A Historic Library Levy Lid Lift Will Appear on Ballots this November, Putting Timberland Regional Library’s Fate in Voters’ Hands

by Kylie McQuarrie

2026 has been a tumultuous year for the five-county Timberland Regional Library (TRL) system. With a new levy lift measure on the ballot, the library’s financial woes will continue until at least November, when voters could choose to solve those problems with a mild property tax bump.

But whether they’ll opt to trust Timberland after years of mismanagement (by Board members and library administrators alike) remains to be seen. If they want a lid lift to pass, the Board and admin have just under 100 days to rebuild public trust, connect with community members, support staff, and take responsibility for past actions.

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Read more TRL coverage here, here, and here.

by Ronda Larson Kramer

In December 2025, federally threatened Mazama pocket gophers played a key role in halting a plan to significantly expand the Olympia Regional Airport. Seven months later, the species and its Bush Prairie habitat at the airport have become part of a nationwide effort to stop a sweeping rollback of the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife and National Marine Fisheries Services — federal agencies that say their mission is to conserve species and and “their habitats” and “the ecosystems they depend on”— have finalized a rule that redefines “harm” under the Endangered Species Act to exclude habitat destruction.

At issue is whether governments, companies, and landowners may destroy habitat occupied by protected species. Tribes and conservation groups insist that protecting endangered species necessarily includes protecting the habitat they require to survive and recover.

Read the rest here

by Morgan Atwater

While we were tabling at a No Kings protest, a Palestinian man from out of town stopped by and said to us, “I can’t believe a group like this exists in Wenatchee. You expect to see this kind of thing in Seattle, not out here.”

We were handing out zines and flyers promoting our Apartheid Free Wenatcheecampaign and collecting email addresses for the Wenatchee for Palestine mailing list. Beside us, a Boycott Chevron trifold poster teetered in the breeze.

Read the rest here

Everyone knows that American-style democracy is a two party system. Whether red/blue, Democrat/Republican, or conservative/liberal, it all points to an either/or outcome. However, substituting this systemic fact for political analysis ignores what’s really going on.

Read the rest here

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2026 has been a tumultuous year for the five-county Timberland Regional Library (TRL) system. With a new levy lift measure on the ballot, the library’s financial woes will continue until at least November, when voters could choose to solve those problems with a mild property tax bump.

But whether they’ll opt to trust Timberland after years of mismanagement (by Board members and library administrators alike) remains to be seen. If they want a lid lift to pass, the Board and admin have just under 100 days to rebuild public trust, connect with community members, support staff, and take responsibility for past actions.

How Did Timberland Reach This Point?

At the end of January, then-director Cheryl Heywood announced a massive budget shortfall that would require sweeping staff layoffs. After massive public pushback, Heywood resigned, and the layoffs were temporarily paused.

While 36 of the planned layoffs were eventually called off, more than a dozen employees still lost their jobs. Branch hours were rolled back at nearly all Timberland locations, and staff have been operating on a skeleton crew ever since.

After seven straight months of public, staff, and union demands for accountability and a clear path forward, the library’s Board of Trustees finally voted to place a levy lid lift on the November ballot. Voters will be asked to approve or deny a slight increase in property taxes. If the lift passes, the library will be able to restore dozens of jobs, add more than 100 hours per month to branches across the library district, and continue to expand the collection.

If it doesn’t, Timberland will more or less cease to function no later than the end of 2028. The library began the year with a $3.8M deficit. That deficit will increase drastically leading to lasting layoffs, closed branches, and — in a worst-case scenario — the potential dissolution of the entire five-county system. More than 200,000 people would lose access to social services, community gathering spaces, support groups, internet and printing services, games, activities, companionship, and (of course) books.

What Will a Levy Lid Lift Entail?

Right now, Timberland collects just over $0.22 per $1,000 of assessed property value. By law, it’s allowed to collect up to $0.50 — but Washington’s regressive tax code means the levy rate declines over time. Without frequent votes to restore rates, libraries can legally collect less and less money, leading to underfunded, overburdened library systems with exhausted, underpaid workers.

In an ideal world, Washington’s tax code will change at the state level. All regional libraries, not just Timberland, could benefit from stable funding. Until then, TRL will have to make do with the newly authorized ballot measure, which would increase the levy rate to $0.35. Homeowners’ property tax rates would hypothetically increase by $3.42 and $5.75 per month, or $41 to $69 per year.

Crucially, TRL has never had a successful levy lid lift — in part because it’s only tried once in the last quarter century. Its sole attempt, in 2009, failed by a margin of just 5%, which is notably small for a five-county region voting during the worst economic downturn in many voters’ memories.

There’s no reason to think a levy lift couldn’t pass during these similarly dire financial times . . . except for the fact that the TRL Board and administration have spent the last several years frantically trying to lose all credibility with the public. And with some notable exceptions, including interim director Andrea Heisel and Grays Harbor County trustee Dustin Loup, far too few of them have been willing to engage with the public and do the necessary work to restore the community trust that would make the levy lid lift a success.

Is There A Path Forward?

Time is undeniably short, but administrators and Board members still have time to get down in the dirt with the rest of us. They can choose to act as equal partners with the public in rebuilding the library, clearly detail what went wrong in the past, and prove that they’re committed to building the library back stronger. Or they can do what the old administration and several current Board members are committed to doing: retrench, blame the community, and talk down to staff and patrons — seemingly forgetting that they, not the public, lost $3.8M tax dollars and devastated the library system we were trusting them to protect.

The overwhelmingly positive public support for TRL already won back 36 jobs and demanded administrative change. We already know that communities in all five counties are desperate to save their libraries. This levy lid lift can succeed — but the battle will be much easier if the trustees can commit to working in concert with the public, not against it.

Kylie McQuarrie is the co-founder of the Patron Coalition for Local Libraries (PCLL), a grassroots organization committed to supporting a thriving, successful five-county library system. If you’d like to get involved in the TRL levy lift movement, sign up to volunteer with the PCLL and/or the adjacent PAC, which will support the levy lift effort this summer and fall.

In December 2025, federally threatened Mazama pocket gophers played a key role in halting a plan to significantly expand the Olympia Regional Airport. Seven months later, the species and its Bush Prairie habitat at the airport have become part of a nationwide effort to stop a sweeping rollback of the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife and National Marine Fisheries Services — federal agencies that say their mission is to conserve species and “their habitats” and “the ecosystems they depend on”— have finalized a rule that redefines “harm” under the Endangered Species Act to exclude habitat destruction.

At issue is whether governments, companies, and landowners may destroy habitat occupied by protected species. Tribes and conservation groups insist that protecting endangered species necessarily includes protecting the habitat they require to survive and recover.

The Department of the Interior and the Department of Commerce stated in a July 2026 press release that they disagree with the previous interpretation of “harm,” which they claim interfered with private property rights and imposed unnecessary permitting costs on landowners, businesses, and local governments. According to the press release, the system created by federal agencies under the Endangered Species Act improperly “punished people for indirect or speculative impacts never contemplated by Congress.”

Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act in 1973 to conserve endangered species and the ecosystems they depend on. Under the Act, it is unlawful to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” an endangered species. For more than four decades, federal regulations have defined “harm” to include significant habitat destruction that injures protected wildlife. This interpretation has shaped permitting decisions and endangered species protection nationwide.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that interpretation in 1995. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority that the definition of harm “naturally encompasses habitat modification that results in actual injury or death.” He also explained that if Congress had intended “harm” to only refer to direct injuries, it would have been unnecessary to include in the Act, because it would have been redundant alongside words such as “kill” and “harass.”

Fourteen conservation organizations, the Squaxin Island Tribe, and the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community said in three separate complaints filed with federal courts that the federal agencies should not have rescinded the longstanding regulatory definition of “harm.”

“If you’re destroying habitat and, as a result, you’re injuring or killing wildlife, that is harmful,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, and Conservation Northwest are among nine conservation organizations represented by Earthjustice in the lawsuit involving Bush Prairie.

The nine conservation organizations argue in their complaint that changing the definition of harm “will upend the finalization of the draft Bush Prairie Habitat Conservation Plan,” which is being developed by the City of Tumwater and the Port of Olympia under the Endangered Species Act. The complaint states that the rule change would undermine habitat conservation measures in the plan, including those intended to protect the Olympia pocket gopher and streaked horned lark.

Olympia resident Betsy Norton is a member of the Center for Biological Diversity and is identified in the complaint as someone who would be personally harmed by the rule change because the species protected by the Habitat Conservation Plan bring her “great enjoyment as she regularly hikes and birds in the area.”

Norton helped South Sound Bird Alliance (formerly known as Black Hills Audubon Society) with its successful 2025 appeal of the Port of Olympia’s Airport Master Plan Update. That appeal resulted in the Port withdrawing its environmental determination and putting airport expansion plans on hold. Mazama pocket gophers featured prominently in the airport appeal. The hearing examiner devoted substantially more analysis to the gopher and other protected species than to issues such as aircraft noise or air quality.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Olympia Mazama pocket gopher is one of four federally listed subspecies of Mazama pocket gopher in Washington. Thousands of Olympia Mazama pocket gophers may occupy the Olympia Airport prairie, which is the subspecies’ core habitat. Elsewhere, populations number only in the hundreds or tens.

The primary threats facing the subspecies are habitat “fragmentation, degradation, and loss” due to development. Both the survival and growth of the subspecies depend on efforts to preserve and restore the prairie habitat.

That dependence on habitat is why conservation groups have enlisted the Olympia pocket gopher in the nationwide legal challenge over whether the Endangered Species Act should apply to habitat. In this lawsuit, as in the airport appeal, the gopher may be rescuing humans as much as humans are rescuing it.

Disclosure: Ronda Larson Kramer was an appellant in the appeal of the Port of Olympia’s Airport Master Plan Update.

While we were tabling at a No Kings protest, a Palestinian man from out of town stopped by and said to us, “I can’t believe a group like this exists in Wenatchee. You expect to see this kind of thing in Seattle, not out here.”

