Anarchistcook’s Weblog

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.

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.

The City of Santa Cruz is forcing hundreds of people who are homeless to stand out in the atmospheric river. Just imagine standing day after day in these torrents of rain with no way to change into dry clothes. These people could be spared this suffering if the city opened empty public buildings like the Civic Auditorium, the Veterans Hall and the Warriors Stadium for 24 hours a day during these deadly storms but they have refused. The one emergency shelter in town is only open for 25 people from the hours of 8:00 pm to 8:00 am leaving those few lucky people to spend their days huddled against the rain in the doorways of failed businesses.

The city of Santa Cruz is not only failing to provide safe shelter during the atmospheric river on March 9, 2023 the city threatened to arrest Food Not Bombs if we shared our meal next to Parking Garage 10, forcing people to stand in the downpour to get the only daily hot meal provided to the homeless during three years of the pandemic lockdown. This sure is an odd way to honor the city’s one volunteer organization who shared food and survival gear every day since March 14, 2020.

On June 29, 2021, the City of Santa Cruz announced that they would receive $14.5M from the State to fund their “homelessness response.” So far there is little evidence that this has provided any assistance and it sure has not been used to provide emergency shelter from the brutal atmospheric river.

As has been the case during each of this winter’s storms hundreds of additional people have been made homeless. “There are about 1,700 people displaced from their homes in Pajaro, and the town is inundated with water throughout,” Monterey County Communications Director Nick Pasculli told NPR. Food Not Bombs has been providing food and sleeping bags to those who lost their housing during these storms.

Adding to the crisis is the fact that hundreds of families have already had their food stamps reduced and there are additional cuts set for April.

“The average household on CalFresh will lose about $200 a month” said Becky Silva, government relations director at the California Association of Food Banks. A single-person household, for instance, could drop from $281 a month in food aid to as low as $23 in April.

Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapsed this week and a bank run on New Republic also started. Many area business who had deposits in Silicon Valley Bank may not be able to meet their payrolls. Over 150,000 tech workers were let go in 2022, many employed in Santa Cruz, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. Another 68,500 tech workers were sacked in January 2023.

By the time you read this the news might be much worse, making the need to respond to the crisis in homelessness even more dire.

Along with a failing economy we are faced with the very real possibility of a global war between nuclear armed nations.

Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs had been preparing for the economic crisis, buying our first shipping container with a grant from Second Harvest. We held a benefit concert with David Rovics at London Nelson Community Center in September 2018 and a year later I shared a flyer pretending that the city had a plan to help the residents during the global economic crash. Well it looks like that time has come and still the city has no plan and it is up to volunteer groups like Food Not Bombs to provide for the community.

The pandemic was the first major event that showed we are on our own. The government has no intention of supporting anyone but themselves. News that it would only take a few weeks to “flatten the curve” gave us hope that the Little Red Church’s Monday night meal, the London Nelson Senior Meal and Saint Francis would reopen in a month or two. Our little crew sat at LuLu Carpenters on March 14, 2020, plotting out our COVID safety protocol believing that we could cover the void left by the shuttering of the indoor meals during the few months they would be closed.

A few days later the city asked us to lure our unhoused friends into their Triage Cages, fenced in parking lots scattered around downtown but we refused. Second Harvest Food Bank delivered its first of many truck load of rice, beans and other dry goods. We were approached by Live Oak School District seeking groceries for their homebound families so we did. We packed dry goods into an empty office and dining area at India Joze. Dozens of people stepped up to volunteer. People delivered homemade meals. Good hearted people dropped off handmade cloth masks. We connected parents with unhoused children, fixed vehicles saving their homes from the city tow trucks and helped charge their phones. We provided the only reliable hand washing station.

A few days later the city asked us to lure our unhoused friends into their Triage Cages, fenced in parking lots scattered around downtown but we refused. Second Harvest Food Bank delivered its first of many truck load of rice, beans and other dry goods. We were approached by Live Oak School District seeking groceries for their homebound families so we did. We packed dry goods into an empty office and dining area at India Joze. Dozens of people stepped up to volunteer. People delivered homemade meals. Good hearted people dropped off handmade cloth masks. We connected parents with unhoused children, fixed vehicles saving their homes from the city tow trucks and helped charge their phones. We provided the only reliable hand washing station.

The CZU Lightning Complex fires sent more people to our meals and clothing distribution. After winning a federal lawsuit against sweeping the homeless from San Lorenzo Park we began a weekly distribution of a pallet or more of food to Mama Shannon’s pantry and JP’s Kitchen in the Benchlands.

Food Not Bombs bought two more 20 foot shipping containers to store our back stock of food and equipment moving them each time the city evicted us from one empty parking lot to another.

