Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
July 16, 2023
The United States should switch gears in Ukraine. It's time to put US efforts into working for a ceasefire and negotiations to end the fighting. The fighting war will not be "won" by either Ukraine or Russia. A stalemate in the fighting stretches into the future as far as the eye can see. It's time to end the cruel "support" for Ukraine, which is destroying Ukraine and killing tens of thousands of people, making refugees of millions. It's time to end the horrible danger that the war could escalate into a wider war, involving more countries, perhaps ending in a nuclear war. It's time to stop.
The horror of this war is illustrated by the "debate" on sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. Millions of these bombs, banned by a UN treaty supported by 123 nations, are now on their way to Ukraine. When Russia used these bombs at the beginning of their invasion of Ukraine, the USA rightly denounced this as a "war crime." Is it no longer a "war crime" when the bombs are made in the US? Will Ukraine become another Laos, where cluster bombs killed 50,000 civilians during the Indochina wars, and where de-mining the unexploded bombs that still litter the countryside is expected to last for another century? Just because the government of Ukraine is fine with carpeting its territory with cluster bombs does not mean that this is morally OK, or that the USA should put these outlawed munitions in play.
Claiming to "support" Ukraine, the Biden administration has sent one piece of advanced weaponry after another to the battlefield – advanced artillery, Patriot missiles, battle tanks, depleted uranium shells, and now cluster bombs. On deck for the next pseudo "debate" about sending weapons to Ukraine are F-16 jets (made by General Dynamics) and the ATACMS artillery system (made by Lockheed), which has a range of 190 miles.. Each time the Biden people have pretended to be concerned, to weigh the pros and cons, and to have considered fears that the new weapons would allow Ukraine and its NATO advisers to take the war into Russian territory, perhaps initiating a nuclear war. And each "debate" within the Biden political/military elite has eventually decided that the risks are low and gaining military advantage over the Russians is "worth it"; and so the new round of weapons are sent. It's time to stop this charade. We have seen this movie too many times to take it seriously again. Let's speak out loudly and say, "No more weapons to Ukraine!" Demand a ceasefire. Negotiations are the only way this war will end.
Some Reading about the War in Ukraine
Stop Biden From Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine
July 11, 2023]
---- President Biden may have crossed a new red line for the Democratic Party when he announced he would send banned cluster munitions to shore up Ukraine's slow counter-offensive against Russian troops. On Friday, 19 House Democrats, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA-7), signed a letter to Biden warning that his decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine "severely undermines our moral leadership." This time it's not just left-leaning activists in CODEPINK and the Peace in Ukraine Coalition who recoil in horror at Biden's escalation in Ukraine, but congressional Democrats who previously stood by their President. [Read More] For the last-minute maneuvering that prevented a vote on the amendment from progressive Democrats, read "[Link],
---- The Biden administration is drawing outrage after announcing it will send cluster bombs to Ukraine as part of a new weapons package. When deployed, cluster munitions spread smaller "bomblets" across a wide area and regularly kill civilians, either on initial impact or from unexploded segments that go off later. Their use has been banned by 123 countries that signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but the United States, Russia and Ukraine are not signatories to the treaty. This comes as a new Human Rights Watch report documents how Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured by cluster munitions, including by Ukrainian forces. We speak to Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, who calls the Biden administration's decision "appalling," and to writer and activist Norman Solomon. [See the Program]
Also of interest – "After Suffering Heavy Losses, Ukrainians Paused to Rethink Strategy," by Lara Jakes, et al., New York Times [July 15, 2023] [Link]; and "The case for Ukraine's NATO membership is the zombie that won't die," by Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft [July 11, 2023] [Link].
