Pete Hegseth’s Department of War is building America’s largest Quantum Computing project right here on the Southside of Chicago, to the detriment of not only our city but the world at large. Governor Pritzker has lauded the venture capital project as an unprecedented opportunity to make Illinois the “Silicon Valley of quantum development.” With whose consent? On whose land? And on whose dime?

When examining the backers of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), it is difficult to rationalize this $9 billion project as anything but an accelerative altar to militarism. Alongside federal backing from DARPA, investors such as BlackRock, IBM, and Israeli startup Quantum Machines have all cited quantum technology as the next frontier in modern warfare. The Military Industrial Complex has emphatically doubled down on Quantum computing technology and advanced computing in AI alike as the next crucial edges in 21st-century militarism. Indeed, AI technology in warfare is already being used extensively by the U.S. and Israel to terrorize the SWANA region.

Even with the considerable private capital financing already allotted to this project’s troubling big tech-war machine alliance, Illinois taxpayers are the top funders of IQMP by far. To the sum of more than 700 million state dollars, the land and water beneath our feet have been sold out to private equity military contracts. As families across our cities starve, as rent costs go up and our unhoused neighbors are continually displaced, we must stop the flow of state and city resources from being directed to a global surveillance state hellbent on mass destruction.

On a local level, the Chicago City Council has unanimously approved the Quantum Park’s construction on three separate occasions, with Mayor Johnson contributing $5 million from the city’s already strained budget. The contrast between the typical glacial speed of approval from City Council and the suspiciously rapid approval process of this project is jarring to say the least, particularly when one considers the largely uncharted nature of the technology itself.

Southside Together, an organization focused on building people power with working-class Southside residents, collected signatures proposing a non-binding referendum concerning IQMP. The petition asked one question: “Should our local elected officials stop the construction of the IQMP and instead invest directly in community resources?” Non-binding ballot referendums are rarely challenged on the basis of their language, yet this expression of community consensus was struck from the ballot summarily. Southside residents, in particular, breaking the silence on this project has been clearly delineated as a high-priority threat by backing city officials.

Widespread awareness and community dissent could in fact function as IQMP’s death knell. If organizing on the Southside alone has already scared these big tech military syndicates into such frantic repression, imagine what genuine citywide resistance to quantum computing development could accomplish in turn.

As Governor Pritzker and Mayor Johnson push this project through, they are continuing to make the people of Chicago complicit in war crimes across the globe. Do Illinois politicians want this escalation in big tech militarism to be their legacy? More importantly, are we as Chicago residents at ease with the unprecedented horrors of Quantum and AI warfare coming out of our own backyards?

Southside Together’s campaign against Quantum is an unequivocal stand for people power against the cynical backdrop of Big Tech fatalism. Join the fight today against what Quantum tech threatens to do tomorrow.

Follow Southside Together for important updates & opportunities to get involved in their campaign against Quantum!

Learn more about CODEPINK’s campaign to take on Data Centers nationwide!

Eli is a disabled social justice activist. He is passionate about using historical knowledge as a guide for tackling current issues.

Giovi is a chapter lead of CODEPINK Chicago. Her passion for reading has taught her that internationalism and principled solidarity are the core tenets of collective liberation.

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One year ago today, the Trump administration brought 800 National Guard troops to occupy the streets of Washington, D.C., part of the “Safe and Beautiful Task Force.” There are now approximately 5,000 troops from 15 states deployed here, with some officially moved in and set to stay through 2029.

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This does not include the alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies swarming our neighborhoods across the city, from ICE to the FBI, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Agency, Park Police, and more.

The National Guard can be found meandering around metro stations, museums, and grocery stores there for mere posture. Despite crime being down before they were deployed here. A new analysis from the Center for American Progress found the Guard deployment has not had a measurable impact on violent crime. They are not even trained in “civilian policing,” and are unable to make actual arrests.

“This was never about reducing crime, especially not violent crime,” said Chandler Hall, who wrote the study. “This has been a show of force without any evidence to bear that it’s actually working.”

The cost of the Guard is estimated at $3 million a day, with some troops said to make close to $9,000 a month, including salary, lodging, and food per diem. It is hard to track the multi-year total in billions of dollars as the administration is far from transparent with the process.

The wasteful spending from the Department of War is unsurprising. Despite the Pentagon never passing an audit, the Department of War’s proposed budget is record-breaking at $1.5 trillion for one year and does not include the recent billions for the Iran war and additional billions to Israel to further the genocide in Gaza and ongoing destruction in Lebanon.

Some of the reasoning for more troops in D.C. was for the Freedom 250 nationalism events, beginning with a UFC fight, State Fair, and 4th of July festivities, all of which were disastrous, from cancellations, evacuations, and heat strokes to stage parts falling, nearly killing performers. The millions of dollars that went into these spectacles strained the local community. On July 4, my friend Nicky, a 71-year-old EMT, worked an 18-hour double shift for $27 an hour while constant military flyovers cost over $1.2 million.

Karen Degraphenreid, a veteran of the US Air Force as a Major of 10 years, got involved with Free DC when the military occupation in D.C. began. She describes her reflections from her time overseas to experiencing the guard takeover here at home.

“Washington is the only place in the country where more than 700,000 American citizens can have troops deployed to their streets by leaders they have no voting representation in choosing. We pay federal taxes, serve in the military, and fulfill every obligation of citizenship, yet Congress can override our local government and impose decisions that fundamentally reshape life in our city. That reality forced me to reconsider what ‘protection’ actually means,” she said.

“Many of my neighbors never asked for soldiers outside their neighborhoods. Many openly opposed their presence. To them, the deployment did not feel like reassurance. It felt like a federal government exercising power over a city that has long been denied full democratic self-government.

And that realization led me to a question I had never seriously asked during my years in uniform.

If my neighbors could experience military protection as something imposed upon them, what did civilians overseas think when American forces arrived in their communities? When we said we were bringing security and stability, did they experience it as protection? Or did they see armed strangers exercising power over places that belonged to them?”

Karen is also a member of Common Defense, which holds trainings for veterans to verbally confront the National Guard. Other veterans are speaking out to encourage their fellows and active-duty members to do the same. Groups like About Face have been welcoming anti-war veterans to become more organized for years, many of whom were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are actively opposed to the genocide in Gaza and the war on Iran.

At a press conference commemorating one year of the occupation, Luke Filomena, a registered nurse with National Nurses United, expressed the imperialist boomerang we are all witnessing

“I’ve seen this administration and every administration prior instead choose to spend hundreds of billions, now trillions of dollars, yearly, to go towards countless amounts of death and destruction through endless imperialist wars overseas and the funding and arming of a genocide in Gaza. I’ve been forced to watch as hospitals filled with patients and fellow healthcare workers, as well as schools filled with children, are indiscriminately bombed in Gaza and in Iran, and as the U.S. blockade of Cuba leaves hospitals without fuel and supplies to power lifesaving medical equipment and provide care for their patients.

Over the past year, under the Trump regime, we’re now seeing the imperialist boomerang come back, with its sights locked on the black, brown, and immigrant communities here in D.C.; those who I see each day at the bedside,” Filomena explained.

It’s one thing to be aware of connecting the dots, and it’s another to act on it. D.C. has been public about its opposition to the military takeover of the city. When the occupation first launched, we disrupted Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s photo op at Shake Shack in Union Station. A month later, Trump and almost his entire cabinet went out to dinner at a restaurant near the White House, and we disrupted it, chanting “Free DC, Free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time.” We later drowned out a public appearance by Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and hundreds of National Guard at Malcolm X Park.

Opportunities to confront the administration are rarer than daily encounters with the Guard. The same week budget cuts to SNAP were being discussed in Congress, I asked a group of troops, who often appear to be aimlessly wandering our neighborhoods in groups of four, if people in their communities would be hit by this. I’ve asked them if they know their neighbors and what services they could use and be funded versus them being deployed here to hang outside of a convenience store. When the forest fires created thick smoke across D.C., I asked why they were here and not putting out the fires.

In these conversations, they almost always nod their head and reach for their pamphlet, telling me and others who confront them to contact their supervisor. They come from states from Mississippi to Michigan, and there have been state-by-state campaigns to get the guard to go home. Many of them are here voluntarily, not simply “following orders” as we are led to believe.

While we have 800 military bases abroad, the war economy is inescapable for most people within the United States as well. The predatory trap the military-industrial complex has on young people of color or those in poverty means they are heavily recruited to join the various branches of the military. The increased amount of data centers across the country is also making the war economy ever more apparent.

But the state can’t use the excuse of job creation anymore. The Climate and Communities Institute shows us that employment at military contractors has plummeted over the past three decades, from an estimated 3.2 million workers during the Reagan military-spending peak in the mid-1980s to 1.1 million workers in 2020. The drop occurred despite Pentagon budgets rising 22 percent over the same period (not accounting for inflation costs). The alternative is a care economy, a system of paid and unpaid labor, services, and relationships that support human health, well-being, and daily life, that moves away from dirty, violent jobs that rely on weapons manufacturers and the fossil fuel industry.

We cannot normalize troops on our streets. But we must address the roots that cause normalization. We’ve been taught to salute combat veterans for their service no matter their history, discounts for military personnel, and TV shows and Hollywood movies glorifying lower-level cadets to high-ranking commanders. While militarized superheroes are a common staple in U.S. popular culture, teachers are buying their own school supplies for their classrooms, social workers have overwhelming caseloads, EMT’s are working overtime while underpaid, and many veterans are unhoused or waitlisted at the VA.

Washington, D.C. does not need occupation; it needs fair representation. We don’t need billions of dollars going towards policing our neighbors and militarization of our streets to make our communities safer - we need housing, education, healthcare, and a commitment to climate justice for true national security. In the meantime, we have only seen our community grow stronger to protect each other--more trainings, skill-sharing, documenting, court support, fundraising, and more. Every day we are supporting each other by radically building community through getting to know our neighbors more deeply in real life.

What would you fund instead of war and military occupation? Tell us!

Olivia DiNucci is an anti-militarism and climate justice organizer based in Washington, D.C., and an international experiential learning facilitator.

We are writing because your recent work has reminded us what courageous journalism can do. In your latest Vanity Fair essays, including your critique of Kamala Harris’s silence on Gaza, you challenged readers to confront difficult questions that have chronically gone unexamined by mainstream media.

There is another defining story demanding that same fearless scrutiny.

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The accelerating U.S. campaign against China is one of the most consequential stories of our time, and yet it continues to be misrepresented in the media.

As journalists, historians, and the public have repeatedly shown, wars do not begin with the first missile. Instead, they begin with narratives that manufacture fear, normalize militarization, and convince ordinary people to believe in the existence of an enemy. The U.S. drive to war on China depends on the story that China is our enemy. Powerful institutions have spent years reinforcing that narrative. That process has ultimately eroded our ability to see China clearly, as well as our capacity for peace.

We strongly encourage you to investigate the accelerating drive toward war with China and the profound consequences it is already having on people, the planet, and the future of the world.

The “China threat” has become one of the most powerful organizing narratives in American politics, shaping military strategy, industrial policy, scientific research, media coverage, and public opinion. The narrative is used and abused by policy officials to pass bills and accomplish specific agendas. And the human, environmental, and economic costs go continuously unreported.

These questions deserve the kind of moral clarity and historical perspective that have defined your work. Among them:

• The militarization of the Pacific. The United States has dramatically expanded its military posture across the Pacific through new base agreements, expanded access to military facilities in the Philippines, Australia, Japan, and other allied countries, larger troop deployments, and some of the largest military exercises in history, including RIMPAC. Tens of thousands of troops, dozens of warships, submarines, and aircraft now train for potential conflict in a region that is home to more than half of humanity. These preparations increase the risk of accidents, military escalation, and catastrophic conflict between nuclear powers while placing Pacific communities on the front lines. The people most affected by this buildup—those living near bases and training grounds—are rarely centered in the story.

• A record military budget at the public’s expense. “Competition” with China has become one of the principal justifications for what is set to become a roughly $1.5 trillion annual U.S. war budget. Members of Congress from both major parties increasingly invoke China to justify new weapons systems, expanded military production, and long-term force expansion. Every dollar directed toward preparing for war is a dollar not invested in affordable housing, universal healthcare, public education, climate solutions, public transit, or addressing poverty.

• Environmental destruction. The U.S. military is among the world’s largest institutional consumers of fossil fuels, while military bases and training sites across the Pacific have left enduring environmental damage, including PFAS contamination, fuel spills, unexploded ordnance, and hazardous chemical releases. Communities in Okinawa, Guam, Hawaiʻi, South Korea, and elsewhere have long raised concerns about pollution, ecosystem destruction, and the health consequences of hosting an expanding military presence. As climate change intensifies storms, rising seas, and extreme heat throughout the Pacific, further militarization consumes enormous resources while compounding environmental harm in one of the regions most vulnerable to the climate crisis.

• The rise of Sinophobia and the erosion of civil liberties. Political rhetoric portraying China as an existential enemy has fueled a broader climate of fear and suspicion toward people of Chinese descent, contributing to discrimination, hate incidents, and racial profiling. Anti-Asian hate surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many advocates warn that escalating anti-China rhetoric risks reinforcing these prejudices. This climate has also reached universities and research institutions, where scientists and students have faced heightened scrutiny, visa restrictions, restrictions on academic collaboration, and investigations that have upended careers even when no wrongdoing was found. Programs such as the China Initiative left lasting damage within the scientific community, while newer policies continue to hurt international exchange. Cases involving Chinese and Chinese American scholars—including University of Michigan researcher Danhao Wang, whose death followed intense federal scrutiny according to those close to him—show the profound human costs of the U.S. drive to war on China.

• A biased media ecosystem. As the U.S. devotes billions of dollars to its war on China, public debate increasingly takes place within a framework that assumes war is both necessary and inevitable. Stories highlighting military threats often receive sustained attention, while the structural incentives behind escalating rivalry, the interests that profit from it, and the opportunities for diplomacy and cooperation receive comparatively little examination. This imbalance shapes not only public opinion but the range of policies considered politically possible.

• A world pulled away from cooperation. Humanity faces shared challenges that no nation can solve alone: climate change, pandemics, biodiversity loss, nuclear proliferation, food insecurity, and the governance of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. Yet a new Cold War redirects immense financial, political, scientific, and diplomatic resources toward militarization rather than international cooperation. The deterioration of U.S.-China relations affects not only the two countries but the entire world, reducing opportunities for collaborative solutions to the defining challenges of our time.

• The loss of understanding. As China is increasingly framed primarily as a military threat, Americans are losing the opportunity to understand one of the world’s oldest civilizations and one of the most consequential societies of the twenty-first century. Coverage centered almost exclusively on geopolitical competition leaves little room to examine China’s history, culture, politics, or the experiences of its 1.4 billion people. It also obscures developments that deserve serious journalistic attention: China’s world-leading buildout of high-speed rail and renewable energy, major advances in electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, its role in global infrastructure and poverty reduction, and policy experiments that are reshaping debates about economic development around the world. Journalism should help us understand the world in all its complexity. When China is reduced to an “enemy”, Americans are left with fear rather than understanding, making it far easier to justify war.

Your writing has consistently illuminated the structures of power that many institutions prefer not to examine. This is one of those moments. The stories being told about China today will shape public opinion for years to come, and they will determine whether future generations inherit a world defined by peace and cooperation or by war and destruction.

Many journalists have examined America’s wars only after they began. We hope you will help investigate the narratives making the next one possible.

Thank you for your courage and your commitment to telling the stories that matter.

Toward peace and truth, CODEPINK

Sign on to our open letter, encouraging Ta-Nehisi Coates to cover the dangerous and deadly years-long build-up to a war on China.

Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China Campaign Coordinator.

Megan graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Prior to that, she attended NYU where she studied Conflict, Culture, and International Law. Megan spent one year studying in Shanghai, and over eight years studying Chinese Mandarin. Her research focuses on the intersection between US-China affairs, peacebuilding, and international development.

I initially wrote this piece in 2024 during the student uprisings that took place around the United States. The content was focused on Gaza and the people who made up the movement for Palestine in the belly of the beast. I’ve rewritten some of it and replaced Gaza with Cuba. The arguments needed no editing at all.

In March, a delegation traveled to Cuba to bring medical aid to Cubans who were suffering under the fuel blockade imposed on them by the United States of America. In recent months, people and organizations who took part, including my own organization, have been targeted by the Trump Administration via investigations, subpoenas, and threatening reports such as Marco Rubio’s 100-page report “The Capital of 21st Century Communism”. In this report, people who bring aid to Cuba or merely speak out against the unilateral policy of starvation that the U.S. implements upon Cuba are accused of being foreign agents and linked to terrorism. People in the comment section of our videos echo the smears because if the accusation is coming from someone powerful like Marco Rubio, it must be true.

I’ve seen them suggest that CODEPINK and other organizers are acting on behalf of someone other than ourselves and perhaps paid to do so. And Rubio has even gone on record saying that the people he is targeting might even be “unpaid” agents of Cuba, which just sounds like he might be going after people for simply having their own opinions that are different from his.

Cuba has dealt with rolling blackouts, fuel, food, and medicine shortages as well as a looming threat of U.S. invasion or attacks as threatened by the Trump Administration. People are not getting the medicine they need or the nutrition, which can and will lead to a slow genocide in Cuba if the U.S. starvation policy stays intact. That is what people are so against: the deliberate slow starvation of eleven million human beings, just ninety miles away from our own border. This recent escalation comes after sixty years of aggressive U.S. policy towards Cuba that has punished its people for pursuing an economic and political system that strays from the U.S. model of capitalist exploitation. Cuba, once existing as a playground for the wealthy elite of the U.S., is now a representation that not only can a small country overthrow U.S.-backed puppets like Batista, but also pursue socialism.

The accusations of being foreign agents or affiliated with terrorist groups aren’t new or innovative accusations levied against anti-war activists. This narrative has been used since there were wars and people against them. So there are a few questions to be asked: is it so un-American for regular people (not policy makers) to care about the disastrous loss of human life? Who is levying these accusations that some malign foreign entity pays (or doesn’t pay) Americans who care about death and destruction to do so? And lastly, how do we, in the greatest interest of preventing future wars, stop reproducing this accusation so much that it becomes the dominant narrative about anti-war activists?

Is it so un-American to care about the loss of human life?

There have been massive resistance movements to every single war, and whether politicians like it or not, many of the people who have participated have been Americans. If it’s un-American to disagree with our government, then we might as well pack it all up and call it a day on this whole democracy schtick. The accusation of being foreign agents or terrorist sympathizers denies the basic trajectory of social life at this present moment. In the United States, our neighbors are truly from all over the world, and humans are social animals. If we are, enjoyably, living our lives, then we will meet our neighbors, we will become their friends, and we will care deeply for them. Friends introduce each other to other friends, and we learn to care for people who live in places we have never been. Some forces seek to squash that diversity and others use it merely symbolically without accepting the fact that it might challenge who our country does or does not bomb. But both forces use the “foreign agent” accusation to destroy the lives of activists and squash movements into the curb until they have no teeth anymore. It has happened over and over again.

If we move ahead with the idea that it is not inherently un-American to care about massacres or blockades, what we are left with is that the accusation is a tool to get everyone to shut the hell up about what the pigs in power are doing to our families and friends far, far away from here. Or in some cases, right here at home when some of the most powerful people in the Trump Administration launch First Amendment chilling investigations into regular people to attempt to stop them from talking about the massacres our country facilitates.

So, I don’t think it’s inherently un-American to care about suffering. It is just an American expectation to get threatened by the State Department for giving a fuck. And the inverse is true: it’s also quintessentially American to remain apathetic to the massacres and not utter a word about them and be awarded some temporary comfort. For example, the quiet may have no subpoena in the mail this week or next. If you fall into the latter category, congratulations on your unthreatening inboxes, but I have some bad news for you: one day our country might do something that will anger you. Or, god forbid, your children become adults who decide to care. Then you or your children will become vulnerable to the same accusation and subsequent treatment, including repression, arrest, and murder (like we’ve seen in the cases of Alex Pretti and Renée Good). Unless we stop reproducing this narrative about protestors at this very critical moment, disagreeing with the government will continue to get you investigated, thrown in jail, or your life ruined by red scare tactics the U.S. government continues to rinse and repeat.

Who is levying these accusations that some malign foreign entity pays Americans who care about death and destruction to do so?

The short answer is the American elite. The politicians and rich have a vested interest in keeping us at war and attempting to drive communist countries like Cuba into the gutter. The US is the largest weapons dealer in the world, and the companies that make the weapons are the biggest donors to many of our politicians. Politicians are bought and sold by the war profiteers, but also by private equity that sees investment opportunities in Cuba. The ruling class has done a great job of making war a profitable industry for themselves. So they built up militarized domestic surveillance to protect the war industry from dissent. If the accusation of being foreign agents scared people into silence about what our country was doing to Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, why wouldn’t this repression tactic work for what’s happening in Cuba? Besides the fact that the tactic has worked in the past, there’s also a part of it that might be a telling projection: that because the elite need to get paid for their morals and opinions, maybe everyone else does too.

So, their tactic of accusing people of being terrorists or foreign agents works at repressing the masses. They’ve learned this over and over again. Can we say the same, that we’ve learned the same lesson over and over again? It appears that we cannot. But we have the opportunity to do things differently right now.

How do we, in the greatest interest of preventing future wars, stop reproducing this accusation so much that it becomes how we all view anti-war activists?

The longer we go without challenging this narrative, the longer it gets passed down to the war resisters after us. We don’t remember the U.S. wars on Vietnam or Iraq kindly. So why do we still write off the people who resisted those wars? Maybe a lot of the Vietnam War protestors were communists, but they were also right when it mattered. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with the war in Vietnam now. Over two million Vietnamese people were killed by our government. It is long over. It only matters if you’re right when it’s actually happening or before it happens, not when the blood is already dried on the pavement.

And as it so happens, being a communist might be the most American thing you can do as more and more people feel like everyone around them somehow got the short end of the stick. Who has the long end of the stick? We’ve never met them.

Americans happen to have their own opinions, and many of us are not paid to have them. You can tell that is a fact by how few of us have healthcare. If the peace movement was such a well-funded foreign apparatus, we would never have a war ever again. We would never have blockades and embargoes that starve people to death. The war industry is far better funded than those of us in opposition to it.

Some of us can shake these accusations off. Two years ago, we all saw a photo of a young Palestinian girl with her face falling apart and her father trying to press her back together. We decided her life was worth more than any job or future opportunity we could ever lose from saying something. Her life was worth more than any threat I could ever receive – but the stakes don’t need to be so high for us to stand up for what’s right if we collectively decide right now that they don’t need to be. We can get it right when it comes to Cuba before it’s too late. Power is reproduced in every single one of us. The accusations stick every time we don’t refute them on behalf of others. The accusations work every time it isn’t shot down or called out. So we must.

I am proud to be the national co-director of CODEPINK. I am called a foreign agent or terrorist sympathizer every time I post about a child being murdered in Gaza. Or that I don’t agree with a policy of collective punishment in Cuba. Or when I dare suggest that the United States shouldn’t be stoking a war with China. The US and China both have nukes. I don’t have to be paid off by a foreign government to have the opinion that a confrontation between two nuclear powers would be a disaster.

Right now, CODEPINK, along with other organizations are the subject of a smear campaign to discredit our work towards peace. We were accused of being funded by a deep and large web of interests that led back to the Chinese Communist Party, and now we are accused of being agents of the Cuban government. I am sorry to our haters and clickbait journalists, but that is just completely untrue. It is a disrespect to the fearless leadership of women in North America who don’t like blockades being imposed in our name and to our thousands of donors who make our work possible. Now, as the Trump Administration escalates its hybrid war on Cuba and people are standing up for what they believe in, the same accusation is coming down on each and every one of us who happens to care about the eleven million Cubans who will go into this fall and winter without electricity, or without the medicines they need to survive. If you ever disagree with the war machine, the titles of “foreign agent” or “terrorist sympathizer” will be waiting for you at your doorstep. It’s really just a matter of time. If we want history to stop repeating itself, if we want to stop the senseless slaughter carried out by our government, we have to stop falling for the same tricks.

When the American elite make the inevitable pivot, and start telling you what country to hate: see through it. And when they start pointing fingers at people who think we shouldn’t go to war — ask if their accusations are actually admissions about their own integrity. You are not bought to care about Cuban life; your comrades aren’t either.

This moment, and every moment of resistance that comes after we are gone, requires us to learn this lesson and fast. The movement and the people sympathetic to it must stand up for themselves and reject the notion that it is fundamentally un-American to care about people or despise massacres.

Take action for Cuba now! Tell Secretary of State Marco Rubio & the State Department: Your 100-Page Cuba Report is a joke but the blockade isn’t!

Danaka Katovich is CODEPINK’s National Co-Director. As a Chicago-based anti-war organizer, she has been organizing against endless wars for her entire adult life. She is the author of the blog Proof That I’m Alive.

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By Former U.S. Diplomat and Colonel (Ret) Ann Wright

Feeling singled-out by people who push back against horrific policies, Trump appointees are taking drastic “McCarthy-like” tactics to stop dissent.

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In less than one month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sponsored two initiatives to frighten those who oppose the Trump administration. The first was a conference with 60 countries participating in “Threats From Left-Wing Terrorists.” The second was the report on Cuba that alleged virtually every group that has ever visited Cuba is paid by the Cuban government. Allegations that paid protest and travel on the dime of another country are unfounded, untrue, and fly in the face of the history of protests.

Trump’s erratic foreign policy, including the disastrous attacks on Iran as a favor to Israel’s war machine, plus cutting health and education domestically, the horrific treatment of migrants, and blatant disregard for facts, all provide good reasons for protests. No one needs to be paid to be outraged!

In particular, Rubio, who authored the latest report to quell opposition to illegal, immoral policies of the Trump administration, seems to have lost his grasp on the history of dissent in the U.S.

From his 15 years in the U.S. Senate, he should remember that each administration’s domestic and international policies have been lawfully and non-violently protested by U.S. citizens. Having been a part of many protests since I resigned from the State Department in March 2003 in opposition to President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq- I know that these protests are NOT a part of attempts of other governments to “overthrow the government of the United States,” but are legitimate shows of concern. Rubio’s allegations of other countries’ influence in these protests are unfounded and untrue.

I was not paid by a foreign government to resign. I resigned because I felt the war on Iraq was illegal, immoral, and a dangerous action jeopardizing the national security of the United States. I’ve never been paid by any country to protest U.S. policies, nor do I know anyone who has. Protest is a legitimate act of outrage that people use to bring attention to egregious policies in the hope of making change

Rubio’s first attack against legitimate protest came in the U.S. Department of State-sponsored conference called “Far Left Terrorism” held in Washington, DC in July 2026 where he and White House pitbull Stephen Miller harangued the representatives of 66 nations about “terrorists” from the left wanting to overthrow the U.S. government. In his opening statement, Rubio railed: “This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”

Stephen Miller called left-wing extremism a growing threat aimed at “the overthrow of our system and form of government” that officials previously failed to sufficiently address. Miller railed, “We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.”

A White House press release stated: “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.” Of course, neither Rubio nor Miller mentioned Trump’s pardon of the over 1500 persons who did try to violently overthrow the United States electoral process on January 6, 2001 as they attacked the Capitol police and broke into and destroyed many offices in the U.S. Capitol.

The most recent ludicrous allegations of “left wing violence” and protests being funded by other countries is in Rubio’s 10- page report on “Cuba: the Capitol of 21^st Century Communism” Rubio accuses the National Network on Cuba, National Lawyers Guild, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and others of being paid by the Cuban government whose goal, the report claims, has been to overthrow the U.S. government.

Talk about turning the facts on their heads, as is well-documented, all 13 U.S. administrations since 1959 have attempted to overthrow the Cuban government in the 60+ years of its existence. The current attempt is centered on the total blockade of fuel going to Cuba, which has left Cuban citizens without electricity for operations in hospitals, for food preparation, and for the ability to conduct normal life activities. Making life so miserable for the Cuban citizenry that they overthrow their government would fulfill the longstanding hopes of Cuban-American Marco Rubio - who has been less than forthright about his heritage in his quest for the overthrow of the Cuban government.

‘Mr. Righteous against birthright citizenship” is a “birthright citizen” born in the U.S. of non-citizen parents who had immigrated in 1956 from Cuba under the Batista dictatorship, not from the 1959 revolutionary government.

‘Mr. Tough on illegal immigrants’ own grandfather entered the U.S. illegally and was ordered to be deported but was saved from deportation by an amnesty during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

‘Mr. Kill the Boat Drug Runners of the Caribbean’s own brother-in-law was convicted of drug running and his sister implicated but never charged.

‘Mr. I Know All About Cuba Because I Am Cuban-American’ has been to Cuba only once. And where in Cuba did he go? A few hours at the U.S. prison on the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo.

More will come in the next two years as Rubio, Miller, and others in the Administration continue bullying those who nonviolently challenge them—unlike the January 6 crowd. Protests will also persist against U.S. sanctions that pressure citizens in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and Nicaragua to topple their own governments.

However, Rubio, no doubt, is thinking that since his buddies in Netanyahu’s government have paid Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, millions of dollars in a specific program to influence U.S. public opinion to stop the massive decline in Israel’s “likeability,” other countries have paid off U.S. persons to work clandestinely on the same scale.

Parscale’s firm was hired by Israel for $6 million in September 2025 and then signed a $15 million contract with Israeli firm Havas to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel according to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Pascale and his team sent conservative influencers suggested positive language about Israel for social media posts. The influencers are compensated based on how many “likes” each post gets.

Israel’s government has quadrupled its “public diplomacy” influence budget, from $150 million in 2025 to $730 million in 2026. But even the Israel Times says it’s too late for a “facelift”—a Pew poll shows U.S. favorability toward Israel has dropped to 37%, down seven points in a year, following its Gaza genocide, West Bank ethnic cleansing, destruction in southern Lebanon, and its entanglement of the Trump administration in the war on Iran.

These recent attempts to quell dissent show how serious challenging illegal, immoral, and criminal policies has become and how important it is that we push back hard against the uptick in intimidation. Despite attempts to silence, dissent is spreading. In a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper, the Honolulu Star Advertiser, a resident of Hawaii summarized the challenge very well: “The true domestic enemy includes those who monopolize political and economic power. The real enemy includes individuals who misinform, threaten and disenfranchise the less powerful. The true enemy is those who are antidemocratic, have little or no concern regarding the welfare of others and enrich themselves, family and a few friends at the expense of the general population.”

Tell Secretary of State Marco Rubio & the State Department: Your 100-Page Cuba Report is a joke but the blockade isn’t!

Ann Wright spent 16 years in the U.S. Department of State as a U.S. diplomat, 8 times as long as Marco “McCarthy” Rubio has been appointed as Secretary of State.

After serving in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and as a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and 8 presidential administrations, she resigned in March 2003 in opposition to President George W. Bush’s justification that the U.S. should wage war on Iraq on the knowingly false claims of Iraq possessing “weapons of mass destruction.”

Philadelphia is the birthplace of the United States. Here, in 1776, those known as the founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence (followed in 1787 by the Constitution). In the 250th year of this country, now is an ideal time to come to a reckoning about the injustices in our society.

We have an ongoing history of guns and violence, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and genocide of indigenous peoples. Our presidents and corporate interests have contributed to prosperity for the few, at the cost of misery for others.

Our successes have been built on the labor of enslaved people and on the stolen land of native Americans. It was in the best interests of the wealthy white landowners and profiteers to continue the practice of slavery. George Washington owned nine slaves. This story is told in the Philadelphia exhibit, “The President’s House,” which our current president has authorized to destroy.

Throughout our nation’s history, we have entered into numerous wars. Unfortunately, the military-industrial complex has become a voracious monster – with our current war on Iran, actions in Central and South America, and our involvement with Israel in Palestine and Lebanon – clear examples of imperialism and a total disregard for human life. A highly militarized ICE and the inhumane imprisonment of immigrants and refugees within our own borders present even further evidence.

Despite repression and imprisonment, those among us who refuse to let the truth die choose to persist and resist. If we are to survive as a democracy, we must have the courage to dissent. This can be a time of atonement and reparations for shameful actions in the past and today. Organizations such as CODEPINK can help us act in solidarity to unite and activate neighbors, voters, workers, congregations, and others, so that we may speak out for truth, equality, compassion, and justice.

We can build a community of neighbors. A local peace economy can replace the current and historic war economy. We need to resist war, violence, oppression, and profiteering. We must offer a peaceful existence for all people and for our planet.

Our record-breaking heat is one more example of the urgency of our time. Planet Earth is crying out for us to take care of her before it’s too late. By acting together, we can make the leap into a new future, which will fulfill the best of our natures.

We need an investment in the people—not profit. What would you fund instead of war? Take our poll now!

Written by Donna Greenberg and the CODEPINK Greater Philadelphia Chapter.

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CODEPINK’s Tim Biondo traveled to Venezuela recently to bear witness to the country’s recovery since it was struck by two deadly earthquakes in July. The following is a summary by Teri Mattson of an interview with Tim upon their return to the States.

Natural disasters expose the strengths and weaknesses of every society. The earthquakes proved that Venezuelans were far more than ambitious political vision.

After a pair of powerful earthquakes struck northern Venezuela last month, images of collapsed buildings, rescue crews, and devastated neighborhoods quickly spread around the world. Headlines tracked the mounting toll of deaths, injuries, and displacement.

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Search-and-rescue teams worked around the clock in suffocating heat, carefully clearing debris by hand before heavy machinery could safely move in. Apartment buildings stood open to the sky, exposing family photographs, furniture, and the ordinary objects of everyday life that remained even after the walls surrounding them had disappeared.

Yet what remained with Tim Biondo after returning home was not simply the destruction.

It was how quickly communities organized themselves to respond.

For years, much of the Western coverage of Venezuela has focused on political polarization, sanctions, economic hardship, and institutional crisis. In the aftermath of one of the country’s worst natural disasters, however, Biondo encountered another story—one rarely reported outside Venezuela. Community councils, communes, healthcare workers, neighborhood organizations, and thousands of volunteers mobilized almost immediately, creating an extensive relief network while search-and-rescue operations were still underway.

“It wasn’t chaos,” Biondo recalled. “People knew what they needed to do.”

Understanding that response requires looking back more than two decades.

The community councils and communes that became indispensable after the earthquakes were not created as emergency institutions. They emerged from Hugo Chávez’s vision of participatory democracy—an effort to shift decision-making from centralized bureaucracies into organized neighborhoods where residents could identify local needs, elect community leadership, and work collectively to solve common problems.

Over more than twenty years, Venezuela built a nationwide network of community councils and later expanded that work through the creation of communes—institutions responsible for identifying local priorities, coordinating public resources, and strengthening civic participation.

Supporters viewed the projects as an effort to deepen democracy at the grassroots level. Critics questioned both their political objectives and their effectiveness.

The earthquakes offered something different from either argument. They offered an opportunity to observe these institutions under extraordinary circumstances.

As part of Hugo Chávez’s political legacy, the neighborhood institutions he envisioned more than two decades ago were no longer simply an ambitious political project. They had become an operational reality when Venezuela faced one of the greatest disasters in its modern history.

Biondo witnessed that operational capacity almost immediately.

“A lot of the work of the communes was surveying their own communities and working together with the government,” they explained. “They were identifying which buildings had been impacted, who needed relocation, where it was safe, and what additional capacity existed. The government, in coordination with the Union of Communes, asked communes across the country to identify how many displaced families they could take in.”

In one commune, leaders walked Tim through a detailed survey of its neighborhood. Maps covered with notes identified damaged buildings, unsafe areas, families requiring relocation, and structures that could safely receive displaced residents.

Rather than waiting for outside direction, neighborhoods already possessed the leadership, relationships, and communication networks needed to respond immediately in coordination with municipal, regional, and national institutions.

Thousands of national communes, cooperative stores and collective enterprises were transformed almost overnight into collection and distribution centers for food, water, and emergency supplies.

The response Biondo witnessed extended far beyond emergency relief.

More than one hundred temporary shelters had been established in schools, cultural centers, community buildings, and tent communities, many operating in coordination with nearby communes.

“Every place we went had what we would call wraparound services,” Biondo said. “There were fully staffed kitchens preparing three hot meals a day. Everywhere we went, they offered us food too. That really astounded me. It’s such a Venezuelan expression of hospitality.”

Medical care accompanied nearly every shelter, but what surprised them most was the attention given to emotional recovery.

“It didn’t even occur to me how traumatic an event like this is. Even if you didn’t lose anybody, you’ve lost your routines, your sense of safety—your whole life has been turned upside down. Everywhere I went, there were psychologists and mental health workers supporting people around the clock.”

Children played basketball while volunteers organized games, art activities, and performances to restore a sense of normalcy. Doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals volunteered long hours because they considered it both a responsibility and an honor to serve communities facing profound loss.

These details rarely dominate international headlines, yet they reveal something fundamental about disaster recovery. Communities are rebuilt not only by removing rubble, but by restoring the rhythms of everyday life.

Biondo also spent time observing active search-and-rescue operations.

Online commentary suggested heavy machinery often sat idle while little work was taking place.

That was not what they found.

Buildings had been marked according to internationally recognized rescue protocols indicating where survivors might still be located, where remains were believed to be, which structures had already been searched, and which had become too unstable to enter safely.

“People see a bulldozer standing idle and assume nothing is happening. In reality, that often means crews are still searching with small power tools and by gloved or bare hand.”

Far from inactivity, rescue workers continued painstaking searches while civil protection units from across Venezuela reinforced local responders—many of whom had themselves suffered personal loss during the earthquake.

The methodical pace reflected not delay, but the difficult reality of disaster response, where preserving the possibility of finding survivors takes precedence over clearing debris quickly.

What emerged from the rubble was not only an effective response to catastrophe, but evidence of a nation navigating a profound period of regional change.

Over the past several years, conservative governments have regained political ground while progressive governments and social movements have confronted renewed political and economic pressures. Those competing visions shape debates over democracy, sovereignty, development, and regional integration throughout the hemisphere.

Biondo observed that the earthquake quickly became part of that larger political struggle.

“One thing I hadn’t heard before going was how quickly the Salvadoran government responded. People I spoke with viewed that response as highly political—as an opportunity to showcase the supposed effectiveness and necessity of Bukele’s right-wing model. Of course, people in El Salvador genuinely wanted to help the Venezuelan people, but humanitarian aid was being filtered through a much larger political narrative.”

Their observation illustrates how rapidly a humanitarian catastrophe became another arena in which competing political visions for Latin America were advanced.

Supporters of Venezuela’s Bolivarian process continue to express concern that expanding U.S. military engagement in the Caribbean and northern South America reflects broader efforts to strong arm governments throughout the region to align more closely with Washington’s strategic priorities. This reality forms an important part of the political context through which many Venezuelans understand both the recovery effort and their country’s future.

The earthquakes did not suspend politics. They became another chapter in the broader struggle over Latin America’s direction.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Biondo what had surprised them most after spending a week documenting the recovery. Their answer had little to do with politics.

Despite the grief, life continued.

Children played basketball outside temporary shelters. Families gathered together after long days of uncertainty. Neighbors prepared meals, cared for one another, and slowly rebuilt routines amid extraordinary loss.

Reflecting on what they had witnessed, Biondo paused before offering an observation that stayed with me long after our interview ended.

“That is just so Bolivarian. It’s such a transformed sense of humanity. It really made me emotional—especially when I think about our response to catastrophe and crisis in the United States.”

No one who visited La Guaira would minimize the scale of the catastrophe. Recovery will take years, and thousands of families continue to navigate profound loss.

But natural disasters expose the strengths and weaknesses of every society.

In Venezuela, the earthquakes exposed terrible destruction. They also revealed something less visible.

After more than two decades of building community institutions, Venezuelans proved that they had become far more than an ambitious political vision. They had become the social infrastructure through which ordinary people responded when disaster struck.

For many outside the country, that may be the most important story they have yet to hear.

Stand with the Venezuelan People: Donate to Our Emergency Solidarity Fund!

Teri Mattson currently works with the Venezuela Solidarity Network. She is an activist with the SanctionsKill coalition and CODEPINK’s Latin America team. Her writing can be found at Anti-War.com, CommonDreams, Jacobin, and LA Progressive. Additionally, Teri hosts and produces the YouTube program and podcast WTF is Going on in Latin America & the Caribbean.

Episode 362 of CODEPINK Radio: Rubio's Red Scare: On the first half of Empire on the Rocks, Medea and Marcy discuss growing opposition to the war on Iran and U.S-Israel military integration. On the second half of our program, our podcasters take a deep dive into Secretary of State Marco Rubio's "Cuba, the Capital of 21st Century Communism." The conspiracy-heavy document attacks both the island nation--long suffering under brutal U.S. sanctions-- and its progressive supporters in the United States. Is Rubio's Red Scare rant a pretext for military intervention in Cuba or a blueprint for persecution of the Left in the U.S? Or is it both?

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The Israeli military’s Orwellian use of artificial intelligence for surveillance, targeting, and execution of attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has been well-documented by journalists, reporters, and activists in Israel and the United States. Less known is the close collaboration between the military and police departments in the United States, which have been quietly adopting tactics pioneered by Israel in their perpetual campaigns in the occupied territories, including US police departments sending their officers to Israel for training. This dynamic, combined with the US’ direct funding of the Israeli military through taxpayer dollars, creates a feedback loop in which the US is effectively funding the real-world experimentation and refinement of AI technology on Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, which then provides models for how the police in the United States can more effectively surveil their own citizens and—especially chillingly—potentially quash dissent. Cities in Nevada, like Reno and Sparks, find themselves at the forefront of this unsettling reality, as developments on both ends of the process—data center construction that powers AI use, and the proliferation of Flock and Axon cameras used for state surveillance—are currently taking place under the sanction of our local governments.

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The Generative AI systems that are being used for warfare abroad and surveillance at home require staggering amounts of data storage and energy. In Northern Nevada, data centers can occupy huge swathes of land with footprints larger than the biggest nearby cities, or nestle right into our communities where they can support local police surveillance. Apart from initial construction, they produce few jobs, poison the groundwater, and generate noise pollution that can harm physical and mental health. The Great Basin is so called because the water that enters the Basin does not drain out again - any toxins that leach from the data centers will stay there, despite promises about closed-loop wastewater-based systems. Data centers also facilitate the shadowy nature of private entities that are funded by the government - Palantir, which develops a variety of AI-based surveillance technologies utilized by the US, does not own its own data centers, but rather contracts with companies like Google to hide their exact location.

Much of the processing power generated in these centers is utilized by the Israeli military and surveillance apparatus, which is in turn funded by US aid. The US has sent Israel approximately $174 billion in aid to date, allowing Israel to continuously remain on the cutting edge of surveilling and murdering Palestinians and their other neighbors in the Middle East. Unit 8200 is one of Israel’s cyber warfare units, and it has developed a variety of target identification tools that rely on generative AI to generate lists of potential targets with little or no human intervention or decision-making. Lavender is a system that has been used to generate kill lists. The Gospel is another - one which had its guardrails with respect to target size removed in 2023. These systems rely on a variety of data sources, including facial recognition and data mining through social media and internet use. Unit 8200’s technologies closely mirror those developed by Palantir, such as ELITE - a system used in Operation Black Rose, the DHS surveillance project in Oregon designed to identify and arrest targets for ICE. These similarities should not be surprising - it’s not unusual for key players in Palantir and other private AI technology developers to have close ties with Unit 8200. For those who follow the Epstein files, it’s important to note that Epstein was deeply involved in Israeli intelligence - and therefore can be connected to the burgeoning projects of surveillance in the US - representing the fusion of private interests and military operations. As sinister as these systems are, it’s essential to recognize that they are fundamentally faulty: Palantir also developed the Maven Smart System, which was used to target the school in Iran where 120 children and 37 adults were bombed to death based on faulty, out-of-date information. The lack of human decision-making contributes to violence on false premises.

Now we are witnessing the disturbing yet unsurprising development of surveillance technology developed in Israel with US aid money returning to US cities. Flock Cameras and the systems that support them are an increasingly notorious example. Flock claims that its own cameras function only as Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), but they allow police departments to connect a wide range of camera systems to a central database. Police cameras, as well as privately owned cameras, can be connected to these databases, which are typically then shared across police departments nationwide. This is already making Americans less safe, as was demonstrated when a journalist in Georgia discovered that an unauthorized Flock employee was viewing the cameras within a Jewish community center. Faulty target identification is also coming home to roost in the US, as evidenced by the false charge against Chrisanna Elser in Colorado. Elser was charged with stealing a package on the basis of a false identification by ALPR cameras. While the case was eventually dropped, this precedent will inevitably lead to more individuals being wrongly targeted for crimes they did not commit.

These systems are all supported by data centers. Data centers built in our hometowns are already bringing the surveillance technology of war to our public spaces and private lives. We unwittingly fund all of this, and so it becomes our duty to resist it on every level possible: tax resistance, blocking data centers from being built in our communities, and resisting the reckless use of AI by government and private entities. The struggle for Palestinian rights, dignity, and livelihood is inextricably connected with the preservation of our freedoms in the US.

Join CODEPINK’s campaign against data centers and the war economy that drives and supplies them.

Collectively written by CODEPINK Reno. You can learn more about Reno’s local CODEPINK Chapter by reaching out at codepinkreno@proton.me.

The U.S. “defense” budget is out of control, unsustainable, and absent of accountability. Now, the U.S. House of Representatives has agreed to a 50% increase in the defense budget to $1.5 trillion. The Senate must approve it and will consider the massive DOD budget when it returns from the August recess.

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The Pentagon cannot tell the American taxpayer where past mega-funding went, as it has been unable to pass a financial audit as required by law -- something every other department of the federal government can do- nor will it be able to handle a budget twice as big as the previous year’s.

The 2027 $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request represents more than $9,000 per individual taxpayer. Americans are tired of seeing our tax dollars spent on needless wars, bombing campaigns, and military excess while our own communities struggle with the costs of health care, childcare, education, and infrastructure.

While the Pentagon, State of Hawaii, and various think tanks claim that the large U.S. military in Hawaii puts around $10 billion annually into Hawaiʻi’s economy, according to a new, exhaustive 2026 study “The True Costs of the U.S. Military in Hawai’i,” the actual economic impact for DOD spending is $7.2 billion, nearly 30 percent less. The report states that “dollar for dollar, military spending creates approximately 5.3 jobs per $1 million invested, compared to 12.3 jobs from the same investment in health care, education, housing, food production or energy efficiency.”

While massive construction projects at Pearl Harbor, including a $3.4 billion construction of a nuclear submarine drydock and a new multi-billion-dollar project recently announced for construction of new piers on Ford Island near the USS Utah to accommodate nine Medium Landing Ship-class vessels, put federal funds into the Honolulu economy, they are fleeting and do not result in long-term economic development.

Five years ago, thousands of persons on Oahu were injured in the Navy’s Red Hill jet fuel leak into the island’s drinking aquifer. Since then, while civilians on Oahu are asked to limit water usage due to drought conditions, the Navy has wasted 5 billion gallons of filtered water instead of diverting the water from Red Hill to a useful purpose, such as irrigating the military’s numerous golf courses, athletic fields and parks.

The ongoing biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval war practice brought 30,000 military personnel from 30 countries for short-term spending in the Honolulu/Waikiki areas but at an environmental cost to the surrounding oceans that is incalculable, with fuel pollution, destruction and sinking of ships and sonar practice that harms marine mammals.

Oahu is definitely a DOD “sacrifice zone” as it is a prime target for potential adversaries, as it was in World War 2.

Presidential administrations and the corporate weapons makers exaggerate threats to our national security which justify a huge U.S. “defense” budget, larger than the next eight nations (most of whom are allies) in the world combined, while American citizens lack health care, childcare and other basic needs.

The defense industry’s lobbyists team up with U.S. politicians, who receive campaign financing from the industry, to draft the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which sets military policy, the expensive weaponry to be purchased, and the overall military budget.

The industry takes the financial windfall and puts it toward stock buybacks, which increase the share price, making the rich richer; dividend payments for shareholders; multi-million dollar annual compensation packages for corporate executives; and the continual political graft through campaign contributions that keep the system greased for the rich.

The principal beneficiaries of the administration and corporate lobbyists’ practice of vastly overstating foreign threats are the Pentagon and senior retired military and civilians who occupy it and secure lucrative post-retirement employment with the military, weapons industries, and the Congressional network of good ole boys.

Unfortunately, these bureaucrats lack the courage to speak of their professional concerns about the mega-budget. Instead, they stay silent to protect themselves.

Government employees, including military officers, are fired for their gender or race, and few who were fired dare speak up regarding the dangerous negative impact of these firings on morale, discipline, and readiness of our military forces.

And very few have spoken up when the U.S. supports genocide in Gaza, extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean, or attacks on the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.

Despite being easily the most defensible of any nation (with two friendly, stable nations to its north and south and oceans on its east and west), its military budget is larger than the next eight countries combined.

Retired five-star General and President Dwight Eisenhower warned ordinary citizens sixty-five years ago in 1961 in his farewell address about the dangers politicians and the military-industrial complex pose for our country:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The courage required today is not to defeat an enemy abroad, but to confront one at home—the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex—and reclaim a government that serves the American people rather than the interests of perpetual war.

We need an investment in the people—not profit. What would you fund instead of war? Take our poll now!

Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves. She was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. She is a member of Veterans for Peace, World Beyond War, CODEPINK: Women for Peace and the Eisenhower Media Network.

She has lived the past 23 years in Honolulu.

Episode 361: Stop Bitching and Engage: Peter Coyote on Peace, Power, and Resistance: This week on CODEPINK Radio, Jodie Evans speaks with actor, author, and longtime peace activist Peter Coyote about his journey from the 1961 anti-nuclear protest at the White House to a lifetime of organizing for peace and justice. Together, they discuss the dangers of militarism, money in politics, Christian nationalism, and why real change begins when ordinary people organize and act together.

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By Colonel (Ret) Ann Wright

Nineteen years ago, during the Bush administration’s Axis of Evil regime and calls for attacks on Iran from members of Congress, including a “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” recitation by Senator McCain, I wrote an article entitled “An Appeal to Conscience to Those Who WOULD Bomb Iran.”

Nearly two decades and four presidential administrations later, the article is virtually the same, except that U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy pilots have now actually dropped ‘‘smart’ bombs on Iran’s nuclear program facilities and, according to Secretary of Defense Hegseth, the U.S. has targeted over 1700 locations in Iran, including civilian infrastructure of roads, bridges and water treatment plants as well as military targets.

Despite the 1976 executive order issued by President Ford banning the U.S. from engaging in political assassinations, a few hours into the first day of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, on the orders of President Trump, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, members of his family, and other senior leaders of the government were assassinated. In 1975, the U.S. Congress’s Church Committee report that examined U.S. involvement in plots to kill foreign leaders, stated that “assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order and morality” and that assassinations should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.

U.S. missiles have destroyed many structures, including a school in Minab, Iran, where 168 persons, including over 100 school children, were killed in an unlawful attack. The U.S. Navy submarine, Hawaii-based USS Charlotte, torpedoed and sunk the Iranian naval frigate Dena, killing 104 sailors, including 20 missing, 2000 miles from Iran in the Indian Ocean as it was returning from regional military maneuvers, which the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command attended.

President Trump has allowed himself and his administration to be led into a war on Iran by Trump’s buddy, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, becoming the “neocon,” regime change advocate in a complete 180-degree turnabout from what he promised his MAGA base.

One former supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, summarized the feeling of much of the MAGA base: “We said “No More Foreign Wars, No More Regime Change!” “We said it on rally stage after rally stage, speech after speech. Trump, Vance, basically the entire admin campaigned on it and promised to put America FIRST and Make America Great Again. My generation has been let down, abused, and used by our government our entire adult lives, and our children’s generation is literally being abandoned. Thousands and thousands of Americans from my generation have been killed and injured in never-ending pointless foreign wars, and we said no more.”

Did anyone tell Trump that if he ordered the U.S. military to attack Iran, that, by international law, Iran has the legal right to defend itself from aggressive action by another country, the U.S., Israel or any other country?

Are U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine pilots reminded that the Iranian attacks on the closest U.S. facilities to Iran, the many U.S. military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, are legitimate targets for the Iranians to attack in response to the U.S. attack?

For leaders of the Trump administration-Hegseth, Rubio, Cane, and pilots of Air Force and Navy jets and the missile operators of the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines- a reminder that after World War II, the United States executed German and Japanese military officers who were convicted of crimes against peace (wars of aggression) and for violations of the Geneva Conventions.

International Law is clear: The attack on Iran, or any other country that has not attacked the United States, is a crime against peace, a war crime. Principle IV of the Nuremberg Principles states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to an order of the Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him. Principle VI states: The following crimes are punishable as crimes under international law:

a. Crimes against peace: i. Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; ii. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (ii).

b. War Crimes: Violation of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave-labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of o in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, town, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

c. Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation of other inhuman acts done against any civilian population or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done, or such persecutions are carried on in execution of, or in connection with any crime against peace, or any war crime.”

Those who drop bombs and fire missiles and torpedoes in an illegal war, a war of choice, a war of aggression, are violating the Nuremberg Principles, the Geneva Conventions and the “Laws” of Warfare.

While I doubt that you should fear prosecution for commission of war crimes from an administration that ordered you to commit these actions, there will be future consequences that may be worse than spending time in jail for your actions-just ask the veterans who suffer from nightmares, erratic and dangerous behaviors, and drug and alcohol abuse, and who commit suicide from the wars that have endured. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among military personnel, and in recent years, more military personnel have died by suicide than died in combat. Just ask the spouses and children of war veterans.

I appeal to the consciences of U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine pilots who fly the bombers and attack aircraft and to Navy, Air Force and Army personnel who command land and sea-based missile units and those who plan these attacks, to stop these criminal actions. Refuse unlawful orders that violate the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg principles. You have a “moral” choice. While refusal to drop bombs or fire missiles or torpedoes may initially draw punishment and the loss of one’s military career, those who refuse will save their souls, their consciences and their sanity.

In a video in 2025, Senator Mark Kelly (Navy) and Representatives Chrissy Houlahan (Air Force), Jason Crow (Army), Chris Deluzio (Navy), Senator Elissa Slotkin (former CIA), and Maggie Goodlander (Intelligence Officer), stated with conviction of the legality of their statement, the “threats to our Constitution” are coming “from right here at home.” They repeatedly urged military and intelligence personnel to “refuse illegal orders.”

Unsurprisingly and without legal basis, President Trump, who never served in the U.S. military and knows nothing about U.S. military law or the duty to disobey illegal orders, called them “traitors” who could face execution. He wrote on Truth Social: “It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand - We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.”

The oath for commissioned officers is to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and not to a particular person or political party.

Military personnel can get assistance at the Center on Conscience and War, War Resisters League, Veterans For Peace, About Face: Veterans Against War, G.I. Rights Hotline, and Military Law Task Force.,VA Suicide and Crisis Lifeline website or Call 988.

Take action! CNN: Put the Pentagon on the Hot Seat!

Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. She also was a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in U.S. embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the Bush administration’s war on Iraq. She is a member of Veterans For Peace and is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”

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As a long-time anti-Zionist activist and retired teacher, I submitted a Public Records Act request to the California Department of Education for copies of all formal complaints, filed from October 7, 2023 to May 26, 2026, alleging discrimination, harassment, intimidation, and bullying that was so “severe” and “pervasive” as to violate federal or state law in California schools.

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If a local education agency (LEA), a school district or county office of education, receives a complaint—a Uniform Complaint Procedure (UCP)—the LEA must, within 60 days, conduct an investigation, interview parties involved, and decide whether to order “corrective action.” Sometimes the UCP ends there. If, however, the complainants are dissatisfied with the LEA ruling, they may appeal to the California Department of Education (CDE).

I reviewed the appeals.

The CDE lacks authority to discipline school personnel, and the appeals I reviewed did not recommend teacher discipline. Teachers, however, have been told by their school districts to remove their keffiyehs and steer clear of stating as fact that Israel exemplifies “settler colonialism.”

If an LEA or CDE finds a complaint has merit, it may order school districts to implement teacher training in antisemitism in consultation with a Jewish or Israeli organization. These orders open the door for Zionist organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee to teach teachers that criticism of Israel is antisemitic and discriminates on the basis of national origin.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations based on someone’s birthplace or ancestry—but does not prohibit criticism of a sovereign state, which is protected speech according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The CDE’s release of files reflects the department and school districts’ tendency to conflate anti-Zionism (opposition to Israel) with antisemitism (bigotry toward Jews for being Jewish). Under AB 715 (D-Zbur) legislation that establishes an antisemitism coordinator to police instruction and teacher training, this confusion could get a lot worse because AB 715 incorporates the US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which promotes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and examples that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Teachers and their allies can, however, act: March on Sacramento, challenge Zionist teacher training, file their own complaints, and collectively teach Palestine across school departments and districts.

The following is a review of some of the CDE’s cases addressing allegations of antisemitism or discrimination against Jews or Israelis.

Banned!

In 2025, the principal of Mountain View Los Altos High School banned popular Lebanese-Palestinian American comedian Sammy Obeid after he cracked jokes about Israel at an after-school on-campus event in 2025 hosted by the Muslim Student Association (MSA). The school investigation report (IR) read, “During the event, the comedian made antisemitic remarks: about the Israeli Prime Minister getting cancer, calling the Prime Minister a supervillain, and how Israel does not believe in abortion so it can bomb more Palestinians.”

Months earlier, on November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity in Gaza, including “starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Nevertheless, the district concluded, after berating the Muslim students for inviting Obeid—that the comedian’s performance was antisemitic. The CDE agreed and ordered the district to further revise its guest speaker policies to include strict vetting and get-off-the-stage intervention should an administrator believe the speaker’s conduct discriminated against a protected group on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, and physical or mental disabilities.

P.S. For the record, abortion is legal in Israel as long as women obtain approval from the Israeli Pregnancy Termination Board.

San Ramon Valley HS

In another example of conflation, the CDE ordered (11/24/25) San Ramon Valley High School to deliver teacher training on antisemitism to all social studies teachers after the department ruled a teacher’s class statements were proof of discriminatory bias against Jewish and Israeli students. The department’s fact-finding said the teacher told students that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Hardly breaking news. Human RightsWatch, B’Tselem, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Doctors without Borders, and the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry had all determined Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

Nonetheless, the CDE said the appeal had merit because the teacher did not cite sources and present an opposing viewpoint. The Department ordered San Ramon Valley High School to provide the CDE with evidence by January 30, 2026 that the school had delivered training from someone not affiliated with the school district to ensure that classroom instruction “does not promote a discriminatory bias.”

Anti-Palestinian Racism

The Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism (IUAPR) defines anti-Palestinian racism as a form of racism that “silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.”

A CDE ruling involving New Haven Unified School District might serve as an example of erasing the human rights and worth of Palestinians. After teachers in the summer 2025 Ethnic Studies Social Justice Academy (ESSJA) presented a slide deck describing actions by Israelis against Palestinians as potentially constituting “genocide, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism,’ the department said instruction lacked adequate balance and historical context, and cast Israel in a negative light. The department acknowledged that the slides for students also discussed the horrific impact of the Holocaust, the ancient connection of Jews to the land also claimed by Palestinians, and how ”the Israeli government is separate from innocent Israeli/Jewish people who stand for justice,“ but still...

The department then ordered the school district to train ESSJA teachers and administrators in the “obligation to comply with Education Code 51500, which states that a teacher shall not deliver instruction, and a school district shall not sponsor any activity that promotes a discriminatory bias.”

For teachers walking a tightrope under the watchful eye of an AB 715 enforcer, there are some lessons that lend themselves to a “both sides” debate: South Africa vs. Israel at the International Court of Justice or Zionists vs. non-Zionists on school board adoption of the IHRA definition and examples of antisemitism. In many instances, however, the “both sides” approach fails to acknowledge the power imbalance between Israel and Palestine to leave students confused.

History will not look back kindly on those demanding investigations of educators who dare to teach about Palestine during a documented genocide. Nor will history applaud those who conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism in lawsuits against states and school districts.

Ready to challenge Zionist brainwashing in our schools? Grab all of our resources from our Summer Workshops 2026!

Marcy Winograd is a voting member of the UTLA House and Representatives and chair of the CTA Caucus: Jewish & Allied Educators 4 Palestine. A retired English and social studies teacher, Marcy co-produces CODEPINK Radio– and Empire on the Rocks, an anti-war podcast she co-anchors with Medea Benjamin.

Episode 360: Empire, Occupation & Resistance: From Venezuela to Gaza: On this episode of CODEPINK Radio, we unmask Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s colonial chokehold on Venezuela and meet CODEPINK organizer Makayla Heiser to learn more about CODEPINK chapters challenging Rubio’s extortion and Trump’s ICE raids.

Danaka Katovich, CODEPINK

In an era of high prices for fuel, food, and housing, an extra $4,000 could make a life-saving difference for many families. But instead, that’s what the average household had to shell out for the Pentagon last year.

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That’s right: The average U.S. taxpayer in 2025 had over $4,000 taken out of their paychecks to fund the Pentagon, according to the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. In the coming years, that amount is set to rise as Congress considers a $1.5 trillion war budget for 2027.

For the growing number of working poor in the United States, that money can mean the difference between making rent or falling behind, or between being able to afford an emergency trip to the doctor or going without care.

Money directed to the Pentagon represents nothing but betrayal for many Americans. A large majority oppose our wars, especially the latest conflict in Iran. And roughly half of the Pentagon’s budget flows to for-profit contractors, fueling the billionaire (and now even trillionaire) class.

Take SpaceX, one of many companies built on government contracts funded by taxpayer dollars. Elon Musk’s company would not exist without U.S. taxpayers. As early Tesla investor Ross Gerber put it, “There would not be (Tesla and SpaceX) if it weren’t for the government.”

Early investments and contracts from the U.S. government helped propel SpaceX to success, while continued awards from the Pentagon provided the stable revenue that made the government one of Musk’s largest customers. The company is now valued at more than $1 trillion. Private investors alone did not make Musk a trillionaire — taxpayers across the United States did.

But Musk isn’t the only person who made himself rich off the backs of American workers.

Lockheed Martin receives over 70 percent of its revenue from U.S. government contracts. The numbers for Raytheon and General Dynamics are similar. These military contractors simply would not exist without the taxpayers — and a new $1.5 trillion budget would send hundreds of billions of dollars more to people who already have more than most Americans could even conceptualize.

At the same time, while taxpayers are subsidizing the military-industrial complex, the jobs those industries are allegedly providing are in decline, with the war industry creating over 2 million fewer jobs than it did forty years ago.

Worse still, under the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” Republicans passed a year ago, the money for these ever-rising Pentagon budgets comes directly from SNAP, Medicaid, and other programs that help Americans make ends meet.

Under those cuts, millions of Americans — including children — have lost SNAP benefits already. And that’s impacting not just families but the farmers who helped feed them.

SNAP benefits were “guaranteed money in the pockets of farmers,” said Reese Amxy, a policy organizer at the Illinois Stewardship Alliance. But 150,000 people in the state have already lost eligibility.

It’s not just Illinois. Arizona has seen the steepest decline, with 50 percent of recipients — nearly half a million — already losing benefits. Louisiana (21 percent), Florida (20 percent), Oklahoma (16 percent), and Virginia (16 percent), Texas (14 percent), Wyoming (13 percent), and Arkansas (12 percent) round out the rest of the hardest hit states so far.

Yet the person who lost SNAP and the farmer who lost their income alike will be asked to foot the bill for the $1.5 trillion war budget. This is Robin Hood in reverse. Worse still, the weapons those taxes buy are often to use to kill children like ours in Gaza and Iran.

The weapons and tech CEOs that would benefit from the massive war budget, and the politicians bought off by them, seek to keep this cycle going next year at an even grander scale. Americans need to demand their lawmakers say no more Pentagon spending — and invest in the things that actually keep our communities safe instead.

We need an investment in the people—not profit. What would you fund instead of war? Take our poll now!

Danaka Katovich is the National Co-Director of CODEPINK. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

By: Nuvpreet Kalra, CODEPINK

In June 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote to Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, saying that “the time has now arrived [for Israel] to move from aid recipient to partner” with the United States. Yesterday, on Fox News, Netanyahu again repeated the proposal to move “from aid to partnership“.

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What Netanyahu proclaims is at the core of the proposed “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”, which has been included in a section of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that seeks to push the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion in 2027. This proposal to the annual military policy bill aims to essentially merge the Israeli and the US militaries.

While the initial bill, the “United States-Israel FUTURES Act,” failed as a standalone bill, the core provisions have been included in the NDAA. This aims to “expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation” between the US and Israel, led by an “executive agent” decided by the US Defense Secretary.

This merger would integrate the United States and Israeli occupation militarily, including “data fusion”, “network integration”, research and development, weapons and bio-manufacturing, and collaboration with AI, cyber, and quantum machine learning technologies. While the Israeli occupation forces and US military are already deeply connected and share many of their genocidal tactics, this represents a significant entanglement of the two most belligerent and murderous militaries in the world.

If passed, this would be the most integrated the United States is with any country on earth. It is perhaps unsurprising for Israel to be that partner, given it is a proxy for the United States used to entrench its hegemony in the region and provide a base for attacks, particularly against Iran. The Israeli occupation is totally reliant on the United States. The US has given Israel at least $300 billion in military money since 1948. It uses US-made weapons, relies on training and intelligence from the US, and is armed by many US citizens. So just like when the Trump administration re-named the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of War”, this is yet another overt action that reveals the reality that has always been there.

In 2008, the US passed a law requiring it to protect Israel’s “military edge” against other countries in the region. The US is required to give Israel at least $3.8 billion a year in military funding until 2028. Israel has always been a major priority of the United States - this only makes that clearer.

This new integration differs from the way the US engages with its other allies. While NATO countries and partners share a degree of military integration with global weapons supply chains, intelligence sharing, military bases, and more, this removes the limitations in existence for military cooperation. Already, the US war drive through NATO has impacts across society beyond what might be recognised as purely military-related, given the military-industrial complex and integration of the US military in all aspects of life. In this case, the merger will deepen ruptures across the political, social, and economic system as the United States moves closer to its proxy. The main beneficiaries of this will be the weapons companies that profited immensely from and have made Israel’s genocide in Gaza possible, as they enter into new seamless contracts.

Israel is increasingly viewed across the world, and within the United States, as a pariah state. In the US, 60% of adults have an unfavourable view of Israel. This push to further integrate with Israel puts the US on the line in an attempt to ensure the continuation and longevity of the settler colonial project. By entrenching the US military with Israel’s own, it provides a layer of protection that goes even further than the impunity that has given Israel full rein to commit a holocaust in Gaza and further colonisation of the occupied West Bank. This integration will mean that Israel is given unfettered support to carry out its genocidal trajectory for the total colonisation of Palestine, inhibiting any future presidents from changing this relationship, if that were to ever occur.

This is the US empire defending itself, as the zionist state becomes isolated, by trying to make its proxy appear more robust and independent, while maintaining its unbreakable connection to the core. This is a clear response to the massive movements that have erupted across the world for nearly three years in opposing Israel’s genocide and the role of countries in facilitating it. The US is, in a way, absorbing Israel to provide the legitimacy being chipped away at internationally and domestically, ending the narrative opposition to unlimited foreign aid to Israel, which has garnered bipartisan support.

Israel is occupying at least 60% of Gaza. Palestinians are being pushed into a shrinking concentration camp, where they are bombed every single day and refused aid during what is described as a ceasefire. For US taxpayers, this merger would put even more of our money into funding this horrific genocide.

This NDAA is dangerous. Through the US-Israeli integration, it would facilitate more deadly technology, more weapons for genocide, and make it nearly impossible to sever support for Israel by the US. Through the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, it would funnel money out of welfare into more war and violence across the world. For the sake of humanity, we have to dismantle this apparatus of death that is the US empire, which is in a perpetual, ever-growing state of war to maintain its system of exploitation and plunder.

We need an investment in the people—not profit. What would YOU fund instead of war? Take our poll now!

Nuvpreet Kalra is CODEPINK’s digital content producer. She completed a Bachelor’s in politics and sociology at the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Internet Equalities at the University of the Arts London. As a student, she was part of movements to divest and decolonize, as well as anti-racist and anti-imperialist groups. Nuvpreet joined CODEPINK as an intern in 2023 and now produces digital and social media content. In England, she organizes with groups for Palestinian liberation, abolition, and anti-imperialism.

June 24 marked the start of the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, the world’s largest international naval war games. Led by the U.S., the military exercises bring together 31 countries and include more than 25,000 personnel, 40 surface ships, 5 submarines, and 140 aircraft. The event, which will run until July 31, marks the newest escalation of U.S. preparations for war on China, further militarizing the Pacific and normalizing the prospect of conflict through increasingly large-scale exercises and an ever-expanding web of alliances and military bases.

At the same time, the U.S. and partner nations kicked off the ten-day Valiant Shield 2026 exercises across Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Japan, and surrounding seas, submerging the entire Pacific into an intensive military operation zone.

At a moment of intensifying climate disasters and growing economic insecurity, the message from Washington is clear: there is always more money for war. RIMPAC comes as Congress is attempting to approve a staggering $1.5 trillion war budget, even as communities across the world are facing deadly heat waves, floods, and other climate-fueled disasters.

This past week, while U.S. military vessels practiced war off their coasts, super typhoon Bavi pummeled Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Only a week into the typical typhoon season, this is already the second major typhoon to hit the islands. Many locals were still without power from the last super typhoon Sinlaku, which killed 17 people and caused over $1.5 billion in damages.

Climate scientist Kristina Dahl remarked, “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths.”

These overlapping crises reveal a profound imbalance in priorities. As Pacific communities contend with increasingly severe climate disasters, the United States continues to invest staggering sums in military expansion and war preparations. The irony is especially stark given that the U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and one of the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitters, while decades of U.S. military activity has caused lasting environmental and human harm across Pacific Island communities.

Instead of pouring resources into preventing climate change and protecting people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, the U.S. continues to pump money into its bloated war budget. In the Pacific, military expansion is justified by the increasing push toward war on China. The 2026 National Defense Strategy committed to “deterring China in the Indo-Pacific through strength” by “erect(ing) a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain” so that “Joint Force always has the ability to conduct devastating strikes and operations against targets.”

The U.S. conception of “deterrence” is both illogical and hypocritical in nature. In the name of “protecting” the Pacific from a future imaginary threat, the United States is harming the very communities it claims to defend through military buildup, environmental degradation, and the transformation of islands into staging grounds for war. The narrative of an imminent Chinese takeover of the Pacific is often treated as a foregone conclusion despite there being no evidence that China seeks to invade or occupy Pacific nations. Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.

A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the U.S. military’s economic benefits to Hawaiʻi have been significantly overstated and that local communities bear enormous hidden costs from its presence. The report estimates that military demand for housing drove Oʻahu rents up by 7.1 percent in 2024 alone, costing non-military renters an additional $234.8 million. It also found that cleaning up PFAS contamination at just three military installations could cost at least $493 million, with broader health and environmental damages potentially reaching into the billions. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has leased more than 46,000 acres of Hawaiian land for just $1 leases, despite the land’s estimated fair market value reaching as high as $133.7 billion. Far from protecting Pacific communities, the U.S. military buildup has contributed to housing insecurity, environmental contamination, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands.

Similarly, U.S. militarization of Guam has severely impacted local communities. The U.S. military controls roughly 27 percent of the island’s land, while decades of military activity have left behind contaminated groundwater, hazardous waste, and damaged ecosystems. PFAS “forever chemicals” linked to military firefighting foam have been detected in Guam’s drinking water wells, threatening the island’s primary freshwater source. Military expansion has also endangered coral reefs, sensitive coastal habitats, and wildlife.

These events, which are just a few of many examples of the environmental and human costs of militarization, reveal the deep hypocrisy of the U.S. strategy of “peace through strength.” Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.

The proposed $1.5 trillion war budget will only deepen these harmful priorities, while large-scale military exercises like RIMPAC intensify U.S.-China tensions, heighten the risk of dangerous encounters at sea, and increase the possibility of pulling the Pacific into a devastating war.

We need an investment in the people—not profit. What would you fund instead of war? Take our poll now!

Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China Campaign Coordinator.

Megan graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Prior to that, she attended NYU where she studied Conflict, Culture, and International Law. Megan spent one year studying in Shanghai, and over eight years studying Chinese Mandarin. Her research focuses on the intersection between US-China affairs, peacebuilding, and international development.

Episode 359: From the River to the Sea: Dr. Maha Nassar, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, presents the chant “From the River to the Sea” as a call for liberation that embraces Palestinian personal ties to the land of Palestine. Dr. Nassar was a guest on the CODEPINK Summer Series: Challenging Zionism in Schools.

“We’re used to people saying ‘fuck no’ and doing it anyway.” These words were seemingly spoken by our very own Governor Gretchen Whitmer earlier this month, caught on a hot mic chatting with Oracle executive Clay Magouryk. The two were celebrating breaking ground on the controversial new AI data center in rural Saline, Michigan — currently the largest data center project in the country. Governor Whitmer is apparently happy to sell Michigan out to military tech giants OpenAI and Oracle. This is the latest in a series of data center projects being forced into communities that have made their opposition crystal clear. Michiganders are ‘fighting like hell’ because they understand exactly what is at stake; Southwest Michigan residents have already filed a class-action lawsuit for the 24/7 noise nuisance that disrupts daily life and reduces property values.

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The development of AI data centers creates harm and destruction. The companies that drive this development, such as OpenAI and Palantir, have contracts with the U.S. military and government agencies like ICE. Locally, the influx of these data centers provides infrastructure for mass surveillance and diverts municipal resources. Globally, the push for data center expansion demands massive amounts of minerals and fossil fuels from resource-rich countries in the Global South, which are obtained through U.S. military intervention and U.S.-backed militia groups. As such, we as Michiganders must continue to oppose these data center projects.

The harm these data centers inflict ripples across the world. Data center development depends on imported critical conflict minerals and massive amounts of electricity generated by fossil fuels, which contribute directly to U.S.-backed conflicts and war on Venezuela, Iran, and in the Congo. Tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold, referred to as 3TG, are essential, and their extraction is linked to financing armed groups and militias. The struggle for control over mineral-rich areas has led to prolonged violence in the DRC, contributing to millions of deaths and leaving entire regions destabilized.

Detroit is becoming a hub for technology, manufacturing, and the military-industrial complex, where events like the annual Reindustrialize conference bring together defense contractors, surveillance firms, and policymakers to strategize a future built on automated warfare and mass data extraction. Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing attended, representing key pillars of the U.S. defense and surveillance industry. Palantir’s Project Maven and Where’s Daddy track individuals and automate kill chain recommendations with little human oversight. Lockheed Martin and Boeing produce the missiles, bombs, warcraft, and strike systems that turn algorithmic targeting into genocide.

It’s understandable that some Michiganders might think the development of AI data centers is a good thing, or at least an inevitability. Governor Whitmer, for one, claims that if Michigan does not lead the charge on these data centers, “they’ll be done elsewhere… with lower wages in a way that abuses the natural resources and jacks up energy prices.” Thus far, this seems to mean that companies that develop these data centers can receive tax breaks and circumvent public input, which sets a disadvantageous precedent. These data centers, furthermore, are not an inevitability, and they can drastically impact resource usage in their regions. At the Saline data center, even with the closed-loop cooling system to reduce on-site water consumption, water will be consumed indirectly: Increased electricity needs increase the need for water and oil consumption for local power plants. There is also no guarantee that any jobs created will be given to local residents. None of the reported advantages are worth the imperialism needed to supply resources to these data centers, nor the mass surveillance apparatus that comes with them.

Governor Whitmer’s hot mic comment confirmed what we already suspected: our voices and opposition are flat-out ignored in favor of destructive corporations. Michiganders across the state have stood up and said ‘fuck no’ to data centers and more war, yet projects keep moving forward. Residents deserve better than politicians who prioritize tech billionaires and war profiteers over their own people.

Let’s build a joint struggle against data centers and the war economy that drives and supplies them.

Jackie Barlow is an anti-war activist, nature lover, and avid gardener in Metro Detroit. Through organizing with CODEPINK Detroit, she works to end militarism and corporate greed that destroy ecosystems, public resources, and local communities.

Stewart Mitchell is an organizer with CODEPINK Detroit. He is an educator and, thus far, lifelong Michigander.

With the 32 North ATLANTIC Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries in Ankara, Turkey, for their annual meeting this week, July 7 and 8, many of the militaries of NATO countries are halfway around the world in the PACIFIC ocean in war preparation maneuvers.

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Ten NATO countries, almost one-third of all NATO countries, have sent military forces, land, air, and sea, to Hawaii to participate in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), a 38-day (June 24-July 31, 2026) war drill.

Forty naval vessels, headed by the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, 5 submarines, 206 aircraft, land forces from 15 nations, and over 30,000 military personnel.

These war drills are specifically directed toward the propagandized military threat of China, when China’s main “threat” is its economic challenge to the “West,” not military confrontation.

Thirty countries are spending lots of their national budgets to send some of their military forces to one of the most isolated island archipelagos in the world, the Hawaiian Islands.

Of the 10 countries from NATO countries, only two have shores on the Pacific Ocean- the United States and Canada.

The other eight NATO countries in RIMPAC are sending vessels and military forces all the way from Europe: Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Additionally, there are 5 NATO “partners” sending aircraft, ships, and land forces to Hawaii that have Pacific Ocean coasts: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Korea, and Colombia, the only country in Latin America to be a “partner” in NATO.

The other 14 countries with shores on the Pacific or Indian oceans that are sending military forces to Hawaii for RIMPAC 2026 are: Brunei, Chile, Fiji, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Tonga.

The 6^th NATO “partner” in RIMPAC 2026 is Israel. Israel has an office in NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and is well integrated into NATO operations through its deep association with the United States military. Israel brings to NATO first-Hand experience in the assassination of national leaders, journalists, ordinary citizens, and in the AI development of targeting infrastructure and surveillance around the World

Israel is the U.S. partner in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and tragically brings the most recent combat experience among RIMPAC militaries with land, air, and sea combat operations in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and Iran.

Israel is the first country from the Middle East to send military to RIMPAC, providing first-hand experience not only in conducting a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza with the weapons provided by the United States, but also offering the latest artificial intelligence programs for the assassination of national leaders, journalists, and ordinary citizens, targeting of infrastructure and surveillance of areas anywhere in the world to the NATO war machine.

RIMPAC Is Not the Only Big Naval War Practice in the Pacific

While RIMPAC is one of the largest war practices, each year the US Pacific Command, by its own count, sponsors over 1,500 war practice maneuvers and other engagement activities with military forces from other countries in Asia and the Pacific.

In fact, the week of June 22-July 1, 2026, as RIMPAC began in Hawaii, the war practice Valiant Shield ended in the front yard of China near Guam, the Northern Marianas, and Okinawa. Valient Shield is held every two years, just as RIMPAC is. The U.S., Japan, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand participated in Valiant Shield, only the second time Japan has sent military forces since Valiant Shield began in 2006.

The Navy described Valiant Shield as an anti-submarine warfare exercise, high-altitude balloon launch, MQ-28 Ghost Bat drone surveillance flight, bilateral medical operations, bilateral resupply and cross-decking, and a live fire of the medium-range intercept capability.

The United States sent the aircraft carrier, Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN 73), the guided-missile cruiser USS Robert Smalls (CG 62), the guided-missile destroyers USS Shoup (DDG 86) and USS Benfold (DDG 65), and Virginia-class fast-attack submarine USS Minnesota (SSN 783) to Valiant Shield.

The Japanese ships included the helicopter destroyer Kaga, the guided-missile destroyer Fuyuzuki, and the attack submarine JS Jingei.

Japanese air and ground Self-Defense Forces also participated in Valient Shield 2026, with 4,100 Japanese ground forces, 150 vehicles, and 60 aircraft involved in the war maneuvers.

The Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Charlottetown (FFH339) and a P-8A Poseidon MPA from the Royal New Zealand Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force also participated in Valiant Shield 2026

The story of the 2026 Valient Shield sinking of the current USS Juneau by a Japanese torpedo a strange chapter in military history. It’s the Second Time a Japanese submarine sank ships named the USS Juneau!

A Navy press release about Valiant Shield enthusiastically read that “The pinnacle event was the sinking exercise (SINKEX) of the decommissioned Austin-class amphibious transport dock USS Juneau (LPD 10) in the Philippine Sea, June 27. The SINKEX brought together air, surface, and subsurface assets in coordinated strikes, allowing crews to sharpen critical skills in weapons employment and target engagement under realistic conditions that no simulator can fully replicate.”

The amphibious transport dock USS Juneau (LPD 10) entered service in 1969 and saw action in the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm before being decommissioned in 2008 and being made ready to be sunk as part of military war practice, 18 years later, in 2026.

June 2026 U.S. Navy images show that aircraft dropped bombs on the USS Juneau. But, according to the U.S. Navy, the final hit that sank the USS Juneau was a torpedo strike from a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force submarine.

The Captain of the Japanese submarine JS Jingei, whose torpedo finally sank the USS Juneau in Valiant Shield 2026, perhaps did not know the history of the ships that have carried the name USS Juneau, or he might have passed up the opportunity to give the final blow to this USS Juneau in June 2026.

Japanese submarine sank the USS Juneau in 1942 during World War II, killing 600 sailors

In 1942, during World War II, the namesake of the 2026 Valiant Shield, USS Juneau, was sunk near the Solomon Islands when torpedoes from a Japanese submarine split the light cruiser in half, sinking it almost immediately. More than 600 sailors died that day, including perhaps the most well-known case of brothers killed during the war.

The Sullivan brothers, five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa—Albert, Francis, George, Joseph, and Madison Sullivan—all served as shipmates on the USS Juneau. Normal protocol during wartime required siblings to be assigned to different units to prevent one family from having to endure such a hardship should tragedy strike. But the Sullivans insisted that they serve together and requested special permission to do so from the Secretary of the Navy.

Tragically, all five brothers were killed in action when their ship, the USS Juneau, was sunk on November 13, 1942, by Japanese submarine torpedoes.

Reminder that the “Killer US Submarine” USS Charlotte is operating in RIMPAC 2026

In RIMPAC 2026, the notorious USS Charlotte, a U.S. nuclear attack submarine, torpedoed and sank in March 2026 the Dena, an Iranian naval frigate, 2,000 miles from Iran as it was leaving a regional military exercise in the Indian Ocean, killing 87 Iranian sailors.

Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. She was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years but resigned 23 years ago in March 2003, in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. She is a member of Veterans For Peace, World Beyond War, International Peace Bureau, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and Hawaii Peace and Justice. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”