Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
April 26, 2020
Hello All – Next Friday is May Day, the international workers' holiday that had its origins in Chicago in 1886 and is celebrated still in many countries around the world. Adopted by the Soviets after the 1917 revolution, May Day waxed and waned with the rise and fall of the communist movement; in the USA it was a victim of the McCarthy period. In recent years, in the United States is has been resuscitated, becoming a vehicle for protests by immigrants and others. Throughout its history, May Day has symbolized solidarity and working-class autonomy; perhaps its moment is coming – or has come – again.
Of course, May Day! May Day! has become part of 20th century culture in another way, as a call of distress – Help Me! – when a plane is on a crash course. And so the dots begin to connect themselves, as the Plague Year in the Age of Trump demonstrates day after day that the good ship "We the People" is in grave danger, threatened by the tsunami of health, climate, and economic crises engulfing us. And so in the absence of a government that protects us and meets pressing needs, people are rising up in protest – medical workers demanding safe working conditions, "essential workers" demanding personal protection and adequate pay, rent strikes beginning Friday (see below), and mutual aid projects that bring food and comfort to those who need it from those who can give it.
On Friday, May 1st, CFOW will hold a May Day rally in Hastings in support of the millions of essential workers who are keeping our country going, and in particular in support of the US Postal Service and its more than 600,000 employees, essential workers who will do the heavy lifting if our elections become "vote by mail," but whose jobs and the Post Office itself are threatened by privatization. Indeed, on Friday President Trump reiterated his threats to prevent the Postal Service from receiving any virus-related federal aid, even though its losses because of the epidemic are thought to be about $13 billion. – So please join CFOW on Friday, May 1st, to celebrate May Day with a rally in support of our millions of essential workers, and in support of the Post Office and postal workers. Details about time and place will be posted on the CFOW Facebook page.
News Notes
Whether or not New York will have a Democratic presidential primary is now down to the wire, with a decision by the Democratic Election Commissioners due Monday. The supposed reason for canceling the primary is that the race is over, with Sanders suspending his campaign and endorsing Biden. But Sanders has not withdrawn from the New York race, in which – along with some two dozen more primaries to come – he hopes to gain delegates to strengthen his campaign's ability to influence the Party and the Convention. Sanders' delegates in New York have been very active in pressuring the Election Commissioners, demanding that democracy not be curtailed and that the primary go forward. If you agree with these positions, please call or email the Democratic Election Commissioners tomorrow morning. For Douglas Kellner, call (518) 474-6336 and/or email douglas.kellner@elections.ny.gov; and for Andrew Spano, email andrew.spano@elections.ny.gov. Just say, "Don't cancel the Democratic presidential primary."
Hastings and nearby towns are served each year by a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, now planning to open on June 3 and seeking more households to participate in the weekly "shares" of fresh produce grown locally. For information about how this works, here's the link - www.stoneledge.farm/csa-program/csa.cfm?csaID=11. To contact the local coordinator, email hastingscsa@gmail.com.
The Democratic primary to fill Nita Lowey's congressional seat (D-17) is contested by more than a dozen candidates. The main danger is that David Carlucci, one of the infamous "Independent Democrats" who voted with the Republicans in Albany, may squeak through a field including several progressive candidates, who will divide the progressive vote. An article in Thursday's edition of The Intercept examined the recent filings of the candidates' financial supporters, which show (among other things) that alleged progressive Evelyn Farkas is in fact strongly backed by the Military-Industrial Complex and donors connected with big pharma, big tobacco, etc. Check out "Donors to Top Fundraising Democrat in New York Congressional Race Include John Negroponte, George W. Bush's Intelligence Chief."
Finally, CFOW's Andy Ryan, known to many of you as a stalwart for peace and justice, has set up a GoFundMe page to raise money to help his son in Ohio hire a lawyer. Please check out Andy's page and his explanation of the situation here, and make a contribution if you can. Thanks.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Until shut down by the virus, we have been meeting for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) In this time of coronavirus, we are meeting (by Zoom conference) each Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. If you would like to join our meeting, please send a return email to get the meeting's access code. 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!
