Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
August 18, 2019
Hello All – Last week several CFOW stalwarts attended a boisterous rally organized by the Rivertowns Sunrise Movement. Its object was to support the demand of thousands of grass roots Democrats, as well as almost all the Democratic presidential candidates, that the Democratic National Committee sponsor a candidates' debate – one of the 10 new scheduled – that would focus exclusively on the most important issue of our time, the climate crisis.
That seems pretty simple and good for the Democrats … but, alas! For the Democratic National Committee has stated that it will not allow such a debate. Furthermore, they say that any presidential candidate(s) who participate in an "unauthorized" debate will be excluded from further DNC-sponsored (nationally televised) debates.
Thus the Sunrise Movement's rally, which took place in White Plains, was in front of the headquarters of the New York State branch of the Democratic National Committee. The rally's "ask" was that the 13 members of the NY delegation to the National Democratic Committee vote to support a climate-crisis debate, when the issue is discussed and voted on at the next meeting of the National DNC, which will take place August 22-24 in California.
And so the CFOW Newsletter's "ask" is that you, the reader, send an email to the 13 NYS members of the DNC, saying that you would like them to support a separate DNC climate crisis debate when it is discussed and voted on next weekend. Here are the hoped-for recipients of your emails.
Jay Jacobs (jay@camptic.com), [chairman, DNC for NYS] ; Stuart H Appelbaum (sappelbaum@rwdsu.org); Vivian Cook (cookv@assembly.state.ny.us); Carl Heastie (Speaker@nyassembly.gov)' Michael Blake (mb79@dnc.org); Grace Meng (https://meng.house.gov/contact); Jennifer Cunningham (JCunningham@skdknick.com) Maria Cuomo Cole (cuomocole@gmail.com); Hazel Duke (naacp@nysnaacp.org); Emily Giske (Giske@boltonstjohns.com); Christine Quinn (christinecquinn@gmail.com); Gerard J Sweeney (gjs2@aol.com); and Robert Zimmerman (robertpzimmerman@gmail.com).
A simple, heart-felt message is best. If you need some prompts, you might want to mention that scientists say we have only a decade before the crisis spins out of control and is unstoppable; that large parts of the United States – and much of the world – will be unlivable if the crisis continues; and/or that hundreds of millions of people will face starvation, as their crops fail; they will become refugees. Thanks!
News Notes
The Statue of Liberty tells the world, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." This week Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, did some serious editing of Emma Lazarus's poem "A New Colossus," claiming that the poem was referencing Europeans, and that "the tired and poor" coming to our shores should be self-supporting. The history of the Statue of Liberty, who made it and what it was supposed to represent, is interesting and instructive; check out this useful recollection by historical Juan Cole here.
The amazing Hong Kong protests continued this Saturday, with what the demonstration organizers claimed were 1.7 million people marching in the rain. Demonstrations in support of the Hong Kong protesters were held in some 40 cities around the world. Read all about it here.
The fascist government in Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, arose from a widely reported electoral coup. Less reported in recent weeks, however, has been the strong opposition to the new government, with many protests and demonstrations. A useful media analysis from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] gives us not only an update on opposition events, but some analysis of how the US media is failing us, and why the black-out might be happening.
Regular readers of the CFOW Newsletter have seen links to many articles that question the fundamental assumption of the Russia-gate story, that the DNCC emails were "hacked" (not "leaked"). The lack of proof for the hacking hypothesis has come up recently in federal court. One of the main sources for analysis and conjecture about the "hacking" v. "leaked" debate has been the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Here is their latest offering, authored by Ray McGovern, "Seth Rich's Ghost Haunts the Courts" [August 14, 2019].
Finally, from the entertaining and insightful blog site "Moon of Alabama," we have an analysis of the US media's propensity to characterize everything about Russian President Vladimir Putin in terms of something he "weaponizes" or as something he "loses." Check out the "free press" at work!
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Monday, August 19th – SURJ ("Showing Up for Racial Justice") will hold its monthly meeting at the South Presbyterian Church, 343 Broadway in Dobbs Ferry, starting at 7 PM. The topic for the meeting will be "Identifying Our Roles in the Struggle for Migrant Justice." For more information, go here.
Thursday, September 5th – "Climate Emergency and the Green New Deal: Centering the Voices of Movements" is the title of a forum sponsored by Bronx Climate Justice North, from 7 to 9 PM. The panel discussion will feature several of the leaders in the NY-area fight for a Green New Deal. Location still to be determined; watch this space!
