IRAN’S VICTORY IS EVERYONE’S VICTORY
March 17, 2026
The 250 years of US terror and genocides could be forced to come to an end by the brave men and women of Iran
Iran kept their word when they said they would target US military sites in the Persian Gulf region if attacked.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned on February 7, 2026, that Tehran would “target U.S. bases” in the region if American forces launch an attack.
The remark came after Araghchi said on Friday, February 6th that indirect nuclear talks with the U.S. in Oman were “a good start” and that there was a “consensus” that the negotiations would continue.
“It would not be possible to attack American soil, but we will target their bases in the region” if Iran is attacked by U.S. forces, Araghchi told Al Jazeera on that Saturday, according to Reuters.
Yes, they did keep their word, launching Operation True Promise 4 in response to the US double tap strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran that killed 168 children and the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei both in the first minutes of the unprovoked attack.
The American leadership almost never keeps their word. Nearly 250 years of broken promises and broken treaties. Iran should never again believe the United States.
The US and Israel appear to be loosing their regime change war of choice. Trump is begging for a ceasefire. A wise Iran will continue until the State of Israel has been removed from the Earth and at this point this may be one of their conditions for ending the war.
The 100% guarantee of no future wars against Iran would require the total disarmament of Israel. Maybe even the end of the Israeli state and the return of a free Palestine. Their other conditions are the permanent removal of all US forces from West Asia and hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for the damage inflicted on their nation. Figuring out the price for priceless historic UNESCO heritage sites could be impossible to calculate.
This madness is already costing America in lives and treasure. The true number of killed and injured is concealed from the public. The US casualties must be in the hundreds in the first week. As of mid-March 2026, the U.S. war on Iran had cost approximately $12 billion, with military expenses running at over $11 billion in the first week alone.
Signs of US desperation are everywhere. Automatic Digital Registration for Selective Service for 18 to 28 year olds started and Trump’s people are hinting at reinstating the military draft. The first young Americans to make the ultimate sacrifice for Israel on the shores and mountains of Iran may begin any day now.
“U.S. officials said the deployment includes elements of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli (LHA-7). The force could include roughly 2,500 Marines along with additional sailors operating the amphibious ships that carry them.” according to military.com on March 14th. The Vietnam Mission creep has started. Towering stacks of silver caskets will soon appear on the tarmac outside the military morgue at the Dover Airbase. The crying families clutching their triangle folded “Star Spangled Banner” are already making the local news.
Even if Israel or the US launch a tactical nuclear weapon at Iran and splinter this beautiful country into another Syria or Libya these two genocidal nations are not likely to survive long as fully functioning states. Empty grocery shelves and long lines at gas stations could be in our future.
Western economies are already being wrecked and their populations will be forced to live in desperation as a result of this war of choice. Riots have already broken out in Tel Aviv. Victory for the satanic baby-raping Zionist cannibals lording over us may be out of reach. They believed their own lies of superiority. The lie that they alone were God’s chosen people.
My family helped start the settler nation of the United States of America. I am the first son of first sons of the first McHenry to step on the shores of colonial America. When the 20 year old Belfast student, James McHenry, set foot on to the docks of Philadelphia in 1773 the Lenape band of the Delaware Indians had already been ethnically cleansed from the colony. By the time the first McHenry had arrived, millions of indigenous Americans had already been killed or driven west by the White Man.
After staying with family friends in Newark, Delaware James moved to Philadelphia to study medicine with Dr. Benjamin Rush. Dr. Rush and his comrades in the Sons of Liberty were plotting an armed confrontation with the King’s army on the Charlestown hills overlooking Boston. Dr Rush enlisted James to set up a flying hospital on the Cambridge flats in preparation for the Battle of Bunker Hill.
On that muggy June 17, 1775, the colonists killed 226 Red Coats. The Americans lost 115 men in the battle. A total of 305 wounded were carried off the hill to the field hospital McHenry had organized in Cambridge.
When George Washington visited the injured at the flying hospital the General hit it off with young James McHenry. They would remain friends through out the rest of their lives.
I was the same age as James when I co-founded Food Not Bombs in 1980 in a Harvard Street house about a fifteen minute walk from where he had pitched the temporary medical facility in 1775.
McHenry became the surgeon of the 5th Pennsylvania Battalion. He was captured at Fort Washington, NY in 1776. McHenry was a prisoner on a British ship docked in the Hudson River until he was paroled in January 1777, and exchanged in a prisoner swap in March 1778. James officially joined Washington’s staff in May 1778, serving as a volunteer “without any emolument.” Contemporary text showed that McHenry was a well-liked and loyal member of Washington’s “military family.” Washington wrote of him:
“McHenry’s easy and cheerful temper was able to bear the strain which we suppose must sometimes occur between two persons thrown so closely and so constantly together in a position of social equality and military inequality.”
Washington reassigned McHenry to Lafayette’s staff in August 1780 resigning his service after the surrender of British officer Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.
After the war McHenry was elected to the Maryland senate, served as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and was a Maryland representative during the Constitutional Convention signing, the US Constitution on September 17, 1787. He was a political ally of Washington and served on his cabinet as the Secretary of War from 1796-1800.
Dr. James McHenry was witness to the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor from his estate. His son was stationed at the fort that evening of September 13–14, 1814. The lawyer Francis Scott Key was held on a British ship during the battle, writing the text to the National anthem “Star Spangled Banner” after witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry.
The new nation continued the two centuries of genocide and broken treaties of the European invaders. My ancestor became Secretary of War soon after the end of the US war against the Northwestern Confederacy and oversaw the internment or removal of Indian tribes on the western and southern frontiers of the United States.
Following the successive military defeats, the United States sent delegates to discuss peace with the Northwestern Confederacy, but the two sides could not agree on a boundary line. The United States sent more troops led by General Anthony Wayne, defeating the confederacy at the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers.
The slaughter of indigenous Americans continued. Inferior brown people who were infesting land that god gave to white Europeans. The Arikara War (1823); Osage Indian War (1837); Buffalo Hunters’ War (1876–1877); Cayuse War (1847–1855); Apache Wars (1849–1924); First Seminole War (1817–1818); California Indian Wars (1846–1880); Winnebago War (1827); Black Hawk War (1832); Navajo Wars (1849–1866); and the Sioux Wars (1854–1891).
From 1778 to 1871, the United States signed some 368 treaties with various Indigenous people across the North American continent. Not one treaty was respected by the United States.
The United States didn’t limit its brutality to North America. The First Barbary War started soon after McHenry was pushed out of the War Department. In October 1803, Tripoli’s fleet captured the USS Philadelphia intact after the frigate ran aground on a reef while patrolling Tripoli harbor. The ship, her captain William Bainbridge, and all officers and crew were taken ashore and held as hostages. Philadelphia was subsequently converted by Tripoli into a floating battery for harbor defense. The US marines recaptured the ship and burned it so Tripoli couldn’t send it to sea.
The US wars continued; The War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, fought from 1846 to 1848, The American Civil War, fought between 1861 and 1865, Spanish-American War (1898-1902), United States occupation of Nicaragua ( 1912-1933) and World War I (1917-1918).
