Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
July 1, 2018
Hello All – On Saturday more than 700 rallies and marches took place across the USA to protest President Trump's outrageous and illegal immigration "policies." About 1,000 people attended the rally and march in White Plains organized by the Hudson Valley Community Coalition. (A full report of events around the country will undoubtedly be aired Monday on Democracy Now! – www.democracynow.org.)
The Trump administration's punitive policies toward immigrants and those seeking refugee status are in part intended to deter all but the most desperate family from approaching our borders; but the subtext of Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric is to mobilize his white-nationalist base against people of color and their liberal supporters. Like his counterparts on the Right in Europe, Trump seeks to organize political support by blaming immigrants for the economic woes and cultural displacement of people who have been by-passed by the economy and culture. And like their counterparts in Europe, US conservative elites are supportive of fascist rhetoric and policies as long as the government it supports produces benefits that reward the rich and keep conservative politicians in office.
Of course we've seen this before, and it is not a pretty picture. The strong response of much of Middle America to the more extreme elements of Trump's attack on immigrants, and the primary-election victory of a democratic socialist in the Bronx, might give us hope that we can still find the resources to stop the slide toward fascism in America. But it won't be easy.
News Notes
There's some good/useful reading below about the wonderful victory of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in this week's NYC Democratic primary in "Featured Essays," but let's start off this newsletter with a 4-minute clip of "the girl from the Bronx" on the Stephen Colbert show.
The deep thinkers at the US Army Corps of Engineers have cooked up several plans for "storm surge barriers" on the Hudson River. Riverkeeper warns that "several of these alternatives could threaten the very existence of the Hudson as a living river." Public hearings are only a week away. For more information, go here.
Last week marked the 30th anniversary of climate scientist James Hansen's testimony to Congress that global warming was happening and it was because of human activity. So much time wasted since then! Read the sobering reminder of what could have been: "A Prophet of Doom Was Right About the Climate"
Thousands of American Jews each year visit Israel as part of the Birthright program. On one recent trip five young women wanted to learn something about the Occupation, as well as about what's so good about Israel, and left the trip on the last day to tour Hebron in the company of the ex-soldiers group, Breaking the Silence. This led to dramatic and interesting discussion and conflicts within the group, recorded on this riveting video.
The New York Times and the mainstream media continue their propaganda war against Venezuela. Is this greasing the skids for an armed intervention? For some perspective on what's actually going on in Venezuela, here is a useful article from the go-to website venezuelanalysis.org, "How The West and Its Allies Sabotaged Venezuela" [June 29, 2018] [Link].
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Ongoing – CFOW holds a vigil/rally each Saturday at the VFW Plaza in Hastings (Warburton and Spring) from 12 to 1 p.m. Everyone invited; please join us!
Ongoing – Added to the Hastings farmers market on Saturdays is the opportunity to recycle food scraps, including meat and anything that was once alive, according to coordinator EZ. Look for the big bin at the market; and for more info email hastingscompost@gmail.com.
Wednesday, July 4th – Come one and all to the CFOW 4th of July picnic. Celebrate true Independence in the company of peace & justice stalwarts. We'll assemble from 2 to 5 p.m. at the beautiful Dobbs Ferry Historical Society (with a beautiful lawn), 12 Elm St. in Dobbs. Please bring snacks and perhaps a dish to share. We hope to have some music; and we will pass the hat to collect money for the Hudson Valley Community Coalition.
Sunday, July 15th – CFOW will host Korean expert Soobok Kim for a discussion about what's happening on the Korean peninsula. Soobok Kim is a South Korean army veteran and a member of Veterans for Peace. He has made five trips to North Korea, the most recent one in November 2107. The program will be at the Hastings Community Center, starting at 2 p.m.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for our rallies are usually about war or climate change, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's immigration policies are often targeted, depending on current events. We meet on the first Sunday of each month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to make a financial contribution to our work, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
This Newsletter
Articles linked in the CFOW newsletter are intended to illuminate some of the main action-issues about which we are concerned. Coming mostly from the "dissenting media," they provide an alternative to the perspectives of the mainstream media. In addition to the excellent "Featured Essays," I especially recommend Robert Fisk's useful explanation of the winding down (?) of the war in Syria; a set of articles about the USA immigration debate and another set about the significance of the Supreme Court's "Janus" case decision; an excellent symposium/discussion about what's happening in Gaza; and ("Our History") a review of what seems to be a path-breaking study of the roots of violent "white supremacy" organizing in the Vietnam War era. Read on!
