Author Archives: Gabrielle Lafayette

The Julian Assange Victory Is A Triumph Worth Celebrating

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After nearly fourteen years in exile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was finally reunited with his family last week. Assange survived a decade-and-a-half of incarceration, from his 2010 London arrest to seven years of “asylum” in the Equadorian embassy and then 1,901 days of solitary confinement that involved psychological torture (Assange endured a kind of “chemical lobotomy” when he was psychologically tortured with a psychotropic drug known as 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, aka “BZ”).

What the American and British governments have done to the world’s most important journalist can be described as nothing short of monstrous and really shows how effective his organization was. WikiLeaks exposed more government corruption and corporate crimes than all other news agencies combined, delivering countless successive master strokes that cumulatively crippled the deep state.

WikiLeaks proved to the world that CIA created ISIS. WikiLeaks published the secret bibles of Scientology. WikiLeaks chronicled America’s illegal 2003 invasion in the Iraq War logs, confirmed the existence of the shadowy Bilderberg Group meetings, and made us aware of the monstrous “trade agreements” known as TPP, TISA and TTIP – elaborate corporate wish-lists aimed toward achieving total fascistic rule. Wikileaks also thoroughly documented Israel’s crimes against humanity.

The Afghan War Diaries outlined how, “U.S. Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the number of people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves.” The Stratfor emails revealed how activists were targeted by a private intelligence agency working on behalf of corporate America. The Guantanamo Bay Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures confirmed the incarceration of the innocent.

In 2017 WikiLeaks posted a trove of CIA documents called “Vault 7,” revealing capabilities such as the ability to remotely commandeer phones, browsers, TVs and even automobiles, and then Vault 8 which revealed the source code behind CIA malware programs.

And let’s not forget that WikiLeaks was instrumental in scuttling Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong ahead of extradition efforts.

But the primary reason for Assange’s persecution was always the dissemination of the notorious Collateral Murder video and subsequent egg on the Pentagon’s face after the world watched in horror as the crew of an AH-64 Apache gunship audibly delight in mowing down a crowd of unarmed civilians (including two Reuters reporters) with recurrent volleys of 30mm rounds.

John Pilger puts it thusly:

“No investigative journalism in my lifetime can equal the importance of what WikiLeaks has done in calling rapacious power to account.”

Comedian and journalist Lee Camp elaborates:

“WikiLeaks posted videos of Tibetan dissidents in China fighting back, videos which were not allowed to be viewed in China. They revealed the Peru oil scandal, and that Russia was spying on its citizens’ cell phones, and the Minton Report on toxic dumping in Africa, and the Syria Files—showing the inner workings of the Syrian government. And WikiLeaks displayed to the global audience a secret Australian supreme court gag order that stopped the Australian press from reporting on a huge bribery scandal that involved the central bank and international leaders.”

None of the criminals implicated by the evidence supplied by Julian Assange were ever indicted or arrested for their crimes, but Assange was punished severely for revealing them. Assange embarrassed many of the world’s most powerful sociopaths who have since done everything in their power to destroy him. Nils Melzer, the United Nations’ special reporter on torture, determined that Assange has undergone “prolonged psychological torture” at the hands of British authorities:

“I was able to visit Mr. Assange in Belmarsh Prison,” Melzer said in the interview. “I was accompanied by two medical experts—a forensic expert and a psychiatrist. Both of them were specialized in identifying, examining and documenting psychological and physical torture. What we found was Mr. Assange showed all the symptoms that are typical for a person who has been exposed to prolonged psychological torture. What we’re talking about is severe traumatization. Chronic anxiety. Intense, constant stress, and an inability to relax or focus, to think in a structured, straight line. Someone who is in a constant, hyper-stimulated stage and can no longer relax.”

Washington has bent itself over backwards trying to destroy Julian Assange, but there’s arguably nobody who wanted his head more than Hillary Clinton, who is on record asking,

“Can’t we just drone this guy?”

The DNC emails provided proof that the Democratic primaries are rigged, that the corporate news media were colluding with Hillary, that Obama’s entire cabinet was chosen for him by Citibank, that Trump was chosen by Clinton as the Republican nominee, and that millions of Saudi dollars had found their way into the Clinton Foundation. As Chris Hedges put it:

“We learned from the emails published by WikiLeaks that the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton paid her donors back by approving $80 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, enabling the kingdom to carry out a devastating war in Yemen that has triggered a humanitarian crisis, including widespread food shortages and a cholera epidemic, and left close to 60,000 dead. We learned Clinton was paid $675,000 for speaking at Goldman Sachs, a sum so massive it can only be described as a bribe. … We learned the Clinton campaign worked to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee. We learned Clinton obtained advance information on primary-debate questions. We learned, because 1,700 of the 33,000 emails came from Hillary Clinton, she was the primary architect of the war in Libya. We learned she believed that the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.”

Writing for Mint Press, Alan MacLeod adds:

“The Hillary Clinton campaign alleges the emails were hacked from Podesta’s computer. The published communications, the authenticity of which is not in doubt, informed the country of the machinations of the Democratic Party, how it tipped the electoral scales in favor of Clinton and against Bernie Sanders in the primary, how Clinton stated to Wall Street that she had a “public” and a “private” position on regulation, insinuating she was lying to the nation, how representatives of Qatar wanted to meet with her husband Bill for “five minutes” to present him with a $1 million check for his birthday, and how her own staff held her in contempt.”

Many leading figures of the Anglo-American Empire have publicly endorsed the assassination of Julian Assange. The Snowden leaks revealed that Assange was on America’s “manhunt target list.” Pompeo, Trump’s CIA chief, referred to WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” And while they certainly didn’t do anything as high profile as droning him, assassinations were nevertheless attempted, albeit with more conventional methods. According to WikiLeaks’ lawyer Edward Fitzgerald, American spies plotted to kidnap Julian Assange, poison him, and make it look like an accident, in cooperation with Ecuador’s security outfit UC Global.

When news of this assassination plot started making its way through the courts, a plea deal was suddenly negotiated and Assange was instantly freed.

On Monday, 24 June 2024, Julian Assange was released from Britain’s Belmarsh Prison under the arrangement that he would be flown to a US court and plead guilty to a single count of Espionage Act violation. Assange was then flown to Saipan of the Pacific’s Northern Mariana Islands for his court appearance.

On Wednesday, 26 June 2024, Assange pled guilty to violations of the American Espionage Act, even though he’s not an American citizen, admitting to possessing and accessing materials related to America’s national defense.

From Anti War:

During the court proceedings, Assange said he was guilty of violating the Espionage Act. “Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide classified information to publish it. I believe the First Amendment protected that,” he told the court. “I accept it’s a violation of an espionage statute.”

He added, “The First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction.”

The fact that Assange is the first-ever journalist to be prosecuted successfully under the Espionage Act has flustered free speech advocates as a precedent-setting decision in Law. However, as we’ll discuss more thoroughly in a moment, this plea doesn’t necessarily set legal precedent as much as it protects the US Government from future legal actions in the form of compensation for wrongful imprisonment, cruel and unusual punishment, etc.

WikiLeaks was so effective in its ability to expose the powerful that it quickly became a priority for the intelligence community to intervene. Since WikiLeaks publications couldn’t be disproved and Assange never committed any criminal acts, the Deep-State-“Blob“-brain-trust decided that the best way to undermine the organization was to destroy Assange’s image and discourage people visiting WikiLeaks, even if it meant portraying WikiLeaks as “in cahoots with the Taliban” and Osama Bin Laden.

Legendary journalist John Pilger outlined the DoD’s coordinated attack on Assange’s reputation, which included the Hollywood movie that deliberately insulted Assange’s character as “callous” and “damaged”:

“In 2008, a plan to destroy both WikiLeaks and Assange was laid out in a top secret document dated 8 March, 2008. The authors were the Cyber Counter-intelligence Assessments Branch of the US Defense Department. They described in detail how important it was to destroy the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ ‘centre of gravity’.”

The intelligence community also manufactured and repeated the highly dubious accusation that the actions of Assange and WikiLeaks have somehow endangered American service personnel. According to Aaron Kesel :

“U.S. lawyers have falsely claimed that Assange’s publishing of the Iraq and Afghanistan war diaries endangered lives, a claim that is debunked by the Pentagon’s own admission that there is no evidence that any of WikiLeaks’ actions have caused even a single death, as Glenn Greenwald previously reported for Salon during the court trial of whistleblower Chelsea Manning.”

Assange didn’t endanger Americans, but he did expose Hillary Clinton. In retaliation, the Democratic Party sued Russia, Trump and WikiLeaks for “conspiring to hurt Hillary in 2016”. In another unprecedented move, the DNC served WikiLeaks with the lawsuit via twitter following what they claimed was a failed attempt to serve the papers by Email.

American intelligence services went on to claim that the Hillary and DNC Emails released by WikiLeaks were “stolen by Russian hackers.” As purported evidence of this claim, Guccifer 2.0 publicly postured as WikiLeaks’ source, first boasting that it hacked the DNC but then later admitting the documents originated from DNC staffer Seth Rich (whose murder led WikiLeaks to offer a $20,000 reward for finding the culprit). Then there was the “explosive” Guardian report about Secret Manafort-Assange Meetings that turned out to be nothing more than evidence-free propaganda puff.

As MintPress’ Mnar Muhawesh wrote in 2019:

The allegations that Assange conspired with Putin to undermine the 2016 election and American democracy as a whole fell completely flat earlier this month when a U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed this case as “factually implausible,” with the judge noting that at no point does the prosecution’s “threadbare” argument show “any facts” at all, and concluding that the idea that Assange conspired with Russia against the Democratic Party or America is “entirely divorced from the facts.”

The “Blob” eventually abandoned their flimsy attempts to link Assange to Russia altogether. Shifting gears, it was decided that a good old sex scandal might finally do the trick, and Assange’s visit to Sweden would provide the setting for their next great plan. Researchers Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers outlined just a few of the eyebrow-raising circumstances of the Swedish sex fiasco:

“Sweden’s charges against Assange were initially dropped by the chief prosecutor, two weeks later they found a prosecutor to pursue a rape investigation. One of the women had CIA connections and bragged about her relationship with Assange in tweets she tried to erase. She even published a 7-step program for legal revenge against lovers. The actions of the women do not seem to show rape or any kind of abuse. One woman held a party with him after the encounter and another went out to eat with him. In November 2016, Assange was interviewed by Swedish prosecutors for four hours at the Ecuadorian embassy. In December 2016, Assange published tweets showing his innocence and the sex was consensual. Without making a statement on Assange’s guilt, the Swedish investigators dropped the charges in May 2017.”

Nils Melzer explained a critical detail that’s been overlooked by most western media outlets:

“What is called a rape allegation [in the Swedish case] is not what would be called a rape in English or Swedish or any other language in the world,” Melzer said. “I know what I’m talking about because I speak Swedish. What the rape allegation refers to is an offense that doesn’t involve any violence. He has been alleged of intentionally ripping a condom during consensual intercourse with a woman. She said it was intentional. He said it was an accident. Predictably, this is something no one will ever be able to prove. The piece of evidence submitted to the prosecution, the condom, was examined and did not have any DNA on it from him, or from the complainant, or anyone else.”

John Pilger also helped reveal that, “Neither woman claimed she had been raped. Indeed, both denied they were raped and one of them has since tweeted, ‘I have not been raped.’” Pilger went on to say that the Assange case has never been about Swedish sexual misconduct allegations, and the behavior of prominent officials in the case seemed inherently suspicious:

On 30 August [2010], Assange attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered the questions put to him. He understood that was the end of the matter. Two days later, Ny announced she was re-opening the case. …

For five weeks, Assange waited in Sweden for the renewed “rape investigation” to take its course. The Guardian was then on the brink of publishing the Iraq “War Logs”, based on WikiLeaks’ disclosures, which Assange was to oversee in London.

Finally, he was allowed to leave.As soon as he had left, Marianne Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol “red alert” normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals.

After Swedish authorities issued the international arrest warrant, Assange turned himself in to the London police. In December 2010 the British court granted bail for Julian under the understanding that his extradition to Sweden was pending. Until his court cases were resolved, he was required to remain in England.

In August of 2012 Julian Assange was granted asylum at the Equadorian Embassy in London by then Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, who was sympathetic to WikiLeaks and disliked by western industrial powers. The UK court declined to reverse Assange’s arrest warrant for violating his bail terms. It was understood that if Julian left the embassy at any time he would immediately arrested by British authorities for “skipping bail,” a situation he remained trapped within for over five years and depicted by CNN as a literal shit-smearing imposition upon the Ecuadorians.

While Assange was holed up in the embassy, a Spanish security company called UC Global conducted espionage operations targeting him on behalf of the CIA. Everything in the embassy from fire extinguishers to the women’s bathroom was bugged to monitor Assange’s every move.

Glen Greenwald outlined how Assange’s rapport with Ecuador began to deteriorate when NATO became outraged that WikiLeaks was calling attention to Spain’s brutal treatment of the Catalan independence movement. Ecuador blamed Assange for putting its relationships with other countries at risk:

“The tensions between Ecuador and Assange center on the debate in Spain over Catalan independence. On October 1, 2017, the autonomous region of Catalonia held a referendum for independence. The Spanish government declared this referendum illegal. Protests and arrests of Catalan activists ensued, as well as the seizure of ballots and raids on polling stations by the government in Madrid. …

“El País, days later, began depicting Catalan activists as a tool of the Kremlin. The paper published an article alleging that not only Assange, but also Edward Snowden, were helping Russian propaganda networks spread “fake news” about Catalonia. El País repeated these claims in subsequent stories, which were echoed in reports from other anti-separatist organizations, such as the Spanish think tank Elcano Royal Institute, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and NATO’s StratCom.”

In January 2018, Julian was granted citizenship by Ecuador. But just a few months later Lenín Moreno became the newly-elected president of Ecuador, which was bad for Assange. It would be an understatement to describe Moreno as less sympathetic to Assange’s situation and more subservient to the Anglo-American Empire. Ecuador’s former foreign minister Guillaume Long described Moreno as “a Shakespearean traitor” whom he says “betrayed Correa, he betrayed his party, he betrayed his electorate…he betrayed Ecuadorians, and he betrayed democracy, and he certainly betrayed Assange.”

