Hello All - After 6 weeks of chaos, the goals of the Trump-Musk dictatorship are becoming clear. With their Cabinet of billionaires in place, the Dictatorship is installing Trump loyalists at the head of all federal agencies. Except for the Military, government agencies are being reduced in size and capability so that there will soon be little support when the agencies are ended. All Musk-Trump changes work toward the goal of reducing regulations on business. Profit and stock market gains now measure “good government.”
Despite little action from the Democrats in Congress, so many hundreds of thousands of people feel threatened by the Dictatorship that they are finding ways to fight back. Much of the leadership of this fightback comes from unions. Much also comes from grassroots organizations. For example: Federal workers – 3 million, representing 2% of the labor force – have organized dozens of protests, often led by their unions. In early February, protests against Trump’s policies on immigration and Musk’s attack on federal workers took place in most states. Last week, on President’s Day, rallies were held in all the state capitals. “No Kings” was a common sign.
Chaos at home was mirrored this week by the on-camera meltdown of Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky. The chaos has now infected Europe and NATO, and it appears that, with US support, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is about to terminate the ceasefire and hostage exchange agreement. Israel’s West Bank, against with US support, is being “Gazafied.” Comparisons can be only approximate, but the anxiety and terror enveloping the world reminds me of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. At any minute, things can go terribly wrong. We don’t have a choice now: Resistance is the only reasonable alternative.
THE KINGDOM OF THE TWO DICTATORS
From Comedy to Brutality
By Fintan O’Toole, New York Review of Books [March 13, 2025 issue]
---- Trump’s imperialist ambitions are in some respects familiar from US history. Building new paradises on land whose indigenous population has been exterminated, displaced to reservations, or otherwise “cleansed” was America’s foundational act. Trump’s recent suggestion that Canada be subsumed into the US as “the 51st state” harks back to John Quincy Adams’s claim that “our proper domain [is] the continent of North America.” His grandson Henry Adams described the expectation that “the whole continent of North America and all its adjacent islands must at last fall under the control of the United States” as “a conviction absolutely ingrained in our people.” In Democratic Vistas (1871), Walt Whitman wrote that “long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba.” At the end of World War II, Harry Truman approved efforts (conducted quietly and diplomatically and gently rejected) to persuade Denmark to sell Greenland to the US. What is new, however, is the fusion of different apocalyptic visions, one religious, the other techno-utopian. [Read More]
Techno-Fascism Comes to America
By Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker [February 27, 2025]
---- When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. “These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government,” Mimura told me. The result is what, in her book “Planning for Empire” (2011), she labeled “techno-fascism”: authoritarianism driven by technocrats. Technology “is considered the driving force” of such a regime, Mimura said. “There’s a sort of technicization of all aspects of government and society.” [Read More]
‘Trump Gaza Number One’
By Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books [March 2, 2025]
---- On February 25, 2025, the president of the United States of America posted a video to his socials, an AI-created vision of a postwar Gaza. To enter this Trumpian utopia you first have to pass through a large hole, like the opening of a cave, or the entrance to a mine. On one side of the portal there is war, devastation, mass murder, orphaned children, destroyed homes. On the other, a beachfront resort of palm trees, bread bowls filled with hummus, Vegas-style hotels, and many golden idols of the great man himself. Dollar bills rain down democratically on ragged children and Elon Musk alike. Meanwhile, Donald and Bibi sip cocktails on a couple of sun loungers, in a modified landscape perfectly adapted to their needs and interests. … It was only thirty-three seconds long, this “satirical” video, but it is one of the most comprehensive depictions of what I want to call the American Imaginary that I have ever seen. Within the American Imaginary, there is and always has been a subcategory of people in this world who are not only born to suffer but are habituated to it. They come from the “shithole countries,” as previously defined by the president, during his first term. This region has historically gone by different names. The “Third World.” “The Global South.” “Arabia.” (And it can be extended. It may soon include all of “Eastern Europe,” as President Zelensky is discovering.) In these places live the “wretched of the earth,” as defined by Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist-philosopher who, though he died in 1961, is one of the political thinkers most closely identified with our historical moment. [Read More]
THE RESISTANCE – NO KINGS!
