Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
October 10, 2021
Hello All – Democracy depends on free and fair elections. The Republicans realize that they cannot win a free election. Their 'issues" are unpopular. Therefore, they want to prevent millions of people from voting. Their action is in the states, not in the federal government. Since the start of 2021, at least 19 states have passed 33 laws making it harder for low-income people and people of color to vote, and to make it easier for partisan officials to undermine valid election results with which they disagree. According to the Brennan Center, one of the leading authorities on voting rights:
Congress has the power to protect American voters from the kinds of restrictions enacted so far this year. The Freedom to Vote Act, which is currently before the Senate, is a comprehensive package of voting, redistricting, and campaign finance reforms. It includes national standards for voting that would ensure access to the ballot across state lines. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which has passed in the House, would complement the Freedom to Vote Act. In many instances, it would prevent changes to voting rules that discriminate on the basis of race or membership in language minority groups from being implemented, and it would restore voters' robust ability to challenge discriminatory laws. Three of the four omnibus restrictive laws were enacted in states that would be subject to pre-clearance under the John Lewis Act (FL, GA, TX).
Even though there is little support in New York for unjust laws such as those being enacted in conservative states, if these laws are not struck down in other states, we could spend years suffering from a Congress that represents only rich and white people. We must stop this attack on democracy. The Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Act now in the Senate, are the way we can do this. The Acts would give us more ways to vote, stop attempts to suppress the vote, make redistricting more fair, and promote campaign finance reform and election security.
The House of Representatives has already passed similar bills, so the action is in the Senate. Please call Sen. Chuck Schumer (202-224-6542) and Kirsten Gillibrand (202-224-4451); ask them to support the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Act. And to support voting rights in states other than New York, you can join a Common Cause phone-bank targeting Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema here; and you can sign a petition that will be sent your congressional representatives, urging support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, here.
News Notes
The murder of ten Afghani/Kabul family members by a drone strike in the last days of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan captures the essence of US military doctrine as the "War on Terror" staggers onward. Killing from a distance ("over the horizon"), with little risk to US military personnel or Our Leader's political standing at home. Ten days ago, former participants in the drone assassination program, "whistleblowers," spoke on a panel about their own experiences and the significance of the Kabul murders. By speaking out, they joined the good company of whistleblower Daniel Hale, who was recently sentence to 45 months in prison (now in Marion) for giving information about the drone program ("90 percent civilian casualties") to The Intercept.
The late John le Carré's last novel, Silverview, will be published on Tuesday. According to The Guardian [UK], "morals and duty clash in le Carré's tale of a bookseller caught in a spy leak"; and you can read the first chapter here. Le Carré was not only a great storyteller and a strong critic of the Cold War, but also an outspoken opponent of the US war on Iraq. Shortly after his death last year, Democracy Now! aired Le Carré's powerful speech, ""The United States of America Has Gone Mad" from 2003. [Link],
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each 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 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, 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 Rewards for intrepid readers honor a request for more good music from Tuba Skinny, which brings New Orleans' jazz and blues music to the concert hall and the streets. They are also a joy to watch. Check out "Jubilee Stomp." Here they are, now with their vocalist Erika, channeling Bessie Smith, at the Albita Springs Opry in 2010; and they came back again 2016. And here is a good set from their 2019 tour of France. There are hundreds of their songs on-line. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
It's Life and Death — Intellectuals Can't Keep Serving the Status Quo
An interview with Noam Chomsky, Truth Out [October 7, 2021]
---- There is a small minority who challenge power, authority and received doctrine. It is sometimes held that their responsibility is "to speak truth to power." I've always found that troubling. The powerful typically know the truth quite well. They generally know what they are doing, and don't need our instructions. They also will not benefit from moral lessons.… It would make a lot more sense to speak truth not to power, but to its victims. If you speak truth to the powerless, it's possible that it could benefit somebody. It might help people confront the problems in their lives more realistically. It might even help them to act and organize in such ways as to compel the powerful to modify institutions and practices; and, even more significantly, to challenge illegitimate structures of authority and the institutions on which they are realized and thereby expand the scope of freedom and justice. It won't happen in any other way, and it's often happened in that way in the past. But I don't think that's right either. The task of a responsible person — anyone who wants to uphold intellectual and moral values — is not to speak what they regard as truth to anybody — the powerful or the powerless — but rather to speak with the powerless and to try to learn the truth. That's always a collective endeavor and wisdom and understanding need not come from any particular turf. But that's quite rare in the history of intellectuals. [Read More]
Why Does Congress Fight Over Childcare But Not F-35s?
