Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
April 25, 2021
Hello All – Next Saturday – May Day! – CFOW will hold a rally in Hastings to demand New York legislature action on pending bills that would allow older prisoners to obtain parole hearings. In this we will partner with RAPP (Release Aging People in Prison). Please join us at the VFW Plaza at noon.
Just over 1.8 million people were in US prisons and jails in 2020. In New York, prisons and jails held just under 49,000. Both numbers have declined significantly since 2008, largely the result of the release of prisoners because of the Covid epidemic. However, while the NY prison population has declined, the number of prisoners age 50 and over has shown a slight increase. Thus, while about 10 percent of the the prison population was 50+ in 2007, by 2021 it was about 20 percent. And so the question is asked, if prison is supposed to be about rehabilitation, as well as about punishment and incarceration, what public good is served by confining elderly prisoners, often needing serious medical attention, to prison for the remainder of their lives?
Our partner at next Saturday's event, RAPP, "works to end mass incarceration and promote racial justice through the release from prison of older and aging people and those serving long and life sentences." They are one of more than a dozen NY organizations united in the Parole Justice Campaign. Our rally next Saturday will be in support of Fair and Timely Parole (S1415/A.4231) and Elder Parole (S15/A.3475).
· Fair and Timely Parole "would provide more meaningful parole reviews for incarcerated people who are already parole eligible. The bill would change the standard of parole by centering release not on the original crime but on the person's rehabilitation while incarcerated. In other words, parole commissioners would no longer be able to deny release based solely on the crime for which the person is convicted."
· Elder Parole "would allow incarcerated people aged 55 and older who have already served 15 or more years a chance to go before the Parole Board for a hearing. Roughly 1,000 people would immediately become eligible for parole with the passage of Elder Parole, and thousands more people would ultimately benefit in years to come. The Elder Parole bill does not provide automatic release but instead a meaningful review and evaluation by the Parole Board."
Even with a supermajority in the state legislature, the Democratic Party leadership in Albany is moving too slowing to bring these bills to a vote before the legislature wraps up business in June. Rivertown residents can support these bills by calling Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins at (518) 455-2585 and telling her staff you want Sen. Cousins to work for the passage of Elder Parole and Fair and Timely Parole. Please also make calls to AssemblymanTom Abinanti (Rivertowns - 518-455-5753) or Assemblyman Nader J. Sayegh (Yonkers - 518 455 3662). (And more legislators' contact info is found here.)
And please join us next Saturday for this righteous campaign!
News Notes
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (CD 16) is under attack by AIPAC for his support – one of 14 co-sponsors – of HR 2590, "Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act." The bill, introduced by Rep. Betty McCollum, would prohibit US military aid to Israel ($3.8 billion) from being used to detain Palestinian children, demolish Palestinian homes, or annex Palestinian lands. (Read more about the bill here.) Jamaal is under attack by the AIPAC people in Westchester, and by congressional "supporters of Israel" in Congress, for being "anti-Israel". Let's show Jamaal that we have his back on this issue. Email him here.
The largest anti-pipeline action since Standing Rock is going on in Minnesota, where activists celebrated Earth Day by blocking the "Line 3 replacement project" by locking themselves into concrete barrels at the entrance of an oil pumping station. The protests are led by "Indigenous groups who see the project and the risk of a spill as a violation of treaty rights, as the project endangers wild rice lakes in treaty territories where the Anishinaabe have the right to hunt, fish, and gather." For more on this evolving story/struggle, go here.
This week marks the 175th anniversary of the US invasion of Mexico (1845-48), which resulted in seizing about half of Mexico, annexing California and much else. As David Vine points out in this useful article, this was one of 10 invasions of Mexico. Indeed, the US has invaded Latin America more than 70 times, leaving occupying armies for months, years, and in some cases decades. While the US political elite wails about the "invasion" of the US by desperate refugees from Central America, we might pause to consider whether our nation has contributed to the distress of people fleeing poverty and violence.
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 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!
With a focus on prison and (someday) prison abolition, it seems only right that this week's Rewards come from Johnnie Cash's album at Folsom Prison (1968). For samples, here are "Folsom Prison Blues," "The Long Black Veil," and "Jackson." Or listen to the whole thing here.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
OUR WEEKLY READER
War & Peace
The U.S. Could Have Left Afghanistan Years Ago, Sparing Many Lives
By Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept [April 16 2021]
---- President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw most U.S. troops from Afghanistan marks a significant reduction in America's participation in the war. But it is unlikely to mean peace for Afghans themselves, who remain caught between a weak and corrupt central government long propped up by U.S. military might and a resurgent Taliban movement that is stronger than at any time since the United States invaded. The question of timing hung heavily over Biden's announcement Wednesday that America's "forever war" in Afghanistan would soon come to an end, with the remaining 2,500 American troops in the country scheduled to come home on the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The violent disintegration of Afghan society began with the 1979 Soviet invasion of the country, but the decision in the early years of this century to occupy Afghanistan and try to transform it into a liberal democracy at great cost in lives and resources has made America a key force in Afghanistan's fate. … After 20 years, the U.S. is leaving Afghanistan in favor of a minimal counterterrorism footprint. Many haunting questions remain, including why this change in America's approach wasn't made decades ago, what has been accomplished by the huge loss of life and resources, and who is responsible for the ultimate failure of the U.S. project in Afghanistan. [Read More] For lots of statistics, read "The War in Afghanistan Has Cost Over $2.26 Trillion" from Brown University [April 20, 2021] [Link].
The Climate Crisis
Biden Is All About Zero Emissions, but Who Do You Think Has Been Fueling Them?
