JOY FOR MAYOR – Welcome to Brave and Free Santa Cruz (Part 1.)

My response to Joy Schendledecker’s essay posted on brattononline

Food Not Bombs marches to Draper Nuclear Weapons Lab Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 6, 1981.

“It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes have rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class” – David Brooks – commentator – August 4, 2023. 

In her post on brattononline, Joy Schendledecker may have jumped to some conclusions about the local community group Brave and Free Santa Cruz. I am pleased that she has given me the opportunity to introduce more people to our efforts to protect our health, defend our civil liberties and work for peace.

Brave and Free’s first action was our participation in the Fourth of July Parades in 2022, where we were greeted with enthusiastic support by the public. It seems many people were done with the coercion, restrictions and mandates, and were relieved that someone was breaking the silence.

With economic conditions growing more difficult, with attacks on our privacy through the implementation of biometric ID connected to programmable Central Banks Digital Currency, and with threats of a global war, we need more groups like Brave and Free Santa Cruz that are bringing people together from diverse political, racial and cultural backgrounds.

I have found that people share much more in common with one another than what the media says divides us. We all want to enjoy time with our families and friends. We want to have a safe place to sleep and tasty food to eat, we want to live a life of meaning with dignity.

But those in power want us fighting and have intentionally magnified our differences, fostering a red blue tribalism.

One of the most terrifying features cultivated by those in power is how close-minded people who support their agenda have become. Anyone who isn’t on board is considered a dumb hick Trump Putin puppet.

We are considered that “basket of deplorables”.  Yet we are that working class that Joy for Mayor’s campaign literature claimed to be supporting. We are the people who repair your cars, prepare your food and wire your homes. We are people who are capable of thinking for ourselves.

Joy’s essay echoes the perspective of David Brooks, when he sneers at struggling Americans calling us “the less-educated classes”, while also assuming we all support Trump. But really, we are the essential workers. Thankfully, a growing number of people are understanding that the amplified caricature of division exploited by the ruling class isn’t a true depiction of our country. It’s a fiction. 

I would have never imagined that the left which I have been a part of for over five decades would come to support NATO expansion and the arming of white nationalists and Nazis. A left that supports the escalation in the nine year Ukrainian war. We denounced Victoria Nuland and her boss Dick Cheney when they instigated the Iraq war based on lies, but we praise her today for starting the war against Russia also based on lies. This conflict with Russia is on the verge of becoming a world war, this time between nuclear armed nations. 

This is a left that has abandoned class struggle and instead embraces the master’s hyped-up divide and conquer culture wars. Many of my left friends have become enforcers of the program to geofence ourselves into the billionaire class’s digital prison. A left that has abandoned the right to free speech, and now argues that we must be protected from information that might challenge the interests of the military industrial state. 

The gatekeepers of correct-think work at places like the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, whose website brags of the inclusion of former CIA agents on its board.  These gatekeepers work at NATO’s Atlantic Council  and the International Monetary Fund, with their plans for a programmable Central Bank Digital Currency linked to biometric facial recognition. They also work at the United Nations, which is promising to provide “proof of personhood’ digital ID for everyone on Earth. No wonder Elon Musk plans to place 65,000 satellites in orbit in this program to connect everyone to their totalitarian matrix. Privacy has vanished. 

Keith visits with his anti-globalization colleague Vandana Shiva

THE LEFT’S LONG TRADITION OF RESISTING THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE ECONOMY

The left I have been a part of has a long history of organizing against the globalization of the economy. On a chilly March 26, 1981, Food Not Bombs set up its first soup line outside the Federal Reserve Tower on Atlantic Avenue in Boston, to protest the policies of the Bank of Boston, its interlocking board of directors, and their investments in a global web of resource extraction and ghetto creating redlining. 

We protested Clinton’s NAFTA. We rallied outside the offices of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund during their annual meetings. In 1992 I joined tens of thousands of labor, environmental and human rights activists in Bonn, West Germany to protest the creation of the Euro and the European Union.  

Every year the left gathers in Davos, Switzerland to denounce the exploitative policies of the World Economic Forum.  In 1997, I spent two months traveling North America on the UnFree Trade Tour, speaking out against the World Trade Organization’s framework of corporate consolidation.  We formed the Direct Action Network, disrupting the WTO’s Seattle summit in November 1999 and took our protest against the WTO to Cancún and Genoa.

