CFOW Newsletter - Focus on the mainstream media and the USA-Ukraine-Russia crisis

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

January 31, 2022

 

Hello All – Today's debate in the UN Security Council about Russia and the Ukraine did not reveal (to me, at least) any new openings whereby this conflict could be resolved by diplomacy rather than force.  The issues involved in this conflict are potentially deadly, reflecting the most serious confrontation between two nuclear-armed USA and Russia since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.  The issues are also very complex, especially the relation between Ukraine and Russia since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

 

For those interested in the deeper background of the conflict, I recommend the article from Code Pink linked below in the Weekly Reader.  Here I limit my comments to the role that the mainstream media is playing in shaping our understanding of what's going on. Looking at Russia and Ukraine, our media gives us little information about any context for the crisis, how the current crisis developed from Ukrainian independence (1991) through the coup that overthrew the elected president Yanukovych in 2014, and why Russian speakers in Ukraine were alienated by the new regime.  Also off the agenda is the role of Ukrainian neo-Nazis in the 2014 coup and the civil war in the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine.  Government or academic sources are endlessly called on to speculate about what degree of evil should be applied to Russia and Putin, though there is little interest in speculating along similar lines (government crisis, the leader losing popularity) about Biden and the USA; and though public opinion in the US supports a diplomatic rather than a military resolution to the conflict, few people espousing this viewpoint are quoted or receive air time.

 

Why the US mainstream media – not least the New York Times – are so intent on banging the drums of war is an interesting question, though not to be answered here.  One way that we can cast a vote for peace, however, is to petition our congressional representatives, Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones, to vote NO on a vote probably coming up this week that would provide Ukraine with another $500 million in military aid and other services. The legislation is described in this useful article from The Intercept. Rep. Bowman's phone is (202) 225-2464.  Rep. Jones' phone is (202) 225-6506.  Please call both,

 

News Notes

The Democrat-controlled legislature In Albany has issued revised congressional district boundaries that are expected to help Democrats gain 3 House seats in the next election.  The legislature is set to vote on these districts sometime this week. According to this map, Hastings will remain in Jamaal Bowman's district and Dobbs and points north will be in Mondaire Jones district.

 

Since 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has maintained the "Doomsday Clock," indicating the extent that humanity is in peril.  In 1947 it was set at 7 minutes to midnight; after the end of the Cold War it was reset to 17 minutes to midnight.  Last year, given the climate crisis and the Covid pandemic, it was reset to 100 seconds before midnight.  And on January 20^th of this year, the clocked stayed put, based on nuclear and biological weaponry, the climate crisis, and a "corrupted information ecosphere that undermines rational decision making." To read more about the Doomsday Clock, go here.

 

CFOW Nuts & Bolts

Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester.  Weather/covid permitting, 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 will be held on Monday, February 7th 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 for the link. 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

 

Featured Essays

(Video) A Fascist World is Breathing [An interview with Arundhati Roy]

From the Laura Flanders show [January 24, 2022]
[FB – The latest video/interview with the great Indian writer.]

---- Have you checked where you stand on the idea that the United States is inherently different from other nations, and that the ghastly things that happen elsewhere, like fascism, or authoritarian rule, can't happen in this place?  I thought about that recently when I had the pleasure of interviewing Arundhati Roy, the renowned Indian novelist, essayist and activist. This spring, the good people at Haymarket Books are publishing a second edition of Roy's latest collection of essays. It's called Azadi: Fascism, Fiction, and Freedom in the Time of the Virus, and in it she brings readers up to date on, among other things, the state of democracy in India. "It's a carcass," she writes, "dragged about by one party without accountability, headed by a man whose power rests on the use and threat of use of violence." … The more I listened to Roy talk about India the more I heard echoes of the US. Perhaps not here, not yet, but by no means impossible. [See the Program].

 

(Video) Leonard Peltier Has COVID; His Lawyer — an Ex-Federal Judge — Calls for Native Leader to Be Freed

From Democracy Now! [January 31, 2022]

---- Jailed 77-year-old Native American activist Leonard Peltier has tested positive for COVID-19 less than a week after describing his prison conditions as a "torture chamber." Peltier was convicted of aiding and abetting the killing of two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 while a member of the American Indian Movement. He has long maintained his innocence and is considered by Amnesty International as a political prisoner. We speak with his lawyer and former federal judge Kevin Sharp, who says Peltier's case was riddled with misconduct, including witness intimidation and withholding exculpatory evidence. Sharp argues Peltier's health, age and unfair trial make him the perfect candidate for executive clemency. "The legal remedies are no longer available," says Sharp on Peltier's case. "Now it's time for the [Bureau of Prisons] and the president of the United States to fix this and send him home." [See the Program]

 

Cuba: 60 Years of a Brutal, Vindictive, and Pointless Embargo

By Peter Kornbluh, The Nation [January 26, 2022]

