Muckraking is all about the shit in the aisle, the guts and urine in the hot dogs, and the cancerous lesions on those cabbage pickers — Ann Larson hits a Bullseye

LISTEN HERE TO THE KYAQ FM 91.7 interview, airing Sept. 16.

Paulo Kirk

Aug 27, 2026

It was a quick 60 minutes, squeezing in:

• her book, Cleanup on Aisle Five — Essential Work, Poverty Wages and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register
• her small-town upbringing and expectations of success
• professional managerial class aspirations
• Shop Class as Soul Craft
• we don’t need no sinkin badges for your goddamn bias against SKILLED workers far and wide
• Nickel and Dimed and pushed out of the health care and secure food market
• The bloody venture capitalist leeches or vultures (two admirable animals in my book, but let’s go with it)
• Koch Brothers Stand Together app for exploiting houseless folk — PadSplit
• just in time, freeway flyer, adjunct disposable faculty
• these muckrakers — Main Street by Sinclair Lewis; A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister by Julie Mars; Twenty Years at Hull-House by Jane Addams; Jack London: Explored harsh social conditions, poverty, and socialist themes in works like [The People of the Abyss] and [Martin Eden];Theodore Dreiser: Wrote naturalistic novels like [Sister Carrie] that focused on the unforgiving economic realities of urban American life; Frank Norris: Authored gritty naturalist works like [McTeague] that examined greed, poverty, and human decay; John Steinbeck: Captured the devastating plight of migrant workers and economic inequality in The Grapes of Wrath ; George Orwell: Combined political sharp commentary and socialist ideals in fictional and documentary works like [Animal Farm] and [Down and Out in Paris and London];Barbara Ehrenreich: Wrote investigative non-fiction like [Nickel and Dimed, which mirrors muckraking traditions by going undercover in low-wage American jobs.

Here, some of her articles:

What was it like to work at a grocery store during peak COVID? (Marketplace) 2025

To the Corporate Media, Workers May as Well not Exist

Seize the Moment Podcast

There’s No Such Thing as Unskilled Labor (Wort Radio)

Composition’s Dead (2016), From the book, Composition in the Age of Austerity

Higher Education’s Big Lie (2010)

And so this Koch Industries-invested company was on Ann’s radar.

Ann — Tenants aren’t the only ones with concerns. In Houston, after two people died in a boarding house fire, the city issued new rules for operators, including requiring permits. In a suburb of Atlanta, neighbors complained about trash, noise, and numerous cars parked in front of PadSplit properties. Last year, affordable-housing activists in Salt Lake City protested to stop a (non-PadSplit) rooming house development. They argued the model turns basics—such as private bathrooms—into luxuries, which exerts upward pressure on rent prices for everyone.

Those problems haven’t stalled the company’s growth. Founded in 2017 in Atlanta, PadSplit has grown to encompass 6,500 rental units across the U.S. and 5,300 renters. PadSplit has received $35.2 million in venture capital funding, and in 2022 Inc. listed it as one of the fastest-growing real estate firms in the country.

It’s easy to see why landlords gravitate toward this model. Heather Wren, an Atlanta-based landlord, partnered with PadSplit in 2018. She started with one property that had formerly been occupied by a woman with three children who was using a housing choice voucher via a program run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that pays a portion of low-income tenants’ rent. Wren converted the home to a PadSplit that housed six individuals who weren’t receiving the government subsidy. She quickly discovered what studies have long shown: Renting to poor people is good for business.

“PadSplit has been the key to higher profits,” Wren told me. She now owns 10 properties with a total of 65 rooms and plans to keep growing.

When I interviewed LeBlanc in March, he contended that the real problem is not with his company but with government inefficiency. PadSplit’s roots go back to 2008 when LeBlanc saw signs of the impending foreclosure crisis in Atlanta.

“It was disturbing to see what was going on in some of these neighborhoods,” he said. “And I knew that housing projects were also shutting down.”

The relationship between PadSplit and the Koch family (often historically referenced as the Koch Brothers) centers primarily on financial backing through philanthropic and venture investment arms, alongside a coincidental executive name connection.

1. Venture Backing via Stand Together

PadSplit, an affordable marketplace platform that allows property owners to rent out single-family homes room-by-room, is financially backed by Stand Together Ventures Lab. Stand Together is a philanthropic and venture organization founded and heavily funded by billionaire Charles Koch to support market-based solutions to social problems, including the affordable housing deficit. [1, 2, 3, 4]

2. Strategic Alignment on Workforce Housing

The Koch network’s investment in PadSplit aligns with their broader, multi-million dollar venture into single-family and workforce rental real estate. For instance, Koch Real Estate Investments—a subsidiary of Koch Industries—previously made a massive $200 million equity investment in Amherst Holdings, one of the nation’s largest single-family rental operators. The network favors companies like PadSplit that utilize private-sector innovation and existing housing infrastructure rather than government-subsidized programs to decrease rent burdens.

3. Executive Team Overlap

Adding to the association, PadSplit’s current Chief Growth Officer is Adam Kolojejchick-Koch. He leads the company’s sales, marketing, and expansion efforts to recruit real estate investors to the platform.

I met Ana through the non-profit program I am heading up, both in Lincoln County and Jefferson County. Family Independence Initiative of Oregon is a pilot project collecting valuable stories from working families in exchange for $840 for one-year participation.

The quarterly deposit of $175 I had just put into her account precipitated Ana to contact me. She told me the money helped her make a car payment. She also is attempting to get more people in Jefferson County to sign up, or at least to email me.

Love Thy Neighbor — One Woman’s Fight for Her Husband

Program aim: enrolling families to end poverty

By Paul Haeder, 2019!

“Sometimes having people in your circle to support you can mean the world of difference,” said Joann, who talked with me in Madras at the United Methodist Church, while discussing the new initiative Jefferson and Lincoln counties are rolling out. “I think my circle of support has given me invaluable emotional and material support not found anywhere else.”

The new gig for me is with Family Independence Initiative, a nonprofit started 18 years ago through the research tools and impetus of the founder, Mauricio L. Miller (author of the book, “The Alternative: Most of What You Believe About Poverty Is Wrong”).

For 450 households in Jefferson County, the chance to be part of a networking and peer support pilot could change the face of how social services staffing and funding are delivered in Oregon. The project is jointly supported by the Oregon Department of Human Services, and the goal is to engage with people who go in and out of poverty and give them networking tools to end that cycle.

FII is a successful model in other cities — Oakland, Austin, Cincinnati, Boston, Albuquerque and a half dozen other cities. What has occurred in those cities is nothing short of miraculous.

Jorge Blandon, executive vice president of Family Independence Initiative, was out here in Newport at the end of May and talked with a dozen households about the project — basically getting a household to form a cohort web of five or six other households to learn and share the value of social networking.

The 12-month participation process is pretty simple: register the family through a website, Up Together, and then each month, the household records progress and goals and challenges.

“For me, this sounds like a win-win,” said Jewel, a secretary for an antipoverty program in Lincoln County. “It makes sense that people are their best supports, their best avenues for networking.”

My job is to get in front of households and present the steps of joining this Lincoln County pilot, which is ultimately about learning directly from the community. Members receive $100 for signing up, and then $700 is paid out quarterly.

I presented the project to groups in Madras last month, and we will be at the Latin Festival Sept. 14, at Sahalee Park. Individuals at the community event in the park were able to ask the questions most people are concerned with: “Where does this information go? Is my private journaling and family budget kept private?”

We are in the process of hiring an on-the-ground site director for Jefferson County.

“Building networks for struggling families is really the key to their self-sufficency,” said Pastor Nancy Slabaugh Hart, of the Madras United Methodist Church.

Family Independence Initiative uses sophisticated language learning tools. The information people put on the Up Together site is looked at as aggregate data, meaning those data points from individuals are put into algorithms that help FII determine what families are doing to get out of poverty. All information is anonymous, and secure. Then FII reports back to DHS about the findings.

Part of the attraction for me to undertake this half-time job is that I have been working in and around communities living through many forms of poverty and life challenges. From educator in gang-prevention programs in El Paso and Spokane, to social worker for Portland homeless and within a transition facility for veterans and their families facing homeless in Beaverton, I have had years working with courageous and resourceful individuals and families.

My role is to introduce the project, get people enrolled and let the families (this could be a single parent, a couple with no children, single individuals, married or not) develop the web of communication and support. I have a complete hands-off role in terms of assisting families with their goals and needs, or locating resources. I do offer up support for the online journal writing over the 12 months of networking.

We all know about American communities which participated in so-called barn-raising events. Those events were people-powered, community-based, with no government or nonprofit involvement.

How Chinatowns across this country were founded is illustrative of peer support, peer networking and social capital: families, friends, businesses and churches came together to provide jobs, micro-loans, community space, spiritual and education support. Again, no government or social services agencies were called upon.

In 2019, families in Jefferson County have multiple challenges — single-parent households with that parent working two jobs, but still not getting ahead; families that get some form of support (food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, housing vouchers) but want to get out of the cycle of multigenerational poverty; seasonal work; expensive housing.

The FII web page states, “As a nation, we have missed an opportunity to invest directly in the initiative and strength of low-income families working toward economic mobility. Seventy-five percent of low-income families move above the federal poverty line within four years. Yet, 50% slip back under within five years. Under the current approach, families struggle to build the necessary assets to weather the next crisis and aren’t rewarded for their initiative in doing so. FII is changing this resource gap for low-income families by partnering with, learning from, and investing directly in families.”

What FII wants is data and stories from the enrolled families or households. From there, a hundred data points are recorded and then mapped in graphs and charts so the heads of DHS can see what social services are missing and what families are really doing to rise out of poverty.

For Blandon, the mission at FII and for any family living in poverty is clear.

“At its core, what FII is doing is trying to bring (connections, choice, and capital) back to families,” he said. “We know that families are the experts. How else would they survive certain conditions? They’re coming up with creative ways to support each other.”

“FII is trying to push for a new system — a system that looks at working poor communities in a different light. They are not moochers or takers. They are not poor because they’re lazy; quite the opposite,” said Blandon. “We’re trying to shed that light by leveraging technology and data.”

For more information, or for hosting orientations, contact Paul Haeder at paul@fii.org, or call 509-8—-9—7. Any household is eligible, with two caveats — there must be an active email and a banking account or debit card for the $800 stipend payment.

Paul Haeder is a writer and site director of the Family Independence Initiative for Lincoln County.

