THE CURRENT STATE OF STATE REPRESSION
December 12, 2025
Food Not Bombs has a 45 year history of defending human and animal rights. Volunteers have provided support for indigenous struggles, class conflicts and in defense of the environment. We stand for the rights of those without a roof to a safe place to sleep free of police disruption and violence. Of course we aren’t going to let governments interfere with the sharing of meals and literature. We will always defend the basic human right to share meals without government permission.
When the Pensacola Florida Police arrested Food Not Bombs volunteer Mike Kimberl for sharing meals after dark in Martin Luther King jr Park the day after Thanksgiving 2025 Food Not Bombs refused efforts by the city to issue them a permit. Mike and the other Food Not Bombs volunteers have been sharing meals every Friday at 6 pm in Pensacola for 14 years Daylight Saving Time or not.
Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves and his police department don’t seem to understand that they have no say in how people help one another. That’s a most basic of freedoms. People don’t ever need permission from the government to share the gift of a warm meal. Food Not Bombs agreed during the1992 and 1995 World Gatherings that we would never request or accept a permit to share food with the hunger after the San Francisco authorities used their process to try and stop our meals. If they believe that they can give you permission they also believe they can take that permission away.
Melbourne Food Not Bombs on the Atlantic coast of Florida successfully pushed back against a local ordinance designed to drive the group from sight. “We are not here to negotiate with you” one volunteer tells City Council. She reminds the council members that the City of Fort Lauderdale was ordered to pay $750,000 to the attorneys that represented Food Not Bombs after the federal courts ruled it was our First Amendment right to share meals without a permit.
Another threat is brewing against anti-fascists, anarchists and groups like Food Not Bombs that organize using anarchist influenced nonhierarchical principles.
A July 4th fireworks protest outside an ICE detention center inspired the July 22nd story on the Dallas Fort Worth NPR station KERA,“Shooting at Alvarado ICE facility, other attacks: The new normal?”
KERA reporter Caroline Love says, “Era Yousuf describes herself as being close friends with many of the defendants — including Benjamin Song, who she said prefers to be called Suzuka. Song, who was recently arrested, is accused of purchasing four guns found in connection with the shooting, according to court records.”
“Yousuf met them through protests and local activism, including the group Food Not Bombs, a nonprofit organization that distributes food that would otherwise be discarded to people experiencing homelessness.”
“Yousuf, who moved to another state recently, said she wasn’t involved with the demonstration at the detention center or any of the planning. She said her friends are not violent.”
“‘These aren’t dangerous people,’ Yousuf said. ‘They want to help innocent folks that are being kept prisoner.’”
The report also notes that “Court records don’t identify who fired the shots,” suggesting the shooter may well be working with law enforcement.
The Alvarado ICE facility shooting was highlighted by Trump and his cabinet at his October 8th White House Antifa roundtable.
Trump stated that, “In July approximately a dozen Antifa aligned militants stormed the ice facility in Texas, and then lured offices out of the building before firing dozens of rounds at police. They were. crazy, frankly. Shooting 1 Texas officer in the neck.”
During that same Antifa roundtable, Jonathan Choe, a reporter for Turning Point USA’s newsroom Frontlines, claimed that political extremism on the ideological left intersects with the “homeless drug crisis.” As evidence, he shared a recent report from the Discovery Institute, a Seattle based think tank best known for promoting the intelligent-design theory that God made everything in seven days to refute the theory of evolution.
“In many cases, the homeless industrial complex is running cover for antifa, and antifa is benefiting from American tax dollars, and they’re essentially being used as the muscle,” Choe reported.
“He then pointed to Stop the Sweeps, a franchise-like, community-coordinated campaign that aims to prevent state violence against homeless encampments.” writes Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling in an October 8th story in the New Republic.
The Stop the Sweeps protests in Santa Cruz have been focused against the local homeless shelter Housing Matters and their coordination with the city to clear the streets of the homeless around their shelter.
The suggestion that Food Not Bombs could be national security threat continued. On October 3, 2025, Fox New’s Jesse Watters aired “Antifa whistleblower BREAKS SILENCE, warns of violence,” interviewing an actor he calls Eric about how he got involved with Antifa. Watter’s starts by explaining Eric had to disguise himself to protect his life. He goes on asking, “How did you get roped into this whole Antifa thing?” Fake Eric responds, “It stared when I was young. I got in through working with different groups like the ARA, Cop Watch, Food Not Bombs and the punk rock movement.” The pretend former Antifa Eric also refers to the WTO protest in Seattle and claimed he had a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook.
On September 25, 2025, Trump issued NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM / NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence Presidential National Security Memorandum. It includes,“As described in the Order of September 22, 2025 (Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization), the groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations. For example, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called “anti-fascist” rhetoric.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered the FBI on December 4, 2025 to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to the Justice Department memo.
Under number 7 “Disseminating intelligence on extremist groups”
“Within 60 days of the issuance of this guidance, the FBI, in coordination with its partners on the JTTFs, shall disseminate an intelligence bulletin on Antifa and Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremist groups. The bulletin should describe the relevant organizations’ structures, funding sources, and tactics so that law enforcement partners can effectively investigate and policy makers can effectively understand the nature and gravity of the threat posed by these extremist groups.”
It might be helpful to learn that when the FBI – Joint Terrorism Task Force observed the August 22, 1988 arrests of 24 Food Not Bombs volunteers at Golden Gate Park they sent a memo to the San Francisco FBI Field Office claiming we were “a credible national security threat”. That November during the Thanksgiving holiday National Guard units across the country held domestic terrorism workshops featuring Food Not Bombs as “one of America’s most hardcore terrorist groups”. In April 2009 the US State Department gave a lecture asking who is more dangerous, “Al-Qaeda or the people sharing vegan meals in the parks?” In conclusion they believed that the people sharing vegan meals were more dangerous because they were influencing the American pubic “to support diverting military spending to education, healthcare and other social services” reducing according to them the country’s ability to fight groups like Al-Qaeda.
While several Food Not Bombs volunteers have been arrested, framed or entrapped by FBI terrorism changes in plots invented by the agency it has not slowed the growth of our movement. Each of these cases was painful for the families and friends of those targeted but if anything it has encouraged more people to participate.
We maybe entering a time of transition where those of us who have no attachment to the current political and economic system can thrive.
In crisis like this people tend to step up and help one another. The collapse frees us to appreciated the value of community and compassion over the cold techno feudal digital dystopia during the dying days of this cruel US Empire.
THE CURRENT STATE OF STATE REPRESSION
https://keithmchenry.substack.com/p/the-current-state-of-state-repression
DYSTOPIAN DIGITAL TERROR
October 22, 2025
The woman managing United Airlines gate D3 greets each passenger with, “Please stand here and face the camera”. I let her know I don’t do facial recognition. “Maggie, is this mandatory yet?” She responds “I don’t think so”. So I hand the attendant my boarding pass and head down the jetway towards my seat.
As I was driving to the airport I get a call from my former wife. She asks me to call her back when I am settled. It’s urgent she explains. I call her back. “I was just let go without warning. My job was replaced by AI.” No severance pay. The Social Security offices were closed due to the government shutdown and she can’t log on to essential websites because of the disruption in the Amazon Cloud Services. She sounds desperate. I promised to help. My heart is broken.
The shutdown could also impact food stamps. “SNAP benefits for November won’t be issued if the federal government shutdown continues past Oct. 27”, warned the Texas’ Health and Human Services Department. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) stated that it will not have enough federal funds to issue all of November’s SNAP benefits if the government shutdown lasts into the month. Separately from the government shutdown, new rules under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will also start in November, which means stricter work requirements will apply for many SNAP recipients.
We are living in a time of cruelty when Fox and Friends Brian Kilmeade could comfortably respond to Lawrence Jones when he says “They have given billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population. Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something,” Kilmeade said. “Just kill ‘em.”
Santa Cruz County’s largest homeless services provider, Housing Matters, is expected to close its Day Services program, which provides showers, bathrooms, water and a welcome area for homeless people at its Coral Street campus. The cuts to services also come as Housing Matters has conducted weekly sweeps of Coral Street in front of the shelter for more than a year.
The campaign to dehumanize those made homeless is nationwide bipartisan. Just a bunch of mentally ill drug addicts that don’t deserve our compassion. California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order in July 2024, to direct state agencies on how to remove homeless encampments.
A year later the Trump administration issued Executive Order 14321, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” It states “ Purpose and Policy. Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.” It also continues to dehumanize those without housing saying “The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both. Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes.”
These policies may be an attempt to respond to an expected increase in homelessness due in part to the rapid replacement of workers by AI and other digital systems.
My former wife was one of over 209,000 employees who were laid off and replaced by AI across 1,319 companies so far in 2025 (and that’s just the layoffs that meet state reporting rules). On average, around 1.6 million people are laid off each month in the U.S., translating to an estimated 19.2 million annually. In August 2025, 85,979 jobs vanished, many being replaced by AI, a 140% surge compared to the same month last year.
The global rush to force Biometric digital ID on their citizens is already having catastrophic economic impact and could increase the number of people becoming homeless. Each country has its own unique policies they believe their populations might be willing to comply with.
In Ukraine the US State Department introduced the Diia app in 2020 where all your government documents including digital ID is stored. The Diia app has a feature that allows you to turn in Russian speaking people for prosecution.
Billionaire Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the CIA initiated Palantir, writes on September 11, 2025, “A camping ban without enforcement is a dead letter. Residents should have an app to report encampments or street crime in real time. If city police fail to respond within hours, state authorities should step in, and if the problem persists after 24 hours, clear it themselves.”
Using this app, citizens could submit a photo of the problem, then confirm inaction by uploading another photo the next day.
This digital craze may dramatically increase the number of people forced in to homelessness who become the target of Lonsdale’s brilliant “solution”.
As of September 1, 2025, banks across Vietnam were closing accounts deemed inactive or non-compliant with new biometric rules. Authorities estimate that more than 86 million accounts out of roughly 200 million are at risk if users fail to update their identity verification.
The United Kingdom’s new digital ID program claims it will help combat illegals working, while making it easier for the vast majority of people to use vital government services. Digital ID will be mandatory for Right to Work checks by the end of the Parliament. One can imagine how many people will find themselves homeless as a result.
The Bank of Russia developed the digital biometric identification system with the implementation of the Guidelines for Financial Technology Development for 2018-2020. The Bank of Russia website claims, “The creation and development of the digital biometric identification platform means that financial services can be digitalized, financial inclusion can be increased, making financial services accessible for, among others, disabled, elderly and physically challenged consumers, and that competition in the financial market can be raised.”
Mexico officially introduced a digital identification system by signing a law that turned the previously optional biometric-based citizen code into a mandatory document for all citizens. The mandatory CURP will contain personal and biometric information, including a photograph and a QR code containing biometric fingerprint and iris data. The identifier is expected to be introduced gradually to all Mexicans by February 2026. So far the Mexicans I have spoken with believe it will be difficult to get people to cooperate.
The crypto crash in October 2025 could be a sign of things to come. Banking on digital currency could leave hundreds of millions of people without access to their money just because of technical failures.
The Binance-linked token BNB tumbled as much as 11% on Friday, October 10th. The world’s largest crypto exchange was cited by analysts as a key driver of the record crash on Oct. 10 and 11 as users encountered technical glitches and price discrepancies.
Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn says “The October 10th sell-off began with high leverage slamming into thin order books, then worsened as exchange auto-deleveraging capped some market-maker shorts and thinned liquidity at the worst point. He cites roughly $19 billion of liquidations as bitcoin slid from an Oct. 6 all-time high near $126,300 to an intraday low around $107,000, with ether falling from about $4,800 to roughly $3,500 before markets steadied into the weekend.”
A digital panopticon prison-state is rapidly being forced on us. “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison told stockholders on September 24, 2024, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts. “We’re going to have supervision,” he continued. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.”
To make this frightening potential possible, massive AI data farms are being constructed all across the world. The number of hyperscale data centers, which house a large portion of AI capacity, increased to 1,136 globally in the last year. Companies are expected to spend $375 billion on data centers globally this year and $500 billion in 2026, according to the investment bank UBS.
The cost of electricity for households is increasing in part because of the need to power AI data centers. CNBC reports, “Billions of dollars of investment and customers’ electric bills are at stake”. CNBC reporter Spencer Kimball adds “The AI companies are rolling out ambitious plans to build server farms that in some cases would consume as much electricity as entire cities.”
Visual Capitalist reports that AI data farms use 7.4 percent of the state’s power and in Oregon it’s already up to 11.4 percent. Data centers in Ireland consume more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity.
Goldman Sachs reports, “Securing the power to operate these new data centers is even tougher, especially with AI data centers housing tens of thousands of energy-intensive GPUs in dense clusters. By 2030, data center power demand is expected to surge +160%*** relative to 2023 levels—and after a decade of flat demand growth, the current grid was not designed for this future.”
To meet the needs of the AI surveillance state nuclear power stations are being proposed and closed stations like Three Mile Island that had a meltdown on March 28, 1979, are going back online. Trade organizations like Central Coast Community Energy are pushing for the construction of new Lithium Battery Storage Sites while also providing lithium batteries to place on our homes.
