Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
August 9, 2020
Hello All – The multiple crises engulfing the USA are about to get worse. To our crises of dysfunctional democracy, Covid-19, and the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s, millions of low- and middle-income Americans are about to face eviction and lose the income supplement paid to those receiving unemployment benefits. It is completely predictable that the ensuing suffering will provoke outrage and disruption, widening the protests against police and police violence to include strongholds of economic power.
When the extent of economic disaster caused by Covid-19 became apparent in early March, most states and the federal government passed laws instituting a moratorium on evictions. But the federal moratorium, which applied to landlords taking part in federal programs and covered about one-third of renters, expired at the end of July; and the New York State program was narrowed on June 20 to require that tenants must show in eviction court that they are without income due to the Covid-19 crisis. Courts resumed hearing eviction cases last week. As the states with a moratorium in place have different rules, it is hard to tell just how many tenants are facing their day in court; but estimates put the number between 17 million and 28 million.
Even keeping current with rent, let alone dealing with an arrears sheltered by the moratorium, will be difficult for millions of people. Employment/hiring last month was offset by an equal number of layoffs, and millions of low-income workers were kept afloat with the $600 weekly supplement to their unemployment compensation. Now this supplement is in doubt, and additional millions will be facing homelessness and privation.
What can be done to alleviate this crisis and what will people do when no assistance arrives? The most practical measure is embodied in legislation introduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar list April that would cancel rent and mortgage payments while sending federal paypments directly to landlords and mortgage holders. Needless to say, it is unlikely that something so simple would get through Congress. While patchwork alternatives at the state and local level may reduce the disaster to millions, millions more will be facing homelessness and destitution next month.
I expect that in cities and other places where Black Lives Matter has been strong, people of color and their allies will make concerted efforts to block or disrupt eviction courts, block sheriffs attempting evictions, and demand of municipalities that they take responsibility for defending those who are not responsible for the crisis overturning their lives. As "Portland" has shown, people facing oppression or desperate circumstances can be very creative. As with Black Lives Matter, we must use all our resources and skill to ensure that a roof over your head and basic subsistence is a human right that can be denied to none. This fight is too important to lose.
News Notes
This week Joe Biden will finally announce his choice for his Vice President running mate. He has stated that he will choose a woman. Media favorites now trending include Sen. Kamala Harris and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice. Both would tilt the campaign towards its conservative side on many issues important to the progressive wing (peace, Black Lives Matter, etc.). Now more than 300 Democratic National Convention delegates (the Sanders people, etc.) are pushing for Karen Bass, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus. Read a useful analysis by John Nichols of The Nation here.
The protests around the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement have highlighted the successful campaigns of progressive candidates for big-city District Attorneys. Last November Chessa Boudin was elected DA in San Francisco, and three years ago civil rights attorney Larry Krassner became DA in Philadelphia. This trend continued last Tuesday, when reformers in Arizona, Michigan, Missouri, and New Mexico won their primary races to be the Democratic DA candidates in their cities. [Read More]
The death penalty has been abolished in 30 states and is active in 20. Though the federal government has passed laws enabling capital punishment, until a few weeks ago federal capital punishment had not been used for 17 years. Then, suddenly, three death row prisoners were executed in states that had abolished the death penalty. And more federal executions are scheduled. Why are Trump and Barr doing this? Read "Blood in the Water: Disregarding the Virus and Victims' Families, Trump Rushes to Execute as Many People as Possible" by Liliana Segura, The Intercept [[Link].
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Taking the Covid Crisis into account, we meet (with safe distancing) for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 11 to 11:30 a.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Another vigil takes place on Mondays, from 6 to 6:30 pm, in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. 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!