----- In mid-December, some 114 members of Congress sent a forceful letter to President Joe Biden calling for "immediate humanitarian actions" to lift the economic sanctions "that prevent food, medicine, and other humanitarian assistance from reaching the Cuban people." With Cuba struggling to emerge from a dire, Covid-generated economic crisis, the congressional representatives are pushing the White House to end the restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on remittances and travel and restore the Obama-era policy of engagement with the island nation. Full engagement with Cuba, of course, would require lifting the US embargo—a demand the congressional letter conspicuously fails to make. As the embargo approaches its 60th anniversary, terminating it would require not only White House action but a vote in Congress that the Democratic leadership has neither the political capacity nor the moral courage to prioritize. Indeed, the humanitarian measures that these members of Congress are asking of President Biden are intended to soften an economic crisis that, for decades, the embargo has explicitly attempted to create. [Read More]  Also of interest re: Cuba is (Video) "Despite U.S. Embargo, Cuba Aims to Share Homegrown Vaccine with Global South," from Democracy Now! ]January 27, 2022] [See the Program].

 

War & Peace

America Is Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Code Pink [January 31, 2022]

---- So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that "panic" by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine…. Most American politicians and corporate media have fallen in line with a one-sided narrative that paints Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine, and support sending more and more weapons to Ukrainian government forces. After decades of U.S. military disasters based on such one-sided narratives, Americans should know better by now. But what is it that our leaders and the corporate media are not telling us this time? The most critical events that have been airbrushed out of the West's political narrative are the violation of agreements Western leaders made at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014.Western mainstream media accounts date the crisis in Ukraine back to Russia's 2014 reintegration of Crimea, and the decision by ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine to secede from Ukraine as the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics. But these were not unprovoked actions. They were responses to the U.S.-backed coup, in which an armed mob led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector militia stormed the Ukrainian parliament, forcing the elected President Yanukovich and members of his party to flee for their lives. After the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, that should now be easier for Americans to understand. [Read More]

 

(Video) Nuclear Disarmament Urged by Catholic Archbishop in New Mexico, Birthplace of Nuclear Weapons

From Democracy Now! [January 25, 2022]

---- As the Biden administration reviews U.S. nuclear weapons policy, over 60 advocacy groups, including Veterans for Peace and CodePink, recently issued a joint statement calling for the elimination of hundreds of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles. "The notion is if you get rid of those ICBMs, you reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war, and it's a first step towards more rational nuclear policy," says William Hartung, research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We also speak with Father John Dear, longtime peace activist and Catholic priest who led a campaign for 15 years in New Mexico calling for the disarmament of the national laboratories at Los Alamos. Dear was an adviser to Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, on his new pastoral letter titled "Toward Nuclear Disarmament" that calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons arsenals around the globe. The letter is part of a sea change in the Catholic Church under Pope Francis, which condemns "the mere possession of these weapons" as "totally immoral," says Dear. [See the Program]

 

Civil Liberties

Islamophobia and the Capitol Insurrection

By Juan Cole, Tom Dispatch [January 30, 2022]

---- Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as "a devout Christian." It's safe to surmise that he wouldn't have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American. Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, they have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination. No matter that this group resides comfortably in the American mainstream, it remains under intensive, often unconstitutional, surveillance. In contrast, during the past two decades, the Department of Justice for the most part gave a pass to violent white supremacists. No matter that they generated more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil than any other group. The benign insouciance of the white American elite toward such dangerous fanatics also allowed them to organize freely for the January 6th assault on the Capitol and the potential violent overthrow of the government. [Read More]

 

The State of the Union

The GOP Dials Up Its Attacks on Critical Race Theory

By Sasha Abramsky, The Nation [January 28, 2022]

---- Since the summer of 2020, nearly 900 school districts around the country, covering 35 percent of K-12 students in the United States, have been roiled by campaigns against the teaching of critical race theory. Those campaigns began shortly after the huge racial justice protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd put issues of racial equity center stage in the American political conversation. They picked up steam as Trump, in the final months of his presidency, accelerated his efforts to exploit any and all white resentments about that shifting conversation. In the year since the election, the GOP has picked up on CRT as its wedge issue du jour, one that its leaders hope will propel them to victory in the 2022 midterms. Most of the school districts in which the local anti-CRT campaigns have picked up steam have two traits in common: They are racially diverse communities that have, over the past two decades, seen large drop-offs in the percentage of white students as demographic patterns shift; and they are in politically competitive districts where Republicans and Democrats both have a realistic chance at capturing the majority of votes. [Read More]

 

Israel/Palestine

Amnesty International describes Israel as an apartheid state in new report

By Jacob Kornbluh, The Forward [January 30, 2022]

