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A Clocktower Center of Control
BY KEITH MCHENRY - COFOUNDER FOOD NOT BOMBS
Santa Cruz and the high-rise development of the dystopian digital panopticon.
Instead of enjoying the beautiful warm seaside evening I forced myself to log on to the Workbench Team’s webinar on the Santa Cruz Clocktower Center development, an 18, now 16, story tower “proposed” to be built next to where Food Not Bombs shares its meals every weekend to an increasing number of hungry and homeless people.
Online daily Lookout Santa Cruz reviewed the farce, “At 16 stories and rising to 192 feet, with 260 housing units and ground-floor commercial space, the Clocktower Center is a wholly new kind of project, in both scale and density, for Santa Cruz County; but it’s one which Workbench says is sorely needed in the most unaffordable housing market in the United States.”
Developers, government officials and their nonprofit shills across California often justify these projects by claiming if they build more housing it will bring down the cost of rent, but as anyone trying to rent an apartment in Santa Cruz can attest, the many completed projects have not reduced housing costs at all. A failed supply and demand argument.
Many people living in Santa Cruz may wonder why even though there is little public support for all these high rise projects, and an organized citizen opposition to each project, every development is approved.
Lookout notes, “Twice, people asked whether the community could stop the project. Twice, Workbench’s co-founder Jamileh Cannon said no.”
“Is it possible to stop this project?” Keith McHenry wrote in the virtual Q&A chat box. McHenry leads Food Not Bombs, a local organization that hosts an open-air soup kitchen at the town clock on weekends.”
“It’s not possible to stop it, but we are very open to your constructive feedback and to making improvements,” Cannon replied.
Lookout writer Neeley links “open-air soup kitchen at the town clock” to a mostly fact free article fed to him by City Manager Matt Huffaker.
There are a number of reasons these unwanted monstrosities like the city’s library parking garage, the Front Street projects and the Cruz Hotel are assumed realities. Giant project after project are designed with limited parking spaces and claims that the high density towers meet the environmental goals of the city as described in their obtuse “Community-wide Climate Action Plan 2030.” The city’s website lists these actions in one of their powerpoint style reports,” Direct emissions reductions; 3 new Municipal Solar PV arrays + energy efficiency work; Rail Trail Completion; Public Transit / Active Transportation Improvements; Fleet Electrification Roadmap and Investments; New Building Energy Reach Code; Induction Cooktop Loaner Program with Library and Food scrap collection.”
Workbench’s webinar painted a wonderful upbeat picture of their tower where you can step out the first floor atrium and walk or bike to all your favorite places. A survey question asked the viewers if we own an electric car and if you required a car for work. It was suggested you could rent a Zip car if you required the use of a vehicle. When asked in the chat if this was a “Fifteen Minute Smart City” project they reported that they had not heard of this and would look into it.
Nothing to see here. Just happy people provided with all the eco-friendly convenience of a walkable community: foamy cafe lattes sipped in the sun on the 16th floor terrace cafe as your Tesla sits charging in the garage above the Cedar Street book-less digital library.
So why did “team member” and co-founder Jamileh Cannon say it was not possible to stop the project? Is this just the case of wealthy people making more money or could there be more to this sudden flurry of construction projects. Could there be any other reason for concern beyond a distaste for the ugly buildings and the elimination our local democratic process?
Or could it be because this massive construction bonanza is part of a global strategy initiated by the institutions controlled by billionaires like Bill Gates, King Charles, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg and their UN and World Economic Forum’s pleasant sounding programs like the, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.
There is a complex system that intentionally soaks the media and every other institution in this ecological affordability story of bliss that meets the interests of the board rooms that intend to reap the “rewards” of their dystopian digital panopticon. That system includes the mobilization of Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) or non-profits, as a tool in nudging the policies that most benefit the hedge funds, banks and global financial vultures of institutes. It’s a strategy that was used effectively in shaping society before Obama’s 2014 coup of the democratically elected government of Ukraine and that the US is currently deploying in the effort to topple the Hungarian, Serbian and Georgian governments. The National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros and other foundations spent nearly $5 billions to fund pro European Union NGOs in their campaign to replace the Ukrainian government with the US State Department’s choice Petro Poroshenko.