These AI data centers are also a strain on water needs to cool the processors. For example Google, which operates Oregon data centers at The Dalles, a city of 16,000 people not far from the Morrow County center, resisted disclosing its water use, paying $100,000 for the city’s lawsuit against The Oregonian, a Portland newspaper that had filed a public records request for the data. When the suit was dropped, Google’s water-use totals were public: 355.1 million gallons, a quarter of the city’s annual water use in 2021.
While trillions of dollars are being invested in this surveillance and war-fighting industry their systems can crash. Even if you comply with the biometric ID programs, access to your banking or other essential services can vanish.
On October 20, 2025, Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS struggled to recover from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world’s most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit. Online banking, crypto, transportation and other businesses went dark across the globe. AWS CEO Matt Garman brags that 70% of their code is written by AI.
I support both a mass movement of noncooperation with this tyrannical dystopia and the formation of communities that live outside this control grid.This draconian system thankfully may collapse under its own contradictions. This sure is a time to start to rely on mutual aid groups on the fringes of society like Food Not Bombs. This may end up being our only hope at survival.
Food Not Bombs
PO Box 422 – Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
THE JOYS OF ANTIFASCISM
October 10, 2025
Community is the cure
The authorities might be trying to link Food Not Bombs to their threats to stamp out anarchists and Antifa.
This July, NPR’s KERN News published the story, “Shooting at Alvarado ICE facility, other attacks: The new normal?” The report included this passage, “Era Yousuf describes herself as being close friends with many of the defendants — including Benjamin Song, who she said prefers to be called Suzuka. Song, who was recently arrested, is accused of purchasing four guns found in connection with the shooting, according to court records.”
“Yousuf met them through protests and local activism, including the group Food Not Bombs, a nonprofit organization that distributes food that would otherwise be discarded to people experiencing homelessness.” The government claims that there were two shooters but only identifies Song. One defendant claims the group intended to launch fireworks outside the detention center on the 4th of July to provide solidarity with the prisoners on Independence Day. KERN reporter Caroline Love wrote, “At least one of the defendants told authorities he didn’t know there would be any violence according to court records. So far, eleven people are charged with three counts of attempted murder of a federal officer and three counts of discharging a firearm in relation to and in furtherance of a crime of violence for the shooting. Court records don’t identify who fired the shots.” This suggests that it was an unidentified government informant that fired at the police when they came out to see what the noise was about.
The Alvarado ICE facility shooting was highlighted by Trump and his cabinet at his October 8th ANTIFA round table.
Trump claimed that “In July approximately a dozen Antifa aligned militants stormed the ICE facility in Texas, and then lured offices out of the building before firing dozens of rounds at police. They were crazy, frankly, shooting one Texas officer in the neck.”
The “Soros Network” among others were listed at Trump’s ANTIFA round table as supporters of violence.
“Patel said his department is working with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “who is allowing us to map out these networks through their financial criminal activities, which has been going on for decades.”
Scott Bessent was the chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management, a $30 billion family office. After graduation, Bessent went to work at the CIA law firm Brown Brothers Harriman, then did stints at the Soros Fund, Protégé Partners, and others before George Soros recruited him as CIO in 2011. In August 2015 Bessent announced that he will leave at the end of the year—with a $2 billion allocation from Soros to start his own hedge fund.
Soros Open Society Foundation provided funding for the NGO’s that participated in the Orange Revolution and 2014 coup of Ukraine as well as providing millions to Indivisible including $9 million in 2024.
On October 3, 2025, Fox New’s Jesse Waters aired “Antifa whistleblower BREAKS SILENCE, warns of violence” interviewing an actor he calls Eric about how he got involved with Antifa. Water’s starts by explaining Eric has to disguise himself to protect his life. He goes on asking, “How did you get roped into this whole Antifa thing?” Fake Eric responds, “It stared when I was young. I got in through working with different groups like the ARA, Cop Watch, Food Not Bombs and the punk rock movement.” The pretend former Antifa Eric also refers to the WTO protest in Seattle and claimed he had a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook.
I rewrote the Anarchist Cookbook after the FBI entrapped five young Occupy Cleveland cooks including two Food Not Bombs volunteers in an FBI invented May Day bombing plot of a bridge and noticed that the federal complaint repeatedly noted that they possessed William Powell’s book which they admitted they had provided to the defendants.
All the hype about anarchists and Antifa suggests that the federal authorities might start attempting to increase their disruption of peace groups like CodePink and Food Not Bombs. Trump signed an executive order Designating Antifa a Domestic Terrorist Organization on September 22, 2025 even though there is no Antifa Organization so that can mean anyone could be a target.
After that he issued NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence Presidential National Security Memorandum.
On October 4, 2025 Trump’s aid Stephen Miller told NewsMax “Every time we make an arrest, we are initiating an investigation into the entire domestic terrorist network.”
He adds, “The president issued a national security presidential memorandum, an NSPM, making clear that it is the national security priority of the United States law enforcement to dismantle, disrupt, defeat, and destroy these domestic terror networks.”
The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indicia” (indicators) of violence:
• anti-Americanism,
• anti-capitalism,
• anti-Christianity,
• support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
• extremism on migration,
• extremism on race,
• extremism on gender
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
So really anyone with a thinking brain and a compassionate heart.
Food Not Bombs meals are a port in the storm of these times of authoritarian threats. Building community, celebrating our independence and cultivating a society of compassion outside the drumbeat of fascism.
We can avoid being framed in one of the FBI’s plots by speaking up when conversations or jokes about getting guns, suggesting arson or other acts of violence by speaking up and reminding them that Food Not Bombs is dedication to nonviolent direct action. We aren’t passive but also we don’t support the organizing of physical attacks against people. As our name makes clear, we are food and not bombs.
The FBI has used informants to suggest bombings and other acts of terrorism in the Food Not Bombs community such as happened with Cleveland Food Not Bombs or our volunteer Eric McDavid who was framed and sentenced to 19 years for an FBI invented plot that he was not aware of believing that “Sarah” the informant was just joking.
The feds can try to cause infighting by hinting someone is an informant so it’s wise to never make such an accusation. Those making suggestions to use violence may have been encouraged by someone they keep “randomly” running into and otherwise are great and dedicated activists.
But the main thing I would suggest is have fun and enjoy all the beautiful connections we make when volunteering with Food Not Bombs.
Keith McHenry
Co-founder of the Food Not Bombs movement
Shooting at Alvarado ICE facility, other attacks: The new normal?
Antifa whistleblower BREAKS SILENCE, warns of violence
THE INTERNING OF AMERICA’S HOMELESS
August 17, 2025
Will we be silent about our neighbors being removed from our communities?
Yes, that time I have been warning of since 1985 has arrived: prison camps for the homeless. Nearly four decades of demonizing the homeless as sub human drug addicted mentally ill “useless eaters” has provided the justification needed to intern those who cannot afford housing.
Thankfully many Americans have compassion for their homeless neighbors. Many of us have family on the streets or are struggling to keep housed and appreciate the difficulties tens of thousands of us are experiencing.
My wife and I owned a graphic design company in Kenmore Square. We designed ads and publications for companies in our neighborhood including the Boston Red Sox and local retail shops who were members of the local business association. The vice president of the Kenmore Association invited me to his stuffy second floor office to ask me to design another publication.
“Keith, the Association wants you to take a photo of that black guy that stands outside Captain Nemo’s Pizza and make a poster with a red circle with a line through it over his face like a no parking sign. The poster should say “Wanted out of Kenmore Square.”
I refused to make the poster, volunteered to share food behind Fenway Park before each game and suggested it would not be possible to drive the homeless from Kenmore Square since the crowds of Red Sox fans and college students made it the perfect place to panhandle. I also explained that “that black guy” was loved and had a name.
A few weeks later my wife Andrea called me over to her desk at our graphic design business to show me the Kenmore Association newsletter.
“Keith look at this.” pointing to page 2 of the October issue of the Kenmore News. The typewritten newsletter of the association mostly reported on the news of the Security and Maintenance Committee.
“The Security & Maintenance Committee encourages all KA Members to assume an active role in cleaning up Kenmore Square. In order to prevent the attraction of streetpeople (especially the “rough element”, new to Kenmore Square), the following guidelines were suggested at the breakfast meeting…
Please don’t give free food to these streetpeople.
Please lock all dumpsters. Unlocked dumpsters will be cited by the City inspectors and all infractions will be subject to fines. Open dumpsters attract streetpeople looking for collectibles and food.
Please refrain from throwing returnable cans and bottles in public trash receptacles. The streetpeople find Kenmore Square a profitable location for collecting on these cans and bottles.
Start calling the police if certain annoyances persist and keep a record of your calls (ie. date, time of day and response time).
We stopped what we had been doing and typed out a response to the business association.
“As members of the Kenmore Association we object to the dehumanizing statements against those living on our streets made by the Security & Maintenance Committee in the October newsletter.”
“These people are our neighbors, friends and family and deserve our compassion and support.”
“Dehumanizing people in this manor smacks of Hitler’s Germany. The association is showing a total disregard for people being people. We urge the Association to support efforts to help our neighbors instead of adopting policing to drive them out of the community.”
“There is no evidence that their presence is having any impact on business. We should celebrate the unique qualities of Kenmore Square that make it attractive instead of seeking to become a second Newbury Street.”
Sincerely,
Andrea and Keith McHenry
24 hour residents of Kenmore Square
We shared our life with our homeless friends. The most visible and lovable of our street friends was “that black guy” Mr Butch who could be found outside Captain Nimo’s Pizza with a blue electric guitar slung across his chest welcoming the streams of Boston Red Sox fans chugging through Kenmore Square. Harold Madison Jr could have been Jimi Hendrix’s double.
The war against America’s homeless had begun.
As the number of Americans who were not able to afford housing increased business districts and municipal governments started to enact laws deigned to remove the homeless from sight.
After eight years of Reagan’s trickle down economics the number of homeless Americans had grown to more than 750,000 people. Cities started to pass and enforce what they called “quality of life” laws designed to make it a crime to be unhoused citing the pseudo science of the Broken Windows Theory to justify their dehumanizing campaigns.
Demonizing the homeless took another ugly step after I had relocated to San Francisco. Mayor Dianne Feinstein held a press event in my Richmond District neighborhood praising the city’s homeless-proof Muni bus stops. Her replacement, former social worker Art Agnos continued her anti-homeless programs including arresting Food Not Bombs for sharing meals at the entrance to Golden Gate Park at the end of Haight Street.
But that was nothing when compared to Mayor Frank Jordan’s “Quality of Life Enforcement Matrix Program”. In the first months Jordan order the police to confiscate the shoes off of people living outside.
Jordan would brag that Rudy Giuliani had adopted his program to clear Manhattan of their homeless.
The next mayor of San Francisco continues the repression. Mayor Brown asks to borrow the Oakland Police Department night vision-equipped helicopter to locate homeless people illegally sleeping in Golden Gate, but Oakland refuses to help. Sweeps of the parks continues anyway and the quality of life enforcement continues with 23,871 tickets issued to people living on the streets in 1999. Brown orders the police to charge people with shopping carts with a felony.
When Gavin Newson was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors he initiated the ballot measure Care Not Cash which would change San Francisco’s General Assistance from $395 per month to just $59 per month but came with a guarantee of housing and food for the homeless. The promise of housing and food failed to materialize but the cuts in assistance was implemented.
When Gavin Newsom took the mayor’s office in 2004 he launched “Operation Outreach,” a special police unit that responds to 911 calls to rid the streets of the homeless, claiming he would be placing people in rehab or mental facilities, but with the lack of services people were just arrested or ticketed. Newsom claimed his program would eliminate the chronically homeless from San Francisco by 2014.
The cruel criminalization of the homeless got a new ally in 2016 when the billionaire co-founder of CIA In-Q-Tel funded Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, started the Cicero Institute. He provides model legislation to states banning “unauthorized street camping.” The Cicero Institute also provides model legislation on civil commitment of the homeless saying that “states should amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves”.
The Cicero Institute succeeded in getting states to pass their legislation. Their Safer Kentucky Act started to be enforced in July 2024. Anyone cited with the offense for the first time can be fined. Subsequent offenses are Kentucky Class B misdemeanors and can bring more fines or jail time. Under this law, if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is uncooperative they can shoot the homeless person under a stand-your-ground provision.
With Joe Lonsdale’s help Tennessee made it a felony to camp on most state-owned property. Having a felony conviction will make getting housing even more difficult.
In September 2022 Governor Gavin Newsom started the first of his Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Courts, opening a way to force the state’s homeless into involuntary mental health treatment.
Governor Newsom’s Proposition 1 passed in 2024 providing funding for facilities for those forced into state conservancy.
Two close homeless friends of mine were forced into civil commitment in 2023. Both were happy and no danger to themselves or others. All they required was enough money to afford an apartment.
The County of Santa Cruz removed one friend from a COVID hotel a week before everyone else was evicted in the Benchlands homeless camp. He was held in a psychiatric unit for months. Both of his cars were junked and he lost 30 years of crystals and drums he had in storage because he was blocked from paying for his units or his website, losing his life’s work. His once magical life was crushed.
My “rainbow family” friend was captured and forced into the mental facility and made to take psych drugs against her will. She died a couple of weeks after being released when she stopped taking the SSRIs.
On July 25, 2024, Newson signed the Executive Order N-1-24 calling on all state agencies to clear encampments. “With the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v Johnson, local governments now have the tools and authority to address dangerous encampments and help provide those residing in encampments with the resources they need.” He also told counties and cities who failed to clear homeless camps that the state would cut their funding.
