Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
September 20, 2020
Hello All – The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg adds new uncertainties to an already chaotic presidential election. This Newsletter, as well as Concerned Families of Westchester, shares the view of many that the re-election of President Trump would be a disaster for humankind. While polls suggest that Democratic candidate Joe Biden has a clear popular majority of support, we know to our sorrow that the details of U.S. election law (e.g. the Electoral College) do not necessarily translate a majority of votes into electoral victory. In the 2020 election, moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the dynamics of voting, greatly increasing the expected share of votes that will be cast by mail. President Trump has made clear that a Democratic victory depending on mail-in votes would be considered by his camp to be illegitimate, and that he would not necessarily leave office in these circumstances. While the path from post-election chaos to a Supreme Court case à la Bush v. Gore may not be taken, with Ginsburg's death we know that if taken it would lead to a Trump victory. It is therefore imperative that the Senate be prevented from approving Trump's nominee for the Court, expected to be announced by him this week. It seems that this can only be done if at least four Republican Senators agree to postpone selecting a new Justice until after the election, or (in the case Biden wins) after January 20, 2021. All this seems like a long-shot.
A somewhat separate issue is the election itself. The parts of the Republican Playbook now in play focus on reducing the Democratic electorate, especially in key states (e.g. ex-felons in Florida). Voting rights expert Ari Berman gave a good overview of the voter suppression effort last Tuesday on Democracy Now!; and, writing in The Nation, John Nichols described the hundreds of Republican-initiated legal challenges to election procedures and voting rights now pending in lower courts. (The progress of such cases can be followed here.) It is possible that some/many of these cases will end up in the Supreme Court before Election Day; this useful article describes how the Court is likely to handle cases working with only eight Justices.
Last month the Newsletter linked an article by Frances Fox Piven called "What if Trump Won't Leave?" In it she asserted that it would be a great mistake to rely on the Courts (of all levels) to produce justice in the case of a disputed presidential election, urging instead/as well the importance of grassroots protest and mobilization. How might such a situation come about? Writing in Huffington Post today, Paul Blumenthal describes "The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term":
Americans will almost certainly go to bed on Nov. 3 without knowing who won the presidential election. Since millions of people will vote by mail, constraints on time and resources will slow ballot counting into potentially a weeks-long process. Voting patterns suggest it's likely that President Donald Trump could end Election Day in the lead in certain key states, only to be overtaken by Democratic opponent Joe Biden when more votes are tallied. This could create a nightmare scenario during the three months stretching from Election Day to the Jan. 20 inauguration: a battle on the state and congressional level over who is the legitimate winner. This could include Congress reconvening on Jan. 6, presided over by Vice President Mike Pence, with no consensus over its potential role in choosing the next president. This is arguably the most likely of the contested-election narratives, and now the Supreme Court — which would likely have to rule on the legal arcana at issue in this epic battle — has been thrown into its own nightmare scenario with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The author continues, describing the complex paths through which a state governor and/or legislature could end up referring competing sets of Electors to Congress for certification, and how Congress could even end up with no winner of the Electoral Vote by January 20, 2021. In which case – you guessed it – the outcome would again be decided by the Supreme Court, now stacked 5:3 and possibly by January 6:3 in favor of Trump.
Concluding, I fear only a landslide victory in the popular vote will enable the Biden forces to avoid a complex, hazardous road to defeat in November – January. Of course, the landslide vote and the grassroots mobilization are in our hands, and so with great effort The People may yet save civilization from barbarism.
News Notes
The deportation hearing for Julian Assange has now concluded its second week. A useful introduction to the case was presented on Wednesday on the Jimmy Dore Show, featuring an in-depth conversation with the co-chairs of the Assange Defense Committee, Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, and Daniel Elsberg. For daily updates, check out Shadowproof, whose Kevin Gostzola is in the courtroom. The Assange deportation case may set the boundaries for political and investigative reporting for decades to come, putting at risk any journalist or publisher anywhere in the world who displeases The Godfather.
Over at Code Pink, Medea Benjamin and Barry Summers alert us to a new generation of surveillance drones, made by General Atomics, which will be soon flying over our cities and collecting "data" about our every move. Interested? Go here.
President Trump gave a speech last week at the National Archives in which he complained about Marxist indoctrination of American school children, singling out Howard Zinn's classic book, A People's History of the United States. To illustrate the crimes of the Zinn followers, we can look at the Zinn Project's website for their lesson plans for Constitution Day, which was last Thursday. Dear or dear, they pointed out that 40 percent of the Founding Fathers were slave owners. Could there be A Lesson here? As the late Howard Zinn told Democracy Now's Amy Goodman not long before he died, "We should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country."
