Hello All – As many of you know first-hand, yesterday a very big crowd joined in Hastings for our Hands-Off rally. To our surprise and great happiness, about 1,500 attended and it did not rain! Some 1,400 events were held across the USA. A spokesperson for MoveOn said that rally-goers were in “the millions.” What did this/might this accomplish?
One of my main takeaways from yesterday is that the protest movement, the protests against Trump and Musk, the demands to defend what democracy we have, are no longer confined to major cities and university enclaves. Now it may be that the pro-democracy, anti-fascism movement has a firm foothold in thousands of suburbs and small towns. For those who did not attend yesterday’s event in Hastings (and for those who did!), check out this informative coverage from our local Channel 12. This is what (perhaps suburban) democracy looks like. Not primarily a student movement, as was the antiwar movement during the early Vietnam years, but a multi-generational turnout of protest veterans and first-timers.
As Micah Sifry notes in an article linked below, what Trump and Musk have done in the last few weeks is to put a human face on their insane plans to greatly weaken, and perhaps eventually to privatize, government institutions. Federal workers are our neighbors. Mom and Dad (or we ourselves!) count on Social Security, Medicare, and many other federal programs and institutions when planning our lives. As I mentioned in my one-minute speaking time at yesterday’s rally, a cut in monthly Social Security benefits would mean I couldn’t pay my rent; a cut in Medicare would mean I couldn’t afford to get sick or injured. Trump and Musk have turned the abstraction of “fascism” into bread-and-butter issues that affect millions.
What we have now is a social movement in formation. It is perhaps for the best that the leadership of what is happening now is very decentralized and relatively unconnected to the Democratic Party. If this lasts it will allow tens of thousands of people to be leaders, and hundreds of thousands of people will have the experience of participating in decision-making that will literally affect their lives. A spectrum of social movements will need hundreds of skills and personal aptitudes to carry on the struggle – one that will grow from an understanding of our immediate needs and prospects, not one that will be outsourced to “experts” and professionals.
We are truly at an historic moment. Yesterday’s rallies showed what we can accomplish, that the spirit resistance is alive and well. I think everybody understands – certainly those with whom I spoke at yesterday’s rally in Hastings – that we are just at the beginning of what will be a long struggle. I think millions are eager to undertake this journey.
MORE THOUGHTS ON PROTESTS AND APRIL 5TH
Millions Stood Up: April 5 Hands Off Day of Action
By Rebecca Solnit • 6 Apr 2025
---- I was the closing speaker at the ebullient San Francisco Hands Off rally, and when I got home later I scoured the news for reports on the rallies. Of course people would show up in the big cities and the bluest places, but what really exhilarated me was to see the turnout in reddest America--Utah, Nebraska, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, Idaho--and small communities not known for their protests. People stood up for their principles in the cold in Alaska and the rain in the Northeast and the heat in St. Augustine Florida. I'm impatiently waiting for the Crowd Counting Consortium to give us numbers, but some early estimates say well over three million people showed up. … The journalist L.A. Kauffman, who's written excellent histories of protest movements and nonviolent activism, commented on BlueSky "A massive decentralized movement like this – everywhere all at once, with everybody pitching in – is extremely difficult for any regime, even the most autocratic, to derail. There are too many leaders, coordinating in too many different ways, for a movement like this to be easily neutralized. And while you usually can't tell the true effect of a protest until long after it's over, today's actions have already made a major impact where we most needed it right now: on people's morale. That in itself is a win." My Hands Off talk follows. ]Read More]
Democrats Are Looking for the Resistance in All the Wrong Places
By Micah L. Sifry, New York Times [April 5, 2025]
---- Democrats have been looking for the next resistance in all the wrong places. Instead of waiting for some politician to say the right words and catch fire, they should look to the people who are already on fire: federal workers. … As the blast radius of Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk’s cuts and chaos spreads, federal workers and their message will only resonate further. It’s like the Joni Mitchell lyric: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” The health workers, scientists, park rangers, veterans care providers, letter carriers, air traffic controllers and many others who are speaking out aren’t just trying to save their jobs — they’re trying to save programs and investments that were providing irreplaceable services to regular Americans. By going after the federal work force, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are radicalizing the very people who can best explain how the government does so much good for so many. [Read More]
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.) And this week the Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter will resume its weekly Monday night vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com, and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
REWARDS!
