Something like that Menorah Lit and Bright Moving Across the DNC Chicago Stage . . . .
Is the Zionist-Jewish-First Rahm Emanuel in the House?
Ahh, the next iteration of the Wailing Wall White House and their Talmudic and bar mitzvahed and bat mitzvahed and wannabe Israelis running the show, with a little (almost all of) help from their friends — the Talmudic but secular (hahaha) Jews running war, finance, AI, AGI, AR, MR, VR, digitalization of your and my minds.
He’s the first Jewish spouse of any president or vice president. After the Hamas attacks on October 7, Emhoff was a passionate voice for Israel for the administration.
“We witnessed a mass murder of innocent civilians. It was a terrorist assault. There is never any justification for terrorism,” Emhoff said, pounding his fists on a lectern while giving remarks at the White House just four days after the attack.
Just another bit of Jew World, Judaics ‘r Us — so the fucking pervert Trump elicits the perverted war monger and anti-Goyim/Slav, Schumer. These fucking Jews and their hard-ons for Putin!
That’s right, that commie, Kamala Emoff:
And Harris-Emoff love these fucking Fascists, the terrorists with the kinky hair and Jewish Ways?
Alex Karp, CEO of the data-mining software company Palantir which is known for its work in defense and intelligence, warned that the U.S. may have to wage war in three different theaters in the future.
He told the New York Times that he thinks the U.S. will "very likely" find itself in a three-front war with China, Russia and Iran. As a result, he said the Pentagon should continue developing autonomous weapons at full speed, pointing to big mismatches in how far the U.S. would be willing to go while fighting a war compared to other countries.
"I think we’re in an age when nuclear deterrent is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might," he added. "Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think."
Karp continued: "In fact, given that we have parity technologically but we don’t have parity morally, they have a huge advantage."
He also said the military is very close to the threshold where "somewhat autonomous drones" that can kill become the most important weapons.
"You already see this in Ukraine," Karp noted.
[Photo: A face only a pine box coffin could love! ]
Oh, those little Satan, err, Santa’s workshop ghouls:
As the Wall Street Journal reports, jurisdictions around the world have cast a long shadow over the nominally altruistic project, which somehow seeks to marry crypto and biometrics to eventually provide a universal basic income for an unidentified number of people.
The scheme is supposed to work like this: you scan your iris with the metallic orb, operated by a volunteer enthusiast, and get 25 of its bespoke cryptocurrency coins in exchange. After that, your iris is attached to your identity on Worldcoin's supposedly secure blockchain, the opaque privacy of which is the subject of ample suspicion by governments worldwide.
By our count, based on reporting from the WSJ and the nonprofit Rest of World, Worldcoin has been under government scrutiny in at least 14 countries on three continents, including France, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Chile.
Last week a watershed study on UBI—Universal Basic Income—was published, which you can find here.
Particularly noteworthy is it was carried out by Sam Altman’s Open Research, a cutout of OpenAI, to test theories of UBI’s potential future impact on society, given that it’s OpenAI’s radical developments in the AI field which threaten to replace the human workforce with machines in the not-so-distant future.
In essence, the study gave $1,000 dollars per month to 1,000 low-income Americans for three years, with another 2,000 people serving as control group with $50 a month. The money was given unconditionally, meaning they could spend it on anything they want, unlike various forms of Welfare with severe restrictions on its usage. It’s said to be the largest scale experiment of its type in America, though there have been others elsewhere, like a well-known UBI pilot study in Finland in 2017.
The researchers aimed to answer a series of questions, such as: would the provision of free money allow underemployed individuals to take more time to search for a better job? Or perhaps seek higher education? Would it allow them to work less in general, and therefore free up time for other activities with a positive spillover?
The results of the study gave some vivid reactions from commentators:
There is a faction interpreting the results with an entirely opposite slant, but let’s first take a look at why the study may forebode a dystopian future.
First, I’ll paste Athan’s truncated summary of the results:
Result 1: UBI participants ended up earning $1,500 less despite being given $12,000 more annually. For every one dollar received, total household income dropped by at least 21 cents.
Result 2: UBI participants stayed unemployed for an extra month compared to those unemployed in the control group.
Result 3: UBI participants worked less and there were no substantive changes in quality of employment. UBI participants did little to improve their education or training to improve their income.
Result 4: UBI participants self-reported increased rates of disability to limit the work they can do.
Two ways to look at these results.
The American Underclass is so worn down that when thrown a life preserver, they could only float rather than paddle to safety. UBI advocates will argue that $1,000 per month wasn’t enough.
Or, Universal Basic Income and its collectivist derivatives are never enough. Work is intrinsically tied to human dignity, happiness and progress.
The principal takeaway is that the experimental group’s income fell by $1,500 per year relative to the control group, with the effects “growing over the course of the study”, implying their income would fall even further.
The program caused a 2.0 percentage point reduction in the extensive margin of labor supply and a 1.3-1.4 hours/week reduction in labor hours for participants. The estimates of the effects of cash on income and labor hours represent an approximately 4-5% decline relative to the control group mean.
