Yesterday’s “No Kings” events around the USA were mostly focused on voting early and getting out the vote. While numbers are as yet incomplete, more than 2,500 events were scheduled. Here is Hastings, about 250 people turned out; far more than we anticipated. Though mostly seniors and veterans of many protests, there were also youngsters and newcomers in the crowd. (You can see many pictures and some video on our Facebook group.) Although the theme of the demo was “Vote Early,” etc., many different issues were raised up by the signs people carried. Unlike our previous events, yesterday’s demo did not have speakers or a clustering inside the VFW Plaza, but spread out along both sides of Warburton Ave., a “visibility event.” Many thanks to all who came, and to Sue McAnanama, Karen Levy, and Maureen Murphy who made up our organizing team.
Where will Europe’s student & worker protests go? Yesterday’s huge protest in France produced late-in-the-day vandalism, which the mainstream media focused on, obscuring the fact that protests had spread to more than 100 cities and towns. In addition to parallel protests in Spain, Italy, and Belgium, new protests took place in Portugal, Greece, and Albania, and there was one in (North Africa’s) Tunisia. With most European budget’s expected to include large increases for military spending, and with many already deeply in debt, there is little money for governments to spend on basic services or meeting human needs. The worldwide inflation, caused in part by the Iran war, has made hundreds of thousands of people desperate. Where will this go? And might US students also join in? Different than in 1968, today’s protests are about a crisis of the “neo-liberal” economic system, and about the relative absence of democracy from the way nation’s are deciding their collective fate. None of this will go away by political rhetoric or symbolic reforms.
And in the United States, the latest AP poll AP poll finds that a “strong majority” of voters want “major change” in the upcoming elections. A factoid that caught my eye was this statement in the AP report: “One thing is crystal clear on the eve of the 2026 midterms: Voters want change. About half of voters say they want “substantial change,” and roughly 3 in 10 want “complete and total upheaval” in the way the country is run.” We are in a moment when the “progressive agenda,” as outlined here by Sen. Bernie Sanders, commands the support of a significant majority of US voters. There is no need now for “moderation” to win over the mythical “swing voters”: people believe they are entitled to equality and a full life.
READ THIS PART FIRST
The Palestinians Who Rescued Heidi Levine
My account of the October 16, 2026 assault on Abu Falah [the West Bank]
By Jasper Diamond Nathaniel, Infinite Jaz [October 18, 2026]
[FB – Jasper Diamond Nathaniel is a native of Hastings. His reporting Israel’s West Bank puts him in the center of the assaults on Palestinians living there by the KKK “settlers,” who are supported by the Israeli military and are campaigning to “cleanse” the West Bank through terror. All this is supported by the Israeli government, in turn supported by Trump et al. This makes Nathaniel’s reporting very important. Check out his substack.]
---- Early on the morning of Friday, October 16, I stepped outside the home where I was staying in Khirbet Abu Falah and saw three plumes of black smoke rising from the olive fields of neighboring Turmus’ayya. This was the site of the pogrom I documented 362 days earlier, when a mob of masked settlers chased olive farmers and me out of the fields and clubbed a grandmother nearly to death. I called a friend in Turmus’ayya, who told me settlers had attacked the harvest, torching three cars and severely beating several farmers. It was an ominous sign for the harvest in Abu Falah, where I was about to head. The annual Palestinian olive harvest is supposed to be a peaceful, celebratory, family affair. It provides Palestinians with their livelihood and connects them to their roots: families across the West Bank have harvested the same trees for as many generations as their records go back. But that was not the scene when we arrived in Abu Falah’s groves. There were no women or children, no extravagant food spreads, no lighthearted chat. Just men racing to pick olives as fast as they could. On a hill above the fields, we watched dozens of settlers preparing to attack: pulling on masks, picking up clubs, peering down at us through binoculars. [Read More]
Take Action October 20 to End the Illegal Us-Israeli War on Iran
By Kevin Martin, Peace Action [October 17, 2026]
---- President Donald Trump has been less than coy about possibly ramping up his illegal war of aggression against Iran after the mid-term elections, and now states the United States would not use a nuclear weapon, but possibly the “Mother of All Bombs,” MOAB for short (with apologies to that lovely town in Utah), officially the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb. The target would supposedly be Iran’s energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities, which were supposedly obliterated by U.S. and Israeli attacks over a year ago. … Voting is crucial, but not sufficient. On Tuesday, October 20, just two weeks before the mid-terms, peace advocates will hold dozens of rallies across the country to demand Peace with Iran NOW! A coalition of nearly 100 national and local organizations, including the National Iranian American Council, Action Corps, Peace Action, and veterans, faith-based, peace and human rights organizations, are holding rallies at congressional offices to demand the following of Congress:
Cut off funding for the war;
Enforce the Iran War Powers Resolutions passed by Congress (which make clear the illegality of Trump and Netanyahu’s war of aggression);
Demand accountability for the Minab elementary school bombing on the first day of the war, which reportedly killed 120 children as well as teachers and staff AND investigate the bombing of the civilian wedding party in Kuhestak. The public deserves a full accounting, and the victims’ families deserve truth and accountability;
Support diplomacy, sanctions and a peace agreement to end the war. [Read More]
In Westchester, the Tuesday, October 20th protest will be at the office of George Latimer, 222 Mamaroneck Ave. in White Plains. Please arrive at 8:30 a.m. For the protest’s demands, go here.