+—+

Ann and I talked about surveillance capitalism as it is not only played out in the grocery store, but EVERYWHERE:

Through the lens of Wrench in the Gears, this pivot to “bipartisan social innovation” is not benign charity. Rather, it is viewed as a calculated long game to dismantle the public safety net and replace it with a privatized “human capital” stock market. McDowell’s research outlines several mechanisms of this strategy.

Charles Koch’s “Stand Together” Donor Conduits Move $176 Million into his Network, Higher Education, and Right-Wing Policy, Advocacy, Litigation, and Media Groups in 2022

This talk with Ann Larson opened up so many Pandora boxes. Here, Wrench in the Gears:

How Pay For Success Finance Will Prey Upon The Poor

One of the biggest things we’re up against, and something few people are talking about, is social impact investing and pay for success finance. Within the hollowed-out shell of the welfare state, which admittedly was always inadequate and used for purposes of racialized social control, global finance has built a new machine that will use predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and wearable and screen-based technologies to monitor the global poor and profit from their misery.

This effort is being carried out in partnership with the non-profit sector, higher education, think tanks, and global foundations. Many involved identify as liberal, even progressive. Successful resistance will require stopping Trump, the Koch brothers, and ALEC, as well as a corporate, militarized Blue Wave that has every intention of stabilizing late-stage capitalism with technocratic “evidence-based” solutions. Make no mistake; this is a fully bipartisan enterprise.

Outcomes-based contracts are this machine’s operating system. Contracts employ pay-for-performance agreements that reimburse service providers IF they produce specified success metrics. These metrics are narrowly defined and chosen for their ability to be gamed. Contrived solutions offer up fake “success” to enrich investors at the expense of vulnerable populations. Think standardized test scores as success metrics for education or Fitbit step counts for preventative health.

This machine requires a steady supply of people labeled deficient by those in power. Like batteries in the Matrix, the poor are meant to be the fuel. The machine does not care for their actual well-being; its sole purpose is to maximize profit. In that it is similar to the capitalist Western medical model where Big Pharma opts for chronic disease management over research leading to cures. Pay for success will not empower the poor, but instead manage them and harvest their data indefinitely.

The infrastructure for this system was put in place in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008. After toxic mortgages imploded, financiers needed another way to keep global capital circulating. It had to be even bigger than real estate debt, since global wealth continues to become more and more concentrated. The next BIG target would be financialized public benefit systems. Through financialization, resources are siphoned from the real economy into the financial sector, where demands for short-term profit lead to instability, overwhelming debt, income inequality, and wage stagnation.

To justify this shift, proponents of pay for success insist governments will never have sufficient resources to care for their people. Services MUST be outsourced. This in turn opens up vast global markets for speculative investment in human capital. The big money isn’t to be had running human services, which are admittedly hard to turn a profit on, but rather in the trade of debt associated with providing those services. Such a development isn’t surprising, given the power finance and technology interests like Alphabet and Goldman Sachs hold over elected officials. Governments have been captured, and as hostages of transnational capital, they’re compelled to go along with this brutal scheme.

After its fin-tech makeover, the new welfare state will essentially function as a maze into which poor people are forced by social work navigators. Technologies will track, predict, and influence behavior. The digital dust the poor generate as they attempt to negotiate punitive bureaucracies will flow to social sector dashboards, informing hedge fund bets in real time. With their varied portfolios of trauma, vulnerable populations will replace real estate in the lead-up to the next Big Short.

Investors don’t put money in markets they expect to dry up. Thus, logic dictates that turning poverty into a global investment market will only increase poverty. Social impact markets require an ever-expanding supply of people deemed cheaply fixable according to the terms investors set. The fixes offered aren’t meant to materially improve lives long-term. That would require redistribution of resources, something unthinkable for the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. While poverty may be reduced somewhat, it is an essential feature of the design. For pay for success to thrive, homelessness, addiction, mental illness, hunger, violence, unemployment, broken families, and uncertainty must remain the norm. Hedge funds hate stability, and they’re the ones driving social impact investing. If everyone had enough to live a stable life, the gambling would have to come to an end.

Vulture philanthropies seeded this market. After many grant cycles, the non-profit sector has been conditioned to impose toxic solutions without question, collecting the data needed to justify venture capital’s profit-taking. Having been integrated into the machine, these partners in crime are tasked with managing populations that black box algorithms have identified as “at risk.” These artificial labels will, of course, be disproportionately applied to Black and Brown communities. The system demands broken people. Broken people are the raw material. As a result, the system is incentivized to manufacture data and create as many broken people as hedge funds require to keep global capital in optimal circulation.

Social sector workers are also part of the human capital pipeline, caught in this web along with the poor. The system intends to extract as much data and impose as much surveillance as it possibly can, which is why those administering harmful solutions must get creative in identifying others with whom they can organize. This shift will be catastrophic for educators, healthcare providers, therapists, and social workers across the globe. Effective resistance will need to unite people across diverse workplaces.

The United Way is a partner in these efforts, as is Strive Together out of Ohio. They’ve identified a permanent underclass for “collective impact” processing called ALICE: Assets Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. These are the households of the working poor: children with unstable housing, indebted college graduates, workers living paycheck to paycheck, patients with chronic illness, disabled veterans, the elderly. Pay for success “solutions” will process them as commodities via ed-tech, tele-health, tele-therapy, and “smart” housing.

Soon large segments of the population will find their life choices subject to digital engineering, forced onto prescriptive pathways, jumping through hoops into which structural racism has been embedded in computer code. Smart phones will play a major role as benefits are moved to online platforms and linked to digital identity. It is the phones with their biometric capacity that facilitate transfers of value and data and enable tracking and analysis of impact. Phones will be the minders of the poor. Those with phones can have no expectation of privacy.

Such systems are being piloted on unhoused people in Austin now with backing from Bloomberg Philanthropies, a major impact investor. The state of Illinois also has a working group setting up Blockchain birth certificates and is looking to digitize SNAP benefits so coded nudges can be used to push “good” food choices. As the poor have their welfare inputs evaluated against their economic and behavioral outputs, the rich will sit on the sidelines placing bets. Either way the rich win, because there’s always someone willing to take the short position.

Beyond financialization of human life, these data-driven systems also legitimize increased surveillance of large segments of the population, especially Black and Brown communities already subject to militarized policing. Resisters will be viewed as insurgents and subject to violent counterinsurgent interventions as we saw in Ferguson and at Standing Rock. Wearable and screen-based technologies and interoperable data systems, like Project Unicorn headquartered a few blocks from here, will feed a vast network of signals intelligence to monitor the behavior of the poor, predicting the likelihood of pushback. The Minerva Research Initiative was set up by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) for exactly this purpose. It’s not hard to imagine the impact such intelligence will have on resistance movements.

So, what does social impact digital surveillance look like?

It looks like behavior tracking apps for low-income mothers.

It looks like play tables that video record toddlers and score their social behaviors.

It looks like online preschool.

It looks like brain wave monitoring headbands and executive function enhancing video games for students.

It looks like wearable tech that tracks vital signs for substance users.

It looks like online cognitive behavioral therapy for prisoners.

It looks like Fitbits and Internet of Things pill caps for Medicaid patients.

It looks like “smart” supportive housing with integrated IoT monitoring.

It looks like tablet-based overseas monitoring of seniors.

It looks like virtual reality death simulation training for hospice workers.

Once you peek under the hood, you realize what a grotesque business social impact investing actually is. These tools are built on 400 years of racial capitalism. It is the Doctrine of Discovery with Blockchain replacing double-entry bookkeeping and smartphones and digital identity systems replacing shackles. It is a system that arose in tandem with cloud-based computing, broadband, 5G, and the Internet of Things. These advancements are inextricably linked to the interests of the US military and intelligence community, which is why we must recognize that as much as we have come to rely on our devices, true liberation will never come through digital channels. It can’t; our opponents run the cloud.

We’re living through a period of orchestrated mass confusion and distraction. Some are sitting like frogs in simmering pots, distracted on their phones as the steam billows around them. Others are forced to play real-life games of Frogger, heads down, crossing dangerous highways, dodging crises right and left with little opportunity to see, let alone plan for, what is coming.

South Africa and Australia have piloted public benefits on Blockchain linked to digital identity. The state of Illinois is looking into it as well. We need to stop them politically, and we must develop alternative networks of support outside existing government and non-profit structures. We need to get out of our simmering pots and look up to the horizon. We need to do it soon. — Alison McDowell

What AnnLarson and I touched upon was the monopolization of food and the “insecurity” of grocery workers is tied to the slave wages and long hours. I have first-hand experience with cashiers and other retail service folk living in vans. I was both a social services worker getting the houseless and just released from prison and those with substance abuse histories JOBS, sometimes felony friendly, and some that needed jobs like warehouse work, and service work, including chopping fruit and frying chickens. Corporate America on down the line, to the very same struggling managers of these places are hell on wheels, retribution focused, and wannabe drill fucking sargeants.

We talked about the infantilization of the training modules for these jobs, and the fact that cashiers have to scan a certain number of items a day or else. At the local Kroger’s Fred Meyer, read all about it: Ground-Truthing at 69 in a time of Genocide, Scholasticide, and “Devolution of the Soul”, There are no exits anymore from the MADD — Mutually Assured Destruction of Decency

Ann — “In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I got a job in a supermarket where my colleagues and I were paid poverty wages to do essential work. I came away from the experience humbled and determined to share what I had learned. In the tradition of bestselling behind-the-scenes classics such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Cleanup on Aisle Five is a character-driven look at the modern supermarket. It unpacks what works and what doesn’t and unveils the corporate interests that control everything from labor conditions in stores to how we shop for food.

So says Ann: “In the small Idaho town where I grew up, you might aspire to be a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a small business owner, but there was nothing demeaning about working in a supermarket. In middle school, my best friend’s mom was a cashier. I never once considered that I ought to judge her, much less feel sorry for her. Almost everyone I knew did hardscrabble work that kept the community afloat. My grandfather installed tile roofs on houses, my mom taught junior high school English, and my dad had mopped floors in a grocery store before cashing in his GI Bill, getting a degree, and becoming a school librarian. There was no way I was going to feel sorry for myself for working in a supermarket.”

• The “New Slavery”: Unlike historical chattel slavery where owners made large financial investments in legally owned slaves and cared for them as long-term property, modern slaves are extremely cheap to acquire.
• Disposability: Because human life is cheap, slaveholders work individuals to the limit and discard them when they fall ill, get injured, or become unprofitable, replacing them easily with other desperate people.
• Root Causes: The global population explosion, economic globalization that displaces small farmers, and severe government corruption in developing regions drive millions into this system.