Two months before Newsom signed his executive order the State awarded the City of Santa Cruz a $4 million “Encampment Resolution Grant” that provides two years of funding to remove the homeless from the streets around the Housing Matters homeless shelter. There is a claim that the grant will provide 55 people with a place in a tiny house or apartment. We will see.
The weekly sweeps scatter people to the woods and doorways until the police force them back to the relative safety of the camp outside the shelter.
In June 2025 San Jose, California passed a law making it illegal not to go into a shelter. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan stated, “Homelessness can’t be a choice” when pushing for his Responsibility to Shelter Initiative. Those refusing shelter three times will be arrested for trespassing on public land. The San José Spotlight points out that the county only has one shelter bed for every three unhoused people.
Trump continues the drive to criminalize those who cannot afford housing with his “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” executive order essentially plagiarizing Newsom’s 2024 anti-homeless executive order.
A month after signing his order he spotted several people living in pup tents as he traveled to play gulf in Virginia, writing on Truth Social platform, “The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capitol” ordering the unhoused residents to leave the US capitol or face eviction and vowed to use officers to make arrests.
Trump also federalized the District of Columbia’s police ordering them to enforce the anti-homeless laws passed by the liberal Democrats.
On August 12th White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt took questions about President Trump’s takeover of the Washington, D.C.police force and the Trump administration’s plan to remove homeless encampments in the city, responding that, “The Police Department, with the support of the new Federal agencies who have been surging on the street of the District of Columbia, are going to enforce the laws that are already on the books here in Washington DC. For far too long, these laws have been completely ignored in the homelessness problem, has ravaged the city. So D.C. Code 1307 and D.C. Municipal Regulation 24-100 give the Metropolitan Police Department the authority to take action when it comes to homeless encampments so homeless individuals will be given the option to leave their encampment to be taken to a homeless shelter, to be offered addiction or mental health services and if they refuse they will be susceptible to fines or to jai time. Again these are preexisting laws that are already on the books.”
The New York Post reported that, “In the past five months, U.S. Park Police have removed 70 homeless encampments, giving the people living in them the same options, she said. As of Tuesday, Leavitt said only two homeless encampments remained in district parks maintained by the National Park Service and would be removed this week.”
Associated Press reporter Meg Kinnard notes that “Trump said this week that homeless people will be moved far from the city in his crackdown on crime. But details of the plan to do so are unclear”.
The number of Americans facing homelessness is increasing as rents and the cost of food continue to rise, families face cuts in SNAP food stamps and other social safety nets. With the potential of tens of thousands more people being forced onto the streets US officials may believe they need to be prepared to deploy the National Guard across the country.
When we speak of the homeless people of Santa Cruz “being moved far from the city” there may already be a plan. Former Mayor Donna Meyers and former County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty were quietly proposing during their 2 by 2 meetings that people could be sent to the Camp Roberts California National Guard Base outside the tiny village of San Miguel in San Luis Obispo county.
Is this what Trump means, that America’s rapidly growing homeless population will be moved far from the city ?
FOOD NOT BOMBS – OUR BERLIN CONNECTIONS
March 31, 2025
The New England chill was starting to warm into a pleasant spring morning in 1980. Food Not Bombs cofounder CT Butler and I coasted through Harvard Square in our old Dodge van on our way to Brattle Square to set up our daily literature and food distribution when we caught a glimpse of an addition to the square.
A new character in the theater of our Cambridge streets stood near Out of Town News dressed with a bright colored poncho depicting a Russian bear and American eagle embracing. The white bearded man balanced a pole topped with a weather balloon painted to look like the Earth. After setting up our equipment I walked over to greet our latest addition to the carnival.
He introduced himself as John Runnings and gave me a copy of his flyer about his “The Odessa Odyssey”, his plan to travel to the Soviet Union for a person to person type détente. He shared that he had bought a boat back in his home in the state of Washington with the intention of sailing to Odessa Russia. He described how he would have docked in some seaside town, stepped onto shore and greeted the first people he came upon with a message of peace from the Americans. Unfortunately the person repairing ship stole the vessel so his new plan was to board a plane in Boston for Berlin and attempt to cross the wall to meet East Berliners
He slept in his van outside the Food Not Bombs house using our restroom before heading down to promote his dream to the pedestrians of Harvard Square. After a few months he recruited the Food Not Bombs volunteers to help him in his plot to sneak onto a Lufthansa flight to the divided city.
We lifted the slight man over a plastic wall that guarded the gangway to the plane but he was never able to board a flight without a passport so he gave in and flew legally to his goal. Once in Berlin he scaled the wall banging a chuck out of its rim, walked along the barbed wired top and dropped into the GDR side where he was arrested. A website tribute to his work says, “He then became the first person in history to have gone over the wall from west to east and back to the west again, all without a passport.” The piece of wall that he hammered free on one of his 1986 walks between worlds is displayed at the “Checkpoint Charlie Museum”.
Around the same time we had first become friends with the “Wall Walker” the Food Not Bombs collective organized a solidarity march with the German people who were protesting the deployment of US Pershing Nuclear Missiles. In October 1981, 300,000 protesters assembled in Bonn, West Germany.
We marched that same October from Cambridge City Hall to Draper Laboratory where they were designing nuclear weapons. Our name Food Not Bombs comes from our learning of the lab while we were donating produce to the mothers at the public housing project across from Draper. That evening I dialed International phone operators in Germany seeking to find an operator who could pass on the message that we had a protest in the United States in support of their campaign against the Pershing missiles. After a dozen or more calls we found one man who promised to let the German Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament know about our protest.
Food Not Bombs helped organize a protest against newly elected Vice President George H Bush who was set to speak against the Pershing Missile protests in Germany. Sue Eaton and I made the first Food Not Bombs banner before the action and she suggested the fist in the logo should be purple to honor all races. A friend borrowed the car of Food Not Bombs co-founder Jo Swanson’s to use while wheat pasting posters for the rally and along the way he spray painted the popular slogan “Shot Bush First” on the wall of the MIT Student Union inspiring the Secret Service pay her a visit but thankfully her roommate who answered the door sent them away. Jo went into hiding to avoid arrest. We brought torches as well as hot food. The torches were used to start a bonfire of wooden police barricades in the middle of Mass Ave. People drummed and danced around the fire and we provided psychedelic mushrooms to all who wished to enjoy them.
George Bush told his audience of MIT alumni that, “Most of the people who turned out to demonstrate against NATO’s nuclear forces are well-intentioned men and women. Many of them are young, too young to have had first-hand knowledge of World War II. I don’t question their idealism”. He continued,”That alone really ought to give these demonstrators pause. Pacifism and Soviet ideology are as incompatible as sheep and wolves, but the latter always fashions clothing out of the former’s wool.” History may be repeating with the new US attempts to deploy short range nuclear missiles in Europe as part of NATO’s current regime change war against Russia.
On the sidelines of the July 2024 NATO summit in Washington DC, Germany and the US announced plans to deploy missiles capable of being nuclear armed. The September 2024 issue of “The Arms Control Association Newsletter” said, “U.S. Army forces in Germany will field the multipurpose Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile, and a hypersonic missile that is still in development in ‘episodic deployments’ as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future,” the joint announcement said. These weapons will equip the army’s Multi-Domain Task Force based at Wiesbaden, Germany, which the army first activated in September 2021.” My father was stationed in the same armored unit as Elvis Presley at Wiesbaden and thus I was born in Frankfurt in May 1957 in the US occupied Luftwaffe Hospital that featured huge concrete swastikas on its cornices.
There is another Berlin connection. A cold San Francisco wind chilled the small ACT-Up rally against Anthony Fauci that I was attending in 1994 outside the Social Security office at United Nations Plaza. A friend named Michael saw me and hurried my way. “Keith, it’s great to see you. Heinke and I did a small tour to highlight your case. We even made T-shirts,” he told me. I had been framed by San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan in his attempt to crush Food Not Bombs and was facing a prison sentence of twenty-five to life.
He was excited. His partner Heinke had booked a popular Kreuzberg pub during Michael’s visit to Berlin and organized an event to build interest in my California Three Strikes case. The threat of a twenty-five to life sentence for crimes that included feeding hungry people and “stealing” milk crates must have been intriguing to a Berlin audience .
He described meeting an activist who had been sitting in the back of the bar listening to their presentation. The activist approached my friends and introduced himself as Manolo. He told them he was touched by my plight and suggested they join him in Spain. He offered to organize a couple of speaking events. Michael spoke warmly of his new friend Manolo. He was a serious radical and well connected in European circles. Michael would give me several news clippings about their presentations in the Basque country and an X Large T-shirt with “Free Keith McHenry” silkscreened across the chest at our next meeting. I felt honored. I would join Manolo on a tour of Spain and host him and two other Spaniards on a two month tour of North America that we called the Unfree Trade Tour, seeking to build resistance to the globalization of the economy by organizations like the Word Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum.
We showed the video “Fifty Years is Enough” about the impact of the economic policies that came from the 1944 the Bretton Woods Conference in the US and the intentions of those same financial vultures to expand their control. The movie showed peace, labor and environmental activists united in protest the introduction of Euro and the European Union warning it would bring in economic and environment damage to Europe. I had participated in a giant protest against the formation of the European Union organized by labor unions, communists, socialists, anarchists, peace activists and environmentalists in Bonn, West Germany and attended a two week long convention against the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. This coalition also tried to disrupt the World Economic Forum in Davos each year seeking to build opposition to the slavery and destruction caused by these globalization programs. It was shocking to return to Europe as the Euro was transitioning from the local currencies. The introduction of the Euro was already driving down wages while increasing prices. The contrast from the relative economic security of the pre Eurozone days and the financial struggles of Europeans after the Euro was heartbreaking. My friends no longer had the time to spend their days with me as they were now too busy meeting their financial expenses.
The UnFree Trade Tour featured one of our low-watt FM radio stations which let us broadcast the program over the airwaves. We shared literature not only on the threat to labor rights and damage to the environment that could happen if the policies of these global organizations were not stopped. We also provided details on how to start your own low-watt radio helping build the Free Radio movement across the US and Canada.
We proposed that people organize a massive protest against the World Trade Organization in the event that they were to hold one of their economic summits in North America. A year later the World Trade Organization announced its summit in Seattle to be held the last week of November 1999. A coalition of left groups united in a campaign to block participants from entering the summit. Since Food Not Bombs had formed the first IndyMedia Center in San Francisco during our second International Gathering in 1995 spreading the idea across the globe and by the time of the Battle of Seattle we had IndyMedia centers all over the world. An IndyMedia center in Australia had written code that let us post videos, sound, photos and text on our IndyMedia sites much like people can on Facebook or other social media platforms today making it possible to share uncensored news of the protests.
While global capital was busy tricking the public into supporting their wars and austerity plans Food Not Bombs chapters were also springing up all across the world in defiance. Food Not Bombs activists joined in anti-globalization protests across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
The Gothenburg European Council meeting was held on June 15-16, 2001, laying the groundwork for EU enlargement while addressing what the corporations called “sustainable development”, as well as economic and social issues, and external relations. The presence of US President George W. Bush at the EU-USA Summit attracted a huge crowd of protesters.
CBS News reported that “Up to 25,000 activists from dozens of anti-EU, anti-U.S. and anti-globalization groups have descended on Gothenburg. About 1,500 people appeared to have been involved in Friday’s rioting.”
The Guardian report of June 15, 2001 said “Anti-globalization protests spilled over into serious violence at the EU summit in Sweden last night as two people were shot and wounded by police apparently overwhelmed by demonstrators. Police in the southern port city of Gothenburg confirmed that two people had been shot when street fighting broke out after a day of clashes. Twelve police officers were injured and 600 people were detained.”
Gothenburg Food Not Bombs co- founder, Hannes Westberg was shot in the chest by police, suffering multiple injuries. According to a hospital spokesman, he had a damaged kidney and liver and is ‘critically ill’. Surgeons had to perform a series of complicated operations in a bid to save his life. I recall that he spent some of his time as a prisoner in a coma. I was honored to play Father Tomte for Hanne’s child on his son’s first Christmas when I visited Sweden on one of my European speaking tours.
My work against the centralization of the global economic system has never stopped. I joined a bus caravan at the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City and headed to the 2003 protest against the World Trade Organization protest in Cancun. Several Food Not Bombs volunteers from Australia had rented a house on the edge of the old town. My Mexican Food Not Bombs friends set up a camp in a park downtown where we provided meals for the protesters. The first day we shared food outside the Ritz Carlton on the beach front. That area was closed to the public soon after. Tens of thousands of us marched outside the security fences. I was less than ten feet away when Lee Kyung Hae, a South Korean farmer, scaled a fence and stabbed himself to death with a penknife while wearing a sign that read “WTO kills farmers.” A few minutes after he fell to the street the police started to toss chunks of concrete at the demonstrators. I joined a friend under the nearest car as blocks of cement rained down around us.
Our history of organizing against the exploitation by the financial institutions has been at the core of our actions from our founding. Our first soup line was a theatrical event outside the Bank of Boston’s stockholders meeting outside the Federal Reserve Bank in March 1981. The night before our noon meal I spoke at the local homeless shelter and invited the twenty or so men to join our protest. They showed to our protest suggesting we share food everyday since there were no free meals for Boston’s hungry. We handed out literature warning that the policies of the bankers and President Reagan could lead to a future where people would be forced to line up for meals at a soup kitchen. Pedestrians were surprised to see people were already queuing up for food just a month after Reagan had taken office.