Best Wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
Today is the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, as last Thursday was the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Both in 1945 and today, the bombing of Hiroshima is at the center of attention: Why was the bomb used? Was it "necessary" to end the war? But similar questions are rarely asked about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. This week a German version of PBS posted an informative 40-minute documentary film, "Nagasaki and the Second Bomb." Like much of the material about the impact of the Bomb on Hiroshima civilians, the survivors of the Nakasaki bombing – the Hibakusha – tell much of the story. Unlike the canonical narrative of US commentators that using the Bombs saved a million American lives, the German film adopts the view of recent scholars that Japan would have surrendered in mid-August without using either Bomb, as Japan's surrender was primarily driven by the intervention of Russia into the war on August 8th. The Bombs were used for other reasons: what were they?
FEATURED ESSAYS
Over 1,100 Policing Agencies in the U.S. Have Bought Drones Capable of Recording
By Nick Mottern, Truthout [August 6, 2020]
[FB – Nick Mottern lives in Hastings, is a member of CFOW, and maintains the website www.knowdrones.com.]
---- In early June, Julie Weiner was at a Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Yonkers, New York, when she spotted a small drone in the sky, monitoring the protest. Weiner, a long-time Yonkers resident, immediately asked her city councilperson, Shanae Williams, who had organized the rally, whether the drone was being operated by the Yonkers police. Williams went over to talk to a group of police and returned to report that, yes, the drone belonged to the Yonkers Police Department. … The Yonkers case illustrates how local police can be swept up in the surge of entering surveillance data into massive, unregulated computer cloud systems and artificial intelligence programs that present a threat of intensified police and military vigilantism, particularly to people of color. … A March 2020 study by the Bard College Center for the Study of the Drone finds that at least 1,103 law enforcement agencies across the United States have purchased drones and that there has been a dramatic increase in their use since 2014. The report says, however, that the number of police drones in use is likely higher because the study did not include "agencies with undisclosed drone programs or federal agencies." Increasing pressure for police to engage in surveillance with Evidence.com (and similar systems) self-generates simply through the almost inevitable use of digitized police data and the adding of piece after piece of data-gathering gear. [Read More]
A Virus Has Brought the World's Most Powerful Country to Its Knees
By Ed Yong, The Atlantic [August 9, 2020]
---- How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet's most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom. In the first half of 2020, SARS‑CoV‑2—the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID‑19—infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the world's population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths. These numbers are estimates. The actual toll, though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens. Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. … Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I've learned that almost everything that went wrong with America's response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. [Read More]
---- How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet's most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom. In the first half of 2020, SARS‑CoV‑2—the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID‑19—infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the world's population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths. These numbers are estimates. The actual toll, though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens. Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. … Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I've learned that almost everything that went wrong with America's response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. [Read More]
130 Degrees [Climate Crisis]
By Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books [August 20, 2020 Issue]
[FB – This is a review of Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas.]
---- So now we have some sense of what it's like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, seeing your parents—shifts dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will you have a job? Will you die? Will you ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? It's unlike anything we've ever seen. The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a harbinger of global warming. Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we're living through now. The main question is whether we'll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization. The latter is a distinct possibility, as Mark Lynas's new book, Our Final Warning, makes painfully clear. … The pandemic provides some useful sense of scale—some sense of how much we're going to have to change to meet the climate challenge. We ended business as usual for a time this spring, pretty much across the planet—changed our lifestyles far more than we'd imagined possible. We stopped flying, stopped commuting, stopped many factories. The bottom line was that emissions fell, but not by as much as you might expect: by many calculations little more than 10 or 15 percent. What that seems to indicate is that most of the momentum destroying our Earth is hardwired into the systems that run it. Only by attacking those systems—ripping out the fossil-fueled guts and replacing them with renewable energy, even as we make them far more efficient—can we push emissions down to where we stand a chance. Not, as Lynas sadly makes clear, a chance at stopping global warming. A chance at surviving. [Read More]
How New Voting Machines Could Hack Our Democracy
By Jennifer Cohn, New York Review of Books [December 17, 2019]
---- The United States has a disturbing habit of investing in unvetted new touchscreen voting machines that later prove disastrous. As we barrel toward what is set to be the most important election in a generation, Congress appears poised to fund another generation of risky touchscreen voting machines called universal use Ballot Marking Devices (or BMDs), which function as electronic pens, marking your selections on paper on your behalf. Although vendors, election officials, and others often refer to this paper as a "paper ballot," it differs from a traditional hand-marked paper ballot in that it is marked by a machine, which can be hacked without detection in a manual recount or audit. These pricey and unnecessary systems are sold by opaquely financed vendors who use donations and other gifts to entice election officials to buy them. Most leading election security experts instead recommend hand-marked paper ballots as a primary voting system, with an exception for voters with disabilities. … For this reason, many analysts have cautioned against acquiring these new ballot-marking machines for universal use, but election officials in at least 250 jurisdictions across the country have ignored their advice. [Read More] To keep up to date on the voting machine/election issue, sign up at Citizens for Voting Integrity.
