Whatever you can do is a good thing to do

We build strong communities or they pick us off one by one

He dumped five shots into the lifeless body on the ground. I’ve watched it over and over. It’s hard to tell which ICE agent shot first, but you can see them all back up after the first pop, and you can see one of them dump his clip into the corpse. Another angle, offering a more complete picture, I could bear to watch only twice. The woman behind the camera, shrieking, what did you just do? what did you just do?!

They’re going to hear the woman shrieking for the rest of their lives. They’re going to feel that shame for the rest of their lives. They’re going to see the body on the ground every night. They’ll swallow the convenient lie currently on offer, that they were in danger somehow. They’ll use it to rewrite their own lived reality. As Guy Debord put it “Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present in which whatever has previously happened is determined solely by its police.” But that’ll only keep the truth out a while. Slowly, it’ll creep back in. They’ll see the body. They’ll hear the woman. There’s only one way to stop these incessant recurring images, they’ll know in time, but they’ll be so afraid. They’ll pick it up. Their hand will tremble. They will put it back down. And they’ll hear what did you just do?! what did you just do?! and they’ll see that body on the ground. And that will happen every day and every night, the inescapable agony, until some fated wind blows out the candle they couldn’t bring themselves to pinch. I hope they all live 100 years.

At the site of murder, Minneapolis residents fought off federal forces and seized the block, preventing them from entering. As of my writing this they’ve got it barricaded. I’m going off a great thread from photojournalist Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, who’s been on scene the whole time. Look at this pic he took.

It’s hard to feel proud of being an American but a pic like this’ll do it for a moment. God bless the fine people of Minneapolis.

I was walking around Philly Friday afternoon and I saw a kid with his mom who looked just like the kid ICE recently hauled away to a detention center in Texas. This kid...

From a story on the matter in The Guardian

...same age, same sorta big zoomorphic knit hat, and he looked so happy to be bopping around on the street and his mother looked over at him and smiled as he struggled to walk a straight line next to her.

I agree with Luke O’Neil’s assessment: “there is only one honorable thing left for the people kidnapping this little baby boy to do.”

He’s got the right tool for the job, which we can say for certain now, having watched three of them whip it out at the same time and unload their clips into a corpse. All of these guys have just the tool for the thing they need to do... in most cases, several such tools… an oddly comforting thought...

As it happens I’d already planned to share a few quotes from an anti-ICE demonstration here in Worcester earlier this week. It was a frigid Tuesday night and dozens gathered in solidarity outside City Hall.

Henry Broadstone of Worcester PSL kicked things off.

So I want to make it very clear that we are here to say loud and clear, we want nothing less than the abolition of ICE.

He asked the crowd “Is that possible?” and the crowd shouted back “Yes!”

ICE is an appendage of the so-called War on Terror, a campaign to terrorize people both at home and abroad, and curb many of our constitutional rights. Support and funding for ice is bipartisan, started under Bush, continued by Obama, then Trump won, then Biden, and now Trump too.

ICE is a terrorist force that comes into our communities, harasses, kidnaps, and kills innocents. ICE’s job is to separate families. There is no reforming that. There is no amount of body cameras that would make them any less violent.

The call is simple, he said, “Arrest these killers and abolish ICE.”

Etel Haxhiaj also spoke, tying the situation in Minneapolis back to Worcester, a connection she’s been made to live day in and day out for months because of one piss baby police union official (Thomas Duffy) and a city power elite too afraid or malicious to stop his rampage.

Like many of you, I am closely following the powerful resistance of beautiful people of Minneapolis standing up against ICE’s violence. I am watching carefully how neighbors are organizing neighborhoods by neighborhood to protect immigrant families. ... I am watching as ordinary people like you and I who are linking arms together not just to resist but to actively defend their neighbors and taking care of them. Cooking meals, doing grocery runs, running errands, forming protective patrols so children can get to school safely. They are figuring out how to build power across movements to meet the gravity of this moment with everything they’ve got. And I am sure that work is messy. You’re an organizer, you know that. It is hard, it is exhausting, it is scary while staring down the barrel of a weapon and a finger on the trigger eager to shoot.