My father’s father Donald Edward McHenry was a medic in the trenches of Belgium. War was not for him. After teaching natural history at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Oklahoma Territory in Stillwater he took employment as a Junior Park Ranger at the Grand Canyon. On the way to the South Rim he crashed and was taken by several Hopi farmers to their pueblo of Old Oribi where he convalescence for several months. When I lived at the Grand Canyon in the first and second grades he took our family to meet his friends. I was blessed to witness three seasons of Snake Dances in the days before electricity desecrated those sacred lands.
My mother’s father John V. Phelan helped continue the US tradition of mass murder. He and his Army intelligence colleague facilitated Pearl Harbor telling me it was the only way to get the American people to go to war with Japan. He joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) when the second World War got underway and directed the world’s most deadly bombing campaign called Operation Meeting House, firebombing Tokyo. I watched him argue over the phone with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Genera Curtis LeMay saying that the US should drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi to “ send a message to the communists that the US will stop at nothing to defend capitalism.” Like those in Washington and Tel Aviv he told me that he was in a Satanic organization.
The next major wars of choice based on lies were the Korean War (1950-1953), the Vietnam War (1964-1975), Desert Storm (1990-1991) and the Global War of Terror (Oct 2001 – Sept 2021), Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), Contra War (1979–1990), Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), Operation Cyclone (1979–1992), United States invasion of Panama (1989–1990), and NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) the regime change war against Russia ( 2014 – present ) and Operation Epic Fuckup against Iran (2026).
Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer estimates that from 1971 to 2021, the US murdered at least 38 million people.
So here I am, the McHenry living during the last gasps of the Empire co-founded by my ancestor Dr. James McHenry.
When I was the same age that James was when he set up a field hospital in West Cambridge I was living at 195 Harvard Street designing the Food Not Bombs logo and preparing vegan meals to share at Harvard Square. I was recovering tofu, produce and bake goods that I delivered to people living in public housing. My friends and I were organizing protests against the nuclear arms race and the US war in El Salvador.
I would spend the next 46 years volunteering with the movement I helped start in 1980. I would find myself homeless several times, survive a few FBI honey traps and over 500 hundred days in jail. The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force would designate Food Not Bombs a credible national security threat in an August 29, 1988, memo to the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office. I would face 25 to life in prison in California. The FBI would place me on a blacklist banning me from employment in the United States after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The FBI, Interpol and the CIA would disrupt the work of Food Not Bombs. Friends would die, be framed and spend years in prison. The police would make hundreds of arrests of our volunteers in San Francisco, Tampa, Ft Lauderdale, Orlando and a slew of other cities for the crime of sharing food with the hungry.
Still ,each of the heavy handed efforts to silence Food Not Bombs backfired inspiring people to organize their own local Food Not Bombs groups.During the more than four decades of activism we would share billions of meals with the hungry on every continent but Antartica.
As the lights of this genocidal empire are being dimmed by the people of Iran, ending the 250 year reign of terror, Food Not Bombs volunteers are busy preparing meals and providing survival gear in at least 1,000 cities in over 65 countries.
Two McHenrys bookending a nation of war. I am the McHenry that dedicated his life to ending a political and economic system that was willing to desecrate the sacred Hopi lands of my childhood.
Iran must win or we will be doomed. If Israel and the US defeat the people of Iran it will be a disaster for humanity. Their live-streamed genocide of Gaza was a message. There are no limits to the horrors they are willing to inflict to ensure the power of Zionist billionaires. The Epstein Class would believe in the illusion that they are Gods. They will assume that they are the rightful masters of the billions of “Useless Eaters” like you and me. A digital dystopian panopticon run by satanic baby-raping Zionists is not a future most of us would welcome.
On the other hand it appears that the people of Iran are bringing an end to this deadly Empire. The White Man has underestimated the indigenous people of color they perceived as backward. They’re arrogance and hubris may be ending their rule. The believing of their own racist lies may lead to their destruction.
On March 13, 2026 Iranian Commander Mohsen Rezaei made his country’s position clear, ”There will be no truce this time. Iran’s missiles are endless. We will bring the US to its knees – the Americans will face the fate of Hitler in the snows of Russia.”
That same day the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani said, “We have received urgent messages from Donald Trump through our mediators. He is begging for the opening of an immediate negotiation channel to achieve a ceasefire. Our response is that Iran will accept no form of negotiation, yield to no pressure, and sign no ceasefire as long as an illegal and criminal entity called Israel exists on the map of our region.”
Major General Ali Abdollahi, commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters stated that, “The criminal U.S. must know that the era of plundering nations across the world is over”. He may be right.
Now that Kingdom of Oman has declared the war on Iran “illegal and immoral,” and many other Gulf nations are refusing to join the US-led coalition, fear of the US military is coming to an end. Buying US weapons and depending on the US for protection seems to be a failed strategy. This defeat in the Persian Gulf may cause countries to end weapons purchases from US companies.
Americans wasted billions in this war while their people are charging groceries at 20% interest on credit cards they are defaulting on at the highest rate in US history.
It turned out that those “primitive” brown Iranians were not so easy to defeat after all. It also turns out that unlike the Zionists they keep their word.
The blockade of oil and the increased price at the gas pump is obvious but there is an even larger crisis looming and that is the increased difficulty in having access to affordable food.
The Strait of Hormuz is a critical choke point for global fertilizer supplies, with roughly 30–50% of seaborne nitrogen-based fertilizers (urea and ammonia) passing through the now blocked seaway. This could impact this spring’s cultivation resulting in smaller harvests this summer and fall. It will also cause food prices to increase even more.
The price shock is real for farmers. One local Missouri retailer told AgWeb that in just a two-week period:
- Urea is up $140 per ton
- NH3 has risen $100 per ton
- UAN is also up $100 per ton
Fuel prices will also increase the cost of food from the diesel required to operate farm equipment to the transportation of food to processing facilities and grocery stores.
An economic depression many experts suggest could be more painful than the Great Depression of the 30’s could send millions of people to seek free food to survive. Our volunteers are prepared to respond to the calamity unfolding before us. Many of us have decades of experience in logistics and the sharing of food. We are here to help.
If there was ever a time for Food Not Bombs that time is now.
Food Not Bombs https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
OPERATION EPIC FUCKUP
March 5, 2026
Escaping the End Times Holy War
We know the names of the first US military deaths in the failed regime change against Iran. Killed on March 1, 2026 in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait while helping murder 168 little girls attending an elementary school in Minab, Iran earlier that same day. The first blow in this world changing war.
The names of those girls are as invisible to Americans as the names of our homeless neighbors who died on our streets whose names were erased this year by the County of Santa Cruz.
* Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Fla.
* Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Neb.
* Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minn.
* Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Iowa
These are the first four Americans to fill the flag draped boxes of the war for the satanic Zionist oligarchs.
I visited the Dover Airbase during the Vietnam War. Our family’s relative Lovejoy worked on the base. We drove along the tarmacs passing block after block of silver caskets stacked 20 high and 20 deep waiting silently for the bodies of America’s youth wasted in yet another losing war.
Operation Epic Fuckup is shaping up to be Gen Z’s Vietnam. Towers of shiny coffins marching down the runway outside Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations in Delaware. The same morgue where the bodies of more than 20,000 young American soldiers had passed during the Vietnam War.