Between March and October 2018 the Equadorian government cut off Assange’s access to internet and phone. Moreno’s administration immediately began preparations to hand Assange over to the British while publicly declaring that Assange was a “hacker“, “an inherited problem” and a “stone in the shoe.” Motivating these statements was the $4.2 billion worth of loan guarantees from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to Ecuador in the form of a “debt relief package”:

“In March 2019, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a $4.2 billion financing deal to support the Ecuador government over the next three years. Authorities subsequently “suspended” Assange’s citizenship and ended his asylum, without much notice, on April 11.”

Three weeks after Ecuador secured their giant IMF loan, Moreno authorized British authorities to circumvent international law by entering the Ecuadorian embassy in London. And on 11 April 2019 Julian Assange was forcibly removed from the embassy and subsequently placed into a year of solitary confinement in Belmarsh’s isolation wing.

The English court originally sentenced Assange to a single year in jail for the crime of skipping bail. But just a few months later the judge ordered Assange’s incarceration be extended indefinitely while his extradition was negotiated.

The US government pursued 18 charges against Assange in his 2020 extradition hearing that would have amounted to an unprecedented sentence totaling 175 years in prison. Caitlin Johnstone summed up the 2020 extradition hearings as “a self-contradictory kafkaesque nightmare.”

The judge had strong conflicts of interest and should have recused herself since her husband was previously exposed by WikiLeaks for his role in bribing officials in exchange for lucrative arms contracts.

Then there was the humiliating glass cabinet.

In a scene straight out of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, Julian Assange was confined within in a glass box at the back of the courtroom during his 2020 extradition hearings. Beyond this humiliating exhibition of the state’s sadism grew a cacophony of bizarre circumstances that created incomprehensible delays throughout Assange’s extradition hearings.

The judge ultimately ruled against extradition, but only on the grounds that America’s draconian prison system was determined to present a high suicide risk to Assange.

Glenn Greenwald tweeted at the time of the ruling:

“This wasn’t a victory for press freedom. Quite the contrary: the judge made clear she believed there are grounds to prosecute Assange in connection with the 2010 publication. It was, instead, an indictment of the insanely oppressive US prison system for security ‘threats’.”

The 17 charges of Espionage Act violations attempted in vain to criminalize activities protected by the First Amendment, while the single hacking charge was demonstrably false given that Assange never hacked into anything. Even after Washington unveiled the Orwellian charge of “offering to hack into a government computer” (allegedly to help Chelsea Manning conceal her identity) the government was forced in the end to concede that no such hack ever took place because there wasn’t any evidence and Manning refused to testify.

Throughout their campaign to destroy WikiLeaks and ruin Julian Assange, Washington has consistently touted violations of its Espionage Act. But the notion that standard newsroom practices (like source protection) can be conflated with “criminal conspiracy” was always a flimsy claim founded on a dubious interpretation of law.

Ecuadorian President Moreno’s termination of Assange’s asylum was unlawful by international standards, as was UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s order of British police to cross onto sovereign territory to arrest a person who has never committed a crime. Going back even further, Attorney General Jeff Sessions insisted that arresting Assange was a top priority even though Assange was not an American citizen and his organization was not based in the states.

The fundamental question was articulated by Caitlin Johnstone:

“Should journalists be jailed for exposing US war crimes? Yes or no?”

Chris Hedges began answering this question in 2019:

“The publication of classified documents is not a crime in the United States, but if Assange is extradited and convicted it will become one. Assange is not an American citizen. WikiLeaks, which he founded and publishes, is not a U.S.-based publication. The message the U.S. government is sending is clear: No matter who or where you are, if you expose the inner workings of empire you will be hunted down, kidnapped and brought to the United States to be tried as a spy.”

While Hedges was correct to assert that publishing classified documents is not a crime, whether Assange’s extradition would have changed that seems dubious because there are countless constitutional lawyers who would have never stood for such a thing. It would have been challenged in court because selective enforcement of the Law does not then nullify the Law. Abuses are not precedent-changing when they were illegal to begin with. And on top of it all, Assange was never successfully extradited to the United States.

Beyond that, altering precedent requires a ruling by an appellate court:

[…] Bruce Afran, a US constitutional lawyer, argued that Assange’s plea will not expand the Justice Department’s powers to target journalists. “A plea is not precedent. Precedent consists of a decision interpreting a matter of law by an appeals court that will govern future cases on the same legal principle,” he explained. “In contrast, a plea is merely a factual agreement by a given defendant that they did a certain act, but does not bind future defendants in similar cases.”


It’s also important to acknowledge that Julian Assange’s plea was given under duress, further nullifying the entire legal process, and only as a mercy to prevent him from dying in prison. This brings us to Blob-Monster-Mike Pompeo’s preposterous double standard that First Amendment protections don’t extend to foreigners but our courts do:

“We also learned that the United States do not consider foreign nationals to have a First Amendment protection, so the US is effectively saying that the long arm of US law can extend to get you anywhere, but they also don’t have to extend its protections.”

Judges and juries are required to align their decisions based solely on the Law, and the First Amendment remains the judicial standard of the land here, regardless of circumstances. The US Constitution explicitly protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers. The courts cannot lawfully ignore the First Amendment just because they don’t like a person. In fact, they’ll very likely be overturned later if they decide to forgo constitutional jurisprudence for a short-term gain. The First Amendment guarantees each citizen’s right to offend others, and others’ right to say offensive things back because that’s how arguments are resolved.

Bullshit legal presumptions can and should always be rebutted, and it’s the duty of active citizens to participate in swatting down the dangerous delusions of pernicious parasites and exploitative predators who abuse the law for their own profit and gain. Lawfare intimidation cannot ever be allowed to set legal precedent, which is why unlawful presumptions must always be challenged by citizens of conscience who understand that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Throughout his career, Chris Hedges repeatedly told his audiences:

“I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”

Johnstone echoed this sentiment at the top of 2021 when she wrote,

“I’m not going to take that as a sign that we’ve won the war, or even the battle. But it is a sign that our punches are landing. And that we’ve got a fighting chance here.”

As soon as Assange was safely reunited with his family in Australia we learned about the $520,000 airplane bill. Because Assange was denied any opportunity to fly commercially, the Australian government chartered a private plane which left him half-a-million dollars in debt. Whether this debt amounted to a final “fuck you” from the authorities or not, it did not rain on the welcome parade.

After the airline’s price tag was announced on social media, donations poured in from every corner of the globe and within ten hours the debt was paid in full.

Assange’s supporters have achieved nothing short of a series of decisive victories for press and speech freedom by securing his release. They’ve succeeded in preserving his reputation in the face of an overwhelmingly well-funded and state-sanctioned smear campaign and in preventing his extradition to the United States. Many of us expected the government to make sure Assange died in prison, but public pressure ultimately prevailed. And even when it seemed his freedom had come with an enormous price tag, his supporters overcame that as well.

While it’s absolutely true that the powerful may try their damnedest to corrupt the law, that doesn’t mean the rest of us must accept their corruption. It’s the other way around. When authorities become irrational the citizenry must stop cooperating with them. And this spirit of defiance made manifest is the real triumph of WikiLeaks.

Julian and Stella Assange embrace after nearly fourteen years apart

This Is Why Missoulians Can’t Have Nice Things

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Who benefits from rising property taxes? Why does Missoula need another special tax levy to keep the firefighters in business when property taxes are already sky high as it is? And why are the lords of Missoula’s budget exempt from the election process?

As Missoulians reluctantly brace for the imminent effects of last year’s 37% property assessment increase (and subsequent 21% property tax increase) a major share of the fault lies with the unorthodox drain on municipal budgets that’s always justified through the ever-profitable concept of redevelopment. An unelected body of members loyal to the Missoula Redevelopment Agency (MRA) now ultimately decides where Missoula’s tax money goes and how it’s divvied out. More often than not large quantities of our tax money gets skimmed and funneled to crony donors instead of where it should be going: schools, roads and municipal services.

Missoula locals are constantly forced to accept special tax levies to sustain services we’re already paying for because the general fund never seems to have any money in it. Taxpayers cannot reverse this trend through voting because none of the bureaucrats responsible for these tax abuses were ever elected by voters. By dominating the management of Missoula’s tax dollars and what those dollars pay for, the MRA consistently proves that it has more power than any elected figurehead. Mayors come and go but the permanent bureaucracy of the MRA maintains a uniform continuity of governance, and they do it with something called Tax Increment Financing (TIF).

The stated and primary purpose of TIF is “to increase taxable value,” which is great for banks, developers and bureaucrats who profit from the plight of workers and retirees. For property owners, increasing the taxable value of their homes means paying higher property taxes, but without any kind of corresponding increase in government services. For renters that means increased rents. For the countless workers who cannot magically double their income overnight, such increases signal their imminent displacement. This game of musical chairs leaves someone without a place to live at the end of every round and only the biggest bank accounts can prevail.

Naturally, the intractable parasites who’ve grown addicted to tax money have a deep-seated fear of public awareness. Runaway redevelopment agencies all too often rely on public ignorance of the law to abuse it to the extent that they have, and make claims of public benefit that are demonstrably false to cover their tracks. After Missoula officials publicly mocked their constituents in 2020 for our alleged ignorance of TIF, Fortune 500 CFO Bob Moore publicly declared to the City Council:

“I understand [TIF] very well. It’s nothing but taking taxpayer money and giving it to developers and builders and calling it investment.”

TIF bonds are so coveted and controversial that those who consistently profit from them expend great deals of energy and resources attempting to convince the public that our lives would collectively fall apart without them. But beyond the hypothetical promises of “free money” and healthier cities, TIF turns out to be just another insidious profiteering scheme that feeds off of public money. This mechanism remains shrouded by acronym and is cleverly designed to smokescreen reality behind complicated financial terminology that ensures most people will never bother figuring out what makes it tick, including legislators and policy makers.

Over the decades the TIF law has morphed from a pledge to eliminate urban blight into the duct-tape solution for every municipal pipe dream. Since their inception half a century ago, urban renewal agencies around the country have often abused their authority and consistently transformed TIF into a mechanism to rob struggling taxpayers in order to provide giant subsidies to large organizations and fund the pet projects of favored donors. Whatever its original intentions, TIF has proven as vulnerable to nefarious activity in the Treasure State as it has in many others.

The word “blight” as defined in the Montana State code allows for any and every possible interpretation, including wildly imaginative perversions like “future blight” and several shades of figurative blight. The law as currently written is rife with loophole opportunities, allowing TIF addicts to interpret whatever definition of blight they want while also technically operating within the letter of the law. As a result, local officials bend themselves into pretzels figuring out as many new ways as possible to spend taxpayer dollars on anything but what they’re intended for: schools, roads and municipal services!

To “improve” these so-called “blighted” areas, TIF-addicted governments accept debt from banks to catalyze solutions. That debt is supposedly paid off with revenue generated by new residents and businesses that benefit from the blight remediation. Since TIFs theoretically pay for themselves by raising the property values of surrounding areas, those adjacent properties are directly affected by the newly elevated values because they create higher tax burdens. Therefore, TIF is meant to increase taxable value of property, and this hurts local citizens and fixed-income taxpayers. Worse still, since many TIF subsidies are provided to out-of-state corporations, local businesses are forced to stand idly by as their tax dollars are literally weaponized against them, economically prioritizing the interests of outside competition. Short-term gains leave long-term residents holding the shit-end of the stick.

Officials who’ve grown dependent on TIF will insist it’s the only tool they have. They’ll say they need it to subsidize affordable housing, to provide incentives for business developments and real estate investment, for job creation, to assist nonprofits, and to grow the tax base. But former Montana Legislator (and former Missoula City Councilman) Adam Hertz asserts that TIF isn’t meant to pay for any of that:

“Those are all great things. None of them are mentioned in state law when it comes to urban renewal districts.”

Despite what tax addicts may claim, the TIF statute says nothing about economic development, job creation or housing. It’s for blight remediation, not a blank check for vertical development.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail. After years of increasingly misusing and abusing the TIF hammer, Missoula began attracting criticism from a former MRA director. Geoff Badenoch, who directed the Missoula Redevelopment Agency for the 18 years before the reign of Ellen Buchanan, had this to say about Missoula’s dependence on and addiction to TIF:

“If you find there’s a temptation to use a tool too often, you’re not a good craftsman. … The thing about tax increment is, it’s so tempting to use it because you don’t have to go to the voters for it. There’s millions lying around.”

One of the core problems with TIF in modern Montana lies with the fact that public money is spent against popular will by an unelected body. The most powerful bureaucrats in our governments are never vetted by voters, but appointed to their positions, sometimes for decades. Ellen Buchanan is working on her third consecutive decade as chief meddler in Missoula’s piggy bank, and there’s nothing that voters can do about it.

Ellen Buchanan, Master of Deficit

Windbag politicians flap their jaws advocating for things like workforce housing, zoning reform, increased subsidies, housing-choice vouchers and trickle-down rent relief to address the symptom of rising homelessness because those “solutions” favor the status quo while ignoring the real problems. Those same windbags then help parasitic redevelopment agencies hollow out the city’s general fund on unnecessary and irrelevant “improvement” projects. As a result, firefighters must now beg taxpayers to approve special levies that further drive taxes up for people who can barely afford them, which pushes even more people toward displacement. As former Montana legislator Brad Tschida explicates in his recent Missoulian op-ed:

“[…] if the liberal Dem mayor and city councilors were frugal stewards of the tax dollars we’ve already sent them, there would currently be plenty of money to adequately fund our firefighters.”

The stuffed shirts calling the shots in Missoula’s secret government all too often treat their municipalities like a sadistic game of Sim City 2000 or CityState. Myopic officials relentlessly propound their failed solutions because they’ve run out of excuses to accrue more TIF debt. As the dumpster fire grows we’re told that dousing it with more gasoline will help extinguish the flames.

TIF was the mechanism through which Missoula’s unelected officials borrowed millions of dollars from banks to provide giant gifts to those same banks. Decades worth of taxpayer-funded interest payments were provided to First Interstate Bank and Stockman Bank by borrowing said gifts from the same banks and packaging those gifts in the wrapping paper of Tax Increment Financing. The taxpayers get stuck with decades of unwelcome interest payments instead of the municipal services they expect from government. In fact, those services steadily deteriorate to the point that extra taxes are proposed, euphemistically referred to as “levies”. Case in point, Missoula’s firefighter levy would not be a topic of conversation if the City’s handling of the budget weren’t so flagrantly corrupt.

Officials addicted to tax increment loans have cultivated relationships with the financial industry to the point that they don’t know how to operate their towns without the banks. In a rare case of pissing-on-our-leg-and-telling-us-it’s-raining, we’re told that without TIF there just aren’t any resources for governments to fix the roads. This irrational claim was actually made by MRA director Ellen Buchanan in 2023:

“Without TIF investment in public facilities, roads, bridges, parks, other infrastructure, this puts more pressure on local governments to find ways to pay for these services.”