(Video) The Billionaires’ Government: Branko Marcetic on Trump’s “Complete Betrayal” of His Base
From Democracy Now! [February 27, 2025]
---- Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been the public face of the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle many government agencies and slash the size of the federal workforce. On Wednesday, he attended Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, although he is not a Cabinet member. Meanwhile, Russell Vought, the Project 2025 mastermind and director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has been working behind the scenes to enact far-right policies aimed at privatizing public resources like Medicaid and Social Security. We speak with Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic to discuss the radical DOGE agenda. “As they make these ruthless, ruthless cuts to the programs that people rely on, … they also want to keep in place massive tax cuts for the rich,” he says. [See the Program]
Resisting the “Everything, Everywhere All at Once” Blitzkrieg
By Max Elbaum , Convergence Magazine [February 27, 2025]
---- No wonder all our heads are spinning. The foundations of the world and the domestic order that everyone under 80 years old has grown up in have been under strain for two decades. Now they are being cracked wide open. A MAGA bloc that has meshed white Christian nationalists, right-wing populists, and a Musk-led “broligarchy” (now MAGA’s dominant faction) has captured the citadel of global power. And it is conducting a Constitution-scrapping coup to consolidate authoritarian rule and implement its take-over-everything-everywhere agenda. It is urgent to get caught up with the breadth of the changes underway. … I offer four initial theses as one potential entryway into the urgent political and strategic exploration this moment demands. [Read More]
The Movement Supporting Public Employees Is Rising
By Sarah Jaffe, In These Times [February 21, 2025]
---- Thousands of workers hit the streets February 19, all around the country — at federal offices like the Department of Health and Human Services, at Tesla dealerships and public spaces — to declare their opposition to the slashing and burning of public services currently happening under the guise of “efficiency.” Workers focused on billionaire Elon Musk’s power within President Donald Trump’s new administration, through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). National Park Service workers, standing in the snow, brandished signs reading, “Immigrants didn’t steal my job. The president did.” … Members of Congress, such as Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as local officials and labor leaders, joined the actions, but they were organized and led by the workers themselves. The protests were more than just an expression of outrage and an attempt to stop the slicing. They amounted to a massive public education project, showing the United States, in real time, the work its government actually does, and how many lives that work touches. … The federal sector can learn from the rest of the public sector, and the labor movement can build on the Labor for Higher Ed alliance — which includes the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the Communications Workers of America, the National Education Association, the United Auto Workers, the Office and Professional Employees International Union, and the United Electrical workers — and expand on this week’s actions. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST is “On National Day of Action: Federal Union Rank-and-Filers Protest Musk & Challenge Their Own Leaders,” by Steve Early, Beyond Chron [February 24, 2025] [Link]
COMING ATTRACTIONS – THINGS TO DO
Next Saturday, March 8th, is International Women’s Day. CFOW will host a rally at noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton & Spring St.) in Hastings. The Women’s Day rallies are sponsored by the Women’s March – there will be hundreds of events across the USA [Link]. We say: “On International Women’s Day, we’re taking to the public square to fight back against the fascist takeover. Join us to defend our rights, our bodies, and our future. Open Mic.” And if you are planning to come, please sign up here so that you can receive info updates and so others can see what a big event we are having.
On Sunday, March 9th, the UN Association Westchester chapter will celebrate International Women’s Day with an in-person/Zoom event at Manhattanville College, beginning at 2 pm. The event will take place at Reid Castle. To sign up and for more information, go here, where you can also learn about the full range of programs of the UNA-Westchester.
