We are being tested. It’s clear that Trump wants a war against Venezuela. Step by step he seeks to provoke a war. Bomb 23 boats and kill more than 80 people. Send a huge fleet of ships to Venezuela’s shores. Send fighter jets into the Gulf of Venezuela. Hijack a load of Venezuela’s oil. If Trump thinks the US people are OK with this, he is more likely to risk war. Polls show strong opposition to the war; we have to make noise, right now.
Venezuela has more oil under its ground than any country in the world. As in Iraq in 2003, US leaders see this “free oil” as an opportunity that can’t be passed up. But since 1998, with the election of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela has had a president who doesn’t obey US orders and, under Chavez, had the temerity to propose Latin American countries unite to resist US power. The threat of a “good example.”
Last week, in the National Security Strategy statement, the Trump people re-affirmed the 1823 “Monroe Doctrine.” In essence, Trump now reminds the world that Latin America “is ours,” and we won’t tolerate any interference as we work to get our hands on the oil and other resources that somehow got under the soil of Latin American lands. With Venezuela, and with a glance at neighboring Colombia, the Trump plan is now in motion.
We don’t know how this will go. First bombing, then a ground invasion? Many experts think that the war may be a long one. We have to make the Democrats know that we care. Please call Congressman Latimer (202) 225-2464 and Senators Gillibrand (202) 224-4451 and Sen. Schumer (202) 224-6542.. Force our “representatives” to make the war an issue. Thanks.
SOME ESSAYS ILLUMINATING THE COMING WAR
Why Did Trump Send his Warships to Venezuela?
By Vijay Prashad, Znet [December 13, 2025]
---- Ever since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1998, the United States has attempted to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution. They have tried everything short of a full-scale military invasion: a military coup, selecting a substitute president, cutting off access to the global financial system, imposing layers of sanctions, sabotaging the electricity grid, sending in mercenaries, and attempting to assassinate its leaders. If you can think of a method to overthrow a government, the United States has likely tried it against Venezuela. However, in 2025, the escalation became unmistakable. The U.S. sent its warships to patrol Venezuela’s coast, began sinking small boats and killing those on board as they left the South American mainland, and seized an oil tanker bound for Cuba. The quantity of attacks on Venezuela has increased, suggesting the quality of the threats has now reached a different magnitude. It feels as if the United States is preparing for a full-blown invasion of the country. [Read More]
Trump campaigned on Ending Forever Wars: Marco Rubio didn’t get the Memo
By Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [December 9, 2025]
---- Donald Trump campaigned on ending endless wars and now boasts that he has resolved eight wars. In reality, this claim is delusional, and his foreign policy is a disaster. The United States remains mired in ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and now Trump is careening blindly into new wars in Latin America. The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting U.S. foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and “America First” priorities. [Read More]
Asking the Right Questions When Lawless US Officials Go on a Murder Spree
By Phyllis Bennis and Khury Petersen-Smith, Common Dreams [December 10, 2025]
---- From Venezuela to Yemen to Iran, the extrajudicial slaughter of civilians has been allowed to continue. What we are witnessing in the Caribbean and elsewhere today has been years in the making. Who will put a stop to it?… It’s all good that members of Congress, mainstream headlines, and the various talking heads are discussing something we don’t hear about often enough—that the US is committing war crimes; how we need a new War Powers Resolution; or why heads should roll at the Pentagon over a series of boat bombings in the Pacific and Caribbean in recent months that are nothing less than premeditated murder. It is important that—after years of the Pentagon using unchecked power to carry out violence all over the world—Congress is finally asking questions. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Trump’s Monroe Doctrine 2.0 Outlines Imperial Intentions for Latin America,” by Michael Fox, Truthout [December 12, 2025] [Link]; “U.S. Imperialism in Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to Maduro: The Trump Corollary,” by Eric Ross, Tom Dispatch [December 8, 2025] [Link]; and (Video) “US-Venezuela military buildup tests Puerto Rico’s painful past,: from Aljazeera [“The Take”] [December 10, 2025] [Link].
NEWS NOTES
New legislation in Congress will make draft registration “automatic” starting next year. According to an expert on the subject, “it will move the USA closer to activation of a draft, or at least to being able to claim to be ready to activate a draft “on demand” of Congress and the President, than at any time in the half century since draft registration was suspended and draft boards were deactivated in 1975.” I’m uncertain whether only young men, or women also, will be registered. In 1980 this ended up in court. Now that women serve in combat, their exclusion from the draft (if it happens) will be less likely. Read more here.
