President Trump may be about to launch a new round of war on Iran. He told Fox News today that he was asking himself “If and when do I blow the entire nation up?.” Last April, again apparently on the verge of a big escalation, he warned “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless “something revolutionarily wonderful” occurs. Last April, the deadline came and went and nothing happened; will Trump once again pull back from Armageddon, or will he give it a try this time?
If Trump does go ahead with his escalation against Iran, Iran has promised a “painful retaliation against US bases” in the region. A US escalation of the war may also give Israel another blank check to pursue their invasion of Lebanon. Escalation of the Saudi-Houthi war might also be expected. The closure of both the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz for an extended period of time would have a devastating impact of global energy markets and thus the world’s economy. As Heather Cox Richardson reported last Friday, the damage being done by the war to the US/global economy has initiated a revolt among Trump’s big-business supporters, which the price of gas and groceries is weakening his support within his MAGA base. Without ending the war (essentially surrendering), Trump has no way to stop the painful economic crisis.
To repeat what this newsletter has maintained before: Trump has painted himself into a corner. He can’t exit the world economic crisis without conceding most of Iran’s demands in the Memorandum of Understanding of a few months ago, and the option to break out of his dilemma by escalating the war has so far been met by disaster. In an article linked below, Robert Borosage describes an alternative, often on my own mind, that Trump might resort to a so-called “tactical” nuclear weapon if he thought this might be a way to break out of his box.
And now congressional elections are only 6 weeks away, and polls show that Trump could lose control of one or both house of Congress. At this point, I think anything is possible. Will Trump simply accept defeat and resign himself to “governing” for two more years while the Democrats control Congress, impeach him, open the Epstein files, investigate his and his family’s corruption, etc.? It’s hard to imagine that he will not choose the option of doubling down on a fascist dictatorship, essentially remaining in power by military force and locking up dissenters. Alas, “interesting times” strike again.
ESSAYS ILLUMINATING TRUMP’S WAR MADNESS
Trump Has Lost Interest in the Iran War, but It’s Still Quite Interested in Him
By David Faris, The Nation [September 16, 2026]
---- To put it bluntly, the war is going far worse for the United States than anyone could possibly have imagined eight, or even three, months ago. The Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, with shipping traffic still at a tiny fraction of what it was on the eve of the conflict. As the United States and Iran continued to trade blows, daily tanker crossings of the waterway have mostly been in the single digits this month (as opposed to around 100 a day before Trump’s blunder). Prices for Brent crude oil were once again trading well above $100 a barrel this week—the invisible threshold that forces headline writers to use bigger font sizes and investors to stop pretending that things are going to be just fine. … Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen have also emerged this month as a significantly more serious threat than they seemed to be at the conflict’s outset, attacking and seriously damaging the vital East-West Saudi pipeline that has kept oil prices from getting out of control. That pipeline will now be closed for weeks. The vulnerability of long, virtually defenseless pipelines to these kinds of attacks is a challenge that seems not to have occurred to the Trumpworld hacks who convinced themselves that there was an easy and permanent workaround for the Strait of Hormuz problem. [Read More]
Pentagon Iran War Report admits to Worst Drubbing since Vietnam
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [September 15, 2026]
---- The Department of Defense report on the Israeli-US war on Iran admits that it has been costly, has seen extensive destruction of US facilities in the Middle East, and has run down Pentagon munitions. Since it is being issued by a department headed by notorious liar and braggart Pete Hegseth, it is hard to take the report too seriously on the positive side. But to the extent that it admits any downsides to the war on Iran at all, that admission is especially interesting coming from this administration. The report acknowledges a cost of $33.4 billion by the end of June. But it admits that this figure does not include the cost of repairing the some 20 US military bases that have been damaged or destroyed, or other damaged facilities. The number is laughably low, with independent analysts putting it at $113 billion already by late June. … And all those calculations don’t include the cost of the war to taxpayers in higher gasoline and diesel prices, and the general price inflation they entail. Extra energy costs for American consumers since Feb. 28 alone come to $100 billion. … Here is another moment of frankness: “USCENTCOM reported that Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict. In addition, dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged during OEF.” [Read More]
The Peril of Trump’s Final Act: Would He Use a Tactical Nuclear Weapon in Iran?
