Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
March 27, 2022
Hello All – Friday marked the 7th anniversary of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. Despite intense bombing, the Saudis and their coalition partner The United Arab Emirates have been unable to defeat the Houthi rebels and their allies, who now control much of the country. The war has become a bloody stalemate, with the United Nations declaring Yemen to be "the world's greatest humanitarian disaster." According to one report, the UN's World Food Program estimates that half of all the country's children under 5, about 2.3 million kids, are at risk of acute malnutrition, with 400,000 at risk of dying.
As the world witnesses the massive outpouring of support for the Ukraine victims of Russian aggression, the failure to attend to the needs of the victims of Saudi aggression stands in sharp contrast. An attempt by the United Nations to raise $4.2 billion for the people of Yemen has failed, with only $1.3 billion in contributions received so far. Moreover, Russia's war in Ukraine is already causing the price of grain to soar, and Yemen depends on Russia and Ukraine for much of its wheat. The United Nations estimated last fall that the Yemen death toll would top 377,000 people by the end of 2021.
In this context, the Biden administration's continued support for the Saudi war against Yemen is simply obscene. The United States continues to supply spare parts for Saudi/UAE coalition war planes, along with maintenance and a steady flow of armaments. Without this support, the Saudis couldn't continue their murderous aerial attacks. As Kathy Kelly states,
Instead of condemning atrocities committed by the Saudi/UAE invasion, bombing and blockade of Yemen, the United States is cozying up to the leaders of these countries. As sanctions against Russia disrupt global oil sales, the United States is entering talks to become increasingly reliant on Saudi and UAE oil production. And Saudi Arabia and the UAE don't want to increase their oil production without a U.S. agreement to help them increase their attacks against Yemen.
The cynicism of the Biden administration, prattling on about Russian atrocities while given aid and comfort to Saudi atrocities on Yemen, is beyond hypocritical. The media coverage of the war in Ukraine has shown us what suffering looks like from the point of view of those being bombed. We can only conclude that, because of the geopolitics of Ukraine and Yemen, some victims of war and terror are more worthy than others for our thoughts and prayers.
Last Friday, Rep. Primila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressive legislators, issued a statement "calling for an immediate end to American involvement in the Saudi-led coalition's brutal military campaign," They will soon introduce a War Powers Resolution demanding an end to US participation in Saudi Arabia's horrible war. Please call our congressional representatives, Jamaal Bowman [(202) 225-2464] and Mondaire Jones [(202) 225-6506] and ask them to support legislation to end US complicity in this war. Thanks.
Some useful reading about the Yemen War
The People of Yemen Suffer Atrocities, Too
By Kathy Kelly, Ban Killer Drones [March 22, 2022] ]Link].
US should use its leverage to end the war in Yemen
By William D. Hartung and Annelle Sheline, Stripes [March 24, 2022] [Link].
As U.S. Focuses on Ukraine, Yemen Starves
By Shuaib Almosawa, The Intercept [[Link].
Progressives Demand End to US Involvement on 7th Anniversary of Saudi-Led War on Yemen
Seven years on, and the war in Yemen has not achieved its goals
By Saeed Al-Shehabi, Middle East Monitor [March 22, 2022] [Link].
Beauty as Fuel for Change 2022
CFOW has a new initiative: the Beauty as Fuel for Change. Our founding statement says" At this time when our #Democracy is at a crossroads, CFOW embarks on a new initiative for 2022. As Community leaders of this initiative, Concerned Families of Westchester stalwarts hope to inspire an exploration of expressive, creative visioning. We want to plant seeds of positive representations, to interrupt the negative, divisive patterns we live with today. A project to change the conversation, with creative expression that is hopeful and helpful and inspires us to create a better world! This is a vehicle for positive imaginings & a way to reach out beyond borders to build bridges between activists in all arenas and to let us unleash the power of creativity in our human community! Color Your Imagination! CFOW is asking people of all ages to show, in all manner of Art imaginable, what our beautiful future looks like. Show us your vision of a truly working Democracy, a more perfect union! Join the peaceful visionaries of Concerned Families of Westchester in this project to help manifest positive change." To learn more, go to our Facebook Group. To contact the project organizers, email BeautyAsFuel@gmail.com.