Rewards!
Here's some good music, rewards for weary newsletter readers. First up is a tune from Ry Cooder's album Chavez Ravine, which chronicles the destruction of a Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles in order to build a baseball stadium for the then-Brooklyn Dodgers. Next up we have the Chilean group Inti Illimani, with El Pueblo Unido. Finally, here's Bob Marley's great musical blast against racism, War.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
The Anatomy of Trumpocracy: An Interview With Noam Chomsky
By C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout [June 28, 2018]
----- [Chomsky] "For some time, candidates for Republican primaries who emerged from the base have been far off the traditional spectrum. The establishment was able to suppress them and gain their own candidate, but that didn't change the basis for their support. For years, both parties have drifted to the right — the Republicans off the spectrum of normal parliamentary politics. Their dedication to wealth and corporate power is so extreme that they cannot get votes on their actual policies — which are now being revealed to us daily — and so have had to mobilize a voting base on issues unrelated to their service to their actual constituency. These include religious fundamentalism — a major phenomenon in the US unlike other developed societies — white supremacy, xenophobia and other latent anti-social attitudes that tend to break through to the surface during periods of disillusionment and distress. This is partly a matter of "search for scapegoats," the actual sources concealed in the usual manner of propaganda; thus, the public vastly exaggerates the number of immigrants, even more than in Europe. In the current period, these malignant tendencies are natural consequences of the harsh neoliberal policies that we have discussed before. We see much the same in Europe, for similar reasons. [Read More] Also timely and of great interest is this Chomsky interview with the Indian magazine Frontline, 'The growth of right-wing forces is ominous' [June 22, 2018] [Link].
The Right Abandoned Civility a Long Time Ago
By Katha Pollitt, The Nation [June 29, 2018]
---- Stephanie Wilkinson, owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, made a fatal mistake when she politely ushered White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders off the premises. Instead of basing her objection on the discomfort of her LGBT staffers, she should simply have said serving Sanders was against her religion. She could have quoted Psalm 101:7: "No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house; no one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence." Or 1 Corinthians 15:33: "Evil communications corrupt good manners." If there's one thing the Bible has plenty of, it's fulminations against putting up with bad people who are doing bad things. Like lying to the American people about why thousands of children were being ripped from their parents and sent hundreds of miles away with no plan to reunite them. Freedom of religion is the right's legal superpower. [Read More]
There's an Easy Answer to Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Won: Socialism
By Briahna Gray, The New Yorker [
---- It seems no one can stop talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old former bartender who ousted 10-time incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley from his seat in New York's 14th congressional district last Tuesday. But some people should. … Myriad horse-race callers seem hell-bent on divorcing Ocasio-Cortez's core ideology from any causal analysis of her win, with no discernible motive other than preserving the party's failing strategies, and the strategists paid to enact them, for another election cycle. Others downplay the radical nature of her policy platform by claiming her leftism for the center, and pretending her choice to identify as a democratic socialist is a distinction without a difference. … [The mistake of these commentators], a mistake I see repeated in op-ed after op-ed covering this race, is to see Ocasio-Cortez's campaign choices as separate and apart from a "single-minded" focus on this country's gross and fundamentally unethical wealth disparity. What gave Ocasio-Cortez's platform its power is not just her rhetorical acuity — the fact that she's frank where others are euphemistic. [Read More] Also useful/illuminating about this positive development are (pre-election) "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Talks to Glenn Greenwald About the Democratic Party and 2018 Midterms," The Intercept [Link]; John Cassidy, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Message to the Democratic Party," The New Yorker [June 29, 2018] [Link]; D.D. Guttenplan, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Ran—and Won—as a Movement Candidate," The Nation [June 27, 2018] [Link].