Buchanan strategically frames the argument from a brazenly dishonest perspective, presuming that scheduled maintenance cannot occur without accruing debt. But we don’t need a bank loan to fix the roads if our tax dollars are handled honestly. Property taxes are collected into the general fund but the account always seems to have insufficient funds to pay for services when the check comes due. Beyond that, municipal services now receive their funding directly from the redevelopment agency. The very idea of redevelopment seems to have become deliberately conflated with the concepts of maintenance and management to the point that many officials have forgotten how to fund services without the MRA.

Missoula County Public Schools admitted to an unconventional funding gift from the Missoula Redevelopment Agency in an Email last month. According to the employee newsletter, the MRA provided $2 million in funding to the school district in the form of a “remittance”. Because the MRA seems to enjoy exclusive control over the city budget, the only way to get a slice of that budget is to cozy up to MRA director Ellen Buchanan.

The fact that a redevelopment agency now funds schools through a nebulous “remittance” process seems outrageous. Why exactly is the school district receiving funding through the MRA instead of directly from the general fund? The MRA was supposed to only deal with issues pertaining to redevelopment, not the maintenance or staffing of every local government body.

Who benefits when scores of locals are displaced by skyrocketing rent increases? It is not possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when the free-money cult of tax addicts keeps taking your boots away. The inevitable corruption of the scheme itself demonstrates its irredeemable nature. We can explore the theoretical benefits of this economic voodoo until the cows come home, but the rhetoric that justifies TIF spending is simply never backed up by facts.

Public money addicts actively ignore the overwhelming impacts that their policies inflict on average citizens. They can be expected to further minimize the disproportionate burden placed on Montana taxpayers caused by their overindulgence on this financial instrument. To acknowledge such “side effects” would interrupt the rush of their high. Reality is a buzzkill for addicts forced to come to terms with the harm their actions cause. The MRA desperately needs an intervention before they sell Missoula’s proverbial kitchen sink to score another hit.

Thorough analysis of the literature generated by regulatory professionals who’ve attempted to curtail TIF abuse with amendments to existing law makes it clear that the abuse continues regardless of what kind of new regulations are put into place. The fanatics who feel they’re entitled to the subsidy don’t ever take “no” for an answer and never will. Whenever the will of the voters becomes bad for business, the industry’s lawyers weave a tapestry of new loopholes to continue spending public money without voter knowledge or consent.

The parasites who’ve turned the government budget into their own personal piggy bank will also predictably point their hypocritical little fingers at “the evil Republicans” at the State Capital as the reason for rising property taxes, no matter how obvious it is that more and more of the municipal tax base has been “captured” and re-routed to subsidize the private development delusions of transplants.

TIF addicts will often and loudly mention that TIF is practiced by a majority of the states, but probably won’t mention that it was killed in the very state in which it was created. TIF was born in California and died in California after bankrupting the Golden State. But California isn’t the only state with a robust record of abusing TIF, nor is California the only state to attempt to curtail TIF abuse.

Montana’s first real attempt to reign in the abuse during the 2023 legislative session revealed the primary tactic of the TIF addicts, who relied on scaring the legislators with fibs about how the sky will fall without these subsidies to hold it up. It’s a simplistic deception, but it has always been easier to fool a man than to convince him that he’s been fooled, and the lie succeeded in shutting down the regulations proposed by Senator Greg Hertz.

As this nightmare carousel of circular logic revolves into another election season, let’s consider how much longer we’re willing to passively accept the anti-human outcomes scripted for us by society’s ruling psychopaths.

Take Your “Workforce Housing” And Shove It

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There’s a new focus-grouped term to re-brand the relentless addiction to unnecessary development.

Since the so-called “involuntary homeless” now occupy a cornered market of government-subsidized housing projects, the term “workforce housing” has come into play. This latest evolution of the “affordable housing” scheme helps guarantee that developers can exploit a whole new market of desperate people. The expression was recently redefined by the Montana Legislature during the 2021 session, causing many public-money addicts to begin licking their chops. The newly minted legal idiom has become a favorite answer to homelessness and poverty by the irrational authorities who daily abuse the public trust.

Now that housing in the United States has become universally unaffordable, an alliance of parasites and predators insist the only solution lies in more development, destruction and debt. But we don’t need to build affordable housing; we need to make existing housing affordable. Our goals should involve the restoration and preservation of what we already have, and doing so would easily house and employ many dormant sectors of the economy.

Not only are new homes poorly built (because everyone cuts corners these days), we simply don’t need them if the goal is merely housing the unhoused. Why construct new buildings when 15.1 million American homes sat vacant in 2022? That’s more than 10% of the country’s total housing inventory. Yet developers and their loyal cronies continue, in vain, to build their way out of the approaching economic disaster, thereby accelerating the financial ruin of everyone else.

Homes that are actually affordable for locals are all too often bought by tourists and tend to get bundled into packages by fund managers who gobble up as many of the smaller fish as they can. During the plandemic such agencies purchased properties like never before as they capitalized on the wave of foreclosures that resulted from the subsequent economic crash. This practice of real estate roulette calls into question the ethics of owning a home without actually having to live in it. Hedge funds and corporations are able to buy large swaths of homes and they can charge exorbitant rents for them. Now that this economic piracy has displaced an entire sector of the economy, the game is on to figure out how to profit from corralling the dispossessed into even smaller cells.

Modern workers already live in cramped stack-and-pack apartments that atomize individuals and maximize isolation which deters any possible sense of community. Every cheap apartment unit crapped out by development firms is a facsimile of all the others. Anonymous neighbors behind every wall, ceiling and floor who either make too much noise or complain about everyone else’s. Our formerly strong communities were robbed from the people who built them because most of us cannot afford the real estate anymore. If you’re “just a worker” then a quiet home with a private yard or garden isn’t just out of reach. It’s out of the question. According to CBS News, the majority of Americans cannot afford homes in 99% of America. Perhaps people will soon turn to solar-powered sleeping pods as the next innovative solution.

Nothing about the euphemism “workforce housing” inspires confidence because it essentially translates to substandard conditions. Reading between the lines one is able to sense the opposite of quality in this definition:

“Workforce housing is generally understood to mean affordable housing for households with earned income that is insufficient to secure quality housing in reasonable proximity to the workplace.”

The politically loyal true believers in Missoula’s power rings are obsessed with increasing housing density, but they wrongly assume that people will desire (or even tolerate) life inside a stack-and-pack apartment.

According to Missoula Mayor Andrea Davis, prospective transplants earning salaries up to $130k declined to move here because they couldn’t secure housing.

“Davis, one of the panelists, offered one example she had just come across at a meeting in Kalispell. She said Applied Industrial Technologies, a significant employer in the Flathead, could hire 200 workers tomorrow at salaries of $60,000 to $130,000, but there are no homes for them to move into.“

Since most American workers earn less than $35,000 annually (and service jobs in Missoula pay less than $13,000) it doesn’t take an advanced degree in economics to figure out that Montana’s long-time locals are certainly screwed by this formula in the long term. At current rates of economic inflation and the associated property tax increases, the threat of financial displacement now affects all wage-earners, not just service workers.

Press events that highlight the homelessness catastrophe in Missoula have become great opportunities for officials to prattle on about “workforce housing” developments as the solution because doing so allows for further feeding frenzies on their primary addiction of public money; the approval of more TIF bonds (debt) that benefit the donor class at the expense of Missoula’s municipal tax base.

Because this process is ugly and complex, Missoula’s public-money addicts enlist the public relations services of the Montana Democratic Party’s former spokesman. When the City of Missoula needs a party loyalist to put a positive spin on miserable policy decisions (like the relentless abuse of Tax Increment Financing), they turn to stenographer-in-chief Martin “Gomer” Kidston. After the State of Montana reworked the definition of “workforce housing”, Kidston championed the new opportunities available to everybody’s favorite local band of tax addicts, the Missoula Redevelopment Agency:

“The term workforce housing may mean different things to different groups, and cities across the state are wrestling with how to define it. But if MRA can ramp up a new program around such housing using tax increment as a catapult, it could help spark a new tool for development.”

As the 2023 legislative session approached, Gomer confirmed the primary goal of Missoula’s rulers:

“Other city priorities include protecting Tax Increment Financing and aligning it with the state’s new definition of workforce housing.”

Perhaps the most offensive aspect of the euphemism “workforce housing” seems its rather obvious manifestation of Klaus Schwab’s “own nothing and be happy” ideology that governs the World Economic Forum’s murderous “Sustainable Development” agenda. The ruling class want us all reliant on the state to satisfy all of our needs, including housing.

Since housing has become so appallingly unaffordable, the state increasingly offers vouchers for residents to offset the rising cost of property taxes. But nothing is free. Signing up for vouchers can automatically nullify many of your rights and often results in inconveniences like unannounced inspections of your apartment. And if the inspectors decide you’re not behaving in accordance to the rigid standards of the corporate policy, you’ll have a whole new set of problems. Just ask anyone who has lived in a property managed by the Missoula Housing Authority and endured the stringent legal terms and conditions inherent in subsidized living arrangements.

The sterile tone of the phrase “workforce housing” indicates how economic elites feel about the plebes. The ruling class and their loyal bureaucratic puppets see workers as just a temporary phenomenon of America’s cities, not a cornerstone of them. The globalist models treat workers like temporary drones and inconsequential statistics because they’re based on an obsession with predictability modules and social control. We can never build solid communities if people must constantly relocate out of financial necessity.

Pathetic Mayors Ignore Catastrophe By Twisting The Law

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What transformed the formerly safe neighborhoods of the American west into the post-apocalyptic bazaars of meth, trafficking and murder they are today? Within less than a decade tent cities rapidly emerged from public parks and sidewalks and grew into shantytowns and Hoovervilles like the ghastly disgrace called “the Zone” in Phoenix, Arizona. Over the past five years, these symptoms of societal decay have grown visibly worse. In the face of this humanitarian crisis, many public officials have made an institutional commitment to ignoring the problem, claiming that their hands have been tied by a decision made by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018. This technocratic abdication of duty is not only legally inappropriate, it normalizes a sadistic indifference toward human suffering that dramatically accelerates the urban decay of the American west. After a five-year long headache, this colossal policy failure now lies before the US Supreme Court for reconsideration.

Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute writes:

“Five years ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided a case called Martin v. City of Boise that radically transformed how local governments address the problem of homelessness and vastly worsened the nation’s homelessness crisis. Now, the Supreme Court is poised to consider whether to overrule that decision—and a subsequent decision called Johnson v. Grants Pass.”

Both Martin and Johnson proclaimed that it is unconstitutional to enforce anti-vagrancy laws unless there are adequate shelter beds available for homeless persons. These lawsuits rely on a ruling from the 1962 case, Robinson v. California, wherein the Supreme Court held that people cannot legitimately be punished for immutable characteristics; in this case, the immutable characteristic of being “involuntarily homeless” – a term that has yet to be defined.

That argument held sway in the case of Martin v. Boise. This case began after a Boise man named Robert Martin fell asleep on an Idaho park bench and was cited by police for doing so. Martin and five other homeless Boiseans in turn sued the City after being cited for sleeping in public spaces. The decision climbed up the ladder to the Federal Appellate Court who eventually ruled against the City. In that case, a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that punishing homeless persons for sleeping in public violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” if shelters are not available for them. As a result, this ruling conveyed to every western court that the City of Boise had violated the constitutional rights of homeless people by imposing criminal penalties for sleeping and camping outdoors.

The expansion of the Martin ruling began in 2018 when a homeless woman named Debra Blake (alongside fellow plaintiffs John Logan and Gloria Johnson) sued the city of Grants Pass, Oregon in federal court for similar reasons. “The city of Grants Pass is trying to run homeless people out of town,” the lawsuit stated. “On any given day or night, hundreds of individuals in Grants Pass, Oregon, are forced to live outside due to the lack of emergency shelter and affordable housing in their community.” The Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, citing Martin v Boise as precedent.

These rulings were meant to reiterate that people have an inherent right to exist in public spaces. Martin established that municipalities cannot criminalize people for sleeping in public and Grants Pass ultimately reiterated the human need for insulation against the elements.

Lazy bureaucrats have twisted these legal decisions into the end-all absolution from municipal responsibilities. Duly-unelected interim-mayor Jordan Hess demonstrated this point perfectly in his County Courthouse Address on 26 April 2023:

“We don’t have – the reality is that we do not have enough indoor shelter in our community for everybody. … Uh, cities across the west have, of course, seen a high increase to the cost of living and the cost of housing as, um, these – as our desirable communities have become destinations for, uh, for people moving into our communities. …

“Municipalities cannot criminalize homelessness, uh, nor can we ticket nor arrest or remove people who are camping in public places because there are no shelter beds, um, because there are no shelter beds for them. So since we don’t have, uh, shelter beds we cannot remove, uh, someone from an encampment, um, in a public space.”

Hess strategically actuates the predictable “criminalizing homelessness” strawman. Relying on public ignorance, lazy bureaucrats ladle out helpings of such logical fallacies frequently and generously. In this case, Jordan relies on the intentionally misrepresented proposition of “criminalizing homelessness” because such fallacies are easier to defeat than the real arguments concerning the actual issues like addiction, mental illness, and financial collapse. Hence “attacking a strawman”.

Arizona Judge Freddy Brown expounds on the folly of “criminalizing homelessness”:

“Martin’s presumption of helplessness is also manifested in such rhetorical tricks as the Respondents engage in when they accuse Petitioners of “criminalizing homelessness.” This is a semantic device intended to substitute intimidation and accusation in place of rational legal analysis. It’s safe to say that no party or amicus in this case seeks to criminalize homelessness. Rather, the laws in question are laws against sleeping in public parks, polluting public areas, and other acts which are voluntary, at least in the vast majority of cases, and that the exceptions can only be discerned on a case-by-case basis.”

Despite what lazy officials and mayoral liars may allege, City governments can still enforce anti-camping ordinances. But Martin’s bizarre application of the concept of “involuntary homelessness” has created a legally unworkable situation that combines a lack of shelter beds alongside a declaration of “involuntariness” that then entitles a person to reside indefinitely in public spaces—while completely exempt from law enforcement intervention as a matter of constitutional entitlement.

“At least that’s how many municipal officials interpret Martin. Notwithstanding the caveats in that case, such officials have taken Martin’s bizarre “involuntariness” theory as an opportunity to shrug off their responsibility to enforce laws that are wholesome and necessary for the public good. The result is a stark homelessness crisis in cities across the west.”