Parole justice is the focus on the film “The Interview,” which will be shown in Westchester twice this month. On Saturday, March 15th, the film will be shown at Christ Church San Marcos, 43 S. Broadway in Tarrytown. (Here is the RSVP). On Sunday, March 30th, the film will be shown at the Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 468 Rosedale Ave. in White Plains (Here is the RSVP). To learn about “The dehumanizing theater of the parole process,” go 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.) Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com, and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please 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 Roberta Flack, who died last Monday at the age of 88. The New York Times published a nice memoir/overview of her career, including video links to “11 essential songs.” Among them are "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face," "Freedom Song," and "Angel Eyes." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
How the Warfare State Paved the Way for a Trumpist Autocracy: A True Cost of War
By Norman Solomon, Tom Dispatch [February 28, 2025]
---- Donald Trump’s power has thrived on the economics, politics, and culture of war. The runaway militarism of the last quarter-century was a crucial factor in making President Trump possible, even if it goes virtually unmentioned in mainstream media and political discourse. That silence is particularly notable among Democratic leaders, who have routinely joined in bipartisan messaging to boost the warfare state that fueled the rise of Trumpism. … While Democrats in Congress have long denounced Trump as an enemy of democracy, they haven’t put any sort of brake on American militarism. Certainly, there are many reasons for Trump’s second triumph, including his exploitation of racism, misogyny, nativism, and other assorted bigotries. Yet his election victories owe much to the Democratic Party’s failure to serve the working class, a failure intermeshed with its insistence on serving the industries of war. Meanwhile, spending more on the military than the next nine countries combined, U.S. government leaders tacitly lay claim to a kind of divine overpowering virtue. As history attests, militarism can continue for many decades while basic democratic structures, however flawed, remain in place. But as time goes on, militarism is apt to be a major risk factor for developing some modern version of fascism. The more war and preparations for war persist, with all their economic and social impacts, the more core traits of militarism — including reliance on unquestioning obedience to authority and sufficient violence to achieve one’s goals — will permeate the society at large. [Read More]
Conquered Lands
By Tariq Ali, New Left Review
---- To the victors, the spoils. A hundred years ago, after the conclusion of the First World War, the British Empire and its French ally broke up the old Ottoman-dominated Arab world and created new countries (Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia), principalities and outposts (the Gulf States, southern Yemen) and puppet states (Egypt, Iran), as well as laying the foundations on which Israel would be built, after the Second World War. A hundred or so years later, after the collapse of the Communist world, the triumphant United States moved rapidly to balkanize the Arab world and remove all real and imagined threats to its hegemony. A tally of the 21st-century wars that have wrecked the Middle East provides a horrific balance sheet, by any standard. How is the situation they created viewed by the imperial strategists in Washington? ‘Freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are even more remote than they were under the authoritarian-nationalist Arab dictatorships. Even the most cynical occupants of the White House and the Pentagon find it difficult to justify in public the mess they have created. … On the face of it, American hegemony in the region is virtually complete. The us embarked on a global policy of divide, occupy, buy and rule. What started in earnest with the Yugoslav civil war has now become a regular feature of us strategy supported by Britain and most of the eu. The gains made by the West in the world’s richest energy zone since the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 have been breathtaking. A brief survey of the region can help to highlight what has been lost and signal the direction in which it is heading. [Read More]
War of Words: From the Mekong Delta to Gaza
By Lawrence Tritle, LA Progressive [February 20, 2025]
---- As a young Army advisor arriving in the Mekong Delta in 1970, I soon learned the language of war. From adjoining quarters, I overheard voices: “What do you call a Viet Cong suspect?” “Any living Vietnamese.” “What do you call a Viet Cong?” “Any dead Vietnamese.” While My Lai is the best-known example of the carnage such thinking incites, far worse was the 9th Infantry Division’s operation called “Speedy Express.” Just a few days before, John Paul Vann, the senior advisor in the Delta, had briefed me and other incoming advisors how in six months (1968/69), as many as eleven thousand Viet Cong were killed. Yet fewer than nine hundred weapons were taken. Who were most of those killed? If you’re guessing civilians, you’d be right. Their only mistake – living among Viet Cong sympathizers and fighters. Sound familiar? Substitute the Palestinians of Gaza for the Mekong Delta’s Vietnamese. Do that and you’ll begin to comprehend how there may be as many as two hundred thousand Palestinian casualties – possibly as many as fifty thousand dead – since 7 October 2023. [Read More]
(Video) Report from a Devastated Lebanon: Sharif Abdel Kouddous on Nasrallah’s Funeral & Fragile Ceasefire
From Democracy Now! [February 27, 2025]