“The Book of Embraces” by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (whose “Memory of Fire,” a trilogy poetically chronicling the history of Latin America, I earlier swallowed in great, swift gulps). Here is a video by Caleb González of a poem from “The Book of Embraces,” with music by the great Spanish guitarist Paco de Lucia. Below is the English translation by Galeano’s longtime translator, Cedric Belfrage, followed by the original Spanish. ~ Diana Rico

The Nobodies

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them–will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.

“Who are my contemporaries?” Juan Gelman asks himself. Juan says that sometimes he comes across men who smell of fear, in Buenos Aires, Paris, or anywhere in the world, and feels that these men are not his contemporaries. But there is a Chinese who, thousands of years ago, wrote a poem about a goatherd who is far from his beloved and yet can hear in the middle of the night, in the middle of the snow, the sound of her comb running through her hair. And reading this distant poem, Juan finds that yes, these people–the poet, the goatherd and the woman–are truly his contemporaries.

—Eduardo Galeano in The Book of Embraces

LISTEN HERE TO THE INTERVIEW WITH ANN LARSON.

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Discussion about this episode

“No self-respecting university should accept funding from Israel, given its destabilizing, destructive, and inhumane use of U.S. weapons,” said Hartung.

Paulo Kirk

Aug 26, 2026

More and more MYOPIA, and the Goyim are gooey:

YIKES. The Big Dirty .2 Percent Solution in the Sky, that fucking TALMUD EYE:

Again, overcounting 6 million in the “gas chambers” and undercounting how much death they give to the world. THINK = 600 nukes, man, plus tactical nukes:

Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, though the country neither acknowledges nor denies the existence of a nuclear arsenal. Israel is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has not accepted IAEA safeguards on some of its principal nuclear activities. Their policy of nuclear opacity has been generally tolerated by both allies and adversaries.

Most estimates posit that Israel possesses about 90 plutonium-based nuclear warheads and has produced enough plutonium for 100-200 weapons. These estimates have been fairly consistent for decades, which points to a nuclear posture defined by Israel’s deterrence needs. Israel appears focused strictly on survival and does not seek to threaten other nuclear-armed states.

Jews, man, the JEWS.

Israel has long armed and backed Criminal gangs in Gaza affiliated with ISIS to help carry out its genocide.

Most notably, early in the genocide in Gaza , Israel armed the ISIS linked drug smuggling gang led by Yasser Abu Shabab, to loot aid going into Gaza.

While Yasser Abu Shabab was later killed in an internal coup, his gang, branded as the “popular forces” by Israel, has been continued to be backed by the IDF, now led by Ghassan al-Duhaini, a former “commander in a terrorist group in Gaza that was associated with al-Qaeda”.

A new investigation in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has revealed that Israel’s arming of terrorist gangs in Gaza to carry out its dirty work is even more extensive than previously reported.

Where Jewish Populations Live

• Israel: Home to roughly 7.2 to 7.7 million Jews (about 45–48% of the world total).
• United States: Home to roughly 6.0 to 6.3 million Jews (the second-largest population).
• Other Countries: The remaining population lives across the Diaspora, with notable communities in France (approx. 440,000), Canada (approx. 398,000), and the United Kingdom (approx. 312,000).

Depending on how “Jewish identity” is defined, numbers can change:

• Core Population: Self-identifying Jews with no other religion (approx. 15.8 million).
• Broader / Enlarged Definitions: Including individuals with Jewish parents or those eligible under Israel’s Law of Return (which includes anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent), estimates range from 21 to 25 million people.

Oh, those SIX million JEWS. That number? Mel Brooks, you around to play Hitler again?

Core Jewish Population: 15.7 million – 16.5 million. 0.2% of the global population

Total World Population ~8.28 billion. Total humans on Earth 

Eligible under Law of Return — The sickness is in the DNA!

25 million – 25.5 million. Includes individuals with at least one Jewish parent or grandparent.

Large Number of Faculty at Elite U.S. Universities Linked to the National Endowment for Democracy, A CIA Cut-Out Specializing in Propaganda

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA off-shoot that was founded in 1983 with the purpose of advancing political propaganda and U.S. regime-change operations.

The NED routinely supports dissidents and highlights human rights abuses occurring in countries that are geopolitical rivals of the U.S., like China, Iran and Russia, or socialist countries that have tried to assert control over their natural resources, like Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.

Meanwhile, the NED is silent about the human rights abuses that occur in countries like Ukraine, Israel, Bangladesh, Kenya, Rwanda, Syria or others whose governments are supported or have been installed by the U.S.

Many of the dissidents that the NED honors advocate for sanctions, bombing and war on their own countries. Some were even indicted for inciting insurrection or terrorist acts.

The NED’s function as a front for CIA covert operations was apparent in February when NED President Damon Wilson—who was invited to give the 2026 commencement address at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy—bragged to a House committee about the NED’s aggressive efforts to spark unrest in Iran, including by smuggling Starlink terminals (a satellite technology to ensure secure communication) and fashioning anti-Iran narratives for the media.

Before he could finish the sentence, Wilson was cut off by the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, Lois Frankel (D-FL), who told Wilson: “You know what, I’m going to interrupt you—we’d better not talk about it.”

Jew List….

• Kenneth Wollack (Vice Chair): Serves as Vice Chair after concluding a four-year tenure as the NED Board Chairman in 2025. He is the former president of the National Democratic Institute (NDI).
• Stuart Appelbaum: Elected to the NED board in 2022. He is a prominent American labor leader who concurrently serves as the president of the Jewish Labor Committee.
• Ambassador Victoria Nuland: Rejoined the NED board in late 2024 after retiring from her position as U.S. Undersecretary of State.
• Marc F. Plattner: A current board member who previously spent decades on the NED staff as the vice president for research and studies and co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Prominent Former Leadership

Carl Gershman: The founding president of the NED. He managed the organization’s strategic vision and global grant-making programs from its inception in 1983 until his retirement in 2021.

Anne Applebaum: A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, journalist, and author who previously served a multi-year term as a member of the NED Board of Directors.

THE .2 (POINT 2) PERCENT (%) FINAL SOLUTION.

WHORES and PIMPS and PROSTITUTES and OPPEN-MONSTER-HEIMER’S of the globe: Jews of the Occupation.

Research funding by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and arms manufacturers often fails to appear in national databases intended to track foreign funding.

By Murtaza Hussain, reposted from Drop Site News, August 24, 2026

The Israeli Ministry of Defense and Israeli defense companies have directed millions in unreported funding to U.S. university research programs for weapons development, sponsoring research directly or serving as the pass-through entity for the funding, a Drop Site investigation has found.

A sample of state and university audits, foreign-funding disclosures, and other institutional records identified millions of dollars in financial ties over the last two decades between the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MOD), Israeli weapons manufacturers, and American universities, much of which does not appear consistently in national databases intended to track foreign funding into U.S. universities.

An analysis of audit records, building on findings compiled by the Antiwar Initiative, an academic research group that documents the connections between universities and the global arms industry, found more than $15 million of unreported or inconsistently reported entries for funding tied to the Israeli MOD or defense manufacturers.

The true scale of Israeli support is difficult to determine because entries for such funding were often not reported in public filings mandating disclosure of foreign gifts, but were discovered by manually cross-referencing public and internal databases, audit records, and acknowledgments in academic papers. Some projects listed in university materials as being sponsored by the Israeli MOD or defense companies also did not include the amounts of funding provided, or contained inconsistent or contradictory records in audit databases.

Drop Site reviewed and verified public records that showed research grants, tuition payments, and receipts of gifts totaling millions of dollars to dozens of colleges and universities around the country. The data shows examples of financial support and sponsorship for American researchers from the Israeli Ministry of Defense as well as Israeli weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems.

Records dating from 2004 to 2025 point to a large number of schools that have had financial relationships with the Israeli MOD or Israeli weapons manufacturers, including Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, Texas Tech, the University of Connecticut, the University of Tennessee, the University of Maryland, the University of Florida, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Rhode Island, the University of New Mexico, the Washington University in St. Louis, and the State University of New York.

No fucking hits or quick bombings set out for all of these cunts? An upside-down fucking world! Look at this fucking freak of a homosexual: His children, how would a knife to the throat be for them, as economic sanctions against the children of Iran.?

Bessent is married to former prosecutor and historical preservationist John Freeman, by the way, and has TWO kids, Cole and Caroline, born via surrogacy.

The JEWS:

JEWS.

Clifton and Jew Lustick say that beyond advocating for a foreign policy that does not serve the American national interest, the lobby has in recent years worked to curb free speech, particularly on college campuses.

“We [now] have the problem of the lobby’s attack on American freedoms domestically,” Jew Lustick said on the podcast. “This is a result of the lobby not being able to defend Israeli policies because they’ve become so extreme. So it attacks American freedoms to try to suppress debate, intimidate dissidents, and break the institutions that produce those dissidents.”

The JEWS: No two ways about it.

Every fucking JEW, man, blood libel.

Israeli strikes have reportedly killed at least seven Palestinians across Gaza, in ongoing violations of a “ceasefire” that went into effect last October.

An Israeli strike destroyed a warehouse storing nutrition supplies intended for children, pregnant women, and breastfeeding mothers Tuesday in Gaza, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) said, which said the entire stock was damaged and rendered unfit for human consumption.

“Access to Oxygen Is Not a Medical Luxury”: With No Spare Parts Allowed In, Gaza’s Hospital Equipment Is Collapsing: Israel’s restrictions on medical supplies and equipment are still making health care in Gaza all but impossible.

Remains of 20 Palestinians recovered from rubble in Gaza City

Israel expels Dutch officials from Gaza coordination center over settlement boycott: The move came in response to what Israel described as a series of anti-Israel measures by the Dutch government, the latest being a law banning trade in Israeli products from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Sa’ar said: “Our message is clear: Those who act against Israel will have no foothold in the region. Israel will not allow measures to be taken against it without a response*.”

Which fucking Jewish LAWYERS are defending the new Zyklon B makers? Defense attorneys representing Monsanto (and its parent company, Bayer) typically receive between $1,000 and $2,500+ per hour for senior partners

Glyphosate Commercial Formulation Causes Cytotoxicity, Oxidative Effects, and Apoptosis on Human Cells: Differences With its Active Ingredient

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Kat

Always afraid to call a fucking Jewish Spade a Jewish Spade. What is this word, Israeli, or the other fucking fake word, Zionist?