US Senator Richard Blumenthal said Tuesday, March 3rd that he is “more fearful than ever” that American forces could be deployed to Iran after a closed-door briefing with senior Trump administration officials on the escalating US-Israeli attacks under “Operation Epic Fury.” Zionist Blumenthal may pretend to worry about another war his political party will inherit after the midterms and how that might impact their popularity but in the end he is all in on war, whether against the Palestinians, Russians and or the Persians.
The US Central Command reports that they launched this catastrophe with over 50,000 troops. That number is sure to grow and with it more trips through the Dover morgue.
Fox News reports on March 2nd, “More U.S. forces are headed to the Middle East, according to Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as the U.S. escalates its campaign against Iran.”
“’The flow of forces continues today. In fact, Adm. Cooper will receive additional forces even today,’” Caine said during a Pentagon briefing Monday morning, referring to Central Command chief Brad Cooper.”
Once again the silver boxes will be piling high in this summer’s heat on the pavement of the Dover Airbase. Possibly thousands of weeping mothers, wives and children sacrificed for the profits of the Epstein child raping Zionist billionaires. Americans don’t get anything out of this war but an economic crisis and dead sons and daughters.
The mothers, daughters, brothers, sons and fathers across the Persian Gulf will also shed their tears. But many will mourn knowing that that their people are standing strong against the most immoral evil of our times, the United States of America and Israel.
To highlight their own evilness, Israel and America launched this disaster on the Jewish holiday Purim. The holiday that commemorates the “victory of the Jewish people” over ancient Persia (now Iran), as told in the Book of Esther. A war that historians say killed over 75,000 Persians.
Another Israeli war during Ramadan. The strategy of fighting a people fasting.
But what could be a bigger fuckup than threatening Armageddon?
Journalist Jonathan Larsen’s March 2nd substack wrote that at least 100 soldiers had complained to the organization Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) about their commanders excitedly telling their troops about how they will get to participate in the final battle to bring on the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. A cheery end times tale to help start a global war and economic collapse.
MRFF reports, “A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.”
“I am a (NCO rank withheld) in our unit. This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be “afraid” as to what is happening with our combat operations in Iran right now. He urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan” and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”.
But before Jesus returns, the savagery and poverty will be staggering. Many more Iranian children murdered by the satanic Zionist armies in double tap bomb strikes. More irreplaceable historic mosques of unparalleled beauty turned to dust. A sure way to win over the Iranian people so they will welcome an American puppet Shah to rule over them.
Assassinating the religious leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei was a great way to inspire 200 million Shia to join in this Holy War. And what better enemy for the believers than to be provided with Epstein proof that they are being slaughtered by a cabal of satanic Zionist baby-raping cannibals.
Embassy after embassy is already being burned by Shia riots. The US State Department issued an alert that all Americans should leave the 14 Gulf states even though they also say you are on your own. This epic fuckup is only getting started. We are in for some catastrophic surprises. The kingdom of Bahrain could have been toppled by the exploited Shia by the time you read this essay.
With oil facilities across the Persian Gulf in flames and shipping traffic blocked from passing through the Straits of Hormuz an already rocky economy is likely to start crumbling. False flag cyber attacks on the banks or utilities may be required to motivate support. Possibly a wave of lone-wolf terror attacks attributed to the axis of resistance. Something is going to be required to overcome the damage done by the Charlie Kirk assassination and Israel’s loss of tens of thousands of former Turning Point USA youth who thought America First didn’t mean Israel First. A war for Israel is going to be hard to sell to the once faithful base that is now listening to people likeTucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
We shouldn’t forget that the other raging war, Ukraine, may find melting down a nuclear power station will redirect attention away from the Persian Gulf to that failed US/NATO provoked conflict. Fear that the regime change war against Russia could turn nuclear is increasing.
“Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service:
“The British & French elites are actively exploring ways to supply Kiev with a nuclear bomb, or at least a so-called “dirty bomb”.
“Such reckless plans show that London & Paris have lost touch with reality.”
In this fog of war it is difficult if Russia ran this story to justify their “Escalate to de-escalate” strategy of launching a tactical nuclear weapon in a demonstration of their seriousness at ending that war.
We really are teetering on the brink of a world war. The clown show of Zionist pedophiles and mafia grifters in Washington and Tel Aviv are steering us towards ruin.
In fact much of Tel Aviv is in ruins. Ruins that the Israeli government is doing its best to conceal from world view. Even so the footage that does make it past the censors shows massive devastation. Towers in tatters. Fires raging.
The hubris and racism of the Epstein class lead to them believing
their own lies. A belief that they are so powerful they can dominate any nation. They think of themselves as gods because they don’t believe in the possibility of a God.
So now that Operation Epic Fuckup is spinning out of control it’s time for everyone to pull together and support one another. The government certainly isn’t going to come to our aid. There is every evidence that the number of people who will be seeking meals and groceries as a result of the dire economic crisis will keep increasing. Food Not Bombs volunteers all across the world are organized to respond to this global crisis. Our networks of food and resource recovery have been established for decades in many cities. New Food Not Bombs groups are starting every week. The Las Vegas and our group in Haifa, Palestine just reestablished their meals. Small towns like Victoria, Texas and Grand Junction, Colorado are springing up.
The Santa Cruz group where I volunteer has spent years preparing for the war against Iran and the resulting economic crash. We shared the only daily meal for unhoused people in Santa Cruz during the three years of the Covid lockdown. We were blessed that the Senior meal and Saint Francis Soup Kitchen reopened and we returned to our weekend schedule. If the increase in need grows dire we plan to return to our daily service.
People who are aware of the crisis are looking for a sense of sanity. It’s not likely that a vanguard party or charismatic leader will liberate us from this horror. Making plans to support one another locally may be the first step to escape this techno-feudal dystopian madness of poverty and war.
Community will be the cure. The community one finds at your typical Food Not Bombs meal. The community of classmates, concerts and conversation. Friends, family and neighbors united in sharing love, nutrition and safety with one another.
Humanity’s spirt can’t easily be crushed. These monsters have spent centuries massacring the indigenous people of the land. Never honoring treaties. Caging people of color in reservations, prisons and concentration camps. Even so they couldn’t defeat the Vietnamese, the Cubans or the Palestinians and they won’t defeat the Persians.
And they also won’t defeat you and me.
DON’T DIE FOR ISRAEL
If you don’t want to die for Israel and are a member of the US military you can call The GI Rights Hotline – 1-877-447-4487
CONTROLLED OPPOSITION
April 18, 2025
Let’s build a movement against fascism outside the control of the genocidal pro-war Democratic Party
While progressive Senator Cory Booker was giving his 25 hour Democratic Party infomercial on the Senate floor a Palestinian father could be seen on social media emerging from clouds of concrete dust in Gaza holding his headless child to the heavens. Two days later in another theatrical stunt designed to secure progressive loyalty to the Democratic Party Bernie introduces a bill to block $8.8 billion in arms sales to Israel which Booker voted against. Where was Bernie when he was voting to silence anti genocide protesters and backing Biden’s arms sales?
