Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
February 7, 2021
Hello All – Javier Castillo Maradiaga is a 27-year-old Bronx resident who was nearly deported last week, saved by lawyers, family, and community protest in the nick of time. He now has a 30-day "reprieve." But it's not over yet.
Javier has lived in the U.S. since he was 7 years old: 20 years. Until recently he was protected by the program called DACA – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. That is, he came to the United States with his parents, who did not have legal papers at the time. Rather than deporting these children who had lived in the US for a decade or two, President Obama established the DACA program, putting deportation on hold as long as they were good citizens. The children – now young adults – became the "Dreamers," hoping for citizenship.
Fourteen months ago Javier fell victim to a NYC "stop-and-frisk" action and was turned over (illegally) to ICE, which scheduled him for deportation. This almost took place last weekend, and may still be in Javier's future. Javier is one of tens of thousands of immigrants and refugees whose fate depends on what President Biden does about immigrants, and whether he can control vicious rogue agencies like ICE. To learn more about Javier's case and how you can support him, go to #FreeJavier. Deportations must end!
As several articles/essays linked below demonstrate, the chaos left behind by the Trump people has made such a mess of the US immigration and refugee "systems" that it will take years to return to a semblance of order. In the meantime, immigration lawyers and their clients are left to fend for themselves. In New York, the go-to organization for the protection of immigrants and their rights is the New York Immigration Coalition. CFOW intends to be more active on immigration issues in the coming months: if you are in a position to help out, please send a return email or contact the NYIC. Thanks.
News Notes
In my mind, one of the historic documents of our era is ACO's livestream video, in which she recounts her experiences during the Capitol insurrection of January 6th, and for which she gives a thoughtful explanation and context. And this week Democracy Now! broadcast the emotional statements that she and Rashida Tlaib made on the House floor about the attacks.
Two weeks ago the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear weapons went into effect. Needless to say, the USA (and all other nuclear-weapons states) refused to sign the Treaty or abide by the demands of the "international community." A cogent review of why the abolition of nuclear weapons is vital to human survival is given in this (video) talk by Noam Chomsky, arguing (to a Canadian audience) why Canada should sign the Treaty. As a reminder of what this is all about, check out this video simulation of a nuclear attack on a large city (8 minutes).
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 on Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Another vigil takes place on the first Monday of the month (March 1st, etc.), 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 4 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!
The rewards for stalwart readers start out with a musical homage to singer and rabble-rouser
Anne Feeney, who died from Covid last week at 69. One of her favorites is "Have you been to jail for justice?" Another is "It's a war on the workers." And here she is live with some pro-union rabble-rousing. Finally, while putting this week's Rewards together, I came across this lovely music video from Pete Seeger. Enjoy!
Best Wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
THE ROOTS OF JANUARY 6TH AND WHAT COMES NEXT
Capitol Attack Was Culmination of Generations of Far-Right Extremism
By Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept [
---- When millions of people marched through the streets last summer, often in the face of tear gas and police crackdowns, they were challenging institutions that did not pack up and leave with Trump. Since then, [historian Robin D. G. Kelley] said, there has been a concerning "demobilization" of organizing around police and state violence. He attributed the slowdown to multiple factors, including a "political calculus" on the part of some activists and organizations heading into the presidential election, and the enormous challenge of organizing in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis. … The challenge in a post-Trump United States is "reminding people that there's a long history of racism, and it doesn't come from white men with horns. It comes largely from state policy and a long history, and a deep history, that we have to contest," Kelley said. Otherwise, he said, "I fear that the summer of 2020 is going to be forgotten." [Read More]
How to Defeat The White Power Movement
By Vincent Emanuele, ZNet [February 7, 2021]