Our fabulous Hands-Off rally included music from the Clearwater Walkabout Chorus. I think you will enjoy this "Intro to the Walkabout Chorus." And let’s hear Mavis Staples singing "This little Light of Mine" and finally Stephen Foster’s "Hard Times Come Again No More."
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAYS
Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.
By M. Gessen, New York Times [April 2, 2025]
----- Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.” … It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. … It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment. … It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers. … It’s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. [FB - And many more examples.] [Read More]
The Fire This Time
By Henry Giroux, Counterpunch [April 2, 2025]
---- We live in perilous times. The mobilizing passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of history—they are here, surging through the United States like an electric current. We are in a period of social, ideological, and racial cleansing. First, the notion of government as a democratizing public good and institution of social responsibility—that once held power to account, protected the vulnerable, and nurtured the ideals of justice and collective responsibility—is being methodically destroyed. … Second, we are witnessing a form of ideological cleansing—a scorched-earth assault on critical consciousness. Education, both public and higher, is under siege, stripped of its democratic mission to cultivate informed judgment, critical thinking, and the capacity to make corrupt power visible. … Third—and perhaps most alarming—is the escalating campaign of racial cleansing—a war against the most vulnerable, on bodies, on the flesh, and on visceral forms of agency. … This is a war not only against people, but against memory, imagination, and the very capacity to think, make connections, and to dream a different future. The unimaginable has become policy. The unthinkable now passes for normal. [Read More]
The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk
By Jill Lepore, New York Times [April 4, 2025]
---- Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom. That is still true, but unlike his forefathers, Mr. Musk does have a theory for the assumption of power. That theory is to seize power with the dead robotic hand of the past. It remains for the living to wrest free of that grip. [Read More]]
A Different Approach Is Needed for Survival in the Nuclear Age
By Lawrence Wittner, Counterpunch [April 4, 2025]
---- Amid growing international chaos, it should come as no surprise that nuclear dangers are increasing. The latest indication is a rising interest among U.S. allies in enhancing their nuclear weapons capability. For many decades, remarkably few of them had been willing to build nuclear weapons―a result of popular opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear war, progress on nuclear arms control and disarmament, and a belief that they remained secure under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. But, as revealed by a recent article in London’s Financial Times, Donald Trump’s public scorn for NATO allies and embrace of Vladimir Putin have raised fears of U.S. unreliability, thereby tipping the balance toward developing an expanded nuclear weapons capability. This growing interest in nuclear weapons is especially noticeable in Europe, where Trump’s berating of NATO and Putin’s threats of nuclear attack are particularly unsettling. … Strengthening international security might seem impractical at this time of overheated nationalist claims and the global chaos they produce. Even so, times of crisis sometimes produce historic breakthroughs, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation might have that effect. [Read More]
TRUMP’S NEW TARIFFS
(Video) “American Empire Is in Decline”: Economist Richard Wolff on Trump’s Trade War & Tariffs
From Democracy Now! [April 3, 2025]
