CFOW Weekend Update
April 27, 2017
Hello All – This is a lot of activity this weekend. On Saturday, in Washington, DC and around the world it's The People's Climate March. The main action will be in Washington, DC, where hundreds of thousands are expected. There will also be hundreds of other marches, including one in White Plains starting at 11 a.m. (see the "Coming Attractions" below). For those not going to any of the Climate Marches, please join us in Hastings on Saturday for our weekly antiwar/pro-peace vigil/protest, focused again this week on the danger of war on North Korea. We meet at the VFW Plaza on Warburton Ave. at Spring street from 12 to 1 p.m. And following the CFOW vigil/protest, a group of Hastings high school students will be arriving and holding a Climate March rally, beginning at 1 p.m. Please be there to give them a warm welcome.
The Peoples Climate March could not come at a more critical moment. As Bill McKibben, of 350.org, wrote last week in The New York Times [Link], we are at the edge of the climate change cliff, now in the climate-denying stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry and the fossil fools assembled by President Trump. What Trump is stealing from us is time – time before we reach a climate-change tipping point, beyond which global warming can't be reversed (melting glaciers, warming seas, melting methane, etc.) As Mike Klare wrote in an article linked in the last issue of the CFOW newsletter, "Inaction on Climate Change Equals Human Annihilation." We simply can't wait until 2018 or 2020 when the Democrats get reformed and may or may not retake the White House. Direct action – peoples' action – is our only hope.
I would like to say a few words about the good/useful weekend reading linked at the end of this Weekend Update. One of the things that the three articles have in common is an implicit stress on the importance of some historical awareness. We don't need to turn ourselves into scholars or academic historians, but we need to consider the issues we are addressing with a sense that they were not born yesterday, or that they were not issues until Trump took office. For example, in her essay on our immigration dilemmas and the threat posed to immigrants' legal rights by the Trump administration, Aviva Chomsky reminds us that the core of the Trump deportation agenda began in the Clinton administration and was carried forward with great energy by President Obama. Thus we need to try to guide our defense of immigrants' rights with some historical perspective, one in which both US political parties participated, and under strong pressure from US business interests, Nativist agitation, the outcomes of the US wars in Central America, and the neo-liberal tsunami that has enabled the movements of capital and labor with little restraint. Similar comments could be made about the other two issues addressed by the articles linked below, the story behind the Palestinian hunger strikers and the absence of much of a US antiwar movement, despite the rising tide of Resistance against Trump. These stories are little known and generally presented by our mainstream media without context, without history. As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explain in their classic book on media, Manufacturing Consent, these techniques are some of the elements that enable our "free market media" to function as a state propaganda machine without visible puppet strings.
Two final notes. The first concerns the dealings of Astorino with ICE, and with the plan to use the Westchester County Jail in Valhalla as an ICE holding area for immigrants detained by ICE. After the mailing I sent to everyone last night, I found a better version of the same information in this article from The New York Daily News. (To my knowledge, there has been no further news except for a short clip on Channel 12.) Also on Wednesday, the Westchester County Board of Legislators issued a statement in response to the report that ICE has asked to use the country jail for detaining immigrants. Please read it. While the statement denounces the Trump immigration policies, its specific complaint concerns the use of taxpayer money to enable these policies. Does this mean, as the Daily News Story indicates, that using the country jail is OK with the Board of Legislators as long as it makes a profit? Also, the statement rejects holding Westchester Co. residents without a warrant; does this mean that they are fine with using the jail if ICE uses a warrant to bring an immigrant in? We need to pay close attention to this developing story.
Also, our friends at the SANE Energy Project/Resist Spectra are still working hard to stop the Spectra pipeline in northern Westchester. The focus now is on persuading Gov. Cuomo to direct the Department of Environmental Conservation to NOT issue critical permits affecting water and streams, which are necessary for the next section of the pipeline to be built. SANE Energy has set up a link for letters to the Governor requesting that he deny these permits, and the deadline for the letters Is Monday, May 1st. Please check out this link, which has a useful/brief explanation of the situation, and an easy-to-use form for writing the letters. NB All this is a continuation of the fight against this pipeline that CFOW stalwarts have been waging for more than two years, and which nearly landed Susan, Linda, and Andy in the hoosegow. We need to keep fighting; let's not give up!
Coming Attractions
Saturday, April 29th – Hundreds of thousands of people will be in Washington, DC for the Peoples Climate March. As the world rockets toward self-destruction and the Trump Agenda eliminates the few feeble protections set up by the Obama administration against global warming and climate change, humanity is on our own to save our civilization. To learn about the Climate March, go here. To get a seat on a Climate March bus leaving Hastings Saturday morning, email Tara Herman (Indivisible CD16) at taraherman@mac.com , and she will send you a reservation link and more information. The cost of the bus is $57.87 per person. (The buses from North White Plains and Bronxville are sold out.)
Saturday, April 29th - Peoples Climate March rally in White Plains (Renaissance Plaza, Main St. and Mamaroneck Ave.) from 11 a.m. to 12 noon). For more information, go here.
Monday, May 1st – "Justice Monday" continues in White Plains, starting at noon at the Renaissance Plaza fountain, Main St. and Mamaroneck Ave. This week j
Monday, May 1st – All out for MAYDAY! This year's rally in White Plains will focus on our demand that federal, state, and local governments ensure respect, dignity, safety, and justice for all immigrants, all workers, and all New Yorkers. The rally starts at 4 p.m. at 148 Martine Ave. and is sponsored by many organizations. For more information, go here.
