A CLOCKTOWER CENTER OF CONTROL
June 12, 2024
Santa Cruz and the high-rise development of the dystopian digital panopticon.
Instead of enjoying the beautiful warm seaside evening I forced myself to log on to the Workbench Team’s webinar on the Santa Cruz Clocktower Center development, an 18 now 16 story tower “proposed” to be built next to where Food Not Bombs shares its meals every weekend to an increasing number of hungry and homeless people.
Online daily Lookout Santa Cruz reviewed the farce, “At 16 stories and rising to 192 feet, with 260 housing units and ground-floor commercial space, the Clocktower Center is a wholly new kind of project, in both scale and density, for Santa Cruz County; but it’s one which Workbench says is sorely needed in the most unaffordable housing market in the United States.”
Developers, government officials and their nonprofit shills across California often justify these projects claiming if they build more housing it will bring down the cost of rent but as anyone trying to rent an apartment in Santa Cruz can attest, the many completed projects have not reduced housing costs at all. A failed supply and demand argument.
Many people living in Santa Cruz may wonder why even though there is little public support for all these high rise projects and an organized citizen opposition to each project, every development is approved.
Lookout notes, “Twice, people asked whether the community could stop the project. Twice, Workbench’s co-founder Jamileh Cannon said no.”
“Is it possible to stop this project?” Keith McHenry wrote in the virtual Q&A chat box. McHenry leads Food Not Bombs, a local organization that hosts an open-air soup kitchen at the town clock on weekends.”
“It’s not possible to stop it, but we are very open to your constructive feedback and to making improvements,” Cannon replied.
Lookout writer Neeley links “open-air soup kitchen at the town clock” to a mostly fact free article fed to him by City Manager Matt Huffaker.
There are a number of reasons these unwanted monstrosities like the city’s library parking garage, the Front Street projects and the Cruz Hotel are assumed realities. Giant project after project each with limited parking spaces and claims that the high density towers are designed to meet the environmental goals of the city as described in their obtuse “Community-wide Climate Action Plan 2030.” The city’s website lists these actions in one of their powerpoint style reports,” Direct emissions reductions; 3 new Municipal Solar PV arrays + energy efficiency work; Rail Trail Completion; Public Transit / Active Transportation Improvements; Fleet Electrification Roadmap and Investments; New Building Energy Reach Code; Induction Cooktop Loaner Program with Library and Food scrap collection.”
Workbench’s webinar painted a wonderful upbeat picture of their tower where you can step out the first floor atrium and walk or bike to all your favorite places. A survey question asked the viewers if we own an electric car and if you required a car for work. It was suggested you could rent a Zip car if you required the use of a vehicle. When asked in the chat if this was a “Fifteen Minute Smart City” project they reported that they had not heard of this and would look into it.
Nothing to see here. Just happy people provided with all the Eco-friendly convenience of a walkable community. Foamy cafe lattes sipped in the sun on the 16th floor terrace cafe as your Tesla sits charging in the garage above the Cedar Street book-less digital library.
So why did “team member” and co-founder Jamileh Cannon say it was not possible to stop the project? Is this just the case of wealthy people making more money or could there be more to this sudden flurry of construction projects. Could there be any other reason for concern beyond a distaste for the ugly buildings and the elimination our local democratic process?
Or could it be because this massive construction bonanza is part of a global strategy initiated by the institutions controlled by billionaires like Bill Gates, King Charles, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg and their UN and World Economic Forum’s pleasant sounding programs like the, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.
There is a complex system that intentionally soaks the media and every other institution in this ecological affordability story of bliss that meets the interests of the board rooms that intend to reap the “rewards” of their dystopian digital panopticon. That system includes the mobilization of Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) or non-profits as a tool in nudging the policies that most benefit the hedge funds, banks and global financial vultures of institutes. It’s a strategy that was used effectively in shaping society before Obama’s 2014 coup of the democratically elected government of Ukraine and that the US is currently deploying in the effort to topple the Hungarian, Serbian and Georgian governments. The National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros and other foundations spent nearly $5 billions to fund pro European Union NGOs in their campaign to replace the Ukrainian government with US State Department’s choice Petro Poroshenko.
Our local NGOs such as Housing Matters perform the same function. They help foster the impression that the homeless are helpless through their “Smart Solutions” community meetings while promoting the myth that more development will lower rents in Santa Cruz providing housing for our homeless. I am sure many of the administrators and staff in those agencies want the best and believe the oceans of information asserting these dodges from reality will really help ease the “problem” of homelessness. I remember seeing Housing Matters Don Lane stride across the Trader Joes parking lot with his “No on Measure M” yard signs in hand out to support the predetermined policy allowing unlimited building heights and the suppression of local control. As soon as Measure M, which would have required a community vote on the height of downtown developments failed, the Clocktower Center was unleashed on the people of Santa Cruz.
The upbeat “we care” messaging of “sustainability” and “income-restricted” affordable apartment units expressed in the June 8th Workbench webinar joyously proclaimed such features as limited parking, Zip cars at the library garage, electric vehicle charging stations, pleasant cafes and attractive retail shops.
