Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Already, okay, we're there. Okay, we're stopping in here this week. My name is Pat Fahey. I'm the producer of Megatrends, a weekly sort of midweek show that gives a sort of Z-axis view on things happening in the United States and giving us a sort of a sense of, you know, also what we can do about that. things. Today's show, you know, I'm going to say welcome to Megatrends, June 11th, 2026, only nine days before the longest solar day of the year, June 20th. The summer solstice is coming up. Very exciting period of the year. So lots going on, but you know, we're going to cover this subject. We only have an hour. You're Megatrends this week examines section 2024 of the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act. And Ro Khanna, the phenomenal Ro Khanna, tried to have it deleted from consideration. So what is section 2024? And we'll get into that in a few minutes as we define Things like a cold war, a term called fifth column, you know, because that's pertinent to that. And we're also covering how states have figured out how to end or neutralize Citizens United. It turns out that SCOTUS interprets what the Constitution says, but Congress doesn't. And the state legislators interpret what the law means, you know, how the constitution is applied beyond the scope and reach of SCOTUS, the Supreme Court, and particularly this extremist right-wing anti-constitutional and anti-democratic Supreme Court, whose decisions have profoundly harmed our country and return us to suffering the undermining of voting rights and mirroring some of the horrors of the Jim Crow era. from the late 19th century in our current election cycle, as was intended by the Roberts Supreme Court and as part of the blueprint of Project 2025. So we're also going to examine, you know, how school vouchers are hurting public education. We're going to do that through listening to Mr. Tallarico's phenomenal oratory. and how it takes money away from state school budgets and gives it to wealthy families to subsidize their children's private school tuition. So a move that has led to the bankruptcy of the public school system in Arizona, complete bankruptcy, and the near collapse of dozens in other states. Just a terrible idea. And it's really upon us, the voters, to say no more of that. That's absolutely what Texas is. Just a case, you know, the ultimate case in the United States, the worst process going on. But with, you know, Mr. Chalarico, James Chalarico, really laying the wood on that. We start today with a history lesson, a history of massacres. Massacres in 1948 that led to the displacement of indigenous Semitic population. The Semitic population, the indigenous Semitic population, the Palestinians. And these were massacres that were conducted, a whole series of them, by two terrorist gangs led by Menachem Begin and Yixha Shamir. And one was the Irgun, that was the Menachem Begin's group, was the Irgun, and Yixha Shamir's was the Stern gang. And they had been operating, you know, in the 1940s in Palestine, And their target was the British Empire. So they were actually originally fighting against the British Empire. But it was the Zionist dream to basically displace the indigenous population in some other country in this case. And it turns out that the European Ashkenazi Jewish population, are not indigenous to that region. They're not Semitic people. They're not people of the desert. And so we need to really change how the whole concept of the word anti-Semitic, actually it's anti-Semitic to attack Palestinians who are the Semitic people of the desert and indigenous. And it turns out the Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir both became prime ministers of Israel Menachem Begin in the 1978 to 86 period, and Shamir just after that, 86 to 92. So I'm going to define two words, cryptia, K-R-Y-P-T-A-I-A, and fifth column. So take notes. You know, cryptia was originally in a Roman era policy. In fact, cryptia is a Greek, is actually a, a Latin word. It means fear, fear-based. And it was a Roman era policy of striking fear in the population by conducting random assassinations or hangings or crucifixions or whatever. People deemed a threat to the current state. So this was a policy that made people afraid. So you can see that intimidation works and you can see how it's working out. Trump tried to make that work here in the United States, particularly in Minnesota, but that didn't turn out to be the case. People were stronger, but anyway, Kryptaya. So this is a policy that has reappeared in many tyrannical governments over the centuries under different names, but always the same method killing someone, you know, and now the other term is called fifth column. It's a cold war term. And it, um, The term fifth column, you know, is a term that refers to a group or faction that works secretly within a larger organization. It can denote individuals who undermine or betray that group for personal gain. And in the modern context, it relates to espionage or political sabotage. The phrase emphasizes an idea of hidden agendas in internal conflict. And that is exactly what APAC is, the American Israeli Political Action Committee. People are very unhappy about it. So that is a major influence, and that's what's projecting, causing Section 2024 to be put into the language of the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act. That's going on right now. It's being conducted in Congress right now. And it turns out that Netanyahu calls it his plan. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin, who was wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, and crimes against humanity in gaza it's called section 2024 my plan he was the one he went to congress had closed door meetings with democrats and saying hey you know all you democrats that are apac democrats getting money from us you know uh remember your your job isn't to represent your constituencies it's to represent us our interests to israel and taxpayers are you know, fighting back. They're saying, no, no, we're more and more. The trend is saying, okay, we, no way, right across the entire political spectrum. So anyway, I wanted to get back to the dear Yassin, D-I-E-R, Yassin, Y-A-S-S-I-N, massacre in 1948. And that was, that was the Kryptaya message from Irgun leader, Menachem Begin and the Stern gang leader, Yixha Shamir, the Palestinians massacred in their homes. Then survivors marched for 13 miles to Jerusalem in summer heat, during which a dozen children and elderly died before then being paraded through East Jerusalem, you know, and spit on and rocks thrown at them. And then they were all massacred later on before sunset. So this is one of dozens of such massacres in the first seven years or so that marked the so-called birth of Israel, born in the blood of thousands of massacred Palestinians in villages in towns between 1947 and 1953, and many since. So this is the hidden sorted hidden sorted history of the settlement settler colonial state of Israel for genocide started the initial push for recognition by Jewish terrorist groups who intimidated Jews who were the indigenous to and neighbors of Palestinians. They also also They targeted not just Palestinians, but also socialist Jews and the Bund Jews who were vehemently anti-Zionist and saw this is the wrong idea. We've lived with these folks for generations. What are you doing coming in here and killing them? What are you doing? So, you know, and psychologists have said, you know, just that, you know, that Begin and Shamir suffered PTSD, because they did, in fact, lose their entire families in the Nazi concentration camps. Their entire families. But then they turned around and recapitulated that on Israelis, I mean, on Palestinians. So, you know, it's the living survivors of the Holocaust who are the most vehement clarions who desperately beg the Israeli people to see that dear Yassin and dozens of other brutal massacres, you know, what they actually mean. And why, you know, why they ask, why should Palestinians suffer for the sins of European wars, where Hitler's Nazis exterminated Jews, gypsies, socialists, communists, and anyone who opposed Nazism. But anyway, we start out today, we're going to get back to that little later on. We're going to start Megatrends with a history being forged presently in the U.S. in Texas by James Tallarico. And he is the master, passionate, precise oratorian, storytelling that conveys a message of compassion with a precise memory of history of a system rigged against workers, teachers, medical workers, students, and retirees alike by a political class addicted to corruption and easy money as their MO. And he lands upon the story of a barefoot preacher who, angered by merchants selling wares on the small tables on the steps of the mosques in Rome, the house of God, he angrily overturned the merchants' tables and chased them away. And so, and Talladega then talks about his uncle, that he was a preacher. He said, the barefoot preacher had two rules, love God, love thy neighbor. And you couldn't love God without loving your neighbor. So let's listen to James Talladega come here.

