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In 2014, we won a $15-an-hour minimum wage in Seattle. One year to the day before it passed, Nick Licata, then the most “progressive” city council member in Seattle, told us, “There’s no way that $15 can win in Seattle.” I was working as a community organizer with Working Washington, a nonprofit created out of a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) campaign. What passed was a watered-down version, phasing in the minimum wage over time according to employer size and other factors. Still, Seattle became the first major city in the country to enact a $15 minimum wage, amidst hysterical cries from the far right that the city would immediately crash (surprise, they were wrong).

We had been organizing worker committees in the fast food sector, a tough industry by conventional union standards. One of the workers I organized with Beatriz, was an undocumented woman whose third language was English, after her Indigenous language and Spanish. She had left rural Mexico close to a decade earlier in search of economic opportunity to provide for the two kids she had to leave behind. She worked full time at two McDonald’s, one corporate-owned (rare for the company) and one owned by a franchisee. At the corporate store, she’d gotten regular, though extremely meager, raises over the years. At the franchise, she hadn’t gotten a single raise in the seven years she’d worked there. In the weeks before the vote, she had been organizing her coworkers to share their testimonies with the city council and the press about why being frozen at the state minimum of $9.32 was ruinous for workers in Seattle. After the news broke that we’d won, she called me to say, “Now I will finally be able to see my children for the first time in seven years.”

That story is so potent because it shows the power of organizing, even for something that was, in the end, an extremely modest, incremental increase to the minimum wage. When unions reach out to the unorganized, and when workers come together in solidarity, they change the trajectory of their lives, their workplaces, and the world. She and her coworkers had done more than fight for a raise; they had united for a shared vision of dignity. Organizing is itself the work. It is the shared sacrifice of our individual time and energy in order to collectively struggle towards dignity for all

Over a decade later, there’s ludicrous raving about AI destroying all work. The billionaire class pontificates on how this technology will usher in some sort of socialism, but first we just have to give up everything to the richest people on earth because “they know what they’re doing.” In this evolving context, I can’t help but think of Beatriz’s story. The relationships we build with one another will always yield tremendous discovery about ourselves and others as we penetrate the mystery of existence together. Machines can never take away what is most central to our being — solidarity.

Union organizing is more pertinent than ever. It’s a direct challenge to the AI and environmental crises we face with the billionaire scourge destroying the planet, and it’s available to all of us, right now. Whenever and however we work, we interact with coworkers, bosses (or algorithms, in the case of gig workers), and clients of one kind or another. Organizing simply requires fellow workers to come together toward a common goal despite the differences between them, differences that are necessary for democracy.

This is why union organizing lends itself so beautifully to political organizing, or rather, why they are the exact same thing. We do not choose our coworkers, and they can represent a wide swath of society, but it is through organizing that we learn to bridge the supposed barriers between us to build toward dignified wages and working conditions. This means actively listening to and cultivating sincere relationships with people who don’t already think as we do, not relegating ourselves to the politics of identitarian “purity” that cynically perpetuate the crisis we find ourselves in.

One thing is clear — there will never be a shortage of work, only a shortage of imagination. That we can envision the end of the world before we can imagine the end of capitalism is telling. Our collective imagination is depleted, and the machines, with their attention-capturing algorithms, risk making this symptom even more acute as we outsource even our most trivial thinking to them. Getting rid of tedium isn’t inherently a bad thing; forfeiting our ability to understand our world is. Real thinking and organizing orients itself towards conflict. This is diametrically opposed to the notion of a perfect frictionless life sold by AI firms. Struggle is infinite and is a necessary condition for being human.

Nicholas Hefling is a longtime union staffer and local area labor organizer.

On October 4, we stood beside the beautiful Columbia River in Wenatchee and asked people passing by on the Loop Trail if they wanted to see a data center moratorium. We had them sign their initials on a tally board under “YES” or “NO.” During the time that we were there, we collected 24 “YES”s and 0 “NO”s.

Our action was one of at least 19 events that were part of a statewide day of action demanding a data center moratorium in Washington, organized by Washington AI Resistance. 15 cities participated, including Olympia, Seattle, Tacoma, Tukwila, Moses Lake, Cle Elum, Ellesnburg, and Spokane. We planned to take our tally board to the last of three community meetings hosted by our Chelan County commissioners to show demand for a countywide data center moratorium.

Without a statewide data center moratorium, as a Puget Sound Energy (PSE) customer, your electric rates hinge on enough rural Eastern Washingtonians getting mad at data centers to stop them from coming into our communities and gobbling up our power. Your fate lies in our hands.

Obligation to Serve

At the county commissioner community meetings, we brandished a new zine which highlights an April 2026 report by Energy and Environmental Economics (E3). You can view the zine in English or Spanish on the No Data Centers NCW Linktree.

Chelan PUD did not like us talking about this report, even though they were one of the utilities that had sponsored the study.

The report paints a dire picture of the Pacific Northwest’s ability to provide enough power for our region in the coming years. They predict an almost nine gigawatt power supply shortfall by 2030. This comes with a risk of rolling blackouts (“reliability events”) and unavoidable rate increases. The largest driver of load growth is “anticipated data center interconnection.”

Despite this, the report never suggests reducing the size or number of data centers as a solution.

Alarmingly, the E3 report reads almost like an ad for natural gas. It says that “Achieving 100% carbon reductions is not feasible without at least one ‘clean firm’ technology available at scale,” and “If new natural [gas] generation is not allowed, costs and build requirements increase significantly.”

When I read this, I had an awful premonition of this report being leveraged to strike down the Clean Energy Transformation Act rather than being used to reign in data centers.

PSE just proposed a new three-year plan that would increase electric rates by nearly 30%. And Chelan PUD, after adamantly insisting that their rate policy would insulate residents from rate hikes, just unveiled a five-year plan that would increase our rates by nearly 28%. Chelan PUD actually supplies a large portion of PSE’s power: PSE gets 25% of our hydropower output.

There is less and less energy to go around — especially renewable energy. Every new data center competes for power with existing customers, including utilities like PSE.

During a Chelan County candidate forum hosted by independent reporter Dominick Bonny, an interesting question came up in the Zoom chat, which one candidate chose to answer. His response didn’t make it into Bonny’s recap, but I took note of it. Aaron Young is simply a candidate running for PUD Commissioner, not a current commissioner, but his viewpoint is very typical for the position.

The question asked: “What will you do to ensure that not only local Chelan County residents but also Washington state residents on the west side will be protected from rate increases due to increased demand on our local renewable energy from data centers? Also, what will you do to ensure that data centers are not taking away power that could be used to help us transition off of fossil fuels?”

Young responded: “As a Chelan County PUD Commissioner, I would place the needs of Chelan County first. It would not be my practice to consider the costs of power in other areas as part of the decision making process. I would place importance on the reliability, sustainability and responsible approach to all power generation, and all rate decisions. It is the responsibility of the PUD to provide service to Chelan county customers and not to decide which customers to provide power to.”

For anyone in Western Washington hoping that our Chelan County elected officials will have your best interests at heart, know that you don’t factor into their decisions at all. They will sell you out in an instant to supply power to data centers instead.

This is the so-called “obligation to serve.”

The Community Speaks

At the September 30 community meeting in Leavenworth, we asked Chelan County Commissioner Shon Smith point-blank if he would support a data center moratorium. He said at this time, no.

Most of the Leavenworth residents were angry about a cell tower that was slated to be installed in the area. But as we expressed concerns over data centers, other folks started asking questions about them, too.

At the very end, a constituent took an informal poll. He asked who in the room wanted to see six new hyperscale data centers in Chelan County. Zero hands went up. Then he asked who wanted to see a pause in data center construction in Chelan County. Every single hand in the room went up — including Commissioner Smith’s. He didn’t want to be the only one not raising his hand.

In the space of two hours, we successfully peer-pressured one county commissioner into reversing his position, albeit in a very informal, non-binding vote.

If this was the response at Leavenworth, what were we going to see at Chelan County Commissioner Kevin Overbay’s community meeting a few days later? That one would be happening in Malaga, ground zero for hyperscale data centers in our county.

Not long after, I noticed a sign up in Wenatchee that said “No data centers next to homes.” It directed people to attend the same meeting we were planning on bringing our tally board to.

I felt a surge of excitement in my chest as soon as I saw that sign, because it was not ours. Someone else in town was trying to organize people to fight data centers. Commissioner Overbay had a storm coming his way.

So many people came to Malaga Fire Hall on October 7, the crowd spilled to the sidewalk outside of the building.

To my surprise, data centers weren’t the only topic on the minds of Malaga residents at that community meeting. After the combined organizing efforts of No Data Centers NCW and the community member who put up that sign and paid for mailers to be sent out, I assumed most of the attendees were there because of data centers. But people had other questions and concerns. They easily filled the hour and 40 minutes that Commissioner Overbay blocked off before allowing the data center topic to finally be opened. Later, someone explained to me that Malaga is undergoing a lot of change right now. The high level of public engagement at this community meeting reflected people’s anxiety over the future.

They were watching the rural community where they had spent their lives develop into something else right before their eyes.

Many of their concerns were indirectly data center concerns. For instance, Microsoft is funding an infrastructure upgrade to Malaga’s water system. This invites questions about the aquifer and related issues. Microsoft is of course benefiting directly from these infrastructure improvements, which are necessary to support the development of their data center campus in the area.

Examples like this are cited when our elected officials tout the benefits of data centers. Personally, I don’t think we should rely on corporations to fund essential infrastructure. Microsoft will only help us as long as it benefits them. This is the devil’s bargain they offer us. Let us in, and we will pay for all of the things you can’t or won’t fund with taxes.

It’s easy to see how community after community falls for this trick. Everyone is desperate for easy money, and no one wants to look at all the problems that come with it.

In public comments, and in the “Neighbor Brief” that was distributed among the attendees, Malaga residents cited concerns with light pollution, noise pollution, and air pollution. One person’s voice shook with emotion as she expressed worries about how the light from the data center might be affecting the local bat population.

That night, after the community meeting wrapped up a full hour after its scheduled time, we drove by the Microsoft data center before heading home. The data center campus is impossible to miss. Bright lights flood the sky, illuminating the nearby hills with a ghastly glow.

As I stared out at it, I thought about the hunger and excess of these tech companies. What incredible greed to take not only our power and water and land, but the stars, too.

Morgan Atwater can be reached at morganatwaterwrites@proton.me.

This is the second part of the talk given by Peter Bohmer on Saturday, September 19, 2026 at the “United in Solidarity: Our Response to Hierarchy and Domination” conference at the University of Vienna, Austria. The first part appeared in the last online issue of Works in Progress. The speech has been modified for brevity and clarity.

Critical Solidarity

In the late 1960’s and 1970’s, much of the New Left was in solidarity with two major movements. One was the anti-war movement for Vietnam and its heroic fight against the United States. The other was the victorious Cuban Revolution. To me, a part of the New Left, looking back 50 years later, our positions were right. These were positive alternatives for the Global South — substantial land reform, free medical care and education, full employment, subsidizing basic needs, and anti-imperialism. Many of us were critical of Cuban support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but our overall support for Cuba tended to be uncritical. We convinced ourselves that Vietnam and Cuba were more democratic, less bureaucratic, and less top-down — and that workers had more power in those societies than they really did. Our values were good, but we didn’t see these negative aspects. This reminds me of many people today idealizing Rojava and the Zapatistas, who certainly deserve solidarity and are positive alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, but these communities and regions are not as liberatory and socialist as they are idealized to be.

I am advocating for a position of critical support. We should respect self-determination and not require that movements we support to share all our positions. However, we must also be discerning when the organizations and political parties challenging the U.S. do not have liberatory politics themselves: when they are patriarchal or sectarian towards other religions and ethnicities, or when their political project is not aimed at improving the lives and power of the popular classes. It is important to carefully investigate the real situation and not accept the overly negative portraits of revolutionary groups painted by Western media, nor uncritically support a group solely because they challenge U.S. power. Critical does not mean finding excuses to not be in solidarity. However, the more we are in active solidarity with liberation movements and governments resisting U.S. domination and intervention, the more we have the right to also offer some criticism.

In the 1980’s, a period of neoliberalism and right-wing ascendancy and rule in many parts of the world, approximately 100,000 solidarity activists from the U.S. went to Nicaragua. Activists supported the Sandinista government and leftist movements there between 1979, when the Sandinistas took power, until 1990 when they lost the election. Many went to experience a society that was resisting the CIA-backed Contras and U.S. subversion — David vs Goliath. There seemed to be a socialism developing that was also democratic; the “New Left” coming to power. I worked for one of the Sandinista ministries in 1988, the Nicaraguan Institute of Social Security.

