November Issue Front Cover

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Public i

THE PEOPLE VS. BIG TECH

Mahomet residents rally on October 3 in front of the public library against a potential data center. Photo by Brett Peugh, used with permission

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Citizens Are Standing Up Against Data Centers in Their Communities

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Nancy Dietrich and Lois Kain

Visualization by Little Sis and PnP (2026), presented by AI Now

The growth of data centers across the globe has been astonishing. According to datacentermap.com, there are currently over 12,000 data centers worldwide, with over 4,700 in the United States. AI (artificial intelligence) hyperscale data centers, or “hyperscalers,” account for a portion of these numbers. While AI and data centers have been around for a while, recent technological developments like Chat GPT, CoPilot, and Claude—which are used to answer questions and solve problems; create memes, graphics, and videos; and surveil us as we go through our everyday lives—have increased the demand for these hyperscalers in order to store and process massive amounts of information.

Hyperscalers are much larger than traditional data centers: they can house over 5000 computer servers and take up millions of square feet of space. According to Cleanview, a market intelligence firm, there are 100 hyperscale facilities currently in operation in the US that consume at least 100 megawatts (MW) of power at peak capacity (100 MW is enough to power 80,000 US homes). Many of the new hyperscalers use between 200 and 500 MW, enough to power a medium-sized city. The largest example of a hyperscaler that is currently under construction is probably the Stratos Project in Utah: once completed, it will cover 20,000 acres (it was originally slated to be 40,000 acres) and, according to The Christian Science Monitor, will consume 9 gigawatts of energy, which is more than twice the amount of electricity used to power the rest of the entire state of Utah. Continue reading →

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50 Megawatts of Solar Doesn’t Offset 50 Megawatts of AI

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Adam Ludd

Solar Farm 2.0 on the South Farms of UIUC, which produces approximately 20,000 MWh per year. Photo from Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP), UIUC

With people being so divided these days on nearly every issue in society, it’s hard to get accurate information, and even harder for people to accept facts that don’t align with their preexisting beliefs. People say that it’s ten times more effort to fight incorrect information than to generate it. While that may be true, it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth the effort. Today’s topic is really about grid stability, and it applies to any large, inflexible consumer of electrical power. The most relevant example at the moment is AI data centers, so we’ll use those as our exemplar of a power user.

At a glance, it might seem as if a company were to bring 50 megawatts (MW) of solar power online and use 50 MW of energy that it would all balance out. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, for a number of reasons. The most obvious problem is that solar panels only work during daylight hours, while the data center runs 24 hours a day. A second issue is that solar panels never produce as much as their nameplate power rating. How much would be enough? Continue reading →

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Flock Out of Central Illinois: A Conversation with Three Organizers

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Jay Burton - pseudonym

“You get some really weird crossovers of culture on anti-Flock that I just have not seen in community organizing elsewhere,” observes Ryan Gale of Tazewell County, who is part of an anti-Flock organizing campaign in downstate Illinois that has won supporters from across the full political spectrum of local residents concerned about surveillance and civil liberties.

De-Flock is a movement to end local governmental contracts with the notorious AI-driven surveillance camera company, Flock Group Inc. Flock produces, distributes, and maintains AI-powered cameras that monitor the movements of cars, bicycles, and, increasingly, pedestrians via a massive nationwide database. Opposition to Flock is currently the most successful bipartisan issue in our country. According to DeFlock.org, over 150 city and local governments have voted to end, not to renew, or to reject Flock contracts. Major news outlets have been forced to acknowledge that an anti-Flock position is not just a far-left concern. This is an issue for Black, Brown, and white working-class people of all political stripes.