Some of you may be wondering why a Texas state representative is here in Chicago. Well, I'm one of those Texas outlaws that broke quorum

This is not just a political struggle.

It's a spiritual struggle. When my colleagues and I set out on this journey, we didn't know what would happen. We took a leap of faith. Right before we got on that plane back in Texas, we said a prayer. an interfaith prayer because we got Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, atheists, we got everybody in our caucus. And I was honored to be asked to give that invocation. We stood in a circle, hand in hand, about to embark on our own kind of exodus. And I asked the spirit of love to be with us, to guide us, to give us strength as we fight for the people. My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas. And when I was little, he told me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave two commandments, love God and love neighbor, because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. Every single person bears the image of the sacred. Every single person is holy. Every single person counts. This American experiment started with that same self-evident truth that all people are created equal. This American democracy is more than just a constitution. It's a covenant. It's a relationship between neighbors. It's a promise that we make to each other to share this country. Some of the most powerful people in this nation are breaking that promise. As we speak, with every gerrymandered district, with every suppressed vote, they are breaking that sacred promise. 2000 years ago, when the powerful few abused the many, That barefoot rabbi walked into the seat of power and flipped over the tables of injustice. His love rose to meet that abuse without becoming it. To those who love democracy, to those who love our neighbors, it's time to start flipping tables.