That evening while cleaning our cooking equipment we made the decision to give our employers two weeks notice so we could dedicate all our time to recovering and sharing food. We all had to seek work after six months when our landlady reminded us that we has not paid rent for half a year but she was so impressed with our work that she reduced our rent from $600 a month to $400 and asked us to start paying at the first of the following month. Our humble beginnings sure have blossomed into a strong global community of compassion in an often very brutal world.
It’s been 45 years since we started the first Food Not Bombs collective after our friend Brian Feigenbaum, was arrested during the May 24,1980, occupation attempt of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station construction site in New Hampshire. During these four decades our volunteers have join relief efforts after cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and wild fires. Our volunteers initiated the campaign that toppled the banker government of Iceland, shared vegan meals outside MacDonalds on the annual McLibel protest each October and during the Millions Against Monsanto marches in May. The Anarchist Against the Wall campaign in Palestine started after the Tel Aviv chapter of Food Not Bombs has helped provide meals during a two months long Peace Camp on the West Bank. We have supported indigenous sovereignty movements in the Americas, Australia and across Asia. As a worldwide movement Food Not Bombs is in a position to initiated global days of action against the cruelty of the emerging totalitarian digital dystopia. And of course we have filled the bellies of the hungry millions of times and will do so for decades to come.
The crisis of war, state repression and poverty is greater today than at anytime in our history. Thankfully we have a global network of over 1,000 chapters to provide mutual aid, emotional support and solidarity.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 – http://www.foodnotbombs.net
FOOD NOT BOMBS IN THIS TIME OF TECHNO-FASCISM
March 17, 2025
CIA funded Billionaires publicly take control of the United States while we organize our resistance to their digital dystopian panopticon.
“…one suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted…” Peter Thiel, February 21, 2024
The eight college aged antinuclear activists who started Food Not Bombs in May 1980 imagined a time when we would need to respond to a time like we are living through today. We thought President Reagan would be the Trump of our time but thankfully it’s taken four more decades to arrive at this dystopian moment.
We could have never imagined there would be nearly 1,000 autonomous chapters of Food Not Bombs in over 65 countries when we started. But we did consider a number of strategies of survival.
If faced with the repression of a totalitarian police state our vision was to build our own communities outside the system with a focus on meeting the basics of water, food, shelter, free expression and friendship.
We had planned to coordinate days of actions with what we at the time dreamed might be a network of dozens of Food Not Bombs chapters spread across to United States. Our first multi-city action happened on October 15, 1988, when all three groups that existed at the time participated in a protest against the US war in El Salvador. The Boston group helped organize and shared meals outside the US Capital in Washington DC while chapters in San Francisco and Long Beach provided meals with those protesting to end the war in their own cities.
This vision of creating a community outside a totalitarian society was experienced in a condensed version by over a thousand people who participated in the 1995 International Food Not Bombs Gathering held in San Francisco during the 50th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This ten day event may offer suggestions on how to build a community of sanctuary from the dystopian digital prison being implemented by the DOGE transfer of the US government’s assets to this junta of techno-fascists. Programmable digital currency linked to your biometric facial digital ID connected to the internet of bodies could be our future if their plans become reality. The Stargate of electronic control and warfare.
The hours of preparing and sharing free vegan meals together built many strong friendships. Smuggled plastic buckets of stew and garbage bags of pastries and bread were quickly shared at United Nations Plaza at noon before the San Francisco Tactical Squad marched in to make the daily felony conspiracy arrests. Over 130 were cuffed for serving food in violation of a court order. We were released a day or two later in to the welcoming smiles and hugs of our fellow Food Not Bombs activists.
At a meeting of about 200 people we came to consensus that we would continue to unite around our three principles that we had agreed to during the first International Gathering held in San Francisco before the October 1992 protests against the 500th anniversary of Columbus invading the Americas.
1. The food is always vegan or vegetarian and free to anyone rich or poor, stoned or sober.
2. Each group is autonomous, there are no leaders, directors or headquarters and decisions are made by consensus and we strive to include those eating with us in our meetings.
3. We are not a charity but instead we are dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action to change society so no one is forced to sleep in the streets or seek food at a soup kitchen.
The assembled also agreed that we would never request or accept a permit from the government to share meal with the hungry. Sharing the gift of food is always an unregulated act of compassion.
Our decentralized horizontal philosophy of organizing is our strength. A strength that could save us under the current conditions.
While these meals and meetings were getting underway people started to pass through our tiny convergence center in an office we rented for the occasion on the fifth floor above one of the Off Broadway theaters on Market Street. Those staffing the office registered over 1,000 names of those who came to attend our second world gathering.
The first Indymedia Center ever was housed in that same office. We broadcast news of the gathering from a low watt pirate radio station whose antenna was mounted on the theater’s roof. That got busted after just a few days but we were also broadcasting on Free Radio Berkeley and San Francisco Liberation Radio. Stephen Dunifer held workshops on how to build your own low-watt free radio transmitter and radio station. Participants took these plans home and set up their own stations. I had the honor of being a guest on many of those stations while on tour. You can see our diagrams in the book Hungry for Peace.
By the time of the blockade of the first World Trade Organization Summit in Seattle in November 1999 there were Indymedia Centers in cities all over the world. Activists in Australia wrote code that made it possible to upload news, photos and videos of the action globally. Massive protests like the blockage of the 1999 WTO Summit rarely made the news outside the city where they were happening before Indymedia. A protest against the first war on Iraq attracted nearly a million people in San Francisco yet few outside the Bay Area had any idea this took place. People are still surprised when I tell them about the Rodney King Uprising in San Francisco and the implementation of martial law assuming that it had only happened in Los Angeles.
As part of the gathering the group Homes Not Jails invited activists to help take over the abandoned officers quarters at the recently decommissioned Presidio Military Base. The housing was in perfect condition and could have housed more than a hundred homeless vets but since it has one of the best views of the Pacific in the city they were not about to sacrifice the property to the poor. Federal police arrested the occupiers hours after we seized the buildings. Even so Homes Not Jails also occupied other housing San Francisco left empty by the Savings and Loan Crisis and was providing shelter for dozens of formerly homeless people.
The workshops on the most effective way to squat abandoned buildings were a popular feature of our gathering. There were also classes on lock picking, making giant puppets and banners, consensus decision making, vegan cooking and other organizing strategies as well as the free radio workshops.
In contrast to the drama in San Francisco there was no threat of arrest for sharing meals at People’s Park in Berkeley where East Bay Food Not Bombs hosted playful events on the lawn and powerful concerts on the stage. Terri Compost shared her skills in what could be called a Food Not Lawns garden near the stage.
The closing event was a torch light march against the death penalty. Black Panther journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal had been sentenced to death in Pennsylvania and was set to be executed soon after the gathering. Hundreds marched from UN Plaza through the Mission with torches, banging drums, chanting, tipping over a flaming dumpster outside the Mission District Police Station as we marched past the precinct. Then the parade was off to the Castro where the police kettled the procession making the country’s largest arson arrest taking over 200 people to jail.
Our ten days of skill sharing and resistance inspired many participants to return home excited to strengthen the Food Not Bombs movement, start their own radio stations, plant vegetable gardens, organize Indymedia Centers and initiate local squatter campaigns. Consider reading our book Hungry for Peace to get an idea of how to start creating an outside the matrix community in your city.
The horrors of the techno-fascists who are now overtly seizing power may feel over whelming but thankfully we have the sanctuary of our Food Not Bombs community.
After 45 years of direct action and service many of us have the experience needed to respond to these terrifying days. We are more prepared than ever to welcome another wave of Americans who could be forced into homelessness under the policies of the privatization of Medicare, and SNAP food stamps. This crisis is not limited to the United States. European governments are removing many of their social safety nets so they can fund their war with Russia and a failing global economy is sure to increase poverty around the world.
Thankfully the Democratic Party’s phony astroturf “resistance” rallies calling for more war and genocide and our vote in the midterms are slowly evaporating as their political party commits a slow suicide. The fact that the share the same agenda as those they are protesting has become all to obvious.
At the same time the Palestinian and immigrant solidarity protests are building an authentic resistance to this totalitarian coup free of Democratic Party domination. Food Not Bombs activist are supporting those actions as well as participating with Veterans for Peace, local homeless unions, LGBTQIA+ diversity rights groups, anti racist activist, labor organizations, mutual aid collectives and environmentalists to build a movement to resist the tyranny of these cruel technocratic oligarchs.
As a Great Depression scale economic crash unfolds Food Not Bombs groups are in a position to use our decades of practice to ease the suffering. No such movement was in place when the world was ravaged by the impact of the 1929 crash. The Catholic Workers, anarchist and communist collectives had to start from scratch as the calamity unfolded. Our flexibility and history of responding to major crises like Hurricanes Katrina, and Sandy, the Covid Lockdowns and the Hurricane Helene floods provides us with an advantage when it comes to making a difference at this critical time.
Along with our regular sharing of food and survival gear we are able to offer our years of logistical skills to support a wider resistance movement. Logistics are what we do week in and week out. We could even initiate our own nationwide campaigns of protest, blockades and noncooperation to this dystopian AI dominated digital war and surveillance state of control. Our creativity is unlimited.
If you are not already volunteering with a local Food Not Bombs group I encourage you to do so. If there isn’t a chapter in your community you are welcome to start a group with your friends. We are happy to help. It could not only save your own sanity it can provide the infrastructure for the change required to protect our rights and wellbeing from the techno-fascist CIA contractors, hedge fund vultures and financial institutions who are seeking to impose their will on society.
Our 45th anniversary reminds us that Food Not Bombs is capable of accomplishing amazing things. If there ever was a time when the spirit of Food Not Bombs was needed that time is now.
Food Not Bombs documentary of the 1995 International Gathering – San Francisco
SOUPSTOCK 2025
Saturday, May 24, 2025 – San Lorenzo Park, Santa Cruz, California – Visit our website to find the celebration nearest you or email menue@foodnotbombs.net
https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
HOW DID I KNOW?
February 5, 2025
By Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry
“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” Oracle’s Larry Ellison – September 24, 2024
My mother’s father John Vanderpoole Phelan slowly rowed our family’s sky blue dingy into position across the placid waters of Middle Pond a few hundred feet from our beach on Cape Cod. My 5 year old frame sat on the bow bench armed with my first fishing pole. I faced my grandfather at the stern. He picked up a fresh water mussel from a pail, broke the paper thin shell, scooped out the slimy life and stabbed his fish hook into its grey flesh. I followed his instructions, skewed my bait onto my hook and dropped my lead sinker into the still waters. It wasn’t long before there was a tug on my line.
He instructed me to snap my pole to set the hook. A heavy creature fought as I reeled it to the surface.
“Unhook him and smack his head hard on the gunnel” he explained. “You don’t want him to suffer,” he added. I looked at those big perch eyes starring back at me, slid the hook from his gasping lips and smashed it against the wooden boat.
He continued with his lesson. “One day you may be asked to kill others. This is our duty. Those you kill will have no moral ambiguity. They will just be dead but for you it will be more difficult. This is the white man’s burden.”
He would repeat this lesson in one way or another for the next ten years often adding that I was born into a genetically superior family that was tasked to defend the rewards of capitalism.
My Grampy Phelan followed the path of many in the intelligence world attending Phillips Academy, Dartmouth College and Harvard Law. He was recruited into the US Army’s Office of Strategic Services, attended boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi, spent time overseeing the testing of Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress in Wichita, Kansas before being stationed in Burma where he directed bombing raids on Japan during World War II.
The 10 acre property on the Cape was our vacation home. My mother’s parents lived in Needham, Massachusetts in a huge two story white house with Dartmouth green shutters. My bed was down in their finished basement. I slept next to two metal file cabinets filled with the MIT formulas that my grandfather would sell to Ken Olson and became the foundation of Digital Electronics. A black and white photo hung on the wall next to my bed showing thousands of people in Burma smashing rocks with hammers or balancing reed baskets piled with stones as they toiled building my grandfather’s runway for his squadron of B-29s.
My grandfather’s first floor den was lined with 63 framed black and white photos that he snapped from 20,000 feet of his progress in the world’s most deadly bombing campaign,Operation Meeting House, the fire bombing of Tokyo.
I watched him pace under those photos arguing over the phone with General Curtis LaMay and then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara about the need to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi. We had to “send the Communists a lesson.” he insisted. Let the world know that the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a “one off” and that America had no limits to what it would do to defend capitalism.
My grandfather taught me about how the US provoked Japan with tariffs and naval blockade and ordered the Pacific fleet to line up at Pearl Harbor to maximize the impact. He claimed that even though US intelligence knew Japan was about to attack the naval facility they intentionally concealed this from the base commander. My grandfather explained that he and his friends set up the attack “because otherwise the American people would never support a war in the Pacific.”
During those days when my grandfather was arguing the logic of a third nuclear strike his good friend Curtis LaMay was trying to convince President John F Kennedy of the logic of bombing a shopping mall in Miami and blaming it on Fidel Castro to justify an invasion of Cuba in their Operation Northwoods plot.
