by Matt Hilton

Following weeks of budget uncertainty, the Shelton School District has determined that a board-approved reduction in force (RIF) will not move forward. The district shared that enough staff members retired or resigned to avoid layoffs for the upcoming school year.

This is a relief to teachers and students. Yet lower enrollment, state cuts, and district administration priorities means this problem is not fully solved. And a question remains: Why was a RIF proposed even after voters approved a local levy?

What Happened

On Feb. 10, Shelton voters passed a local levy to preserve school programs and protect staff jobs. The community groups Citizens for Shelton Schools and the Shelton Education Association (SEA) informed the public about the importance of the levy through door-knocking outreach and a social media campaign. The levy passed with 62% “yes” votes, a victory for supporting Shelton schools.

Read Article Here

Shut Down ICE & CBP Collaborators

by Lalo Cuitzeo

Collaboration from private corporations is essential to the daily operations of the US detention and deportation machine. Tracking down and confronting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents engaging in abductions can be difficult to arrive to in time, and leads to higher risk of arrest and injury. But corporate targets have stationary addresses and often lower defensive capabilities. People willing to take action must raise the social costs of any entity that assists ICE and CBP.

Corporations like Geo Group and Global X Air directly facilitate detentions and deportations, while tech companies provide the software used to track and target immigrants for abduction. Another such example is Hilton Hotels and Resorts, who provide ideological and logistical support to ICE and CBP. They do so by welcoming its agents to stay there, as well as punishing subsidiaries for taking actions in support of immigrant communities. For these reasons, the Doubletree by Hilton Olympia was targeted on March 28, 2026.

Read Article Here

“A Library That is Not Based on Relationship is One That Will Wither and Die”: Rural TRL Libraries’ Longstanding Demands Lead Calls For Change Across the System After Layoffs Canceled

by Caelen McQuilkin

“Many of you signed the petitions placed in local stores recently and these have been delivered to the Timberland Board. But the power of individual letters is mighty indeed and a few letters to follow up the petitions might mean the difference in getting a library. So how much do you want it? Tell the board,” reads an article in the 1973 issue of The Quinault Rain Barrel, a local newspaper in the Amanda Park community.

Four years following the letters and petitions, the first Amanda Park Timberland Regional Library branch opened as a bookmobile by the Lake Quinault School. In 1991, the branch was expanded into a permanent building with full services and community support for the local library has continued strongly since then, but in the past decade the Amanda Park library has faced at least three threats of closure or major cuts. Community members have been continually forced to remind the board and administration why the library is important to them, just as they did in 1973.

Today, patrons across the entire Timberland Regional Library (TRL) system are hearing calls to protect local libraries from staffing cuts and closure. After the TRL admins announced a budget shortfall of about $3.8 million in January 2026, they attempted to lay off 61 frontline staff and transition three rural libraries to unstaffed libraries only accessible to “Expanded Access” (EA) card holders.

Read Article Here

Stay tuned! Thursday May 14 12-1pm 89.3FM

Managing Editor, Arlo Dolven and a few Works in Progress staff writers will be hitting the air waves with Kim Dobson’s Parallel University on KAOS 89.3FM.

Following weeks of budget uncertainty, the Shelton School District has determined that a board-approved reduction in force (RIF) will not move forward. The district shared that enough staff members retired or resigned to avoid layoffs for the upcoming school year.

This is a relief to teachers and students. Yet lower enrollment, state cuts, and district administration priorities means this problem is not fully solved. And a question remains: Why was a RIF proposed even after voters approved a local levy?

What Happened

On Feb. 10, Shelton voters passed a local levy to preserve school programs and protect staff jobs. The community groups Citizens for Shelton Schools and the Shelton Education Association (SEA) informed the public about the importance of the levy through door-knocking outreach and a social media campaign. The levy passed with 62% “yes” votes, a victory for supporting Shelton schools.

However, after the state budget, federal cuts, and enrollment estimates were finalized, it was apparent that the school district still faced a budgetary setback. “Once the levy passed, there was some relief. And then we were told the RIF was going to happen,” said Nick Sanders, Oakland Bay Junior High teacher and SEA president.

At the March 24 school board meeting, Superintendent Wyeth Jessee and Executive Director of Financial Services Clinton Sherman proposed a RIF for the upcoming year that would affect two to five staff members. The school board approved the RIF, with board member James Dale abstaining.

Educators were unsure of their positions. “I’m sure some people were preparing to look for a new job. It’s usually people on the lower end of the seniority list. ... But not always; last year, we had a teacher that was RIF’ed, and she’d been in the district for 8 or ten years,” said Sanders. “She didn’t leave on her own account.”

At the April 28 school board meeting, Superintendent Jessee announced the district would not move forward with the RIF due to “the way staffing moves had transpired. ... We had some staff going out on leave, or moving on to other districts, moving out of the area.”

The new RIF proposal came just a year after the school district initiated a previous RIF in February 2025. The levy was intended to preserve status quo at the district, yet other budget factors outweighed the levy’s projected funding. Student enrollment has declined due to a “lack of newcomers, a drop in birth rate, and some parent choice,” said Sherman, bringing enrollment numbers below where they were during COVID-era school closures.

Additionally, state funding has changed. Local Effort Assistance (LEA), which matches levy dollars for largely rural areas, was cut statewide, leading to a $400,000 reduction for Shelton schools. The state’s 2.6% implicit price deflator, meant to keep up with cost-of-living adjustments, does not match actual inflation.

Federal funding has also decreased. Office of System and School Improvement (OSSI) grants were cut by more than $500,000. McKinney-Vento funding, to support houseless and foster children and youth, was reduced by $55,000. The district will continue to support these students despite the funding loss.

All these changes have created challenges in maintaining the budget. At the beginning of the 2025-26 school year, the Shelton School District has a negative fund balance of nearly $2 million and are projected to reach a positive $1.5 million for the upcoming 2026-27 school year. The district’s fund balance target is in the $7.5 to $8 million dollar range.

Without these funding losses from state and federal programs, the levy would have allowed the district to keep existing staffing levels. Without the levy, the cuts and RIF would have been much higher and more disruptive.

Moving Forward

When asked whether he believes the district is prioritizing classrooms and staff, Sanders said, “We’re headed back in the right direction, since we’re not doing a RIF. But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what next school year brings. Of course, through bargaining, that’ll help shape what next school year looks like.” The Shelton Education Association is currently undergoing bargaining, as their current agreement ends in August.

At the April 28 school board meeting, SEA Vice President Robin Clarey spoke to the superintendent and board members, with several red-shirted teachers behind Clarey in support.

“We are happy the district made the choice to invest in classrooms and our students. That’s what the community voted for,” Clarey said. “Going forward, we will continue to use this forum to openly communicate with the board. We look forward to working together [to] navigate the district’s ongoing budget crisis while prioritizing students and classrooms.”

Sanders expressed that SEA representatives plan to speak at school board meetings for the rest of the school year. “I think the best way for the community to support the schools right now would be to come to school board meetings. Share their experiences as parents, family of students, and current students ... Let (the school board) know what they like about what’s going on in schools right now, what they’d like to see change. ... I think when people don’t show up, then the school board thinks everything’s fine.”

School board meetings are often available online (Shelton, Olympia, Tumwater) and public comments can be made in person or remotely.

Collaboration from private corporations is essential to the daily operations of the US detention and deportation machine. Tracking down and confronting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents engaging in abductions can be difficult to arrive to in time, and leads to higher risk of arrest and injury. But corporate targets have stationary addresses and often lower defensive capabilities. People willing to take action must raise the social costs of any entity that assists ICE and CBP.

Corporations like Geo Group and Global X Air directly facilitate detentions and deportations, while tech companies provide the software used to track and target immigrants for abduction. Another such example is Hilton Hotels and Resorts, who provide ideological and logistical support to ICE and CBP. They do so by welcoming its agents to stay there, as well as punishing subsidiaries for taking actions in support of immigrant communities. For these reasons, the Doubletree by Hilton Olympia was targeted on March 28, 2026.

This action was done in solidarity with other anti-ICE and CBP protests of early 2026, with particular connection to resistance efforts in Minneapolis and the surrounding areas. During the Department of Homeland Security’s siege of the Twin Cities, known as Operation Metro Surge, Hilton Hotels became a consistent focus of protest. ICE and CBP were known to stay at various Hilton hotels throughout this time period. Hilton Hotels also publicly severed ties with an affiliated Hampton Inn in Lakeville, Minnesota, after a well-publicized action by staff who allegedly canceled a reservation made by immigration enforcement officers.

Minnesotans spent many cold nights protesting outside multiple Hilton hotels, where a large number of immigration agents stayed. This strategy spread to comrades in New York City, who mobilized on January 27, 2026, three days after the killing of Alex Pretti by CBP. In Manhattan, dozens of protesters occupied the lobby of a Tribeca Hilton hotel, where federal immigration agents had previously lodged.

In solidarity with those who had taken a stand against Hilton’s complicity with ICE and CBP, the Palestine Action of the South Sound (PASS) Direct Action Committee planned a march to the Olympia Hilton Doubletree. Scheduled for Saturday March 28, 2026, this demonstration would take place immediately following the No Kings rally at the State Capitol Building, where hundreds of flyers were handed out to attendees. The action was also previously promoted throughout town with physical flyers, and spread through social media and personal invites.

The march began around 2:40pm, with a crowd of about 250 people. Protestors marched down Capitol Way, picking up energy and steam as they chanted and distributed literature, inviting nearby spectators to join. Bike cops followed closely, surveilling the crowd that had taken over the entire street with no permit. The group intentionally did not seek a permit because permission is not needed when demanding justice and liberation. The loud chants continued as the protestors approached the target of the march, the Hilton Doubletree, and filled the parking lot. Representatives from the Direct Action Committee entered the hotel to confront hotel management while the noisy crowd rallied just outside the lobby.

They delivered the following demands:

1. Release a public statement and commit to not house or otherwise support ICE and CBP through the Olympia Double Tree Hotel.

2. De-affiliate from the Hilton Brand.

This action against Hilton and similar ones across the nation are continuations of a long history of directly targeting companies who profit from suffering. For example, in 1960, 4 Black college students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s store lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The protest sparked six months of sit-ins, demonstrations and public pressure until Woolworth’s, the store targeted by the demonstrations, formally desegregated.

The Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement holds relevance as well, as it began in the 1970’s as a way of combating apartheid in South Africa. An international solidarity campaign would target businesses, cultural institutions, and nations complicit in supporting the apartheid regime, which was eventually brought down.

The majority of immigrant detainees are imprisoned in detention centers operated by private prison companies like Geo Group and CoreCivic who contract with ICE. Geo Group operates the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, WA on behalf of ICE. Deportation and detainee transfer flights out of King County Airport are a joint venture between ICE and private airlines like: Global X, Eastern Air Express, World Atlantic, Avelo, and more. Sky Service is the Fixed-Base Operator (FBO) that provides the fueling, runway support and other key assistance for these ICE flights. La Resistencia, an undocumented led organization, confronts these corporations, fighting to shut down the NWDC, to end to all immigrant detention and deportations, and to stop deportation flights out of King County Airport (BFI).

In 2019 people in Olympia and Seattle led actions targeting ICE collaborators, disrupting financial institutions like US Bank, Blackrock, Bank of America, Bank of the West, and other collaborators involved in the detention and deportation machine. The following year Olympians disrupted UPS and the AT&T inside the Capital Mall for their involvement.

In 2025, Olympia activists again marched into the Capital Mall to demand Verizon and AT&T cut ties with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Even small collaborating businesses should be targeted for actions as well. Comrades in Tucson disrupted a local auto repair shop called TCR II Suspension Brake and Alignment, for servicing Border Patrol vehicles in 2026.

These are just a few of the many instances of people taking action against companies that profit off of the misery that ICE and CBP inflict.

ICE and CBP cannot presently function without collaboration from corporate profiteers in the private sector. Hilton Hotels is just one of the many corporations that are complicit. Like other mechanisms of oppression, the detention and deportation system utilize infrastructure that can be disrupted. Just as ICE and CBP must be confronted, so too must the collaborating businesses that enable them. Continuous pressure on these corporate profiteers can lead to divestment which will slow down the machine, providing momentum to the resistance. Relentless and diverse actions against ICE, CBP, and its profiteers by people across the land can bring the system to a halt and create a society where people have freedom of movement and families stay together.

References:

1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/31/trump-denaturalization-citizenship-somali-americans-minnesota-fraud/87970217007/

2. https://www.sitinmovement.org/museum-news/post/1996202/woolworth-s-lunch-counter-sit-in-remembered-by-those-who-witnessed-history

3. https://laresistencianw.org/

4. https://itsgoingdown.org/july-8th-12th-week-of-action-shut-down-i-c-e-profiteers/

5. https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/seattle-wa-rolling-picket-shuts-down-ice-profiteers/

“Many of you signed the petitions placed in local stores recently and these have been delivered to the Timberland Board. But the power of individual letters is mighty indeed and a few letters to follow up the petitions might mean the difference in getting a library. So how much do you want it? Tell the board,” reads an article in the 1973 issue of The Quinault Rain Barrel, a local newspaper in the Amanda Park community.

Four years following the letters and petitions, the first Amanda Park Timberland Regional Library branch opened as a bookmobile by the Lake Quinault School. In 1991, the branch was expanded into a permanent building with full services and community support for the local library has continued strongly since then, but in the past decade the Amanda Park library has faced at least three threats of closure or major cuts. Community members have been continually forced to remind the board and administration why the library is important to them, just as they did in 1973.

Today, patrons across the entire Timberland Regional Library (TRL) system are hearing calls to protect local libraries from staffing cuts and closure. After the TRL admins announced a budget shortfall of about $3.8 million in January 2026, they attempted to lay off 61 frontline staff and transition three rural libraries to unstaffed libraries only accessible to “Expanded Access” (EA) card holders.

This existential threat to the library system produced massive public backlash, which skilled organizers channeled into a highly visible union campaign and the creation of a brand new organization called the Patron Coalition for Local Libraries. The Patron Coalition and AFSCME Local 3758B, the union which represents most TRL workers, have since built a strong coalition that opposes these cuts to staff and important library services. They pushed Executive Director Cheryl Heywood to resign on March 25, and later, on April 15, the TRL administration agreed to pause 80% of the proposed layoffs, reducing involuntary layoffs to 8 employees. Then, on April 24, the TRL administration buckled under immense pressure and announced an almost complete reversal of the plan to switch three rural libraries to entirely unstaffed EA hours — the branches will now remain staffed and open at least three days a week.