The people power Haxhiaj spoke about here is being built in cities around the country at astonishing speed and presents the best shot we have for this spectacle of cruelty to backfire. More on that later. Back to Etel, she pointed out what’s been made evident over the months since Eureka Street: most city officials are unwilling to help us do that.

I know that we can also meet this moment with the same courage and more clarity as many of us did on Eureka Street on May 8th of last year. Even though some of our elected officials are apparently very exhausted of us bringing up Eureka Street every time. They’re tired of us organizing and figuring out how to protect our neighbors and our families. But I’m all tired of reminding them that we aren’t giving up on strengthening our efforts to support our neighbors in every corner of our city. That they’re tired of us reminding them that it was mostly mothers and women on Eureka Street who acted to protect a mother and her children.

What’s happening in Minneapolis could just as easily happen here, it’s something we shouldn’t just accept as a possibility but accept as likely and prepare for.

So let me ask you: if you see ICE, if they come for you or for your neighbor, do you know who to call? Do you know what to do? Do you have a plan?

If your answer to any of that involves a police officer in any way *buzzer sound* wrong. Start again. Same goes for the city council, who are, until they prove otherwise, nothing more than the police department’s useful idiots.

Luckily, we have some great organizations here in Worcester doing the sort of stuff the cops won’t, and they’re constantly in need of new volunteers and financial support and help with getting the word out about what they’re doing. Here’s a few links to get you going.

LUCE Defense Hotline

Neighbor To Neighbor

MIRA’s legislative campaign

Whatever you can do is a good thing to do.

Back to Etel:

The scenes unfolding across Minneapolis remind us that Eureka Street can happen again anytime in any street in our city. The spark that with many other moments of resistance across the country and that it’s not just a moment in time, it is our reminder that we still have a lot of work to do. It would be nice if most of our elected officials stood with the community, but we don’t need their speeches about decorum, declarations about loving immigrants, or their shaming our community members for doing what’s right.

They are worse than useless, I’ll add, and should be summarily ignored until they prove otherwise.

Mysti Green, from one of the organizations that has Worcester and Indivisible in its name, put it perfectly when she took the mic to say “Joe Petty you SUCK.”

Meanwhile, inside City Hall, the council was preparing to waste four hours of time for themselves and anyone else who bothered to pay attention.

About halfway through Satya Mitra was adorably trying to propose that the city council set measurable goals. Beside him, Moe Bergman can be seen falling in and out of sleep. A perfect visual metaphor for the Worcester City Council and the “city business” they promised voters they’d “get back to.” This right here is precisely that business.

They do absolutely nothing and the suggestion they start doing anything at all puts one of them straight to bed. You just have to laugh.

Anywho...

You guys ready to get dumped on?

I’m down in Philly and am still not entirely sure how or when we’ll get back. Tattoo convention. Load out tomorrow is gunna be a shiiiitshow. Subscribe to this newsletter just in case we have to find an emergency hotel room haha

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The matter of Worcester’s ability to plow the roads or lack thereof has been all over the news lately, so let me renew my call to FUND THE DPW and support that claim with a little factoid from the FY 2026 operating budget.

You’ll notice the public safety (police) budget increases some 8 percent, while the DPW budget goes down by 6 percent. Shooting yourself in the foot and going fuuuuuck why does my foot hurt? Then calling the cops to report a shooting and telling them when they arrive thank you for keeping us safe. We Support You.

The Worcester Way.

To get some perspective I looked up the 2016 budget book. Back then, police were getting $44 million and the DPW was getting $17 million. Over a decade the police budget has tripled ($123 million) while the DPW budget has yet to double (a paltry $25 million). Looking at it this way it makes perfect sense we’re unable to plow the roads.