Anti-war organizations will hold a rally on Saturday, July 22 at 11 am at the Scranton (PA) Army Ammunition Plant to oppose sending cluster bombs, and all weapons, into the Ukraine War. We urge all who oppose the U.S. sending cluster bombs and any weapons to Ukraine and who want an immediate ceasefire in the Ukraine war to join us at the Scranton (PA) Army Ammunition Plant, 156 Cedar Ave., where the production of 11,000 artillery shells a month cannot keep up with the demand for killing. Speakers will include David Swanson, Executive Director, World BEYOND War, Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Dorothy Day and formerly imprisoned nuclear war protester, and others. The rally is endorsed by many peace organizations, including Veterans for Peace, Code Pink, and World Beyond War. To RSVP or for more info, Jack Gilroy – jgilroy1955@gmail.com – (607) 239-9605 or Nick Mottern – nickmottern@gmail.com – (914) 806-6179
Man Shot Dead by Police After a Report of Stolen Fruit
From the New York Times [July 13, 2023]
---- A New Rochelle, N.Y., police officer shot Jarrell Garris, 37, after he was accused of eating some grapes and a banana without paying, his family's lawyer said. The police said he tried to grab an officer's gun. Representative Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat who lives in Yonkers and represents New Rochelle, said that the shooting reflects a long history of tension between the police and Black residents of Westchester County and across the country.New Rochelle Against Racism, a local activist group, said in a statement that local police "will need deep, transformational change if the Black community is to feel safe, protected and respected, rather than monitored, controlled and attacked." [Read More]
(Video) AOC Teams Up With Workers To Take On UPS
---- UPS workers are prepping for one of the biggest strikes in American history. We hit a Teamsters practice picket with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and hundreds of workers, who told us why 340,000 of them are ready to strike. The biggest demand? "We need to get paid." We've been covering UPS Teamsters ahead of their looming strike deadline later this summer. If UPS fails to reach a fair deal with workers, over 300,000 workers could walk out on the largest single-employer strike in U.S. history. [AOC speaks]
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 is held in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. 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. 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 stalwart newsletter readers commemorate the anniversary of the French Revolution, sparked by the attack on the hated Parisian prison, "La Bastille" (July 14, 1789). The Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity – was unpopular with the conservative classes and their monarchs in the rest of Europe; and in 1792 several armies launched an attack on revolutionary France. To repel this invasion "the nation" rallied, with those marching to Paris from Marseilles singing the song that would become the French national anthem. The lyrics to La Marseillaise are stirring, combative, and mobilizing; and socialists throughout Europe over the past two centuries have adopted it as their own. Much later, the song played a role in defeating the Nazis, as this rare documentary footage reveals.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
In Memory of Those Still in the Water
By Amanda Gorman, New York Times [July 15, 2023]
---- On June 14, 2023, the migrant boat Adriana capsized off the coast of Greece, killing more than 600 men, women and children who had been crammed onboard the trawler by traffickers. As investigations by the BBC and The New York Times have revealed, officials and coast guard crews failed to treat the crisis as a rescue mission until the last few hours. Those on the Adriana died torturous deaths. At the water's surface, some clung to pieces of wood, surrounded by drowned friends, relatives and strangers. And yet, given the scope and horror of the disaster, few people seemed to care; the story was barely a blip on many news websites. … Refugees and migrants dying while trying to cross the Mediterranean in search of safety is not new. The United Nations estimates that more than 27,000 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014. As I am an African American keenly aware of our history, the tragedy of the Adriana is in some ways familiar to me, a haunting that is almost heritage: Humans squeezed onto a boat by their traffickers, crushed skin to skin, bone to bone, throats gasping in the breaths of a hundred suffering others, enduring or perishing in the hellish conditions of starvation and dehydration as the vessel churns them away from their homeland. [Read More]
The Illusion of a U.S.-India Partnership
By Arundhati Roy, New York Times [July 13, 2023]
---- The state visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India to Washington last month was billed as a meeting of two of the world's greatest democracies, and the countries duly declared themselves "among the closest partners in the world." But what sort of partners will they be? What sort of partners can they be? President Biden claims that the "defense of democracy" is the central tenet of his administration. That's commendable, but what happened in Washington was the exact opposite. The man Americans openly fawned over has systematically undermined India's democracy. … And what kind of an ally will the United States be to India in the event of a confrontation with China? [Read More]
The Black Radical Tradition Can Guide Our Struggles Against Oppression
An interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Jacobin Magazine [July 6, 2023]
[FB - Historian Robin D. G. Kelley recently published a new edition of his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Daniel Denvir interviewed Kelley for the Jacobin podcast the Dig]
---- The most important thing is that whatever their agenda is, their vision is not something that's made ahead of time. It is made in struggle and movement. If anything, the basic lesson of Freedom Dreams is not that people need to go to sleep, dream, and wake up in the morning with a new idea, but that what we think of as future thinking — dreams of possibility — comes out of struggle. It doesn't come out of think tanks or out of taking mushrooms. … I had been thinking about a new edition for a while, but especially after 2020, I was thinking about the long history of anti-state violence and what we witnessed, because the 2020 protests were a culmination of lots of things. That upsurge was a culmination of the Occupy movement. It had its roots in the anti-police protests erupting after Trayvon Martin and [Michael] Brown, the 2013-2014-2015 season. The other context, of course, is that we're facing a resurgent fascism. I say resurgent because fascism has a long history in the US. [Read More]
War & Peace
[FB - Mr. Anderson is the editor of "Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance Since the Cold War," to which Mr. Meaney is a contributor.]