(Video) Beirut Explosion Follows Years of Lebanese Gov't Incompetence & Corruption
Democracy Now! interviews journalist Rami Khouri [August 5, 2020]
[FB – The protests in Lebanon set off by this week's massive explosion could destabilize much of the region. This program and the article below serve as a primer for what's going on, and an antidote to what we can expect from the mainstream media.]
---- The explosion in the Port of Beirut, which killed at least 100 people and injured about 4,000 others, is the latest blow to Lebanon, which already faces an economic, political and public health crisis amid the coronavirus pandemic. The blast is believed to have been triggered by 2,700 tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate inexplicably left unattended in a warehouse for six years. Journalist Rami Khouri says it's further proof of "the cumulative incompetence, corruption, lassitude, amateurism and uncaring attitude by successive Lebanese governments" that have failed the country. "It's the ruling political elite that is responsible for this," he says. [See the Program] Also insightful is a post today by Middle East historian Juan Cole, "Beirut: 'Day of Judgment' Protesters Occupy Gov't Buildings, Banking Assn., Forcing New Elections,"
OUR HISTORY
How Not to Lose the Lockdown Generation [The New Deal v. today]
By Naomi Klein, The Intercept [
[FB – What if government policies worked to make people's lives better? No, can't be done, not here in the USA. But it has been done, here in the USA. Read on….]
---- … It's worth letting that sink in, given the learned helplessness that pervades the U.S. today. For months, the White House hasn't been able to figure out how to roll out free Covid-19 tests at anything like the scale required, let alone contact tracing, never mind quarantine support for poor families. Yet in the 1930s, during a much more desperate economic time for the country, state and federal agencies cooperated to deliver not just free tests but free houses. … The National Youth Administration [The NYA] served as a kind of urban complement to FDR's better-known youth program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, launched two years earlier. The CCC employed some 3 million young men from poor families to work in forests and farms: planting more than 2 billion trees, shoring up rivers from erosion, and building the infrastructure for hundreds of state parks. They lived together in a network of camps, sent money home to their families, and put on weight at a time when malnutrition was epidemic. Both the NYA and the CCC served a dual purpose: directly helping the young people involved, who found themselves in desperate straights, and meeting the country's most pressing needs, whether for reforested lands or more hands in hospitals. [Read More]
The Radical James Baldwin
By Laura Tanenbaum, Jacobin Magazine [August 2020]
[FB – A useful review of the recent book by Bill Mullen, James Baldwin: Living in Fire]
---- Baldwin saw things through an anticolonial lens early on, shaped by an interest in the nonaligned movement and the years he spent witnessing the impact of the Algerian War on France during his formative years there. When he condemned the Vietnam War, he did so in terms similar to Martin Luther King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech: as a participant in Bertrand Russell's tribunal which sought to document and condemn war crimes. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin's 1963 book, came out of his sympathetic engagement with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam; the leader's religious struggles resonated with him deeply. And while Baldwin's relationship to the Black Panthers was complicated by Eldridge Cleaver's homophobic attacks against him, he formed deep relationships with others in the party, and the vitality of black nationalist culture was central to Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone and other works of the period. For Baldwin, black nationalism was never a question of "separatism" or a departure from the struggle for civil rights; it was an expansion to an internationalist and, increasingly, a socialist vision. [Read More]