How are the union and Patron Coalition organizing so effectively? Part of the answer to that question lies in stories from rural branches like Amanda Park, which the union and Patrons Coalition center in their ultimate objective to keep all TRL libraries open and fully staffed.

Rural TRL branches have long been made to articulate the value of their services in opposition to the TRL administration’s increasingly business-centered models. Their understandings of the core value of a library — conversation, community building, and access to information — sit at the core of the ultimate objective for those now organizing to save all TRL libraries.

Stories from Amanda Park & Other Rural Branches

The TRL system provides the Amanda Park branch with more resources than local property taxes could. This allows for a wider book collection, engaging programming, and library staff dedicated supporting patrons with questions, research, and technology.

In March 2026, the Amanda Park library was slated for a transition to complete Expanded Access (EA) hours, meaning the building would have no staff and patrons could only enter if they apply for a designated EA card, which requires patrons to be above 14 and have a verifiable address, among other restrictions. But on April 24, the Amanda Park community received the news that the library will remain open and fully staffed on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and use EA hours the other days of the week.

The Friends of the Library had planned an appreciation party for April 24 in light of its likely closure, but the mood was lighter and more cheerful upon the morning’s good news. Patrons, library staff, students and other community members filled the library with chatter, eating baked goods, looking through albums of archival documents from the library’s history. As local high school students watched a slideshow of old library photos, many recognized themselves from years ago. One student recounted monthly story time at the library, remarking, “it was one of my favorite memories.”

Aja Wright, a 9th and 10th grade teacher at the Lake Quinault School, a public K-12 school of 223 students in Amanda Park, brought her class to the appreciation party on April 24. “Because of the funds for our schools, our [school] library is not robust,” she said, “The way we get a robust library is here. ... If we weren’t part of a bigger system, this library wouldn’t be that great. This is an amazing resource.”The TRL system provides the Amanda Park branch with more resources than local property taxes could. This allows for a wider book collection, engaging programming, and library staff dedicated supporting patrons with questions, research, and technology.

Kameme Ogemahgeshig, Post-Secondary Specialist in the Education Department of the Quinault Nation, shared her thoughts connected to the unique geography and community of the region. “It’s a scatter of small little towns, and everybody knows each other all up and down the beach, Amanda Park and up to Quileute and La Push. You kind of just know because it’s so small here,” she said. “I do think that that library is absolutely important. And I do think that a staff member is absolutely important there in that little town.”

Years ago, library staff from all TRL branches wrote monthly reports of “service stories,” important moments from the library services they provided. At board meetings, Trustees read these stories to learn more about each branch and the impact of its work. A January 2012 story from the McCleary library — which had been slated to be transitioned to EA only along with Amanda Park and Hoodsport — ls of a patron who came into the library panicking after a doctor’s appointment, thinking the doctor had told him he was going to die. The librarians helped him figure out the doctor had not in fact told him that his life was in danger. “He was really happy to have a resource in ‘plain English,’ and he was better prepared to ask questions when the clinic called him back,” the service story recounts. If the McCleary branch transitioned to EA access only, this service would be gone.

Protecting Rural Libraries Now Helps Protect All TRL Libraries

The Patron Coalition and union are using arguments similar to those of the rural libraries that pushed back against the CFP eight years ago.

The notion that rural communities deserve access to an open, staffed libraries seems so uncontroversial it is hardly recognizable as a contentious point. However, this view of libraries is in stark opposition to a long-running narrative from the TRL administration: Because rural libraries serve fewer patrons, directing resources towards these branches is generally not money well spent.

Brooke Pederson, former manager of the Amanda Park library, reflected on this: “There will be days in a rural library when only a handful of people come in; but the point is that they have the same opportunity of access to services as an urban library user,” she said. “I’m tired of hearing, ‘but the numbers don’t support it.’ … It’s about future attendees and future needs. It’s about letting people know that every single community member is valued and has access to information, education, and entertainment.” Thinking about the broader question of what libraries are supposed to do, she continued, “a business model for libraries, consolidating services and staff to urban centers, valuing workflow or efficiency over customer service, pokes at the foundation of what libraries stand for: equitable access to information.”

As the TRL administration has adopted more business model like priorities over the last eight or so years. Rural branches have consistently organized against closures and reduced services. The 2018 Capital Facilities Proposal (CFP) slated almost every rural branch in the system for closure or major reduction in services. In 2024, the South Bend library was closed when mold was discovered in the basement, but has yet to reopen. A few months later, the Naselle library was also closed and switched to entirely unstaffed EA hours, a move strongly opposed by residents, librarians, and AFSCME Local 3758B. A timeline of the Amanda Park branch’s history created by library staff lists at least three threats of closure since 2016. The most recent is March 2026, when the Amanda Park, Hoodsport, and McCleary were slated for transition to full EA hours.

Today, with a $3.8 million budget shortfall, both rural and urban libraries across the TRL system are facing the threat of major staffing cuts and closures, meaning more pokes at their foundational function: providing equitable access to information. But organizing across the TRL system is making effective progress in stopping the damaging cost-cutting proposals introduced by the TRL administration in February 2026. “Pressure from the union and pressure from the public, in particular the Patron Coalition for Local Libraries, is what has led to the resignation of the executive director and the pause in the majority of layoffs,” said a current TRL employee, referred to here as Librarian C.

As explored in the April issue of Works in Progress, many librarians and advocates, specifically those with experience working in rural branches, saw the administration’s cost-cutting proposals in 2026 as a way of “reverse engineering” the proposals they put forward in their 2018 CFP, which was intended to lay off large numbers of library staff and slated almost every rural branch in the system for closure or major reduction in services.

The Patron Coalition and union are using arguments similar to those of the rural libraries that pushed back against the CFP eight years ago. Libraries are about more than checking books in and out, organizers and advocates say, they are about the relationships, conversations, and community connections they help build. “How can a library that is closed to young patrons ... be one that gives the right book, at the right time, into the hands of a reluctant reader?” questioned Rich McConnell, a Quinault resident and Amanda Park library patron, “A library that is not based on relationship is one that will wither and die.”

Over the past few years, the TRL administration’s increasingly out-of-touch policies have also impacted TRL branches serving higher population areas. A current TRL library assistant working in higher-population branches, referred to here as Librarian B, shared that over the past four years, administrators have reorganized library positions so that library staff have less time to spend with patrons.

Librarians have been asked to take on more responsibilities with outreach, while library assistants have taken on more circulation and patron-service jobs, notably increasing their workload. At the same time, library refreshes have consolidated the information and circulation desks into one desk used for all purposes, Librarian B said. “[Patron wait] times have lengthened because we just don’t have enough staff to be able to answer your question or be able to help you out,” they said.

From Amanda Park to downtown Olympia, the TRL administration’s policies have been diminishing the quality of staff-patron interactions, moving resources away from community-informed needs, and worsening work conditions for library staff, advocates and former library staff say. To focus on changing this, the Patron Coalition and union link very different library branches’ struggles together, creating a wide coalition of places, stories, and patrons united under the strong demand that libraries should be based in relationship.

Some of the Patron Coalition’s strategies aim to change TRL leadership. The library system should be guided and run by people who all have on-the-ground experience working in public libraries, said Rachelle Martin, former TRL employee and organizer with the Patron Coalition. “When you have people running the organization that don’t understand truly, [how working in a library means] watching people’s lives transform in front of you, you’re going to think that a library is just a building with books in it,” said Martin.

This means hiring administrators who have experience working in the TRL system (currently, most of the administrative staff do not), and selecting Trustees who understand the board as a “working board,” not just an entity designed to rubber stamp decisions, Martin said. Recent emails from the Patron Coalition also say this means firing administrators Brenda Lane and Andrea Heisel, who, along with former director Heywood, helped design and implement many of the plans to close and cut services to libraries since 2018.

Along those same lines, the Patron Coalition is calling for more transparent and accountable leadership structure. As TRL stands right now, Martin said, “they’ve designed this system where they’re blameless… who’s really steering the ship?”

Another important part of the Patron Coalition strategy is presenting viable alternatives for the current budget crisis. In early April, Martin drafted a strategic plan that would save almost $2.8 million in the library’s current budget, and reverse all front-line staff layoffs. The plan saves money mainly by cutting high-salary positions at the TRL service center, while still sustaining all the service center and administration’s normal functions.

The Patron Coalition and union are also clear in their support for preserving the system of Timberland Regional Library as a whole. Established in 1968, TRL was voted in as an Intercounty Rural Library District, “specifically created to provide library services in unincorporated areas outside of city limits” according to its website. Under this setup, Thurston County, the economic driver of the region, helps fund libraries in the other four counties whose taxes would not be able to fund libraries with such extensive services. “It’s revolutionary,” said Martin. “This is something really worth preserving.”

“For many years, the amazing things that happen every day in Timberland libraries are in spite of a toxic leadership that resents, distrusts, and looks down on the workers,” said Librarian C. “Ultimately, we are part of a larger struggle. What is happening at Timberland is happening at all levels, across the country. At stake is freedom of information and free access to essential resources, for all of us.”

Caelen McQuilkin is a reporter from the high desert of eastern California who has loved the green of Olympia since moving here in August. They love reporting as a way to build connections while reflecting a place's complex picture.

When colonialism first penetrates into new territories, it tends to do so under the guise of help. It alleges to provide a service that no one else can. Then it causes a rift in the social norms promoting those that do its bidding through population control by giving titles: “today we honor the first ever Ethics Manager” or “The first Supervisor of Shoe Shiners.”

But to truly make the people submit, it must infiltrate the law, so a system of corrupt judges, prosecutors, and lawyers must be on board. Without them, the corporations’ true cash cow — the for profit prison system — would not exist. This is what is taking place globally in what I call Corporate Colonization.

Angela Davis in her talk “The Meaning of Freedom,” highlights how corporations deplete the natural resources of third world countries (Third world is a racist term mind you, to describe any country that does not subscribe to western capitalist ideology). However, shiny new state-of-the-art Prisons are built to warehouse any one who opposes corporate interests.

Similarly to corrupt states, which have have a top down bribery pyramid, criminal codes in colonially occupied countries are created so ambiguously that a judge can interpret them in any scheme of ways. These codes, you’ll find, will always have to do with the economic interests of extractive corporations. If the lucrative industry is natural resources, rare metals, or agriculture, the main codes with heaviest prison penalties are trespassing, robbery, burglary, and for promoting “terrorism.” Puppet judges, prosecutors, and lawyers, who are frequently paid by the same entity, also have shares in the so called “country enriching programs” that the corporations provide.

A report by France Press 2014 highlighted how U.S. companies invest 14 billion in order to secure free-market access to 350 million middle class African consumers. Their alleged goal is to tie financial institutions, promote trade investments, and create job growth.

From a pure predatory capitalist stand point, companies backed by First World governments and militaries will toot about how they tap into the middle class of their new colonized host, sucking them of their moral fiber and creating a class division. The manipulated population glorify the jobs created by external investment and scramble to be trained (indoctrinated), further help defile their home land, and imprison their fellow compatriots all while bragging about the new car they bought.

All the while, colonizers like General Electric will earmark that they’re investing 2 billion to build equipment for oil and “other industries” as well as train health and “other sectors.” Other industries and other sectors should be understood to mean judicial and new high-tech prisons.

With their populations infected, these countries governments’ are vulnerable to accusations of corruption, which tend to fall on their hands. If government officials attempt to temper foreign corporate exploitative quests, coups will be orchestrated to behead them under the guise of democracy regime change.

For example, on February 8, 2022, Democracy Now reported, “Waves of coups disrupts Africa as U.S. trained soldiers play a key role in overthrowing governments.” Several U.S. trained officers (as part of a growing U.S. military presence in the African region under the guise of counterterrorism), have taken part in coups in Mali, Chad, Sudan, and Burkina Faso.

We can see the theme here, but where do these ousted government officials go? What type of due process do they receive? and who is the puppet master?

Stay woke my friends. The cancerous corrupt judicial process we loath is being exported, and a new global corporate Jim Crow system is being installed to enslave humanity on a global scale… Colonization never died, it just put a mask on rebranding it self.

Tomas S. Afeworki is a Pan-Afriqan illustrator and human rights activist focused on the social and political protection of the diaspora. Through grass roots organizations, community celebrations and legislative summits, he aims to unify a coalition for freedom and is inspired by Nelson Mandela’s quote, “There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere.”

Afeworki maintains that he has been wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for a crime he did not commit and is actively fighting for his freedom.

Following in the steps of leaders that inspire his purpose like Nelson Mandela, George Jackson, and Assata Shakur, he seeks justice for himself and his fellow bothers and sisters that have been victimized by a corrupt judicial system.

To learn more about Tomas S. Afeworki and support his exoneration please visit: www.FreeTomas.com

A future where you are required to scan your face, fingerprint, or government identification to access your email, interact with social media, or even log in to your computer is not just dystopian science fiction — it is quickly becoming a possible near-term reality.

In an environment of increasing federal government surveillance and intrusion into our private affairs, software age verification laws are gaining in popularity, with proponents claiming they will protect children and prevent crime. These laws would require most technologies that have become integrated into our daily lives to force users to positively identify themselves. Other countries, such as the U.K., have already implemented these laws to some degree, and they are beginning to show up in the United States as well. Is this for the greater good, or it it a blow to our individual privacy?

In October 2025, California passed the Digital Age Assurance Act (Assembly Bill 1043), which will take effect in 2027. This law requires all operating system providers to collect and verify age information during program launch, transmit that information to the software company in real time for verification, and sort users into age categories. While it doesn’t require face or ID card scans, this law lays the groundwork for such requirements. Texas and Utah have passed laws that require ID or face scan for access, although these are currently limited to app stores on mobile devices rather than embedded in the device’s foundational software.

Last year, the U.K. implemented laws that not only require the above elements but also general monitoring of all user-generated content, including private conversations, as well as age verification to access any website that hosts user-generated content, such as Wikipedia.

The internet has drastically changed how most people interact with current events, share ideas and intellectual resources, and engage in creative projects. We rely on this connectivity to stay in touch, learn about the world, and be productive in work and art. Today, people gladly labor for no pay to share knowledge, whether by contributing to an encyclopedia article on an obscure historical figure or creating a file of a useful part that can be generated on a 3D printer. The flow of discourse is free and fluid, for better or worse. What would the world be like if this were to change?

One effect of the U.K. age verification laws is that Wikipedia may no longer be accessible to U.K. residents. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts and maintains Wikipedia, does not have an effective way to comply with the requirements and plans to possibly cut the U.K.’s access to the website entirely. The replacement for this trove of user-contributed information will likely be resources that are controlled either by corporate media or by the state itself. This outcome feels like it was pulled straight from the pages of a dystopian novel, with a free and open resource becoming one that only some can access, with great effort, and possibly for a fee.