President Trump refers repeatedly to the people of Somalia as “garbage.” While the mainstream media faithfully report this, less publicized is the fact that the US Africa Command has launched 111 airstrikes on Somalia this year. For more on this, go here.
The UK has designated Palestine Action as a “terrorist organization.” Among other things, declaring support for Palestine Action gets you arrested now. Hundreds have been arrested, and eight people detained for allegedly protesting in support of Palestine are currently undertaking the largest hunger strike in UK prisons in over 40 years. Read more about this here. Climate & justice activist Greta Thunberg posted a short video in support of the hunger strikers. Excellent. See it here.
Four years ago Starbucks workers in a shop in Buffalo succeeded in winning a union, despite fierce repression from management. Today there are about 560 Starbucks locations with a union. Yet they are still without a contract. Under current economic circumstances, the unionization of workers at Starbucks, Amazon, Walmart, etc. is of great importance. Read about the Starbuck’s union workers, from CNN, here.
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) 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!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers come from our old friends, Tuba Skinny. This is a video made of their concert a few months ago on Cape Cod (lucky them!). There are tons of videos from Tuba Skinny on-line. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Mutual Aid in the Age of Fascism
By Judith Levine, Boston Review [Spring 2025]
---- The coordinated response to Öztürk’s kidnapping exemplifies community self-defense and mutual aid at their best. Timpona and Ahmad were connected by a comrade in LUCE’s network of grassroots organizations. The frightened caller contacted a friend, who recommended the hotline, which he’d heard about by word of mouth. That the first impulse was to call a community organization, not the police, was itself a kind of win. ... Mutual aid is the brigade of volunteers mucking out basements after a flood, the church basement food pantry staffed by retirees, the GoFundMe to pay the rent for a tenant about to be evicted. It can look like an easier alternative to politics, which requires not just generosity but toughness, not just tolerance but side-taking. But mutual aid is more than glorified good neighborliness. The response to the Somerville abduction is a case in point: such projects can channel rage and fear into disciplined, concrete action, linking movements and bringing new individuals into them. Rather than sidestep politics, it can make politics happen. [Read More]
In Cover-Up, Laura Poitras Investigates Seymour Hersh
By A. J. Goldmann, Columbia Journalism Review [December 3, 2025]
---- Laura Poitras, the journalist and documentary filmmaker, has the rare distinction of having won a Pulitzer Prize (for her reporting on the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden), an Academy Award (for Citizenfour, about Snowden), and the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion (for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about the artist and activist Nan Goldin and the opioid crisis). Her new film, Cover-Up, examines the career of Seymour M. Hersh—known for his investigative journalism on My Lai and Abu Ghraib, as well as other, more contested scoops—using archival material and exclusive access to Hersh’s notes to probe how accountability journalism is made. [Read More]
The Public Pays the Price for Big Data Centers
By Michi Trota, Counterpunch [December 12, 2025]
---- According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the price of energy has risen at more than twice the rate of inflation since 2020, and Big Tech’s push for more power-hungry data centers is only making it worse. The data centers proliferating across the country drive up energy costs by powering energy-ravenous generative AI, cloud storage, digital networks, and other energy intensive programs — much of it fueled by coal and natural gas that exacerbate climate change. In some cases, data centers consume enough electricity to power the equivalent of a small city. The wholesale price of electricity in areas housing data centers is up a whopping 267 percent from five years ago — and everyday customers are eating those costs. [Read More].
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Israel’s Gaza proxy strategy is collapsing
By Muhammad Shehada, 972 Magazine [Israel/Palestine] [December 12, 2025]
[FB – From one of Gaza’s top reporters, this is an eye-opening insight into how Israel is attempted to use Palestinian gangsters in Gaza to cement Israeli control.]