What strategies are working to bring Flock down? I spoke with organizers representing three counties across Central Illinois–Champaign, McClean, and Tazewell—to learn more. Continue reading →

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We Need to Fight Technofascism, Not Just Data Centers

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Janice Jayes

The “Fighting Technofascism” workshop brought together hundreds of organizers from across the country. Photo by Donté Carnell Winslow, used with permission

On September 19, 2026, a delegation from UCIMC participated in the one-day workshop “Fighting Technofascism: Power, Surveillance and Resistance, jointly organized by MediaJustice from Atlanta and Mijente’s Chicago office. They joined hundreds of participants from Chicago to New Mexico exchanging ideas on educational and organizational campaigns to counter the expanding political power of the technology sector in the US and around the world.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor set the tone for the day by leading an open discussion of their recent book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World (2026). Klein and Taylor emphasized that they did not use the term fascism lightly. The technology sector–state power nexus that has accelerated under the Trump administration, the cultivation of cultural visions featuring in-groups and out-groups, and the switch from rights-based values to discourses centered on social control all fit the markers of fascism. In addition, Klein and Taylor find echoes of the eugenic ideas that justified Jim Crow regimes, ethnic cleansings, genocide, and apartheid-like repression in the worldview of the current technocracy, which reduces humans to data points to be managed and surveilled. The leaders of these industries, they argue, have shown their disdain for human agency, democracy, and the public good in their focus on designing data infrastructures convenient for their own goals of national and planetary management. The authors encouraged attendees to push back against this dehumanization as well as against the expansion of the infrastructure enabling these technofascist campaigns. Continue reading →

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Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Walter Feinberg

Recently, lawyers representing Jewish groups at the University of Illinois exchanged letters with the UI administration about antisemitism on campus. As reported by the News-Gazette, the lawyers’ letter alerted the administration: “Too many incidents of harassment based on antisemitism or anti-Zionism remain inadequately addressed or completely ignored.”

Not too long ago I would have welcomed such a letter and, were I a lawyer, would have co-signed it. After all, one incident of antisemitism ignored is one too many (as is one incident of Islamophobia—which is not mentioned in the letter). However, I reject the letter’s implication that anti-Zionism is antisemitism Continue reading →

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The Democrats, Israel, and Netanyahu

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Tariq Khan

As we get closer to midterm elections, notice that the establishment “centrist” Democrats have shifted their rhetoric about Israel in an intentionally tricky way. They know that the general population across party lines despises the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and opposes US tax dollars and resources going to genocide, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the US/Israel war against Iran, and the US–Israel “special relationship.” They know that the appearance of being in cahoots with AIPAC will hurt their electoral chances. The problem is that the establishment Democrats still do support those things and still want AIPAC to support their campaigns.

The trick they’ve come up with to try to be all things to all people is to talk big about being opposed not to Zionism or the racist Zionist project of ethnic cleansing and building an exclusionary ethnostate (all ethnostates are fascistic by necessity) but to make a big show of disliking Benjamin Netanyahu. Notice the language they use: they frame it as Netanyahu being bad for Israel’s defense, as if once Netanyahu is voted out we can get back to business as usual. Can they name even a single Israeli politician who has a realistic electoral chance of replacing Netanyahu who is less racist, less authoritarian, less dishonest, or less genocidal than Netanyahu? What Israeli politician do they imagine will be a good leader who stands for progressive values? Continue reading →

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When Our Votes Don’t Count: The Case for Curbing Court Chaos

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Grant Chassy

Human rights protesters outside the Supreme Court. Photo by Ted Eytan, used under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0

Do you remember your civics class? The one you took in high school, where you learned about each of the separate, coequal branches of the federal government? You may recall hearing a few refrains that define the premise of that course’s curriculum: “we are a democracy,” “your vote counts,” and “the courts don’t make laws, they interpret laws.”

You likely heard about the checks and balances baked into our system. A structure of shared responsibilities which ensures that the president, Congress and the courts divvy up power, rather than having a centralized, all-powerful decision-making core. Congress writes a law and passes it, a president signs it, and that law is interpreted by the courts in the cases that come before them. That’s the system we learned about.

