Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
May 24, 2020
Hello All – The deeper meaning of "Memorial Day," like many American holidays, is up for grabs. In my grandparents' time it was "Decoration Day," the continuation of a 19th century tradition of decorating the graves of those who died in the Civil War. But like so many American traditions, Decoration Day was gobbled up in the Cold War and became a day to remember the war dead not just because they died, but because they had made America great. A recent email from the Village of Hastings, for example, spoke of "the brave and selfless men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect and preserve the luxury and freedom we enjoy here in the United States."
Ah, if it were only that simple. It's long past the time to move beyond the wars against fascism between 1939 and 1945, and to ask how "freedom" has been protected by the wars in Korea and Vietnam, or the more recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The wars of our modern era have been accompanied by a massive attack on civil liberties; the "war on terror," for example, has effectively ended the right to privacy in the USA, as all of phone calls and email messages are swept up in a vast collection project by federal agencies looking for "bad guys." To the extent that "our freedoms" have been protected, the heavy lifting of protecting them has been done by courts and lawyers and citizen advocates, not by the Pentagon.
'Preserving our luxury" is something else again. When we consider that millions of people, non-combatants, have been killed in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, we should ask what they got out of "preserving our luxury." Does American prosperity depend on bringing terror and death to people across the globe? Moreover, as the United States is now one of the countries with the most unequal distribution of wealth and income in the world, where 40 percent live in or near poverty, and where more than a quarter of our children go to bed hungry each night, we should look closer at this "luxury" bestowed on us by our wars. Then we see that the "luxury" produced by war is limited to war profiteers, to the one percent, and to the fossil fuel and military production corporations that do so well out of war. And the veterans of those wars, those who did not make "the ultimate sacrifice," but simply came home – often damaged – and tried to pick up the pieces of their lives. How is "luxury" working for them?
Indeed, it is time to recognize that our need today if for human security, not just a big military machine. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed many weaknesses of our society that our military is helpless to address, let alone repair. Perhaps one day, not too far in the future, our Memorial Day will honor those who worked and sacrificed for our human security – our peace workers, our medical workers, our teachers, those who put food on our tables, or those who just helped their neighbors.
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
This week we encourage peace & justice stalwarts to send off two emails to Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, urging her to support important legislation that cannot move forward in the state legislature without her support. So for those who live in her District, please do this right away, as action may/may not come as soon as Tuesday. Email scousins@nysenate.gov or call her office in Albany at (518) 455-2585.
The first issue is immigrant health overage in COVID-19 relief legislation. Senate Bill 8366 would extend Essential Plan coverage to income-eligible New Yorkers who have had confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 and who are otherwise ineligible for coverage because of their immigration status. Their exclusion is both unjust and foolish, endangering the health of others. Email or call Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins and ask her to support SB 8366.
The second issue is the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act, which targets the NYS pension fund, which has $12 billion invested in the fossil fuel industry, including more than $4 billion in fracking operations. Please call or email Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins and ask her to bring the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act (S.2126A) to a vote this session. And for some useful background information on fossil fuel divestment, go here.
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!