Targeting the Most Vulnerable: Children in Detention in the US and Palestine
By Alice Rothchild, Mondoweiss [June 28, 2018]
---- When kids are brown does anyone care? Americans are grappling with the incarceration of 10-year-olds and the concept of "tender age detention centers" while morally bankrupt politicians wring their bloodied hands. As courts begin to respond, many folks across the political spectrum are wondering, "What happens to the children caught in this catastrophe?" Interestingly, there is much we can learn from research in the US and from the Israeli experience with regard to children and prisons. The US and Israel both perceive themselves as enlightened "western democracies," yet both have high incarceration rates, particularly for children of color, sometimes involving the same global prison industries. In both countries, these kinds of children are perceived as the "other," the "enemy," the "invading hordes ready to destroy America," the "Muslim terrorists seeking to kill Israelis." They are presented as less human and less deserving than white and/or Jewish children and less likely to evoke an empathic reaction. [Read More]
WAR & PEACE
No More Blank Checks for War
By Rep. Barbara Lee, The Nation [June 20, 2018]
---- Nearly 17 years into the war in Afghanistan, there is still no end in sight. Our strategy and goals for the region are murky and ill-defined—and yet, while the violence continues unabated, the media and Congress have turned a blind eye to the conflict. Despite the trillions of dollars spent on the so-called War on Terror—a sum that could have sent every young person in the United States to college—we have invested almost nothing in a peace process to draw down our military operations. … Just three days after 9/11, Congress voted to authorize war against the conspirators involved in the attacks and any associated forces. That legislation—known as an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)—was a blank check for any president to wage war anywhere in the world, in perpetuity, without congressional input. As the lone vote against the authorization, I could not in good conscience support such an overly broad resolution. [Read More]
Bankrupting Ourselves to Death: How We're Borrowing to Fight the Wars we're Losing
---- In the name of the fight against terrorism, the United States is currently waging "credit-card wars" in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Never before has this country relied so heavily on deficit spending to pay for its conflicts. The consequences are expected to be ruinous for the long-term fiscal health of the U.S., but they go far beyond the economic. Massive levels of war-related debt will have lasting repercussions of all sorts. One potentially devastating effect, a new study finds, will be more societal inequality. In other words, the staggering costs of the longest war in American history — almost 17 years running, since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 — are being deferred to the future. In the process, the government is contributing to this country's skyrocketing income inequality. [Read More]
Pentagon Puts Cyberwarriors on the Offensive, Increasing the Risk of Conflict
By David E. Sanger, New York Times [June 17, 2018]
---- But the risks of escalation — of U.S. action in foreign networks leading to retaliatory strikes against U.S. banks, dams, financial markets or communications networks — are considerable, according to current and former officials. Trump has shown only a cursory interest in the subject, former aides say, not surprising for a man who does not use a computer and came of age as a business executive in a predigital era. Efforts to rewrite the main document governing the presidential authorities in the cyberarena — Presidential Policy Directive 20, signed by Barack Obama — have faltered in the chaos of Bolton's decision to oust the key players.[Read More]
The War in Syria
The US Has Given Up on the Overthrow of Assad
---- It will be called the great betrayal. And it was a long time coming. But the grim message from Washington to the anti-Assad fighters of southern Syria – that they could expect no help from the West in their further struggle against Assad's regime or the Russians – will one day figure in the history books. It's a turning point in the Syria war, a shameful betrayal if you happen to belong to the wreckage of the "Free Syrian Army" and its acolytes around the city of Deraa, and a further victory for the Assad regime in its ambition to retake all of rebel Syria. … Across the map of Syria, however, it is the West's power which now appears to be in retreat. If it is prepared to turn its back on its erstwhile allies in southern Syria and in the north, then Russia is the winner (as well as Assad) and all the eggshell militias which remain – in Idlib, along the Turkish border and certainly in the south, are doomed. The instruction from the US to its allies outside Deraa – "surrender" might sum it up best – may be presented as a small victory: Washington can claim to have kept Iran away from Israel. But it will also mean that America and Nato have given up on the overthrow of the Assad family. [Read More] Also useful – for the forthcoming Trump-Putin summit – is Juan Cole, "Report: Trump hopes for Deal with Putin over Iran in Syria, US Exit
War With Iran?
Turkey, Iraq and China defy Trump on new Iran Sanctions, Act to Hold Tehran Harmless
---- The Trump administration is unlikely to have the same success in getting other countries to boycott Iranian petroleum as did the Obama administration in 2012-2015, though its officials are making a full court press in that regard. Proof came in the form of statements from the Turkish, Iraqi and Chinese governments yesterday. Turkish Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci was scathing on Trump's aggressive moves against Iran. Turkey, he said, is not bound by the new US sanctions, which are unilateral. Reuters reports him saying in Ankara, "The decisions that the United States makes are not binding on us. We would be bound by any decisions taken by the United Nations," [Read More]
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
If You Really Want to Curb Migration, Get Serious About Climate Change
By Lauren Markham, New York Times [June 28, 2018]
---- Last year I traveled to southern Guatemala, the source of one of the largest migrations of unauthorized immigrants to the United States in recent years. It's clear why people are leaving: Guatemala is a country rife with political conflict, endemic racism against indigenous people, poverty and, increasingly, gang violence. But there's another, lesser-known dimension to this migration. Drought and rising temperatures in Guatemala are making it harder for people to make a living or even survive, thus compounding the already tenuous political situation for the 16.6 million people who live there. … The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that since 2008, 22.5 million people have been displaced by climate-related or extreme weather events. This includes tragedies like the widespread famine in Darfur, monsoons and flooding in Bangladesh and the catastrophic hurricane in Puerto Rico. The more out of whack our climate becomes, the more people up and leave their homes. As our world heats up and sea levels rise, the problem of forced migration around the world is projected to become far worse. … If President Trump really wants to curb "illegal" migration to the United States for the long haul, he'd better get serious about climate change. The Trump administration can continue to eviscerate the E.P.A. and thumb its nose at global efforts to protect the climate. Or he can work responsibly to try to curb international migration by addressing the challenges of a warming planet. He can't have it both ways. [Read More]
The Trump Administration Is Reshaping the Country Under the Guise of National Security. The Energy Sector Is Next.
