Hello All - In dozens of elections last Tuesday, Republicans lost. From governors to school boards, conservatives and Trump supporters were defeated by an outpouring of voters intent on stopping the rule of the very rich and the US slide to fascism. Many Trump supporters switched to voting Democrat, but the big swing was voting turnout, as hatred and fear of Trump energized the electorate. In celebrating this, we remind ourselves that, at the end of the day, “we” are many and “they” are few.
The flagship victory that gives us great hope is the Zohran Mamdani election as Mayor of New York City. In his victory speech, he said:
“Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice. Hope is alive. And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”
For many years, the Democratic Party has been saddled with the dilemma that, while its voting base may be the Roosevelt Coalition of the 1930s, its funding base does not share the political goals of the rich. As political campaigning has come to rest more and more on money – to hire staff and “consultants,” and to buy time to air political advertisements – the natural tilt of the leaders of the Party has been to rely on the political needs of the well-to-do, not on the day-to-day needs of the middle class and working class. Mamdani showed that, at least in New York, this could change. Indeed, it had to change. In his victory speech, he said:
“If tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the Right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.”
Defeating Trump’s fascist movement will not be easy. They now have the power of the state, including the ability to issue “executive orders” and to dispatch the police and other armed units, and to control and disrupt the economy with strokes of a pen. Our work will not be accomplished in months or even years. But Tuesday’s victories in elections across the USA show that together, we can make significant gains.
SOME LESSONS FROM MAMDANI’S WIN
(Video) Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani Wins Historic NYC Mayoral Race: “The Future Is in Our Hands”
From Democracy Now! [November 5, 2025]
---- Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoral race, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo. A year ago, Mamdani was polling at just 1%, but on Tuesday he became the first New York mayoral candidate to win over a million votes since the 1960s. Mamdani won despite being vastly outspent by Cuomo, who was backed by a group of billionaires. We play part of Mamdani’s victory speech to supporters at the Brooklyn Paramount, in which he vows to stand up to President Trump and acknowledges his unlikely path to Gracie Mansion: “I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.” [See the Program]
(Video) The Movement Behind Mamdani: Organizers & Supporters Celebrate Stunning Victory & Repudiation of Trump
From Democracy Now! [November 5, 2025]
---- Democracy Now! spoke with supporters celebrating Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral race Tuesday night. Volunteers with the Democratic Socialists and other campaign organizers at the Brooklyn Paramount victory party described the night as “surreal” and vowed to fight back against President Trump’s agenda. Sumaya Awad, a NYC-DSA member, describes Zohran as a politician “that doesn’t put the platform and the mission at the expense of anyone.” “When people’s needs aren’t being met, they need an alternative, and so far, only the far right was providing an alternative in the form of authoritarianism, in the form of fascism, in the form of hate, turning against immigrants, against queer people, against Muslims,” says Fahd Ahmed, director of DRUM Beats. “What this campaign and our movement was able to do was offer a left alternative.” [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Socialists Won City Elections Across the Country This Week,” by Branko Marcetic, Jacobin Magazine [November 8, 2025] [Link]; “How (Most of) the NYC Democratic Establishment Got on Zohran’s Bandwagon and Helped Him Consolidate His Victory ,” by Theodore Hamm, The Indypendent [November 5, 2025] [Link]; and “Zohran Mamdani’s Proposals Are Surprisingly Affordable,” by Richard Eskow, Common Dreams [November 4, 2025] [Link].
NEWS NOTES
Peter Weiss, one of our leading human rights lawyers, died this week at the age of 99. He worked to end South African apartheid and the Vietnam War, fought for nuclear disasmament, and much, much more. Learn more about who he was and what he did in this program from Democracy Now!
An article published this week on the Grayzone reports that “AI drones used in Gaza now surveilling American cities.” They write: “AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database. The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US. … Skydio shows once again how Gaza is the laboratory for weapons makers, the place where new surveillance and apartheid technologies are tested, before being refined and used in the West.” Read more here.
