amounts of wasted time adapting to what he calls the “absurd organization of cities, which require a lot of traveling to get to and from basic functions such as home, work, education, and social interaction” adding “Even if we have to spend 45 minutes to one hour for a trip to work, this was considered normal,” Moreno says. His solution was the 15-minute city. “In such a city, all residents should be able to access their daily needs of home, work, education, care, essential shopping, and socializing within the distance of a 15-minute walk or bike ride.”
“When Moreno proposed the concept of fifteen minute cities at the UN climate talks in Paris, people considered it a great idea but too utopian, mainly because they thought it unrealistic that everyone should work close to home. Fast-forward to 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic forced many people all over the world to work not just closer to home, but actually at home, using technology to access meetings and information they previously had to travel to a central place of work for.”
Even though it appears that these plans have been in the works for decades to aid in fulfilling the dreams of Agenda 2030 the UN publicly announced support for Smart Cities as the world was reeling from the pandemic lockdown restrictions. The UN website has a page that reports, “The United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) launched a Smart City Project in 2021″.
– Considering high risk of natural disaster and climate change impacts on cities and communities in developing countries.
– Acknowledging profound impact of sea level rise and health emergencies such as COVID-19 pandemics on the sustainable development of developing countries
– The United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) launched a Smart City Project in 2021 which aims to provide technical assistance and support to urban policy makers, planners, and city officials for building their cities and communities safer, smart, efficient, resilient, inclusive, livable and sustainable through smart city solutions.
The wedding of the 15-Minute City and The Smart City concepts of Agenda 2030 are marching forward with little public understanding of the future they will force on our town and as Jamileh Cannon said in the Clocktower Center webinar nothing can stop it. That is unless we start getting serious and initiate a campaign of nonviolent direct action to physically disrupt their construction sites.
Just like the insanity of belief that accounting for every pound of discarded food will slow the climate crisis, Agenda 2030 is also implementing infrastructure to “make the world more inclusive” by issuing a biometric digital ID to every person on Earth. How this makes our environment more sustainable is not so obvious. To help make this global “sustainable” Eco-solution possible Elon Musk has launched an aggressive satellite program. “The satellites are launched into orbit by batches, each batch containing between 15 and 56 satellites. As of early 2024, there are nearly 6,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. Eventually, SpaceX plans to build a massive constellation of 12,000 satellites, with a possible expansion to 42,000 satellites later on.” If they succeed it will impossible to escape their totalitarian digital prison.
The website biometricupdate.com states, “As digital public infrastructure becomes the norm, governments must adopt digital services to improve access and development. The UNDP released a blog post outlining a rights-based and inclusive digital ID governance framework in response to frequent requests for institutional support.”
The UN writes,”The goal of Target 16.9 of the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 is to provide legal identity and birth registration for all, underscoring the importance of comprehensive civil registration.” Since the UN compartmentalizes information about their programs one must flip through link after link to find the many pages praising their progress,”The government of Malawi, with technical and financial support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the European Union (EU) and Irish Aid, recently launched a project that will ramp up digital inclusion efforts in the country and make access to essential public services much easier.” If one wishes you can click through page after page on country after country who are making progress in this grand transition to these electronic corporate chains.
The biometric ID of everyone on Earth is designed to facilitate their digitalization of programmable currency. The Atlantic Council and International Monetary Fund are among the many international organizations participating in Agenda 2030’s digital currency program. In May 2024 the NATO think tank The Atlantic Council published, “134 countries & currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are exploring a CBDC. In May 2020 that number was only 35. Currently, 68 countries are in the advanced phase of exploration –development, pilot, or launch.” This programmable digital currency aspect of the Fifteen Minute Smart City vision may start as a Universal Basic Income promoted to help the poor under SDGs Item One – NO POVERTY.
When you move into your 16th floor apartment at the Clocktower Center you may be required to provide access to your digital wallet so your rent can be extracted. Management will be able to download your financial and medical history to confirm you have complied with the requirements for residency. The fees for your smart stove, smart refrigerator, smart shower, smart washing machine and smart entertainment center will flow into some BlackRock or Vanguard super computer carrying with it the times, energy usage and other details of each service used.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website explains, “Digital ID is a critical piece of digital public infrastructure. Digital ID systems are one of the three pillars of what’s known as digital public infrastructure (DPI); the others are digital payment systems and data exchange systems.
The stated benefits of a programmable digital currency linked to your biometric ID for those implementing the program is that it is supposed to make it impossible to cheat on your taxes and will provide the global corporations profiting from this demonic scheme more control.
The Bank for International Settlements head Agustin Carstens explains, “Our analysis on CBDC in particular for the general use we intend to establish the equivalence with cash and there is a huge difference there for example in cash we don’t know for example who is using a one hundred dollar bill today we don’t know who is using a one thousand pesos bill today a key difference in the CBDC is that central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that those two issues are extremely important and that makes a huge difference with respect to what cash is.”
The use of financial de-platforming of critics to this agenda was used in December 2010 when CIA linked PayPal froze the public donations of the whistleblowing publication WikiLeaks and the now imprisoned Julian Assange. In August 2023, GoFundMe froze more than $90,000 from 1,100 contributors to The Grayzone independent news platform, citing unspecified “external concerns”. Max Blumenthal said he believed the concerns were political and related to the platform’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. In 2022 Canadian banks started freezing the accounts of people linked to the anti-mandate truckers protests in Canada. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that “the federal government is promising to take more accounts offline in coming days in an attempt to clear demonstrators from Ottawa, which has been occupied for nearly a month’.
A programmable digital currency can geofence you into your 15- Minute Smart City by switching off your money if you travel outside the a prescribed area or wish to make an unauthorized purchase. For example it could be determined that a drive to see your family in Sacramento will deplete your allotment of Carbon Credits making it impossible to refuel your car, take a bus or plane. Like the examples already noted with Wikileaks or the Canadian truckers you might not be able to use your funds to buy materials for a protest or if caught expressing “wrong thought” on line an AI algorithm might cut you off your digital money all together.
Instead of restricting the use of your digital dollars those implementing Agenda 2030 could geofence you in other ways. You might jump into your Chevy Volt that has been charging at the library parking garage to take your friends to a protest against a mining project outside of town but that extraction enterprise is deemed essential. You get ten miles from the protest and the car is remotely stopped much like those Trader Joes Shopping carts that lock before you wheel to your vehicle.
Sometimes it takes a bloody war to shock people into surrendering their freedom to this digital dungeon. That sure worked in Ukraine where there are more than 21.7 million users of their Diia portal and 500,000 dead soldiers.
The Brookings Institute posts, “Following the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising, which ousted Russian-leaning President Viktor Yanukovych, the successor government led by Petro Poroshenko embarked on Ukraine’s national digital transformation.”
“With technical support from the Eurasia Foundation, initially funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and subsequently also by UKAid, Prozorro is a platform built on open-source code that removes much of the human element (and therefore opportunity for corruption) in procurement.”
The website Ukraine Now boasts, “Taking the lead internally, the Ministry of Digital Transformation has the ambition to make Ukraine a world champion in being digital, and we are already the first ones who can use digital IDs with absolutely no internal restrictions. Here is how Ukraine moves forward with the concept of building a digital state over 70 government services are available online. Mobile application Diia allows Ukrainians to access 14 digital documents (ID card, foreign biometric passport, student card, driver’s license, vehicle registration certificate, vehicle insurance policy, tax number, birth certificate, IDP certificate) and 21 services in total.” Some of those 21 services include a “snitch” feature where you can turn in a neighbor who comments negatively on the war effort.
“Just recently, Ukraine has become the first country with a digital ID that is valid and can be used everywhere within the country and the fourth in Europe to launch a digital driving license. All digital documents in Diia now have the same legal force as their plastic or paper counterparts.”
The same web of global institutions that lied us into war after war, lied us into their military counter measures, mandates and lockdowns are behind the ravaging of Santa Cruz with their high density sudo-ecological Smart Solutions matrix of blissful slavery.
Like many of you I attended one planning department promotional hearing after another. I have attended many of the twice yearly Smart Solutions homeless charades and suffered long hours of presentations about the inevitability of the library garage. Self serving shows pretending to be democracy. It was rare to hear any support for any of these projects by those of us who live in Santa Cruz.
One law suit after another. One ballot measure after another. One election after another and this tsunami of glass and metal horror and electronic panopticon are still on their way to completion. Our real problem is our having any attachment to the institutions of power. If we want to have any hope of stopping this diabolical monster we need to remove all allegiance to this system and build organizations independent of social control. In the short term if we want to stop all the high rise towers we had better cost these vultures money by taking nonviolent direct action blocking delivery of their materials and disrupt their ability to continue.
In the long term we must refuse to comply with their dictates and embrace a love of freedom. End all cooperation with these genocidal sociopaths and their attempt to force us into their dystopian digital house of horrors.
ELECT TO END HUNGER AND WAR
May 13, 2024
On April 24, 2024, Joe Biden signed authorization to spend $95 billion on the wars in Ukraine and Palestine saying that it was “a good day for world peace.”
The Food Not Bombs march for Nuclear Disarmament August 6, 1981 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Food Not Bombs will honor its 44 years on the front lines of the peace and social justice movement on Saturday, May 25, 2024.
The first group in Cambridge, Massachusetts spent two years helping build the June 12, 1982, March for Nuclear Disarmament that attracted over a million people to the Great Meadow in Manhattan. They held their first “Free Concert for Nuclear Disarmament”, later to be called Soupstock, on May 3, 1981 at Sennott Park in Cambridge. Food Not Bombs volunteers also participated in the protests against the wars in El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Today we are facing the real possibility of a world war if we don’t rise up to stop it. This will be one of the messages expressed at the Soupstock 2024 free concert on Saturday, May 25, 2024 at the Duck Pond Stage at San Lorenzo Park in Santa Cruz.