Keeping our Elections Safe and Secure
For several years, CFOW stalwarts and many others have worked to protect our elections by exposing the fault of certain voting machines and trying to keep dangerous machines from being used in NYS/Westchester. A "touchscreen hybrid machine," one of the easily hackable machines, is about to be certified for use in NY. In Albany, Assembly member Amy Paulin and others are attempting to get legislation through the Election Law Committee, and to a floor vote, that would ban such machines from use. So far, the following members of the Assembly have signed on this legislation:
Abinanti, Anderson, Barrett, Bichotte, Brabenec, Burdick, Burgos, Carroll, Colton, Clark, Cook, De La Rosa, DeStefano, Dickens, Dinowitz, Durso, Englebright, Epstein, Fahy, Forrest, Galef, Gallagher, Gottfried, Hermelyn, Jackson, Jacobson, Kelles, Lupardo, Mamdani, McDonald, McDonough, Mikulic (multisponsor), Norris, Pichardo, Rajkumar, Reyes, Rivera J, Rosenthal L, Sayegh, Simon, Simpson, Tague, Taylor, Thiele, Woerner, Zinerman.
To help keep "touchscreen hybrid machines" out of NYS, please write to thank your Assembly representative if they are sponsors of the legislation, or use/modify this letter/template if your Assembly representative is not yet a co-sponsor, urging to become one. Thanks!
Sign here!
About half a million people have joined the Dalai Lama and other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates in signing this powerful (and timely) open letter against war and nuclear weapons. To join them, sign here.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather 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, April 4th 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
The Worldwide Oligarchy
---- If you watch the corporate media, you'll often hear the word 'oligarch' preceded by the word 'Russian.' But oligarchs aren't uniquely a Russian phenomenon or a foreign concept. No. The United States has its own oligarchy. Today, in the United States, the two wealthiest people own more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of our population – more than 130 million Americans. And the top one percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 92 percent. During the last 50 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth in our country, but it's going in the wrong direction. … Clearly, while we face oligarchy, COVID, attacks on democracy, climate change, the horrific war in Ukraine and other challenges it is easy to understand why many may fall into cynicism and hopelessness. This is a state of mind, however, that we must overcome – not only for ourselves, but for our kids and future generations. The stakes are just too high, and despair is not an option. We must come together and fight back. What history has always taught us is that real change never takes place from the top on down. It always occurs from the bottom on up. That is the history of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement and the gay rights movement. That is the history of every effort that has brought about transformational change in our society. That is the struggle we must intensify today. [Read More]
Chomsky: Let's Focus on Preventing Nuclear War, Rather Than Debating "Just War"
An interview by C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout [March 24, 2022]
Q. - Does he want to occupy all of Ukraine? Is he trying to rebuild the Russian empire? Is this why peace negotiations have stalled?