Since the Ninth Circuit enjoys jurisdiction over the entire American West from Arizona to Washington and even Alaska and Hawaii, their rulings set precedent for all lower courts of nine western States, including Montana.

With Grants Pass up for review before the US Supreme Court, the city attorneys from that case point out the obvious effects of this ludicrous policy in a separate brief:

“This Court can see the track record under Martin in the Ninth Circuit — sprawling encampments, rising deaths, and widespread harms to the community, as localities are forced to surrender their public spaces.”

Timothy Sandefur’s amicus brief elucidates on this observation:

“One need only look at the multitude of dangerous and dehumanizing homeless encampments and open-air drug markets in cities under the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit—such as the Zone in Phoenix—to see the profound impact that Martin and Grants Pass have had. … And the decisions also provide a convenient excuse for other city leaders that wish to do nothing while such encampments grow and fester.”

In January the Supremes agreed to hear an appeal from the City of Grants Pass of the 2022 ruling by the Ninth Circuit that expanded the 2018 Martin ruling. As Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle reported in January:

“The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear a case that could dramatically reshape how cities across the West respond to the homelessness crisis. Gov. Gavin Newsom, governments in 20 other states and organizations of cities and counties had asked the court to review and overturn a September 2022 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that prohibited local governments from sweeping homeless encampments unless shelter was available for the camp’s residents.” …

“Families can no longer walk the streets of Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle in safety,” said lawyers for the 20 states, led by Idaho and Montana.

Writing for Planetizen, Irvin Dawid clarifies that the appeal was filed under “Grants Pass” even though the case that originally created this monstrous precedent was Martin v. Boise:

“Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal, the case goes by title, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. Note that the high court refused to hear an appeal of Martin v. Boise in December 2019. Since the Grants Pass ruling involved precedent set by Martin, consideration of appeal means that both are up for reconsideration.”

MISSOULA RESCUED BY THE STATE OF MONTANA, AGAIN

When Missoula drops the ball on enforcement, the State of Montana must often mop up the mess. Both the $250,000+ Reserve Street shantytown eviction as well as the $20,000 burrows rebuild came out of the State budget because both areas are owned by the Montana Department of Transportation. So while Jordan Hess and other pathetic bureaucrats whine about the State legislature hoarding budgets from Missoula, these overwhelmingly expensive mistakes—made by Missoula ideologues—were paid for by all Montanans.

Why was the State of Montana allowed to do what Hess said couldn’t be done?

Jordan Hess reflects on time in office

Jordan Hess demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the law when he claims—falsely—that his government wasn’t allowed to protect innocent taxpayers against people who are unable to control their own actions. By this nincompoopery, if a shelter runs out of vacancies then the police and citizens must stand down and watch the town burn.

While the City of Missoula claimed its hands were tied regarding the Clark Fork Colonies proliferating around the Reserve Street Bridge, the State of Montana took legal action against Missoula County to enforce an eviction of 100+ John Does “from accessing, residing on, or otherwise occupying the Property.” The 2022 complaint from the State of Montana addresses factors like health, dangerous fires, improper disposal of waste, the building of permanent structures on land owned by MDT, and vandalism:

“The lawsuit includes five counts including forcible detainer, trespass, a claim for public and private nuisance, a request for injunction and a declaratory action.”

According to the complaint:

“One such health and safety risk involved the continual risk of contamination to the Clark Fork River due to the encampment’s improper waste disposal system and the encampment’s proximity to the river. …

“In Montana, a nuisance is defined as anything that is injurious to health, indecent or offensive to the senses, or an obstruction to the free use of property, so as to interfere with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property, or that unlawfully obstructs the free passage or use, in the customary manner, of any….public park, square, street, or highway.

An abandoned sliver of the 2022 Reserve Street Shantytown

A similar situation arose this past November when Chinese President Xi Jinping was due to arrive in San Francisco, whereupon California’s Governor Newsom cleaned up his city literally overnight. Presenting a kind of Potemkin Village, the entire downtown was barricaded by miles of black fencing while authorities purged the district of tents, garbage and homeless. Newsom didn’t hide behind the Ninth Circuit decision, admitting that the cleanup was only performed for Xi’s arrival.

By legal precedent, Federal law is supposed to supersede state and local laws, but with several caveats. Since individual states exist within the regional boundaries of the Ninth Federal Circuit District’s jurisdiction, the Martin and Grants Pass decisions are technically binding. But since Federal rulings are not supposed to infringe on states’ rights, decisions can be lawfully challenged and presumptions rebutted.

The State of Montana would seem well within its rights to file a complaint petition, as it did two years ago in the case of the Reserve Street Shantytown. Article IX of the Montana Constitution guarantees that “the state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”

Furthermore, the Ninth Circuit never declared the west was a free-for-all to make encampments wherever anyone desires, nor did it legalize public endangerment, the contamination of public waterways or the degradation of public spaces. Their ruling was narrowly defined. But that hasn’t stopped municipalities like Missoula from twisting the decision into a one-size-fits-all excuse to ignore a profitable catastrophe while redirecting public funds into private partnerships and blaming fallout on those dastardly Republicans at the State Legislature.

Sandefur elaborates:

“The Martin/Grants Pass rule has not only worsened the homelessness problem—by confusing and frustrating city officials who want to do something to clean up their communities and help the unsheltered—but it has also encouraged irresponsible and foolhardy policies that only exacerbate the homelessness crisis. Cities such as Phoenix and San Francisco responded to those precedents by adopting the failed policy known as “Housing First,” which has actually increased homeless populations. And some cities, including Phoenix, took Martin and Grants Pass as handy excuses to do nothing about the homelessness problem—ignoring the laws they’re supposed to enforce, and endangering the hardworking taxpayers who have the right to police protection. We saw the practical consequences of that in The Zone.”

“The idea behind “Housing First” is simple: there will be no more homelessness if everyone has a home. The fault with that logic is that there are many individuals who do not want housing—at least, not at the cost of giving up their addictions—and for that reason choose not to take advantage of available aid.”

Despite what their pushers may allege in the corporate media, so-called “Housing First” policies have overwhelmingly proven themselves a failed strategy in the west. From 2014 to 2020, the States of Oregon, California and Washington all initiated “Housing First” initiatives that resulted, quite ironically, in dramatic increases in homelessness on the streets of their cities.

Liberal mayors in both Missoula and San Francisco committed to ending homelessness within a decade. Missoula’s ten-year plan to end homelessness was called “Reaching Home” and ended in such utter failure that by its conclusion in 2022 none of its former proponents were enthusiastic about its mention.

In the meantime, Missoula burns while mayor Andrea Davis fiddles with her “urban camping” working group, which concluded earlier this month “without clear recommendations” for policymakers. This doesn’t seem particularly surprising given that Davis introduced her working group back in February on KGVO with murky statements like this:

“So, our plan here is in addition to obviously, long-term community planning that we’re doing, to come up with our next plan to address homelessness, is to make homelessness rare, brief and one time only.”

Andrea Davis discusses the unhoused in Missoula

It is already the case that most people who become homeless are only so for a day or two, according to Dennis Culhane’s Five Myths about America’s Homeless, which reveals that chronic homelessness is usually the result of addiction or mental illness. Once again, the reality on the ground doesn’t fit with the narrative being forced down from above.

The reality-averse bureaucrats pulling the purse-strings of local government will constantly assert that the solutions lie in constructing more affordable housing. They’ll never discuss whether it’s possible to make existing housing affordable because their developer donors want subsidies to build new apartment complexes. Whether the proposed solutions are effective at “eliminating homelessness” becomes completely irrelevant once the money changes hands.

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL

Prohibiting homeless persons from sleeping, camping, and lodging wherever they want, whenever they want, cannot be construed as torture. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what the lawyers in these cases argued, and the Ninth-Circuit-Numbskulls bought it. The arguments bolstering the Martin ruling (and by extension, Grants Pass) hinge entirely on the bastardization of the Eighth Amendment’s clause prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment”. Timothy Sandefur expounds on this misinterpretation:

“The Martin and Grants Pass cases declared that it’s unconstitutional to arrest people for living in tents in public parks or other public property, any time there aren’t enough beds available in government-run homeless shelters to accommodate the city’s unsheltered population. Relying on a 1962 precedent called Robinson v. California, which said that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” bars the government from punishing people for things that are outside their control, the Ninth Circuit reasoned that if the number of homeless people is greater than the number of shelter beds available, those who sleep on the streets must be doing so because they can’t help it. Everyone must sleep, after all, so a person who can’t find a place to stay, and falls asleep on a sidewalk, is doing so as part of what the judges called the “inevitable consequences of being human.”

It seems obviously dubious that anyone who chooses to live indefinitely outdoors can be said to be doing so only as an unavoidable “consequence of being human.” Nevertheless, this is where legislators and bureaucrats tend to get lost in the weeds.

From the appeal:

“Dissenting, Judge Bumatay stated that nothing in the text, history, and tradition of the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause comes close to prohibiting enforcement of commonplace anti-vagrancy laws, like laws against sleeping on sidewalks and in parks.”

While homeless individuals are certainly entitled to the utmost respect and compassion, they are not therefore immune from the law. Breathing in public is quite different than building structures into the riverbank and polluting the waterway with dangerous chemicals and hazardous substances. Judge Bumatay describes how the Martin decision flipped the Eighth Amendment completely upside-down:

“Today, we let stand an injunction permitting homeless persons to sleep anywhere, anytime in public in the City of San Francisco unless adequate shelter is provided. The district court’s sweeping injunction represents yet another expansion of our court’s cruel and unusual Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. Our decision is cruel because it leaves the citizens of San Francisco powerless to enforce their own health and safety laws without the permission of a federal judge. And it’s unusual because no other court in the country has interpreted the Constitution in this way. …

Based on this innovative reading of the Clause, our court thought it was “compel[led]” to prohibit enforcement of Boise’s anti-camping and disorderly conduct ordinances whenever shelter is not offered. Id. Martin reasoned that sitting, lying, and sleeping are “universal and unavoidable consequences of being human” so that the “conduct . . . is involuntary and inseparable from status.” … So Martin felt that governments cannot criminalize the “state of being homeless in public places” if “there is no option of sleeping indoors.”

Sandefur illustrates the logical fallacy inherent in this reasoning:

“By the Ninth Circuit’s logic, if a person drives home intoxicated from a bar, and gets into a collision that kills someone, she cannot be held criminally responsible—because the government failed to provide her with a taxicab. That is illogical. Likewise, someone who chooses to start a fire that gets out of control and consumes a neighbor’s house has no “involuntariness” defense to an arson charge just because the government did not give him an electric heater. And a person who pours poisonous waste into a river is not “involuntarily polluting” simply because the government failed to provide her with a toxic waste disposal service.”

Among other “unintended consequences” of the Ninth Circuit’s dimwitted decision was the explicit validation of an extraordinarily vague term: “involuntarily homeless”. According to dissenting judge Patrick J. Bumatay, “The district court didn’t even define what it means to be “involuntarily homeless” and gave conflicting signals on the point.”

But comparing involuntary homelessness to voluntary substance abuse seems an inappropriate conflation on the verge of non sequitur. Voluntary intoxication is not a defense in criminal proceedings per Montana v. Egelhoff. Sandefur further explains the absurdity of associating human behavior under the auspices of “involuntary”:

“[…] both rulings embody an untenable assumption that people lack free will—and therefore cannot be held responsible for their actions—whenever the government fails to provide them with a free-of-charge alternative to breaking the Law. …

“A corollary mistake in both cases is the assumption that the government cannot penalize “involuntary” conduct—and is thus powerless to protect innocent citizens from harms inflicted by people who are unable to control their actions. … The law cannot punish people for who they are, but it certainly can arrest and incarcerate people for what they do.

“To regard the homeless as lacking free will—or, in today’s fashionable jargon, as lacking “agency”—not only paralyzes public officials and harms the hardworking taxpayers who expect their public employees to enforce the law for the protection of their neighborhoods; it’s also dehumanizing to the homeless themselves. To treat the destitute as choice-less underestimates their capacities and, by failing to regard them as ordinary people, risks denying them full humanity.”

Sandefur further describes why overly-simplistic declarations like “the answer to homelessness is housing” represent the flawed reasoning of low-effort thinkers and their antisocial shepherds who ignore the phenomenon of “shelter resistant” individuals:

“Take, for example, the plaintiffs in an ongoing federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU involving Phoenix’s infamous “Zone”—which until recently was occupied by as many as 1,000 people living in tents on downtown sidewalks. In that case, the plaintiffs are a man who admits he’s lived on the streets for nearly 25 years, and a woman who is not only physically and mentally competent, but even maintains a credit card account. These people are clearly not incapable of making decisions in their lives, and characterizing them as “involuntarily homeless” is ludicrous. So is giving them a constitutional right to reside indefinitely in tents on public property.

The infamous “Zone” of Phoenix, Arizona

SCOTUS REVIEW WILL LIKELY OVERTURN DISASTROUS NINTH CIRCUIT DECISION

The Supremes appear to be siding with the City of Grants Pass in this case, though they haven’t ruled yet and probably won’t until the very end of their session next month. According to the New York Times:

“A majority of the Supreme Court appeared inclined on Monday to uphold a series of local ordinances that allowed a small Oregon city to ban homeless people from sleeping or camping in public spaces. … The conservative majority appeared sympathetic to arguments by the city of Grants Pass, Ore., that homelessness is a complicated issue that is best handled by local lawmakers and communities, not judges.”

Another factor that makes a SCOTUS overturn of Martin very likely is the multilateral support the appeal has garnered from a wide variety of unlikely allies. The San Francisco Chronicle notes that, “The case has become a rare instance in which officials across the political spectrum, from Newsom to conservative state senators in Arizona, are seeking the same outcome.”

Jamie Parfitt of KGW8 likewise notes that:

“Dozens of parties have submitted amicus curiae or “friend of the court” briefs, many of them backing Grants Pass in its bid to overturn the ruling. And the case has produced some strange bedfellows, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the conservative Goldwater Institute, not to mention the attorneys general of Idaho, Montana, Nevada and other western states. …

“What’s really striking is how many states, how many counties, how many cities here on the West Coast — governments run by liberal Democratic mayors and governors — have filed briefs with the court saying that ‘This is unworkable.’”

