Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
November 8, 2020
Hello All – In this transition between the Old and the New, between the Trump era and the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on January 20th, there will be a lot to do. With several states recounting votes, some lawsuits looming and a reactionary Supreme Court possibly hearing them, and noises coming from the Trump White House about unspecified last-ditch obstruction, the presidential election isn't quite over yet. For that reason, the hundreds of efforts across the country who readied themselves to "protect the election" can't quite rest yet. CFOW is one of these groups: we held rallies in NW Yonkers on Wednesday and another one in Hastings on Saturday. If the need arises, we will list our next rally on www.protecttheresults.com, where local protests can be found by typing in your Zip Code.
Looking forward, there will be an Interregnum between now and January 20th, during which Trump will have the power, and perhaps the will, to do lots of damage. We have to be en garde for whatever; the trouble's not over.
And there is the coming contest inside the Biden-Harris administration and the Democratic Party for whose program, whose vision, will form the template for action going forward. In a nutshell, how much of the Sanders movement and his program will be included in the Biden-Harris initiatives to fix the economy, combat white supremacy, and address our healthcare system, the immigration disaster, the climate crisis, our foreign policy, etc. etc.? Some of these issues are addressed below, and will be a focus of our Newsletter for the coming weeks.
Finally, the ability of President Biden to pursue any legislative program depends on who controls the Senate, which at the moment appears to rest on the outcome of two Senate run-off elections in Georgia in January. The Democratic candidates are Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock. The Elect Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock 2020 Facebook page explains their campaigns. ActBlue has set joint contribution site. You can donate and volunteer to help the campaigns at The New Georgia Project. Coming soon (if not already here) will be phone-banking and postcard writing opportunities; more news when I have it.
Local News Notes
On Saturday, CFOW sponsored a "Protect the Results" rally in Hastings, focused on preventing the Trump people from overturning the election through trickery. Just as we were about to start, the major media networks called the election for Biden-Harris. CFOW photo/video stalwart Susan Rutman recorded the ensuing outburst of joy from her apartment balcony, and then recorded some of the rally action. Photographer Joe Malone shot lots of fine pictures of the rally, which you can see here,
On Wednesday, newly elected congressman from CD17 Mondaire Jones was interviewed on Democracy Now. He describes his progressive ideas and legislative goals here.
Tomorrow, Monday, you can watch the UN's Universal Periodic Review of the United States from 8:30 am to 12 noon. At this Review, "the US government will be questioned on its human rights record by UN Member States, who will make recommendations to improve or remedy specific human rights violations." One of the issue-areas under consideration will be voting issues and free and fair elections, a topic initiated by the Westchester UN team. For more information about the Review, go here..
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, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Another vigil takes place on Mondays, from 5 to 5:30 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 5 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. 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
Yesterday, across the USA, there were spontaneous outbreaks of joy and celebration. In that spirit, I was inspired by this video by Lorraine O'Grady and the voice of Ray Charles, "America the Beautiful." [h/t BT] And check out David Chappelle's monologue from yesterday's "Saturday Night Live," already seen by four million people.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
ELECTION 2020 – WHAT HAPPENED?
[FB – The Democrats – and the rest of us – are just beginning to assess why their party performed so far below hopes and expectations. Yes, Biden and Harris won, but it was not the "blowout" many expected. Were the polls wrong? The vote-counting rigged? Was Trump's strength underestimated? Or did the Democrats make errors that lost them lots of votes? The way the issue gets framed will be important going forward, especially considering the emerging argument over whether the summer's anti-racism uprising and the widespread support for socialism (AOC, Sanders) in the party triggered a white conservative backlash and mobilization. In an interview in yesterday's New York Times, AOC pushed back against this charge, saying that the Democratic "moderates" who lost ran lousy campaigns. She also said that the role of congressional progressives in Congress (now including our own Jamaal Bowman) would hinge on whether Biden sought to include them – or exclude them – from the Party's leadership. This Newsletter will carry more on these issues going forward; for now, here are some ways in which grassroots mobilizations of low-income people carried the election for the Democrats.]