---- Amnesty International, a widely respected human rights group, plans to release a report on Tuesday accusing Israel of committing apartheid and describing its existence as a Jewish state as a deprivation of Palestinians' basic rights. Israeli officials on Sunday denounced the report as "antisemitism." In a 211-page report set for publication on Tuesday and obtained by the Forward, Amnesty alleges that Israel is involved in a "widespread attack directed" against Palestinians that amounts to "the crime against humanity of apartheid." Amnesty, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, has previously condemned Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank and accused it of committing war crimes during the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. But this report is the first time the group is officially using the term "apartheid" to describe it. The Amnesty report follows a similar report from Human Rights Watch last April; that report came after two leading Israeli human-rights groups began using the term apartheid. Human Rights Watch, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, issued its own lengthy report detailing its rationale for using the term "apartheid" to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in a report about Israel. The Israeli group Yesh Din had begun using the term in 2020 and B'Tselem, another Israeli group, had adopted it in January 2021. But while the HRW report accused Israel of discriminating against Palestinians in all areas under its control but of practicing apartheid only in the areas beyond its original 1948 borders, the Amnesty report applies the term "apartheid" to the state's internal operations as well. [Read More] For an illustration of the workings of apartheid, see (Video) "Home Demolition in Sheikh Jarrah Seen as Part of Broader Israeli Effort to Dispossess Palestinians" from Democracy Now! [January 28, 2022] [See the Program]

 

Our History

Is Slavery an Evil Beyond Measure?

By Jamelle Bouie, New York Times [January 28, 2022]

[FB – This is imo a fascinating reconstruction of how we know what we know about slavery, especially movement across the Atlantic and then within the Caribbean and the USA.  All this has happened since I was in college, where our reading still reflected "slavery" as a topic open to debate about whether its abolition was worth a Civil War.]

---- The historian Marcus Rediker opens "The Slave Ship: A Human History" with a harrowing reconstruction of the journey, for a captive, from shore to ship:

 

The ship grew larger and more terrifying with every vigorous stroke of the paddles. The smells grew stronger and the sounds louder — crying and wailing from one quarter and low, plaintive singing from another; the anarchic noise of children given an underbeat by hands drumming on wood; the odd comprehensible word or two wafting through: someone asking for menney, water, another laying a curse, appealing to myabecca, spirits.

 

An estimated 12.5 million people endured some version of this journey, captured and shipped mainly from the western coast of Africa to the Western Hemisphere during the four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Of that number, about 10.7 million survived to reach the shores of the so-called New World. It is thanks to decades of painstaking, difficult work that we know a great deal about the scale of human trafficking across the Atlantic Ocean and about the people aboard each ship. Much of that research is available to the public in the form of the SlaveVoyages database. [Read More]

CFOW Newsletter - Focus on the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

January 23, 2022

 

Hello All – When the last US soldier left Afghanistan, the country's economy and service-infrastructure was held together only by massive US spending and the funding of international NGOs.  Now this funding has been removed and, according to the United Nations, millions of people live on the edge of starvation. Why is this happening?  Does the USA have a moral obligation to address this disaster?  And what are the obstacles to it doing so?

 

There is little argument over the severity of the crisis. The United Nations estimates that only 2% of the population is getting enough to eat.  The head of the World Food Program in Afghanistan estimates that 3.2 million children face acute malnutrition and 23 million people are in crisis. "It's on the brink," say the head of the WFP. "There is no province in Afghanistan today with less than 30% of their population either in crisis or emergency food insecurity." Two-thirds of the population lives in conditions of famine [Link].  Similarly, the World Health Organization says the country's hospital and medical infrastructure is on the brink of collapse [Link]. And this month the United Nations is attempting to put together a $5 billion aid program to avert a humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, the biggest single-country appeal in the organization's history [LInk].

 

The failure of the world's international organizations to address the crisis in Afghanistan parallels their failure to adequately address the climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.  And in each case some (but not all) of the bottlenecks are in the USA. In the case of Afghanistan, The imposition of economic sanctions on the Taliban prevents payments from donor organizations to NGOs from functioning; and the impounding of some $9 billion of Afghanistan government money in the USA blocks government action. Of course the Taliban is not a typical government, and from many quarters come demands to not release Afghanistan's money to the government until it has met certain conditions (e.g. women's freedom and girls' education), or to release the money only to a non-governmental agency.  And there's the rub, as described in a useful article from The Intercept about conflicting strategies in Congress to secure the release of the $9 billion. For by the time a system of "conditions" for aid to Afghanistan and the Taliban has been structured and the conditions supposedly met, millions of people may well have died. "Unconditional aid" is the only responsible way to address the crisis, but the political prospects of this happening face an uphill battle.

 

Useful Reading on the Famine/Crisis in Afghanistan

 

(Video) Afghanistan Faces "Tsunami of Hunger" as U.S. Sanctions Crash Country's Economy, from Democracy Now! [January 21, 2022] [See the Program]

 

Democrats Dicker in Congress as Biden Flirts With Afghan Genocide

By Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota, The Intercept [January 19, 2022] [Link].