Capitalizing on the understandable anxiety of a Trump victory the Democrats are once again deploying their astroturf movement Indivisible. Since the mythology of the Democrats is that they are the party of the left they need to attract support from those who desire a progressive agenda. The party was trounced out of power for refusing to end the genocide or provide for the needs of the American people. The Republicans employed a similar strategy and used the fear of an Obama administration to launch the Tea Party to counter the perception that their party had moved away from their conservative roots. This is one method the billionaire class uses to tamp down any threat to their power.
After spending 18 brutal days in the Orange County Jail for the crime of sharing meals with the hungry I was released into the arms of Food Not Bombs volunteer Eric Montanez and handed a Tupperware of the best vegan Mac and Cheese I have ever tasted. News helicopters whirled above but they were not there for me. Socialite Casey Anthony, whose daughter was found dead as she partied was also being released from the Orlando jail at the same time as myself.
I was one of nearly 30 food servers arrested in the summer of 2011 after an appellate court ruled Florida’s most liberal city had the constitutional right to ban the sharing of meals with the homeless when Food Not Bombs appealed the Orlando groups first arrest.
On April 4, 2007, at the conclusion of an Orlando police undercover investigation that, according to the Orlando Weekly, cost taxpayers $65,000, Food Not Bombs volunteer Eric Montanez was arrested. When Food Not Bombs lost its appeal of the city ordinance volunteers defied the order and continued to provide the meals at Lake Eola Park picnic grounds.
When I finally was able to access my email one message included a call from Ad Busters to “Occupy Wall Street” on October 17th in a campaign to protest Obama’s bailout of the banks instead of coming to the aid of the 5.5 million families who lost their homes to foreclosure.
I supported the strategy of occupation and delivered hundreds of pounds of rice to New York and Washington DC and cooking equipment ready to help feed the protests. By Thanksgiving I had participated in over two dozen camps when the Obama administration aggressively started to crush the Occupy Wall Street movement.
A year after Occupy Wall Street was smashed Naomi Wolf wrote in the Guardian that, “FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF)… reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country.”
Many of us started organizing to ReOccupy the camps on May Day. As we were building our campaign a group calling itself 99% Spring asked San Francisco Bay activists to join them at a meeting in the Mission District. Nearly a hundred people sat around a conference room listening to the facilitators and watched their 20 minute inspirational film.
After the video people started to ask questions about why was there no mention of Obama’s bail out of the banks or his wars. The organizers dodged our questions and moved on to their plan. When it was suggested that many of us had already been planning to start the occupation on International Workers’ Day they claimed they had already picked their day in April. The presenters were clearly uncomfortable and deflected our questions. Nearly half of those attending walked out at lunch and never returned realizing that 99% Spring was just another Democratic Party front group designed to co-opt our movement.
The resulting confusion from their heavily promoted 99% Spring made organizing an independent return to the streets difficult. Masked people trashed areas of Seattle on May Day posing as a Black Block and news broke of a May first plot to bomb a bridge. The FBI had entrapped five of the 2011 Occupy Cleveland cooks including three young Food Not Bombs activists in a plot to use plastic explosives to topple the Route 82 bridge spanning Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park on 30 April 2012. Media reports of these events made sure that we didn’t continue the occupations.
The controlled opposition of the 99% Spring was only one of such subversions used to suppress threats against the Democratic Party from the left. MoveOn.org and Common Cause are among the well financed “grassroots” groups like Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution designed to “sheepdog” people they fear might dedicate their energy to organize against corporate power and war redirecting them back into the dominate political system.
I signed up with Our Revolution in 2016 when Sanders was running against Hillary Clinton. Since he supported military contracts like the F-35 I was skeptical that he would bring the change he was campaigning on but I gave him a chance. It seems that contact list is still being used for the purpose of corralling those who might be a threat to their agenda from the left into their orbit. Bernie asked us to vote for the cackling about Libyan Open Air Slave Markets Hillary Clinton. He would go on to ask us to back genocide Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. That list was an important factor in drawing so many people to the Hands Off and Anti-Oligarchy Democratic Party rallies.
Those lists were also used to send out a Cory Booker fundraising text shortly after the Senator voted to stop Bernie’s theatrical attempt to cut arms shipments to Israel. Messaging intended to mobilize people still gullible enough to believe that the Democrats could be a progressive challenge to the madness of the Trump administration. The Pussy Hat distraction of the first Trump administration has become the Hands Off of Trump’s second term.
In their all out effort to protect their system of exploitation and empire they also launched the AOC/Bernie Anti Oligarch tour, started another group, 5051 to attract those who had become wise to the Indivisible scam, and made much of the Cory Booker 25 hour content free yapathon. We are sure to see even more seemingly progressive groups emerge but none will be opposed to the genocide, war or corporate power.
In 2016 when it became clear that Trump would win the election two Congressional staff members, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, initiated Indivisible “publishing a twenty-three-page document drafted by a handful of former Democratic Congressional staffers in the days after Trump was elected. The subtitle: “A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” with the intention of harnessing the fear many rightly had of what might happen during his first administration. It is no surprise that when the Democrats returned to power they made no effort to reverse some of the most damaging of Trump’s policies like the tax cuts for the wealthy, the mass deportations of migrants or even move the US Embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv.
The August 18, 2017, issue of the Progressive Magazine writes, “Indivisible has, in a very short time, emerged as the public face of citizen resistance to Trump. Like the Democratic Socialists of America and Our Revolution, the official outgrowth of Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign, Indivisible has received a surge of interest post election. Unlike those groups, it didn’t exist beforehand.” The Tides Foundation provided $350,000 to help them start.
The article goes on to say, “The former staffers, including Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, now the group’s executive director and chief strategy officer respectively, had seen the Tea Party kneecap their bosses” attempts to pass progressive policies during Obama’s first term.”
One core member, Peter Dreier, claimed, “the goal of Indivisible was to “save American democracy&” and “resume the project of creating a humane America that is more like social democracy than corporate plutocracy.”
Anyone following the Democratic Party knows the last thing they support is democracy, otherwise for example, Bernie Sanders would have been their nominee, they wouldn’t have sued to keep the Green Party off the ballot in state after state and they would have held a primary in 2024. To claim the political party that refused to increase the minimum wage, presided over an economy that caused a 30% increase in the number of Americans who became homeless during their four years in power and armed the genocide of Gaza as “humane” seems a stretch.
Indivisible’s website states, “We’re a grassroots movement of thousands of local Indivisible groups with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda.”
It is rare to see a grassroots movement receive millions in donations from wealthy foundations like Open Society Foundation that gave $3 million to one arm of Indivisible in 2023; $1,135,000 in 2022; $500,000 to one account in 2021 and $375,000 to another account also in 2021; $1,750,000 in 2019; $500,000 in 2018 and $350,000 in 2017. The Open Society Foundation has not posted how much it donated in 2024 and it is not clear how many millions more was provided by other foundations to the other Indivisible units like Indivisible Project, Indivisible Civics, and Indivisible Action. Open Secrets reported that one of the sections of Indivisible raised $9,922,930 in 2024. Hardly grassroots.
Indivisible isn’t the only Democratic Party project that was funded by Soros. In the second quarter of 2020, his organizations gave at least $500,000 to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, becoming one of the campaign’s largest donors. Soros was the country’s largest donor to political campaigns in 2022 donating $128.5 million to support the Democratic Party in that election cycle. While Soros’ Open Society Foundation was financing the Hands Off rallies Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury happens to be Soros Fund Management partner Scott Bessent.
