Anarchistcook’s Weblog

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;

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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

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.

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. 

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. 

Joy Schendledecker may have jumped to some conclusions in her posts on brattononline 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.

With economic conditions growing more difficult, attacks on our privacy with the implementation of biometric ID connected to programmable Central Banks Digital Currency, and 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 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, 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.

I never locked down. I was lucky if I could return home by nine at night during those first months of what would turn out to become three years of Food Not Bombs sharing hot meals, water and survival gear every day, when the other meal programs were locked down.

I saw a notice on Serf City Times announcing the Joy for Mayor launch party.  So on the day Biden announced the end of the pandemic, I went to support Joy’s campaign at the London Nelson Community Center. Soon after I had arrived, three of her supporters started violently attacking me in this public facility, when I failed to show my vaccination papers. 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.

Two local women, Diane Dutton-Jones and Kathleen Lynch, started an organization “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.

So, after being attacked at Joy’s event, and being banned for not having proof of vaccination from seeing the film that I was in “Foodie for the People”, banned from a new progressives organizing meeting and from the Tabby Cafe, I was eager to join Kathleen and Diane. The authoritarian clampdown was frightening.

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”.

Kathleen has been a peace and social justice activist for over 40 years.  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.  I share much more about her work in the left in my longer essay.

Joy starts her essay talking about the August 9, 2023 rally for peace at the Town Clock. “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”. She adds, “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 have followed events in Ukraine since Food Not Bombs had a kitchen in Maidan Square in Kiev for the 100 days of the Orange Revolution and continued to correspond with them after the second US coup in 2014. They shared with me the brutality of the Azov Nazis and their role in the burning of the Trade Union Hall in Odessa that started the 9 year war. It has been clear for years that NATO expansion could lead to a war with Russia.  Food Not Bombs organized a Food Not NATO meal in Istanbul before that NATO meeting and marched against NATO in Chicago at that summit.

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 big fan of Putin.

While I am not a “Putin-apologist” I am very concerned that the escalation in the war could lead to a nuclear conflict. Just imagine if Russia was bombing Washington D.C. from Mexico. I am also now getting dozens of calls a day from seniors seeking food. Many are angry that we can send billions of dollars to Ukraine while we are facing hunger and homelessness here in America.

In Joy’s second posting she says, “So, I invite Brave and Free Santa Cruz once again to look closely at its own questionable connections. Put some thoughtful statements about the need to counter discrimination on your website; get rid of links to hate and hate-adjacent content; and show up for minoritized groups in Santa Cruz, with a commitment to listening, learning, and supporting.”

Currently I can’t access the braveandfreesantacruz.org website since 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. The arrogance of Joy telling working people how to organize says a lot.

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, privacy, labor rights, the protection of the environment and defended our civil liberties. That seems to no longer be the case for many of our colleagues, who see themselves as commentator David Brooks puts it, the “educated class”, and believe that the working class are ignorant, anti-semitic, 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 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/

The Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Station and NATO’s drive towards a nuclear World War III.

Our cousin Mr Lovejoy took my family on a field trip to see his place of work. He wheeled his new 67 Buick between two hangars and on to the concrete tarmac of Dover Air Force Base. Towers of shimmering steel caskets neatly stacked twenty high and twenty deep marched like city blocks down the length of the airstrip. Each tin box waiting to receive what was left of another young American in the depressing bowels of the US Army Morgue. Over 20,000 corpses would pass through this Delaware mortuary on their way to a flag draped funeral. A memorable lesson for this ten year old.

I was also receiving an education from my mother’s loving father, the Harvard Law School graduate and Crimson football star, John Vanderpoole Phelan.  He had been a member of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the organization that was the precursor to the US Central Intelligence Agency.  And this is why you should pay attention to the message of my essay.

The lessons I learned from my grandfather inform my opinion that our country is run by psychopaths that are systematically taking us to a global war between nuclear armed nations. A war they believe they can win. Again, you should take my words here very seriously.

Grampy Phelan as I called him made sure I understood that like himself, I too was “genetically superior” and as such would be tasked with helping direct the course of our nation and the world. He explained that “we” only use elections and the illusion of democracy as a means to keep the public distracted and divided. He claimed it would be irresponsible to let the American rabble determine the direction of our country.  The people running the economy and wars today share that same belief.