 

(Video) Afghanistan in Freefall: Deadly U.S. Sanctions Blamed for Shocking Humanitarian Crisis, from Democracy Now! [January 14, 2022] [See the Program]

 

Hospitals are collapsing in Afghanistan. At this rate sanctions will kill more people than the Taliban, by Dr. Paul Spiegel, Washington Post [December 16, 2021] [Link].

 

News Notes

This Newsletter has reported previously on the strike of some 3,000 graduate-student workers at Columbia University, and on the relatively successful outcome of their strike.  Graduate student and part-time workers increasingly provides the bulk of university instruction in the USA.  In "Columbia University Has Lost Its Way" by Columbia Law School professor, Katherine Franke, the author gives us an overview of this Brave New World of higher education. [Link].

 

In June the Supreme Court will announce its decision in the case of a Mississippi law that could end the legal right to abortion.  If the Court upholds the law, some two dozen states are poised to enact similar legislation, returning much of the USA to the pre-Roe world of a half century ago.  In those Dark Days of abortion criminalization, one alternative for women seeking an abortion was the underground service called "Jane," which initially provided referrals to cooperating doctors and later became abortion providers themselves.  This year's Sundance Film Festival offers two films that look back on "Jane," described in this interesting article from The New York Times.

 

Buddhist Monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh died last week at the age of 95. Born in the Vietnamese city of Huế, in the 1960s he founded the Youth for Social Services in Vietnam and traveled to the United States to study.  A strong critic of the Vietnam War, Nhất Hạnh was barred from returning home for decades and spent much of his life in France, where he established Plum Village, which became Europe's largest Buddhist monastery. To learn more about this remarkable man, go here..

 

CFOW Nuts & Bolts

Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester.  Weather/covid permitting, 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 will be held on Monday, February 7th 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 for the link. 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!

Some stalwart readers have asked for another round of selections from the New Orleans blues/jazz band Tuba Skinny, which accompanied me during the writing of this Newsletter, so here's a selection that I like. Enjoy!

 

Best wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

 

CFOW Weekly Reader

 

Why I Almost Didn't Read My Poem at the Inauguration

By Amanda Gorman, New York Times [January 20, 2022]

---- It's told like this: Amanda Gorman performed at the inauguration, and the rest is history.

The truth is I almost declined to be the inaugural poet. Why? I was terrified. I was scared of failing my people, my poetry. But I was also terrified on a physical level. Covid was still raging, and my age group couldn't get vaccinated yet. Just a few weeks before, domestic terrorists assaulted the U.S. Capitol, the very steps where I would recite. I didn't know then that I'd become famous, but I did know at the inauguration I was going to become highly visible — which is a very dangerous thing to be in America, especially if you're Black and outspoken and have no Secret Service. [Read More]

 

Anti-Vaxxers Maintain Persistent Presence in the Hudson Valley

By Will Solomon, The River [January 4, 2022]

----By most accounts, COVID-19 vaccination efforts in the Hudson Valley have been successful. As of January 3, about 70 percent of the population in the Mid-Hudson Valley and Capital regions are fully vaccinated, including nearly 80 percent of those over age 18. Thanks in large part to vaccination, deaths statewide have correspondingly declined from the highs of the initial surge and last winter's wave. … One enduring obstacle is opposition to COVID-19 vaccines. Resistance to both vaccination and mitigation measures, like masks, is stronger than it might appear in the region, where in the Upper Hudson Valley, anti-vaxxers have a persistent voice in the group Do We Need This? The Columbia County coalition, which appears to operate more as a loose network than an actual organization, is at the center of regional opposition to COVID-19 vaccines, spreading misleading and often false information on vaccines and COVID mitigation measures, and exhibiting disturbing ties to extreme right movements and trends. [Read More]

 

War & Peace

After a Year of Biden, Why Do We Still Have Trump's Foreign Policy?

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [January 20, 2022]
---- President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of President Trump's foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama's diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that Biden was promising. Tragically for America and the world, Biden has failed to restore Obama's progressive initiatives, and has instead doubled down on many of Trump's most dangerous and destabilizing policies. It is especially ironic and sad that a president who ran so stridently on being different from Trump has been so reluctant to reverse his regressive policies. Now the Democrats' failure to deliver on their promises with respect to both domestic and foreign policy is undermining their prospects in November's midterm election. Here is our assessment of Biden's handling of ten critical foreign policy issues: [Afghanistan]; [Russia/Ukraine] [and 8 more.] [Read More]

 

The War in Yemen

Biden's Shameful Silence on Saudi Arabia's War in Yemen

By Trita Parsi and Annelle Sheline, The New Republic [January 13, 2022]