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; if you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, Tuesday and Thursday at noon and/or Saturday at 2 pm, please send a return email. 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!
Feeling the pull towards Resistance, today's first reward for stalwart readers is Leonard Cohen's "The Partisan." This song about the French resistance to German occupation in WWII was written by a French resistance leader, Emmanuel D'Astier de la Vigerie, codenamed "Bernard." and you can hear it in French here. The UK anarchist group Chumbawamba brings us a great song from the 17th century revolution in England, 'The Diggers' Song." And for some local Resistance, here is Hudson Valley Sally (with Jenny Murphy!) singing the Hutchinson Family's abolitionist song of the 1850s, "Get Off the Track!" ("Moderates out of the way!") Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
"The Fate of Humanity Hangs in the Balance"
By Noam Chomsky, a speech at the Inaugural Conference of the Progressive International [September 18, 2020]
---- Returning to the major crises we face at this historic moment, all are international, and two internationals are forming to confront them. One is opening today: the Progressive International. The other has been taking shape under the leadership of Trump's White House, a Reactionary International comprising the world's most reactionary states. In the Western Hemisphere, the International includes Bolsonaro's Brazil and a few others. In the Middle East, prime members are the family dictatorships of the Gulf; al-Sisi's Egyptian dictatorship, perhaps the harshest in Egypt's bitter history; and Israel, which long ago discarded its social democratic origins and shifted far to the right, the predicted effect of the prolonged and brutal occupation. [And more examples.] … The two internationals comprise a good part of the world, one at the level of states, the other popular movements. Each is a prominent representative of much broader social forces, which have sharply contending images of the world that should emerge from the current pandemic. One force is working relentlessly to construct a harsher version of the neoliberal global system from which they have greatly benefited, with more intensive surveillance and control. The other looks forward to a world of justice and peace, with energies and resources directed to serving human needs rather than the demands of a tiny minority. It is a kind of class struggle on a global scale, with many complex facets and interactions. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the human experiment depends on the outcome of this struggle. [Read More]
California's Apocalyptic 'Second Nature'
By Mike Davis, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung ["Foundation"] [September 15, 2020]
---- A world set on fire by climate change has unleashed a dangerous transformation of plant ecology, and thus faunal populations, from the Arctic to Patagonia, Montana to Mongolia. California is a paradigmatic example of such a vicious circle, where extreme heat leads to extreme fires that prevent natural rejuvenation and accelerate the conversion of iconic landscapes into depauperate grasslands and treeless mountain slopes. … Fire in the Anthropocene has become the physical equivalent of endless nuclear war. In the aftermath of Victoria's Black Saturday fires in early 2009, Australian scientists calculated that their released energy equaled the explosion of 1,500 Hiroshima-sized bombs. The current firestorms in the Pacific states are many times larger, and we should compare their destructive power to the mega-tonnage of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. A new, profoundly sinister nature is rapidly emerging from our fire rubble at the expense of landscapes we once considered sacred. Our imaginations can barely encompass the speed or scale of the catastrophe. Gone California, gone. [Read More] Also of great interest, imo, is "Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration," by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica [September 17, 2020] [Read More]
---- A world set on fire by climate change has unleashed a dangerous transformation of plant ecology, and thus faunal populations, from the Arctic to Patagonia, Montana to Mongolia. California is a paradigmatic example of such a vicious circle, where extreme heat leads to extreme fires that prevent natural rejuvenation and accelerate the conversion of iconic landscapes into depauperate grasslands and treeless mountain slopes. … Fire in the Anthropocene has become the physical equivalent of endless nuclear war. In the aftermath of Victoria's Black Saturday fires in early 2009, Australian scientists calculated that their released energy equaled the explosion of 1,500 Hiroshima-sized bombs. The current firestorms in the Pacific states are many times larger, and we should compare their destructive power to the mega-tonnage of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. A new, profoundly sinister nature is rapidly emerging from our fire rubble at the expense of landscapes we once considered sacred. Our imaginations can barely encompass the speed or scale of the catastrophe. Gone California, gone. [Read More] Also of great interest, imo, is "Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration," by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica [September 17, 2020] [Read More]
Deportation Nation
By Julia Preston, New York Review of Books [October 8, 2020 Issue]
[FB – This is a review of "The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants," by Adam Goodman and "The Battle to Stay in America: Immigration's Hidden Front Line," by Michael Kagan.]