It is clear that these laws constitute a gross restriction on access to information. At minimum, they are an invasive hurdle for all users, and at worst, they can be viewed as the first steps of blanket state and corporate censorship and control of the internet as a whole. Further, the personally identifiable information that would be collected must be transmitted, stored, and analyzed somewhere — and where are the assurances that the storage location would be secure against malicious actors?

The greatest advocates for these laws fall into two main camps: socially conservative activist groups and big tech companies. The former wants to restrict access to viewpoints that conflict with those they espouse under the guise of moral protection. The latter wants to control, and therefore profit from, access to information, regardless of the social cost. The ideal corporate internet of the future is less of a vibrant global forum of free ideas and more like a subscription streaming service, with content curated and delivered to those who pay for the privilege.

The state, of course, seems to relish the idea of controlling access to supposedly harmful information for the good of minors, but there is no clear definition of “harmful” and no guarantee that only minors would be affected. We need to ask: Why do we need to be known to the powers that be so intimately, and what do they gain? Que bono?

We are subject to constant scrutiny by forces more powerful than us. AI-equipped cameras scan our license plates, tying our whereabouts to databases administered by private companies under government contract. Our devices store our advertising profiles, tracking our online activity to sell to companies hoping to influence our buying habits. Operating systems increasingly integrate news stories and advertisements from associated media companies. Our faces are scanned and the images stored in databases when we travel (a practice one can opt out of, for now). Our privacy continues to shrink, and we are on the brink of losing freedom in the digital spaces where we still have the ability to speak our minds and hear from others doing the same.

There are groups fighting software age verification laws, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has launched a resource hub for those who wish to challenge online age gating. Moving away from corporate software or cloud services and toward open-source or privacy-oriented alternatives is also a way to resist. For operating systems, you can use Linux instead of Windows on your computer and Graphene instead of Android on your smartphone. Proton or CryptPad are end-to-end encrypted services that can be used instead of Google Docs. (This article was written on an Ubuntu Linux laptop via Proton Docs, and the author found the process of transitioning to both quite simple and painless.)

For now, at least, resources on shifting to a more private and secure digital presence are readily available. However, this could change; your phone and computer may soon no longer be an open gateway to knowledge provided by fellow humans in all their beauty and wildness, but rather a walled and manicured garden cultivated by those who tell you they know what is in your best interests.

During the last decade, there have been intermittent protests and clinic defense for patients entering and exiting the Planned Parenthood on the corner of Legion and Adams in downtown Olympia. The protests have historically countered the presence of forced birthers who attempt to invoke fear, shame, and harass patients entering the clinic. Forced birthers are against abortion in all circumstances. They are a splinter of the national pro-life movement that has been mobilizing for decades to abolish and criminalize access to abortion legally in the United States.

In response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, concerned community members sought to create a recurring third space on the sidewalk outside the clinic and build community. This space has been habitually gathering once a week since June 2022 to serve a free hot breakfast for all. The space is called the Anti-Fascist Community Alternative Breakfast, also known as ACAB Breakfast. It is in opposition to fascist ideologies, groups, and individuals.

Since the lively inception of ACAB Breakfast, it has confronted forced birthers on the ground once per week. Less than a year into the project, the forced birthers stopped showing up. One of the goals of this protest is to take action against a capitalist culture and economic system that alienates people from their community and makes it a requirement to spend money to be in public. ACAB Breakfast includes a wide range of activities, from directly confronting patient harassment by forced birthers, to gathering food and clothing, to sign waiving, playing music, and providing first aid and harm reduction supplies.

Rain or shine, forced birthers or not, ACAB Breakfast has sought to continue protesting our consumer culture while supplying free breakfast; meanwhile, joyfully celebrating bodily autonomy and solidarity with patients and clinicians, entering and exiting the clinic. Now and then, patients have sought help in finding the Planned Parenthood entrance or ask for support to go inside. Socializing with the community passing by has been a critical tactic in successfully protesting our cruel circumstances. Having fun and being welcoming while striving for a more humane approach to access to food, access to public space, and access to healthcare have made ACAB Breakfast a place people show up to connect and resist.

Continuing throughout 2023 to 2024, there was an absence of any reactionary presence or forced birthers protesting in any organized capacity outside of Planned Parenthood. Forced birthers began appearing again consistently in January of 2025, now with a larger influx of participants. As their numbers have been rising, so has their blatant fascist rhetoric: from Christian nationalists revising American history to people aggressively misgendering trans individuals, to the brazen endorsement of spewing the great replacement conspiracy claims. Pastors have also started showing up more frequently, bringing anti-abortion crowds with them. The demand to protest this attack on bodily autonomy has increased.

Anti Fascist Community Alternative Breakfast is currently setting up free breakfast and clinic defense every Saturday, 9 am to 12 pm, on the corner of Legion and Adams. Come and join us!

A more than 20-year effort to protect sensitive salmon habitat and one of the largest populations of Oregon spotted frogs in Washington entered a new phase in December, when Thurston County commissioners, by a vote of 4 to 1, approved an industrial rezone of approximately 270 acres in the Black River corridor, overriding a recommendation from the county’s Planning Commission to deny a rezone.

The change allows uses such as meat processing, pesticide distribution, fertilizer manufacturing, and landfills on land largely surrounded by a national wildlife refuge. South Sound Bird Alliance is now appealing the decision before the Growth Management Hearings Board.

At issue is how the County evaluated the future of the Black Lake Quarry. Under prior rural zoning that limited development to one home per 20 acres (Rural 1/20), the site was subject to reclamation requirements that included large-scale revegetation after mining ends. Under the rezone to a Rural Resource Industrial designation (RRI), the site can instead be developed for industrial uses. The question is whether the County adequately considered that difference in long-term futures—between restoration on one hand and continued industrial use on the other hand.

The Black River corridor has long been treated as a place where development should be limited. In 2007, in response to litigation by growth management watchdog Futurewise, Thurston County added protective zoning of Rural 1/20 along the entire Black River corridor. A 2007 county ordinance even calls out the Black River corridor as an example of what types of lands warrant the zoning classification of Rural 1/20. The ordinance identifies the corridor as an environmentally sensitive area where incompatible uses should be avoided.

That framework has shaped how mining has been allowed to proceed over the years. The expectation was not that the quarry would remain industrial, but that it would be returned to a vegetated landscape consistent with the surrounding corridor when mining was done.

The Department of Natural Resources approved a post-mining reclamation plan requiring the mine owner to plant approximately 440 trees and shrubs per acre across more than 200 acres—on the order of 100,000 plantings. Projects of that scale typically involve millions of dollars in revegetation costs. The rezone relieved the mine owner of that expense.

Planning commissioners, environmental advocates, and members of local Tribes who participated in the review process said the record did not support a rezone to industrial. The county Planning Commission voted 6 to 3 to recommend denial of the rezone. Its analysis looked at what the site is required to become after mining ends: large-scale revegetation in a zone that allows no more than one house per 20 acres versus more limited planting requirements under a Rural Resource Industrial zone.

But county staff and all but one member of the Board of County Commissioners applied a narrower framework. In a December 2, 2025, agenda-setting meeting, they solely compared the site’s current condition as an active mine to potential future industrial uses. Staff told commissioners that future industrial uses could result in a better environmental outcome compared to what the site looked like today, and that future development would be regulated through permitting and the County’s critical areas ordinances.

“The Planning Commission overwhelmingly voted to reject this proposal,” said Colin Bartlett, a member of the county Planning Commission. “We forwarded all of those findings in the trust that the Board would follow the evidence, our recommendation, and the expressed wishes of their constituents. … Instead, all it takes is a couple of motivated speakers to annul all of that when it benefits owners [of the mine].”

County Commissioner Emily Clouse, the sole member of the Board who voted against the rezone, explained at the December 2^nd meeting why she would be voting against the rezone: “I just can’t, in good conscience, have that expanding industrial intensity in a hydrologically fragile ecosystem—without that scientific certainty—I just can’t support that.” Before the final vote on December 16, Clouse sought to give the Board more time to analyze the proposed rezone, but her motion failed 4 to 1.

In its August 2025 comment letter to the Board, the South Sound Bird Alliance wrote about the wildlife refuge largely surrounding the quarry, noting there is a “consensus of opinion, from legal, policy and advocacy points of view, on the extraordinary environmental vulnerability of this area and the need to strictly limit land uses adjacent to it.”

Sue Danver, who South Sound Bird Alliance called one of the “strongest, most passionate and committed advocates” of the natural world when she passed away in 2025, had devoted considerable time to protecting the Black River Corridor, according to her husband Bob Metzger who testified at the rezone’s November hearing.

Metzger told the Board that Danver “and the Black Hills Audubon Society spent years, untold hours of volunteer effort, and over $60,000 for experts and lawyer fees…to protect the Black River and the adjacent wildlife refuge from degradation caused by inappropriate industrial uses and to see that the area was restored to functioning habitat once the gravel mining was completed. That was over 20 years ago. …[T]he current rezone…would…ensure that the parcel will never again provide any usable habitat for birds and wildlife.” Metzger is also a party to the appeal.

Beowulf Brower, who kayaks and hunts on the Black River, said at the hearing in November that the rezone would negatively impact recreation and tourism, “undermining years of effort by groups like CNLM [Center for Natural Lands Management], Ducks Unlimited, the Audubon Society, and the Chehalis Tribe.”

County resident Brett Clubbe told the Board before its final vote that the rezone “benefits one landowner while shifting long-term costs onto the public.”

The dispute is not only about environmental risk, but also about how the County justified the rezone under its own planning framework.

Commissioners cited a need for additional Rural Resource Industrial land, relying in part on the County’s 2023 Industrial Lands Study. That study describes the RRI zone as intended for industrial uses tied to agriculture, forestry, and mineral extraction, with controls designed “to establish compatibility with surrounding rural development and offer protection from industrial blight and impacts.”

The study also explains that more intensive industrial uses are limited by specific location and performance criteria, including proximity to an Interstate 5 interchange, access to arterial roads, and availability of rail service. “These conditions limit the area in which RRI-zoned land can support more intensive industrial uses to the Maytown Interchange,” the study states, identifying approximately 97 acres of developable land under those constraints.

On the same day the Board approved the rezone, it also amended the development code to remove those same constraints: the requirements tying Rural Resource Industrial uses to proximity to Interstate 5, rail access, and arterial roads. As a result, the locational constraints described in the Industrial Lands Study no longer applied, and land that previously could not accommodate those uses became newly eligible across the county. The Board did not address those changes in connection with its decision to rezone Black Lake Quarry.

Leading up to the vote, the chair of the Board, Commissioner Tye Menser, said his understanding of the study was that while the county has sufficient industrial land overall, there are gaps in the availability of large, fully serviced sites. “I heard several people say that we don’t need industrial lands… And then heard other people say, ‘Well, we do need larger parcels,’” he said. “My recollection was that Thurston County had enough industrial land, . . . but there were deficiencies in having large parcels with utility access.”

Gordon White, a former Thurston County planner who developed the first industrial lands studies in Thurston County in the 1980s and early 1990s, joined the South Sound Bird Alliance in appealing the rezone. He said the need for large industrial parcels is already addressed through land assembly. “Costco in Tumwater recently bought multiple smaller adjacent parcels, which, when combined, met its need for a larger parcel,” he said.

The Board’s process of analysis contrasted with that of the Planning Commission, which was shown pictures of mines that had been restored, including one mine that is now salmon habitat.

“We reviewed hundreds of documents, reports, studies, testimonies, and public comments from community members, nonprofit stewards, scientists, lawyers, and stakeholders, all overwhelmingly opposed to this rezone,” said Planning Commissioner Colin Bartlett. “The voices in favor were almost unanimously developers, industry figures, and paid consultants of those who stood to unilaterally profit off of a rezone.”

Before the Board took its final vote to approve the rezone, Thurston County resident Elizabeth McNagny urged it to consider the fact that the county has enough industrial lands already. “When adequate capacity already exists, expanding industrial zoning is not driven by need — it is a discretionary policy choice. And making that choice next to a national wildlife refuge does not make sense.”

Kenny is a self-proclaimed “hot head.” Living with mold, leaking windows and holes in the walls of his Newcastle Apartment haven’t done much to calm him down — then his landlord banned his cat, and he’s not the only one. “Everybody’s pissed, but I’ve got a certain righteous fury that’s downright biblical, man,” he said when speaking with the Seattle Worker. Kenny and the residents of the Newcastle Apartment Tenant Union (NTU) are banding together and demanding satisfaction. They are but one of four tenant unions that have launched in the last several months in Tacoma.

Unionized Tacoma tenants are following in the footsteps of New York Apartments Tenant Union (NYTU), Tacoma’s first tenant union, which launched December of last year. Newcastle Tenant Union, New York Apartments Tenant Union, and recently launched North Slope Tenant Union (NSTU) are a part of the same portfolio owned by absentee landlords Ann Linborn, Rob Hoover, and Candy Hoover. All together, these unions make up roughly 75% of tenants in Hoover-Linborn owned properties, and control $50,000 in monthly income to their landlords. For reference, the Hoovers own over $22 million dollars worth of property in Pierce County, a yacht, an art gallery, and a permanent residence in Huntington Beach, California. The cost of repairs is not beyond them.

“My neighbors have gone entire winters without heat. We’ve gone weeks without hot water. We’ve been forced to pay, sometimes more than half our monthly income on apartments with caved-in ceilings, mold-infested walls, rotted floors, and windows that do little to deter weather and pests,” said NYTU member Francis Faye. The aforementioned unions, as well as The McIlvaine Apartment Tenant Union (MTU) have all submitted demands to negotiate with the landlords directly, remedy the violations, and advocate for better conditions.

Only the NYTU demand letter has received a response from the then-serving (but since fired) management company, Elevate Property Management. The response explained that as the law does not require them to fulfill many of the demands they will not. These demands include, among other things: standardizing rental rates, allowing current and future tenants to keep pets in their units, and their right to organize. Additionally, Elevate said communication would exist through management and individual tenants, and not through the landlords.

Hoover and Linborn fired Elevate shortly after the NYTU launched. According to Union residents, an Elevate employee told them the company was dismissed from managing the properties following their fulfillment of multiple maintenance requests resulting in “overspending” on maintenance for buildings. Many of the maintenance requests have been left unresolved.

While the NYTU did not receive a response to their demands, they did receive a cease and desist letter claiming they were doxing the Hoovers and Linborn, and that ANTIFA groups were sharing their address online. The closest thing to evidence of this is that their Huntington Beach work address was released to the press to exemplify them being absentee landlords. They also claimed that the renters were already on a rent strike. They are not.