My grandfather directed the world’s most deadly bombing campaign, Operation Meeting House, sending lines of B-29s “over the hump” from Burma to the skies above Tokyo unleashing their deadly firebombs over the city.

I watched my grandfather pace around his Needham, Massachusetts den yelling into his phone receiver passionately arguing with his friends Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Curtis LeMay. He was surrounded by 63 framed black and white photos that he had shot from 20,000 feet above a burning Tokyo as he laid out his reasons for why the US should drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi. Not to win the war but rather to send a message to China and the Soviet Union that America had no limits in war and would take every measure to defend capitalism.

He made it clear to me that every thing is on the table in defense of US economic interests including nuclear annihilation. There is no limit to the number of Dover, Delaware caskets that these Ivory Towers of ambition are willing to fill.

I have been hearing my grandfather’s logic in the statements of Victoria Nuland, Biden’s Under Secretary for Political Affairs, her Project for the New American Century/Brookings Institute husband, Robert Kagan and the others who believe themselves to be masters of our universe.

Most recently these monsters initiate decades of US backed billion dollar coups, threats of Ukrainian entry into NATO and billions of dollars in arms shipments to Europe’s most corrupt country.  A regime change effort to antagonize another capitalist nuclear armed nation. A desperate attempt by neocons to use an insane geo-political chess game to maintain global control. It’s a terror game taking our money while burying hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian youth into the muddy graves of what once were fertile loam plains of yellow wheat.

This blood soaked cabal in DC, is cut from the same Phillips Academy, Dartmouth and Harvard cloth as my grandfather. There is nothing they won’t do to protect their system of domination and control. From the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, to the murder of a million Iraqis, to the bombing of the Nord Stream Pipeline and the breaching of the Kakhovka Dam it could not be more obvious that these murderers have no boundaries.

NATO is ratcheting up the tension weapons system by weapons system. The UK delivers Storm Shadows, France sends Caesars, and Germany sends Leopard Tanks. The US ships in HIMARS, Patriots, and Bradleys. Soon there will be deliveries of F-16s and ATACMS hoping that Ukraine can cross another of Russia’s red lines, the taking of Crimea and the port of their Black Sea fleet.

“The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews – just understand, don’t kid yourself, no matter what y’all say, that’s called World War III,” Biden told a gathering of House Democrats in Philadelphia on March 9, 2023. We sure are getting closer to this World War III. New blocks of sparkling coffins will line the runways of Dover, Delaware.

Peace in Ukraine has always been possible but the US and its NATO allies have scuttled each agreement. Killed Minks I and Minks II. The Ukrainian Russian peace treaty signed on March 14, 2022, in Antalya, Turkey where Ukraine agreed it would not pass Russia’s principle red line of joining NATO was squashed by Britain and the US.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Estonia Kaja Kallas spoke of their hopes for the July 11 – 12, 2023, NATO summit in Vilnius, Estonia.

“At the Summit, we will take the next steps, with new regional plans. Assigned forces and capabilities, and an enhanced exercise program. All backed by over 300,000 troops on high readiness.”

“At the Summit, we will agree to a multi-year package of assistance, and upgrade our political ties with Ukraine. This will bring Ukraine closer to its rightful place in NATO.”

If the promise to cross another of Russia’s stated security concerns isn’t dangerous enough. NATO appears to have an even deadlier plan.

In another round of “Russia plans to do the dumbest thing possible if they don’t want a direct war with NATO,” and meltdown the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Station.

In a video address aired on June 22, 2023, Zelensky announced that Ukrainian intelligence “received information that Russia is considering a scenario of a terrorist attack at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. “A terrorist attack with radiation leakage.”

Twitter and the media were flooded with news of this Russian plot. By day’s end US Senators Graham and Blumenthal were putting their stamp of approval on the latest and most dangerous of false flags proposing a resolution “stating that any use of tactical nuclear weapons by the Russian Federation, Belarus ‘or proxy of Russia’, or the nuclear facility destruction, which will lead to the entry of radioactive elements into the territory of NATO member countries and cause serious damage, should be considered an attack on Alliance and the reason for the use of Article 5.”  On June 26, 2023 Congress officially introduced S.Res.268 and H.Res.562 – “Responding to the threat posed by the Russian Federation’s deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, and for other purposes.”

In this context Article 5 means NATO will officially launch a war into Russia. The attacks inside the country have already started. Ukrainian drones targeted locations around Moscow on July 4, 2023. Triggering Article 5 could quickly lead to a nuclear conflict.

