Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
March 8, 2020
Hello All – It looks like COVID 19 (the coronavirus) may be with us for months, perhaps for years. It is already starting to be the wallpaper of our lives. We ask ourselves: Will I get sick? Will the schools close? Will my job last? Will our cities and towns stay strong or break down? The virus is forcing us to think about how we live, and how we live with each other, in new and difficult ways.
An early lesson is that the "public" in public health means everybody. It matters to me if my neighbor gets sick, whether he or she is rich or poor, whether they came over on The Mayflower or are refugees from Central America. COVID 19 teaches us that we all have a stake in healthcare for all. If my neighbor gets sick, my children may get sick too.
The virus is also teaching us that it is not enough to have a good doctor and great hospitals; we also need a public health infrastructure that supports basic research, training and preparation for disease outbreaks, and a manufacturing capacity for needed drugs and medical supplies. This infrastructure will not be built by "the free market," by profit-making corporations. Only a government can afford to invest in a public health infrastructure and adequate long-range planning, research, and development.
So COVID 19 teaches us that we need healthcare for all and a strong public health system. What else?
In the last week news reporting and discussion about a new vaccine (some day) and a medicine that has a high success rate in curing someone with the virus has focused on Who will pay? and Who can pay? Much of the research on new medicines is supported in whole or in part by federal funding. When a vaccine for the virus is developed, or a drug that is effective in curing the disease is made, should private corporations be allowed to use this research to produce medicine that is very expensive? Would denying medicine to those who can't pay, or who don't have health insurance, be immoral? Shouldn't medicine be affordable to all?
Also, treatment for the virus goes beyond medicine and opens up another area of inequality in the face of the disease. Even if good treatment and prevention programs are developed, many people may not be able to take advantage of them. For example, many people cannot take time off to be sick or to "self-quarantine." They may have limited sick days or none at all, and must keep working, even when sick, to make ends meet, thus endangering others as well as harming themselves. We must find a way to spread the costs of the virus so everyone receives equal protection and support.
And there will be more lessons from COVID 19 in the months ahead. In sum, they point towards a reorientation of our federal and state government towards building "human security," and curtailing excessive support for profit-making and war
To read more about the coronavirus and "human security" in the USA
The total failure of the Trump Team to understand the coronavirus and to act to combat it produced lots of responses this week. For a sampling, I recommend a roundtable discussion from Thursday's Democracy Now! program, "Coronavirus Is Best Case for Medicare for All"; a New York Times editorial, "With Coronavirus, 'Health Care for Some' Is a Recipe for Disaster"; and a good article from The Intercept, "Coronavirus Matters, the Stock Market Doesn't, and Thinking It Does May Literally Kill Us." More on the medical side, CFOW's Betsy Todd has a useful post in her blog for the American Journal of Nursing on "to mask or not to mask"; today The New Yorker put up an informative article on "How Long Will It Take to Develop a Coronavirus Vaccine?" [Link]; and funnyman John Oliver has a wonderful takedown of the Trump Keystone Medical Corp and their misunderstandings of the coronavirus [Link].
Politics
Understanding what happened on Super Tuesday is important but difficult. Will the results propel Joe Biden into a Convention victory, or does the progressive side still have a good chance? The New Yorker has a useful article about the consolidation of the "moderates" around Biden. Much was made of his support from African-Americans in the South Carolina primary and then on Super Tuesday; and this Democracy Now! roundtable by African-American activists and scholars addresses why this happened and whether African-American support for Biden will continue as the primaries leave the South; and I found the post-election assessments from activists connected with the Organizing Upgrade group helpful. I also recommend "Sexism Sand Elizabeth Warren" from The Nation's Elie Mystal [Link] and "Does the Democratic Establishment Really Fear That Bernie CAN Win in November?" by Jeff Cohen, ZNet [March 4, 2020] [Link].
News Notes
It will come as no great surprise to stalwart Newsletter readers to learn that, in all 2019, of the tens of thousands of news stories broadcast by the three major television networks, less than one percent addressed climate change. While this has been true in the past, that fact that 2019 saw California and Australia on fire and the Green New Deal emerge as a major focus for progressive politics in the USA, the avoidance of this subject by news media that are most influential in how people see the world is scandalous. For a good analysis of what might lie ahead, read "Network News's Climate Disappearing Act—Will 2020 Be Different?" by Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation [March 4, 2020] [Link].