In this episode of Falasteeniya, we examine the systematic use of sexualised and gendered violence against Palestinians and its relationship to settler colonialism and genocide.

Palestinian organiser, writer and member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective Tara Al-Alami joins Palestine Deep Dive’s Hala Hanina to discuss the collective’s new report, A Predatory State: Israeli Systematic, Sexualised and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians.

We discuss the historical use of sexual violence against Palestinians, the experiences of Palestinian political prisoners, reproductive genocide, attacks on Palestinian reproductive life, the weaponisation of sexuality and intimacy, pinkwashing, and the role of Western and imperial feminism in shaping narratives around Palestine.

The conversation also asks why Palestinian testimonies of sexual violence are so often dismissed, and what meaningful political action can look like, from grassroots organising and divestment to arms embargoes and international accountability.

Two dudes, two dogs, the fucking KKK American Flag, and a deputized ACAB in my town. The gazebo is a public place, but these two broke dudes are colonizing it. AMERICA.

WEATHERING, man. Francesca is WEATHERED by the JEWS.

And if you DO NOT HATE these kinds of JEWS and AMERICA in general, then you are both lobotomized and analy raped by the Mitzvah and Minyan.

HACK that fucking helicopter, man, down it NOW.

Chris —

When writing about Gaza, verbs are in the passive tense. There is no subject. No one is accountable. Genocide, it seems, is an act of God. No different from an earthquake or tsunami. Clichés and opaque adjectives such as the “cycle of violence” or “clashes” distort and falsify reality.

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” George Orwell warned.

Terms such as “genocide,” “atrocity,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territories” magically disappear from media reports on Palestinians, whose resistance is routinely described as “savage” and “barbaric.” New York Times reporters are instructed by editors to avoid terms such as “Palestine,” “genocide,” “carnage,” “refugee camp,” “slaughter” and “massacre,” when referencing Palestinians.

The media slavishly regurgitates what Israel feeds it. Saturation bombing becomes “surgical air strikes.” Israel’s weaponization of famine becomes a “food shortage.” The killing of unarmed civilians — including children — becomes “clashes.” The hilltop fortress-like compounds of Jewish colonists becomes “neighborhoods.” Extrajudicial assassination of a journalist or a doctor becomes “died.”

Genocide, referred to as the “Israel-Hamas war” is justified as “self-defense,” part of the mantra of Israel’s “right to defend itself.” When schools, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, mosques, churches and other civilian targets are obliterated, they are labeled “Hamas command centers” or targeted because Hamas is “using civilians as human shields” — something Israel does routinely, when the army binds detained Palestinians and forces them to enter potentially booby-trapped buildings and tunnels ahead of Israeli troops.

19 or 25 million fucking perversions, schizoids:

Israeli settler walks free in occupied Jerusalem after brutally attacking a French nun on video

Eman Mohammed

Bray Beach, rainy, 2:30 PM, Wednesday, August 26 | Gaza Beach, burning heat, 4:30 PM

Earlier today, an Israeli Court acquitted Yona Simcha Schreiber, a 36-year-old Israeli settler from the occupied West Bank settlement of Peduel, of criminal responsibility for the brutal April 28 assault on a French nun in Jerusalem. The court ruled that Schreiber suffered from schizophrenia and was in a psychotic state during the attack. Instead of prison, the judge ordered his hospitalization for up to six years.

Surveillance video documented the attack in occupied Jerusalem, where the footage shows Schreiber shoving the nun to the ground and kicking her violently while she lay defenseless. The Israeli occupation police arrested him the same day, while prosecutors charged him with assault causing bodily harm motivated by religious hostility.

Demographic data proves this colonial erasure. While the Palestinian Christian population inside the1948 borders has grown to approximately 187,900, their share of the population in the occupied West Bank and Gaza has plummeted over the last century. In Bethlehem alone, Palestinian Christians made up roughly 85 percent of the population in 1950. Today, they constitute only 10 to 12 percent. Surveys cite occupation restrictions as the primary driver for this drop.

The acquittal of Schreiber proves how the Israeli legal system aligns with settler violence. For Palestinian Christians, this acquittal is not a legal loophole but Israel’s main policy. The occupation’s courts do not defend the indigenous but they do provide the paperwork for genocide and the impunity to enforce it.

JEWS.

Ya think?

According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), the United States’ and Israel’s war against Iran has brought the number of armed conflicts in which states are involved to more than sixty. In this regard, it is pertinent that both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are at the centre of serious controversies and accusations of various kinds that are widely reported in the international press, and are also embroiled in ugly, far-reaching legal and political disputes. The attack on Iran increases the number of the planet’s armed conflicts to almost two hundred, if civil wars, tribal conflicts, and fighting among criminal gangs are counted. If we add to these the cold wars, or social media dis(information) wars that fuel the hot wars, could we say that a third world war has already begun?

What Antonio Piccarolo’s A Guerra e a Paz na História (War and Peace in History – 1940) tells us about recent armed conflicts.

Piccarolo demonstrates how craving for dominance, ambition for glory, religious fanaticism, whims of rulers, trivial slights, and false pride are causes of war and, going deeper into the question, he concludes that “the true cause is always one, the economic cause which, depending on the circumstances of time and place, adopts various forms”. Colonial wars and conquests are frequently waged in the name of religion or “civilisation”, thus disguising their material causes.

For Piccarolo, schools and especially the press cover up the real motives of tyrants. He laments that, “The press seems to have shed its true role, one of the noblest of all, to put itself on sale and become an instrument of hatred and discord among peoples. All modern wars are preceded by press campaigns, which seem to have the single aim of stirring up discord and fanning the flames of hatred.”

He was, of course, referring to the printed press, radio, and cinema. He couldn’t have imagined how the evolution of these media outlets via satellite TV, the internet, and Big Tech would produce instruments of war even more odious than those of the mass media of his times. — Source

Fun headline: Iowa’s Cancer Explosion is Rattling the Midterms by Tamara Bedic

3 Likes∙

2 Restacks

Simple fucking stuff: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Or: “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”

Paulo Kirk

Aug 16, 2026

2006 — Nearly 18 months after an uproar erupted over a professor who likened some Sept. 11 victims to Nazis, the University of Colorado on Monday took its biggest step yet toward firing him.

The highest-ranking official at Colorado’s main campus called on the university to dismiss ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill for “a pattern of research misconduct committed over a period of time.”

Churchill did not immediately return telephone messages but has denied the allegations and dismissed the university’s investigation as a pretense to fire him. His attorney, David Lane, said Churchill will appeal and, if he loses, he will sue.

“I trust juries to make these decisions, not bureaucrats,” he said.

Churchill’s comparison of Sept. 11 victims to Nazis ultimately led to his speech being canceled at Eastern Washington University in April 2005. But he appeared on the Cheney campus anyway and drew 500 mostly enthusiastic spectators at an outdoor rally. He also addressed a class.

I was there, talked with Ward, and of course the journalists and fucking faculty I was associated with stated that Ward was bad mojo. Ward is gone now. I, of course, pushed back on Ward’s terrorists thesis around 9/11.

I would have liked to bring Ward to a campus in Spokane or out in Washington or Oregon, speaking about this great man’s questioning of the 9/11 narrative:

Filmed during the final year of his life, Dr. Graeme MacQueen reflects on his personal transformation from peace activist and academic to 9/11 researcher. As he revisits his involvement in the global peace movement and the controversial questions he raised about the events of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, MacQueen delivers a final message about truth, war, and the power of asking hard questions—even when they challenge the official narrative.

Peace, War, and 9/11 (2023) is a compelling documentary that centers on the late Dr. Graeme MacQueen, a Canadian peace scholar, author, and one of the most respected voices in the 9/11 truth movement. Filmed shortly before his passing in 2023, the documentary serves as both a reflection on his life’s work and a thought-provoking examination of the events surrounding September 11, 2001.

Dr. MacQueen—who held a Ph.D. in comparative religion from Harvard and taught religious studies at McMaster University for 30 years—was known for his deep commitment to nonviolence and his rigorous critique of official war narratives. He was the founding director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster, where he also played a key role in peace-building initiatives in war-torn regions like Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

Peace, War, and 9/11 combines his final in-depth interview with archival footage, personal reflections, and commentary from colleagues and researchers. The film challenges viewers to reconsider the implications of 9/11 on global policy, civil liberties, and the peace movement.

Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens

The Politics of a Perpetrator Population

Meet the “Terrorists”

About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau

On Matters of Proportion and Intent

The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy

In the Alternative

When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously — and quite charitably, all things considered — replied that it was merely a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens — along with some half-million dead Iraqi children — came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable — in fact, widely predicted — result of the 1991 US “surgical” bombing of their country’s water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other “infrastructural” targets upon which Iraq’s civilian population depends for its very survival. [See The Secret Behind the Sanctions — How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq’s Water Supply, by Thomas J. Nagy, The Progressive, September 2001.]

If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough — and it should be noted that this sort of “aerial warfare” constitutes a Class I Crime Against Humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of “civilized” behavior [See Sanctions and War on Iraq: In 300 words, by Citizens Concerned for the People of Iraq, 17 Aug 2002] — the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now [See Iraq Sanctions: Humanitarian Implications and Options for the Future, marking the 12^th anniversary of sanctions on Iraq, 8/6/02, and the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, a registered society at the University of Cambridge, England]. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims’ ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to save the lives of even their toddlers.

All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered — are still suffering — a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.

The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41^st “freedom-loving” father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43^rd: “The world must learn that what we say goes,” intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere.

How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.

In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 “towel-heads” and “camel jockeys” — or was it “sand niggers” that week? — in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance. It was a performance worthy of the Nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany’s “innocent civilians” until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943. [See They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–1945, by Milton Mayer (University of Chicago Press: 1966)]

There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed — nay, empowered — their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.

If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was truly ghastly.

Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo — continued bull force by Bush the Elder’s successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of its “resolve” to finalize what George himself had dubbed the “New World Order” of American military/economic domination — it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.

One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, repeatedly denounced what was happening as “a systematic program … of deliberate genocide.” His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was “unaware” of them. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halliday’s assessment. Asked during the widely viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his “allegations,” she calmly announced that she’d decided it was “worth the price” to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.

The Politics of a Perpetrator Population

As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns. There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting “Jeremy” and “Ellington” to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little “Tiffany” and “Ashley” had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays — for “our kids,” no less — as an all-absorbing point of political focus.