---- The assassination last week of Yasser Abu Shabab — the 32-year-old leader of the Israeli-backed “Popular Forces,” a militia operating in the Rafah area of the southern Gaza Strip — is more than a lurid gangland hit. His killing at the hands of his own disgruntled militiamen is a clear representation of a policy coming undone. For months, Israel stitched together a sordid alliance of convicted felons, former ISIS affiliates, and opportunistic collaborators, presenting them as the embryo of a local governance alternative to Hamas in Gaza, while using them to orchestrate starvation and carry out attacks on Israel’s behalf. Now, this attempt to cultivate a network of criminal proxy gangs as subcontractors of its occupation is collapsing into paranoid infighting and bloody chaos. [Read More]
Inside the Machine of Annexation. Israel tightens its noose around the West Bank.
By Jasper Nathaniel, Infinite Jaz, [December 14, 2025]
[FB – Jasper Nathaniel is from Hastings. He is writing very insightful commentary from Israel’s West Bank. Here is his latest output; check out his Substack site.]
----In this week’s feature I unpack a moment of extraordinary candor from inside the occupation: an IDF officer telling Israel’s public broadcaster, in plain language, how settlers, the military, and the government work hand in glove to steal Palestinian land. I also uncovered a trove of new information about the man I believe coordinated the October 19 settler attack on Turmus’ayya. And to round it out, I break down the week’s surreal news highlights, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and friends swapping their yellow hostage ribbons for a conspicuously similar-looking gold noose, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s farcical hearing on “Understanding Judea and Samaria.” [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Israel’s military chief says the ‘Yellow Line’ dividing Gaza will be Israel’s new border. Palestinians say this is a ‘second Nakba,’” by Tareq S. Hajjai, Mondoweiss [December 10, 2025] [Link]; “It is not too late for the world to redeem itself on Gaza. And it can do so by saving its children, by Mais Al-Reem Hussein, Aljazeera [December 13, 2025] [Link]; “How to Keep Resolution 2803 From Becoming a U.S.–Run Occupation: by Carol Daniel-Kasbari, The Quincy Institute [December 10, 2025] [Link]; and “Gaza Diary: They Bulldozed Mass Graves and Called It Peace,” by Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch [December 12, 2025] [Link].
WAR WITH CHINA?
New York Times Editorial Board Urges US To Prepare for Future War With China
By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com [December 10, 2025]
---- The New York Times editorial board released a video on Monday calling for the US to “prepare for the future of war” and urged the Pentagon to take drastic steps to be better prepared for a potential fight with China, a conflict that could quickly turn nuclear. “US politicians often boast that America has the ‘Strongest and most powerful military in the history of the world’ but behind closed doors, they’re being told a different story,” the editorial board said. “New York Times Opinion has learned that the Pentagon has been delivering a classified, comprehensive overview of US military power called the Overmatch brief. The report shows what could happen if a war were to break out between China and the United States. The results are alarming.” [Read More].
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
The Paris climate treaty changed the world. Here’s how
By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian [UK] [December 12, 2025]
---- Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate treaty, one of the landmark days in climate-action history. Attending the conference as a journalist, I watched and listened and wondered whether 194 countries could ever agree on anything at all, and the night before they did, people who I thought were more sophisticated than me assured me they couldn’t. Then they did. There are a lot of ways to tell the story of what it means and where we are now, but any version of it needs respect for the complexities, because there are a lot of latitudes between the poles of total victory and total defeat…. On 23 July, the international court of justice handed down an epochal ruling that gives that treaty enforceable consequences it never had before. It declares that all nations have a legal obligation to act in response to the climate crisis, and, as Greenpeace International put it, “obligates states to regulate businesses on the harm caused by their emissions regardless of where the harm takes place. Significantly, the court found that the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is fundamental for all other human rights, and that intergenerational equity should guide the interpretation of all climate obligations.” The Paris treaty was cited repeatedly as groundwork for this decision. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
America’s New Political Reality: Trump Decides Which Beliefs Are “Legal”
By Thom Hartmann [December 9, 2025]
---- Back in September, most Americans (and the media) thought it was so over-the-top that it had to be a joke. Turns out, it wasn’t a joke and isn’t remotely funny. In a bizarre directive that could have been written by the staff of The Onion or Putin’s secret police, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), Donald Trump ordered the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police forces across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism. … Now, in a second bombshell report, [a reporter] has obtained and published a copy of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 4th memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russia-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above. Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as 5 years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of our possible adherence to these now-forbidden views. [Read More]