Food Not Bombs volunteers in hundreds of cities around the world are sharing meals with the hungry and taking actions to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine, Palestine and the increasing threat of a global war between nuclear armed nations. The Jerusalem and Tel Aviv chapters of Food Not Bombs have been holding protests against the Gaza genocide outside the US Embassy. Polish chapters are providing meals to war refugees fleeing Ukraine and an increasing number of local homeless. The lines of those seeking food are growing longer at Food Not Bombs meals in cities all across the United States as the government sends billions of dollars worth of bombs to wage those wars. Hungry children stand together waiting for a warm bowl of stew from Food Not Bombs in Manila and Bangkok, We really do need food, and not bombs.
While the war of hunger is ravaging families across the exploited lands of Africa, Asia and the Americas there is one famine that stands out as the most horrific today.
Western nations are forcing the starvation of hundreds of thousands children in Gaza. Mothers struggle to choose which of their children will get that next crumb of bread. The first of several Flour Massacres was unleashed on February 29, 2024 when at least 118 Palestinians were killed and 760 injured after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on the coastal Al-Rashid Street in Gaza City. United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk denounced the rampant hunger and looming famine in Gaza and the using of starvation as a “weapon of war”, which he decried as a “war crime”. On March 18, 2024 Reuters reported that Gaza’s health ministry said 27 children and three adults had died by that time from malnutrition. They added that over 210,000 people were on the brink of starvation in northern Gaza. Conditions only became more dire and many more have died.
The attacks on the starving were not enough. On April 1, 2024, the Israeli military who may have been using AI targeting assistance from the CIA contractor Palantir sent missiles through the World Central Kitchen logo on their relief van in Gaza. Seven aid workers were killed in the attack. The World Central Kitchen made a hasty retreat from Gaza ending any possibility of even the most inadequate relief effort. The CIA data-mining company Palantir co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley vulture capitalists started with money from CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The current CEO is billionaire co-founder Alex Karp.
If the insanity in Palestine is not dangerous enough there is Biden’s decade long regime change war against Russia in Ukraine, another tragic legacy of the faltering American empire. While laying waste to Gaza, Biden’s administration also continues with its carnage in eastern Ukraine in some illusionary regime change war against Russia that the West can never win. The Pentagon claimed in leaks to the New York Times that Ukraine has lost 500,000 soldiers, killed or seriously wounded, since the beginning of the Russian special military operation. The once productive soils of wheat depicted on the blue and yellow flag of that war torn nation are littered with bombs and the graves of Ukraine’s men and women.
There is money enough for war even if the desperation of poverty is crushing millions of Americans. Hour after hour, call after call from the desperate seniors of rural America flood the Food Not Bombs Hunger Hotline, each with tales of their last few cans of tuna or an empty gas tank. Many are frustrated that they have been given the run around by one agency after another and are angry that the government is pouring billions into foreign wars of choice while Americans struggle to survive.
A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org found that 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. According to Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, homelessness in America increased by 11% from 2022 to 2023. HUD also claims they can end homelessness for $20 billion and yet the federal government just sent $61 billion to Ukraine and $26 billion to Israel.
Along with the threat of a global conflict between nuclear armed nations and a genocide, a war on America’s homeless is also raging. While Joe Lonsdale’s Palantir is aiding in the bombing of Palestinians turning their homes into rubble he is also coordinating a nationwide program to “solve” the homeless problem here in the United States. The Cicero Institute that he founded posts, “The United States has a growing homelessness problem – and bad policies at the local, state, and federal level exacerbate that problem.”
The Cicero Institute provides a “Model Bill” they call “Reducing Street Homelessness Act” to state and city legislators which their website notes is legislation based on the 2022 Missouri HB 1606.
So far the Cicero Institute, has placed bills in at least nine states including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. Texas became the first state to pass such a law in 2021, and Tennessee and Missouri followed in 2022.
Cynthia Griffith wrote about Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 on the Invisible People website, “Concentration camps and secret committees, out-of-state lobbyists, and flat-out lies – as unbelievable and terrifying as it sounds, this is a glimpse into what’s happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.”
The Cicero Institute website reported a recent success,”This morning (March 20, 2024 ) in Miami Beach, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365/ SB 1530, which will make Florida a leading state in the fight against the failed homelessness policies that have wreaked havoc on so many American cities. HB 1365 will ban street camping and upend how Florida provides treatment and help to the homeless – and holds providers and cities accountable for failure.” This is the same Ron DeSantis that provided legal advice to those torturing prisoners at Guantanamo.
In early April 2024 this movement against America”s poorest people had another victory in their nationwide campaign to make it a crime to be homeless. Kentucky bill HB 5, the “Safer Kentucky Act” was signed into law. The 78-page bill criminalizes “homelessness” and decriminalizes the use of deadly force against individuals engaging in unlawful camping. Under this law, “if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is attempting to commit a felony or attempting to dispossess them, they can shoot the homeless person.”
The war includes police raids on camps and the destruction of survival gear at a cost of millions to the already strapped taxpayers. The Washington DC chapter of Food Not Bombs started a fundraising campaign to buy pup tents and sleeping bags for the homeless who are being forced out from their camp. The group posted on May 8th, “today we purchased about $500 worth of tents in preparation for the Foggy Bottom encampment sweep scheduled for May 15th.”
According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel two million dollars was provided to the City of Santa Cruz to clear the homeless camps that Food Not Bombs had been delivering food to at Harvey West Park and along Coral Street. To be fair there are claims that some of the two million would be used to build 55 tiny homes with a shared restroom. We will see.
Americans can’t depend on their government to address the crisis of poverty so it has been left up to groups like Food Not Bombs to provide food and shelter. The COVID lockdowns shuttered indoor food programs for the poor. This was the case in Santa Cruz where the local Food Not Bombs group provided the only daily hot meal for three years without missing a single day. When the CZU Lightning Complex fires forced people out of their homes they came to eat and find clothing at the Lot 27 meal. Floods sent more to our meals. The group served through the atmospheric rivers even sustaining an arrest in Garage Ten at the height of one blasting storm. If it wasn’t for Food Not Bombs daily feast downtown Santa Cruz may have experienced a huge increase in shoplifting bordering on looting. A hungry man is an angry man as the saying goes.
Tent cities grow larger while politicians crow on about their military campaigns. The live streamed carnage of Gaza is shocking, sparking mass protests around the globe. A student movement demanding universities divest from Israel and the military contractors that profit from the genocide have sprung up on at least 150 campuses. Local Food Not Bombs chapters are helping.
At San Francisco State the students formed committees to address things they saw happening on other campuses that led to violence or to media narratives that the encampments were only about university/campus issues.
“We wanted to center Palestinians in Gaza instead of us. It’s not about us. So there was a lot of outreach. Reaching out to a lot of organizations like Food Not Bombs to provide food and water. We also were very fortunate to have had widespread faculty [academic staff] support.”
Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs is also supporting our campus divestment camp providing food and opening one of their kitchens to the students.
These protest camps are starting to send a panic through some members of the ruling class.
During the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security in Washington DC on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, former U.S. general Mark Milley and Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp chatted with some dismay about the student protest movement. The general reminded the audience that the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan and that civilian deaths in war are really nothing new so why are students even protesting about Gaza?
Palantir’s Alex Karp told the assembled national security members that the Palestine solidarity campus protest movement is an existential threat to American empire, “We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show.” he adds, “If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”
In a CNBC interview aired on May 13, 2024, “Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale on college chaos: It’s showing ‘rot’ at a lot of these places.” The website’s subhead adds, “Joe Lonsdale, 8VC founding partner and Palantir co-founder, joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss the rise in college campus protests, the state of college campus wars, the advancement of defense technology on the battlefield, his trip to India, and more.”
If these CIA contractors are correct the movement against the genocide may be a turning point. This could be a time of transformation as the cruelty of the corporate dystopia is being live streamed for all to see.
The revulsion at such horrors while most of us are struggling to pay our bills could remove any doubt that we need to reject the current economic and political system. It is time for a change, a revolution, a world that expects everyone to thrive and live as equals.
A vision of such a world can be found in the many mutual aid projects like the Food Not Bombs meals. One such project started in San Antonio, Texas. A Food Not Bombs activist who once volunteered with the Santa Cruz group joined the San Antonio Cares Collective. Like Food Not Bombs they spent their time helping provide food and survival gear with the homeless.
His friend and fellow collective member was Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman. Aaron set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC on February 25, 2024 telling the camera as he walked to the front gate “I will no longer be complicit in genocide” and then he called out; “Free Palestine, Free Palestine” as flames engulfed his uniformed body.
Before his protest he posted, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
THE FOUNDING OF FOOD NOT BOMBS – May 24, 1980
April 11, 2024
Bitter tear gas clawed at our eyes as National Guard clubs smashed against our frames. Several thousand arrived in this little New Hampshire town intent on gaining access to the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station construction site to stop the nuclear power station from going on line.
That sunny spring morning Boston University Law Student Brian Feigenbaum stood before the local media as whiffs of white acrid gas drifted in the background blurring the view of the main gate and the hundreds of State Police and Guardsmen guarding the Public Service Company’s investment.
Brian outlined the dangers to downwind Boston and intentions of the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook and our May 24th Occupation Attempt.
After several failed attempts to breech the high chain link fences hundreds of us retreated to the warm asphalt entrance outside the facility.
Brian and his friends were chatting when a half dozen riot police waded through the crowd, lifted him to his feet and cuffed him whisking him off to jail.
Brian’s friends rushed off in pursuit. We got the impression that he was picked as an example since he was one of the few of us who could be identified because of his TV appearances. In those days we never came to protests with an ID and it was common when arrested to use names like Alexander Berkman or Emma Goldman.
A substantial amount would be required to make bail. Fortunately one of us knew of a man of means who was able to loan us enough to win his freedom.
That evening as six of us chugged south in our old van towards home in Cambridge we bounced ideas on future protests and discussed possible ways to pay back our benefactor. Bake sales rose to the top of the list.
As to be expected that was not very lucrative. We also ran an informal moving company called Smooth Move. A family we were moving was tossing out a copy of that famous poster,”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” and we at once knew what to do.
So we headed off to the army navy surplus store in Central Square to buy uniforms. We set up again in Harvard Square with our poster and pastries but this time we brought the cardboard backed poster dressed as soldiers and pretended that we were raising money to buy a bomber. While we didn’t really make much more cash we did notice that many more pedestrians visited, giving us a chance to educate them about the nuclear industry.