Beyond being unworkable, the Martin ruling results in policies that ironically mock the very compassion their authors purport to embody. Sandefur’s amicus brief concludes:

“Leaving people to remain living indefinitely on the streets, or in tents in a park—precisely on the grounds that they are unable to do otherwise!–is not a compassionate response. On the contrary, it simply reasserts, under the strangest of disguises, the cold attitude of a past era that viewed the poor as a mere “surplus population” beyond possibility of rescue. …

“A compassionate response would consist of providing people with the care they need—including taking them into custody against their will if they are unable or unwilling to manage themselves. … Finally, the law-abiding, taxpaying public deserves compassion, also. The victims of municipalities’ abdication of their law-enforcement duties aren’t just the homeless—who certainly deserve better than to be left to live on the streets—but also members of the community who must suffer threats, pollution, damage to their properties, and the ruin of their businesses as the consequence of a legal principle that is indefensible.”

Picking Up Trash in Missoula, Montana Could Land You In Jail

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It’s a dark and snowy morning in Missoula, Montana. A billow of smoke rises up from beneath a pedestrian bridge where several hooded figures huddle around a morning campfire near the river’s shore. A path through the foliage leads away from the campfire toward a shoreline shantytown of tents and lean-tos. Further down the trail a man solemnly lugs a large section of tree recently chopped down by the Parks department that he plans to use for firewood. The morning traffic of the city hums anonymously overhead along the bridges that span the Clark Fork River.

A new society has formed on the banks of the Clark Fork River within the Missoula Valley. From Deer Creek to Deep Creek, an anonymous community of laborers, vagrants, addicts, gypsies and criminals has embedded itself into the riverbanks and adjacent parks. In the spring, this dissociated network tends to cluster into a central village near the California Street Bridge where the real estate is wide and inviting, at least until the river rises with the April runoff.

This was the location of an incident on 02 January 2024 involving several propane tanks that ignited and exploded. The discharge launched flaming shrapnel past several firefighters.

Near Yoke‘s grocery store on West Broadway, the steep banks leading down to the Clark Fork River are smothered by multicolored detritus blobs. Gnome homes stand sculpted into the turf alongside tree houses, meth-dens and shanty settlements built onto the vertical banks above the beach. An abandoned hammock swings in the morning breeze as the tarp suspended above it rattles between the trees. The band of contiguous settlements lines both sides of the river for as far as the eye can see. This is Missoula’s New Hellgate Village, a living topography that shifts with the tides and continues to grow.

When Missoula was first getting started as a trading-post town in the mid-1800s it was originally called “Hellgate Village” and it was a very violent place where duels and killings were a regular occurrence.

Today, paintball shootings and tent stabbings characterize the more charming incidents that transpire in New Hellgate Village. The now infamous Authorized Camping Site (ACS) was the home of so many instances of meth dealing, human trafficking and violent attacks that it had to be shut down in November of 2022 after only ten months in operation. A body was also purportedly found hanging from a tree near the Reserve Street Bridge.

As a result, Missoula’s riverfront has transformed into a veritable dumping ground for what’s left of the American dream. Endless strings of discarded refuse coagulate into sloppy amalgamations of plastic bags, broken glass, rotting fabric, human feces, aluminum cans, hypodermic needles, rubber gloves, disintegrating bed mattresses, bicycle tires, sex toys and cigarette butts.

Many locals are understandably heartbroken by the condition of the city’s riverfront. Citizens with jobs don’t have the time or the energy to clean up after the shantytown catastrophe unfolding all around them, or address the structural reasons for its existence. Taxpayers expect their government to do something about the problem but popular will gets stifled by the red tape of bureaucracy. Eventually some citizens inevitably grow tired of the lack of response and simply take matters into their own hands.

ARRESTED FOR UNAUTHORIZED BEAUTIFICATION

The trouble began when an apparently “mysterious private group or solitary citizen” removed “an entire dump-truck load of garbage” from Missoula’s West Broadway island and left it on the sidewalk. According to the Missoulian, the trash included dozens of syringes and was castigated as unauthorized:

“We don’t really know who’s doing the cleanup, that’s still being investigated,” said Charmell Owens, the city’s code compliance program manager. “We were just surprised early (Monday) morning by six larges piles of garbage and trash that had been collected and was placed adjacent to the sidewalk on Broadway. When that occurs, we have to then pull crews from streets to do a cleanup.”

In the days that followed, NBC Montana noted trash was continuing to find its way up the riverbank and sought the identity of the “Clark Fork Custodian”:

Ryan Tollefson and his dog, Avaya, often stroll along the Clark Fork River, and recently Tollefson says he’s noticed things piling up, like needles, human waste and garbage he never expected there. Tollefson grew up in Missoula, and he’s never seen it like this before, so he did what he thought was right. In late February, he took it upon himself to start cleaning the bank of the river — spending his time off from work to tidy up the place he loves.

Ryan Tollefson and his dog Avaya

“There has to be a solution, man,” Tollefson said. “I just don’t think that giving them syringes and clothing and food and watching it all end up in the river is the solution.”

When he started cleaning, he placed the trash where everyone could see it — on the sidewalk — reminding others that just because it’s out of sight doesn’t mean it should be out of mind. That’s when he got in a little trouble. In early March, Tollefson received a citation from the city for blocking the sidewalks. He said police showed up and questioned his motives.

“I said, ‘Are you going to take me to jail for picking up garbage?’” Tollefson said. But the citation didn’t deter him. Now he’s just strategic about where he’s placing the debris.

Tollefson was initially cited by law enforcement for blocking the sidewalk on 05 March 2024.

While his efforts were appreciated by local taxpayers, they managed to attract fury from several of the Village’s more aggressive residents. On 14 March 2024, Ryan was assaulted with a chain and lock that were whipped down on top of his head by an unstable individual. He wasn’t concussed, unconscious, or bleeding, but law enforcers were reticent to press charges against his attacker.

“The first incident, when I got hit with the lock with the chain, they came and they didn’t even arrest that guy. After he hit me with the chain, he pulled out a big knife –like a Crocodile Dundee knife– that was at least 12” long. But they just said it was my word against his and there were no witnesses or evidence so they let him go scot-free. I asked the officer to feel the back of my head because there was a big lump back there. She just said, ‘“’That could just be your skull.’”

On 20 March 2024 Ryan returned to his beachhead and continued his work, and was again physically assaulted, this time by a different homeless individual than the week prior, and with a different weapon. As reported by Travis Mateer:

“A man allegedly pushed Ryan three times, resulting in Ryan calling 911, but according to Ryan nothing was done to address the issue, so he continued working to remove trash from near the river bank. The man who pushed Ryan got increasingly agitated, then chucked two hockey sticks at him, so Ryan broke the hockey sticks in half and added them to the trash pile, which is when the man began “wailing” on Ryan. When the police responded to a passerby who called 911, they allegedly accused RYAN of stealing the man’s personal belongings.”

Authorities charged Ryan with disorderly conduct, the one-size-fits-all excuse to arrest anyone at any time for any reason. According to NBC Montana:

“Ryan Tollefson said police arrested him after he defended himself when a homeless person attacked him. The man accused Tollefson of taking away his possessions.”

Ryan elaborates:

“This incident happened a week and a half later [than the chain lock incident] at the same spot. A different guy was pushing me around at first so I called the police because he was pushing me. He got upset and they warned him about putting his hands on people. And right after they left, that’s when he threw a hockey stick at me. I broke the hockey stick and that antagonized him. So he started punching me in the face. And then a passer-by called 911 and the police came back. They arrested him for assault and they arrested me for disorderly conduct. But they didn’t have to arrest anyone.”

Three weeks after Tollefson’s arrest, internationally-recognized “firebrand” journalist Travis Mateer conducted his annual cleanup with a crew of volunteers on 08 April 2024. Within a week of this effort, Mateer also was arrested and detained in the Missoula County Detention Center.

In effect, it appears these individuals were cited and arrested for picking up garbage.

Meanwhile the individuals doing the littering are shielded from prosecution because they’re protected by the law. So-called “involuntary homeless” individuals can litter the river, cause a scene and assault citizens with impunity. But if anyone tries to do anything about the trolls living under the bridge, the authorities throw them in the clink.

As someone who oversaw homeless outreach for the Poverello Center from 2008-2016, Travis Mateer sees Ryan’s arrest as symptomatic of a notable deterioration in substantive outreach by relevant authorities:

“If I was still coordinating the Homeless Outreach Program–a program I grew from its infancy in 2010 to a well-respected part of the service delivery system when I left in 2016–this incident with Ryan Tollefson would NEVER have happened.”

Speaking of things that would never have happened, that gaping hole in the burrows beneath Broadway that MDT repaired was only discovered because Tollefson excavated the mountain of trash piled in front of it.

Ryan began his work across the street from the Yoke’s grocery on Broadway. “That’s where I was concentrating my clean up efforts because that’s where it’s the worst,” he said. In the process of excavating this area, he discovered the hidey-hole.

“I found that. [Authorities] didn’t even know that was there until I started cleaning up. … all I was doing was putting the garbage on the sidewalk. And I took such a huge amount of trash out of the river when they came to clean it up, they saw that the hole was there. All the garbage was all around that and was covering it up before I removed it.”

The burrows below Broadway were so badly damaged by the illegal settlements that Montana taxpayers paid upwards of $20,000 for the repair:

“When NBC Montana started reporting on trash cleanups in the West Broadway Street area, we learned about holes dug into the bank of the Clark Fork River. After removing some of the retaining wall, individuals dug underneath the sidewalk, creating nooks for belongings.”

Whether anyone will be charged for the damage remains to be seen. Ryan reflected on whether the people on the beach committing offenses are breaking the law or not.

“No, they’re not. They’re protected somehow. And these guys are just running the streets, stealing, building houses on the river, and throwing needles everywhere. These people aren’t even getting a misdemeanor. And I understand that the court system is flooded and the prison is flooded. I don’t see any point in locking anybody who is addicted to substances up because there is a better way around addiction.

“I said [to police], ‘Why aren’t you guys doing anything about the needles on the ground?’ I mean, if you were investigating a crime that I had supposedly committed and there were syringes all around my feet, would you or would you not assume those were my syringes? And wouldn’t you want to search my person to see if I have drugs on me? You have probable cause to search any one of these people that have syringes within their reach and you don’t do it. You have all the time to encourage them to go to the shelters and places where they can get help, and you’re not doing that either. You guys are sitting in your cars, driving around, doing nothing’.

“When I called the police about the lock and chain incident it took them 25 minutes to respond to the scene, and they drove by three times without stopping. And I was so sick of them driving by without stopping I finally flagged down a Sheriff who was driving by. And then a city police officer called me five minutes later and was like, ‘Where are you at?’

“Instead of helping the issue, instead of helping to solve the problem, they’re going to ticket me for cleaning?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, you’re breaking the law’.”

This isn’t the first time that a citizen has ignored institutional limitations and taken the responsibility for cleaning up the riverfront onto their own shoulders. Last year a group of volunteers directed by Travis Mateer launched the 2023 Earth Day Meth-Den clean-up and successfully removed nearly 3 metric tons of garbage from a segment of riverfront by the Missoula College at great personal cost to its organizer. Mateer spent $1,200 of his own money to ultimately be ignored by the City and local media. A fellow journalist from the Missoula Current purportedly covered the event only to have the story axed by her boss, Martin “Gomer” Kidston. Mateer has a long history of assisting such clean ups.

Tavis Mateer gives the thumbs-up following the successful liquidation of the Meth-Den in 2023. Above: before and after pictures of said beachfront Meth-Den.

The 2023 Meth-Den clean-up yielded literally thousands of glass test tubes along the riverbank. It seems ironic that summertime river floaters are constantly reminded to make sure they never ever bring glass onto the water lest they be cited by law enforcement for potentially littering the shorelines with dangerous shards of fractured glass.

If you have an address and a life and things to lose, the authorities can threaten you with fines and court as a means of controlling your behavior. But the vagrants living on the riverbank don’t have anything left to lose so fines and court won’t do much to change the situation.

So what will? And who’s responsible?

A JURISDICTIONAL JIGSAW PUZZLE

Many local Missoulians have become outraged in recent years at the accelerated deterioration of their community. Permanent residents who pay taxes to the City and County and State are rightfully beginning to wonder why no organization or agency of government can coherently name who is responsible for maintaining cleanliness and order along the riverbank. As it turns out, determining who bears responsibility depends on which part of the riverbank we’re talking about.

All land below the low water mark along the riverbank seems to be managed exclusively by the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) as corroborated by this 2020 DNRC announcement:

“Based on historical evidence the Bitterroot River is commercially navigable from the mouth of Jenning’s Camp Creek on the east fork (SW1/4, Sec.27, T2N, R18W) to its confluence with the Clark Fork River. Therefore, the state claims ownership of the riverbed below the low water mark between these two points. … DNRC has no jurisdiction above the low water mark.”

Meanwhile, the land above the low water mark along the riverbank is managed by a plurality of agencies and offices including (but not limited to) the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT), US Army Corps of Engineers, Conservation District, Floodplain Administrator, and others. Depending on which segment of Missoula’s riverfront jigsaw-puzzle we’re talking about, the jurisdictional finger-pointing can also regard lands owned by the US Forest Service, the University of Montana, as well as Fish Wildlife and Parks (FWP). For example:

“The two major camps – off the Kim Williams Trail and under the Reserve Street Bridge – are on U.S. Forest Service and Montana Department of Transportation ground, respectively.”

Meanwhile, the West Broadway Island is operated exclusively by Missoula Parks And Recreation, who’ve closed it for reasons of “vegetation management.” It certainly is true that vegetation has a hard time competing with propane explosions.

Riverfront jurisdictions carve their way through a gauntlet of boundaries and the resulting confusion allows for selective enforcement of the law. Some of these agencies belong to the City of Missoula, some represent Missoula County, and still others are managed by the State of Montana. That’s a lot to juggle, and we haven’t even covered the relevant Federal jurisdiction that’s thrown a wrench into this already byzantine structure.

MDT was placed between a rock and a hard place in 2020 when they faced steep fines from the Missoula City-County Health Department for the human waste ending up in the river as a result of unchecked illegal camping settlements under the Reserve Street Bridge. There were also serious concerns of rampant fires that threatened to close said bridge and necessitate detouring Highway 93 through the heart of Missoula.

Under the constraints of a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision known as Martin v Boise, MDT couldn’t legally move the encampments without an answer to the question of “Where do they go?” So the now infamous Authorized Camping Site experiment was created as a temporary landing platform in January 2022. MDT spent more than $163,000 on a chain-link perimeter fence to deter future settlements. This fence was soon thereafter cut and penetrated by persistent individuals. So in mid-April of 2022, MDT sought a court order to begin a formal eviction process of the remaining encampments under the bridge.