The fate of Elevate and their initial response echoes the sentiments of Hoover, Linborn, and other absentee landlords. They do not recognize the authority of the union, and they will hold the line on providing substandard minimum care to their properties and tenants, even if it means getting rid of people to do it.

Another case took place in the St. James Apartments also in Tacoma. After paying for a mold inspection, Kathryn Foster’s primary doctor advised her to throw out her belongings and leave her apartment because of the high levels of mold. Foster moved, but was too late however, and she is now permanently disabled. “My life is nowhere near what it was …I’m on welfare. I’m sitting here trying to find out how to get food stamps. I now can’t drive myself because I [have] these seizures where my body tightens up. I’m now cheering that I can walk 10 minutes on a treadmill,” Foster told The Tacoma News Tribune. Foster subsequently sued The Neiders Company, who owns the molded apartment on 821 South Yakima along with another 15 properties in Tacoma for damages. The case was settled out of court in favor of Foster.

Foster is lucky to have gotten any money from her former landlord who allegedly caused irreparable damage to her body and life. The advocacy group Tacoma for All, who helped to organize the NYTU, has door knocked units across Tacoma and heard from countless tenants experiencing problems similar to those in the unionized apartments and Foster’s former building. One such unit, rampant with mold, houses a family of four children and a dog. The family has had to rent a storage unit for their children’s belongings so they don’t lose them to mold exposure. The children have no choice but to sleep surrounded by mold. One child has developed a cough from it.

Renters are often threatened with rent increases when they file maintenance requests so that landlords can foist the cost of repairs. However, monthly rent already includes all needed repairs. Increasing rent to pay for repairs is just a way for landlords to extract more wealth from their tenants. It is indignifying at best and legal theft at worst. “When you buy these old buildings, fixing them is a responsibility. It is something you keep up,” said NCTU member Isaac Galvon.

A part of the organizing committee for his building, Galvon believes every apartment complex in Tacoma should be unionized. “We don’t want that to be the end of it. If we have negotiations with the landlord and get what we want, we aren’t going to stop there. Because that doesn’t help Tacoma. We are trying to set a precedent throughout Tacoma.” With nearly half of Tacoma being renters, Galvon continued, “we want Tacoma to be a tenant union town so that everyone is respected as a tenant. The more tenant unions that pop up in Tacoma, or Olympia and Seattle, the better because there’s less places for landlords to go out and abuse people.”

If you were to ask any of Tacoma’s tenant union members, they’d tell you starting a tenant union doesn’t take much. “It’s just neighbors helping neighbors,” NTU members Maggie and Scott told the Seattle Worker. “That’s what union is all about and what solidarity is all about. And it inspired people to work together, and that’s what I like about it. That’s what we need.”

Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1765 is the latest public-sector union in our area to be embroiled in contentious negotiations with a recalcitrant employer. ATU 1765 represents transit drivers in Thurston, Grays Harbor, and Pacific Counties in western Washington. Their current contract negotiations with Grays Harbor Transit (GHT) have been ongoing since August of 2025, and drivers are feeling the pressure as management refuses to make a fair deal. Works in Progress sat down with ATU 1765 President Mark Neuville and Executive Board member Kenny Farver to discuss the situation.

According to Neuville, the union’s key concerns in Grays Harbor are around wages and scheduling. Under the current contract, new drivers with GHT start at $24 an hour and are often only given a part-time schedule. However, they are expected to be on-call 24/7, making it difficult for them to find supplemental employment or plan their lives. These conditions also hinder the recruitment of new drivers, aggravating GHT’s labor shortage and placing additional pressure on existing drivers. A convoluted system for assigning work shifts has also made it easier for management to engage in favoritism rather than following seniority.

The union is asking for a 10 percent per year pay increase over three years to alleviate economic insecurity among GHT drivers due to inflation and cost-of-living increases. Neuville estimates that at least 30 percent of drivers are on some kind of food assistance. 1765 is also seeking a single simplified list for assigning shifts to ensure greater fairness and prevent burnout. The union would also like to see a robust joint union-management safety committee to respond effectively to incidents and concerns arising on the job, but have encountered resistance there as well. Safety issues are of particular concern given a number of recent assaults against transit drivers in various communities around Washington.

GHT’s response to 1765’s first contract proposal was to simply say “not interested” and suggest sending negotiations straight to mediation through the Public Employee Relations Commission (PERC) after only three bargaining sessions. PERC is a state entity that adjudicates labor disputes involving state and local public entities in Washington. Now all bargaining sessions must include an advisor from ATU International, a PERC mediator, and GHT’s legal advisor, which has caused long delays between meetings.

Farver stated that GHT has engaged in a pattern of retaliation and intimidation against union activists and bargaining team members, targeting them for what the union believes are unfounded and/or disproportionate disciplinary actions including terminations. Local 1765 has filed Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges relating to this conduct with PERC; GHT has denied all the allegations in that filing.

This situation bears strong similarities to 1765’s bargaining with Intercity Transit (IT) in Thurston County last year. There too, the employer made unreasonable delays to the bargaining process and engaged in retaliation against union members. Two IT drivers were been wrongfully terminated for taking part in legally-protected union activities. They were only recently reinstated with back pay due to a finding by PERC.

Like last year’s bargaining with IT, and previous bargaining with GHT in 2022, this round of negotiations in Grays Harbor has also been marked by the involvement of the legal firm Summit Law, and specifically attorney John Lee, who has played a prominent role in advising the employers in all these cases. Summit Law has a widespread negative reputation among labor unions in Washington for their history of supporting anti-union employers. Neuville and Farver stated that the union believes Summit Law is at least partially responsible for the employers’ tactics in these cases.

When asked for comment, Rachelle Martin, President of the Thurston-Lewis-Mason Central Labor Council, stated that Summit Law had also advised Timberland Regional Library (TRL) in their last bargaining with employees represented by AFSCME Local 3758B. Martin has been active in efforts to support TRL workers at risk of layoffs after the library system announced a dire budget crisis recently, in a major reversal from the financial picture TRL leadership painted during bargaining.

Beyond the involvement of Summit Law, Neuville asserts that situations like the one in Grays Harbor are also made worse by the fact that PERC’s caseload is so backlogged due to lack of resources. This means that penalties for ULPs by employers can be delayed for many months, making it easier for employers to treat these penalties as merely a cost of doing business. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal body which adjudicates private-sector labor law disputes, is in a similar situation, and many large corporations also treat NLRB penalties as a regular operating cost.

Wider concerns about public entities adopting the mindset of for-profit companies are well-founded in cases like that of 1765 and GHT, where a government employer has retaliated against workers for supporting reasonable demands in a new contract, and has spent large sums of taxpayer money to avoid coming to a fair deal with its employees.

As it stands now, ATU Local 1765 and GHT are continuing a difficult set of negotiations. Farver and Neuville stated that support for the union is strong among GHT drivers, but workers are afraid to speak up due to fear of retaliation. This is another parallel with the recent situation at TRL, where many former employees spoke of widespread intimidation against workplace activists. By that token, like TRL workers, GHT drivers are counting especially on members of the public to help advocate on their behalf.

One way community members can help is to attend GHT’s board meetings and make public comments in support of the workers and their demands for a fair contract, living wages, and transparent scheduling. These take place the 2nd Tuesday of every month at 4:00pm, at the GHT Administrative Offices (343 W Wishkah St, Aberdeen, WA 98520).

Like recent debacles at IT and TRL, the situation at GHT points to the need for working people to reassert their influence over their public institutions. If we want our communities to thrive, we need our local governments to be accountable to members of the public, including civil servants, and not a few heads of administration or outside attorneys.

Today, individualism is the dominant mode of thinking. In schools, in workplaces, online and at home, personal opinions are prioritized over others. They end up serving as the only tool we have for understanding the world. This has led to a common practice where anytime we want to get involved in something, we start by forming personal opinions and then go see if anyone agrees. In this process, other people are an afterthought, so you literally think of them after yourself.

By doing things in this order, and by only emphasizing the personal aspects, political thinking has also become something that’s done before consulting others. Why concern ourselves with the struggle to build unity if we expect to just find it or not?

It’s certainly easier to avoid working with others than to commit to a shared analysis, but without this struggle to get on the same page, even popular projects will get stuck since instead of a clear unifying strategy, there will be a tenuous grouping of personal opinions.

In elections, for example, you’re supposed to iron out your own beliefs, then categorize yourself based on which candidate or “team” has the most in common with you. This approach guarantees that individualism is the only relevant force in political thought. On top of that, it diminishes the political influence of the most affected people to simply defer to professional politicians and technocrats for all the big, important decision-making and strategizing.

Things like healthcare and wages affect more than just the people with the most refined opinions on the topics, and political support shouldn’t be treated like a consumer choice where you scope out who’s selling what you’re buying. It’s more than charismatic leaders giving orders to brainwashed followers, and it’s more than the plans cooked up by professional strategists.

This is confusing since political discourse is full of hot-takes. Pundits, podcasters, politicians, presidents … popes. While all these opinions come off as “political”, not all of them are shaped by collectively determined lines, the kinds of guardrails that are agreed upon with others and that exist independently of one’s own beliefs.

Taking political positions isn’t about erasing or ignoring personal experiences or the unique contributions that a single individual can bring to the table, but the political situation is always “out there”, in the world, not in some enlightened person’s head. There’s no way around taking the opinions of others into account. This means listening to how they describe their current circumstances and personal experiences, in their own words.

Coordinating with others involves more than just finding out who agrees with you. It’s also about committing to a shared framing, a shared outlook. It’s about agreeing to use the same tools as others so the assessments and proposals make sense to everyone and can be discussed more strategically and less personally. Otherwise, oppressive political lines will continue to be the only thing shaping our understanding of where we are, where we want to go, and how we get there.

It’s only with others that our personal opinions have the potential to become political and influential. This is why dialogue is so generative: it allows us to develop a new, collective perspective by incorporating multiple different points of view.

Of course, taking political positions, strategizing, and acting all depend on the freedom of individuals. So if we can’t tell the difference between personal and political opinions, the potential for transforming society will stay stuck in our heads.

[ON RADIO]:… continued disturbances in Jakarta, but are advising U.S. citizens…

JOEL: Jakarta. Where is that, Middle East?

TOMMY: Doesn’t ring a bell. It’s definitely a country. Or maybe part of Asia?

SARAH: Being a part of Asia isn’t mutually exclusive with being a country, and in fact, [Jakarta] is the capital of Indonesia.

- HBO’s The Last of US

The prevailing tendency in the English speaking world is to reduce the Cold War into a boxing match between capitalism and communism (the plot of Rocky 4) or a story of two superpowers playing spy games in the shadows (the plot of Stranger Things season 3). The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins rectifies this misreading and shines light on the overlooked history of anticommunist bloodshed. In his 2020 debut, Bevins argues that the United States’ most significant Cold War victory took place in Indonesia roughly 60 years ago.

Regardless of postal address or education level, few North Americans could tell you anything substantial about Indonesia. Most do not know that Indonesia’s population exceeds 270 million. Or that it is home to more Muslims than any other country in the world. Due to its reputation as a desirable vacation spot, Bali has more name-recognition than the rest of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands combined. Why does the Southeast Asian archipelago cast such a small imprint? If Indonesia’s present does little to pique our interest, then Indonesia’s past does less. Our lack of awareness is by design.

Only a handful of First Worlders, even those who proclaim a general moral opposition to US imperialism, are familiar with former Indonesian Prime Minister Sukarno or the bloody coup d’etat that removed him from power. In 1965, high-ranking Indonesian military officials, supported by Washington, started a genocide that ended with over five percent of the Indonesian population being killed. But The Jakarta Method is much more than just a summary of a single mass-killing campaign. According to Bevins, Jakarta was once synonymous with “brutal elimination of people organizing for a better world” (pp. 205). This book is about the legacy of imperial violence that extends beyond the shorelines of Bali and Java and still reverberates today.

Sukarno was not a communist in theory or practice, domestically or internationally. In fact, shortly after vanquishing the colonial Dutch government, Sukarno pleased Washington by putting down a communist rebellion. So what did the father of Indonesian independence do to provoke the US? For one, he hosted the intercontinental Bandung Conference in 1955. “Third World,” is often a euphemism for abject poverty. Bevins interprets it as “a movement…that came into its own in Indonesia.” (pp. 55). The Third World internationalist movement, or “Bandung spirit,” was rooted in a principled commitment to post-colonial sovereignty and self-determination. Most attendees were leaders of former colonies who strove for Cold War neutrality. They did not want to be US banana republics or be beholden to Moscow — a stance the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) found unacceptable. To them, anything short of a total disavowal of Moscow was an affront to Washington.

Sukarno’s other sins included passing “very moderate land reform[s]” and proposals to appropriate oilfields from foreign capital. What Western intelligence agencies found more distressing, however, was the rising stardom of the Communist Party of Indonesia — The PKI. “Since the 1950s” the US was determined “to destroy the [PKI], not because it was seizing power undemocratically but because it was popular,” writes Bevins (pp.155). By 1965 the PKI’s “three million card-carrying members,” made them the third largest communist party in the world. The PKI simultaneously supported Sukarno’s reforms while criticizing them for not going further.

Most CIA plots to destabilize Indonesia failed. However, they successfully infiltrated and divided the loyalties of Indonesian military leadership. The State Department won over many soldiers through exchange programs and bribery. This included a corrupt general named Suharto. Shortly after kick-starting the coup d’etat in the fall of 1965, CIA analysts handed Suharto’s army a kill-list containing “the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists” (pp.156). Within six months, the new anticommunist regime had toppled Sukarno’s government and placed a million Indonesians into concentration camps.

Suharto’s military dictatorship shut down Indonesian media outlets except the ones paid by the CIA to manufacture consent. An alternative history was pushed to the world: Suharto’s men had saved Indonesia from a nefarious commie takeover. The massacre of Asian civilians generated little to no outrage from most international publications. The New York Times praised Indonesia’s “savage transformation” (pp.158). Estimates vary but historians conclude that the military dictatorship butchered between half a million (a conservatively low estimate) to one million Indonesian men, women, and children; including “several hundred thousand” PKI members (pp.151). Due to a sustained effort to silence the truth, it is impossible to calculate exactly how many Indonesians were killed, maimed, or tortured.

Every dollar the State Department invested into engineering and justifying the anticommunist crusade paid off immediately and in multiple hemispheres. Essentially, “the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of…US world order” (pp.158). When nearby East Timor gained independence from Portugal in 1975, Washington feared it could become the Cuba of Asia. Suharto received a “big wink” from Nixon and savagely transformed East Timor through an invasion which “annihilated a third of the population.” (pp.213) Over in Latin America, “[T]he scale of victory...and ruthless efficiency…inspired extermination programs named after the Indonesian capital,” including Operação Jacarta in Brazil and Plan Djakarta in Chile (pp.159).