Our local NGOs such as Housing Matters perform the same function. They help foster the impression that the homeless are helpless through their “Smart Solutions” community meetings while promoting the myth that more development will lower rents in Santa Cruz providing housing for our homeless. I am sure many of the administrators and staff in those agencies want the best and believe the oceans of information asserting these dodges from reality will really help ease the “problem” of homelessness. I remember seeing Housing Matters Don Lane stride across the Trader Joes parking lot with his “No on Measure M” yard signs in hand out to support the predetermined policy allowing unlimited building heights and the suppression of local control. As soon as Measure M, which would have required a community vote on the height of downtown developments failed, the Clocktower Center was unleashed on the people of Santa Cruz.
The upbeat “we care” messaging of “sustainability” and “income-restricted” affordable apartment units expressed in the June 8th Workbench webinar joyously proclaimed such features as limited parking, Zip cars at the library garage, electric vehicle charging stations, pleasant cafes and attractive retail shops.
“I think it is imperative that we work to create as much sustainable housing in Santa Cruz… I think that the scale of Santa Cruz hasn’t changed in 95 years (since the city’s tallest building, the Palomar Hotel, was built) and that is a huge tragedy,” Workbench Team member Simon wrote at the webinar.
As the public relations webinar progressed it became clear that this project, maybe unknowingly to the developers, was just one piece in the puzzle outlined in the UN and World Economic Forum”s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their Agenda 2030. The Santa Cruz City website lists the high impact actions needed to meet this Agenda 2030. “Choose Renewable Electricity from Central Coast Community Energy; Reduce Air Travel; Eat more Plant-based Meals; Take Public Transportation; Buy or lease an Electric Vehicle; Electrify: Install Electric Heat Pump Water Heater or Space Heating; Use Active Transportation: bike, walk, skateboard, or scooter; Install Solar Panel.” I would normally be a big supporter of many of these aspirations if there wasn’t a hidden agenda that is much more sinister behind Agenda 2023.
The path from the seas of think tank white papers, World Economic Forum seminars, UN pronouncements and the legislation required to implement their Agenda 2030 is expressed in a brutal silent manipulation that trickles into state, county and municipal law by way of workshops hosted by associations such as the California League of Cities, business associations and foundations that fund cooperating university departments and non-profits like Housing Matters and No on Measure M buster Second Harvest.
Not only did Second Harvest encourage a no vote on Measure M, they also paraded around the county to their agencies a state mandated presentation that touted the ecological virtues of accounting for each pound of discarded food recovered, an illogical burden that seemed more about surveillance of the food supply than an effort to reduce the threat to our climate as advertised.
It is easy to understand why people would embrace the “reasonable” concepts promoted in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In principle the idea of people being able to walk or ride a bike to obtain all you need sounds wonderful. Promises of clean air and water, safer streets, housing for everyone, streamlined digital healthcare system and a slowing of the climate crisis all sound worthy.
But looking more closely at who is driving these utopian promises and it will reveal some very disturbing features. Journalists Iain Davis and Whitney Webb write at Unlimited Hangout that, “Many of these goals sound nice in theory and paint a picture of an emergent global utopia – such as no poverty, no world hunger and reduced inequality. Yet, as is true with so much, the reality behind most – if not all – of the SDGs are policies cloaked in the language of utopia that – in practice – will only benefit the economic elite and entrench their power.”
They continue, “This can clearly be seen in fine print of the SDGs, as there is considerable emphasis on debt and on entrapping nation states (especially developing states) in debt as a means of forcing adoption of SDG-related policies. It is then little coincidence that many of the driving forces behind SDG-related policies, at the UN and elsewhere, are career bankers. Former executives at some of the most predatory financial institutions in the history of the world, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America to Deutsche Bank, are among the top proponents and developers of SDG-related policies.”
