Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 22, 2020
Hello All – For many members of CFOW, it has been decades – if not forever – since we have been involved in a winning election campaign. It is to be devoutly hoped that that moment may be coming (again) tomorrow, when Jamaal Bowman is favored (by polling) to defeat Rep. Eliot Engel in the CD-16 primary election. In many ways Eliot Engel has been a classic Cold War liberal on the model of the late Hubert Humphrey, progressive in most areas of domestic politics – health care, immigration, civil liberties – but hawkish on war and peace issues. Looking forward, we have every confidence that Jamaal Bowman will make a strong, progressive contribution to his district's well-being in domestic issues such as housing, education, "the Green New Deal" and more, while opposing big military budgets and aggressive foreign policies, and supporting real peace efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere.
As an anti-war organization, CFOW clashed with Eliot Engel since Day One. From our inception 19 years ago, the day after 9/11, CFOW has protested against the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the war in Syria, the threatened war against Iran (but in support of the Iran nuclear agreement), the threatened war against Venezuela, and the war in Yemen, the world's greatest humanitarian disaster. We have also protested the steady march of bigger and bigger military budgets, the emergence of Democratic and Republican policies that make nuclear war more likely, and the ongoing martyrdom of the Palestinian people, groaning under the thumbs of right-wing Israel government. In all these developments, Rep. Engel was on the other side, supporting the wars, or the bigger military budgets, or the positions of the Israeli government against the rights of the Palestinian people. When the Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives in 2018, Engel became the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and in this position aligned with the Democratic Party leadership in criticizing many of the policy initiatives of the Trump administration – except on Israel/Palestine, where he supported the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, failed to join other House members in condemning Israel's planned annexation of the West Bank, etc. If in fact Bowman prevails in Tuesday's election, the loss of Rep. Engel will increase the prospects for peace.
News Notes
The Federal Reserve reported recently that, as a result of the economic crisis induced by the Covid-19 crisis, $6.5 trillion in household wealth vanished during the first three months of 2020. However, all is not lost; between March 18th – the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place—and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus U.S. billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion, a 20 percent increase. During the same three months, over 45.5 million people filed for unemployment, according to the Department of Labor. To read more about the lucky and the unlucky, go here.
According to a report from Amnesty International, police officers in nearly 100 U.S. cities and towns have fired tear gas at protesters in recent weeks. Tear gas is banned as a weapon in war, but it is a standard item in the arsenals of big city police forces. A spokesperson for Amnesty made a useful presentation about the dangers of tear gas and its uses against civilians in a program broadcast last week by Democracy Now! To see it, 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 reward for reading-to-here this week is another opportunity to see the terrific documentary film, "Stitching Palestine" (2017). Filmmaker Carol Mansour offers us the stories of 12 Palestinian women who talk about their lives before the tragedies of 1948, the lives they have made since then as part of the Palestinian Disaspora, and of their enduring connection to their former homes in Palestine. Linking the women is their mutual practice of embroidery, a traditional women's art, now serving also as a form of resistance to forgetting or abandoning Palestine. See the film here.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Noam Chomsky: What History Shows Us About Responding to Coronavirus
Interviewed by David Barsamian, Literary Hub [May 28, 2020]
---- David Barsamian: Some years ago you wrote, "Among the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake and one of the most important is to look honestly in the mirror. If we allow ourselves to do so, we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics of failed states right at home." What does the current coronavirus pandemic reveal about characteristics of the US as a failed state?
---- Noam Chomsky: First of all, I perhaps should say that 15 years ago, as you may remember, I wrote a book called Failed States. It was mostly about the United States, a country that is a danger to itself, to its own citizens, to the world, violates international law, fails to develop internal systems that sustain its own people, and much else. It's much more extreme now. By now I think it's a widely held opinion about the US, abroad and at home. [Read More]
(Video) With the World Focused on the Pandemic, Israel Prepares to Annex Large Swaths of the West Bank
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept/System Update [
---- 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. [Read More] This short article serves as an introduction to the latest edition of Greenwald's "System Update" video, an excellent explanation of how and why Israel is moving towards annexation of much of the West Bank, followed by an informative interview with Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian civil society leader who helped launch the BDS movement 15 years ago.