“I think it is imperative that we work to create as much sustainable housing in Santa Cruz… I think that the scale of Santa Cruz hasn’t changed in 95 years [since the city’s tallest building, the Palomar Hotel, was built] and that is a huge tragedy,” Workbench Team member Simon wrote at the webinar.
As the public relations webinar progressed it became clear that this project, maybe unknowingly to the developers, was just one piece in the puzzle outlined in the UN and World Economic Forum”s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their Agenda 2030. The Santa Cruz City website lists the high impact actions needed to meet this Agenda 2030. “Choose Renewable Electricity from Central Coast Community Energy; Reduce Air Travel; Eat more Plant-based Meals; Take Public Transportation; Buy or lease an Electric Vehicle; Electrify: Install Electric Heat Pump Water Heater or Space Heating; Use Active Transportation: bike, walk, skateboard, or scooter; Install Solar Panel.” I would normally be a big supporter of many of these aspirations if there wasn’t a hidden agenda that is much more sinister behind Agenda 2023.
The path from the seas of think tank white papers, World Economic Forum seminars, UN pronouncements and the legislation required to implement their Agenda 2030 is expressed in a brutal silent manipulation that trickles into state, county and municipal law by way of workshops hosted by associations such as the California League of Cities, business associations and foundations that fund cooperating university departments and non-profits like Housing Matters and No on Measure M buster Second Harvest.
Not only did Second Harvest encourage a no vote on Measure M they also paraded around the county to their agencies a state mandated presentation that touted the ecological virtues of accounting for each pound of discarded food recovered, an illogical burden that seemed more about surveillance of the food supply than an effort to reduce the threat to our climate as advertised.
It is easy to understand why people would embrace the “reasonable” concepts promoted in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In principle the idea people being able to walk or ride a bike to obtain all you need sounds wonderful. Promises of clean air and water, safer streets, housing for everyone, streamlined digital healthcare system and a slowing of the climate crisis all sound worthy.
But looking more closely at who is driving these utopian promises and it will reveal some very disturbing features. Journalists Iain Davis and Whitney Webb write at Unlimited Hangout that, “Many of these goals sound nice in theory and paint a picture of an emergent global utopia – such as no poverty, no world hunger and reduced inequality. Yet, as is true with so much, the reality behind most – if not all – of the SDGs are policies cloaked in the language of utopia that – in practice – will only benefit the economic elite and entrench their power.”
They continue, “This can clearly be seen in fine print of the SDGs, as there is considerable emphasis on debt and on entrapping nation states (especially developing states) in debt as a means of forcing adoption of SDG-related policies. It is then little coincidence that many of the driving forces behind SDG-related policies, at the UN and elsewhere, are career bankers. Former executives at some of the most predatory financial institutions in the history of the world, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America to Deutsche Bank, are among the top proponents and developers of SDG-related policies.”
These policies of a Santa Cruz filled with an “Internet of Things,” high density car free housing and Smart Meters comply with the SDGs pushed with the objective of implementing the social control designed to increase the power and wealth of the master class. Why would giant military contractors, global banking and investment interests, high tech firms, oil and coal companies be at the forefront of initiating this Sustainable Development agenda? Ending war is never on the climate solution map even though it is the single largest contributor to every environmental crisis. More war is in fact at the core to the success of implementing Agenda 2030.
Is it possible that the recent purchase of license plate readers that record every vehicle entering Santa Cruz and small fleet of surveillance drones are more than innocent public safety measures? Could they be another step to normalize the total social control described in the SDGs and other UN, World Bank and Bill and Melinda Gates publications.
Even though you might get the impression from what you have read so far that I am opposed to protecting the environment but that could not be farther from the truth. I grew up in a family of environmentalists. My father’s father Donald McHenry was the Chief Naturalist at Yosemite National Park before retiring to the Santa Cruz mountains. He started the tidal pool walks at Natural Bridges State Park. My father, Bruce McHenry followed in his footsteps also spending his adult life as a naturalist in the National Park Service, was a world-renowned pioneer of the environmental education movement and cofounded Association of Interpretive Naturalists. I was thrilled when he took me to the founding convention of Earth Day.
The roots to my radical environmental activism started during my childhood while living in America’s National Parks. I was blessed to spend time in those sacred lands of the Hopi witnessing the Corn and Snake Dances, the majesty of the red canyons dotted with Anasazi cliff dwellings and the vast northern Arizona landscape before it was desecrated by Lake Powell, Peabody’s coal mines, and the high tension power lines. I recall that day when I was 16 sitting atop the Wasatch Mountains looking down at the black smoke drifting up the valleys of southern Utah from the Navajo Generating Station. Right then and there I decided to dedicate my life to dismantle the political and economic system that was willing to inflict such horror.