We were handing out zines and flyers promoting our Apartheid Free Wenatchee campaign and collecting email addresses for the Wenatchee for Palestine mailing list. Beside us, a Boycott Chevron trifold poster teetered in the breeze.

If you put a pin in the center of Washington state, you’ll probably land on Wenatchee.

As you cross over the mountains from the west side, the rain dries up, the lush forest becomes sagebrush, and the liberal political climate turns conservative and deeply bigoted.

“Wenatchee is a hotbed for Christian nationalism. Josh McPherson, an ultra conservative pastor who prayed for Trump inside the Oval Office during an official White House visit, leads the local Grace City Church. Grace City Church has successfully installed local Republican elected officials who are friendly to them, has a very close relationship with local police, and recently pulled off a coup to replace the City of Wenatchee’s Pride banners in June with Turning Point USA banners.

Wenatchee also has some of the cheapest electricity rates in the country thanks to our hydroelectric dams, and we are what people in the data center fight refer to as a “frontline community.” Cryptocurrency and AI companies have their greedy eyes all over the region, so we’re having to fight off Microsoft and Sabey Corporation, who are attempting to steal our hydropower to power data centers. This is in addition to the problems that every other city is facing: ICE abductions terrorizing community members, housing and food insecurity, worsening wildfires, and summers that are just getting hotter and hotter.

Somehow, in the midst of all of this, Wenatchee for Palestine was born.

Wenatchee for Palestine’s roots are actually somewhere in Olympia. Or rather, The Evergreen State College was where I first learned to talk about Palestine in terms of occupation and liberation. Years ago, I took a class on representations of martyrdom, not knowing that the course of my own life would be radically altered by the ongoing genocide that would follow in the wake of October 7, 2023.

When Wenatchee for Palestine started, it was December 2023, and we were just three people holding signs on the side of the street. For those initial months, we often stood out there in the snow.

At the time, my hard lines for participating in protests were the following: I won’t give any speeches, I won’t lead a march, and I won’t lead chants. I would go on to do two of those three things within the next year. I still haven’t led a chant though.

Wenatchee for Palestine’s membership steadily grew over the course of 2024. As national and international organizing around the genocide shifted, so too did our tactics. Our protests grew more focused. Rather than protesting the genocide in general, we zeroed in on priority boycott targets of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, like Chevron, which supplies nearly 50% of Israel’s electricity grid.

In early 2025, Wenatchee for Palestine decided that it would be beneficial to join the brand new local coalition that was just starting to coalesce around anti-Trump sentiment. Our primary motivation at the time was to counteract the erasure of Palestine taking place within the Democratic Party and Democratic-Party-adjacent national groups like Indivisible. We wanted to make “progressive except Palestine” untenable in the Wenatchee Valley.

We thought that if we could just get Wenatchee for Palestine into the coalition, then they would print our name on all of the No Kings rally flyers alongside groups like the NCW Democrats and Confluence Indivisible. This would make it clear that progressives on a grassroots level support Palestine and that the national organizations were ignoring the genocide at their own peril.

We strong-armed our way into that coalition with a lot of persistence.

At the same time, we expanded our BDS work. We joined the nascent West Coast Boycott Chevron coalition and participated in their first action, a coordinated highway banner drop, on August 29, 2025, as well as several more coordinated actions on November 22, 2025 and March 22, 2026.

In May 2025, we found out that the Chelan County Public Utility District planned to authorize a contract with Microsoft that would grant the software giant access to our hydropower for their data centers. We collaborated with Weapons Out of Wenatchee on a letter-writing campaign to block the contract. If nothing else, we figured our efforts would at least put additional pressure on Microsoft during a pivotal time for the worker-led No Azure for Apartheid movement.

We criticized Microsoft’s complicity in genocide at both the PUD public comments meeting and at the No Kings protest in June 2025. Days later, the PUD board of commissioners voted unanimously to authorize a large load service agreement and contract with Microsoft. It would be nice if we could win all our campaigns with just a few well-worded statements at a public comments meeting, but it’s never that easy.

But sure enough, that September, Microsoft caved under pressure and stopped the sale of a subset of its cloud and AI services to Unit 8200, the spy agency of the Israeli military. Even though we lost our local battle, we played a small part in a broader BDS victory by demonstrating to Microsoft that their support for genocide will not go unchallenged. We did have better luck with another local campaign, though.

On May 18, 2025, we helped arrange a film screening of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land at the First United Methodist Church. After the screening, we spoke to members of the church and informed them about the Apartheid-Free Pledge, which invites communities of faith, congregations, and other organizations to take a stand against apartheid. The members of the church were moved by the film and receptive to the pledge. They wanted to act in solidarity with Palestinians.

And on October 12, 2025, after months of dedicated work from church members, the First United Methodist Church voted to take the Apartheid-Free Pledge. In doing so, it became the first Apartheid-Free Community in Wenatchee, and the first in Central Washington as a whole. Then, less than two months later, on December 2, 2025, the Sunnyslope Church voted in favor of taking the Apartheid-Free Pledge, making them the second Apartheid-Free Community in Wenatchee.

Both churches would go on to do significant work on their own in solidarity with the people of Palestine. That December, the First United Methodist Church hosted a Boycott Chevron caroling event which was the first BDS action in Wenatchee arranged by an organization besides Wenatchee for Palestine. Then in March, the church hosted a book club for Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible Through Palestinian Eyes by Palestinian Christian theologian Mitri Raheb.

The Sunnyslope Church has a big sign out front promoting the Apartheid-Free Pledge. Individual members of the church are working diligently to spread the word and encourage other organizations and congregations to take the pledge.

Slowly but surely, we’re growing our Apartheid Free Wenatchee map.

Organizing in a rural area has its challenges, but it has some advantages, too. There is less institutional power, but less institutional obstruction as well. Some advice I was once told is: “Organize where you’re at.” We are most powerful in the communities we are already embedded in, where we have preexisting connections and are participants in a society that can’t function without us.

All over the country, there is important work happening in rural areas that never makes it into the news but is nonetheless helping shift narratives and broaden the window of what is possible. What people should take away from this is that you can just do things. You can just start a group called “[Your City] for Palestine.” What that group looks like will depend on your specific location and what opportunities are available to you.

Here in Wenatchee, the local struggle against data centers has been reenergized by support from Washington AI Resistance, a statewide organization, and a brand new local data center opposition group called No Data Centers NCW. Unlike with other BDS targets, we have actual leverage over Microsoft because we have something they want: our land, our water, and our hydropower. And we are bound and determined to keep those resources out of Microsoft’s hands as long as their technology is used to surveil and kill Palestinians.

Everyone knows that American-style democracy is a two party system. Whether red/blue, Democrat/Republican, or conservative/liberal, it all points to an either/or outcome. However, substituting this systemic fact for political analysis ignores what’s really going on.

Today, the Republican Party’s coalition combines edgy cultural movements with the “free” market policies of the capitalist class. This extremist tendency filled a void created by the party’s conservative and centrist tendencies after they failed to propose any convincing alternatives.

On the Democratic side, as a reaction to this right-wing coalition, the centrist tendency has defined its project as an attempt to maintain old norms. At the very least, they want to slow down change. But like what happened on the other side, when centrists and conservatives refuse to advance a new position, they leave space open, and other tendencies look to fill that void.

In American politics, populism is a very comfortable third wheel to the two major parties because it fundamentally opposes old leadership, aka “the establishment.” It has an inherent affinity for insurgent candidates. Depending on the specific thread, and whether it’s coming from the right or the left, populism might position itself against the elites, the oligarchs, the technocrats, or the 1%. Recently, in the context of the rising cost of living, populists have gained support by making their brand synonymous with cost-reducing reforms.

This election season has already had a lot of buzz about socialists and their embrace or rejection by the Democratic Party, raising the question of why news anchors and podcasters are suddenly so interested in socialism, right in the middle of the democratic primaries, and where’s their curiosity the rest of the year?

Intrigue is one of the main reasons. It makes great clickbait to frame one of the established parties as undergoing a shakeup. Candidates that embrace an “outsider” or radical identity are interviewed more than candidates that fit the party mold. And this works both ways: an incumbent defending their seat from “socialism” is guaranteed more invitations to Meet the Press than one having to convince people of the same old thing for another term. That’s why it’s important to remember that, in a primary, all the candidates are running to represent the same party, and in a general election, they’re all competing to run the same government.

Populism itself is another reason there’s so much interest in so-called radical candidates. The framing of the elites vs. the non-elites, of the establishment vs. the upsurge, helps justify the presence of a candidate whose policies don’t fall in the “center” of the party’s political spectrum. Combine that with spicy rhetoric about landlords and capitalism, and you have the potential for a viral candidate that could get a lot of votes. The problem is that this never advances beyond blue vs. blue. That’s what makes the whole discussion a reformist debate about how to steer the ship, not a revolutionary debate about how to get to a different society, free from class domination.

Electoralism is part of the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). For them, that means using the Democratic Party as a vehicle. That’s a big part of why they’re getting so much media coverage. If you run for office calling yourself a socialist, you’re putting a target on your back. It invites opponents, supporters, and sometimes the whole internet to follow every detail of your local campaign. A socialist candidate isn’t hard to understand. In an election, they come off as being just like any other candidate, only more radical or progressive or whatever. I don’t think that’s a useless take because it’s relevant that, in order to get elected, they have to be “just like any other candidate.”

I’m not saying their proposed reforms aren’t better than the alternatives or that revolutionary currents should actively work against them. I’m not questioning their socialist vision or their commitment. But running for office is different than governing is different than building popular power. If the success of a political strategy relies on the outcome of a single tactic, like winning an election, it’s precarious; if it relies on the dominant political class allowing the election of their own gravediggers, it’s misleading and energy zapping.

I say all of this as a proponent of a revolutionary current that rejects the right-wing’s dominance and the former status quo defended by the centrists, arguing instead for an advance toward a new system, based on popular power rather than state power. While the revolutionary tendency is far from the most influential force today, there were decades when it was imperceptible due to repression and demobilization. But in the wake of Trump’s rise, people are starting to get familiar with revolutionary politics again.