The anticommunist dictatorships in both Brazil (which took power in 1964) and Indonesia could not have emerged if the US had not indoctrinated their troops. Some of that indoctrination took place in the 1950s across the state of Kansas where Indonesian and Brazilian soldiers roomed, trained, and studied counterinsurgency together. Just like in Indonesia, Brazil’s “most important media” outlets churned out fanatical anticommunist propaganda (pp.105) Just like many Indonesians, many Brazilians accepted the fabricated story that their military had valiantly saved civil society from an evil communist plot. One anticommunist revolutionary was a young soldier by the name of Jair Bolsonaro.

Brazil would play the same role in Latin America that Indonesia played in Southeast Asia. When Salvador Allende won Chile’s 1970 presidential election, Washington saw him as a bigger threat than Fidel Castro due to his popular non-authoritarian brand of socialism. Just like in Indonesia and Brazil, the CIA successfully bought off high-ranking members of the Chilean military and press. A spray-painted message started appearing on the walls of Santiago: “Yakarta viene” (Jakarta is coming). And so it did. On September 11, 1973, corrupt General Agusto Pinochet overthrew Allende and established a decades-long dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, Pinochet’s execution squads featured Brazilian soldiers.

That alliance formed the basis of a Latin American anticommunist network called Operation Condor. The condors dispensed Jakarta-esque terror across the Americas. In the entire hemisphere, journalists, labor organizers, immigrants, indigenous peasants, and members of persecuted religious groups risked being deemed subversives. Therein lies the key to anticommunist violence: anyone who challenges an unjust status quo can become a threat that needs to be neutralized. Instead of delivering democracy to the Third World, the so-called free world delivered the freedom to exploit and dominate. Any country, socialist or not, whose modus operandi was not perfectly aligned with US hegemony could meet the fate of Indonesia.

The Jakarta Method is a harrowing read. It contains graphic violence. More importantly, it forces readers to ponder “what-could-have-been.” What would global inequality look like today without these genocides? The Bandung Spirit did not expire, it was extinguished. The trauma caused by anticommunist bloodshed never left us. Capitalist exploitation remains the nucleus of our global economy in large part because of what went down in Indonesia.

The Jakarta Method undermines a status quo that reinforces itself by sweeping atrocities under the rug. The most stirring passages in The Jakarta Method are the testimonies from survivors whose lives were shattered by anticommunist violence. In Indonesia, monuments that commemorate the victims of anticommunism are prohibited by law. Honor them by reading their story.

What Are We Invested In?

In the fall of 2024, a group of people in Olympia, WA reached out to city Council Member Clark Gilman. At this time it had already become apparent that there was a genocide happening against Palestinians in Gaza, carried out by the Israeli military and supported by U.S. tax dollars.

Soon after Israel’s full scale invasion of Gaza following October 7, 2023, activists gathered in Olympia to form an organization that soon took the name Palestine Action of South Sound (PASS), which calls for a permanent ceasefire, an end to the siege of Gaza — now nearing twenty years — and an end to Israeli occupation. PASS operates through committees, and it is the legislative committee that began to work with Gilman.

By the time the PASS legislative group had reached out to Gilman, some individuals within the committee had already filed a Public Records Request to learn what the City held in Israeli bonds or other holdings concerning Israel. The findings turned out negative. Nothing in the Public Records Request told us that the City had any holdings regarding Israel. We wanted to keep it that way.

One of the members of the legislative committee has been a long-time friend of Council Member Gilman. She suggested we ask him to talk with us about what the City was invested in and to assure us the City was not invested in holdings supporting Israel. We began to have productive weekly conversations in which we all, including Gilman, learned more about what the City was invested in, how the City could rewrite its investment policy, and processes to pass divestment efforts.

One thing we wanted to avoid was the atmosphere we experienced when Olympia passed a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire resolution in Gaza and the West Bank, which passed in December 2024. There was contentious public commentary and efforts to water down the resolution by council members. We wanted to avoid public comment that could derail our work to assure that the City had no money that supported Israel’s actions and long-standing policies.

We had an advantage that many advocacy groups working for ethical investment or divestment efforts at city or state level often don’t have. We had a council member that wanted to work with us.

Our Process and Language

After weeks of discussions — including with Gilman, who continued to join our weekly meetings — we learned that the City should pursue ethical investment policies and that it’s possible to pass such efforts through a consent portion of a city council meeting where the majority (4 of 7) vote on an item without public discussion.

We are indebted to the American Friends Service Committee, which advised us at their weekly virtual Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) Office Hours and other meetings to pursue ethical investment policies without public debate if possible. They also helped us craft the language proposed to City Council. The language introduced in Olympia reads in part:

The City will refrain from investment in companies with primary business functions in harmful industries such as tobacco, fossil fuels, mass incarceration or immigrant detention, and weaponry of any kind, or in companies with a consistent record of direct involvement in severe human rights violations such as slavery and prison labor, war crimes, illegal military occupation, racial segregation, or apartheid.

This intentionally broad language does not mention Israel. It is written to assure that the City does not invest money in any institution that supports human rights violations including racial segregation and apartheid — both of which Israel has been accused of by human rights organizations, including several within Israel itself.

It would be wrong, however, to say that Israel’s policies were not part of our discussion about ethical investment. As mentioned, we were prompted to begin this work because we wanted to know what our city was invested in, and how we could assure that it’s not engaged in supporting Israel. We discussed whether “genocide” should be something the City refrains from investing in (we concluded that “genocide” falls under severe human rights violations, and the less push-back on the language the better). Several members of our PASS committee have been to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. I’m also an employee of the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice (RCF) and several members of our committee are also currently and formerly involved in RCF work.

We were able to develop the policy language, learn the structure, and learn how it could be introduced by May 2025. That month, the City of Olympia Finance Committee voted to adopt a draft resolution of the language. However, for various reasons — including political campaigns and multiple issues the City has needed to address in our charged political climate — the language was never proposed to the full city council in 2025.

This year, after council members took their oaths of office, the finance committee proposed the same language with an updated and more expensive packet explaining the monitoring system, the role of the city, and the process of ethical investment. The Draft Investment Policy Update can be found on February 23 finance committee proposed agenda.

Introduced as part of the City Council consent agenda, on March 24, 2026, the Olympia City Council unanimously passed the ethical investment policy. We are the latest addition to the list of cities that have adopted ethical investment policies, closely following St. Louis, which passed its ethical investment policy in November, 2025.

Other Local Ethical Investment and Divestment News

In Washington State’s short legislative session this year (January 12-March 12) there were several important bills introduced. One was the Responsible Investment Act, Senate Bill 6304, which ensures that responsible principles of investing are incorporated into the investment decision making of the Washington State Investment Board (WSIB). Previous work with WSIB has made it clear that they are invested in harmful industries, and that state legislation is the best way to change that. Senate Bill 6304 did not make it through the essential committees for a final floor vote this year, and we expect a multi-year campaign.

We are pleased that this March the Washington State Treasurer’s Office fully divested from $62 million in bonds previously invested in Caterpillar Inc. Caterpillar manufactures the armored D-9 bulldozer which has long been used by the Israeli military in home demolitions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. A militarized Caterpillar D-9 operated by two Israeli soldiers was also the machine that killed Rachel Corrie in 2003.

A March 25 article in the Seattle Times demonstrates the popular sentiment surrounding ethical investments and the movement to refrain from investing in companies with a consistent record of direct involvement in severe human rights abuses.

Praise for Olympia Ethical Investment

The City of Olympia’s Finance Director, Michael Githens, said of the policy: “[the] newly adopted update to the Investment Policy incorporates environmental, social, and governance language to guide investments to better align with the City of Olympia’s broader objectives of the community.” He stated, “This is a way of investing that involves evaluating companies based on how well they perform in the areas of environmental responsibility, social impact, and corporate governance. Githens added, “The City typically holds few investments in this realm, but the investment language makes sure that now and in the future, we follow specific guidelines. The language will allow the City to still maintain a portfolio that maintains an investment approach to further the City’s goals of achieving safety, liquidity, and return.”

Our RCF colleague Emily Antoon-Walsh shared, “As a pediatrician and a parent in Olympia, I am proud that our city has taken this step towards ethical investment. It should not be controversial to say that we do not want our money to harm children. From Gaza to Dilley, Texas, adults can either look away, or show up as helpers. Children see how we respond in this time of great harm. Let the message we send with our actions be one that recognizes the humanity of everyone. Removing our dollars from doing harm is one step we want our city to take.”

Lin Nelson, former RCF board member and one of Rachel Corrie’s professors, emphasized that “the Ethical Investments principle that the Council has adopted is very significant, especially at this time of global peril for so many. Olympia will be joining other communities committed to urgently reshaping our priorities.”

Council Member Clark Gilman, without whom this success would have been impossible, said, “I am very proud that Olympia adopted ethical investment amendments to our investment policy. We didn’t take this action in a vacuum. This success happened through the sustained efforts of community volunteers from the legislative committee of Palestine Action South Sound and the guidance of Dov Baum from the American Friends Service Committee.” He continued, “It is often said that the budget document is our most important policy statement. I believe that the investment policy is a most important statement of community principles.”

Gilman said that 2026 Investment Policies “also charged the city finance director with reviewing existing investments to ensure compliance with our policy and seeking new opportunities for affirmative investments that will provide community benefit.”

We all considered the language we wanted Olympia to pursue as a template for other cities, counties, and states. Reflecting on the campaign, Council Member Gilman said, “I hope this inspires other local governments to join us in saying our investment dollars should not support human rights violators, fossil fuels, or weapons of war.”

Bill Dole is the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice Policy and Communications Coordinator and a member of the Palestine Action of South Sound Legislative Committee.

The mass resistance in the Twin Cities has been inspirational for all of us. Like Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles before them, the people came together en masse, organized across political and social barriers, and fought back an invading fascist army. For those of us watching from afar, looking desperately for some way to actually fight this growing fascist force, there is so much to respect in these examples, and so much to learn from.

However, it’s also easy to fetishize the specific tools of resistance that have been effective in other places and in different contexts. Rapid response teams, hyper-local ICE watch, and 3D printed whistles have been crucial tools in Minneapolis’ fight against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), but our context is not the same. We can’t simply carbon copy these tools and expect them to work as well here in Thurston County.

Conflating two different strategies

Part of the issue is that what we see on the news and on social media mostly reflects what happens during a “surge.” It’s easy to miss that this represents just one of two completely different strategies that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are employing. For all of the horror and destruction “surges” cause, they are actually a pretty weak strategy.

While the numbers are hard to pin down, it seems Minnesota’s “Metro Surge” only produced about 4,000 arrests over 3 months using 3,000 agents, according to Reuters. This a scary number of arrests, especially in one place, but surprisingly few compared to the approximately 40,000 monthly arrests across the US since October, according to The Guardian.

A surge is a spectacle, built by throwing countless bloodthirsty ICE and CBP agents into one place to wreak havoc and terror for cellphone cameras to capture. It is a project of building political legitimacy through fear to create the image of a great, unstoppable boot, ready and willing to stomp out any dissent.

It is weak because it puts so much of their strength in one place, where they can be seen, monitored, and tracked. You can have watchers on every street corner of the city connected to a rapid response dispatch, and you can set up block parties or “filter blockades” to slow traffic and check for state agents. It is a strategy that allows us to build super effective tools to stop them.

ICE’s primary strategy, though, is a much more dispersed snatch-and-grab approach that focuses on successful abductions with little visibility. Because it’s incredibly difficult for us to be ready and vigilant everywhere, this strategy is much more effective. It’s telling that during the current “draw-down” of forces in the Twin Cities, the remaining agents have largely moved to the surrounding suburbs.

This isn’t to diminish any of the horror of what has happened in the Twin Cities, Chicago, Washington D.C., or Los Angeles. The point is that despite the terror, people were able to come together and run ICE out of town in part because these surges actually make them super vulnerable. However, for those of us living outside these large invasions, and outside of dense cities, we can’t expect the tools used in cities like Minneapolis to work the same way.

What does resistance look like here?

Lacey and Olympia aren’t Minneapolis or Chicago. We are facing an enemy that is dispersed, infrequent, and much harder to locate. So how do we organize to respond here?

There probably is not one single correct answer, but a good place to start is that we need to focus less on the point of contact: the moment when ICE agents gets out of their cars and grab somebody. They will always have the advantage of surprise. Instead we need to find ways to impede their ability to move and operate in the first place. We need to gum up their system, so each life they destroy costs them more and more.

One way to do this is to focus on their points of operations: field offices and detention centers where they have to go to and from. These are mostly known locations where they can be potentially tracked, ID’ed, and slowed down. Hotels that house ICE agents can be pressured, as happened in Los Angeles. Local surveillance infrastructure, like Flock cameras, can be opposed and dismantled (as we’ve done here in Olympia). We can pressure companies that support DHS to drop their contracts. On the other side, we can materially support families that are potential targets, lessening the insecurities that ICE agents take advantage of. This also means supporting and organizing directly with people that have been taken, as La Resistencia has for done years at the Northwest Detention Center. Every one of these things make it harder for ICE to work and move easily.

Above all though, we need to stop thinking in terms of finding the right tactics, and instead think in terms of what Black Rose/Rosa Negra calls deep organizing — the kind of committed, long-term relationship and support building that turns neighborhoods and workplaces into powerful communities that are able to defend and fight for themselves. This means building deep and reciprocal solidarity, for which there are no blueprints or short-cuts. This kind of organizing will allow us to work with different tactics over time, while defending against the more common day-to-day threats to targeted communities, like government neglect and police harassment. For those of us that are not part of part of a targeted population, it means building real, living relationships with those that are, so that we can work together from a place of care and real awareness. Minneapolis was able to jump to action so effectively, in part, by activating already existing structures that had been built up over years, like union/church alliances, tenants unions, and signal networks from the George Floyd rebellion.

Taking on the specific neighborhood level tactics made famous in the Twin Cities is not necessarily wrong. In immigrant neighborhoods or a large apartment complexes, it might actually be exactly the right thing to resist ICE kidnappings. Still, we need to work with a clear head about what we are actually confronting, and recognize that organizing might look totally different at different times and places. We need to think seriously, and collectively, about what the terrain really looks like where we are, and then pick, adapt, and invent from there. We need to do this so that we can all get in the fight for real.

by: V Lane Hoy

A few weeks ago, I built a diorama in response to a call for artistic proposals ruminating on the theme of “the space between.” I took a somewhat literal interpretation and focused on the space between buildings, drawing inspiration from the title of Danish urbanist Jan Gehl’s 1971 book, Life Between Buildings, and let my hands be guided by whimsy and vagary. Halfway through the process, I was struck by doubt: Am I doing anything more than child’s play: building a fairy theme park using a variety of adhesives, popsicle sticks, and fake mosses? Is that art? The issue — I felt in the moment — had partly to do with the popular appeal of the cuteness of miniature scenes and objects. I wondered: Is cuteness a shortcut, and proof that the project lacked conceptual rigor?

