Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 30, 2020
Hello All – Today's newsletter begins with a request that readers take a few minutes to defend the right of asylum. The Trump administration, whose contempt for would-be immigrants and indeed all people of color is well known, has formally promulgated a new Rule that will govern the details of how one goes about applying for refuge and asylum. The new regulations are contained in a lengthy Homeland Security document. We have until July 15th to submit thousands of "Comments" saying NO to ending any meaningful chance to apply for asylum in the USA.
It's easy to Comment. Clicking on this line - https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EOIR-2020-0003-0001 – will take you to a form to make your comment. This is not an essay contest; your comment should make it clear that you are OPPOSED to the new rule (your first sentence). Then write two or three sentences (or more!) about why the USA should continue to offer asylum, why many people coming to the USA are desperate to obtain asylum, and/or why offering asylum to people in fear of their lives is what America should be all about. If you would like to read up on this issue, an immigration lawyer has recommended two brief but cogent articles - https://www.law360.com/access-to-justice/articles/1282494/planned-asylum-overhaul-threatens-migrants-due-process and https://www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21288063/trump-immigration-asylum-border-regulation. Please share this request/info. Thanks.
Striking another blow against the right to asylum, the Supreme Court this week ruled that asylum seekers do not have the right to appeal the ruling of an immigration judge. As Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation this week, an asylum seeker "can be arrested for crossing the border without the proper documents, detained until a Custom and Border Protection agent gets around to reviewing their claim, have that claim denied by an immigration judge (who is not really a "judge" but a federal employee who works for Attorney General William Barr), and then detained indefinitely until the government boots them out of the country. And all of this can be done without their ever getting to talk to a lawyer, because asylum seekers have no constitutional right to an attorney." Mystal compares this ruling to the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, on the eve of the US Civil War: "A border crosser has no rights which the white man is bound to respect." There seems no relief in sight for asylum seekers until Trump is defeated in November and an aroused country demands compassion and achieves justice.
The Korean War Remembered
This week marks that 70th anniversary of the Korean War (1950-53, with no peace agreement yet). These days the war has achieved enough prominence to be called "The Unknown War," but when I was growing up in the 1950s it was a family secret involving Commie Aggression and whispers that we didn't win. Even today there are still 28,000 US troops in Korea, and the main debate is not when they will come home, but how much money South Korea should be paying for them to stay there. Historian Bruce Cumings has spent a long life studying, writing, and speaking about Korea, and it is to him that we owe much of the perspective we have on the war 70 years ago and why it is still at the center of a possible nuclear showdown today. Throughout his work on Korea, Cumings stresses the needs and wishes of the Koreans themselves (and not just the Pentagon) about reuniting their families and country; check out this user-friendly interview in which Cumings puts the events of Korea today into perspective, and a recent segment on Democracy Now!, where he discusses the devastation brought to Korea during the war ("More Destructive Than Damage to Germany, Japan in WWII") [Link].
News Notes
In Westchester, and around the USA, the many disasters so far encountered with trying to run primary elections during the coronavirus plague has raised serious questions about whether democracy can function in the November 2020 presidential election. A few days ago The New York Times put up a useful article titled "From 47 Primaries, 4 Warning Signs About the 2020 Vote" [Link]. The Times identifies money, a shortage of poll workers, a shortage of paper things like ballots, and a tsunami of misinformation and incompetence as the root causes of the election problems. A petition calling on the Westchester Board of Legislators to hold hearings on voting concerns and election problems can be signed here. The Board of Legislators has announced a hearing/meeting with the County's Election Commissioners during the week of July 20th [Link]. I'm sure there will be many more events and things to do in the next few weeks.
On Tuesday morning, The New York Times reported that the coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 10 million people world wide, and that more than 500,000 had died. Last week PBS Frontline put up a 90-minute film that attempts to capture the story so far. I say "so far," because it's clear that we have many more months – perhaps two years – of the pandemic. Check out "The Virus: What Went Wrong?"
Mehdi Hasan of The Intercept broadcast a podcast/interview with Mondaire Jones last week entitled "The Rise of the Left." Check it out here.
Temperatures reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the first day of summer in Siberia. This is of course not normal. According to a useful article on this disaster, "the Arctic is warming at roughly twice the rate of the globe as a whole." "Western Siberia recorded its hottest spring on record this year, according the EU's Copernicus Earth Observation Program, and that unusual heat isn't expected to end soon. The Arctic Climate Forum has forecast above-average temperatures across the majority of the Arctic through at least August." As we have learned over the last few years, such dramatic changes in the temperature of the Arctic changes the weather everywhere else.