NEWS NOTES
The documentary film “NAZA” has been widely praised. “Naza” means “collateral damage” in Hebrew, and the film interviews Israeli soldiers who made decisions about bombing targets based in part on how many non-targeted people would be killed – “collateral damage.” The film is reviewed by the insightful writer Jonah Raskin here; and it is playing now at the IFC Center in Manhattan and the Picture House in Bronxville.
Port Elizabeth is the east coast’s biggest port. Activists are assembling there to stop shipments of weapons to Israel. They operate under the banner of “Port of Elizabeth Movement” (POEM). Read about their organizing and tactics here.
The Irish writer Sally Rooney is very successful; her best-selling books include Normal People and Conversation With Friends. Rooney is also a support of the UK’s Palestine Action, which has been banned as a terrorist organization by the British government. Those indicating support for Palestine Action are arrested as “terrorist supporters.” Of course includes financial supporters, and so Rooney’s announcement that she would give the proceeds from the sale of her books to Palestine Action got her in trouble. The outcome of legal complications is that Rooney’s books will no longer be sold in the UK. Read more about this true stalwart and great writer here.
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364,é Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
In the spirit of “No Kings” and “Vote Early,” this week’s rewards for stalwart readers start off with a tender ballad by Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric, “Vote That Fucker Out!” In the same defiant spirit, here is the Woody Guthrie classic “All You Fascists Bound to Lose,” sung by the Resistance Revival Chorus. And last but not least is Willie Nelson and Sinéad O’Connor with “Don’t Give Up,” a song for our hard times. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Apocalypse Now and Then - Artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination
By Arundhati Roy, Znet [October 16, 2026]
---- Those of us who have already lived our lives in a different kind of world know what we are losing. But what of the generation that is about to come of age? Will it have its own language, its own thoughts, its own grief? Will it have the right to strive? To fall? To fail? To be imperfect? Will it experience the impossible pain and ecstatic pleasure of solving a math equation or creating art or literature or music of its own –however flawed? The triumph of AI will be a crime against humanness. It will bottle our brains in formaldehyde. It will destroy the world as we know it. The men who promote it and profit from it are cognisant of this, and have already made arrangements to exit into another realm. The oligarchs are announcing the battle lines loudly, proudly: that it is us against them. They suggest, without flinching, that for Cyclopes to thrive, humanity may have to die. The young generation that is rising up to fight it understands this. I know that, earlier in this essay, I suggested we should “regulate with extreme prejudice”. But what I really want to say about those AI companies is this: terminate with extreme prejudice. [Read More]
The Man Who Taught Us How to Pay Attention - [John Berger]
By A.O. Scott, New York Times Magazine [October 18, 2026]
---- Berger, a British art critic, novelist and political polemicist who died in 2017, devoted much of his writing life to the theory and practice of looking — at paintings, at animals, at the natural world. This wasn’t merely an aesthetic preoccupation. “You can’t talk about aesthetics,” he wrote, “without talking about the principle of hope and the existence of evil.” Attention, for him, was a matter of life and death, or at least of their cultural equivalents, remembering and forgetting. … While working on a documentary project about migrant laborers with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, Berger discovered that most of the people he interviewed had been small farmers or agricultural workers uprooted from land where their families lived for generations. … After moving to Quincy, he would devote much of his creative and critical energy to witnessing and trying to explain to himself and his readers the contours of a mode of existence in the process of vanishing, and to understanding why that vanishing mattered. He came to believe that an essential piece of human experience was disappearing from memory. [Read More]
Exit Strategy
By Paige Oamek, Dissent [Fall 2026]
[FB – This is a review of End Times Fascism, by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor.]