The coronavirus lockdown has stifled protest against Trump and his Agenda, but satire, parody, and humor remain strong. Sarah Cooper has become famous just by lip-synching the words of Our Leader. Randy Rainbow and Roy Zimmerman have retrofitted the Mess in the White House to classics of American theater. And a new generation of impersonators is emerging. Enjoy! (And h/t BT)
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
ANNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEAR
"The way we get through this is together": the rise of mutual aid under coronavirus
By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian [UK] [May 14, 2020]
---- One of the biggest clichés about disasters is that they reveal civilisation as a thin veneer, beneath which lies brutal human nature. From this perspective, the best we can hope for from most people under crisis is selfish indifference; at worst, they will swiftly turn to violence. Our worst instincts must be repressed. This becomes a justification for authoritarianism and heavy-handed policing. But studies of historical disasters have shown that this is not how most people actually behave. There are nearly always selfish and destructive people, and they are often in power, because we have created systems that reward that kind of personality and those principles. But the great majority of people in ordinary disasters behave in ways that are anything but selfish, and if we're stuck with veneer as a metaphor, then it peels off to reveal a lot of creative and generous altruism and brilliant grassroots organising. With the global pandemic, these empathic urges and actions are wider and deeper and more consequential than ever. [Read More]
Coronavirus and the End of American Exceptionalism
----With Covid-19, the very idea of American exceptionalism may have seen its last days. The virus has put the realities of wealth inequality, health insecurity, and poor work conditions under a high-powered microscope. Fading from sight are the days when this country's engagement with the world could be touted as a triumph of leadership when it came to health, economic sustenance, democratic governance, and stability. Now, we are inside the community of nations in a grim new way -- as fellow patients, grievers, and supplicants in search of food and shelter, in search, along with so much of humanity, of a more secure existence. [Read More]
Inside Trump's coronavirus meltdown
By Edward Luce, Financial Times [UK] [May 14, 2020]
---- What has gone wrong? I interviewed dozens of people, including outsiders who Trump consults regularly, former senior advisers, World Health Organization officials, leading scientists and diplomats, and figures inside the White House. Some spoke off the record. Again and again, the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie, led by his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner – the property developer who Trump has empowered to sideline the best-funded disaster response bureaucracy in the world. People often observed during Trump's first three years that he had yet to be tested in a true crisis. Covid-19 is way bigger than that. "Trump's handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has exposed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First," says William Burns, who was the most senior US diplomat, and is now head of the Carnegie Endowment. "America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America's influence and reputation will be very hard to undo." [Read More]
Covid-19 Isn't the Only American Health Epidemic
By Augie Lindmark, The Nation [May 21, 2020]
---- If there are medical conditions that would force people otherwise resistant to seeking medical care into the health system, a deadly virus is one of them. But not even Covid-19 has wiped away hesitation born of financial fear. Last month, a Gallup poll reported that 14 percent of Americans would avoid health care because of the cost if they developed symptoms of Covid-19. This number was higher among low-income individuals and people of color. Testing, contact tracing, social distancing, and treatment are all important components of pandemic responses. But the efficacy of these tools is blunted by a splintered health system that bars easy access to care. Perhaps the greatest risk of this pandemic is that we'll come out on the other side with an unchanged health care system—one that causes harm. [Read More]
FEATURED ESSAYS
Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy?
Editorial, New York Times [May 23, 2020]
[FB – On Memorial Day – or any day – this is an important question to ask – and answer.]
---- It is time to rename bases for American heroes — not racist traitors. … Secessionists embarked on the Civil War to guarantee the rights of some human beings to own others, or the fact that the Confederate banner represents the same white supremacist values as — and is often displayed in tandem with — the Nazi swastika. Military installations that celebrate white supremacist traitors have loomed steadily larger in the civic landscape since the country began closing smaller bases and consolidating its forces on larger ones. Bases named for men who sought to destroy the Union in the name of racial injustice are an insult to the ideals servicemen and women are sworn to uphold — and an embarrassing artifact of the time when the military itself embraced anti-American values. It is long past time for those bases to be renamed. [Read More]
A Trump Second Term: Tyranny by Another Name
By Van Gosse, Organizing Upgrade [May 23, 2020]
---- We must stop hoping that the millions of Republicans who supported Trump's opponents in 2016, and believe themselves to be law-abiding people, will object to an ever-more authoritarian government. Of course, not every Republican is a hater or a permanent enemy. But their class interest and racial blinders—functionally the same thing—precludes any rocking of the boat. They have gained greatly under him, and the consequences of admitting his increasing despotism, in terms of personal ruin and moral responsibility, would be very grave. Here is the parallel from our history of authoritarian governments. For three-quarters of a century, the overwhelming majority of southern whites defended the Jim Crow system as natural and fitting. … Given the real possibility of Trump winning again via votes suppressed and votes bought, just enough to take the Electoral College, we face a stark necessity. The majority must mass together to defeat Trump and crush Trumpism. We cannot stay where we are, we will move forward or we will move back. Democracy, all that we have fought for and not-yet achieved, is on the line. [Read More]
There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy
By Joel Whitney, Jacobin [May 2020]
[FB – This is a review of the recent collection of Arundhati Roy's nonfiction writings/essays, My Seditious Heart.]
