Welcome to The Worldwide WEBB

Letter from the Director | April 24, 2026

Peace WEBB family,

I'm proud to introduce The Worldwide WEBB — a weekly news roundup tracing the threads that bind our world together. More than a conventional collection of headlines, we wish to supply not only the news, but a profoundly radical way of interpreting it: one that allows us to see more clearly the wider web of forces that shape our lives.

Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh once said the two most important things in mastering mindfulness were to stop and to look. In these highly volatile and unpredictable times, the practice of stopping and looking becomes ever more imperative — especially for justice movements that seek, in addition to moral recognition and historical reparation, the fundamental material transformation of society.

Every inflection point in human history, every moment when we as a species elevated our collective consciousness and achieved some measure of emancipation, points to the need for bold, radical visionaries willing to illuminate pathways through the darkness toward a brighter world rooted in dignity, care, love, and reciprocity. And without exception, these visionaries are surveilled, slandered, silenced, searched, seized — the list intensifies from there.

In the logic of empire, freedom fighters must be identified and neutralized, because imagination is the most contagious and dangerous force on earth. The most critical theater in the struggle for a just world is not the legislature or the courtroom. It is the minds and hearts of the people — and it is there where the seeds of change find fertile soil and grow into revolutionary action.

If we are to develop a mass consciousness sufficient to sustain a counter-hegemonic struggle against what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the three evils of racism, capitalism, and imperialism — the interlocking belief systems whose operations structure our concept and experience of humanity, and whose continuation now threatens planetary life itself — then we must sharpen both our critical faculties and our spiritual resolve. We must be flexible in practice while remaining firm in principle. We must be capable of meeting escalating coercion with clarity, not confusion.

In this light, the act of reading becomes a daily practice: of seeing the world as it is, of stopping and looking, of listening deeply to the rhythms and contours of reality in order to better comprehend how these death-dealing systems function and interact — and to thereby deploy more effective interventions to subvert, dismantle, or destroy them.

The Worldwide WEBB, then, is an effort to see more clearly. To map the systems beneath the surface. To thread connections between what is happening across the globe and what is happening to our blocks, our bills, and our bodies. To make visible the interdependencies upon which all life relies — and to assume the full responsibility to honor and protect that life. Because nothing we are living through is disconnected, and we have no chance of remaking the world unless we all remake it together.

The highly asymmetric nature of political power, military force, and control of international financial institutions means that the working class has only one decisive advantage in the struggle to recapture the commons: our sheer numbers. We are fighting for — and winning — new worlds all across this collapsing one. And in the construction of these egalitarian, intercommunal societies, new networks of solidarity are being forged through struggle, experimentation, collaboration, shared visions and values. The Worldwide WEBB is here to strengthen those networks and deepen that cross-border awareness, analysis, and action.

From the anti-imperial project of the Alliance of Sahel States to the devastating oil embargo against Cuba — as seen in the cascading nationwide blackouts now unfolding across the island (what energy sanctions look like on the ground) — and from the militarization of the Strait of Hormuz to the proliferation of data centers across Wisconsin — none of these phenomena exist separately or apart from one another. They are expressions of a single organizing logic. A unifying, though highly toxic and destructive story we tell ourselves about ourselves. If we are to fundamentally transform the world, we must first reckon with the story we continue to tell about our place in it.

I have loved Joseph Campbell as much as the next person, and was mesmerized as a teenager to discover his writings on the cosmogonic cycle and the Hero's Journey. But Campbell's depiction of Western narrative structure — conflict-driven, conquest-oriented, centered on the lone hero's domination of the unknown — mirrors and reinforces, intentionally or not, the prevailing notions of what it means to be human. And therefore, what it means to be not human. To be The Other.

Science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin named this directly in her 1986 essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Against the dominant story of the Hero — his spear, his kill, his glory — she proposed a different origin: the carrier bag. The container. The vessel that gathers, holds, and sustains. "The mammoth hunters make a good story," she wrote, but. "It's not the only story." She imagined a human technology that wasn't a weapon but a womb — not built for conquest but for nourishment, relation, and care. Her point was not merely literary. It was civilizational: that the story we tell about humanity shapes the humanity we become.

The Homo economicus version of the human being — selfish, competitive, territorial, violent by nature — has ruled our collective consciousness and shaped our institutions, our technologies, and our geopolitics for over five hundred years. Racial capitalism almost appears inevitable as an outcome of such foundational beliefs about who we are; a system whose inner working are laid bare in a deeper look at how capitalism reproduces itself.

The costs of such a system are truly staggering: the vast majority of humanity endures deprivation, war, famine, and climate chaos so that a ruling class of billionaire tech bros, asset managers, defense contractors, and fossil fuel executives can amass even more wealth than they already hoard. In 2025, the top 1 percent owned more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of the global population. In a world of eight billion people, that is eight dudes holding more wealth than the populations of China, India, Russia, Brazil, and the United States. Combined.