Noam Chomsky: There is very little credible information about the negotiations. Some of the information leaking out sounds mildly optimistic. There is good reason to suppose that if the U.S. were to agree to participate seriously, with a constructive program, the possibilities for an end to the horror would be enhanced. What a constructive program would be, at least in general outline, is no secret. The primary element is commitment to neutrality for Ukraine: no membership in a hostile military alliance, no hosting of weapons aimed at Russia (even those misleadingly called "defensive"), no military maneuvers with hostile military forces. … Neutralization of Ukraine is the main element of a constructive program, but there is more. There should be moves towards some kind of federal arrangement for Ukraine involving a degree of autonomy for the Donbass region, along the general lines of what remains of Minsk II. Again, that would be nothing new in world affairs. No two cases are identical, and no real example is anywhere near perfect, but federal structures exist in Switzerland and Belgium, among other cases — even the U.S. to an extent. Serious diplomatic efforts might find a solution to this problem, or at least contain the flames. [Read More]
The Racism and Incoherence of the World's Asylum Systems
By Naureen Khan, The Nation [March 24, 2022]
---- In the early days of the Russian invasion, the European Union took an extraordinary action: It granted the hundreds of thousands—soon to be millions—of Ukrainian refugees the automatic right to live, work, and move freely within the bloc for at least a year. The unanimous decision by all 27 member states to invoke the Temporary Protection Directive—created over 20 years ago in the wake of the Yugoslav Wars but never before deployed—gave Ukrainians access to social services like housing, education, and health care without their having to go through the laborious nation-by-nation asylum process. The institutional support is a sliver of solace for the 3 million Ukrainians who have escaped Russian bombardment and had their lives shattered by war. … But the swift aid rendered to them also brings into sharp relief the hell that non-white asylum seekers have endured when they have tried to escape equally harrowing circumstances. When Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi, and other refugees came to European shores seeking safety, border guards sometimes violently pushed them back, while conservative politicians and parts of the population treated them with suspicion and contempt. They were often pushed back from borders by violent force and met with xenophobic contempt. In the United States, seeking asylum at the southern border remains nearly impossible for Central Americans and others as the Biden administration continues the mass expulsions begun by its predecessor. The vastly different receptions speak to the racism and incoherence at the heart of the world's asylum systems. [Read More] Also useful on the "double-standards" of the world's immigration/refugee policies, read "We must turn solidarity with Ukraine into the new normal for all refugees{ by March 22, 2022] [Link]. A short video from AJ+ sums it up [Link].
The Russia-Ukraine War
(Video) Don't Turn Ukraine into Another Afghanistan: Anatol Lieven Urges Peace Talks, Not a Prolonged War
From Democracy Now! [March 24, 2022]
---- NATO, the G7 and the European Council held unprecedented emergency meetings in Brussels Thursday as the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second month. NATO has announced plans to send even more troops to Eastern Europe, where its troop presence has already doubled from last month to 40,000. We speak with Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who says that as the war becomes a prolonged stalemate, the U.S. and other countries should be doing everything possible to facilitate an end to the fighting. "There is something deeply immoral in trying to wage a war of this kind at the expense of other people if a reasonable peace settlement is on the cards," says Lieven. [See the Program]
(Video) Yanis Varoufakis: The West Is "Playing with Fire" If It Pushes Regime Change in Nuclear-Armed Russia
From Democracy Now! [March 25, 2022]
---- A month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than 3.6 million Ukrainians have left the country as refugees, and the war risks becoming "an Afghanistan-like quagmire," warns Greek lawmaker Yanis Varoufakis, founder of the Progressive International with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. He says the West's sweeping sanctions on Russia and bottomless military aid to Ukraine risk escalating the conflict and foreclosing chances of a peaceful resolution. "What is exactly the aim? Is it regime change in Russia?" asks Varoufakis. "Well, whenever the United States tried regime change, it didn't turn out very well and has never been tried with a nuclear power. This is like playing with fire." See the Program]
The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone
March 21, 2022]
---- In destructive power, the behemoths of the Cold War dwarfed the American atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Washington's biggest test blast was 1,000 times as large. Moscow's was 3,000 times. On both sides, the idea was to deter strikes with threats of vast retaliation — with mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The psychological bar was so high that nuclear strikes came to be seen as unthinkable. Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb's force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable. Concern about these smaller arms has soared as Vladimir V. Putin, in the Ukraine war, has warned of his nuclear might, has put his atomic forces on alert and has had his military carry out risky attacks on nuclear power plants. The fear is that if Mr. Putin feels cornered in the conflict, he might choose to detonate one of his lesser nuclear arms — breaking the taboo set 76 years ago after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [Read More]
War & Peace
This Is What It's Like to Witness a Nuclear Explosion
[FB - Rod Buntzen is the author of "My Armageddon Experience: A Nuclear Weapons Test Memoir."]