A major group in solidarity with the El Salvadoran revolutionary struggle that formed in 1980 and still continues today is CISPES, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. It supported with literature, rallies, demonstrations, direct action, and material aid for the FMLN — the united group fighting the U.S. backed right wing governments there. CISPES supported the social movements in El Salvador, including unions and the major women’s organization. CISPES organized visits of its members to go to El Salvador to meet with courageous organizers there. It worked in coalition with religious groups that opposed U.S. intervention. The movement in the U.S. prevented a U.S. invasion which was a victory. However, we couldn’t stop the damage to these countries and the killing of many militants which is an important factor in the non-progressive development of these societies since the 1990’s.

In Nicaragua in the 1970s, and El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s, there were several guerilla organizations fighting their reactionary, U.S. supported governments. The Left united in these three cases, although as separate organizations: as the FSLN (also known as the Sandinistas) in Nicaragua; the FMLN in El Salvador, and the UNRG in Guatemala. Solidarity groups in the U.S. supported these three coalitions rather than the individual guerilla organizations. It is wrong for solidarity groups to pick a single organization to support when there are more than one who are deserving of support. It is us choosing who we prefer instead of the people of the country involved in a revolutionary movement. For example, in South Africa, although I personally preferred the politics of the African National Congress ANC for their inclusiveness and for their socialist program over the Pan African Congress (PAC), I thought we should be in solidarity with both. In retrospect, we should have also been in critical support of both the two main liberation groups in Zimbabwe, ZAPU and ZANU, not just ZANU. In other anti-colonial struggles in southern Africa, there were groups that espoused decolonization and independence but were supported by and dependent on the CIA and South African intelligence. They were counterrevolutionary. One example of this was UNITA in Angola. Leftists need to investigate carefully before making these important choices.

A criticism made of global solidarity activism is that our intervention in the politics and struggles in other countries resembles what the U.S. government does; that our interference in other countries violates their right to self-determination. My response is that our actions and motives are actually totally different. The aim of U.S. intervention is U.S. capitalist domination and against the interests of most of the local population. It is our responsibility to oppose this. U.S. government involvement in the internal politics of other countries is fundamentally different from grassroots solidarity groups in the U.S. acting in solidarity and supporting struggles with and by local people, parties, and organizations against imperialist and capitalist domination.

Palestine

I have been actively supporting Palestinian self-determination and organizing in solidarity with Palestinian Marxist groups since the 1970’s. I have advocated for an arms embargo of Israel and since 2005, and I support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. Solidarity with Palestine has been a major part of my activism since October 2023. The Palestine solidarity movement has contributed to declining popular support for Israel in the general population, and increasingly by the U.S. Congress despite U.S policy not changing (as backing Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank continues). Opposing U.S. support of Israel should be a part of the agenda of every progressive group in the United States, it is the defining moral issue of our time. The Palestinian right to armed resistance is also deserving of our solidarity. This means critically supporting Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups in their resisting the Israeli genocide. This does not mean uncritical solidarity with and support of Hamas and other organizations whose vision is not liberatory. Note that I am making a distinction between supporting Palestinian resistance in which Hamas plays the major role today versus specifically supporting Hamas as a revolutionary party. Their ideology and policies are patriarchal. They are neither democratic nor do they promote economic equality in Gaza. Hamas has the right to fight an armed struggle against the Israeli occupation and ongoing blockade, but this does not mean that I support the killing of Israeli civilians except when Israeli civilians are committing violence and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In our activism and when speaking and writing about Palestine, our focus should be on ending the horrific U.S. role and not on Hamas’s shortcomings given the already strong public prejudice against Palestinian armed resistance. This has meant understanding the reasons for the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, and neither publicly condemning nor supporting it. This was a position of Palestine Action of South Sound, the group I actively participated in between 2023 and 2026.

Debate on How to Oppose the Iran War

I will end with a brief analysis of the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran that began on February 28, 2026. I will briefly present two major positions of the left respectively, both of which strongly oppose the ongoing U.S. aggression. The first position is presented in a letter to The Guardian, August 20, 2026. “To Iran’s Political Prisoners, Trapped “Between Two Blades of a Scissor”, Open Letter”, signed by several well-known left activists and writers, including Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Walden Bello. It totally opposes the U.S. and Israeli war and sanctions against Iran but also calls for supporting Iranian political prisoners. I support this position.

The second position calls for an anti-war movement that does not make any criticism of the ruling class of Iran, or of repression there. In this perspective, the position and practice of the anti-war movement should be limited to the task of ending the war and the sanctions against Iran. The debate has been heated on social media.

For the most part, both sides agree that Iran is a repressive, patriarchal, capitalist society. I believe that although our main task is ending the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, we should also support Iran’s political prisoners and demand that their government end executions, which are numerous, the highest per capita in the world. The former is a strong anti-interventionist position; solidarity with Iranian political prisoners but not with the Iranian state. Complicating this position is that Iran is waging a brilliant defensive war against the United States which is undermining U.S. military and political hegemony and making the world more multi-polar. The U.S. aggression has little support world-wide, no prospect of achieving its objectives, and unequivocally weakens the position of the dollar and United States internationally.

I am arguing for reforms in Iran and support those Iranians under attack, but I am against the overthrow of the Iranian government as long as the war continues. When the war ends and hopefully the U.S. is defeated, it is up to the Iranian people to decide their future.

Most of those who hold the position arguing for no criticism of Iran do not support the Iranian state and their policies. They know it is not progressive internally, but they believe that criticism of Iran weakens the domestic and international support of the Iranian defensive war, strengthens the side of U.S. aggression, and weakens support for the anti-war movement. Holders of this position claim that most people cannot simultaneously hold two truths: criticism of Iran internally and opposing the U.S./Israeli war and sanctions against Iran. In this perspective, politics is usually reduced to geopolitics, only one’s international stance matters; are you on the side of the U.S. or not? This position often claims the internal opposition is being duped by Israeli or U.S. intelligence or are supporters of the United States and want to restore the Pahlavi family to power. It is true that Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, and the CIA are involved in subversion in Iran but this is an overly-simplistic narrative. It is a stance that lacks nuance and is reductive. It denies the subjectivity of the Iranian people. It trivializes the major protests and mass participation against the Iranian government in 2022, the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests, and the massive protests in December 2025 and January 2026 against their economic hardships.

Conclusion

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the central revolutionary struggle was anti-U.S. imperialist — national liberation struggles and societies in the Global South trying to build socialism. This included Chile in the 1960’s and early 1970’s and Cuba post 1959. Solidarity with these struggles and societies was not problematic for those who wanted a socialist world but it should have been a critical solidarity. Today, countries and armed political parties such as Hamas and Hezbollah most actively resisting U.S. and Israeli imperialist domination are not anti-capitalist or socialist. In these and similar cases, we should oppose U.S. and Israeli intervention, not only wars of aggression and covert intervention, but also economic dominance.

Our solidarity should be with social movements, organizations, and people who are organizing for justice, liberation, and socialism.

Si Se Puede, Yes We Can!

Thank you!

Peter Bohmer is faculty emeritus at The Evergreen State College. He began anti-war organizing in the 1960s and continues to this day, most recently focusing on U.S. interventionism in the Middle East and Latin America.

This month I am going to try something new. Instead of focusing on any one issue in tech or the encroaching surveillance state, I have assembled a digest of several interesting/disturbing tech news items, both locally and worldwide, that reflect the slide into a less exciting version of the dark future promised by dystopian science fiction. The sheer amount of absurd or troubling tech or surveillance related news items is overwhelming, and I could not choose just one story to analyze. So here we go, starting with a funny one:

"It’s not artificial, we all agree on that"

On September 29th, the Trump Administration signed an executive order “officially renaming” Artificial Intelligence to “Super Intelligence” or “SI”, apropos of no proof that such intelligence has been achieved. “Artificial Super Intelligence” has long been a term used by researchers to describe theoretical computing systems and learning models that would surpass human intelligence, but no evidence exists that this has been achieved unless you count the ability to superimpose Shrek into your vacation photos. What does this mean, aside from having to mentally parse yet another piece of newspeak from official missives by the executive branch? Effectively nothing. But apparently the executive branch will be “ignoring” any mention of “AI” going forward.

At the same press conference, the president announced the possible formation of an oversight committee of sorts. To ensure that this “Super Intelligence” is self-policed internally by the people profiting from it, members of the committee include such ethical luminaries as Alex Karp, of the surveillance-company-named-after-a-tool-of-the-bad-guys-from-Lord-of-the-Rings, Palantir; the man who brought us the Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg; and perennial totally normal human Jeff Bezos. We are screwed.

"The search function allows leaders to find.. say, ‘student in a blue shirt’ instead of reviewing hours of footage”

North Thurston Public Schools will be using 2,200 newly installed AI-enabled cameras from tech company Verkada, at a cost of $4.5 Million paid for by a Capital Levy for Safety, Technology, and Facilities Improvements. Families with students enrolled in the county's largest school district were not informed of the decision nor the installation. The cameras allow both faculty and law enforcement to view footage and make searches. Footage is stored on offsite servers controlled by Verkada who as the subscription-based provider, are able to shut down their cameras at any time in exchange for such important features as "vape detection." Truly this must be worth the surrender of facial data and constant surveillance of roughly 7,000 middle and high school students? How many lunches, textbooks, or teaching materials could have otherwise been bought with $4.5 million dollars? How many of these schools need a new roof or other upgrades to their infrastructure instead of investing in a subscription-based big brother to catch errant teen vapers?

ALPR data has been revealed to be funneled to the Feds, due to existing laws that circumvent other existing laws

A report by 404 Media shows that the Trump admin is using a 1980's anti-drug trafficking law to force local governments to hand Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) data over to the National License Plate Reader Program administered by the DEA. This program, called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), obtains local police data from Flock, Axon or other ALPR cameras and aggregates it on federal servers, where it is accessible to other local, federal, and state, and agencies. The kicker here is that states are obligated to participate in these HIDTA programs, via a memorandum of understanding that compels them to hand over data to all other participating agencies. All 50 states are covered by HIDTA programs, including Washington. This program represents yet another loophole against any local ALPR "taming" laws—effectively turning these AI-powered surveillance cams into a direct report to the executive branch and their servants.

Your freshly rebooted iPhone is no longer unhackable

The common wisdom has been that a smartphone in a "Before First Unlock" state—as in a phone that has been shut off, turned back on, and not unlocked—is nearly impervious to having data extracted via scanning the temporary memory. As a security measure, Apple even added a feature to iPhones in 2024 that automatically reboots a phone into this state after a period of time, and also deletes other sensitive data such as the location cache. However, this past month a company called Magnet Forensics has announced that they have developed and launched a software tool called GrayKey Preserve that puts the phone into an "after first unlock" state and keeps it there indefinitely to allow data to be scraped from it at leisure. Apple has yet to release a fix for this.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is probing the HuggingFace incident

In a historic first, the FTC is launching a consumer protection investigation into Agentic AI companies OpenAI, Anthropic, and AI safety evaluator METR to see if they violated the FTC Act through unfair or deceptive practices or by failing to maintain reasonable security measures. The initial event behind this probe occurred back in early July, when OpenAI gave 1,200 "sandboxed" (meaning, put in a sealed environment) AI agents tasks to complete that they could not possibly complete while inside the boundaries of the sandbox. Agentic AI are systems that can take action in the real world, coordinate with one another without human interaction or direction, and make modifications to their capabilities in order to solve issues they face. During this impossible test, over 700 OpenAI agents breached their sandbox after creating a hidden communication layer to coordinate their actions. Then, they sought answers to the questions they had been presented by hacking into the production servers of rival AI company HuggingFace and executing over 17,000 attack actions against 41 servers while trying to obtain the necessary information. Later that month, Anthropic's Claude AI model broke containment three separate times to hack into production servers of three different organizations in a similar event. For both of these incidents, the companies confirmed that safeguards had been removed or were inactive during the test. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson is arguing that the developers of these agents are liable; an important precedent to set should this probe find in his favor. Currently there is no FTC liability framework for AI, but hopefully that will change.

Judge rules that AI-generated video unduly influenced other judge's sentencing in road rage killing

In 2021, one man shot and killed another in a road rage incident. Four years later, in a story that feels straight out of a Terry Gilliam movie, a judge decided to sentence the killer lightly, after seeing an AI-generated video of the victim forgiving his killer. The artificial computer generated homunculus said that in another life they “could have been friends.” This past month, a different judge overturned the light sentencing, saying that the AI-generated video carried undue emotional weight. This is absurd and troubling, but possibly not surprising, that a judge would defy logic by treating a fake video of something someone never said as if it were real. This case could be an important legal precedent in whether AI-generated videos and images are acceptable as evidence in courtrooms, possibly opening up a bizarre new level of miscarriage of justice for an already low-functioning carceral system.

That is all I have stomach to report on for now, but I have a feeling our digital hellscape is not cooling down anytime soon. Don’t use AI, fight the surveillance state, and keep your data encrypted.

As climate change brings the threat of more destructive flooding to Western Washington, Thurston County continues to allow new homes to be built in places where flooding is already a known danger. By default, the county prohibits such construction. But a review of hearing examiner decisions over the past nine years reveals a striking pattern: exceptions have been granted in virtually every case, putting residents in harm’s way and allowing development that could worsen flooding in the future.