This week's Rewards offer some classic films that carry on the spirit of May Day. First up is "Salt of the Earth," the story of a strike by Mexican-American workers made in 1947 by blacklisted Hollywood film people and a largely amateur cast. Next up is "With Babies and Banners," the story of the Women's Emergency Brigade that helped win the strike of the General Motors sit-down strike of 1936-37. This wonderful film combines documentary footage with interviews with the old fighters. Finally, something more modern: "The Take," a film by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis about workers in Buenos Aires who, in the wake of their country's economic collapse in 2001, occupied an abandoned auto factory and set about running it themselves. Lot's of action and thought-provoking lessons for us all. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
Annals of the Plague Year
With Millions Unable to Pay for Housing Next Month, Organizers Plan the Largest Rent Strike in Nearly a Century
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [
---- Want a grim picture of the state of American dissent during the coronavirus pandemic? Take an overview of media coverage from the last week. The press focused disproportionate attention on a few hundred white reactionaries, in a small number of states, rallying against social distancing measures — buoyed, of course, by tweets from President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, some of the most radical and righteous acts of mass resistance this country has seen in decades — from a wave of labor strikes to an explosion of mutual aid networks — are earning but a fraction of the media focus accorded to fringe, right-wing protesters. Based on mainstream news coverage alone, for instance, you'd likely never know that organizers and tenants in New York are preparing the largest coordinated rent strike in nearly a century, to begin on May 1. [Read More] To continue one of the topics raised in this article, also useful is "How the Tiny 'Reopen' protest movement was Astroturfed and boosted by Fake Grassroots Tactics" by Marc Ambinder, The Conversation [April 26, 2020] [Link] For lots of news about rent strikes now underway, read "Rent Protests Deserve Far More Attention Than Right-Wing Funded Gatherings Against Stay-At-Home Orders" from Shadowproof.
Inequality and the Coronavirus: Or How to Destroy American Society From the Top Down
By Liz Theoharis, Co-Chair, Poor People's Campaign [April 22, 2020]
---- In order to respond to such a crisis and the growing needs of millions, it's important to first acknowledge the deeper history of injustice and pain that brought us all here. In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., put it well when he said that "the prescription for the cure rests with an accurate diagnosis of the disease." To develop a cure not just for this virus but for a nation with the deepest kind of inequality at its core, what's first needed (as with any disease) is an accurate diagnosis. … Hasn't the time finally come to reject the false narrative of scarcity? Isn't it time to demand a transformative moral agenda that reaches from the bottom up? If the wealthy were to pay a relatively modest amount more in taxes and we shrank our war economy to support the common good, then universal health care, living wages, and a guaranteed income, decent and affordable housing, strong programs for the poor, and even more might finally be within reach. This crisis is offering us a striking demonstration of how an economy oriented around the whims of the rich brings death and destruction in its wake. A society organized around the needs of the poor, on the other hand, would improve life for all of us — and especially in this Covid-19 moment, exactly this might be possible. [Read More]
Did This Virus Come From a Lab? Maybe Not – But It Exposes the Threat of a Biowarfare Arms Race
[FB – I hesitated to put this article in the newsletter, because it raises issues similar to those of some conspiracy theories, and to the China-bashing that Trump has picked up again in an effort to deflect attention from his own mess-making. But Husseini is an excellent investigator, known by me for years, and I stress that what Husseini is asserting here is not that the coronavirus COVID-19 was made in a lab in China (or anywhere else), but that the world is endangered by programs underway in many countries to weaponized viruses and perfect weapons for bioterrorism. Our present health crisis illustrates how dangerous/damaging these weapons can be, whether used intentionally or released into the world through accident.]