Meanwhile I was delivering my unsold leftover produce from my job at Bread and Circus to the mothers at the Portland Avenue public housing projects. One morning they excitedly pointed out that the glass office building at the end of the block had finally opened, reporting that it was a laboratory that designed nuclear weapons. It was Draper Lab and sure enough they were working on the guidance systems for intercontinental nuclear weapons. What a symbol of misdirected priorities and at a time when Ronald Reagan was promising to cut social services and increase military spending. Families needing food on one side of the street while those with money were busy designing guided bombs and the idea for the name Food Not Bombs was born.
The May 24th action at Seabrook Nuclear Power Station and our inability to occupy the site led us to the idea of bringing the protests to the doorsteps of those profiting from the project. Top on that list was the First National Bank of Boston and its board members. Their next stockholders meeting was scheduled for a month after President Reagan’s inauguration on March 26, 1981 at the Federal Reserve Bank across from South Station.
We set out to organize a theatrical soup line on the Atlantic sidewalk so those entering the stockholders meeting would see a line of Depression Era hobos waiting for soup. Our message on our literature was both against the nuclear projects pushed by these bankers but also in opposition to local investment policies that created areas of neglect and poverty. The banks board was well represented by the CEOs of military contractors and would be reaping in huge profits from the new administration’s proposed increase in military spending.
The night before the lunch action we realized we had done a poor job of recruiting friends to play hobo so I went to the old Pine Street Inn to see if the men staying at Boston’s Depression era homeless shelter would be interested in joining the protest. Several remarked that they hadn’t been to a protest since the Vietnam War and expressed an interest in joining our performance against the bankers.
Our Smooth Move van sidled up to the curb below the towering silver Federal Reserve Bank. We set up our saw horse and plywood table and slid a huge pot of steaming hot vegan stew. Our supporters from the homeless shelter ambled up. I oriented the quickly assembled participants in a line along the sidewalk. One by one they stepped up to receive their cup of warmth. “God bless you,” the first in line whispered.
An angry blue hair pearls gave us the middle finder as she stomped towards the Fed doors. Another stockholder thanked us sharing she was on her way to vote on some issue facing the bank. A young businessman who had just departed one of the South Station trains stopped to speak with us expressing amazement at the sight of a soup line, “Wow, Reagan has only been in office a month and there are already soup kitchens.”
The guys and one woman who ate with us asked us to share food everyday. They had no access to food all day long until their donuts and coffee back at the Pine Street Inn. So that evening while cleaning up from the day we agreed this had to be one of the most magical days any one of us had ever experienced. Without hesitation we all decided to quit our jobs and spend our days recovering groceries, making deliveries to local housing projects, and sharing vegan meals on the streets.
Thus Food Not Bombs was born.
Forty-four years later Food Not Bombs has grown to an all volunteer global movement sharing meals and groceries in over 1,000 cities in nearly 70 countries.
YES, THEY ARE COMING FOR THE HOMELESS
February 17, 2024
Billionaire Joe Lonsdale, cofounder of CIA contractor Palantir initiates campaign to intern the homeless
A confluence of horrific policies are converging that threaten the freedom of America”s homeless. California Governor Newsom and big city mayors across the Western United States are demanding the “right” to drive the homeless from view and have pushed for the Supreme Court to remove the Martin v. Boise restrictions on criminalizing the unhoused. The case Johnson v Grants Pass based on the Martin ruling will be heard on Monday, April 22, 2024 at the US Supreme Court in Washington DC.
The effort before the US Supreme Court along with California Prop 1, the CIA linked Cicero Institute’s legislative campaign and just introduced California Senate Bill 1011 ban on public camping are among the measures lining up to force the homeless into mental facilities or internment camps.
In 2016 the CIA linked billionaire, Joe Lonsdale started the Cicero Institute which is spearheading a nationwide effort to criminalize the homeless. He also co-founded the CIA data-mining company Palantir with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley vulture capitalists. Peter Thiel got his start with the CIA’s law firm Sullivan and Cromwell launching a career in deep state manipulation of our society. According to journalist Whitney Webb “Palantir’s first backer was the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, but the company steadily grew and in 2015 was valued at $20 billion.”
Palantir currently serves as a contractor to all 17 of the U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as many other U.S. federal agencies including the Pentagon.
After Palantir, Joe Lonsdale founded and remains as Chairman of both Addepar, which has over $4 trillion USD on its wealth management technology platform, and OpenGov, which provides software for over 2,000 municipalities and state agencies.
Joe Lonsdale’s The Cicero Institute provides legislative templates to states and cities.
His website on homelessness starts, “States should ban unauthorized street camping.”
“Street camps are dangerous to the public and the vulnerable homeless alike. They are often hotbeds of violence, especially against women and children —especially those who are homeless themselves.
The public widely supports enforcing ordinances against dangerous street camps and moving individuals into emergency shelters.”
He goes on to write, “States should amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves — and keep them out of prison.” adding, “Many street homeless suffer from chronic and untreated mental illness. For those that are a public nuisance or a danger to themselves or others, there must be a third option besides prison and abandonment.”
So far the Cicero Institute, has placed ten bills in at least eight states including Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. Texas became the first state to pass such a law in 2021, and Tennessee and Missouri followed in 2022.
Cynthia Griffith wrote about Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 on the Invisible People website, “Concentration camps and secret committees, out-of-state lobbyists, and flat-out lies — as unbelievable and terrifying as it sounds, this is a glimpse into what’s happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.”
And it gets even worse. “Kentucky GOP’s New Bill Decriminalizes Use of Deadly Force Against the Unhoused” writes Zane McNeill for the January 17, 2024 edition of Truthout.
“Republican lawmakers in Kentucky introduced a bill last Tuesday that would criminalize homeless encampments and expand the state’s Stand Your Ground law to allow property owners to confront unhoused people with a gun. The bill, dubbed the “Safer Kentucky Act,” already has received more than 45 Republican co-sponsors and the Kentucky State Fraternal Order of Police has committed to testify in support of the legislation when it has a committee hearing.”
Another dire measure is California Proposition 1, Behavioral Health Services Program and Bond Measure (March 2024) that would fund a $6.4 billion bond to drastically expand the state’s mental health and substance abuse treatment infrastructure. A majority of the money, $4.4 billion, would be used to build 10,000 in-patient and residential treatment beds across the state. The Cicero Institute says “states should amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves.”
I have lost homeless friends to the mental health system who were perfectly happy with their independence, were not a danger to themselves or others and didn’t use drugs. In two cases they were just free spirited “hippies” until someone in Santa Cruz County government decided to haul them off to the mental hospital where their health failed. In one case she died a few days after being released because she stopped taking their mind numbing psych drugs. Another lost nearly 100 pounds in less than half a year and his life’s work of jewelry, drums and his spiritual website were trashed along with the working van he lived in.
Then there is California Senate Bill 1011 introduced by Senate GOP leader Brian Jones of San Diego and Democratic Sen. Catherine Blakespear of Encinitas. Modeled after San Diego’s cruel “Unsafe Camping Ordinance,” Senate Bill 1011 would prohibit encampments within 500 feet of schools, open spaces and major transit stops. It also bans camping on sidewalks if shelter space is available; requires cities or counties to give an unhoused person 72-hour notice before clearing an encampment; and mandates “enforcement personnel” to provide information about homeless shelters in the area.
If the US Supreme Court strikes down the Ninth Circuit ruling that homeless persons cannot be punished for sleeping outside on public property in the absence of adequate alternatives it could set the stage for interning our homeless neighbors and friends.
This is of particular concern since the number of people becoming homeless is already on the increase and is sure to explode as economic conditions worsen. Pressure to “do something about all the people living on the streets” could provide the political justification from the forced removal of the those living outside. Housing and Urban Development reported an 11% increase in the number of unhoused Americans in 2023 from the year before. According to a new report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies claims that housing is unaffordable for half of all American renters.
Rather than spending the $95 billion being allocated to the waging of wars it could have been redirected to humane solutions to our failed economy but just as those in power view Palestinians as “human animals” they also view the homeless as less than human. If they can exterminate 15,000 children in less than four months as the world looks on in horror there is really nothing these monsters are not capable of doing to any of us.
If you are in California join the rally and civil disobedience on the west side of the State Capitol Building on Saturday, March 16, 2024 at noon to 2 at 10th Street between N and L Streets in Sacramento.
There is also a rally planned for Monday, April 22, 2024 outside the US Supreme Court.
KEEP UP TO DATE ON THE JOHNSON V GRANTS PASS CASE
https://johnsonvgrantspass.com
AMERICA’S TRAIL OF TEARS
January 23, 2024
The CIA linked Cicero Institute and the plot to remove America’s homeless into internment camps.
Her eyes said do you have a tent. She stood silently shivering in a soiled white hoody a few feet away as to not interrupt my conversation. That all common look of hope tugged, “Just a second,” I interrupted stepping her way. “Do you need a tent?” I could feel the relief.
It wasn’t long before another person desperate to prepare for the promised storms approached me for a tent and tarp. A family of four requested two sets.
I had bought every on sale tent the day before but the need continued so I returned hoping on an off chance a new shipment had arrived. It had so it was back to the rain soaked.
When returning from Costco I noticed those fluorescent bright orange eviction notices stuck to every tent along Coral Street. The January 18, 2024 “ORDER TO VACATE” timed to drive as many as a hundred people into the rain to maximize the cruelty of the City of Santa Cruz.
It’s not clear if Housing Matters director Phil Kramer knew that this inhumane attack would be happening outside his shelter or not.
It isn’t long before people are calling to say they are seeing those drenched refugees of the police action standing in doorways and under the redwoods at San Lorenzo Park. Where are our unhoused neighbors expected to exist?
It is my understanding that the San Lorenzo Redwood hunchers were driven away by a call from a housed person maybe offended by the view of those less fortunate outside their warm dry apartment.
Of course that municipal law restricting motorists to 15 minutes in our cities two and three story garages is aggressively enforced against those who have no other place to escape the rains.
You might be ignored until 3 in the morning when the rain is at its heaviest before a gang of Santa Cruz Police forces you and your friends into the cold drenching showers You rush to pack your belongings but it won’t be long before most of what you own will be sopping wet.