The Democrats are employing the same Color Revolution strategy they used to topple the elected governments of Ukraine and Georgia. Build a system of controlled opposition in defense of US centric corporate power. The Soros funding of regime change programs in Georgia was considered by Georgian nationalists to be crucial to the success of the Rose Revolution coup. Alexander Lomaia, secretary of the Georgian Security Council, is a former executive director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation (Soros Foundation), overseeing a staff of 50 and a budget of $2.5 million. The Biden administration was still seeking to subvert the democratically elected government of Georgia with a second color revolution as he left office. Like most of Biden’s policies Trump is continuing the effort to replace that government with a US compliant puppet.
I echo CodePink’s Medea Benjamin in strongly agreeing with most of the demands listed on publicity for the Hands Off rallies, Hands Off Medicare, Hands off Social Security, Hands Off Education, Hands Off Public Lands, Hands Off Immigrants and Hands Off LGBTQIA+.
But what suggested to me that these Hands Off rallies have another goal other than to stand against the terror of the CIA linked vultures hovering around the Trump administration was what was absent in their messaging. Their publicity didn’t include Hands Off Gaza or Hands Off Yemen even while US bombs were tearing children to shreds as people gathered for the rallies. Horrors that were beyond anything we have ever witnessed raging at the exact time these rallies were taking place.
Even more telling was that one of the institutions they want to protect is the organization directing the regime change war against Russia. The “Hands Off!” rally’s website even offers a pdf of a “Hands Off NATO” sign for activists to print and bring to their rallies. The website also quotes MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting saying, “This peaceful movement is powered by everyday people.” Does that include the dozens of “everyday people” who have been calling me nearly everyday for the past two years desperate for food often remarking that it makes them angry that we can fund a war in Ukraine but we can’t provide for our own people here in the US.
While most of those who join these rallies have the best intentions, some even came holding handmade signs against the genocide in Gaza or waved a Palestinian flag, it is unlikely that Indivisible intends to unite with the massive protests against the murder of Palestinian families. Their message of peace was drowned out by all the Ukrainian flags supporting the deadly war against Russia and their support of the political party that just spent 15 months slaughtering Palestinian babies.
It is understandable that people would join the Hands Off rallies. The stunning cascade dismantling our rights and social supports is frightening. Legal residents being snatched off the streets and deported, the privatizing of social services and threats to donate our National Parks to Trump’s billionaire friends for mining and oil extraction couldn’t be more terrifying. Americans are leading busy lives, struggling to pay their bills and base their political perspectives from limited information served by the same corporate media that supports the agenda of the war state and naturally joined the rallies in desperation. Had I not been following Indivisible since their founding and realized their organization was designed to kill any opposition to the system I would have also participated. I just can’t join rallies where it’s ok with the organizers for people to wave the Ukrainian flag. I don’t want to be seen as supporting war let alone one led by supporters of Stepan Bandera.
When rallies get such positive national news you know they have the support of those in power. You won’t see dozens of Democratic Party officials participating in protests that threaten the economic and political system. Insider trading success Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi spoke to her fawning supporters in the swing state Pennsylvania. Former vice presidential running mate Tim Waltz screamed to his supporters that the Democrats were back. The ghoulish anti-homeless YIMBY California State Senator Scott Wiener gloated over a video of himself he shared on Facebook that opened with a fluttering Ukrainian flag outside San Francisco City Hall. Wiener came to Santa Cruz on April 5, 2019 helping launch the luxury high rise condominium craze that is turning our community into a 15 Minute Smart City hell-scape.
Santa Cruz Indivisible is dominated by our city’s worst West-siders and pro development politicians. Their Facebook site includes supporters like anti-homeless Take Back Santa Cruz activist and former city councilperson Richelle Noroyan. One of the first members is the founder of the Predictive Policing Software Ryan Coonerty now used by CIA contractor Palantir to target Palestinians. Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Casey Coonerty-Protti’s husband Michel Protti helped finance this program when he was Vice President of Yahoo.
Those who waved their Ukrainian flags most likely believed that Russia’s military actions were unprovoked and feared Trump’s claims of making peace with Putin were real. Nothing says provoked like the torrent of western leaders spending the last 20 years threatening to topple the Russian government. On March 26, 2022, Biden continued those regime change threats during a speech in Warsaw saying of President Putin that,”For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
The Hands Off events share the same Zionist sponsors as the current regime so it’s no wonder there was silence about the bombings of Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Trumps threats to attack Iran. In a January 2024, article, “I don’t belong”: A Jewish student leaves Occidental College over wartime protests” the Forward writes, “Dreier, who identified himself as a “committed Jew” and has taught at the school for 30 years, acknowledged that “there are Jewish and Arab students feeling traumatized by what is happening in the Middle East.”
The Bernie AOC billionaire funded Anti-Oligarch tour is a second major front after Indivisible in the campaign to absorb those who might otherwise participate in an authentic movement against fascism into their dead end project. Police arrested Pro-Palestine protestors that had unfurled a banner saying “Free Palestine” at the Nampa, Idaho, rally as Sanders repeated his “Israel has a right to defend themselves against terrorism&” Zionist mantra followed by “I am doing my best to demand not another nickel for Netanyahu’s war.” Bernie is careful to accuse Netanyahu and avoids placing blame on Israel or his own record of voting for the genocide. Many in the crowd chanted Free Palestine as they removed the protesters. Non-Binary Artist in Recovery Blakeley posted a video of the tour saying “Bernie continues to claim “Israel has a right to defend themselves against terrorism” 18 months into a fucking genocide is actually fucking grotesque and you can’t call yourself pro-Palestine if you think this is okay or excusable.” Even though the Idaho crowned chanted Free Palestine Bernie ignored them and continued with his speech.
Of course he turned his back on his supporters.In 2023, as the genocide was reaching its most murderous levels, Bernie Sanders voted for a Senate Resolution condemning anti-genocide student protesters and organizations as “antisemitic, repugnant, and morally contemptible”. AOC and Bernie are not likely to travel to the Louisiana Detention Center where Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil is now being held.
This could spell disaster for our future as the US threatens to start a global war while the economy collapses. Two aircraft carrier armadas, six to ten B 2 stealth bombers capable of dropping nuclear weapons, and dozens of heavy transport planes, air defense systems are set to attack Iran if they fail to bend to Trump’s demands. At the same time Ukraine is increasing its attacks on Russia while it is reported that Moscow strikes a meeting with NATO officers in Kyiv and the global economic system crashes, threatening to force millions of Americans into financial ruin. Yet none of this was even a blip on the agenda of the Hands Off or Anti-Oligarch rallies.
Indivisible helped smother any possibility of using the terror of Trump’s first term to build a massive movement. Their solution was more war, austerity and a genocide.
If we have any hope of the change required to defend ourselves from the onslaught of the End Times Techno-fascists implementing their Stargate AI digital future we had better stop falling for the two party illusion. We urgently need to build a movement independent of the Democratic Party. A movement that threatens power.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
https://open.substack.com/pub/keithmchenry/p/controlled-opposition
FOOD NOT BOMBS – OUR BERLIN CONNECTIONS
March 31, 2025
The New England chill was starting to warm into a pleasant spring morning in 1980. Food Not Bombs cofounder CT Butler and I coasted through Harvard Square in our old Dodge van on our way to Brattle Square to set up our daily literature and food distribution when we caught a glimpse of an addition to the square.