Grampy explained that elections were designed to divide people so they won’t be a threat to those in power. The intelligence agencies had the responsibility of placing people in positions of power making sure the correct people came to office and that according to him this included the President of the United States.
This can be achieved in many covert ways. For example their claims that the Hunter Biden Laptop was Russian disinformation to make sure Biden won or making a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to hold the hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran in exchange for US weapons in an effort to sink President Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign.
Chuck Schumer told Racheal Maddow in a January 2017 interview, “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, so even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman [like Trump], he’s being really dumb to do this,” referring to claims by Trump that he would take on the Deep State. And sure enough the Deep State ate Trump and today we are witnessing the bitter fruits of a military dominated surveillance state free to overtly seize control of the government and confiscate its assets for their own benefit.
I spent the summer before high school living in that sweet little cubby in my grandfather’s basement while I attended summer classes at Needham High. He passed that winter.
My grandfather’s second wife held his funeral at the Congregational Church in Needham. The pastor claimed Grampy was a great and godly soul and would be remembered in heaven. I was stunned as my grandfather made it clear to me that he believed that God was a fiction and talked about his having belonged to a secret Satanic order.
When I was an art student at Boston University I had a part time job staffing Old South Meeting House on Milk and Washington Streets telling visitors about the drama of the Boston Tea Party, collecting the 50 cent entrance fee and selling post cards of the historic building.
During a lunch break I went to Boston Commons to eat and enjoy the warm spring sun. An older lady was standing on a milk crate telling a small audience of other elderly women about the threat of nuclear Armageddon and Mutually Assured Destruction. Her name was Dr Helen Caldecott.
After absorbing Helen Caldecott’s speech it occurred to me that I could use my skills as an artist to address what seemed to be the most important yet mostly invisible issue of our times.
I dropped into the offices of Mobilization for Survival in the basement of Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church to see if I could put my artistic skills to use. It wasn’t long before I was participating with the just formed Boston Alliance Against the Registration and the Draft. At first, nearly a hundred people were attending the weekly meetings but the number of participants started to decrease after a few months.
We had organized a plan where we would table outside the local high schools in the weeks before the students left for summer vacation to warn them of the potential danger of cooperating. Red Sun Press was going to give us a great price for the literature we intended to distribute. Once we were set to launch our campaign one of the leaders of BAARD announced she had spent most of our money on a first class plane ticket from San Francisco to Boston for Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and that he had agreed to speak at a rally on the Boston Commons after attending his child’s graduation at Harvard. We needed to raise more money for our printing.
Since the number of people attending our meetings was plummeting just when they were most needed my friend Frank and I called those on our phone list to see why they stopped participating. Most were disturbed about the jokes by some of the core members about “getting guns for the revolution” so we made a suggestion that we stop any reference to guns since the point of the organization was to oppose war. There was push back from the others so we agreed to take a vote at the next meeting.
When Frank and I arrived to the meeting a dozen or more people who had never attended before were there to vote against our proposal and the policy was not adopted.
After the meeting I returned to the street with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of flyers but I was arrested before posting the first flyer. Frank was still in the office and saw the woman who had spent all our funds on the first class plane flight for Ellsberg dial up the Cambridge Police. This event is described towards the end of Brian Glick’s book “War at Home” on covert actions against the peace movement.
The shock at learning that BAARD had been infiltrated and was intentionally sabotaging our efforts at tabling and plans for the July 21,1980 protest outside the Main Post Office inspired us to start another group we called AWOL. We organized our first meeting at the Clamshell Alliance office at 595 Mass Ave in Central Square and just as it was about to start members of BAARD arrived with rebar and started attacking us.
It was very disturbing to discover that many of those who you thought were friends were likely working for the FBI. I was no longer a virgin to covert state manipulation and disruption.
I would face years of FBI, CIA, Interpol, local police and corporate intelligence operations. I have survived over 40 years of honey traps, the confiscation of all my out going and incoming mail for months at a time, elaborate smear campaigns, wiretaps, police doubles dressed as me who did crimes that I would be arrested for and the trauma of learning that an FBI agent slept with my wife while I sat in jail facing 25 to life in prison.
On August 15, 1988, the San Francisco Police arrested nine Food Not Bombs volunteer at the entrance to Golden Gate Park for sharing meals without a permit, a permit we would learn did not exist. A week later another 24 of us were arrested at Haight and Stanyan. Fifty-five more food servers were cuffed and taken to jail on Labor Day. The pressure on Mayor Art Agnos to end the spectacle led to our negotiating an end to the arrests and the creation of a permit process. I had to take the City to Federal Court to force them to comply with the process but they revoked the permit shortly after issuing it anyway and deleted the permit a year later.
That Thanksgiving volunteers wearing the Food Not Bombs button on their coat were approached by uniformed members of the National Guard as they waited for flights home after the holiday. They remarked that they had seen the Food Not Bombs logo at that weekend’s Domestic Terrorism Workshop claiming we were “one of America’s most hardcore terrorist groups.”
In 2021 as part of a decade long Freedom of Information Acts Request effort by “Property of the People” we received a document that showed that the FBI- Joint Terrorism Task Force had watched the August 22nd mass arrests and sent a memo on August 29, 1988, to the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office claiming we were a “credible national security threat.” There were only three chapters at the time with a total of 30 volunteers combined.
The San Francisco Police made over 1,000 arrest in all for sharing meals ending in 1995. I was arrested 94 times, spent 500 days in jail and as noted before faced 25 to life in prison after being framed by the Mayor’s office. I was captured three time and taken to a dark room where my clothes were ripped off, was lifted by my arms and legs until my ligaments and tendons were torn and stuffed into a tiny Stress Position Cage. I spent hours in that cold dark cage struggling unsuccessfully to stretch my legs.
A parade of Food Not Bombs volunteers have been framed in FBI invented terror plots. Connor Cash on Long Island, Eric McDavid in California and three of the cooks at Occupy Cleveland, Douglas Wright, Brandon Baxter and Connor Stevens are among the many targeted.
While I find it frustrating when people express distress or support for the actions of Donald Trump suggesting they believe he is all powerful I understand they’ve had a lifetime of messaging that suggests that things like elections and the law are real.
I believe Trump was “hired” by the Deep State to perform the needed drama designed to implement the strategies formulated in think tanks, intelligence funded university research programs, the halls at the Pentagon and Langley and corporate boardrooms on Wall Street, in London, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley.
The choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate signaled that the Deep State was no longer going to play nice. When the PayPal Mafia of CIA contractors at Palantir took over power of the United States on January 20, 2025, it became clear to me that things are about to get very bleak and not just the ways the liberals have been crowing about.
At Trump’s first press conference of his second term on January 21st he announced the $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project called Stargate. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank and Larry Ellison of Oracle introduced their grand designs as though they were the masters of the Universe.
Larry Ellison stepped to the mic, “Okay. Thank you, Mr. President. We certainly couldn’t do this without you. It would simply be impossible. AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American. We’ve actually been working with OpenAI for a while, and with Masa for a while. The data centers are actually under construction.The first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building is a half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20, and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”
“Walking down a suburban neighborhood street already feels like a Ring doorbell panopticon.” writes Kenneth Niemeyer of Business Insider after Larry Ellison spoke at Oracle financial analysts meeting in September 2024.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
It appears that the United States government is about to be privatized and handed over to the techno-fascist oligarchs associated with the intelligence community. They seem to have the belief that their AI program has finally sucked up enough data that they are ready to implement a totalitarian terror state here at home and launch massive automated wars abroad to achieve their vision of global domination.
So when people ask me how I come to my unusual perspectives it is because I have nearly five decades of real world experience in the application of the grand lessons of my grandfather.
Food Not Bombs – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
POWER HUNGRY
January 23, 2025
By Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry
There is a growing realization that the left right divide is mostly a fiction and that we all share the same struggles of paying our bills and keeping our families safe. We have never needed unity more than we do today.
One suggestion that this is true is the response to the assassination of United Health CEO Brian Thompson. People across the political spectrum are starting to see the billionaire vulture class as our common enemy. The response in the comments on Ben Shapiro’s podcast in support of Luigi was epic. Class war is replacing the culture wars as it gets more difficult to survive realizing that we have more in common with one another than what is claimed by politicians and media.
The TikTok ban was another sign that the human spirit cannot be crushed so easily. Americans on both the so called left and right turned to RedNote as the days ticked towards the TikTok ban. Popular TikTok personalities invited their followers to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu with #RedNote racing across the American social media.
As the day of the January 19th ban grew closer people started to post their RedNote content on X and other platforms. Americans realizing that they had been lied to about China as the Chinese RedNote members welcomed the #TikTokRefugees.
I have been inspired by the posts. The app has an instant translation feature that makes it easy for people across the Pacific to talk. Chinese people express shock that Americans are charged for ambulance trips to the hospital. Americans and Chinese are showing one another the contents of their refrigerators and comparing prices. Chinese members expressed shock that the homeless crisis was not Communist Party propaganda. One gruff MAGA hat wearing fellow was almost in tears at what he had experienced on the platform in just a couple of days. He had been lied to about China.
If there is one person that has the pulse of public opinion it is billionaire CIA contractor Peter Thiel the man behind VP Vance. He owns what he claims is the world’s most powerful AI surveillance data company Palantir. He is worried for the survival of his economic class.
Thiel appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” where the host asked him, “to those who think this shooter is a hero because he did it, because he said this healthcare executive is presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them coverage. What would you say to them?”
After being speechless for nearly 20 seconds, Thiel offered up a halting answer, telling Morgan, “It’s, I don’t know what, what to say? I, I think I still think you have, you should try to make an argument. And I, I think this is, this is you should, you know, there may be things wrong with our health care system, but you have, you have to make an argument, and you have to try to find a way to convince people and and change, change it by by that, and this is, you know, this is not going to work.”
“I don’t know. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, yeah, I mean, all sorts of things I, I could say about it, but I don’t, I don’t think, and I again, I think, you know,” he added.
On May 9, 2024 Palantir CEO Alex Karp at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security in Washington D.C. expressed fear that the protests for Gaza meant that they were losing control. “We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show…If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.” They know the pitch forks are coming if we can see our fellow working class Americans as allies rather than fall for the false divisions of Democrats and Republicans.
The TikTok ban not only also demonstrates the possibility of class unity but it reveals what could be a central feature of our future. The CIA founded company Oracle switched off TikTok after the US Supreme Court ruled its elimination was not a violation of the Constitution only to turn it back on less than 24 hours later. When you logged back on millions of Americans were greeted by this message. “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.” It wasn’t long before people started to discover that you can’t post “Free Palestine”on the new TikTok.
On January 21, 2025 Trump, flanked by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Japanese CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son, announced the $500 billion AI total surveillance Project Stargate. “I’m gonna help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built. So they have to produce a lot of electricity. And we’ll make it possible for them to get this production done easily, at their own plants if they want.” Trump trumpeted.
And the outrage by Trump supporters at Larry Ellison’s glorification on the individual mRNA cancer vaccines made possible by AI was instantaneous on social media. Many in the MAGA crowd were already posting anger at all of his Neocon appointments, the prominence of billionaires like Elon Musk on his team and disappointment at Trumps support of the immigrant H-1B visa program.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said to investors in 2024. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
But what’s maybe even more important than the ability to implement Biometric Digital ID, programmable digital currency and total surveillance is warfare. Biden’s Jake Sullivan told Axios, “Regardless of what was said in public, every background conversation we had with President Biden’s high command came back to China. Yes, they had concerns about the ethics, misinformation and job loss of AI. They talked about that. But they were unusually blunt in private: Every move, every risk was calculated to keep China from beating us to the AI punch. Nothing else matters, they basically said.” AI targeting in Gaza, and autonomous swarm drone warfare is already being used on the battle field.
The Moss Landing Lithium-ion battery fire on January 16, 2025 provides a number of lessons that may bridge the artificially magnified left right divide. It is turning out that the UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals may not be so green as the toxic gasses and heavy metals raining down across “America’s Salad Bowl”, farm land that provides 70% of our country’s vegetables.
This mental struggle is apparent in the public statements of Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church who both supports the Green Agenda but wants the battery storage facility to be safe, saying to the media the morning after the fire started, “This is a Three Mile Island event for this industry” We really don’t know much about this technology.”
“There are a lot of really powerful forces in this state and in this country that want to see these batteries in place and going out here… and we don’t really matter,” Church told a public meeting at Prunedale Grange 388 on January 20th. The State of California adopted legislation on June 30, 2022, that allows state authorities to bypass local laws in permitting large-scale renewable energy projects.
The case of OpenAI whistleblower 26 year old Suchir Balaji found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, 2024, suggested Supervisor Church may be correct about what the community is up against. Suchir Balaji worked on the ChatGBT program and quit after Sam Altman turned OpenAI from a nonprofit to a for profit company. He started raising the alarm about AI’s use of copy written material to make OpenAI a profit.
In a new interview with KTVU his mother insisted there were things out of place in his “ransacked” apartment where his body was found four days before he was due to be called as a witness to the OpenAI case.
The New York Times wrote in October 2024, “But after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, he thought harder about what the company was doing. He came to the conclusion that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.” His mother claims flash drives were taken during the murder that San Francisco authorities ruled was a suicide.