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [October 7, 2021]
---- President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic Senators, fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema. But the very week before the Dems' $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. … Only 38 Democrats were willing to vote against a $778 billion military spending bill that, once Veterans Affairs and other related expenses are included, would continue to consume over 60% of discretionary spending. "How're you going to pay for it?" clearly applies only to "money for people," never to "money for war." Rational policy making would require exactly the opposite approach. Money invested in education, healthcare and green energy is an investment in the future, while money for war offers little or no return on investment except to weapons makers and Pentagon contractors, as was the case with the $2.26 trillion the United States wasted on death and destruction in Afghanistan. [Read More]
War & Peace
Geopolitical Earthquakes Increase the Danger of Catastrophic War
By Joseph Gerson, Committee for a SANE US-China Policy [October 9, 2021]
---- There is a powerful U.S. elite consensus that China must be contained and its rise managed to ensure U.S. supremacy. Peace advocates in Washington describe the political environment there as "radioactive" when it comes to questioning the need to bludgeon Beijing into compliance. Even as the Pentagon recognizes that China's defining military doctrine is "strategic defense", Biden [etc.] have been building on Trump's 2018 National Defense Strategy. That defining doctrine shifted the country's strategic priority from the "war on terrorism" to "great power competition," preparations for war against China and to a lesser degree with Russia. … The U.S. peace movement is just now, belatedly, beginning to make the transition from its twenty years of resisting the forever wars in the greater Middle East to the growing dangers of great power war. [Read More]
Afghanistan
Averting Afghanistan's Economic and Food Crises
By October 6, 2021]
[FB - John Sifton is the Asia Advocacy director at Human Rights Watch]
----- Afghanistan's humanitarian situation is spiraling into catastrophe. Millions of Afghans are now facing severe economic stress and food insecurity in the wake of the Taliban's August takeover, set off by widespread lost income, cash shortages, and rising food costs. Officials with the UN and several foreign governments are warning of an economic collapse and risks of worsening acute malnutrition and outright famine. Surveys by the World Food Program (WFP) reveal over nine in ten Afghan families have insufficient food for daily consumption, half stating they have run out of food at least once in the last two weeks. One in three Afghans is already acutely hungry. Other United Nations reports warn that over 1 million more children could face acute malnutrition in the coming year. Millions of Afghan families have lost their incomes. [Read More]
Also useful/interesting on the Afghanistan disaster – "The Lie of Nation Building" by Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books [October 7, 2021 issue] [possibly behind a pay-wall] [Link]; and "How the U.S. Derailed an Effort to Prosecute Its Crimes in Afghanistan" by Alice Speri, The Intercept [[Link]
The Climate Crisis
(Video) "Blah, Blah, Blah": Youth Climate Activists Slam Political Inaction at U.N. Summit Ahead of COP26
From Democracy Now! [October 4, 2021]
---- Thousands of youth climate activists marched through the streets of Milan last week demanding world leaders meet their pledges to the Paris Climate Agreement and keep global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. The protest came at the end of a three-day youth climate conference, ahead of the United Nations' COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. Activists at the Youth4Climate conference slammed political inaction on the climate crisis and world leaders' vague pledges to reduce carbon emissions. "Historically, Africa is responsible for only 3% of global emissions," said Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate. "And yet Africans are already suffering some of the most brutal impacts fueled by the climate crisis." Swedish activist Greta Thunberg mocked the jargon politicians use to talk about climate and the environment. "Net zero, blah, blah, blah. Climate neutral, blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders: words — words that sound great but so far has led to no action," said Thunberg. "Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises." [Read More] Still trying to kill us all are the fossil fools: read "Big Oil Lobby Spending Millions to Gut Key Build Back Better Climate Provisions" by Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams [October 6, 2021] [Link].