This is what you want, this is what you get. This is what you want, this is what you get. This is what you want, this is what you get.

There isn’t a councilor on who’d dare suggest taking a little bit from the bloated police to feed the emaciated DPW. Wish there was! Oh well. The cops will keep being the bad guy from Spirited Away for the foreseeable future, eating everything in sight while the rest of City Hall nervously watches, skipping dinner.

I watched Maura Healey’s state of the commonwealth address because I’m a sicko and her line about how we have the best police in the country got the loudest applause from the bicameral gathering of fellow sycophants. As the kids say, we’re cooked.

She didn’t say anything about how all cops in Massachusetts share a ton of information with ICE via the state Criminal Justice Information System. Did some digging a few days ago and found they have open information-sharing contracts with the Immigration Alien Query system, the backbone of ICE’s Alien Criminal Response Information Management System (ACRIMe). As well as a standing agreement directly with DHS.

No, she neglected to mention all that, instead offering the front page-ready line: “Enough is enough.”

A pretty crazy thing to say when you allow them to pore through all your records of every interaction police have with residents of your state, knowing it all gets thrown into Palantir’s magic algorithm: Digital information in, and out comes a schedule of street violence campaigns optimized for narrative synchronicity with the right wing outrage machine. Streamlined consent manufacturing the likes of which we’ve never seen. Enough is apparently not enough when it comes to all that.

On the local level it’s been radio silence since my last post detailing the city’s particular complicity with ICE: the $15 million they have tied up via the retirement system in Signature Aviation, a key component of “ICE Air.” Read up on that if you haven’t: “Tangled Up In Ice”

Internal emails, being made public here for the first time, show the city has been unwilling to renegotiate the relationship, even as evidence of the collaboration has become more apparent, and pressure campaigns have proliferated elsewhere across the country, from Seattle to, most recently, Quincy, Mass., kid.

The assurances made by the city manager and the mayor both before and after Eureka Street have found another wiggly caveat! The police don’t assist ICE, they said... unless you try to stop ICE from unlawfully kidnapping someone. The city doesn’t cooperate with ICE, they said... unless there’s a good return on investment.

“There would be a large financial loss to withdraw from the fund, which itself would be difficult for the system to do.” So ends the minutes of a June 12 meeting of the Worcester Retirement System’s financial board. The statement caps a terse paragraph relaying a summary of the Signature Aviation situation provided by Steven MacLellan, a principal and consultant at Meketa Investment Group, the retirement system’s contracted investment manager. Willfully or otherwise, MacLellan apparently downplayed the relationship between the company and the Brown Vest arm of the Hamburger Reich. “They simply operate terminals and offer types of maintenance to airlines,” reads one line. “Signature Aviation does not find out who is on what plane. They are legally obligated to provide service to their clients. Signature Aviation does not have a contract with ICE, it’s just ICE may have been on a couple planes they have serviced.” Had the members of the retirement board investigated further, they would’ve had an easy time finding out MacLellan’s summary wasn’t quite accurate. As we’ll get to, it’s simply the regurgitation of an increasingly flimsy lie.

The rest of this post is more general observations written whilst on my travels. Then some council notes. Please consider supporting what we do here. Very little of what you’ve just read or are about to read makes it into the “legacy” local outlets. And even if it did it would be double-dipped in the stylings of “objective reporting” that reliably obscure the truth. We can be like this because we don’t have to placate advertisers or benefactors within the local power elite. It’s real freedom, and we only have it so long as enough of you throw us a little bit of money on a regular basis.

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Oh god what now

It was one of those windy dusty ultra sunny winter days, they call ‘em bluebird... nothing but that light blue sky comes around in the winter. The one that almost hurts to look at it’s so bright and you’ve been so used to cloud cover. Nothing up there except for tiny little puffs of lilly white way high up and the long crisscrossing lingering exhaust trails from jet planes taking somebodies do different somewhere. All of that hung over the city skyline as we hit 290 West Thursday en route to Philly for the annual massive tattoo convention they hold in their convention center... imagine six or seven DCU Centers like someone was playing the Sims dragging and dropping it.