---- Thousands gathered in Beirut Sunday to mourn the death of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s longtime leader who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September. Under a ceasefire agreement, Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon last week, but it continues to illegally occupy five locations in the country. Correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous traveled to Lebanon last week to report from the ground in southern Lebanon and to cover Nasrallah’s funeral, one of the biggest in the region in decades. The large turnout of thousands of Lebanese mourners was a “show of presence and of support for Hezbollah, which suffered heavy losses in Israel’s war on Lebanon,” Abdel Kouddous says. [See the Program]
THE WAR ON GAZA
The Trump administration has no plan for Gaza other than supporting Israel’s perpetual war
By Mitchell Plitnick, Mondoweiss [February 28, 2025]
---- On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump released a horrifying, AI-generated video showing his “vision” of Gaza, complete with every imaginable anti-Arab stereotype, an unabashed appeal to white supremacy and extreme oligarchy, and an image of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lounging in nothing but swimming trunks that will live a sickeningly long life in my head. The next day, Netanyahu brazenly declared that contrary to the agreement governing the ceasefire in Gaza, Israel is refusing to move its troops out of the Philadelphi Corridor, the narrow strip of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Neither power is seriously grappling in any way with the realities on the ground. Trump is rolling around in a fantasy about the “Riviera on the Mediterranean” that has no chance of materializing. Meanwhile, he’s ignoring everything that is happening in Gaza and the West Bank on a daily basis. Taken together, these two actions illustrate the approach the United States and Israel are taking to Gaza. [Read More]
(Video) Dr. Khaled Alser Speaks from Gaza on Surviving 7 Months in Israeli Prisons After Raid on His Hospital
From Democracy Now! [February 28, 2025]
---- Dr. Khaled Alser, a renowned Palestinian surgeon at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, describes how Israeli forces abducted him from Gaza last year before transferring him to Israeli prisons rife with abuse. He was held by Israel for seven months last year, during which time he says he was beaten, humiliated, denied medical treatment and tortured. He also describes routine sexual assault and sexual humiliation of prisoners by Israeli soldiers, as well as the use of military attack dogs on the detainees. No charges were filed against Alser before he was released back to Gaza. “Most of the prisoners I met inside the prison are civilians or civil workers here, working inside hospitals, schools, universities,” Alser tells Democracy Now! from Gaza. “We as healthcare workers, we don’t have any agenda against anyone. We just provide medical care.” [See the Program]
(Video) Does Israel have a future? with Ilan Pappé
---- The Israeli Jewish public consistently supported the genocide in Gaza by large margins, according to opinion polls. But in recent months things started to shift. An overwhelming majority now say they support the ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal that went into effect in January. Earlier this month, the Israel Democracy Institute published a poll which found that 66 percent of Israeli Jews agree that “Israel should proceed to the second stage, which includes a complete end to fighting, withdrawal from Gaza and the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of all the hostages.” And another poll, published by the Lazar institute at the end of January, found that only four percent of Israelis believe that the goals of the war in Gaza were met. We are joined by historian Ilan Pappé, who will share his insights into the state of Israeli politics and society in the context of broader geopolitical developments. This is a segment from The Electronic Intifada's livestream on day 33 of the Gaza ceasefire. Ali Abunimah, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Jon Elmer and Asa Winstanley were joined by historian Ilan Pappé. [See the Program]
THE WEST BANK
Israel Is Gazafiying the West Bank, and Turning These Palestinians Into Refugees Yet Again
By Gideon Levy and Alex Levac, Haaretz [Israel] [March 1, 2025]
---- Winds of war blow through the northern West Bank. The head of the local council of Anabta says emergency plans are in place to absorb thousands of refugees. Jenin has already been invaded by tanks, and three refugee camps – Jenin, Tul Karm and Nur Shams – have been almost entirely depopulated by army forces. Minister of Defense Israel Katz boasted this week that 40,000 displaced West Bank residents will not be able to return home for at least a year. Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces has been tearing down infrastructure in the camps, with dozens of homes already reduced to rubble. Displaced people will clearly have nowhere to return to – and the operation has only just begun. It is safe to assume the campaign will expand to include all the refugee camps in the West Bank. The "Gaza-fication" of the West Bank is in full swing. The three northern camps already look like Jabalya, and no one is allowed to enter them. … On January 21, the army invaded the Jenin camp, evicted all its inhabitants and began to destroy homes and infrastructure. On January 27, troops entered the Tul Karm camp. On February 7, they invaded Nur Shams. Since then, the military has maintained a presence in all three camps, while their inhabitants remain displaced and destitute. [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
No, Donald: The US Owes Ukraine. Not the other way around.