---- The United States is in an age of mass deportation. This may not be surprising, given how consistently President Trump has denigrated, demonized, and threatened immigrants. His administration has waged an assault on the entire immigration system, shutting down access to asylum, pressuring the immigration courts to churn out removal orders, and adopting rules that narrowed the avenues to legal immigration and crippled US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers it. According to the most recent official figures, from the beginning of Trump's term through September 2019 his administration carried out more than 584,000 formal deportations. As of last October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was monitoring more than 3.2 million cases of immigrants who were in active deportation proceedings. Yet despite Trump's repeated warnings that he planned to expel more than one million unauthorized immigrants, he has not reached the numbers achieved by President Obama, whose administration expelled over three million people and holds the record for formal deportations in a year—more than 432,000 in 2013. Trump has remained preoccupied with the Mexican border and constructing his wall. He has also been increasing ICE's funding and staff, which now numbers more than 20,000. In doing so, he has built on a steady expansion of immigration enforcement initiated two decades ago, in response to the September 11 attacks. [Read More]
Taking the Next Knee [Sports and Politics]
By Robert Lipsyte, Tom Dispatch [September 17, 2020]
---- As baseball and basketball, battered by the Covid-19 pandemic, cautiously continue their delayed and shortened seasons and the National Football League and some college football conferences finally launch their own belated starts, more and more questions arise: Will such physically dangerous playing conditions be sustainable? (Is there even such a thing as a socially distanced tackle?) Will fans accept rule changes meant to take the coronavirus into account and still keep watching (while their own lives threaten to go down the tubes)? Will former San Francisco 49er Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked the current sports revolt by kneeling to the national anthem four years ago and was subsequently abused by the president and functionally banished from football, ever get to play again? And above all, what effect will the various protests of such athletes have, if any, on the election? [Read More]
WAR & PEACE
This Soldier's Witness to the Iraq War Lie
By Frederic Wehrey, New York Review of Books [September 17, 2020]
---- A few weeks before I deployed to Iraq as a young US military officer, in the spring of 2003, my French-born father implored me to watch The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's dramatic reenactment of the 1950s Algerian insurgency against French colonial rule. There are many political and aesthetic reasons to see this masterpiece of cinéma vérité, not least of which is its portrayal of the Algerian capital's evocative old city, or Casbah. … To this day, it is taught to West Point cadets as a cautionary tale. Still, the full weight of the film's lessons was not apparent to me in Iraq until one morning in the summer of 2003, when I received an urgent phone call about a captured Iraqi intelligence officer. My commander wanted me to go interview him at the Baghdad hospital where he was being treated for unspecified wounds. [Read More]
(Video) A Crisis Made in America: Yemen on Brink of Famine After U.S. Cuts Aid While Fueling War
From Democracy Now! [September 17, 2020]
---- The humanitarian crisis in Yemen is deepening amid the pandemic and cuts to international aid from the United States and its allies, leaving millions of Yemenis facing famine after years of a brutal U.S.-backed, Saudi-led bombing campaign that has devastated the country. CNN's senior international correspondent Nima Elbagir says what is happening in Yemen is not a natural disaster but a "man-made catastrophe" directly tied to U.S. policies. Elbagir says, "Not only is the U.S. profiting from the war by selling weapons to the UAE and Saudi Arabia," but it is also ignoring the impact on civilians. We also feature her exclusive CNN report, "Yemen: A Crisis Made in America." [See the Program]
For more on Yemen's disaster - Nima Elbagir's report for CNN, "Aid cuts by Trump and some US allies are costing lives in Yemen," can be read here. Saudi Arabia's use of US-made weapons to kill thousands of people in Yemen may lead to war crimes charges for the Americans involved: read "War Crime Risk Grows for U.S. Over Saudi Strikes in Yemen," [Link]. Congress is beginning to push back; read "US lawmakers call on Trump administration to restore aid to Yemen," Middle East Eye [Link].