----In their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor make the case that the ruling class is not lording over our future, but trying to escape it, building walled-off utopias for themselves while the rest of humanity is forced to manage the crises they’ve left behind. This coalition of religious apocalypticists, tech accelerationists, and ethno-nationalist survivalists, according to Klein and Taylor, are united by a “super-sized prepperism,” believing that “the human story itself has hit a wall and that only a small, deserving group of humans will survive the coming cataclysm.”... According to one survey, 39 percent of American adults believe they are living in the end times; among Black Americans, that figure rises to 68 percent. A separate international poll found that most young people agreed with the statement that “humanity is doomed.” It’s easy to see why. Wildfire seasons have become year-round threats, and extreme heat now kills more Americans annually than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. More than one in five Gen-Zers say that in the next five years, World War III is more likely than them buying a home. ... The end times fascists are fleeing the crises of poverty, environmental destruction, and tech overreach they helped cause. And if the richest people on the planet are visibly searching for an exit strategy, should we assume they know something that we don’t? When they speak of the end of the world, are they bluffing? [Read More]
In India, “Cockroaches” Are Leading the Fight for Democracy
By Prajwal Bhat, Jacobin [October 17, 2026]
---- It started as an online joke after a top judge compared jobless young people to cockroaches. It has become the most serious challenge to Narendra Modi’s rule in years. October 10, India’s capital city, New Delhi, was turned into a fortress as protesters tried to oppose a countrywide exercise to revise the electoral rolls. The protests were called by the Gen Z movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), working with left-wing student groups, which forced the resignation of the minister of education in July. In response, the Indian government deployed more than twenty thousand police officers and paramilitary personnel, suspended internet access in central Delhi, and barricaded the city center. Thousands of protesters, including the leaders of the CJP and prominent opposition politicians, were detained. The protests stem from a massive government effort, known as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), to revise India’s electoral rolls by removing dead, duplicate, and ineligible voters. Concerns intensified in the last month that under the SIR eligible voters are losing their right to vote, with 130 million names left off the draft electoral rolls since the start of the program. [Read More]
WILL TRUMP STEAL THE ELECTION?
Power is the Answer: What Trump wants and how he’ll use the midterms to keep it
By Seymour Hersh, Substack [October 14, 2026]
---- The Republicans are facing a shellacking—no matter what the cost of diesel fuel may be—in next month’s election. The House is sure to go to the Democrats, and Republican control of the Senate is at high risk. The US war with Iran has turned into a quagmire. … I have turned in the past to the reportage of two former national security officials in Democratic administrations, Mark Medish and Joel McCleary, who have focused on the Trump excesses in an ongoing series of dispatches for the Washington Spectator, now flourishing as an online magazine of political journalism. The two won instant fans for what turned out to be prescient warnings that there were gaps in the Constitution that would allow a president facing election defeat to ward off a loss by reaching into what they wrote was “a deep reservoir of presidential [emergency] powers” that could change the outcome. Their newest essay on little understood presidential powers is called “It’s the Power, Stupid”: “Trump may not have a strategy or contingency plans for the Iran war,” they write, “but he certainly does for staying in power” as president. [Read More]
Unions Step Up to Meet the Moment
By Stephanie Luce, Convergence Magazine [October 6, 2026]
---- Since taking office, Trump and MAGA forces have made considerable advances in implementing Project 2025 and consolidating authoritarian power—but many of these moves have proved unpopular and undermined their support. With Trump’s approval ratings dropping and elements of his coalition defecting, conditions look promising for pushing back MAGA in the midterm elections. But there are at least two sources of concern. With their support declining, the MAGA forces are likely to step up their efforts to interfere with the elections—doing everything from stopping people from voting to refusing to seat elected officials to unleashing violence. And even if elections go smoothly, will the anti-MAGA forces be prepared to govern in a way that brings about real change? Or will we face business-as-usual Democrats who answer to billionaires and waffle on key reforms? A growing number of billionaires support authoritarian rule because they directly benefit from it or know they could not amass such wealth under a true democracy. Labor unions can play a crucial role on both fronts. When unions are engaged in democracy movements, the odds of defeating authoritarian rule increase, according to political scientists who examined cases of democratic backsliding. So what are unions doing to meet the moment? Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “‘Democracy’s on the Line’: NYC Unions Unite to Protect Elections,” by Steve Wishnia, Work-Bites [October 16, 2026].