Nothing says NATO will join your front lines if you pull off a radiation release we can blame on Russia like a resolution before the US Senate promising NATO’s entry into the battlefield.

Associated Press reported on June 29, 2023, “Dressed in white and yellow protective suits and armed with devices to detect radiation levels, Ukrainian emergency workers took part in a drill Thursday to prepare for a potential risk of radiation leakage from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.”

Ukraine’s first deputy energy minister, Yuriy Vlasenko, told reporters at the drills that in the worst-case scenario 138,000 people might need to be evacuated from Zaporizhzhia alone. Roughly another 300,000 might need to be evacuated from four other regions, he said.

Signs and media reports are calling on Ukrainians to pack an emergency evacuation suitcase listing 13 Radiation accident zones. News footage shows panic buying at grocery stores in cities near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station. The Ukrainian Ministry of Health is distributing Iodine pills.

The New York Times reported in April that the US “Nuclear Emergency Support Team, or NEST, a shadowy unit of atomic experts run by the security agency, is working with Ukraine to deploy the radiation sensors, train personnel, monitor data and warn of deadly radiation.”  NEST is not the most reliable source of such information.

At the same time the International Atomic Energy Agency has made claims that they have not witnessed Russia placing explosives at the power station. Update 168 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine published on June 30, 2023

“International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts have so far found no visible indications of mines or other explosives currently planted at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), but they still need additional access to carry out further such checks at the site, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said today.”

So yes, the conductors of this ghoulish march towards a nuclear world war know no limits and it is not out of the question that”looted radioactive material from Chernobyl turned dirty bomb” or the partial meltdown of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station would provide justification for NATO forces to openly fighting Russia. These people are desperate to maintain global power.

Those running this Neo-con Project for the New American Century Biden crime family war may fear that they have miscalculated and are growing more desperate. The nine year war, bombing of the Nord Stream Pipeline and the sanctions are contributing to an economic collapse of Europe and the US. The riots in France, Belgium and Switzerland are just some of the fall out the West is experiencing. The world is turning its backs on the dollar inspiring nations to join Brazil, Russia, India, and China in the BRICS economic alliance. This is serious.

But even if I laughed with my Bethesda Elementary classmates at the futility of ducking and covering under our formica desks during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis there was a real possibility that the Soviet Union could retaliate against NATO’s deployment of Jupiter nuclear missiles to Italy and Turkey by launching the nuclear missiles that they had rushed into Cuba in response. We don’t have a John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office now.

The nuclear catastrophe that we face today is much more dangerous than any crisis we have faced. I am concerned I won’t publish this before it’s too late.

Since there is little hope of a peace movement filling the streets or even the halls of Congress the only thing I can think to do to interfere with what seems to be Biden’s plan to start a nuclear World War III is to share this essay and hope that if enough of us expose this doomsday plot that they will realize the world isn’t buying it and that they abandon their meltdown strategy before they kill us all.

On Monday, April 2, 2023, Reno Food Not Bombs volunteers Diamond and Clarissa Roman were helping a local woman select items from the clothing donations at the weekly meal when they were struck by a motorist. The three were rushed to the hospital where the woman seeking clothes, fifty-five-year-old Michelle Jardine was pronounced dead.  Diamond and Clarissa are in critical but stable condition according to hospital staff. Diamond arrived in the emergency room with a broken back. Clarissa’s condition upon arrival at the ER was significant. She had a broken clavicle, broken ankle, broken ribs, collapsed lung, and a brain bleed. 

The driver, identified as David Turner made statements to officers that this incident was intentional. He faces one count of open murder and two counts of attempted murder. 

Politicians and the media regularly dehumanize the homeless portraying  those who are forced to live outside as criminals and mentally ill while passing laws they claim will “protect’ the public from the homeless and those who help them.

The city of Houston passed a law against the Food Not Bombs meal outside the main library and has been issuing tickets to the volunteers at every serving. Their first jury trial is set for June 1, 2023. Authorities in West Palm Beach, Florida recently introduced a local ordinance against their weekly meal. The City of Santa Cruz also passed a similar law last year seeking to limit our local Food Not Bombs group and threats to drive the meal off the Town Clock continue.

Santa Cruz city officials have coordinated with local anti-homeless vigilante groups Take Back Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz Neighbors.  Its members and allies encourage violence against the homeless while providing what officials call citizen support for their sweeps of homeless camps and the towing of vehicular homes.