Civil Liberties
Free Steven Donziger
October 1, 2021]
---- Lawyer Steven Donziger was sentenced to six months in prison today, after being found guilty on several counts of misdemeanor criminal contempt in July. Donziger, who won a major suit against the oil giant Chevron in Ecuador in 2011, has been under house arrest since August 2019—well over the length of his sentence, which is the longest he can be imprisoned for the charges against him. Just yesterday, the United Nation's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled his house arrest was "arbitrary" and a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, arguing for his release. The U.N. is right. Donziger should be free. … The case that Donziger brought in Ecuador against Texaco—now Chevron—resulted in the company being made to pay out $9.5 billion for the decades it spent dumping oil waste onto Indigenous ancestral lands in the Amazon. But the convoluted proceedings did not stop there. The company vowed revenge…. [Read More] And what do we make of this? – "Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Has Deep Ties to Chevron Lawyers Leading Legal Attacks on Steven Donziger" by Andrew Fishman, The Intercept [October 7, 2021] [Link].
The State of the Union
America Is in the Midst of a Dramatic Labor Resurgence
October 8, 2021]
---- All over the country, workers are winning concessions. What business calls a "labor shortage" is really labor power in action. … Businesses are complaining of a "labor shortage," which in reality is—viewed from the perspective of workers—labor power in action. … The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks "large strikes," meaning strikes of over 1,000 workers. In 2020, there were a total of nine such strikes, involving 28,800 workers. In 2021 so far, the total number is already at 12 strikes, involving 22,300 workers. And they're not done yet. There are three large pending strike authorizations that could add to that tally: IATSE-affiliated Hollywood production workers (60–65,000 workers), Kaiser Permanente workers (37,000), and UAW-affiliated John Deere workers (roughly 10,000). [Read More] The go-to place for learning about this strike mini-wave is Labor Notes. For example, here is their report on "Two Thousand Hospital Workers Strike in Buffalo" [Link].
Israel/Palestine
Racial Justice vs. The Israel Lobby: When Being Pro-Palestine Becomes the New Normal
Posted on October 09, 2021
---- There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, a change that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially the youth, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into tangibly diminishing Israel's stronghold over the US Congress, it promises to be of great consequence in the coming years. … Members of the Squad, young Representatives who often speak out against Israel and in support of Palestine, were introduced to the 2019 Congress. With a few exceptions, they remained largely consistent in their position in support of Palestinian rights and, despite intense efforts by the Israeli lobby, they were all reelected in 2020. The historic lesson here is that being critical of Israel in the US Congress is no longer a guarantor of a decisive electoral defeat; on the contrary, in some instances, it is quite the opposite. [Read More]
Our History [Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer]
(Video) "Until I Am Free": The Enduring Legacy of Voting Rights Pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer
From Democracy Now! [October 8, 2021)
----- As Republican lawmakers attempt to make it harder to vote in states across the country, we look at the life and legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights pioneer who helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Historian Keisha Blain writes about Hamer in her new book, "Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America." In addition to fighting for voting rights, Hamer challenged state-sanctioned violence and medical racism that Black women faced. [See the Program] – Looking for more about Fannie Lou Hamer, I found this amazing short documentary produced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963, a year before "Freedom Summer" and the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Hamer is among the dozens of people from the Mississippi Delta who spoke about the terrorism directed against would-be Black voters by the white power-structure. Very powerful.