THE US-ISRAEL WAR AGAINST IRAN
(Podcast) Voices of Resistance: Iran and the Anti-War Movement
From Code Pink Radio [October 17, 2026]
---- Host Marcy Winograd explores the Iranian-American anti-war diaspora, options for GI resistance, and people-to-people diplomacy to stop the illegal U.S. war on Iran. Guests include Isabella Javidan, Communications Director for the National Iranian American Council; Ann Wright, CODEPINK Board Member; and Iranian-Americans Nuri Ronaghy and Alan Shorb, grassroots diplomats who recently returned from Iran. [Hear the Program].
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Writing About War as Bombs Fall
By Marwan Bishara, The Nation [October 12, 2026]
[FB – Marwan Bishara is the “senior political analyst” at Aljazeera. His new book, which I am reading now w/interest, is Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide.] ---- On October 7, the day Hamas launched its bloody offensive against Israel in an attempt to shatter the status quo, I wrote that Hamas’s shocking attack should have surprised no one. Not after Israel’s decades-long military occupation, repression, and siege, and endless years of contempt, humiliation, and dismissiveness of basic Palestinian rights. In those early days, stating the obvious—that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum”—was construed as controversial, even condemned as blood libel. But context is indispensable; without context, there can be no real understanding. And explanation must not be confused with justification for the killing of civilians, regardless of whether the victims are tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, or hundreds of Israeli civilians. On October 12, five days into the war, I warned that Israel was “manufacturing the case for genocide.” [Read More]
(Video) Manufacturing Consent for Genocide
From Peter Beinart [October 18, 2026]
---- Our guest is Assal Rad, author of Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide. We talked about how American media has covered Israel-Palestine, about recent efforts by Israel’s supporters to gain ownership of key institutions in American media, and about alternative media and how it is shaping the American foreign policy debate. [Hear the Program]
‘We Will Not Forgive’: Gazans Rage at Hamas for the October 7 Gamble
By Amira Hass, Ha’aretz [Israel] [October 13, 2026]
---- Those living in the Gaza Strip today, and those who have managed to escape, long for October 6, 2023. They have not forgotten the blockade Israel imposed on them or their isolation from the world; the unemployment and poverty that isolation caused, and the humiliation that came with both; the struggle for the right to receive medical treatment outside the Strip; or being prevented from seeing relatives and friends living just 80 kilometers away. Yet Gazans defied the blockade through community and family life, their studies and their plans for their children. They cultivated their talents in painting, poetry, prose and computer science, pursued building projects and business ventures, and connected with the world online. In the face of Israel, the hostile power that controlled them and aspired to “sink Gaza into the sea,” their insistence on living rather than merely existing was an act of civil resistance. Hamas’ “Flood” held this kind of unarmed struggle in contempt. [Read More]
THE SAUDI-HOUTHI WAR: WILL THE US INTERVENE?
Why Saudi Arabia has returned to war in Yemen
By Annelle Sheline, Responsible Statecraft [October 12, 2026]
---- When Ansar Allah—commonly referred to as the Houthis—seized Yemen’s Red Sea coastline and strategic islands in the Bab al-Mandab Strait on September 10, 2026, they appeared to gain the upper hand in Yemen’s long-running conflict. However, in early October Saudi-backed government forces began to retake some of the captured territory and Saudi Arabia launched a punishing assault on Houthi positions from the air. France, Pakistan, and the United States have all sent personnel to help the kingdom counter the Houthi offensive. Outside the region, some have portrayed the Houthi offensive as another theater within the broader US-Israeli war on Iran. However, this broader regional war is separate from the war in Yemen, which can be traced back to the Houthi takeover of Yemen’s capital Sanaa in September 2014 and the decision by neighboring Saudi Arabia to launch a coalition to oust them in March 2015. While the Houthis are certainly allied with Iran and benefit from the weapons and support that Tehran has covertly provided them since at least 2009, they have their own agenda: to consolidate their control over Yemen. They would pursue this political objective even if Washington and Tehran somehow agreed to end the war that Trump rashly launched. Still, their recent decision to escalate does reflect the sense of momentum produced by Iran’s success in withstanding American and Israeli attacks. Thus, even as these two conflicts are distinct, the Iran war is both exacerbating and heightening the effects of the violence in Yemen. [Read More]. – ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “Yemen Plunges Back into “Full-Scale Civil War,” Houthis Trade Strikes with Saudi Arabia,” from Democracy Now! [October 13, 2026] [Link].