---- Dangerous pathogens are captured in the wild and made deadlier in government biowarfare labs. Did that happen here? There has been no scientific finding that the novel coronavirus was bioengineered, but its origins are not entirely clear. Deadly pathogens discovered in the wild are sometimes studied in labs – and sometimes made more dangerous. That possibility, and other plausible scenarios, have been incorrectly dismissed in remarks by some scientists and government officials, and in the coverage of most major media outlets. Regardless of the source of this pandemic, there is considerable documentation that a global biological arms race going on outside of public view could produce even more deadly pandemics in the future. While much of the media and political establishment have minimized the threat from such lab work, some hawks on the American right like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., have singled out Chinese biodefense researchers as uniquely dangerous. But there is every indication that U.S. lab work is every bit as threatening as that in Chinese labs. American labs also operate in secret, and are also known to be accident-prone. [Read More]
What the Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us
By
[FB - Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. I've read some of his novels, my favorite is My Name is Red, a murder mystery set in the world of book illustrators in 16th-century Istanbul.]
---- For the past four years I have been writing a historical novel set in 1901 during what is known as the third plague pandemic, an outbreak of bubonic plague that killed millions of people in Asia but not very many in Europe. Over the last two months, friends and family, editors and journalists who know the subject of that novel, "Nights of Plague," have been asking me a barrage of questions about pandemics. They are most curious about similarities between the current coronavirus pandemic and the historical outbreaks of plague and cholera. There is an overabundance of similarities. Throughout human and literary history what makes pandemics alike is not mere commonality of germs and viruses but that our initial responses were always the same. The initial response to the outbreak of a pandemic has always been denial. National and local governments have always been late to respond and have distorted facts and manipulated figures to deny the existence of the outbreak. … The knowledge that the whole of humanity, from Thailand to New York, shares our anxieties about how and where to use a face mask, the safest way to deal with the food we have bought from the grocer and whether to self-quarantine is a constant reminder that we are not alone. It begets a sense of solidarity. We are no longer mortified by our fear; we discover a humility in it that encourages mutual understanding. [Read More]
This Week's Featured Essays
Will the Corruption of Trump's America End on a Ventilator or in a Mushroom Cloud
---- Little by little, Americans are understanding just how badly our government has let us down by its belated and disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and how thousands more people are dying as a result. But there are two other crises we face that our government is totally unprepared for and incapable of dealing with: the climate crisis and the danger of nuclear war. … Sanders may have lost the Democratic nomination, but he successfully demonstrated that Americans don't have to be passive in the face of a corrupt political system that is leading us down a path to self-destruction. We do not have to accept a dysfunctional for-profit healthcare system; ever-worsening inequality and poverty; structural racism and mass incarceration; an overheated, dying natural world; or a military-industrial complex that fears peace more than a nuclear apocalypse. A political system that is structurally incapable of acting for the common good, even when millions of lives are at stake, is not just failing to solve our problems. It is the problem. Hopefully, as we struggle to emerge from today's tragic pandemic, more and more Americans are understanding that healing our sick, corrupt political system is the vital key to a healthy and peaceful future. [Read More]
What Progressives Could Teach Joe Biden About Foreign Policy
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor of The Nation [April 21, 2020]
---- After receiving Senator Bernie Sanders's endorsement, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden invited the Vermont progressive into a policy dialogue, setting up six joint task forces—all on domestic issues—to find common ground. Nothing similar has been announced on foreign policy, but Matt Duss, Sanders's foreign policy adviser, reported that Biden's advisers "want to be engaged in the conversation to make the platform stronger." If so, there are several critical initiatives that Biden should embrace. … There are already some areas in which the vice president has taken the right stance, including his support for the War Powers Resolution introduced by Sanders and Khanna to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia's savaging of Yemen. But a unity platform has to go beyond easy gestures. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) put it, the process of coming together "should be uncomfortable for everyone involved. . . . If Biden is only doing things he's comfortable with, then it's not enough." [Read More]
(Video) Bill McKibben on Earth Day at 50: We Must Stop Subsidizing Fossil Fuel Industry Wrecking the Planet
From Democracy Now! [April 22, 2020]
---- Today marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, when more than 20 million Americans joined in actions to protect the environment — 10% of the U.S. population at the time. Half a century later, in the middle of a pandemic, protests planned around the world have moved online, and the Trump administration has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency — established not long after Earth Day — rolled back fuel economy standards and eased the enforcement of pollution regulations. "The countries that flattened the coronavirus curve early on are doing far better than those like ours, which delayed," says Bill McKibben, author, educator, environmentalist and co-founder of 350.org. "That's a pretty perfect analog to the 30 years that we've wasted in the climate crisis [See the Program]. Also of interest is McKibben's recent article in The Nation, "This Earth Day, Stop the Money Pipeline."