Indian Muslims facing 'genocidal climate' amid pandemic
An interview with Arundhati Roy, by Daniela Bezzi, Il Manifesto [June 21, 2020]. [FB – Manifesto is an important Italian socialist journal.]
---- [Daniela Bezzi] - India's coronavirus lockdown, which began in March, has been one of largest and strictest in the world. It has left tens of millions without work prompting a mass exodus from cities; many have attempted to travel hundreds of miles – on foot, by bicycle or even clinging to trucks – to return to their home villages. This week, the government has begun loosening restrictions despite the number of reported cases continuing to rise. Although the numbers are relatively low for a population of almost 1.4 billion people, the country is yet to reach its peak. As the lockdown lifts, we asked the acclaimed writer Arundhati Roy, who has been an outspoken critic of Narendra Modi's government, what kind of India will emerge from under lockdown. – "The Indian government acted fairly quickly to impose a lockdown. Has it worked?"
---- [Daniela Bezzi] - India's coronavirus lockdown, which began in March, has been one of largest and strictest in the world. It has left tens of millions without work prompting a mass exodus from cities; many have attempted to travel hundreds of miles – on foot, by bicycle or even clinging to trucks – to return to their home villages. This week, the government has begun loosening restrictions despite the number of reported cases continuing to rise. Although the numbers are relatively low for a population of almost 1.4 billion people, the country is yet to reach its peak. As the lockdown lifts, we asked the acclaimed writer Arundhati Roy, who has been an outspoken critic of Narendra Modi's government, what kind of India will emerge from under lockdown. – "The Indian government acted fairly quickly to impose a lockdown. Has it worked?"
---- [Arundhati Roy] The lockdown has been disastrous. India is the only country where the numbers climbed sharply through the lockdown and just when the graph is the steepest the lockdown has been relaxed. So we have a double disaster. An economic wreckage as well as a raging pandemic. … Add to all this, the Modi Government's overt Islamophobia, amplified by a shameless, irresponsible mainstream media – that overtly blamed Muslims for being spreaders of disease. You have whole TV shows dedicated to "COVID jihad" etc… All this came off the back of the unconstitutional dismantling of Kashmir's special status (leading to a 10 month on-and-off lockdown and internet seige of 6 million people in the Kashmir valley – a mass human rights violation by any standards), the new anti-Muslim citizenship law, and the pogrom against Muslims in North East Delhi in which the Delhi Police were seen actively participating. [Read More]
Tipping the Nuclear Dominos
By Conn Hallinan, ZNet [June 19, 2020]
---- If the Trump administration follows through on its threat to re-start nuclear tests, it will complete the unraveling of more than 50 years of arms control agreements, taking the world back to the days when school children practiced "duck and cover," and people built backyard bomb shelters. It will certainly be the death knell for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, passed by the UN'S General Assembly in 1996. Halting the tests helped slow the push to make weapons smaller, lighter and more lethal, although over the years countries have learned how to design more dangerous weapons using computers and sub-critical tests. Nonetheless, the test ban did—and does—slow the development of nuclear weapons and retards their proliferation to other countries. … Why? On many levels this makes no sense. Partly this is a matter of simple greed. The new program will cost in the range of $1.7 trillion, with the possibility of much more. Modernizing the "triad" will require new missiles, ships, bombers and warheads, all of which will enrich virtually every segment of the US arms industry. But this is about more than a rich payday. There is a section of the US military and political class that would like to use nuclear weapons on a limited scale. [Read More]
---- If the Trump administration follows through on its threat to re-start nuclear tests, it will complete the unraveling of more than 50 years of arms control agreements, taking the world back to the days when school children practiced "duck and cover," and people built backyard bomb shelters. It will certainly be the death knell for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, passed by the UN'S General Assembly in 1996. Halting the tests helped slow the push to make weapons smaller, lighter and more lethal, although over the years countries have learned how to design more dangerous weapons using computers and sub-critical tests. Nonetheless, the test ban did—and does—slow the development of nuclear weapons and retards their proliferation to other countries. … Why? On many levels this makes no sense. Partly this is a matter of simple greed. The new program will cost in the range of $1.7 trillion, with the possibility of much more. Modernizing the "triad" will require new missiles, ships, bombers and warheads, all of which will enrich virtually every segment of the US arms industry. But this is about more than a rich payday. There is a section of the US military and political class that would like to use nuclear weapons on a limited scale. [Read More]
The Gilets Jaunes and the Invention of the Future [France]
By Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Roar Magazine [June 2020]