---- Last February, in his first major foreign policy speech, President Biden declared, "The war in Yemen must end." But nearly a year later, the U.S.-enabled death and destruction in Yemen continue apace. … This latest round of violence demonstrates that U.S. support continues to embolden the Saudis, Emiratis, and the Hadi government, perpetuating a war that has already claimed 377,000 Yemeni lives. … Biden appears to maintain the same flawed logic that kept the U.S. mired in Afghanistan for 20 years: that the situation on the ground in Yemen will change with a U.S. thumb on the scales. But the only change is for the worse. More civilians are dying, whether of violence or disease or starvation. Institutions and services are eroding and collapsing. The currency is depreciating. Already classified as a "failed state" before the war began, Yemen is slipping further into ungovernable chaos, precipitating further military intervention by foreign powers. [Read More]

 

USA – Russia - Ukraine

Russia Reacts to NATO…and History

By Lawrence Davidson, Counterpunch [January 21, 2022]

---- In mid-December 2021, the Russian government publicly announced that it would "seek legally formulated guarantees of security" from the United States and its allies that would end NATO military activity in eastern Europe as well as military support for the Ukraine. U.S. media reporting on this event, characterized by the New York Times, framed it as a Russian attempt to "wind back the clock 30 years to just before the collapse of the Soviet Union," and thus Russian demands were "echoes of the Cold War." Little media credence has been given to Russian President Vladimir Putin's repeated insistence that his country is "threatened" by NATO activities close to its borders. … It would seem that while Washington and its allies, to say nothing of the media, heard the Russian demands, they displayed no evidence of understanding them within an accurate historical context—a history that goes back considerably further than the dissolution of the Soviet Union 30 years ago. [Read More]

 

The Climate Crisis

Brazil Is On Fire

By Marina Milos, Extinction Rebellion [January 12, 2022]

----I'm a Brazilian biologist and I actually cannot believe what I'm seeing...Brazil is on fire! We are losing biodiversity, killing and displacing wild animals and producing smoke, a lot of smoke. Our forests are adding carbon to the atmosphere instead of absorbing it. And, year after year, the situation seems to get worse, and the burning season extends for a longer period. … As a biology student, I visited the Cerrado and the Atlantic Forest. As a nature lover, I went to the Amazon Rainforest. All these biomes are unique and so exotic. As I watch the fires consuming trees more than 1000 years old, I think "How can there be people who in their right minds let this happen?" A skyscraper goes up in a few months, a city is built in a few years, but a forest takes millennia to form! We urgently need to stop consuming the planet's resources so wildly. Sometimes, I think of humanity as if we are a swarm of grasshoppers consuming everything in sight until there is nothing left. [Read More]

 

Civil Liberties/"The War on Terror"

Gitmo's Shameful Twentieth Anniversary

By Farrah Hassen, Foreign Policy in Focus [January 19, 2022]

---- The U.S. prison at the Guantánamo Bay naval base reached its shameful 20th anniversary of operations on January 11 — with a legacy marked by the detention of nearly 800 Muslim men and boys, the majority of them held without charge or trial for years and many subjected to torture and other cruel and inhumane treatment. President Biden has so far failed to take consequential action during his first year in office to fulfill his pledge of closing the prison before his term ends. His administration has in fact done the opposite and is now reportedly spending millions of dollars to upgrade it. Without taking bold action, Biden risks following in President Obama's footsteps of empty promises that ultimately perpetuate an untenable status quo. Meanwhile, the remaining 39 prisoners and our nation's rule of law still languish. [Read More]  For a deeper dive into the legal issues re: Guantánamo read "America's Prison from Hell" by Karen J. Greenberg, Tom Dispatch [Link].

 

The State of the Union

As Immigration Plummeted, Conservatives Falsely Accused Biden of Fueling a Crisis

By James Risen, The Intercept [January 22 2022]

---- Throughout 2021, Republican politicians and conservative pundits hammered the Biden administration over what they claimed was a crisis of uncontrolled immigration. Images of migrants seeking to cross the border from Mexico in the early months of the new administration, which played in a seemingly endless loop on cable news, led to growing acceptance on the right of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, claiming that President Joe Biden was throwing open the nation's borders to nonwhite immigrants who would steal white Americans' jobs — and vote for Democrats. … But rarely has such a long-running and widely accepted political and media narrative been so at odds with reality. In fact, immigration into the United States in 2021 plunged as a result of both a decline in international travel brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic and restrictive U.S. immigration policies, according to new report from the Census Bureau. The nation's political and media classes were seemingly so obsessed over the images of migrants at the border that they failed to grasp the truth, which was that immigration levels collapsed in 2021. [Read More]

 

Israel/Palestine

The Cruel, Petty Killing of an Anti-Occupation Activist

By Ben Ehrenreich, The Nation [January 21, 2022]