Cruelty as official policy.
Those policies are about to get much more brutal.
The confluence of increased numbers becoming homeless and the potential bloodlust of a nation participating in a World War could have dire impact on homeless Americans.
How different is it really when no one reacts against the claim that “We are fighting human animals”; publicly expressed on TV by Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, 2023 and the hours of such hate against the homeless spewed over every Nextdoor.com in America?
Biden’s government admits to an increase in homelessness. Housing and Urban Development reported that there was an 11% increase in the number of people who had become homeless in 2023 over the number of unhoused people counted in 2022.
The first in a number of cruel policy changes was the United States Supreme Court agreeing to hear a challenge to the Johnson v. Grants Pass case which was based on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Court ruling in Martin v Boise that homeless persons cannot be punished for sleeping outside on public property in the absence of adequate alternatives.
Cities are already failing to abide by that ruling.
Even so, cities organize a campaign to have the ruling overturned. A September 29, 2023 article in The Spokesman-Review cheers “Spokane joins effort to overturn landmark homeless rights case Martin v. Boise”
Jeanne Kuang in the January 22, 2024 CalMatters writes, “The situation has led city officials — and Gov. Gavin Newsom — to complain that the Boise ruling has tied their hands from addressing the state’s sprawling encampments, arguing they need to sweep camps both for health and safety reasons and for the well-being of encampment residents. It’s led liberal state and local officials, including Newsom, to join conservatives in asking the court for more power to penalize the homeless for sleeping outside. The high court has a 6-3 conservative majority.”
Another cruel policy are a host of proposed laws designed to be implemented while the Supreme Court is expected to rule against the meager humanity of Martin v Boise.
Cicero Institute is ready to help repress the homeless and states are buying their proposals and introducing them to their state legislators.
Their website starts:
A New Way on Homelessness
The United States has a growing homelessness problem — and bad policies at the local, state, and federal level exacerbate that problem.
For nearly two decades, failed, ideologically driven policies promulgated by HUD and embraced by local bureaucrats and activists have resulted in more and more spending on homeless services — for worse and worse results. That must change.
The Cicero Institute offers the strongest reform package to state leaders who want to fix bad incentives, hold service agencies accountable for results, and get the homeless the help they need instead of doubling down on failure.”
Here is the plan that states are adopting with the help of The Cicero Institute;
- States should ban unauthorized street camping.
Street camps are dangerous to the public and the vulnerable homeless alike. They are often hotbeds of violence, especially against women and children — especially those who are homeless themselves
The public widely supports enforcing ordinances against dangerous street camps and moving individuals into emergency shelters.
- States should direct funds away from expensive and ineffective “Housing First” programs toward short-term shelter and sanctioned, policed encampments.
Since the mid-2000s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as the vast majority of homeless services agencies and NGOs, have endorsed the “Housing First” model of providing free housing to the homeless.
It requires between eight and twenty units of “Permanent Supportive Housing” to get one chronically homeless person off the street. This is untenable as a solution. Instead, states should pursue minimally viable shelter options and sanctioned encampments with services.
Permanent supportive housing doesn’t address homelessness —; it creates demand for more homelessness and supports cronyism.
- States and cities should pay non-profits for performance, not just services.
Performance-based contracts should be the standard in public contracting, and especially for homeless services. Instead of paying non-profits based on the amount of services provided, some or all of the contract should be contingent on the performance of the provider.
Today, even when contractors are clearly failing on metrics they continue to get public funding. The public expects results; accordingly, the public should pay for results.
- States should amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves — and keep them out of prison.
Many street homeless suffer from chronic and untreated mental illness. For those that are a public nuisance or a danger to themselves or others, there must be a third option besides prison and abandonment.
By providing options like assisted outpatient treatment, which is a less restrictive alternative to inpatient treatment, states can let judges get people the help they need — and respect their due process rights.
Joe Lonsdale is the Chairman of the Board of The Cicero Institute. He co-founded the CIA asset Palantir with several others including PayPal’s Peter Thiel. He also co-founded Addepar, OpenGov and is a partner at 8VC, his venture capital firm.
Palantir is an AI military contractor known for three projects; Palantir Gotham, Palantir Apollo, and Palantir Foundry. Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense.
Joe Lonsdale’s associate and fellow Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel got his start with the CIA’s law firm Sullivan & Cromwell suggesting that The Cicero Institute is part of a larger national security strategy where there has been a decision to criminalize the homeless instead of providing access to housing, education, a living wage, dignity and independence.
Cynthia Griffith wrote in Invisible people “Concentration camps and secret committees, out-of-state lobbyists, and flat-out lies — as unbelievable and terrifying as it sounds, this is a glimpse into what’s happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.
Here, Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669, which present template legislation to further criminalize Wisconsin’s homeless population, have been very quietly introduced, according to outside sources who “attended their private meetings.”
Dozens of states are busy crafting changes to their laws to facilitate even more extreme measure in their campaigns to remove the homeless.
And it gets even worse. “Kentucky GOP’s New Bill Decriminalizes Use of Deadly Force Against the Unhoused” writes Zane McNeill for the January 17, 2024 edition of Truthout.
“Republican lawmakers in Kentucky introduced a bill last Tuesday that would criminalize homeless encampments and expand the state’s Stand Your Ground law to allow property owners to confront unhoused people with a gun. The bill, dubbed the “Safer Kentucky Act,” already has received more than 45 Republican co-sponsors and the Kentucky State Fraternal Order of Police has committed to testify in support of the legislation when it has a committee hearing.”
There is a lot of talk about “affordable housing” and hype about breaking ground on this or that promise and always never enough even if it becomes some version of reality. The “Means Testing” required to qualify would never be forced on the billions that is being rushed to kill families in Gaza and Biden’s many wars.
Rather than spend the $40 billion HUD claims would “end homelessness” the government is busy spending billions to bomb families in Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria while killing off a generation in Ukraine.
An October 20, 2023 AP story shows that Biden could have announced a national program to end homelessness but has chosen not to. Why spend money on America’s “human animals” when it can be used to kill savages in wars manufactured by America’s DC monsters. Even our Mayor of Santa Cruz Fred Keeley vote against the ceasefire says 10,000 dead children isn’t enough.
“Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told reporters Friday that Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and Hamas” attack on Israel represent a “global inflection point.”
“This budget request is critical to advancing America’s national security and ensuring the safety of the American people,” Sullivan said.
The biggest line item in the supplemental funding request is $61.4 billion to support Ukraine. Some of that money will go to replenishing Pentagon stockpiles of weapons that have already been provided.
Israel would receive $14.3 billion in assistance under the proposal. The majority of that money would help with air and missile defense systems, according to the White House.”
Biden’s several wars have every possibility of becoming a global affair. Even more body parts to be crushed under concrete and tears of those who survive. Gas prices crippling family budgets into homelessness. Americans returning home in flag draped caskets lining the tarmacs of Travis and Dover Air Force Bases. Maybe another million will die in the fury of America’s last war. The war to defend Biden’s right to feed the genocide while millions of others starve.
Instead of demanding federal funding to help the homeless cities will take advantage of the new laws provided by the CIA linked Cicero Institute and bully those with no place to be into their rainbow colored interment camps outside the city limits.
We don’t have long to stop this diabolical plan.
If you are in California join the rally and civil disobedience on the west side of the State Capitol Building on Monday, February 19, 2024 at noon to 2 at 10th Street between N and L Streets in Sacramento.
Trail of Tears for the Useless Eaters
October 20, 2023
The call for the genocide of the Indigenous people. – Could America’s demonized homeless be next?
Homeless prisoners at the Dachau Death Camp
“If we shot a dog we would be fined 2,000 shekels but if we killed a Palestinian there wouldn’t even be an inquiry since Palestinians aren’t considered human.” Anna and Evan of Tel Aviv Food Not Bombs – December 2003
“We are fighting human animals” Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant October 9, 2023
Tears flow rivers at the carnage. The sociopaths in charge know no shame. Another genocide is necessary and righteous sing the monsters of Washington, London, Brussels and Tel Aviv. After all, just like the native Americans before them, Putin’s Russians and the homeless in our communities today these “aren’t humans like you and I” the title of a study on homeless claimed when Clinton was president. If cutting off all food, water and electricity to one million children hasn’t made it clear enough to everyone, the murder of nearly 500 at the Al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza highlights the official belief of many western leaders that the original people of the Holy Land are less than human.
The five by twenty-five mile Gaza reservation holds over two million Palestinians, half of which are children. Most of these “Human animals” have never been outside the prison walls.
The people of the world know that US President Joe Biden could end this genocide today by threatening to cut off the billions we donate to their military every year. He won’t do it though. Genocide is as American as apple pie.
I resonate with the indigenous people. When I was a child I was blessed to walk the sacred lands of the Hopi before it was desecrated by US coal interests. I experienced the pounding of the Snake Dancers as boys became men. The stone walls of the ancient village of Old Oraibi shared that timeless spirit of the West Bank villages that I have visited.
Tel Aviv Food Not Bombs started by local Jews who refused to join the Israel Defense Forces. They were jailed and when released they organized a “Refusenik” conference. Palestinian farmers invited Food Not Bombs to help provide meals for a two month long Peace Camp on the West Bank. During those weeks they agreed to initiate Anarchists Against the Wall.
I landed at Ben Gurion Airport the same day as the first breach of the wall from the West Bank. Their Wikipedia page states, “A member of Anarchists Against the Wall has described the construction of the barrier as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing, “one of the greatest threats the Palestinian population has known over the last century… which is to make life so appalling for the Palestinian people that they will be left with one choice: move out.” A former IDF soldier Gil was shot in the leg. I found my hosts hunched over a computer in a Jaffa apartment editing a video news report of that days historic action.
If you know where to look it is still possible to see videos of the massacres of Gaza but it may not be the case for long. Governments are implementing laws that will block unofficial information from being shared on social media. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, the U.K.Online Safety Bill (OSB), Ireland’s The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022, and the Restrict Act pending in the United States could make it illegal to support the Palestinians or the demonized Russians on social media with claims of antisemitism or the inciting of violence. Making comments against government policies or expressing support for officially declared enemies of the state is likely to be silenced on social media as a result of these new laws. Elon Musk’s X is already under attack by the European Union. On October 12, 2023, X was given 24 hours to implement the required censorship. So far he has defied this order.