In the foreground against that bluebird sky there was a black helicopter and at first glance it looked as if it was hovering the way the newscopters do over some news event and my stomach dropped Oh god what now. But as we got closer I could see it was moving at a steady clip and I breathed a sigh of relief as it faded into that bright dramatic background.

A few miles later, on the mass pike, a kitted out F-150, subtle police siren lights built into the semi-permanent plastic bed cover, the windows tinted, totally unmarked, Massachusetts plates that looked a little weird but mostly normal. We inched past it and I saw the driver scrolling on a mounted laptop like the cops have. As we reached his peripheral he slammed it shut as if he didn’t want people seeing he had one of those. Oh god what now.

ICE’s primary concern is not immigration status nor “the laws of this country” it’s racial purity. Deportations are not the goal, they’re the pretense. Displays of violence on the TV, that’s the goal. The Death Cult must be fed. There’s not a clearer piece of evidence for that than the fact they’re moving now from Minneapolis to Lewiston Maine, a city I happen to know a thing or two about because my sister lives and works there. Like Minneapolis, the city is home to a large Somali diaspora compared to other American cities. Like other American cities large diasporas of black and brown people become a canvas on which the townie whites of a respective locale paint their grievances. When they hear ‘make America great again’ the first thing they picture is their town before ‘they’ showed up. I can say this because I grew up in it. In Milford, the Ecuadorians started coming when I was coming into young adulthood. I heard how the grownups would whisper to each other. I saw how they were treated in my high school as social pariahs. I read the headlines in the newspaper about neighborhood task forces and proposed limits on where ‘white work vans’ could park. I read the headlines about the moral panic inspired by ELL programs. The ‘unfunded mandate’ they called it. I remember the calls for blood when a white kid on a motorcycle got hit and killed by an Ecuadorian driving a white work van. I remember, as a reporter there, seeing the same names over and over and over in the police department’s daily sheet for driving without a license.

The promise of Trump has always been that he’d make ‘these people’ disappear. It has nothing to do with law, policy or the economy. It is about reclaiming something perceived to be stolen. What that something is, no one can say. Thus the magic sleight of hand in the vague imaginary of “great.”

Far as immigrant populations go Somalis are among the least likely to be here “illegally” but the ease with which the Nazis have focused the whole of their outrage apparatus onto Somalis regardless should make clear what was always the case: legality was only ever the pretext for the main concern. Whiteness and its supremacy and the perception of that supremacy slipping away. Becoming un-Great. ICE officers go into communities on these pre-scheduled “operations” dictated by the reactionary outrage cycle like a circus on a tour—because it is a circus on a tour. Where your stock standard circus leans on narratives of far-off mysticism, exotic wonder, a world out there so much bigger and wilder than the little community they rolled in on, this is a circus leaning in the opposite direction, on narratives of resentment, loathing for the present circumstances. The exotic wonder is still there for ears tuned to hear the frequencies but it exists on a timescale rather than distance. The glorious past opening anew, echoing up from the time well. They are filled with the wonder of the way things were. They are thrilled that someone finally has the balls enough to ‘do what needs to be done’ in order to get there.

Nothing but a cheap illusion but they are nevertheless thralls to it. Hardly able to notice how weak and sickly they’ve become. The fiction of white supremacy is an intoxicant, in this way. Like opium. They see ICE on the TV and they’re offered a momentary respite from the gnawing truth: any white supremacy that once existed does not anymore. Not for them. Not in a way they feel. That the ‘great replacement’ they fear is coming already came actually. That they are fat, lazy, useless, living in communities they hollowed out themselves willfully and on purpose. The pursuit of the American Dream led so many of them to so many exurban McMansion subdivisions built on swampland, mosquito infested and dank and they’re so lonely there, where their mortgage and their health insurance and their monthly payments for their large automobiles and the credit cards they put the ammo boxes on have made them a prisoner within the castle they were promised. And they’re so desperately depressed by the reality of their lives in this collapsing empire the only reassurance they can comfortably fall back on is that they have it better than someone else does. That someone else wants what they have so bad they’ll come and take it. They need to defend it.