Last Friday The New York Times published one of those maddening stories with no specific facts and no named sources that will dominate our news cycles for a long time to come. I'm referring to the claim that the Russians paid (one or more) bounties to (someone connected with) the Taliban to kill Americans, and this in fact happened one or more times. Why the Russians might or might not do this, and why – after 19 years of war – the Taliban would need an incentive payment to kill Americans, is addressed in a user-friendly way by Prof. Juan Cole in an article published on Sunday. It's a fairly safe prediction that the original claim in this story – that the Russians did something and the Taliban did something – will be left behind in the news cycles devoted to what did Trump know, why he didn't do anything, what the Russians are up to, and should the USA retaliate? Just hours after The Times' story was published, Rachel Maddow gave us a preview of what this will look like. The Zombie Cold War rises from the dead.
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 reward is once again from Sweet Honey in the Rock. Someone posted "Ella's Song" on the CFOW Facebook page this week, and I couldn't stop listening. "Ella" of course is Ella Baker, the Teacher of the Civil Rights movement who shared her skills in organizing and solidarity with the young SNCC workers of the early 1960s. To learn some basics about Ella Baker, check out the Ella Baker Center. To learn about SNCC – the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee of the early 1960s – make your first stop the (Howard) Zinn Education Project. And to hear more fabulous music from Sweet Honey in the Rock, start here.
Best wishes
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
THE UPRISING AND THE CRISIS
What is Owed [Reparations]
By Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times Magazine [June 24, 2020]
[FB – Please read this powerful essay; it will be famous soon.]
---- No one can predict whether this uprising will lead to lasting change. History does not bode well. But there does seem to be a widespread acceptance of the most obvious action we could take toward equality in a nation built on the espoused ideals of inalienable, universal rights: pass reforms and laws that ensure that black people cannot be killed by armed agents of the state without consequence. But on its own, this cannot bring justice to America. If we are truly at the precipice of a transformative moment, the most tragic of outcomes would be that the demand be too timid and the resolution too small. If we are indeed serious about creating a more just society, we must go much further than that. We must get to the root of it. … To summarize, none of the actions we are told black people must take if they want to "lift themselves" out of poverty and gain financial stability — not marrying, not getting educated, not saving more, not owning a home — can mitigate 400 years of racialized plundering. Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this country worked against black Americans doing the same. "The cause of the gap must be found in the structural characteristics of the American economy, heavily infused at every point with both an inheritance of racism and the ongoing authority of white supremacy," the authors of the Duke study write. "There are no actions that black Americans can take unilaterally that will have much of an effect on reducing the wealth gap. For the gap to be closed, America must undergo a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies." At the center of those policies must be reparations. "The process of creating the racial wealth chasm begins with the failure to provide the formerly enslaved with the 40 acres they were promised," Darity told me. "So the restitution has never been given, and it's 155 years overdue." [Read More] And for some interesting ideas about how reparations can begin: "Banks Should Face History and Pay Reparations," by Angela Glover Blackwell and [Link]. Also interesting is "If You Want to Let Freedom Ring, Hammer on Economic Injustice," by [Link].
(Video) Scholar Robin D.G. Kelley on How Today's Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally Change the Country
An interview with Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept [
---- We are living in a moment of change and upheaval, a time of immense pain and suffering, but also a time of hope and tremendous possibility. We are nearing four years of an incompetent but dangerous authoritarian — Donald Trump — occupying the most powerful office in the land. We are in the midst of the deadly coronavirus pandemic. And we are just four months away from presidential and congressional elections. But we are also in a moment of great reckoning, because of the courage and determination of activists, the Movement for Black Lives, and good people across the country. This reckoning is a confrontation of the legacy of racism and genocide upon which this nation was built. Monuments to slave owners, traders, and Confederate generals are being pulled down as the uprising against police violence has regained momentum. A new generation of abolitionists is picking up the mantle and building upon the work of the activists, scholars, and martyrs who came before them.. [See the Program]
"What Law Did We Break?" How the NYPD Weaponized a Curfew Against Protesters and Residents
By Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept [
[FB – Please read this enraging account of police terror in NYC.]