Okay. Was that it? Oh, yeah. So it's time to flip tables. So I hope you heard that one. I love that message. And, you know, that's the basis of his appeal and why he scares corrupt institutional and AIPAC Democrats as well as the genetically corrupt sycophantic Republicans whose existence is owed entirely to dark money. You know, how dangerous is a taxpayer-funded election to the current status quo of donor class wealth, right? So they declare openly that oligarchy is preferable to social democracy. And they would find society harder to control by masses informed and organized, you know, by citizens and voters, you know. So, you know, let's move toward ending the electoral college and promoting the national popular voting pact. It's dangerous stuff, you know, it's time to turn over the tables. So again, ever hear the word fifth column? That was a Cold War era term referring to covert influence by a foreign government. And at the time, spy versus spy narrative between USSR and US is going on. Both had spies that infiltrated each other and seen as a hidden battle between U.S. CIA and Russian KGB. But these days, the term fifth column is a modern appearance. But the current operation is between Israel and the U.S. In fact, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been run not from Washington, but from Tel Aviv for at least 20, 25 years. And the fifth column is a massive decades-long infiltration into U.S. mass media, Capitol Hill, U.S. elections, TV and radio. They have a whole campaign going on right now. Very, very well funded. And they're actually targeting the churches. You know, they're actually having this spy software that is capturing what people's cell phones are. that's capturing their cell phones and, you know, their, you know, their, I forget the word for it, but they're kind of spying on American citizens that are influencing churches to, for the, to have the, the, the epistle or whatever, talking about supporting Israel. They should have their tax exempt status taken away. Every single one of them that's going on right now. So we'll see more of that a little bit later. So AIPAC is, um, uh, played a major role in us elections. Like so powerful that half a dozen, half a dozen elective officials of members of Congress who were critics of USA to Israel and undue influence of Israel over the decisions to go to war by the U S uh, they, their tax paying constituents are beginning to complain and say, wait a minute. Our tax dollars are funding Israel's genocide in Gaza. And so most recently, Netanyahu influenced the clueless Trump to start a war in Iran. And that's destabilized the whole world in 2026. So this is some serious stuff, this fifth column. And Netanyahu was instrumental in the Bush administration's war in Iraq and Afghanistan that led to, you know, killing more than a million Iraqi and Afghanistan citizens and Tens of thousands of soldiers who suffer PTSD to this day. But almost none of them were Israeli soldiers. You know, they put it all. So this whole thing is that war was based on a lie, weapons of mass destruction that was exposed within like four months of that U.S. invasion in March of 2003. So the fifth column influence continues unabated today in a demonstration of how both parties in Congress are utterly sycophantic poodles of the international war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli propaganda network, AIPAC, is seen in the debate over Section 224 in the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act. And again, I just repeat that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and and Crimes Against Humanity has called Section 224 my plan. So, you know, at a time when Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, Congress should be cutting off military support, said Ro Khanna. Not integrating the U.S. military and Israeli defense sector That's what this is. So let's go to this next one that's gonna give you some details on that. This is by Eric Moutsos.

All the darkness is finally coming to light. So you know that language in the bill they tried to sneak in where they were merging the US military and the Israeli military? Can you guess who gave the language to the United States to do that bill? Can you guys guess? Thanks to House Democrat Ro Khanna for saying the quiet part out loud. He says this. Let me be clear. Netanyahu is the one that actually told members of Congress to add Section 224, merging the US and Israeli militaries into the bill. This is why there is no left. There is no right. We all need to be speaking truth right now. Thank you, Ro Khanna.

The American people... are tired of the arrogance and insolence of Prime Minister Netanyahu telling America what we should do. The entire country of Israel has a GDP that is less than a single town in my district. Yet somehow Netanyahu thinks he could tell the American people what we should do. The person who's most upset with him right now is President Donald Trump. And everyone in America, whether you're a Republican, an independent, or a Democrat, says that we need to tell Netanyahu that America calls the shots, not the prime minister of any other country. They want less cooperation and blank checks to Israel, not more. Only the United States Congress would dream up at this moment, let's actually do more for Israel, not less. And that's what Section 2024 does. It's a pretty simple thing. Should we do more for Israel than we already do, or should we do less? If you think we should do more for Israel, you should be against my amendment. If you think we should do less for Israel at the time that he's arrogantly telling Donald Trump what to do, then you should be for my amendment. Now, let me just be clear. Mr. Netanyahu actually wrote to a member of Congress to put this Section 224 into the bill.

And there it is.

All right. So now we're in the hotel room. The only thing...

All right, so it turns out that the proposed NDAA authorizes $1.15 trillion in baseline military spending, while the Trump administration's full defense request seeks an unprecedented debt exploding $1.5 trillion in armed forces and related funding for the coming So Section 2024 would require the U.S. Defense Secretary to designate a Pentagon executive agent responsible for coordinating and expanding U.S.-Israeli defense technology cooperation. In Thursday's voice vote, members of the House Armed Services Committee from both parties rejected the amendment to remove Section 2024 from the NDA with only Khanna and a representative Sarah Jacobs Democrat from California backing the removal of it. What are Democrats thinking? You know, people should be absolutely bombing their, I mean, you know, calling their offices, you know, with phone calls and just calling up and say, what are you thinking? Get Section 2024 out of there. I don't care how much money you're being, you know, threatened with or primary, being primaried threats by AIPAC. That's not what we elected you for. You're here to represent us, your constituents, not a foreign entity. So while proponents have said, you know, they contend that the measure would reduce U.S. taxpayer funding for Israel. Just to tell us all a canard. It's really just a blank check. And so anyway, that's. story on that. So this next one is number three is the International Court of Justice declared Israel's unlawful occupation unlawful by the UN Charter and that they must do reparations. So let's listen to that was number three and it's listening to what they have to say.

