Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
January 18, 2021
Hello All – What do we remember, who do we honor today? After a long and bitter struggle, the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was made a national holiday. Even in death, Dr. King's life and message were denounced by a substantial portion of the American people, with white supremacists decrying any reverence or even recognition given to a black man who fought for civil rights and justice, against war and poverty. Yet his cause prevailed, and today the nation honors Dr. King.
And yet official America, illustrated by the speeches and commemorations on this day, still refuses to look Dr. King in the eye and to recognize, or even comprehend, his message for his time and ours. Our official celebrations today cling closely to Dr. King as an apostle of nonviolence, and focus on his early years as a leader of desegregation movements in the American South. Consistently glossed over are his later years when, after Selma, Dr. King brought his struggle for justice to the North, to Chicago and other great cities. Also forgotten is Dr. King's incisive criticism of the US War in Vietnam, and his efforts in his last year to lift up the struggles of the poor, culminating in his support of the Memphis sanitation workers' strike and his "I have been to the mountain top" speech on the evening before he was assassinated in 1968.
Like so much of American history, the meaning of Dr. King's life has to be reclaimed. This morning I listed to Dr. King's speech given exactly one year before his murder. It was called "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break the Silence". Unlike virtually all of the other civil rights leaders, and deviating 100 percent from the consensus of even liberal elites at that time, Dr. King called for an immediate end to the war:
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
A few paragraphs later, Dr. King took even this radical critique of the war further, maintaining that the war was not just skin-deep in America, but was rooted in the very heart of our national culture:
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,
And so today, if we want to truly honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I think it is incumbent on us to do him the simple courtesy of recognizing the man as he truly lived, and to acknowledge his message as he truly lived it. A man of peace; a prophet of justice; a fighter for human equality; a leader in struggle.
News Notes
Last week many of the major progressive organizations in New York City, including the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Make the Road New York launched the Invest in Our New York campaign, a coalition of more than 100 groups that aims to persuade lawmakers to pass laws raising $50 billion in new revenue in 2021. A "tax the rich" campaign is necessary and long overdue; read about it here.
On Friday Democracy Now! interviewed Dr. Peter Salk, an infectious disease specialist, but also the son of Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed the first polio vaccine. At a time when patent rights and "who will pay?" is central to the question of immunizing the world against the ravages of the Covid-19 virus, we are reminded that Dr. Jonas Salk refused to patent his work on the polio vaccine: "Would you patent the sun?" he famously asked an interviewer.
Almost every day the CFOW Facebook page carries a post from Heather Cox Richardson, an historian at Boston College whose comments on the day news has attracted a large following. Of equal interest to me is her weekly presentation on her area of specialty as an historian, Reconstruction (1863-77), a period of history so relevant to our current engagement with white supremacy. A recent offering that I enjoyed is called "Recontruction: Communism and Cowboys" ["How the quest for equality after the Civil War shaped today's politics."]. Check it out
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 (February 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!
This week's Rewards for stalwart readers-down-to-here come, first, from CFOW cultural advisor Alison W, who sent along this collection of songs packaged by David Byrne, "A Change is Gonna Come." My other offering for this week started out with liking a song composed by Elizabeth Cotton and sung buy Rhiannon Giddens, "Shake Sugaree. I had no idea what a sugaree was, let alone why one would shake it. Investigation led to a host of explanations; the one that worked for me is that "sugaree" was a traditional southern dancing thing with sugar shaken on the dance floor and adding to percussion. Thus the song is a lament from an old person about how they lost everything they had ("gone to pawn"), but had a party while doing it. However, even further investigation revealed (according to Elizabeth) that the song was a nonsense song composed as bedtime singing with her grandchildren. And so here is her great-granddaughter Brenda Evans (12), accompanied by Elizabeth Cotton, singing "Shake, Sugaree." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
THE ATTEMPED COUP OF JANUARY 6TH
'Be Ready to Fight' [January 6th, in DC]
By Mark Danner, New York Review of Books [February 11, 2021 issue]
---- As I advanced toward the White House and the booming, reverberating electronic voices, the crowd began to thicken and finally to coalesce. Before I knew it I had been pressed into a mass of bodies straining toward a faintly gesticulating figure hundreds of yards away, echoed by the crudely pixelated image of an amped-up Eric Trump, magnified a hundred times on the jumbotron, just glimpsable through the MAGA hats and flags. … If it all seems too fantastical, you might consider: How do you know the election wasn't stolen? In part it is because you trust institutions: the governors who preside over the elections, the secretaries of state who administer them, the courts that adjudicate the claims of fraud. When you see the news that the courts threw out the suits brought by Trump's lawyers you believe it proves the election was fair. But what if you hated and distrusted those institutions and believed instead what your duly elected president told you? That he had won in a great landslide, that corrupt elected officials were trying to steal it from him, that it was all happening in plain sight? … And I thought of watching the tumult and the flags and the savage fighting at the wounded Capitol that day and the words that had several times come unbidden into my mind there—that unctuous phrase that has come to describe America and our era: "This is not who we are." And yet, I thought, it is what we do. [Read More] For some fascinating (to me) "live action" of the assault on the Capitol, assembled by ProPublica from hundreds of short videos that were posted on the rightwing site Parler, go here.