Birthright Citizenship is in the Constitution Plain as Day
By Mitchell Zimmerman, Counterpunch [December 12, 2025]
---- At least four Supreme Court justices recently signaled their apparent agreement with Donald Trump’s effort to roll back the Fourteenth Amendment’s definition of American citizenship. The case at issue, Trump v. Barbara, involves birthright citizenship — the principle that you’re a citizen of the country where you were born. In the United States, birthright citizenship was written into the Constitution after the Civil War. Following the end of slavery, the amendment confirmed that the fundamental rights of citizenship do not depend on white ancestry, but belong to everyone born in this country. On Day One of his presidency, Trump issued an Executive Order to overthrow that principle. He ordered that babies born in the U.S. of undocumented immigrants should not be considered citizens. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Trump Is Dragging Republicans to Crushing Defeat After Crushing Defeat
By John Nichols, The Nation [December 12, 2025]
---- Americans are now so soured on Trump (whose economic mismanagement, chaotic governance, and authoritarian overreach have dropped his approval rating as low as 36 percent in a late-November Gallup survey) and the GOP brand that they are turning out anywhere and everywhere to vote for Democrats. That was the case in Miami, a city with a large Latino population that not long ago was seen as an emerging base for the Republicans. … While partisans always put the best spin on election results—and while their rivals seek to discount them—the message from 2025 could not be clearer. The record of Trump and his administration, as well as that of the president’s allies in Congress, has become a massive burden for the Republican Party and is setting up a 2026 election cycle that could produce an epic smackdown for the GOP. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST is this (Video) “Why Gerrymandering Won’t Save Republicans” [Link].
The American Dream, We Hardly Knew You
By John Miller, Dollars & Sense [November/December 2025]
---- If Americans’ hopes of getting ahead have dimmed, as the Wall Street Journal reports yet again, it could only be because the lid of the coffin in which the “American Dream” was long ago laid to rest has finally been sealed shut. The promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will get ahead, or if you don’t, surely your children will, was broken long ago. And today’s economic hardships have left young adults distinctly worse off than their parents, and especially their grandparents. This long decline has stripped away much of what there was of U.S. social mobility, which never did measure up to its mythic renderings. Let’s look closely at what the economic evidence, compiled in many meticulous studies, tells us about what passed for the American Dream, its demise, and what it would take to make its promised social mobility a reality. [Read More].
OUR HISTORY
Learning from Myles Horton’s legendary career in social movements
By Mark Engler, Waging Nonviolence [December 12, 2025]
---- Over a career that spanned more than 50 years and touched on some of the major American social movements of the 20th century, Myles Horton established himself as one of our country’s most renowned popular educators. … Founder of the Highlander Folk School, later reformed as the Highlander Research and Education Center after it was shut down by Jim Crow officials in Tennessee in 1961, the adult education program maintained deep ties to working people in the South. It played an important role in the labor upheavals of the New Deal era in the 1930s. ...Rosa Parks famously attended Highlander before returning home and declining to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Among the other prominent names in the civil rights movement who walked its grounds were Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Andrew Young, John Lewis and Dorothy Cotton. But Highlander’s impact is properly measured less by the luminaries it influenced than by the countless unheralded union shop stewards and local community leaders who were enriched by coming together to study and struggle with others who faced similar challenges in their lives, and who left inspired to make greater contributions to creating change. [Read More]
The Mostest Anarchist
By Paul Buhle, Portside [December 11, 2025[
[FB – This is a review of Johann Most, Life of a Radical, by Tom Goyens.]
---- Scholars date the rise of anarchism to the early nineteenth century and the British thinker William Godwin, then to the famed utopians like Proudhon. Only with the middle of that century does something clearly and (somewhat) strategically emerge as “anarchism”— simultaneously with something that will compete with Marxism but also serve as a fellow-actor in the global struggle to overcome capitalism. … Until the 1890s at the earliest, these two, mostly competing ideologies had about the same number of sympathizers and activists. Not only did the followers of Bakunin and Marx struggle with each other, but hundreds of thousands of local activists shifted back and forth in ideas and tactics across the US, Europe and far beyond. … Meanwhile, Most himself seems to have changed the nature of his anarchist beliefs. By the late 1880s, he felt himself closer to the violence-shunning philosophy of Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus. He translated the published pamphlets by the Prince, urging social transformation on a cultural, almost spiritual basis. [Read More]