---- While New York City's curfew is now over, important questions remain. For six days, law enforcement had a pretext to openly conduct the kind of crackdown that would normally take place in the shadows. In the span of a week — May 28 through June 4 — the NYPD arrested more than 2,500 people for their involvement in activities related to the protests against police violence, more than any other protest-related multiday arrest total in recent memory. Nearly 1,350 people were issued summonses for curfew violations, a majority of them Black or Hispanic, and contrary to the claims coming out of City Hall, many of those arrests were violent. Despite the fact that just a few weeks prior, New York City was considered the global epicenter of the coronavirus, individuals who were cited for curfew violations were physically processed through the system, rather than being issued a ticket. Once in custody, some arrestees reported that the masks they were wearing to protect themselves from Covid-19 were taken by the NYPD. Public defenders saw others disappear into the system altogether, whereabouts unknown, for up to 24 hours. [Read More]
Black Lives Matter Protests Are Everywhere, Even in the Unlikeliest Places
By Zoë Carpenter, The Nation [June 25, 2020]
---- While massive crowds and police crackdowns rocked major cities, countless other demonstrations occurred in small cities and towns—even in conservative areas with no history of protest. … Laramie [Wyoming] is one of thousands of communities across the country where protests sparked by Floyd's killing have upended business as usual. While massive crowds and violent police crackdowns rocked New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other major cities, countless other demonstrations occurred out of the spotlight in small and midsize cities, in rural towns, and in remote unincorporated communities—in all 50 states, even in white, conservative areas with little to no history of protest. The scale of the movement is unprecedented and, weeks after Floyd's death, it was still rippling across the country, spreading and blooming like scattered seeds. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
(Video) With the World Focused on the Pandemic, Israel Prepares to Annex Large Swaths of the West Bank
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept [June 18, 2020]
---- Israel is planning a move on July 1 that the international community has long regarded as one of the gravest assaults on the international order and international law: annexation of land that does not belong to it. The annexation plan developed by the Netanyahu government in consultation with the Trump administration would declare not only the decades-old settlements in the West Bank which the U.N. Security Council in 2016 declared illegal to be permanent Israeli land, but also other swaths of Palestinian territory, including the Jordan Valley, that is central to Palestinian agriculture. … Regardless of motives, it is virtually certain that annexation of any part of the West Bank would trigger intense pressure in the west to impose serious sanctions on Israel. The last significant annexation took place in 2014, when Russia declared Crimea a formal part of its country, and that event triggered multi-level sanctions from the west despite the fact that a large majority of people in Crimea wanted to be part of Russia rather than Ukraine. Palestinians, needless to say, are virtually unanimous in their opposition to further control over their land and their lives by a foreign occupying government that grants them no political rights of any kind. Any attempt by the west to avoid sanctioning a post-annexation Israel would destroy whatever residual credibility is vested in their claims of a consistent system of international law. [FB - The program also includes an interview with Palestinian human human rights activist Omar Barghouti, one of the co-founders of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that is almost certain to see increased support if annexation occurs.] [See the Program] Also useful/important is "Will Biden remain tone deaf to Palestinian rights?" byJune 23, 2020] [Link]
(Video) Palestinian Scholar Noura Erakat: Israeli Forces Killed My Cousin on His Sister's Wedding Day - From Democracy Now! [June 24, 2020]
[FB – Noura Erakat is one of our era's great scholars on Israel/Palestine and an impassioned speaker. Please check this out.]
---- Israeli soldiers on Tuesday killed 27-year-old Ahmed Erekat at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank as he was on his way to pick up his sister, who was set to be married that night. Ahmed Erekat is the nephew of senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and cousin of Palestinian American legal scholar Noura Erakat, who says Israeli claims that Ahmed was attempting a car-ramming attack on soldiers are completely unfounded. … The entire world stops asking questions the moment you say Hamas, the moment you say Palestinian violence, the moment you say Palestinian resistance. It's as if we expect that to be a carte blanche to kill as many Palestinians as possible. They did it with [21-year-old paramedic] Razan al-Najjar. They did it with Iyad el-Hallak. They did it with Ahmed yesterday. [See the Program]
OUR HISTORY
How Modern Human-Driven Climate Change began with European colonisation, mass slavery and the 'great dying' of the 16th century
By Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis, The Conversation [June 29, 2020]
---- The toppling of statues at Black Lives Matter protests has powerfully articulated that the roots of modern racism lie in European colonisation and slavery. Racism will be more forcefully opposed once we acknowledge this history and learn from it. Geographers and geologists can help contribute to this new understanding of our past, by defining the new human-dominated period of Earth's history as beginning with European colonialism. …In the Americas, just 100 years after Christopher Columbus first set foot on the Bahamas in 1492, 56 million indigenous Americans were dead, mainly in South and Central America. This was 90% of the population. Most were killed by diseases brought across the Atlantic by Europeans, which had never been seen before in the Americas: measles, smallpox, influenza, the bubonic plague. War, slavery and wave after wave of disease combined to cause this "great dying", something the world had never seen before, or since. [Read More]
"Silence is not an option": Black Women Make History
By Keisha N. Blain, Roar Magazine [June 28, 2020]
---- While we know that the majority of Black people killed by police in the United States are young men, we distort the narrative when we only focus on Black men. Despite several high-profile cases throughout the years that have placed a spotlight on how state-sanctioned violence shape Black women's experiences — including Sandra Bland, Korryn Gaines, and most recently, Breonna Taylor — there is still a perception among many Americans that Black women are somehow shielded from the threat of police violence. Black women's concerns are still sidelined in public discussions about policing. I think the response to this issue — or lack of a response — is rooted in misogyny. … Black women are key voices in the struggle to end anti-Black police violence and dismantle structural racism. They are key voices now and they have always been key voices — especially because their lives have been directly impacted by police violence and racism. [Read More]