The Bitter Fruits of Trump's White-Power Presidency
r, The New Yorker [January 12, 2021]
---- The spectacular violence in the Capitol on January 6th was the outcome of Donald Trump's years-long dalliance with the white-supremacist right. Trump all but promised an attack of some kind as he called for his followers to descend on Washington, D.C., for a "wild" protest to stop the certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory… The white right-wing assault on the Capitol, with a Confederate flag in the building and gallows on the lawn, was alarming yet wholly predictable as Trump's frantic efforts to hold on to power faltered. Not only did Trump clearly incite violence with his speech, but his Administration also paved the way for the violence through its deliberate neglect of the rising threat of white extremism. … Democrats now have the votes to demonstrate the power of government to repair and provide in a time of crisis. If they bungle this effort with continued overtures to the disgraced Republican Party, even as its leaders persist in appealing to the worst of right-wing extremists, not only will the galvanizing efforts of Black activists in Georgia have been wasted, but an even-grimmer future will wait on the horizon. A failure of the Democratic Party to deliver during a time of unprecedented need would further validate the sense that electoral participation does not matter. Grassroots activists and other ordinary people will have to continue to push and cajole the Party establishment to think big and act boldly. We have to seize the time. [Read More]
For more on next steps and deep causes – "There Can Be No 'Unity' With Seditious Republicans by Elie Mystal, The Nation [January 14, 2021] [Link]; and "We need to prepare for ongoing insurrectionary violence and address its root causes" by Maria J. Stephan, Waging Nonviolence [January 14, 2021] [Link] And if you haven't already heard AOC's riveting analysis of the events of January 6th and her call for a struggle against white supremacy, please check it out..
Who were the rioters who joined in the attempted coup?
(Video) From Charlottesville to the Capitol: Trump Fueled Right-Wing Violence. It May Soon Get Even Worse
From Democracy Now! [January 15, 2021]
---- As security is ramped up in Washington, D.C., and state capitols across the U.S., the FBI is warning of more potential violence in the lead-up to Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20. Federal authorities have arrested over 100 people who took part in last week's deadly insurrection at the Capitol, and The Washington Post reports that dozens of people on a terrorist watch list — including many white supremacists — were in Washington on the day of the insurrection. "This was something that had been coming for a long time," ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson, who covers right-wing extremism, says of the January 6 riot. "If you looked at the rhetoric online … it was all about revolution, it was all about death to tyrants, it was all about civil war." [See the Program] Also useful are these capsule profiles of some of the rightwing groups: "What is the 'boogaloo' and who are the rioters who stormed the Capitol? Five essential reads," from The Conversation [January 15, 2021] [Link].
