Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
May 9, 2021
Hello All – While the United States and other wealthy countries are on a path to vaccinate most of their people, other countries are not, and low-income countries have little hope of vaccinating all their people in the near future, One cause of this is the rules of the World Trade Organization that protects patents, including the patents that Big Pharma companies have on vaccines, thus limiting production. Millions will die if this doesn't change.
Last week President Biden surprised Corporate America by stating that the USA supports waiving these patent rights so that more corporations could make vaccines. If the WTO agrees to this waiver, all countries may hope that their populations will be vaccinated soon. In addition to protecting many more people, universal vaccination will limit the number of virus mutations, thus protecting people in rich countries from re-infection and ending the pandemic. Several good/useful articles pasted in below address the economic and medical implications of sharing or not sharing the vaccines.
This patent waiver may or may not be successful; already objections from Germany and hesitation by many European countries show the hard road ahead. But the pandemic itself, along with the collapse of healthcare systems world wide and the problems in sharing existing medical solutions, illustrates our larger dilemma. We/the world stand on the brink of several crises, each one of which could severely damage our civilization or even do us in. Most salient of these crises are the climate crisis and the danger of nuclear war, but the dangers of fascism, a more virulent pandemic, or the collapse of our financial and economic systems are close behind.
Focusing just on the climate crisis, we know that it has many facets – and many of these are addressed in an article linked below by the Green Party's Howie Hawkins – but the crisis can be summarized by simple arithmetic. The world emits so many billions of tons of greenhouse gases each year, each year slightly warming the planet, and before too many years go by we will have reached a "tipping point" beyond which the possibilities to prevent runaway warming will be lost. As Greta Thunberg warned before Biden's recent Earth Day Climate Summit, "We can keep cheating in order to pretend that these targets are in line with what is needed, but while we can fool others, and even ourselves, we cannot fool nature and physics… Let's call out their bullshit."
Like the pandemic and vaccine problem, the climate crisis illustrates the need to use political action to overcome the corporate roadblocks that prevent the world from using science and the understanding it gives us from solving life-and-death issues facing humanity. The reigning neo-liberal order, which dictates that all problems can be solved through the magic of the market, has been codified into law – and thus the power of the state and the police – to protect the "rights" of the property owners who stand between human survival and horrible death. These so-called "rights" must be challenged and overcome quickly, or else.
News Notes
It is clear that drones – for surveillance and killing – are the coming way of war in much of the world. The Pentagon, for example, has already made it clear that after US troops leave Afghanistan drones will continue to give the USA a strong military role in the country. A new website, www.bankillerdrones.org, explains, monitors, and combats these developments. On Sunday, May 16th, at 11 a.m., a "Ban Killer Drones" webinar will address drone proliferation, border surveillance, and the persecution of drone whistle blower Daniel Hale. Last week the website was launched with an excellent video webinar that gave an overview of weaponized drones and surveillance drones.
Last week Code Pink's Medea Benjamin took the floor at the annual meeting of military manufacturer General Dynamics to question the morality of the company's billion-dollar weapon sales to Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes such as the UAE and Bahrain. She also questioned the moral values of the company's CEO Phebe Novakovic for "personally making $21 million a year through a business model that thrives on conflict, death, and destruction." Ms. Novakovic then had a brief dialogue with Medea. Watch the video here.
As a college student and newbie peacenik some 60 years ago, I heard a talk by Albert Bigelow, a Quaker peace activist who in 1958 attempted to sail his ship the "Golden Rule" into a Pacific Nuclear test site – the Marshall Islands – to stop the test. Needless to say, he did not succeed in this and he and his crew were arrested; but much publicity about the tests themselves resulted from his action. Last week the refurbished "Golden Rule" renewed its peace mission, setting sail from Hawai'i to California with a crew organized by Veterans for Peace and protesting against the continuing threat of nuclear war. Read the story here.
Things to Do/How to Help
CFOW supports Smart Elections, a website and action-organization whose mission it to protect our elections, with a focus on banning voting machines that can be easily hacked and/or do not produce a reliable paper trail. In NYS, the focus is on passing bills in the Assembly (A1115) and Senate (S309) that will do this. As the legislative session has only a month to go, pressure to get the bills to the floor is urgent; otherwise, we will be voting on hackable machines next fall. To learn more about Smart Elections and the problem with voting machines that will be used in Westchester if they are not stopped, go here; and to join their meeting next Friday noon, register here.