---- To defeat the white power movement in the United States, liberals, progressives, and leftists must better understand the movement and provide political, economic, social, and cultural alternatives and develop a more coherent and reasonable position concerning institutions such as the police and military. …The white power movement of the 21st-century functions differently than its 19th and 20th-century predecessors. While it's true that political terrorism and violence has always been a key feature of right-wing political movements in the U.S., it's important to recognize the shifting terrain of violence and its intended targets. Whereas 19th and 20th-century right-wing terrorists functioned as an extra-military arm of the state, reinforcing state power through vigilante violence, the modern white power movement seeks to destroy the state through spectacular acts of violence.. … Right now, what is desperately needed is a comprehensive overview of the existing white power movement, who it's connected to, how, through what organizations, financial institutions, and governmental agencies, and a proper accounting of networks, members, leaders, websites, publications, and gear (weapons, equipment, explosives, vehicles). [Read More]
On Non-Conviction, Empire, and U.S. Presidents
---- Donald Trump ought to be convicted by the U.S. Senate, of course: he instigated a mass proto-fascist physical assault on Congress in a last-ditch effort to stop it from certifying his clear defeat in the 2020 presidential election – and to provoke a pretext for martial law. Five people died. … There's no basis for the Trump "legal" team's claim that it is unconstitutional to impeach and convict a president after he has left office. The notion that the U.S. Founders wanted to give presidents a blank check to do whatever they want after they are un-elected is absurd. The preponderant majority of constitutional scholars agree that Congress has the right to convict Trump after his presidency, a prerequisite for the elementarily decent task of banning the monster from holding federal office again. But just as obvious as the legitimacy and duty of a Trump conviction is the strong likelihood that the duty will not be met. Trump will walk. … Let's review a number of crimes for which no U.S. presidents were impeached, much less convicted: [Read More]
Also of interest – "Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda" by Jason Stanley, Just Security [February 4, 2021] [Link]; and "The QAnon Delusion Has Not Loosened Its Grip" b[Read More]
FEATURED ESSAYS
The Case for a Third Reconstruction
By Manisha Sinha, New York Review of Books [February 3, 2021]
---- Since the election of Joe Biden to the presidency, it is clear that our democracy is at a turning point. The first order of business of the Biden-Harris administration will necessarily be to undo the damage done by the Trump regime's criminal incompetence and assault on our democratic institutions over the past four years. The Biden White House has proceeded to do that at a rapid clip, with new appointments to federal posts and a stream of executive orders designed to restore faith in government. … But perhaps the biggest issue he will have to confront is the political crisis caused by the failed attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election. American democracy is once again at a crossroads, as it was during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the postwar period when the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union. Like the secessionist slaveholders who would break the republic rather than accept the election of an antislavery president, Trump and his enablers tried to disrupt the electoral process rather than accept his decisive defeat in the election. … The history of Reconstruction reveals that moments of crisis can also provide opportunities to strengthen our experiment in democracy. With a Democratic-controlled Congress, the new administration has just such a chance to inaugurate a much needed "third reconstruction" of American democracy. [Read More]
Confronting the Long Arc of U.S. Border Policy
By Harsha Walia, The Intercept [
---- The celebratory clamor surrounding President Joe Biden's 100-day deportation moratorium was short-lived, as a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the pause on deportation within a few days of its announcement. Even though the court order did not require the Biden administration to proceed with deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement swiftly deported hundreds of people to Guatemala, Honduras, and Jamaica anyway. … The immigrant rights movement will inevitably find itself in an ongoing battle with Biden and his ilk of liberal-centrists, especially when the administration attempts to force through future compromises over who gets to stay and under what conditions, and who is disposable and deportable. To effectively confront those state efforts at divide and rule, movement activists must understand how central Democrats have been to shaping abhorrent U.S. border policy and must refuse to sanitize the Democratic Party's shameful record. [Read More]
Also of interest – "The Border Patrol Calls Itself a Humanitarian Organization. A New Report Says That's a Lie," by Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept [[Link]; and "The Race to Dismantle Trump's Immigration Policies" bn, The New Yorker [February 1, 2021] [Link].
The Resilience Doctrine: Disaster Collectivism in the Climate and Pandemic Crises
, Evergreen State College [February 4, 2021]
[FB – This is Part 4 of an extraordinary 4-part college classroom primer on Disaster Collectivism in the Climate and Pandemic Crises. Each of the parts includes links to dozens of informative articles and essays. Learn more about the 4-Part series here.]