We really don’t know how far back intelligence agencies, think tanks and the billionaires that direct them have been working on the creation of the Fifteen Minute Smart City idea that is currently devouring our seaside community. The rewriting of our history by Google makes it difficult to search for that which they wish to conceal. But I do know that I rented office space from a pioneering AI start up in Boston in the early 1980s and without AI it would not be possible for these Smart Cities to work, suggesting its roots may go back to the development of the internet by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
IBM launched its “Smarter Cities” marketing initiative called Smarter Planet in 2008, which included the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge. Two years later Cisco Systems, with $25 million from the Clinton Foundation, established its Connected Urban Development program in partnership with San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Seoul. In 2011, a Smart City Expo World Congress was held in Barcelona, in which 6000 people from 50 countries attended. During that event the United Kingdom proposed to invest £140 million in the development of smart cities and the Internet of Things.
According to Earth Island Journal the 15-minute city concept was the idea of Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno who found that urban life involves large amounts of wasted time adapting to what he calls the “absurd organization of cities, which require a lot of traveling to get to and from basic functions such as home, work, education, and social interaction” adding “Even if we have to spend 45 minutes to one hour for a trip to work, this was considered normal,” Moreno says. His solution was the 15-minute city. “In such a city, all residents should be able to access their daily needs of home, work, education, care, essential shopping, and socializing within the distance of a 15-minute walk or bike ride.”
“When Moreno proposed the concept of fifteen minute cities at the UN climate talks in Paris, people considered it a great idea but too utopian, mainly because they thought it unrealistic that everyone should work close to home. Fast-forward to 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic forced many people all over the world to work not just closer to home, but actually at home, using technology to access meetings and information they previously had to travel to a central place of work for.”
Even though it appears that these plans have been in the works for decades to aid in fulfilling the dreams of Agenda 2030 the UN publicly announced support for Smart Cities as the world was reeling from the pandemic lockdown restrictions. The UN website has a page that reports, “The United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) launched a Smart City Project in 2021″.
– Considering high risk of natural disaster and climate change impacts on cities and communities in developing countries.
– Acknowledging profound impact of sea level rise and health emergencies such as COVID-19 pandemics on the sustainable development of developing countries
– The United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) launched a Smart City Project in 2021 which aims to provide technical assistance and support to urban policy makers, planners, and city officials for building their cities and communities safer, smart, efficient, resilient, inclusive, livable and sustainable through smart city solutions.
The wedding of the 15-Minute City and The Smart City concepts of Agenda 2030 are marching forward with little public understanding of the future they will force on our town and as Jamileh Cannon said in the Clocktower Center webinar nothing can stop it. That is unless we start getting serious and initiate a campaign of nonviolent direct action to physically disrupt their construction sites.
Just like the insanity of belief that accounting for every pound of discarded food will slow the climate crisis, Agenda 2030 is also implementing infrastructure to “make the world more inclusive” by issuing a biometric digital ID to every person on Earth. How this makes our environment more sustainable is not so obvious. To help make this global “sustainable” Eco-solution possible Elon Musk has launched an aggressive satellite program. “The satellites are launched into orbit by batches, each batch containing between 15 and 56 satellites. As of early 2024, there are nearly 6,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. Eventually, SpaceX plans to build a massive constellation of 12,000 satellites, with a possible expansion to 42,000 satellites later on.” If they succeed it will impossible to escape their totalitarian digital prison.
The website biometricupdate.com states, “As digital public infrastructure becomes the norm, governments must adopt digital services to improve access and development. The UNDP released a blog post outlining a rights-based and inclusive digital ID governance framework in response to frequent requests for institutional support.”
The UN writes,”The goal of Target 16.9 of the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 is to provide legal identity and birth registration for all, underscoring the importance of comprehensive civil registration.” Since the UN compartmentalizes information about their programs one must flip through link after link to find the many pages praising their progress,”The government of Malawi, with technical and financial support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the European Union (EU) and Irish Aid, recently launched a project that will ramp up digital inclusion efforts in the country and make access to essential public services much easier.” If one wishes you can click through page after page on country after country who are making progress in this grand transition to these electronic corporate chains.
The biometric ID of everyone on Earth is designed to facilitate their digitalization of programmable currency. The Atlantic Council and International Monetary Fund are among the many international organizations participating in Agenda 2030’s digital currency program. In May 2024 the NATO think tank The Atlantic Council published, “134 countries & currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are exploring a CBDC. In May 2020 that number was only 35. Currently, 68 countries are in the advanced phase of exploration –development, pilot, or launch.” This programmable digital currency aspect of the Fifteen Minute Smart City vision may start as a Universal Basic Income promoted to help the poor under SDGs Item One – NO POVERTY.
When you move into your 16th floor apartment at the Clocktower Center you may be required to provide access to your digital wallet so your rent can be extracted. Management will be able to download your financial and medical history to confirm you have complied with the requirements for residency. The fees for your smart stove, smart refrigerator, smart shower, smart washing machine and smart entertainment center will flow into some BlackRock or Vanguard super computer carrying with it the times, energy usage and other details of each service used.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website explains, “Digital ID is a critical piece of digital public infrastructure. Digital ID systems are one of the three pillars of what’s known as digital public infrastructure (DPI); the others are digital payment systems and data exchange systems.