---- NATO leaders convening this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, have every reason to toast their success. Only four years ago, on the eve of another summit, the organization looked to be in low water; in the words of President Emmanuel Macron of France, it was undergoing nothing short of "brain death." Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the situation has been transformed. … But NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. Rather, it set out to bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order, in which American protection served as a lever to obtain concessions on other issues, like trade and monetary policy. In that mission, it has proved remarkably successful. [Read More]
---- A new US intelligence report has reaffirmed that Iran is not trying to build nuclear weapons despite constant claims made by Israel and Western media outlets to the contrary. The report noted that Iran has taken steps to increase uranium enrichment, which it called "research and development activities that would bring it closer to producing the fissile material needed for completing a nuclear device following a decision to do so." Iran has been enriching some uranium at 60%, a step it took in 2021 in response to an Israeli attack on its Natanz Nuclear Facility. But 90% enrichment is needed for weapons-grade, and there's no sign Tehran is looking to bring enrichment to that level. [Read More]
From Democracy Now! [July 7, 2023]
---- This week unprecedented temperatures driven by climate change shattered heat records around the world. More records could be broken soon, as scientists say 2023 is set to be one of the warmest years in the history of planet Earth. "We can't stop global warming at this point," says Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. "All we can do is try to stop it short of the place where it cuts civilizations off at the knees." McKibben says these temperatures are the "inevitable result" of fossil fuel use, criticizes politicians for their simultaneous embrace of renewable energy and fossil fuels, and calls on activists to disrupt the status quo: "This is the last of these moments we're going to have when the world is summoned to action by events and when there's still time to make at least some difference in the question of how hot it ultimately gets." [See the Program]
---- Last fall, the International Organization for Migration at the United Nations estimated that 62,000 Iraqis living in the center and the south of the country had been displaced from their homes by drought over the previous four years and anticipated that many more would follow. Just as people from Oklahoma fled to California in droves during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, so now Iraqis are facing the prospect of dealing with their own dustbowl. It is, however, unlikely to be a mere episode like the American one. Instead, it looms as the long-term fate of their country. If, instead of invading Iraq, the American government had swung into action in the spring of 2003 to cut carbon dioxide output, the emission of hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 might have been avoided. Humanity would have had an extra two decades to make the transition to a zero-carbon world. In the end, after all, the stakes are as high for Americans as they are for Iraqis. [Read More]
By Chris Hedges [July 9, 2023]
---- The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous. The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism. [Read More]
By Tareq Baconi, New York Times [July 10, 2023]
[FB - Mr. Baconi is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine at the International Crisis Group and author of Hamas Contained. He serves as president of the board of al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.]
---- Our screens are filled once again with images of weeping women, children, and the elderly marching down the street with their hands raised or waving white garments from slow-moving vehicles. Palestinians have seen this before, having lived through a long history of expulsions from their homes and villages under the threat of fire. The newest images came in last week during the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. …. More than 20 years ago, another right-wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led an extensive military campaign against the same refugee camp. It was two years into the second Palestinian uprising. Palestinian suicide bombers, some of whom hailed from Jenin, had rocked Israeli streets. In response, the Israeli Army invaded the West Bank and ravaged the Jenin refugee camp, then, as now, a center of Palestinian resistance. ... The two invasions unfolded in vastly different contexts. Between 2002 and 2023, the illusion of partitioning the land into two states disintegrated. It exists now only in diplomatic talking points, hollowed out of all meaning, and replaced by a consensus among international and Israeli human rights organizations, including B'Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, vindicating what Palestinians have long believed.[Read More]
---- Political historians recognize Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy as the great anti–Vietnam War candidates of the 1968 presidential campaign. George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, is recalled as the most ardent foe of a US military intervention to be nominated by a major American political party since the party ran William Jennings Bryan in 1900. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean and former Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich sought the Democratic presidential nod in 2004 as sharp critics of the Iraq War. And prescient opposition to the Bush-Cheney administration's war of whim, which Barack Obama voiced as early 2002, did much to advance his successful bid for the presidency in 2008. But of all the anti-war campaigns of the modern era, the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential runs were uniquely dynamic bids. And they had a profound and lasting impact on progressive thinking about foreign policy. [Read More]