Like populism, the revolutionary tendency has many currents: anarchist, Marxist, indigenous, abolitionist. But unlike populism, it sees reforms as the result of the self-managed power of the people, not as lures to attract voters to a certain side in an election. There’s undeniably a fight in the government over who gets to promote state policy, but there’s also another, equally valid fight taking place against the whole capitalist system, promoting the policies of the people and working to increase their power outside of the state.

It’s naive to imagine the future being the dream of any one single ideological source. You can’t just ignore everyone else and get on with your own thing. On top of that, there’s no empty space in politics. When one set of ideas and theories for explaining things fails, there’s always another way, another tendency ready and willing to fill the void. This doesn’t happen in an even and balanced way; it’s a struggle. There are winners, and there are losers. That’s why it matters which tendency you’re promoting and which one you’re resisting.

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

Excerpt from Clare Follmann’s Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong

by Clare Follmann

A caste of plants and animals, labeled “invasive species,” are charged with being a key cause of habitat degradation that must be eradicated at any cost — an ethically questionable and often futile approach. While some invasive species cause great environmental damage, recent developments in the study of ecology have found that intervention efforts themselves have frequently proved more harmful than helpful to their local ecosystems. Yet the outdated narrative of “species management” persists in both public belief and conservation policy, distracting from and even justifying a far greater threat to biodiversity: the global capitalist system that is destroying our planet.

***

(Abridged excerpt, slightly edited)

Although this book isn’t a story, it’s certainly about a story. It is full of many different stories, and it also begins with a story. So, for the sake of tradition (which this book at times will at length disavow), let it begin this way.

Once upon a time, there was a group of fishermen. . .

Read the rest here

Right to Work, Reconsidered

In order for organized labor to overcome the anti-union political right, it must shift focus from simply using collective power for meager pay raises, towards taking back power.

by Nicholas Hefling

As a union rep, I hear a lot of confusion about Right to Work (RTW) — a term that the left should reappropriate. RTW is the norm in most states (though not in the State of Washington) and the entire public sector since 2018. Where RTW exists, most workers in a union-represented workplace only pay dues voluntarily. RTW is an attack on a hard-won contractual provision called the union security clause, which requires that everyone a union represents pay their share of the cost of that representation.

At first glance, RTW can sound fairer to workers; why should anyone be forced to pay union dues? Here’s the catch. Even when a worker pays nothing, the union is still legally required to represent them: to bargain on their behalf, file their grievances, and defend their rights on the job. That costs significant resources. When the share of workers paying dues shrinks while the represented workforce doesn’t, the union is squeezed. This strain pushes unions to raise dues (which drives more people to drop out), cut staff, or scale back external organizing efforts. That, of course, was the dream anti-union activists pursued in Janus v. AFSCME.

Read the rest here

Captive Consumers!

Within prisons, exclusive contracts with private vendors leave incarcerated people with no choice.

by Tomas S. Afeworki

The prison industrial complex has always been rooted in profit, and it’s a well-oiled, self-feeding operation. And it will continue to grow during this new AI era as the citizenry loses jobs and the middle class becomes more nonexistent with each passing year.

Olympia Joins International Kite Festival to Resist Israeli Occupation in the West Bank

by Nicholas Kohnen and Michelle Ryder

On a sunny summer Sunday afternoon, some 25 Olympia families gathered near the Heritage Park Fountain to build, decorate, and fly kites alongside organizers across the world to show solidarity with Palestinians facing settler violence in the West Bank.

Laughter mingled with the sounds of classic Arabic music as bubbles floated past smiling faces, and children ran freely, compelling their kites to take to the skies. It was an afternoon of deliberate celebration and unbridled joy, part of an act of global solidarity coinciding with the 13th annual Burin Kite Festival.

Read the rest here

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A caste of plants and animals, labeled “invasive species,” are charged with being a key cause of habitat degradation that must be eradicated at any cost — an ethically questionable and often futile approach. While some invasive species cause great environmental damage, recent developments in the study of ecology have found that intervention efforts themselves have frequently proved more harmful than helpful to their local ecosystems. Yet the outdated narrative of “species management” persists in both public belief and conservation policy, distracting from and even justifying a far greater threat to biodiversity: the global capitalist system that is destroying our planet.

(Abridged excerpt, slightly edited)

Although this book isn’t a story, it’s certainly about a story. It is full of many different stories, and it also begins with a story. So, for the sake of tradition (which this book at times will at length disavow), let it begin this way.

Once upon a time, there was a group of fishermen. . .

It was the summer of 1959, and a group of fishermen set sail to Pinta, a small, northern island of the Galápagos. The fishermen planned on using this equatorial island as a home base of sorts while they fished for a few weeks, so they brought plenty of essentials to keep them comfortable and well fed. This included three plump goats, which would serve as a backup food source if the fishermen were unable to catch enough fish to sustain themselves. Whether their fishing expedition was successful or not is unknown, but we can assume that the fishermen’s nets were heavy and full for the duration of their trip because these three lucky goats were spared and left to live out the rest of their days on the beautiful island of Pinta. For the goats, this small island proved to be a paradise — so much so that by the 1970s, they had multiplied to over forty thousand, spreading across the twenty-three-square-mile island. But the native plant life of Pinta suffered thanks to these hungry new inhabitants.

From 1995 to 1997, as the total goat count in the Galápagos topped one hundred thousand, concerned conservationists decided that enough was enough.

To stop the goats and their insatiable hunger, conservationists initiated Project Isabela. Spanning nine years, Project Isabela attempted to restore biodiversity to the Galápagos Islands by “managing” these goats.

“The trickiest part of the whole thing was logistics,” said Dr. Karl Campbell, the field manager who ran Project Isabela’s operations. “We had to bring helicopters, rifles, and munitions to one of the remotest parts of the world.” The conservationists and volunteers of Project Isabela began by hunting the goats from both the sky and the ground. Exterminators wielding rifles leaned out of roaring helicopters or marched across the tropical landscape, shooting down the goats. Despite this methodical massacre, the conservationists still faced a problem.

Project Isabela required the total eradication of the goats, but the goats were getting wise to the pattern of slaughter, and they learned to hide from their executioners.

The masterminds behind Project Isabela came up with a new plan. This involved capturing a selection of the remaining female goats, ominously referred to as the “Judas goats.” These Judas goats would then be sterilized so that they could not reproduce, injected with hormones to produce constant arousal, and accessorized with brightly colored radio-tracking collars. The Judas goats were then let loose on the islands — and surreptitiously pursued. When a Judas goat at last found her kin, the snipers tracking her would swoop down and massacre the herd, leaving only the Judas goat alive. After watching her companions gunned down around her, the frightened Judas goat would flee and look for more goats, and the bloodshed would continue. At long last, every goat was found. “You have to understand,” says Campbell. “We don’t want to put a cute face to an invasive species. We focus on the outcomes, letting people see how good the islands look once the goats are gone.”

Though the goats were killed off, the story does not quite end there. Several years after the completion of Project Isabela, a study emerged that revealed an unexpected consequence of this goat extermination. The native Galápagos hawk, which had fed on carcasses of the invasive goats for decades, experienced a drastic decline in population that coincided perfectly with the timeline of Project Isabela. Luckily, the dwindling Galápagos hawk made a few dietary changes and became more reliant on invasive rats for food. However, in 2012, conservationists initiated Project Pinzón in an effort to eradicate the invasive rats.

Do you see where this story is headed?

The history of invasive species management is littered with stories similarly dripping with irony. Yet the narrative of invasive species is often only told from one side, which describes them as an invading enemy to be eliminated at any cost. Despite being ethically dubious, the popular ways of “managing” invasive species are typically Sisyphean, doomed from the outset. Even if some invasives are killed in management projects, enough are typically able to survive and to reproduce.

Additionally, most common forms of invasive species eradication will also include unforeseen ecological damage. Sometimes, as in the case of the Judas goat and the Galápagos hawk, the invasive species has become so entangled in the intricate web of its new ecosystem that eradication will disrupt that ecosystem.

Particularly in the wake of climate crisis and with the growing flight of climate refugee species, we are facing a strange new world where increasingly undernuanced stories of native habitats, of native species, and of Sisyphean invasive species management nevertheless maintain a firm hold on public belief and conservation policy.

As Greta Thunberg argues, when your tub is overflowing, the first thing to do is turn off the tap. Pursuing invasive species management while largely ignoring the climate crisis and ongoing global capitalism is like bailing out the water before turning off the tap. This isn’t to say we don’t need those sorts of solutions — bailing water out is necessary when you have an overflowing tub. But we also must turn off the tap, or our efforts will be pointless. We need far more diverse solutions, or this story and many other stories will simply end in extinction.

I don’t deny that the goats on the Galápagos Islands caused great ecological damage and that they threatened already endangered species that deserve protection.

Yet, in the story of the Judas goat, I can’t help but feel a deep compassion for those unlucky goats, mercilessly hunted down in their new home. But this is largely the way that scientists in invasive species management have decided to address biodiversity loss. It is just this sort of slaughter that is generally considered necessary for the greater good of the ecosystem. It goes largely unquestioned. But I believe it is important to ask questions especially when something feels wrong but is made to appear unquestionable through language, rhetoric, or tradition. Where do the moral or ethical limitations lie in this philosophy of preservation? What has brought invasive species management to this degree of brutality, and what maintains it? How can we protect biodiversity in a way that feels right?

How can we live with nature better?

Clare Follmann, M.E.S., is an author and environmentalist located in Olympia, Washington. Her writing engages with themes of ecology, language, political theory, and philosophy. She likes to poke holes in dominant or obsolete narratives, and strives to help uplift and listen to the voices and stories that have been too often cast aside — including those from our more-than-human world. Her work focuses on finding and planting the literal and figurative seeds that will help support a post-capitalist society that prioritizes the well-being of people and planet. Scapegoat is her first book.