The founder of Santa Cruz Neighbors and moderator of the Nextdoor.com in Santa Cruz is Deborah Elston. She is also a “volunteer” police officer Badge # V502 and records show she has issued hundreds of tickets to the vehicles of homeless people often resulting in their shelter being towed forcing the occupants to move into a pup tent along the river or in a doorway downtown.

Nextdoor.com and local anti-homeless Facebook sites across the country spew a tirade of threats against the unhoused encouraging people to beat the homeless as they sleep or torch their tents.

In Santa Cruz Brendon Edwards posted this on Facebook above a photo of a woman with a sign saying, “WANT ME TO KILL THEM?” Writing, “Pro-Solution: Dress up like dirty hippies, pretend to be “food not bombs”, poison the food you serve, come back to burn the dead, then Santa Cruz will be safe once again for young people with a well-paid job and a fashionable lifestyle.”

Driving attacks on the homeless are not limited to Reno. A man in a white pickup truck has driven at people during the Food Not Bombs meal in Santa Cruz several times in the last half year. Thankfully people were able to jump out of the path of the truck as it hopped the curb.

Take Back Santa Cruz treasurer Manuel Prado is the husband of Google’s chief council Halimah DeLaine Prado. According to emails we received under the public records act he met regularly with Mayor Donna Meyers, City Manager Martin Bernal and other city council members to discuss efforts to criminalize the homeless. In one follow up email Prado demands “Enforcement of all parking rules (not just 72-hour limit) such as bald tires, leaking vehicles, missing license plates, cracked windshields, broken mirrors, etc.”

He adds, “-Update on what is being done to bring up the RV parking ban again with the coastal commission” and continues, “-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.” I don’t have any tickets on my car but this was not the case with Alicia because Prado had encouraged the police to target her and her young children and disabled husband and Deborah Elston complied. It will not be surprising to find out that he has regular meetings with Mayor Keeley.

Announcements of new anti-homeless policies are praised by hate groups flooding our local media with dehumanizing quotes by politicians and their supporters. In April 2021, the city used their proposed Temporary Outdoor Living Ordinance (TOLO) to enrage allies of Mayor Meyers and County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty starting yet another anti-homeless group Seabright Strong. They had used the same strategy a couple of years before ambushing Council member Glover’s suggestion to review the 500 possible locations of safe sleeping when city staff chose Depot Park as a temporary camp knowing it would mobilize the West Side against the homeless.

As hate swirls from the lips of city hall the attacks on those portrayed as less than human marches on.  KSBW reported on the September, 30, 2022, assault of my soft spoken friend Max, “Two teenagers were arrested after they attacked a homeless man in Santa Cruz, police reported on Tuesday. Police say that a 53-year-old transient was involved in a fight with two teens in the area of Ocean St. and Glenwood Ave.” Max is one of the most gentle souls I have had the honor to know and he is not a “transient” having lived in Santa Cruz for decades. The teenagers video taped their attack for social media. He was not “involved” in a fight.

Passing laws to “protect the public” from the homeless helps make it is acceptable to attack those who live outside.

In Reno local News 4 reported on December 14th 2022, “Washoe County commissioners voted Tuesday to advance an ordinance banning non-recreational camping — a proposal requested by the sheriff to give his office more leeway to clean up homeless encampments in the unincorporated parts of the county” The segment featured piles of trash and dehumanizing descriptions of people with no place to be. Violators would be guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by 6 months in jail and/or a fine of up to $500.

On March 20, 2023, Santa Cruz launched its new war on the homeless in the article, “In the Public Interest: A new law-and-order approach to homelessness in Santa Cruz?”

“The compassion meter of residents in the city is dropping like a stone when it comes to homelessness,” Keeley said. “It’s a different day in Santa Cruz now. It’s a different city council and a different administration.”

As expected Keeley’s supporters followed with their letter to the editor campaign supporting the get tough on the homeless.

“It was ironic to see that the writer opposing Mayor Keeley’s common-sense approach to homelessness is from Aptos. Most people actually living in Santa Cruz are indeed, as Mayor Keeley stated in so many words, fed up with the homelessness impacts on our downtown, our parks and open spaces. Keeley spent years working on the CACH so is well aware of these issues and ways to address them. Most of us appreciate his honest assessment of the situation.