Will the US resume nuclear testing? Or was Trump’s announcement on October 29 just a stray thought, based on ignorance of what is “nuclear” and what are “tests”? Between 1945 and 1992 the US carried out 1,054 nuclear tests. Until 1963 they were conducted above ground, causing great injury through radiation exposure by those “downwind.” Military Times has a useful article about nuclear testing; read it here.
On The Intercept this week we learn that “YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations.” According to The Intercept, “the accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. … YouTube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups’ accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions against the group after a review. The Trump administration leveled the sanctions against the organizations in September over their work with the International Criminal Court in cases charging Israeli officials of war crimes.” [Link].
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 week’s Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers come from the amazing musical duo Elle Cardova (“Reina del Cid”) and Toni Lindgren. Elle was featured in our Rewards recently for her fabulous and strange videos (e.g. this one.) As for their music, I think you will enjoy “Runner in the Sun,” “You Never Can Tell” (Chuck Berry cover), “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (Bob Dylan cover), and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (“Land of Inequity”). Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
The Lingering Delusion [The Democrats]
By Fintan O’Toole, New York Review of Books [November 2025]
[FB – This a review – and much more -of Kamala Harris’s book about her/the Democrats’ election campaign in 2024. What didn’t go wrong?]
---- Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party The underlying question now is whether Trumpist Republicanism is becoming a hegemonic political order of this kind—and how the Democrats can stop that from happening. In a negative sense, Trump has already bent them to his will. He has defined the terms of American politics for the last decade. The Democrats have sought to survive by being un-Trump: the civil, reasonable, decent alternative to his crudity, cruelty, and blatant corruption. Proper as this is, it has failed because it has allowed American democracy to become Trump’s property, in which the Democrats are tenants—on increasingly short-term and arbitrary leases. … What should be bleakly consoling is that there is, in any case, no safe option. The meek will not inherit the scorched earth of post-democratic America. They will, like democracy itself, be consumed in the fire. Safety is not available, but resistance is far from futile. It is what the American republic was founded on, and if the 250th anniversary of that foundation next year is not to mark its obsequies, all obsequiousness must be banished. [Read More]
The Making of Arundhati Roy
By Siddhartha Mahanta, The Nation [November 6, 2025]
---- After college, I took a long trip to India. … Over those six months between 2007 and 2008, in every corner of the country, I sensed a rabid hunger to turn the page on decades of deep-rooted corruption, entrenched inequality, maddening underdevelopment, and, perhaps above all else, a history of shame and disgust at what the world’s biggest democracy had become. For many upwardly mobile Indians, the future couldn’t arrive fast enough. And yet, as I pored over Indian media and met housemaids, trash pickers, and labor activists, I came to see how this new world would come at the expense of India’s underclass as well as its ethnic and religious minorities, who often found themselves at the mercy of a still-palpable zeal for violent communal rage. It pains me to recall how much had remained invisible to me. Smoky late-night debates with friends, family, organizers, and academics filled in some of the gaps. For the rest, there was Arundhati Roy. … In her new book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy turns to her own mother in order to understand where she came from and why she has devoted her life to advocating on behalf of the dispossessed and the exploited. As with most memoirs, Roy seeks to set the record straight and rebut her critics. But there’s a deeper purpose at work here: to consider the profound impact of those we’ve spent a lifetime running away from. [Read More]
(Video) “Fire in Every Direction”: Palestinian Author Tareq Baconi on Gaza, Zionism & Embracing Queerness
From Democracy Now! [November 6, 2025]
---- Palestinian writer Tareq Baconi joins us to discuss his new memoir, Fire in Every Direction, a chronicle of his political and queer coming of age growing up between Amman and Beirut as the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa. While “LGBTQ+ labels have also been used by the West as part of empire,” with colonial projects seeking to portray Native populations as backward and in need of saving, “there’s a beautiful effort and movement among queer communities in the region to reclaim that language,” says Baconi. “I identify as a queer man today as part of a political project. It’s not just a sexual identity. It expands beyond that and rejects Zionism and rejects authoritarianism, and that’s part of my queerness.” Baconi also comments on the so-called ceasefire agreement in Gaza and the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City. “Palestinians are the ones that have to govern Palestinian territory, not this international force that comes in that takes any kind of sovereignty or agency away from the Palestinians,” he says. [See the Program]. AND for part 2 of this interview, go here.