These policies of a Santa Cruz filled with an “Internet of Things,” high density car free housing and Smart Meters comply with the SDGs pushed with the objective of implementing the social control designed to increase the power and wealth of the master class. Why would giant military contractors, global banking and investment interests, high tech firms, oil and coal companies be at the forefront of initiating this Sustainable Development agenda? Ending war is never on the climate solution map even though it is the single largest contributor to every environmental crisis. More war is in fact at the core to the success of implementing Agenda 2030.
Is it possible that the recent purchase of license plate readers that record every vehicle entering Santa Cruz and small fleet of surveillance drones are more than innocent public safety measures? Could they be another step to normalize the total social control described in the SDGs and other UN, World Bank and Bill and Melinda Gates publications.
Even though you might get the impression from what you have read so far that I am opposed to protecting the environment, that could not be farther from the truth. I grew up in a family of environmentalists. My father’s father, Donald McHenry, was the Chief Naturalist at Yosemite National Park before retiring to the Santa Cruz mountains. He started the tidal pool walks at Natural Bridges State Park. My father, Bruce McHenry, followed in his footsteps spending his adult life as a naturalist in the National Park Service, was also a world-renowned pioneer of the environmental education movement and cofounded the Association of Interpretive Naturalists. I was thrilled when he took me to the founding convention of Earth Day.
The roots to my radical environmental activism started during my childhood while living in America’s National Parks. I was blessed to spend time in those sacred lands of the Hopi witnessing the Corn and Snake Dances, the majesty of the red canyons dotted with Anasazi cliff dwellings and the vast northern Arizona landscape before it was desecrated by Lake Powell, Peabody’s coal mines, and the high tension power lines. I recall that day when I was 16 sitting atop the Wasatch Mountains looking down at the black smoke drifting up the valleys of southern Utah from the Navajo Generating Station. Right then and there I decided to dedicate my life to dismantle the political and economic system that was willing to inflict such horror.
We really don’t know how far back intelligence agencies, think tanks and the billionaires that direct them have been working on the creation of the Fifteen Minute Smart City idea that is currently devouring our seaside community. The rewriting of our history by Google makes it difficult to search for that which they wish to conceal. But I do know that I rented office space from a pioneering AI start up in Boston in the early 1980s and without AI it would not be possible for these Smart Cities to work, suggesting its roots may go back to the development of the internet by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
IBM launched its “Smarter Cities” marketing initiative called Smarter Planet in 2008, which included the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge. Two years later Cisco Systems, with $25 million from the Clinton Foundation, established its Connected Urban Development program in partnership with San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Seoul. In 2011, a Smart City Expo World Congress was held in Barcelona, in which 6000 people from 50 countries attended. During that event the United Kingdom proposed to invest $140 million in the development of smart cities and the Internet of Things.
According to Earth Island Journal the 15-minute city concept was the idea of Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno who found that urban life involves large amounts of wasted time adapting to what he calls the “absurd organization of cities, which require a lot of traveling to get to and from basic functions such as home, work, education, and social interaction” adding “Even if we have to spend 45 minutes to one hour for a trip to work, this was considered normal,” Moreno says. His solution was the 15-minute city. “In such a city, all residents should be able to access their daily needs of home, work, education, care, essential shopping, and socializing within the distance of a 15-minute walk or bike ride.”
“When Moreno proposed the concept of fifteen minute cities at the UN climate talks in Paris, people considered it a great idea but too utopian, mainly because they thought it unrealistic that everyone should work close to home. Fast-forward to 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic forced many people all over the world to work not just closer to home, but actually at home, using technology to access meetings and information they previously had to travel to a central place of work for.”
Even though it appears that these plans have been in the works for decades to aid in fulfilling the dreams of Agenda 2030, the UN publicly announced support for Smart Cities as the world was reeling from the pandemic lockdown restrictions. The UN website has a page that reports, “The United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) launched a Smart City Project in 2021:
"- Considering high risk of natural disaster and climate change impacts on cities and communities in developing countries.