Israel's unity government protects Netanyahu from prosecution, paves the way for annexation
By Mitchell Plitnick, Responsible Statecraft [April 21, 2020]
---- Now Netanyahu can more comfortably go along with the U.S. timetable. Trump has indicated that he wants to get back to his "Deal of the Century" soon, but the COVID-19 crisis has brought everything to a halt. July 1 would seem to be an optimistic target for finding a way to move forward with annexation in a way Trump's Arab partners would be comfortable with. Netanyahu, who wants to be both the Israeli prime minister who extends sovereignty over the West Bank and who simultaneously opens relations with the monarchies in the Persian Gulf, will be happy to stick with Trump's timetable as long as the pressure from his right is not too intense. Gantz just gave him that flexibility. Both Trump and Netanyahu will want to move annexation forward ahead of the U.S. election in November. It fits with Trump's campaign strategy of focusing on his base, but for both Netanyahu and Gantz, the concern is that Trump might not win. As staunchly pro-Israel as presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is, he opposes annexation. Biden believes that the two-state process, which was finally buried under his watch as Barack Obama's vice president, remains the only way forward. … Gantz was never going to stop annexation, but his partnership with Netanyahu will now make it easier for the new government to move forward on it in a more effective way. Coupled with the personal protection Gantz has afforded the prime minister, the former opposition leader got precious little for his surrender. [Read More]
Our History
Lorraine Hansberry's Radicalism
By Elias Rodriques, The Nation [April 21, 2020]
[FB – This is a review of Looking for Lorraine The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, by Imani Perry. NB Lorraine Hansberry lived in Croton-on-Hudson.]
---- Most people these days know Hansberry for A Raisin in the Sun, a play that took housing segregation as its subject. But as Imani Perry chronicles in her new biography, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, the revolutionary Hansberry has long been hidden in plain sight. A Raisin in the Sun is often understood as the story of a black family fighting racist housing discrimination to purchase a home in a white neighborhood. Yet Hansberry always insisted that the play was not simply about black people's right to spend their money freely. It was also a critique of employment discrimination, Northern white racism, and American poverty. Hansberry's death in 1965, at the age of 34, curtailed her work's more radical, materialist, and socialist analyses. Later liberal histories of the civil rights era would likewise narrow the scope of a movement that was opposed not only to segregation and disenfranchisement but also to the inequalities and violence that capitalism and liberalism produced—a set of concerns central to Hansberry's oeuvre. [Read More]
A Pandemic Nearly Derailed the Women's Suffrage Movement
By Ellen Carol DuBois, National Geographic [April 20, 2020]
---- "These are sad times for the whole world, grown unexpectedly sadder by the sudden and sweeping epidemic of influenza," wrote Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, in a letter to supporters in 1918. "This new affliction is bringing sorrow into many suffrage homes and is presenting a serious new obstacle in our Referendum campaigns and in the Congressional and Senatorial campaigns," she continued. "We must therefore be prepared for failure." Suffragists had been fighting for women's right to vote for 70 years, and victory seemed almost in reach. Even with the United States fully mobilized for World War I. President Woodrow Wilson had come out in support of a constitutional amendment, and the House of Representatives had passed it. Then the Spanish flu struck, and the leaders of one of the longest-running political movements in the country's history had to figure out how to continue their campaign in the midst of the deadliest pandemic in modern times. [Read More]