(Video) Juan González: The Media Has It Wrong. Record Latinx Turnout Helped Biden. White Voters Failed Dems
From Democracy Now! [November 5, 2020]
---- Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden appears to be inching toward victory as counting continues in several key states that could put him over 270 electoral votes, the threshold needed to win the Electoral College and take the White House. President Trump and his supporters, meanwhile, have attacked the process and falsely claimed Democrats are stealing the election, and the Trump campaign has launched a barrage of legal challenges in swing states related to ballot counting. With the results closer than many pollsters had predicted, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González says "a false narrative" is taking root that Latinx voters were primarily to blame for the weak Democratic result. "The main story is that people of color, especially Latinos, flocked to the polls in numbers that far exceeded what the experts had expected, while the total number of votes cast by white Americans barely increased from the last presidential election," says González. "How come none of the experts are asking why white voters underperformed the Democratic Party?" [See the Program]
For more on the grassroots in the 2020 election – "Exit Lines: Campaign Analysts Miss the Signal in the Noise" by Jim Naureckas, FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [November 6, 2020] [Link]; "A Bumpy Night in Berks County, Pennsylvania" by D.D. Guttenplan, November 3, 2020 [November 3, 2020] [Link]; and (Video) "Biden Pulls Ahead in Georgia: Blue Shift Follows Years of Community Organizing to Expand Electorate," from Democracy Now! [November 6, 2020] [Link].
BIDEN'S INHERITANCE, OUR CHALLENGES
[FB – It is clear that President-elect Biden is inheriting a mess, starting with a pandemic and an economic crisis, with dozens more crises attached. At the same time, Biden is signaling, as he did throughout his campaign, that he will choose centrist party veterans to address these many issues with centrist solutions. Though in most cases vastly better than what Trump is doing, they are also viewed by many on the left of the party as being inadequate to the task. Yet many of the injuries Trump inflicted on our country were via executive actions, and these can be rolled back by new ones, but others will depend on legislation and who controls the Congress. This is another issue-area that the Newsletter will keep in focus in the coming weeks.]
Biden's Wretched Inheritance
"America is paying a terrible price for having a president who acts like a 19th-century carnival barker, riding the rails and hustling dubious elixirs."
– Michael Spector, 2020.
The four-year circus will soon leave town, and the clean-up effort will take at least a decade. The three rings of Trump's circus—his White House, his do-nothing Senate, and his politicized judiciary—have contaminated governance, and given the Biden administration the worst political inheritance in U.S. history both at home and abroad. Trump's attacks on Obama's health care and environmental legacies during a pandemic is literally breathtaking. We will never fully know the extent of the pandemic deaths that can be attributed to his malicious and unconscionable incompetence. Central American families have been separated, some never to be reunited. Syrian Kurds have been thrown to Turkish wolves. The racist Muslim travel ban is sordid. Donald Trump is responsible for it all and, as a result, the reputation of the United States has never been lower. Domestic agencies have been savaged by the Trump administration, following Steve Bannon's pledge to "deconstruct the administrative state." Trump has trampled democratic norms, and has purged professional civil servants and policy experts. [Read More] For some estimates of what it will cost to fix this mess, read "Why a Biden Administration Needs to Spend Big" by Mike Konczal, The Nation [November 2, 2020] [Link].
Treasury Secretary Warren? Progressives Line Up to Press Their Agenda on Biden
By
---- With control of the Senate unclear, liberal Democrats are trying to figure out how to achieve their policy goals through the White House. They have an extensive blacklist for possible Biden appointees they do not like. They want to elevate allies like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to premier government posts. And they are even considering the possibility of bypassing Senate approval to fill executive branch roles. As progressives have watched the Senate potentially slip out of reach this week, they have begun preparing to unleash a furious campaign to pressure President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. over personnel and priorities — even as they wrestle with the results of the election and the possible need to be more realistic about expectations over the next two years. [Read More] For a pessimistic view, read "Biden: A War Cabinet?" bNovember 6, 2020] [Link]
FEATURED ESSAYS
Why Trump Can't Afford to Lose
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker [November 1, 2020]
---- The downfall of Richard Nixon, in the summer of 1974, was, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relate in "The Final Days," one of the most dramatic in American history. That August, the Watergate scandal forced Nixon—who had been cornered by self-incriminating White House tape recordings, and faced impeachment and removal from office—to resign. Twenty-nine individuals closely tied to his Administration were subsequently indicted, and several of his top aides and advisers, including his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison. Nixon himself, however, escaped prosecution because his successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a pardon, in September, 1974. No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. [Read More]
People Power in the Coronavirus Depression
By Jeremy Brecher, Labor Network for Sustainability [November 6, 2020]