By Kate Aronoff, The Intercept [
---- The Trump administration is unilaterally reshaping the United States under the cover of national security. The White House's justification for its "zero tolerance" policy of separating families at the border was based on the president's powers over national security. President Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban was justified on grounds of national security, as are his vague "extreme vetting" proposals for visa applicants. Now, his Energy Department is looking to reshape the energy industry and reverse the trend away from coal-fired power plants. Their justification? National security. Yet in the case of the energy industry, nobody is buying the rationale, and the radical intervention into energy markets has produced an odd-bedfellows coalition of opposition that includes the oil and gas industry, renewable energy companies, and environmentalists. [Read More]
The State of the Union
Trump's War on Immigrants
The Seventh Exclusion: Great Moments in American Racist Immigration History
---- US history is replete with racism as public policy. It has been more often our history than not, and the era since 1965 has been unusual inasmuch as there has been widespread public pushback against the use of race for policy purposes. Trump's movement is an attempt to see whether that widespread US consensus of the past few decades can be reversed. Just as the Ku Klux Klan took over the Democratic Party in the 1920s, including the whole state of Indiana, so white nationalism has taken over the Republican Party today, including the GOP majority on SCOTUS. As I have argued in the past, there have been at least 6 major times in American history when people were excluded on the basis of race or religion (religion is tied up with race in the racialist imaginary). Here is my list, to which the Roberts court has just added our seventh: [Read More]
Zero Tolerance for Internment Camps
By Linda Sarsour, The Nation [June 29, 2018]
---- Donald Trump has been in power for less than two years, and already, discrimination is a legal norm in America. As a nation, we've lost our standing in the international community. We're continuing our country's long history of ripping families of color apart. We're rejecting refugees fleeing violence in their home countries, even as we provide the weapons to fuel endless wars. We've endured several different versions of travel bans aimed at Muslims, and gutted voting-rights protections that ensure our ability to hold leaders accountable for their actions, or inaction. The Supreme Court of the United States' decision to uphold Trump's Muslim ban this week endangers many members of the communities I come from and work with as much as it affects the people arriving at our shores or our borders. It throws people into the same broken immigration system, and forces them into detention centers, full of fear that they will never see their sons, daughters, grandmothers, or cousins again. … Twice in the last couple of weeks, I have stood at LaGuardia Airport in New York City with hundreds of other activists, waiting after word spread that a plane full of children was on its way. My heart broke watching the little 6- and 7-year-old girls being escorted from the airplane into vans; the mother in me was sick with grief imagining how scared, lonely, and worried they must be about never seeing their parents again. [Read More] And this news should get more attention than it has: "US Navy Plans Detention Camps for Tens of Thousands of Immigrants on Remote Bases" [Link]. Useful information for all is Arun Gupta's "15 Actions That Can Shut Down Trump's Assault On Immigrant Families," Yesmagazine.org [June 22, 2018] [Link].
(Video) Today's Refugee Crisis Is Blowback from U.S. Dirty Wars in Central America.
From Democracy Now! [June 28, 2018]
---- In our special broadcast from the U.S.-Mexico border, we speak to human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury, who has lived here in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas for over 40 years and has been active in the response to the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, was a Mayan comandante and guerrilla who was disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. After a long campaign, she found there was U.S. involvement in the cover-up of her husband's murder and torture. Now she continues to work with people fleeing violence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. [Read More] Also from Democracy Now, watch "Voices from Brownsville Protest: We Have a Moral Responsibility to Help Asylum Seekers" [Link].