So, the participants worked less and made less money. The kneejerk conclusion that’s natural enough to make is that the money “made them lazier”, resulting in their simply working less to play more video games, or something to that effect.
Here’s what the study said on that:
The time diaries and survey questions support the findings for employment. Treated participants primarily use the time gained through working less to increase leisure, also increasing time spent on driving or other transportation and finances, though the effects are modest in magnitude.
One of the main reasons for covering this study is that it dovetails so well with the common theme here, which is that the elites simply do not understand human nature, which leads them to impose crudely thought-out social engineering projects to reshape society in their image, all the while treating humans like experimental mice to be prodded and corralled into the ‘pre-approved’ maze tunnel.
We’ve often talked about how the elites typify a detached aristocratic conception of society which treats humans like a string of code to be tweaked and optimized. It’s why their worldview so perfectly aligns with the modern managerial ‘Longhouse’ paradigm of restructuring the natural, unmappable human anima into a sort of antiseptic DMV or HR mode. It also quite snuggly conforms to our materialist age’s mandate of ‘The Science’, sensitivity, and victim culture which aims to reduce human activity to a sterile, programmable state.
This is a literal war of the Technocratic Machine against human nature itself, in all its flawed, unchartable, and impure chaos. It is the imposition of routine over adventure, regulation over mystery, and a mathematically deterministic model of existence over faith, chance, and fate. It’s the destruction of our ancient calling for the sake of a grotesquely misplaced sympathy for abstracted suffering. Rather than let you suffer the agonies of a papercut on your finger, we’ll force you into a medicated ‘safety’ strapped in perpetuity to a gurney in an inoffensively white-walled room.
It’s the epitome of protecting us ‘from ourselves’ for the sake of an increasingly disconnected moral framework.
But in reality, these diversionary half-measures ignore the real root causes of every moral and social issue of our times.
Ultimately, the question of a societal panacea in the form of a UBI drip-feed to keep us half-consciously plugged in to the commoditized-banking-financial panopticon doesn’t even pass the most basic competency assessments.
Primarily: if the whole question of UBI is being brought up due to AI robots eliminating our jobs, then shouldn’t the very same robots provide so much cheap excess labor that prices then consequently plummet in every economic category? The need for a $1,000 monthly check would be obviated by virtue of rent, food, etc., dropping to the equivalent tune of $1,000 owing to robots making those things cheaper.
After all, Sam Altman himself stated:
Altman’s interest in universal basic income is related to his work as CEO of OpenAI—if AI eliminates jobs, could guaranteed cash help workers who lose their income? In 2021, Altman said he believed AI could generate enough wealth to pay every U.S. adult $13,500 a year. “He was definitely thinking about future labor market changes—not just what happens if robots take jobs, but also a recognition of the challenges we’re facing today with distribution of resources and opportunities across the population,” Rhodes says.
Unfortunately, that’s where the Great Lie of our rent-seeking economy rears its head via the Cantillon Effect. Production costs have already historically plummeted since the ‘80s with the onset of globalization, but the bonanza of corporate extra profits was absorbed for pure greed, being financialized back into the system via derivatives, stock buybacks, executive pay hikes, etc.
A corporation would never re-circulate excess profit back to the little guy if it didn’t have to. We can only expect the age of AI to drive another bubble to be gobbled up by corpos to fund massive buyouts and mergers until only a few megacorps remain to consolidate their control of the globe.
Some have even proposed futures consisting of ‘gamified’ forms of UBI that will see our daily lives be relegated to the plasticity of a cheap mobile sim.
Imagine being forced to complete “quests” and develop “skill trees” outlined by corporate overlords in order to earn your petty dosh. We know such plans have been in development for a long time, what with Microsoft patenting similar quest-based crypto-mining schemes, impelling the human vassal to complete “activities”—don’t you love euphemisms for indentured servitude?—to earn their shabby coin.
It all comes down to the same thing: the elites have no conception of human nature or human chemistry, apart from manipulating it for a narrow transactional purpose. We can credit them with having a good bead on base nature, how to manipulate our basest biological urges for crude ends. But when it comes to actual human dynamics and anthropological understanding of humankind as community, our Silicon Valley patricians know little beyond the sterile dioramas offered by the large-paned glass views of their tech campus courtyards.
It leads to every proposed solution being invariably more coercive, and subversive; being ignorant of human nature forces them to rely on gimmick and artifice. The fundamental issues themselves are left woefully un-redressed. You want to cure homelessness? You address society’s ails at the root cultural level—you don’t invent infantilized gimmicks to have people dancing jigs for a digi-coin that’ll be inflated to nil in a flash.
The conversation has rightfully grown into a question of human dignity, ambitions, fulfillment, and life satisfaction. By forcing humans to subsist on the dole—especially a meager and conditional one—you take away their capacity to attain the kind of human dignity which comes with providing for oneself and one’s family. The kind tied to the civilizational tradition of people earning a place of standing and respect in society, or amongst their local community. Without that, you leave humans deracinated of cultural ties as mere wards of the state; the result is a scientifically sterile society by-committee.