Eventually, I got over this, both because I was running out of time to be delayed by doubt, and also because I was ostensibly taking a vacation to pull this off and wanted to have a little fun. I was finding that working with my hands allowed me to slip effortlessly into the unparalleled pleasure of “flow state.” Compared to that feeling, who cares about conceptual rigor? Not me!

Plus, beneath the doubt, I was curious about cuteness as potentially fruitful intellectual terrain. I wanted to create an opportunity for my imagined viewer to experience the feeling of opening the plastic oyster shell of the mermaid Polly Pocket, which, as a kid in the 90s, I recall evoked both kinds of wonder: the awe and the aww kind.

This makes me wonder if part of why these kinds of toys are so effective at captivating the attention of children, in particular, might have to do with the already out-of-scale-ness of their experience, in which most everything, materially speaking, is just out of their reach. For a kid with a Polly Pocket in palm, suddenly, mercifully, they have one thing in their control. Their little kid fingers, typically offering insufficient grip on the average door handle, become powerful and imposing in that small palm-sized world. And might that serve as a way to attenuate the frustration of the otherwise reignless period of young life when one is blown around by the whims of adults like a reed in the wind?

Along with age, I sense sex and disability are at play — the world is also made just a little out of scale for the small body, the slow body, the body on wheels or crutches. Feminist architects and urbanists have been sounding this alarm for ages, though the message is still largely tuned out. We can’t seem to get out from under the influence of the man most identified with the Modernist movement in architecture, Le Corbusier, who envisioned the “Modulor” as a tool to incorporate the human scale into design. A worthwhile aspiration, I’d say, except that he based this human scale on “the good-looking men, such as policemen” in detective novels, who, he claimed, were “always 6 feet tall!” Unfortunately for the rest of us, his Modulor standard was taken up across Europe, the United States, and other places where Modernist influences are articulated in the built environment.

So perhaps alienation is relative to the extent of the out-of-scale-ness one feels with the surrounding structures. Even so, the wonder of the miniature seems to work on just about anyone. For me, cityscape miniatures hold a particular fascination. My working theory has to do with the perceived irreproachability of the built world. The average person is rarely afforded the kind of agentic rush of leaning over to pick up a building and move it here and there or experimenting with being the decider of what gets affixed where with the power of the hot glue gun.

Part of the intrigue of the urban diorama stems from a general sense that the built world is something that happens to you rather than something you have a relationship with. You might walk downtown and suddenly find that a building you’ve come to have some relationship with was leveled and the grade beams have been laid for the foundation of a new development, and it’s not clear why and it’s not clear who decided and it’s not clear if anyone — any regular person — was consulted. All of this can lend itself to a sense of alienation from the urban process and the built environment. Making a diorama creates a fantastical opportunity to step into the role of decider, but it also creates the space to re-enchant the process and expand the realm of possibility.

While reflecting on the catharsis afforded by my week of diorama-ing, I developed a fantasy of renting a small warehouse downtown, perhaps in the building along the west side of Capitol Way between Olympia and Thurston Avenues that housed the Procession of the Species studio circa 2011. I recall admiring its vaulted skylights and taking refuge in the lofted area that had a secret-crawl-space feel while I built a stegosaurus costume in anticipation of that year’s parade, with somewhat unfortunate results, the back portion looking more like a giant weed leaf than the regal spines I was trying for.

In this imagined warehouse, people could stop by to drop off unusual household items and interesting garbage, anything that could possibly come in handy for model-making. To picture this grand diorama, look at The Panorama of the City of New York on display at the Queens Museum, a 1:1200-scale replica of the city first created for the World’s Fair in 1964, which continues to aspire to keep pace with the city’s developments and serve as an honest representation of every one of its evolving structures.

Yet rather than a representation of what already is, this collaborative model-making scheme would be a fantastical manifestation of the dream city, of what could be. Perhaps a child wants to make a playground for their paper dolls. The neighbors living along the north block of Legion Street who, while taking my evening sit in Sylvester Park, I see lugging their groceries from the bus stop on route 14, might enjoy a zip line installed along the park’s perimeter to ferry their bags along their route. For my part, I wouldn’t mind a public soft serve ice cream machine installed by the Artesian Well, whose contested perimeter gate, in this telling of the tale, has been removed once and for all. Any of these ideas and more could go into the dream city model.

The word diorama comes from two roots: dia, the Greek word for “through,” and orama, from “panorama,” a compound which means “a complete view.” This Works in Progress column is an iterative space to elaborate this diorama-esque work on the page, in service of seeing as clearly as possible what is, in order to courageously and playfully envision what isn’t yet. The wager: Making sense of the built forms around us is the first step in articulating what we’d like them to be and what we’d like to preserve, what we might want to demand and what we might need to make for ourselves.

Note: “Five fingers on the total plan” is a lyric from the song “Ode to Hanky” written by Lucien Spect with the band Scrivener.

V Lane Hoy is an interdisciplinary writer drawing on observation, cultural criticism, architecture, and psychogeography.

Trumpism is waging a war against the people of U.S. and the rest of the world. It is an authoritarian, bullying playbook that violently oppresses, exploits, and dehumanizes immigrants and poor people at home and abroad. The U.S. takes resources from the Global South through resource imperialism and demands total geopolitical dominance. The U.S. has no right or authority to intervene in other countries. Not surprisingly, this authority is seldom questioned by either of the two major political parties or the mainstream media. The following four cases demonstrate a bipartisan project of U.S. intervention that is both immoral and illegal. With blatant and murderous U.S. imperialism on the rise, we need a popular movement to build the power to stop it.

Palestine/Israel

The U.S. has given Israel $300 billion in aid since its founding in 1948, which Israel has used for its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the annexation of Jerusalem, and many wars against Gaza dating back to well before October 2023. This has led to the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The U.S. also supports Israel’s intense bombing of Lebanon which has killed more than 1100 people, displaced one million, and has led to Israel is occupying southern Lebanon again.

Israel has consistently violated the October 2025 ceasefire accords with Hamas by blocking food and medical aid from entering Gaza. The Israeli military has killed 700 residents since the ceasefire was announced in October, 2025. Our movements must oppose the illegal occupation and genocide by demanding the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the West Bank as well as the opening of all the borders to Gaza. Palestinians deserve dignity and equality, which means ending the occupation of Palestine, establishing right of return for Palestinians, and equality for all people living in Palestine/Israel. Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaigns such as the Boycott Chevron campaign and the successful campaign to get the City of Olympia to divest from companies involved with Israel show that we can have a material impact if we organize collectively. However, our most important demand remains unmet: the demand for the U.S. to end all aid to Israel.

Venezuela

On January 3, 2026, the U.S. blatantly violated both international law and its own laws when it invaded Venezuela, killing 130 people and kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Since then, the US has threatened to invade Venezuela again if it sends oil to Cuba or does not bend to the Trump administration by opening its economy to be exploited by U.S. corporations. We demand ending to U.S. terrorism, including the killing of more than 160 Venezuelans and others on small boats off the Venezuelan coast. In addition, we demand the withdrawal of the U.S. military from the Caribbean and the immediate release of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores.

Cuba

The U.S. has conducted a covert war against Cuba since the revolution led by Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1959. In the eyes of the U.S., Cuba's crime has been its independence. The Cuban revolution brought many advances for the Cuban people: free, high quality health care and education, as well as cultural sovereignty and the dignity of its people. Economic problems such as a lack of consumer goods are partially caused by the US blockade, which severely cuts Cuba's ability to import goods. The Trump administration's position, led by Marco Rubio, is starving the Cuban people by stopping all oil shipments. This is murder and economic war. Trump claims Cuba is next on their hit list after Iran. We demand no to war on Cuba, the end of the U.S. blockade, and reparations to Cuba for a 64 year old embargo.

Iran

In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democratic Iranian Government led by Mohammed Mossadegh and replaced him with the repressive, pro-Israeli Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1979, a popular uprising overthrew him, bringing Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei to power. However, recent popular opposition has responded to their conservative interpretation of Islam and repressive political leadership.

The United States and Israel are committed to overthrowing the Iranian government. They both want to dominate the Middle East militarily, economically, and politically. Iran is an impediment to this imperialist aim, which compelled the U.S. and Israel to launch this unprovoked war on February 28, 2026. 2,000 Iranian civilians and counting have been killed, including 168 school children and 14 teachers in a single U.S. missile attack. Iran is justifiably defending itself by raising the social cost to the U.S. and Israel by attacking U.S. military bases in the region, attacking Israel, bombing Gulf oil facilities, and blocking oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Prices of oil, natural gas, and fertilizer are rising rapidly. At home, inflation is increasing and the standard of living of working-class Americans is declining further.

Building an Anti-War Movement

There has never been a war that has been as unpopular from the start as this U.S.-Israeli War on Iran. This tension creates an opportunity to convince the U.S. to withdraw and end its attacks on Iran. The No Kings rallies locally and nationally are important actions towards stopping these wars and the Trump agenda but they alone are not enough. Voting matters but it alone is not enough. Many levels of protest and resistance are needed: people in the streets, direct actions against institutions complicit with this war machine, non-compliant non-cooperation, and more.

Currently, there is no mass anti-war movement in the United States. Moving beyond one-off mobilizations and building an infrastructure for ongoing organization that actively involves people is necessary. So is a movement focused on all lives lost, not just the lives of U.S. citizens. It is important to reach out to those already involved, to do political education, and to make it easier to get plugged in. Building this infrastructure will create the conditions that help form a mass anti-war movement, expand its effectiveness, and increase its longevity. Why this hasn’t happened yet is not entirely clear.

One reason might be that there wasn’t a buildup of U.S. propaganda to influence public opinion before the U.S. attacks on Iran. This is a partial explanation of the low support for the war. On the other hand, there wasn’t time to build an anti-war movement either. There was a broad Palestine solidarity movement in 2023 and 2024 against the U.S. backed Israeli genocide against Palestine, but this movement has weakened despite the U.S. continuing to fund Israel’s murderous attacks on Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran. Repression and fear are a cause for the weakening of the Palestine solidarity movement. Fear should not stop us. There is a lack of anti-war organizations that can effectively mobilize or involve large numbers to oppose U.S. aggression abroad in the way that various organizations existed in the 1960s, for example.

Sending soldiers into Iran causing mass U.S. casualties shouldn’t be necessary for bringing people into the streets, but it would likely have this effect. That is why it is important to focus on all casualties, not just the ones from the United States. It is also important to connect the war to the increasing hardship for working class people in the U.S., as inflation increases faster than wages as the war continues.

In the anti-war movement against the war in Vietnam, the anti-apartheid movement, and in the Palestine solidarity movement, especially the encampments in Spring 2024, students have played a major role. Spring is the season when student movements are usually the most active. There is a good possibility a student movement will rise up this spring in support of anti-war, immigrant solidarity, and climate justice. Additionally students can help resist the increased control of university curricula, admissions, and hiring of faculty and staff by the Trump administration, which is part of their racist agenda. Student movements are the strongest when issues of national and global importance are connected to campus complicity such as college portfolios supporting the war in Iran, involvement with Israel, or collaborating with ICE.

In the Olympia and Thurston County area, there is a need for a strong anti-war organization that continues to include Palestine solidarity as a focus while making room for other causes. As mentioned, stopping U.S. wars against Iran and Cuba should be integral to local organizing as well. Including anti-nuclear weapons and building an ongoing structure against the next war would be a powerful stance and draw in more participants.

Another option would be to form an organization that explicitly connects economic and social justice at home and U.S. aggression abroad. An example was the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace (OMJP), a group that was active in the 1990s and early 2000s. Its focus was anti-imperialism and also support of the homeless, solidarity with farmworkers, universal healthcare, and organized many events including forums, conferences, and demonstrations. Domestic oppression and exploitation of the working class are intrinsically linked. Immigration is a clear example of this.

Let us take initiative to organize ourselves and form groups that go beyond single issues, and that respect and cooperate with existing progressive organizations in the area. We need to go beyond only organizing and mobilizing to return to the pre-Trump status quo unless we want another Trump in 2032.

Speaking out and organizing against attacks on democracy and defending social programs while simultaneously winning non-reformist reforms are a necessary and desirable strategy. Non-reformist reforms are ones that build our power, our political consciousness, and our capacity so that we can fight harder with more resources. Reforms are important stepping stones for our movements, but in the long run capitalism cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown. Examples of non-reformist reforms include reigning in U.S. imperialism, quality health care and housing for all, a universal basic income, free child care, free higher education and cancelling student debt, climate justice, and an end to deportations. These reforms will allow us to fight more ardently for reproductive, trans, and racial justice, as well as labor issues such as meaningful work and a shorter work week.

The need to connect this program of meaningful reforms to an anti-capitalist perspective that develops participatory socialist alternatives is necessary in expanding the imagination of the public in seeing a world beyond the current order. “Our alternatives,” as Rosa Luxemburg said more than 100 years ago, “are barbarism or socialism.”

As a political-cultural geographer who has long been an anti-war organizer and studied the history of U.S. military interventions, it’s clear that the war on Iran could set into motion a regional conflagration, the violent break-up of Iran into ethnic enclaves, and a toll that would make the Iraq War look like a warm-up exercise.

The U.S. role in the Middle East began with the 1953 CIA coup that toppled democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, whose government had nationalized the oil industry for the benefit of its people. The U.S. replaced him with the dictatorial monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom the U.S. backed with both weapons and nuclear technology. It’s in Iran that the U.S. regional domination in the Middle East began, and where it might confront the hardest obstacles, at home and abroad.

Most Americans concur with the country singer Alan Jackson, who sang in 2002, “I’m not a real political man \ I’m not sure I can tell you \ The difference in Iraq and Iran.” But Iran has always been more geographically pivotal than Iraq, in land area, population, and economics. It was one of the few countries that retained independence through the colonial era, and one of the only Third World societies to keep control of its own resources.