Calls to Abolish ICE Are Becoming More Mainstream
By Zaid Jilani and Aída Chávez, The Intercept [
---- The argument to shut ICE down revolves around its cultural ecology. The agency has become corrupted with a military mentality that doesn't respect civilian oversight and has little effective oversight. Once an institution's culture has metastasized, reforming it can become impossible, with the only solution to abolish it and disperse its various authorities elsewhere. … The demand to eliminate the law enforcement agency started with a push by some grassroots immigration activists — which was signal-boosted on social media as #AbolishICE — that quickly spread to a number of progressive Democratic challengers. Ocasio-Cortez was one of at least 15 challengers who made eliminating the agency part of their platform. … What's notable among the various individuals calling for the elimination of ICE is that they have yet to settle on a comprehensive alternative as to what would replace it, something which opponents of the bill in both parties brought up repeatedly in interviews with The Intercept. [Read More] For more on the "Abolish ICE" discussion, read "Abolishing ICE becomes Dem litmus test," by Alexander Bolton, The Hill [June 30, 2018] [Link].
Why the Supreme Court's "Janus Decision" Is Important
Supreme Court's Janus Decision Opens a "Pandora's Box" for Public-Sector Unions
By Rachel M. Cohen, The Intercept [J
----- Six years after Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito first signaled his interest in striking down agency fees on First Amendment grounds, he authored a crushing blow to public-sector unions in a giddy 5-4 opinion issued Wednesday. Janus v. AFSCME resolved whether agency fees, also known as "fair-share fees," can be collected from public-sector employees who do not wish to be members of a union. Under the law, a public-sector union has to represent all workers in a workplace, irrespective of whether they opt to be union members. Charging agency fees has historically enabled unions to avoid the free rider-problem — without them, employees could enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining without paying the dues required to support union activities. This week, the Supreme Court affirmed that no agency fee or any other form of payment can be deducted from an employee, "nor may any other attempt be made to collect such a payment, unless the employee affirmatively consents to pay." The decision has immediate ramifications for the nearly 7 million state and local government workers represented by a union, of which 58 percent are women and 33 percent are African-American, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, and Latino. There are 17.3 million public-sector workers across the nation. [Read More] Also useful/interesting on the Court's decision are Lee Fang and Nick Surgey, "Right-Wing, Business-Funded Groups Are Preparing to Use the Janus Decision to Bleed Unions, Internal Documents Show," The Intercept [[Link]; and Priscilla Murolo, "Five Lessons from the History of Public Sector Unions," Labor Notes [June 11, 2018] [Link].
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
One Question: Gaza
From State of Nature [June 30, 2018]
---- One Question is a monthly series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question. This month, we ask: "What is the future of Gaza?" [FB – With 15 prestigious/informed respondents] [Read More]
The 'Ultimate Deal'
By Robert Fisk, The Independent [UK] [June 29, 2018]
---- Is there no humiliation left for the Palestinians? After Oslo, after the "two state solution", after the years of Israeli occupation – of "Area A" and "Area C" to define which kind of occupation the Palestinians must live under – after the vast Jewish colonisation of land thieved from its Arab owners, after the mass killings of Gaza, and Trump's decision that Jerusalem, all of Jerusalem, must be the capital of Israel, are the Palestinians going to be asked to settle for cash and a miserable village? Is there no shame left? For the Palestinians are soon to be awarded the "ultimate deal" – "ultimate", as in the last, definitive, terminal, conclusive, no-more-cards-to-play, cash-in-your-chips, go-for-broke, take-it-or-leave-it, to-hell-with-you, cease-and-desist, endgame "deal". A pitiful village as a capital, no end to colonisation, no security, no army, no independent borders, no unity – in return for a huge amount of money, billions of dollars and euros, millions of pounds, zillions of dinars and shekels and spondulix and filthy lucre, the real "moolah". [Read More] For more on the role of Jared Kushner and his family/fortune, read "The Peace Deal That is All Israel," b [Link]. Middle East expert Phyllis Bennis talks about the "ultimate deal" here.