[FB - Kate Aronoff is the author of "Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet — And How We Fight Back."]
---- "We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil … preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft," Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in 1965. That ethos would inspire a generation of environmentalists to see the fates of this planet's inhabitants as intertwined. By contrast, the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who was labeled a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 1974 urged a "lifeboat ethics": for rich countries to be "on our guard against boarding parties" from predominantly nonwhite countries whose residents he saw as an intolerable strain on the planet's resources. Racked by ever-worsening fires and floods, our little craft is not doing well. This week, the White House is welcoming world leaders to a virtual summit on curbing climate destruction. Countries will present their plans to meet the goal inscribed in the Paris Agreement to cap warming at "well below" 2 degrees Celsius. President Biden has pledged to cut emissions at least in half from 2005 levels by 2030, aiming for "net zero" emissions by 2050. But accounting for the United States' outsize responsibility for the climate crisis requires much bolder action, according to a recent recommendation from several groups, including Friends of the Earth U.S. and ActionAid USA: "a reduction of at least 195 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions" compared with 2005 levels by 2030 — 70 percent cuts within U.S. borders and "the equivalent of a further 125 percent reduction" by providing support for emissions reductions abroad. The question, then: Does the White House want to helm a spaceship or a lifeboat? [Read More] On Friday, Kate Aronoff was a guest on Democracy Now! to talk about Biden's pledge at the virtual Climate Summit to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions to 50% below the 2005 level: "This is well, well below what the United States really owes the rest of the world," she said, "based on its historical responsibility for causing the climate crisis and the massive, massive resources this country has to transition very quickly off of fossil fuels."
Israel/Palestine
The Reorientations of Edward Said
a, The New Yorker [April 19, 2021]
---- "Professor of Terror" was the headline on the cover of the August, 1989, issue of Commentary. Inside, an article described Edward Said, then a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, as a mouthpiece for Palestinian terrorists and a confidant of Yasir Arafat. "Eduardo Said" was how he was referred to in the F.B.I.'s two-hundred-and-thirty-eight-page file on him—perhaps on the assumption that a terrorist was likely to have a Latin name. V. S. Naipaul willfully mispronounced "Said" to rhyme with "head," and asserted that he was "an Egyptian who got lost in the world." Said, an Arab Christian who was frequently taken to be Muslim, recognized the great risks of being misidentified and misunderstood. In "Orientalism" (1978), the book that made him famous, he set out to answer the question of, as he wrote in the introduction, "what one really is." The question was pressing for a man who was, simultaneously, a literary theorist, a classical pianist, a music critic, arguably New York's most famous public intellectual after Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag, and America's most prominent advocate for Palestinian rights. … Said had pushed for negotiation with Israel and for a two-state solution long before Arafat accepted both, in 1988. This major compromise by the Palestinian leader, which Said helped draft in Algiers, implicitly recognized Israel's right to exist and cleared the way for the peace process that led, in 1993, to the first Oslo Accord. However, by the time that Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin hesitantly shook hands on the South Lawn of the White House, Said was denouncing the accord as "an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles." In his view, an old, exhausted, and increasingly venal Palestinian leadership had succumbed to American and Israeli blandishments and pressure. Palestinian leaders, ignorant about facts on the ground created by Zionist settlers in the West Bank and Gaza—Arafat hadn't even seen the occupied territories since his departure in 1967—had consented to a new and quasi-permanent form of occupation. [Read More]
Our History
Slave Rebellions and Mutinies Shaped the Age of Revolution
By Steven Hahn, Boston Review [April 23, 2021]
[FB – This essay reviews three new books: The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, by Julius S. Scott; Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, by Vincent Brown; and The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution, by Niklas Frykman.]
---- The Age of Revolution (1770–1850), bookended by the American and French Revolutions on the one side and the Revolutions of 1848 on the other, is widely viewed as the progenitor of the modern Euro-Atlantic world. Its intellectual energy fused the liberal and republican ideas of John Locke with the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; its political energy fed off the struggles between the bourgeois and their aristocratic enemies. Although visionary hopes could meet crushing defeats—as they did during the popular risings of 1848—by the end, there were new parliamentary regimes, emerging nation-states, declarations of rights, and the eruption of an industrial age. Until recently, Caribbean slave rebellions have been treated as sidebars to the Age of Revolution. In part this is because of a Eurocentrism that has long diminished the role of Black people in shaping history. But equally, enslaved people didn't fit the image of political actors. And yet, this classic narrative leaves out the most radical of the revolutions that exploded neither in continental Europe nor in North or South America, but in the Caribbean, on the island the French called Saint-Domingue and the victorious rebels would call Haiti (Ayiti), after its indigenous name. [Read More]
---- The Age of Revolution (1770–1850), bookended by the American and French Revolutions on the one side and the Revolutions of 1848 on the other, is widely viewed as the progenitor of the modern Euro-Atlantic world. Its intellectual energy fused the liberal and republican ideas of John Locke with the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; its political energy fed off the struggles between the bourgeois and their aristocratic enemies. Although visionary hopes could meet crushing defeats—as they did during the popular risings of 1848—by the end, there were new parliamentary regimes, emerging nation-states, declarations of rights, and the eruption of an industrial age. Until recently, Caribbean slave rebellions have been treated as sidebars to the Age of Revolution. In part this is because of a Eurocentrism that has long diminished the role of Black people in shaping history. But equally, enslaved people didn't fit the image of political actors. And yet, this classic narrative leaves out the most radical of the revolutions that exploded neither in continental Europe nor in North or South America, but in the Caribbean, on the island the French called Saint-Domingue and the victorious rebels would call Haiti (Ayiti), after its indigenous name. [Read More]