---- No one can complain of a shortage of funerals in the West Bank lately. In the last year, Israeli forces have killed more than 300 Palestinians, nearly a quarter of them children. Hajj Suleiman was well into his 70s, but his death hit me hard, and not only because I knew him. His nephew Tariq Salim al-Hathaleen once told me, "There are not many people like Suleiman on Earth." And he was right. Hajj Suleiman was a whirlwind in human form. His pure anarchic dignity, his defiance, and his courage were the sort that cannot be confined to a political program. The circumstances of his killing are almost too painful to recount—too cruel, too petty, too cowardly, too perfectly typical of Israel's occupation. … It is Umm al-Kheir's misfortune to be located within the more than 60 percent of the land in the West Bank that falls under the complete administrative control of the Israeli military. Israeli authorities routinely refuse to grant construction permits to Palestinians, which means that almost every structure in the village is illegal. [Read More] Also of interest is this report from the on-going fight against house demolitions in Sheikh Jarrah, from Mondoweiss. The Israel and Palestine chapter from the latest Human Rights Watch report can be read here.

 

Our History

Smedley Butler Helped Build American Empire. Then He Turned Against It.

By Jonah Walters, Jacobin Magazine [January 2022]

[FB – This is a review of Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire by Jonathan M. Katz.]

---- Born into a family of congressmen and millionaires in 1881, Smedley Butler was destined to succeed in the career of his choice while promoting the interests of his class. And that's what he did, at first. … Butler was the youngest major general in Marine Corps history, and at the time of his death, he was the most decorated Marine who had ever lived. But accolades were not enough to ease his troubled conscience. As the fearsome roar of the early century faded into the unease of the Great Depression, Butler exchanged his military garb for a civilian suit and jacket, leaving the Marine Corps behind to pursue a new vocation as the most prominent antiwar orator in America. Turning his back on the defense establishment, Butler forcefully rejected not only the military command hierarchy but also the entire project of US warmaking. In the process, he became an avatar of the rumbling discontent that gripped the country in those years, as hundreds of thousands of aggrieved war veterans demanded relief from an intransigent government and, in doing so, ended up challenging the legitimacy of the American political system. [Read More] Also of interest is this Podcast interview with the book's author, from The Intercept.

CFOW Newsletter - Focus on remembering the radical legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

January 16, 2022

 

Hello All – Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15^th, 1929.  In 1983, after a long, state-by-state struggle, King's birthday became a national holiday, celebrated on the third Monday in January. In the way that Americans remember King, each year the celebration becomes a temperature-check on our national political consciousness.  Though in his day King was widely viewed as a trouble-maker and a Communist, our national memory has transformed him into an American saint, focusing on his time with the Montgomery bus boycott (1955) and his "I have a dream" speech (1963).  The incorporation into the national mainstream of King's commitment to nonviolence and his vision of a multi-racial America has come at the expense, however, of a more inclusive picture of what his life and work were all about.

 

King was only 26 years old when he became the public face of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955; and while he brought to this work years of thinking and study, it is not surprising that his views evolved over the 13 years that remained of his short life.  Nonviolence and the importance of unity for the Black community were constants in his worldview, but his initial hope that white people could be persuaded to support a world that gave equality and dignity to Black people faded.  He found himself in agreement with the observations of W.E.B. DuBois in his (1935) Black Reconstruction that the fatal flaw in the project of American democracy was that white workers saw their allies in white rulers, not in other workers who were Black.  This view was reinforced by his experiences when he brought his civil rights work to the North, settling in Chicago in 1965 and experiencing vicious racism from white people.  Though he continued to reach out to the organized labor movement, union leadership was reluctant to ally with civil rights movements, either because of the racism of union leaders or their belief that attempts at Black-white unity would endanger the union itself. Only a social-democratic program could accomplish what needed to be done, King thought, but the refusal of white workers to abandon their opposition to Black equality was a fatal barrier to the development of the interracial movement of poor and working-class Americans that King sought.

 

The final chapter in King's radical development, of course, was in his public opposition to the Vietnam War.  While the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and some others parts of the black freedom movement opposed the war, the major civil rights organizations and their influential white supporters, including Democratic Party leaders (and President Johnson) were aghast at King's antiwar stance.  This stance was evident, most famously, in his April 1967 speech at New York's Riverside Church, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence" (linked below), exactly one year to the day before his assassination.  In his speech, he called the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today"; and he framed his opposition to the war as a critique of what he saw as American imperialism, saying:

 

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just."

 

For this writer, the most chilling part of King's speech occurred just before the conclusion.  Looking back, we can see now that the Vietnam War precluded roads not taken, roads that might have led to a different outcome than the one that now confronts us, which is so dangerous and discouraging.  King said:

 

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

 

We were warned; and in remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today, I especially remember his courage and insight in understanding this country and seeing where it was going, and in calling to his last breath for Americans to choose another path.