---- Is there no humiliation left for the Palestinians? After Oslo, after the "two state solution", after the years of Israeli occupation – of "Area A" and "Area C" to define which kind of occupation the Palestinians must live under – after the vast Jewish colonisation of land thieved from its Arab owners, after the mass killings of Gaza, and Trump's decision that Jerusalem, all of Jerusalem, must be the capital of Israel, are the Palestinians going to be asked to settle for cash and a miserable village? Is there no shame left? For the Palestinians are soon to be awarded the "ultimate deal" – "ultimate", as in the last, definitive, terminal, conclusive, no-more-cards-to-play, cash-in-your-chips, go-for-broke, take-it-or-leave-it, to-hell-with-you, cease-and-desist, endgame "deal". A pitiful village as a capital, no end to colonisation, no security, no army, no independent borders, no unity – in return for a huge amount of money, billions of dollars and euros, millions of pounds, zillions of dinars and shekels and spondulix and filthy lucre, the real "moolah". [Read More] For more on the role of Jared Kushner and his family/fortune, read "The Peace Deal That is All Israel," b [Link]. Middle East expert Phyllis Bennis talks about the "ultimate deal" here.
New House Bill Would Empower Donald Trump to Punish U.S. Companies that Boycott Israel
By Alex Emmons, The Intercept [
[FB – As the bill was passed "unanimously," we can presume that our own Rep. Eliot Engel, the "ranking" Democrat on the Committee, also voted for this.]
---- The House Committee on Foreign Affairs unanimously passed a measure on Thursday that would give the Trump administration power to decide how to punish U.S. companies that engage in or promote boycotts of Israel — including through criminal penalties. … [Committee chairman] Royce's amendment rewrites the bill to direct the administration to issue regulations that prohibit U.S. companies from involvement with the BDS movement, as it is known. The bill covers those companies that attempt to "comply with, further, or support" United Nations or European Union calls for a boycott of Israel, including merely by "furnishing information" about them. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Declaration of War: The violent rise of white supremacy after Vietnam
By Patrick Blanchfield, The Nation [June 20, 2018]
[FB – This is a review of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, by Kathleen Belew. There are several copies in the WLS.]
---- The belief expressed [in the rightwing novel, The Turner Diaries] is that the majority of Americans are soft and insulated, ignorant of a long-running war, and that revolutionary racist terror is the only remedy for an American society suffering from a terminal cancer of liberalism and tolerance. This conviction may seem obscure and The Turner Diaries mere fiction, but as the historian Kathleen Belew demonstrates in her compelling new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, it has been at the core of decades of white-supremacist organizing and violence. … Two fundamental insights underpin the book: first, that there exists a profound relationship between America's military violence and domestic right-wing paramilitary organizations, and, second, that the character of that relationship underwent a decisive change in the late 1970s and early '80s. … Unlike previous racist violence, a new strain of white militancy emerged after Vietnam that was not conservative at all: It envisioned overthrowing the state and entertained the idea of founding an all-white homeland and participating in outright genocide. [Read More]
Farewell, 'Oil Can': Ed Sadlowski, 1938-2018
By Ruth Needleman, Labor Notes [June 15, 2018]
---- The late 1960s and 1970s gave rise to grassroots movements for union democracy all over the United States. The ones in the Auto Workers and Mine Workers have been written about the most, but Steelworkers Fightback was no less momentous. The name that stands out in this national uprising is Ed Sadlowski, who rose from an oiler's job to director of the largest district in the Steelworkers at that time, District 31. "Oil Can Eddie," as he was known, went on to challenge the top bureaucracy, running for president in 1977. Those of us who worked with him or knew him pay tribute to his endless contributions to democratic unionism. There could not be a greater loss to grassroots democracy in the union movement than his passing on June 10. … Eddie brought the union out of its conservative past to challenge the politics that had left the union defenseless against downsizing, automation, restructuring, and globalization. … What Eddie did was forge many caucuses and local movements into a national powerhouse that was inclusive, women as well as men, Black and Latino as well as white. Eddie's Fightback slate when he ran for president was the most diverse group ever to run for office in steel. [Read More]
How Trump and Three Other U.S. Presidents Protected Israel's Worst-Kept Secret: Its Nuclear Arsenal
By Adam Entous, The New Yorker [June 18, 2018]
---- Israel crossed the nuclear threshold on the eve of the Six Day War, in 1967. At that time, it had three nuclear devices. Israeli efforts to build a bomb at the nuclear complex in Dimona had been a source of tension with Washington for nearly a decade. But, by the fall of 1969, when Golda Meir, Israel's Prime Minister, met with Richard Nixon at the White House, Israel's possession of nuclear weapons was a fait accompli and the two sides reached an unwritten understanding: the Israelis would not declare, test, or threaten to use their nuclear weapons; and the Americans would not pressure the Israelis to sign a landmark international nuclear-nonproliferation treaty known as the N.P.T. [Read More]
