Hello All – Divided as they are between a working-class electoral base and an elite cadre whose campaign donations are essential to victory in this age of media campaigning, the Democratic Party leadership is immobilized, flailing about. As many commentators have noted, the Democrats conceded to the Republicans after 6 weeks of government shut-down, in a week when Democrats had swept the board with election victories across the USA. As California congressman Ro Khanna told Democracy Now!, “The President was panicking. He realized that he had lost the election over this [the shutdown]. We caved too soon.”
The Mamdani-for-Mayor campaign shows an alternative, a winning path for the Democrats. Most importantly, it campaigned on a political program that addressed some real needs of New Yorkers. It targeted the very high cost of living in the city, and proposed practical ways to make the city more affordable. This generated enthusiastic support; 104,000 volunteers worked to elect Mamdani. Despite Cuomo’s support by the very rich, “people power” won the election.
The Mamdani campaign made clear that focusing on the economic needs of average people can be a winning strategy. Tax the rich. Meet human needs. Demand equality across the board. Appeals by Cuomo and the Republicans to racism and “anti-communism” were unsuccessful when people were given a chance to vote for their real needs. Going forward, Democrats will do better if they offer:
● A program of peace and disarmament, cutting the “defense” budget and funding real human needs. Let’s confine the Pentagon to “defense,” not running an empire;
● Strong programs to end racism and support equality among all peoples; and
● Economic programs of state investment that develop climate-friendly outcomes, repair infrastructure, and address the state of our schools, medical care, etc.
These are just a few ideas. There are hundreds more. The point is that we could have a society of peace and abundance if our political and economic system were oriented to the needs of all, not just the very rich. To move the Democrats in this direction, we will have to overcome the entrenched power of its older generation of leaders. We will have to prove over and over again that “people power” can beat “money power.” The Mamdani campaign shows that this can be done. Let’s ponder these lessons.
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 holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com, and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group 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!
The Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers this week bring back our old friends Chumbawamba, the UK anarchist group from a few decades back. One of their good deeds was to record an album of “English Rebel Songs, 1381-1914,” from which the famous “Diggers Song” is linked here. (It was written by the original Digger himself, Gerald Winstanley.) Finally, this anarchist cadre has great faith in the abilities of the common people, as expressed in one of my favorites, “Time Bomb.” Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Francesca Albanese and the Palestinian Fight for Survival
By Richard Drake, Jacobin Magazine [November 10, 2025]
---- The US sanctions against Francesca Albanese are testament to her courage speaking up for the Palestinians. If international law lies buried underneath the rubble of Gaza, truth-tellers like Albanese have implacably defended basic universalist principles. This July 9, the Trump administration targeted Francesca Albanese for sanctions. Executive Order 14203 listed the forty-eight-year-old UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel as a “specially designated national,” thereby forbidding US citizens and companies to have any dealings with her. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, “Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated. . . . We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense.” That same month, the eighth edition of Albanese’s 2023 book, J’Accuse, appeared. Only available in Italian, it presents her indictment of the ongoing Israeli war crimes in Gaza, leading up to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Its title comes from a famous 1898 newspaper article by the French novelist Émile Zola. He called for “the truth above all” in the case of the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been falsely accused of treason. Albanese makes the same demand for the truth about today’s genocide in Gaza. [Read More]
(Video) Dr. Atul Gawande: Hundreds of Thousands Have Already Died Since Trump Closed USAID
From Democracy Now! [November 13, 2025]
---- “We had the cure for death from malnutrition, and we took it away.” We speak to surgeon and health policy expert Atul Gawande about the Trump administration’s near-total dismantling of USAID. Gawande, the head of global health at USAID during the Biden administration, is featured in the short film Rovina’s Choice, filmed at a refugee camp at the border between Kenya and South Sudan earlier this year. We play an excerpt from the film and discuss the impact of USAID cuts on humanitarian crises around the world. Gawande says hundreds of thousands of deaths have already occurred as a result of the loss of aid. “We’re seeing early deaths, like the malnutrition cases, and then we’ll see the wave that’s more to come.” [See the Program]
Trump’s Military Occupations of U.S. Cities Cost $473 Million and Rising
By Nick Turse, The Intercept [November 11, 2025]
---- President Donald Trump’s military occupations of U.S. cities have cost nearly half a billion dollars, according to an expert estimate provided exclusively to The Intercept. The current $473 million price tag now includes $172 million spent in Los Angeles, where troops arrived in June; almost $270 million for the occupation of Washington, D.C., which began in August; nearly $15 million for Portland, Oregon, which was announced in September; and more than $3 million for Memphis, Tennessee, and almost $13 million for Chicago, which both began last month. The National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, tallied these totals from open-source information and costs-per-day estimates supplied to The Intercept by the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. The skyrocketing price of Trump’s occupations come as the president threatens to deploy additional troops to more American cities to quell dissent and turn America into a full-blown police state. Trump recently said he could “send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted” into urban America — while threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, one of the executive branch’s most potent, oldest, and rarely used emergency powers. He has specifically threatened to surge troops into Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. Troops are also expected to be deployed to New Orleans later this month. [Read More]