In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved, by and large, contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing “moral witness” as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.

Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the “resistance” expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically useful task of trying to ensure, as “a principle of moral virtue,” that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of “challenging” the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these “dissidents,” in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory “violence” as having their windows broken by persons less “enlightened” — or perhaps more outraged — than the self-anointed “peacekeepers.”

Property before people, it seems — or at least the equation of property to people — is a value by no means restricted to America’s boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone “pacifists” queuing up to condemn the black bloc after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.

Small wonder, all in all, that people elsewhere in the world — the Mideast, for instance — began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America’s purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.

The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption. So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America’s free-fire zones.

Tellingly, it was at precisely this point — with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it — that the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United States.

Meet the “Terrorists”

Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate “news” media immediately following their successful operation on September 11.

They did not, for starters, “initiate” a war with the US, much less commit “the first acts of war of the new millennium.”

A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the “Christian West” — now proudly emblematized by the United States — against the “Islamic East” since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago.

More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel’s dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered “Desert Shield” in 1990, or at any of several points in between.

Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war — and they can — then the same is true of every US “overflight” of Iraqi territory since day one.

The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course.

That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint. They did not license themselves to “target innocent civilians.”

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center.

Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved –, and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” – a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind, and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not “cowards.” That distinction properly belongs to the “firm-jawed lads” who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough to be below – including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians – while themselves incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the word describes all those “fighting men and women” who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September 11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining their objectives.

Nor were they “fanatics” devoted to “Islamic fundamentalism.”

One might rightly describe their actions as “desperate.” Feelings of desperation, however, are a perfectly reasonable – one is tempted to say “normal” – emotional response among persons confronted by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid them, a Gypsy).

That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle, of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI’s investigative reports on the combat teams’ activities during the months leading up to September 11 make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it’s pretty obvious at this point that they were secular activists – soldiers, really – who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.

And still less were they/their acts “insane.”

Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one – or one’s country – holds what amounts to a “divine right” to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting in some material way to bring the process to a halt. Sanity itself, in this frame of reference, might be defined by a willingness to try and destroy the perpetrators and/or the sources of their ability to commit their crimes. (Shall we now discuss the US “strategic bombing campaign” against Germany during World War II, and the mental health of those involved in it?)

Which takes us to official characterizations of the combat teams as an embodiment of “evil.”

Evil – for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept – was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she’d imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq. Evil was to be heard in that great American hero “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf’s utterly dehumanizing dismissal of their systematic torture and annihilation as mere “collateral damage.” Evil, moreover, is a term appropriate to describing the mentality of a public that finds such perspectives and the policies attending them acceptable, or even momentarily tolerable.

Had it not been for these evils, the counterattacks of September 11 would never have occurred. And unless “the world is rid of such evil,” to lift a line from George Junior, September 11 may well end up looking like a lark.

There is no reason, after all, to believe that the teams deployed in the assaults on the WTC and the Pentagon were the only such, that the others are composed of “Arabic-looking individuals” – America’s indiscriminately lethal arrogance and psychotic sense of self-entitlement have long since given the great majority of the world’s peoples ample cause to be at war with it – or that they are in any way dependent upon the seizure of civilian airliners to complete their missions.

To the contrary, there is every reason to expect that there are many other teams in place, tasked to employ altogether different tactics in executing operational plans at least as well-crafted as those evident on September 11, and very well equipped for their jobs. This is to say that, since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were acts of war – not “terrorist incidents” – they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results. From this, it can only be adduced that there are plenty of other components ready to go, and that they will be used, should this become necessary in the eyes of the strategists. It also seems a safe bet that each component is calibrated to inflict damage at a level incrementally higher than the one before (during the 1960s, the Johnson administration employed a similar policy against Vietnam, referred to as “escalation”).

Since implementation of the overall plan began with the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it takes no rocket scientist to decipher what is likely to happen next, should the U.S. attempt a response of the inexcusable variety to which it has long entitled itself.

About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau

There’s another matter begging for comment at this point. The idea that the FBI’s “counterterrorism task forces” can do a thing to prevent what will happen is yet another dimension of America’s delusional pathology.. The fact is that, for all its publicly-financed “image-building” exercises, the Bureau has never shown the least aptitude for anything of the sort.

Oh, yeah, FBI counterintelligence personnel have proven quite adept at framing anarchists, communists and Black Panthers, sometimes murdering them in their beds or the electric chair. The Bureau’s SWAT units have displayed their ability to combat child abuse in Waco by burning babies alive, and its vaunted Crime Lab has been shown to pad its “crime-fighting’ statistics by fabricating evidence against many an alleged car thief. But actual “heavy-duty bad guys” of the sort at issue now? This isn’t a Bruce Willis/Chuck Norris/Sly Stallone movie, after all.. And J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t get to approve either the script or the casting.

The number of spies, saboteurs and bona fide terrorists apprehended, or even detected by the FBI in the course of its long and slimy history could be counted on one’s fingers and toes. On occasion, its agents have even turned out to be the spies, and, in many instances, the terrorists as well.

To be fair once again, if the Bureau functions as at best a carnival of clowns where its “domestic security responsibilities” are concerned, this is because – regardless of official hype – it has none. It is now, as it’s always been, the national political police force, and instrument created and perfected to ensure that all Americans, not just the consenting mass, are “free” to do exactly as they’re told.

The FBI and “cooperating agencies” can thus be relied upon to set about “protecting freedom” by destroying whatever rights and liberties were left to U.S. citizens before September 11 (in fact, they’ve already received authorization to begin). Sheeplike, the great majority of Americans can also be counted upon to bleat their approval, at least in the short run, believing as they always do that the nasty implications of what they’re doing will pertain only to others.

Oh Yeah, and “The Company,” Too

A possibly even sicker joke is the notion, suddenly in vogue, that the CIA will be able to pinpoint “terrorist threats,” “rooting out their infrastructure” where it exists and/or “terminating” it before it can materialize, if only it’s allowed to beef up its “human intelligence gathering capacity” in an unrestrained manner (including full-bore operations inside the US, of course).

Yeah. Right.

Since America has a collective attention span of about 15 minutes, a little refresher seems in order: “The Company” had something like a quarter-million people serving as “intelligence assets” by feeding it information in Vietnam in 1968, and it couldn’t even predict the Tet Offensive. God knows how many spies it was fielding against the USSR at the height of Ronald Reagan’s version of the Cold War, and it was still caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. As to destroying “terrorist infrastructures,” one would do well to remember Operation Phoenix, another product of its open season in Vietnam. In that one, the CIA enlisted elite US units like the Navy Seals and Army Special Forces, as well as those of friendly countries – the South Vietnamese Rangers, for example, and Australian SAS – to run around “neutralizing” folks targeted by The Company’s legion of snitches as “guerrillas” (as those now known as “terrorists” were then called).

Sound familiar?

Upwards of 40,000 people – mostly bystanders, as it turns out – were murdered by Phoenix hit teams before the guerrillas, stronger than ever, ran the US and its collaborators out of their country altogether. And these are the guys who are gonna save the day, if unleashed to do their thing in North America?

The net impact of all this “counterterrorism” activity upon the combat teams’ ability to do what they came to do, of course, will be nil.

Instead, it’s likely to make it easier for them to operate (it’s worked that way in places like Northern Ireland). And, since denying Americans the luxury of reaping the benefits of genocide in comfort was self-evidently a key objective of the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it can be stated unequivocally that a more overt display of the police state mentality already pervading this country simply confirms the magnitude of their victory.

On Matters of Proportion and Intent

As things stand, including the 1993 detonation at the WTC, “Arab terrorists” have responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq with a total of four assaults by explosives inside the US. That’s about 1% of the 50,000 bombs the Pentagon announced were rained on Baghdad alone during the Gulf War (add in Oklahoma City, and you’ll get something nearer an actual 1%).

They’ve managed in the process to kill about 5,000 Americans, or roughly 1% of the dead Iraqi children (the percentage is far smaller if you factor in the killing of adult Iraqi civilians, not to mention troops butchered as/after they’d surrendered and/or after the “war-ending” ceasefire had been announced).

In terms undoubtedly more meaningful to the property/profit-minded American mainstream, they’ve knocked down a half-dozen buildings – albeit some very well-chosen ones – as opposed to the “strategic devastation” visited upon the whole of Iraq, and punched a $100 billion hole in the earnings outlook of major corporate shareholders, as opposed to the U.S. obliteration of Iraq’s entire economy.

With that, they’ve given Americans a tiny dose of their own medicine.. This might be seen as merely a matter of “vengeance” or “retribution,” and, unquestionably, America has earned it, even if it were to add up only to something so ultimately petty.

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations, killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.

Were this the intent of those who’ve entered the US to wage war against it, it would remain no less true that America and Americans were only receiving the bill for what they’d already done. Payback, as they say, can be a real motherfucker (ask the Germans). There is, however, no reason to believe that retributive parity is necessarily an item on the agenda of those who planned the WTC/Pentagon operation. If it were, given the virtual certainty that they possessed the capacity to have inflicted far more damage than they did, there would be a lot more American bodies lying about right now.

Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the “news” media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast “aren’t like” Americans, not least because they don’t “value life’ in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life – all lives, not just their own – far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.

The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy

In sum, one can discern a certain optimism – it might even be called humanitarianism – embedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.

Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name – indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it – mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

Now they do.

That was the “medicinal” aspect of the attacks.

To all appearances, the idea is now to give the tonic a little time to take effect, jolting Americans into the realization that the sort of pain they’re now experiencing first-hand is no different from – or the least bit more excruciating than – that which they’ve been so cavalier in causing others, and thus to respond appropriately.

More bluntly, the hope was – and maybe still is – that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as “stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe.”

Either way, it’s a kind of “reality therapy” approach, designed to afford the American people a chance to finally “do the right thing” on their own, without further coaxing.

Were the opportunity acted upon in some reasonably good faith fashion – a sufficiently large number of Americans rising up and doing whatever is necessary to force an immediate lifting of the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, or maybe hanging a few of America’s abundant supply of major war criminals (Henry Kissinger comes quickly to mind, as do Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and George the Elder) – there is every reason to expect that military operations against the US on its domestic front would be immediately suspended.

Whether they would remain so would of course be contingent upon follow-up. By that, it may be assumed that American acceptance of onsite inspections by international observers to verify destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (as well as dismantlement of all facilities in which more might be manufactured), Nuremberg-style trials in which a few thousand US military/corporate personnel could be properly adjudicated and punished for their Crimes Against humanity, and payment of reparations to the array of nations/peoples whose assets the US has plundered over the years, would suffice.