Saturday, May 6th – The 6th annual "River Sweep" – organized by the Riverkeeper – will include 90 cleanups and tree planting projects from NYC to Albany. Last year, Over 2,200 volunteers removed 49 tons of debris from the Hudson River Estuary. To learn more, and to get hooked up with local projects in Yonkers, Hastings, Dobbs, Irvington, etc., go here.
Saturday, May 20th – CFOW will be one of the organizations participating in the Westchester Social Forum, at the New Rochelle High School, starting at 10 a.m. For more information, go here.
Saturday, June 3rd – CFOW will once again lead off the River Arts Music Tour. As those with working memories will recall, for the last two years we kicked off the Music Tour in Hastings with some peace and justice songs, starting at 12 and going to 1 pm, under the leadership/direction of Jenny Murphy. So we're signed up for this again. Please start vocalizing and get ready to join our Stalwart Chorus.
Contributions to CFOW
If you are able to contribute to CFOW work, we would appreciate it very much. Please send your check to Concerned Families of Westchester, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
For newsletter stalwarts reading all the way to here, your reward is to share in some music I've been listening to lately, the songs of Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Here is their first (1975) big song, "Heart Like a Wheel." Kate McGarrigle died in 2010 at the age of 63. A year later, Terri Gross interviewed Kate's sister Anna about "life without her sister." You can hear this interview – and more of the McGarrigle's music - here. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
478-3848
SOME GOOD/USEFUL WEEKEND READING
Making Sense of the Deportation Debate: How Bill Clinton and Barack Obama Laid the Groundwork for Trump's Immigration Policies
By Aviva Chomsky, Tom Dispatch [April 27, 2017]
By Aviva Chomsky, Tom Dispatch [April 27, 2017]
---- In many ways, Donald Trump is only reiterating, with more bombast, ideas and policies pioneered under Clinton that then became a basic part of Barack Obama's approach to immigration. Those policies drew directly on racist tough-on-crime and anti-terrorism police tactics that also helped foment white racial fears. Anecdotally speaking, there have already been numerous cases of detention and deportation that appear to go far beyond what was occurring in the Obama years. But a closer look at those cases and at the numbers suggests surprisingly more continuity than change. Both the mainstream media and social media have highlighted what appear to be extreme cases of the arrest of DACA ("deferred action for childhood arrivals") youth, also known as "Dreamers," as well as of individuals appearing for routine check-ins with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, or other arbitrary detentions and deportations. Most of these cases, however, have been far more in line with Obama-era policies than readers of such news might imagine. Then, too, "low-priority immigrants" were swept up surprisingly often in what the New York Times in 2014 called "the net of deportation." [Read More]
American Media Continues to Ignore Historic Hunger Strike Underway [Israel/Palestine]
By Vijay Prashad, AlterNet [April 25, 2017]
---- Since April 17, over 1,500 Palestinian political prisoners have been on hunger strike. Each time the political prisoners declare their intention to strike, Israeli authorities put them into solitary confinement. The hope is that isolation will break their spirits and detach the detainees from the outside world. … This strike, the largest such demonstration inside Israel's colonial prisons, is called the Freedom and Dignity hunger strike. It suggests that the people who sit in cold, lonely cells remain confident of their cause and of their victory. Dignity is important. It is the opposite of occupation. [Read More] Also interesting/useful is this article from the Israeli publication +972 Mag by Amjad Iraqi, "How the hunger strike could bring Palestinian prisoners back to the fore" [April 20, 2017] [Link]; and this article published in Haaretz [Israel] today called "No Meetings, No Radios and No Salt: How Israel Is Pressuring Palestinian Hunger Strikers" [Link].
Where Is the Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders of Foreign Policy?
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post [April 2, 2017]
[FB – Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor of The Nation.]
---- The Democratic establishment's record on foreign policy has been disastrous. Most Democratic leaders supported the war of choice in Iraq, the largest foreign policy debacle since Vietnam. They cheered the "humanitarian intervention" in Libya that has ended in the humanitarian horror of a ruined country, racked by violent conflicts, where the Islamic State is consolidating a backup caliphate. They applauded President Barack Obama's surge in Afghanistan even as that war dragged on year after year. … In 2016, Trump showed how unhappy Americans were with that record of futility. During the campaign, he lambasted Hillary Clinton for Iraq and Libya. He derided regime change. He argued that the United States had wasted $6 trillion in the Middle East for nothing. He claimed his "America First" policy would focus on the Islamic State and protecting our borders. He intimated that he would seek to work with Russia's Vladimir Putin to take out the Islamic State.In less than 100 days, Trump has discarded many of his most populist and popular positions. … Trump has proved more con man than strongman, but Democrats haven't had much to say about these head-spinning reversals. They largely applauded Trump's bombing of Syria and were reassured by his flip-flops on NATO and the moderating of his positions on China and trade. Objections to his military budget increase have focused more about the domestic cuts than the idiocy of pumping more money into an already bloated military. With Democrats in the political wilderness, having lost the White House and both houses of Congress, this is the time for fundamental debate and reassessment. A challenge to the failed doctrines of the Democratic foreign policy establishment is long overdue. [Read More] Also useful/interesting is this article by Lawrence Wittner, the leading historian of the US antiwar movements, "Why Is There So Little Popular Protest Against Today's Threats of Nuclear War?"' Antiwar.com [April 25, 2017] [Link].