Beyond the ‘Unbreakable Bond’: Is the US Reclaiming the Wheel from a Self-Destructive Israel?
By Ramzy Baroud, Antiwar.com [November 3, 2025]
---- Has Donald Trump’s sharp rebuke of Israel in his October 23 Time Magazine interview fundamentally changed the calculus in the Middle East? His comments immediately sparked two opposing views: for some, his position represents the clear demarcation of a genuine shift in US foreign policy; for others, it is nothing more than a political ploy designed to claw back credibility lost by the US during two years of Israeli genocide in Gaza…. This is the crux of his message, repeated in his stark warning to Netanyahu: “Bibi, you can’t fight the world… The world’s against you. And Israel is a very small place compared to the world.” This may appear to be an obvious fact, yet considering the history of US – and, by extension, Western – blind support, Israel has always felt much larger than its own size. Indeed, Israel’s perceived power has historically been defined by the unconditional backing of the United States. But, according to Trump’s claim, the US no longer perceives itself as the unconditional vanguard for Israel. [Read More]
THE US AND AFRICA
The Price of Silence in Sudan
By Justin Lynch, The Nation [November 7, 2025]
---- The United Arab Emirates is arming a militia committing genocide in Darfur. In exchange for US silence, Biden got a Middle East partner, and Trump got cryptocurrency cash.. Since April 2023, Sudan has experienced systematic atrocities from both sides. RSF is slaughtering people with weapons provided by the United Arab Emirates. The SAF, according to the United States, has used chemical weapons. The SAF has received weapons and support from Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Russia, and Qatar. State Department officials have attempted interventions, but neither the Biden nor Trump White House has provided the top-level political support to stem the flows of weapons from its allies—the UAE, Qatar, and Egypt. The fall of El Fasher partitions Sudan. RSF holds Darfur in the West, SAF the east. It also reveals a policy failure. Shortly after the war began, the United States documented sophisticated arms shipments from the UAE to the RSF. Officials knew atrocities were likely. Stopping the flow of arms could have lowered the intensity of the conflict by eliminating the advanced drones and foreign fighters that the UAE has provided the RSF for its fight in El Fasher. [Read More]
How Christian Nationalism Is Shaping Trump’s Foreign Policy Toward Africa
By Jessica Washington, The Intercept [November 8 2025]
---- After threatening last weekend to go “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria in defense of Christian Nigerians, President Donald Trump has ended protection for another group facing violence and political instability. On Wednesday, the Trump administration terminated temporary protected status shielding immigrants from South Sudan from deportation, even though the African nation has faced escalating violence, political instability, and food insecurity in recent weeks. The announcement stands in stark contrast to another recent decision from the administration to give Afrikaners priority for asylum, even as the State Department moved to severely limit refugee admission to the United States. The president has justified prioritizing white South Africans by spreading misleading claims about the persecution and killings of white farmers. While Trump’s immigration and foreign policy stances in relation to these three countries may seem disjointed, experts on white supremacy and Christian nationalism told The Intercept that it all fit into the white Christian nationalist playbook. Trump’s strategy feeds into his base’s fears over immigration and demographic change while positioning the president as a defender of Christian values. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Israel is trying to divide Gaza in half along the ‘Yellow Line.’ What is it, and is it here to stay?
By Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau and Qassam Muaddi [November 6, 2025]
---- Today, there are essentially two Gazas. One is ruled by Hamas as the de facto governing body in the Strip, and makes up about 47% of the territory. The remaining 53% is under the total military control of the Israeli army. Separating these two zones is an invisible border that’s being called “the Yellow Line,” splitting Gaza roughly in half down the middle. Even though Israel has been placing yellow cement blocks all across Gaza to demarcate the line, it’s supposed to be temporary. But what makes it very real is the number of people who are being killed near it. According to the ongoing ceasefire agreement brokered by U.S. President Trump, this “temporary” withdrawal line is supposed to be moved back after the end of the ceasefire’s first phase, which is approaching its one-month mark. Negotiations are underway to advance to the second phase, but recent statements and reports indicate that the current division of Gaza could be permanent. There’s also something else to consider, and it’s even more troubling: what if the partition of Gaza is the point? [Read More]
Conflicting Visions of an International Force for Gaza in Istanbul and Washington
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [November 6, 2025]
---- Two visions of the future of Gaza are congealing, in two different power centers. One is the Arab and Muslim foreign ministers who met Monday in Istanbul, including Türkiye, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Tuesday morning that the group rejects any foreign custodianship over Gaza. He also said that Hamas is prepared to hand over the governance of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian administration. He and the other foreign ministers want a formal United Nations Security Council mandate for any international military force in Gaza, with careful specifications of its role. … The vision enunciated at the Istanbul conference, of a Palestinian administration supported by ground troops from major Muslim powers in preparation for a return of Gaza to rule by the Palestine Authority, is anathema to Netanyahu and it isn’t exactly the same as the Trump plan. Barak Ravid at Axios reports that he has seen a US draft resolution sent to the UN Security Council regarding the international force, which Washington hopes will be on the ground by January. The Trump plan involves creating a “Board of Peace,” which he will head up, to which the international troops will report. That sounds like the “foreign tutelage” over Gaza that the Muslim foreign ministers in Istanbul just rejected. [Read More]
WAR ON VENEZUELA?
(Video) Is the U.S. Planning to Assassinate Maduro? “Trump’s Gunboat Diplomacy”
From Democracy Now! [November 7, 2025]
---- The U.S. is continuing to blow up boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific despite growing international condemnation, while the Trump administration reportedly considers launching airstrikes on Venezuela or even assassinating President Nicolás Maduro. “We are committing wanton criminal acts of assassination in the Caribbean [against] innocent people who haven’t been found guilty of anything, and kind of setting the stage for an attack on Caracas itself in an attempt to take out its leader,” says Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive. Kornbluh also discusses the legacy of the Church Committee 50 years ago, which investigated abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, including coups and assassinations abroad. [See the Program]
Venezuela’s Oil, US-Led Regime Change, and America’s Gangster Politics
By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares, Common Dreams [November 4, 2025]
---- The United States is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in Venezuela. Although the slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists,” the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela’s oil. The methods followed by the US are familiar: sanctions that strangle the economy, threats of force, and a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as if this were the Wild West. … What’s underway today is a typical US-led regime-change operation dressed up in the language of anti-drug interdiction. The US has amassed thousands of troops, warships, and aircraft in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The president has boastfully authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela. … The calls by the US government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law, and human life. A war against Venezuela would be a war that Americans do not want, against a country that has not threatened or attacked the US, and on legal grounds that would fail a first-year law student. Bombing vessels, ports, refineries, or soldiers is not a show of strength. It is the epitome of gangsterism. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Michael Mann to Bill Gates: You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it
By Michael E. Mann, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [October 31, 2025]
---- If your only tool is technology, every problem appears to have a technofix. And that’s an apt characterization of the “tech bro”-centered thinking so prevalent today in public environmental discourse. There is no better example than Bill Gates, who just this week redefined the concept of bad timing with the release of a 17-page memo intended to influence the proceedings at the upcoming COP30 international climate summit in Brazil. The memo dismissed the seriousness of the climate crisis just as (quite possibly) the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in human history—climate-fueled Melissa—struck Jamaica with catastrophic impact. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Wage Stagnation vs. Living Wages for U.S. Workers Today