---- The Coronavirus pandemic and the economic depression accompanying it are already engendering new movements of both employed and unemployed workers. In some ways these resemble the worker and unemployed movements that emerged in the first years of the Great Depression; in other ways they are very different. The early years of the Great Depression saw the emergence of new forms of popular action in response to the devastating economic conditions workers faced. Unemployed workers organized in Unemployed Councils; used "eviction riots" to protect renters; marched and occupied city halls and state capitols to demand food, jobs, and relief; organized quasi-unions in government jobs programs; and fought for legislation to provide for the needs of the unemployed. Unemployed workers in hundreds of cities created mutual aid organizations that produced and distributed goods like food and firewood and services like carpentry and health care. While the early years of the Great Depression saw a rapid decline in unions and conventional strikes, they also saw the rise of self-organized strikes and local horizontal worker organizations. [Read More]
A New Constitution: What the United States Can Learn From Chile
By Ariel Dorfman, The Nation [October 26, 2020]
---- It is not often that a country gets to decide its destiny in one momentous election. I am thinking, of course, of the United States. But I am also thinking of the referendum in Chile, where, this past Sunday, the people of that country decided by a landslide—78.27 percent of those who voted—to give themselves a new Constitution and thereby drastically redefine the way they wished to be governed. Though a change in its founding document is not on the ballot in the United States, we should, here in America, pay close attention to what just happened in that distant land at the end of the earth. … Do the problems that beset us, so similar to those that plague our Chilean brothers and sisters—the systemic racism, the police brutality, the ecological disasters, the offensive disparity of income, the increased polarization of our public—not cry out for a radical reimagining of who we are? Has not the pestilence of Covid-19 revealed that we are woefully unprepared for the challenges ahead? [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Biden Realizes the Palestinian Authority's Importance to Israel, but Expectations Remain Low
By Amira Haas, Haaretz [Israel] [November 8, 2020]
---- Biden, a pro-Israeli politician of the old-school kind, understands the importance of the Palestinian Authority to Israel in that it spares Israel the direct burden of governing the occupied Palestinian population. The new U.S. president therefore needs to ensure that the PA doesn't collapse economically or lose political relevance. Diplomatic ties between the United States and the PA will be resumed. The Palestinian mission in Washington will reopen. Meetings between American civilian and military officials and Palestinian representatives will also resume – reinforcing the Palestinian governing class' sense of self-importance. … Officially, the Democratic Party supports the two-state solution. In fact, however, even under President Barack Obama, it did nothing to prevent Israel from curbing the prospect that such a solution would be realized. It supported Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip and didn't get the siege on the Strip lifted. Nevertheless, new forces have entered the Democratic Party over the past several years that have dared criticize Israel as an occupier. They reflect changes that have occurred among Democrats, including among American Jews. [Read More]
For more on this week in Israel/Palestine – "With Reporters Distracted by US Polls, Israel Demolishes 76 Bedouin Palestinian Homes," b[Link]; and "Maher al-Akhras "prevails over jailer," ends 103-day hunger strike," bNovember 6, 2020] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
Why You Should Be Watching the Film 'Z' Right Now
By Margaret Spillane, The Nation [November 3, 2020]
[FB – Whether or not you have already seen this film, I think you will find this essay interesting. The author states: "Costa Gavras's classic antifascist thriller reminds us that the moment of reckoning constitutes not the end of the story, but the beginning."]
---- A half-century later, I remember the exhilaration. My Greek boyfriend and I clutched hands in the front-row balcony of Boston's gracious Exeter Theater while convulsive music thundered up through our feet like a shock treatment. It was Mikos Theodorakis's soundtrack to Costa Gavras's Z, a sexy, high-voltage film that inaugurated a genre: the antifascist thriller. Z offered backstory to the 1967 junta that had just, with tacit US approval, toppled the democratically elected government in Greece and established post–World War II Europe's most gruesome torture regime until the Republika Srpska's Omarska camp. Much of the junta's success derived from its creation of ad hoc domestic-terror brigades. The film zeroes in on one savage attack: a charismatic opposition leader known only as The Deputy (played by Yves Montand and based on progressive legislator Grigoris Lambrakis) is jumped and bludgeoned by freelance goons on a public square in full view of the assembled and untroubled police. The Deputy later dies from his injuries. Along comes an unlikely movie hero: the buttoned-up, robotically punctilious Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) with Coke-bottle eyeglasses and a just-the-facts manner. [Read More]
On Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism
By Alan Wald, Solidarity – Against the Current [November-December, 2020]
---- The Jewish Revolutionary Internationalist commitment to the indivisibility of justice was on full display in palpable if muted form on April 26, 1964. That day, in Pretoria, South Africa, a tall, handsome man stood boldly in the prisoner's dock of the Supreme Court. … Sitting behind Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), and facing the same charges and the same fate, sat nine comrades and codefendants. All had agreed that Mandela should deliver a four-hour speech explaining their cause and defending the use of violence. His oration ended as follows: "During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." This passage from Mandela is critical to the reconstruction that the following essay will offer of several select aspects of the history of Jewish Revolutionary Internationalism. It is composed in the hope of persuading others to think through the germaneness of this tradition for the present moment of Black Lives Matter, BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions for Palestinian rights against the State of Israel), and other social movements demanding interracial and interethnic solidarity. [Read More]