The court won unanimously find that it has jurisdiction to give the advisory opinion requested by 11 votes to 4 is of the opinion that the state of israel's continued presence in the occupied territory is unlawful by 11 votes to 4 is of the opinion that the state of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory as rapidly as possible. By 14 votes to 1, is of the opinion that the state of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities and to evacuate all settlers from the occupied Palestinian territory. By 14 votes to 1, is of the opinion that the State of Israel has the obligation to make reparation for the damage caused to all natural or legal persons concerned in the occupied Palestinian territory. By 12 votes to 3, is of the opinion that all states are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

By 12 votes to 3. All right. So, basically, that is the... um, the UN, uh, the International Court of Justice, um, declaring that, that all occupied territory, uh, uh, uh, is illegally illegal under international law. So, um, uh, we're going to go to the, uh, uh, number, uh, this one on, this is remembering, uh, Deir Yassin, that I talked about before. And that was on April 9th, 1948. And so let's go to that right now.

What would later become a standard Israeli practice started on April 9th, 1948. Just weeks before Israel occupied Palestine, members of the Irgun and Stern Zionist militias stormed the village of Deir Yassin. a few kilometers to the west of occupied Al-Quds, committing a horrendous massacre pre-Al-Nakba. Palestinians were murdered in cold blood and buried in mass graves. As news of the insane atrocity spread, around 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced, fearing widespread massacres and marking the Deir Yassin massacre a decisive moment in Palestinian history. According to a 1948 letter sent by the British delegation to the United Nations, the killing of some 250 Arabs, men, women, and children took place in circumstances of great savagery. Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing. And survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities. The report added those who were taken prisoners were treated with degrading brutality. Salam Saba Khalaf, deputy chief and head of the Intelligence for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, said that defenseless men, women, and children had their throats slashed. Numerous bodies had been mutilated with knives, pregnant women had been disemboweled, and the women of Deir Yassin were raped by the Israeli occupation forces. According to other testimonies from the perpetrators and survivors, many Palestinians in Deir Yassin were burned to death. The Deir Yassin Massacre sparked a snowball effect of Israeli violence in Palestine, shaping the ongoing struggle for freedom. Israeli historian Benny Morris noted that the Deir Yassin Massacre had a profound demographic and political effect, where it was followed by two waves of forcibly displacing Palestinians en masse. Wave two happened after the Deir Yassin Massacre. while a third occurred during the Nakba, when Israel proclaimed its occupation of Palestine by announcing the establishment of the State of Israel. Israeli historian Ilan Pape believes that depopulating Palestine was not a consequential war event, but a carefully planned strategy, otherwise known as Plan Dalet, which was authorized by Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion in March 1948. adding Operation Nashon was, in fact, the first step in the plan. In 1949, the Gevat Sholbet settlement was established on the ruins of Deir Yassin as an extension of an earlier settlement. To commemorate the Deir Yassin massacre is to put the Palestinian struggle in its true context, one of recurrent Israeli murder and brutality.

So the next segment is going to be This gentleman details, he's done a lot of research on it, and it's just a segment from, you know, it's only 438 to 924, okay? So listen to his commentary. By the way, check this guy out. His longer commentary is just a small part of a 28 or 30-minute segment that he does. It's really powerful. This is killing for sport. Let's go to that.