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Are the peace movement and the climate movement the same thing?
By Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years [October 18, 2026]
---- It struck me the other day that ‘peace’ is a word we’re not using much at present. Our war in Iran is unpopular, for sure, but there’s not really a ‘peace movement’ to end it (though the midterm elections are in some measure a proxy for that). When we talk about it, it’s in the context of ‘forever wars,’ as in ‘what a pain for us to have to fight,’ or it’s about the way that war has raised prices. We seem barely to have noticed that we have attacked another country, killed its leaders, bombed its schools, made life as impossible as we can for its citizens, not to mention billions of other humans who are dealing not with higher prices at the pump but with no access to fertilizer or fuel. But actually this is the perfect moment for a revival of the peace movement—because it’s easier now than ever before to imagine the rapid transition to a more peaceful world. That’s because all of a sudden we have an alternative to oil, and if you look around us, oil is the cause, the weapon, and the casualty of our current round of conflicts. More than at any point in our past, oil has become inextricably bound up in warfare, which means we could in short order move past it, in ways that I don’t think we’ve focused on clearly enough. [Read More]. – ALSO OF INTEREST - “Abby Martin on the Climate Cost of US Empire,” by Shilpi Chhotray, The Nation [October 16, 2026] [Link].
CIVIL LIBERTIES/”THE WAR ON TERROR”
(Video) How the Trump Admin. Is Expanding the Definition of ‘Terrorism’ — and What It Means
By Chris Hedges, Substack [October 14, 2026]
---- In communities throughout the United States, the infrastructure required to surveil and track anyone is rapidly being constructed, from Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems to fusion centers to the hyperscale data centers used to store the vast amount of information being gleaned from consumer products and surveillance devices. As the public becomes more aware of the hazards of this infrastructure and the extent that the state is intruding into their lives, a broad, organic national grassroots movement has formed and has already won significant victories, which frightens the political elites and their corporate benefactors. … In this new era, there is scant oversight of the surveillance system, enabling major abuses of power by both the state and corporations. An individual or group does not have to engage in violent acts to be deemed a threat. The list of suspicious activities is long and includes those “that could easily be carried out by peaceful protesters.” Congress, where there is bipartisan support, and academia, through its field of ‘extremism research,’ are also responsible for the growing security state. As Hedges summarizes, “these institutions perpetuate themselves and so they manufacture threats in order to continue not just their existence but their expansion.” [See the Program]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
The White Man Can Always Take What You Have – [Ilhan Omar]
By Elie Mystal, The Nation [October 16, 2026]
---- I do not think the national media, members of Congress, or people in general are sufficiently outraged over what is happening to Representative Ilhan Omar. The feds have broken into her house and subpoenaed and harassed her family. They have stolen her laptop, notebooks, and phone. They took her passport. They are said to be “building a case” for denaturalization and deportation…. Still, for me at least, the hypocrisy and sketchiness of this smear campaign fails to capture what’s happening here. A political figure, supported by the people, is facing exile from the country because the white-supremacist rulers running the joint can’t get rid of her any other way. The attack on Omar should be viewed as an attack on every immigrant, every person of color, and every outspoken activist in this country. The Trump administration is saying that no matter who you are, they, the white people in charge, can make you disappear. It is racist. It is fascist. It is disgusting. It is something all of us should stand against. Ilhan Omar is the physical embodiment of the idea—the dream—that you can start with nothing in this country and not only make a life for yourself but also lift up others on your way. In contrast, the people doing this to her represent the very worst this country has to offer: the idea that no matter what you have, the white man can take it from you whenever he feels like it. [Read More]