According to the complaint:

“At its peak, approximately one hundred and forty individuals resided on the Property in tents and temporary structures built with scavenged materials.”

Following a summer where literally dozens of fires ran ablaze below the Reserve Street Bridge, the area was cleared of illegal camps in 2022 and remains mostly clear to this day. MDT Maintenance Chief Steve Felix was happy to report that the site formerly home to more than 100 “urban campers” remains largely empty following the eviction.

Felix’s name comes up whenever repairs are necessary due to illegal settlements that threaten to destroy the highway infrastructure flowing through Missoula, as was the case with the 2022 Reserve Street Camps eviction:

“The fires, propane tanks, and other heaters present in the encampment also posed a risk of significantly damaging the integrity of the Reserve Street Bridge, a vital aspect of Missoula’s public infrastructure. The fires have already caused damage to the Reserve Street Bridge in the form of concrete delamination. … “The only way to abate the ongoing health and safety hazards and threatened damage to public infrastructure is to remove Defendants and their personal belongings from the Property.”

EARTH DAY SCHMEARTH DAY

Government is not capable of solving our problems, as more people are beginning to realize. The riverfront got cleaned up in spite of the City government’s attempts to keep it contaminated. As Mateer attests:

“I can coordinate a safer, cheaper, more efficient cleanup than ANY individual or entity in this town, and if you doubt me, just scroll through the 20+ links featured in yesterday’s post if you want proof about how kick-ass I am.”

Regardless of what any individual or organization might claim about the complexity of managing this ongoing zombie apocalypse transpiring in our streets, it’s obvious to everyone that the problem is growing worse, and government’s solutions are haphazard at best. Activists are exhausted and community clean-up efforts become more difficult to organize when everyone is struggling financially.

Institutions can never solve our problems. They are an impediment to change. The moment they are formed their existence hinges on fooling us into believing we could never live without them.

You don’t need your city officials and you don’t need your government. Your government needs you. No matter how the corporate forces might try to twist “the consent of the governed” into some kind of religious obligation to the state, the power ultimately lies in the hands of We The People no matter how many of us have fallen asleep at the wheel. Public servants exist at the pleasure of the electorate. They’re not our overlords and we’re not their subjects. They’re employees of the public trust.

The inhabitants of New Hellgate Village aren’t bad people. Most of them are a bit rough because they have to be to survive in difficult circumstances. The city’s riverfront was not meant to house tent dwellings, and our society did not have to choose the cruelty of publicly ignoring such profound human suffering on such a massive scale. The City of “Missoula has spent roughly $138,000 on ‘urban camping’ cleanups” in the past year with no end in sight. Will Mayor Davis’ Urban Camping Working Group task force yield competent solutions or prove to be one more instance of institutional cruelty? If Engen’s 10-Year-Plan-To-End-Homelessness is any indication, the answer won’t feel encouraging.

It’s no secret that our miserable status quo actually benefits some people and organizations. Hence the business that is the Homeless-Industrial-Complex and its cousin the NonProfit-Industrial Complex. The people and organizations who profit from the lethal misery in our streets tend to expand the powers of government to benefit authoritarian cronies. These parasites don’t want to problem to be solved because it would end the disaster-capitalism gravy-train.

Tucker Carlson elaborated this point last week on the Joe Rogan Podcast:

“There’s an entire sector of the economy now that feeds off of human misery. The drug treatment centers that don’t work, the homeless advocates who create more homeless migrant workers, American-born aid agencies, … the arms manufactures that help kill people in foreign countries; people are making money off of this.”

Those who profit from industries related to homelessness are keenly aware of how the optics of what they do could work against them. As a result, a tremendous amount of effort has gone into maintaining public ignorance.

County Commissioner Emails recovered during a FOIA request revealed a conspiracy of silence in 2021. According to Mackenzie Smith, the Emails are evidence that Missoula County officials have deliberately kept constituents in the dark regarding “collaborations” with the private nonprofits who consistently profit from the homelessness crisis:

Emails released in a Freedom of Information Act request appear to show Missoula County commissioners using private partnerships to advance their projects in an effort to intentionally keep plans out of public view.

“We asked United Way to start convening to try to tackle this issue outside the public/media eye,” wrote Commissioners’ Office Chief Administrative Officer Chris Lounsbury to the three Missoula County commissioners in a March 27 email.

“We definitely want to structure this in a way to avoid media parachuting in and derailing productive staff conversations,” replied District 2 Commissioner David Strohmaier.

“The commissioners’ emails regarding the TSOS are riddled with this type of language and blatant desire to conceal their actions from the public and media. And with the aid of United Way of Missoula County, it appears they are able to do it.“

Nonprofits like United Way alongside private sector partners like Blue Line Development (owners of the real estate beneath the Transitional Safe Outdoor Space) work with governments to profit from the disaster while their government counterparts flasely claim their hands are tied. None of the companies or individuals want the causes and conditions of the disaster to be addressed because that would end their gravy train. It would seem community outreach has become co-opted by corporate forces.

HOMELESSNESS IS NOT THE ISSUE HERE, DUDE!

While homeless Americans freeze in the makeshift dwellings of illegal “urban camps,” 15.1 million empty houses remain unoccupied at the behest of their owners, primarily BlackRock. If the answer to homelessness is “housing” – as United Way Executive Director Susan Hay Patrick contends – then why can’t “the richest country in the world” free up some of the 15.1 million empty homes that Wall Street continues sitting on?

There’s no doubt that Missoula’s homeless catastrophe pales in comparison to that of San Fransisco, Portland or Seattle. It is, however, representative of the same institutional indifference toward human suffering that the 9th Circuit has apparently mandated for Western States. The common excuse that “it’s not that bad here” seems quite obtuse when considering that San Fransisco didn’t burn in a day. There were incremental steps that led formerly great cities down this skid-row abyss, such as their deliberate indifference toward theft, vandalism, arson, assault and murder.

As the former homeless outreach coordinator for Montana’s largest homeless shelter, Travis Mateer knows the difference better than most between the legit local homeless population and the harmful criminal elements taking advantage of services meant for said locals:

“I’m including the deteriorating situation in San Francisco in today’s report because of my concern that fear will lead our own community to degrade our ability to make distinctions between houseless people who are dangerous and need to be held accountable, and houseless people who are NOT dangerous, and face just as much risk, if not more, from the dangerous people riding the carousel between the jail, the hospital, and the streets.”

While it’s true that society cannot ethically outlaw homelessness or addiction or mental illness, many of the most violent incidents that occur in Missoula (and require taxpayer-funded services) are perpetrated by drifters, not locals. Peaceful people who’ve fallen on tough times cannot depend on our shelters because criminal gangs have taken them over:

“[R]esidents of this camp don’t feel safe staying at the Poverello Center. Incidents of sexual assault and violence INSIDE THE [Poverello Center] is confirmation of those claims that some people feel safer living outside than they do in an overcrowded shelter where active drug and alcohol use has led to some very bad outcomes.”

It has also become an observable reality that local homeless individuals differ significantly from their transplant counterparts. In 2014 the Missoulian reported that transient Gilbert “Jack” Berry “was brutally beaten, tortured and killed by several non-local transients”:

“[Missoula Police Officer Andy] Roy, who is the city’s main bicycle police officer, primarily deals with the homeless and transient population. He said there’s a big difference between the local transient population and the newcomers. The locals heed his warnings and abide by city ordinances, for the most part. But when he approaches the new transients, Roy said he’s consistently met with a “lousy” attitude.”

We shouldn’t welcome everyone because some people are criminals and bending over backwards to provide them services will result in increased exploitation of said services. If too many people overwhelm the life boat, it sinks. As Mateer explained in 2020:

“The majority of humans across the socio-economic spectrum are not bad, violent people. But some are, and Missoula residents shouldn’t be shamed for worrying about that fact. Do I need to remind readers that a sweet, old man by the name of Lee Nelson had his skull bashed in last month because he and the monster who senselessly murdered him were both staying at the Poverello Center? … So yes, I understand the concern about “who our new neighbors are”, but I also understand how the illuminated braintrust operates, and they will hide behind their homeless-people-guilt-shields all day long if critics wade into this area of criticism without the constructive focus on policy.”

Nobody can assert for sure where any of these people are from, and it only takes one psychopath to keep a whole town busy. Train hoppers and seasonal vagrants aren’t from here, but they’ll gladly exploit any services offered by enablers practicing “fool’s compassion”.

Enforcing the law with regards to murder, assault, battery, vandalism, and theft cannot be conflated with “outlawing homelessness”. Regardless of who owns the land beneath New Hellgate Village, criminal activity within the City Limits is the City’s prerogative, and therefore ultimately the Mayor’s responsibility. The highest overlap of jurisdictions occur within the City Limits. In the past Missoula County Commissioners have proclaimed a state of emergency regarding hazardous waste entering the Clark Fork River. But if criminal activity occurs on the riverfront and someone calls the DNRC or MDT, they will tell the caller to dial 911 and report it to City law enforcement.

Andrea Davis can choose to do something about the crime in the streets or she can continue to serve the interests of global elites. Given that she received her training in the “proper” management of her community at Harvard at the start of her term alongside 26 other freshmen Mayors from around the country, she may likely favor the latter.

The Clark Fork Coalition holds an annual Earth Day cleanup that is undoubtedly commendable. But every year the camps consistently reappear the very next day. The task couldn’t be more Sisyphean and locals have taken notice.

In 2021 volunteer efforts successfully removed more than 15 tons of trash from the Missoula riverfront. In 2022 volunteers collected more than 67 tons of trash. Locals are worried the problem is growing worse and believe that people of means and ability can and should do something about it.

On 26 April 2023, duly-unelected interim-mayor Jordan Hess told Missoulians to donate to charity if they want to see these problems solved, because the City apparently lacks the funds to do its job:

“First of all, uh, we, we suffer from a shortage of resources to address these issues. Uh, members of the public can make a meaningful difference by donating to organizations that work in this space, um, such as the Poverello Center or other organizations that help such as Hope Rescue Mission.”

Did you get that, Missoula? As the City of Missoula wastes money on mountains and hotels, Jordan Hess thinks overburdened taxpayers should donate even more money they don’t have to solve these problems.

But the favorite excuse of Missoula “leaders” whenever the abomination of our public spaces are brought to their attention revolves around the now infamous 9th Circuit ruling on Martin v Boise. This is how Hess framed the limitations imposed by the Martin ruling:

“Municipalities cannot criminalize homelessness, uh, nor can we ticket nor arrest or remove people who are camping in public places because there are no shelter beds, um, because there are no shelter beds for them. So since we don’t have, uh, shelter beds we cannot remove, uh, someone from an encampment, um, in a public space.”

He goes on to deputize the public and further eschew any institutional responsibility:

“We’re asking the public to visit the City website and to follow the information on the homepage, uh, to learn how to report, uh, situations that involve threats to help their safety. People need to understand that if we investigate and we don’t find threats, we cannot ask the campers to leave. Uh, nor will we. …

“We receive dozens of complaints each day and we lack the finances and the staff to get to every situation. Years of cuts at the State level and at the Federal level, uh, but especially at the State level, to mental health services and a lack of support at the Federal level, have put us and other communities in a really untenable position where we’re dealing with these issues as best we can.

Mateer jumps to the observable punchline:

“Ok, so is there anything our hamstrung leaders CAN do? Yes, they can blame the state, which they always do. And they can beg the public to give more money to enablers, like my former employer, the Poverello Center. …

“Are we, as a community, going to be held hostage by these petulant tax addicts who can’t achieve their transformative utopia without squeezing every spare penny from taxpayers while complaining all the way to the bank that it’s never enough when evidence of their failure becomes too obvious for the narrative controllers to hide?”

Travis Mateer operates his bullhorn during a post clean-up poetry reading.

Problems that remain perpetually unsolved tend to be profitable for lazy bureaucrats with an inflated feeling of importance. So, we’re told over and over that there either just isn’t enough money to do what needs to be done or sent on a jurisdictional wild-goose chase.

The onus here is not on citizens. Wall Street has hoarded all of the real estate, the economy is in the dumps, people are desperate, our politics are corrupt and our infrastructure is crumbling. This isn’t about solving the problems exacerbated by those who profit from them. Standards of living have fallen nationwide and supposedly “compassionate” communities have overwhelmingly chosen to ignore the ongoing humanitarian disaster. This is simply about survival.

Missoulians already pay taxes to a City government hell-bent on wasting them. The City of Missoula takes in hundreds of millions of dollars, always needs a little more, and can never complete basic objectives—like fixing roads—with what it has. So the Fire Department has to ask the citizens if they’d like to pay more taxes through a special levy that can’t be robbed by City bureaucrats who’ve depleted the tax base from the General Fund toward projects that gentrify the community, driving up housing costs, driving out locals, and starving municipal services.

Due to the fact that government officials seem reticent to accept uniform responsibility for the abortion that our rivers and streams have become, the work of cleaning them up has fallen on community activists and other people who are tired of watching their community rot before their eyes.

Travis and Ryan have both illustrated their unconditional and uncompromising love for the Missoula Valley. If more locals participated in the management of their communities perhaps we wouldn’t have to outsource said management to disconnected bureaucrats.

In the face of all the adversity he’s experienced, Ryan remains committed to restoring Missoula’s riverfront:

“I’m just trying to be a better person and give back to the city, because I love Missoula so much. It’s my home town. I was born here 43 years ago and I love this place so much. And I just can’t stand to see what it’s becoming.”

“It seems like the whole Pacific Northwest is becoming like this, except for Idaho. I don’t know what Idaho does to keep their state so clean. But everywhere else there’s homeless people and fentanyl and meth. It’s crazy.”

Imperial Hypocrisy: NATO And The Neo-Nazis Are The Aggressors In Ukraine, Not Putin

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It’s been exactly ten years since the American-backed coup d’état that overthrew democratically elected president Yanukovich in Ukraine on 23 February 2014. After the decade of civil war that followed, many Americans still don’t know why Russia “invaded” Ukraine’s eastern border. Most of us have never heard of the Donbass or the neo-Nazi Azov Battaltion responsible for the horrific war crimes that took place there. Indeed, most Americans have no idea where the endless billions in military aid for Ukraine have gone.

Nineteenth century author and journalist Ambrose Bierce famously stated that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” It seems ironic that this statement remains true in the age of the internet, but corporate media’s monopoly of the airwaves has rendered Americans dangerously misinformed about Ukraine, as well as the nature of international conflicts generally.

