Hello All – Perhaps I share your pain, or you mine. On week days I start my day watching the progressive news program Democracy Now! It’s first 15 minutes or so are news headlines, brief stories about “what’s happening.” I used to be able to follow it, even on little coffee so far. But now! It’s “Trump this” and “Trump that” and one would get the opinion that our King is at work 24/7 to make the world miserable. This newsletter makes an effort to recall that there is more to life than Trump and his antics, but at the end of the day this is not always easy to remember.
Yet Trump and his antics have generated a VERY broad coalition of fear, hate, and mobilization. PLEASE JOIN US next Saturday in Hastings, when Concerned Families of Westchester will host yet another too large rally to sound the alarm at what’s coming down. Our rally will be part of more than 600 rallies (so far) networked by May Day Strong. Many of these rallies will happen on May Day, Thursday, but ours and many others will launch on Saturday. Our national focus is primarily on the traditional themes of May Day, the workers’ holiday born in Chicago during the strikes of 1886, which fought for/brought us the 8-hour day. But workers are also immigrants, students, federal employees, teachers, nurses, bus drivers, etc, all of whom are having their lives turned upside down by the Trump/Musk slash-and-burn approach to fascism. So if this is affecting or scaring you or someone you love, PLEASE JOIN US IN HASTINGS, 2 pm at the VFW Plaza in the middle of town. We’ll have some community leaders speaking for inspiration, and an OPEN MIC so that all who wish to speak (briefly) can do so.
Trump and his chaos are addressed by several excellent articles pasted in below, many things worth protesting. But buried in the fog of class war is the genocide in Gaza, now completely destroying the city of Rafah to make room for whatever, and continuing its total blockade on food and medicine entering Gaza. As noted below, the World Food Program is all out of food. For years Gaza was described as an “open-air prison.” Now it is simply a death camp. One can watch what it’s like for families starving, or having loved ones die because there is no medical assistance, 24/7 on www.aljazeera.com or many Arabic-language channels. Americans may not want to do this, but please be sure that millions of people in the Middle East are watching this live-streamed genocide intently. Hatred of Jews and Americans will surely follow in the wake of the knowledge of what’s being done to Palestinians. As the Israeli writer Gideon Levy says in an essay below, what’s happening in Gaza may not be a Holocaust yet, but it is well on the road to being one.
SOME ILLUMINATION OF THE WRITING ABOVE
Welcome to Trump’s Mafia State
By M. Gessen, New York Times [April 21, 2025]
---- The Trump administration has threatened universities — at this point, I hesitate to say how many high-profile universities — with pulling their federal funding, which in this case means pulling research grants. Some of them amount to more than $2 billion, as in the case of Harvard, unless they submit to various demands. In effect, these demands are to place the university under direct federal oversight. The pretexts that the administration is using have to do with D.E.I. and antisemitism. The real reasons, I think, are anti-intellectualism and greed, and the fact that Trump is building a mafia state. … I think the broader lesson is that there’s no such thing as negotiating with this administration. It is always going to demand more concessions until nothing is left of the institution that Trump has targeted. [Read More]
Trump’s Power Feeds on White Demographic Fears
By James Risen, The Intercept [April 20, 2025]
---- GETTYSBURG — This is the most American of towns. It is where Robert E. Lee tried to destroy the nation, where Abraham Lincoln tried to heal it, and where William Faulkner revealed a century later that the country was still irretrievably racist and broken.Even though much of its bloody Civil War past is hidden behind McDonald’s and Burger King and Dairy Queen and Walmart, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, today is still the symbolic capital of the endless American fight over the nation’s history. Inevitably, that fight always comes down to race. And so that means that this is the town that best explains Donald Trump. Once you understand that Trump’s rise is all about white fears and white power — the same motivations that triggered the Civil War — the Trump agenda begins to make sense. … It is white hysteria, the same phenomenon that gripped the antebellum South and led to the Civil War, that has fueled the rise of Donald Trump. [Read More]
World Food Program says it has no remaining Food Stocks in Gaza, as Israel keeps Crossings Closed
From Middle East Monitor [April 25, 2025]
---- The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has depleted all its food stocks for families in Gaza, it said in a statement today. “Today, WFP delivered its last remaining food stocks to hot meals kitchens in the Gaza Strip. These kitchens are expected to fully run out of food in the coming days,” the UN body explained. For weeks, hot meal kitchens have been the only consistent source of food assistance for people in Gaza. Despite reaching just half the population with only 25 per cent of daily food needs, they have provided a critical lifeline, it added. ... “The situation inside the Gaza Strip has once again reached a breaking point: people are running out of ways to cope, and the fragile gains made during the short ceasefire have unraveled.” [Read More].