---- It's possible to mark time in Indian politics by how long it's been since Arundhati Roy has pissed off the government. Her meticulous, two-decades-long dissection of India's unsustainable development, its Islamophobic Hindu nationalism and caste violence, alongside the United States' pursuit of global empire has been proven accurately, darkly predictive. When India's December law restricting Muslim citizenship passed, readers of Roy's essays had a framework, going back two decades, within which to place these developments. By midwinter, Muslims were being beaten and lynched in the streets of the capital. This was shocking but not unprecedented, and readers of her essays recalled her warnings over mass killings in Gujarat in 2002, an early flashpoint that she describes explicitly as a contemporary genocide… The title of the essays nods to Roy's power to rile state prosecutors and their media allies. The former are prone to slapping her with charges (since the first novel appeared) and the latter to camping outside her house and haranguing her for her perceived "anti-national" treachery.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE – AS ANNEXATION APPROACHES
[FB – The newly formed government of Israel – headed now by the indicted Benjamin Netanyahu – has announced that Israel will annex some 30 percent of the West Bank, part of the Occupied Territories. This is illegal under international law, and will decisively end any practical prospects for establishing a Palestinian state; thus ending the "two-state solution" that is the façade of US policy towards Israel/Palestine. – Here are some essays that frame this development and speculate about what comes next.]
Some Historical Background
The Nakba Did Not start or End in 1948
From Aljazeera [May 23, 2020]
---- Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world, numbering about 12.4 million, mark the Nakba, or "catastrophe", referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near-total destruction of Palestinian society in 1948. The Palestinian experience of dispossession and loss of a homeland is 69 years old this year. On that day, the State of Israel came into being. The creation of Israel was a violent process that entailed the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish a Jewish-majority state, as per the aspirations of the Zionist movement. Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres. [Read More] Why this remains important: "Why Israel Elites Fear the Nakba: How memory became Palestine's greatest weapon," by [Link]
What Happens Now?
Palestine: The third way forward
By Marwan Bishara, Aljazeera [May 19, 2020]
---- Since the catastrophic Arab failure in the 1948 and 1967 wars led to total Israeli control over historic Palestine, the Palestinians have been trying to recover their losses, but to no avail.
Refugees and prisoners in their own homeland, they have tried armed struggle and peaceful negotiations with equal vigour, but have failed to get justice or attain peace. Both strategies entailed great sacrifice and major concessions, but ultimately neither led to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli domination. Worse, Israel's appetite for expansion has grown with every Palestinian concession, and now its delusion of invincibility is driving it to illegally annex almost a third of what the Palestinians assumed would be their future state. Regardless of whether it actually formalises its de facto annexation or not, Israel is already radically and unilaterally changing the reality on the ground. So now what? What to do? What not to do? [Read More]
Will Mahmoud Abbas really stop PA collaboration with Israel?
---- Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas announced for the umpteenth time on Tuesday that he is canceling all agreements with Israel, in protest over the occupying power's plans to forge ahead with annexation of large parts of the West Bank. Meanwhile, the European Union has bowed to Israeli pressure once again. "The Palestine Liberation Organization and the State of Palestine are absolved, as of today, of all agreements and understandings with the American and Israeli governments," Abbas told a gathering of officials in Ramallah, adding that this included security agreements. I told Al Jazeera that Abbas routinely makes such statements, but that there was no reason to take this one any more seriously than previous announcements.
Biden won't allow 'daylight' between U.S. and Israel in public, an aide assures Israel lobby group
ByMay 18, 2020]
---- Palestinians must recognize the "right and reality of Jewish state," and US left is "equally wrong" to Trump in not criticizing Palestinians for their failure to do so, says Biden aide Tony Blinken, signaling that Biden will be far more supportive of Israel than Obama was. [Read More]
Democratic senators release letter warning Israel against annexation
By Melissa Weiss, Jewish Insider [May 21, 2020]
---- On Thursday, a group of Democratic senators released a letter they have been working on for weeks, warning Israeli leaders against unilaterally annexing portions of the West Bank.
The letter, signed by 18 Democratic senators and authored by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Tim Kaine (D-VA), is a watered-down version of the letter the trio drafted and distributed to fellow senators earlier this month. The initial draft threatened that unilateral annexation would end bipartisan congressional support for Israel. … A second draft of the letter, which softened the original language, was circulated among Senate offices and gained additional signatories. [Read More]