---- At The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, our winter-quarter class on "Catastrophe: Community Resilience in the Face of Disaster" began in early January 2020, so our students had early warning of coronavirus as it began to spread around the world, but before the disease or public awareness had reached the United States. … After the shutdown began in mid-March, our faculty decided to introduce a new "Pandemic Academy" class, with the "Resilience Doctrine" as my inaugural lecture. … Beyond exposing social injustice and inequalities, the pandemic has revealed the stark dangers of western individualism and social atomization, and in particular the American brand of "rugged individualism," or the "liberty" of individuals to do as one pleases, despite the potentially fatal effect on others. Certain areas of the country, particularly the Southeast and Great Plains states, almost made a point of defying health authorities. … Meanwhile, Asian societies with a stronger sense of community, social cohesion, and collective responsibility generally fared much better in the pandemic. … All three of these countries had experience with the 2003 SARS pandemic, but even more importantly had the cooperation of their people, and a cultural sense of intergenerational responsibility and accountability. [Read More]
WAR & PEACE
America's Global Empire is Now Costing Us Our Own Well-Being
---- In the full flowering of the American empire after the Second World War, its leaders understood the skill and subtlety required to exercise imperial power in a post-colonial world. No country fighting for independence from the U.K. or France was going to welcome imperial invaders from America. So America's leaders developed a system of neocolonialism through which they exercised overarching imperial sovereignty over much of the world, while scrupulously avoiding terms like "empire" or "imperialism" that would undermine their post-colonial credentials. … So post-World War Two Americans grew up in carefully crafted ignorance of the very fact of American empire, and the myths woven to disguise it provide fertile soil for today's political divisions and disintegration. Trump's "Make America Great Again" and Biden's promise to "restore American leadership" are both appeals to nostalgia for the fruits of American empire. Past blame games over who lost China or Vietnam or Cuba have come home to roost in an argument over who lost America and who can somehow restore its mythical former greatness or leadership. Even as America leads the world in allowing a pandemic to ravage its people and economy, neither party's leaders are ready for a more realistic debate over how to redefine and rebuild America as a post-imperial nation in today's multipolar world. [Read More]
US ending aid to Saudi-led forces in Yemen, but questions persist
By Joseph Stepansky, Aljazeera [February 7, 2021]
---- United States President Joe Biden last week announced plans to end US support for Saudi Arabia's "offensive operations" in war-torn Yemen, including ceasing relevant arms sales to the government in Riyadh. The move signaled a distinct shift in Washington's approach to the conflict and a renewed emphasis on reaching a diplomatic solution to the years-long war, which has caused what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis. But since the announcement on Thursday, the Biden administration has released few details on what support to Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces in Yemen it plans to end – or how it will differentiate it from other US assistance and arms sales to Saudi Arabia. "The United States provides spare parts, munitions, technical assistance, all kinds of things to the Saudi military, which enable its offensive operations," Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Al Jazeera. "So if the Saudis continued to use the Royal Saudi Air Force to bomb targets in Yemen, presumably, under this doctrine, that aid and assistance should halt." [Read More[ This week the Friends [Quakers] Committee on National Legislation sponsored a screening about the hunger/malnutrition crisis that is killing tens of thousands of children in Yemen. A panel discussion following the film, which addresses the nutrition crisis, can be viewed here.
Biden's Top Foreign Policy Challenge: Avoiding a Cold War with China
By , Foreign Policy in Focus [February 3, 2021]
---- It is a dangerous moment. The Chinese are convinced the U.S. intends to surround them with its military and the Quad alliance, although the former may not be up to the job, and the latter is a good deal shakier than it looks. … As for the U.S. military: virtually all war games over Taiwan suggest the most likely outcome would be an American defeat. Such a war, of course, would be catastrophic, deeply wounding the world's two major economies and could even lead to the unthinkable — a nuclear exchange. Since China and the U.S. cannot "defeat" one another in any sense of that word, it seems a good idea to stand back and figure out what to do about the South China Sea and Taiwan. The PRC has no legal claim to vast portions of the South China Sea, but it has legitimate security concerns. And judging from Biden's choices for Secretary of State and National Security Advisor — Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, respectively — it has reason for those concerns. Both have been hawkish on China, and Sullivan believes that Beijing is "pursuing global dominance." [Read More]. To learn more about US-China, go to the site of The Committee for a SANE US-China Policy.
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Overwhelming odds, unexpected alliances and tough losses — how defeating Keystone XL built a bolder, savvier climate movement
January 29, 2021]
---- When President Biden rescinded a crucial permit for the Keystone XL pipeline last week, it marked the culmination of one of the longest, highest-profile campaigns in the North American climate movement. The opposition to Keystone XL included large environmental organizations, grassroots climate activist networks, Nebraska farmers, Texas landowners, Indigenous rights groups and tribal governments. Few environmental campaigns have touched so many people over such large swaths of the continent. The Keystone XL resistance was part of the ongoing opposition to the Canadian tar sands, one of the most carbon-intensive industrial projects on the planet. Yet, it came to symbolize something even bigger. Many activists saw stopping Keystone XL as a measure of success for the climate movement itself. … A stroke of President Biden's pen finally killed Keystone XL. But paving the way for this victory were countless battles at the grassroots level, where activists tested new tactics and organizing strategies that built a bolder, savvier climate movement. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them.