The stated benefits of a programmable digital currency linked to your biometric ID for those implementing the program is that it is supposed to make it impossible to cheat on your taxes and will provide the global corporations profiting from this demonic scheme more control.
The Bank for International Settlements head Agustin Carstens explains, “Our analysis on CBDC in particular for the general use we intend to establish the equivalence with cash and there is a huge difference there for example in cash we don’t know for example who is using a one hundred dollar bill today we don’t know who is using a one thousand pesos bill today a key difference in the CBDC is that central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that those two issues are extremely important and that makes a huge difference with respect to what cash is.”
The use of financial de-platforming of critics to this agenda was used in December 2010 when CIA linked PayPal froze the public donations of the whistleblowing publication WikiLeaks and the now imprisoned Julian Assange. In August 2023, GoFundMe froze more than $90,000 from 1,100 contributors to The Grayzone independent news platform, citing unspecified “external concerns”. Max Blumenthal said he believed the concerns were political and related to the platform’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. In 2022 Canadian banks started freezing the accounts of people linked to the anti-mandate truckers protests in Canada. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that “the federal government is promising to take more accounts offline in coming days in an attempt to clear demonstrators from Ottawa, which has been occupied for nearly a month’.
A programmable digital currency can geofence you into your 15- Minute Smart City by switching off your money if you travel outside the a prescribed area or wish to make an unauthorized purchase. For example it could be determined that a drive to see your family in Sacramento will deplete your allotment of Carbon Credits making it impossible to refuel your car, take a bus or plane. Like the examples already noted with Wikileaks or the Canadian truckers you might not be able to use your funds to buy materials for a protest or if caught expressing “wrong thought” on line an AI algorithm might cut you off your digital money all together.
Instead of restricting the use of your digital dollars those implementing Agenda 2030 could geofence you in other ways. You might jump into your Chevy Volt that has been charging at the library parking garage to take your friends to a protest against a mining project outside of town but that extraction enterprise is deemed essential. You get ten miles from the protest and the car is remotely stopped much like those Trader Joes Shopping carts that lock before you wheel to your vehicle.
Sometimes it takes a bloody war to shock people into surrendering their freedom to this digital dungeon. That sure worked in Ukraine where there are more than 21.7 million users of their Diia portal and 500,000 dead soldiers.
The Brookings Institute posts, “Following the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising, which ousted Russian-leaning President Viktor Yanukovych, the successor government led by Petro Poroshenko embarked on Ukraine’s national digital transformation.”
“With technical support from the Eurasia Foundation, initially funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and subsequently also by UKAid, Prozorro is a platform built on open-source code that removes much of the human element (and therefore opportunity for corruption) in procurement.”
The website Ukraine Now boasts, “Taking the lead internally, the Ministry of Digital Transformation has the ambition to make Ukraine a world champion in being digital, and we are already the first ones who can use digital IDs with absolutely no internal restrictions. Here is how Ukraine moves forward with the concept of building a digital state over 70 government services are available online. Mobile application Diia allows Ukrainians to access 14 digital documents (ID card, foreign biometric passport, student card, driver’s license, vehicle registration certificate, vehicle insurance policy, tax number, birth certificate, IDP certificate) and 21 services in total.” Some of those 21 services include a “snitch” feature where you can turn in a neighbor who comments negatively on the war effort.
“Just recently, Ukraine has become the first country with a digital ID that is valid and can be used everywhere within the country and the fourth in Europe to launch a digital driving license. All digital documents in Diia now have the same legal force as their plastic or paper counterparts.”
The same web of global institutions that lied us into war after war, lied us into their military counter measures, mandates and lockdowns are behind the ravaging of Santa Cruz with their high density sudo-ecological Smart Solutions matrix of blissful slavery.
Like many of you I attended one planning department promotional hearing after another. I have attended many of the twice yearly Smart Solutions homeless charades and suffered long hours of presentations about the inevitability of the library garage. Self serving shows pretending to be democracy. It was rare to hear any support for any of these projects by those of us who live in Santa Cruz.
One law suit after another. One ballot measure after another. One election after another and this tsunami of glass and metal horror and electronic panopticon are still on their way to completion. Our real problem is our having any attachment to the institutions of power. If we want to have any hope of stopping this diabolical monster we need to remove all allegiance to this system and build organizations independent of social control. In the short term if we want to stop all the high rise towers we had better cost these vultures money by taking nonviolent direct action blocking delivery of their materials and disrupt their ability to continue.
In the long term we must refuse to comply with their dictates and embrace a love of freedom. End all cooperation with these genocidal sociopaths and their attempt to force us into their dystopian digital house of horrors.
ELECT TO END HUNGER AND WAR
May 13, 2024
On April 24, 2024, Joe Biden signed authorization to spend $95 billion on the wars in Ukraine and Palestine saying that it was “a good day for world peace.”