Now, we're going to be going through these war crimes in chronological order, starting all the way back in 1948. And in fact, the first three war crimes that we're going to cover all took place in 1948 during the Nakba. And for the uninitiated, the Nakba was the forced violent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. Number one, Operation Cast Thy Bread. In April of 1948, Israeli forces engaged in a top secret biological warfare operation in which operatives contaminated drinking water wells in Palestinian villages with typhoid bacteria in an attempt to inflict mass casualties against the refugees and to prevent them from returning to the homes that they had been expelled from. The contamination of these wells triggered a typhoid epidemic in Acre, as noted by the mayor of that region on May 3rd of 1948. Additionally, four Israeli special forces soldiers disguised as Arabs attempted to poison the local water supply in Gaza, but were captured by Egyptian soldiers on May 23rd of that year and were executed by an Egyptian military court. Declassified documents have revealed that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion oversaw and approved the use of biological warfare against non-combatant civilians. Additionally, in the final months of the war, the government of Israel gave orders to expand the biological warfare campaign into neighboring Arab states such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, but those orders were never actually carried out because the war ended shortly thereafter. Needless to say, this was a blatant violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. And unfortunately, it will neither be the only or the worst example of chemical or biological warfare against women and children that we see on this list. Now, folks, I want you to take a second and imagine the sickness of the mind that it would require to poison the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of women and children with typhoid. in order to expedite the appropriation of land. And in fact, as we're going through these war crimes, I would like for you to just generally imagine how you would feel knowing that people from your country, people who shared your culture or your ethnic background or your religion or whatever, behaved in such a way. And then imagine being part of such a culture and feeling absolutely no regret, no shame, and offering no apologies for any of the things that we see on this list. especially because as we go through this, you'll see nobody has ever faced any meaningful consequences for any of the war crimes on this list. And quite the contrary, many of them were promoted or rewarded as a result. Number two, the Deir Yassin Massacre. Also in April of 1948, Zionist paramilitaries attacked Deir Yassin, a small Palestinian village immediately west of Jerusalem, and killed over 100 people using firearms, hand grenades, and armored vehicles, including women and children. This despite the fact that the village had previously agreed to a non-aggression pact and posed no meaningful military threat. thus beginning a time-honored tradition of Israeli forces violating ceasefires in order to murder women and children. To quote a former IDF colonel who, to his credit, initially objected to the attack while addressing his superior officer, quote, Is it true that you gave the dissidents permission to attack Deir Yassin? How can you do this? We have a pact with this village, and they have kept it faithfully. No shooting, no foreign soldiers, no aggression of any kind. Later on, the same colonel had this to say about the massacre after it was already underway. Quote, We went into the houses and in the corners we saw dead bodies. Almost all of the dead were old people, children or women with a few men here and there. They stood them up in corners and shot them. They also shot people running away from houses and prisoners, mostly women and children. According to other eyewitness testimony as collected by filmmaker Neta Shoshani, at least one young boy was tied to a tree and burned alive. Other groups of small girls were lined up against concrete walls and executed with submachine guns. Other survivors were taken prisoner and paraded through the streets of nearby Jerusalem, where they were spat on, mutilated, stoned, and executed. This was not the only massacre of women and children during the Nakba, but it was perhaps the most significant and emblematic. To quote historian Benny Morris, this event probably had the most lasting effect of any single event of the war in precipitating the flight of Arab villagers from Palestine.

And that was what was the... the flipping point that led to the, you know, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians just leaving, you know, and there were refugees of, uh, by the hundreds of thousands. And so that's why the right of return is such an powerful, um, uh, uh, thing for the Palestinian people, the right of return and, and, but, uh, israel refuses any allowing any kind of right of return uh you know for and for them it's a population issue you know uh so this by the way i this is a book that i'm reading right now it's called how to sell a genocide and how to this this really terrific book um As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 23, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world. Like openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of the horrors to come. But the U.S. media downplayed it, obscured it, repackaged it as the war on terror framework. So how to sell a genocide as an indictment of U.S. corporate media rolling the role of enabling and at times directly inciting one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in modern history. So he unpacks this and it's in the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC. You know how New York Times, CNN and MSNBC systematically sanitized Israel's war crimes and hid the US's central role and dehumanized the Palestinian people. So that's this book, How to Sell Genocide by Adam H. Johnson. So I urge you to take that into consideration. We're going to go to... I think the number six, which is how Congress is moving to integrate the U.S. Israeli militaries. And then number eight with Melissa Chowdhury, who is running against AIPAC Democrat Adam Smith, who is one of the two Democrats that actually co-introduced Section 2024. So let's listen to to this. This is I'm going to play.