Such schemes operate under the now-typical egalitarian assumption that all human beings yen for some form of abstract advancement or material equality with their peers. The study above is mired in preconceptions that people drip-fed on UBI will aspire to some lofty ‘entrepreneurship’ or self-improvement in the form of higher education, owing to the newly freed-up time the gifted money affords.
This is the height of modern egalitarianist Utopian delusion. It stems from the misconception of human nature mentioned earlier. Modern liberal technocrats, grazed on the ideal that all human variability comes down to social constructs, believe that every individual is an Elon Musk or Albert Einstein in waiting, just a couple handfuls of corporate handouts shy of breaking out into super stardom and worldly significance. It’s an age old lie used to hoodwink society into the disastrous myth of the ‘American Dream’: that anyone can be anything with just the right amount of gumption and elbow grease. In reality, the ruse is designed to conceal a two-tiered system where a hereditary nobility class fat on generational wealth enjoys all the privilege while the biddable commoner sleep-walks through life to the hypnotic siren song of manufactured hope.
It again comes down to ignoring root causes, first principles. Society has grown into a sprawlingly complex Tower of Babel, erected on a bedrock of so much epistemic distortion, layer-caked with myths and obfuscations, criss-crossed with mazes of unspoken schemes, and crowned with a toppling minaret of rent extraction the craven elites can only prop up by plastering on layer after layer of outrageous artifice, like gargoyles of illogic dangling from broken cornices—an unnatural bricolaged horror so elephantine and unwieldy, that it stands to calve into biblical ash at any moment. But no one is honest or brave enough to voice that the only way to realign with the spiritus of our ancient unconscious is to raze the whole thing to the ground and start anew.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Zuckerberg was asked what evidence he had that people actually want to live in this simulated world known as the Metaverse that he pushes so fervently.
“I think people want to connect,” he says, citing no evidence of the assertion. And there lies the problem with modern Silicon Valley tech-archon thinking—they have devised a distantly warped conception of reality based on nothing more than their own idealized assumptions about what humans want, and how human nature itself even fundamentally operates. It’s a flawed Bayesian game based on the rigged profits and growth of their monopolistic empires: after spending decades illegally undercutting competition, the remaining few mega-giants at the top now solipsistically chalk up their “success” to the correctness of their vision of reality and human destiny.
“Our synoptic conception of reality must be the correct one because we have a trillion dollar market cap!”
This is a critically flawed form of logic. When you artificially constrict humanity’s choices, shunting the whole world into a repressive little walled garden, cultivating a culture of fear for every small business that doesn’t want to be cut out and destroyed—like with Google Adsense, for example—the ensuing empire ends up merely representing the product of coercion and forced adoption due to lack of choice, not humanity’s de facto approval of your vision.
People in the comments of the Zuckerberg interview were keen to expose the flaws in his argument. For instance: Zuck strikes the chord of “connecting” to each other as primary motivation for humans. Yet he goes on to pitch his next big idea of “AI influencers” and AI avatars of normal people, which will be programmed to interact with their owner’s ‘community’ on their behalf. If connecting humans is the goal, why push for artificial ‘clones’ of ourselves to take our place in the social continuum? In the grand old tradition of Big Tech double-speak and contradiction, this is the actual opposite of connecting humans; it is distancing us by blurring the social fabric via uncanny valley clone-impersonators all for the sake of boosting monetization potential. Just like the ruling class figured out they could socially engineer women into joining the workforce to double tax revenue for the Cold War-primed MIC, the newly ascendant tech ruling class realizes they can copy-paste us to double-fist the ad-generated revenue.
Use of the word “connect” remains a red herring to conceal this digital paradigm’s true purpose: to keep us plugged in to their cyber ecosystem, generating endless revenue streams for the techno-rentier class. It’s through this lens we can conclude that even the feigned altruism of UBI is nothing more than a stalking horse for keeping us ‘afloat’ just enough to be involuntary participants in the newly-fashioned tech-ecosystem.
This ego-driven assumption model the elites employ to understand the world extends to the homeless population, particularly those pullulating around the palmy Silicon Valley tech-mecca. They understand homeless people as those merely down on their luck, or having suffered some great jumble of misfortunes, but that are people eagerly clambering their way back into regular, structured life as ‘upstanding citizens’
The trouble, or so I’ve been told, is that like so many of the homeless she refuses help when offered, and both the policy and the culture of institutionalized do-gooding prevent the people who might save her life from doing anything about it. To force help on dying people must not be considered. And for the current generation of said do-gooders, that’s the end of the story. Nothing to be done. For reasons that I find impossible to understand, just utterly senseless, many progressives have decided that forcing help on the homeless and the sick is a worse outcome than simply letting them die. And letting them die is exactly what we’re doing.
The truth is that the majority of homeless people aren’t ‘temporarily displaced’ or ‘underemployed’, but rather people who have voluntarily checked out of a society they no longer feel comfortable, or capable of, navigating. Even if you were to offer them a “job” and a place to live, a good portion of them would turn it down in favor of the purity of the wild.