- Acknowledging profound impact of sea level rise and health emergencies such as COVID-19 pandemics on the sustainable development of developing countries
- The United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) launched a Smart City Project in 2021 which aims to provide technical assistance and support to urban policy makers, planners, and city officials for building their cities and communities safer, smart, efficient, resilient, inclusive, livable and sustainable through smart city solutions."
The wedding of the 15-Minute City and The Smart City concepts of Agenda 2030 are marching forward with little public understanding of the future they will force on our town and as Jamileh Cannon said in the Clocktower Center webinar, nothing can stop it. That is unless we start getting serious and initiate a campaign of nonviolent direct action to physically disrupt their construction sites.
Just like the insanity of believing that accounting for every pound of discarded food will slow the climate crisis, Agenda 2030 is also implementing infrastructure to “make the world more inclusive” by issuing a biometric digital ID to every person on Earth. How this makes our environment more sustainable is not so obvious. To help make this global “sustainable” Eco-solution possible Elon Musk has launched an aggressive satellite program. “The satellites are launched into orbit by batches, each batch containing between 15 and 56 satellites. As of early 2024, there are nearly 6,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. Eventually, SpaceX plans to build a massive constellation of 12,000 satellites, with a possible expansion to 42,000 satellites later on." If they succeed it will impossible to escape their totalitarian digital prison.
The website biometricupdate.com states, “As digital public infrastructure becomes the norm, governments must adopt digital services to improve access and development. The United Nations Development Program released a blog post outlining a rights-based and inclusive digital ID governance framework in response to frequent requests for institutional support.”
The UN writes,”The goal of Target 16.9 of the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 is to provide legal identity and birth registration for all, underscoring the importance of comprehensive civil registration.” Since the UN compartmentalizes information about their programs one must flip through link after link to find the many pages praising their progress,”The government of Malawi, with technical and financial support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the European Union (EU) and Irish Aid, recently launched a project that will ramp up digital inclusion efforts in the country and make access to essential public services much easier.” If one wishes you can click through page after page on country after country who are making progress in this grand transition to these electronic corporate chains.
The biometric ID of everyone on earth is designed to facilitate their digitalization of programmable currency. The Atlantic Council and International Monetary Fund are among the many international organizations participating in Agenda 2030’s digital currency program. In May 2024 the NATO think tank, The Atlantic Council, published, “134 countries and currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are exploring a Central Bank Digital Currency, CBDC. In May 2020 that number was only 35. Currently, 68 countries are in the advanced phase of exploration —development, pilot, or launch.” This programmable digital currency aspect of the Fifteen Minute Smart City vision may start as a Universal Basic Income promoted to help the poor under SDGs Item One - "NO POVERTY."
When you move into your 16th floor apartment at the Clocktower Center you may be required to provide access to your digital wallet so your rent can be extracted. Management will be able to download your financial and medical history to confirm you have complied with the requirements for residency. The fees for your smart stove, smart refrigerator, smart shower, smart washing machine and smart entertainment center will flow into some BlackRock or Vanguard super computer carrying with it the times, energy usage and other details of each service used.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website explains, “Digital ID is a critical piece of digital public infrastructure. Digital ID systems are one of the three pillars of what’s known as digital public infrastructure (DPI); the others are digital payment systems and data exchange systems.
The stated benefits of a programmable digital currency linked to your biometric ID for those implementing the program is that it is supposed to make it impossible to cheat on your taxes and will provide the global corporations profiting from this demonic scheme more control.
The Bank for International Settlements head Agustin Carstens explains, “Our analysis on CBDC in particular for the general use we intend to establish the equivalence with cash and there is a huge difference there for example in cash we don't know for example who is using a one hundred dollar bill today we don't know who is using a one thousand pesos bill today a key difference in the CBDC is that central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that those two issues are extremely important and that makes a huge difference with respect to what cash is.”