The Third Sovereign - [Indigenous People]
By Robert Sullivan, New York Review of Books [December 5, 2025 issue]
---- Hope is a rare commodity, but if there is hope for the earth, generally it has to do with acknowledging indigenous sovereignty in the face of insatiable resource extraction. Indigenous people make up 6 percent of the world’s population, but their territory accounts for close to a quarter of the earth’s land surface, containing more than a third of remaining natural lands worldwide, often in northern boreal and equatorial forests. Tribes have built up a body of Indian law that is as dynamic as it is unacknowledged. “Tribal sovereignty is one of the most powerful and valuable public ideas that has ever touched my mind,” Wilkinson writes. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Winter Is Coming To Gaza
By Kathy Kelly, November 11, 2025
---- Now, a cold, hard winter approaches Gaza. What do Palestinians in Gaza face, as temperatures drop and winter storms arrive? Turkish news agency “Anadolu Ajansi” reports [description of conditions[ … No one knows how many corpses are rotting beneath the rubble. These mountains of rubble loom over Israelis working, in advance of global journalism’s return, to create their counternarratives, but also over surviving Gazans who, amidst unrelenting misery, struggle to provide for their surviving loved ones. Living in close, unhygienic quarters, sleeping without bedding under torn plastic sheeting, and having scarce access to water, thousands of people are in dire need of supplies to help winterize their living space and spare themselves the dread that their children or they themselves could die of hypothermia. The easiest and most obvious solution to their predicament stands enticingly near: the homes held by their genocidal oppressors. [Read More]
Good Settler, Bad Settler
By Jasper Nathaniel, Infinite Jazz [November 16, 2025]
---- This week, after masked settlers torched a mosque, set fire to Palestinian trucks, and beat farmers bloody during what the UN calls the worst olive harvest for settler violence since it began keeping track in 2006, things finally got bad enough that Israeli authorities felt compelled to issue strongly worded statements…. The idea that this is just the “youth” is plainly inaccurate. It is certainly true that teenagers and even children are often put on the front lines—some outposts even register as “foster homes” to recruit at-risk minors into the hilltop movement—but many of the most violent settlers are full-grown men. Yinon Levi, who murdered Awdah Hathaleen in Umm al-Khair, is 31. Ariel Dahari, the man I filmed clubbing a grandmother, is in his twenties. The leader of the nearby outpost, who waved his pistol at us and is known to orchestrate these attacks, appears to be in his forties or fifties. … It’s hard to square the idea of a “small band” of roaming extremists with the reality of eight attacks per day across the entire West Bank—from the Hebron Hills in the south to the Tulkarm Governorate in the north—launched from a network of outposts embedded in virtually every region of the occupied territory. [Read More]
What happened to the Jenin Freedom Theater?
By Majd Jawad, Mondoweiss [November 15, 2025]
---- On September 19, 2023, during a performance of the “Danteel” Palestinian monodrama at the Freedom Theater in Jenin refugee camp, the electricity suddenly cut out. On stage, the actress and playwright playing the main character, Salwa Naqqara, broke the silence and asked, “What happened?” “It’s the army,” someone from the audience responded. In that instant, the play transformed, its music and theatrical scenes drowned out by the thunder of gunfire and explosions. The theater was plunged into fear, with the audience trapped inside as shooting continued for over two hours. “We completed the performance by candlelight, with the sound of gunfire filling the background,” said Mustafa Sheta, the manager of the theater. “It felt like the scene was an extension of the play itself, which explored the suffocation of space and the search for identity.” The Freedom theater itself came under attack again. The military raid included attempts to seize control of the building, burning cars outside the theater, detonating stun grenades, and smashing doors and windows. The assault came two months after Israel had launched a major invasion of the camp in July called Operation Home and Garden, which aimed to eliminate armed resistance fighters in the city and refugee camp. The operation resulted in the deaths of 12 Palestinians, all young men, while hundreds more were injured in airstrikes and drone attacks, and some 300 were arrested. [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
(Video) Is Europe sliding closer to conflict with Russia?
From Aljazeera [“Inside Story”] [November 12, 2025]
---- After nearly four years of war between Kyiv and Moscow, fighting is heating up on the frontlines of eastern Ukraine. But with drones spotted at sensitive sites across the European Union, its leaders have declared Russia is fighting a hybrid war beyond Ukraine’s borders. They say the bloc will protect “every centimetre” of its territory, as member states scale up military spending to heights not seen for decades. And although only Ukraine and Russia are officially at war, the continent has now entered an arms race that’s reshaping its economies, rattling governments and reframing relationships within the union itself. All this comes as Ukraine is losing territory to Russia, one kilometre at a time. So, is war really edging closer to Europe’s borders and is the continent prepared? [See the Program]
(Video) John Mearsheimer: How Dangerous is Russia to America? to the World?