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and seizure of hostages in the U.S. Embassy, Washington has sought to topple the Shi’a revolutionary government in Tehran. That moment was when the demonization of Muslims replaced anti-communism as the main selling point for military interventions. I remember seeing U.S. sailors in the Philippines 40 years ago sporting t-shirts that read “I Got My Tan off the Coast of Iran,” and a string of U.S. bases with 40,000 troops has encircled Iran since then, now in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Oman. U.S. bases in all these countries have come under Iranian retaliation.

The U.S. has already been at war with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. In 1987-88, the U.S. Navy actively sided with Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran by escorting tankers carrying Iraqi oil, attacking Iranian boats and oil rigs, and “accidentally” shooting down an Iranian civilian jetliner. The currently unfolding war with Iran is continuation of a long-simmering conflict. [7] U.S. and Israeli threats have also encouraged a siege mentality among Iranian leaders, who, in turn, repeatedly used them as a rationale for cracking down on internal dissent. The heads of state in Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran reinforce and feed off of each other, and to create fear to build their own internal power and legitimacy.

Trump and Netanyahu may have thought the Sunni Gulf States, which have long been at odds with Iran, and the Iranian people would side with their current drive toward regime change. The 12-Day War last year had the exact opposite effect, causing stronger Muslim solidarity and rallying Iranians around the flag, even many who had protested and been imprisoned by the ayatollahs but don’t want a new Shah or other foreign puppet ruler. Much the same happened in Germany in World War II, when Allied fire-bombings that targeted civilian neighborhoods may have prevented internal dissent from growing.

Escalation Beyond Air War

Both the Iraq and Iran wars were justified with lies about weapons of mass destruction told by the nuclear-armed states of the U.S. and Israel. Attacking Iran is far more disastrous than attacking Iraq. It will scuttle any chance of political reforms in Iran or regional agreement around Palestine. Iranian forces have blocked global oil lanes in the narrow Strait of Hormuz shipping chokepoint. In the future, they could clash [9] with U.S. naval forces in the Gulf or melt into an insurgency far deeper and longer than in Iraq. Trump’s War will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it could stimulate the terrorism and weapons programs it claims to oppose.

Yet in four decades of conflict, Iran has never sponsored an attack within the U.S., even as the U.S. has attacked its allies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and directly attacked its own forces in the Gulf. Only Sunni forces (also opposed by Iran) have attacked targets in the U.S.

All recent U.S. wars, such as in Iraq, began as bombing campaigns, but as they met resistance or retaliation, led to boots on the ground. Unlike Iraq, the U.S. has limited options to invade Iran. Iraq has largely flat terrain, and so has been repeatedly invaded by foreign armies. Iran has natural defensive barriers in its mountain ranges, and a political advantage in having complex neighbors that may not be willing to host invading forces.

Part of the neoconservative agenda for occupying Iraq was to have a staging area for regime change in Iran, but that is no longer possible. Ground forces invading Iran from Kuwait would have to pass through a slice of Iraqi Shi’a territory. An invasion from Pakistan or Turkey would be politically untenable.

These limited options means that a U.S. ground invasion of Iran is very unlikely, so there would not be a repeat of the 2003 Iraq invasion, followed by an occupation of the entire country. That’s why it may be dangerous for the anti-war movement to warn that an Iran War would be a repeat of the Iraq War, with massive U.S. casualties and a legacy of combat injuries and PTSD. During the Vietnam War, facing huge protests because of bodybags coming home, President Nixon switched from a ground war to an air war, reducing U.S. troop casualties, but vastly increasing civilian casualties. Evidence already shows a U.S. strike [10] on a girls’ school has claimed at least 165 lives, mostly children.

President Bush employed a similar strategy in the 1991 Gulf War, sanitizing air strikes on Iraq as a detached video game. Clinton’s 1999 air war on Serbia and Obama’s 2011 air war on Libya were the first time in human history that a one side in a major war had zero deaths by enemy fire. Trump has inherited these technological tactics of imperial impunity. If the anti-war movement mainly emphasizes the possibilities of U.S. military casualties, it only plays into the Pentagon’s hands and reinforces high-tech warfare that claims even more civilian lives.

Ethnic Divisions for an Oil Grab

There is one scenario that could lead to boots on the ground in Iran. The U.S. and Israel again may try to stoke ethnic divisions in the diverse country, where ethnic minorities form more than 40 percent of the population. Azeris and Kurds in the northwest, Baluchis in the southeast, and Ahwazi Arabs in the southwest, have been oppressed by both the Shah and Ayatollahs. The most dangerous sign would be encouraging a rebellion in the province of Khuzestan, called “Al Ahwaz” by its Arab inhabitants.

On the first day of this war, Netanyahu exclaimed, “The time has come for all segments of the Iranian people — the Persians, the Kurds, the Azeris, the Baluchis, and the Ahwazis — to throw off the yoke of tyranny and bring about a free and peaceful Iran.” Yet at the same time, Israel backs the Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi as a future ruler, who would not be welcome by the ethnic minorities that his father severely repressed, nor by most Persians living in Iran.

Two decades ago I wrote about the possibility that the U.S. would use an uprising as an excuse to occupy Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province (next to southern Iraq), with a so-called “humanitarian” rationale of protecting its ethnic Arab population from “ethnic cleansing.” Instead of occupying all of Iran, U.S.-allied forces could take control of the plains of western Khuzestan, where about 85% of Iran’s crude oil deposits are present, and hold the oil industry hostage for its demands.

The Arab Shi’as living on the plains of western Khuzestan share both their ethnicity and faith with the Arab Shi’as across the strategic Shatt al-Arab waterway in Iraq. Arabs make up only 3% of Iran’s population, but a plurality of about 3 million in Khuzestan. In 1897, the British Empire backed Ahwazi Arab rulers to secede from Persia and become the de facto British protectorate of “Arabistan” (much as the British did in neighboring Kuwait). The southern zone of Persia was declared a British “sphere of influence” in 1907, and the following year a British adventurer discovered oil at Masjed Soleyman in “Arabistan.” The discovery created the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later renamed British Petroleum (BP). In 1925, Reza Shah’s forces retook “Arabistan,” and renamed it Khuzestan, as he renamed “Persia” as Iran a decade later.

British troops occupied Khuzestan during World War II, but after the war Iranians grew more concerned that Westerners had a stranglehold on their oil wealth. In 1951, the Iranian nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry based mainly in Khuzestan (including Anglo-Iranian’s holdings), resulting in the 1953 coup that installed the Shah.

In 1978, Arab oil workers in Khuzestan went on strike against the Shah, and played a central role in the Iranian Revolution that toppled him the following year. The workers supported the revolution in its early months, when it included leftist and other secular parties, which were later crushed by the Islamic Republic. Encouraged by counterrevolutionary Western powers, Saddam Hussein launched a brutal invasion of Khuzestan in 1980, and occupied its western Arab oil region. He tried to engineer the secession of the province from Iran, and backed an Arab separatist rebel group that also briefly seized the Iranian Embassy in London.

Yet in the Iran-Iraq War, most Iranian Arab Shi’as fought on the side of Persian-ruled Iran, just as Iraqi Arab Shi’as fought on the side of Saddam’s Sunni-ruled Iraq. State territoriality trumped both ethnic and religious territoriality, in a massive slaughter. Iranian forces pushed the Iraqis out of Khuzestan in 1982, but the province’s cities and oil refineries were the most heavily damaged in the war, that finally ended in 1988.

My color map makes it clear that Khuzestan contains Iran’s largest oil reserves. In a 2008 New Yorker article, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed CIA assistance to Ahwazi Arab and other ethnic insurgents, later advocated by John Bolton, and a CIA analysis declassified in 2013 referred to Khuzestan as “Iran’s Achilles Tendon.” Tehran’s repression of Ahwazi Arab rights protests and separatist attacks stepped up in 2005, 2011, and 2018, and have recently been increasing again, so the possibility again exists of the U.S. exploiting their legitimate grievances for its own interests. The ethnic break-up of Iran would make the 1990s shattering of Yugoslavia into seven countries look like a cake walk, and would unleash regional violence that would reverberate for decades.

Even if ethnic minority grievances against Persian rule are legitimate, the timing of western interest in their grievances coincides too neatly with the larger desire to pressure and isolate Iran. Washington has a long history of championing the rights of ethnic minorities against its enemies (such as in Montagnards in Vietnam, Hmong in Laos, Miskitus in Nicaragua, and most recently Kurds in Syria), then abandoning or selling out the minority when it is no longer strategically useful. We love ‘em, we use ‘em, and then we dump ‘em.

Stopping This War

On one hand, Netanyahu pressured Trump on the timing of this particular attack. Netanyahu needs to avoid prosecution and feared the stability of an Iran nuclear deal, just as Trump needs this war to divert attention from the Epstein files. But on the other hand, Israel has always served as a U.S. aircraft carrier carrying out U.S. aims of controlling the economy of the oil-rich Middle East, doing our dirty work of preventing and crushing revolt.

The American public has developed a healthy “Iraq Syndrome” that abhors endless wars, much as the “Vietnam Syndrome” temporarily scaled back U.S. military interventions. Even though Iran is very different from Iraq, that strong public sentiment previously prevented both Obama and Trump from attacking Iran. This war is less popular than even the 12-day war last year (between Israel—with U.S. support—and Iran), across the political spectrum.

This time, a clear majority of American voters felt we should have stayed out of this war, so we start with far stronger support than in any war in living memory. At the same time, a clear majority opposes sending ICE and soldiers into our cities. We have a responsibility to support veterans in groups such as About Face and Veterans for Peace, who are telling the truth to military personnel and their families, and support military personnel on their inevitable grievances, and when they refuse illegal orders or quietly frustrate the expansion of wars at home and abroad.

To be effective, the movement has to focus on the horrendous effects of such a war on Iranian civilians, and not only on U.S. troops. We should understand that this war may unfold in unpredictable ways that differ from previous conflicts. Just as “generals always fight the last war,” anti-war movements will lose if we merely fight against the last war.

Just as the Iranian people have a long, proud history of fighting against monarchy and theocracy, Americans are now facing a new monarchy and new theocracy at the same time. We should understand that tyrants like Trump always turn to war abroad to crush internal dissent at home. He is joining with messianic fascist allies like Netanyahu and Putin to stoke a religious nationalist crusade that will bring only suffering to civilians abroad and repression at home. It’s not just the future of the Middle East that’s at stake, but our own future as a democracy.

The old saying is that Truth is the First Casualty of War. Now we can turn that around to say that war should become a casualty of the truths that we tell about our country. At long last we need to pull back from dominating other peoples to take care of all people in our own country.

Dr. Zoltán Grossman is faculty in Geography and Indigenous Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, studying and teaching the intersections of ethnic nationhood, natural resources, and militarism, and a longtime community organizer.

His website is at https://sites.evergreen.edu/zoltan

On March 13, 2026, Timberland Regional Library (TRL) announced its plans to lay off 61 front-line library workers in response to its budget shortfall. The shortfall, which is currently estimated to be about $3.8 million according to The Aberdeen Daily World, was announced in late January 2026.

Current and former librarians, board members, patrons, and advocates say that this story has deep roots of contention in the library system. The budget shortfall doesn’t come as a surprise, librarians say, and perhaps even more importantly, the cost-cutting response falls in line with a long history of the administration’s priorities opposing front-line staff and the communities they serve.

To better understand what shapes the 2026 budget shortfall, some librarians pointed to the year 2018, when the administration released its Capital Facilities Proposal (CFP), which included rural branch closures, layoffs, and shifts to alternative library models like Expanded Access. Community response, and the ultimate failure of the CFP, reveals a deep disconnect between the TRL administration’s vision for its libraries, and the libraries that front-line staff and patrons are struggling to create and keep alive. While the administration’s policies move towards efficient, streamlined branches and concentrate most services in densely populated areas, many librarians and patrons within the TRL system are calling for increased access to physical library space that fosters community as well as information access.

2018 Capital Facilities Proposal

In September of 2018, the TRL Administrative and Public Services teams released the 98-page Capital Facilities Proposal. The proposal analyzed data of TRL’s expenditures and community engagement. The introduction proposes new changes for the library system to “adapt to changes, to invest in new opportunities, and seek out new possibilities.”

To understand how the CFP connects to the 2026 budget shortfall and staff layoffs, former TRL library manager Mary Prophit says there’s an important story beginning in the Mountain View Library, located in the small town of Randle in eastern Lewis County.

Prophit, who worked as a manager and assistant at the Mountain View Library, started there in December 1992, at a time when “we didn’t even have the Internet or anything. We had books.” She described her approach to library work as almost entirely centered around patrons. “When a patron walks through the door, you stop everything, you take care of the patron,” she said. “We used to have a saying: ‘people are the heart of the library. Quality service begins with me.’” Seeing people at the heart of the library, Prophit said, meant focusing on listening to patrons and adapting the library’s programming and priorities to fit the needs of the community it serves. For the Mountain View Library, this meant outreach at local schools, opportunity to make remote Senate testimony, veteran service programming, and Teen Night events that helped local high schoolers find a stronger sense of community.

“I used to wake up excited to go to work,” Prophit said. This changed around the year 2018, when administrative priorities began shifting, in part exemplified by the introduction of the CFP. In August 2018, a month before the CFP was publicly released, Prophit received a call from her supervisor and boss at the time. The supervisor informed Prophit that TRL was choosing not to renew the lease for the Mountain View Library’s building. “It came completely out of the blue,” she Prophit said. “I started crying. I was like, ‘I don’t understand, why my library?’ and [the supervisor] said, ‘you have to understand that your library is just one piece of the bigger picture.’”

Section V of the Capital Facilities Proposal analyzes each of TRL’s branches using data like projected population growth, number of items borrowed, and daily operating cost. Using this data, the CFP proposes a new library service model for each branch. The proposals, overall, aimed to close or consolidate rural library branches and concentrate library staff and programs into a few “full-service hub locations” in higher-population areas. Only these libraries would provide “the full spectrum of library services to the public,” services like meeting rooms, technology stations, more extensive book collections, and regular programming. Most rural branch buildings, meanwhile, were proposed to be replaced with mobile services (library vans that drive around a large geographic area and offer Internet connection, book check-outs, and programming), remote lockers (pickup and dropoff points where patrons with a library card can access books they check out), LibraryExpress stands (“coffee-stand style service points” staffed by 2 librarians, where patrons can check out books or “park and take advantage of 24/7 WiFi”) or expanded access buildings (unstaffed building that patrons with a library card can enter).

In Grays Harbor County, for example, the CFP proposed to renovate and “further develop” the Aberdeen branch while closing the Hoquiam, Amanda Park, Montesano, and Elma branches, consolidating those into one physical building in Elma and the others into mobile services based in Aberdeen.

The Mountain View Library too, was suggested for consolidation with Salkum and Packwood, and replacement with mobile services and LibraryExpress stands.