But ask most Silicon Valley types and they’ll recite you a litany of artificial ‘fixes’—like UBI—to “solve the problem”, as if people are merely transistors on a circuit board to be soldered and rewired at will. The tech-archons simply cannot conceive of a world where society has grown too distorted and unnatural, out of order with time-honored cultural impulses, for people to even bother taking part in it any longer; that’s not to mention most of those dispossessed drifting through that underbelly are long estranged from family, thanks to—once again—that terminal cultural rot which distances us all, and makes us enemies of understanding.
The vast majority of homeless fentanyl addicts are not ‘entrepreneurs-in-waiting’, ready to reinvest their generous UBI scratch into some self-improvement scheme, itself nothing more than another rentier-extraction mechanism which we’re wrung through by the elites to press us into proper, agreeable, state-sanctioned instruments of commerce and financial velocity to grease the global stock casino’s cash conveyor belts. No, many of these people are in fact the grounded ones, most sensitive to the growing dissonance and imbalances, who’ve rebuked the false charade. Of course, some will merely dismiss them as “mentally ill” misfits, but then ask yourself what made them so? In our modern world, mental illness is often a kind of cognitive crash from the unforgiving thorns of the bio-commerce dystopia imposed on us by the techno-materialists.
Just look at how our ruling class treats the homeless; here’s a recent “enough is enough” ultimatum by Gavin Newsome:
The sentiment of his message is clear: “We’ve done our part in throwing printed fiat at them, they don’t want help, so to hell with them!”
See! If you don’t want to play the game, then get off our board—there’s no place for you here!
A modern world for modern sensibilities.
It only goes to affirm the earlier thesis—the elites don’t understand the fundamental nature of civilization at all. Just like in their flawed Myth of Progress, they can only process human existence in a base, materialist framework, always operating under the assumption that every human aspires to the same material heading the hereditary nobility inherits as its birthright. From the valorization of Equity on a mass scale, resulting in destructive social engineering programs from the Great Society era onwards, to the current madness we inhabit, the lever-pullers go on fashioning society into a grand empirical experiment.
Ultimately, what is the real purpose of UBI—not as a program in general, but specifically as a cash injection to individuals? After all, if you wanted to really help people, why wouldn’t you just build them free housing of some sort, which would more than offset the $1,000 monthly equivalent in expenses, and allow them to truly spread their wings without the endemic distress of worrying about rent. But it’s not about that, is it? Consider this: who really ends up with that $1,000? It’s a bit sophistic to imply it’s money for the people—after all, it’ll likely evaporate faster than it can register in their savings, and won’t bring them anything of lasting value. Where does it go, who actually ends up with it? Why, it’s the same corporate cabals, the Black Rock and co., to whom it’s quickly returned when the recipient splurges on some worthless consumerist poison, as he’s designed to do. The stimulus is really more for them, isn’t it? $1,000 is only enough to palm some fleeting triviality, some expendable or consumable dross, which is gone in days.
In the end, that ‘stimulus’ ends up juicing the classic scheme: money velocity, that grand perpetual ferris wheel of the banking system. Just another way to keep the dry-spin cycle running so the banking elite’s trembling house of cards stays upright. Again: why not build something lasting for people instead, if you truly meant to help them? UBI is nothing more than petty scratch meant to be sprung into a lousy coin slot at the back of some shonky gas station casino, to be pumped back into the system piecemeal like any of the other endless rent-seeking instruments, to keep the system lubed and cycling, the dark money whirlpools of velocity-driven volatility speculation gurgling to the glee of the money men.
That’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it?
Ripped in full from: Universal Basic Incompetence
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Speaking of Jewish Criminals eating off the taxpayers dime, and working for Mossad and Israel: Peter Thiel tells Joe Rogan his next move is either to Nashville or Miami to avoid California taxes
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Oh, what canard is that? The Jews Own the Media?
Veteran media executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. on Monday submitted a roughly $4.3 billion bid to take over Paramount Global through the acquisition of National Amusements, the family holding company that owns a controlling stake in the media company, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The competing offer for the home of Paramount Pictures, the CBS broadcast network and MTV is a fresh twist in a sale process marked by a number of unexpected turns.
It threatens to undo a planned acquisition by tech scion David Ellison and his firm, Skydance Media.
Shit, Redsonte? Sounds like native American, but then BlackRock and BlackStone, and = Rothstein. [Photo: Shari Redstone attends the premiere of “Ghost in the Shell” at AMC Loews Lincoln Square in New York on March 29, 2017.]
Skydance and its deal partners reached an agreement last month to acquire Paramount in a complicated transaction, in which it would buy out the Redstone/Rothstein family’s controlling stake in Paramount and subsequently merge into the larger publicly traded company.
That agreement contained a 45-day “go-shop period” that allowed Paramount to solicit and evaluate other offers. That period ends on Aug. 21, but can be extended.