So at the third anniversary of Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs sharing hot meals and survival gear it is clear that we can’t depend on the city to provide life saving services. But we can depend on them to implement the most brutal policies designed to inflict as much suffering as possible.

The violence of those at city hall is horrific and criminal. A very special kind of cruelty.

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

“February 8, 2023 – The US Air Force announced earlier today that a test launch of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile with a mock warhead will take place late between 11:01 p.m. Thursday and 5:01 a.m. Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.” – Leonard Eiger, Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action

My grandfather loved me. He also directed the most deadly bombing campaign ever and claimed he killed more than a million people in Tokyo during his Operation Meeting House. I watched him spin around his den surrounded by his 63 framed black and white photos of the firebombing arguing with his friends Robert McNamara and Curtis LeMay, demanding they send the communists a message by dropping a nuclear bomb on Hanoi.

Like many of the architects of the rush towards World War III he attended the best schools: Phillips Academy, Dartmouth and Harvard Law. He was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services and was stationed in Burma.

I slept in his Needham, Massachusetts finished basement next to the two file cabinets of formulas that he would sell to Ken Olson, the founder of Digital Electronic. A photo of thousands of shirtless Burmese slaves pounding rocks with hammers or balancing baskets of stones on their heads sat next to my bed. He shared stories about how he helped set up the opium trade to the United States so they could flood the black community with heroin to keep them busy with addiction knowing the GI Bill wouldn’t offer equal benefits to those who shared the horrors of war.

I was expected to follow in his foot steps. I would grow up to determine who would live and who would die, saying that this was the “white man’s burden.”  Those I killed would not have to worry about the responsibility of such decisions. He shared that elections were theater designed to give the impression of Democracy. We couldn’t give real power to the ignorant masses. I was one of the genetically special people who would help defend corporate power.

In the months before Russia’s Special Military Operation I could see my grandfather in the words of the Brookings Institute, the Atlantic Council, Victoria Nuland and her husband Robert Kagan. Suggestions that a first strike against Russia might be necessary.

The call for a direct conflict and a suggestion the US could and should use nuclear weapons against Russia was outlined in the long rambling essay, “The Price of Hegemony – Can America Learn to Use Its Power?”’ by Robert Kagan in the May 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs outlining the rationale for going to war with Russia.

Kagan writes, “It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then.”

In the opinion piece “The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War” by Seth Cropsey, the founder of the Yorktown Institute, wrote is but one of dozens of articles preparing us for a nuclear conflict.

Cropsey writes, “The reality is that unless the U.S. prepares to win a nuclear war, it risks losing one.”

“The ability to win is the key. By arming surface ships with tactical nuclear weapons, as well as attacking a nuclear-missile sub and thus reducing Russian second-strike ability, the U.S. undermines Russia’s ability to fight a nuclear war.”

The foreign secretary Liz Truss told a Tory hustings event in Birmingham in August 2022 that she was willing to hit Britain’s nuclear button if necessary – even if meant “global annihilation”.

Calls for regime change in Russia is dangerous. Is there any leader who would let themselves be topped without a fight?

During a speech in March 2022 in Warsaw, Poland, President Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Thankfully the White House staff tried to tamp this statement down.

Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested that Russians should assassinate President Vladimir Putin.

“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” the South Carolina Republican asked in a March 2022 Tweet.

Roman Emperor Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus and others in the Rome Senate on the Ides of March. Graham was also referring to German Lt. Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, who tried to kill Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1944.

“The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out. You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service,” Graham said.

Do we really think that sending Ukraine F16 jets, long range missiles and tanks will force Russia to agree to end the war? Was bombing the Nord Stream pipelines and the Kerch Bridge the best way to reduce tensions? Will launching intercontinental nuclear capable missiles reduce the threat of a global nuclear war?

We might not be able to stop World War III but we should try. That is why I am helping organize Rage Against the War Machine protest on February 19, 2023.

PHOTO: One of the 63 photos of the firebombing of Tokyo

22S – 07279 DCL

20S – 01888 PR

518 a  – extortion induced by wrongful use of force
472 – counterfeit seal
532A – false financial statement
182A – conspiracy to commit a crime
120275 – violation to comply with shelter in place


The pheromones of fear swept Californians indoors from the chilly mist of March 2020. News of death haunted the media. The streets were silent of all but the unsheltered, police and the hardy volunteers at the Santa Cruz Homeless Union COVID – 19 Relief Center and Food Not Bombs meal.

The CDC announced that every effort should be made to provide hotel rooms to the homeless to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Governor Newsom also announced that the State would provide millions of dollars in funding for what he would call Operation Room Key.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel’s March 19, 2020 article “Santa Cruz coronavirus ‘triage centers’ in the works for city’s unsheltered population” reported that the state would be “setting aside $50 million to convert hotel and motel rooms into quarantine options for those who are infected, plus more than 1,300 trailers statewide for the same use.”