We’re repeatedly told Ukraine is a “democracy” by the corporate media. But the fact remains that the Ukraine’s quasi-fascist government has outlawed opposition political parties, closed down the news agencies and thrown all the religious leaders in prison.

In March 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy nationalized and consolidated television news and began officially suppressing all 11 of Ukraine’s opposition political parties. Under Ukraine’s modern government, orthodox Christians are officially outlawed and honest journalists are targeted for assassination (including those living in the United States):

“Journalists in Ukraine are threatened, jailed, or worse. Journalists inside and outside Ukraine are listed on a website which for all intents and purposes amounts to a murder for hire list. The website, called Myrotvorets or Peacekeeper, was started by Ukraine’s Information Ministry in 2015. It serves as a clearinghouse to showcase undesirables and has targeted people for assassination.”

American journalist Gonzalo Lira died in a Ukrainian jail cell in January of 2024 following months of gruesome torture, beatings and sleep deprivation at the hands of Ukrainian security forces. He was arrested in 2022 for posting videos critical of Ukrainian policy that the Ukrainian government twisted into “justifying Putin’s invasion.” Lira was arrested again on 01 May 2023 and held without release. Washington implicitly allowed Lira’s incarceration to continue unabated until his death.

Stating the facts should never assume the waving of pom-poms for either side in any ongoing conflict. Having said that, it is not an ingratiation of Putin or his policies to observe the obvious with regards to the civil war in eastern Ukraine.

The eastern corner of Ukraine geographically known as the Donbass is the home of the three “breakaway territories” that declared independence following the 2014 Maidan coup. Ukraine was already ideologically divided between the northwest and southeast regions, with the former moving toward European integration and the latter toward Russia. In eastern Ukraine, citizens of the Donbass weren’t happy about Washington’s overthrow of their democratically elected government. Over 10,000 people attended a rally in Donetsk’s Lenin Square in eastern Ukraine on March 1, 2014 to demonstrate their stance with Russia and against Kiev.

As reported by former Marine Intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter:

“Over the course of five days, from February 18 to 23, 2014, neo-Nazi provocateurs from the Svoboda (All Ukrainian Union ‘Freedom’) Party and the Right Sector, a coalition of far-right Ukrainian nationalists … engaged in targeted violence against the government of President Viktor Yanukovich. It was designed to remove him from power and replace him with a new, US-backed government. They were successful; Yanukovich fled to Russia on February 23, 2014.

“Soon thereafter, the predominantly Russian-speaking population of Crimea undertook actions to separate from the new Ukrainian nationalist government in Kiev. On March 16, 2014, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, both of which at that time were legally considered to be part of Ukraine, held a referendum on whether to join Russia or remain part of Ukraine. Over 97% of the votes cast were in favor of joining Russia. Five days later, on March 21, Crimea formally became part of the Russian Federation.”

Washington immediately claimed Crimea’s referendum was unconstitutional. At the same time, the Ukrainian government reacted by cutting off Crimea’s electricity and damming Crimea’s agricultural fresh water sources. As Scott Ritter explains, “The damming of the North Crimean Canal and the destruction of the electrical transmission lines were simply the radical expression of the indifference shown by Kiev.”

After Crimea seceded from Ukraine, millions of ethnic Russians in two eastern territories also refused to cooperate with Washington’s new puppet government and followed Crimea in declaring independence from Kiev. On 07 April 2014, separatist Russians of the Donbass formed the Lugansk & Donetsk People’s Republics (LPR & DPR) which were both formally recognized by Russia. The breakaway republics ratified an agreement entitled, ‘Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Russian Federation’, which began military and financial cooperation with Moscow.

Kiev responded to the secession by declaring war on the Donbass. Civilians living in the breakaway territories in-turn endured astonishing violence provoked by Ukraine’s military forces:

“The “Anti-Terrorist Operation” in southeast Ukraine was launched on April 14, 2014, by an order issued by Oleksandr Turchynov, the acting president of Ukraine. Those Donbass citizens who refused to recognize the coup d’etat were labeled “enemies” and “terrorists.” The horrific Odessa Trade Unions House massacre happened on May 2, 2014; about fifty individuals were burned alive and bludgeoned to death. On May 9, 2014, participants in the Victory Day Parade in Mariupol were slain and subjected to persecution by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and the military. Additionally, the Ukrainian regime began bombarding Donbass.”

Following the 2014 coup, Russians were increasingly targeted with violence throughout Ukraine:

“First, there were attempts at arresting them [ethnic Russians] using the police, but the police defected to their side quite quickly. Then the central authorities started to use Special Forces and in the night, people were snatched and taken to prison. Certainly, people in Donbass, after that, they took up arms. Ukraine’s government started to use weapons directly – tanks and even military aircraft. There were strikes from multiple rocket launchers against residential neighborhoods. … Russia repeatedly appealed to this new leadership asking them to abstain from extreme actions. However, the civil conflict only grew worse with thousands of people killed in some of the worst violence that Europe has seen since World War II. … When Stone asked about the “annexation,” Putin responded: “We were not the ones to annex Crimea. The citizens of Crimea decided to join Russia.”

In October 2023, Ukraine’s Sviatoshyn District Court ruled:

“Along with Maidan leaders, and Western-backed fascist paramilitary Right Sector, the snipers were also implicated in the May 2014 Odessa massacre, a gruesome incident in which scores of Russian-speaking anti-Maidan protesters were forcibly herded into the city’s Trade Unions House, which was then set alight. In all, 46 died due to burn injuries, carbon monoxide poisoning, and attempts to escape the horrors by jumping out of windows. Non-fatal casualties reportedly totaled around 200. … All these developments paved a path to the eight-year-long civil war in Donbas, which claimed the lives of over 14,000 and precipitated Russia’s invasion in February 2022. ”

Russia responded to Ukrainian war crimes by deploying military resources to protect the civilians of the breakaway republics. Since the Donbass is overwhelmingly inhabited by ethnic Russians, Putin felt great pressure to defend them and put an end to the civilian bloodshed. Putin has stated on numerous occasions that Russia didn’t cross Ukraine’s border to start a war, but to end one.

This brings us to the question of whether Russia’s military action constitutes an “invasion” or not. Russian military forces never approached the capital city of Kiev because doing so would have triggered an automatic response from NATO amounting to a no-win situation for Russia. Even the establishment Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft publicly admitted this fact:

“A Russian seizure of the whole of Ukraine, as imagined by Washington, seems inherently unlikely. An occupation of Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine is much more plausible. … This would fall far short of invasion. It would mark only a limited escalation in the conflict that has been going on in the Donbas since 2014.”

It’s an open secret that Ukraine is managed in no small part by a neo-Nazi government. In a piece called “The Ukraine Mess That Nuland Made,” Robert Parry writes, “the new regime in Kiev was permeated by and dependent on neo-Nazi fighters and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who wanted a pure-blood Ukraine, without ethnic Russians”. A great deal of Ukraine is overtly run by Pravy Sektor:

“The political formation is known as “Pravy Sektor” (Right Sector), which is essentially an umbrella organization for a number of ultra-nationalist right wing groups including supporters of the “Svoboda” (Freedom) Party, “Patriots of Ukraine”, “Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self Defense” (UNA-UNSO), and “Trizub”. All of these organizations share a common ideology that is vehemently anti-Russian, anti-immigrant, and anti-Jewish among other things. In addition they share a common reverence for the so called “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” led by Stepan Bandera, the infamous Nazi collaborators who actively fought against the Soviet Union and engaged in some of the worst atrocities committed by any side in World War II.”

Svoboda is not just a neo-Nazi political party, it’s Ukraine’s fourth largest party and its members have held major Cabinet positions in Ukraine’s government. This unholy alliance caused a rather awkward moment at the United Nations in December of 2020:

“In December, the United States and Ukraine were the only two nations to vote against a United Nations measure (passed 130-2), “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance.”

The United States can’t stand against Nazism because it installed a neo-Nazi government in Ukraine ten years ago:

“[…]the two main neo-Nazi entities have been entrusted with key positions which grant them de facto control over the armed forces, police and national security. … members of Svoboda and the Right Sector occupy key positions in the areas of defense, law enforcement, education and economic affairs.”

In 2015 The Daily Beast also weighed in on the question of how many neo-Nazis the U.S. was backing in Ukraine, admitting that “The U.S. government is knowingly training and arming neo-Nazi Ukrainian ultranationalist paramilitary members in broad daylight in an unstable country with an unclear future.” While Svoboda may have lost a few chairs in parliament since 2014, Ukraine’s trend towards Nazism continues under Zelenskyy’s administration. In fact, it was Zelenksyy’s visit to Canada that prompted the notorious Yaroslav Hunka scandal.

Canadian parliament’s standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, the elderly Ukranian who fought in Hitler’s Third Reich for the SS, was neither a fluke nor mistake. Hunka was announced in the Canadian parliament as someone who had “fought against the Russians” without a shred of irony. It’s as if Canadian schooling has become so lethargic that their citizens forgot that America and Russia were allies against Hitler, or that Russia lost more than 20 million citizens fighting the Third Reich.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dismissed the parliamentary applause of Hunka as “Russian disinformation.” Nevertheless, Anthony Rota who had introduced Hunka as a man who had “fought against the Russians in World War Two,” stepped down as Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons soon thereafter.

What seems particularly ironic is western media’s constant portrayal of Putin as “the next Hitler” while Russia defends the Donbass from literal Nazis. If Hitler remains the quintessential symbol of evil for the west, how can American tax dollars finance literal neo-Nazi regimes in Ukraine?

Acute students of history are less surprised by Washington’s support of literal Nazis. Beyond the auspices of Project Paperclip which sought to recruit the Third Reich’s top people (like Wernher von Braun) before the Russians could, the American Military-Industrial-Complex has a long established history of arming terrorists in countries it wants to overthrow. John McCain’s meeting with Svoboda neo-Nazis in the lead up to the 2014 coup differed little from his meetings with Isis in Syria. The motivating factors that propel Washington into these unsavory partnerships go deep.

The Central Intelligence Agency has spent the past ten years waging a “shadow war” against Russia, building more than 12 underground command centers along the Ukraine/Russia border and training an elite Ukrainian commando force known as Unit 2245. The espionage operation yielded such a gold mine of Russian communications that the CIA station in Kiev had trouble keeping up with it. After a decade of denials, Washington finally disclosed the CIA’s Ukraine operations this week in the New York Times:

The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months after Russia’s invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine’s military. There is also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the CIA.

Russophobia has been and continues to be the official rhetoric of the Party in Washington and its obedient mockingbird media. Nancy Pelosi’s desperate attempt to conflate anti-war sentiment with loyalty to a foreign country sounds crazy because it is. Nevertheless, Washington think tanks run by sociopaths like the Atlantic Council use propaganda like this to smear anyone critical of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) or US foreign policy as a “Russian agent.”

Hillary Clinton went out of her way to demonize Tucker Carlson as Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot, even though George Stephanopoulos, Barbara Walters, Charlie Rose, Oliver Stone, Megyn Kelly and many others have successfully interviewed Vladimir Putin without sustaining such accusations or having to overcome similar hurdles. But Carlson’s recent interview contradicts the corporate image of Putin as an unhinged maniac and that’s bad for business as usual in Washington.

Carlson was even the target of a foiled assassination attempt allegedly contracted by Ukrainian intelligence. In a confession tape following his arrest, 36 year-old Vasiliev Alexeieovich told interrogators that he was recruited by Ukrainian Special Services through the internet and instructed to place a bomb in the underground parking lot of Moscow’s Four Season’s Hotel, where Carlson was a guest. After several weeks of training, he was activated on 31 January 2024, the day prior to Carlson’s week-long visit to Russia.

Following the Putin interview, Carlson spoke passionately at the World Government Summit about how Washington deliberately sabotaged any potential for détente between the east and west:

“Russia has been rebuffed by the west. I’m not flacking for Putin. I’m an American. I’m not going to live in Russia. I don’t love Vladimir Putin. I’m stating the facts. He asked Bill Clinton to join NATO … and NATO said, “No, we don’t want you.” … The post war goal of NATO was to keep the Russians – the soviets – from coming into western Europe. It was a bulwark against the Russians. So if the Russians ask to join the alliance that would suggest you have solved the problem and you can move on to do something constructive with your life. But we refused.”

The late American journalist Gonzalo Lira sheds more light on why Washington is so triggered by Vladimir Putin:

“Ukraine, since 1991 – the collapse of the Soviet Union – has been a cesspool of Western corruption. Oligarchs were not only allowed to rise, but were in fact encouraged to rise by the western powers, in particular the United States, because the United States figured that by way of these oligarchs, these countries could be controlled. … But what happened was that slowly over the years, Putin started edging out the oligarchs. And even as he put in his own oligarchs, he started making those oligarchs smaller and weaker, which is what he’s been doing for the past 23 years. Had Putin not existed in Russia, Russia would be what Ukraine is today. Americans started realizing that Putin was subtly resisting them, resisting their attempts to turn Russia into a whore.”

Washington’s strategy to split up Ukraine along ethnic lines traces back at least three decades, when Zbigniew Brzezinski published the west’s plan for Ukraine in his 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard”:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

Noam Chomsky succinctly observed many years ago that the purpose of NATO has been altered away from defense against the Soviets and toward guaranteeing corporate hegemony over worldwide energy markets:

“Why did NATO even exist after 1990? Throughout the whole history of the cold war we were told NATO is necessary to defend western Europe from the Russian hoards. Okay, no more Russian hoards. What happens to NATO? It expands to the east. Its mission changed. Its official mission is not to defend Europe from the Russian hoards, it’s to control the global energy system – sea lanes and pipelines, and to serve as a US-run intervention force. …

“If NATO is there to defend the west from the Russians, why is it now expanding right to the borders of Russia, becoming a global US-intervention force, protecting sea lanes and pipelines and so on? What that tells us is all the talk about the cold war was just a pure lie.”

In violation of promises made following the end of the Soviet Union, NATO has expanded eastward not just once, but five separate times. Consider the trove of declassified documents from the National Security Archives that “show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner.” Again from Mint Press:

“In 1990, the U.S. government promised Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would stray “not one inch eastward” from its current position in exchange for Soviet support for German reunification. However, it later reneged on this promise, and between 1999 and 2004 NATO galloped eastward, even admitting three former Soviet republics, all of which share a land border with Russia. In 2008, NATO also invited Ukraine and Georgia to join.”

In February 2022 US Vice President Kamala Harris urged Zelenskyy to join NATO at the New York Security Conference. Meanwhile, NATO had just turned down Russia’s December 2021 security agreements seeking to secure peace in Europe.