----In the early days of his war against Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin told the world that he had ordered his nation's nuclear forces to a higher state of readiness. Ever since, pundits, generals and politicians have speculated about what would happen if the Russian military used a nuclear weapon. What would NATO do? Should the United States respond with its own nuclear weapons? These speculations all sound hollow to me. Unconvincing words without feeling. In 1958, as a young scientist for the U.S. Navy, I witnessed the detonation of an 8.9-megaton thermonuclear weapon as it sat on a barge in Eniwetok Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. I watched from across the lagoon at the beach on Parry Island, where my group prepared instrumentation to measure the atmospheric radiation. Sixty-three years later, what I saw remains etched in my mind, which is why I'm so alarmed that the use of nuclear weapons can be discussed so cavalierly in 2022. Although the potential horror of nuclear weapons remains frozen in films from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the public today has little understanding of the stakes of the Cold War and what might be expected now if the war in Ukraine intentionally or accidentally spins out of control. [Read More]
Before US Enters New Cold War, Let's Remember the Costs of the Last One
By William Hartung, et al., Tom Dispatch [March 22, 2022]
---- A growing chorus of pundits and policymakers has suggested that Russia's invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new Cold War. If so, that means trillions of additional dollars for the Pentagon in the years to come coupled with a more aggressive military posture in every corner of the world. The first Cold War, of course, reached far beyond Europe, as Washington promoted right-wing authoritarian regimes and insurgencies globally at the cost of millions of lives. Before this country succumbs to calls for a return to Cold War-style Pentagon spending, it's important to note that the United States is already spending substantially more than it did at the height of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or, in fact, any other moment in that first Cold War. … Beyond the danger of breaking the budget and siphoning off resources urgently needed to address pressing challenges like pandemics, climate change, and racial and economic injustice, a new Cold War could have devastating consequences. Under such a rubric, the U.S. would undoubtedly launch yet more military initiatives, while embracing unsavory allies in the name of fending off Russian and Chinese influence. Here's the irony: going back to Cold War levels of Pentagon funding would mean reducing, not increasing spending. Of course, that's anything but what the advocates of such military outlays had in mind, even before the present crisis. [Read More] Bill Hartung spoke about the costs of "a new cold war" on Democracy Now! this week: [Link].
The Climate Crisis
In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things
---- On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most dire report yet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, had, he said, "seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this." Setting aside diplomatic language, he described the document as "an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership," and added that "the world's biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home." Then, just a few hours later, at the opening of a rare emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly, he catalogued the horrors of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and declared, "Enough is enough." … So let's reframe the fight. Along with discussing carbon fees and green-energy tax credits, amid the momentary focus on disabling Russian banks and flattening the ruble, there's a basic, underlying reality: the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. [Read More]
American Exceptionalism is the Wrong Lens for our Massive Carbon Dioxide Emissions
By Aviva Chomsky, Tom Dispatch [March 25, 2022]
---- Three years after the end of World War II, diplomat George Kennan outlined the challenges the country faced this way:
"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security."
That, in a nutshell, was the postwar version of U.S. exceptionalism and Washington was then planning to manage the world in such a way as to maintain that remarkably grotesque disparity. The only obstacle Kennan saw was poor people demanding a share of the wealth. Today, as humanity confronts a looming climate catastrophe, what's needed is a new political-economic project. Its aim would be to replace such exceptionalism and the hoarding of the earth's resources with what's been called "a good life for all within planetary boundaries." Back in 1948, few if any here were thinking about the environmental effects of the over-consumption of available resources. … Today, the situation has shifted — at least a bit. With approximately 4% of the world's population, the United States still holds about 30% of its wealth, while its commitment to over-consumption and maintaining global dominance remains remarkably unshaken. [Read More]