(Video) Gaza faces famine as Israel’s aid blockade persists
From Aljazeera [April 13, 2025]
---- Israel's total blockade of Gaza is fuelling desperation across the strip. Food, water and medicine are running out, leaving thousands of Palestinians without basic necessities. The United Nations says people face “barely livable” conditions. Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reports from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Palestine. Clemence Lagouardat is an Oxfam humanitarian coordinator. She says that the stocks are depleted, even the fuel to cook meals, the wood is becoming also inaccessible. [See the Program]
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.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter has resumed its weekly Monday night vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW 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 make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
REWARDS!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers come from one of my jazz favorites, Sidney Bechet. If you don’t know him, here is a collection of his songs that will make you tap your toes. Sidney’s story is pretty deep; check out this documentary of his life and music, "Treat It Gentle" (60 minutes). Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAYS
My Thoughts During the Siren
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [April 23, 2025]
[FB – In Israel, the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day took place on April 23rd. By tradition, silence is maintained during a two-minute siren heard all over. Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy’s thoughts….]
--- Israel is not committing a holocaust against the Palestinian people. In the last 19 months, however, it has been approaching it at a frightening speed. This has to be said, and with even greater emphasis today. Like every year, I will stand at attention when the siren sounds, and my thoughts will wander. They will move from remembering my grandmother and grandfather, Sophie and Hugo, whose names I saw engraved on the commemoration wall at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, to the sights from Gaza, which won't leave me. … This is not a comparison to the Holocaust but a terrible warning of where things are heading. Not thinking about it today is to betray the memory of the Holocaust and its victims. Not thinking about Gaza today is to forfeit one's humanity and desecrate the memory of the Holocaust. It is a warning sign against what is yet to come. … It is not yet the Holocaust, but one of its foundational elements has long been in place: the dehumanization of victims that took hold among the Nazis is now blowing in full force in Israel. Since the war resumed, some 1,600 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. That is a bloodbath, not combat. It is taking place not far from our homes, carried out by the best of our sons. It is happening amid the silence and nauseating indifference of most Israelis. [Read More]
If fear is the goal, then solidarity is the antidote
By Daniel Hunter, Waging Nonviolence [April 21, 2025]
---- Many of us are angsting these days about the mounting repression coming from the White House. In my community, many are worried about rumors of possible executive orders targeting climate and other nonprofit groups. The concern is well-founded. As Bloomberg reports, these executive orders — expected on Earth Day — would try to strip some groups of their tax exempt status, similar to the threats the president has made to Harvard. I’m now thinking about the many teachers, students, nonprofit staff, lawyers, university staff and faculty and beyond who are worried, concerned and uncertain about what is coming. The common denominator is that we’re all afraid. How do we handle these mounting fears? An authoritarian derives a good deal of their power from fear. Fearful people want answers. Fearful people crave an end to uncertainty. Fearful people can be more easily duped, controlled or kept silent. Fear is a goal. [Read More]
MORE WARS
The Other Catastrophe: Genocide and Famine in Sudan
By Gilbert Achcar, New Politics [April 24, 2025]
---- Two years have passed since the war broke out in Sudan between the two sides of the military regime that the country inherited from the infamous Omar al-Bashir. While the situation in Sudan does not get even a tenth of the global media attention that the ongoing Zionist genocidal war in Gaza receives, the scale of the human catastrophe there is equally horrific. The death toll from the military-on-military war is estimated at more than 150,000, while the number of displaced people stands at approximately 13 million, and the number of those threatened with severe famine reaches 44 million—a record number that makes the war in Sudan the greatest humanitarian crisis in today’s world. [Read More]
(Video) How dangerous is the latest India-Pakistan dispute?
From Aljazeera [“Inside Story”] [April 25, 2025]
---- The United Nations urges calm between India and Pakistan. Relations plummeted after gunmen killed tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir. Furious rhetoric and diplomatic actions by both sides are keeping tensions high. How serious is this crisis? [See the Program] ALSO OF INTEREST is “India Seems to Be Building Its Case for Striking Pakistan,” by Mujib Mashal, New York Times [April 27, 2025] [Link].
Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter
From FB – Some decades ago, scientists and thinkers about nuclear war concluded that a nuclear war posed the danger of creating “nuclear winter,” whereby the dust and ash from many nuclear bombs had the potential to block out sunlight around the world, thus devastating agriculture and everything else that depends on sunlight. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could do this. According to the Arms Control Association, “Even a small nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan could kill 20 million people in a week. If a nuclear winter is triggered, nearly 2 billion people in the developing world would be at risk from death by starvation.” For a primer on how this works, go here.
WHAT IS TRUMP UP TO NOW?
Trump Harvests Autocratic Powers Planted by Bush and Cheney
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch [April 20, 2025]
---- It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily-passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted. … The constant thrill of what some have called security theater has kept us primed for new enemies and so set the stage for the second set of Trump years that we now find ourselves in. We still encounter this theater of the absurd every time we stand in line at an airport, unpacking our computers, removing our shoes, sorting our liquids into quart-sized baggies — all to reinforce the idea that we are in terrible danger and that the government will indeed protect us. [Read More]
(Video) As Trump Attacks CBS, Maria Ressa Warns He Is Following Philippine Model to Crack Down on Free Press
From Democracy Now! [April 24, 2025]
---- As the Trump administration goes after universities, law firms and more, some argue that the free press will eventually become a target. Trump’s attacks on the press have already begun, with the president filing a number of baseless lawsuits against organizations like ABC and CBS, including a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over how the network edited an interview with Kamala Harris last year on 60 Minutes. The White House has also banned the Associated Press from covering some presidential events over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. “I didn’t want to be an activist, but when it’s a battle for facts, journalism is activism,” warns Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, whose new site Rappler faced attacks from former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte. We also speak with The American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner, who has a new piece headlined “Is the Press Next?” [See the Program]
THE WAR ON GAZA
Rafah no longer exists. This is part of Israel’s plan to permanently occupy Gaza.
By Tareq S. Hajjaj, Mondoweiss [April 24, 2025]
---- Over the past month, the Israeli army has been methodically emptying Rafah of its residents and leveling what remains of its buildings. The city of Rafah and its surrounding towns are now virtually gone, with most residents having evacuated north to Khan Younis and the Mawasi coastline under artillery fire and the approaching sound of tanks and bulldozers. Rafah has also been the site of several documented massacres, including the first responders massacre in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in late March, when the Israeli army opened fire on and executed 15 paramedics and rescue workers from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and the Gaza Civil Defense. Rafah is the Gaza Strip’s southernmost governorate, located along the border with Egypt. Before the war, it housed about 200,000 residents, and its territory made up about a fifth of Gaza’s land. It no longer exists. … The objective of the all-out assault on Rafah is now clear: to turn all of Rafah into a flattened buffer zone with a permanent Israeli military presence. According to a Haaretz report, this would “effectively turn Gaza into an enclave within Israeli-controlled territory, cutting it off from the Egyptian border.” [Read More]. ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “Emptying Gaza” (w/ Norman Finkelstein), from The Chris Hedges Report [April 17, 2025] [Link]; and (Video) “Avi Shlaim: Israel's aim is domination and military supremacy,” [See the Program].
On ‘Moral Panic’ and the Courage to Speak: The West’s Silence on Gaza
By Ilan Pappe, The Palestine Chronicle [April 19, 2025]
---- The responses in the Western world to the situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank raise a troubling question: why is the official West, and official Western Europe in particular, so indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians? Why is the Democratic Party in the US complicit, directly and indirectly, in sustaining the daily inhumanity in Palestine—a complicity so visible that it probably was one of the reasons they lost the election, as the Arab American and progressive vote in key states could, and justifiably so, not forgive the Biden administration for its part in the genocide in the Gaza Strip? This is a pertinent question, given that we are dealing with a televised genocide that has now been renewed on the ground. It is different from previous periods in which Western indifference and complicity were displayed, either during the Nakba or the long years of occupation since 1967. … Ignoring the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank can only be described as intentional and not out of ignorance. Both the Israelis’ actions and the discourse that accompanies them are too visible to be ignored, unless politicians, academics, and journalists choose to do so. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “‘I Want A Death That The World Will Hear,’” — Journalist Assassinated By Israel For Telling The Truth,” by Caitlin Johnstone [April 19,2025] [Link]; “Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials review – existence is resistance,” by Alex Preston, The Guardian [UK] [September 13, 2025] [Link]; and “Israel’s anti-war protests avoid Gaza. These women are changing that,” by Rachel Chason and Heidi Levine, Washington [April 21, 2025] [Link].