Sunday, September 8th – The next CFOW monthly meeting will be held at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs, from 7 to 9 PM. At these meetings we review our work & the events of the past month, and make plans going forward. Everyone is welcome at these meetings.
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 (usually) 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. The next CFOW monthly meeting will be on Sunday, August 4th, at 7 PM, at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs. And if you would like to support our work by making a contribution, 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. As always, we have some excellent "Featured Essays," I also highly recommend Kevin Young's article (and video) about the impact of the sanctions on Venezuela; in light of the climate crisis, a writer asks why we don't nationalize the fossil fuel industry so we can shut it down; a strong article that reminds us how much we owe to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and why we should defend him; and a trio of excellent articles in "Our History."
Rewards!
The Newsletter's rewards this week are from one of my favorite groups, Hudson Valley Sally. Here are some of my favorites; there are lots more on-line: (Fred Small's) "Annie"; (Pete Seeger's) "Sister Moon"; and (Phil Och's) "The Power and The Glory." Enjoy!
Best Wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
The Silence Is the Loudest Sound [Kashmir, India, and Pakistan]
By Arundhati Roy, New York Times [August 15, 2019]
---- As India celebrates her 73rd year of independence from British rule, ragged children thread their way through traffic in Delhi, selling outsized national flags and souvenirs that say, "Mera Bharat Mahan." My India is Great. Quite honestly, it's hard to feel that way right now, because it looks very much as though our government has gone rogue. Last week it unilaterally breached the fundamental conditions of the Instrument of Accession, by which the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India in 1947. In preparation for this, at midnight on Aug. 4, it turned all of Kashmir into a giant prison camp. Seven million Kashmiris were barricaded in their homes, internet connections were cut and their phones went dead. … Today Kashmir is one of the most or perhaps the most densely militarized zone in the world. More than a half-million soldiers have been deployed to counter what the army itself admits is now just a handful of "terrorists." If there were any doubt earlier it should be abundantly clear by now that their real enemy is the Kashmiri people. What India has done in Kashmir over the last 30 years is unforgivable. An estimated 70,000 people, civilians, militants and security forces have been killed in the conflict. Thousands have been "disappeared," and tens of thousands have passed through torture chambers that dot the valley like a network of small-scale Abu Ghraibs. … When it ends, as it must, the violence that will spiral out of Kashmir will inevitably spill into India. It will be used to further inflame the hostility against Indian Muslims who are already being demonized, ghettoized, pushed down the economic ladder, and, with terrifying regularity, lynched. The state will use it as an opportunity to close in on others, too — the activists, lawyers, artists, students, intellectuals, journalists — who have protested courageously and openly. [Read More]
What Happens in El Norte Doesn't Stay in El Norte
By Rebecca Gordon, Tom Dispatch [August 17, 2019]
By Rebecca Gordon, Tom Dispatch [August 17, 2019]
---- It's hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco's Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala. On February 26, 2015, two undercover police officers shot him six times in the back, although they would claim he'd been running toward them with an upraised butcher knife. For two years, members of my little Episcopal church joined other neighbors in a weekly evening vigil outside the Mission police station, demanding that the district attorney bring charges against the men who killed Amílcar. When the medical examiner's office continued to drag its feet on releasing its report, we helped arrange for a private autopsy, which revealed what witnesses had already reported -- that he had indeed been running away from those officers when they shot him. … Still, this isn't really an article about Amílcar, but about why he -- like so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans in similar situations -- was in the United States in the first place. It's about what drove 225,570 of them to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2018 and 132,887 of them to be picked up at or near the border in a single month -- May -- of this year. As Dara Lind observed at Vox, "This isn't a manufactured crisis, or a politically engineered one, as some Democrats and progressives have argued." It is indeed a real crisis, not something the Trump administration simply cooked up to justify building the president's wall. But it is also absolutely a manufactured crisis, one that should be stamped with the label "made in the U.S.A." thanks to decades of Washington's interventions in Central American affairs. [Read More]
Banning U.S. Congresspersons from Israel
By Richard Falk, [August 18, 2019]
---- Israel's decision to ban these two members of Congress can at best be considered 'an unfriendly act' by Israel toward its unconditional ally. This alone should persuade a self-respecting U.S. Congress to react with much more than a few empty words of disapproval. At the very least, a message of censure should be formally endorsed by the House of Representatives, and delivered to the Israeli government, which strongly discourages further visits to Israel by members of Congress until Israel announces a policy of allowing entry any American official to visit Israel without restrictions. Perhaps, a more suitable alternative would be to urge banning members of the Knesset until Israel welcomes as visitors any and all members of the UN Congress without conditions. A further appropriate step would be to condition any approval of future military or economic assistance to Israel on lifting the ban on future visits by government officials, but also ideally by all American citizens regardless of political views; After all, American taxpayers have long paid their share of the annual aid package of at least $3.8 billion, the greatest per capita amount given to any country in the world. [Read More] Netanyahu's banning of the two congresswomen has consequences that are still unfolding. For some early assessments, read "Political upheaval over Tlaib/Omar shows power of BDS — more than liberal Zionism, violent resistance," by Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss [August 17, 2019] [Link]; "Now is the time for the Democratic Party to stand up to Israeli racism," by Nada Elia, Mondoweiss [August 15, 2019] [Link]; and "Tlaib and Omar Make Things Clear About South Africa's Successor," by Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [August 18, 2019] [Link].