---- As President Trump finally unveils his global tariff plan — setting a baseline 10% tariff on all imported goods, with additional hikes apparently based on individual countries’ trade balances with the United States — economists like our guest Richard Wolff warn it will have grave economic effects on American consumers and lead to a recession. Wolff says the Trump administration’s tariff strategy is borne out of an ahistorical “notion of the United States as a victim” despite the fact that “we have been one of the greatest beneficiaries in the last 50 years of economic wealth, particularly for people at the top.” In response to the growing economic fortunes of the rest of the world and the associated decline in U.S. hegemony, Trump and his allies are “striking out at other people” in desperation and denial of an end to U.S. imperial dominance. “[It’s] not going to work,” says Wolff. [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Trump's Absurd Trade Policies Will Impoverish Americans and Harm the World,” by Jeffrey D. Sachs, Common Dreams [April 2, 2025] [Read More]; and “Trump’s Tariffs Aren’t Going to Work How He Thinks They Will,” by Kate Aronoff, The New Republic [April 2, 2025] [Read More]
THE WAR ON GAZA
A Mother’s Plea From Gaza to the People of the World
By Mariam Alfarra, The Nation [March 31, 2025]
---- When Ramadan began, there was a ceasefire, tenuous but still holding, that had put a pause on Israel’s horrific 17-month assault and complete siege on Gaza. We were just beginning to feel safe again, to contemplate the possibility of perhaps rebuilding our home and returning to living something that resembled a normal life. But only four days into March, Israel resumed blocking food and other humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, once again weaponizing hunger against the population. Then, on the night of March 17, Israel’s military suddenly shattered the ceasefire and reignited its brutal war, raining death and destruction on all areas of Gaza. More than 700 people have been killed since, the majority women and children. Once again, we live in constant fear of violent death, wondering what our fate will be and whether we will be driven out of Gaza completely, assuming we survive. Each night we break our fast eating the little that we have in darkness. We struggle to find water, and when we do, it’s contaminated. We haven’t had cooking gas for two months. Firewood is extremely difficult to find, even if I felt safe enough to send my kids out to search for it, much less to actually light a fire, knowing that the light and smoke could also make us a target, the way it did my neighbor who was killed while cooking for her family. All night we hear bombs, missiles, gunfire, and quadcopters. One night, I was preparing some food pre-dawn to help sustain my children for the fast ahead when some shrapnel flew through our tent. It was divine mercy that we escaped unharmed. [Read More]
(Video) Muhammad Shehada on the Gaza Protests
From Peter Beinart [April 6, 2025]
---- Our guest is the Gaza-born political analyst Muhammad Shehada, who I’ve long admired for his ability to criticize Israel without exonerating Hamas and to criticize Hamas without exonerating Israel. We talk about the recent protests in Gaza against Hamas, and for an end to Israel’s slaughter. [See the Program]
The Real War on Gaza
“Evidence of ‘execution-style’ killings of Palestinian aid workers by Israeli forces, doctor says,” by Malak A Tantesh , et al., The Guardian [UK] [April 2, 2025] [Read More]
“The Destruction of Gaza’s Healthcare Infrastructure,” by J.C. Mueller, Counterpunch [April 4, 2025] [Read More]
“Gaza faces ‘largest orphan crisis’ in modern history, report says,” from Aljazeera [April 3, 2025] [Read More]
“Israel’s Genocide Has Killed More Journalists Than WWI and WWII Combined: Report,” by Sharon Zhang, Truthout [April 1, 2025] [Read More]
(Video) “Thirst Among the Ruins” [Gaza], from Aljazeera [“People and Power”] [See the Program]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Ukraine’s Ravaged Environment
By Brendan Hoffman and Evelina Riabenko, New York Times [April 2, 2025]
---- The human costs of Russia’s war in Ukraine are enormous, measured in mass graves, nightly missile attacks, traumatized children and hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead or wounded. But Ukraine’s environment is also being devastated. The war may end, but damage from artillery shells, mines, drones and missiles will endure for decades, experts say, degrading industries like farming and mining, introducing health risks and eroding natural beauty. Fields are pocked with shell craters, their soil contaminated with the residue of explosives. Burning fuel tanks spew pollution into the air and wildfires burn unchecked in combat zones. Water from reservoirs has poured through destroyed dams, causing droughts upstream and damaging floods below. [Read More]
WAR ON YEMEN?