Despite your teacher’s well-intentioned lessons, those sentiments are largely untrue; that system is fiction. Look no further than the courts in the United States. That’s where the checks begin to bounce and the scales fall far out of balance. Continue reading →

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The Early Years of the CU Folk and Roots Festival

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Brenda A. Koenig

The author (center) at a jam in the Green Room, 2014, with performer Frank Fairfield (left), volunteer Wayne Logue (right), and another volunteer, Sue Hansen (top right), looking on in the background. Photo by Drew Phillips

In early 2009, I set out to create a weekend community folk festival that was all volunteer-run, participatory, and focused on energizing the existing or nascent grassroots organizations, clubs, and unofficial gatherings that were happening off the radar around central Illinois. Pete Seeger once said “I want to put a song on people’s lips, not just in their ears.” This is what I wanted the Champaign-Urbana Folk and Roots festival to be about: breaking down the barriers of passive consumption and building a space where people, no matter their talent level, background, or who they knew, could come together and dance, make music, and create and/or strengthen friendships.

My first inspirations were the folk festivals I attended with my mother as a Gen X kid (primarily around Albany, NY), summer camp sings, the PBS series Zoom, the Foxfire book series, and front porch jams during my undergraduate years at Indiana University. After moving to Chicago, I started playing old-time fiddle and helped organize or attended dance weekends and festivals like Sugar Hill dance weekend in southern Indiana and the University of Chicago Folk Festival. At these events, everyone lent a hand setting up the spaces, cooking, and providing beds in their homes for visiting attendees and musicians. Bands signed up to play for free, often jamming between sets and making new combinations of folks or generating new material. The reward never was, and still never is, monetary. It was the creativity that emerges when money (or power) isn’t the goal, and the deep friendships and fulfillment of being part of a community. Continue reading →

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Keeping Illinois’s Rich Labor History Alive

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Mike Matejka

“Mother Jones” (Loretta Williams) and fellow unionists sing “Solidarity Forever” at the 2026 Union Miners’ Day at the Union Miners’ Cemetery in Mt. Olive, IL on October 11. Photo by the author

No US state has a richer labor history than Illinois. From Chicago’s Haymarket Square to southern Illinois coal fields, Illinois workers shaped not only the US labor movement but also the world.

The Illinois Labor History Society (ILHS), founded in 1969, is a popularly focused organization that documents and celebrates this rich workers’ history through education, public events, research, and community involvement. The ILHS mission is to educate workers and the broader society, on labor’s struggles and contributions. Continue reading →

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November Issue Back Cover

Posted on 11/11/2026 by Public i

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September Issue Front Cover

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Public i

FIFA WORLD CUP: “FOOTBALL UNITES THE WORLD”—AGAINST US

Cartoon by Osama Hajjaj, used with permission

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Did the Trump-Infantino World Cup Ruin the “Beautiful Game”?

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Richard Esbenshade

President Donald Trump poses for a photo with FIFA President Gianni Infantino at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. on Friday, December 5, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

Ahead of the 2026 football (soccer) World Cup, there was much doom and gloom among commentators and fans across the globe. Extortionate ticket prices and onerous visa requirements in place in the US, where the great majority of matches would be played, made it impossible for the vast majority to even contemplate attendance. The expansion of the tournament from 32 to 48 national teams, combined with the wear and tear on top players during their increasingly packed and lengthy club seasons, had many worrying that the quality of play would be diluted, producing a lackluster experience. The crude farce of FIFA President Gianni Infantino creating the “inaugural FIFA Peace Prize” for Donald Trump, to curry favor by assuaging Trump’s ego after being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, encapsulated the ethical gutter that the governing body of world football had sunk to. Critics such as Lefty sports journalist Dave Zirin warned of a “joyless World Cup.”