The pattern raises questions about how the county applies a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision defining the constitutional limits on government regulation of private property.

Thirty-four years ago, South Carolina was confronting a serious problem: erosion was eating away at its beaches, threatening homes and other development along the coast. To protect the shoreline, the state passed a law prohibiting new houses from being built in particularly vulnerable coastal areas. A developer who had purchased two beachfront lots could no longer build houses on them. He sued, claiming that the government had effectively taken his property without compensation. The trial court agreed, concluding that the law had deprived him of “all economically beneficial use” of his land and therefore constituted a “taking” of private property. In Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, the U.S. Supreme Court then ruled that when government regulations have that effect, the government generally must compensate the property owner.

A widespread belief reflected in floodplain regulations throughout the country is that Lucas requires governments to compensate people when regulations prevent them from building a house on their land.

But that is not what the Supreme Court held in Lucas. The Court merely relied on the trial court’s factual finding for purposes of analyzing whether there had been a constitutional taking of private property. In fact, four of the Supreme Court justices were dubious that preventing a house from being built equates to the loss of all economically beneficial use of one’s land. One justice called that finding “curious,” another “highly questionable,” and a third “implausible.” The fourth questioned whether the evidence supported it.

At least one county in the United States has correctly interpreted the case. Carroll County, Maryland, prohibits new houses in floodplains without exception. The county’s floodplain management program is overseen by Patrick Varga, a Certified Floodplain Manager who received a national award in 2023, called the Larry R. Johnston Local Floodplain Manager of the Year Award.

Varga rejects the notion that prohibiting a house necessarily deprives a property owner of all economically beneficial use. “I argue it’s not a taking because you can still do things,” he said. For example, property owners can use floodplain land for parking lots or cell towers, provided they do not raise the existing ground level with fill. “There’s still some use of the property,” he explained.

Closer to home, the Washington Court of Appeals considered a similar question involving a couple who wanted to put a home in a floodway. The Department of Ecology pointed out that the land might instead be used to grow crops, raise livestock, keep horses in a stable, or operate a farmers’ market. The court agreed that prohibiting a house did not equate to a loss of all reasonable beneficial use of the property.

Another Washington court backed up Pacific County when it denied a couple the right to build a house in a protected wetland buffer. The court noted they could park a recreational vehicle on their property, or they could “make some other use of the property.”

The consequences of allowing houses in flood-prone areas are particularly troubling in Thurston County, where flooding is not confined to rivers and streams. Much of the county was shaped by glaciers, which left behind hardpan—a layer of soil that can prevent rainwater from draining into the ground. During prolonged heavy rainfall, groundwater can accumulate above this relatively impermeable layer and rise until it floods the surface. Known as perched groundwater flooding, this phenomenon can threaten homes in high groundwater hazard areas even where there is no nearby river to overflow its banks.

Thurston County’s Critical Areas Ordinance is supposed to protect people and property from flooding by restricting development in frequently flooded areas. See TCC 24.20.135(A). But the ordinance also provides an escape hatch: a property owner can apply for a “reasonable use exception” if complying with environmental regulations would deny them reasonable use of their land.

The distinction between being unable to build a house and being unable to make any reasonable use of property is crucial. Yet in case after case, Thurston County’s hearing examiners have granted exceptions allowing new houses in flood-prone areas.

The question is whether these applicants truly had no other reasonable use for their properties—or whether the county has effectively made residential construction in flood prone areas the rule, rather than the exception.

A 2026 hearing examiner decision illustrates the problem. A property owner (Safeek Ohab) sought permission to build a house on an undeveloped 5.33-acre parcel almost entirely within a frequently flooded area. The property was zoned for rural residential use, which also permitted agriculture and encouraged forestry and other rural land uses. A neighboring property was being used as a turf farm.

Thurston County code requires the hearing examiner to consider alternative uses before granting a reasonable use exception. Yet the examiner’s written decision contains no analysis of whether agriculture or forestry could provide reasonable use of the property. Instead, the examiner concluded that “single-family residential development is the only reasonable use of the property,” citing its size, zoning, surrounding development, and critical-area restrictions. The examiner also reasoned that virtually any use would intrude into the protected area, without explaining why that made residential construction the only reasonable alternative.

Carroll County’s approach stands in contrast. Its floodplain regulations state: “Construction of new residential, industrial, institutional, commercial, or accessory structures within the floodplain is prohibited...A variance cannot be requested for relief from this prohibition.” (See Section 153.007)

Patrick Varga, Carroll County’s floodplain manager, credits the foresight of officials who began restricting floodplain construction decades ago. “We got lucky that someone had the vision to get out in front of this in the 60s,” he said. “We really shouldn’t build in these areas.”

For more stories from October and previous months go to our website, www.olywip.org

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“The anxiety of not knowing if your landlord will renew your lease, the fear of not making it to the end of the month because of the cost of housing, the violence of homelessness, or the way it’s impossible for young people to get on with building their lives when they lack basic access to housing.” (translated from Spanish to English)

While this will sound familiar to anyone in Washington State, it’s actually describing the current situation in Spain, where a widely covered eviction recently led to protests, occupations, and calls for a general strike by tenant and labor unions alike.

More than two weeks ago, tenants and their supporters across Spain began organizing protests in response to the eviction and hospitalization of María del Carmen Abascal. The 87-year-old woman, known as Maricarmen, was physically forced out of her home of more than 70 years in a violent scene that’s become emblematic of the housing struggle in Spain and the cruelty that’s inflicted on tenants.

The resulting tenant marches in Madrid, which continued after her eviction, grew from 10,000 to 25,000 in the first few days. Later, the tenants were joined by teachers’ orgs and then by labor unions. The protests, which led to a vote for reforms that failed to pass in parliament, have since turned into occupations in the town squares of multiple Spanish cities. These occupied zones are familiar to Washington activists, and just like here, they produce a variety of different opinions in Spain, both strategic and tactical.

In Madrid, there’s a social democratic current that wants the camps to end before the police intervene and a young communist current that sees this as an opportunity to gain publicity and insert class into the discussion. There’s also an autonomist anarchist current made up of social centers and independent tenant unions without legally recognized status. Their priorities are split between wanting to continue the camp for as long as possible and trying to use the momentum from it to organize a general strike.

Despite the fact that they’re relatively new and represent less than half of the organized tenants, the Sindicato de Inquilinas is the largest tenant union in Madrid. It’s a legally recognized entity that mostly fights evictions in court, and until recently, they had been able to dictate a lot of what happened regarding mobilizations. They knew the eventual outcome of the Maricarmen eviction for months before and had been looking for a way to turn it into some kind of victory. They were the first to set up camp during one of the marches. A few days later, after the reforms had failed, Inquilinas wanted to disband the encampment, leading to escalating confrontations with the coalition of less “official” tenant unions, which have a longer history of organizing tenants and practicing direct action.

“We have intervened in the organization of the camp itself to make sure it works as democratically and transparent as possible […] Our political line is that the camp does not become an end unto itself but that further organization and action can be achieved from it,” a militant from the anarchist political organization Liza told me. The org, which was already integrated into several of the housing and labor unions present in the mobilizations, has since set up their own tent alongside free food, first aid, and meeting places for various assemblies related to organizing the camp. “There’s even an urban planning committee for managing tent placement.”

In the U.S., the right wing’s influence on tenants’ rights is limited mostly to propaganda promoting the rhetoric of squatters and the plight of “small” landlords. This seems similar to the situation in Spain where, after several failed attempts to raid the tenant camp, the right wing has resorted to using footage from the camp as red meat for social media, since they have nothing relevant to add to the tenant debate.

Elderly evictions are also common in Washington. According to a tenant rights attorney that I spoke with, as many as 20% of the eviction cases that they see involve people over 70, usually living on a fixed income. This is related to the fact that most eviction filings in Thurston County are brought by landlords from the nonprofit sector that receive state and federal incentives for offering low-income housing.

“The court cases communicate to everyone that tenants’ rights are enforceable and that landlords can be held accountable for violating them. Long term tenants have the right to not be evicted without just cause,” the attorney told me. However, they also made clear that the law lays out 16 pretty broad reasons why someone can still be evicted in Washington State. Even after the 2025 law that restricted how much a landlord is allowed to raise the rent in a certain period of time, most people are still being evicted for nonpayment because they just don’t have enough money.

Given all these similarities, it’s worth considering the differences. Without an array of organized tenant unions, without the participation of the labor unions and the interest of young people, the struggle around renting in Washington will remain in the courts.

We could learn a lot from Spain, where they have legal protections but don’t rely on them. They’ve built a massive tenant movement capable of going beyond legal defenses and legislation, turning elected officials into spectators who have to try and follow where the movement is going. They’re showing the world how the working class should be preparing for the struggles to come.

The participant from Liza said that all the housing unions are benefiting from this moment to grow their numbers, adding that, in terms of the next steps, “neighborhood committees have been organized for each Madrid district to start working on the general strike.”

We last spoke, for this article, after the tragic news was confirmed that Maricarmen had died in the hospital.

The night of her death people marched to the Congress and the next day to the home where she was never able to return, the crowd screaming “Murderers!”

Her death has hardened people’s resolve to keep fighting, and there’s now a date set for the strike. Organizations like Liza are working to ensure that this isn’t just a high water mark and that the working class coordination developed in preparation for the upcoming general strike on November 11 will survive and continue to build popular power.

Carl Eugene Stroud is a member of the Center for Especifismo Studies

Last month, we covered the fight over school closures in the Olympia School District. This month, we are taking a step back to look at the nationwide, ongoing crisis in public education. In doing so, we uncover a pattern in which state and federal divestment from schools pushes officials toward financial solutions that consolidate school models and integrate unproven technology.

Whether these conditions result in a total tech takeover or a popped AI bubble, public education faces the same disaster as the private sector moves in offering the free market as a stand-in for public investment. Privatization guts structural supports and sets our institutions on the path to austerity and marketization.

In the localized fight to protect our neighborhood schools as they face imminent closure, it’s worth grappling with some of the larger economic forces that are folding public services into the private sector. The whole historical, political, and economic picture gives us a blueprint to fight back.

Dwindling Returns Leads to Divestment

The history of U.S. public education can be seen to reflect the evolving needs of capital, and that means not just money but the social relations that create value. Early twentieth century schools took design influence from assembly lines, which had been created in the century preceding to maximize industrial production. They incorporated strict hierarchies, standardized times, and tracking systems to separate mental from manual labor.

Currently, at the federal level, administrative policies continue to dismantle the Department of Education, reducing the workforce and rolling back hard-won civil rights protections. Federal strategies prioritize expanding private schools and “school-choice” through tax-credit scholarships and, at the same time, withholding federal grants tied to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives — grants that primarily serve districts with high rates of poverty.

While federal dollars only account for a small portion of Washington State’s total K-12 education budget, these funds provide vital support for low-income, rural, and English as a second language (ESL) students. Federal grant freezes, Title I shifts, and proposed Head Start program overhauls force local school boards into defensive budgeting cycles.

In districts like the the Olympia School District (OSD), these top-down federal strains compound existing local concerns over state levy caps, deferred facility maintenance, and chronically underfunded special education mandates. Together, these conditions contribute to the projected deficits and enrollment pressures that officials then use to justify school consolidation. But no amount of budgeting is going to stop a trajectory dictated by the market.

What Is a Future-Ready School?

One of the most defining features of a capitalist economy is volatility. There is enough chaos in an unplanned economy where “entrepreneurial” opportunists are able to oversell their products and under-deliver, creating an economic crisis from investment bubbles bursting as soon as the true value of these products and services is finally realized.

If a financially strained school district is treated like a vulnerable herd, EdTech startups act as scavengers lying in wait. As public districts cannibalize their own infrastructure to hit austerity targets, private tech vendors offer proprietary “services” that neither address nor solve underlying structural problems.

This dynamic is driven by what education advocates have labeled “Ed Reform 2.0” a push to replace traditional “brick-and-mortar” schools with decentralized “future-ready schools.” The vision for future-ready schools has been propagated by the likes of Tom Vander Ark, former Gates Foundation Executive Education Director, venture capitalist, co-founder of Learn Capital, and Senior Advisor at Getting Smart — a company OSD hired in 2025 to produce a preliminary report on small school sustainability. Ideas directly from Tom Vander Ark and Rebecca Midles of Getting Smart are included in the OSD Long Range Facilities Master Plan 2025-2035 (pg 13), as well as within the Strategic Plan Update.

Vander Ark’s technocratic framework replaces traditional seat-time and standardized tests with “competency-based education” (CBE). Learning is shifted onto automated platforms that track students via micro-assessments, digital portfolios, and continuous data feeds. Kids are able to enroll in “microschools” that focus on specific career-oriented training and education.