Goddamn, more Jewish Advice for the Goyim: Billionaire Google cofounder Larry Page’s unlikely advice for new grads: Be lazy.
“Find the leverage in the world, so you can be more lazy!”
Oh, those poor confused Gen X-ers — A Gen Xer who makes $150,000 secretly working multiple remote jobs says 100-hour weeks are worth it to ensure his family is financially secure. A Gen Xer began taking on part-time work out of fear that he'd lose his full-time role. In 2020, he started secretly working two full-time jobs and made six figures annually.
Oh, that Jewish University, Harvard, now listen up pro-Palestine people. Alan Garber’s Harvard Won’t Be Perfect, but It Should Be Transparent
These Talmudic Little Nazi’s.
Love him or hate him, Alan M. Garber ’76 is officially Harvard’s president for at least the next three years.
Garber sparked outrage this spring after reneging on what appeared to many to be a promise to refrain from harshly punishing students involved with the Harvard Yard encampment. Despite this agreement being written in both public and private communications, the Harvard College Administrative Board suspended five student protesters and prevented 13 from graduating — sanctions far more extreme than what past students had faced for similar actions.
Though the College ultimately softened those punishments, the debacle dealt a (deserved) blow to Garber’s credibility.
For Harvard’s leadership, the three years ahead could hold devastating failure or much-needed success. President Garber has the potential to build a legacy that consists of more than banning chalk in Harvard Yard. And the Corporation has the opportunity to set a laudable standard for selecting Harvard presidents to come.
President Garber and the Corporation can continue to silo themselves from the Harvard community and hope for a different result, or they can engage with it. Here’s hoping they choose the latter.
Democratic Genocide Convention: Isra-hell mentioned 23 times in the manifesto/platform, man, and they laugh at me saying, well, this is the UnUnited Snake$ of Israel.
LINK.
Endnote: Yes, I got my $35 an hour working with Family Independence Initiative, out of Chicago and San Fran. Fucked up how much I fought for my clients, who got $800 for one-year of putting down things in their monthly journals — what the kids are doing, what they are spending their money on, and then they were attempting to forcd the banking and checking accounts to FII, a Googlized shit how, now something completely on steroids.
Here’s a feature on one of my cohorts, who did not last long with this outfit, FII:
Makwirituni Erakuni – “I’d Like to Introduce You to My family”
Madras, Oregon, Man Heads Up County Project to Put an End to the Cycle of Poverty
Juan Garcia helps the family’s youngest, Jacob, 9 months, as he fusses during a recent mass at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Central Oregon, Madras, where the ecosystem looks like parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua.
He introduces me and my colleague, Susy S. — both of us from Family Independence Initiative, a national non-profit now working in both Lincoln County and Jefferson County to engage families in a large social capital project – to his family and parishioners.
For Juan, who is a former Michoacán resident, family is everything to him. He tells me recently at the Madras Latino Festival that he and his wife Jaquilina are done growing their family.
He smiles proudly when rattling off his brood’s names and ages – Jose, 21, Julianna, 16, Jesse, 15, Juan Junior, 11, Javier, 9, Josefina, 5 and the infant, Jacobo.
Juan is proud that all of them are still at home, part of his philosophy of bearing the fruits of decent living and the proverbial golden rule.
“What I believe we have on earth is this ability to pass on good lessons and instruction to our children who have a chance to make this a better world,” he states as he preps the ground for the second annual Madras Latino Festival before the onslaught of people coming to Sahalee Park.
Also deeply ingrained in this former undocumented immigrant is his religion, Catholicism, and his tolerance of other peoples. It’s fitting the Latino Festival – the second annual event Juan has had some hand in helping get off the ground with the Latino Community Association – is held at a park whose Chinook name translates to “high heavenly ground.”
Life before El Norte
We talk about his father’s roots in Michoacán – a tall, dark-skinned man who is part of the Purépecha people. The Nahuatl name for the Purépecha was “Michhuàquê” (“those who have fish”), for which the Mexican state of Michoacán was named. His father was a metallurgy specialist working for a door frame and security bar factory near Zamora.
"My father can trace his family tree back to Asia,” Juan, who is 41, states proudly. He is six foot two and very dark skinned, unlike Juan, who picked up many traits from his mother, a woman who traces her family line back to Portugal, Spain and Germany. "I am what you call a Mestizo, a mix from my dad’s pure Indian line and my mother’s European side."
That tribe — Purépecha – only numbers in the tens of thousands, but more than 600 years from the present, it was considered a tribe of exceptional warriors,
"Out of the hundreds of tribes in Mexico, most think of the Mayans, Aztecs and Toltecs. Well, the Purépecha was in the middle, one of the few non-conquered tribes during that era."
For the young Juan and his two sisters, it was rough growing up in that community – the tribe didn’t accept his family because Juan’s mother was white, and the white community didn’t accept them because of the father’s tribal background.
His grandparents on his mother’s side were ranchers and agriculturalists with land and productive fields. For that, this story of a young Juan gets highly dramatic and dangerous.