By Robert L. Borosage, The Nation [September 18, 2026]
---- The United States, the only country ever to drop a nuclear weapon, has repeatedly refused to adopt a “no first use” policy. The president has sole authority to order the use of a tactical nuclear weapon. Neither Congress nor the public would be given prior notice. Would Trump use a tactical nuclear weapon on relatively isolated Pickaxe Mountain in Iran as his exit line? … Dropping a nuclear weapon on Iran would not only be criminal; it would be incredibly dumb. Iran would respond by unleashing an assault on oil and desalination and energy platforms across the Emirates and an unprecedented assault on Israel. It would also set off a race for nuclear weapons, as countries across the globe would understand that the reason Iran was targeted and not North Korea is that the latter has nuclear weapons and the former does not. … Trump, trapped, desperate, angry, delusional, intent on punishing his enemies and displaying his prowess, could well be tempted. And the anticipated Democratic election victories this fall will corner him—and that will make him even more dangerous, as we saw with the sacking of the Capitol after his 2020 loss in the presidential race. … The last weeks of reduced military activity and apparent stalemate have been misleading. The economic costs of the war—now with oil transport through both Hormuz and the Red Sea constricted—are escalating. The pressure on Trump to escalate, to unleash another round of bombing in order to declare victory and get out, is rising. Without a concerted movement toward a settlement, the unimaginable is becoming more conceivable. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
For the second year in a row, the United States has banned the Palestinian president and other leading Palestinian officials from attending the opening sessions of the United Nations next week. According to the Middle East Eye, the State Department said the bas was “a consequence of their failure to reform, contrary to their commitments to the United States, and their ongoing activities that undermine the prospects for peace”. The US ban is illegal, according to the UN Charter and protocol.
This week we lost Judy Gumbo, the “card-carrying Yippie” who died at 83. A very nice piece by Yippie-insider (and much else) Jonah Raskin recounts some of the many things she did, along the way illuminating for those who might not have been there the brief moment in the sun of the Yippie non-organization. [Link].
Many/most Americans are not aware that for a decade the United States has been bombing Somalia. Recently, most of the attacks have used MQ-9 Reaper drones. According to Tom Stevenson, writing in the London Review of Books, “The US has been running military operations in Somalia since 2003 and launching drone strikes there since 2011. But the current air campaign is larger than at any time during the war on terror. In his eight years as president Obama ordered 48 airstrikes on Somalia. During Trump’s first term there were 219. Biden ordered 51. Since the start of Trump’s second term in 2025 there have already been more than two hundred.” Read more here and see if you can figure out why we bomb Somalia.
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, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
It has been too long since we heard from the New Orleans band Tuba Skinny; so the rewards for stalwart newsletter readers this week include some of their recent work. First up is their rendition of Duke Ellington’s “Take it Easy”. recorded a few weeks ago at the Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival. Next up we have “Harlem Joys” by Willie “The Lion” Smith, also from the Bluegrass Festival. And finally, I think you will enjoy their busking on Royal St. in NOLA with “Cushion Foot Stomp.” Lots more of their great stuff on-line.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
(Video) “End Times Fascism”: Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor on Billionaires, Bunkers, AI, Gaza & the Far Right
From Democracy Now! [September 15, 2026]
---- Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor launch their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World on Democracy Now! It examines how wealthy elites are preparing for “the end of the world,” even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability and the climate crisis. The rise of modern-day fascism is “not simply a rerun,” explains Klein. “We don’t believe that history repeats on a loop. We believe that we’re in something more like a sequel, where the logics of fascism, which are the logics of dehumanization, of othering, of racial supremacy and hierarchy, are now being applied in a time of global existential crisis.” In response, says Taylor, the growing movement seeking to resist this fatalistic vision “fundamentally needs to be grounded in a desire to stay here on Earth, to commit to this place.” [See the Program]. – ALSO OF INTEREST – (Video) “Apocalypse Now: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance,” from The Intercept – 44 minutes - [Link].
(Video) What I Learned From Watching “NAZA”
By Peter Beinart [September 20, 2026] – 15 minutes
---- About Israel’s “human shields” defense, the nature of the Israeli “center-left” and the way ordinary people become killers. [See the Program] – ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “NAZA” Film on Gaza Genocide Wins Venice Special Jury Prize; Israel Threatens Directors’ Citizenship,” from Democracy Now! [September 14, 2026] [Link]; and “Why Israel Fears This Searing New Documentary,” by Michelle Goldberg, New York Times [September 18, 2026] [Link].