“We are tired of Food Not Bombs flaunting laws that the rest of us have to follow and using the homelessness as a shield for his anarchist activities. We are tired of open-air drug dealing, theft and lawlessness downtown. We need a new approach.

Thank you, Mayor Keeley, for talking about it honestly and taking steps to address these problems.” – Steve McCarty

I attended all but one of the CACH  Community Advisory Committee on Homelessness meetings. Fred Keeley made it clear that the solution to homelessness was harsh law enforcement. This campaign of cruelty is well organized. Officials held a Safety meeting at the sheriff’s office two days before the $50,000 Housing Matters April Fools Day March to End Homelessness officiated by the Mayor, followed by the Grand Reopening Celebration of San Lorenzo Park setting the stage for another round of violence.

States across the country are preparing for the tidal wave of homeless Americans forced onto the streets by the crashing economic conditions. But instead of making plans to keep families in their homes they are introducing policies to intern the the millions who will find themselves without a roof over their heads.

Tennessee was the first U.S. state to make it a felony to camp on public property.  It was already illegal to sleep on private property and state property, and now public property has been added.

State Senators in California have introduced SB-31, “This bill would prohibit a person from sitting, lying, sleeping, or storing, using, maintaining, or placing personal property upon any street, sidewalk, or other public right-of-way within 1000 feet of a sensitive area, as defined. The bill would specify that a violation of this prohibition is a public nuisance that can be abated and prevented, as provided.”

The definition of “a sensitive area” is given as: “(2) “Sensitive area” means a school, daycare center, park, or library.”

Food Not Bombs volunteers across the country are preparing for our nations slide into the next Great Depression and the state violence likely to accompany the madness.

The attack against the volunteers in Reno is not the only tragedy Food Not Bombs has faced this year. Officers from multiple agencies shot and killed Tallahassee Food Not Bombs volunteer Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita, on January 18, 2023, after authorities moved through the camp of peaceful activists who were in a forest to protest a planned $90m police training facility. 

The Food Not Bombs community is saddened by the attack on our volunteers and those they were helping. A gofundme account was set up by our allies at Family Soup Mutual Aid.  In true giving form, the Roman family has agreed to this fundraiser on the premise they will provide some burial assistance to the family of the woman who was killed in this tragedy.

fhttps://www.gofundme.com/f/fnb-reno-hospitalized-after-attack/

Thankfully Mayor Keeley’s supporter Steve McCarty is wrong. Many people who live in Santa Cruz are compassionate and support those neighbors who have lost their housing. Unlike those driving this ugly inhumane plan to demonize the unhoused into their prison camps we have no access to the media or to the millions of dollars they have allocated to sweep clean the streets of “useless eaters.”

What we have is our love for our fellow human beings and a desire to stop this rush towards a totalitarian corporate dystopia.

Food Not Bombs

PO Box 422

Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA

1-800-884-1136

http://www.foodnotbombs.net

One of the agenda items at the weekly Food Not Bombs meeting was that morning’s Lookout story “In the Public Interest: A new law-and-order approach to homelessness in Santa Cruz?”

A shirtless friend of ours who lives along Highway 9 spoke on the subject. He was upset that the atmospheric rivers were washing the contents of their pit toilets across parts of the camp of several hundred people. He wanted us to press for portable toilets and garbage collection. The sewage rushing through his campsite had infected his girlfriend with sepsis and he took her to Dominican where they amputated her foot. The hospital sent her back to the camp.

Housing Matters had included me in an invitation to participate in the February 13, 2023 March to End Homelessness Community Coalition Meeting so I logged on. The subject was the April Fools Day March to End Homelessness which would gather at the future site of the city’s gift to the Front Street and Pacific Avenue condominium and retail store projects providing parking with a library and some so called affordable housing. We wouldn’t want the developers to spend money providing their tenants with their own parking. The march ends with what they are calling a festival and will cost between $50,000 and $70,000 to produce.

You may have seen the Housing Matters blue ads for this march on social media. It seems they wanted to save money by cannibalizing the corporate identity they had already paid several hundred thousand dollars to create when they rebranded the Homeless Services Center on Coral Street. I have been helping organize marches for about 50 years and other than the June 12, 1982, March for Nuclear Disarmament that drew over a million people to Central Park in New York I don’t think we have ever spent close to that amount. Generally less than $100 would be enough to bring out nearly 1,000 people if the cause is of public concern.