I worked with anti-war activist Ronnie Cummings and food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva on the Millions Against Monsanto Campaign in an effort to stop the patenting of seeds. Private ownership of life is one key element of the trade agreements that we have been fighting against. 

So, when the institutions that those of us had spent decades protesting against started to implement what they called Build Back Better, Fourth Industrial Revolution, and “Great Reset”, I knew I had to push back.

Food Not Bombs shares meals everyday for three years during the lockdowns

CITIZEN POLICING IN THE SERVICE OF THE STATE AND THEIR BILLIONAIRE MASTERS

What surprised me was how many of those I had been working with suddenly came to the defense of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, and his deployment of the military counter measures born from the gain-of-function research that my friends and I had spent decades organizing against.  

Even more horrifying was the way these allies willingly enforced the authoritarian orders of the corporate state. They blocked the participation of the working class from their meetings, cafes and film showings, a working class which is understandably suspicious of government mandates and threats to their employment.  

So, on the day Biden announced the end of the pandemic, I went to London Nelson Community Center to support Joy’s campaign for mayor. Soon after I arrived, when I failed to show my vaccination papers, three of her supporters started physically assaulting me in this public facility. That “show your papers” demand recalled the dark days of Apartheid South Africa, the East German secret police Stasi or my days with working with Palestinian farmers and merchants on the West Bank.  Another local peace activist in her 70’s was also the victim of assault and battery at the same event when she failed to show her papers. Violently brutalizing your supporters might not be the best way to win an election.

Naturally, when I was being personally threatened by the emergence of this new totalitarian atmosphere, I supported the formation of a local movement to stop it. There were many months when my family and I thought we were alone in seeing the formation of a dystopian fascist corporate state. I recalled the sad entries in German artist Kathe Kollwitz’s diary about her colleagues’ growing support of Hitler.   It would be months before I would learn that other progressive activists shared my horror at the clampdown. 

Keith and Bas visiting after sharing food in a poor neighborhood in the Philippines.

ARE THESE PEOPLE REALLY GULLIBLE FAR-RIGHT HOMOPHOBIC RACISTS?

Two local women, Diane D. Jones, a retired carpenter, and Kathleen Lynch, a social worker, started Brave and Free Santa Cruz to defend the freedoms that are under attack. Kathleen expressed that you must be brave in these Draconian times if you wished to stay free. 

A mass hysteria had ensued against anyone who did not agree with the messaging of the New York Times, National Public Radio and CNN. People were insulted and bullied into compliance with unscientifically based orders.  We now know, from FOIA emails of the NIH and court cases, that the masking and six foot “social distancing” were just made up by the security agencies without any scientific basis. Stopping the virus dead in its tracks with two injections and two weeks to flatten the curve turned into months of restrictions and regular boosters. Our vaccinated friends kept getting COVID while the unvaccinated rarely contracted the illness. Now, it looks like the drumbeat demanding a return to those failed policies is again growing louder in the halls of government, in the media and online. Another winter of virtue signaling and social control. 

I was as frightened as anyone when the pandemic was announced, but I soon started to think that some things were not adding up. My friend, virologist Dr Shannon Murray, who had spent years at the NIH developing the mRNA technology, warned me against using the experimental countermeasure. She explained that the survival rate of their lab subjects was very poor and that there could be another agenda behind the pandemic.

Yet, those who just years before had been my allies in denouncing the military, the CIA and corporate power were now treating me as though I was diseased.  A baseless Witch Hunt of political correctness descended on our community. Noam Chomsky even suggested the unvaccinated be interned in prison camps and left to starve. I could relate to the concerns of Kathleen and Diane.

Joy’s essay included, “I have nothing against any of the individuals in this group, since (as far as I know) I don’t know any of them particularly well. I suspect that a few people that I like very much may be increasingly drawn to them as they are drawn to support RFK Jr’s seriously effed-up presidential bid or Ukraine anti-war positions that may lean towards Putin-apologists.” 

BRAVE AND FREE SANTA CRUZ

https://braveandfreesantacruz.org/

PLEASE SEE PART 2.