WAR & PEACE
Here Are Five Lies About Iran That We Need to Refute to Stop Another Illegal War
By Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept [August 14 2019]
---- The Trump administration's lies on the topic of Iran are now beyond parody. There is, however, nothing funny about them. U.S. government lies can have deadly consequences: Never forget that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children, not to mention more than 4,400 U.S. military personnel, are dead today because of the sheer volume of falsehoods told by the George W. Bush administration. So it is incumbent upon journalists to do in 2019 what we collectively did not do in 2003: Check the facts, challenge the lies, debunk the myths. … Let's be clear: Many of the accusations leveled by Western governments and Western media organizations against Iran — it is a serial violator of human rights; it is complicit in Bashar Assad's murderous attacks on his own people; it backs Hamas and Hezbollah, it is a promoter of anti-Semitism — are undeniably true. But the five lies that are constantly deployed by politicians and pundits to justify military action against Iran, and even regime change in Tehran, are flat-out false. And if they are not called out, we will soon find ourselves embroiled in another bloody Middle East conflict that will make the war in Iraq look like a walk in the park. [Read More]
The Saudi Arabia War in Yemen
Long Range Attack On Saudi Oil Field Ends War On Yemen
By Bernard, Moon of Alabama [August 18, 2019]
---- Today Saudi Arabia finally lost the war on Yemen. It has no defenses against new weapons the Houthis in Yemen acquired. These weapons threaten the Saudis economic lifelines. This today was the decisive attack. … The war on Yemen that MbS started in March 2015 long proved to be unwinnable. Now it is definitely lost. Neither the U.S. nor the Europeans will come to the Saudis help. There are no technological means to reasonably protect against such attacks. Poor Yemen defeated rich Saudi Arabia. The Saudi side will have to agree to political peace negotiations. The Yemeni demand for reparation payments will be eye watering. But the Saudis will have no alternative but to cough up whatever the Houthi demand. The UAE was smart to pull out of Yemen during the last months. Its war aim was to gain control of the port of Aden. Its alliance with southern Yemen separatist who now control the city guarantees that. How long they will be able to hold on to it when Khamenei rejects a division of Yemen remains to be seen. Today's attack has an even larger dimension than marking the end of the war on Yemen. That Iran supplied drones with 1,500 kilometer reach to its allies in Yemen means that its allies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have access to similar means. [Read More]
The War Against Venezuela
Washington Intensifies Its Collective Punishment of Venezuelans
By Kevin Young, NACLA [August 14, 2019]
---- On August 5, the Trump administration issued an executive order escalating its sanctions against Venezuela. The order froze all Venezuelan government assets in the United States and threatened third parties around the world with punitive action if they trade with the Venezuelan government. The next day, National Security Adviser John Bolton delivered a speech to a meeting of foreign governments in Lima, Peru. "We are sending a signal to third parties that want to do business with the Maduro regime: proceed with extreme caution," he said. "There is no need to risk your business interests with the United States." In response, the Nicolás Maduro government cancelled its negotiations with self-proclaimed "interim president" Juan Guaidó, which had been scheduled for later that week in Barbados. The Venezuelan foreign minister plausibly speculated that Washington was "trying to dynamite the dialogue." The move is the Trump administration's latest escalation of its coup campaign in Venezuela. In August 2017, Trump imposed sanctions that cut off the government's access to U.S. financial markets. In January 2019, it recognized the right-wing Guaidó when he anointed himself president and imposed sanctions that prevented Venezuela's state oil company from exporting to the United States. … The sanctions will remain in place at least as long as Trump and Maduro are in office, making economic recovery almost impossible. And since most Democrats support the sanctions, a potential Democratic president after 2020 might even keep them in place. [Read More] Old friend Kevin Young has also made a film, "Venezuelans Under Siege / Venezuela frente las sanciones": check it out here. Linked at the same site is a useful/interesting primer about the situation in Venezuela: "Hands Off Venezuela: A Reader on Capitalism, Imperialism, Revolution, and Crisis," compiled by the Organization for a Free Society.