Amanda Gerut writes in Fortune Magazine, “President Trump on Tuesday announced an eye-popping investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the U.S., funded through a joint venture called the Stargate Project. According to Trump, the investment is likely to spur an increase of 100,000 jobs and will be accompanied by a spate of executive orders to ensure new data centers built in connection with the investment will have enough energy.”
A Scientific American article of October 2023 reported, “A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption are set to lead to NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.”
The mantra of “saving the climate” may morph into “made in America” but America’s move to an electric future will march on. Robotic warfare preparation, digital surveillance and the production of autonomous vehicles will increase. Teslas will continue to roll off the assembly lines and the 15 Minute Smart City and the Internet of Things programs will advance. Essential features of the digital panopticon of Stargate.
We are facing an existential crisis and its time to unite the working class against this billionaire technocracy.
IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING HERE
July 27, 2024
Santa Cruz and the theater of hypocrisy, carnage and suffering
The “Buzz Windrip” type characters of Santa Cruz planned to read the 1935 dystopian political novel written by American author Sinclair Lewis. A Good Times cover story promoting Bookshop Santa Cruz’s reading of “It Can’t Happen Here” warned that if we didn’t vote for the political party waging a genocide in Palestine and arming far-right Nazi groups in Ukraine that Trump would come to power. The fascist dictator Buzz Windrip of Lewis’s text.
Before that July 19th The 418 Project event featuring Congressman Jimmy Panetta and Mayor Fred Keeley I visited my friends on the levee handing out some of the last of the announcements for that evenings “It is Already Happening Here” protest. As I walked up to one group perching along the levee I could hear two Santa Cruz Police officers chatting with several tent occupants about providing pizza. Once the officers moved on I asked about this pizza donation. They explained that the police claimed they would give you pizza if you took a drug test. They were not sure if that offer was still good if you tested positive.
Joe Shultz of India Joze met me at the Trader Joe’s parking lot delivering ice tea for the 6:00 pm rally. We set up the table with pastries, sandwiches and cold drinks on the River Street sidewalk. The first of those from the levee joined us for a snack. I saw a few people assembling outside the front door of the theater so not wishing to waste the last of my flyers I ambled down to share them with the people waiting to hear the congressman and mayor. A security guard dashed out of the venue and thrusting two white envelopes at me as he mumbled something about my being banned from the area. I shared that I didn’t care and continued passing out flyers until he summoned one of Santa Cruz’s police officers. To avoid a pre-protest arrest I wandered off to retrieve my bullhorn returning to blast my message to those in my banned area. “It’s already happening. You don’t need to wait for Trump. A genocide sounds like fascism. Arming Nazis in Ukraine sounds like fascism. Sweeping the homeless also sounds like fascism”.
It wasn’t long before a crowd of protesters arrived and I suggested they could move from the sidewalk and take the action directly outside the entrance to the event. Before long several dozen people arched around the people lining up to get in. I gave my bullhorn to one of the Palestinian activists and joined the group holding our “Stop the Sweeps” banner defying the threat of arrest.
Wallace Baine writes in Lookout Santa Cruz “Several dozen protesters, armed with bullhorns, drums and flamethrower passions, ringed the theater, creating a din that the ‘actors’ inside had to nearly shout over. On top of that, a few protesters found their way into the audience and, at least five times, interrupted the play reading with loud denunciations aimed at the panelists.”
After the spoiled political theater ended it was clear from their distressed looking faces that Keeley and Panetta were desperate to flee their free speech circus.
I opened those two envelopes the next morning discovering that The 418 Project executive director Laura Bishop’s letter that I was “persona non grata” adding “person not welcome” until August 1, 2034. You read that right, a decade long ban “at 155 River Street or any event held elsewhere by The 418 Project.” The second letter also banned me from the Galleria Mall for 10 years.
Sinclair Lewis’s novel warned that Buzz Windrip was an enemy of free speech, adding an interesting twist to my pre-ban letters seeking to silence the protest. This is not too much of surprise. The event’s host, Bookshop Santa Cruz commemorated “Banned Books Month” while owner Casey Coonerty-Protti’s husband Michel Protti directed the unit at Meta that silenced medical professionals who were critical of Trump’s COVID policies, posts detailing the arming of far-right Azov Nazis by the Biden administration and the ugly truth of the genocide in Gaza.
Fascism is a family affair for the Coonerty folks. Casey’s brother is former county Supervisor Ryan Coonerty. A 2012 Monterey Herald article titled “‘Predictive policing’ gets capital boost” reports that “Attorney Caleb Baskin and Councilman Ryan Coonerty have taken the experimental ‘predictive policing’ program used by the Santa Cruz Police Department and created software that they hope to sell to law enforcement agencies around the nation. The duo, who founded the co-working business NextSpace, say they’ve raised more than $1 million so far to fund their newest venture.”
The article continues, “The program has gained international media attention — and the attention of law enforcement agencies nationwide, many asking how they can get the program.”
“Based on such requests, Zach Friend helped coordinate a meeting between Mohler and Baskin and Coonerty to discuss the idea of creating a business.”
“Baskin, 36, and Coonerty, 38, say investors who’ve helped fund their venture include Plantronics CEO Ken Kannappan, former eBay executive Rob Chesnut and Coonerty’s brother-in-law Michel Protti, a vice president at Yahoo.”
PredPol is based on an analytics model developed by a group of researchers, including mathematician George Mohler of Santa Clara University and Jeff Brantingham at UCLA’s Department of Anthropology.
In 2018 theverge.com posted, “Jeff Brantingham is as close as it gets to putting a face on the controversial practice of ‘predictive policing.’ Over the past decade, the University of California-Los Angeles anthropology professor adapted his Pentagon-funded research in forecasting battlefield casualties in Iraq to predicting crime for American police departments, patenting his research and founding a for-profit company named PredPol, LLC.”
A June 2021 article “Stop LAPD Spying Sues LAPD to Uncover Communications with UCLA Professor Who Founded PredPol “ reports on opposition to this dystopian racist police state software started by Ryan Coonerty.
In 2019, a group of 68 UCLA professors and graduate students sent a letter to LAPD condemning Professor Brantingham’s work on “predictive” policing technologies. And in June 2020, over 1,400 academic mathematicians joined a public letter condemning mathematical research that contributes to racist policing. The letter singled out Professor Brantingham’s work with LAPD and named PredPol’s “racist consequences.”
Posted on datasmart.hks.harvard.edu in 2013, “Dr. George Mohler could not have foreseen the deluge that descended upon him at Santa Clara University, shortly after local police adopted his groundbreaking algorithm in July 2011 and media reported that his new software program was taking criminals off the streets.”
“It may seem a stretch, but the model of post-earthquake temblors is very similar to that of criminal activity,” Dr. Mohler says. “Criminals want to replicate their successes, they go back to similar locations, they repeat their crimes — it’s almost identical to how aftershocks roll out after earthquakes, following predictable fault lines and timetables.”
“In 2010, Dr. Mohler took his seismology theory north to Santa Clara University, where he joined as assistant professor of mathematics and computer science, married and started a family. Then serendipity struck — he met Zach Friend, a public information officer and crime analyst with the Santa Clara police. Friend was intrigued by the potential of predictive analytics; soon he and Dr. Mohler were brainstorming how the latter’s algorithm to track earthquake aftershocks could be adapted for police work.”
“We met several times and decided to try for deployment with the Santa Cruz police,” Dr. Mohler says. “I wrote the prototype software and gave it to the police in July 2011. It turns out Zach was a media mastermind — he’d worked in the press office of the 2008 Obama campaign. Once PopSci and The New York Times picked up the story, it was off to the races.”
It was fitting that someone supporting the genocide in Gaza and the arming of Azov far-right military units in Ukraine would be reading a play warning of fascism. His April 20, 2024 post on his blog announced his support for more war as he writes, “The package would deliver critical support for Ukraine in its efforts to push back against Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression, safeguard Taiwan from an advancing China, and ensure the security of the nation of Israel in a volatile Middle East.”
“The $95 billion national security package includes; $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel, $8 billion to bolster defense capabilities in the Indo-Pacific, and $9 billion for global humanitarian assistance.” Meanwhile the City of Santa Cruz is getting $4 million to clear the homeless from outside the homeless shelter.
Bookshop Santa Cruz is not shy about hosting war criminals. They invited a former CIA Director to speak on the need to expand the war on terrorism on September 10, 2018 at Peace United Church. Several of us who protest Panetta’s call for more war were banned from Bookshop Santa Cruz for life but Casey changed her mind realizing I was helping organize an event with Chris Hedges and she had already ordered copies of his books.
Panetta has been a solider advancing the agenda of the Empire for decades. When Panetta was Clinton’s chief of staff the administration’s sanctions and no-fly zone killed more than 560,000 children according to a study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
A December 12, 2011, Voice of America report noted “U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is on a surprise visit to Afghanistan, where he says 2011 will mark a turning point in the 10-year-old war.” Panetta would denounce Biden’s hasty evacuation 10 years later after tens of thousands of Afghans had been killed.
The locally owned Bookshop Santa Cruz is not the innocent free speech defender of democracy as it likes to project. Like others in Santa Cruz who seek to project a “do no harm” image many are direct participants in the creation of a frightening dystopian digital panopticon complete with robotic warfare.
An officer of the anti-homeless hate group Take Back Santa Cruz is the husband of Google’s general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado. We received a snap shot of Manuel’s emails between himself, City Manager Martin Bernal, Mayor Donna Meyers and Republican City Councilperson Renee Golder coordinating efforts to rid Santa Cruz of the homeless.
In a December 18, 2020, email Manuel thanks Martin for the week before’s zoom meeting writing about striping Delaware where many living in vehicles sleep, stepping up enforcement of all parking rule “(not just 72-hour limit)” and this “- Update on why some folks such as Keith McHenry (parked on McPherson) and Alicia Kuhl (parked on Delaware) have not been towed despite receiving so many tickets.” It is a relief to learn that their intelligence on my parking locations and ticket reality is so inept.
Google is one of many companies advancing slaughter in Gaza with their product Project Nimbus. This $1.2 billion joint contract between Google and Amazon signed in 2021 provides cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military.
A staff person who attended the 2 by 2 meetings between city and county officials shared the Halimah DeLaine Prado exchange with County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty and Mayor Donna Meyers. Meyers and Coonerty talked about busing the homeless to Camp Roberts California National Guard Base in Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties.
Facebook is another local CIA linked member of the national security state. Investigative journalist Whitney Webb’s April 12, 2021 article “The Military Origins of Facebook” writes”Facebook’s growing role in the ever-expanding surveillance and ‘pre-crime’ apparatus of the national security state demands new scrutiny of the company’s origins and its products as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was essentially analogous to what is currently the world’s largest social network.” According to Meta’s website Ryan Coonerty’s brother-in-law Michel Protti is the head of privacy at Facebook.
Webb writes “In mid-February, Daniel Baker, a US veteran described by the media as ‘anti-Trump, anti-government, anti-white supremacist, and anti-police,’ was charged by a Florida grand jury with two counts of ‘transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure.’”
“The communication in question had been posted by Baker on Facebook, where he had created an event page to organize an armed counter-rally to one planned by Donald Trump supporters at the Florida capital of Tallahassee on January 6. ‘If you are afraid to die fighting the enemy, then stay in bed and live. Call all of your friends and Rise Up!,’ Baker had written on his Facebook event page.”
“Baker’s case is notable as it is one of the first ‘precrime’ arrests based entirely on social media posts—the logical conclusion of the Trump administration’s, and now Biden administration’s, push to normalize arresting individuals for online posts to prevent violent acts before they can happen. From the increasing sophistication of US intelligence/military contractor Palantir’s predictive policing programs to the formal announcement of the Justice Department’s Disruption and Early Engagement Program in 2019 to Biden’s first budget, which contains $111 million for pursuing and managing ‘increasing domestic terrorism caseloads,’ the steady advance toward a precrime-centered ‘war on domestic terror’ has been notable under every post-9/11 presidential administration.’”
Palantir was in the news the night Congressman Panetta and Mayor Keeley read “It Can’t Happen Here”. Palantir’s co-founders Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel announced that they would be supporting Donald Trump and JD Vance. Peter Thiel is the puppet master behind JD Vance’s career from setting him up in his Mithril Capital hedge fund, his book and movie deals, the US Senate to his rise as Trump’s Vice Presidential running mate. The “Swamp” is already in Trump’s tent. Another Thiel associate, the military contractor Elon Musk also pledged support for the Trump ticket assuring the wars will continue no matter who is elected.
While Palantir is donating millions to Trump’s campaign they are also bragging in their ads that their AI software was used by the FBI to nab nearly 1,000 January 6th Trump supporters.
Palantir serves as a contractor to all 17 of the U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as many other U.S. federal agencies including the Pentagon. It was largely funded into existence by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the CIA was Palantir’s only client from 2005 until 2008, during which time the CIA was a key part of directing Palantir’s product development.
James Bamford writes in the April 2024 issue of the Nation, “ Earlier this month saw a continuation of that effort, with the targeting of three well-marked and fully approved aid vehicles belonging to World Central Kitchen, killing their seven occupants and ensuring that the food would never reach those dying of starvation. The targeting was precise—placing missiles dead center in the aid agency’s rooftop logos. Israel, however, said it was simply a mistake, similar to the ‘mistaken’ killing of nearly 200 other aid workers in just a matter of months—more than all the aid workers killed in all the wars in the rest of the world over the last 30 years combined, according to the Aid Worker Security Database.”