Since they’ve shown no sign of being unreasonable or vindictive, it may even be anticipated that, after a suitable period of adjustment and reeducation (mainly to allow them to acquire the skills necessary to living within their means), those restored to control over their own destinies by the gallant sacrifices of the combat teams the WTC and Pentagon will eventually (re)admit Americans to the global circle of civilized societies. Stranger things have happened.

In the Alternative

Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case. Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations’ worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US. Then, again, it’s entirely possible they were aware that a decisive majority of American adults have been reduced by this point to a level much closer to the kind of immediate self-gratification entailed in Pavlovian stimulus/response patterns than anything accessible by appeals to higher logic, and still felt morally obliged to offer the dolts an option to quit while they were ahead.

What the hell? It was worth a try.

But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the dosage of medicine administered was entirely insufficient to accomplish its purpose.

Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, Americans for the most part still don’t get it.

Already, they’ve desecrated the temporary tomb of those killed in the WTC, staging a veritable pep rally atop the mangled remains of those they profess to honor, treating the whole affair as if it were some bizarre breed of contact sport. And, of course, there are the inevitable pom-poms shaped like American flags, the school colors worn as little red-white-and-blue ribbons affixed to labels, sportscasters in the form of “counterterrorism experts” drooling mindless color commentary during the pregame warm-up.

Refusing the realization that the world has suddenly shifted its axis, and that they are therefore no longer “in charge,” they have, by and large, reverted instantly to type, working themselves into their usual bloodlust on the now obsolete premise that the bloodletting will “naturally” occur elsewhere and to someone else.

“Patriotism,” a wise man once observed, “is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

And the braided, he might have added.

Braided Scoundrel-in-Chief, George Junior, lacking even the sense to be careful what he wished for, has teamed up with a gaggle of fundamentalist Christian clerics like Billy Graham to proclaim a “New Crusade” called “Infinite Justice” aimed at “ridding the world of evil.”

One could easily make light of such rhetoric, remarking upon how unseemly it is for a son to threaten his father in such fashion – or a president to so publicly contemplate the murder/suicide of himself and his cabinet – but the matter is deadly serious.

They are preparing once again to sally forth for the purpose of roasting brown-skinned children by the scores of thousands. Already, the B-1 bombers and the aircraft carriers and the missile frigates are en route, the airborne divisions are gearing up to go.

To where? Afghanistan?

The Sudan?

Iraq, again (or still)?

How about Grenada (that was fun)?

Any of them or all. It doesn’t matter.

The desire to pummel the helpless runs rabid as ever.

Only, this time it’s different.

The time the helpless aren’t, or at least are not so helpless as they were.

This time, somewhere, perhaps in an Afghani mountain cave, possibly in a Brooklyn basement, maybe another local altogether – but somewhere, all the same – there’s a grim-visaged (wo)man wearing a Clint Eastwood smile.

“Go ahead, punks,” s/he’s saying, “Make my day.”

And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad – or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the “terrorists”’ own schedule, and at a place of their choosing – the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here “at home.”

Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?

That, too, is their choice to make.

Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.

“You’ve got to learn, “ the line went, “that when you push people around, some people push back.”

As they should.

As they must.

And as they undoubtedly will.

There is justice in such symmetry.

That Counterpunch article is gone: Ward Churchill, RIP – CounterPunch.org

GONE!

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/16/ward-churchill-rip

So bizarre! I accessed it today, 8/16, 9 am.

Yep. I saw him in 2005.

In April 2005, controversial speaker and former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill visited the Eastern Washington University campus near Spokane (in Cheney, WA) to deliver a speech, despite initial cancellation and security concerns raised by the university’s president. Churchill and student/faculty plaintiffs also briefly filed a civil rights lawsuit against university leadership in U.S. District Court in Spokane related to the speech dispute before it was dismissed.

Background & Context

• The Controversy: The visit occurred amid a national uproar over Churchill’s essay comparing some 9/11 victims to Nazi bureaucrats.
• EWU Canceled & Re-invited: EWU President Stephen Jordan initially canceled the appearance citing security and resource limits, but the campus Academic Senate subsequently reinvited him, leading Churchill to speak on campus in April 2005. [
• Legal Action: A lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington in Spokane (Churchill et al v. Eastern Washington University Board of Trustees) was voluntarily dismissed in June 2005

Before his Eichmann line, Churchill set up his case: “They [the 9/11 terrorists] did not license themselves to ‘target innocent civilians.’”

There you have it. Churchill was making the argument that the 9/11 terrorists did not target the WTC simply to kill innocent Americans. According to him, the 9/11 attackers went after the WTC because it was a legitimate military target in an act of war.

Of course, Churchill should have clarified his position in his original essay, which was sloppy given the weight of his argument and his tone (he defended and explained himself later, which we’ll get to in a moment). Unfortunately, his vagueness aroused a plethora of reactionary attacks, both from the right and left.

Churchill should have also emboldened this “little Eichmann” argument in his original piece by pointing out that CIA offices were housed in the WTC along with a large office of the cruise missile manufacturer, Raytheon. He could have also stressed the terrorists likely attacked the WTC in hopes of inflicting a massive fracture in the US economy, the driving force behind the violent US war machine. Instead, he left his readers to sit quietly with his “little Eichmanns” reference.

Even so, Marc Cooper and many others who criticized Churchill’s statement failed to point out that nowhere in his original essay did he argue that the WTC attacks were justified. In fact, he said it was an act of war, which he detests.

Churchill wrote that “if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war — ­and they can — then the same is true” for the US conduct in the Middle East.

He went on to compare the terrorists to Madeline Albright, who oversaw the US-imposed UN sanctions on Iraq, which killed tens of thousands, mostly elderly and small children. “Evil ­for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept ­was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she’d imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq.”

Does such a harsh critique of the US military actions, and Churchill’s comparison of these ventures to the WTC attacks imply that he was delighted people were killed on 9/11?

Not in the least.

In fact, Churchill argued that these were not individual acts of terror (unless you can also categorize US military activity as terror): “This is to say that since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were an act of war, not ‘terrorist incidents’ ­ they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results.”

FACTORIES!!!! U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? Well, it didn’t at the time.

Rooted in ancient Greece, the earliest universities were single communities of “masters and students.” In 18th century Europe they were oligarchies of sorts, apart from society, serving the elite, averse to change. But a distinctly American institution emerged after President Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which gave the states federal lands to fund universities serving agriculture, industry, and the general public. American universities combined the British emphasis on undergraduate education in humanities and the German emphasis on graduate research in science, with a new emphasis on public service. The massive infusion of federal research funds during and after World War II further fueled the rise of what Kerr called the “multiversity.”

The university, he said, was no longer cloistered, but now central to society, “a prime instrument of national purpose.” Its job was to produce new knowledge, by which he meant information in all its forms. As Kerr declared, “New knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth.”

“What the railroads did for the second half of the last century, and the automobile for the first half of this century, may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth.”

Here are some paragraphs from Ward I got before Counterpunch erased Joshua Frank’s article/interview of Ward:

Now, with respect to why anyone should even care about this stuff, let me put it this way: Like it or not, the universities have become a central component in the shaping of consciousness in the U.S., and stand to become ever more so over the foreseeable future. They can either fulfill their purported social function of inculcating critical consciousness, or they can do exactly the opposite. Absent a bona fide critical consciousness among a significant portion of the population, genuinely constructive socioeconomic and political transformation is impossible. What you end with instead is the ability of frauds like Barack Obama to pass himself off as a “progressive,” and a “left” discourse dominated by people on the order of Rachel Maddow, Ed Schulz, and the Rev [Al Sharpton: JF]. Or Michael Moore, for god’s sake. The superficiality and duplicity at issue were recently manifest in the Occupy movement.

That’s where we are, and it’s a long, long way from where we need to be. Hell, it’s a long way from the point we’d managed to reach forty-odd years ago. The decline has been dramatic, and it’s occurred at an ever more rapid rate since the ’90s. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them policy-driven. The steady withdrawal of public funding from higher ed over the past several decades is a really big one, correlated as it is to the twin evils of spiraling tuition costs and the growth of institutional dependence upon corporate subsidies.

It’s worth remembering that Reagan kicked off the tuition business at U/Cal back in 1970, mainly in retaliation for student activism in Berkeley and as a means of curbing an influx of black and Latino students. Once the barrier was breached—U/Cal, like most state university systems, used to be essentially tuition-free, the premise being that an increasingly better-educated electorate was a public good—the right quickly figured out how to use the situation to ever greater advantage. For example, raising tuition rates allowed decreasing levels of state funding, and that, in turn, helped with the lowering of corporate tax rates and the rates applicable to individuals in the uppermost income brackets.

In some ways more importantly, it didn’t take them long to realize that if rising tuition rates were coupled to making a degree the entry-level requirement for most jobs that had previously required a high school diploma, young people would be forced to go to college for that purpose rather than “the pursuit of higher learning,” per se, and they’d be compelled to incur significant personal debt in the process. This has not only been rather profitable for the banks and other entities that plunged into the business of making education loans—all of them federally guaranteed, of course—it’s provided corporate America with a labor force which, since federal law has been changed to preclude the retirement of student debt through bankruptcy, increasingly exists in a condition of veritable indentured servitude. The effect has essentially been that of a pacification program directed at students and workers alike.

Among the more insidious effects within the universities themselves has been that as students have been coerced into a trajectory of ever-greater preoccupation with making themselves more marketable to potential employers, the demand for courses designed for exactly that purpose has steadily mounted while demand for courses intended to broaden general knowledge and hone critical facility has correspondingly diminished. This has positioned corporations to specify the kinds of courses—mostly managerial and technical in nature—they prefer, and, in no small part utilizing the windfalls accruing from the earlier-mentioned reductions in corporate tax rates, to increasingly offset reductions in public funding by “sponsoring” certain curricula at the expense of others, not infrequently to the point of dictating content in preferred areas while proscribing it elsewhere within recipient institutions.

Were this not enough, the process is being rationalized and facilitated by a whole slew of lavishly-funded rightwing organizations, the objective of which—although each of them casts itself as a champion of academic freedom and “excellence”—is exactly the opposite. What they’re after is the complete elimination of critical studies from the curriculum, along with ethnic studies, women’s studies, and any other field serving to extend appreciations of cultural diversity into domains beyond those taught during the “good old days” of the 1950s. And that, of course, entails purging the professoriate of what David Horowitz characterizes as “dangerous professors,” or at least making a few prominent examples in order to chill the rest.