War in Africa?
U.S. Generals Worry About Rising Russian and Chinese Influence in Africa, Documents Show
By Nick Turse, The Intercept [August 13, 2019]
---- The Trump administration and the Pentagon have repeatedly warned that China and Russia are expanding their influence across Africa, where the two longtime American adversaries "interfere with U.S. military operations and pose a significant threat to U.S. national security interests," national security adviser John Bolton said last December. That view was echoed by the former head of U.S. Africa Command, Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, who left the job last month, and his replacement, Stephen Townsend, both of whom testified publicly before Congress earlier this year. But the two generals went further in written responses to Congress obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, describing an Africa ever more likely to fall under the sway of Beijing and Moscow — with Russia exerting influence in as many as 10 different African countries and China likely to open more bases across the continent. [Read More]
THE HUMAN-CAUSED CLIMATE CRISIS
Time has come to nationalize the US fossil fuel industry
By Carla Santos Skandier, ROAR Magazine [August 15, 2019]
---- No other generation understands better the implication of climate change than today's teens. As sixteen year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has famously summarized it, "this is an emergency." But despite this emergency, the response from national governments has been to hype up the private sector as the silver bullet capable of providing the financial means and innovations needed to address climate change — even when the private sector itself is pointing out it can neither fund the massive costs nor create the technological breakthroughs necessary to do the job at the pace and scale required. Over the past few months a handful of US politicians, spurred by a youth-led climate mobilization, have started to wrap their heads around of what it will actually take to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change in the country. This has led to the introduction of the Green New Deal Resolution back in February, and the recently proposed Climate Emergency Resolution. Despite their different purposes, the proposed resolutions agree in one aspect of the climate fight; if we are to successfully transform our energy system in the next decade mobilization efforts will need to resemble those taken during World War II. But let's be clear about how WWII was fought in political-economic terms: when the private sector got in the way of defeating fascism, it was removed from the equation. If we want to win our fight against the fossil fuel industry, we need to center a similar commitment to nationalization. [Read Morfe]
THE DEMOCRATS AND THE 2020 ELECTION
Progressive Candidates Are Carving a Path to the Senate in 2020 — No Thanks to Chuck Schumer
By Ryan Grim, et al., The Intercept [August 15 2019]
---- A bevy of new progressive Senate challengers have launched their own highly credible campaigns outside Schumer's orbit, with others threatening to do so. If Democrats do manage to seize the Senate chamber and make Schumer the majority leader — gaining four seats, or three seats and the presidency — it will be in large part due to the work of an organized left. But before they can help Schumer become majority leader, first they'll have to get past Schumer and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. In state after state, the fight at the heart of the Democratic Party is playing out: What kind of candidate is most likely to appeal to voters? In most (but not all) states, the preferred establishment candidate is white and leans moderate, while the left is in most cases (though not all) organizing around progressive candidates of color. This is the same battle we saw in the House Democratic primaries in 2018 — one that is also playing out in the 2020 presidential race — and its outcome will shape what kind of party takes power, or doesn't, in 2021. [Read More]
Bernie Sanders: Criticizing the Israeli Gov't is not anti-Semitic & Palestinians Deserve Rights
From Middle East Monitor [August 2019]
---- US Democratic candidate and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has said that criticising Israeli government policy is not anti-Semitic. … Asking Sanders directly "why does it matter to you to fight to end the occupation," the Vermont Senator responded: "All that I have ever said about this issue is that US foreign policy should be even-handed. We respect Israel. Israel has every right in the world to live in peace and security, but so do the Palestinian people." Sanders also used the opportunity to double down on his previous promise to use US aid to Israel to pressure the Israeli government to end its now 52-year-old occupation. "The United States gives a whole lot of money to Israel," Sanders conceded, adding that "I think we can leverage that money to end some of the racism that we have recently seen in Israel". … Sanders' comments on anti-Semitism will likely be seen as a timely intervention in a raging debate – both within the US and around the world – as to what constitutes anti-Semitism. Last week the US State Department revised its definition of anti-Semitism to include "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis", adding to the number of examples included in the definition which directly relate to Israel. Many of these examples mirror those in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, which has been widely adopted by organisations and political parties. … The IHRA definition has since been deemed unfit for purpose on the grounds that it was "never meant to serve as a catch all definition for anti-Semitism". One of the definition's creators, US attorney Kenneth S Stern, has criticised the way in which the IHRA definition is now being used to restrict academic freedom and punish free speech, particularly when it comes to pro-Palestine events and any criticism of Israel. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES/"THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR"