As an oldster still in the Dark Ages re: social media, I have been mystified by how influential it seems to be. I learned a lot about how it works from this in-depth article, "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President" by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic [March 2020] [Link]. The author concludes his essay: "The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers "a mixture of gullibility and cynicism." Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to "believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true."… Should it prevail in 2020, the election's legacy will be clear—not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.
It looks like Israel may have to have a fourth national election in order to form a government. Or something else may happen. For a user-friendly explanation of Israel's political gridlock and the forces behind it, read "Netanyahu, failing to get a majority for the third time, Lashes out at Foes as "Arab Terrorists" and Jewish Terrorist-Lovers" b[Link].
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 the climate crisis, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's immigration policies are often targeted, depending on current events. Also, we (usually) have a general meeting on the first Saturday afternoon of each month. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. 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!
Rewards!
Let's start this week's Rewards for stalwart readers with Hell You Talmbout," from Janelle Monae (h/t AW). And 20 years ago Leonard Cohen wrote "Everybody Knows" for just this American Moment (h/t FA). Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
THIS WEEK'S FEATURED ESSAYS
After I Lived in Norway, America Felt Backward. Here's Why. A crash course in social democracy.
By Ann Jones, Tom Dispatch [January 28, 2016]
[FB – Ann Jones wrote this article four years ago (and it was in the newsletter back then, too), but it was back up on-line today and I realized how appropriate it's message is to our current moment, when "democratic socialism" is actually being debated and (as indicated in the posting just below) when much of our country is on the ropes and nearing collapse. Ann Jones is the author of the excellent book Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan. (2007)]
---- Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting truths about America's disastrous wars, and so I left Afghanistan for another mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family. It's true that they didn't work much–not by American standards, anyway. In the United States, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren't away on long paid vacations. At the end of the workday, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three during the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest, a swim with the kids, or a beer with friends—which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs. Often I was invited to go along. I found it refreshing to hike and ski in a country with no land mines, and to hang out in cafés unlikely to be bombed. Gradually, my war-zone jitters subsided and I settled into the slow, calm, pleasantly uneventful stream of life there. Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent, impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what America's wars have done to America. [Read More]
How Working-Class Life Is Killing Americans, in Charts
By David Leonhardt and March 6, 2020]
---- When the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton first published their research on "deaths of despair" five years ago, they focused on middle-aged whites. So many white working-class Americans in their 40s and 50s were dying of suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse that the overall mortality rate for the age group was no longer falling – a rare and shocking pattern in a modern society. But as Case and Deaton continued digging into the data, it became clear that the grim trends didn't apply only to middle-aged whites. Up and down the age spectrum, deaths of despair have been surging for people without a four-year college degree. … Case and Deaton — a married couple who are both economists at Princeton — try to explain the causes in a new book, "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism." Their basic answer is that working-class life in the United States is more difficult than it is in any other high-income country. "European countries have faced the same kind of technological change we have, and they're not seeing the people killing themselves with guns or drugs or alcohol," Case says. "There is something unique about the way the U.S. is handling this." [Read More] For some excellent companion reading on the same topic, recommended is "Left Behind," a review of the Case and Deaton book and also of "We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America," by Jennifer Silva, from the current New York Review of Books.
'Ruin Our Territory—for What?'
By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours, The Nation [March 5, 2020]
[FB – The stand-off between the native peoples of British Columbia, Canada and the corporate and government powers attempting to force an oil pipeline through their lands has attracted lots of attention, including here in the Newsletter. This remarkable article traces and analyzes the complete arc of the struggle and illuminates by implication the myriad struggles going on by indigenous people (and their allies) around the world to protect civilized society against the depredations of corporate barbarism.]
---- For years, Na'Moks (who also goes by John Ridsdale) and the rest of the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs have been embroiled in conflict with a company called TC Energy and the BC government over the construction of a multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline called Coastal GasLink that would cut through the heart of traditional Wet'suwet'en territory. Wet'suwet'en band councils, who are elected via rules set up by the Canadian government, supported TC Energy's project. But the hereditary chiefs, who hold a more traditional form of authority, oppose it. In late January, as the hereditary chiefs fought to block pipeline construction, their showdown with TC Energy, the BC government, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police exploded into a nationwide solidarity movement in support of Indigenous rights. Long-simmering tensions began to boil over at the end of 2019, after a BC court cleared the way for the pipeline construction and the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs delivered an eviction notice to Coastal GasLink in response. The RCMP raided encampments that the Wet'suwet'en had set up on their land to block construction—and solidarity actions spread across the country. [Read More]
A New Pentagon Papers or the Same old Almost Endless War?