America's War on Terror is the True Cause of Europe's Refugee Crisis
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent [UK] [September 16, 2020]
---- Desperate refugees crammed into cockle-shell boats landing on the shingle beaches of the south Kent coast are easily portrayed as invaders. … But there is absurdly little interest in why they endure such hardships, risking detention or death. There is an instinctive assumption in the west that it is perfectly natural for people to flee their own failed states (the failure supposedly brought on by self-inflicted violence and corruption) to seek refuge in the better-run, safer and more prosperous countries. But what we are really seeing in those pathetic half-swamped rubber boats bobbing up and down in the Channel are the thin end of the wedge of a vast exodus of people brought about by military intervention by the US and its allies. As a result of their "global war on terror", launched following the al-Qaeda attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, no less than 37 million people have been displaced from their homes, according to a revelatory report published this week by Brown University. [Read More]
---- Desperate refugees crammed into cockle-shell boats landing on the shingle beaches of the south Kent coast are easily portrayed as invaders. … But there is absurdly little interest in why they endure such hardships, risking detention or death. There is an instinctive assumption in the west that it is perfectly natural for people to flee their own failed states (the failure supposedly brought on by self-inflicted violence and corruption) to seek refuge in the better-run, safer and more prosperous countries. But what we are really seeing in those pathetic half-swamped rubber boats bobbing up and down in the Channel are the thin end of the wedge of a vast exodus of people brought about by military intervention by the US and its allies. As a result of their "global war on terror", launched following the al-Qaeda attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, no less than 37 million people have been displaced from their homes, according to a revelatory report published this week by Brown University. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
As the West Burns, the Trump Administration Races to Demolish Environmental Protections
By Sharon Lerner, The Intercept [September 19, 2020[
---- As wildfires destroy millions of acres in California, Oregon, and Washington, and an unprecedented series of hurricanes cause historic flooding in the South, leaving parts of the region uninhabitable, the Trump administration has been racing to reverse rules designed to prevent exactly these kinds of climate disasters. Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has presided over the rollback of more environmental rules and regulations than any other president. … In recent months, the pace of these assaults has quickened. The frenzied efforts of federal agencies during the last months before a presidential election are often referred to as "midnight regulation." But the work the Trump administration has recently been hurrying to complete would be more accurately described as "midnight deregulation." [Read More]
Cuomo's Choice: Tax the Rich or Starve the Schools
By Ross Barkan, The Nation [September 17, 2020]
---- New York City is facing its most tumultuous school reopening in recent memory. The city's Department of Education is the only major urban school system that is attempting to start the new school year with in-person learning, and the move will offer either a road map for districts everywhere or serve as a cautionary tale of what a city should not do. As of now, the DOE plans to reopen in-person instruction in staggered shifts, with the majority starting after September 29, delaying a start date from September 10 after pressure from concerned teachers and parents. The city's bumbling mayor, Bill de Blasio, has emerged as the usual villain of the narrative, with parents and teachers alike deeply frustrated over his Department of Education's confusing reopening plan. And de Blasio's sins are many... But it is America's most famous governor, Andrew Cuomo, who looms far larger over the future of public education in New York in the age of Covid-19. [Read More]
America's Eviction Epidemic
By Gabriel M. Schivone, New York Review of Books [September 17, 2020]
---- When Covid-19 arrived in the US this spring, it changed the housing landscape overnight. By late March, when the public health crisis engulfed the US, hundreds of grassroots mutual aid networks had emerged around the country, in virtually every state. They could hardly do enough, but they did help many vulnerable people. And it was many of these same aid networkers who also demanded a moratorium on evictions. In one sense, they appeared to be pushing an open door: numerous authorities at city, state, county, and federal level ordered halts on evictions, based in part on the pressing need for people to stay isolated at home to tamp down community transmission of the coronavirus. But some commentators saw fundamental flaws in these measures from the beginning. … Meanwhile, the rent strikes started spreading. By April 1, one third of Americans couldn't make rent. Rent strikes organized nationwide on May 1, International Workers' Day, were by some accounts the largest in US history. Communities have organized eviction resistance actions from Kansas City, Missouri, to New Orleans to New York City—the latter now "the epicenter of a growing tenants' rights movement," according to a Wired report. [Read More] For some context, read "Fighting Evictions: The 1930s and Now," b
Millions of Children Go Hungry as Mitch McConnell Blocks Stimulus Bill
By Mike Ludwig, Truthout [September 18, 2020]
---- Millions of children across the United States are already going hungry amid the economic recession spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, and emergency food assistance is set to expire on September 30 as Congress remains at an impasse over stimulus legislation. The House has already passed legislation that would renew the emergency food assistance, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to take it up in the Senate. During the last week of August, up to 14 percent of parents reported that they could not consistently afford to feed their children as millions of people remain without work due to efforts to contain the coronavirus… Compare these numbers to figures from 2019, when only 3.7 percent of adults reported that their households had "not enough to eat" during the course of the year and about 1 percent of parents reported their children going hungry, according to CBPP's analysis. [Read More]