A new character in the theater of our Cambridge streets stood near Out of Town News dressed with a bright colored poncho depicting a Russian bear and American eagle embracing. The white bearded man balanced a pole topped with a weather balloon painted to look like the Earth. After setting up our equipment I walked over to greet our latest addition to the carnival.
He introduced himself as John Runnings and gave me a copy of his flyer about his “The Odessa Odyssey”, his plan to travel to the Soviet Union for a person to person type détente. He shared that he had bought a boat back in his home in the state of Washington with the intention of sailing to Odessa Russia. He described how he would have docked in some seaside town, stepped onto shore and greeted the first people he came upon with a message of peace from the Americans. Unfortunately the person repairing ship stole the vessel so his new plan was to board a plane in Boston for Berlin and attempt to cross the wall to meet East Berliners
He slept in his van outside the Food Not Bombs house using our restroom before heading down to promote his dream to the pedestrians of Harvard Square. After a few months he recruited the Food Not Bombs volunteers to help him in his plot to sneak onto a Lufthansa flight to the divided city.
We lifted the slight man over a plastic wall that guarded the gangway to the plane but he was never able to board a flight without a passport so he gave in and flew legally to his goal. Once in Berlin he scaled the wall banging a chuck out of its rim, walked along the barbed wired top and dropped into the GDR side where he was arrested. A website tribute to his work says, “He then became the first person in history to have gone over the wall from west to east and back to the west again, all without a passport.” The piece of wall that he hammered free on one of his 1986 walks between worlds is displayed at the “Checkpoint Charlie Museum”.
Around the same time we had first become friends with the “Wall Walker” the Food Not Bombs collective organized a solidarity march with the German people who were protesting the deployment of US Pershing Nuclear Missiles. In October 1981, 300,000 protesters assembled in Bonn, West Germany.
We marched that same October from Cambridge City Hall to Draper Laboratory where they were designing nuclear weapons. Our name Food Not Bombs comes from our learning of the lab while we were donating produce to the mothers at the public housing project across from Draper. That evening I dialed International phone operators in Germany seeking to find an operator who could pass on the message that we had a protest in the United States in support of their campaign against the Pershing missiles. After a dozen or more calls we found one man who promised to let the German Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament know about our protest.
Food Not Bombs helped organize a protest against newly elected Vice President George H Bush who was set to speak against the Pershing Missile protests in Germany. Sue Eaton and I made the first Food Not Bombs banner before the action and she suggested the fist in the logo should be purple to honor all races. A friend borrowed the car of Food Not Bombs co-founder Jo Swanson’s to use while wheat pasting posters for the rally and along the way he spray painted the popular slogan “Shot Bush First” on the wall of the MIT Student Union inspiring the Secret Service pay her a visit but thankfully her roommate who answered the door sent them away. Jo went into hiding to avoid arrest. We brought torches as well as hot food. The torches were used to start a bonfire of wooden police barricades in the middle of Mass Ave. People drummed and danced around the fire and we provided psychedelic mushrooms to all who wished to enjoy them.
George Bush told his audience of MIT alumni that, “Most of the people who turned out to demonstrate against NATO’s nuclear forces are well-intentioned men and women. Many of them are young, too young to have had first-hand knowledge of World War II. I don’t question their idealism”. He continued,”That alone really ought to give these demonstrators pause. Pacifism and Soviet ideology are as incompatible as sheep and wolves, but the latter always fashions clothing out of the former’s wool.” History may be repeating with the new US attempts to deploy short range nuclear missiles in Europe as part of NATO’s current regime change war against Russia.
On the sidelines of the July 2024 NATO summit in Washington DC, Germany and the US announced plans to deploy missiles capable of being nuclear armed. The September 2024 issue of “The Arms Control Association Newsletter” said, “U.S. Army forces in Germany will field the multipurpose Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile, and a hypersonic missile that is still in development in ‘episodic deployments’ as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future,” the joint announcement said. These weapons will equip the army’s Multi-Domain Task Force based at Wiesbaden, Germany, which the army first activated in September 2021.” My father was stationed in the same armored unit as Elvis Presley at Wiesbaden and thus I was born in Frankfurt in May 1957 in the US occupied Luftwaffe Hospital that featured huge concrete swastikas on its cornices.
There is another Berlin connection. A cold San Francisco wind chilled the small ACT-Up rally against Anthony Fauci that I was attending in 1994 outside the Social Security office at United Nations Plaza. A friend named Michael saw me and hurried my way. “Keith, it’s great to see you. Heinke and I did a small tour to highlight your case. We even made T-shirts,” he told me. I had been framed by San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan in his attempt to crush Food Not Bombs and was facing a prison sentence of twenty-five to life.
He was excited. His partner Heinke had booked a popular Kreuzberg pub during Michael’s visit to Berlin and organized an event to build interest in my California Three Strikes case. The threat of a twenty-five to life sentence for crimes that included feeding hungry people and “stealing” milk crates must have been intriguing to a Berlin audience .
He described meeting an activist who had been sitting in the back of the bar listening to their presentation. The activist approached my friends and introduced himself as Manolo. He told them he was touched by my plight and suggested they join him in Spain. He offered to organize a couple of speaking events. Michael spoke warmly of his new friend Manolo. He was a serious radical and well connected in European circles. Michael would give me several news clippings about their presentations in the Basque country and an X Large T-shirt with “Free Keith McHenry” silkscreened across the chest at our next meeting. I felt honored. I would join Manolo on a tour of Spain and host him and two other Spaniards on a two month tour of North America that we called the Unfree Trade Tour, seeking to build resistance to the globalization of the economy by organizations like the Word Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum.
We showed the video “Fifty Years is Enough” about the impact of the economic policies that came from the 1944 the Bretton Woods Conference in the US and the intentions of those same financial vultures to expand their control. The movie showed peace, labor and environmental activists united in protest the introduction of Euro and the European Union warning it would bring in economic and environment damage to Europe. I had participated in a giant protest against the formation of the European Union organized by labor unions, communists, socialists, anarchists, peace activists and environmentalists in Bonn, West Germany and attended a two week long convention against the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. This coalition also tried to disrupt the World Economic Forum in Davos each year seeking to build opposition to the slavery and destruction caused by these globalization programs. It was shocking to return to Europe as the Euro was transitioning from the local currencies. The introduction of the Euro was already driving down wages while increasing prices. The contrast from the relative economic security of the pre Eurozone days and the financial struggles of Europeans after the Euro was heartbreaking. My friends no longer had the time to spend their days with me as they were now too busy meeting their financial expenses.
The UnFree Trade Tour featured one of our low-watt FM radio stations which let us broadcast the program over the airwaves. We shared literature not only on the threat to labor rights and damage to the environment that could happen if the policies of these global organizations were not stopped. We also provided details on how to start your own low-watt radio helping build the Free Radio movement across the US and Canada.