First Principles for a New Progressive Foreign Policy
By Phyllis Bennis, Foreign Policy in Focus [September 18, 2026]
---- For many years, progressive movements and activists have longed for the moment when we could imagine a real foreign policy rooted in true internationalism and solidarity. But in our efforts to influence actual policy decisions, we’ve settled for important but smaller asks — ending specific wars, blocking the transfer of certain weapons to Israel, reducing military aid, cutting the military budget. That made sense — our movements’ view of the world was rarely fully reflected in Congress, the State Department, or the White House. Now some of those limitations are fading. There are new possibilities rising as we see new candidates with incredibly progressive politics win their campaigns — and even more importantly, we see in recent years the extraordinary shift in public discourse about the U.S. role in the world, especially (though not only) throughout the almost three years of U.S.-enabled genocide in Gaza. The escalation of global crises — especially those caused, exacerbated, and sponsored by the United States — means we need to do more as movements, and to demand more from our elected representatives. [Read More]
Yes They Want to Kill Us: The Worshipers of Machines Versus Human Beings
By Rebecca Solnit, Meditations in an Emergency [September 19, 2026]
---- The week brought into focus how Silicon Valley creates ideological bubbles within which worldviews deeply at odds with the mainstream become norms. Gil Duran’s new book The Nerd Reich and Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein’s even newer book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World both focus on the broligarchy, the powerful people at the top who’ve become right-wing backers of the Trump Administration, enemies of democracy, often idiotic figures convinced their own extraordinary superiority equips them to run the world. And to escape it: some of the recklessness about the fate of the earth comes, in some cases, from the belief that we can go colonize other planets. … But it’s not just the oligarchs; a lot of workers inside the industry have apparently taken up worldviews far removed from those of the rest of us. Inside the tech bubbles is a deeply flawed notion of our humanity that seems to reduce us to our brain functions, specifically brain functions that machines can do and maybe do better. That comes, it seems to me, of deep alienation from one’s own biological, spiritual, and emotional nature, the embodied foundations of consciousness, the valuation of life itself, and the earth as the source of it all. Nature in this view is at best something to defeat or transcend; thus the twin obsessions with escaping mortality and escaping the earth; the biological limits of individual human existence and the biosphere are not seen as glorious gifts but as confinement. [Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “Time Has Run Out for AI Risk Deniers,” by David Futrelle, The Nation [September 14, 2026] [Link].
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Don’t Look Away – Gaza
By Kathy Kelly, World Beyond War [September 17, 2026]
---- After spending millions of dollars redecorating the White House and transforming D.C. monuments, President Trump approved, on September 15, 2026, an additional 2.8 billion dollar sale of heavy bombs to Israel, including 40,000 one-ton bombs, 20,000 of the 2,000 lb. bombs, and 20,000 bunker-busting penetrator warheads. Israel has used these bombs to destroy homes, families and crucial infrastructure in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. This latest U.S. weapons package will replenish Israel’s stockpile of bombs that human rights groups have condemned after documenting their use over the past two and a half years to kill, maim, bereave, and forcibly displace Palestinians. Survivors whose homes have been reduced to rubble now live in makeshift shelters, including flimsy tents, while Israel continues to restrict deliveries of supplies that could protect Gazans from harsh weather, disease, rodent and insect infestations, and other hardships of displacement. [Read More]
Israeli NGO B’Tselem Says Israel Is Implementing a ‘Project of Elimination’ Against Palestinians in the West Bank
By Matan Golan, Ha’aretz [Israel] [September 14, 2026]
---- Israel is systematically dismantling the conditions necessary for Palestinians to continue living as a collective in the West Bank, according to a report published Tuesday by Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. The 249-page report, titled “The Elimination Project,” alleges that Israel is pursuing a goal of comprehensive erasure of Palestinian life “more openly, directly and violently than before [October 2023], and increasingly relies on cooperation between official state authorities and settler militias operating in the West Bank with state backing and support.” The group says that while many of these policies have been in place for decades, they have been expanded and intensified since the current far-right government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, took office in 2022. Since then, the distinction between settler violence and state violence has become increasingly blurred, it argues. [Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “The Elimination Project”: Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Life in West Bank: B’Tselem,” from Democracy Now! [September 16, 2026] [Link].