Can I play this? Congress quietly moves to integrate U.S. and Israeli militaries. In the first step toward shifting aid further into the shadows, the House's 2027 DA would all but fuse the two countries' armed forces together. At a time when the American public is expressing unprecedented levels of distrust in the Israeli government, Congress just proposed tying the U.S. to the Israeli military more than ever before. Buried in the House's version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act , released on Tuesday, is Section 224, entitled United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. The provision would arguably do more to intertwine the U.S. military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion in military assistance Israel has received from the U.S. since its founding in 1948. Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The US and Israel already worked together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes network integration and data fusion. In other words, the U.S. military's data could soon be the Israeli military's data. If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world. To be sure, the U.S. has worked closely with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defense Production Action Plan. And, as the number one arms dealer in the world, the US provides weapons to militaries across the globe. But that is mostly a one-way street, with the US providing weapons to foreign buyers who only occasionally make parts for those weapons themselves, as in the case of the F-35's global supply chain. Section 224 would be a different beast entirely. It would fuse the US and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future, like autonomous systems and cyber. It would also bring extraordinary Israeli influence to the U.S. beyond what it already has through the Israel lobby and its robust network of social media influencers. It would give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in US politics, jobs in the US by expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas. The Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on US soil, thereby securing allies among members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs lie. The result could well be a US political system even more susceptible to the whims of an Israeli government that seemingly has no qualms about drawing the US into military conflicts in the Middle East. this unprecedented level of U.S.-Israeli military integration stands in stark contrast to the traditional aid model of defense cooperation, in which Israel already stood out as the top recipient of U.S. military assistance. As laid out in a recent Quincy Institute brief, authored by Stephen Simon, this shift from an aid model to a military integration model has troubling implications, namely, The shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent. This all comes at a time when the Israeli military has repeatedly used U.S. weapons in strikes that have violated international humanitarian laws in Gaza, and as Israel has repeatedly violated ceasefires, as has the U.S. itself, in the Trump administration's unnecessary war with Iran. The enormous gulf between what most Americans want and what the president is doing when it comes to Israel and what Congress is proposing here should not be ignored. Just 30% of respondents to a New York Times slash Sienna poll from mid-May believe Trump made the right decision to go to war with Iran, with 64% saying it was wrong. An Institute for Global Affairs poll released earlier this week dove even deeper into the American psyche when it comes to arming Israel, finding that just 16% say the United States should keep supplying Israel with weapons without new restrictions. 38% want to stop supplying weapons entirely, and another 24% want weapons conditioned on how they're used. Yet, mainstream leadership in both parties remains largely pro-Israel and continues to shape the base legislative text before amendments and broader congressional debate open it to the full body, as is the case with this deprovision. Though slowly, tides within both parties are shifting as more and more members speak out against the growing divide between Israel's actions and America's interests. For example, Senator Chris Van Hollen, DMD, wrote in the New York Times on Tuesday that, the Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values. On the Republican side of the aisle, Representative Thomas Massey, R-KY, and former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican Georgia, Yes, the

Oppose the U.S. military-industrial merger. That's exactly what this is. Dangerous, dangerous stuff. It would mean closed-door stuff. Everything would be behind closed doors on Capitol Hill. And the oversight would be limited. The public would be denied access. And definitely the plans to target journalists to make sure that anything that they would say to reveal about it would be, hey, no whistleblowers allowed here, right? This next one is actually Melissa Chowdhury, and she's running against AIPAC Democrat Adam Smith, who co-introduced Section 2024 at the urging of Netanyahu in his face. So let's listen to this. This is really powerful, really important.

Here's what you need to know about Section 224 and the fact that the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith, who's my opponent, co-introduced this piece of the National Defense Authorization Act that would combine the United States and Israel's militaries. In cyber, in tech, in intelligence, in weapons production, the IDF and the American military that my husband and my father both served with honor in and were disabled in would suddenly be completely combined, unaccountable to the public. You may have noticed that lately there's been a lot of pushback starting at the grassroots and getting up finally into the halls of Congress saying, no, we do not want American money that should be in American communities going to fund human rights abuses by a foreign nation. That has led to this. Section 224, if it passes, would merge the US and Israeli militaries in such a way that there's never an annual approval of any aid package that would get to be debated. The public wouldn't have that opportunity to stand up and say no and push their representatives to say no, because if we're functionally the same thing, then any allocation to the American military would also be going to the IDF. I cannot believe that this is where we are. And it is viscerally shocking and infuriating and disgusting that someone who is in office to represent the American people would be betraying American sovereignty, American national interests, American freedom of speech while we're at it, all to please his campaign donors. if you look at adam smith's open secrets page you will see he receives all kinds of money from aipac those who support aipac and the defense industrial and surveillance industrial complex up to and including palantir and andaril andaril are the makers of killer robots they are making autonomous weapons ai powered robots that will kill people without any human authorization You tell me how a congressperson can take money from that entity and then go take a vote. And we're supposed to believe that he's acting in our best interest. No, no. My name is Melissa Chowdhury. I ran against Adam Smith in 2024. I made it through the primaries. I fought against him in the general. And I've earned over 90,000 votes as a grassroots candidate in a first-time race. I'm running again in 2026. I'm standing for care, courage, and the Constitution. And I'm asking for your vote. I'm asking for your support. I'm asking for you to share this. Because the corruption goes all the way to the top. And we need people who are principled, experienced, and unbought. to occupy those seats and do good things with that power and uphold American sovereignty in the interest of the American people. Vote Melissa for Congress.

So this is Megatrends today, and I hope you spread the word from wherever you're listening. Section 2024 just is not getting the coverage that it ought. I was looking for it, and it's starting to come out, but hopefully blowing on the sails of this. Please pass the word. Vote with your feet. Get on the phone. Let's surround the White House and Congress and visit your representatives' offices. This next one is Media Benjamin, who co-founded Code Pink. And she always is great. She's always on it right now. Let's listen to Media Benjamin. She really is on top of it.