By Stephen Crowley, The Nation [February 28, 2025]
---- Despite Trump’s claim that Ukrainian president Zelensky was only good at “playing Joe Biden like a fiddle,” the Kremlin is dangling the promise of its own mineral wealth to bait Trump to drop sanctions in exchange for deal-making. This includes rare earth elements to be taken from land Russia seized from Ukraine. In the likely event that Trump can’t resist such a deal, he will be handing Putin a lifeline to save his faltering economy and prevent the unrest that could follow in its wake. It is past time for this war to end. Yet, while promising to do so, Putin and Trump appear to be conspiring to cannibalize Ukraine—Putin through a land grab from the east, and Trump by extracting its mineral resources, the very means Ukraine will need to rebuild the shattered country. Ukraine deserves a much better future, one free from militarized foreign policies and 21st-century imperial conquest. [Read More]
The Plunder of Ukraine: A Story of Debt, Greed, and Betrayal
By Elizabeth Kucinich, Znet [March 1, 2025]
---- The systematic plundering of Ukraine by international financial institutions and governments is underway. As history has shown in countless other countries, predatory terms will cripple Ukraine’s future, a continuation of war, by other means. This is colonization in action—not through military conquest, but through economic enslavement, that will bind Ukraine in perpetual debt and subjugation. Ukraine is home to some of the world’s richest agricultural land and vast mineral deposits, including critical rare earth elements. Today, it is being sacrificed to the international community, its natural wealth placed on the altar of global capital. Her fertile land, water, and fragile ecosystems stand on the brink of exploitation—viewed not as living, sustaining forces, but as mere “natural resources” for extraction, debt collateral for creditors, and fuel for industrial appetites. We will hear the familiar rhetoric of “green energy,” “sustainability,” and “digital transformation,” but behind these words lies a brutal reality: a feeding frenzy cloaked in the language of progress. The word we should be screaming is STOP! [Read More]
IMMIGRATION & DEPORTATION
Immigration Myths Feed Divisions among Workers
By Aviva Chomsky, Labor Notes [February 26, 2025]
Myth#1: Immigrants take American jobs.