Good piggies that they are they spend a lot of money in the consumer goods that indulge this fiction and so they have lots of guns and they watch a lot of movies and TV show that operate on the premise of whiteness under assault. They become obsessed with their white virility which must in some way be superior and they find ample product lines and podcasts so many podcasts indulging that fiction as well. But none of that slakes the unquenchable thirst for evidence of their superiority quite like seeing agents of the state on the TV beating up people who deserve America less than they do. They look at that and they see The West in action. Even more so, you have to imagine, when they start shooting. Like in any good fictional work, the narrative tension comes from the rising action. You have to keep upping the ante for the spectacle to work right. This is how the Death Cult operates. Among its members are relatives of mine. I know firsthand the pool from which ICE recruits people to go out there and put on a good show. To empty their clips into the corpse of a community organizer and then stand around the dead man like they’re Mortal Kombat characters in the “choose your fighter” menu.

What they’re going to inadvertently do is organize communities in ways not seen since the collapse of the New Deal. People aren’t simply getting out in the street, they’re joining rapid response teams, manning hotlines, building mutual aid networks... literally going block by block, crossing the sort of divides that have kept true rainbow coalitions in the past from fully materializing. It is happening without and really in spite of the Democratic Party. That is encouraging. (They are not coming to save you. A new funding bill for DHS passed the House Thursday with none of the paltry concessions they tepidly asked for, and seven Democrats broke rank to vote it through. They will not be disciplined by party leaders for that.) Here are the links I shared earlier for those of you who want to get involved in the first real popular movement with real promise in our lifetimes.

LUCE Defense Hotline

Neighbor To Neighbor]

MIRA’s legislative campaign

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Council notebook

At the council meeting Tuesday you’d hardly know there was anything out of the ordinary going on. Same as last week and same as we should expect every week going forward, the council was content to kvetch about the same old things without any sort of action plan. They demanded the manager do a lot of things and set no mechanism in place to hold him to it. They bandied about a lot of ideas. For instance, during yet another conversation about the Roosevelt School traffic congestion on Grafton Street, esteemed Public Safety Chair Kate Toomey invented crossing guards.

Through you, Mr. Chair, I had an off conversation with the commissioner regarding the possibility of establishing volunteer parents, crossing students and walking down the street for safety’s sake

Wow!

All told a half hour was spent on the subject before adopting a solution presented by the manager unanimously. No changes were made.

Gary Rosen had an order on about Union Station, essentially asking flat out that the police do a better job banishing undesirables—people who ask for money, he said, and kids on bikes. He said the order was prompted by an email he received from a woman complaining about “Union Station and issues there.”

He read from what I assume was a printout of the email in question. “She said loitering, aggressive behavior, individuals approaching diners—This one was new to me—Approaching Diners at Maxwell, Luciano’s restaurant, asking for money.”

He asked that “things be tightened up down there.” A euphemism for sending the cops in to cite, arrest, run warrant checks and otherwise bully unhoused people and teens.

Kate Toomey entered the proverbial chat, riffing on the same euphemism.

“I think we all received the same email, and because of the nature of the issue, I reached out to the chief, and it’s my understanding that over the past two weeks, they’ve had a number of arrests down there and they’ve really tightened everything up. So it’s underway, and there is a station down there, but they did send folks down to address this.”

Oh good now that they’ve been arrested they’ll be set up for success! Certainly won’t be made more destitute by their mandatory tithing to the DA and will never be back at Union Station to beg another diner at Luciano’s for money ever again. As we all know increased recidivism for poverty crimes has a long track record of success. Just look around.

I actually saw this banishment campaign in action, in court a couple months ago for the Etel and Spring cases. A guy with his backpack in hand was called up to the judge and offered a deal: his trespassing charge would be dismissed if he committed to a stayaway order on Union Station. For one year, he’s essentially on a geographic probation: anywhere but there. And if he’s even seen there, straight to jail. From what I understand talking to a few people this has become an increasingly common homelessness strategy: slap people with trespassing charges, then administer where they can and can’t go by dangling a sweet deal in front of them at court the next day. A banishment tactic sneaky as it is brutal. Invisible unless you bother to look hard for it.

Thank you to Rob Bilotta, Khrystian King and Luis Ojeda who voted against this order. The no vote didn’t accomplish much. It sailed through 8-3 and it already happened, turns out. But if only to preserve a bit of dignity.

On the agenda for next week is the vote for a big tax break to a developer who broke our rules for who gets tax breaks. It will pass. Probably 8-3 or 9-2.

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Odds and ends

One more request for the money we need to keep this outlet alive and well!

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Sometimes you read something and just have to have a laugh: “Compelling Pictures Sets Docuseries & Feature On ‘Turtleboy’ Blogger Tied To Karen Read Murder Case”

I liked this line from a recent Forever Wars.

Gunboat diplomacy, unleashed at the dawn of overseas U.S. empire in Latin America, now sails in its dusk to Europe.

Wait but stop the presses, a second Chick Fil A coming to town. Oh fuck oh crap.

WORCESTER −The second Chick-fil-A location in the city is nearing its opening after being granted the necessary business license by the License Commission on Thursday, Jan. 22.

The Stafford Street location is set to hold a grand opening in February, a representative for the chain said at the commission meeting.

The popular chain has been a favorite for chicken lovers in the city, consistently serving long lines out of its Gold Star Boulevard location, which opened in 2017.

Is it a good sign that Canada is “creating a civil defense force of 300,000 volunteers” to respond to emergencies including “foreign invasion”? A good essay on what it’s like to live in Canada right now as the US falls apart in a recent Welcome to Hell World.

Canada is creating a civil defense force of 300,000 volunteers to respond to any emergency, from flood to fire to foreign invasion. Folks will be trained to shoot, perform first aid, set up communications systems and fly drones, among other things. The force is inspired by the Swedish and Finnish “whole of society” territorial defense plans that are a defining feature of living in those countries, and will soon be a defining part of living here too.

I don’t post on social media, but I lurk. I’m watching Minneapolis, witnessing the annihilation of the rule of law and the overwhelming courage of the Minnesotans banding together to peacefully resist the war being waged on them by their federal government.

I’m watching the Danish military and troops from other European countries land in Greenland. A bunch of Canadians will probably arrive there shortly.

No winners and a ton of weird losers in the story of the city apparently firing its director of veteran services for using the honorary doctorate title before submitting his dissertation (but after completing his coursework). Very very weird situation here. You’d think this would be an easy one to avoid. Both parties would simply have to act a little normal. The city could not give a shit about a thing that’s already fake and the ousted veterans services director could not use an honorary title that’s goofy for even full PhDs to use.

Changes coming to the Newton Square roundabout and Highland Street! There’s an informational meeting about it coming up, on Feb. 11 at the new Doherty. Would be nice to drown out the cranks who are currently hard at work I’m sure finding The Thing they’ll complain about in an attempt to bully the project out of happening.

Really enjoyed this essay about white noise and sleep and nighttime sounds and the oppressive nature of the Internet, by Misah Brooks for Majuscule Lit.

Ok I have to go over to the convention center and eat a gross hot dog in a big room where thousands of people are getting tattooed at once the buzzing of so many machines rattling around the 100 foot warehouse ceilings like the pounding of some biblical bug rain. And you bet your sweet bee-hind I’m cranking this on the walk over. Cuz it’s Saturday Saturday Saturday Saturday baby.

Stay safe and hunker down everybody. Storm’s coming.