As a union rep, I hear a lot of confusion about Right to Work (RTW) — a term that the left should reappropriate. RTW is the norm in most states (though not in the State of Washington) and the entire public sector since 2018. Where RTW exists, most workers in a union-represented workplace only pay dues voluntarily. RTW is an attack on a hard-won contractual provision called the union security clause, which requires that everyone a union represents pay their share of the cost of that representation.

At first glance, RTW can sound fairer to workers; why should anyone be forced to pay union dues? Here’s the catch. Even when a worker pays nothing, the union is still legally required to represent them: to bargain on their behalf, file their grievances, and defend their rights on the job. That costs significant resources. When the share of workers paying dues shrinks while the represented workforce doesn’t, the union is squeezed. This strain pushes unions to raise dues (which drives more people to drop out), cut staff, or scale back external organizing efforts. That, of course, was the dream anti-union activists pursued in Janus v. AFSCME.

From 1977 until 2018, public-sector agency fees (public-sector speak for union dues) were constitutionally protected under Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, and by 2018, 22 states plus D.C. allowed for public-sector union security. Anti-union activists came close to killing agency fees in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association in 2016, but the sudden death of Justice Scalia left the Court deadlocked 4–4, and the pro-union ruling permitting union security survived. Undeterred, right-wing think tanks brought another vehicle in 2018: Janus. The 5–4 majority argued that requiring a public employee to pay agency fees is compelled “political speech.” Never mind the fact that there were already stringent legal limits that govern how dues can be spent. Never mind that objectors could redirect that money to a charity of their choice, and never mind that the ruling broke with decades of precedent. It was a landmark victory for the Right, which has long wanted RTW in every state and workplace.

With Janus making every public-sector union in the country RTW, the next target was the private sector. However, because public-sector workers represent a highly disproportionate share of all union members in the United States, the private sector represents a smaller prize for anti-union activists. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, private-sector union density sits at a historically dismal 5.9%. In comparison, the public sector, though still far from where it should be, sits at a much more robust 32.9%.

So why chase union security clauses one at a time instead of going after the entire legal framework that unions depend on to exist? That’s the real dream of the anti-union Right: to strip unionization of any institutional recognition and power. Enter the recent, hotly contested fight over the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) itself — the federal body that certifies and governs private-sector unions nationwide. In August 2025, the Fifth Circuit ruled in SpaceX, Energy Transfer, and Findhelp v. NLRB that the removal protections shielding the Board’s members and judges are likely unconstitutional under Article II, which froze the Board’s proceedings against those companies (Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Starbucks have pressed similar arguments in their own cases). SpaceX sought to bring the issue before the Supreme Court to land a killing blow. That effort stalled when the new NLRB under Trump’s second term withdrew the complaint against SpaceX, leaving no live controversy for the court to rule on. Unions have petitioned to intervene and keep the fight alive; as of now the issue remains unresolved. The future of the NLRB, and of private-sector organizing as we know it, is still up in the air.

The anti-union Right uses the courts because they’ve held them for decades, and they’ll keep winning there. None of this gets undone in a courtroom. It gets undone by militant shop floor organizing and federal legislation. This is more difficult precisely because it requires the density of organized workers that RTW was designed to prevent. We must shift our focus from simply using our collective power for meager pay raises and maintenance of benefits towards taking back power and shared ownership of operations. The labor movement spent fifty years managing decline from behind a bargaining table. Our moment demands we stop defending the old model and start taking back what the bosses have spent a century accumulating.

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

The prison industrial complex has always been rooted in profit, and it’s a well-oiled, self-feeding operation. And it will continue to grow during this new AI era as the citizenry loses jobs and the middle class becomes more nonexistent with each passing year.

Corporations have a hidden hand: They use AI to replace you while they bid for contracts to sell their defective surplus products to your loved ones who are unfortunate enough to find themselves caught up in the system.

These are just a few of the companies that sell their goods in prisons:

• Shoes: Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Fila, Under Armour

• Personal care: Irish Spring, Ivory, Dove, Suave, Speed Stick, Colgate, VO5, Pantene, Gillette

• Food: Kirkland, V8, Keefe, Folgers, Kool-Aid, International Delight, BelVita, Top Ramen, Hershey’s

There is no real free market here. In the past, your family could go to different vendors to get you food and clothing. Now all orders must go through Union Supply, and of course all commissary is purchased through Correctional Industries (CI). Local small businesses are prohibited from getting these contracts. They force us to buy products from their lists while price gouging, since there is no competition.

CI also sells food to the Department of Corrections (DOC). They feed prisoners inferior products that violate Washington Executive Order 13-06, which directs that all state facilities must provide healthy foods and meet the Department of Health’s nutrition guidelines. We become captive consumers, forced to buy these products or starve.

These are dangerous times. As the job market dries up due to AI, everyone is at risk of being replaced. Imagine a bad version of Star Wars come true: If you can’t afford a ticket for a trip on Elon Musk’s space flights to occupy Mars, then you will be subject to imprisonment and forced to buy products from the same corporations that invest in your captivity.

Tomas S. Afeworki is a Pan-Afriqan illustrator and human rights activist focused on the social and political protection of the diaspora. Through grassroots 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.

On a sunny summer Sunday afternoon, some 25 Olympia families gathered near the Heritage Park Fountain to build, decorate, and fly kites alongside organizers across the world to show solidarity with Palestinians facing settler violence in the West Bank.

Laughter mingled with the sounds of classic Arabic music as bubbles floated past smiling faces, and children ran freely, compelling their kites to take to the skies. It was an afternoon of deliberate celebration and unbridled joy, part of an act of global solidarity coinciding with the 13th annual Burin Kite Festival.

Burin is a small village in Palestine, located just south of Nablus in the West Bank. Since 1967, Burin and the rest of the West Bank have been under continuous Israeli military occupation. The 4,000 Palestinians who live in and around Burin face constant threats, intimidation, and property destruction at the hands of the Israeli settlers, supported by the Israeli military. Three Israeli settlements have expropriated large chunks of Burin, and two additional Israeli outposts have recently been established, only awaiting authorization from the Israeli government to legitimize further theft of Palestinian territory. More than 20,000 olive trees stewarded by the people of Burin have been burned, poisoned, or cut down by Israeli settlers since 2004, according to Ghassan Najjar, the founder of the Burin Land & Farming Cooperative and organizer of the Kite Festival in Burin.

“To be in Burin as a child, it makes you bigger than your age,” Ghassan said in a documentary about the 2024 festival. This is why he saw the act of flying a kite and spending care-free time in the hills around Burin as so critical for his community. While the initial impulse for organizing this festival was focused on the children of Burin, Ghassan’s imprisonment by the Israeli military in 2014 led him to consider the inherently political and revolutionary aspects of this small act of resistance. Following that arrest, Ghassan began extending an invitation to children in refugee camps across the West Bank, demonstrating that, as he said in a recent interview with the Green Olive Collective, “the Palestinians are one people, and we are here, we will not leave our land.”

In the following years, more than 20 volunteers have been arrested in Burin for supporting the festival. Every year, when the kites take to the sky, Israeli settlers fire weapons at them. In 2024, settlers set fire to at least 600 olive trees immediately prior to the start of the festival. But to Ghassan, these attempts to discourage and intimidate festival-goers only re-emphasize the futility of the settler position:

“This is our land, this is our sky. Even if you kill us and don’t like us to fly, out kite will fly ... When you see the settlers burning trees, and poisoning the trees, and cutting the trees, that’s making sure that this is not their land. If god gave them this land, why are [they] burning and poisoning the soil and poisoning the trees?”

Fortunately, there are organizations that defend Ghassan’s vision and share it with the world. Raphael Mimoun and Brandon Tonner-Connolly documented the 2024 kite festival. They were there as members of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, in solidarity with Palestinian resistance and to provide a protective presence. When international or Israeli observers are present, settlers and the Israeli military are less likely to employ overt violence against Palestinians.

The Green Olive Collective has worked to promote festivals in solidarity with the one in Burin as a means of raising awareness and also fundraising for materials and food to ensure that the children in Burin and across the West Bank can, at least for one day, enjoy themselves and live the carefree life that many of us take for granted. This is reflected in how Ghassan conceives of the festival today. As he sees it, “the problem is not just with the Zionist occupation [of Palestine], the problem is also with capitalism, which is the umbrella for the occupation.”

In Olympia we enjoyed the spectacular creativity of our children, free from interruption or harassment. Six days later, in Burin, an hour before their kite festival was to begin, five military jeeps stormed the community. Fortunately, Burin residents and festival-goers were able to dispel the attacks and avoid violence and disruption. Despite the constant threats and oppression of the Israeli military and settlers, as the Green Olive Collective recounts, the 13th Annual Burin Kite Festival was a great success:

“The hills of Burin were brimming with children as they frolicked up the hillsides, reached for the heavens, taught guests to dance Palestinian dakbe, and were lifted up by their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and the whole community,” said Erez Bleicher, the Green Olive Collective Advocacy and Membership Director. “Children from the refugee camps in Balata and Tulkarm joined with friends from Madama, Huwara, Iraw Burin, and other nearby villages as the sun descended over hundreds of kites still soaring kilometers above the reach of settlers, soldiers, or a system designed to contain their smiles.”

Nicholas and Michelle are on the Coordinating committee of Palestine Action South Sound (PASS). PASS meets the first Monday of every month, from 7-9 PM, at the YWCA Friendship Hall, 220 Union Ave SE, Olympia, WA, 98501.

by Ronda Larson Kramer

A first-of-its-kind lawsuit by growth management watchdog Futurewise against Thurston County is set to become one of the initial tests of Washington’s pioneering climate planning law.

The 2023 law builds on decades of planning research showing that development patterns influence how far people drive and how much money local governments spend extending water, sewer, and other infrastructure. The climate planning law requires many local governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled through land-use planning.

Under Washington’s pre-existing Growth Management Act, most future urban growth must occur within designated Urban Growth Areas, or UGAs. UGAs include existing cities as well as adjacent unincorporated land intended to accommodate future urban growth. One of the main aims of a UGA, according to the Thurston GeoData Center, “is to provide a limit for the extension of urban utilities, especially sewer service.”