---- The revolt of the Gilets Jaunes ["Yellow Vests"] has been interpreted and analyzed many times in many, sometimes completely opposing, ways. … One thing is certain: this popular revolt is a political event that is significant considering how long it has lasted, how widely it has been supported by the population, how much it has provoked and continues to provoke effects both political and social. But above all, it is the unique features of this revolt that mark a turning point in social and political history. First, its spontaneous outbreak over social media and its dynamic of self-organization. Second, its sociologically diverse composition of unorganized individuals who often had no prior experience of collective mobilization and who come from a wide range of backgrounds in society — salaried professionals, retirees, unemployed, small business owners — not to mention the massive presence of women. Third, its original forms of action: no longer the traditional union demonstration on the "grand boulevards" of Paris, but instead the occupation of "roundabouts" everywhere in France, and, every Saturday, demonstrations, sometimes violent, in the symbolic bastions of wealth like the Champs Élysées in Paris or the commercial centers of other major cities across the country. [Read More]
THE UPRISING AND THE CRISIS
Massive Uprisings Confront White Supremacy
By Marjorie Cohn, Jurist [June 19, 2020]
---- On May 25, a Minneapolis police officer tortured George Floyd to death in what his brother, Philonise Floyd, called "a modern-day lynching in broad daylight." Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in all 50 states and Washington D.C.; the anti-racist uprisings continue. Why do a majority of people in this country now support the Movement for Black Lives? Why have calls to defund and abolish the police entered the mainstream discourse? Why are people risking the deadly coronavirus to join the protests? And why are we seeing what may be the broadest popular movement in the history of the United States? More than 400 years after the first Africans were kidnapped, forcibly brought to this country and enslaved, White supremacy continues to infect our society. Police murder Black people with impunity. Black people are incarcerated at an unprecedented rate. And White fragility keeps us in denial about our White skin privilege…. The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) supports demands to defund the police, demilitarize communities, remove police from schools, free people from prisons and jails, repeal laws that criminalize survival, invest in community self-governance, provide safe housing for everyone, and invest in care, not cops. The NLG also supports reparations for slavery and discrimination against Africans and African descendants. This transformational moment is becoming a transformational movement. The time to effect revolutionary change is now. [Read More]
(Video) "Movements Work": As Activists Occupy Seattle's Capitol Hill, City Bans Tear Gas, Expels Police Union
From Democracy Now! [June 18, 2020]
---- In Seattle, the fight to demilitarize and defund the police continues as the King County Labor Council voted to expel the Seattle police union Wednesday, following weeks of protest. Seattle police sparked outrage for responding to massive protests against police brutality by using pepper spray, tear gas and flashbangs on demonstrators and reporters. Activists then formed an autonomous zone in response to the police department's abandonment of a precinct building. On Wednesday, President Trump threatened to send troops into Seattle to dismantle the community-run Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, which extends over several city blocks. Seattle socialist Councilmember Kshama Sawant calls the threat of military intervention "absolutely horrific" and says it "shows that Donald Trump is a coward and movements work." [See the Program]
The End of Black Politics
By June 13, 2020]
---- Young black people have exploded in rebellion over the grotesque killing of George Floyd. We are now witnessing the broadest protest movement in American history. And yet the response of black elected officials has been cautious and uninspired. The Congressional Black Caucus offered a familiar list of the kind of police reforms that have failed for decades to end police violence. After protesters vandalized CNN's headquarters and set a police car on fire in Atlanta, the mayor, Keisha Bottoms, told them to "go home" because registering to vote "is the change we need." President Barack Obama also argued in an essay that "real change" comes from both protest and voting. Instead, organizers on the ground have provided leadership. … These organizers and workers are channeling the confrontational black politics of a previous period. Because of them, we are at the end of one era of black politics and the start of a new one. … Representation in the halls of power has clearly worked for some, but we must talk about those it hasn't worked for. We have not seen, in decades, protests with the scale or scope of those that were unleashed by the killing of George Floyd. New, young, black leaders with the Movement for Black Lives are now emerging, leaders unencumbered by past failures and buoyed by their connection to the ruckus in the streets. [Read More]
From Policing to Climate Change, a Sweeping Call for a 'Moral Revolution'
By
---- A national coalition to address the challenges of the working poor released a sweeping legislative platform in a three-hour virtual rally on Saturday, including proposals to address mass incarceration, health care and wealth inequality. The policy agenda by the coalition, the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, seeks to offer a concrete road map for tackling the systemic injustices that have captured the nation's attention in recent weeks after the police killing of George Floyd. "The worst mistake we can make now, with all the marching, the protesting in the streets, would be to demand too little," said the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, a co-chair of the campaign along with the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. [Read More] The Poor People's Campaign has issued a detailed and comprehensive "Poor People's Moral Justice Jubilee Policy Platform"; read it here.