The Food Not Bombs march for Nuclear Disarmament August 6, 1981 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Food Not Bombs will honor its 44 years on the front lines of the peace and social justice movement on Saturday, May 25, 2024.
The first group in Cambridge, Massachusetts spent two years helping build the June 12, 1982, March for Nuclear Disarmament that attracted over a million people to the Great Meadow in Manhattan. They held their first “Free Concert for Nuclear Disarmament”, later to be called Soupstock, on May 3, 1981 at Sennott Park in Cambridge. Food Not Bombs volunteers also participated in the protests against the wars in El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Today we are facing the real possibility of a world war if we don’t rise up to stop it. This will be one of the messages expressed at the Soupstock 2024 free concert on Saturday, May 25, 2024 at the Duck Pond Stage at San Lorenzo Park in Santa Cruz.
Food Not Bombs volunteers in hundreds of cities around the world are sharing meals with the hungry and taking actions to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine, Palestine and the increasing threat of a global war between nuclear armed nations. The Jerusalem and Tel Aviv chapters of Food Not Bombs have been holding protests against the Gaza genocide outside the US Embassy. Polish chapters are providing meals to war refugees fleeing Ukraine and an increasing number of local homeless. The lines of those seeking food are growing longer at Food Not Bombs meals in cities all across the United States as the government sends billions of dollars worth of bombs to wage those wars. Hungry children stand together waiting for a warm bowl of stew from Food Not Bombs in Manila and Bangkok, We really do need food, and not bombs.
While the war of hunger is ravaging families across the exploited lands of Africa, Asia and the Americas there is one famine that stands out as the most horrific today.
Western nations are forcing the starvation of hundreds of thousands children in Gaza. Mothers struggle to choose which of their children will get that next crumb of bread. The first of several Flour Massacres was unleashed on February 29, 2024 when at least 118 Palestinians were killed and 760 injured after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on the coastal Al-Rashid Street in Gaza City. United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk denounced the rampant hunger and looming famine in Gaza and the using of starvation as a “weapon of war”, which he decried as a “war crime”. On March 18, 2024 Reuters reported that Gaza’s health ministry said 27 children and three adults had died by that time from malnutrition. They added that over 210,000 people were on the brink of starvation in northern Gaza. Conditions only became more dire and many more have died.
The attacks on the starving were not enough. On April 1, 2024, the Israeli military who may have been using AI targeting assistance from the CIA contractor Palantir sent missiles through the World Central Kitchen logo on their relief van in Gaza. Seven aid workers were killed in the attack. The World Central Kitchen made a hasty retreat from Gaza ending any possibility of even the most inadequate relief effort. The CIA data-mining company Palantir co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley vulture capitalists started with money from CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The current CEO is billionaire co-founder Alex Karp.
If the insanity in Palestine is not dangerous enough there is Biden’s decade long regime change war against Russia in Ukraine, another tragic legacy of the faltering American empire. While laying waste to Gaza, Biden’s administration also continues with its carnage in eastern Ukraine in some illusionary regime change war against Russia that the West can never win. The Pentagon claimed in leaks to the New York Times that Ukraine has lost 500,000 soldiers, killed or seriously wounded, since the beginning of the Russian special military operation. The once productive soils of wheat depicted on the blue and yellow flag of that war torn nation are littered with bombs and the graves of Ukraine’s men and women.
There is money enough for war even if the desperation of poverty is crushing millions of Americans. Hour after hour, call after call from the desperate seniors of rural America flood the Food Not Bombs Hunger Hotline, each with tales of their last few cans of tuna or an empty gas tank. Many are frustrated that they have been given the run around by one agency after another and are angry that the government is pouring billions into foreign wars of choice while Americans struggle to survive.
A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org found that 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. According to Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, homelessness in America increased by 11% from 2022 to 2023. HUD also claims they can end homelessness for $20 billion and yet the federal government just sent $61 billion to Ukraine and $26 billion to Israel.
Along with the threat of a global conflict between nuclear armed nations and a genocide, a war on America’s homeless is also raging. While Joe Lonsdale’s Palantir is aiding in the bombing of Palestinians turning their homes into rubble he is also coordinating a nationwide program to “solve” the homeless problem here in the United States. The Cicero Institute that he founded posts, “The United States has a growing homelessness problem – and bad policies at the local, state, and federal level exacerbate that problem.”
The Cicero Institute provides a “Model Bill” they call “Reducing Street Homelessness Act” to state and city legislators which their website notes is legislation based on the 2022 Missouri HB 1606.
So far the Cicero Institute, has placed bills in at least nine states including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. Texas became the first state to pass such a law in 2021, and Tennessee and Missouri followed in 2022.
Cynthia Griffith wrote about Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 on the Invisible People website, “Concentration camps and secret committees, out-of-state lobbyists, and flat-out lies – as unbelievable and terrifying as it sounds, this is a glimpse into what’s happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.”