We proposed that people organize a massive protest against the World Trade Organization in the event that they were to hold one of their economic summits in North America. A year later the World Trade Organization announced its summit in Seattle to be held the last week of November 1999. A coalition of left groups united in a campaign to block participants from entering the summit. Since Food Not Bombs had formed the first IndyMedia Center in San Francisco during our second International Gathering in 1995 spreading the idea across the globe and by the time of the Battle of Seattle we had IndyMedia centers all over the world. An IndyMedia center in Australia had written code that let us post videos, sound, photos and text on our IndyMedia sites much like people can on Facebook or other social media platforms today making it possible to share uncensored news of the protests.
While global capital was busy tricking the public into supporting their wars and austerity plans Food Not Bombs chapters were also springing up all across the world in defiance. Food Not Bombs activists joined in anti-globalization protests across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
The Gothenburg European Council meeting was held on June 15-16, 2001, laying the groundwork for EU enlargement while addressing what the corporations called “sustainable development”, as well as economic and social issues, and external relations. The presence of US President George W. Bush at the EU-USA Summit attracted a huge crowd of protesters.
CBS News reported that “Up to 25,000 activists from dozens of anti-EU, anti-U.S. and anti-globalization groups have descended on Gothenburg. About 1,500 people appeared to have been involved in Friday’s rioting.”
The Guardian report of June 15, 2001 said “Anti-globalization protests spilled over into serious violence at the EU summit in Sweden last night as two people were shot and wounded by police apparently overwhelmed by demonstrators. Police in the southern port city of Gothenburg confirmed that two people had been shot when street fighting broke out after a day of clashes. Twelve police officers were injured and 600 people were detained.”
Gothenburg Food Not Bombs co- founder, Hannes Westberg was shot in the chest by police, suffering multiple injuries. According to a hospital spokesman, he had a damaged kidney and liver and is ‘critically ill’. Surgeons had to perform a series of complicated operations in a bid to save his life. I recall that he spent some of his time as a prisoner in a coma. I was honored to play Father Tomte for Hanne’s child on his son’s first Christmas when I visited Sweden on one of my European speaking tours.
My work against the centralization of the global economic system has never stopped. I joined a bus caravan at the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City and headed to the 2003 protest against the World Trade Organization protest in Cancun. Several Food Not Bombs volunteers from Australia had rented a house on the edge of the old town. My Mexican Food Not Bombs friends set up a camp in a park downtown where we provided meals for the protesters. The first day we shared food outside the Ritz Carlton on the beach front. That area was closed to the public soon after. Tens of thousands of us marched outside the security fences. I was less than ten feet away when Lee Kyung Hae, a South Korean farmer, scaled a fence and stabbed himself to death with a penknife while wearing a sign that read “WTO kills farmers.” A few minutes after he fell to the street the police started to toss chunks of concrete at the demonstrators. I joined a friend under the nearest car as blocks of cement rained down around us.
Our history of organizing against the exploitation by the financial institutions has been at the core of our actions from our founding. Our first soup line was a theatrical event outside the Bank of Boston’s stockholders meeting outside the Federal Reserve Bank in March 1981. The night before our noon meal I spoke at the local homeless shelter and invited the twenty or so men to join our protest. They showed to our protest suggesting we share food everyday since there were no free meals for Boston’s hungry. We handed out literature warning that the policies of the bankers and President Reagan could lead to a future where people would be forced to line up for meals at a soup kitchen. Pedestrians were surprised to see people were already queuing up for food just a month after Reagan had taken office.
That evening while cleaning our cooking equipment we made the decision to give our employers two weeks notice so we could dedicate all our time to recovering and sharing food. We all had to seek work after six months when our landlady reminded us that we has not paid rent for half a year but she was so impressed with our work that she reduced our rent from $600 a month to $400 and asked us to start paying at the first of the following month. Our humble beginnings sure have blossomed into a strong global community of compassion in an often very brutal world.
It’s been 45 years since we started the first Food Not Bombs collective after our friend Brian Feigenbaum, was arrested during the May 24,1980, occupation attempt of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station construction site in New Hampshire. During these four decades our volunteers have join relief efforts after cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and wild fires. Our volunteers initiated the campaign that toppled the banker government of Iceland, shared vegan meals outside MacDonalds on the annual McLibel protest each October and during the Millions Against Monsanto marches in May. The Anarchist Against the Wall campaign in Palestine started after the Tel Aviv chapter of Food Not Bombs has helped provide meals during a two months long Peace Camp on the West Bank. We have supported indigenous sovereignty movements in the Americas, Australia and across Asia. As a worldwide movement Food Not Bombs is in a position to initiated global days of action against the cruelty of the emerging totalitarian digital dystopia. And of course we have filled the bellies of the hungry millions of times and will do so for decades to come.
The crisis of war, state repression and poverty is greater today than at anytime in our history. Thankfully we have a global network of over 1,000 chapters to provide mutual aid, emotional support and solidarity.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 – http://www.foodnotbombs.net
ELECT TO END HUNGER AND WAR
May 13, 2024
On April 24, 2024, Joe Biden signed authorization to spend $95 billion on the wars in Ukraine and Palestine saying that it was “a good day for world peace.”
The Food Not Bombs march for Nuclear Disarmament August 6, 1981 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Food Not Bombs will honor its 44 years on the front lines of the peace and social justice movement on Saturday, May 25, 2024.
The first group in Cambridge, Massachusetts spent two years helping build the June 12, 1982, March for Nuclear Disarmament that attracted over a million people to the Great Meadow in Manhattan. They held their first “Free Concert for Nuclear Disarmament”, later to be called Soupstock, on May 3, 1981 at Sennott Park in Cambridge. Food Not Bombs volunteers also participated in the protests against the wars in El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Today we are facing the real possibility of a world war if we don’t rise up to stop it. This will be one of the messages expressed at the Soupstock 2024 free concert on Saturday, May 25, 2024 at the Duck Pond Stage at San Lorenzo Park in Santa Cruz.
Food Not Bombs volunteers in hundreds of cities around the world are sharing meals with the hungry and taking actions to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine, Palestine and the increasing threat of a global war between nuclear armed nations. The Jerusalem and Tel Aviv chapters of Food Not Bombs have been holding protests against the Gaza genocide outside the US Embassy. Polish chapters are providing meals to war refugees fleeing Ukraine and an increasing number of local homeless. The lines of those seeking food are growing longer at Food Not Bombs meals in cities all across the United States as the government sends billions of dollars worth of bombs to wage those wars. Hungry children stand together waiting for a warm bowl of stew from Food Not Bombs in Manila and Bangkok, We really do need food, and not bombs.
While the war of hunger is ravaging families across the exploited lands of Africa, Asia and the Americas there is one famine that stands out as the most horrific today.
Western nations are forcing the starvation of hundreds of thousands children in Gaza. Mothers struggle to choose which of their children will get that next crumb of bread. The first of several Flour Massacres was unleashed on February 29, 2024 when at least 118 Palestinians were killed and 760 injured after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on the coastal Al-Rashid Street in Gaza City. United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk denounced the rampant hunger and looming famine in Gaza and the using of starvation as a “weapon of war”, which he decried as a “war crime”. On March 18, 2024 Reuters reported that Gaza’s health ministry said 27 children and three adults had died by that time from malnutrition. They added that over 210,000 people were on the brink of starvation in northern Gaza. Conditions only became more dire and many more have died.