What you end up with, if they have their way, is universities that function as little more than glorified vo-techs. This is to say that emphasis will be placed upon the imparting of certain “useful” skill-sets, along with sufficient ideological indoctrination to blunt the potential of cognitive dissonance among most students with regard to the realities of American business as usual, and perhaps a basic grounding in triumphalist interpretations of Western culture. In substance, they’re demanding that the institutions be reconfigured in their entirety along the lines of what the corporations have taken to subsidizing and, by any estimation, they’re making considerable headway. All you have to do is listen for five minutes to Obama explaining why higher education is important to get the picture. You might as well be listening to a spokesperson for right-wing “university reform” outfits like ACTA.

Churchill and I talked briefly about the dual-use universities, about Monsanto U at Washington State University’s Ag program, or Walgreens’ sponsored pharmacy programs throughout the land. DARPA and colleges. He and I anticipated the complete groveling of colleges to the war “economy” — military ag mining chemical oil banking media surveillance physics math medicine culture congressional pharma insurance finance psychological marketing anthropology COMPLEX.

The second-largest weapons manufacturer on Earth wants your middle-schooler to love math. Raytheon (rebranded RTX) has been the title sponsor of the MATHCOUNTS competition since 2009, runs its own MathMovesU program, tours a MathAlive! exhibit through Gulf monarchies that happen to be its biggest customers, and maintains a long partnership with the Girl Scouts of the USA, for whom it launched a national computer science program and wrote many of the coding badges. A new MintPress News investigation by Alan Macleod maps this ecosystem, and it is bigger and stranger than you think.

Lockheed Martin hosts CYBERQUEST, an annual high-school competition steering teenagers toward careers in intelligence and cybersecurity, and runs internship pipelines it says convert 60 percent of participants into paid company roles. A $1.5 million donation to the University of Texas at Arlington bought its name onto the campus career center. Boeing’s Engineering is Elementary program starts on children in pre-K.

BAE Systems goes furthest of all. The maker of jets, missiles, howitzers and warships has published videos of its employees and British soldiers reading Rapunzel, Cinderella and Goldilocks to small children, complete with problem-solving worksheets. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade notes BAE claims to spend as much as 100 million pounds a year on educational activities, and argues the motive is not community spirit but recruitment and reputation-laundering aimed at people too young to know what an arms company is.

Set the fairytales against the product line. The Tomahawk cruise missile that destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Iran this February, killing at least 156 people, most of them pupils, is a Raytheon product; BAE subsystems supported the strike. The laser-guided bomb that hit a school bus in Dhahyan, Yemen in 2018, killing 40 children, was traced to Lockheed Martin. Human Rights Watch found that the GBU-39s dropped on the Khadija Girls’ School in Deir al-Balah in 2024 were built by Boeing. Some 97 percent of schools in Gaza have been hit, with US military aid to Israel running to $21.7 billion in two years, per Brown University researchers.

The symmetry is the story. In America, cash-starved school systems accept the arms industry’s money and its framing: empowerment, inclusion, girls in STEM. Abroad, children experience the same companies as the manufacturers of the things that fall on their schools. One set of kids gets the branded worksheets; the other gets the payload. The scouting movement was, after all, founded by a British general explicitly worried that boys weren’t fit enough for the next war. The pipeline has simply been modernized.

Long live the power of Ward:

Kirsten Bayes from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade was unimpressed by Raytheon’s attempts to improve their image and to train the next generation of weapons manufacturers. “Our view is that arms companies have no place in schools or colleges, and should certainly not be working with children’s educational charities. Schools and other places of education should be places where children learn, grow and develop their full potential. They should not be a recruiting ground where arms companies whitewash their activities.”

CAAT condemns the US and Israel’s illegal war on Iran that began on 28th February, which is a flagrant violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter which prohibits the use of force against another state, except in self-defence or following authorisation by a UN Security Council resolution. There was no evidence of an imminent attack by Iran on either the US, Israel, or any other state, that would support a claim that this is a ‘preemptive’ attack. It is an illegal war of aggression, pure and simple.

The attacks were launched, moreover, in the middle of negotiations on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme, supposedly one of the main reasons for the attack, which were apparently making progress, but where the US was clearly negotiating in bad faith.

CAAT likewise condemns Iranian attacks against civilian targets in Israel and the Gulf, and against states not involved in the attacks. International law allows for a defensive military response to armed aggression, but only against military targets. Iran has launched strikes on 27 American military bases, across Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as on Israeli military facilities, but also on civilian infrastructure and residential areas.

Already the US-Israeli attack has killed at least 787 Iranians including, most tragically, 165 civilians, mostly schoolgirls, in an attack on Saturday on a girls’ elementary school in Minab. At least 52 people have also been killed in Israel’s attack on Lebanon, and at least 27 have been killed in Israel and the Gulf region in Iran’s retaliatory strikes. The danger of even greater escalation is severe, and could lead to chaos in Iran and across the region. This war can only bring further death and destruction, and will do nothing to bring freedom to the people of Iran, who are now caught between US and Israeli bombs and regime bullets, or peace or stability to any country in the region.

American and Israeli foreign intervention is not about helping the people of Iran, but about gaining further neo-colonial control in the region. Significantly, this is motivated by Israel’s desire to continue its ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestine with even further impunity.

UK involvement and arms supplies

Following the start of the war, our government has once again aligned itself with the deadly violence of American foreign policy. Despite Starmer’s earlier promises that British military bases would not be used by the United States in any escalatory aggression in the region, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper continues to defend the government’s decision to go against its word and allow the US to use British bases for its attacks.

With British military bases in use and British planes “in the sky”, it is hard to believe this is anything other than the UK being pulled back into another American war in the Middle East, no matter how much our government states any British involvement is for so-called “defensive purposes”.

British involvement in these attacks goes beyond allowing the use of its bases by the US. In particular, both US and Israeli forces have used F-35 fighter jets in their strikes on Iran, 15% of which are produced in the UK. Indeed, the F-35 has played a crucial role in the war owing to its stealth capabilities, making it the first line of attack in ‘contested’ air space. The F-35 also played a crucial role in Israel’s previous attack on Iran in June 2025. The F-35 was also used by the US in its illegal attack on Venezuela in January.

Key components for F-35s are produced across England and Scotland, including:

• the rear fuselage by BAE Systems in Samlesbury, Lancashire
• the active interceptor system by BAE Systems in Rochester, Kent
• the targeting lasers by Leonardo in Edinburgh
• the bomb release cables by L3 Harris in Brighton.

In allowing the continued supply of F-35 components to Israel (via the US), despite their use in the genocide in Gaza, the UK government claimed that these supplies could not be stopped without jeopardising the global supply chain for the F-35 programme as a whole, which it claimed was crucial for preserving “peace and security”. But instead of peace and security, we are seeing this aircraft used again and again for illegal aggression and untold death, destruction and instability.

This illegal war of aggression, with all its devastating consequences, should call into question not only the UK’s long-standing subservience to US foreign policy and support for military aggression, but also its deep military and military-industrial dependence on, and intertwining with the United States and its arms industry. The US’s overwhelmingly dominant military machine, far from being a guarantee of global peace and international law, is – along with Russia, Israel, the UAE, and many others – one of its primary destroyers.

CAAT calls upon the UK government to:

• Reverse its decision to allow the US to use UK military bases to attack Iran, issue a clear condemnation of the US-Israeli war as a violation of international law, and ensure that the UK plays no part in the war going forward.
• Withdraw from the F-35 programme, immediately halting all F-35 component supplies to the US and Israel
• Suspend all arms supplies to the US that can be used for illegal military action against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, or other countries that have been threatened militarily by the US
• Work to reduce UK arms imports from the US, and end UK military and arms industry dependence on the US, pursuing a foreign and defence policy based on collective security, human rights and respect for international law.

Thanks Alan: How Lockheed Martin, Raytheon & BAE Systems are propagandizing children to support war through STEM

The most infamous arms companies manufacturing the very bombs for the United States and Israel to use in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran are partnering up with the U.S. military to fund STEM mathematics programs to propagandize children in the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and others.

Essays by Native American authors and activity on contemporary Native issues, including the quincentenary.

Table of Contents:

• Wind River / DeLinda Wunder
• The state of native North America / Evelyn Hu-DeHart
• Sand Creek: the morning after / M. Annette Jaimes
• Key Indian laws and cases / Ward Churchill and Glenn T. Morris
• The demography of native North America : a question of American Indian survival / Lenore A. Stiffarm with Phil Lane, Jr.
• International law and politics : toward a right to self-determination for indigenous peoples / Glenn T. Morris
• Self-determination and subordination : the past, present, and future of American Indian governance / Rebecca L. Robbins
• Federal Indian identification policy : a usurpation of indigenous sovereignty in North America / M. Annette Jaimes
• The earth is our mother : struggles for American Indian land and liberation in the contemporary United States / Ward Churchill
• American Indian water rights : the blood of life in native North America / Marianna Guerrero
• In usual and accustomed places : contemporary American Indian fishing rights struggles / The Institute for Natural Progress.
• (cont.) Native North America : the political economy of radioactive colonialism / Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke
• Trouble in high places : erosion of American Indian rights to religious freedom in the United States / Vine Deloria, Jr.
• A warrior caged : the continuing struggle of Leonard Peltier / Jim Vander Wall
• American Indian women : at the center of indigenous resistance in contemporary North America / M. Annette Jaimes with Theresa Halsey
• Patriots and pawns : state use of American Indians in the military and the process of nativization in the United States / Tom Holm
• American Indian education in the United States : indoctrination for subordination to colonialism / by Jorge Noreiga
• The great pretenders : further reflections on whiteshamanism / by Wendy Rose
• Cowboys and … notes on art, literature, and American Indians in the modern American mind / by Jimmie Durham
• Looking for Columbus : thought on the past, present and future of humanity / John Mohawk.

You have to suspend reality to understand how we GOT to this fucking clown show, amateur high school follies moment in history

For as long as Saturday Night Live has been on the air, it’s been a whole lot of “Jewish.”

Jewish cast members. Jewish writers. Jewish creator and executive producer. Jewish characters and Jewish sketches.

The iconic late-night institution Saturday Night Live has served as a significant platform for Jews and Judaism since its inception, and SNL’s 50th Anniversary Special, which aired Feb. 16, featured several Jewish individuals who have made the show into what it is today.