Seemingly incapable of curbing its consumption to slow catastrophic rates of species and habitat extinction, the ruling class has doubled down — accelerating its insatiable drive for accumulation and control. Extraction now extends into every available frontier: fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, data, land, labor, migration, our attention, and life itself. To sustain it, they are building an infrastructure of domination — militaries, power grids, surveillance systems, detention centers — a full architecture designed to secure energy and manage the fallout. And that is where this week’s stories begin.

The United States and Israel are at war with Iran (why this war is also a climate crisis; who controls the world’s most critical chokepoint. Crude oil has surged past $100 a barrel (what this means for energy prices). The Strait of Hormuz — through which a fifth of the world's oil passes — is a flashpoint. Gas prices are climbing. We are told to brace for inflation across food, transportation, and energy. What we are not told is that this is not a natural disaster. It is a decision. A decision that military dominance over fossil fuel supply routes is worth more than your grocery bill, more than your heating costs, more than the lungs of the child sleeping next to the highway in Lindsay Heights.

The Climate and Community Institute reminds us that militaries worldwide are responsible for 5.5 percent of global carbon emissions — double that of commercial aviation (how the war machine fuels the climate crisis). The war that is spiking your gas bill is also heating the streets that are killing our elders in summer. These are not separate phenomena. They are the same wound.

This is the same logic driving regime change in Venezuela — not democracy promotion, but oil control. The same logic strangling Cuba through decades of embargo, where U.S. fuel restrictions have now pushed eleven million people into rolling, nationwide blackouts — twice in a single week. Hospitals struggling to function. Crops rotting for lack of fuel to bring them to market. This is what the weaponization of energy looks like at national scale.

It is not so different in logic from what happens when a Wisconsin utility shuts off power to a family that cannot pay a bill inflated to subsidize the next data center. Energy as punishment. Energy as a lever of political control. Energy not as a human need but as a commodity — available to those who can pay, withheld from those who cannot. And when the system destabilizes the world through war, climate disruption, and economic violence, it takes no responsibility for the harm nor replenishes that which it stole (from the land and from human labor). Instead, the government and private contractors plan for hyper-expansion of IC detention facilities through updating old and building new infrastructure to contain it. 

Across the United States, ICE is expanding detention capacity to 92,600 beds at a cost of $38.3 billion — quietly converting warehouses into cages (how detention is expanding in plain sight). The carceral state grows alongside the fossil fuel state not as a coincidence, but as a necessity. One extracts. The other contains. They are the same system, making the same calculation about whose lives are costs to be managed and whose lives are profits to be extracted.

In Wisconsin, this system is not abstract. It is operational. It collects through your We Energies bill. It collects through the data center rising in your neighborhood, drinking water and electricity while your rates go up to subsidize it. It collects through the summer heat that kills elders and children in neighborhoods without tree canopy or air conditioning. Through the flooding that takes basements and belongings and isn't covered by any insurance. Through the air that triggers asthma in zip codes that didn't cause a single airstrike, didn't vote for a single sanction, didn't ask for any of this.

What connects Iran to Wisconsin is not geography. It is design. We do not accept that design as inevitable.

At The WEBB, we are not organizing only against individual policies or bad actors. We are organizing against  the logic itself — the idea that energy is a commodity, that land is an asset, that human beings are liabilities. We believe energy is a basic human right. We believe communities must determine and control their own futures. We believe the people closest to the harm must be closest to the power.

And so there is more to read in this week's roundup. I encourage you to read it the way we organize: to stop and look for patterns, follow the threads, ask who benefits and who pays. And then ask the only question that matters — what would it take to build a world where none of the myriad harms we suffer were viewed as the unfortunate, yet natural unavoidable byproducts of growth, innovation, progress, civilization? 

What if we viewed today’s global crises — obseity, deaths of despair, rising homelessness, widening inequality, deepening poverty, endless wars, famines, mass migration, climate collapse, fascism — instead as the death throes of a corrupt and murderous economic system wretching to adapt itself to a world of floods and flames of its own making? It would reveal these species-annihilatory conditions to be the symptoms of a pervasive disease of the mind, heart, and imagination. 

In her seminal poem Rant,  the late artist and organizer Diane di Prima suggests that “the war that matters is the war against the imagination” and that “all other wars are subsumed in it.” On the battlefront of beliefs and ideas lay centuries of distorted, disgusting, and deceitful narratives about who we are, what we deserve, and what is possible. These stories do not simply mislead — they discipline. They condition us to assume hierarchy and domination as the natural order; to operate within a mindset of scarcity and competition; and to therefore accept the systemic, mass suffering of living beings and the planet as being somehow unavoidable. 

These stories we tell in our collective imagination about ourselves as human beings shrink our sense of the possible until even the imagination of freedom begins to feel unrealistic or unserious. And yet, it is precisely here — in the contested terrain of the imagination — where every system is first built and where every system can be undone. If the current order depends on our belief in its permanence, then our task is to withdraw that belief and replace it with something more true, more humane, more life-giving. 

The act of dreaming that world, and then moving collectively toward its materialization, is the essence of our work here at The WEBB: to make those other worlds utterly irresistible, inevitable, and inextinguishable. 

In solidarity and struggle, 

Bryan 

Director, The WEBB at Walnut Way