The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
By Ramona Wadi, Informed Comment [September 15, 2026]
---- While independent and alternative media wrought a change in US public opinion since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, mainstream media provided Israel with a coverup for its crimes. “This book does not make for easy reading,” Rashid Khalidi wrote in the introduction to Robin Andersen’s The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza (OR Books, 2026). While legacy media justified genocide and acted as a mouthpiece for Israel and the US, independent media illustrated genocide as it happened. As Israel’s genocide continued without political opposition, legacy and mainstream media framed Palestinians in Gaza and anyone opposing the genocide as “the villains of the story, rather than the war criminals who perpetrated these murders, and this destruction and starvation.” … Indeed, the simplistic narrative emphasised by US mainstream media required a starting point. October 7 provided the peg not only for supporting Israel’s genocide, but for obliterating the entire Zionist colonial history and appropriation of Palestinian territory. Without context, news became a series of events obfuscated and far removed from history. [Read More]
THE WAR IN YEMEN
To Understand the Houthis, Begin With Yemen
By Yohannes Woldemariam, Znet [September 16, 2026]
---- The Houthis are routinely described as an Iranian proxy. The description has become even more common as their military reach has expanded from northern Yemen toward the Red Sea and Bab el Mandeb. Iran has supplied weapons, training, intelligence and technical assistance that have greatly increased Houthi military capabilities. That relationship is real and important. But beginning the story of the Houthis with Iran turns their history upside down. To understand who they are, it is necessary to begin in Yemen, particularly in Saada, a mountainous region in the north with its own religious, tribal and political history. The movement that eventually became Ansar Allah emerged there from a Zaydi religious and political revival during the closing decades of the twentieth century. The Believing Youth movement, founded in the 1990s, sought to revive Zaydi learning and identity. Hussein al Houthi emerged from this environment, not from an Iranian project to establish an armed organization on the Arabian Peninsula. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
If You Thought Immigration Policy Couldn’t Get Any Crueler
By Stephen Yale-Loehr, New York Times [September 15, 2026]
---- In other words: The new public charge rule will reduce health coverage, nutrition assistance and other sources of support for immigrant families, including U.S. citizen children in those families. Nationally, one in four children lives in a family with at least one immigrant parent. Reduced participation in health coverage and other assistance programs will hurt immigrant families and their children. And when community health safety nets disappear, local police departments and jails face higher demands to manage untreated health crises. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that the public charge rule will reduce federal spending — even as states worry they will lose billions each year, largely because people will unenroll or avoid public benefits. D.H.S. acknowledges the ripple effects that will follow: lost revenue for hospitals and nonprofits that participate in Medicaid, for pharmaceutical and medical supply companies, for grocery stores that accept food stamps and for the farmers who grow the food those stamps buy. [Read More]
(Video) “Fast Food Nation,” Mystery Meat & Trump’s Dismantling of U.S. Food Safety System: Eric Schlosser
From Democracy Now! [September 17, 2026]
---- Amid growing concerns over food safety in the United States, President Donald Trump last month authorized the duty-free importation of 660 million pounds of cheap beef trimmings that will get mixed in with other cuts to make ground beef. Imported beef and pork were once labeled with their country of origin, but Congress voted in 2015 to end that requirement, so customers at the grocery store will have no way to identify this “mystery meat,” which is coming mostly from Brazil. … Schlosser is author of the landmark book Fast Food Nation, published in 2001. He says that in the 25 years since then, the United States has developed “two food systems.” While affluent and well-educated people increasingly favor sustainable, organic foods and care deeply about how food is grown and consumed, working people and the poor are relegated to the “fast-food industrial system” of cheap, mass-produced food of dubious safety. [See the Program]
OUR HISTORY
(Video) “We Are the 99%”: 15 Years Later, Occupy Wall Street’s Impact Is Still Being Felt
From Democracy Now! [September 18, 2026]
---- Fifteen years ago this week, thousands of activists marched on the Financial District in New York City. They formed the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park, launching a movement focused on economic inequality that spread across the nation and globe under the slogan, “We are the 99%.” Protesters would go on to sleep in Zuccotti Park for nearly two months before police raided the encampment. “Occupy Wall Street changed the public’s common sense about class and class struggle and inequality in this country,” says Yotam Marom, who helped organize the Occupy protests in New York City. “It’s hard to see how you get a Bernie Sanders 2016 run without the public shifting its relationship to that story.” Marom says Occupy participants were inspired by mass protests happening around the world at that time, including the Arab Spring and the anti-austerity movement in Spain known as the Indignados. Still, “We got it wrong on a lot of things. We had a ton of internal conflict that really jeopardized the project,” he says. [See the Program] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “Occupy, Fifteen Years Later - What does today’s Left owe to those nights at Zuccotti Park?” by Nara Roberta Silva, Public Seminar [September 18, 2026] [Link].
(Video) The Encampments – [The students at Columbia, 2024]
---- A documentary film (1 hr, 21 minutes). Excellent. Among the producers was Macklemore. in the news again this week. [See the film].