The Prosecution of Julian Assange Affects Us All
By Nozomi Hayase, Counterpunch [August 16, 2019]
---- With the indictment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the imprisonment of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, we are seeing the US government's blatant attack on the First Amendment. This assault now is officially acknowledged by a US federal court, where the judge dismissed a Democratic National Committee (DNC) civil suit against WikiLeaks on the grounds of First Amendment protections that apply to all journalists. Assange, who has become a political prisoner in this war on the free press, was charged under the Espionage Act over publications exposing the US illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. … From the election in Kenya and the Icelandic revolution to the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, WikiLeaks' publications sparked a global uprising. Courage brought by this fearless journalism became contagious. Months after the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks cables had bolstered a peaceful youth movement against the political corruption of the media in Mexico. Revelations of Cablegate burst into Latin America, having a fresh impact on corrupt politics, changing media and public perspectives on major issues. It affected the course of a presidential election in Peru, transformed the media in Brazil, and in two countries led to the departure of US ambassadors. … The impulse for justice that Assange brought to us, together with his sources' courage, calls all to ignite our moral indignation. It urges us, of our own volition, to bear the burden of those truth-tellers who have sacrificed so much of their lives in order to defend the public's right to know. Only through each person choosing to act with courage to claim and exercise the creative power inherent in free speech, can we free those prisoners of conscience and achieve our shared goal of justice. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
'Christian left' is reviving in America, appalled by treatment of migrants
By Laura E. Alexander, The Conversation [August 18, 2019]
---- Holding pictures of migrant children who have died in U.S. custody and forming a cross with their bodies on the floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, 70 Catholics were arrested in July for obstructing a public place, which is considered a misdemeanor. The protesters hoped that images of 90-year-old nuns and priests in clerical collars being led away in handcuffs would draw attention to their moral horror at the United States' treatment of undocumented immigrant families. American Catholics, like any religious group, do not fit neatly into left-right political categories. But ever more they are visibly joining the growing ranks of progressive Christians who oppose President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric and federal agencies' negligent, occasionally deadly treatment of immigrants on his orders. … Talk of an emerging "religious left" is ahistoric. American Christianity has always had its liberal strains, with pastors and parishioners protesting state-sponsored injustices like slavery, segregation, the Vietnam War and mass deportation. But the high profile, religiously based moral outrage at Trump's immigration policies does seem to be spurring some long-overdue rethinking of what it means to be Christian in America. [Read More]
---- Holding pictures of migrant children who have died in U.S. custody and forming a cross with their bodies on the floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, 70 Catholics were arrested in July for obstructing a public place, which is considered a misdemeanor. The protesters hoped that images of 90-year-old nuns and priests in clerical collars being led away in handcuffs would draw attention to their moral horror at the United States' treatment of undocumented immigrant families. American Catholics, like any religious group, do not fit neatly into left-right political categories. But ever more they are visibly joining the growing ranks of progressive Christians who oppose President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric and federal agencies' negligent, occasionally deadly treatment of immigrants on his orders. … Talk of an emerging "religious left" is ahistoric. American Christianity has always had its liberal strains, with pastors and parishioners protesting state-sponsored injustices like slavery, segregation, the Vietnam War and mass deportation. But the high profile, religiously based moral outrage at Trump's immigration policies does seem to be spurring some long-overdue rethinking of what it means to be Christian in America. [Read More]
A Fascist Threat in the USA?
Riotlandia: Why Portland Has Become the Epicenter of Far-Right Violence
By Arun Gupta, The Intercept [August 16, 2019]
[FB – This article was published earlier this week, prior to Saturday's demonstration and anti-fascist counter-demonstration. As it happened, the situation was dangerous, but violence was minimized. Read some local coverage here and see some video of the stand-off here.]