“Today the European Commission services formally sent X a request for information under the Digital Services Act (DSA). This request follows indications received by the Commission services of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation, in particular the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech. The request addresses compliance with other provisions of the DSA as well.”
“Following its designation as Very Large Online Platform, X is required to comply with the full set of provisions introduced by the DSA since late August 2023, including the assessment and mitigation of risks related to the dissemination of illegal content, disinformation, gender-based violence, and any negative effects on the exercise of fundamental rights, rights of the child, public security and mental well-being.”
The effort to conceal the horror of the reality of war, poverty and unhelpful ideas from public view includes our local company Google who is busy deleting YouTube accounts critical of the genocide against the Indigenous people of Palestine and the failure in the US regime change war in Ukraine. This shouldn’t be surprising.
Google’s Chief Legal Officer Halimah DeLaine Prado is no friend of the the dispossessed. Her husband Manuel is the treasurer of the anti-homeless hate group “Take Back Santa Cruz”. A public Records Act request obtained a December 18, 2020 email from Manuel Prado to City Manager Martin Bernal, then Mayor Donna Meyer and Republican City council person Renee Golder included calls to terrorize the “human trash” struggling to survive.
In his recap of their weekly meeting he writes, “Update on why some folks such as Keith McHenry (parked on McPherson) and Alicia Kuhl ( parked on Delaware) have not been towed despite receiving many tickets.”
Alicia was living with her three little children and her disabled husband in an RV next to a vacant lot in an industrial area of Santa Cruz after having been ticketed off of the block long Olive Street at the request of the Prados and friends. If towed her family would have had to move in a tent as the dozens of others have during the Prados successful campaign to have the city tow their only access to shelter. Like many, her family was forced into this stressful condition by an illegal eviction.
I didn’t have any tickets on my car and the only reason I ever drive down McPherson is to pick up bread and pastries at Companion Bakery so it’s a relief that their intelligence is not so great.
Halimah DeLaine Prado’s salary has been reported to be half a million a year plus stocks. Bloomberg Law noted that the person she replaced had a “$51 Million Pay Package.” Her California form 700 says she has over 1,000,000,000 shares of stock in Google’s parent company Alphabet. They slept warm in their $2,606,200, 2,500 square foot home on the ocean while they plotted to torment struggling families who were wakened night after night by the Santa Cruz Police Department and ticketed into financial disaster.
That disregard for the suffering of children living on the streets of her community is mirrored in the policies Halimah DeLaine Prado’s legal team seems to endorse at Google removing YouTube channels expressing compassion for the indigenous people of Palestine while letting those channels airing calls for their genocide spread like wildfire. Stoking hate, hate of the “other,” “the useless eaters,” “the human animals.”
Halimah DeLaine Prado
“Eliminate them” barks presidential candidate and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on Fox TV. In an interview on Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said: “We’re in a religious war here. I am with Israel, do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself “level the place.”
Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”
And those are just a few of the more well known calls for genocide of over two million people of which one million are children.
Supporters of the Israeli Occupation scream “savages”, “bugs”, or “animals” while demanding the last of Palestinian people living on what’s left of their homeland be exterminated. Not one peep condemning these horrific calls for ethnic cleansing from the Biden administration.
Sound familiar? One of the first genocides of Indigenous people executed by Europeans was carried out in the Americas where over 20 million nonhuman “savages” were slaughtered, poisoned or starved to death. Gaza, the West Bank, the 100,000 Armenians driven from Artsakh in September and the homeless camps of America cleared everyday are just a modern edition of the dehumanization required to justify the clearing of a people off the face of the Earth.
The failure of public figures to denounce the call to exterminate the Palestinian people is chilling.
Our homeless friends are frequently described as less than human by political leaders, members of the media, the Prados and their friends in the local anti homeless hate groups of Take Back Santa Cruz or Seabright Strong . Ten minutes on Deborah Elston’s moderated Nextdoor.com and you are likely to read some of the ugliest dehumanizing calls to clean out the “trash.” Elston is the principle volunteer police officer who targeted Alicia and her family’s vehicular home with a blizzard of tickets during the 2020 holiday season.
Eric Harris of the Grant Park neighborhood had no fear of social ostracization when he posted this on Nextdoor.com, “Most of Ross Camp parasites are criminals and can’t vote, much like the illegals this town harbors.” In a Facebook thread suggesting the formation of a vigilante group Mike Julian writes in all caps, “FEMA CAMP” and gets two thumbs up.
The City of Santa Cruz takes the dehumanization of those who can’t afford housing to another level passing laws against sleeping outside and banning RV’s from parking overnight. A small army of police and public works employees are draining that $14 million state donation in an unrelenting campaign of “sweeping clean” the sleeping spots of our dear fellow humans. Listen to any City Council debate on the “homeless problem” and the hatred flows freely. You won’t hear Mayor Fred Keeley silence those voices as he did during the CACH committee meetings that have been used to justify the city’s terror.
As Alicia’s family was enduring the nightly harassment a COVID pandemic was announced. The response by the City of Santa Cruz was to erect chain link cages for the homeless in downtown parking lots. In the Sentinel story, “Santa Cruz coronavirus ‘triage centers’ in the works for city’s unsheltered population” explains, “The city plans to open as many as seven outdoor city triage centers on an as-needed basis, temporarily housing between 10 to 15 people per site for about as long as 72 hours, Susie O’Hara said. The first such site opens Friday in city Lot 17, on Laurel Street across from the Kaiser Permanente Arena. A next intake site is likely on Coral Street near Housing Matters, where the right-of-way soon will be closed to allow for a Homeless Persons Health Project health triage area expansion, O’Hara said.” The same article reports that California Gov. Gavin Newsom set aside $50 million to place the homeless in hotels but our city took months to do so because the homeless are seen as less than human by those in charge. My dear friend Bob Reese didn’t make it and died with his C-PAP machine in his backpack.
In a miniature version of the starvation policies of Israel on the Gaza Strip based on the same mind set Santa Cruz City Manager and Second Harvest Treasurer Matt Huffaker and then Second Harvest Community Liaison and Take Back Santa Cruz officer Richelle Noroyan cut off their weekly deliveries of food to their second largest agency Food Not Bombs. They justified their intentional severing of relations because the IRS had not posted our 990s on their website during the COVID lockdown even though we provided the Second Harvest staff with proof of our current valid nonprofit status Huffaker even used this move to contact Lookout Santa Cruz’s Chris Neely to feed him a story about our returning to our weekend schedule because of his successful removal of Food Not Bombs, the one group who provided the only daily meal for hundreds of people for the three years St Francis Soup Kitchen was closed and could only offer a bagged sandwich. Instead of thanking Food Not Bombs for protecting downtown from the inevitable looting by hundreds of desperate people. They cut off food to Food Not Bombs with the stated goal of starving the homeless.
Now that everyone is welcome to proudly demand the genocide of people of the Holy Land without concern of being embarrassed how long will it be before such calls will move from the horror of police sweeps to more Draconian measures against the homeless? The long feared FEMA camps will seem human compared to the 56 years in the pre-genocide concentration camp of Gaza. Our good liberals will bark that we treat our vermin better here than the Israelis.
It won’t be long before another few thousand people will be forced to move to the doorways, levee banks and parks of Santa Cruz. The Wall Street Journal reported that the number of people who became homeless increased by 11% in the first eight months of 2023 compared with all of 2022. The US Census announced child poverty more than doubled in 2023 from the year before. More children we don’t care about like those who disappeared in the Maui fire or under the thousands of bombs raining down on Gaza.
Political leaders have no plan to aid the people of the United States letting millions of us to become homeless. I have been flooded with more than a dozen calls a day from desperate seniors living in rural America who have no food. Their health insurance company gave them a $100 debit card that they thought would be refilled each month only to discover it was a trick to have them sign up for their plan. The number on the back of the card directs them to a call center that passes on my number. They often complain that we can send billions to Ukraine but can’t take care of our own people.
How will the Prados and their allies respond as the number of people pitching tents and sleeping in the doorways of Santa Cruz grows by the thousands as it surely will as prices for food, housing and gas skyrocket. President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen tell us we can afford two wars but our government demands means testing for a useless housing voucher and SNAP food stamps that never pay for a month’s worth of groceries.
The callousness with which the “good” people are cheering on the genocide of the Palestinians suggests that those same “good” people will be fine with locking America’s less than human homeless in concentration camps. The former mayor who held weekly meetings with Manuel Prado proposed at a two-by-two meeting with county officials that they should ship our town’s homeless 122 miles south to Camp Roberts in San Miguel. If that happens will anyone have the courage to stop the authorities?
The inevitable cruelty of a World War fueled by calls for genocide could unleash the unthinkable in this atmosphere of any atrocity goes.
Many in Canada already support the concept of self extermination of their unhoused. A headline in the National Post reports on May 16, 2023, that “One third of Canadians fine with prescribing assisted suicide for homelessness” referring to Canada’s program Medical Assistance in Dying – MAiD. Hundreds have already “taken advantage” of this option rather than face the harsh winters of the Canadian streets.
Will this sanctioned hatred of the Palestinians, Armenians and Russians pave the way of removal of America’s homeless into internment camps? By the time you read this the conflict in Palestine may have erupted into a global war. Access to Persian Gulf oil may have been disrupted, tumbling the economy into chaos. Food shortages could increase. Official hatred of immigrants and homeless may increase as the number of people living on our streets is too much to ignore. Will officials be forced to ration food and those “useless eaters” in the FEMA camps be allowed to starve for “national security” purposes? I fear so.
Thankfully hundreds of thousands of people are on the streets calling for an end to the genocide, demanding western leaders recognize those being slaughtered as flesh and blood humans.
We can only hope fellow Americans will stand against the forced removal of our homeless neighbors into the internment camps and denounce the dehumanizing rhetoric before the tragedy of World War III opens the doors of hell.
Keith McHenry – keith@foodnotbombs.net
JOY FOR MAYOR – Welcome to Brave and Free Santa Cruz (Part 1.)