FIFA has a long tradition of bedding down with dictators and authoritarian regimes, who could use the ever-increasing prestige and attraction of the game—and, often, manipulation of conditions of play—to reap legitimacy at home and abroad. The 1934 World Cup was awarded to Benito Mussolini’s Italy; the Italian team’s victory was celebrated as a victory for fascism. The 1978 event was held in Argentina in the midst of the military junta’s “dirty war,” and that national team’s triumph was sullied by allegations of match-fixing. More recently, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, under sanction for the 2014 seizure of Crimea from Ukraine, hosted in 2018; as did the repressive petro-state Qatar in 2022. Thousands of migrant workers paid with their lives building the stadiums for the latter (see Janice Jayes’s article “Labor Abuse as Product Placement at the World Cup” in the December 2022 Public i, in which she discusses the term “ballwashing” for such reputation-cleansing). Continue reading →

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Divestment and Reflection: 40 Years Since the University of Illinois Anti-Apartheid Protests and Arrests

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Susan Lacy-Ryan

The protest shantytown erected on the UIUC Quad in spring, 1986. Photo by the author

Former members of the Divest Now Coalition (DNC) gathered in Champaign on June 6, 2026, to mark the 40th anniversary of student-led divestment protests at UIUC. The reunion brought together former student activists, community members, and others to reflect on the campus movement against apartheid in South Africa.

The event opened with former UIUC student and DNC activist Lawrence James raising his fist and leading the chant, “Amandla!” The audience, without prompting, answered, “Ngawethu!” Many had chanted those words, along with other anti-apartheid slogans, during protests and meetings in the mid-1980s. “Amandla Ngawethu,” a phrase from isiZulu and isiXhosa, is commonly understood as “power to the people.”

The reunion centered on April 10, 1986, when 60 people were arrested and charged with trespassing after demonstrating at the Illini Union during a board of trustees meeting. Participants were calling on UIUC to divest from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa. Continue reading →

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South Africa: A Report Card

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Teresa Barnes

This is an edited version of a talk given at the Illini Union, June 6, 2026 at “Divestment and Reflection: 40 Years Since the University of Illinois Anti-Apartheid Protests and Arrests.”

Colonialism poured poison into the soil of South Africa for 400 years. The poison was the idea of the legitimacy of racial hierarchy. In daily life that meant convincing people that race is real, that white people are good and deserving humans, while black people are only fit to be like livestock—used and managed. And in that line of thinking, the strong (white people) have a duty and a right to dominate (and probably to despise) the weak (black people).

South Africa’s first one-person-one-vote democratic elections were held in 1994, and have been held every four years since then. Given 400 years of poison in the soil, what has grown? We have to expect that the things that will grow out of that soil will be twisted and deformed for quite some time. Continue reading →

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The Sanctuary Movement: Still a Model for Shaping Policy from the Grassroots Up

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Janice Jayes

The late Father Tom Royer with refugees hosted by CUECOS in 1984. Source: papers of Father Tom Royer

The Urbana-Champaign community has a long history of making national and even global matters topics of local debate. Apartheid in South Africa, the US war in Vietnam, and nuclear proliferation are among the many issues that galvanized residents in past decades. This legacy isn’t just for local history buffs, however; it’s a reminder that policymakers revise stances when pressure from tens of thousands of community movements across the US works to educate the public and channel concern into campaigns for change. Today’s locally rooted campaigns against surveillance technology, data centers, and US complicity in genocide in Gaza continue in this tradition.

The National Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s

One issue with a long history of local activism is the rights of immigrants and refugees. In the 1980s Champaign-Urbana joined other cities across the country in organizing a Sanctuary campaign to draw attention to the interrelated issues of human rights in Central America and civil rights here in the US. At the time the US was in the final grip of Cold War fever. While many analysts questioned the ability of the Soviets to sustain their own system, let alone undertake global expansion (the USSR did in fact break up just a few years later, in 1991), the Reagan presidency fanned fears of Communist expansion on the election trail; and, once in office, doubled down on military aid to Central America. The counterrevolutionary militias Reagan funded to undermine the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and the authoritarian governments he bankrolled in the rest of the region became the US’s first line of defense against the so-called cancer of Communism. Continue reading →

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Recent Local Wins for the Growing BDS Movement

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Bryan Maxwell

Activists celebrate the passage of an ethical divestment policy by the Urbana City Council in June. Photo by the author

Almost three years into Israel’s genocide in Palestine, the US federal government continues to double down on support for Israel. Despite Israel ranking last in global perception surveys for three years in a row. Despite over 60 percent of all Americans opposing Israel’s actions. Despite the UN adding Israel to the list of countries committing sexual violence in war zones, Israelis violently detaining a member of Congress, and Israel kidnapping and torturing Americans on a humanitarian trip in international waters.