FEATURED ESSAYS
The Things You Are Getting Wrong About White Supremacists Is What Allows Them To Grow
---- Twelve years ago, I packed up a Uhaul and left the home my son was born in. I drove across the country with him in a car seat, singing hours of nursery rhymes to keep him entertained. … There were ten thousand personal reasons why I packed up that house and sold it, but there was also one troublesome thing that had been on my mind. A few years earlier the Vinlanders — a white power hate group — had set up a clubhouse only a few blocks away. They were disruptive, violent, and scary and they were recruiting the neighborhood's poor white kids who they hoped had no other offers or chances in life. As a young, poor single mom of a white son, I knew he could eventually be a target. I'll take a lot of risks, but not that one. …Only days ago, a white mob marched from the White House to the Capitol building in order to break in and disrupt the Electoral College count. Some of the mob had zip ties to, apparently, take hostages. Some had guns and other weapons. Some chanted that they were going to kill the Vice President. Someone erected a platform with a noose. Five people died. The nation remains shocked. How did we get here? We each have asked. This is not us, we each have hoped. Then, the day after the attack on the Capitol, the Indianapolis Star — the reputable, award-winning paper — ran a run-of-the-mill story including an interview with a man named Brien James. It was reported that James had joined about one hundred other Trump supporters and Proud Boys at the Indiana statehouse to oppose the Electoral College count and he spoke to the Star as the assault was occurring in Washington. The Star then also quoted James again the next day, documenting him as just another voice in this moment in history. It read like a benign human interest story: Some men, who you may or may not agree with politically, holding a protest at the statehouse — as we do and will continue to do in our American democracy. But I know plenty about Brien James. He was my old neighbor. [Read More]
How to Fight Climate Change and Fascists at the Same Time [Democracy Reform]
January 14, 2021]
---- Politicians in the United States have long had a single, instinctive response to crises both real and imagined: make new kinds of cops. After 9/11, the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security. Amid a ginned-up border crisis two years later, it created the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now, after last week's raid on the Capitol, President-elect Joe Biden is being pushed to create a Cabinet-level appointee tasked with fighting domestic terrorism, bolstered by the bold new statutes criminalizing it that he's promised. That's despite the fact that there's a much better way to defang the violent far right and countless other crises boiling in our teetering republic. The best way to contain the militant GOP, while helping the U.S. face global warming and more, is to expand democracy—not the national security state. The people who stormed the Capitol last week and the politicians who incited them should be held accountable, a process begun by yesterday's impeachment vote. But we already have laws for dealing with domestic terrorism. The relevant agencies just haven't wanted to enforce them, preferring almost always to target either whole categories of people—predominantly, nonwhite people—and forms of small-d democratic dissent like nonviolent protests. Anti-pipeline protesters, for instance, have found themselves on the losing end of a rash of new legislation making sit-ins and other peaceful disruptions to "critical infrastructure" a felony. New counterterrorism measures may be framed as protecting democracy, but more often they constrain it. [Read More]
(Video) America Has Entered the Weimar Era: Walden Bello on How Neoliberalism Fueled Trump & Violent Right
From Democracy Now! [January 12, 2021]
---- Democrats in Congress are pushing ahead with impeachment following the violent insurrection that killed five people at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The single article of impeachment against President Trump cites his incitement of insurrection and accuses him of subverting and obstructing the certification of the 2020 election. This comes as authorities are warning of more right-wing violence around Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20, with possible armed far-right protests planned at all 50 state capitols as well as the U.S. Capitol. We speak with Walden Bello, an acclaimed sociologist, academic, environmentalist and activist, whose latest column argues the United States has entered a "Weimar Era," in which democratic elections are increasingly delegitimized as street violence becomes the norm. "This is not something that's unusual that has happened in the Capitol. Right-wing groups, when they begin to lose electorally resort to the streets and to violence in order to stop that process," says Bello. [See the Program]
What Price Wholeness? [Reparations for Slavery]
By Shennette Garrett-Scott, New York Review of Books [February 11, 2021]
[FB – This is a review of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen.]