“My dad ran into a lot of bad people because he was heading up safety and environmental plans,” Juan tells me. His father attempted to keep illegal loggers off tribal land, and for that, he was attacked and insulted by many poachers.
At seven years of age, the young Juan was kidnapped. The people who took him had other children, part of a human trafficking ring.
These criminals believed the Garcia clan was rich because of grandparents who had some land and farming interests three hours away.
Juan recalls many dismembered bodies being found around his community.
"As I grew up in that community, I learned there is no difference between the races. We are all the same, all creatures of God."
His father inculcated the reverence for wildlife and nature, always going into the forest protecting the tribal land and cultural trust.
Juan said he escaped his captors with other children in toe.
Leaving Home, Searching for a Sister
I have been lucky to have lived in the Southwest of the USA and the northern parts of Mexico we call La Frontera. I have had many deep relationships with people who have roots in Mexico and Central America, who made the treacherous journey north as undocumented humans. A few of those people were my professors at UT-El Paso when I was a graduate student.
Juan’s journey at age 17 was one of desperation to help his family at home – mom, dad, sister, brothers – who were struggling financially. Another sister had married a man who ended up moving them both to the US. He wanted to find her.
It took more than two weeks to journey from his home state, to Tecate in the state of Baja. Because his father left the family on many occasions, to seek work far away, there were months on end when the family didn’t know if he was alive or deceased.
It was tough. In my own country I was discriminated against all different ways. So many people think they are superior, Juan recalls. Honestly, when I crossed the border, I didn’t know it was illegal to do so. I was not hurting anyone. I wasn’t trying to harm people or this country.
He recounts being harassed by Mexican federal police and coyotes. In the end, when he crossed the border, he found himself working as a “slave” in Los Angeles for the people that took his money to cross into the United States but exacted punishment for Juan’s lack of funds.
"For two months, I was a slave. I worked 16 hours a day just to get a meal. I was in a house and the farthest I was allowed to go was from the building where I was making crafts to the trash can."
All Juan knew was he had a sister in Oregon, but with the help of a fellow traveler he met on the underground trail to the USA, they located his sister in Salem. She basically paid off his ransom, and soon the 17-year-old Juan ended up north, in Portland.
Other stories during that trip north:
in Sinaloa and Sonora police and federales were going to kill him
six men surrounded him and were ready to murder him
Juan defended himself with words
“You are supposed to be defending and supporting the people . . . you should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“Throughout Mexico, people are just focused on greed . . . all about money and they don’t think about people.”
From that day forward, his ethos and principles have been galvanized to a simple belief:
"What I do I do because I believe I can help change the world. Anyone is in the position to change the world, and we have to pass it on to our neighbors, friends and family."
Making Bucks and Hitting the Books Hard
So, he tells me how important school – education – is to him. The young Juan ended up in Woodburn, Oregon, and he had no idea how to enroll in high school. In Mexico, school costs money, and there are no free lunches, no free supplies.
"When I tried to enroll, they asked for so many things. I reached out to a counselor, and told her, ‘All I want to do is go to school so why are you asking me so many questions. I didn’t come here to harm anyone.’"
He survived rejection after rejection, but as a minor he ended up with a guardian, the principal, Mrs. Dallas, who Juan is still friends with to this day.
“You know, when they asked me at the border if I was an American, of course, I said I was. In our schools in Mexico, they treat the entire continent — north, south, central and Mexico — as one America.”
Luckily, he also had an uncle who left the tribe and ended up in Oregon, so Juan was set with two guardian angels, so to speak. He told me he ended up crying with tears of joy when he was told school and lunches were publicly-supported with no cost to students.
Mrs. Dallas challenged Juan to not let her down. “I told her that I didn’t think that was in my dictionary, letting people down.”
Juan has worked since age four or five in Mexico, and this journey was not without risks – he held down three jobs to help pay for the health care costs for one of his medically sisters in Mexico.
"Everything went well, until three months later when I was told my parents did not have the money to pay the medical bills. I left school. I told Mrs. Dallas, ‘I’m sorry, but this is not about me anymore . . . my younger sister needs me.’"
He ended up working in a pizzeria, for a nursery and a commercial tree grower. His brother-in-law had lost his job, and Juan’s married sister in Woodburn was also having surgeries for her medical issues.
The hard reality of exploitation hit the young Juan after he dropped out his junior year to support his family. The tree planter hired seasonal workers, mostly Latino migrants. Juan recalls how the boss restricted the amount of water the hard-working laborers could get.
“I told the boss that this is not humane. That he was treating us like criminals. We ended up drinking water from puddles.”
Enter the University of Oregon Ducks
Juan went back to his “guardian teacher” at Woodburn High School, and proposed to re-enroll with only a few weeks left of the school year. It just so happened that a teacher passing by heard the conversation and offered Juan a chance to enroll in an accelerated GED program that was being piloted at U of O.
What seems to be a truism in Juan Garcia’s life is, “good things come to people who wait, or good things come to good people.”