The presenters on the zoom meeting explained that the purpose of the march was to bring the homeless social services sector together and that they hoped to attract close to 1,000 marchers. I might have been the only person who had been homeless participating in the midday zoom meeting. Not one homeless person attended which is no surprise as people are busy surviving and were not invited to participate.

As Food Not Bombs was about to reach its third year anniversary of being the only daily hot meal for the homeless we receive an email from the city announcing that they would arrest us if we dared to attempt to share food near Garage 10 during the atmospheric rivers.

That morning The Santa Cruz Homeless Union was sent a post from staff at the Depot Park Emergency Shelter angry that the city and county would not let people enter until 8:00 pm forcing the 25 lucky people to stand in the driving wind and rain all day. They claimed they had the staff and resources to do so. We organized a campaign to open not only the Depot Park Shelter for 24 hours a day during the storms but that they should also open the Civic Auditorium. Mayor Fred Keeley’s beloved Warriors Stadium also sat empty. Hundreds of people would be doomed to survive torrents of rain huddled under tarps as trees threatened to crush them.

So in honor of our three years of daily free service to the city they chose to send us a threatening letter promising to arrest us if we did not force those joining us for a hot lunch to stand in blistering winds and driving rain.

Mayor Keeley’s allies are using his chairmanship of the  Community Advisory Committee on Homelessness (CACH) to praise his new law and order campaign against the homeless.

Steve McCarty’s letter to the editor states “Keeley spent years working on the CACH so is well aware of these issues and ways to address them. Most of us appreciate his honest assessment of the situation.”

I did attend all but one of those meetings and Steve has no idea of what he is saying. Fred shut down any conversation about the many real solutions we offered and bullied his appointed members. One of two homeless members quit when he was not able to get back into the 1220 River Street camp because the meeting went past closing time. He was left to sleep on the streets in the cold.

In 2019 the Santa Cruz Homeless Union, Food Not Bombs and campers were working with the Fire Department to make a large homeless camp behind Ross safe for its members. At that time there seemed to be a progressive majority on the City Council and it would be possible to delay a proposed eviction of the camp. The one progressive councilperson we needed to make sure voted with the other three was Justin Cummings so we invited him to a meeting at the Saturn Cafe the night before. Saturn had been my “office” when I became homeless after my second back surgery.

We told of the danger that could happen if the camp was closed. Many of the early occupants were women who were seeking protection from the all too common threat of sexual assault.

At the June, 2019, City Council Meeting Justin Cummings voted to evict the camp and as has often been the case during other major votes by the council to harm the homeless they set up the CACH committee. I suggested during public comments that they could save us all a lot of time by whiting out the date on the 2000 report replacing it with 2019 since it was likely to have the same findings and sure enough by the end of the CACH committee their report was  essentially the same.

Our dear friend Santa Cruz Union Officer Deseire Quintero moved with many others to the Pogonip. She was helping her neighbors evacuate during the Diablo Winds when a tree fell crushing her to death on October 27, 2018. These are the same woods people were swept to after the Benchlands evictions this winter.

The city appears to have intentionally launched it’s current media campaign by feeding a young reporter new to Santa Cruz their position in the Lookout story “In the Public Interest: A new law-and-order approach to homelessness in Santa Cruz?”  I spoke with him twice for that report. He began by asking if the rumor was true that Second Harvest had cut off Food Not Bombs and that we were ending our daily service as a result.

When I explained that we had always intended to return to weekends as soon as the Saint Francis Soup Kitchen and the Senior Meal at London Nelson Community Center started their weekday lunches he said he hadn’t ever heard of the London Nelson Community Center. I said it was the center at Center and Laurel across from the police station but that still didn’t ring a bell.

When he called a second time I asked him how he heard about our being cut off by Second Harvest. He sounded very nervous and said that was confidential. I asked if he knew that City Manager Matt Huffaker was also on the board of Second Harvest and that Matt had been waging a war against the homeless and Food Not Bombs since he was hired. He didn’t respond.

It seemed he was targeted by the city because he was the least informed of any reporters in town.

Just as I suggested to the young man the letters to the editor attacks against the homeless and Food Not Bombs propaganda campaign had started.

Another wave of municipal violence against our homeless neighbors is about to begin. We can expect many more sweeps of homeless camps driving those hundreds struggling along Highway 9 back into the doorways and levee banks of downtown only to face late night police raids.