August 22, 2023
My response to Joy Schendledecker’s essay posted on brattononline
Food Not Bombs marches to Draper Nuclear Weapons Lab Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 6, 1981.
“It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes have rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class” – David Brooks – commentator – August 4, 2023.
In her post on brattononline, Joy Schendledecker may have jumped to some conclusions about the local community group Brave and Free Santa Cruz. I am pleased that she has given me the opportunity to introduce more people to our efforts to protect our health, defend our civil liberties and work for peace.
Brave and Free’s first action was our participation in the Fourth of July Parades in 2022, where we were greeted with enthusiastic support by the public. It seems many people were done with the coercion, restrictions and mandates, and were relieved that someone was breaking the silence.
With economic conditions growing more difficult, with attacks on our privacy through the implementation of biometric ID connected to programmable Central Banks Digital Currency, and with threats of a global war, we need more groups like Brave and Free Santa Cruz that are bringing people together from diverse political, racial and cultural backgrounds.
I have found that people share much more in common with one another than what the media says divides us. We all want to enjoy time with our families and friends. We want to have a safe place to sleep and tasty food to eat, we want to live a life of meaning with dignity.
But those in power want us fighting and have intentionally magnified our differences, fostering a red blue tribalism.
One of the most terrifying features cultivated by those in power is how close-minded people who support their agenda have become. Anyone who isn’t on board is considered a dumb hick Trump Putin puppet.
We are considered that “basket of deplorables”. Yet we are that working class that Joy for Mayor’s campaign literature claimed to be supporting. We are the people who repair your cars, prepare your food and wire your homes. We are people who are capable of thinking for ourselves.
Joy’s essay echoes the perspective of David Brooks, when he sneers at struggling Americans calling us “the less-educated classes”, while also assuming we all support Trump. But really, we are the essential workers. Thankfully, a growing number of people are understanding that the amplified caricature of division exploited by the ruling class isn’t a true depiction of our country. It’s a fiction.
I would have never imagined that the left which I have been a part of for over five decades would come to support NATO expansion and the arming of white nationalists and Nazis. A left that supports the escalation in the nine year Ukrainian war. We denounced Victoria Nuland and her boss Dick Cheney when they instigated the Iraq war based on lies, but we praise her today for starting the war against Russia also based on lies. This conflict with Russia is on the verge of becoming a world war, this time between nuclear armed nations.
This is a left that has abandoned class struggle and instead embraces the master’s hyped-up divide and conquer culture wars. Many of my left friends have become enforcers of the program to geofence ourselves into the billionaire class’s digital prison. A left that has abandoned the right to free speech, and now argues that we must be protected from information that might challenge the interests of the military industrial state.
The gatekeepers of correct-think work at places like the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, whose website brags of the inclusion of former CIA agents on its board. These gatekeepers work at NATO’s Atlantic Council and the International Monetary Fund, with their plans for a programmable Central Bank Digital Currency linked to biometric facial recognition. They also work at the United Nations, which is promising to provide “proof of personhood’ digital ID for everyone on Earth. No wonder Elon Musk plans to place 65,000 satellites in orbit in this program to connect everyone to their totalitarian matrix. Privacy has vanished.
Keith visits with his anti-globalization colleague Vandana Shiva
THE LEFT’S LONG TRADITION OF RESISTING THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE ECONOMY
The left I have been a part of has a long history of organizing against the globalization of the economy. On a chilly March 26, 1981, Food Not Bombs set up its first soup line outside the Federal Reserve Tower on Atlantic Avenue in Boston, to protest the policies of the Bank of Boston, its interlocking board of directors, and their investments in a global web of resource extraction and ghetto creating redlining.
We protested Clinton’s NAFTA. We rallied outside the offices of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund during their annual meetings. In 1992 I joined tens of thousands of labor, environmental and human rights activists in Bonn, West Germany to protest the creation of the Euro and the European Union.
Every year the left gathers in Davos, Switzerland to denounce the exploitative policies of the World Economic Forum. In 1997, I spent two months traveling North America on the UnFree Trade Tour, speaking out against the World Trade Organization’s framework of corporate consolidation. We formed the Direct Action Network, disrupting the WTO’s Seattle summit in November 1999 and took our protest against the WTO to Cancún and Genoa.
I worked with anti-war activist Ronnie Cummings and food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva on the Millions Against Monsanto Campaign in an effort to stop the patenting of seeds. Private ownership of life is one key element of the trade agreements that we have been fighting against.
So, when the institutions that those of us had spent decades protesting against started to implement what they called Build Back Better, Fourth Industrial Revolution, and “Great Reset”, I knew I had to push back.
Food Not Bombs shares meals everyday for three years during the lockdowns
CITIZEN POLICING IN THE SERVICE OF THE STATE AND THEIR BILLIONAIRE MASTERS
What surprised me was how many of those I had been working with suddenly came to the defense of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, and his deployment of the military counter measures born from the gain-of-function research that my friends and I had spent decades organizing against.
Even more horrifying was the way these allies willingly enforced the authoritarian orders of the corporate state. They blocked the participation of the working class from their meetings, cafes and film showings, a working class which is understandably suspicious of government mandates and threats to their employment.
So, on the day Biden announced the end of the pandemic, I went to London Nelson Community Center to support Joy’s campaign for mayor. Soon after I arrived, when I failed to show my vaccination papers, three of her supporters started physically assaulting me in this public facility. That “show your papers” demand recalled the dark days of Apartheid South Africa, the East German secret police Stasi or my days with working with Palestinian farmers and merchants on the West Bank. Another local peace activist in her 70’s was also the victim of assault and battery at the same event when she failed to show her papers. Violently brutalizing your supporters might not be the best way to win an election.
Naturally, when I was being personally threatened by the emergence of this new totalitarian atmosphere, I supported the formation of a local movement to stop it. There were many months when my family and I thought we were alone in seeing the formation of a dystopian fascist corporate state. I recalled the sad entries in German artist Kathe Kollwitz’s diary about her colleagues’ growing support of Hitler. It would be months before I would learn that other progressive activists shared my horror at the clampdown.
Keith and Bas visiting after sharing food in a poor neighborhood in the Philippines.
ARE THESE PEOPLE REALLY GULLIBLE FAR-RIGHT HOMOPHOBIC RACISTS?
Two local women, Diane D. Jones, a retired carpenter, and Kathleen Lynch, a social worker, started Brave and Free Santa Cruz to defend the freedoms that are under attack. Kathleen expressed that you must be brave in these Draconian times if you wished to stay free.
A mass hysteria had ensued against anyone who did not agree with the messaging of the New York Times, National Public Radio and CNN. People were insulted and bullied into compliance with unscientifically based orders. We now know, from FOIA emails of the NIH and court cases, that the masking and six foot “social distancing” were just made up by the security agencies without any scientific basis. Stopping the virus dead in its tracks with two injections and two weeks to flatten the curve turned into months of restrictions and regular boosters. Our vaccinated friends kept getting COVID while the unvaccinated rarely contracted the illness. Now, it looks like the drumbeat demanding a return to those failed policies is again growing louder in the halls of government, in the media and online. Another winter of virtue signaling and social control.
I was as frightened as anyone when the pandemic was announced, but I soon started to think that some things were not adding up. My friend, virologist Dr Shannon Murray, who had spent years at the NIH developing the mRNA technology, warned me against using the experimental countermeasure. She explained that the survival rate of their lab subjects was very poor and that there could be another agenda behind the pandemic.
Yet, those who just years before had been my allies in denouncing the military, the CIA and corporate power were now treating me as though I was diseased. A baseless Witch Hunt of political correctness descended on our community. Noam Chomsky even suggested the unvaccinated be interned in prison camps and left to starve. I could relate to the concerns of Kathleen and Diane.
Joy’s essay included, “I have nothing against any of the individuals in this group, since (as far as I know) I don’t know any of them particularly well. I suspect that a few people that I like very much may be increasingly drawn to them as they are drawn to support RFK Jr’s seriously effed-up presidential bid or Ukraine anti-war positions that may lean towards Putin-apologists.”
BRAVE AND FREE SANTA CRUZ
https://braveandfreesantacruz.org/
PLEASE SEE PART 2.
JOY FOR MAYOR – Welcome to Brave and Free Santa Cruz (Part 2.)
August 22, 2023
My response to Joy Schendledecker’s essay posted on brattononline
Martin Sheen visited Kathleen when she was working in the rebel held area of El Salvador. She is in the back row center between the two combatants.
ARE THESE PEOPLE REALLY GULLIBLE FAR-RIGHT HOMOPHOBIC ANTI SEMITIC RACISTS?
One of the people Joy doesn’t “know particularly well” is Kathleen Lynch so I will share a bit about her and you can see if you think she is politically naive and would as Joy said, “employ dangerous tropes and misinformation, while partnering with people and organizations that are funded by the far-right”.
When Kathleen was attending San Jose State University, she volunteered with the Catholic Workers sharing meals with the homeless. She became a staff person at the San Jose Peace Center and joined Scott Kennedy and others here in Santa Cruz in organizing against war. She was arrested protesting the nuclear arms race outside Lawrence Livermore Labs, spending two weeks in Santa Rita Jail. She also spent time incarcerated with others from the Abalone Alliance protesting the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station.
Kathleen joined Peace Brigades International and moved to El Salvador, spending 6 years of the war in the zones of combat. She stood between a death squad and striking workers barricaded inside their factory in San Salvador, helping win their demands. She survived aerial bombing raids and armed assaults, secreted people out of the country to freedom and organized women’s groups across the rebel held territories of Morazán.
When she returned to the United States, she organized a patients’ union at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose. Years later she would walk precincts in the snow in Reno for Bernie Sanders, and proudly stuck a Bernie for President sticker on her car’s bumper. Kathleen has also been an active member of SEIU walking picket lines.
Kathleen was a Medical Social Worker at Good Samaritan and Dominican Hospitals during the pandemic. She taught our Food Not Bombs volunteers the COVID safety protocol. She helped COVID patients, and once Trump’s vaccines were introduced, she found herself helping the vaccine injured navigate the medical system.