The Cicero Institute website reported a recent success,”This morning (March 20, 2024 ) in Miami Beach, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365/ SB 1530, which will make Florida a leading state in the fight against the failed homelessness policies that have wreaked havoc on so many American cities. HB 1365 will ban street camping and upend how Florida provides treatment and help to the homeless – and holds providers and cities accountable for failure.” This is the same Ron DeSantis that provided legal advice to those torturing prisoners at Guantanamo.
In early April 2024 this movement against America”s poorest people had another victory in their nationwide campaign to make it a crime to be homeless. Kentucky bill HB 5, the “Safer Kentucky Act” was signed into law. The 78-page bill criminalizes “homelessness” and decriminalizes the use of deadly force against individuals engaging in unlawful camping. Under this law, “if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is attempting to commit a felony or attempting to dispossess them, they can shoot the homeless person.”
The war includes police raids on camps and the destruction of survival gear at a cost of millions to the already strapped taxpayers. The Washington DC chapter of Food Not Bombs started a fundraising campaign to buy pup tents and sleeping bags for the homeless who are being forced out from their camp. The group posted on May 8th, “today we purchased about $500 worth of tents in preparation for the Foggy Bottom encampment sweep scheduled for May 15th.”
According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel two million dollars was provided to the City of Santa Cruz to clear the homeless camps that Food Not Bombs had been delivering food to at Harvey West Park and along Coral Street. To be fair there are claims that some of the two million would be used to build 55 tiny homes with a shared restroom. We will see.
Americans can’t depend on their government to address the crisis of poverty so it has been left up to groups like Food Not Bombs to provide food and shelter. The COVID lockdowns shuttered indoor food programs for the poor. This was the case in Santa Cruz where the local Food Not Bombs group provided the only daily hot meal for three years without missing a single day. When the CZU Lightning Complex fires forced people out of their homes they came to eat and find clothing at the Lot 27 meal. Floods sent more to our meals. The group served through the atmospheric rivers even sustaining an arrest in Garage Ten at the height of one blasting storm. If it wasn’t for Food Not Bombs daily feast downtown Santa Cruz may have experienced a huge increase in shoplifting bordering on looting. A hungry man is an angry man as the saying goes.
Tent cities grow larger while politicians crow on about their military campaigns. The live streamed carnage of Gaza is shocking, sparking mass protests around the globe. A student movement demanding universities divest from Israel and the military contractors that profit from the genocide have sprung up on at least 150 campuses. Local Food Not Bombs chapters are helping.
At San Francisco State the students formed committees to address things they saw happening on other campuses that led to violence or to media narratives that the encampments were only about university/campus issues.
“We wanted to center Palestinians in Gaza instead of us. It’s not about us. So there was a lot of outreach. Reaching out to a lot of organizations like Food Not Bombs to provide food and water. We also were very fortunate to have had widespread faculty [academic staff] support.”
Santa Cruz Food Not Bombs is also supporting our campus divestment camp providing food and opening one of their kitchens to the students.
These protest camps are starting to send a panic through some members of the ruling class.
During the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security in Washington DC on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, former U.S. general Mark Milley and Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp chatted with some dismay about the student protest movement. The general reminded the audience that the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan and that civilian deaths in war are really nothing new so why are students even protesting about Gaza?
Palantir’s Alex Karp told the assembled national security members that the Palestine solidarity campus protest movement is an existential threat to American empire, “We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show.” he adds, “If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”
In a CNBC interview aired on May 13, 2024, “Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale on college chaos: It’s showing ‘rot’ at a lot of these places.” The website’s subhead adds, “Joe Lonsdale, 8VC founding partner and Palantir co-founder, joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss the rise in college campus protests, the state of college campus wars, the advancement of defense technology on the battlefield, his trip to India, and more.”
If these CIA contractors are correct the movement against the genocide may be a turning point. This could be a time of transformation as the cruelty of the corporate dystopia is being live streamed for all to see.
The revulsion at such horrors while most of us are struggling to pay our bills could remove any doubt that we need to reject the current economic and political system. It is time for a change, a revolution, a world that expects everyone to thrive and live as equals.
A vision of such a world can be found in the many mutual aid projects like the Food Not Bombs meals. One such project started in San Antonio, Texas. A Food Not Bombs activist who once volunteered with the Santa Cruz group joined the San Antonio Cares Collective. Like Food Not Bombs they spent their time helping provide food and survival gear with the homeless.
His friend and fellow collective member was Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman. Aaron set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC on February 25, 2024 telling the camera as he walked to the front gate “I will no longer be complicit in genocide” and then he called out; “Free Palestine, Free Palestine” as flames engulfed his uniformed body.
Before his protest he posted, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
THE FOUNDING OF FOOD NOT BOMBS – May 24, 1980
April 11, 2024
Bitter tear gas clawed at our eyes as National Guard clubs smashed against our frames. Several thousand arrived in this little New Hampshire town intent on gaining access to the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station construction site to stop the nuclear power station from going on line.
That sunny spring morning Boston University Law Student Brian Feigenbaum stood before the local media as whiffs of white acrid gas drifted in the background blurring the view of the main gate and the hundreds of State Police and Guardsmen guarding the Public Service Company’s investment.