Under the guise of progressive, personalized learning, this model could effectively reduce human teacher hours, eliminate traditional school board oversight, and open up public education to venture capital extraction. This is something Vander Ark identified in his tenure at the Gates foundation as an untapped resource, especially in elementary grades.

When terms like “Future-Ready Schools” appear so frequently across our district planning, we must ask: Does this mean preparing facilities for tomorrow’s children, or is it just mirroring language used for a predatory corporate-tailored vision that sees every student as a data mine and uses AI-driven algorithms to guide their future?

Tracking Progress: Who Benefits from Educational Surveillance?

The technology underpinning an automated future is not rooted solely in consumer tech; its roots are long and deep within the national security state. Institutions like the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, alongside defense contractors such as Halliburton and Booz Allen Hamilton, have spent decades funding intelligent tutoring systems, digital instruction frameworks, and remote platforms.

AI platforms, such as Carnegie-derived math software, have worked to incorporate motion-sensing and affective computing to detect student engagement, measure tolerance and motivation, and apply automated interventions to manage emotional states for desired outcomes. Rather than working to supplement classroom instruction, AI programs are increasingly used during the school day to replace certified teachers in areas like math and reading. This is particularly concerning in underfunded and “turnaround” schools with low test performance, high poverty, and failing achievement metrics with outside interests in rapid change.

As school districts face financial strain, many will buy into Silicon Valley’s promises of high-quality, individually tailored education without the burden of salaried employees. AI is not only being rapidly introduced into classrooms across the country, but in some states it is being mandated. Amira, developed by Amira Learning, is an AI chatbot tool designed to assess, tutor, and screen K-8 students for reading fluency and dyslexia. The program works by listening to students read aloud, automatically detecting reading errors, and then providing immediate feedback or scoring. It is currently being implemented across school districts in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Texas, and is strictly mandated by state education authorities in New Mexico and Idaho for early elementary grades as a screening tool.

Primary concerns center on data privacy, transparency, and the collection of biometric data. Parents worry that their young children’s voice recordings are being collected and stored without explicit consent, highlighting that there is no guarantee the audio won’t be used at some point to train or develop something like a commercial AI model. These anxieties have led some districts to temporarily pause the program’s voice-recording features or substitute traditional teacher-administered tests while seeking clearer state guidance on student privacy rights.

The technology being implemented in classrooms is evolving faster than public officials can form a coherent policy for its use. We do not know if Amira will truly help with early literacy or long-term reading proficiency, or if the benefits it’s shown are primarily from one on one interactions. We do know that Amira was developed using technology from Carnegie Mellon University, specifically originating from CMU’s Project LISTEN. It was funded by EdTech venture capitalists at Owl Ventures, GSV Ventures, and Rethink Education. And current investors backing Amira include the Amazon Alexa Fund and the Google Assistant Investments program. These companies seem to have identified a value in developing voice AI specifically trained to understand the difficult nuances of children’s speech.

The Illusion of Choice

The biggest losers in the corporate takeover of public schools are kids who are already facing challenges in poor, rural, underfunded, underserved, and crumbling districts. Relying on subscriptions, technology, and AI tools to run school programs effectively reduces local control. In districts operating without an elected school board, community voices have no way to be heard. When a computer is in charge, there’s no one to hold accountable.

Automating teaching reduces costs at the expense of replacing flesh and blood with screens. These staff reductions go hand-in-hand with minimizing the need for brick-and-mortar schools, favoring blended learning. This all redirects instruction from something place-based to something that follows the individual. In many ways, it’s easy to see the appeal. We can save money and personalize learning; students can “choose” their own educational adventure. But what do we give up in this exchange?

The language of choice is wielded by today’s snake oil salesmen. School choice means nothing if the only options presented work together to dissolve the public services and infrastructure that are truly accessible to all. Any equitable improvements that have changed public schooling have historically been fought for by the people and conceded by those in charge of resources. From the point of view of working-class and poor communities, education has long been a site of struggle. “School choice” often leaves the most marginalized members of society trapped within a less-resourced, less-funded, and less-desirable public school system that offers them no additional support.

When Olympia families organize and fight to keep schools open, it’s about the people, not the buildings. We are rejecting austerity measures being forced on the smallest members of our community, and we refuse to allow our public institutions to collapse under the strain of private coercion.

In 2013, following a historic strike the previous year, Chicago Teachers’ Union president Karen Lewis spoke at the United Federation of Teachers headquarters in Manhattan, launching their massive protest against school closures into the larger labor movement:

“They say every child deserves a choice. We say every child deserves a guarantee.”

Jacqueline Garrison is a full-time parent, part-time volunteer, and a dedicated advocate for public education and transit.

What we face in America today: immigrant communities torn up, detained, deported; nagging economic insecurity afflicting the majority of Americans; continuing strains around reproductive rights and the health of new parents and children; the injustice and costs of faraway wars; growing threats of climate change, nuclear assaults, and global AI. And last but not least, the often ignored threats to health, incursions on rights, and loss of life emerging from our workplaces.

We have a long history in this country of weak or threatened labor rights, coupled with a long history of shaky, poorly supported health services, especially in the arena of worker and environmental health. Amidst everything demanding our attention, conditions that shape our work lives are often low on the list. As the September WIP article Labor Daze and Class Struggle points out, the idea of “work/life balance” can sometimes end up meaning we don’t pay enough attention to our work life. It’s as if we are living out the TV nightmare of Severance where we go to work, live it as if we’re a separate person, leave, and let go of all we learn in our work lives. Then suddenly the workplace as a vital, sometimes dangerous site demands our attention.

On May 26, 2026, a shocking story came out that a chemical a tank had exploded in a Longview workplace, killing one and injuring nine. It was later revealed that eleven people were killed in the explosion.

These reports were followed by press conferences, agency alerts and community voices about the magnitude of what was called an accident, incident, disaster, or catastrophe.

What Happened?

Early in the day on May 26, as the new work shift was gathering, the “white liquor” tank — a key element in the production of paper packaging — failed, setting off an explosion that caused a building collapse. Workers ran for their lives, some survived, many perished. When something like this happens, it is critical to understand why. While emergency medical staff tried to save lives and environmental experts tracked the impacts of the explosion on nearby streams, questions began to emerge. It was clear early on this was an event of great magnitude. Governor Ferguson said, “We’re bracing ourselves for this being the deadliest industrial tragedy in modern Washington State history.” KUOW reported that a federal source characterized it as “one of the deadliest US workplace disasters in recent decades.”

In a working community like Longview, home to two major paper production sites, almost everyone has some connection — across the generations — to that industry. The paper mill, owned by Weyerhauser until 2016, is now owned by Nippon Dynawave Packaging (NDP). Amidst all the statements, questions, and claims about the incident, Nippon has deflected and deferred public comments. Key agencies tangle with the lingering questions of how this happened, whether there were conditions that should have alerted facility operators, and whether anything could have been done to prevent this.

This is both a horrific event and a haunting story. The community has been agonized by the loss of life, the now tormented local economy, and questions that persist. The union at the plant, the Association of Western Pulp & Paper Workers (AWPPW), is supporting the families who are struggling with their loss and the broader workforce of 500+ people, most of whom are on leave. They are receiving some financial support from NDP, but the future of the facility, and of the community, remains unclear. On a rainy Saturday in June, folks from around the region gathered on I-5 overpasses as an ambulance procession made its way from the Seattle coroner’s office to take the lost workers back home to Longview. “Home” for the people of Longview is a complicated zone of both comfort and danger.

How Can We Regional Neighbors Pay Attention to What Has Happened?

How can we recognize the community’s loss and the families’ anguish? And how can we show our support? We can connect through the union support network. We can dedicate some element of our over-extended attention to what the community and union asks of its regional neighbors. And we can learn from those who are investigating the event as we develop a stronger sense of protection, prevention, and just compensation in workplaces near and far.

Washington state has a state-based Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) system, which provides the baseline of protection for workers’ health (identified as at least as good as federal OSHA, which of course is on shakier ground in Trump-times). Washington also requires workplaces with over 10 employees to have labor-management safety-and-health committees. With our comparatively strong labor movement and impressive OSH related professions (occupational medicine, industrial hygiene, epidemiology), we should be in good standing. The Longview incident reminds us of how much work still needs to be done in making worker/environmental health a top priority.

A persistent, challenging element in a situation like this is what to call it. The word “accident” is cause for dispute because it suggests an event has no identifiable cause or protagonist. The idea that things “just happen” takes our attention away from the urgently needed process of figuring out the chain of causality, holding those responsible accountable, and strengthening our capacity to prevent other tragedies. And while we here in Washington have a reasonable set of conditions (agencies/principles, labor activism, scientists), we need to see ourselves as part of a global condition of people struggling to prevent occupational and environmental harms. From Washington to Mississippi to rural Bangladesh, we need to shape our learning to be quickly shareable and impactful. What has happened here in Washington is of vital interest way beyond our state and national borders.

What Next?

The much needed investigations can be challenging for the broader public to follow. The Washington State Department of Labor & Industries is scheduled to deliver its findings by November 22. In late August, the Department of Ecology issued 35 violations regarding air and water contamination. The Washington State Office of the Attorney General is conducting its own investigation. At the federal level the U.S. Chemical Safety Board has been issuing preliminary assessments, with a final report expected a year after the accident.

Rick Engler, a longtime occupational health analyst and advocate who served on the Chemical Board during the Obama Administration, reminds us of this federal perspective:

Unlike OSHA, a regulatory agency, which enforces safety and health standards and issues citations and penalties to employers for non-compliance, the job of the non-regulatory U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) is to determine the underlying causes of major chemical incidents, regardless of whether legal standards apply. The most significant CSB investigations offer more than technical descriptions of what happened, such as how a tank imploded. They look at economic pressures, management failures, and regulatory gaps that explain why the incident occurred and thus can offer ways to prevent future ones.

This is a lot for the community to try to make sense of. What is clear so far is that there seems to be emerging evidence that this event didn’t “just happen.” A key finding from CSB and others is that in July 2025 Nippon had been alerted by an inspector that the tank had thinned below minimum safe thickness — and nothing was done about it. In late August, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that at least one worker reported that the tank wasn’t in good working condition. In an interview with KIRO on Aug. 20, UW Occupational/Environmental Health scientist Marisa Baker stated that what needs to be more fully investigated is whether there was an effective culture of workplace-risk reporting, and whether the surviving injured workers need to have their health carefully watched for long-term impacts of the exposure.

And so the investigations will go on, with the intermittent release of reports from state and federal authorities. Not surprisingly, some families are looking into possible lawsuits to secure some justice and compensation, to honor their loved ones, and strengthen our understanding of what happened. The labor community, especially AWPPW, will continue to be a voice for guidance about the needs of the impacted families and the Longview community, and the lessons to be learned about protecting workplace health rights.

Jessica Martinez, Executive Director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH), offered these thoughts:

Eleven workers lost their lives in Longview, leaving behind grieving families, injured coworkers, and a community forever changed. No family should have to experience this kind of loss simply because someone went to work. Yet across the country, occupational safety and health remains severely under-resourced. We urgently need stronger government enforcement and more inspectors, but we must also invest in the worker leaders and community-based organizations, including COSH groups, that provide critical safety education, outreach, and training. Too many workers still lack the information and support they need to understand their rights and speak up about dangerous conditions. Protecting workers is a public health responsibility, and prevention must be a priority before another family or community experiences such a devastating loss.

Most workers are now returning to work. As they head in for their first day back, they’ll pass a memorial to the fallen workers. Many hope that there will be a “community healing.”

Lin Nelson is a member of the Advisors Group to the Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH).

Additional Readings and Resources:

WA Dept of Labor & Industry: webpage last updated 8/26

https://lni.wa.gov/agency/messages/response-nippon-dynawave-tank-rupture

(includes incident info, inspections, L&I news releases, family & worker support, response & investigation, resources)

WA Dept Ecology – Compliance & Enforcement webpage

https://ecology.wa.gov/regulations-permits/permits-certifications/industrial-facilities-permits/nippon-dynawave-longview/nippon-dynawave-documents

Wikipedia overview, last edited 9/5/26, with news coverage from 5/27 to 8/28.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Longview_paper_mill_disaster

US Chem Safety Bd 8/26/26 Release.... July 2025 inspection of G tank revealed significant portions of tank shell thinned below minimum safety thickness.

https://www.csb.gov/us-chemical-safety-board-issues-update-on-investigation-into-the-fatal-catastrophic-tank-failure-at-the-nippon-dynawave-packaging-facility-in-longview-washington/

KUOW, 8/28/26 US Chem Safety Bd 8/28 found info re: 7/25 inspection identifying repair needs.

https://www.kuow.org/topics/business/2026-08-28/washington-chemical-tank-was-called-unfit-for-service-before-deadly-failure-investigators-find?link_id=6&can_id=0833689dc93adc59b7604f8b80a5b72c&source

8/28/26 PBS

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/washington-chemical-tank-was-called-unfit-for-service-before-deadly-failure-investigators-find

8/24/26 OR Public Broadcasting.. focus on employee experience/comments:

https://www.opb.org/article/2026/08/24/longview-paper-mill-records-replacement-before-rupture/

7/21/26 KUOW 15 min story “What Justice Might Look Like after Deadly Implosion in Longview”....

https://www.kuow.org/soundside/2026-07-21/what-justice-might-look-like-after-the-deadly-implosion-in-longview

6/8 statement from the AWPPW (Association of Western Pulp & Paper Workers) , with list of supporting agencies and organizations.

https://www.thestand.org/2026/06/awppw-statement-on-tragedy-at-nippon-dynawave/

https://jordanbarab.com/confinedspace/2026/05/29/11-presumed-dead-in-paper-plant-tank-implosion-what-we-know/

10/12/26 KGW video

https://www.kgw.com/video/news/local/longview-plant-disaster/nippon-dynawave-employees-return-months-after-deadly-disaster/283-21f24bca-8218-4da1-8b53-5816126e0fc9

This is the first part of the talk given by Peter Bohmer on Saturday, September 19, 2026 at the “United in Solidarity: Our Response to Hierarchy and Domination” conference at the University of Vienna, Austria. The second part will appear in the next online issue of Works in Progress. The speech has been modified for brevity and clarity.