I couldn't believe it when I turned on CNN this morning and heard Fareed Zakaria talking about war crimes in Gaza.

This is a war crime. There is no other word to describe it.

It's been 19 hellish months and finally, finally, mainstream TV pundits are beginning to say what so many of us have been shouting all along. Farid was interviewing former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who recently dropped a political bombshell in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz when he wrote in his op-ed that what Israel is doing in Gaza is nothing short of extermination. He said indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, criminal killing of civilians. And he didn't stop there. He laid bare the starvation, calling denying food, medicines, and basic necessities explicit government policies. carried out intentionally, viciously, and maliciously. His conclusion was, yes, we are committing war crimes. And he ends with the warning, it is time to halt before Israel is banished from the family of nations and summoned to the International Criminal Court with no good defense. Enough is enough. Well, we've been saying enough is enough for the last 19 months. But finally, mainstream media is starting to break ranks. It's time to turn up the pressure where it matters most, and that is the White House and Congress. Let's make sure they hear us. Let's make sure they act. Stop supporting Israel.

Okay, so she really nailed it. So let's go to Mr. Tallarico, who tells us, this is one of the really great ones, number 10. Let's play this. I just want to get right to this. And let's hear it from James Tallarico.

There is something happening in the great state of Texas. There is something in the air. We are uniting Texans onto one team to take on this broken, corrupt political system. We're going to do something extraordinary. We are going to end 30 years of one party rule in this state and elect a senator who's going to serve us. in the gospel of matthew when jesus's disciples are all jockeying for position jesus tells them the rulers of this world lord their power over the people but among you it will be different the greatest among you will be a servant this is not just a political battle This is a spiritual battle between selfishness and service, between greed and greatness. After decades of this corruption, we are on the cusp of returning to those old fashioned values. Service. taking responsibility and doing what's right even when no one is watching. If we the people can come together to defeat the most corrupt politician in America, we can come together to defeat this entire corrupt system. They're going to call this movement that we're building un-Texan, un-American. They'll call us a threat. the only truth out of all of those lies is that we are a threat and on november 3rd the greatest among us will be the servants let's go with this thing thank you okay

Yeah, that's what public service is. Now, we're going to go to this next one really quick, and then we'll finish off with Dave Littman. This is a tour de force, a guy lambasting corrupt city officials who supported the timber industry, failing old growth redwoods and allowing big oil to buy off city officials. This is what you should do when you go to public comment. Check this guy out. Three-minute limit to share your comments.

evening council city staff two weeks ago around earth day private contractors began felling some of the last remaining old growth ponderosa pine in the world just a few miles upstream of this city hall i do not stand before you today to convince you to stop the logging in the municipal watershed Because the deeper I dig through public records, the more I find the city was not just aware from the beginning, but an active and even eager participant in this publicly funded multi-million dollar cash grab explicitly describing our drinking water source as a case study for dangerous untested forest management experiments. I do not stand before you to convince you that your primary duty is to your constituents, not industry interests and their federal grant partners. Because for months on end, hundreds of the citizens you swore an oath to serve have written letters, made comments, and shown up repeatedly to beg you for prudence, for caution, for an EIS, with not even a symbolic gesture of regard to show us that you heard our pleas. You gave us nothing. Nor do I stand before you merely to berate you for your negligence. I have no illusion that my words will fall as anything more than vitriol on callous ears. No, I stand here tonight as the harbinger of consequence, an omen of drought and floods, of faster fires and scorched earth and wells run dry. Because forests make rain and filters store and slow the release of water. When you remove them, the land dries up. It's that simple. I stand here tonight for the voiceless, for the soil and the fish and the rain and the birds. I stand for the fungus and the old trees that have watched over this land for centuries before the white man came with his insolvable lust for timber and land. I stand for the future ones who will inherit this parched, degraded watershed. and be left to toil for generations to restore the reign and slowly rectify the greed of lusty imperialists and the folly of their political puppets who casually wave away their children's birthright without decorum nor decree. Counsel, I stand here tonight to haunt you with the specter of dissent because democracy does not die at the ballot box. It lives in the voice of the people. Governments derive their authority by performing the ritual of consent in theaters like this one, and I desist. I stand here for you, my kindred spirits watching this. There are a million assaults on decency and good sense. Choose your battles wisely, then fight them with every fiber of your being and every tool justice allows. overwhelm public meetings, demand public records, file petitions in the courts. We must be relentless. We must flood the halls of power and thrash the gears of the machine of bureaucratic dominion with demands of justice because the walls of the empire will tremble before the united voice of the people. It is time. We must stand up for our earth mother. She has given us everything and still we take more. Water is life.