CFOW is supporting RAPP (Release Aging People in Prison) in an effort to have the NYS legislature pass two bills – "Elder Parole" and "Fair and Timely Parole." To learn what these are about, go here; but in a nutshell, 20 percent of people now in state prisons are over 55; and as for people from Westchester, about two-thirds of the older prisoners are people of color. The goal of these two bills is to give older prisoners with long sentences an opportunity for a parole hearing, and to direct the Parole Board to consider what kind of person the prisoner has become, rather than simply considering the nature of the crime committed long ago. Assemblyman Tom Abinanti has not indicated support for "Elder Parole"; please call him at 518-455-5753 and ask him to support bill A3475A. Thanks.
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.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil takes place every Monday from 5:30 to 6 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 10:30 a.m., please send a return email. Our 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!
This week's Reward for stalwart readers is a terrific short animated film called "White Fatigue." I think it hits the nail on the head. As the film makers say, "Watch the film in full here to learn the history of white supremacy and understand how passive racism perpetuated via white fatigue is the biggest challenge in the fight against racism today." If you like this, please share.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
914-478-3848
CFOW WEEKLY READER
(Video) "Millions of Lives Are at Stake": Pressure Grows on Biden to Back WTO Waiver on Vaccine Technology
From Democracy Now! [May 5, 2021]
[FB – This Democracy Now! segment interviews Lori Wallach of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. The interview took place the day before a meeting of the World Trade Organization where President Biden, to the surprise of many, voted against the demands of Big Pharma and for a temporary waiver on intellectual property rights for COVID-related medicines and vaccines. Lori Wallach told Democracy Now!: "The big problem is simply not enough vaccines are being produced. The world needs 10 to 15 billion doses to reach herd immunity, and right now all of the global production together is on track to make 6 billion doses this year." [See the Program]. Lori Wallach recently co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post with Nobel-Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, "Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish." Also of interest is "The West Has Been Hoarding More Than Vaccines" by Walden Bello, New York Times [May 3, 2021] [Link].
The Climate Crisis
Biden's Climate Pledge Is a Promise He Cannot Keep
By Howie Hawkins, Green Party Presidential Candidate [May 4, 2021]
---- President Biden's Earth Day pledge to cut carbon emissions by 50% to 52% by 2030 is a promise he cannot keep. The White House Fact Sheet released with Biden's pledge added nothing to the climate actions in his American Jobs Plan announced on March 31. The 12,000-word White House Fact Sheet on the American Jobs Plan hardly mentions the climate. The plan is presented as a jobs through infrastructure program with only a fraction of it impacting carbon emissions. The climate emergency demands a radical and rapid decarbonization of the U.S. economy with numerical goals and timetables to transform all productive sectors.… Biden provided no explanation for how the U.S. will get to the precisely stated range of "50% to 52%." [Read More] Also of interest is "The Future of Fracking" by Willa Glickman, New York Review of Books [May 5, 2021] [Link].
Israel/Palestine
Why Human Rights Watch Designating Israel's Crimes as Apartheid Is a Very Big Deal
By
---- Human Rights Watch is the best-known and arguably the most influential among Washington elites of any of the many human rights organizations in the United States. So when HRW issues an unsparing, 200-plus page legal and factual report concluding that Israeli government authorities are guilty of the crime of apartheid, it is a very big deal. …The report reflects the power of decades of work in defense of Palestinian rights. It hasn't ever been easy, and it won't be easy now. It surprised no one that White House press secretary Jen Psaki, asked about the report, responded that it "is not the view of this administration." But the report will make it much more difficult for reluctant mainstream Democrats to ignore Palestinian rights, and much easier for progressive Democrats, looking for evidence of broadening support for those rights, to take a stand. It will significantly strengthen our work to change US policy: winning support for the Palestinian Children and Families Act in Congress, moving forward on conditioning and eventually ending military aid to Israel, and mobilizing BDS campaigns against the kinds of corporations HRW calls on to stop supporting Israeli apartheid. [Read More]
Our History
(Video) "Exterminate All the Brutes": Filmmaker Raoul Peck Explores Colonialism & Origins of White Supremacy
From Democracy Now! [May 4, 2021]
---- A new four-part documentary series, "Exterminate All the Brutes," delves deeply into the legacy of European colonialism from the Americas to Africa. It has been described as an unflinching narrative of genocide and exploitation, beginning with the colonizing of Indigenous land that is now called the United States. The documentary series seeks to counter "the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse, that we have been subject to all of these years," says director and Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck. "We have the means to tell the real story, and that's exactly what I decided to do," Peck says. "Everything is on the table, has been on the table for a long time, except that it was in little bits everywhere. … We lost the wider perspective." [Read More]