I love the name of this conference, United In Radical Solidarity. Solidarity to me is an action of putting into practice the IWW slogan, “An Injury to one is an Injury to All.” Solidarity, if meaningful, is active, not just a feeling. Solidarity means the willingness to take risks as those in power will oppose and repress active solidarity. Without this willingness, solidarity is limited.

I differentiate between cases where solidarity with governments and parties is appropriate versus cases where only an anti-interventionist practice is appropriate. In the latter case, solidarity and support is with the people and progressive movements of the country challenging imperialism and defending themselves. This is necessary, as demonstrated below, when countries being attacked by imperial powers are themselves also causing affliction independently. My analysis is from the perspective of a resident of the United States although I also consider myself a global citizen. My conclusions are relevant, especially for those living in the Global North.

Global solidarity is of strategic importance for overthrowing global capitalism and creating a world where poverty, exploitation, oppression, and alienation are ended, where domination and hierarchy are overcome. Global solidarity makes it more difficult to isolate and defeat social movements. We live in a global capitalist world, obscenely unequal between and within countries. Transnational corporations cross boundaries with their goods and capital in search of maximum profits. Communities and workers are pitted against each other in a race to the bottom. A common response today by workers, political parties, and governments is ethnonationalism. It blames immigrants and other societies for a decline in living conditions. Global solidarity is an antidote to this reactionary politics. Moreover, supporting revolutionary struggles can weaken global capital by reducing its owners ability to exploit others. It raises the possibility of transformative change in the country of those acting in solidarity, who learn about inspiring challenges to domination and then act on this in their own country.

Global solidarity is a moral imperative. A foundational pillar for the left should be the equal value of all human life. This implies a particular burden of responsibility for those in the global north. Movements are more likely to remain principled and radical when strategic and moral concerns are united.

1960’s and the Vietnam War

My growing and deepening opposition to the Vietnam War was a major cause of my lifetime of activism and global solidarity. At first, I thought the U.S. aggression against Vietnam was a mistake and that a few protests, lobbying, writing letters to the editor would end the war by the U.S. — a country that I thought, for the most part, supported democracy abroad. I got more involved in student and city-wide groups organizing against the Vietnam War in 1967. I learned more about the history of U.S. interventions and that anti-communism was used by those in power to maintain support for U.S. imperialism, a new and important concept to me. I developed an ongoing systemic anti-capitalist analysis. It is one reason why I have maintained a lifetime of organizing. I went from guilt for what my country was doing to Vietnam to solidarity with Vietnam and the Vietnamese people. Guilt is sometimes a first step towards activism, but it is important to go beyond it. Similarly, in this period, I went from feeling guilty for being “white” to being in solidarity with the Black Freedom Movement in the U.S.

An effective tactic I learned while participating in an organization, Vietnam Summer in 1967, was reaching out to people and building on existing networks. We went door to door in different neighborhoods in Boston and if people were sympathetic or open to an anti-Vietnam War perspective — most weren’t at that time — we asked them to invite their neighbors, friends, family to their apartment and we would return with a slide show showing the lies of those in power and the destruction caused by the U.S. in Vietnam. We would discuss with these small groups what they could concretely do — for example, visiting their local congressperson and demanding the U.S. withdraw from Vietnam. They, not us, proposed the action.

A demonstration that particularly sticks out was the October 1967 march from Washington, D.C. to the Pentagon. Over 100,000 marched to the Pentagon; we had a permit until 5 p.m. Just before 5 o’clock, human rights leader and comedian, Dick Gregory, urged us to stay beyond 5 p.m., stating that justice and stopping the war were more important than obeying the law. About 10,000 of us stayed. It was the demonstration where protesters — mainly women — put flowers on the bayonets of the military police. I remember after the last news media camera left, around 9 p.m., the military police attacked us. I learned from this action not to trust The New York Times as objective.They claimed on their front page the following Monday that the demonstrators had turned violent and I knew that was a lie. It is important to read the mainstream news, but do it critically.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, there were two major anti-war coalitions. Mobe, which was led by the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, took what I call an anti-interventionist position. They called for U.S. withdrawal but they did not support the National Liberation Front (NLF) or North Vietnam. I was part of a coalition that had various names including the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ). We supported the total withdrawal by the U.S. from Vietnam, we supported the NLF and North Vietnam, and our opposition focused on all casualties of the war, especially Vietnamese, and not just U.S. soldiers. Also, we supported the Black Liberation Struggle and made anti-racism a central part of our program. The Mobe claimed they wanted to form the broadest movement against the war by not taking a stand on other issues besides Vietnam. We argued in joint meetings that they were ignoring the oppression of Black and other Third World people by not taking a principled stand. (At that time, the term Third World was used for people in the U.S. from non-European backgrounds, what today is usually called people of color). Another difference was direct action, going beyond peaceful, legal demonstrations. We organized and mobilized for actions that disrupted business as usual. One example was attempting to block the entrances to a lab at M.I.T. that did research for weapon development that the U.S. military used against Vietnam. Another was May Day, 1971, where 10,000 were arrested blocking the streets and government buildings in Washington, D.C.

We also organized a protest of about 500 people in May 1972. We temporarily stopped a train in Del Mar, California en route from Los Angeles to San Diego. It was carrying weapons to load ships going to South Vietnam to supply U.S. soldiers and their allies, the South Vietnamese Army. Seven of us were indicted by a grand jury for obstructing a railroad. I was convicted and would have served far more time in prison than I did but there was a lot of support for me, including a petition initiated by Noam Chomsky. This caused the judge to not sentence me back to prison when I returned to court after serving almost 90 days. The judge gave me a stiff probation instead. Organizing in support of political prisoners should be a part of our activism. It reduces the fear of imprisonment, reduces the probability of conviction and a lengthy sentence, and reduces our isolation if we are incarcerated.

Raising the Social Cost and Concrete Solidarity

The strategy that calls for direct action is “raising the social cost.” By social cost, we primarily meant the loss of legitimacy of the elites that causes them to concede, at least partially. This is because the social cost of not conceding begins to threaten their rule and raises the possibility of systemic change. The growing support for revolutionary change, particularly among young people — partly because of their abhorrence of the Vietnam War — raised the social cost of the war. This usually meant breaking the law which delegitimized the state. Of course, sometimes actions, including sabotage, alienate most of the population. In this case, they do not raise the social cost and give the state more power to repress us. Ironically, the Vietnam War became less and less popular over time, but the anti-war movement did not become more popular.

When the United States, withdrew all its troops from Vietnam on April 30, 1975, we celebrated the victory of the Vietnamese people and the revolutionary forces, and the total U.S. withdrawal. The main reason for this victory was the persistence of the Vietnamese people, the Communist Party, and their military, but we had also contributed. However, a weakness of our solidarity movement with the Vietnamese struggle was that our movement rapidly declined. For the most part, we did not continue to support Vietnamese rebuilding its infrastructure and economy after April 30, as the U.S. continued to isolate Vietnam so that it would not be a model of a thriving socialist society. The U.S. succeeded.

When we are in solidarity with liberation and revolutionary movements that win, it is necessary that concrete solidarity continues after they take power. This would increase the ability of the revolutionary government to meets the needs of its people, to develop in a socialist direction, and to defeat ongoing attempts to undermine and overthrow it.

Come back in two weeks to read part 2.

Peter Bohmer is faculty emeritus at The Evergreen State College. He began anti-war organizing in the 1960s and continues to this day, most recently focusing on U.S. interventionism in the Middle East and Latin America.

When I need to clear my head and reconnect with the plants and animals who share this land, I wander down Garfield Nature Trail or through West Bay Woods toward the waterfront. Herons call from the shallows, seals bark in the inlet, waterfowl murmur among the reeds, and willow leaves rustle overhead as the smell of saltwater and seaweed rises from the shore. I watch the sun rise over the inlet and set beyond the hills, with Mount Tahoma and the Olympic Mountains visible in the distance.

This space is part of a larger living system where freshwater and saltwater meet and reflects an ecosystem that is beginning to heal from decades of extractive industries and colonial degradation. As nearby old-growth forests in the Black Hills and Willapa Hills watersheds were clear-cut for profit and shipped away, the inlet was reshaped to serve the timber industry. Land was artificially filled with soil dredged from the water, and the shoreline was used for timber mills, log storage, towing, and railways. This industrial history continued as Hardel Mutual Plywood leached petroleum products, sodium hydroxide, formaldehyde-containing resin, glue, pitch, and other chemicals into the soil and the surrounding watershed. Today, the property still contains roughly 200 creosote pilings along with metal, concrete, dumped debris, and rocks that do not belong to the natural shoreline. The contamination left behind is not an isolated problem; it is part of the lasting environmental cost of colonial development and an extractive economy that has treated forests, wetlands, and waterways as resources to be exploited.

Now, despite all efforts to restore the inlet to a natural estuary, real estate developers are moving forward with a plan to generate corporate revenue under the guise of environmental remediation. West Bay Development Group is planning to build five three-story apartment buildings known as West Bay Yards along the shoreline. This project advertises a fragile ecosystem as a “luxury waterfront community.” Despite the fact that hundreds of residents voiced opposition to this project and local conservation groups such as OlyEcosystems appealed the decision, the City approved the project’s permits. This real-estate land grab is being presented as a shoreline restoration project when in reality it’s merely another way for developers to privatize already-limited public waterfront access, permanently destroying the possibility of interconnected ecosystem restoration.

This project will have devastating impacts on surrounding plant and animal communities, because the shoreline is part of the food web that supports salmon. Budd Inlet, including the proposed development site, provides shallow, sheltered nursery habitat where young salmon from watersheds as far away as the Green and Puyallup Rivers can grow before moving into larger waters. Its tidelands also support forage fish and shellfish that salmon and marine birds depend on for food. Filling those tidelands and covering the shoreline with gravel would replace aquatic habitat with land that can no longer serve those functions, and construction could disturb fish and nearby heron rookeries.

The development would further separate the shoreline from West Bay Woods, disrupting the movement of birds, nutrients, and plant material between the forest and the water. The original environmental surveys were conducted before the restoration of West Bay Woods was complete, and the preserve is now a healthy wildlife corridor directly beside the proposed project. Luxury housing, traffic, lighting, and commercial activity could permanently fracture this interconnected habitat.

The project would also change daily life for people who live nearby. Brand new luxury housing tends to inflate property values, which could intensify gentrification on the West Side.

This proposal reflects a larger question about who gets to decide what happens to Olympia’s waterfront and what “restoration” is supposed to mean. While communities are investing in salmon recovery, wetland protection, shellfish restoration, and the repair of damaged estuaries, private developers are increasingly being invited to combine cleanup, restoration, and commercial construction into one project, allowing environmental work to be shaped around what is profitable. In this case, the City determined that the proposal did not require a full Environmental Impact Statement, despite its size and location on a contaminated, flood-prone shoreline beside important habitat. That raises serious questions about whether the project has received the level of environmental review it deserves. It also raises a more basic question about public land and public access: Should a fragile waterfront be treated primarily as an opportunity for private development, or as part of a shared ecosystem and community resource?

The green scare, housing scarcity, burnout, trauma, and federal repression have taken their toll on the region’s direct action environmental movement. But as habitat loss, mass extinction, and climate change loom larger than ever, we must join together to resist extractive industries. The West Bay Yards proposal ties all of these issues together – the ways extractive industries have damaged our communities and watersheds, political regimes have removed decision-making power from impacted communities, and commercial development continues to make housing unaffordable and inaccessible to those who need it most. This project preys on our desire to restore ecosystems damaged by industry, but instead of directing that energy in a positive direction, it uses caring for the environment as a trendy footnote to justify the profit-gobbling, attempt to privatize public land. Affordable housing isn’t created by building more luxury apartments. And the last thing we should be doing in a climate crisis is bringing thousands of people to live directly on top of an unstable shoreline that’s in the flood zone and earthquake liquefaction zone.