The use of financial de-platforming of critics to this agenda was used in December 2010 when CIA-linked PayPal froze the public donations of the whistleblowing publication WikiLeaks and the just released from prison Julian Assange. In August 2023, GoFundMe froze more than $90,000 from 1,100 contributors to The Grayzone independent news platform, citing unspecified "external concerns." Max Blumenthal said he believed the concerns were political and related to the platform's coverage of the war in Ukraine. In 2022, Canadian banks started freezing the accounts of people linked to the anti-mandate truckers' protests in Canada. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that “the federal government is promising to take more accounts offline in coming days in an attempt to clear demonstrators from Ottawa, which has been occupied for nearly a month."
A programmable digital currency can geofence you into your 15-Minute Smart City by switching off your money if you travel outside a prescribed area or wish to make an unauthorized purchase. For example it could be determined that a drive to see your family in Sacramento will deplete your allotment of Carbon Credits making it impossible to refuel your car, take a bus or plane. Like the examples already noted with Wikileaks or the Canadian truckers, you might not be able to use your funds to buy materials for a protest, or if caught expressing “wrong thought” online, an AI algorithm might cut you off your digital money all together.
Instead of restricting the use of your digital dollars, those implementing Agenda 2030 could geofence you in other ways. You might jump into your Chevy Volt that has been charging at the library parking garage to take your friends to a protest against a mining project outside of town, but that extraction enterprise is deemed essential. You get ten miles from the protest and the car is remotely stopped much like those Trader Joe's shopping carts that lock before you wheel to your vehicle.
Sometimes it takes a bloody war to shock people into surrendering their freedom to this digital dungeon. That sure worked in Ukraine where there are more than 21.7 million users of their Diia portal and 500,000 dead soldiers.
The Brookings Institute posts, “Following the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising, which ousted Russian-leaning President Viktor Yanukovych, the successor government, led by Petro Poroshenko, embarked on Ukraine’s national digital transformation.”
“With technical support from the Eurasia Foundation, initially funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and subsequently also by UKAid, Prozorro is a platform built on open-source code that removes much of the human element (and therefore opportunity for corruption) in procurement.”
The website Ukraine Now boasts, “Taking the lead internally, the Ministry of Digital Transformation has the ambition to make Ukraine a world champion in being digital, and we are already the first ones who can use digital IDs with absolutely no internal restrictions. Here is how Ukraine moves forward with the concept of building a digital state where over 70 government services are available online. Mobile application Diia allows Ukrainians to access 14 digital documents (ID card, foreign biometric passport, student card, driver’s license, vehicle registration certificate, vehicle insurance policy, tax number, birth certificate, IDP certificate) and 21 services in total.” Some of those 21 services include a “snitch” feature where you can turn in a neighbor who comments negatively on the war effort.
“Just recently, Ukraine has become the first country with a digital ID that is valid and can be used everywhere within the country and the fourth in Europe to launch a digital driving license. All digital documents in Diia now have the same legal force as their plastic or paper counterparts.”
The same web of global institutions that lied us into war after war and lied to us about their military counter measures, mandates and lockdowns, are behind the ravaging of Santa Cruz with their high density pseudo-ecological Smart Solutions matrix of blissful slavery.
Like many of you I attended one planning department promotional hearing after another. I have attended many of the twice-yearly Smart Solutions homeless charades and suffered long hours of presentations about the inevitability of the library garage: self-serving shows pretending to be democracy. It was rare to hear any support for any of these projects by those of us who live in Santa Cruz.
One lawsuit after another. One ballot measure after another. One election after another and this tsunami of glass and metal horror and electronic panopticon are still on their way to completion. Our real problem is our having any attachment to the institutions of power. If we want to have any hope of stopping this diabolical monster we need to remove all allegiance to this system and build organizations independent of social control. In the short term if we want to stop all the high rise towers we had better cost these vultures money by taking nonviolent direct action blocking delivery of their materials and disrupt their ability to continue.
In the long term we must refuse to comply with their dictates and embrace a love of freedom. End all cooperation with these genocidal sociopaths and their attempt to force us into their dystopian digital house of horrors.
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