While the CFP describes these changes as future-looking and cost-saving, TRL librarians, especially those working at the rural branches proposed for drastic cuts or closure, saw things differently. “How does a van replace a building?” Prophit asked. She explained that the administration called these proposals “reimagined libraries,” but the reason why this reimagining required changing staffing and cutting costs so drastically, librarians didn’t know. “They were kind of implying ‘something’s gotta give’,” said Prophit. “We were confused -- was it because of a budget, or because of ‘reimagined’?”

The CFP’s “Revenues and Expenditures” section does not provide explicit numbers, but it reads: “TRL has reached the point where revenues are not keeping up with expenditures.” The proposal continues to state, “It is more cost-effective to provide services in areas with higher populations, yet much of the library district remains rural with a lower population density.” Indeed, when describing the new service models it proposes for reaching rural patrons, the plan most often uses language related to cost-cutting. The proposal describes the LibraryExpress model as “convenient, fast, and low-cost,” and, when describing why full-service hub locations will be established in higher-population areas, writes, “these locations take advantage of the economies of scale.”

In Randle and the other rural communities where libraries were proposed for closure, patrons were devastated. “My whole mission in life was to make my library an indispensable part of my community,” Prophit said. “That’s what I thought my job was, and I did it well.”

Public comment at the September 26, 2018 TRL Board of Trustees meeting shows the degree to which proposed closures impacted patrons and librarians.

Hundreds of library patrons shared, angrily, emotionally, and sometimes with humor, about how important the physical space of a library was to them. “You can’t uproot a library, move it to a new location, and expect the same success,” one Randle resident shared. “The community needs the library, and you can tell how hard they are willing to fight for it.”

“It would give quite a financial burden to me to have to pick up all the subscriptions of the magazines that I get. The gas — I could not come to a library,” shared one patron from Ocean Park, whose branch was slated for closure.

As the comments continued, patrons shared personal stories and how the space of the library, and its very existence in their town, went deeper than just the building itself. As one patron said: “Randle has lost mills, schools, logging, senior services, access to forest lands, jobs, and more. We have only one public community service building. And now they want to take that away from us too. This really hurts.”

Prophit describes the meetings about the Mountain View Library’s closure as some of the most painful yet also rewarding moments of her whole career. It showed her how integral and important the Mountain View Library had become to her community, yet only because that library’s very existence was on the line.

All of Works in Progress Issue 1 was published directly to our website, read all articles here.

Fallout and the 2026 Budget Shortfall

In 2018, faced with pressure from patrons and communities across the TRL system, the Board of Trustees ended up voting down the CFP. But eight years later, public comment in board meetings and concerns from TRL librarians sounds similar. “The fact that you are allowing the administration to destroy our sacred place is abhorrent,” said one public commenter in the March 18 board meeting. “It’s where I bring my child to learn to love books, to learn to love knowledge, and to learn to be part of the community.”

Another shared -- “I learned to read, I learned to enjoy books, because the Timberland Regional Library was so successful in their outreach ... And you have completely failed us. You have completely failed the children in the rural places.”

Former and current TRL librarians say that since the stop to the CFP, the TRL administration has continued to implement policies that diverge further and further from the wants and needs that front-line staff and patrons express.

“This administration is very out of touch with what happens at a building,” said a current TRL librarian, who preferred to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation. They are referred to here as Librarian A. “They’re ... treating us like, I don’t know, robots. Like things that accomplish their work that don’t have means.”

Brooke Pederson, former manager of the Amanda Park Library and current Grays Harbor library substitute, wrote to the TRL administration in March 2026 with concerns about the workplace culture. “The message I’m receiving from TRL’s current decisions, and from the pattern of toxic employment practices I’ve witnessed over the past 2 years, is that rural library service is expendable; librarians are expendable; front-line service is expendable; access is expendable. Rather, backline administration and automation are the future of libraries,” she wrote.

Over the past few years, TRL has introduced Expanded Access (EA) hours to some library branches. Similar to some of the formats laid out in the CFP, an Expanded Access library has no staff, and patrons apply for library cards that allow them to access the building and use the library’s services themselves. While some libraries originally started EA to expand upon the library’s normal staffed hours, new TRL policy has pushed some branches to replace staffed hours with EA hours. Currently, 12 of TRL’s branches offer EA hours, and the Naselle branch uses entirely EA hours with no staff. After the administration’s announcement of layoffs and cost-cutting measures on March 13, three more libraries — Amanda Park, Hoodsport, and McCleary — will transition to the full EA model.

Patrons and librarians say that EA limits access to the library. In order to get a card, patrons need a verifiable address, must be over fourteen years old, and must travel to another physical library to pick up the card. This limits and in many cases cuts off library access for many people, including unhoused patrons, young patrons, and patrons without easy access to transportation. “You have to have a lot of privilege to be able to get those [EA] cards,” said Kylie McQuarrie, an organizer with the Patrons Coalition for Local Libraries. And even if a patron is able to get an EA card, their ability to use library resources decreases without librarians to help. “If you don’t know how to use the library resources already, you won’t be able to use them,” she said. Susan Leite, former manager of the Amanda Park library, said that most importantly EA means libraries will lose most of their programming. “Taking the staff away means that the kids can’t come down for story time,” she said, describing how the Amanda Park library, which will now transition to entirely EA, is located close to the local school. “A huge part of getting kids to be lifelong learners is having them come down for story times ... it’s a huge decrease in the way libraries can serve their communities, at a time where really people need library services more than ever,” she said. Librarian A described that the administration’s decisions about changes and new policies in branches often feel bizarrely out of touch with the community’s actual needs. Money is spent on things like new trash cans and rearranging the book drop locations inside the library, not staffing to keep programs running or materials that patrons show their community needs.

These decisions also typically don’t include input from librarians or patrons, Librarian A said. “A lot of times we’re told we have to sit with a change they have made for a few months before we’re allowed to say anything about it.”

Pederson’s list of observations of the current TRL workplace includes “staff expecting policy changes to further restrict their work and patron services,” “staff being expected to pay more attention to their work processes than the patrons standing in front of them,” and “staff feeling their feedback is not welcome and that there will be retaliation against them for speaking out about anything.”

In an October 2018 Board of Trustees meeting about the CFP, a Packwood resident spoke to a similar disconnect. He described feeling like the TRL administration measured a library’s success by the number of books checked out there. “Metrics like internet use, and intangible things, like being the hub of your community, should be some of the metrics,” he said.

McQuarrie shared similar thoughts. “The library is about books. It is also about 10 billion other things, and one of them is community,” she said. “There are so many things you can do that you gain access to at the library, that you need a librarian there to point you towards ... And in fact, what they’ve done, is they’re going to close these branches, they’re going to fire these people, and they are going to decimate quality of life in these rural places.”

But just like in 2018, patrons have not given up in fighting for the libraries they want. Breaking developments are still occurring as patrons and front-line staff continue shaping the library’s story. On the afternoon of March 25, 2026, Executive Director Cheryl Heywood submitted a letter of resignation. She was not present at the Board meeting that evening, but the Trustees announced the update. In the public comment that followed, patrons sounded relieved and elated, and encouraged the Trustees to accept Heywood’s resignation and hold the rest of the administration accountable. Patrons proposed new ideas for re-envisioning the library system to better reflect patron and librarian priorities. “TRL needs a fresh, honest approach to this mess that was created by Cheryl and her cohort,” one patron commented.

Budgetary Mystery

The mystery behind all of these changes, many librarians and advocates say, is that these changes to the library system don’t appear to actually cut its costs.

In December 2018, The Daily World reported that the CFP proposals would have introduced new costs roughly equal to the money they would have saved — while staffing cuts and information technology changes would have saved TRL about $800,000 to $900,000 total, documents obtained by the paper’s open records requests showed that the implementation of the new services outlined in the CFP would have totaled “just more than $1 million.”

The 2018 TRL Board of Trustees expressed concern over these discrepancies and the lack of communication surrounding it. The Board’s 2018 Performance Evaluation reads: “[It] is of great concern that there were no budget committee meetings called to discuss the ‘financial cliff’ facing this organization […] Committee members were alarmed to hear that significant reductions in facilities and/or staffing would be necessary to close the gap between revenues and expenditures. The plan presented to the Board on Sept. 22 [2018] did not provide sufficient evidence of financial impacts of proposed changes, while indeed, many proposed changes would result in additional expenditures for TRL.”

Prophit, Hirschi, and Leite all say they think the administration may have concealed the current budgetary shortfall and then revealed it in order to push through more elements of the rejected CFP.

“I honestly think it was purposeful,” said Leite. “I think they purposely spent more money than they knew they had, and I think this is their way to get the CFP, by reverse engineering it.”

In the years since 2018, TRL’s finances have not improved. The Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT) used by the Washington State Auditor’s office shows TRL’s financial status reaching “concerning” status in the year 2022. FIT is designed to show whether the organization’s funds are being spent in line with the revenue they receive.

In 2020, former TRL Board Member Brenda Hirschi resigned over her concerns about the budget and the administration’s lack of action to address it.

“Using my past nearly three decades of financial management education and experience, I have studied the TRL budgets, financial reports, and trends of patron core services from 2012 to present,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “The people in this five county region are not getting their money’s worth. The taxpayer’s property tax contribution to TRL is mainly used to support the bureaucracy at the Administrative Service Center with little or no oversight from the trustees. Neighborhood libraries struggle to meet the core services patrons would like to see.”

Hirschi wrote that her primary budgetary concern was the portion of funds used by top TRL administrator’s salaries, including Heywood’s 2020 approval to increase one top administrator’s salary from $84,975 to $104,508 in one year.

Heywood did not respond to request for comment.

“You’ve only got so much revenue that’s coming in, so you’ve got restraints you’ve got to work within,” said Hirschi in an interview with Works in Progress. “I kept on saying, there’s something going on here with these salaries ... And that is why I said, ‘this is what is coming.’ I tried to tell those county commissioners, ‘this is what is coming.’”

According to Chris Chrzan, Public Information Officer for TRL, 68% of TRL’s yearly expenditures go towards salaries and benefits. “Over the years, TRL has pursued a variety of strategies to maintain library access with fewer staff in an attempt to minimize the impact on the public and preserve access to services ... Although we have been working to find ways to adjust over the years, we have now reached a point where gradual changes are no longer sufficient, and staffing costs must be reduced in order to find a sustainable path forward,” he wrote in a statement to Works in Progress. The TRL employee union and other advocates question why administrators’ salaries are not also being reduced, as they compromise part of the 68%, too. When a Trustee asked this question in the March 18th, 2026 board meeting, HR administrator Kandy Seldin responded that salaries are not the cause of the budget shortfall as they have stayed within their allotted 68% of the budget over the last few years.

Chrzan stated that TRL has been aware of the potential budget crisis since 2022, and chose to make incremental changes over time. “Essentially, major service reductions, and especially layoffs, are a last resort,” he wrote. “While the costs versus revenue trend lines were converging, the preferred strategy of library leadership and the Board has been to pursue conservative, incremental change that is minimally disruptive, whenever possible.”

Librarian A said that it’s more important to look at the library’s actions over their statements. “This administration can say they love this library, they can say they love this staff,” they said, “but their actions are not showing it.”

Caelen McQuilkin is a reporter from the high desert of eastern California who has loved the green of Olympia since moving here in August. They love reporting as a way to build connections while reflecting a place's complex picture.

All of Works in Progress Issue 1 was published directly to our website, read the rest here.

Cycling advocacy is about safety, so it makes sense that cycling advocates are mostly concerned with the roads where they live. However, following this logic politically has reduced cycling to an entirely local issue.

The idea is that you fix your own local problems first then spread those fixes to other places. In theory, all the “bike friendly” towns will keep teaming up until there’s enough bike infrastructure to go around. The problem with this strategy is that if the vision is only ever defined from a local perspective, it won’t be useful when it rolls into a new town or a different part of the world.

Of course, since things do have to start somewhere, arguing about localism can seem like the chicken or the egg, but it doesn’t matter where the movement begins if the politics only make sense locally and big corporations are presenting the only international alternative.

The cycling industry, like the auto and oil industries, isn’t organized around local relationships. It’s shaped from the top down by money and political power. This means the objectives of international capital have way more influence on infrastructure and culture than a coalition of townies trying to get more of their neighbors on bikes. That’s why safety is sold to us as products to buy or road barriers to build.

Since the politics behind car culture are already pervasive, any effort at change will have to reach beyond the city limits at some point. This means that without an expanding political perspective, localism is a trap. It’s based on the assumption that the most influence an individual can have is at the local level, despite the fact that mass movements clearly build more social force than individuals. Political strategies are most effective when they maximize the impact of movements, not of individuals.

Cyclists shouldn’t wait until some city council or chamber of commerce decides to jump on the bandwagon and spread the word. The cycling movement should aim to already be an undeniable force anywhere and everywhere the politicians and businessmen try to go.

We should determine our own needs and articulate our own demands, including a variety of proposals coming from different local communities. The goal should be to articulate cycling politics that can be recognized and understood at the national and international levels. This is the only way to really influence policy and significantly change society.

Historically, the cycling movement has had legitimate national sway. Back before most people had cars, it wasn’t enough to only improve the roads around town if you wanted to go places by bike, and it wasn’t enough to participate in the movement as an individual. That’s why they formed large cycling associations where they could debate their collective politics.

Doing this effectively today will require a movement that’s independent from the capitalist and bureaucratic classes, a movement capable of bringing smaller groups together into a mass organization with a coherent and consistent set of values. This means recognizing our needs and forcing our demands, building popular power as cyclists, rather than relying on opportunistic politicians or big construction firms aiming to get rich making cycling infrastructure on our behalf.

Even setting aside the debate about localism, the struggles inside the cycling movement are hard to ignore, especially since the elephant in the room is cycling’s pro-consumerism. Nevertheless, other tendencies do exist, and they don’t all just fit under the reactionary banner of anti-consumerism. Think of cyclists with or without cars, parents and kids, retired people, teens, working people, the unemployed, the homeless. If these cyclists can organize themselves and present a clear direction that speaks to others, they could start to influence society on their own terms, exercising their potential to force change.

It doesn’t take an economist to recognize that supply chains aren’t local, and it doesn’t take an environmentalist to recognize that bikes use less gas than cars. So, as the world enters a potential economic crisis driven by the price of oil, it’s more important than ever for the cycling movement to become a singular force, reaching into every sector of society, across the country and around the world.

To have an impact, even on something as plain and obvious as not getting hit by cars, we have to become more than hobbyists, more than localists, more than advocates. We have to encourage organizing and coalition building in the cycling movement, and we have to concern ourselves with roads that go out of town too.