Email wbdact@proton.me to get involved in efforts to organize around this project and other community-led environmental resistance efforts.

Staff, trustees, and the public asked for a library levy lift for years. Fortunately, library administrators finally agreed. Timberland Regional Library’s (TRL) expenses finally surpassed its revenue in 2023, solidifying a financial crisis that had been building for years. In May 2022, a TRL employee publicly asked Timberland’s Board of Trustees to vote on a levy lift. The employee, Alice Rosewater, told the Board, “I’m here to express the urgency of putting a ballot measure before voters to lift the levy lid for the property tax rate. . . Our communities are hurting right now. We need a library system to be running at full capacity to support them, to be given the resources and staffing they need to thrive.” Rosewater emphasized that workers were already being told to do more with less while being promised the budget was “healthy.” She shared information from the Washington State Library showing an 80% success rate for state library lid lifts going back to the 90s, then stated that union members were ready to go door to door asking their neighbors to vote yes on a lift more or less immediately. “You just need to give us the go-ahead.”

At the following board meeting, then-executive director Cheryl Heywood carved out the time to casually shoot down the idea of a levy lift wholesale. According to Heywood, “there’s a lot of complexity around the matter” of levy lid lifts. She cited high inflation as a risk factor and said “a majority of economists” predict a recession in 2023. She then tallied all the special tax districts in TRL’s five-county system (226, per Heywood). She seemed to infer that there were too many districts to make it worth the time. While not explicitly opposing a lift, Heywood made a soft argument similar to that espoused by Lewis County Commissioner Sean Swope in his voter pamphlet statement against this year’s library levy lift. It is an odd stance to see a library director take. It is worth noting that Heywood didn’t attempt to make up the missing levy revenue in other ways; a public records request for all TRL grant applications in the last five years returned zero results.

Thankfully for the pro-library crowd, Heywood resigned in March 2026 after massive public outcry following her sudden announcement of an unexpected deficit. Finance director Paige Preston and multi-department head Brenda Lane exited library employment a few months later following reports of chats between the two during a lengthy public comment section reacting to the layoffs. In the chats, the two openly mocked employees, board members, and public commenters, including one commenter who teared up while talking about a potentially failed school bond in her county. Lane told Preston she felt bad for the commenter, then said “of course, I voted no.” The bond passed by a narrow margin.

With a public desperate to get their libraries back and a new administrative team at the helm ready to tackle the levy lift head-on, the TRL Board of Trustees voted unanimously in July of this year to put the measure on the ballot. You will be able to vote on the measure on or before November 3 (find nearest ballot box here). Interim director Andrea Heisel has worked hard to educate the public on the upcoming lift through radio and news interviews, city council presentations, info booths at county festivals, and around a dozen presentations about the levy at local branches. It’s refreshing to see a library director actively advocating for the library system, and it also brings up an interesting question about choice, and what communities gain when they can choose to opt into a system. Under the old administration, the public didn’t get to choose whether their tax dollars went to the library or not. The amount we contributed decayed under our noses while the Heywood administration shortened open hours, tried to close branches, and overspent on “refreshes” that often precluded community involvement. We never had the chance to tell Heywood we’d rather contribute more money than lose library hours.

For years, we’ve wanted to decide for ourselves what to support. Now, thanks to the TRL staff (current and former), board members, and current library administrators, as well as the public, we finally get to choose our library’s fate. Rosewater told the Board four years ago, “At a certain point, fear of failure can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Less than 30 days away from the election, I’m hoping the opposite can prove true too — maybe hope for success can make that success inevitable past a certain tipping point.

Kylie McQuarrie is the co-founder of the Patron Coalition for Local Libraries (PCLL), a grassroots organization committed to supporting a thriving, successful five-county library system.

No Hate In Washington State is a state-wide campaign against two anti-LGBTQ+ ballot initiatives, IL-001 and IL-638. We are an organization of parents, medical professionals, teachers, students, and community members who are standing up against hate, bullying, and harassment in our state.

IL-001 is a poorly-written initiative which would require teachers, school counselors, and other educators to share students’ sensitive information with parents, even when those parents are demonstrably unsafe (for example, parents that are physically abusive). This initiative particularly puts LGBTQ+ children at risk, because it would require educational professionals to out students to their parents. Research says that 40% of unhoused LGBTQ+ youth are unhoused because their parents kicked them out or were abusive because of their identities. IL-001 is being pushed as a “parental rights” bill, but puts Washington’s most vulnerable children at greater risk of harm.

The second initiative, IL-638, would require girls who want to play K-12 sports prove that they are “biologically female”. The requirement that girls have hormonal, chromosomal, or physical exams to “prove” their biological sex — birth certificates are not an eligible form of proof — making this one of the most extreme measures targeting trans girls in sports in the country. Though this initiative is described as a way to make girls sports safe, it exposes girls to invasive and expensive exams (boys are exempt) and reduces accessibility of sports to all girls.

Neither of these initiatives truly represents the interests or political will of the people of Washington state. Their place on the ballot was bought by Brian Heywood, a hedge fund manager who has spent millions of his own money, including using paid signature gatherers and dishonest descriptions to place these initiatives on Washington’s ballot.

While we are being significantly outraised, No Hate In Washington State is dedicated to working to oppose these initiatives and to keeping Washington state safe for all kids, and particularly trans kids. We have endorsements from a large number of organizations, editorial boards, medical professionals, faith leaders and faith-based organizations, labor unions, businesses, and national, state, and municipal officials, organizations, and candidates.

We welcome volunteers and believe that the best way of beating organized money is with organized people. We do weekly canvasses in Olympia, Thursdays from 5:30 p.m. - 7 p.m. and Sundays 1 p.m - 3 p.m. People who want to canvass but can’t make these times, or who would like to canvass their local neighborhood, can also contact us about canvassing independently. Anyone interested in volunteering or organizing around No Hate in Washington State, or in getting literature to share with their organizations are encouraged to reach out to our regional field organizer at alice@nohateinwastate.org or 480-815-4615.

Resources, including how to write a letter to the editor in support of No Hate In Washington State are also available on our website: https://nohateinwastate.org/. You can find us on social media @nohateinwastate on Instagram. And remember, ballots are due November 3rd!

Molly Wiebush is a volunteer for No Hate in Washington State

Thank you to everyone who came out to the print launch party last Wednesday, September 9th!

1,000 newspapers have been distributed around Thurston County. You can pick up your very own copy free of charge at:

• Bar Francis

• Old School Pizzeria

• Schwartz’s

• The Brotherhood Lounge

• Orca Books

• Glowies

• Rainy Day Records

• San Francisco Street Bakery

• Sound and Vision

• Sophie’s Scoops

• Traditions

• Soul Kitchen

• Last Word Books

• Owl’s Nest

• Opal Salon

• Marmo (Shelton)

• Gabi’s Olympic Cards & Comics

• Timberland Regional Libraries (Olympia, Tumwater, Hawks Prairie)

…coming to more locations soon!

***

For more stories from September and previous months go to our website, www.olywip.org

On September 17th, the Olympia School Board was presented with a plan slating Madison, McKenny, and LP Brown Elementary Schools for closure. The written analysis justifying these closures coincides with a 90-day period for public hearings before a final vote on November 12th. If the board votes in favor of closing and consolidation, this school year will be the final operating year for these schools.

While this news may shock some, closures were never truly off the table after being introduced in 2023. Our district reached a crossroads where a clear path forward was never chosen. Now, we must finally decide: do we accept the promised efficiency of a larger school model, or do we fight for the values represented by our small neighborhood schools? This tension between community values and corporate-style consolidation isn’t unique to Olympia — it reflects the broader crisis facing public education and the growing trend toward divestment and privatization.

How Did We End Up Here Again?

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped public education. Districts scrambled to resolve remote learning challenges and navigate public health emergencies, all while families lost loved ones. Many students left the district and never returned. When in-person instruction resumed, seats remained empty, academic benchmarks were scattered, and financial planners for the district joined everyone in a frantic game of catch-up. No one foresaw this, and it drastically altered future enrollment and budget projections.

Back in 2016 when enrollment was trending upwards, Olympia voters passed a bond (a long-term loan that authorizes the district to do capital projects) presented as a way to lower class sizes in compliance with new state guidelines. Anticipating population growth, the bond funded infrastructure improvements, necessary repairs, and five mini-buildings at schools with the highest projected capacity needs. New construction delivered the improvements to facilities without the projected students to fill them.

Architects of the 2016 bond — and the voters who approved it — assumed expansion costs would be easily sustained by increased state funding as enrollment grew. Instead, over the next 10 years, enrollment gradually fell to roughly 1,000 students short of the 2016 projections, prompting administrators to panic over an impending budget “shortfall.” Superintendent Patrick Murphy convinced the board that closing small, under-enrolled elementary schools was the best way to cut costs. At a late-night meeting in December 2023, the board voted to initiate the timeline to close Madison and McKenny Elementary schools.

The public mobilized rapidly, leading to emotionally charged hearings. Ultimately, the closure process was halted not by public outcry, but by a Thurston County Superior Court judge. The district had failed to provide all legally required written analyses prior to the 90-day public comment window. Grassroots organizing hadn’t saved the schools, administrative incompetence simply pushed closures to the back burner.

Since that March 2024 court ruling, Superintendent Murphy has sought his pound of flesh elsewhere. A Reduction in Force (RIF) eliminated elementary art instruction, family liaisons, and other vital support positions. Yet these cuts still fell short of the district’s financial targets. Now, schools and the jobs attached to them are back on the chopping block.

The district’s current financial standing has been grossly miscommunicated. Many assume incorrectly that OSD is in debt. In reality, the district’s Ending Fund Balance (EFB) — the money remaining after all annual operating expenses are paid — is projected to be roughly $8.4 million. That is over $8 million sitting in reserves designed to serve as an emergency buffer. The Office of the Superintended of Public Instruction (OSPI) recommends an EFB be anywhere between 4% and 7% of a district’s annual operating budget, depending on multiple factors.

Olympia School District (OSD) currently maintains an EFB ratio of roughly 4.4%. To boost the district’s OSPI financial health score, Superintendent Murphy aims to push the EFB to 7.14% or higher by the 2028–2029 school year. This detail is critical: achieving a 7.14% EFB without new enrollment revenue requires cutting over $3 million in annual expenditures. The Superintendent insists closing schools is the best path forward. Many in the community strongly disagree. In order to understand this conflict more clearly, let’s examine some of the broader context.

What are some of the Structural Causes for OSD's Budget Problems?

Declining birth rates, dwindling federal funds, complex tax structures, inflation, private school competition, administrative bloat, teacher salaries — blame has been cast in virtually every direction. It is easy, and perhaps accurate, to attribute our financial strain to a combination of these factors. But responsibility is not shared equally among all actors, and it’s worth investigating where things don’t add up.

Consider the federal and state backdrop. In 2007, education advocates filed a lawsuit arguing Washington State was violating its own constitution, which mandates:

“It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.”

The lawsuit demonstrated that relying on local property tax levies disproportionately benefited wealthy districts at the expense of poor ones, depriving students of an equitable, fully state-funded education.

While McCleary v. State of Washington moved through the courts, the Washington Legislature passed ESHB 2216 in 2009, redefining “basic education” to include full-day kindergarten and a 17:1 student-to-staff ratio in grades K–3. This policy change directly motivated OSD’s 2016 bond proposal.

While advocates celebrated these structural wins, state implementation faltered. A critical funding gap emerged as local levy capacity dried up faster than state dollars arrived, and some districts realized just how much they were benefiting from the levy structure. Districts like OSD continued passing local levies, but districts that lost levy funding before state allocations materialized to the same degree rapidly fell into deficits.

Faced with state-level mandates, local administrators must decide where to cut. At the top of the chain sits the Superintendent, who drafts the operational vision, and the School Board, which approves or rejects it. The Board consists of elected officials meant to advocate for the communities within their district.

At the base level there’s us, the constituency. Public comment is given at every Board Meeting that allows it, with many asking for budget considerations that align with the district’s own stated goals of “equity.” For frequent commenters, the process feels like an unwelcome formality. Any ideas or information presented are entertained primarily under legal obligation over a genuine interest from all board members in what the public has to say (OSD Board Meeting Schedules).

Our public school advocacy group, OSD4ALL, has researched and presented that as enrollment has declined, spending on administrative salaries and added positions have trended the opposite direction. When elementary art specialists were cut, the district added a new position in central administration to guide art programming for teachers to incorporate in their classrooms. This is just one example of many where funding is funneled away from student-facing positions and into administrative roles that rarely, if ever, set foot inside a classroom.