Another increase in the ticketing, towing and junking of vehicular homes. More unpaid fines to destroy credit histories and more misdemeanor convictions for the crimes of living outside to make sure housing remains out of reach for hundreds of our neighbors.

Fred’s friends in Sacramento are lining up a host of statewide laws to increase the suffering of those tens of thousands who will be forced on to the streets as the economy crashes into what is expected to be as bad or worse than the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  Over 25,000 tech workers lost their jobs in February 2023, many of whom were working here in the Bay Area. It would not be surprising if the number of people seeking doorways and river banks in our town will balloon another few thousand in the coming months.

I am sure Fred’s friend Senator John Laird will be voting for SB-31. “This bill would prohibit a person from sitting, lying, sleeping, or storing, using, maintaining, or placing personal property upon any street, sidewalk, or other public right-of-way within 1000 feet of a sensitive area, as defined. The bill would specify that a violation of this prohibition is a public nuisance that can be abated and prevented, as provided.”

My local friends who survived the internment camps of Europe during World War II often share their alarm at what they are witnessing with the hatred towards the homeless. City and County officials have quietly floated the idea that the “shelter resistant” be shipped off to Camp Roberts outside San Miguel.

In meetings with Fred at the Santa Cruz Diner he hinted he supports the plan to solve the bad behavior of the homeless much as former Mayor Donna Myers and former County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty had suggested in their Two By Two meetings. Force those “Useless Eaters” into prison camps.

City of Santa Cruz – 831-420-5010 

Mayor Fred Keeley  – fkeeley@cityofsantacruz.com 

City Manager Matt Huffaker – mhuffaker@santacruzca.gov 

Police Chief  Bernie Escalante – bescalante@cityofsantacruz.com 

Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs 

PO Box 422 – Santa Cruz, CA 95061 USA 

santacruz.foodnotbombs.net 

1-800-884-1136 

A global war is boiling in the back kitchen with the noisy rattling of a brass kettle on a gas stove left unattended. Millions of us stand at the register discovering our food stamps have diminished leaving our families with half full bellies as the banks of the exploiters slide into insolvency promising to take us all down with them.

The invisible masters of our cloud based universe struggle to delete the digits of uncomfortable empathy. Google makes sure every search reveals a truth vetted by Langley.  Their local enforcer of cruelty, Google chief attorney Halimah Delaine Prado and her Take Back Santa Cruz husband Manuel press their City Manager Matt Huffaker into action. They are but just a few of the many AI bots that infest our town.

Force those without housing into the atmospheric rivers to shiver in weeks of drenched clothing. Deny the hundreds of homeless access to the empty parking garages and lock the doors of the Civic Auditorium tight as 40 mile an hour shards of cold water pierced the flapping garbage bag raincoats to shreds.

The Prados may not have succeeded in having the home of Alicia Kuhl’s family and my car towed but they were victorious in making hundreds of their neighbors miserable in the brutality of our floods. The next advance in their campaign of pain was the eviction of the Food Not Bombs meal from the protection of Garage 10 and threats of arrest outside City Hall. Next was the attempt to cut off Food Not Bombs sources of food with the promise of forcing the all volunteer group into some dark patch of sidewalk where the public never passes outside Housing Matters in their effort to hide opposition to their wars and exploitation. The people we want to reach avoid the Coral Streets of America.

Just as Houston Mayor Turner claims in his effort to drive Food Not Bombs out of sight into a fenced lot under a freeway, Matt Huffaker will claim that we need his permission to share food with those he refused to feed and has forced them to endure weather sure to kill.

But you never need permission to help the hungry. Sharing food is always an unregulated gift of compassion. This kindness is protected by the US Constitution. There are some things that the government has no say in and  the Food Not Bombs protest and meal at the Town Clock is one such assembly.

If they can give you a permit they can take it away. Something we experienced in San Francisco in the 90’s and led to Food Not Bombs’ global policy against accepting or requesting permission. We showed that issue was never about permits it was always about our independence and desire to change society so no one is forced to seek a meal at a soup kitchen or sleep in the streets.

Consider risking arrest if these heartless bureaucrats attempt to drive our message of Food Not Bombs into the shadows of the homeless industrial complex.

Join Food Not Bombs at 5:00 pm on Monday, March 20, 2023 at the Resource Center For Nonviolence at 612 Ocean Street, Santa Cruz, California.