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Russia’s Security Concerns Before the War in Ukraine Were Plain to See
By Cory Sinclair, Znet [April 21, 2025]
---- Look closely, and it becomes hard to justify. It is increasingly clear that the Biden Administration made a series of policy decisions concerning Ukraine that gave the Kremlin little choice but to either defer to Washington at the expense of Russian security or resist. There is much to say about the background to this conflict, described in depth by such scholars as Richard Sakwa and John Mearsheimer, the latter in a widely cited 2014 article in Foreign Affairs. But the focus here is on former President Joe Biden’s stewardship of the Ukraine crisis leading up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022 and two pivotal moments that followed. … On February 4, 2021, Biden gave his first foreign policy speech as president and began by extending an olive branch to the international community: “America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” He announced a five-year extension of the New START Treaty, the only remaining nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and Russia. But the president’s tone changed when he came to Putin, the only foreign leader he mentioned by name. He said that he told the Russian president “that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions—interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizens—are over.” [Read More]
THE WAR ON YEMEN
A Beleaguered Hegseth Wanders Into His Forever War
By W.J. Hennigan, New York Times [April 24, 2025]
---- President Trump came into office promising to disentangle the U.S. military from its costly forever wars in the Middle East. Three months in, he is embroiled in the same sort of open-ended military campaign that plagued his predecessors, and one that holds the potential for wider war with Iran. The military, in a controversial mission to stop Houthi attacks from Yemen on commercial ships in the Red Sea, is amassing firepower in the region — sensitive details about which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared in a second unsecured conversation on Signal. He’s overseeing an operation in which the United States has not only so far failed to restore regular traffic through the sea lane, which connects the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal, but has also sent the Trump administration into an exorbitant, potentially escalatory spiral from which it will be harder to extract American troops with every passing day. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST is “Trump’s Unconstitutional, Presidential War Against Yemen,” by Ted Galen Carpenter, Antiwar.com [April 21, 2025] [Link]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
The World Seems to Be Surrendering to Climate Change
By David Wallace -Wells, New York Times [April 23, 2025]
----The story of retreat from climate politics is larger than Trump or his desire to make America more of a petrostate and is more worryingly global than merely MAGA. Just a few years ago, worldwide climate concern seemed to be reaching new peaks almost monthly, with cultural momentum growing and policy commitments following. Then came Covid, inflation and higher interest rates, which made the cost of living and global debt crises worse — and above all, perhaps, a new accommodation to the brutal realities of climate change that some call pragmatism and some normalization. Surveys still show widespread climate concern; in a poll covering 130,000 people in 125 countries, 89 percent of respondents said they wanted stronger action. But at the highest levels of discourse and policy debate, just a few years since the Inflation Reduction Act and Boris Johnson declaring, “It’s one minute to midnight on that Doomsday Clock,” the tide is going out on climate alarm. In truth, it has been for a while. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “Can the Green Transition Work for Workers?” With Robert Polin, Analysis News [April 25, 2025] – 30 minutes [Link]; “Americans Will Be Less Safe”: An Author of the Country’s Biggest Climate Report Reflects on Its Gutting,” by Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Mother Jones [April 2025] [Link]; “A Silent Climate Majority,” by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope, The Nation [April 23, 2025] [Link]; and (Video) “Beyond the Threshold: The Urgency of Climate Change,” from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [April 17, 2025 [Link].