Russia proposed another ceasefire in March 2022, prompting Boris Johnson’s sudden appearance in Ukraine to threaten Zelenskyy with sanctions if he agreed to the peace settlement:

“The Minsk II process for a resolution of the Donbas conflict is now dead — though to be fair, the Ukrainian government had long since made clear that it had no intention of implementing its basic provisions (on autonomy for the Donbas), and the West had made clear that it had no intention of pressuring Ukraine to do so.”

The head of the Ukrainian delegation at the 2022 peace talks in Istanbul, Davyd Arakhamia, confirmed that the Russians “were prepared to end the war if we agreed to – as Finland once did – neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO,” but the US sabotaged the peace deal.

THEIR WARS RELY ON YOUR IGNORANCE

In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych angered the west after turning Ukraine’s back on Europe to renew economic collaborations with Russia. Yanukovych realized the EU’s new association agreement would require Ukraine to bankrupt itself attempting to transition its entire infrastructure to conform to EU standards, and ultimately saw it as a poison pill for his country:

“Nikolai Azarov, Yanukovich’s closest aide and adviser, at the 11th hour calculated that switching to European standards would indebt Ukraine at a scale one had never imagined,” Matyushin said. “The transition envisaged changing everything, starting from sockets to railway tracks, everything had to be rebuilt. [The Yanukovich government] concluded it was unprofitable and refused [to sign the agreement with the EU]. After that, students took to the streets and were dispersed by Berkut on camera, which caused a wave of indignation in Kiev. From that point Euromaidan started to gain momentum.”

When protestors began to congregate in Kiev’s central Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), on November 21, 2013, both John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland immediately flew to Kiev. Paul Craig Roberts reported that the US and EU were paying Ukrainian rioters and protesters in Kiev, reminding readers that, “Nuland is the State Department stooge who got caught red-handed naming the members of the Ukrainian government Washington intends to impose on the Ukrainian people once the paid protesters have unseated the current elected and independent government.” Another key organization in Maidan called CANVAS turned out to be a US-Financed NGO that had helped plan the “carefully-orchestrated” Kiev protests.

At a National Press Club Conference on 10 December 2013 Nuland announced the US had invested $5 Billion in the Ukraine to pay protesters cash to overthrow the government, but peaceful protests hadn’t yet produced results. Five weeks after this meeting Kiev was suddenly gripped with violence.

On 20 February 2014 the infamous Maidan massacre horrified the world with footage of snipers firing upon protesters in Kiev. By the end of the day 94 people lay dead. At the time many Ukrainians were sure former President Victor Yanukovych had ordered the violence.

However, the Ukrainian Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that Yanukovych could not possibly have been responsible for the massacre that preceded his overthrow. On 18 October 2023, the Sviatoshyn District Court made their ruling:

“The evidence “was quite sufficient to conclude categorically that on the morning of February 20, 2014, persons with weapons, from which the shots were fired, were in the premises of the Hotel Ukraina,” the court found. Another section reveals “Hotel Ukraina” was “territory… not controlled by law enforcement agencies at that time.” Numerous video recordings show that before, during, and after the massacre, the building was overrun by the far-right opposition party Svoboda, whose leaders used the premises to coordinate their anti-Yanukovych activities on the streets below.

The “mysterious snipers” of the bloody Maidan massacre remained hidden in the shadows of anonymity until last year, when Covert Action Magazine exposed the American paratrooper who led the sniper teams that day:

“One of the great mysteries surrounding the Maidan coup and the civil war which has followed is how the rabble of soccer hooligans and neo-Nazis who orchestrated the coup were able to become an army capable of subjugating the nation so quickly. … As it turns out, they had a good teacher: an American paratrooper by the name of Brian Boyenger.

“In early 2014, the ongoing Maidan coup reached a stalemate. Time and bitter cold had driven many of the protesters on both sides back to their homes and the revolution was facing the very real danger of simply fizzling out. To prevent this, Mamulashvili needed a spark of violence to light the fire of revolution. He hatched an audacious plan to fire on the crowds and blame the attacks on the Yanukovych government. His point man for the plan was the U.S. Army-trained sniper, Brian Boyenger. On February 20, 2014, snipers, allegedly under the direct command of Boyenger, opened fire on the crowds from the Maidan-occupied Kyiv Philharmonic building, killing dozens of both police and protesters. The plan worked, and the sniper attacks were the pivotal moment that gave the Maidan the momentum to finally depose the democratically elected Yanukovych government.”

Robert Parry corroborates Nuland’s pivotal role in the 2014 overthrow:

“For her part, Nuland passed out cookies to anti-Yanukovych demonstrators at the Maidan square, reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the US had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” declared “fuck the EU” for its less aggressive approach, and discussed with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who the new leaders of Ukraine should be. “Yats is the guy,” she said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

“Nuland saw her big chance on Feb. 20, 2014, when a mysterious sniper – apparently firing from a building controlled by the Right Sektor – shot and killed both police and protesters, escalating the crisis. On Feb. 21, in a desperate bid to avert more violence, Yanukovych agreed to a European-guaranteed plan in which he accepted reduced powers and called for early elections so he could be voted out of office. But that wasn’t enough for the anti-Yanukovych forces who – led by Right Sektor and neo-Nazi militias – overran government buildings on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives. … Instead of trying to salvage the Feb. 21 agreement, Nuland and European officials arranged for an unconstitutional procedure to strip Yanukovych of the presidency and declared the new regime “legitimate.” Nuland’s “guy” – Yatsenyuk – became prime minister.”

Victoria Nuland hands out cookies to Maidan protesters in 2014

Ukraine’s democratically elected government was usurped by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Wall Street-supported puppet prime minister who put the country into debt by negotiating loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Yatsenyuk’s interim government transitioned to one run by billionaire oligarch Petro Pereshenko, the fifth president of Ukraine, who served from June of 2014 to May of 2019. Poroshenko pushed Russian separatist forces into the Donbass region and ignored the Minsk Agreements Ukraine had agreed to.

Before his death, Gonzalo Lira indicated that Victoria Nuland is Ukraine’s shadow president overseeing continuity of government between administrations:

“These Ukrainian extremists, they hate ethnic Russians and that fits very neatly with Nuland. She’s always allied herself with people who hate Russians. When the Maidan revolution started, she supported the Right Sector. She micromanaged the Maidan revolution and that implicated her. When Poroshenko came to power –the next president– she made sure that that government abused the Russians. And of course, she made sure that the Ukrainian army started getting seriously supplied with weapons and she used that Ukrainian army and she micromanaged this to attack the Donbass. You have to understand that, in a very real sense, Victoria Nuland has been president of Ukraine since 2014. And so the weapons flowed into Ukraine starting in 2014 after the coup d’état.”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Ukraine’s sixth president and by far the most obedient of the west’s puppet figureheads. With no political record (aside from playing the president on a West Wing style TV show), Volodymyr Zelenskyy succeeded incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in a 73% landslide vote in April of 2019. Zelenskyy was depicted as an anti-establishment political outsider, but his backing by Ukrainian billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky revealed his administration would return Ukraine to a familiar state of “corruption as usual”.

In fact, Zelenskyy’s election was ultimately deemed illegitimate by the international community:

“[…] to put it concisely, the 2019 Ukrainian election did not meet international standards. While legal according to Ukrainian law, the 2019 election and processes are illegitimate by ODIHR, Council of Europe, PACE, and OSCE standards and practices.”

Ukraine’s status as the “most corrupt country in Europe” is not a newly minted smear campaign, but a long understood historical fact that has never changed. Case in point, several billion dollars extracted from United States taxpayers has financed Ukrainian oligarchs and their luxury “superyacht lifestyles” in Monaco. Similarly many Americans have never heard about (or remain in denial of) Hunter Biden’s scandalous relationship with Ukraine’s biggest gas company, Burisma Holdings.

Last summer, Kanekoa News reported on Hunter Biden’s Maltese Bank Account Opened by Burisma amid “FBI allegations of $10 Million bribe.” The same Maltese bank was shut down altogether in 2018 for violating money laundering laws. And when Ukraine’s top prosecutor began looking into Hunter’s dealings, daddy Joe Biden claims he gave President Poroshenko six hours to fire the prosecutor or let the country go bankrupt:

“At the heart of the matter is Biden’s role in threatening Ukraine if they didn’t immediately fire their top prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin – who was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into a natural gas firm – Burisma Holdings – which Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors. Biden openly bragged about this at a January CFR event.

“In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.”

–The Hill

Europe’s energy relationships have motivated the west to meddle in Ukraine’s affairs perhaps more than any other single factor. That’s part of the reason why the Biden Administration targeted the Nord Stream energy pipelines that delivered cheap Russian gas to Germany. Mike Whitney of the Ron Paul Institute writes:

“Washington sees the [Nord Stream II] pipeline as a threat to its primacy in Europe and has tried to sabotage the project at every turn. … They don’t want Germany to become more dependent on Russian gas because commerce builds trust and trust leads to the expansion of trade. … In a world where Germany and Russia are friends and trading partners, there is no need for US military bases, no need for expensive US-made weapons and missile systems, and no need for NATO. Ukraine is Washington’s ‘weapon of choice’ for torpedoing Nord Stream and putting a wedge between Germany and Russia.”

During a White House press conference in 2022, Biden stated emphatically that, “If Russia invades … there will no longer [be] a Nord Stream Two. We will bring an end to it. … I promise you. We’ll be able to do it.”

Nuland, who now serves as Biden’s Under Secretary for Political Affairs, said the same thing:

“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream Two will not move forward.”

Within months of these ominous promises the Nord Stream pipelines were covertly sabotaged as part of NATO’s annual joint Baltic Operations (BALTOPS ’22) training exercises.

Washington officially denied any involvement, and even blamed Putin for the sabotage of Russian-owned pipelines. Nevertheless, the truth about Nord Stream eked out last year when Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh learned how America destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines from an anonymous military source, published in a Substack piece called “A Year Of Lying About Nord Stream”. Following his exposé, Hersh appeared on Democracy Now, Jeremy Scahill, Chris Hedges, Russell Brand, and elsewhere to back up his findings.

Nord Stream isn’t all the Biden Administration is lying about. The repeated Ukraine “foreign aid” bills that have justified more than $113 Billion of American support constitute little more than taxpayer-funded stimulus packages for weapons companies, and the $95 billion Ukraine bill that just passed the Senate is no different.

US Senator Mitch McConnell admitted that the Ukraine funds constitute a money laundering scheme that funnels the cash, not to Ukraine, but to “American defense manufacturers”.

In a video tweet from 10 February 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spelled out how the $113 Billion for “Ukraine aid” ultimately benefits companies that are all owned by BlackRock:

“So Tim Scott, during the Republican debate, said, “Don’t worry, It’s not a gift to Ukraine. It’s a loan.” … So why do they call it a loan? Because if they call it a loan they can impose loan conditions. … Ukraine has to put all of it’s government-owned assets up for sale to multinational corporations, including all of it’s agricultural land – the biggest single asset in Ukraine. … They’ve already sold 30% of it. The buyers were DuPont, Gargill and Monsanto. And who do you think owns all of those companies? Yeah, BlackRock. And then in December, President Biden gave out the contract to rebuild Ukraine. And who do you think got that contract? BlackRock.”

Starting in 2023, BlackRock negotiated directly with Zelenskyy to finance the “rebuilding” of Ukraine. And while on the subject of US firms buying up Ukrainian farmland, Don DeBar writes:

“Ukraine grain” is actually owned by US/EU corporate giants. When people talk about “Ukrainian grain” they’re actually talking about grain that is now owned by US and EU mega-corporations such as Vanguard Group, Kopernik Global Investors, BNP Asset Management Holding, Goldman Sachs-owned NN Investment Partners Holdings, and Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

It’s unlikely that any of Ukraine’s soldiers knew their country’s ancestral farmland would be auctioned off to the highest corporate bidder as a result of Washington’s proxy war on Russia. To add insult to injury, the people of Ukraine have suffered such unimaginable personnel losses that their military is no longer combat effective.

According to Scott Ritter, Ukraine’s military campaign has failed to meet even the first line of Russia’s defenses, having lost the majority of their fighting force in Russia’s minefields, trenches and ambush zones.

The National Pulse reports, “Ukraine’s new head of the armed forces, Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, announced the withdrawal of Ukrainian units from the eastern city of Avdiivka.” After sustaining heavy losses throughout the Donbass conflict, Ukraine is low on soldiers.

Following a controversial delivery of cluster bombs, the latest “wonder weapons” for Ukraine include a kayak with a grenade launcher, and AI-assisted swarming drones. While corporate media frames every one of these cute technological updates as “game changers,” they’ve failed to bring about the tactical success imagined by Washington. All they’ve done is rob Ukraine of half a million young men while also losing ground.

Rumors have now begun to circulate in Kiev that Victoria Nuland has grown so desperate for NATO troop intervention in Ukraine that she’s willing to sacrifice the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in a meltdown to be blamed on Russia. In June 2023, Zelenskyy issued a warning to Ukraine that the Russians were plotting an attack on the plant.

When it comes to people attracted to power there are few, if any, “good guys” up there at the top of this world’s cutthroat corporate food chain. In America’s corporate political duopoly (Republicans v. Democrats) there is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Monsanto or the Military-Industrial-Complex. In a very similar way, the architecture of world government now takes the shape of another two-sided duopoly between NATO and BRICS. This global government scheme threatens to corner us all in one of two authoritarian camps, and the dividing line between east and west has proven an extraordinarily lethal one in Ukraine.


President Zelensky awarding the Hero of Ukraine title to Dmytro Kotsyubaylo, leader of the Pravy Sektor group, December 2021

Both George H.W. Bush and Vladimir Putin have spoken publicly about the benefits of a New World Order, even if they were talking about different aspects of it. Putin, who has spoken at Davos and met with WEF chairman Klaus Schwab, serves the same authoritarian interests as Bush’s New World Order. As mentioned, appraising the facts honestly requires objective observation, and that means abstaining from cheering on the team you like the most. Legendary historian Howard Zinn explains why it pays to be cautious when choosing sides:

“Nixon and Brezhnev have much more in common with one another than we have with Nixon. J.Edgar Hoover has far more in common with the head of the Soviet secret police than he has with us. It’s the international dedication to law and order that binds the leaders of all countries in a comradely bond. That’s why we are always surprised when they get together – they smile, they shake hands, they smoke cigars, they really like one another no matter what they say.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with WEF Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab