Global

As our we open GREEP #243, our Poet Laureate MIMI GERMAN celebrates the ability of America’s Air Traffic Controllers’ ability to shut the nation down.

Activist-advocate JAY PONTI introduces us to STOPTHECAMPS.COM to fight the Alligator Alcatraz/Auschwitz nightmare while arguing that the MAGA movement is not a monolith.

In the wake of NoKings 2.0, MARISOL BIELMAN reminds us that Albert Speer used Jewish slave warriors to build Hitler’s war machine.

After discussing Donald Trump’s AI insane images showing dropping feces on a reporter, the great PAUL NEWMAN calls the alarm on ES&S voting machines.

From Arizona, the great JOHN BRAKEY highlights his 3-year defiance in pursuing citizen demands for critical public voting records.

Our engineer STEVE CARUSO warns us that election theft cuts both ways as Hillary & Kamela both walked away from electoral integrity.

Co-Convenor MIKE HERSH introduces MAGA escapees ANDRA WATKINS and JENNIE GAGE who discuss their astounding backgrounds in Christian nationalism.

In case you have never heard the name "Valetina Gomez" before, she is a 26 y/o Columbian immigrant and a right-wing extremist Republican candidate for Secretary of State in Missouri who faced a resounding defeat in the primary election last year. One day after her brother's support for her campaign, he was fired from the office of New Jersey mayor.

She came to public attention when she burnt a copy of the Qur'an during her election campaign to attract media attention and generate votes. But the self-confessed “biggest bitch in America” uses the verbal equivalent of "shock and awe" against Muslims, Blacks, immigrants, and gay people to make a name for himself. 

Here are some samples of her recent obnoxious remarks:

* She recently burned a copy of the Qur'an.

* Muslims should never be able to hold public office in the US.

* Muslims want to kill every Jew, Christian, and Hindu.

* She cheers the slaughter of innocent children in Gaza. 

* She is banned on Instagram, Facebook, and Wikipedia due to her incendiary remarks and call for violence.

The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?

Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.

While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.

The massively successful NoKings2.0 has again underlined Donald Trump’s four failing MAGA fascist roots: male dominance; global white dominance; US financial dominance; and the end of fossil/nuclear fuels.

They’re all linked to the impending collapse of the petro-dollar, the century-old pillar of American prosperity, about to disappear.

Autocratic hucksters like Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump have forever feasted on the human inability to cope with a perceived loss of status.

Hitler’s Nazi putsch was rooted in Germany’s inability to accept losing World War I.

Deutschland’s “Christian” misogynists had ultimate faith in their assumed superiority. Their “incomprehensible” 1918 defeat was made unbearable by the 1929 crash.

So Hitler’s Mein Kampf promised to make Germany “great again.”

Under the thumb of Adolph’s white male Master Race, women were defined by the KKK: Kirche (church) Kitchen (cooking) & Kinder (kids). Gays were untermenchen. Jews, gypsies, slavs, trans, Jehovah Witnesses, immigrants…all were “vermin,” fit only for extermination.

There's nothing more inflaming to the souls of Arab and Muslim Americans than seeing US officials treating them as they are less American. 

Case in point:

Mohammed Ibrahim, a 115 y/o American citizen from Palm Bay, Florida, has been illegally locked in Israel’s military prison system since February 17, 2025. Israeli occupation soldiers kidnapped him from his family’s home in al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya near Ramallah in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, three weeks after he arrived to visit relatives. Israel claims he threw stones at settlers, yet no trial has taken place and the allegations remain unproven, according to FB post by his supporter Sandra Ibraham.

"When he was taken, Mohammed weighed 108 pounds. Since that time, he has lost 22 pounds, bringing him down to 86 pounds. Troops blindfolded him at arrest, held him in harsh conditions, and confined him for months in 'quarantine' for a scabies infection he contracted in prison as a result of medical neglect by Israelis. His parents have seen him only three times via a courtroom camera and every visitation request has been denied."

It is particularly difficult to pick out the most idiotic comments made by President Donald Trump over the past week as there is so much to choose from. There were the memorable doodle-headed speeches before the Israeli Knesset and the so-called Peace gathering in Sharm el-Sheikh Egypt and the threats against Hamas over the failure to come up with the bodies of Israeli hostages that were killed by American government provided bombs dropped by Israel and are now buried beneath piles of rubble. And then there is the Insurrection Act, cited nearly every day by Trump or one of his cabinet, which, if it is successfully called for and passes through judicial review, will truly turn the United States into a police state ruled by a leader that clearly is mentally incompetent as well as providing all the signs that he is a narcissistic psychopath whose goal in holding the presidency is to be surrounded by folks who tell him constantly how great he is! And let’s not forget the bloviation regarding the “Triumphal” Arch being planned for the Arlington National Cemetery end of Memorial Bridge leading to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

A single, candid statement by US President Donald Trump during a Fox News interview on October 9 may illuminate the true calculus behind Israel’s decision for a ceasefire in Gaza, following a relentless, two-year genocidal campaign that has tragically killed and wounded nearly a quarter of a million Palestinians.

 “Israel cannot fight the world, Bibi,” Trump declared during the interview, a direct warning he said to have previously delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Suddenly and violently, their childhoods were shattered. No child should have to live in a war zone. No child should have to bear witness to the murder of their mother. Some stopped talking. Others endured long rehabilitation for physical wounds in hospitals. We spoke to half a dozen Ukrainian orphans who witnessed their mothers killed in Russian drone or missile attacks. They are the hardest cases in a generation of children growing up scared by war, though many young people in Ukraine will have to make their way in life without one or both parents. We asked about interests, hobbies, plans and coping in times of terrible uncertainty, of facing the future and moving on.

Katia and Yulia