---- Darity and Mullen lay out a history of America's failures to live up to its democratic ideals and its long record of state-sanctioned violence against and exploitation of African Americans. The early section of their book outlines a history of the reparations movement and tentative precedents to recompense African Americans for racist violence and exclusion after emancipation. Its lengthy midsection outlines a self-described political history of the United States, beginning with the institutionalization of chattel slavery, which turned people into property and stripped Black people of their humanity. Racial inequities have endured long after the formal end of slavery; its legacies persist to the present day. Finally, in the last two chapters, Darity and Mullen present a blueprint for "a just and fair America": a detailed plan for calculating and administering reparations. The most basic definition of "reparations" is payment to make up for a past wrong. When invoked as a mechanism of redress for American slavery, the word ignites passionate responses from advocates and critics alike. Darity and Mullen propose a "portfolio of reparations" that includes a mix of monetary payments, public services, and education. [Read More]
WAR & PEACE
Joe Biden Can Reverse Trump's Warpath With China
By Michael T. Klare, The Nation [January 15, 2021]
---- Soon-to-be President Joe Biden will instantly face a set of extraordinary domestic crises—a runaway pandemic, a stalled economy, and raw political wounds, especially from the recent Trumpian assault on the Capitol—but few challenges are likely to prove more severe than managing US relations with China. While generally viewed as a distant foreign-policy concern, that relationship actually looms over nearly everything, including the economy, the coronavirus, climate change, science and technology, popular culture, and cyberspace. If the new administration follows the course set by the preceding one, you can count on one thing: The United States will be drawn into an insidious new Cold War with that country, impeding progress in almost every significant field. To achieve any true breakthroughs in the present global mess, the Biden team must, above all else, avert that future conflict and find ways to collaborate with its powerful challenger. Count on one thing: Discovering a way to navigate this already mine-laden path will prove demanding beyond words for the most experienced policymakers in Biden's leadership ensemble. … As in so many other areas he will have to deal with after January 20, to make progress on any issue, Biden will first have to overcome the destabilizing legacies of his predecessor. This will mean, above all, scaling back punitive and self-defeating tariffs and technological barriers, slowing the arms race with China, and abandoning efforts to encircle the mainland with a hostile ring of military alliances. Short of that, progress of any sort is likely to prove next to impossible and the 21st-century world could find itself drawn into a Cold War even more intractable than the one that dominated the second half of the last century. If so, god save us all, we could end up facing nuclear hot war or the climate-change version of the same on a failing planet. [Read More]
In Shadows, SecState Mike Pompeo passed 'Death Sentence' for Millions in Yemen and poisoned Biden's well in Cuba, China, Iran
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [January 15, 2021
---- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who styles himself a Christian gentleman, has according to United Nations officials just passed a death sentence on hundreds of thousands or millions of Yemenis by designating the ruling Helpers of God government of North Yemen a "Foreign Terrorist Organization." The Saudi-UAE War on little Yemen that began in 2015 has left one of the poorest countries in the world a complete basket case. Its 29 million people have seen their infrastructure destroyed from the air by US-made F-16s. Bridges that are needed to transport food have been destroyed. Hospitals have been bombed. Port facilities have been struck, even though they allow the importation of food to the country. The US has been an active participant in the war, providing in-air refueling to the Saudi-led coalition and offering other logistical help and strategic counsel on targeting. Both houses of Congress invoked the War Powers Act to force Trump out of the war, but he vetoed it and not enough Republicans cared to override the veto. … Yemenis are on the brink of mass starvation, and international aid agencies are trying to prevent it. They have to deal with the Helper of God government, to get the food to people. But if they deal with the Houthis, the humanitarian organizations and the companies, banks and governments that fund them will all be declared guilty of material support to terrorists by the United States government. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
The Last Thing We Need Is Another War on Terror
By Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast [January 13, 2021]
White terrorism—or, if you prefer, Radical White Terror—is the oldest and most fundamentally American terrorism there is. Distinct among forms of political violence, it feeds from the same innocence narratives of the American Founding on display in textbooks and airport bookstores across the country. … Accordingly, there is no confronting Radical White Terror without the difficult political and social challenge of confronting its powerful apologists and enablers, from President Donald Trump to the 100-plus Republican members of Congress who helped fan the January 6 Insurrection through embracing Trump's election lies, to the state legislators who actually joined the mob at the Capitol. There is also no confronting Radical White Terror without arresting, prosecuting, and convicting those who executed the riot and expelling them from Congress or, in Trump's case, impeaching, and prosecuting those who provoked them to do it. [Read More] For more cautionary remarks on additional "domestic terrorism" legislation, I suggest "We Should Be Very Worried About Joe Biden's "Domestic Terrorism" Bill" by Luke Savage, Jacobin Magazine [January 2021] [Link]; and "Schumer's Insurrectionist No-Fly List Is a Civil Liberties Nightmare" by Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept [January 13 2021] [Link].