Read the rest here!

US vs. Iran, Live Coverage on Every Channel

by Carl Eugene Stroud

If you follow the news at all, you’ve definitely encountered their extra easy-to-understand theory of war, a theory that presents armed conflict like a soccer match. The pervasiveness of this theory has created a situation where the dominant narrative about American-Iranian relations might be true, but it’s not the whole truth. Billing it as two sides facing off against each other increases the number of spectators watching from home, but it doesn’t help us see where, how, or why various forces are behaving the way they are.

Read the rest here!

The Jungle's Planned Closure Falls Short on the Issue of Cats

by Whitney Bowerman

In May, the City of Olympia announced the beginning of a multi-year process to close The Jungle. It is the right thing to do. The site is unsafe and lacks the infrastructure to support human life with dignity.

However, conversations about encampment closures almost never cover the fact that the residents have animals, and lots of them! Almost all housing has strict rules about animals.

Most housing options permit a maximum of two animals. Encampment residents frequently have more. Additionally, animals must be spayed, neutered, and vaccinated to be accepted by most housing options — services that are genuinely difficult to access without transportation, funds, or the ability to keep appointments. So residents face an impossible calculus: which animals do I give up to get into housing? For many, the honest answer is none. They will not leave their cats behind. What looks from the outside like resistance to housing, is often something much simpler and more human. It is loyalty. It is love.

Read the rest here!

Mesh: Not Just for Your Home Network

by Rob Ott

For months, I’d been hearing about mesh networks as various friends started getting into learning about them and attending educational events (often held at DECAY, which, along with so many other good things can be found on the DECAY community events calendar).

I had a long career in tech at the State, during which I studiously avoided becoming a supervisor and also, despite knowing many good humans who worked in this field, also avoided hardware or network setup. My brain is great at a lot of things. Understanding how physical things are built, configured, or operate is not one of them. Mesh falls into this category and therefore not intuitive to me. So, I kept asking people in mesh-land for a simple, easy intro document but none were offered. And as you know when you repeatedly ask for things like that, sometimes it is suggested that you create what it is that you are looking for. This is my bare bones attempt. With the research I have done so far, it is clear that I could spend many hours diving into this rabbit hole because there is so much more to learn. Here’s what I’ve got.

Read the rest here!

🗞️ Watch this space! We are going to be announcing some really exciting news soon! The Works in Progress team has been working hard to make our dream of bringing back a print issue a reality!

A big thank you to everyone who has already donated to our fundraising campaign! If you would like to contribute to the creation of an ongoing print issue, you can make one time, monthly and yearly donations here.

In May, the City of Olympia announced the beginning of a multi-year process to close The Jungle. It is the right thing to do. The site is unsafe and lacks the infrastructure to support human life with dignity.

However, conversations about encampment closures almost never cover the fact that the residents have animals, and lots of them! Almost all housing has strict rules about animals.

Most housing options permit a maximum of two animals. Encampment residents frequently have more. Additionally, animals must be spayed, neutered, and vaccinated to be accepted by most housing options — services that are genuinely difficult to access without transportation, funds, or the ability to keep appointments. So residents face an impossible calculus: which animals do I give up to get into housing? For many, the honest answer is none. They will not leave their cats behind. What looks from the outside like resistance to housing, is often something much simpler and more human. It is loyalty. It is love.

Pet Life in The Jungle

“Hello, hello! This is Whitney with Oly Camp Kitties! We have some cat food for you!”

This is how we announce ourselves at every campsite we visit in The Jungle. The responses we get vary — sometimes people wave, sometimes they shout, sometimes they just rustle their tent flap — but we almost always encounter a cat.

One resident we visit regularly has two of them. They are particular fans of Churu treats — the squeeze-tube variety that I affectionately call “kitty crack.” This resident is meticulous about ensuring each cat receives an equal number of treats in each flavor. They are genuinely concerned their cats would be upset if they received different things, that there might be conflict over it. This is a person paying close attention to the emotional lives of their animals. This is a person who loves their cats deeply and has, for many years, made a life with them in The Jungle.

When I describe scenes like this to people outside the encampment world, I am often met with surprise. “But I never see homeless people with cats,” is a common response. It is true! You don’t see them from the road or the sidewalk. But The Jungle is absolutely full of cats, hundreds of them when you count both the friendly/socialized ones and the feral ones who watch suspiciously from a distance. Residents know them — their names, their personalities, their histories, their relationships with each other. The cats of The Jungle are not strays wandering through. The cats are family.

Why People Experiencing Homelessness Have Pets

A common public reaction to learning this is: “Why do homeless people have pets if they can’t even take care of themselves?” This is a question that reveals more about the public’s assumptions than about the reality of unsheltered life.

People experiencing homelessness have pets for exactly the same reasons the rest of us do.

The science is clear. Interacting with animals boosts oxytocin and endorphins, reducing anxiety, lowering blood pressure, and improving overall mood and outlook. Caring for a pet creates routine and structure, things many of us take for granted, but which can be profoundly stabilizing for someone whose daily life is defined by uncertainty and instability.

And there is something even more fundamental at work. People experiencing homelessness are among the most invisible members of our society. Passersby avoid eye contact. People cross the street to avoid them. The daily experience of being unseen and unacknowledged is dehumanizing in ways that compound over time. A cat does not do this. A cat makes eye contact, it purrs, headbutts, demands attention, curls up in a lap. A cat says: you are here, I see you, you matter to me. For someone accustomed to being looked through, that is no small thing. It can be exactly the thing that gives a person hope.

The Hard Work Ahead

When encampments are cleared, the animals are never part of the government’s planning conversation. The burden falls on municipal animal shelters and animal rescue organizations who are suddenly absorbing animals with no warning and no resources allocated for their care. If the animals at The Jungle are not addressed systematically there will inevitably be a large number of animals left at the end. The honest and uncomfortable truth is that many of them will be euthanized. No one wants to say this out loud. But the shelter system cannot absorb a sudden, massive influx of animals. And the government actors planning this closure do not, as of now, have a plan to deal with The Jungle’s cats.

The resident with the two Churu cats has lived in The Jungle for many years. They are skeptical of the housing options available to them and resistant to how most housing projects are run. They are what service providers call “hard to house,” and they represent the population that will define the greatest challenge of The Jungle closure. This is not because they don’t deserve housing, but rather because the housing available has not yet been designed around people like them.

As the City and its partners work through what is expected to be an 18-month to two-year closure process, the cats will be there. Hundreds of them. Bonded to residents who will not easily be separated from them, and who should not have to be.

The measure of how well we close The Jungle will not only be how many people we house. It will be whether we were honest enough to plan for their extended family — the animals.

For months, I’d been hearing about mesh networks as various friends started getting into learning about them and attending educational events (often held at DECAY, which, along with so many other good things can be found on the DECAY community events calendar).

I had a long career in tech at the State, during which I studiously avoided becoming a supervisor and also, despite knowing many good humans who worked in this field, also avoided hardware or network setup. My brain is great at a lot of things. Understanding how physical things are built, configured, or operate is not one of them. Mesh falls into this category and therefore not intuitive to me. So, I kept asking people in mesh-land for a simple, easy intro document but none were offered. And as you know when you repeatedly ask for things like that, sometimes it is suggested that you create what it is that you are looking for. This is my bare bones attempt. With the research I have done so far, it is clear that I could spend many hours diving into this rabbit hole because there is so much more to learn. Here’s what I’ve got.

What is it?

Mesh is technically a type of network topology. You can buy mesh devices for your house to extend your Wi-Fi, but that isn’t the mesh THIS article is about. This article is about the build-out/implementation of a mesh long-range radio network, which doesn’t rely on cell towers or the internet to operate. This kind of network doesn’t have the bandwidth to transmit massive quantities of data (like streaming videos or even voice), but can transmit text and, when enabled, GPS coordinates. As you might imagine, this makes it very useful for emergency situations where cell towers and the internet might be down or unavailable, and also for remote area situations where those services do not exist in the first place.

Why are so many people increasingly talking about Mesh and working to expand and improve it?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but our current world situation is…fraught, fragile, pretty unnerving. It feels like we’re getting squeezed from a lot of different directions whether it’s the crazy cost of living increases, how our data (including surveillance) is being sold everywhere to everyone, or maybe a data center will pop up down the way sucking up all our power and water but we won’t know about it because our elected officials signed non-disclosure agreements. It is getting harder to trust in systems and corporations, and it feels like there’s not a lot we have control over. Plus, many of us are seeking to build true community and that can feel similar to building out a network. And, there are humans who just enjoy tinkering and trying to make stuff work. These are just some of the factors driving the current interest in mesh radio networks.

• “Mesh networking gives communities a communication lifeline that doesn’t depend on cell towers or the grid. When a disaster knocks out infrastructure, or in remote backcountry where coverage never existed, mesh devices route messages peer-to-peer, hopping from node to node to keep people connected. For emergency preparedness, that means neighborhoods can coordinate and share critical information even when the network goes dark. For search and rescue teams, it means maintaining contact across canyons, forests, and dead zones where a phone is just dead weight. it’s resilient, decentralized, and exactly the kind of tool that could prove its worth when everything else fails.” - Grace, SW Olympia Neighborhood Association (SWONA) treasurer and Council of Neighborhood Associations (CNA) Program and Events Coordinator

• “Real community safety means we don’t depend on infrastructure we don’t control. Meshcore is a radio network built by us, for us. It keeps neighbors talking to neighbors, without a carrier, without a capitalist company, without permission.” - Kenny, Oly Whistles

Some people are researching it for Continuity of Operations or Emergency Preparedness planning, others are looking for ways to take back some control from big tech or monopolistic companies, and some are people whose brains function very differently than mine and who LOVE digging into details (such as the finer details of which antenna to buy and where/how to place it to live its best life) and figuring out ways to not only set up but improve upon the hardware (and firmware) designs that have been improving this network rapidly over the past year.

More details? What is involved in this network?