“Such horrendous ‘mistakes’ are hard to understand, considering the enormous amount of advanced targeting AI hardware and software provided to the Israeli military and spy agencies—some of it by one American company in particular: Palantir Technologies. “We stand with Israel,” the Denver-based company said in posts on X and LinkedIn. “The board of directors of Palantir will be gathering in Tel Aviv next week for its first meeting of the new year. Our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.” As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, with ties to the CIA, Palantir’s ‘work’ was supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities—the precise capabilities that allowed Israel to place three drone-fired missiles into three clearly marked aid vehicles.”
Cicero Institute’s Joe Lonsdale
Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s corporate profile says he is a technology entrepreneur and investor. He is the managing partner at 8VC, a US-based venture capital firm that manages several billion dollars in committed capital. He was an early institutional investor in several technology startups including the Santa Cruz military contractor Joby Aviation. Ryan Coonerty’s investor Ken Kannappan sold his Plantronics building to Joby Aviation in November 2022. The Joby Aviation website noted in April 2022 that the U.S. Air Force’s Agility Prime program would net more than $45 million for the Santa Cruz company.
“Building on more than five years of engagement with defense agencies, the expanded contract leverages Joby’s years of research and technology development and will include new testing to evaluate Joby’s advanced technologies. It brings the potential value of the total contract to more than $75 million.”
Joe Lonsdale also started the Cicero Institute, a policy group that delivers “entrepreneurial solutions to public problems.” The Cicero Institute campaigns for laws that allow private competition in government areas such as health care, housing, and education.
The Cicero Institute provides legislative templates to states and cities.
His website on homelessness starts, “States should ban unauthorized street camping.”
“Street camps are dangerous to the public and the vulnerable homeless alike. They are often hotbeds of violence, especially against women and children— especially those who are homeless themselves.”
“The public widely supports enforcing ordinances against dangerous street camps and moving individuals into emergency shelters.”
He goes on to write, “States should amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves — and keep them out of prison” adding, “Many street homeless suffer from chronic and untreated mental illness. For those that are a public nuisance or a danger to themselves or others, there must be a third option besides prison and abandonment.”
So far the Cicero Institute, has placed ten bills in at least eight states including Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Wisconsin. Texas became the first state to pass such a law in 2021, and Tennessee and Missouri followed in 2022.
Cynthia Griffith wrote about Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 on the Invisible People website, “Concentration camps and secret committees, out-of-state lobbyists, and flat-out lies — as unbelievable and terrifying as it sounds, this is a glimpse into what’s happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.”
And it gets even worse. “Kentucky GOP’s New Bill Decriminalizes Use of Deadly Force Against the Unhoused” writes Zane McNeill for the January 17, 2024 edition of Truthout.
“Republican lawmakers in Kentucky introduced a bill last Tuesday that would criminalize homeless encampments and expand the state’s Stand Your Ground law to allow property owners to confront unhoused people with a gun. The bill, dubbed the “Safer Kentucky Act,” already has received more than 45 Republican co-sponsors and the Kentucky State Fraternal Order of Police has committed to testify in support of the legislation when it has a committee hearing.”
The Cicero Institute website notes, “On March 20, 2024, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365 / SB 1530, which will make Florida a leading state in the fight against the failed homelessness policies that have wreaked havoc on so many American cities.”
Joe Lonsdale writes in his blog, “It has been a momentous few weeks for homeless policy in the United States. As you may know, this has been a keystone policy area for us since founding the Cicero Institute, and we have become the leading organizational voice for reform, as well as a resource for state leaders who want to take bold action. In Florida, we were proud to work with lawmakers on a legislative package that meets the needs of the state and emphasizes the incentives & accountability model that we pioneered at Cicero.”
Joe Lonsdale had another win on April 22, 2024 with the US Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v Johnson letting localities impose criminal penalties for acts like public camping and public sleeping without violating the Eighth Amendment — even if they lack sufficient available shelter space to accommodate their unhoused population.
Democratic mayors and governors pushed to have the meager protections of the Grants Pass case overturned. “Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court provides state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets,” Newsom said in a statement after the ruling, “This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.”
The bipartisan march to criminalize America’s homeless doesn’t need to wait for the election of Trump and Vance. It is happening now in Santa Cruz.
The city of Watsonville began to clear out a homeless encampment along the Pajaro River Levee on Monday July 22, 2024. It’s a process that is expected to last through August 2, 2024. The Santa Cruz Police posted eviction notices on tents throughout the Pogonip telling those who fled the sweeps at Harvey West and Coral Streets they had to remove their belongings by 9:00 am on July 29, 2024.
Jessica York writes in her April 19, 2024 Sentinel article “Santa Cruz receives $4M to address Harvey West, Coral Street homeless encampments”
“In April 2024 the city of Santa Cruz has been awarded a two-year $4 million state homeless encampment resolution grant.”
“During the two-year life of the Encampment Resolution Fund, granted via the state Department of Housing and Community Development, Santa Cruz would be expected to assist 55 people sleeping on the streets.” The city claims there are over 1,000 people living outside in the city and that is based on what seemed an intentionally poorly organize Point in Time Count.
In a June 4, 2024 email, Chief Executive Officer of Housing Matters Phil Kramer thanked Mayor Keeley, City Managers Matt Huffaker, Lisa Murphy, Larry Imwalle and Housing for Health Director Robert Ratner for clearing the area around the homeless shelter of the homeless.
“Hi all- Thanks you for your work to create a more welcoming and safe Coral Street for shelter guests, day services participants, staff and partners. I appreciate what a large undertaking this was and understand there is more infrastructure work (fencing, etc.) coming soon.”
“The sidewalks are stained and reek of urine. Is it possible for City staff to do some sidewalk powerwashing? If you give us authorization we might be able to do some of this cleaning work ourselves, or hire it out. Please let me know.
Thanks again,
Phil”
Deputy City Manager and girlfriend of Police Chief Bernie Escalante responds that afternoon by email.
“Hi Phil,
Thank you for recognizing the incredible undertaking this effort took to accomplish. We had nearly 20 employees out at the location on Monday, and we will continue to have our team in that location. We still have lots of work to do to try to break the cycle of people returning to that space. Our team is scheduled to power wash the sidewalks, and may have already done so by now. It may need multiple washes. I will let you know what the status is of the cleaning.”
“I look forward to working with Housing Matters as a valuable partner to help those individuals in and around Coral Street with our recently awarded Encampment Resolution Grant. This will help keep this location clear.”
The rush to remove the homeless got another boost when California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-1-24 on July 24, 2024, directing state and local officials to start removing homeless encampments stating that the recent Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v Johnson now empowers cities to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public.
“Today I announced an executive order to move the process forward. We’re done, it’s time to move with urgency at the local level to clean up these sites, to focus on public health and focus on public safety. There are no longer any excuses,” Newsom said. “We now have no excuse with the Supreme Court decision.”
So, yes it is already happening here and is likely to get even more repressive as the noose of biometric IDs and programmable digital currency, an AI driven World War and the internment of homeless Americans is implemented by those very same people who struggled to read, “It Can’t Happen Here” at the Bookshop Santa Cruz event.
Keith McHenry – PO Box 422, Santa Cruz, CA 95061 USA – 575-770-3377
A CLOCKTOWER CENTER OF CONTROL
June 12, 2024
Santa Cruz and the high-rise development of the dystopian digital panopticon.
Instead of enjoying the beautiful warm seaside evening I forced myself to log on to the Workbench Team’s webinar on the Santa Cruz Clocktower Center development, an 18 now 16 story tower “proposed” to be built next to where Food Not Bombs shares its meals every weekend to an increasing number of hungry and homeless people.
Online daily Lookout Santa Cruz reviewed the farce, “At 16 stories and rising to 192 feet, with 260 housing units and ground-floor commercial space, the Clocktower Center is a wholly new kind of project, in both scale and density, for Santa Cruz County; but it’s one which Workbench says is sorely needed in the most unaffordable housing market in the United States.”
Developers, government officials and their nonprofit shills across California often justify these projects claiming if they build more housing it will bring down the cost of rent but as anyone trying to rent an apartment in Santa Cruz can attest, the many completed projects have not reduced housing costs at all. A failed supply and demand argument.
Many people living in Santa Cruz may wonder why even though there is little public support for all these high rise projects and an organized citizen opposition to each project, every development is approved.
Lookout notes, “Twice, people asked whether the community could stop the project. Twice, Workbench’s co-founder Jamileh Cannon said no.”
“Is it possible to stop this project?” Keith McHenry wrote in the virtual Q&A chat box. McHenry leads Food Not Bombs, a local organization that hosts an open-air soup kitchen at the town clock on weekends.”
“It’s not possible to stop it, but we are very open to your constructive feedback and to making improvements,” Cannon replied.
Lookout writer Neeley links “open-air soup kitchen at the town clock” to a mostly fact free article fed to him by City Manager Matt Huffaker.
There are a number of reasons these unwanted monstrosities like the city’s library parking garage, the Front Street projects and the Cruz Hotel are assumed realities. Giant project after project each with limited parking spaces and claims that the high density towers are designed to meet the environmental goals of the city as described in their obtuse “Community-wide Climate Action Plan 2030.” The city’s website lists these actions in one of their powerpoint style reports,” Direct emissions reductions; 3 new Municipal Solar PV arrays + energy efficiency work; Rail Trail Completion; Public Transit / Active Transportation Improvements; Fleet Electrification Roadmap and Investments; New Building Energy Reach Code; Induction Cooktop Loaner Program with Library and Food scrap collection.”
Workbench’s webinar painted a wonderful upbeat picture of their tower where you can step out the first floor atrium and walk or bike to all your favorite places. A survey question asked the viewers if we own an electric car and if you required a car for work. It was suggested you could rent a Zip car if you required the use of a vehicle. When asked in the chat if this was a “Fifteen Minute Smart City” project they reported that they had not heard of this and would look into it.
Nothing to see here. Just happy people provided with all the Eco-friendly convenience of a walkable community. Foamy cafe lattes sipped in the sun on the 16th floor terrace cafe as your Tesla sits charging in the garage above the Cedar Street book-less digital library.
So why did “team member” and co-founder Jamileh Cannon say it was not possible to stop the project? Is this just the case of wealthy people making more money or could there be more to this sudden flurry of construction projects. Could there be any other reason for concern beyond a distaste for the ugly buildings and the elimination our local democratic process?
Or could it be because this massive construction bonanza is part of a global strategy initiated by the institutions controlled by billionaires like Bill Gates, King Charles, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg and their UN and World Economic Forum’s pleasant sounding programs like the, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.
There is a complex system that intentionally soaks the media and every other institution in this ecological affordability story of bliss that meets the interests of the board rooms that intend to reap the “rewards” of their dystopian digital panopticon. That system includes the mobilization of Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) or non-profits as a tool in nudging the policies that most benefit the hedge funds, banks and global financial vultures of institutes. It’s a strategy that was used effectively in shaping society before Obama’s 2014 coup of the democratically elected government of Ukraine and that the US is currently deploying in the effort to topple the Hungarian, Serbian and Georgian governments. The National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros and other foundations spent nearly $5 billions to fund pro European Union NGOs in their campaign to replace the Ukrainian government with US State Department’s choice Petro Poroshenko.
Our local NGOs such as Housing Matters perform the same function. They help foster the impression that the homeless are helpless through their “Smart Solutions” community meetings while promoting the myth that more development will lower rents in Santa Cruz providing housing for our homeless. I am sure many of the administrators and staff in those agencies want the best and believe the oceans of information asserting these dodges from reality will really help ease the “problem” of homelessness. I remember seeing Housing Matters Don Lane stride across the Trader Joes parking lot with his “No on Measure M” yard signs in hand out to support the predetermined policy allowing unlimited building heights and the suppression of local control. As soon as Measure M, which would have required a community vote on the height of downtown developments failed, the Clocktower Center was unleashed on the people of Santa Cruz.
The upbeat “we care” messaging of “sustainability” and “income-restricted” affordable apartment units expressed in the June 8th Workbench webinar joyously proclaimed such features as limited parking, Zip cars at the library garage, electric vehicle charging stations, pleasant cafes and attractive retail shops.
“I think it is imperative that we work to create as much sustainable housing in Santa Cruz… I think that the scale of Santa Cruz hasn’t changed in 95 years [since the city’s tallest building, the Palomar Hotel, was built] and that is a huge tragedy,” Workbench Team member Simon wrote at the webinar.
As the public relations webinar progressed it became clear that this project, maybe unknowingly to the developers, was just one piece in the puzzle outlined in the UN and World Economic Forum”s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their Agenda 2030. The Santa Cruz City website lists the high impact actions needed to meet this Agenda 2030. “Choose Renewable Electricity from Central Coast Community Energy; Reduce Air Travel; Eat more Plant-based Meals; Take Public Transportation; Buy or lease an Electric Vehicle; Electrify: Install Electric Heat Pump Water Heater or Space Heating; Use Active Transportation: bike, walk, skateboard, or scooter; Install Solar Panel.” I would normally be a big supporter of many of these aspirations if there wasn’t a hidden agenda that is much more sinister behind Agenda 2023.