Brian outlined the dangers to downwind Boston and intentions of the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook and our May 24th Occupation Attempt.
After several failed attempts to breech the high chain link fences hundreds of us retreated to the warm asphalt entrance outside the facility.
Brian and his friends were chatting when a half dozen riot police waded through the crowd, lifted him to his feet and cuffed him whisking him off to jail.
Brian’s friends rushed off in pursuit. We got the impression that he was picked as an example since he was one of the few of us who could be identified because of his TV appearances. In those days we never came to protests with an ID and it was common when arrested to use names like Alexander Berkman or Emma Goldman.
A substantial amount would be required to make bail. Fortunately one of us knew of a man of means who was able to loan us enough to win his freedom.
That evening as six of us chugged south in our old van towards home in Cambridge we bounced ideas on future protests and discussed possible ways to pay back our benefactor. Bake sales rose to the top of the list.
As to be expected that was not very lucrative. We also ran an informal moving company called Smooth Move. A family we were moving was tossing out a copy of that famous poster,”It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber” and we at once knew what to do.
So we headed off to the army navy surplus store in Central Square to buy uniforms. We set up again in Harvard Square with our poster and pastries but this time we brought the cardboard backed poster dressed as soldiers and pretended that we were raising money to buy a bomber. While we didn’t really make much more cash we did notice that many more pedestrians visited, giving us a chance to educate them about the nuclear industry.
Meanwhile I was delivering my unsold leftover produce from my job at Bread and Circus to the mothers at the Portland Avenue public housing projects. One morning they excitedly pointed out that the glass office building at the end of the block had finally opened, reporting that it was a laboratory that designed nuclear weapons. It was Draper Lab and sure enough they were working on the guidance systems for intercontinental nuclear weapons. What a symbol of misdirected priorities and at a time when Ronald Reagan was promising to cut social services and increase military spending. Families needing food on one side of the street while those with money were busy designing guided bombs and the idea for the name Food Not Bombs was born.
The May 24th action at Seabrook Nuclear Power Station and our inability to occupy the site led us to the idea of bringing the protests to the doorsteps of those profiting from the project. Top on that list was the First National Bank of Boston and its board members. Their next stockholders meeting was scheduled for a month after President Reagan’s inauguration on March 26, 1981 at the Federal Reserve Bank across from South Station.
We set out to organize a theatrical soup line on the Atlantic sidewalk so those entering the stockholders meeting would see a line of Depression Era hobos waiting for soup. Our message on our literature was both against the nuclear projects pushed by these bankers but also in opposition to local investment policies that created areas of neglect and poverty. The banks board was well represented by the CEOs of military contractors and would be reaping in huge profits from the new administration’s proposed increase in military spending.
The night before the lunch action we realized we had done a poor job of recruiting friends to play hobo so I went to the old Pine Street Inn to see if the men staying at Boston’s Depression era homeless shelter would be interested in joining the protest. Several remarked that they hadn’t been to a protest since the Vietnam War and expressed an interest in joining our performance against the bankers.
Our Smooth Move van sidled up to the curb below the towering silver Federal Reserve Bank. We set up our saw horse and plywood table and slid a huge pot of steaming hot vegan stew. Our supporters from the homeless shelter ambled up. I oriented the quickly assembled participants in a line along the sidewalk. One by one they stepped up to receive their cup of warmth. “God bless you,” the first in line whispered.
An angry blue hair pearls gave us the middle finder as she stomped towards the Fed doors. Another stockholder thanked us sharing she was on her way to vote on some issue facing the bank. A young businessman who had just departed one of the South Station trains stopped to speak with us expressing amazement at the sight of a soup line, “Wow, Reagan has only been in office a month and there are already soup kitchens.”
The guys and one woman who ate with us asked us to share food everyday. They had no access to food all day long until their donuts and coffee back at the Pine Street Inn. So that evening while cleaning up from the day we agreed this had to be one of the most magical days any one of us had ever experienced. Without hesitation we all decided to quit our jobs and spend our days recovering groceries, making deliveries to local housing projects, and sharing vegan meals on the streets.
Thus Food Not Bombs was born.
Forty-four years later Food Not Bombs has grown to an all volunteer global movement sharing meals and groceries in over 1,000 cities in nearly 70 countries.
YES, THEY ARE COMING FOR THE HOMELESS
February 17, 2024
Billionaire Joe Lonsdale, cofounder of CIA contractor Palantir initiates campaign to intern the homeless
A confluence of horrific policies are converging that threaten the freedom of America”s homeless. California Governor Newsom and big city mayors across the Western United States are demanding the “right” to drive the homeless from view and have pushed for the Supreme Court to remove the Martin v. Boise restrictions on criminalizing the unhoused. The case Johnson v Grants Pass based on the Martin ruling will be heard on Monday, April 22, 2024 at the US Supreme Court in Washington DC.