There are two different approaches here — one is meshtastic which is better for shorter distances and the other is meshcore which is better for longer distances. You can use both, or decide which one meets your needs or interests better.

The hardware falls into a few categories:

1. Repeaters: These are essentially optimally located relay nodes, with antennas that allow them to catch and send the radio transmissions they pick up onto the next node and the next node and the next node until they reach their intended destination. They need a source of power, whether battery or solar.

2. Sensors: These are add-on extras that gather specific info so it can be included - for example, weather details.

3. Node, or companion devices: These are the little bluetooth devices that you pair with your phone. Each node will have it’s own ID, so if you have a few (like one for the car, and one for the house), you won’t have the same ID on each of them.

Software and Firmware

1. Phone apps allow you to pair and setup your companion device/node and send/receive messages. They also allow you to check coverage, follow particular channels (in meshcore) or rooms (in meshtastic) that may interest you.

2. There are also online apps available to get a sense of network performance (https://analyzer.cascadiamesh.org/#/home) or allow you to look around and see all the different repeaters in your area such as https://meshmapper.net/ (zoom in and you’ll get to the PNW region to see the Cascadia mesh network). Think of this as looking at a carrier map to identify where you will and won’t have cell phone coverage.

3. There is firmware installed on the devices that will occasionally need to be upgraded, just like there is firmware on the home router you probably never upgrade. Just like any other firmware/software, it is occasionally updated to fix things or provide improved functionality. You’ll get notified and can decide which upgrades you might want and when. Once you upgrade you’ll benefit from all the changes made since the last time you upgraded. (In the last year, upgrades have drastically reduced the use of power, making batteries in these devices last way longer).

4. All the coding (firmware and software) is open source — made for/by a community (not a corporation) and is free. The community determines what it will work on and how it will evolve.

Want to get involved/learn more?

I am at nearly the end of what I feel confident enough to share, as I am just now exploring my new meshcore app and newly purchased companion device. But check the DECAY calendar and you’ll see that there’s a decentralized tech meeting on the first Wednesday evening of each month (mesh is a subtopic, but you can also learn about getting off of Google, better digital security, and other topics). There is also a dedicated mesh workshop on the second Sunday afternoon of each month. That’s where I learned most of what I’ve shared here, and where I purchased a companion device.

Also, they regularly schedule additional workshops that assemble devices or go into more detail about particular topics (which antenna should I buy, are there easy ways to upgrade firmware without crawling onto my roof, etc). Again, all of this is driven by community. The people at DECAY are so knowledgeable and so welcoming. I fully anticipate I will be going back to learn more. Maybe I will meet some of you there too!

A first-of-its-kind lawsuit by growth management watchdog Futurewise against Thurston County is set to become one of the initial tests of Washington’s pioneering climate planning law.

The 2023 law builds on decades of planning research showing that development patterns influence how far people drive and how much money local governments spend extending water, sewer, and other infrastructure. The climate planning law requires many local governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled through land-use planning.

Under Washington’s pre-existing Growth Management Act, most future urban growth must occur within designated Urban Growth Areas, or UGAs. UGAs include existing cities as well as adjacent unincorporated land intended to accommodate future urban growth. One of the main aims of a UGA, according to the Thurston GeoData Center, “is to provide a limit for the extension of urban utilities, especially sewer service.”

Where urban utilities are extended strongly influences where growth occurs. Research has found that extending water infrastructure leads to residential growth. Where growth occurs, in turn, influences vehicle miles traveled. That connection is one of the main causes for the climate planning law’s emphasis on reducing transportation related greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled.

When the Thurston County Board of County Commissioners declared a Climate Emergency in 2021, the Board acknowledged that mitigating climate change would require immediate action and a long-term commitment. Five years later, Futurewise’s appeal alleges that the County has failed to adopt measurable actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled.

The appeal comes as county officials continue debating how unincorporated land within UGAs should develop. At the Thurston County Planning Commission’s June 17 meeting, the discussion turned to leapfrog development, a pattern of growth in which developers bypass vacant land closer to existing urban areas in favor of less expensive land farther away.. Economist Carol Heim describes leapfrogging as “one form of urban sprawl” driven in part by developers seeking lower land costs in outlying areas.

Thurston County Community Planning Manager Derek Day stated that leapfrog development can sometimes be used strategically to extend sewer and other urban services to “places that are unserved” in the more rural areas of UGAs. “That can be a strategy,” he said. “In an area where you don’t have the services, large enough development might be enough to trigger the services to go all the way out.”

But extending sewer in this way can have significant consequences for existing homeowners. Connection costs can be substantial, often placing sewer service beyond the reach of lower-income homeowners. The City of Olympia Septic to Sewer website indicates a cost between $8,000 and $103,500 for a single homeowner. In some situations where connection is required, those costs can mean the difference between remaining in one’s home and having to move.

The consequences may extend beyond individual homeowners. Manufactured home parks are an important source of affordable housing, particularly for many seniors living on fixed incomes. Extending urban infrastructure can increase land values and redevelopment pressure, creating economic incentives to replace those communities with higher-priced housing. For residents who own their homes but rent the land beneath them, redevelopment can mean displacement and loss of housing.

Leapfrog development also generally costs local governments more because roads, sewer, water, and other infrastructure must be extended farther outward. Building on vacant or underused land within existing urban areas — or redeveloping existing neighborhoods — uses infrastructure that is already in place. This is known as infill. It involves replacing older single-family homes with higher-density housing such as duplexes, townhomes, or apartments. Compared with leapfrog development, infill generally requires fewer infrastructure extensions and generates fewer vehicle miles traveled.

The Growth Management Act encourages local governments to ensure development occurs “in a contiguous and orderly manner.” Leapfrog development, by definition, is neither contiguous nor orderly. As Thurston County seeks to comply with Washington’s new climate planning law, that distinction may become increasingly important for jurisdictions that view leapfrog development as a strategy for extending urban infrastructure.

If you follow the news at all, you’ve definitely encountered their extra easy-to-understand theory of war, a theory that presents armed conflict like a soccer match. The pervasiveness of this theory has created a situation where the dominant narrative about American-Iranian relations might be true, but it’s not the whole truth. Billing it as two sides facing off against each other increases the number of spectators watching from home, but it doesn’t help us see where, how, or why various forces are behaving the way they are.

The intrigue of a potentially declining world leader going head to head against a re-emerging regional powerhouse is useful propaganda, and that sells. So, pretty much all the media outlets around the world pose the same rhetorical questions. In any number of different languages, they repeatedly ask if this is the end of US hegemony and whether or not Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. They want to know definitively if Trump made a mistake in starting the war and where the negotiations are headed. And of course, they have to ask: does the most recent attack fall outside of the current ceasefire agreement?

In political analysis, it isn’t useful to consider nation-states as bastions of solidarity. The premise that both sides are solid masses without internal contradictions is way too convenient. It shouldn’t be taken for granted that the state forces are the most capable of rallying everyone else behind their cause. This means the harmonious coordination of military, capital, and state forces should never be assumed since their relationship is always in flux.

For example, there are politics involved in the exercise of military power. Any theory that conflates state apparatuses with military might incorrectly expects the chain of command (or some other structural assurance) to prevent the need for analyzing the relations between different sectors.

However, since power is a social force, social dynamics can’t be subtracted from the equation. That explains why all the capitalists of the world don’t just come together and form a single block of power to control all the others. We shouldn’t expect them to team up and defend one side because they play for both teams and change sides when there’s more money to be made.

Some capitalists are against the war in Iran because high oil prices generally increase the cost of doing business. But others, like weapons manufacturers and the makers of electric vehicles, are fine with the current situation because it increases the overall demand for their products as well as their customer base.

Still, generally speaking, war between nation-states is good for the capitalist system because it distracts from the class struggle, domestically and internationally, and leads us to underestimate the role that people play in the formation, maintenance, and reproduction of power.

Capitalists will position themselves to profit regardless of which side wins, but military leaders, have a different task. The allegiances of the US Armed Forces and the IRGC are obviously to their own respective states, but just like how the capitalist forces must accurately consider the material reality of doing business, the military forces must consider strategic planning and logistics using their own theories and methodologies.

This is why the popular forces should be seen as something distinct from the military, state, and capitalist forces. They’re different because they’re unmediated. Even within the current paradigm, the popular forces have a unique kind of flexibility since they’re not bound by military strategy, profit margins, or statecraft. They don’t have to use the dominant modes of power to organize communities, workplaces, and industries.

The international working class has the potential to reproduce it’s own power, through its own labor. But popular forces can only be strengthened from within the popular sector. They aren’t helped by the oil industry’s critiques of the war or the military industry’s embrace of it. The same is true for the actions of the US or Iranian militaries and the executive orders of government leaders.

Most theories of geopolitics are only concerned with the interactions between the (mostly synonymous) state and military forces. This usually gets boiled down to a narrative with a “home team” taking on an “away team,” just like in sports. But while there are undeniably state and military forces at play, there are also capitalist ones as well. And most significantly, there are popular forces that encounter the others in the form of repression and exclusion, exploitation and poverty, occupation and violence.

Superficial theory limits our actions. With a theory that considers states the only relevant forces, the international working class won’t notice the other potential forces at play, including its own. When the only methods we see are geopolitical, we’re left with nothing to do but watch the news and wait for peace to be brokered by the same political class that started the war in the first place.

While this article can’t be a substitute for specific strategic proposals, this theoretical framework can help us recognize opportunities for people to have an influence on international conflicts. A salient, working class theory of global power relations is a necessary foundation for revolutionary politics. The popular forces of the world don’t need states to declare war and peace on their behalf; what they need is a sense of their own agency and collective will. This means staying focused on the class struggle and leaving the overly simplistic theoretical tools to the football commentators.

by Isaac Wagnitz

Staff at North Thurston Public Schools (NTPS) are looking at layoffs after the school board decided on a reduction in force (RIF), as part of their plan to address a significant budget shortfall in the district.