 

Some reading & viewing on the radical Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

"Martin Luther King Was a Radical, Not a Moderate," by Peter Dreier [December 27, 2021] [Link]

 

(Video) Martin Luther King speaks at the Riverside Church, NYC – "Beyond Vietnam" [April 4, 1967] [50 minutes] [Link]

 

Two articles from The Nation: "Let Justice Roll Down" – (The power of demonstrations and "legislation written in the streets.") [March 15, 1965] [Link]; and "MLK's Forgotten Call for Economic Justice" [March 14, 1966] [Link].

 

CFOW Nuts & Bolts

Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester.  Weather/covid permitting, 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 will be held on Monday, February 7th 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 for the link. 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!

Though Martin Luther King's birthday was on Saturday, January 15, it will be celebrated on Monday.  Soon after King's assassination in 1968, legislation was introduced in Congress to   make his birthday a federal holiday. but this was resisted in many states; and it was not until 1983 that King's birthday was finally made a national holiday. In 1980, during the campaign for the King holiday, Stevie Wonder recorded his fabulous  "Happy Birthday" for King. In the same spirit, I think you will also enjoy "Ella's Song," honoring the great civil rights organizer Ella Baker, sung by the Resistance Revival Chorus. [h/t js].

 

Best wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

 

CFOW Weekly Reader

 

(Audio) "Don't Look Up" and Fighting Capitalism With Naomi Klein

From The Intercept [January 12 2022]

---- As 2022 begins, the world continues to see the effects of the climate crisis — from the severe drought in East Africa to the odd snowfall in British Columbia. But since December 5, a new film has been sounding the alarm. In Adam McKay's "Don't Look Up," an allegory about the impending climate disaster, scientists discover an approaching comet that will destroy Earth. But the media, politicians, and elite in the U.S. fail at every opportunity to prevent the impending doom. The Intercept's senior correspondent Naomi Klein joins senior writer Jon Schwarz to discuss the film, how present-day elites are failing to address the climate crisis, and the future of the climate justice movement. Klein is a professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia and the author of many books on climate change, including her latest, "How to Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other." [Hear the Program]

 

Bin Laden and Trump: Two Bookends to America's Imperial Decline

By Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus [January 16, 2022]

[FB – As the founder of "Focus on the Global South," Walden Bello has given us insights on "the global north" for decades. I like this essay very much and encourage reading and discussion.]

---- The end of 2021 and the beginning of a new year is a convenient time to take stock of the causes of America's decline. This past year saw both Washington's inglorious exit from Afghanistan after 20 years in the country that had served as the launching pad for its direct military intervention in the Middle East and an historic insurrection at the very heart of the empire. … It is hard to avoid the sense that we are indeed at the end of an era. Serving as the bookends of this era were two individuals that stamped their personalities on it: Osama bin Laden at the beginning and Donald Trump at the end. … As the era 2001 to 2021 comes to an end, the American empire continues to be dominant, but its pillars have been severely eroded. Its ability to discipline the rest of the world has been shattered by its defeat in Afghanistan. Its credibility even among its western allies as a reliable partner is at an all-time low. Meanwhile white supremacist politics has become the hegemonic force in the politics of the white population, creating not only deep polarization but an existential threat to the world's oldest democracy itself. … A third wind is, of course, a theoretical possibility. But while we should be wary of deterministic projections, how such a rejuvenation can take place is much, much less evident today. Each empire descends from the zenith in its own unique way, but if there is one path that is broadly similar to that being trodden by the United States, it is that of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Like the Ottomans then, the United States now is a very sick empire, faced abroad by powerful challenges to its hegemony, eroded by economic stagnation, shorn of ideological legitimacy, and torn apart internally by a civil war in all but name. [Read More]

 

Rebecca Solnit Is Not Giving Up Hope

By John Nichols, The Nation [January 14, 2022]

---- Rebecca Solnit, the great essayist of this time, gave us a fresh understanding of George Orwell with her brilliant 2021 book Orwell's Roses (Viking). But as with all things Solnit, Orwell's Roses is about a good deal more than its nominal subject: the flowers that the author of Animal Farm and 1984 planted in the garden of a rented cottage in the English village of Wallington. I spoke with Solnit about the need for bread and roses—especially in perilous times. —John Nichols [Read More]

 

War & Peace

(Video) Afghanistan in Freefall: Deadly U.S. Sanctions Blamed for Shocking Humanitarian Crisis

From Democracy Now! [January 14, 2022]

---- As Afghanistan faces a dire humanitarian crisis, we look at how more Afghans may die from U.S. sanctions than at the hands of the Taliban. The U.S.'s attempts to block support for the new de facto government have prevented vital funding from flowing to the nation's civil servants, particularly in education and the health sector. Dr. Paul Spiegel says conditions in the hospitals he visited in Kabul as part of a World Health Organization emergency team are rapidly deteriorating, and he describes the lack of heat and basic amenities as winter descended. "There's been a drought. There's food insecurity. And all of this has been exacerbated due to this economic crisis and due to lack of the U.N. and NGOs being able to pay people in the field," says Spiegel. "What we see now is that it's not the Taliban that is holding us back. It is the sanctions," says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. [See the Program]

 

Also upsetting – "Warning of 'Humanitarian Collapse,' Dozens of House Dems Urge Biden to Unfreeze Afghan Funds" by Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams [December 20, 2021] [Link]; "Progressives Demand Biden End Sanctions to Avert Mass Starvation in Afghanistan" by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams [January 10, 2022] [Link]; and [Audio] "Is Biden in the Midst of a World Historic Crime Against Humanity?" with Masood Shnizai, The Intercept [January 15, 2022] [Link].