---- Portland, Oregon is bracing for a storm of far-right violence. In July, Joe Biggs, a former staffer at the far-right conspiracist site Infowars announced an "End Domestic Terrorism" rally in Portland this Saturday. Its aim: the local antifa movement. … Portland has joined Berkeley, New York, Charlottesville, and Seattle as liberal cities that have become flash points for far-right violence since Donald Trump took office in 2017. But Portland is unique in that the far right has turned the city into a regular battleground. Why Portland? The city presents a unique mix of past and present white nationalism; policing that enables the far right; weak political leaders; and a legacy of antifascist organizing. Combined, these elements allow the far right to stage violent spectacles with few legal consequences against their ideological enemies — antifa, liberals, so-called PC culture, cities — while using social media to glorify the violence as a recruiting tool and proof of their racial and masculine virility. [Read More] On the larger topic of how the government should counter fascist groups, read "To Fight White Supremacist Violence, Let's Not Repeat the Mistakes of the War on Terror," by James Risen, The Intercept [August 17, 2019] [Link].
Civil rights lawyer: 20 ways Trump is copying Hitler's early rhetoric and policies
By Steven Rosenfeld. Salon [August 13, 2019]
---- A new book by one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America's constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler's extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s — when the Nazis took power in Germany. In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America's constitutional foundation in 2019 — an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority — is not positioned to withstand Trump's extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, "Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?," extensively details Trump's mimicry of Hitler's pre-war rhetoric and strategies. … Here's how Neuborne introduces this section. Many recent presidents have been awful, "But then there was Donald Trump, the only president in recent American history to openly despise the twin ideals — individual dignity and fundamental equality — upon which the contemporary United States is built. When you confront the reality of a president like Trump, the state of both sets of brakes — internal [constitutional] and external [public resistance] — become hugely important because Donald Trump's political train runs on the most potent and dangerous fuel of all: a steady diet of fear, greed, loathing, lies, and envy. It's a toxic mixture that has destroyed democracies before, and can do so again. "Give Trump credit," he continues. "He did his homework well and became the twenty-first-century master of divisive rhetoric. We're used to thinking of Hitler's Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn't take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump's bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic. It fell into their hands as the fruit of Hitler's satanic ability to mesmerize enough Germans to trade their birthright for a pottage of scapegoating, short-term economic gain, xenophobia, and racism. It could happen here." [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Uncle Sam Was Born Lethal
By Paul Street, Counterpunch [August 16, 2019]
---- The United States enjoys historically unprecedented global power on a scale the fascist Third Reich's leaders dreamed of achieving but never remotely approached. Still, I sometimes worry about reaching beyond American history to label horrors of its own making. Longstanding foundational aristo-republican U.S. white-settler nationalism and its state-military-capitalist, imperialist, and corporatist evolution has long been disastrous and dystopian… Fascism won't come to America. It will emerge out of American history. Yes, "it could happen here," to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis 84 years ago, with "it" meaning an fascism. But let us not turn away from how terrible and dangerous what had already happened here and what is happening now, richly consistent with a savagely racist, patriarchal, ecocidal, authoritarian, and classist Americanism that is as old as this criminal, savagely merciless and "exceptional" nation itself. [Read More]
The Boycott's Abolitionist Roots
By Willy Blackmore, The Nation [August14, 2019]
---- Lucretia Mott did not wear cotton. Wool was her choice of fabric for the long Philadelphia winters; she wore linen or silk when the weather was hot. Her husband, James Mott, had for a time worked as a cotton merchant, but ultimately quit to trade in wool. He left for the same moral reasons that drove Lucretia's abstinence: As adherents of the Free Produce Movement, an abolitionist effort led by Quakers in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Motts did not buy or consume any goods made with slave labor—period. This meant that in addition to abstaining from buying or wearing cotton, the Motts went out of their way to buy staples like rice, coffee, and tea, and nonfood items like tobacco and indigo dye from sources besides the American South or the Caribbean. Lucretia was even particular about her sweets: maple sugar over cane. … "Free Produce was not successful if you look at it purely in terms of results," Holcomb said. "The number of people who supported it, it was a very small movement overall. But the lasting legacy of Free Produce is that they managed to transform a consumer choice into something more"—a moral standard, a vision for the future. In that sense, the contemporary counterparts to Free Produce are not the knee-jerk boycotts but highly organized movements like BDS that use boycotts as a means to a broader end. [Read More]
The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the 'white gold' that fueled slavery.
AUG. 14, 2019
[FB - The New York Times Magazine is running a series of interesting articles call The 1619 Project, to commemorate and reflect on the 400th anniversary of the coming of slavery to North America. Here is an example, the most recent publication.]
---- None of this — the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health — was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren't for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work. [Read More]