He was on a year waiting list, which Juan was okay with, but soon after applying, an opening popped up. He passed every single test necessary to get in.
Three months later after attending the intense Eugene-based program, he passed the test with a 99.9 percent grade. He also met his future wife there, Jackie who was also in the program.
Juan loved attending other classes at the university, and he ended up staying after matriculating to assist and tutor those others who were struggling, fellow students from all over, including Idaho, Seattle, Teas, Washington, Oregon and other parts of the US.
He said he came to Madras the first time to ask her hand in marriage from her father. They were married in November 1999, and went back to Woodburn. He ended up interviewing with the Holiday Inn. “I interviewed for a supervisor position, but the general manager laughed, saying I was going to be sweeping and mopping floors. If that’s a reason, that I am Latino, then, well, I told him I was there to work.”
He worked hard to assist co-workers, and soon this Wilsonville
Holiday Inn was being managed by Juan, and he was training workers, hiring others, and was offered to move up, out to other states, but he opted to be in Oregon, with his family.
Seven years later, he got an apology from the GM, telling Juan he was wrong to doubt his abilities based on racist perceptions about Latinos.
"The problem I had there was I treated co-workers as family. I met their wives and kids. I was hiring people from different cultures – African Americans, Russians, Arabs, Asians."
Mind you, this was not his sole job – he was still working for the pizzeria and for Nike and a taco stand. When the Wilsonville Holiday Inn sold out to another company, Juan was asked to cut 50 employees.
"I saw the numbers, the budget. I told the new manager that every single one of the workers is busy the entire shift. Every single one was giving 100 percent. I told them I wasn’t going to fire them."
Nike, Just Do It (unless you are a Latino)
He and Jackie at that point had two children. Juan went into an interview with Nike to get more income for the growing family. He was told that since he was a Latino, he couldn’t be trusted. So they put him in a department nobody liked. Juan thought cleaning restrooms was the bottom rung, but the interviewer laughed and told him the very worse department was receiving.
Juan recalls it was total chaos, and hard heavy lifting work. “I wanted to quit three hours in. But a fellow Latino employee advised him not to: “Juan, people don’t believe in us. You would be giving them an excuse if you quit.”
Even though Juan has worked his entire life, he felt this this place was treating them like animals.
He recalls praying, and remembers all the yelling he did to himself in the receiving department. “I was going crazy, I thought. But I got my own answer: ‘Fix it.’”
He realized that nobody was watching or cared about this department – seven of them: two African Americans, five Latinos, and one Chinese-American.
He asked the team if they could give him a few weeks to try and improve working conditions and turn things around.
That department went from the bottom of the heap to the best at Nike in six months. He was called to different departments to help those respective workplaces fix their inefficiencies and poor workplace productivity and conditions.
He quit Nike, because he wanted to go into the Army, and was still working three other jobs. He told me that he felt he was providing okay, and that his wife reaffirmed that he was a loving father of two children and caring husband. His wife told him, “But Juan, we hardly ever see you.”
Enter Madras, Oregon
The idea was to get closer to his wife’s family and to center in a small rural community from which to grow. The third child, Jesse, was on the way, born March 2006 in Madras.
His bosses understood his drive to be centered around family and wished him good luck after three years at Nike.
Currently, Juan works as systems maintenance technician for TDS Communications, a company out of Madison, Wisconsin that provides communication services like cellular, TV and phone service. This job for Juan Garcia is going on 14 years, and while Juan has a better work-life balance than his earlier years in Oregon, he still has a large service area, sometimes driving 300 to 500 miles in his vehicle in a day servicing customers in three counties.
He was just hired on as a part-time site director for Family Independence Initiative. The Madras Pioneer ran my article on the FII initiative Sept. 11; however, in a nutshell this non-profit is partnered with the state of Oregon to get hundreds of households in both Lincoln and Jefferson counties to enroll in a social capital project.
Juan’s presence in Madras and Metolius is deep, and his commitment to coaching youth and helping youth have options rather than spiraling into drugs and delinquency is huge.
Juan’s job with FII is to recruit families, get them enrolled and assist them with their commitment of 12 months journaling (once a month updates) about their families’ progress and circumstances.
For the exchange of data FII collects, the family will receive a total of $800 for both the time and commitment.
Language is More than Meaning – It’s Culture, History
We talk about how many people over the last few months and years have sort of reacted negatively when seeing the Garcia family of nine out in public. Not ironically, what gives Juan hope is how the “world needs to have hope through the family, through children.”
His biggest fear is losing his family.
We talk about language extinction, and his own tribe’s language, which is called Tarascan or Tarasca.
“Every once in a while, I force my dad to talk to me in our language. But unfortunately, my kids aren’t learning it, and thus on my side, it will die out.”
We get to the basics – love is satichu in the native tongue. I ask him what community is in the language, and like many indigenous languages, the concept of community is expanded: “What brings you here” – natchiwantuterasini abeushaqi.
This proud man ran for mayor of Metolius and lost by one vote. He said it is a dream of his to become governor of Oregon. He is also enrolling at OSU-Bend to carry forth with his college education.
