Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 13, 2021
Hello All – As President Biden is in Europe this week, urging NATO countries to – among other things – ramp up their anti-China efforts, our weekly vigil focused on the growing dangers of nuclear war. In the case of possible war with Russia, the danger-zone lies primarily in the US/NATO military build-up on Russia's borders; but in the case of China, the challenge by China to the USA's world economic leadership and regional leadership in Northeast Asia presents a more amorphous danger-zone.
Of great importance to recall/understand, this new round of Great Power Rivalries is playing out against a background of a dramatic growth in the production of nuclear weapons. According to a new report from the Nobel Prize-winning "International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons," in 2020 the nine nuclear-armed nations of the world spent $72.6 billion on nuclear weapons, with the USA share at about 50 percent of that amount, $37.4 billion.
Why is this happening? According to the Campaign's report, the upsurge of weapons-building in the USA is not responding primarily to international events, but got its start during the Obama presidency around the need to appease domestic critics of Obama's attempts to reduce international tensions (e.g. the Iran Nuclear Agreement) by offering a trade-off with a "Nuclear Modernization" program that would send more than a trillion dollars to the arms makers (Raytheon, General Dynamics, etc.) over the next 30 years. The Campaign's report also highlights the role of millions of dollars spent by the arms makers on lobbying Congress, and for the first time (I think) highlights the role of arms makers in funding the leading think-tanks that shape the USA narrative of "what must be done" for "National Security."
Of great interest to me is that the non-nuclear countries of the world are pushing back against nuclear madness. Initiated by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons [Link] in Australia in 2007, by 2017 a Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons was adopted by the United Nations; and the Treaty came into force in January 2021. So far the Treaty has been ratified by 86 nations, though (no surprise) not the United States or the other eight nuclear weapons countries. But this is a beginning, and we will get there someday.
Some reading/viewing – The main author of the Campaign's report on the nuclear build-up was interviewed on Democracy Now! this week. The Campaign's website has an excellent and user-friendly illustrated history of their work over the decade that culminated with the Treaty. And I think you may be inspired, as I was, by the speech by Campaign leader Beatrice Fihn when she accepted Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 on behalf of the Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
News Notes
A decade ago, White Plains police officers killed DJ Henry and Kenneth Chamberlain (in separate incidents) that sparked outrage against what was perceived as racist police violence. This week Westchester DA Mimi Rocah announced that she was reviewing these two cases. The Kenneth Chamberlain murder has been the subject of on-going protests, led by Kenneth Chamberlain, Jr. with broad community support. One year ago, Democracy Now! ran an extensive interview with Kenneth Chamberlain, Jr. when a court ruling allowed a re-opening of the case. (To see the extensive coverage of the Chamberlain case over the last decade, click here.) CFOW will follow this case closely.
This week Hastings High School grad Emma Francis-Snyder was featured in The Enterprise because her short documentary film, "Takeover," is included in the Tribeca Film Festival. The film focuses on the dramatic 1970 takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx by the Young Lords, a radical activist organization of NY Puerto Ricans. Emma was interviewed and parts of the film were aired this week on Democracy Now!, whose co-host, Juan Gonzalez, was a leader of the Young Lords and part of the Takeover a half-century ago. [See the Program]
As part of the BDS movement, last week Bay Area activists blocked an Israeli-owned ship from off-loading their cargo in Oakland. The effort was a joint project of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and the longshore workers' union. The (Westchester-based) website Mondoweiss has an illuminating interview the project's organizer, Lara Kiswani. [Link].
Finally, it turns out that there are people who do research into where's a good place to raise a child, and this week the New York Times published the results: the "Raising a Family Index." The bottom line? It's better in the USA than in Mexico, but not as good as in Bulgaria.
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 Sunday at 7 pm., 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!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
Why Biden Might not be Able to Extricate the US from its Middle East Quagmire
By Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus [June 9, 2021]
---- Next September, when the last C-130 cargo aircraft and Chinook transport helicopters take off from the infamous Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan that has doubled as a CIA torture center for suspected jihadists, they will not only be leaving behind the site of a military defeat. Their departure will also mark the dismal end of a strategy of direct military engagement to drastically reshape the Middle East that resulted instead in upending the global strategic balance. America's 20-year-long war in the Middle East contributed decisively not only to degrading U.S. imperial power but also to the domestic polarization savaging the American political process at present and to the emergence of China as the new center of global capital accumulation. Ending the Afghanistan commitment, liberals and progressives hope, will provid the conditions for a fundamental reset of US foreign policy. But even now, many are skeptical that the United States has really learned its lesson and that Joe Biden will not find another excuse to maintain a military contingent in Afghanistan. In a United States that has gone through the trauma of COVID-19, followed by the January 6 insurrection and a pandemic of almost weekly mass shootings, Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, 9/11, and the War on Terror might seem to be historical footnotes that pale before the country's present troubles. But these now seemingly distant personalities and events had a decisive role in shaping the present. [Read More]. To read Part 2 of Walden Bello's essay, "Osama's Ghost: The Economics of Overextension," click here.
The Climate Crisis
The Keystone XL Pipeline Is Dead. Next Target: Line 3.
June 11, 2021]
---- The announcement this week from the Canadian company TC Energy that it was pulling the plug on the Keystone XL pipeline project was greeted with jubilation by Indigenous groups, farmers and ranchers, climate scientists and other activists who have spent the last decade fighting its construction. The question now is whether it will be a one-off victory or a template for action going forward — as it must, if we're serious about either climate change or human rights. The next big challenge looms in northern Minnesota, where the Biden administration must soon decide about the Line 3 pipeline being built by the Canadian energy company Enbridge Inc. to replace and expand an aging pipeline. … If Keystone failed the climate test, how could Line 3, with an initial capacity of 760,000 barrels a day, possibly pass? It's as if the oil industry turned in an essay, got a failing grade, ignored every comment and then turned in the same essay again — except this time it was in ninth grade, not fourth. It's not like the climate crisis has somehow improved since 2015 — it's obviously gotten far worse. At this point, approving Line 3 would be absurd. [Read More] And please note, "Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere Hits Record High" [419 ppm] by Brad Plumer, New York TimesJune 7, 2021] [Link].
The State of the Union
The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
---- In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world's richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row. ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation's wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. … Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year. [Read More]
Our History
The Secrets and Lies of the Vietnam War, Exposed in One Epic Document [The Pentagon Papers, 1971]
By Elizabeth Becker, New York Times [June 9, 2021]
[FB – On the 50th anniversary of the publication of what came to be called "The Pentagon Papers," the New York Times had several articles about the Papers' publication, significance, etc., as well as a link to the original zillion-page document.]
---- Brandishing a captured Chinese machine gun, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara appeared at a televised news conference in the spring of 1965. The United States had just sent its first combat troops to South Vietnam, and the new push, he boasted, was further wearing down the beleaguered Vietcong. … That was a lie. From confidential reports, McNamara knew the situation was "bad and deteriorating" in the South. Lies like McNamara's were the rule, not the exception, throughout America's involvement in Vietnam. The lies were repeated to the public, to Congress, in closed-door hearings, in speeches and to the press. The real story might have remained unknown if, in 1967, McNamara had not commissioned a secret history based on classified documents — which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. By then, he knew that even with nearly 500,000 U.S. troops in theater, the war was at a stalemate. He created a research team to assemble and analyze Defense Department decision-making dating back to 1945. [Read More] Also of interest is the Times article about the use the Vietnamese make of the Pentagon Papers in writing their history of the war. [Link].