THE STATE OF THE UNION
How the United States Chose to Become a Country of Homelessness
By Dale Maharidge, The Nation [January 14, 2021]
---- The end date for the federal moratorium looms in a matter of weeks, while various state moratoriums are also slated to sunset. And the $25 billion in rent relief provided by Congress, while critical, falls far short of what advocates believe is necessary. But perhaps the most intractable problem is that a moratorium is not the same as rent forgiveness. This means that, even if the moratoriums are extended again (and then again), tenants will at some point have to pay their landlords all of the accrued back rent. Already, nearly 12 million households owe an average of $5,850 in overdue rent and utilities, according to Moody's Analytics. That's $70 billion. How will people be able to repay those sums if they remain jobless? How will they be able to repay them even if they do land a job? Many advocates believe that only a sustained, robust, and far-reaching intervention by the US government can prevent a full-scale catastrophe. Biden's victory, along with Democrats' newly cemented control of the Senate, have given them some hope that aid might be forthcoming. But with Republicans still holding significant power in Congress and Democrats hemmed in by their own party dynamics, they are hardly breathing sighs of relief. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
President Biden, you Need to Hear this: Respected Israeli Rights Group B'Tselem declares Israel an Apartheid State
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [January 17, 2021]
----The respected Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem, has declared Israel an Apartheid state. … B'Tselem points out the sleight of hand in much international discourse in which the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan is typically seen as two administrative units, the state of Israel on the one hand and the Palestinian territories on the other. The latter are often thought of as a state in waiting, hence the "two-state solution." They are not. Unfortunately, the incoming Biden administration is still wedded to the 'two-state' rhetoric, which is completely detached from reality. Worse, it serves as a fig leaf for military occupation and Apartheid, with vague future hopes of a Palestinian state that increasingly doesn't have any plausible territory, since it is being eaten away at by Israel. [Read More] The Israeli magazine +972 just published two interesting essays about the report: one by a member of the B'Tselem executive committee [Link] and another pointing out that, while the Apartheid Report got some coverage in the Israeli English-language media, it was blacked out by the Hebrew media [Link]
OUR HISTORY
[FB – Many thoughtful essays, both in this Newsletter and elsewhere, debate whether Trump and his followers are "fascists," or whether there are such differences between the USA today and Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany that the comparison is useless. But often some of the basics of the German or Italian story, necessary for comparison between then and now, are glossed over. For example, who actually supported Hitler, who went to the rallies, who voted for him … and why? – This review essay addresses these questions based on a reading of Richard Hamilton's 1982 book, Who Voted for Hitler? – I knew Hamilton when I was a student and admired him very much. – By dissecting "Who supported Hitler?" and suggesting some reasons, I think the story helps to illuminate our own times. And for some additional thoughts on the obstacles placed before us in addressing these questions, just out is "A (Not-So-New) Profile of the American Right: On the Authoritarian-Fascist Crisis" by Anthony DiMaggio, Counterpunch [January 15, 2021] [Link].
Who Voted for Hitler?
By Dan Simon, The Nation [January 15, 2021]
---- Three-quarters of a century have passed now since Hitler came to power in Germany, leaving in place two enduring myths about how it happened. One claims that Hitler's rise was born of the frustrations of the middle class in post-WWI Germany. The other holds that Hitler's support came from the disenfranchised and uneducated working and out-of-work poor. But neither myth is accurate, and both are based on hearsay—half-truths people are comfortable with, rather than hard truths that emerge from the data. … What followed with almost blinding speed was the consolidation of power by Hitler, the building of a war machine, and then the start of Second World War itself. Within just a few months, the Nazis had asserted complete control over industrial output, finance, labor, the military, and politics in Germany. But, to be clear, and as Hamilton states emphatically, the key election was the one that took place on July 31, 1932, when Hitler's Nazi party secured only 37.3 percent of the national vote. As Hamilton writes, "Since only three out of eight voters supported Hitler at that point, one must ask, which Germans voted for Hitler?" He doesn't stop there: "But that is only part of the problem and in many respects the less interesting part. It is much more difficult to provide an answer to the why question—why did they support Hitler?" [Read More]