---- With all the talk about a flood of new immigrants, unemployment is still close to a record low. This indicates that immigrants are not taking jobs from native-born workers. Analysts from the left, right, and center agree: Immigration contributes to job growth, locally and nationally. It might seem logical that adding new workers to an economy would increase competition for jobs. But this assumes that jobs and workers exist in a laboratory with only those two factors at play. Real-world economies are much more complicated. In fact, immigrants contribute work, spend money, and actually increase the size of the economy, creating jobs where there were none before. Employers eliminate jobs due to lots of factors: recession, automation, business failure, offshoring, government cutbacks, and lowered demand. All these have more impact than immigration. In fact, where immigrants are available to work, it sometimes means companies opt to stay in the U.S. rather than move overseas. [FB – And the myths continue: “Immigrants compete with low-skilled workers and drive down wages”; “Immigrants don’t pay taxes”; Immigrants are a drain on the economy”; “The country is being overrun by illegal immigrants”; and “Tougher U.S. policies will slow down immigration.”] [Read More]
A Cruel Hoax: The Political Economy of Anti-Immigration
By Richard D. Wolff, Znet [February 28, 2025]
---- Deporting immigrants may deliver electoral wins to politicians if voters have been sufficiently cultivated by years of demonizing and scapegoating them. For its victims, the cruelties involved are horrific. Yet such deportation makes little sense economically. It represents a nationally self-destructive program based on a faulty grasp of immigration economics. What once “made America great” (at least for the majority white population) were its successive waves of immigrants. What underscored the American economy’s strength was its ability to absorb and integrate those waves despite frictions among them: a genuinely productive melting pot. My American schooling through my PhD stressed such points. What then reversed such a positive understanding of immigration? What converted immigration instead into an urgent danger to American greatness? What lets Trump pose as “protecting” us by sharply reducing immigration and massively deporting immigrants? (By “immigrants” I mean the vast majority of people who are poor and join the working class at low levels of pay. Foreign-born U.S. residents comprise about 14 percent of the total population or roughly 46 million. About 12 million of them are undocumented.) Answers to such questions lie in the political economy of immigration. Yet those answers and the political economy that generates them are stunningly absent from popular debates and consciousness. [Read More]
A Report from Limbo: Asylum Seekers Face the New Trump Era
By Todd Miller, The Border Chronicles [February 27, 2025]
---- There’s something spectacular about seeing the face of a newborn. Maybe this is partly because of some personal nostalgia, a reminder of when I first held my own kids in my arms. But there’s more. Perhaps in the case of Valentina, the baby I was about to meet, it was because she was born in a shelter for migrants, far away from her parents’ home in Guerrero. Or perhaps it was because she represented hope; at least that’s what her father, José, told me a week ago during my interview with him at the Casa de la Misericordia y de Todas las Naciones, located in Nogales, Sonora. Since 2020, the Casa has housed asylum seekers, who can stay for months as they go through the long bureaucratic process to get a hearing with the U.S. government. When I finished the interview with José in one of the shelter’s dormitories, where he and his family had been staying for almost a year, he asked me if I wanted to see Valentina, who was born February 4. She was the first newborn at the shelter since Donald Trump’s inauguration. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
BP to ‘Fundamentally Reset’ Strategy in Shift Back to Oil and Gas
By Stanley Reed, The New York Times [February 26, 2025]
---- BP, the energy giant, on Wednesday said it would increase spending on oil and gas while sharply paring back investments on various forms of clean energy.The move appears to be a response to a combination of investor pressure for higher returns and a realization that the so-called energy transition to cleaner fuels is not paying off as once expected…. BP said it would increase oil and gas investment to around $10 billion per year in order to bolster output, while cutting spending on renewables to between $1.5 billion and $2 billion per year, a $5 billion-per-year drop from previous plans. … The Trump administration, which favors fossil fuels, has also altered the investment and operating environment for energy companies. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Inside the Student Sit-in That Rocked Barnard College
By Eric Santomauro-Stenzel, The Indypendent [NYC]