By Robert Pollin, Dollars & Sense [November 3, 2025]
---- At the end of last August, President Donald Trump asserted that average wages for U.S. workers had risen by $546 during the first six months since he returned to office in January 2025. As with virtually all of Trump’s pronouncements, this one bears little relationship to the truth. In fact, when using the most reliable government data on wages and then controlling for inflation, workers’ wages did still rise under Trump, but by $26—that’s 95% less than the $546 average pay raise proclaimed by Trump. The reality of wage stagnation under Trump is fully consistent with his broader attack on working people. … Still worse is that wage stagnation to date under Trump follows what is now a 50-year pattern. In 1973, the average nonsupervisory employee earned $29.15 an hour (in 2024 dollars). As of 2024, that average wage was $30.13. Over the same time period, the average productivity of U.S. workers—the average value of what they produce when they show up at work—rose by 150%. If these workers had received raises every year between 1973 and 2024 just equal to their increased productivity, but not a penny more, their average hourly pay today would be $72.88 an hour.[Read More]
Curbing Gun Violence Takes More Than Just Gun Laws
By Elizabeth Reed, The Progressive [October 27, 2025]
---- Just a few weeks ago, my six-year-old daughter came home and told me about the lockdown drill they had that day at school. Six-year-olds, and kids of all ages, are now living with the fear of getting shot at school. And parents like me are not just concerned. We’re heartbroken, shaken, and infuriated that this has become our reality. This year alone, through mid-October, more than 1,000 children in the United States lost their lives due to gun violence and more than 2,660 were injured. Understandably, many Americans—a majority in fact—support more restrictive gun laws. I agree. A store that sells firearms is only three minutes from my home. In many states, purchasing a firearm—including assault-style weapons designed for rapid firing—can be almost as easy as picking up a gallon of milk. However, after spending more than three decades working in violence prevention and public health, I have learned that while more restrictive laws are needed, the problem goes beyond access to guns. Indeed, our nation’s prioritization of personal rights over the common good is not only a major barrier to gun law reform, it is the very soil in which America’s epidemic of violence grows. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Lessons from the movement to stop the ‘war on terror’
By Frida Berrigan, Waging Nonviolence [November 5, 2025]
---- As I read Jeremy Varon’s new book “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror,”I wanted to scream: We were right! The peace movement predicted and forewarned the cataclysm that followed the opening salvos of the “global war on terror.” We foresaw the decades of war, the lives lost, the trillions wasted, the blowback and consequences that are still ballooning outward decades later. It is not enough to be right, of course. It didn’t save the lives of the 46,319 civilians that independent agencies guesstimate were killed in Afghanistan under “Operation Enduring Freedom.” It won’t bring back the estimated 600,000 Iraqis killed just in the first four years of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Being right doesn’t restore the obliterated infrastructures of those two nations, or restore to life the roughly 7,000 U.S. military personnel killed in those two wars. And, sadly, being right does not return $8 trillion in direct and indirect war costs to U.S. coffers. … Weaving together the voices and reflections of hundreds of activists and distilling 24 years of history, Varon’s book is ambitious in scope and scale as it grapples with a deeply un-American hypothesis: That this effort had value, meaning and impact even though it did not result in “winning.” [Read More]
The Uncertain History of the Bronx Fires
By Samuel Zipp, The Nation [November 4, 2025]
[FB – This is a review of Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, by Bench Ansfield].
---- Few images from the 1970s still resonate like those of the destruction of the Bronx. Block after block of once-doughty apartment buildings, abandoned and burned; whole streets, even neighborhoods, left strewn with charred remains and blackened ruins; just a few churches, storefronts, or other survivors spiking up from the fields of rubble. Scenes like this—repeated across New York and other postindustrial cities—stood in for the very idea of the Bronx, just as the name of the beleaguered borough served as a synecdoche for the whole idea of urban decay. Half a century on, such scenes have become a kind of stock repository of city clichés, requiring the obligatory comparison to Dresden or Hiroshima, as well as the relentless “the Bronx is burning” memes. But all along, some fundamental questions have gotten lost or obscured in the haze surrounding ruin porn, or in mass forgetting and its handmaiden, pre-gentrification nostalgia: How exactly did this happen? What set the Bronx burning? … The truth is that most of the fires were set or commissioned by landlords. But why would they burn down their own property? Fifty years ago, neighborhood organizers, journalists, firefighters, local politicians, law enforcement, and municipal and federal investigatory commissions uncovered the answer. For the historian Bench Ansfield, whose Born in Flames returns us to the scene of these crimes, the primary culprit is both banal and all-encompassing—insurance. [Read More]