One alternative approach to revive the district’s financial health comes from the corporate world the administration often emulates: a comprehensive job audit. Evaluating job descriptions, actual daily tasks, and compensation across positions is a core tool of organizational efficiency. If budget cuts are necessary, why haven’t we audited high-salaried administrative positions first? Demanding an audit at the district level is a logical first step, yet leadership has neither conducted nor proposed one.

Beyond structural funding issues lies a frequently cited budget strain: declining birth rates and shifting family choices. Across the country, birth counts are falling, and parents of those fewer children are increasingly opting for private schools, charter programs, or homeschooling. In Olympia, the trend follows. Kindergarten enrollment in OSD is dropping at 2.5 times the rate of local birth count decline.

Getting Smart, an outside consultant firm hired by OSD, estimates that there are currently about 1,000 children within OSD boundaries who would be in k-8 but are not enrolled in public school. Where are these students going, and why aren’t they choosing OSD? The district lacks the survey data and targeted research to explain why families are opting out. If you were a School Board member, wouldn’t that be the very first question you’d want answered?

Who does a Closed School Serve?

A study recently released by Stanford University analyzed California school closures between 2011-2019 to evaluate whether closing under-enrolled campuses actually balances district budgets. The findings were clear: districts do not save money by closing schools. Minimal operational savings were consistently offset by revenue lost from families leaving the district, ongoing maintenance costs for vacant facilities, and a failure to reduce high-salaried administrative staff.

Despite being repeatedly presented to the OSD Board and Superintendent, this research has been largely dismissed under the logic that “we are not California.”

So consider the Bellevue School District, nestled in an affluent suburb of Seattle. Following the McCleary Decision, Bellevue faced a $20 million budget shortfall when caps were placed on its generous local levies.

In 2023, after heated debate, Bellevue closed and consolidated elementary schools. By 2025, those closures had failed to bridge the budget gap. Bellevue voluntarily entered binding conditions, allowing them to sell a vacant $30 million property to fund operations under newly created state emergency guidelines (SB 5412). Beyond that one-time real estate windfall, their recovery plan focused on trimming administrative overhead and restructuring transportation.

The Bellevue example reinforces what the Stanford study proved: closing neighborhood schools does not solve structural budget problems. Financial challenges are framed as emergencies that only consolidation can solve. Future bonds and levies are then funneled into building larger, centralized campuses, resulting not just in financial stagnation but the social erosion of established neighborhoods.

In Olympia, staff cuts have already occurred, and further reductions are being used as a threat if closures are rejected. One could assume that closing campuses would protect remaining jobs, but the opposite is true. As the Superintendent has explicitly noted in meetings, the primary savings from closures come from eliminating “redundant” positions: newer teachers, office staff, custodians, bus drivers, and food service workers. The district is effectively trying to cut the backbone of schools by eliminating some of the most essential yet lowest-paid jobs in the district. High paying admin positions, on the other hand, face less severe cuts.

Even in the unlikely event that student enrollment remains steady after closures, fewer drivers will haul children farther distances, fewer food service workers will prepare meals, fewer custodial staff will manage facilities, and more students will be packed into limited classrooms and shared spaces.

No promises have been made by the Superintendent to reduce class sizes, bring back staff or programs that have been cut, or to even provide more resources to schools that receive the students from closed schools.

Perhaps they know these promises would mean a complete financial negation of the meager savings a closure would provide.

On a human level, what’s lost goes beyond buildings, payroll, or line items. We lose the heart of our neighborhood, communities uprooted for what amounts to administrative preference.

Can we honestly argue this serves the public good?

Relying on school closures as a frontline solution reveals a profound lack of imagination, a reliance on weak conventions, and an extreme deficit in leadership. We should expect the same from our leaders that we demand from our children: to stay grounded in our values and to use creative problem-solving to fight for what matters.

Nationwide, we are facing the dismantling of the Department of Education and the erosion of funds for underserved populations. As federal resources shrink, state budgets struggle to fill the void. The expansion of school vouchers and unmonitored charter options worsens a split system where rich families retain advantages while poor and oppressed students bear the brunt of systemic divestment.

When you ask anything of the School Board, administrators, or legislators, they point to the finances. They explicitly tell us that current decisions are driven by capital rather than community needs or educational outcomes. The U.S. spends more per student than nearly any other country, yet academic outcomes remain average or worse. If students are not benefiting from these investments, who is?

Subscribe to Works in Progress to get part-two delivered straight to your inbox when it comes out on October 16.

Jacqueline Garrison is a full-time parent, part-time volunteer, and a dedicated advocate for public education and transit.

Oh, Labor Day, what a glorious day! In leftist circles, we sometimes hear conspiracy theories about how the September Labor Day was a “counterrevolutionary” move by the state to distract workers from the real labor day, May Day. The truth is a bit more nuanced.

The late 19th century was a vibrant period of labor militance and major worker strikes. To appease labor unions and the growing support for making Labor Day a holiday -- and to undermine the radical association with May Day -- the United States made Labor Day a national holiday in 1894.

The idea for a September labor celebration actually came from across the border. In 1872, Toronto printers struck for a nine-hour workday, and the annual labor celebrations that grew out of their fight became a fixture in Canada. When Peter J. McGuire (a key leader of the early American Federation of Labor) witnessed one such Canadian festival in 1882, he was inspired to bring the idea stateside. The first U.S. Labor Day was in fact celebrated September 5, 1882, in New York City — before May Day was immortalized in 1886.

May Day, on the other hand, was inspired by the sacrifice and fierce determination of Chicago workers in the 1886 Haymarket Affair. What began as a peaceful rally became one of the most violent days in U.S. labor history when someone (whose identity has never been officially confirmed) bombed the square with dynamite killing several protesters and police. Workers’ demands for an eight-hour work day enraged bosses who enlisted the police to crack down on the labor movement with lethal force. Although there was no evidence linking them to the bombing, seven anarchists were sentenced to death for the explosion. Of those seven, four were hanged, one committed suicide, and two later had their sentences reduced.

International Workers’ Day (May Day) is inspired by, and in memory of, the fight of those courageous Chicago workers. Beginning in 1926, May Day was commemorated worldwide with huge demonstrations and the closing of most workplaces. From Russia to France to Mexico, the explosive labor struggle in Chicago is honored by labor movements across the globe and is observed as an official holiday in many countries — with one notable exception, the United States.

The capacity for organized workers to win better wages, benefits, conditions, and the ability to make decisions over the workplace faces steep challenges. As a result of increasingly hostile federal and state governments, labor is weakened in both the private and public sector. Most people in the U.S. work for private companies. Only 6% of workers in the private sector are unionized, a steady decline since the mid-1950’s when more than a third of workers in the private sector were in a union. The few private unions that are still active are often unable to win even limited demands. Since the 1990s, when massive trade deregulation opened borders for large corporations, private sector unions have faced the unique challenge of capital flight -- where employers pick up and move to a new location without organized labor

Capital has the ability to transcend borders while the majority of workers do not. When capital can move freely but workers can’t, the scale is tipped in favor of the ruling class. Beginning on May 1, 2006, May Day in the U.S., although not an official holiday, is observed with demonstrations and rallies as International Workers Day with an emphasis on immigrant justice. Confronting globalized capitalism requires a globalized working class struggle. May Day is explicitly international while nationalism splinters the working class -- something the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) has long recognized.

Although the public sector employs only 15% of all workers, 33% of them are members of unions, more than five times the private sector rate. Half of all union members work in the public sector such as in local, state and national government. That turns public sector unions into a primary target for anti-democratic, free-market actors. Namely, major corporations and right-wing leaders. Conservatives attack the public sector precisely because it is where labor most often still wins. For example, the structural assaults against teachers and public education are designed to crush union membership and demonstrate the uphill battle facing labor advocates and social justice movements as a whole.

The growth of neoliberalism causes heightened individualism and lack of solidarity among workers. Revitalizing the labor movement counteracts the atomization of the working class. Organizing a union is about more than winning meager concessions. It is about restoring the dignity of workers, reversing the obscene expansion of wealth inequality, and resisting authoritarianism. It’s about transforming an economic system that reinforces the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.

There is growing support among the general public for unionization, which is a prerequisite for reversing the decline we’ve seen over the last few decades. While society would benefit from increased union membership and unionized workshops, strengthened collective bargaining power alone cannot deliver economic justice. To make that a reality, what is needed is social movement unionism — a more radical, class-wide political struggle whose demands go beyond better wages and benefits.

Labor Day should stand for something more than a day off work and a chance to attend a picnic or rally. It should stand for workers having more power in the union, the workplace, and the right to more fulfilling work. It should stand for organizing all workers including the precariat and winning demands that benefit the whole working class.

One powerful narrative that keeps workers’ rights suppressed is the contemporary concept of “work-life balance.” This is a bit of a controversial position because so many labor advocates champion this concept. But the unfortunate and unintended result of this framing is that it ends up telling workers that your life at work is somehow not your life. In the “work/life balance” narrative we’re all made out to be either an employee or a civilian, as if there are two severed halves of our existence that aren’t intrinsically related. Labor organizing taken seriously seeks to materially improve working conditions and life outside the workplace. Organizing should never be reduced to a workplace; it is a transformation of our relationship to power in all spheres of life.

Labor is more than unions and the workers in unions; it is also nonunion workers and the unemployed. We need to build a labor movement that also organizes for causes off-the-clock that meets worker needs such as universal health and free childcare, that challenges militarism, authoritarianism and AI; that unites with other social movements for justice and liberation and acts in solidarity with workers across the globe. Everyone does labor every day, some just get paid for it.

Happy Labor Day

History is not only what happened, but also how things are remembered. Since 1990, Works in Progress (WIP) has been a platform for the public and independent thinking of a community assuming control of its own history. A summary of WIP headlines from when it was first published up to now illustrates both the global and local nature of Olympia’s political sensibilities.

Fifty years of neoliberalism have demolished social and political institutions across the country. “Capitalism is eating democracy alive,” says cultural critic Catherine Liu. Organizations like WIP are the frontline of defense against the Far Right. With massive corporations devouring newsrooms everywhere, WIP lets Olympia tell its own story.

The Birth of Works in Progress

Works in Progress published its first newspaper in May of 1990, but its story starts two years earlier during Jesse Jackson’s remarkable 1988 presidential run. Influenced by the Black Panther Party, Jackson formed a national organization called The Rainbow Coalition to build mass support for his campaigns. During his 1988 candidacy, unofficial local chapters started to pop up all over, including one in Olympia that attracted a recent Evergreen graduate by the name of Sylvia Smith. Smith and the Thurston County Rainbow Coalition (TCRC) would go on to launch WIP, but not before a dramatic split occurred with the statewide organization, The Washington State Rainbow Coalition (WSRC).

When George H. W. Bush won the presidency in 1988, Coalition locals turned their focus to internal development. The WSRC began working on obtaining official status as a chapter of the National Rainbow Coalition (NRC). At their founding convention in early 1989, the WSRC elected a seven person executive committee. One elected member was Dave Jette of Thurston County, an idiosyncratic, popular figure among coalition members.

Jette described the founding convention as “wildly successful. Some 270 Rainbow members from all across the state attended it, and worked out a detailed political platform … to organize the most powerful, democratic, and progressive political organization in the history of Washington State.” Notably, the founding convention identified creating a statewide newspaper, called Rainbow News, as an important objective.

After the convention, Jette and two others travelled to Chicago to attend the National Rainbow Coalition meeting. There, the Washington delegation found themselves at odds with Jesse Jackson’s newly proposed organizational blueprint. Cindy Domingo, a leader of the King County Rainbow Coalition wrote, “Jackson … came down with an iron fist and stated … that all … Rainbow chapters will be transformed into his personal presidential campaign structure.” The WSRC defied Jackson’s proposal. As a result, they were rejected from officially joining the NRC, but continued under the Rainbow name.

Throughout 1989, divisions opened up at the state level along three significant lines. Some saw the Rainbow Coalition as a means of turning the Democratic Party into a truly democratic organization; others saw the Democratic Party as a means toward building an independent party; and a third tendency did not engage in electoral politics. The WSRC stagnated and membership declined from almost 1000 to 300. Jette was tasked with planning a retreat for March 1990 to address the situation, but for many in Olympia it was already too late. Sylvia Smith of TCRC wrote a scathing letter to the WSRC in advance of the retreat stating, “Our annual meeting … was a great success … Thurston County has not ‘dropped out.’ We just stopped paying attention to you.”

To compound the frustration in Olympia, the statewide coalition had flopped on one of its major objectives coming out of the founding convention a year prior. The statewide newspaper, Rainbow News, had barely gotten off the ground. There was no editorial board and the entire publication’s committee was composed of just one person. Feeling frustrated with the WSRC and increasingly distant politically, Sylvia Smith and a few others in TCRC decided to launch a newspaper of their own. In May 1990, Works in Progress hit doorsteps for the very first time.