 

Welcome to the New Cold War [US & China]

By Michael T. Klare, The Nation [January 14, 2022]

---- The word "encirclement" does not appear in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law by President Joe Biden on December 27, or in other recent administration statements about its foreign and military policies. Nor does that classic Cold War–era term "containment" ever come up. Still, America's top leaders have reached a consensus on a strategy to encircle and contain the latest great power, China, with hostile military alliances, thereby thwarting its rise to full superpower status. The gigantic 2022 defense bill—passed with overwhelming support from both parties—provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of US bases, military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states. The goal is to enable Washington to barricade that country's military inside its own territory and potentially cripple its economy in any future crisis. For China's leaders, who surely can't tolerate being encircled in such a fashion, it's an open invitation to… well, there's no point in not being blunt… fight their way out of confinement. [Read More]

 

The State of the Union

(Video) "The Coming Coup": Ari Berman on Republican Efforts to Steal Future Elections

From Democracy Now! [January 13, 2022]

---- Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman warns the Republican Party is laying the groundwork to steal the 2022 midterms and future elections through a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression and election subversion, that together pose a mortal threat to voting rights in the United States. Republicans, many of whom are election deniers, are campaigning for positions that hold immense oversight over the election process. "What's really new here are these efforts to take over how votes are counted," says Berman. "That is the ultimate voter suppression method, because if you're not able to rig the election on the front end, you can throw out votes on that back end." [See the Program]

 

I'm a Longtime Union Organizer. But I Had Never Seen Anything Like This.

By Vanessa Veselka, New York Times [January 14, 2022]

Ms. Veselka is a writer and former union organizer.

---- Last winter, workers at a memory care facility in western Oregon decided they were done watching the residents suffer. Conditions at the Rawlin at Riverbend, a 72-bed home in Springfield, were horrific because of critically low staffing and a lack of training. Elderly residents screamed from their rooms for assistance, and workers had to make the kinds of decisions that people are forced to make in war: Do you take precious time to do emergency wound care, even though you aren't quite sure how, knowing that it means other residents might sit in their own feces for hours or trip and fall in the hallways? Do you stop to feed a resident who has trouble swallowing, knowing that others may not be fed if you do? According to workers, Onelife, the company that operated the Rawlin, did not provide enough staff to properly care for the dozens of residents with dementia and other serious health problems. Around 20 residents died in about two months, from mid-November 2020 to mid-January 2021, only six of them from Covid. Many of the other deaths, caregivers believe, could have been prevented with better treatment. … Caregivers at the Rawlin formed a traumatized family, which grew closer with each new death. They called the state. They pleaded with management for more workers and higher wages to retain them — at least something more than what they'd earn at a fast-food restaurant. Not knowing what else to do, they contacted the local union. [Read More]

 

Our History

In Hope and Struggle: an interview with Sheila Rowbotham

From Tribune Magazine [UK] [January 2022]

[FB – This interview with English feminist/historian Sheila Rowbotham focuses on her new book, Daring to Hope, her memoir of the 1970s.  This was an explosive period in the development of the UK women's liberation movement, and Rowbotham was one of its leading activists and interpreters.  I read her book with great interest and highly recommend it.]

---- I was always a rebel, but when I got to university, I met people who were socialists, and they convinced me that I couldn't just go around being mystical. The version of feminism we had at that time was maybe represented by St Hilda's College at Oxford, where I was, which had been formed by women in the early suffrage movement. We had this idea that they were a bit prim and proper, and not really like us. Instead, the people I related to first were women who'd been active in revolutionary movements in places like France: I had this connection to women who had been trying to change society, to change aspects of women's lives. I'd become aware through my own life, and through speaking with women friends, too, that there were problems we as women rarely talked about. … By the mid-seventies, I sensed that a new contingent of socialist feminists had emerged partly through the campaigns, with a total picture of socialist feminism. They spoke with a sense of certainty. They were more inclined to see being a socialist feminist as a political tendency, whereas I think those of us who'd been involved from the early times were still groping about trying to assimilate ideas from women's particular experiences, rather than seeing ourselves as having an encapsulated understanding. We possessed instead an underlying vision of total social and cultural transformation. [Read More]