But despite our government’s failure to do the right thing, the movement to end the genocide continues. Electoral organizing has had recent successes removing pro-Israel members of Congress from office. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed last month won Michigan’s primary for US Senate, which would be the highest office claimed by the movement. El-Sayed calls for a full arms embargo on Israel. Continue reading →

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The Anatomy of a Defeat: Why the United States Lost the War on Iran

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Behrooz Ghamari

This article previously was published in Italian in il manifesto on June 27.

From the first shots targeting the Islamic Republic’s leadership, the United States and Israel waged an illegal war against Iran that was doomed to fail. Articles 1 and 2 of the United Nations Charter prohibit the violation of another country’s sovereignty. But the US–Israeli alliance clearly recognized that the European nations and their Gulf-state allies would remain silent on this clear breach of international law. Indeed, in the early days of the war, not only did these nations remain silent on the aggression against Iran, but they also successfully ratified UN Security Council Resolution 2817, sponsored by Bahrain and championed by France, condemning “the deplorable armed attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran” against the territorial integrity of the Gulf states. The resolution made no references to the US–Israeli attacks on Iran, and the fact that Islamic Republic’s attacks targeted the American military bases in those countries.

This war was undertaken with a certain imperial arrogance, born out of a profound misreading of the Iranian situation. The US and Israel, like many of their allies, assumed that Iran had neither the capacity to resist the military campaign nor the diplomatic currency to muster political support around the world. They were wrong, and their misperceptions are worth detailing. Continue reading →

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Bad News from Venezuela

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Alen Romero

On July 28, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry summoned Iranian Ambassador Ali Chegini to deliver a formal note of protest against a comment made by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in a video circulating online, in which he said Iran was “not Venezuela” when referring to negotiations with the United States. How are we to interpret these comments on the Left in the United States? The political lessons arising from Venezuela are contentious, but increasingly clear and relevant to anti-imperialists. I will take up my dictum from a previous article as a starting point: in no way are Latinos allowed to determine their own destiny.

The Bolivarian Revolution

Alan McLeod’s Bad News from Venezuela provides a clear framework for interpreting Venezuela news in the mainstream media: “[I] found a pronounced to overwhelming tendency for all newspapers to present the country, its economics, and politics in an extremely negative light, presenting minority opinions on highly contested and controversial issues as undisputed facts . . . and displaying an overwhelming aversion to the Venezuelan government and its project.” What project? To the reader whose starting point is this article, that’s the Bolivarian revolution, led by firebrand President Hugo Chávez, which aimed to take oil revenues from the world’s largest proven oil reserves to fund social benefits like education, food sovereignty, community health care, low-income housing, the return of indigenous land, and land reform in the service of agricultural and rural development. In short, Chávez wanted to use Venezuelan money to benefit Venezuelans, instead of Americans. Continue reading →

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Immigration Protection Campaign on Campus

Posted on 09/14/2026 by Xenia Osterhout and Emma Walters and Jon Hale

On May 1, International Workers’ Day, a crowd of around 200 students, campus workers, and Champaign-Urbana community members marched from the Alma Mater statue on the UIUC campus to the Swanlund Administration Building just up the street. They carried with them a petition with over 950 signatures—mostly from undergraduate and graduate students—calling on the University administration to enact a slate of policies that would provide proactive protection for international and noncitizen students and scholars from illegal and inhumane threats from federal immigration enforcement.

The May Day march marked the high point of an ongoing public pressure campaign by several labor unions representing workers at UIUC, that had begun in late January, 2026, during the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “surge” in Minneapolis and ensuing mass mobilizations against it. A member motion from a steward at a general membership meeting of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO Local 6300, representing most graduate workers at UIUC) proposed that GEO launch a campaign to secure a specific set of protections for international and noncitizen students and workers at UIUC; the proposal passed with the unanimous support of attendees.

Continue reading →

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