Charlie Warzel and , New York Times [February 5, 2021]
[FB – For those wanting to bring the January 6th insurrectionists to justice, these cellphone tracking abilities are an ally; but for those interested in civil liberties, let's think twice.]
---- A source has provided another data set, this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump's political rally turned into a violent insurrection. At least five people died because of the riot at the Capitol. Key to bringing the mob to justice has been the event's digital detritus: location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing. … The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day. It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building. About 40 percent of the phones tracked near the rally stage on the National Mall during the speeches were also found in and around the Capitol during the siege — a clear link between those who'd listened to the president and his allies and then marched on the building. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
After Trump's Execution Spree, Lingering Trauma and a Push for Abolition
By Liliana Segura, The Intercept [
---- Although it took some time for Americans to start paying attention, the killings revitalized the fight against the death penalty in the United States. Many of the executions were emblematic of capital punishment's enduring unfairness, and the final three were no exception. Lisa Montgomery, the only woman under a federal death sentence, had lived a life marked by extreme trauma and mental illness. Johnson was killed despite a Supreme Court ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities. And Dustin Higgs, the last man to die, was executed for three murders carried out by another man, who had since said that the government's case was "bullshit." All of the last six men killed were Black. [Read More]
Pandemic's Toll on Housing: Falling Behind, Doubling Up
---- As the pandemic enters its second year, millions of renters are struggling with a loss of income and with the insecurity of not knowing how long they will have a home. Their savings depleted, they are running up credit card debt to make the rent, or accruing months of overdue payments. Families are moving in together, offsetting the cost of housing by finding others to share it. The nation has a plague of housing instability that was festering long before Covid-19, and the pandemic's economic toll has only made it worse. Now the financial scars are deepening and the disruptions to family life growing more severe, leaving a legacy that will remain long after mass vaccinations. Even before last year, about 11 million households — one in four U.S. renters — were spending more than half their pretax income on housing, and overcrowding was on the rise. By one estimate, for every 100 very low-income households, only 36 affordable rentals are available. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
In Game Changer, Int'l Criminal Court will take up Israeli War Crimes and Apartheid in Palestine
---- On Friday, the International Criminal Court found that it had jurisdiction to consider war crimes and crimes against humanity and the crime of Apartheid in the Palestinian territories. … Israel has egregiously violated the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of people in Occupied territories by flooding its own citizens into the Palestinian Territories, by stealing Palestinian land from its owners and building squatter settlements on it, and by using disproportional force against Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border. The court will also look into war crimes by Hamas, which was elected in 2006 and retains control of the Gaza Strip. [Read More]
Call to reject the IHRA's 'working definition of antisemitism'
Israeli academics worldwide [January 11, 2021]
[FB – Five years ago, the International Holocaust Remembrance Association adopted a definition of "anti-Semitism" that, among other things, says that many expressions criticizing the State of Israel qualify as anti-Semitic. This is causing distress in many countries (as is the outlawing of support for BDS, e.g. in Germany). Recently several dozen Israeli academics circulated a protest against the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, describing how it is being used to stifle discussion and legitimate criticism.]
---- Fighting antisemitism in all its forms is an absolute must. Yet, the IHRA document is inherently flawed in ways that undermine this fight. In addition, it threatens free speech and academic freedom, and constitutes an attack both on the Palestinian right to self-determination and the struggle to democratise Israel. The IHRA document has been extensively criticised on numerous occasions. Here, we touch on some of its aspects that are particularly distressing in the higher education context. … The second part of the IHRA document presents what it describes as eleven examples of contemporary antisemitism, seven of which refer to the State of Israel. Some of these 'examples' mischaracterise antisemitism. They likewise have a chilling effect on University staff and students legitimately wishing to criticise Israel's oppression of Palestinians or to study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Finally, they interfere with our right as Israeli citizens to participate freely in the Israeli political process. [Read More]