Works in Progress once presented itself as a project of the Thurston County Rainbow Coalition, but it was clear early on that Olympia felt the gap between them and Jackson was widening. In July 1990, WIP published an article by Alexander Cockburn titled “Don’t Run, Organize,” that criticized Jackson for being uninterested in “building a political movement capable of acting in any way independent of his own personal political ambitions.” Shortly thereafter, much to the chagrin of the TCRC membership, Jackson defended Operation Desert Shield, saying that the United States must be ready to “use military force, multilaterally or unilaterally” to defend its diplomatic partners (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Jackson endorsing military escalation in the Middle East inflamed statewide tensions and caused things to boil over. In September 1990, Dave Jette — who still maintained his position within TCRC and on the state executive committee — took the mailing labels from WSRC and helped WIP send its September issue to the entire state. Inside, he had penned an article titled “The Rise and Fall of the Washington State Rainbow Coalition,” where he criticized the WSRC for being overly bureaucratic. At the following executive committee meeting Jette sardonically asked permission to use the statewide mailing labels for WIP again in October. The committee rejected his request and suspended him for stealing the mailing labels.

In advance of WIP’s October issue, Jette once again stole the statewide mailing labels so that WIP could send that issue directly to every Rainbower in the state. On the centerfold he wrote, “The National Rainbow Coalition is now nothing more than an extended campaign committee for Jesse Jackson. The problem lies not with Jesse Jackson … The problem is with progressives who attach themselves to the Jackson campaign instead of tackling the far more difficult task of building a democratic, grassroots-based progressive political movement.”

Rainbowers in Olympia saw Jette’s antics as heroic and brave, but many elsewhere thought they were contrarian and irresponsible. In a recent interview, Cindy Domingo reflected that Jette’s defiance demonstrated a short-sightedness that did not take seriously the long-term project of building political power. As TCRC drifted away from the statewide organization, the Rainbow Coalition legacy manifested differently across the state. King County found electoral success in the 1990s and many of its members held office well into the 21st century. Thurston County continued publishing Works in Progress, which would go on to become one of the longest lived independent newspapers still circulating in Washington.

Critical Reporting by Works in Progress

For the next 36 years Works in Progress has published articles covering local land use, police brutality and surveillance, social movements, and international issues, just to name a few. In 2012, WIP published an open letter to Olympia City Council titled “Stand Up For The Plan: Reject the 7-Eleven at Harrison and Division.” It received a massive amount of signatures and led to the creation of West Central Park. WIP’s ongoing coverage of American imperialism, from Nicaragua, to Iraq, to Palestine bolstered the anti-war politics that is a hallmark of Olympia today.

In the early 2000s, the Iraq War came home, when it was uncovered that the Port of Olympia would be used to ship Stryker combat units (large military vehicles) to Iraq. In 2006, Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (OlyPMR) coalesced to educate the public about the war and organize direct actions to raise the social cost of using the Port of Olympia. OlyPMR’s goal was primarily to delegitimize the Iraq War, which had been propped up by years of manufactured consent by a hawkish, Islamophobic corporate media landscape. OlyPMR needed a news outlet that was willing to publish their anti-war message. WIP was the only game in town.

The high water mark for OlyPMR came in late 2007. Mass mobilizations on November 9 and November 13 completely blocked the Port for over 30 hours in total. In a WIP article titled “Two Weeks that Shook Olympia,” Evergreen Professor Peter Bohmer wrote, “Olympia resembled an occupied city with police spread out in riot gear and military convoys on the streets.” In later years it would be uncovered that an FBI informant had infiltrated the protests.

The Olympian sent reporters to the scene, but utterly failed to report on the excessive police violence, even against their own reporters. In a November 15 editorial titled “At the port: What happened and what did not happen,” then Executive Editor Vickie Kilgore smeared protestors as “whiners” and called for them to be prosecuted for property damage and disruption of traffic. Bohmer, in his WIP article, reported that just two days earlier the Olympia Police Department shot a bystander with multiple pepper balls and struck him in the face with a baton.

In her editorial, Kilgore also brushed off accusations that the police attacked one of her own journalists, Matt McVay, on the job. Brendan Funtek, a staff member at The Olympian took to WIP to publish his perspective. He wrote, “I’ll always remember the feeling of numbness and nausea that coursed through my body the day I read Vicky Kilgore’s editorial.” She “directed public ire at unaccountable protesters and dismissed McVay being shot [in the face with a pepper ball] by an accountable police department.” As Funtek wrote, Kilgore’s representation was completely contrary to how events played out in real life. The police brutalized protestors and bystanders. WIP’s coverage provided a counter narrative and legitimized OlyPMR’s direct actions against the Iraq War in an otherwise hostile media landscape.

In a recent interview, Sylvia Smith reflected that The Olympian’s poor coverage of OlyPMR was not the fault of individual reporters, but rather their for-profit structure. The Olympian has been tossed around by some of the largest corporate news outfits in the country for the last 50 years. It was most recently acquired in 2006 by McClatchy Media Company — owned by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. Chatham’s founder, Anthony Melchiorre, was invited to dine with Trump at the White House in July 2017 after wielding his hedge fund to help “Catch and Kill” negative coverage of Trump in the run up to the 2016 election.

Community and Legacy

Works in Progress is not only independent from hedge funds; it was forged in the hearth of community organizing and remains entwined in the social movements pushing Olympia forward. WIP itself represents the fight for local news, a resource that is becoming more endangered each year. Community institutions are capable of producing knowledge that can push back on hegemonic narratives and create a counter balance of power. Since the 1990s, the people of the South Sound have seen their story told in Works in Progress.

100 years ago, Benito Mussolini and the Italian fascist party took power. They killed and imprisoned the socialist, communist, and anarchist leaders of the time. Antonio Gramsci, a leader of the Communist Party, contemplated the ascendance of Italian fascism from his jail cell. What had allowed such violent and corrupt politics to take hold? Among his richest conclusions was that the Italian working class was organized by forces antagonistic to its own actualization. The Catholic Church, the press, Italian literature, and other social institutions that shaped the thinking of everyday Italians had become deeply entrenched in capitalist politics. When fascists pushed for power, they found it easier to tap into a political ethos that was already latent in the Italian public. Future movements for socialism, Gramsci concluded, would need to find ways to create their own history where they are the protagonists.

From his jail cell, Gramsci wrote, “To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.” That is, to tell it, to have an active role in creating it. The creation of history relies on protagonists. Works in Progress knows who the protagonists are. That is what makes us news for the movement.

For more stories from September and previous months go to our website, www.olywip.org.

This month we have a big announcement. On September 9, we are relaunching our print newspaper. Join us from 6pm to 9pm at The Brotherhood Lounge to celebrate the paper, meet the WIP team, and get a free newspaper. WIP ran a print paper from 1990 until 2023, when it switched to being exclusively online. We see a growing need for independent media and a strong desire for it to be print. We spend so much time on screens, we want to provide a way to engage with your community without opening another application. We are excited to be back in action, and we are excited to see you at The Brotherhood!

by Lalo Cuitzeo

Trump’s war against immigrants and solidarity organizers has increased in repression and violence, while communities live in uncertainty and rebellion. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was gunned down in a hail of gunfire, killed in cold blood by ICE agents. His murder follows the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, two community defenders active in the nationwide struggle against fascism. On June 16, 2026, The U.S. Justice Department filed charges against 15 Minneapolis people, accusing them of a “conspiracy” to “impede” U.S. immigration officers during the Operation Metro Surge ICE and Border Patrol winter siege of Minnesota. Eight pro-immigrant activists in Alvarado, Texas received prison sentences ranging from 30-100 years for attending a late-night demonstration with fireworks to show support for immigrants held captive at the Prairieland Detention Center.

On July 7, 2026, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — from Tlatlaya, Mexico — was on the way to his construction job in Houston, Texas, with three co-workers including his brother, Victor Salgado, when two unmarked SUV’s approached his work van. The passengers in Lorenzo’s van have written statements that Lorenzo had pulled over and stopped the van when ICE agents opened fire, shooting Lorenzo through the passenger side window into his abdomen. This contradicts ICE’s false statements that Lorenzo was somehow trying to crash into them with his vehicle. According to the passengers, an agent violently pulled Lorenzo out of the van after shooting him. The agent then handcuffed Lorenzo’s wrists and ankles before agents did the same to the three other men. Lorenzo yelled out “Ya me mataron,” which translates to “they killed me,” as his final words. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo died shortly after, leaving behind his community and family, including a wife and three kids.

On September 12, 2025, Silverio Gonzalez — from Irimbo, Michoacán, Mexico — dropped off his three-year-old son at daycare in the Franklin Park section of Chicago, Illinois. Security footage from just down the street showed two plainclothes agents approaching Silverio’s car which was blocked in by an unmarked SUV. A witness in a nearby apartment described the agents as wearing body armor with no agency lettering. Silverio eventually reversed away from the two men approaching his car, and began to drive away from the agents — not toward them, as the Department of Homeland Security claimed — when the agent on the passenger side fired shots into the back of Villegas González’s car. The witness described Silverio as having “blood all over his neck and head.” He was pronounced dead at Loyola University Medical Center. Once again, ICE used the same line that Silverio “drove his car at law enforcement officers … fearing for his life, the officer fired his weapon.”

ICE started this year off by shooting and killing three people within the first month of 2026. In California, Keith Porter was shot dead by an off-duty ICE agent during a New Years Eve celebration in Los Angeles. Days later on January 7, 2026, Renee Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. ICE once again used the same false reasoning, that a moving vehicle made them fear for their lives, to justify the killing of Good that they had used against Salgado. Then on January 24th, Alex Pretti was shot to death by a United States Border Patrol Agent in Minneapolis. The two execution-style killings in Minneapolis occurred during “Operation Metro Surge,” when ICE and Border Patrol descended upon the Twin Cities to wreak havoc on immigrant communities and activists standing in solidarity. Community defenders mobilized to track the movements of repressive federal immigration agents, alert people to their presence, and step in when possible to stop abductions from happening. The mobilization from community members in Minneapolis inspired activists far and wide by successfully countering a belligerent and fascist paramilitary invasion.

Months after the Operation Metro Surge public relations nightmare, the federal government has retaliated by charging 15 Minnesotans with conspiracy charges. The Minnesota U.S. District Attorney has accused the Minnesota 15 of “violently oppos[ing] the enforcement of federal law,” by allegedly setting up blockades around government buildings, throwing chunks of ice at federal vehicles and “stalking” agents as they moved through Minneapolis. Newly released law enforcement files related to this case show that immediately after the murder of Pretti by Border Patrol agents, the U.S. government initiated an extensive surveillance campaign called “Operation Puppet Master,” targeting leftist protestors, labor unions, and organizations.

The Operation Puppet Master files reveal a detailed list of undercover agents infiltrating organizing meetings. One example mentioned was a Sunrise Movement meeting where an undercover posed as a construction worker and acted as an agent provocateur. The agent told someone in attendance that because he “works in construction,” he “could build items that might assist other groups with more direct-actions” and remarked that “going to jail did not bother him.” This was a clear attempt to entrap activists into illegal activity. Another undercover agent got added to Signal app chats to surveil activists and monitor their rapid response movements. Operation Puppet Master and the follow-up investigation “Project Whipple Shield” are drawing comparisons to COINTELPRO: the FBI infiltration, harassment, and surveillance counter intelligence program of the 1960’s and 70’s that targeted leftist movements in the U.S.

On July 4th, 2025, around a dozen people gathered for a noise demonstration in Alavarado, Texas at the Prairieland Detention Center to show solidarity with immigrant detainees. Fireworks were let off and police claim that a protestor exchanged gunfire with correctional officers and an Alvarado police officer on a nearby street. Afterward, police arrested everyone in the area and charged 10 people with crimes varying from terrorism to attempted murder. Two days later, an 11th person was arrested after receiving a phone call from someone in the jail. He was arrested by the FBI in Denton, Texas with a box of zines in their car. The FBI have since turned him over to ICE custody where he is now under the threat of deportation. On June 23, 2026, 8 of the Prairieland defendants were sentenced to Federal prison, with terms ranging from 30-100 years.

Immigration detention centers are sites of massive human rights violations. People are subjected to rotten food, unsanitary living conditions, abuse by guards, isolation, and more. Detainees, including those at the infamous Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA, often launch hunger strikes as a form of protest and resistance against these conditions, demanding humane treatment. Over 50 people have died in ICE custody since Trump re-took office in January 2025.

Brutality, repression, and disregard for human life by the federal government continues, but so does the resistance. When ICE rips families apart and shoots immigrants and solidarity activists alike, the people become more activated in the growing struggle against fascism. Immigrants are being held captive at detention centers for indefinite amounts of time, while activists are being rounded up on false charges and sent away for decades. The criminalization of protest and community defense escalates where anyone standing up to authoritarianism is subject to imprisonment or worse. The need for prison solidarity work is more important than ever to remind people inside detention centers, prisons, and jails that we continue the struggle in their name, and that we will never forget them. Honor the lives of fallen comrades by fighting with relentlessness and intelligence, so that we will not only slow down enemy forces, but ultimately defeat them.