Most of you know something about my history. I will share some of what you may not know about to see if you agree with Joy and share her claims that I am also gullible and would let myself be used by the far right.
You may know that I co-founded the global movement Food Not Bombs in 1980. The movement is active in over 1,000 cities in over 65 countries. When Russia’s Special Military Operation started, our Moscow Food Not Bombs volunteers were arrested for marching for peace. A Putin linked white supremacist group murdered several of our volunteers, including Timur Kacharava in St. Petersburg as he was leaving the Food Not Bombs meal in November 2005. So, I am not really a fan of Putin.
This is the background of this “deplorable” who must be an anti-semitic racist homophobe. The suggestion that Brave and Free condones racism and homophobia is odd considering my history.
What you might not know is that the Klan marched around my family’s home in Virginia with flaming torches and threw rocks at our house, because my parents stood up for the rights of our town’s only Jewish family during a PTA meeting. That same elementary school was finally forced to allow black children to attend when I was in the sixth grade, but like me they were placed in the special education class to keep us away from the good white students.
I am proud to count as good friends Black Panther leaders Kiilu Nyasha and Carol Hill. I delivered groceries to the Black Liberation Army controlled housing project at Columbia Point in Boston in the early years of Food Not Bombs. I was the director of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, the native American political prisoner, and helped Pam and Ramona Africa on the campaign to free Abu Jamal. I have worked with Food Not Bombs volunteers in Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Palestine, Turkey, and dozens of cities in Eastern Europe, Mexico, the Philippines and Indonesia. Racists always join people of color in addressing the suffering of war and poverty.
I participated with Act Up in protests against Anthony Fauci, and the police violence waged against my gay and trans friends in the Castro. I designed the weekly full color drag queen magazine “Current News”, staffed the Kansas City’s Gay Lesbian Hotline, and like most of us I have gay and lesbian friends and family members who I love.
As you may know, I did 500 nights in jail in San Francisco and faced twenty-five to life in prison for my work with Food Not Bombs. I was captured on three occasions and taken to a dark room, had my clothing ripped off, was lifted by my arms and legs until my ligaments and tendons tore, and was stuffed naked into a stress position cage for three days each time.
The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force sent a memo to the San Francisco Field Office on August 29, 1988 after witnessing our arrests at Golden Gate Park, claiming Food Not Bombs was a “credible national security threat”. That is a huge endorsement of my ability to organize.
When I arrived at Chris Krohn’s recent San Francisco Mime Troupe afterparty, a dear friend and owner of Veg News happened to walk by with her brother. He had just finished reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” He was excited to tell me that I was included in Zinn’s book. I shared that Howard and I had been friends and that he wrote the forward to my first two books. Chris Hedges wrote the forward to my last text, ‘The Anarchist Cookbook.”
On August 22, 1988 the city censored Food Not Bombs by making 24 arrests at Golden Gate Park.
NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE TO WAR AND THE ATTACKS ON OUR FREEDOMS
Again, I tell you all this in response to Joy Schendledecker’s attack against Brave and Free in Bruce Bratton’s newsletter, where she claims the group is some stealth-racist far right group made up by innocent dupes. Do you really think I am that politically unsophisticated?
Kathleen initiated Brave and Free Santa Cruz, using her decades of experience in the peace and social justice movement to inform the strategy of our local resistance to the AI managed digital prison being implemented as this phase of global centralized control. I designed the Brave and Free logo and most of our literature.
Working class people of every background joined the group. We held a series of workshops on how to build a nonviolent movement against a totalitarian government. We asked our members to read “CANVAS: A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle”. A group of about thirty people met at the Resource Center for Nonviolence writing our Values and Mission Statement, as suggested by what we had learned from studying the process that the activists in Serbia had used to build their nonviolent resistance movement against Milosevic, much of which was based on the teachings of Gene Sharp.
When CodePink announced a national protest for an end to the nearly decade long war in Ukraine, the members of Brave and Free Santa Cruz agreed to participate. It was chilling to see our peace rally being hijacked by supporters of Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera with their “Clear the Skies” signs. This particularly disturbed me because, in May 2014, I watched a livestream video of a mob attacking the Trade Union Center in Odessa, Ukraine, setting the building on fire and killing over 40 people. Some of those attacking the union hall waved red and black flags that I generally associate with left anarchist allies. So I wrote my Food Not Bombs friends in Ukraine to find out why anarchists were involved. They responded that that was the flag of the far right Nazi group Azov and that their members had been terrorizing our volunteers for years. They said that they had a history of attacking the annual gay pride march and often assaulted the Roma community.
The “Clear the Skies” group at our rally were proud to show me their Facebook pages with Bandera’s photo and red and black profile backgrounds. One board member of the Resource Center for Nonviolence vigorously defended them when I expressed alarm that Nazis were participating in our peace protest, and were calling for an escalation in the conflict that would most certainly lead to a nuclear war. CodePink’s Medea Benjamin also expressed frustration that they had attended our protests. That red and black flag can still be seen in current videos and photos flapping over the graves of those killed during the war in Ukraine, and flying on the tanks provided to them by the taxpayers of America and Europe.
While social media censors their reporting, if you look hard enough you can follow journalists like Patrick Lancaster, Wyatt Reed, and Eva Bartlett who have been reporting from the Donbas for years covering the war.
I am currently getting 15 to 20 heartbreaking calls a morning from seniors who live in rural America, seeking food. Many express anger that we are sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, while they are down to their last can of tuna and don’t have money to buy gas for their car. This crisis is only going to become more dire. LendingTree reported on March 30, 2023 that more than 8.07 million people in the United States were behind in their monthly rent payments.
While nearly half of the members of Brave and Free probably call themselves progressive, we also have support of people who may have voted for Biden or Trump. Some members might be backing Trump, Robert F Kennedy Jr or Dr Cornel West. Others like myself don’t care at all about the divisive Presidential theater that was designed to pit Americans against one another, to insure we will never be a threat to power. Brave and Free doesn’t endorse any political party or personality. We are united against the threats to our health and freedoms, bound together by our values and mission statement. We stand against war and the increased escalation in Ukraine that brings us closer every day to a nuclear conflict. That is why we chose to hold a rally for peace in Ukraine on Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons on a city.
Moscow Food Not Bombs is arrested marching with a banner against the Special Military Operation
THOUGHT POLICE – SUPPORTING CENSORSHIP TO PROTECT CORPORATE DOMINATION
Joy Schendledecker also attacked the website “The Last American Vagabond” where independent journalists like Whitney Webb publish their ground breaking research on the inner workings of power and the role of the mafia, finance, and the security state in building a system of control that has no allegiance to any political party or political personality.
Whitney Webb’s two volume book “One Nation Under Blackmail” provides a detailed account of covert manipulation of our society. I can confirm from direct experience that the perspective on power that she details are accurate. We plan to show one of her interviews at our next meeting. Two of my old leftist friends, Dr Shannon Murray and Palestinian American journalist Sam Husseini both suggested I read Webb’s work, and I am pleased that they introduced me to her research.
When social media started to censor unofficial information and flooded the media with their divide and conquer propaganda, the information provided on far left sites like “The Last American Vagabond” and “The Corbett Report” provided access to information that had been silenced at the request of the state. We now know from discovery in federal lawsuits, FOIA requests and the Twitter Files that the government was able to hide experts who expressed perspectives on the pandemic, war or the economy that interfered with the agenda of the corporate state. We have direct personal connections with the people whose websites we have linked on our website, and we know they are not supporting racists, or homophobic hate.
Joy, you seem to believe that these websites are based on the dog-whistle images on unrelated ads you may see pushed by AI algorithms. You seem to be making things up to fit your ideology. For example, it’s weird to accuse Brave and Free of endorsing a t-shirt simply because it’s on the same merchandise platform as that used by a totally different channel. Currently, I can’t access the braveandfreesantacruz.org website because our “webmaster” Commander X has disappeared with the details, and I have more important things to do. But if I could, I would add more links and sure would not remove the great links we already have.
These censors live among us. Google’s Trust and Safety team is managed by three former CIA agents. A total of 165 people from the Intelligence Community work at Google. Facebook and Twitter also have large numbers of spooks gatekeeping speech. Three years ago, everyone on the left would have been horrified by the use of the security forces to silence dissent.
Our digital history is even being rewritten. The co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has been making some serious allegations about the manipulation of information on the platform by intelligence agencies, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Information I could find three years ago while writing my memoir has vanished.
Before 2020, those of us on the far left lived by a slogan “Question Authority.” We stood against censorship, militarism, big Pharma, mass surveillance and CIA coups. We supported bodily autonomy, labor rights, the protection of the environment, and defended our civil liberties. That seems to no longer be the case for many of our colleague, who see themselves as the “educated class” and believe that the working class are ignorant antisemitic, homophobic, racist rednecks.
“Obey Authority” has become the slogan of the lockdown liberals.
The black, gay, lesbian, trans and Jewish members of Brave and Free Santa Cruz might not agree with Joy Schendledecker and her depiction of our organization.
Thankfully our movement is growing in response to the increasing threats to our freedom and the very real danger of a global war between nuclear armed nations. I encourage you to join us in what has become one of the most important times in our half century of resistance to the totalitarian policies of these global institutions. I encourage Joy and her supporters to attend one of our meetings to verify their claims.
BRAVE AND FREE SANTA CRUZ
https://braveandfreesantacruz.org/
Police arrest Moscow Food Not Bombs for protesting the war.
Peace, Love, and Dog-Whistles in Santa Cruz?
8/7/2023
Joy Schendledecker
Last weekend I attended the annual Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembrance Day event at the Clock Tower, which this year (as in the past) was enveloped by a “Peace in Ukraine” rally. The Collateral Damage sculpture is cleaned and polished annually, and is an important, intersectionalist anti-war, anti-racist, universal justice symbol for the community to rally around.
Generally speaking, this is my crowd, and the kind of event that I love: grassroots organized, small, peace-loving, intersectionalist, sometimes a little cheesy. But this year I had some qualms about attending at all, because of the involvement of one group: Brave and Free Santa Cruz.