By Howard Machtinger, ZNet [March 6, 2020]
---- The Washington Post's exposure of the failure of this war – in its publication of selections from interviews by the government-instituted Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) as part of its "Lessons Learned" project, as well as confidential emails from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — has attracted amazingly little notice in the reality show that characterizes contemporary American politics. This not only demonstrates the short attention span of the news media, its failure to distinguish what is important from trivial entertainments in its infatuation with the horse race of electoral politics, but the lack of an antiwar movement to ensure public awareness. Despite important similarities, the release of these documents has not constituted a Pentagon Papers moment, but merely another episode in the normalization of war. … The Afghanistan Papers reveal an insider perspective on a failed war that has dragged on for 18 years. Like the Pentagon Papers, these interviews and emails expose a long-term duplicitous policy that kept the truth from the American people and derailed any real accountability for the futility of the warmakers' efforts. The futility of the war is amply demonstrated. Like the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post series also fails to understand the war in the context of an American imperial trajectory. This, of course, is not to be expected of government operatives or mainstream media, but is the work of an authentic antiwar movement. [Read More]
---- The Washington Post's exposure of the failure of this war – in its publication of selections from interviews by the government-instituted Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) as part of its "Lessons Learned" project, as well as confidential emails from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — has attracted amazingly little notice in the reality show that characterizes contemporary American politics. This not only demonstrates the short attention span of the news media, its failure to distinguish what is important from trivial entertainments in its infatuation with the horse race of electoral politics, but the lack of an antiwar movement to ensure public awareness. Despite important similarities, the release of these documents has not constituted a Pentagon Papers moment, but merely another episode in the normalization of war. … The Afghanistan Papers reveal an insider perspective on a failed war that has dragged on for 18 years. Like the Pentagon Papers, these interviews and emails expose a long-term duplicitous policy that kept the truth from the American people and derailed any real accountability for the futility of the warmakers' efforts. The futility of the war is amply demonstrated. Like the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post series also fails to understand the war in the context of an American imperial trajectory. This, of course, is not to be expected of government operatives or mainstream media, but is the work of an authentic antiwar movement. [Read More]
The Real Modi: Do the Killings of Muslims Represent India's Kristallnacht?
---- On 9 to 10 November 1938 the German government encouraged its supporters to burn down synagogues and smash up Jewish homes, shops, businesses, schools. At least 91 Jews – and probably many more – were killed by Nazi supporters egged on by Joseph Goebbels, the minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, in what became known as Kristallnacht – "the Night of Broken Glass". It was a decisive staging post on the road to mass genocide. On 23 February 2020 in Delhi, Hindu nationalist mobs roamed the streets burning and looting mosques together with Muslim homes, shops and businesses. They killed or burned alive Muslims who could not escape and the victims were largely unprotected by the police. At least 37 people, almost all Muslims, were killed and many others beaten half to death: a two-year-old baby was stripped by a gang to see if he was circumcised – as Muslims usually are, but Hindus are not. Some Muslim women pretended to be Hindus in order to escape. Government complicity was not as direct as in Germany 82 years earlier, but activists of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, were reported as being in the forefront of the attacks on Muslims. [Read More] For an excellent and in-depth article that explains the background to India's current crisis, read "India under the BJP's rule: The long fight against Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda" by Achin Vanaik, Solidarity [March 4, 2020] [Link]
Our History
How Did International Women's Day Start?
[FB – This brief history includes a fine video of International Women's Day celebrations around the world. Like so many Days we celebrate (May Day, Mother's Day), International Women's Day was begun by radicals in the USA. A secret well-kept by our high school textbooks.]
---- The impetus for establishing an International Women's Day can be traced back to New York City in February 1908, when thousands of women who were garment workers went on strike and marched through the city to protest against their working conditions. "Like today, these women were in less organized workplaces [than their male counterparts], were in the lower echelons of the garment industry, and were working at low wages and experiencing sexual harassment," says Eileen Boris, Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. [Read More]