According to The Olympian, the district is currently facing a $10 million shortfall. The layoffs were first proposed at a school board meeting on April 28th, but were tabled due to substantial opposition from organized labor and present community members. At a subsequent meeting on May 7th, the board decided to follow through with the RIF. Initially the board had been at an impasse, but board member Michelle Gipson ultimately cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the layoffs. Members Sarah Tracy and Gretchen Maliska also supported the RIF, while Esperanza Badillo-Diiorio and Jeff Line cast their votes in opposition.

Works In Progress spoke with two NTPS staff about the current situation: Jeff Berland, a special education teacher in the district, and another employee who declined to be named due to concerns about retaliation who will be referred to hereafter as E for Educator. Berland and E discussed the background and impacts of the RIF, as well as steps moving forward.

Read Article

Fragments of a Working-Class Queer History

by Coco N. Spirator

Historically, the fights for queer liberation and for working-class power are seen as completely separate struggles, with completely independent demands. Yet, most queers in the United States are, and always have been, working class. Additionally, queer people also make up the most economically marginalized members of the working class. In reality, the history of queer struggle is often about tangible day-to-day concerns: work, living, housing, policing and access to healthcare. In other words, working-class issues. This oversight is particularly dangerous right now, as attacks on trans existence have become a central pillar of the right-wing movement.

What follows is a small collection of scenes from the history of queer struggle that demonstrate how the material realities of class and race informed those struggles. Although these movements rarely utilized many working class slogans, it was these day-to-day realities that brought people together into larger fights for queer liberation, and affected the kinds of movements they built. Unfortunately, these concerns were just as often also the basis of class divisions that would tear those movements apart again and again. There are important lessons to be learned here.

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Noticings: A Column About Public Space and Design — The City’s Back Door

by V Lane Hoy

During a seminar on the subject of public art in the late 1990s, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche outlined how a renovation of Jackson Square Park in New York City’s West Village introduced a new gate around the park’s perimeter. The New York City Parks Department entrusted a community group with keys to close the gate at night and prevent houseless people from taking refuge there. This was but one of the ways the underfunded parks department offloaded maintenance tasks they weren’t able to accomplish in-house due to ongoing budget cuts initiated in the late 1960s. Deutsche uncovers one of the assumptions embedded within that decision: ”People without homes are not residents of the neighborhood and are therefore not part of the public. Rather, homeless people are intruders in public space.”

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Prison Reformism: The Molding of Docile Prisoners

by Tomas Afeworki

In the not so distant past, many recognized the inhumane, militaristic oppression that was embedded into the fabric of the prison slavery system.

This recognition produced political awareness about the social, economic and cultural impacts of poverty. That awareness influenced many of us to radically defy this unjust status quo.

Read Article

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Staff at North Thurston Public Schools (NTPS) are looking at layoffs after the school board decided on a reduction in force (RIF), as part of their plan to address a significant budget shortfall in the district.

According to The Olympian, the district is currently facing a $10 million shortfall. The layoffs were first proposed at a school board meeting on April 28th, but were tabled due to substantial opposition from organized labor and present community members. At a subsequent meeting on May 7th, the board decided to follow through with the RIF. Initially the board had been at an impasse, but board member Michelle Gipson ultimately cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the layoffs. Members Sarah Tracy and Gretchen Maliska also supported the RIF, while Esperanza Badillo-Diiorio and Jeff Line cast their votes in opposition.

Works In Progress spoke with two NTPS staff about the current situation: Jeff Berland, a special education teacher in the district, and another employee who declined to be named due to concerns about retaliation who will be referred to hereafter as E for Educator. Berland and E discussed the background and impacts of the RIF, as well as steps moving forward.

E stated that the origins of the crisis at North Thurston ultimately reflect larger historical trends. They mentioned that school districts in general are often not very transparent about finances, and that the public only scrutinizes them during shortfalls or levy requests. However, the main issue lies in how public schools in Washington are funded. E pointed out that in spite of the contention that sometimes surrounds local school levy elections, Washington schools are primarily supported by the state government, supplemented with some federal funding. According to this primer from USAFacts, North Thurston recieves less than 30% of its overall funding from local levies. This creates a situation where, even when local levies pass, shortfalls in state and federal budgets can still allow public schools to not meet their operating costs. With an ongoing state budget crisis, and a federal administration that is openly hostile to public education, NTPS was vulnerable despite having won a levy in the last local election. Works In Progress also reported on a similar situation which arose recently with Shelton Public Schools.

North Thurston Superintendent Troy Oliver was quick to place blame on the state Legislature, as well as falling enrollments (down 178 this year, and projected to fall another 117 next). Berland expressed basic agreement, emphasizing that the state has continually failed to meet the paramount duty in its own constitution to fully fund public education. At the same time, he added that the Legislature can only do so much as long as its hands are tied by Washington’s highly regressive revenue system, which is overly dependent on sales and property taxes. “The Millionaires Tax is a step in the right direction, but we’re not seeing that money yet,” Berland said. E attributed some of the drop in enrollment to administrators who are too eager to divert students with academic or attendance issues into GED programs outside their usual school. “This removes ‘problems’ from the building, but also they don’t have to count them as dropouts,” E said.

They went on to say that the district may also be neglecting to take advantage of some revenue sources that are actually available. They stated that some special-education activities are reimbursable under Medicaid, but that the district is not seeking those reimbursements. E cited documents on the current and forecasted NTPS budgets, which for unclear reasons show $0.00 under certain revenue sources. “Does that mean we were getting money from those sources, but now we aren’t? And if not, why is that?” they asked. E also pointed out that the district employs a full-time grant-writer, yet is nonetheless facing a serious budget shortfall.

The impacts of that shortfall will be felt immediately by students, their family and community, and currently employed staff. The most visible and reported impact will be the loss of 8 of the district’s 11 mental health social workers. E said these staff members assist students by doing crisis-intervention work. They connect students and their families with other support resources in the community. E said that the social workers had also done a great deal of work helping families whose children were afraid to come to school because of federal immigration enforcement activity. The loss of these staff and the stability that they provide will have severely negative effects on the students they serve, in some cases immediately. Berland added: “I’ve seen students who are already starting to check out because they know that support isn’t going to be there for them next year. Their learning is already suffering.”

The district is also using “attrition” to try to close the budget gap, that is, not hiring replacements for retired staff. Altogether, 21 provisional educators (those not yet on a permanent employment basis with the district) are not having their contracts renewed. Two physical therapists who serve students in the district are also being laid off. Additionally, a supervisor position was eliminated which provided direct support to custodial staff throughout the district. A custodial employee who was reached for comment said that position was crucial for their logistics, by managing supply orders and coordinating substitute coverage. “He [the supervisor who was cut] was also the only person actually working the same hours as us, so we could call someone if there was an emergency past 3pm when the rest of the district goes home. Basically we will be without dedicated support in the evenings from August on.”

While the district has not yet announced the intention to make any further cuts, E said staff are still nervous about the possibility of more to come. They pointed out that even laid-off staff still cost the district, since NTPS will have to contribute to their unemployment benefits until they find new work, so the RIF may do less to close the budget gap than advertised. When asked what supporters of students and educators could do to help, Berland and E said that regrettably there is not much the public can do at the moment now that the cuts have gone through, and emphasized the need for long-term changes to ensure that crises like this do not arise in the future.

E talked about the need for members of the public to educate themselves about how school districts operate and fund themselves. They emphasized the need for deeper, more consistent collaboration and communication between communities and school districts as the norm, not just at times of crisis. They also stated that communities must demand greater transparency from district leadership, and push for more opportunities for the public to voice their concerns directly to boards and administrators. They went on to say that, as long as schools are dependent on levies,[1] “yes” campaigns need to do a better job of making clear what communities gain from fully-funded schools.

Berland focused on the need for constant public pressure on the Legislature to reform the state’s revenue system, so that Washington can truly fulfill its paramount duty to fund education in the long term. He also spoke of the need for a wider shift in public perception, away from schools as just being a government expenditure, and toward them being a resource worth investing in for our collective future. He said that if people need to consider economic figures to get onboard with this, “even the most conservative studies find that every dollar invested in early learning brings at least four dollars in returns down the road; some go as high as 16.”

Berland also suggested that school districts need to stop spending so much money on expensive technologies that do not improve the quality of instruction. “Every student has a Chromebook now, which costs a lot of money, but their learning outcomes aren’t any better. We’re just giving them another screen to be addicted to.” A recent Jacobin article describes how, in a generation raised on screens at home and at school, even students at prestigious universities lack basic reading comprehension. Finally, Berland emphasized the need for school administrators who will seek out and listen to input from educators and students, and be fierce advocates on their behalf. “We need to see more of that ‘servant leadership’ people talk about.”

The crisis at NTPS calls attention on the one hand to the need for better collaboration between school leadership, the communities they serve, and the staff who carry out the work; and on the other hand, to the need to drastically reform education funding, and Washington’s revenue system as a whole. Neither goal will be possible without strong, coordinated efforts by a well-organized coalition of students and their families, educators and their labor allies, and all those invested in the future of their communities. Until Washington can implement a more equitable and sustainable model for funding public education, situations like the one in North Thurston are likely to become more common.

During a seminar on the subject of public art in the late 1990s, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche outlined how a renovation of Jackson Square Park in New York City’s West Village introduced a new gate around the park’s perimeter. The New York City Parks Department entrusted a community group with keys to close the gate at night and prevent houseless people from taking refuge there. This was but one of the ways the underfunded parks department offloaded maintenance tasks they weren’t able to accomplish in-house due to ongoing budget cuts initiated in the late 1960s. Deutsche uncovers one of the assumptions embedded within that decision: ”People without homes are not residents of the neighborhood and are therefore not part of the public. Rather, homeless people are intruders in public space.”

These assumptions, Deutsche notes, are never consensus-based and are instead established through specious discursive processes that take their own logic and values for granted by framing them as neutral, self-evident, or simple common sense. And in this case, they also cast a distinction around who (and, by extension, what behavior) is legitimate inside society and what lies outside that figurative, and sometimes also quite literal, boundary.

Humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has theorized about the spatial articulations of figurative framings of cities: insides, outsides, fronts, backs, lefts, and rights. Tuan writes:

Many buildings have clearly demarcated front and back regions. People may work in the same building and yet experience different worlds because their unequal status propels them into different circulatory routes and work areas. Maintenance men and janitors enter through service doors at the back and move along the “guts” of the building, while executives and their secretaries enter by the front door and move through the spacious lobby and well-lit passageways to their brightly furnished offices. A middle-class residence typically presents an attractive front to impress and welcome social adults, and an unprepossessing rear for the use of people of low status such as delivery men and children.

I am reminded of a classmate from graduate school who worked by night as a DJ. They similarly conceptually mapped the front stage / front door and the back stage / back door onto waking life and night life and, by symbolic extension, the productive city and the illicit city. We find another version of this binary in the lyrics of blues musicians who sing about the “back door man,” the stealthy guy using the back door to get in and out of the house of the woman with whom he’s having an affair. In Howlin’ Wolf’s rendition, he sings, “When everybody’s sound asleep / I’m somewhere making my midnight creep.” Here, too, the back door suggests stigma in the form of someone up to no good, and also, curiously, gives the sense that those who use the back door might be having a little more fun than the front-door types. Or, if not fun, that they may desire something different than just a simple longing to be the type who uses the front door. To put it in slightly more neutral terms, something else can be created amidst the banal fact of exclusion.

In Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African American Slang, interdisciplinary artist Clarence Major writes about the connection between the denial of front-door access African Americans experienced during and after slavery when working in the homes of wealthy white people. Slang expressions like the “back door man” began to act as “a secret tongue,” a language that maintained “its own center of gravity, integrity, and shape.”

In an interview in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Fred Moten spoke about this something else that can emerge within the experience of oppression. He identifies one of the pedagogical practices used in the Mississippi Freedom Schools that were developed during the Freedom Summer of 1964 in response to racist voter suppression laws. A prompt invited students to take inventory of not just what they wanted to see transformed in their communities, but also what they cherished and wanted preserved. Moten describes what made this approach stand out: “There’s a way of thinking about what was going on in Mississippi in 1964 that would be predicated on the notion that the last question you would ever consider to be relevant for people in that situation, for black folks in Mississippi in 1964, is what do they have that they want to keep?”

The philosophy behind that question embedded in the curriculum, Moten goes on to say, “presupposes…(a) that they’ve got something that they want to keep, and (b) that not only do those people who were fucking them over not have everything, but that part of what we want to do is to organize ourselves around the principle that we don’t want everything they have.”

I observed a related pattern while working overnights at The People’s House, a low-barrier homeless shelter that at the time was hosted in the basement of the First Christian Church in downtown Olympia. While we were grateful for the church’s and the surrounding neighborhood’s willingness to host the shelter—which was no small feat after an arduous process of permit rejections and community meetings where residents often took anti-homeless stances—the church basement proved a less-than-ideal setting. The physical environment, with its long hallways, labyrinthian dormitories, and low ceilings, was difficult to traverse for many of the elderly and disabled residents, who rightfully made their frustrations known.

Yet after residents finally secured housing, some would keep coming back to hang out at the shelter, even though, during their tenure living there, they were desperate to get out and into their own place.

One former resident continued to come by regularly, often helping the overnight staff mop the floors in the morning after the residents had left for the day (the permit for the shelter was granted with the condition that it had to close during “business hours”). On one of those mornings, I asked him how it felt to have his new apartment, my tone cheery, expecting a moment of celebration. But, in his endearing Boomhauer-like mumble, he said, “Yeah, it’s alright… kind of lonely though. Everybody’s just in their apartments all day.”

For all the dysfunction within that run-down environment, something in the culture that grew out of the motley crew of residents and staff met a real social need that became evident only after residents transitioned into permanent housing and would return to visit, notably restless with boredom and isolation.

So there is this tension between the real suffering that occurs when some are rendered to the outskirts, the alleyways, the proverbial and actual back doors of buildings and cities, and also the possibility that there might be something meaningful that subjugation reveals, something that those using the front door can’t always see and maybe wouldn’t understand anyway.

• Dembart, Lee. 1975. “Parks Agency Plight Epitomizes the City’s.” New York Times, October 23. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/23/archives/parks-agency-plight-epitomizes-the-citys.html.

• Deutche, Rosalyn. 2021. “The Question of ‘Public Space’.” In Public Space Reader, edited by Miodrag Mitrašinović and Vikas Mehta. Routledge.

• Devi, Debra. 2012. “The Language of the Blues: Back Door Man.” American Blues Scene. https://www.americanbluesscene.com/2012/07/the-language-blues-back-door-man.

• Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Autonomedia.

• Major, Clarence, ed. 1994. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. Puffin.

• Tuan, Yi Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press.

Originally published in Freedom Socialist newspaper, Vol. 47, No. 3, June-July 2026 socialism.com

In February, Burger King began spying on worker “friendliness” using an AI headset called “Patty” in an attempt to make the technology seem more human (and less threatening) by giving it a name. The device listens in on the employees’ conversation and creates a friendliness score. Phrases Patty looks for include “please” and “thank you,” which management sees as a way to “promote hospitality” among workers.

Burger King president Tom Curtis isn’t the only one supersizing the dystopian landscape of worker surveillance. Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Meta would be adding new tracking software on US-based employees’ computers, recording actions like keystrokes and mouse activity. This form of oversight will have a widespread impact on workers across industries.

While Patty will coerce a friendly facade from overworked employees, Meta’s tracking data will train AI models to locate and terminate “inefficient” employees. CNBC reported in late April that over 92,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 so far.

Tracking surveillance first started gaining popularity in 2020 and 2021 as Covid-19 forced many people to work from home. Out of the office, bosses needed new tricks to monitor workers and Amazon implemented technology to detect when employee’s home computers went idle. Innovative in appearance, these tactics are the modern equivalent of managers spying on workers from office windows high above the shop floor.

Labor’s response to these forms of monitoring have varied. The pandemic led some unions to implement provisions in their contracts that require employers to notify workers about the use of automated management and surveillance tools. Some workers have won access to their employer’s collected data.

Invasive scrutiny and Big Brother tactics will only dehumanize workers, not increase production. And considering the amount of wage theft and massive bonuses management profits from every day, it is time the cameras are turned back on them. Instead of waiting for the next “innovation” to strip away their rights, workers can “have it their way” by organizing together and fighting back.

In the not so distant past, many recognized the inhumane, militaristic oppression that was embedded into the fabric of the prison slavery system.

This recognition produced political awareness about the social, economic and cultural impacts of poverty. That awareness influenced many of us to radically defy this unjust status quo.

In this movement’s heyday, heroes like George Jackson exposed the new slave labor system in pursuit of revolutionary changes. A unified front of Black, White, Red, Yellow and Brown organic intellectuals fostered ideas for true change.

The uprising in Attica demonstrated the power and potential of the movement. That fact was not lost upon FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Democratic congressman Richard H. Ichord. So they created the House Internal Security Committee (HISC). Through this committee, they implemented secret programs that targeted the intellectuals, co-opted plans, and created splits to neutralize and isolate the prison revolutionary movement. This was also referred to as the Prison Activist Surveillance Program.

The idea was simple: to create reformist counterinsurgency. Using the word “reform” as camouflage, prisons created an internal manual. From this emerged the “Prison Level System” and creation of minimum, medium, and maximum facilities. It was a major win for prison corporations and their desire to expand. More physical structures had to be built. This unsurprisingly coincided with a 500 percent increase in the prison population that took place between 1970 up until the 2000’s. This phenomena is often referred to as mass incarceration.

The genius of this counterinsurgency campaign was that it had hardcore revolutionaries unwittingly advocating for a reformist agenda that split the movement. The prisoners movement has not yet recovered. Rebuilding the movement is difficult because these reforms successfully quelled revolutionary impulses in favor of developing a prison population that is at present largely docile, untrained, and uneducated.

They can buy products after begging their family for money. They are fed. They are given modern comforts like TV, candy, food packages, property packages, and access to prescription drugs.

Everyday I see Brothas standing in line for pills awaiting drugs to help them conceal their problems. They turn into zombies.

The cancerous food served in the cafeteria fattens the pockets of corporations while taxpayers foot the the bill. There is no dish washer so food trays are dipped in chemicals that cause internal health problems.

It is now hard to see the silent killer as it is not readily identifiable. Until of course, you fight to get out of prison then you see how unaccommodating the prison becomes, and how treacherous the the courts are to the constitution. One’s rights become nonexistent.

Having seen all this, it’s amazing that we have Brothas and Sistas who overcame the odds to get out of prison but are politically brainwashed by reformist ideology without even knowing the origin of such programs.

Is it shocking that virtually every prison program that has been created financially benefits prison corporations. To further enslave more of the population a bill has to be signed to allocate more funding, under the guise of “educational help programs” or “diversity programs.”

We are faced with a startling problem as our societal defects go unaddressed and the effects of oppressive capitalism go unchecked.

I do see a solution. The effects of J Edgar Hoover and democratic congressman Richard H. Ichord’s mirage of reform also left a weak spot, an Achilles heel, if you will.

We are in prime position, mingling with judges, lawyers, and politicians, who depend on us. LEGAL CLINICS that provide legal assistance can easily be formed, likeminded souls can be galvanized, we can strategize to get more people out of prison. The opportunities are there and it can be profitable (that discussion is for another article). Rebuilding the revolutionary prisoners movement and the formation of legal clinics in solidarity will crumble the new slavery system once and for all.

But this requires decolonization of the mind. We have to address the fact that we have been conditioned - brainwashed even - by our oppressor into believing that the only way we can rise is by oppressing each other. This cycle has kept us financially broke and generationally enslaved.

We should be quick to remember the best way to subdue an enemy is without lifting a finger. We can have political power. It is up to us to muster the inner will to use it for JUSTICE.

Tomas S. Afeworki is a Pan-Afriqan illustrator and human rights activist focused on the social and political protection of the diaspora. Through grassroots 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