Wow. That was, there you have it. That's how to do it. Choose your battles wisely, then fight with all your might. That's it. All right, this is Pat Fahey. We're going to be finishing off with Dave Lipman, my dear friend Dave Lipman, shooting from the lip. So we'll see you a little bit on the other side.

A hunger strike continues inside GEO Group's Delaney Hall Detention Center for Immigrants from the Wrong Countries in Newark, New Jersey. The border czar said the inmates were demanding their own ethnic food rather than protesting worms in their non-ethnic food. He didn't mention the worms, however, since that would be like saying President Trump is bad. minutes maybe an hour but it's not ours anymore new cbs chief barry israel weiss is firing left and right on all sinister she particularly disliked a segment on salvadoran prisons which she eventually allowed to air with a rebuttal from king donald freedom of the press it turns out belongs to whoever owns one and the king Israel, ever an enemy of boycotts, is boycotting the UN Secretary General for noting Israel's sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees. The apartheid state recently dropped a case against five soldiers charged with brutalizing a detainee, citing problems with the evidence. It just took too long to sift through. A military legal officer resigned after helping to spring a leak of surveillance footage of the abuse, which it turns out was fake.

by Hamas and JVP.

In a productive, if not perfect, phone call, Prez Mobbaz has informed Brother Mobbaz Netanyahu in colorful language that everyone hates Israel, called him fucking crazy, and told him they should knock it the fuck off. He is understandably peeved as Israel's destruction of Lebanon has caused Iran to balk at talks, shutting down an escape hatch for the Trump-Pibby failing war that threatens to destroy the world economy, and perhaps even the Republican Party.

Everyone tells me it's unpopular, but I think it's very popular.

The Trump bump gets sycophants elected, but it can also bump people off social services, especially if they're immigrants, or used to be. These backbone of the nation folks are being denied jobs, health care, banking, tax credits, and daycare in an attempt to drive them out of the country that destroyed their country of origin, more or less. Look it up. This slice and dice is the new ice, freezing people out, and is captained by one Stephen Miller, who says many of them are a threat to American prosperity and identity. Prosperity? False. Threat to American identity? Good for them. White Palace Flack Abigail Jackson explained that immigration policy, quote, will always be doing what's best for the American people. Yes, offering them free stupid lessons with extra credit for innovations in hate. Many of the targets of this policy are refugees, and they will now add to their resume the title of refugee from the USA. And many of the families have spouses with different statuses, so some of them will need to re-spouse themselves. All this raises two questions. Is it legal? And are they ruining the lives of the wrong immigrants? Should they perhaps deport the immigrants who came here before the current pogrom and are now billionistas who rule over the rest of us?

Let us pause for a moment to commemorate this ongoing democracide.

Two judges struck down two Trump crimes in one day. They may have to go to seven judges to parry the magical mystery tour of Trumpian autocratic thrusts.

This week's Fuck You Emperor decisions start off with stopping the thug-in-chief from slapping his trumped-up name on the Kennedy Center and from shutting the center down for two years. The gist of the ruling is you can't just take things that belong to other people, you fucking two-year-old. In response to the ruling, President Baby threatened to abandon the project. Look for an upcoming ruling preventing him in advance from issuing executive orders that violate the Constitution. Also, from appointing partisans to replace experts in government, museums, and scientific institutes. And then, wait for the tantrum pout to begin. In an even more outlandish case, the judge who closed Prez Trump's lawsuit against himself, DBA the IRS, reopened it, calling into question the legality of the $1.8 billion slush fund created in the settlement. The Trump heist would benefit convicted Jan. 6 felons and had already been temporarily blocked by yet another judge. Other opponents of it include radical left Republicans, a new grouping eligible for imprisonment or deportation. But Trump looks to be tacoing on this burglary. Not to worry. Heist Man still has plenty of other scams going. At the risk of copyright violation, they can only bad happen.

I think ultimately the question you have to ask yourself is, are you better off today than other people?

Thanks to implementation of new sensor guidelines at the Trumpsonian museums that eliminate many descriptive signs or wall texts from displayed artworks, we can now learn many new fun facts, including that Trump was never impeached, Palestine was never existing, Jackie Cazares was never killed in a school shooting, and black people have never been misidentified by facial recognition. Conservatives say the wall texts have presented only progressive views, omitting those of the Klan and its associated organizations like Project 2025. Progressives, says an admin spoke, quote, are trying to indoctrinate people about U.S. history. And that's our job.

Well, thank you for tuning in to Megatrends. This is Pat Fahey with my co-host Jason. So we will see you next week. And please, you can see this on YouTube by just going to, you know, Pat Fahey, Megatrends TV. You can see this replay along with other, you know, in the archive. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you remember. Let's reverse. democracy and make it our social democracy. See you soon. See you next week.