If he was mayor of Madras, Juan said he’d get an activities center building with a climbing wall, indoor soccer, a jumping house and other amenities to give families a place to recreate and bond.
This journey started in 1978, when he was born, and his life pathway, with seven children, in-laws, dozens of friends and neighbors, continues to find new and exciting trials and tribulations.
In 2005, he made the permanent move to Madras with his family, and he also became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
And yet, he easily recalls times when he was a child, high in the mountains in Michoacán, where the kids went out into the forest and gathered natural spoons from the palm trees so they could eat grandmother’s pozole: mashed hominy, with meat (typically pork), and seasoned and garnished with shredded lettuce or cabbage, manzana peppers, onion, garlic, and limes.
It is now Koch Brothers outfit.
Charles Koch is making big moves to ensure that his charities and causes are funded long after he’s gone. In an exclusive interview, the 87-year-old chairman and co-CEO of Koch Industries (and the 16th richest person in America, worth $54.5 billion) tells Forbes that over the last four years he has quietly transferred $5.3 billion of his $125 billion (2022 sales) conglomerate’s nonvoting stock to a pair of nonprofits with fewer restrictions on lobbying and politics than traditional charities. Forbes estimates those shares account for nearly a tenth of the 42% stake previously held by Koch (though he still has 42% voting power).
One of America’s top 25 philanthropists, the staunch libertarian has donated an estimated $1.8 billion to charity over his lifetime (excluding amounts that have not yet been distributed by affiliated nonprofits), with a focus on education, poverty alleviation and reforming the criminal justice and immigration systems. Most of that has flowed through his Stand Together nonprofit network (formerly known as the Koch Network), which also includes the nearly two-decade-old Americans For Prosperity– a “grassroots” organization that has spent tens of millions a year on policy and politics.
“I want everything I have beyond taking care of my family to go to these kinds of efforts,” Koch says. “Stand Together is the best organization I've seen to do this. They're innovative, principled and effective in helping people change their lives and in achieving policy changes–more at the state level than the federal level, because that's a very difficult place to get anything improved.”
But Koch didn’t make gifts of his company stock directly to Stand Together. Instead he chose groups that support the network and are allowed to directly engage in political campaigns and to do an unlimited amount of issue lobbying (as long as those are not their primary activities).
Last year, he donated $4.3 billion of his Koch Industries stock to a newly created 501(c)4 nonprofit group Believe in People, named after his 2020 book Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions For A Top-Down World. The gift and the existence of this group have not been previously reported. A social welfare organization that emphasizes empowering people to “reach their potential,” Believe in People is run by three individuals who are all very close to Charles: Koch Industries co-CEO Dave Robertson; Brian Hooks, the CEO of Stand Together and coauthor of Koch’s latest book; and Koch’s son Chase, the founder and CEO of Koch Industries’ venture capital subsidiary Koch Disruptive Technologies who also founded Stand Together’s venture capital and music-focused subsidiaries.
In 2020, Koch gave $975 million of his company stock to another C4 with a similar mission called CCKc4, which bears the initials of his 46-year-old son, Chase (his full name is Charles C. Koch), who runs the nonprofit.
Unlike a traditional 501(c)3 nonprofit–which includes the private charitable foundations commonly used by wealthy individuals–a C4 can own an entire for-profit company indefinitely and (so long as these activities support its principal purpose) benefit private individuals; engage in an unlimited amount of issue lobbying; and get directly involved in politics.
Our Story
UpTogether was founded as Family Independence Initiative (FII) in Oakland, California in 2001 after our founder saw firsthand the faults of the United States social services system. He was frustrated watching the same families cycle in and out of social service agencies, while the financial resources designed to support them did nothing to build their economic or social mobility.
As the son of a hardworking single mother who immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico, he saw that his mother, a talented dressmaker who worked hard to “make it” in the U.S., wanted more access and opportunity for him and his sister. He was certain there was a better way to invest in people’s initiative than what his mother had experienced. He also knew firsthand the harmful stereotypes and belief systems that perpetuated biased practices and policies, undermining the pride of those being “helped” and their chances for success.
Our founder believed if families had access to resources and community support, they would decide for themselves how to implement them—as his mother had—and they could move up, together, out of poverty. He founded FII based on this philosophy.
In 2021, we changed our name from FII to UpTogether to more clearly convey our purpose and engagement with community.
I wonder if anybody from Whizz-con-sin, “right” across the bored-err from Shit-kaka-go has ever heard of Jeffrey Dhamer???
That dude was a rank amateur when sizes up next to the murdering, maiming, mauling, menorahing, dismembering, cannibalizing, dirty, filthy, Israeli, Zionist, Jewish, Murican, masturbating rapist shit, I’m sicka seein’.
Nicholi got 20 years, and BIG PRESS, for a self/selfish defense.
The serial killers from Israel get standing ovations, money, bombs, free reign to inflict pain.
Dhamer and Co. gets condemnation, and termination.
CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!!!