The attacks on the starving were not enough. On April 1, 2024, the Israeli military who may have been using AI targeting assistance from the CIA contractor Palantir sent missiles through the World Central Kitchen logo on their relief van in Gaza. Seven aid workers were killed in the attack. The World Central Kitchen made a hasty retreat from Gaza ending any possibility of even the most inadequate relief effort. The CIA data-mining company Palantir co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley vulture capitalists started with money from CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The current CEO is billionaire co-founder Alex Karp.
If the insanity in Palestine is not dangerous enough there is Biden’s decade long regime change war against Russia in Ukraine, another tragic legacy of the faltering American empire. While laying waste to Gaza, Biden’s administration also continues with its carnage in eastern Ukraine in some illusionary regime change war against Russia that the West can never win. The Pentagon claimed in leaks to the New York Times that Ukraine has lost 500,000 soldiers, killed or seriously wounded, since the beginning of the Russian special military operation. The once productive soils of wheat depicted on the blue and yellow flag of that war torn nation are littered with bombs and the graves of Ukraine’s men and women.
There is money enough for war even if the desperation of poverty is crushing millions of Americans. Hour after hour, call after call from the desperate seniors of rural America flood the Food Not Bombs Hunger Hotline, each with tales of their last few cans of tuna or an empty gas tank. Many are frustrated that they have been given the run around by one agency after another and are angry that the government is pouring billions into foreign wars of choice while Americans struggle to survive.
A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org found that 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. According to Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, homelessness in America increased by 11% from 2022 to 2023. HUD also claims they can end homelessness for $20 billion and yet the federal government just sent $61 billion to Ukraine and $26 billion to Israel.
Along with the threat of a global conflict between nuclear armed nations and a genocide, a war on America’s homeless is also raging. While Joe Lonsdale’s Palantir is aiding in the bombing of Palestinians turning their homes into rubble he is also coordinating a nationwide program to “solve” the homeless problem here in the United States. The Cicero Institute that he founded posts, “The United States has a growing homelessness problem – and bad policies at the local, state, and federal level exacerbate that problem.”
The Cicero Institute provides a “Model Bill” they call “Reducing Street Homelessness Act” to state and city legislators which their website notes is legislation based on the 2022 Missouri HB 1606.
So far the Cicero Institute, has placed bills in at least nine states including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. Texas became the first state to pass such a law in 2021, and Tennessee and Missouri followed in 2022.
Cynthia Griffith wrote about Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 on the Invisible People website, “Concentration camps and secret committees, out-of-state lobbyists, and flat-out lies – as unbelievable and terrifying as it sounds, this is a glimpse into what’s happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.”
The Cicero Institute website reported a recent success,”This morning (March 20, 2024 ) in Miami Beach, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365/ SB 1530, which will make Florida a leading state in the fight against the failed homelessness policies that have wreaked havoc on so many American cities. HB 1365 will ban street camping and upend how Florida provides treatment and help to the homeless – and holds providers and cities accountable for failure.” This is the same Ron DeSantis that provided legal advice to those torturing prisoners at Guantanamo.
In early April 2024 this movement against America”s poorest people had another victory in their nationwide campaign to make it a crime to be homeless. Kentucky bill HB 5, the “Safer Kentucky Act” was signed into law. The 78-page bill criminalizes “homelessness” and decriminalizes the use of deadly force against individuals engaging in unlawful camping. Under this law, “if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is attempting to commit a felony or attempting to dispossess them, they can shoot the homeless person.”
The war includes police raids on camps and the destruction of survival gear at a cost of millions to the already strapped taxpayers. The Washington DC chapter of Food Not Bombs started a fundraising campaign to buy pup tents and sleeping bags for the homeless who are being forced out from their camp. The group posted on May 8th, “today we purchased about $500 worth of tents in preparation for the Foggy Bottom encampment sweep scheduled for May 15th.”
According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel two million dollars was provided to the City of Santa Cruz to clear the homeless camps that Food Not Bombs had been delivering food to at Harvey West Park and along Coral Street. To be fair there are claims that some of the two million would be used to build 55 tiny homes with a shared restroom. We will see.
Americans can’t depend on their government to address the crisis of poverty so it has been left up to groups like Food Not Bombs to provide food and shelter. The COVID lockdowns shuttered indoor food programs for the poor. This was the case in Santa Cruz where the local Food Not Bombs group provided the only daily hot meal for three years without missing a single day. When the CZU Lightning Complex fires forced people out of their homes they came to eat and find clothing at the Lot 27 meal. Floods sent more to our meals. The group served through the atmospheric rivers even sustaining an arrest in Garage Ten at the height of one blasting storm. If it wasn’t for Food Not Bombs daily feast downtown Santa Cruz may have experienced a huge increase in shoplifting bordering on looting. A hungry man is an angry man as the saying goes.
Tent cities grow larger while politicians crow on about their military campaigns. The live streamed carnage of Gaza is shocking, sparking mass protests around the globe. A student movement demanding universities divest from Israel and the military contractors that profit from the genocide have sprung up on at least 150 campuses. Local Food Not Bombs chapters are helping.
At San Francisco State the students formed committees to address things they saw happening on other campuses that led to violence or to media narratives that the encampments were only about university/campus issues.
“We wanted to center Palestinians in Gaza instead of us. It’s not about us. So there was a lot of outreach. Reaching out to a lot of organizations like Food Not Bombs to provide food and water. We also were very fortunate to have had widespread faculty [academic staff] support.”
Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs is also supporting our campus divestment camp providing food and opening one of their kitchens to the students.
These protest camps are starting to send a panic through some members of the ruling class.
During the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security in Washington DC on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, former U.S. general Mark Milley and Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp chatted with some dismay about the student protest movement. The general reminded the audience that the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan and that civilian deaths in war are really nothing new so why are students even protesting about Gaza?
Palantir’s Alex Karp told the assembled national security members that the Palestine solidarity campus protest movement is an existential threat to American empire, “We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show.” he adds, “If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”
In a CNBC interview aired on May 13, 2024, “Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale on college chaos: It’s showing ‘rot’ at a lot of these places.” The website’s subhead adds, “Joe Lonsdale, 8VC founding partner and Palantir co-founder, joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss the rise in college campus protests, the state of college campus wars, the advancement of defense technology on the battlefield, his trip to India, and more.”
If these CIA contractors are correct the movement against the genocide may be a turning point. This could be a time of transformation as the cruelty of the corporate dystopia is being live streamed for all to see.
The revulsion at such horrors while most of us are struggling to pay our bills could remove any doubt that we need to reject the current economic and political system. It is time for a change, a revolution, a world that expects everyone to thrive and live as equals.
A vision of such a world can be found in the many mutual aid projects like the Food Not Bombs meals. One such project started in San Antonio, Texas. A Food Not Bombs activist who once volunteered with the Santa Cruz group joined the San Antonio Cares Collective. Like Food Not Bombs they spent their time helping provide food and survival gear with the homeless.
His friend and fellow collective member was Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman. Aaron set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC on February 25, 2024 telling the camera as he walked to the front gate “I will no longer be complicit in genocide” and then he called out; “Free Palestine, Free Palestine” as flames engulfed his uniformed body.
Before his protest he posted, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
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