“Newsom said one of his experts’ health models predicted that 56% — some 60,000 — of California’s estimated 108,000 unsheltered residents may contract the coronavirus in the next eight weeks.”

The article goes on to report the City Manager’s program:  “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, O’Hara said.”

Mayor Justin Cummings visited our relief center at the Town Clock that same morning begging Food Not Bombs to help lure the homeless into their triage cages. I refused to cooperate with their demeaning program. With millions of dollars in the pipeline the city could place every unhoused person in a hotel room but the homeless were not worthy of a warm place to lay their heads. Reward them now and people would think it was possible to house everyone.

I was not willing to destroy my reputation by endorsing such a degrading  plan. I did let the Mayor know I would be happy to work with the city if they made an effort to provide hotel rooms for those who lived outside.

At about 10 am on March 23, 2020, I visited the Oceana Inn at 525 Ocean St, Santa Cruz and asked to rent 8 rooms for the homeless showing the manager a sample voucher I had designed that morning. They would not agree because the guests would be homeless people.

I crossed the street and spoke with the family managing The Islander Motel. After some back and forth they agreed to rent 8 rooms. I agreed to place an officer of the Santa Cruz Homeless Union in one of the rooms and that if there was any trouble we would remove that person. I gave them my credit card and paid for 8 rooms plus a damage deposit. That included the city’s 11% tax on hotel rooms.

The Motel Santa Cruz was not willing to rent any rooms but I was able to rent rooms at Ocean Gate Inn, Budget Inn Motel, Riverside Inn & Suites and Aqua Breeze Inn. The Aqua Breeze Inn reconsidered.

By lunch time I had paid for about 40 rooms using money I had from the sale of my farmland in New Mexico and an award I had received for my work supporting a vegan diet.

I let the volunteers at the relief center know the homeless union would be issuing hotel vouchers at 6:00 at the Town Clock. We already had social distancing marks of the line to get food and had surrounded the relief center in crates and caution tape to help maintain safety.

A volunteer started to add social distancing marks for the voucher distribution but she was arrested for marking the street so we stopped. News of a warm bed and shower raced through the community. Dozens showed up for a chance at a coveted night indoors. By 5 PM over 100 people had come for the chance to spend the evening in a bed. People were desperate to get a room and it was difficult keeping the crowd from swarming us.

Union officers arched behind me prepared to welcome their hotel mates.  Those desperate faces of hope will never leave my memory. It was crushing to announce we had exhausted our vouchers. “If we show the hotels that there won’t be any problems this will help us get another round of rooms tomorrow.”

The next morning Sergeant Jones and his patrol ordered us to shut down the relief center, handing us a letter from Chief Andy Mills who was across the street lording over a sweep of our friends who were camping next to the Post Office.

“Last night, March 23, 2020, you held a rally at the Clock tower, where dozens of people gathered close to one another. Under the current pandemic conditions and order from public health officials at the federal, state and local levels, you must immediately cease and desist from operating in an environment where people are forced to abandon safe social distancing.”

A frosty rain encouraged us to move our next voucher distribution to Garage 10 next to Wells Fargo. Our success the night before made it possible to rent rooms at Pacific Inn Santa Cruz, the Ocean Lodge and the Mission Inn & Suites making the total of 180 beds for the night of March 25th.

I painted about 100 social distancing dots at six foot intervals in the Parking Garage 10 at 24 River Street. The community cooperated with our request and stood on their dot.  We passed out 180 vouchers and officers of the union lead their guests to the assigned hotel.

On March 27th Salvation Army employee Jeremy Anthony came to me at the County Building and asked if I could place half of the 60 people at the Laurel Street Shelter into hotels. He said his guests were still sleeping eight inches apart on gym mats.

I drove to the hotels and rented another 125 beds reserving 30 for those crowded into the Laurel Street Shelter. I asked Jeremy if the Salvation Army would be willing to pay for two more weeks but he thought that was impossible and we agreed it would be better to give the rooms to people who couldn’t get into the shelter.

That same day Emergency 911 dispatch called to know if we had more vouchers. A social worker at Dominican Hospital asks if she could place her discharged patient into one of our beds. We are the reality the old system never was.

It’s day four of the great hotel voucher crusade. Thirty-six of our communities proud unhoused stand at six-foot intervals in the wet mud of the Santa Cruz Benchlands. We are operating by the street lights behind the County Court House. Cold drizzle, COVID-19, and the uncertain future drape us in sorrow.