---- It was a quiet Wednesday at Milbank Hall. Barnard College students were attending classes and administrators working in offices. As the work day was coming to a close around 4 p.m., that all changed in less than a minute. Around 50 keffiyeh-clad protesters with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) gathered at the 120th Street entrance to Barnard and made a mad dash into the building. … “Free, free Palestine!” the protesters chanted, running up a set of stairs. The activists turned right and quickly filled either side of a hallway as its startled occupants left. At the end of the hallway stood the office door of the subject of their ire: Barnard College Dean Leslie Grinage. The door soon bore blue masking tape to say “For Hind,” with photos of the six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, who was murdered by the Israeli military last year. Protesters raised Palestinian flags on the walls, hanging above their heads as they sat on either side of the hallway. Protesters demanded the reinstatement of two Barnard students they say were expelled for disrupting a “History of Modern Israel” class earlier this semester. CUAD called for the abolition of “the corrupt Barnard disciplinary process” and “amnesty for all students disciplined for pro-Palestine action or thought.” The group demanded a public meeting with Dean Leslie Grinage and President Laura Rosenbury. [Read More]
Cruel and Usual: Republicans Prepare to Gut Medicaid [West Virginia]
By Paul Krugman [February 27, 2025]
---- Medicaid covers 45 percent of the state’s children. But now the Republicans West Virginia helped put in power are preparing to impose savage cuts on a program that has literally been a lifeline for many in the state, in order to help offset the cost of huge tax cuts for high-income Americans, hardly any of which will trickle down to WV voters. Populism! We’ll be hearing a lot of lies about Medicaid in the weeks ahead, starting with Trump’s arithmetically impossible claim last week that Medicaid won’t be “touched” by the planned spending cuts. So here are two things you should know about a program Trump and his allies have in their crosshairs: it’s extremely important to many Americans, and it’s much more cost-efficient than the rest of our health care system. [Read More]
As Poverty Rises in New York City, 1 in 4 Can’t Afford Essentials
By Benjamin Oreskes, New York Times [February 26, 2025]
---- A quarter of New York City residents don’t have enough money for staples like housing and food, and many say they cannot afford to go to the doctor, according to a report that underscores the urgency of an affordability crisis elected officials are struggling to confront. The report, by a research group at Columbia University and Robin Hood, an anti-poverty group, found that the share of New Yorkers in poverty was nearly double the national average in 2023 and had increased by seven percentage points in just two years. The spike is in part due to the expiration of government aid that was expanded during the pandemic. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
A People’s History, Retold in Graphics
By Hank Kennedy, Against the Current [March/April 2025]
[FB – This is a review of the important new book by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: A Graphic Interpretation”]
---- Paul Peart-Smith, a comics artist with a background at U.K. comics mainstay 2000 AD, has adapted An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States to comics form, with the help of editor Paul Buhle, himself no stranger to nonfiction comics. … The book begins in media res at the 1973 Wounded Knee Occupation when the American Indian Movement occupied the site of an 1890 massacre of 120 Lakota by U.S. Cavalry. The Occupation meant to draw attention to the repeated violations of treaties between the U.S. government and Native tribes. Beginning the story at this point has important symbolic value, as Peart-Smith knows. The 1973 Occupation birthed a new era of indigenous activism and opened a space for historians and scholars to think more critically about the conquest of the Americas. Dunbar-Ortiz appears throughout as our guide, reminiscent of Howard Zinn’s similar appearances in the 2008 comic A Peoples’ History of the American Empire, illustrated by Mike Konopacki, also edited by Buhle. Other historians appear as talking heads. The effect is something like an informative documentary, but given the comics form, readers can pore over the images in a way impossible with film. [Read More]
Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism
By Marc Blanc, Jacobin Magazine [February 2025]
---- Printed out of a cattle barn in Minnesota, Anvil published some of the biggest leftist writers of the 1930s, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Its popular vision for a multiracial socialism in the heart of the US could hardly be more urgent today. The small, ragtag magazine, founded in 1933, was unique among leftist literary journals of the time in its racial diversity and its proud adoption of rural radicalism. It sought to offer an alternative to New York periodicals such as New Masses and Partisan Review and make Marxism accessible to workers in the cultural outskirts of the Midwest. Despite publishing the early works of some of the most renowned US socialist writers of the twentieth century, Anvil remains unknown to all but a few specialists in leftist literary history. That’s a shame, because it offers a blueprint for communicating a popular socialist vision to a working class outside the United States’ major urban centers — a task that could hardly be more urgent today. … Today US politics continues to turn on regional conflicts and inequalities, both real and perceived, and the Left cannot assemble a majoritarian, working-class coalition without winning over the nation’s rural and deindustrialized midlands. Especially for leftists campaigning in the field of culture, Jack Conroy and Anvil magazine provide lessons in representing and nourishing interracial radicalism in the heart of the United States. [Read More]