Go Ahead and Destroy That Racist Statue (and Then the System Too)
By Jillian Steinhauer, The Nation [June 22, 2020]
---- Monuments, statues, flags, and symbols are an important part of how we understand our national histories and project our values, not to mention how we shape the physical landscape. They can champion oppression or broadcast liberation, reinforce racist policies or reckon with the violence of the past. Is it inspiring to have "Black Lives Matter" written in huge, defiant letters in front of a White House occupied by a racist president? Yes. Is our cultural landscape less oppressive and more honest without Confederate and colonial monuments towering over our streets? Unquestionably. But will these changes undo the white supremacy on which this country is built? No. We should celebrate the way that the people are rising up and forcing a profound shift in how public visual culture is used to shape and codify national stories. But we should also be wary and demand more from leaders who offer performative gestures in place of meaningful action. White supremacy has withstood much more than statues and paintings. [Read More]
More good reading about the Uprising and the Crisis – "From the Covid-19 Battle Can Come Unstoppable Citizen Power to Propel 'Full Medicare for All' Through Congress" b [Link]; "Trading One Uniform for Another: Can Police Be 'De-Militarized' When So Many Cops Are Military Veterans?" b [Link]; "How Workers Can Win the Class War Being Waged Upon Them" by Richard D. Wolff, ZNet [June 19, 2020] [Link]; and "If we're going to defund militarized police departments, why not add the Pentagon?" by June 18, 2020] [Link]. Finally, historian (and now artist) Nell Painter put up an interesting short piece this week about anti-police cartoon art back in the day (the Black Panthers, etc.) and similar art today; to read it go here.
OUR HISTORY
(Video) Juneteenth: A Celebration of Black Liberation & Day to Remember "Horrific System That Was Slavery"
From Democracy Now! [June 19, 2020]
[FB – Gerald Horne, interviewed here, is imo one of our most interesting (and provocative) historians.]
---- June 19 is Juneteenth, celebrating the day in 1865 when the last enslaved Black people in the United States learned they had been freed from bondage. As momentum grows to enshrine it as a national holiday, we speak with author and historian Gerald Horne, who says that while the story of Juneteenth is "much more complicated and much more complex than is traditionally presented," increased recognition of the day "provides an opportunity to have a thorough remembrance of this horrific system that was slavery." [See the Program]
(Video) 99 Years Later, Wounds of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Have "Never Been Remedied"
From Democracy Now! [June 19, 2020]
---- President Trump's first campaign rally since the start of the pandemic takes place Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, despite a spike of COVID-19 cases there. Trump rescheduled the rally to Saturday after facing backlash for saying it would happen on Juneteenth — a celebration of African Americans' liberation from slavery — amid a nationwide uprising against racism and police brutality. Tulsa is also the site of one of the deadliest massacres in U.S. history, when a white mob in 1921 killed as many as 300 people in a thriving African American business district known as "Black Wall Street." For more on this history and the pervasive racism that remains, we speak with civil rights lawyer Damario Solomon-Simmons, who represents the last known survivor of the Greenwood massacre living in Tulsa. [See the Program]