Jake is a refugee of Police Chief Andy Mills’ morning of the lockdown sweep of the Post Office. But even though he lost his shoes in the day-long police action and stands barefoot for our rice and beans he is one of the lucky twelve who the city has placed in a hotel room for a week’s stay.

Sandra clutches our pink plastic clipboard and signs up for a room at the Riverside adding a cursive “God Bless You, Keith” below her signature. We share a smile of relief.

Lauren shivers in a beautiful lacy brown dress. It is her turn for the sacred hotel voucher for that one night at the inn. Tears cascade across her cheeks. She hasn’t bathed in days she whispers and sobs gripping her voucher for dear life with moist eyes of thanks as she joins her hotel mates.

I run out of rooms. My heart breaks as I report the desperate news and hand out blue tarps to the unfortunate. Melissa suggests I ask for their names. Put them first in line for Friday’s warm showers and soft bed and I hope their wish comes true.

A young Venessa finds a seat on the sliver of pavement next to her boyfriend Seth, looks up towards me and tells me not to worry. You did your best, they cheerfully add.

Mark grumbles the truth what everyone on the streets knows. The governor passed out $500 million to place those without housing in California’s hotels. That bought Chief Mills a week for twelve at the Motel Santa Cruz and his half dozen abandoned chain-link cages at the city’s parking lot gulags of triage. Maybe it was a psychological preparation for that final solution to the problem of our town’s useless eaters?

I leave ten of us to the frost.

Nearly three years after those first frightening days the activists at  Food Not Bombs were still comforting the unhoused every day. Twenty-five mile an hour winds and shards of rain soaked us on the one thousandth afternoon of providing daily meals, driving us from the Town Clock into the dry cavern of Garage 10. Frantic volunteers grab at a flying red canopy as it snaps into a twisted web of trash while others stuff my car with tables. Father Joel arrived with his donation of survival gear. Local students struggled to save our equipment from the gales.

After we had started setting up in a secluded corner of the garage two bedraggled Santa Cruz police officers arrived to our chaos of relocation, objecting to our safe haven but we ignore their pleas to retreat back into the deadly atmospheric river and by 3:00 pm that afternoon all are fed.  I felt so blessed that I was able to peel off my drenched clothing in the warmth of my girlfriend’s home. Those thousands of others forced to live in the storm would not have such luxury.

A crispy sun greeted our Santa Cruz Community Christmas Dinner. City hoisted wreaths gently sway from the Clock Tower on December 25, 2022. Volunteers glow with holiday joy as they spoon out blobs of stuffing, mashed potatoes and slices of ham provided by Veterans for Peace. A friend sits against the empty Light House Bank gate, his sad face reflecting the pain of Christmas separation and family regret.  For others we are family.

A second drenching storm crashes against our Pacific coast two days after the holiday festivities. Timbers bounce against the bridges crossing the San Lorenzo River. I will learn that many of my friends had rushed to scale the muddy slopes of the Pogonip to escape the rising torrents.

I get a call that police are swarming the garage area and I see two police officers forcing a cold camper out from under the sheltering overhang at the Wells Fargo ATMs into the drenching sheets of rain.

A secluded area of Garage 10 marked ‘No Parking” is a perfect location for our operation. Friends place our six new folding tables in our daily pattern. Drew strategically places the two remaining garbage cans saved from the winds of December 10th.

Ten or more Santa Cruz Police Officers amble up. Sergeant Denise Cockrum orders us to return to the ravages of the atmospheric river. I let her know we would be out of the garage at 3 and invited her to join us for lunch. It wasn’t long before she clamped on the metal cuffs and had me carted off to the county jail for an eleven hour visit and the promise of an arraignment for two misdemeanors on January 30, 2023

I arrived early to court on the appointed day. I couldn’t find my name on the docket. The window woman at Room 120 sends me to the second floor District Attorney’s office.

“Do I have a case today?” I ask sliding my drivers license into the trough under the plexiglass screen. She investigates her computer listings. “No, but you do have another case from March 2020.”

I ask her if she could print out the information. She can’t but she can write out the charges and this is what she marks down in blue ink and slides back to me with my identification.

22S – 07279 DCL
20S – 01888
518 a  – extortion induced by wrongful use of force
472 – counterfeit seal
532A – false financial statement
182A – conspiracy to commit a crime
120275 – violation to comply with shelter in place

The first line 222S-07279 DCL indicates the case of my alleged counterfeit vouchers did not disappear in March 2021 as I thought and more charges were added in 2022.

Why am I under investigation on felony charges and a violation to comply with shelter in place nearly three years after I spent close to $20,000 on hotel rooms for the homeless?

What would we find in the police reports on the great hotel voucher crusade?

Keith McHenry

PO Box 422

Santa Cruz, CA 95061

USA

1-800-884-1136

keith@foodnotbombs.net