I have nothing against any of the individuals in this group, since (as far as I know) I don’t know any of them particularly well. I suspect that a few people that I like very much may be increasingly drawn to them as they are drawn to support RFK Jr’s seriously effed-up presidential bid or Ukraine anti-war positions that may lean towards Putin-apologists.
I’m used to having close relationships with people that I disagree with strongly on a few issues (including Trump voters and anti-vaxxers). So I’ve been thinking hard about why this group concerns me so much, especially at this particular event, aside from my immediate turn-off due to their anti-vaxx stance.
It’s because they employ dangerous tropes and misinformation, while partnering with people and organizations that are funded by the far-right. It makes the whole world, and our little community, more dangerous for queer, BIPOC, disabled, neurodiverse, nonconformist people. People like me, my kids, and my friends. People I love. What they espouse or endorse is also fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-social, in spite of their stated values.
Scan the Brave and Free Santa Cruz home page and you might decide that their views are not so bad. I think there’s general consensus in our community that we support much of what they include in their vision bullet points: healthy ecosystems, free speech, civil rights, anti-war peace, and the weakening of corporate power.
Scratch the surface and follow their links, and you might start to think: “They’re a little out there, but hey, to each their own. They’re not outright saying they hate jews or trans people.”
Unfortunately, their foundational Mission Statement, Vision, and Values include beliefs that are inseparable from antisemitic, racist, anti-queer, trans-phobic, xenophobic, anti-abortion, and decidedly reactionary movements, ideas, and individuals. They are linked to a world-wide movement that can be incredibly dangerous.
Central to this movement are dog-whistles–insider speak or code words and symbols that outsiders either don’t get the significance of or that can be plausibly denied when called out.
For example, personal sovereignty in the literal sense is something that most of us can probably agree on: privacy and bodily agency are essential to our civil rights and healthcare choices. Personal Sovereignty in the context of the other words on the Brave and Free homepage is also coded to reference the Sovereign Citizen movement, which, in large part, is rooted in white-supremecy, colonialism, patriarchy, and rejection of our social contracts to live together in ways that are developed over time through community, consensus, and democracy. It is anti-communitarian and libertarian in its anti-government and anti-tax stances.
The Great Reset is a real and troubling pro-capitalist program; the Great Reset conspiracy theory employs anti-semitic tropes and dog-whistles.
Another event they’re holding this week focuses on 15-Minute Cities. 15-Minute Cities are a good thing: it’s how most people lived for ages, basically getting around by foot or slow transport to everything they needed in their village or neighborhood in about 15 minutes. It’s a great idea for universal accessibility and pro-social economic and environmental justice. Somehow, the 15-Minute City conspiracy theory, on the other hand, invokes the bogeymen of government surveillance, confinement, control, and scarcity.
We have good reasons to oppose Geolitica (FKA PredPol) and I have written about them critically in the past. But I can find no link between them and the concept of 15-Minute Cities at all.
The “News” link on Brave and Free takes you directly to The Last American Vagabond (LAV) website, an implicit endorsement of their content. Among many (MANY!) other troubling elements, in their online shop they sell this t-shirt.
As an outsider, I didn’t get the significance of this name/image at all until I did a couple of internet searches. It’s a reference to a 2018 shooting-suicide at Youtube’s headquarters in San Bruno, CA. The shooter, cis-woman Nasim Najafi Aghdam, was quickly co-opted by the conspiracy world as a trans-woman scapegoat, the idea being that trans women are actually dangerous men. In part thanks to anti-trans fake news like this, in the US murders of trans people nearly doubled from 2018-2022. And we do have anti-trans shenanigans happening in our own county and state, it’s not just Ron DeSantis’s Florida suffering. Check out this local gem!
I don’t want to get into an encyclopedic listing of problematic LAV partners and merch, so I’ll just flag Lift the Veil and an apparent love of cryptocurrencies.
I’m an artist with ADHD, and I love (or can’t help) thinking outside the box and lateral thinking. But when lateral thinking falls off the edge of the earth and stockpiles weapons or tries to coup or promote hate (even laterally), I’m done. Like the Querdenker movement in Germany tipping over into the Reichsbürger movement.
I’ll leave you with one more resource to help get you grounded: The Transnational Institute. Please, we cannot fall into hate-fuelled conspiracy theories that harm or kill people. It’s not enough to say that the less obvious discriminatory views of a group can be ignored so that we can work together on what we do agree on. It’s not enough to tolerate hate so that we’re not seen as canceling members of our community.
We can only come together in solidarity when we are truly and proactively anti-racist, anti-antisemitic, and anti-sexist. We must call in our community members to do better if they want to collaborate with us. We must make our community safe for ourselves and all of our diversities. If a rally or meeting is unsafe for any of us, then it’s not okay to keep going; or to allow those associated with hate to infiltrate our events.
Peace, Love, and Dog-Whistles in Santa Cruz?
August 22, 2023
8/7/2023 Joy Schendledecker – <schendledecker@icloud.com>
This is the post I am responding to:
Peace, Love, and Dog-Whistles in Santa Cruz?
Last weekend I attended the annual Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembrance Day event at the Clock Tower, which this year (as in the past) was enveloped by a “Peace in Ukraine” rally. The Collateral Damage sculpture is cleaned and polished annually, and is an important, intersectionalist anti-war, anti-racist, universal justice symbol for the community to rally around.
Generally speaking, this is my crowd, and the kind of event that I love: grassroots organized, small, peace-loving, intersectionalist, sometimes a little cheesy. But this year I had some qualms about attending at all, because of the involvement of one group: Brave and Free Santa Cruz.
I have nothing against any of the individuals in this group, since (as far as I know) I don’t know any of them particularly well. I suspect that a few people that I like very much may be increasingly drawn to them as they are drawn to support RFK Jr’s seriously effed-up presidential bid or Ukraine anti-war positions that may lean towards Putin-apologists.
I’m used to having close relationships with people that I disagree with strongly on a few issues (including Trump voters and anti-vaxxers). So I’ve been thinking hard about why this group concerns me so much, especially at this particular event, aside from my immediate turn-off due to their anti-vaxx stance.
It’s because they employ dangerous tropes and misinformation, while partnering with people and organizations that are funded by the far-right. It makes the whole world, and our little community, more dangerous for queer, BIPOC, disabled, neurodiverse, nonconformist people. People like me, my kids, and my friends. People I love. What they espouse or endorse is also fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-social, in spite of their stated values.
Scan the Brave and Free Santa Cruz home page and you might decide that their views are not so bad. I think there’s general consensus in our community that we support much of what they include in their vision bullet points: healthy ecosystems, free speech, civil rights, anti-war peace, and the weakening of corporate power.
Scratch the surface and follow their links, and you might start to think: “They’re a little out there, but hey, to each their own. They’re not outright saying they hate jews or trans people.”
Unfortunately, their foundational Mission Statement, Vision, and Values include beliefs that are inseparable from antisemitic, racist, anti-queer, trans-phobic, xenophobic, anti-abortion, and decidedly reactionary movements, ideas, and individuals. They are linked to a world-wide movement that can be incredibly dangerous.
Central to this movement are dog-whistles–insider speak or code words and symbols that outsiders either don’t get the significance of or that can be plausibly denied when called out.
For example, personal sovereignty in the literal sense is something that most of us can probably agree on: privacy and bodily agency are essential to our civil rights and healthcare choices. Personal Sovereignty in the context of the other words on the Brave and Free homepage is also coded to reference the Sovereign Citizen movement, which, in large part, is rooted in white-supremecy, colonialism, patriarchy, and rejection of our social contracts to live together in ways that are developed over time through community, consensus, and democracy. It is anti-communitarian and libertarian in its anti-government and anti-tax stances.
The Great Reset is a real and troubling pro-capitalist program; the Great Reset conspiracy theory employs anti-semitic tropes and dog-whistles.
Another event they’re holding this week focuses on 15-Minute Cities. 15-Minute Cities are a good thing: it’s how most people lived for ages, basically getting around by foot or slow transport to everything they needed in their village or neighborhood in about 15 minutes. It’s a great idea for universal accessibility and pro-social economic and environmental justice. Somehow, the 15-Minute City conspiracy theory, on the other hand, invokes the bogeymen of government surveillance, confinement, control, and scarcity.
We have good reasons to oppose Geolitica (FKA PredPol) and I have written about them critically in the past. But I can find no link between them and the concept of 15-Minute Cities at all.
The “News” link on Brave and Free takes you directly to The Last American Vagabond (LAV) website, an implicit endorsement of their content. Among many (MANY!) other troubling elements, in their online shop they sell this t-shirt.
As an outsider, I didn’t get the significance of this name/image at all until I did a couple of internet searches. It’s a reference to a 2018 shooting-suicide at Youtube’s headquarters in San Bruno, CA. The shooter, cis-woman Nasim Najafi Aghdam, was quickly co-opted by the conspiracy world as a trans-woman scapegoat, the idea being that trans women are actually dangerous men. In part thanks to anti-trans fake news like this, in the US murders of trans people nearly doubled from 2018-2022. And we do have anti-trans shenanigans happening in our own county and state, it’s not just Ron DeSantis’s Florida suffering. Check out this local gem!
I don’t want to get into an encyclopedic listing of problematic LAV partners and merch, so I’ll just flag Lift the Veil and an apparent love of cryptocurrencies.
I’m an artist with ADHD, and I love (or can’t help) thinking outside the box and lateral thinking. But when lateral thinking falls off the edge of the earth and stockpiles weapons or tries to coup or promote hate (even laterally), I’m done. Like the Querdenker movement in Germany tipping over into the Reichsbürger movement.
I’ll leave you with one more resource to help get you grounded: The Transnational Institute. Please, we cannot fall into hate-fuelled conspiracy theories that harm or kill people. It’s not enough to say that the less obvious discriminatory views of a group can be ignored so that we can work together on what we do agree on. It’s not enough to tolerate hate so that we’re not seen as canceling members of our community.
We can only come together in solidarity when we are truly and proactively anti-racist, anti-antisemitic, and anti-sexist. We must call in our community members to do better if they want to collaborate with us. We must make our community safe for ourselves and all of our diversities. If a rally or meeting is unsafe for any of us, then it’s not okay to keep going; or to allow those associated with hate to infiltrate our events.
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