The path from the seas of think tank white papers, World Economic Forum seminars, UN pronouncements and the legislation required to implement their Agenda 2030 is expressed in a brutal silent manipulation that trickles into state, county and municipal law by way of workshops hosted by associations such as the California League of Cities, business associations and foundations that fund cooperating university departments and non-profits like Housing Matters and No on Measure M buster Second Harvest.
Not only did Second Harvest encourage a no vote on Measure M they also paraded around the county to their agencies a state mandated presentation that touted the ecological virtues of accounting for each pound of discarded food recovered, an illogical burden that seemed more about surveillance of the food supply than an effort to reduce the threat to our climate as advertised.
It is easy to understand why people would embrace the “reasonable” concepts promoted in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In principle the idea people being able to walk or ride a bike to obtain all you need sounds wonderful. Promises of clean air and water, safer streets, housing for everyone, streamlined digital healthcare system and a slowing of the climate crisis all sound worthy.
But looking more closely at who is driving these utopian promises and it will reveal some very disturbing features. Journalists Iain Davis and Whitney Webb write at Unlimited Hangout that, “Many of these goals sound nice in theory and paint a picture of an emergent global utopia – such as no poverty, no world hunger and reduced inequality. Yet, as is true with so much, the reality behind most – if not all – of the SDGs are policies cloaked in the language of utopia that – in practice – will only benefit the economic elite and entrench their power.”
They continue, “This can clearly be seen in fine print of the SDGs, as there is considerable emphasis on debt and on entrapping nation states (especially developing states) in debt as a means of forcing adoption of SDG-related policies. It is then little coincidence that many of the driving forces behind SDG-related policies, at the UN and elsewhere, are career bankers. Former executives at some of the most predatory financial institutions in the history of the world, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America to Deutsche Bank, are among the top proponents and developers of SDG-related policies.”
These policies of a Santa Cruz filled with an “Internet of Things,” high density car free housing and Smart Meters comply with the SDGs pushed with the objective of implementing the social control designed to increase the power and wealth of the master class. Why would giant military contractors, global banking and investment interests, high tech firms, oil and coal companies be at the forefront of initiating this Sustainable Development agenda? Ending war is never on the climate solution map even though it is the single largest contributor to every environmental crisis. More war is in fact at the core to the success of implementing Agenda 2030.
Is it possible that the recent purchase of license plate readers that record every vehicle entering Santa Cruz and small fleet of surveillance drones are more than innocent public safety measures? Could they be another step to normalize the total social control described in the SDGs and other UN, World Bank and Bill and Melinda Gates publications.
Even though you might get the impression from what you have read so far that I am opposed to protecting the environment but that could not be farther from the truth. I grew up in a family of environmentalists. My father’s father Donald McHenry was the Chief Naturalist at Yosemite National Park before retiring to the Santa Cruz mountains. He started the tidal pool walks at Natural Bridges State Park. My father, Bruce McHenry followed in his footsteps also spending his adult life as a naturalist in the National Park Service, was a world-renowned pioneer of the environmental education movement and cofounded Association of Interpretive Naturalists. I was thrilled when he took me to the founding convention of Earth Day.
The roots to my radical environmental activism started during my childhood while living in America’s National Parks. I was blessed to spend time in those sacred lands of the Hopi witnessing the Corn and Snake Dances, the majesty of the red canyons dotted with Anasazi cliff dwellings and the vast northern Arizona landscape before it was desecrated by Lake Powell, Peabody’s coal mines, and the high tension power lines. I recall that day when I was 16 sitting atop the Wasatch Mountains looking down at the black smoke drifting up the valleys of southern Utah from the Navajo Generating Station. Right then and there I decided to dedicate my life to dismantle the political and economic system that was willing to inflict such horror.
We really don’t know how far back intelligence agencies, think tanks and the billionaires that direct them have been working on the creation of the Fifteen Minute Smart City idea that is currently devouring our seaside community. The rewriting of our history by Google makes it difficult to search for that which they wish to conceal. But I do know that I rented office space from a pioneering AI start up in Boston in the early 1980s and without AI it would not be possible for these Smart Cities to work, suggesting its roots may go back to the development of the internet by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
IBM launched its “Smarter Cities” marketing initiative called Smarter Planet in 2008, which included the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge. Two years later Cisco Systems, with $25 million from the Clinton Foundation, established its Connected Urban Development program in partnership with San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Seoul. In 2011, a Smart City Expo World Congress was held in Barcelona, in which 6000 people from 50 countries attended. During that event the United Kingdom proposed to invest £140 million in the development of smart cities and the Internet of Things.
According to Earth Island Journal the 15-minute city concept was the idea of Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno who found that urban life involves large amounts of wasted time adapting to what he calls the “absurd organization of cities, which require a lot of traveling to get to and from basic functions such as home, work, education, and social interaction” adding “Even if we have to spend 45 minutes to one hour for a trip to work, this was considered normal,” Moreno says. His solution was the 15-minute city. “In such a city, all residents should be able to access their daily needs of home, work, education, care, essential shopping, and socializing within the distance of a 15-minute walk or bike ride.”
“When Moreno proposed the concept of fifteen minute cities at the UN climate talks in Paris, people considered it a great idea but too utopian, mainly because they thought it unrealistic that everyone should work close to home. Fast-forward to 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic forced many people all over the world to work not just closer to home, but actually at home, using technology to access meetings and information they previously had to travel to a central place of work for.”
Even though it appears that these plans have been in the works for decades to aid in fulfilling the dreams of Agenda 2030 the UN publicly announced support for Smart Cities as the world was reeling from the pandemic lockdown restrictions. The UN website has a page that reports, “The United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) launched a Smart City Project in 2021″.
– Considering high risk of natural disaster and climate change impacts on cities and communities in developing countries.
– Acknowledging profound impact of sea level rise and health emergencies such as COVID-19 pandemics on the sustainable development of developing countries
– The United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) launched a Smart City Project in 2021 which aims to provide technical assistance and support to urban policy makers, planners, and city officials for building their cities and communities safer, smart, efficient, resilient, inclusive, livable and sustainable through smart city solutions.
The wedding of the 15-Minute City and The Smart City concepts of Agenda 2030 are marching forward with little public understanding of the future they will force on our town and as Jamileh Cannon said in the Clocktower Center webinar nothing can stop it. That is unless we start getting serious and initiate a campaign of nonviolent direct action to physically disrupt their construction sites.
Just like the insanity of belief that accounting for every pound of discarded food will slow the climate crisis, Agenda 2030 is also implementing infrastructure to “make the world more inclusive” by issuing a biometric digital ID to every person on Earth. How this makes our environment more sustainable is not so obvious. To help make this global “sustainable” Eco-solution possible Elon Musk has launched an aggressive satellite program. “The satellites are launched into orbit by batches, each batch containing between 15 and 56 satellites. As of early 2024, there are nearly 6,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. Eventually, SpaceX plans to build a massive constellation of 12,000 satellites, with a possible expansion to 42,000 satellites later on.” If they succeed it will impossible to escape their totalitarian digital prison.
The website biometricupdate.com states, “As digital public infrastructure becomes the norm, governments must adopt digital services to improve access and development. The UNDP released a blog post outlining a rights-based and inclusive digital ID governance framework in response to frequent requests for institutional support.”
The UN writes,”The goal of Target 16.9 of the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 is to provide legal identity and birth registration for all, underscoring the importance of comprehensive civil registration.” Since the UN compartmentalizes information about their programs one must flip through link after link to find the many pages praising their progress,”The government of Malawi, with technical and financial support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the European Union (EU) and Irish Aid, recently launched a project that will ramp up digital inclusion efforts in the country and make access to essential public services much easier.” If one wishes you can click through page after page on country after country who are making progress in this grand transition to these electronic corporate chains.
The biometric ID of everyone on Earth is designed to facilitate their digitalization of programmable currency. The Atlantic Council and International Monetary Fund are among the many international organizations participating in Agenda 2030’s digital currency program. In May 2024 the NATO think tank The Atlantic Council published, “134 countries & currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are exploring a CBDC. In May 2020 that number was only 35. Currently, 68 countries are in the advanced phase of exploration –development, pilot, or launch.” This programmable digital currency aspect of the Fifteen Minute Smart City vision may start as a Universal Basic Income promoted to help the poor under SDGs Item One – NO POVERTY.
When you move into your 16th floor apartment at the Clocktower Center you may be required to provide access to your digital wallet so your rent can be extracted. Management will be able to download your financial and medical history to confirm you have complied with the requirements for residency. The fees for your smart stove, smart refrigerator, smart shower, smart washing machine and smart entertainment center will flow into some BlackRock or Vanguard super computer carrying with it the times, energy usage and other details of each service used.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website explains, “Digital ID is a critical piece of digital public infrastructure. Digital ID systems are one of the three pillars of what’s known as digital public infrastructure (DPI); the others are digital payment systems and data exchange systems.
The stated benefits of a programmable digital currency linked to your biometric ID for those implementing the program is that it is supposed to make it impossible to cheat on your taxes and will provide the global corporations profiting from this demonic scheme more control.
The Bank for International Settlements head Agustin Carstens explains, “Our analysis on CBDC in particular for the general use we intend to establish the equivalence with cash and there is a huge difference there for example in cash we don’t know for example who is using a one hundred dollar bill today we don’t know who is using a one thousand pesos bill today a key difference in the CBDC is that central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that those two issues are extremely important and that makes a huge difference with respect to what cash is.”
The use of financial de-platforming of critics to this agenda was used in December 2010 when CIA linked PayPal froze the public donations of the whistleblowing publication WikiLeaks and the now imprisoned Julian Assange. In August 2023, GoFundMe froze more than $90,000 from 1,100 contributors to The Grayzone independent news platform, citing unspecified “external concerns”. Max Blumenthal said he believed the concerns were political and related to the platform’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. In 2022 Canadian banks started freezing the accounts of people linked to the anti-mandate truckers protests in Canada. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that “the federal government is promising to take more accounts offline in coming days in an attempt to clear demonstrators from Ottawa, which has been occupied for nearly a month’.
A programmable digital currency can geofence you into your 15- Minute Smart City by switching off your money if you travel outside the a prescribed area or wish to make an unauthorized purchase. For example it could be determined that a drive to see your family in Sacramento will deplete your allotment of Carbon Credits making it impossible to refuel your car, take a bus or plane. Like the examples already noted with Wikileaks or the Canadian truckers you might not be able to use your funds to buy materials for a protest or if caught expressing “wrong thought” on line an AI algorithm might cut you off your digital money all together.
Instead of restricting the use of your digital dollars those implementing Agenda 2030 could geofence you in other ways. You might jump into your Chevy Volt that has been charging at the library parking garage to take your friends to a protest against a mining project outside of town but that extraction enterprise is deemed essential. You get ten miles from the protest and the car is remotely stopped much like those Trader Joes Shopping carts that lock before you wheel to your vehicle.
Sometimes it takes a bloody war to shock people into surrendering their freedom to this digital dungeon. That sure worked in Ukraine where there are more than 21.7 million users of their Diia portal and 500,000 dead soldiers.
The Brookings Institute posts, “Following the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising, which ousted Russian-leaning President Viktor Yanukovych, the successor government led by Petro Poroshenko embarked on Ukraine’s national digital transformation.”
“With technical support from the Eurasia Foundation, initially funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and subsequently also by UKAid, Prozorro is a platform built on open-source code that removes much of the human element (and therefore opportunity for corruption) in procurement.”
The website Ukraine Now boasts, “Taking the lead internally, the Ministry of Digital Transformation has the ambition to make Ukraine a world champion in being digital, and we are already the first ones who can use digital IDs with absolutely no internal restrictions. Here is how Ukraine moves forward with the concept of building a digital state over 70 government services are available online. Mobile application Diia allows Ukrainians to access 14 digital documents (ID card, foreign biometric passport, student card, driver’s license, vehicle registration certificate, vehicle insurance policy, tax number, birth certificate, IDP certificate) and 21 services in total.” Some of those 21 services include a “snitch” feature where you can turn in a neighbor who comments negatively on the war effort.
“Just recently, Ukraine has become the first country with a digital ID that is valid and can be used everywhere within the country and the fourth in Europe to launch a digital driving license. All digital documents in Diia now have the same legal force as their plastic or paper counterparts.”
The same web of global institutions that lied us into war after war, lied us into their military counter measures, mandates and lockdowns are behind the ravaging of Santa Cruz with their high density sudo-ecological Smart Solutions matrix of blissful slavery.
Like many of you I attended one planning department promotional hearing after another. I have attended many of the twice yearly Smart Solutions homeless charades and suffered long hours of presentations about the inevitability of the library garage. Self serving shows pretending to be democracy. It was rare to hear any support for any of these projects by those of us who live in Santa Cruz.
One law suit after another. One ballot measure after another. One election after another and this tsunami of glass and metal horror and electronic panopticon are still on their way to completion. Our real problem is our having any attachment to the institutions of power. If we want to have any hope of stopping this diabolical monster we need to remove all allegiance to this system and build organizations independent of social control. In the short term if we want to stop all the high rise towers we had better cost these vultures money by taking nonviolent direct action blocking delivery of their materials and disrupt their ability to continue.
In the long term we must refuse to comply with their dictates and embrace a love of freedom. End all cooperation with these genocidal sociopaths and their attempt to force us into their dystopian digital house of horrors.
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