From Dan Davis, “Deep Dive” [November 14, 2025]
---- John Mearsheimer argues that modern warfare requires smart, well-educated soldiers at every level, which historically benefited countries like Prussia/Germany. Today, however, Russia under Putin is less focused on general education and more on preparing society for a prolonged, militarized confrontation with the West. He predicts the Ukraine war will end not with a decisive victory but with a frozen conflict—a long, hostile stalemate marked by “poisonous” relations between Russia and the West, numerous potential flashpoints, and ongoing low-level conflict in occupied and adjacent regions. [See the Program]
WAR ON VENEZUELA?
(Video) “Gunboat Diplomacy”: U.S. War in Latin America Feared as Hegseth Launches “Operation Southern Spear”
From Democracy Now! [November 14, 2025]
---- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced the launch of Operation Southern Spear to target suspected drug traffickers in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. The U.S. now has 15,000 military personnel in the region. Over the past two months the U.S. has blown up at least 20 boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. “80 people have been killed in what are extrajudicial executions under international law,” says Juan Pappier, Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch. The Pentagon claims the boats were carrying drugs but officials have acknowledged they don’t know who has been killed. “Progressives and people of goodwill — of the U.S. and Puerto Rico — it’s time for those of us here to stand up and say that where we will not support any attempt to bring back the old gunboat diplomacy and to invade another Latin American country, and we need to do it soon, because this stuff is moving very quickly,” says Democracy Now!’s Juan González. [See the Program]
“Change” In Venezuela Is a Euphemism For U.S.-inflicted Carnage and Chaos
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [November 11, 2025]
---- The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal”—or simply the destruction of a country or society. A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, U.S.-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking—while making life worse for ordinary people. These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage By George Monbiot, The Guardian [UK] [November 14, 2025]
---- The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich. If democracy is the problem capital is always trying to solve, propaganda is part of the solution. Like the kings and empire-builders of the past, they use their platforms to project the claims that suit them and suppress the claims that don’t. This means boosting right and far-right movements, which defend wealth and power against those who wish to redistribute them. In the US, we witness a rapid and extreme hardening of this position, as Trump’s allies, old and new, sweep up legacy media platforms – it seems obvious that the result will be ever more unhinged attacks on anyone who challenges capital. … In this media climate, it’s not surprising that governments are retreating from climate action. In June, a review by the International Panel on the Information Environment found that “inaccurate or misleading narratives” in the media about climate breakdown create “a feedback loop between scientific denialism and political inaction”. The results can be seen at the current Cop30 climate talks, whose president, André Corrêa do Lago, remarks on a “reduction in enthusiasm” among rich nations. It didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a deliberate and systematic assault on knowledge by some of the richest people on Earth. Preventing climate breakdown means protecting ourselves from the storm of lies. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
What the data says about food stamps in the U.S
By Drew DeSilver, Pew Research Center [November 14, 2025]
---- Even before large pieces of the federal government shut down in October 2025, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP – sometimes called the food stamp program – was in for some big changes. The tax, spending and policy bill passed by Congress earlier this year expanded work requirements for SNAP, tightened eligibility rules, imposed new cost-sharing obligations on states and made other changes to the program. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the changes will reduce federal spending on SNAP by $186.7 billion over the next decade. But the 43-day shutdown created further challenges for the program, which helps nearly 42 million Americans put food on the table. While October benefits were paid in full and on time, November’s payments got caught up in a tangle of lawsuits, conflicting court rulings and short-term, state-level fixes. The law reopening the government funds SNAP through September 2026, the end of the current fiscal year. Here’s a closer look at the food stamp program, based on data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (whose Food and Nutrition Service administers SNAP), the Census Bureau and other sources. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Who Was Eugene Debs?
By Michael K. Smith, Counterpunch [November 14, 2025]
[FB - Zohran Mamdani began his victory speech last week by calling up and eulogizing Eugene Debs. Who was this guy from the long ago? Find out here.]
---- By the time he ran for president for in 1904 (the second of five attempts, the last one from a prison cell), socialism had elbowed its way onto the national political scene. Schoolteachers warned of its growing menace; workers jammed meeting halls to hear of its glowing promise. Debs was the unanimous choice to represent the Socialist Party that year. In the wake of a dizzying spate of corporate mergers, three hundred firms controlled more than forty percent of the industrial capital of the country and monopoly quickly emerged as the dominant issue of the campaign. Selling out auditoriums with paid admissions, Debs ridiculed Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting schemes for their failure to realign class power, and scoffed at the notion that a state dominated by gigantic private corporations could ever alleviate the workers’ distress: “Government ownership of public utilities means nothing for labor under capitalist ownership of government,” he thundered. [Read More]
Escalating the Escalation: A Short History of the Long War on Drugs in Latin America from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump
By Greg Grandin, Tom Dispatch [November 14, 2025]
---- As with so many Trumpian things, it’s important to remember that he wouldn’t be able to do what he does if it weren’t for policies and institutions put in place by all too many of his predecessors. His horrors have long backstories. In fact, Donald Trump isn’t so much escalating the war on drugs as escalating its escalation. What follows then is a short history of how we got to a moment when a president could order the serial killing of civilians, publicly share videos of the crimes, and find that the response of all too many reporters, politicians (Rand Paul being an exception), and lawyers was little more than a shrug, if not, in some cases, encouragement. [Read More]