+—+

“By selecting Linda McMahon, Donald Trump is showing that he could not care less about our students’ futures,” said NEA President Becky Pringle.

“Rather than working to strengthen public schools, expand learning opportunities for students, and support educators, McMahon’s only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools, where 90% of students – and 95% of students with disabilities – learn, and give them to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools,” said Pringle.

• April 3, 2004 (Season 29): Trump hosted during his run with The Apprentice, appearing in several sketches alongside cast members like Darrell Hammond (who famously impersonated him).

• November 7, 2015 (Season 41): Trump hosted a second time while campaigning for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. This appearance drew significant protests outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza and considerable media controversy

Linda McMahon’s Only Qualification as Education Secretary Is a History of Spreading Hate

Even in Trump’s cabinet of hucksters, reality-show stars, and drunk white nationalists, Linda McMahon is a bizarre choice for education secretary.

The first Major League Baseball player to break the color line was Jack Roosevelt Robinson in 1947. The first Black man, in the restricted, country club world of golf, to play in the Masters was Lee Elder in 1975.

The first Black man’s win of the World Wrestling Federation championship was in 1997, when the biracial charisma-machine Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson took the belt. It would not happen again for another Black wrestler until 2019, when the title adorned the waist of Kofi Kingston. The longtime fan favorite was then squashed in eight seconds by German American Übermensch Brock Lesnar and never got a rematch. This backstage decision was widely perceived as humiliating to Kingston and a slap in the face to fans and Black wrestlers who were literally crying with joy when Kofi was crowned

In the world of sports entertainment, where outcomes are scripted, the most common role for Black wrestlers had always been minstrelsy: Ugandan headhunters, “voodoo practitioners” holding human skulls, and a Black woman named Sapphire. (The “Sapphire caricature” is a minstrel trope from the early 20th century, so none of this was subtle.)

SNL producers forbade him from discussing Gaza during his hosting appearances.

Dave Chappelle Says ‘SNL’ Producers Forbade Him From Talking About Gaza And Trans People.

Fifty years before President Donald Trump proposed that the U.S. should take over Gaza, Saturday Night Live — in its very first episode on Oct. 11, 1975 — introduced a land swap solution to Middle East peace: The state of Israel and the state of Georgia could switch places.

The swap was the subject of a short film by Albert Brooks that aired on SNL. The conceit: A news broadcast airs a press conference with an announcement. Several politicians are seated at a long table, flanked by flags.

“In an unprecedented move to ease world tensions,” a narrator declares, “the country of Israel and the state of Georgia have agreed to change places. “The entire state of Georgia — residents, businesses, all forms of commerce — will relocate in the Middle East on January 1st, 1977. No buildings will be moved. It will be an even property exchange.”

The camera cuts to the Israeli leader: “I hope that New Orleans will be easier to deal with than Cairo,” and the representative from Georgia adds, “I know that my entire state is looking forward to heat without humidity.”

Dirty mind washing, brain spinning, rinse and repeat:

From ‘Coffee Talk’ to ‘The Hanukkah Song,’ 36 standout Jewish moments from 50 years of ‘Saturday Night Live’

Many Jewish comedy greats got their start in the once-scrappy comedy sketch show, which celebrates its golden anniversary this weekend.

What was he thinking to be mayor of Jew York City. Jew York Times keeps the industry of Holocaust crap going:

Oh, betrayal!

They fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan. Now they worry about losing their green cards.

“When I came here, I thought that all my problems were solved, that now is the time to build my future right here,” Sasad said, adding that he is concerned about his ability to stay in school, have a career or even travel outside the U.S. in an emergency. “What now? I cannot focus on my long-term goals. Now all of my thoughts are ‘what if?’ situations. A lot of ‘what if?’ situations [are] giving me anxiety and depression.”

Jew World — Surveillance ….

Marion County employees say pattern of retaliation, surveillance keeps them quiet – Salem Reporter

Yeah, that fake social-ist cuntry….

Water companies could be allowed to raise bills for customers during periods of drought under proposals being considered by the sector’s regulator for England and Wales.

Suppliers would be permitted to factor “water scarcity” into bills as part of efforts to reduce consumption under Ofwat’s plans, which are being likened to surge pricing – the practice where private hire firms raise taxi fares at times of higher demand.

The proposals come just a few days after the prime minster, Andy Burnham, said he was angry with water companies and accused them of treating their customers like a “blank cheque” after more than a dozen firms were given the green light to raise water bills even higher.

It emerged last Thursday that five companies – Southern Water, Thames Water, Severn Trent, Wessex Water and South East Water – would be allowed to raise bills more than originally planned before the end of the decade to allow for billions of pounds of extra spending on repairs and infrastructure.

Anal rape: Public anger over the behaviour of water companies has soared in recent years as bills have continued to climb even while sewage has flowed into the nation’s waterways and firms have increased bosses’ pay and handed out millions of pounds in dividends to shareholders.

CAPITALISM, as in Chlamydia Capitalism!

US law to investigate foodborne illness outbreaks has been delayed for 15 years

Law was set to go into effect in January, months before cyclosporiasis outbreak, but now is set for 2028.

See that Lorne Michaels set, everywhere you fucking turn? ‘Godfather of AI’ says billionaires like Elon Musk are right about the future of work—but he predicts mass unemployment is on its way.

Crimes against humanity, just another day in the life of the Jews. ‘Water and salt’: Qusra residents trapped in Israeli settler siege

As the blockade enters its second week, Palestinians remain trapped by settlers and soldiers without water or power.

Expect Jew Lawyers getting in on the lawsuits against citizens.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) – With many communities using what are often called Flock cameras in South Dakota, Aberdeen has decided against using the surveillance technology.

In a Friday post, Aberdeen Mayor Travis Schaunaman announced that the city does not plan to install license plate reader cameras in the Aberdeen area. The planned police work session involving the technology has also been canceled.

“For Aberdeen, this issue is settled,” Schaunaman said in his post.

The cameras are automated license plate readers or license plate readers. The Flock Safety company makes many of them.

More difficult to retain uniformed fucking mercenaries? That’s the position of this POS BIPOC?

More brown pieces of shit that need machetes to the head:

Humanoid robots capable of autonomously navigating rugged terrain and detecting people could eventually join federal agents patrolling the southern border, with one U.S. robotics company telling Fox News Digital it has already demonstrated the technology to Department of Homeland Security officials.

Sankaet Pathak, founder and CEO of Foundation, spoke with Fox News Digital to discuss the company’s development of humanoid robotics and their potential applications at the border.

Pathak said Foundation is in talks with several national security agencies.

How’s that working out, Brown Piece of Shit? AI and your killer robots going to solve this?

‘Uncharted territory’: Second-largest reservoir in US plunges to a record low

The “outrageous” handcuffing of a New Orleans journalist covering the indictment in July of Louisiana’s attorney general – a case that ultimately was dismissed – conveyed “a chilling message to members of the press and the public” for which there is no excuse, according to a prominent media rights advocacy organization.

An attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) made those assertions in a recent letter to the New Orleans criminal district courthouse where deputies temporarily detained WWL Louisiana investigative producer Danny Monteverde and outlet lawyer Elana Beiser in the course of their duties in early July.

Beiser and Monteverde, whose station is a Guardian reporting partner, were trying to object to judge Leon Roche’s closure of the courtroom where a grand jury had handed up an indictment against state attorney general, Liz Murrill, on accusations that she had threatened the jobs of Democratic New Orleans officials who fought a Republican-led overhaul. A 5 August letter from RCFP attorney Virginia Hamrick to New Orleans criminal court chief judge contended that there were “no findings justifying closure” and urged the courthouse to “properly hear and consider objections of the public and the press before any … proceedings are closed”.

“Refrain from detaining reporters (or their counsel) who are simply exercising their constitutional rights,” which include the access to court proceedings, Hamrick’s letter continued. The missive added that such “outrageous actions send a chilling message to members of the press and the public who may seek to object to closure in the future”.

“Members of the public – including journalists – should not fear being hauled away in handcuffs merely for asserting these basic rights,” Hamrick went on, saying open access to court proceedings “informs the public, ensures an accurate portrayal of proceedings and promotes government accountability”.

The letter alluded to arguments from Roche that he closed the courtroom where the indictment had been handed up – and outside which Monteverde and Beiser were handcuffed – in order “to protect grand jurors’ safety and anonymity”.

“But such concerns do not warrant the closure of a courtroom without hearing objections to such closure,” Hamrick’s letter said. “Moreover, there is no excuse for deputies to handcuff reporters and counsel asking to be heard.”

Hamrick’s letter also offered the New Orleans criminal courthouse “comprehensive and collaborative training regarding the importance and legality of access to judicial proceedings” from the RCFP, whose steering committee members include highly regarded former Washington Post editor-in-chief Marty Baron and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

The Guardian reached out to Lombard, Roche and WWL for comment.

Prior to Monteverde and Beiser’s handcuffing, there had been months of political tensions between Louisiana Republicans and New Orleans Democrats over a law that eliminated a court clerk position won in an election by Calvin Duncan, who spent nearly three decades in prison in connection to a murder that he was exonerated of having committed.

SNL on crack: World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s flagship crypto venture, said on Friday that its trust company has received preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to become a bank.

Upon final approval, World Liberty Trust will operate as a federally chartered national trust bank. The charter will allow World Liberty to issue, redeem and safeguard USD1, the dollar-backed stablecoin that World Liberty launched last year. The stablecoin, whose reserves are currently custodied with BitGo, has a market value of about $4 billion.

What might go wrong here? Special Operations Veterans Could Carry Concealed Guns in All 50 States Under New Bills

New bills would let qualified special operations veterans carry concealed guns nationwide, extending protections now given to retired police.

Our Special Operations Forces spend their careers protecting the American people with unmatched discipline, judgment, and professionalism, Sheehy said in announcing his legislation. This bill honors that reality by giving qualified special operators the same nationwide concealed carry privileges already afforded to retired law enforcement officers.

Datacentres drive up big tech’s carbon emissions to a third of those of France

Microsoft, Amazon and Google say they still aim to achieve net zero output despite construction boom.

Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday dismissed criticism over the Justice Department’s (DOJ) recent opinion on executive privilege over communications between the president and “private advisors” outside of government, saying that it is not “any novel legal concept.”

“Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream played a clip to Blanche of Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) telling MS NOW that the DOJ’s opinion is “about hiding corruption. “It’s about allowing the president to do whatever he wants to do.”

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