CIVIL LIBERTIES
On the Free Speech Rights of Noncitizens
By Erin Corcoran, Counterpunch [April 23, 2025]
---- Do lawful permanent residents have the right to protected free speech? Or are there limitations – among them, a determination by the U.S. government that permanent residents’ speech or political activity makes them a threat to national security? Arresting and detaining nonviolent, foreign protesters and the authors of opinion pieces is usually not legally permissible. That’s because these actions are protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment, which guarantees everyone the right to freedom of expression. … The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the right to freedom of speech applies to everyone in the U.S., including noncitizens. When noncitizens are living in the U.S., they have the same First Amendment protections as U.S. citizens, the Supreme Court ruled in 1945. As a scholar of U.S immigration and administrative law, I know that these protections enter a murkier territory when U.S. immigration law collides with the Constitution. [Read More]
Judges Are Slowing Down Trump’s Fascist Deportation Regime. Now He’s Arresting Them For It.
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [April 25 2025]
---- In the absence of any meaningful opposition party challenges, activists and organizers are struggling to gain ground in building robust resistance in the face of extraordinary repression. Unions, for their part, are disempowered. That has left courts as one of the few sites of actionable pushback on Trump’s agenda. That we are left with only the courts is no good thing; the U.S. criminal legal system with its carceral designs has never been suitable terrain for achieving justice. And our current Supreme Court has been a regular aid to the far right and the president’s authoritarian ambitions. Whatever limitations there are to Trump’s expansive power grabs, however, must be championed. Judges willing to push back on the administration’s unconstitutional and illegal behavior are a lifeline. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “DHS Revokes Visas of Over 1,500 Students, None Charged With Any Crimes,” by Connor Freeman, Antiwar.com [April 20, 2025] [Read More]; and “New Poll: Americans Reject Deporting Foreigners for ‘Wrongthink’ on Middle East,” by Daniel McAdams, Antiwar.com [April 21,2025] [Link].
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Worst Day of My Life [Gun violence]
By Laura Finley, Counterpunch [April 22, 2025]
---- I got one of the worst text messages a parent can receive at 12:05 p.m. on April 17. “Active shooter.” My daughter is in her final two weeks of undergraduate studies at Florida State University, where a shooter, later identified as FSU student Phoenix Ikner, opened fire. As I write, still the day of the shooting, two people have died and six others are injured. The six likely includes Ikner, who refused to comply with police commands and was shot and hospitalized but as of this writing is not in critical condition. … I am so grateful that my daughter and all her friends are alive and safe. I am also grateful that from everything I have heard so far, campus police and local law enforcement responding quickly and effectively. While I am still deeply gutted, I am moving toward anger. This incident marks the sixth mass shooting in Florida alone so far in 2025. [Read More]. ALSO OF INTEREST – The Gun Violence Archive has an astounding collection of up-to-date reports and charts that show the insanity of US gun culture. A good place to start might be their report on mass shootings.
OUR HISTORY
A Chorus of Defiance [Vietnam War]
By David Cortright, Boston Review [April 24, 2025]
---- When news of the end of the Vietnam War arrived fifty years ago, immortalized in images of U.S. helicopters lifting off from the roofs of Saigon, many who had worked for years to end the carnage gathered spontaneously in public places. I had joined the movement in 1968 as an active-duty soldier, and spent my time in the army organizing protests and circulating petitions and underground newspapers among fellow GIs. In Washington, D.C., that day, hundreds of us—veterans, draft resisters, students, community activists—streamed into Lafayette Square in front of the White House, the park where the first protest against the war had occurred a decade earlier. There was no program or speech making. People just wandered about, in small groups or alone, speaking softly, averting eyes, holding back tears, in a collective mood of grief over the millions who had died but also relief that the slaughter, at last, was over. We hoped that our collective struggles had made a difference in ending a war that never should have been fought. [Read More].
(Video) Historic 1955 Anti-Colonial Bandung Conference Inspired New Era in Global South
From Democracy Now! [April 22, 2025]
---- This week marks the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference, when 29 nations from Asia and Africa gathered in Indonesia for a historic anti-colonial conference that was meant to chart a new path for developing countries amid a tide of decolonization sweeping the globe. The 1955 Bandung Conference announced the arrival on the world stage of peoples from the Global South, and it marked the birth of what would later become the Non-Aligned Movement at the height of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Key nations participating included China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Burma and Vietnam. The conference was hosted by Indonesian President Sukarno, a major anti-imperialist figure who would later be overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup. “They all gathered together because they understood their unity was very important, not only to create a new trade and development order — that was not the only part — but also to fight for peace,” says author and journalist Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental think tank. “Bandung represented hope for hundreds of millions of people around the planet in 1955.” [See the Program]