The effort before the US Supreme Court along with California Prop 1, the CIA linked Cicero Institute’s legislative campaign and just introduced California Senate Bill 1011 ban on public camping are among the measures lining up to force the homeless into mental facilities or internment camps.
In 2016 the CIA linked billionaire, Joe Lonsdale started the Cicero Institute which is spearheading a nationwide effort to criminalize the homeless. He also co-founded the CIA data-mining company Palantir with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley vulture capitalists. Peter Thiel got his start with the CIA’s law firm Sullivan and Cromwell launching a career in deep state manipulation of our society. According to journalist Whitney Webb “Palantir’s first backer was the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, but the company steadily grew and in 2015 was valued at $20 billion.”
Palantir currently serves as a contractor to all 17 of the U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as many other U.S. federal agencies including the Pentagon.
After Palantir, Joe Lonsdale founded and remains as Chairman of both Addepar, which has over $4 trillion USD on its wealth management technology platform, and OpenGov, which provides software for over 2,000 municipalities and state agencies.
Joe Lonsdale’s The Cicero Institute provides legislative templates to states and cities.
His website on homelessness starts, “States should ban unauthorized street camping.”
“Street camps are dangerous to the public and the vulnerable homeless alike. They are often hotbeds of violence, especially against women and children —especially those who are homeless themselves.
The public widely supports enforcing ordinances against dangerous street camps and moving individuals into emergency shelters.”
He goes on to write, “States should amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves — and keep them out of prison.” adding, “Many street homeless suffer from chronic and untreated mental illness. For those that are a public nuisance or a danger to themselves or others, there must be a third option besides prison and abandonment.”
So far the Cicero Institute, has placed ten bills in at least eight states including Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. Texas became the first state to pass such a law in 2021, and Tennessee and Missouri followed in 2022.
Cynthia Griffith wrote about Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 on the Invisible People website, “Concentration camps and secret committees, out-of-state lobbyists, and flat-out lies — as unbelievable and terrifying as it sounds, this is a glimpse into what’s happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.”
And it gets even worse. “Kentucky GOP’s New Bill Decriminalizes Use of Deadly Force Against the Unhoused” writes Zane McNeill for the January 17, 2024 edition of Truthout.
“Republican lawmakers in Kentucky introduced a bill last Tuesday that would criminalize homeless encampments and expand the state’s Stand Your Ground law to allow property owners to confront unhoused people with a gun. The bill, dubbed the “Safer Kentucky Act,” already has received more than 45 Republican co-sponsors and the Kentucky State Fraternal Order of Police has committed to testify in support of the legislation when it has a committee hearing.”
Another dire measure is California Proposition 1, Behavioral Health Services Program and Bond Measure (March 2024) that would fund a $6.4 billion bond to drastically expand the state’s mental health and substance abuse treatment infrastructure. A majority of the money, $4.4 billion, would be used to build 10,000 in-patient and residential treatment beds across the state. The Cicero Institute says “states should amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves.”
I have lost homeless friends to the mental health system who were perfectly happy with their independence, were not a danger to themselves or others and didn’t use drugs. In two cases they were just free spirited “hippies” until someone in Santa Cruz County government decided to haul them off to the mental hospital where their health failed. In one case she died a few days after being released because she stopped taking their mind numbing psych drugs. Another lost nearly 100 pounds in less than half a year and his life’s work of jewelry, drums and his spiritual website were trashed along with the working van he lived in.
Then there is California Senate Bill 1011 introduced by Senate GOP leader Brian Jones of San Diego and Democratic Sen. Catherine Blakespear of Encinitas. Modeled after San Diego’s cruel “Unsafe Camping Ordinance,” Senate Bill 1011 would prohibit encampments within 500 feet of schools, open spaces and major transit stops. It also bans camping on sidewalks if shelter space is available; requires cities or counties to give an unhoused person 72-hour notice before clearing an encampment; and mandates “enforcement personnel” to provide information about homeless shelters in the area.
If the US Supreme Court strikes down the Ninth Circuit ruling that homeless persons cannot be punished for sleeping outside on public property in the absence of adequate alternatives it could set the stage for interning our homeless neighbors and friends.
This is of particular concern since the number of people becoming homeless is already on the increase and is sure to explode as economic conditions worsen. Pressure to “do something about all the people living on the streets” could provide the political justification from the forced removal of the those living outside. Housing and Urban Development reported an 11% increase in the number of unhoused Americans in 2023 from the year before. According to a new report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies claims that housing is unaffordable for half of all American renters.
Rather than spending the $95 billion being allocated to the waging of wars it could have been redirected to humane solutions to our failed economy but just as those in power view Palestinians as “human animals” they also view the homeless as less than human. If they can exterminate 15,000 children in less than four months as the world looks on in horror there is really nothing these monsters are not capable of doing to any of us.
If you are in California join the rally and civil disobedience on the west side of the State Capitol Building on Saturday, March 16, 2024 at noon to 2 at 10th Street between N and L Streets in Sacramento.
There is also a rally planned for Monday, April 22, 2024 outside the US Supreme Court.
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