By David S. D’Amato, Counterpunch [April 4, 2025]
---- The public discourse about Signalgate reveals something important about American politics—far more important than the incompetence at the center of the scandal. What has rarely been mentioned during the national conversation is the elephant in the room: the United States’ attacks on Yemen violate international law and contribute to one of the world’s most significant humanitarian crises. The nightmare of the Washington ruling class is that we might finally open our eyes to the real, documented crimes going on in a country most Americans can’t find on a map. It would be difficult to overstate the degree of brutality and suffering that the United States has foisted upon the people of Yemen. And it is impossible to separate the United States’ strategic approach to Yemen from its support of the genocidal onslaught in Palestine. [Read More]
THE STUDENTS
Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump
By Ellen Schrecker, The Nation [April 3, 2025]
---- Even before the Trump/Musk administration unleashed its current blitzkrieg against the university, Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), was describing MAGA’s campaign against higher education as the “new McCarthyism.” Wolfson was wrong. What’s happening now is far worse. The current wave of threats and attacks could actually—and is intended to—wipe out the American system of liberal higher education as we know it. … The differences between today’s attack on higher education and that of the 1950s are undeniable—and make the current situation so much worse—for two main reasons. The first is that, unlike McCarthyism, which focused only on the past political activities of individual professors, the current onslaught, led off by the not inconsiderable power of the federal government, touches almost every aspect of higher education. … The other reason today’s attack on the university is worse than McCarthyism is that, despite higher education’s much larger footprint within American society, today the academy is in a much weaker position to resist political intervention. The Cold War Red Scare occurred during what historians call academia’s Golden Age. Colleges and universities had considerable prestige and were expanding exponentially, while politicians at every level were throwing money at them. But since the late 1960s, the combination of a powerful right-wing backlash against the student movement and the concurrent imposition of a neoliberal regime of austerity has undermined the academy’s financial stability and undercut its public support. [Read More]
Mahmoud Khalil’s Attorney: “This Is the McCarthy Era All Over Again”
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [April 1, 2025
---- Khalil said in a statement, “My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention.” As the number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocidal campaign since October 7, 2023, surpasses 50,000, the Trump administration is intensifying its repression against critics of the Israeli regime, branding anyone who supports the Palestinian people as “antisemitic” and a supporter of terrorism. Even U.S. lawful permanent residents are now in Trump’s crosshairs. His administration says the arrest of Khalil is a “blueprint” for investigations and deportations of prominent student activists. … Nine days after Khalil’s abduction, in an attempt to bolster its case against him, the U.S. government came up with a new rationale to deport him. On March 17, DHS charged that Khalil had omitted from his application for permanent residency that he was a member of the United Nations Relief and Works for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), that he was employed by the Syria Office of the British Embassy in Beirut, and that he was a member of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student groups promoting the demands of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Khalil’s arrest is “the first of many to come,” Trump posted on Truth Social. Indeed, his repression against pro-Palestinian voices is proceeding apace. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Trump administration says it has revoked at least 300 visas for Palestine advocacy,” by Michael Arria, Mondoweiss [April 1, 2025] [Read More]; and “Trump’s Academic Purge Will Make America Stupid and Provincial Again,” by Jeet Heer, The Nation [March 31, 2025] [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
You Don’t Get Trump Without Gaza
By Ben Ehrenreich, The Nation [April 3, 2025]
---- On March 17, the Justice Department announced the creation of “Joint Task Force October 7,” which will be free to pursue citizens and noncitizens alike. Staffed by FBI agents and data analysts, it will investigate, among other things, “acts of terrorism and civil rights violations by individuals and entities providing support and financing to Hamas, related Iran proxies, and their affiliates, as well as acts of antisemitism by these groups,” which sounds nefarious indeed but is, we know by now, established code for “taking a stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” Like the devil, vampires, and the more timid varieties of ghost, fascism must be invited in. The Trump administration’s first political persecutions have all targeted individuals who were bold enough to believe that constitutional guarantees of free expression extended to solidarity with Palestine. This was hardly an accident. In the time-honored practice of predatory bullies everywhere, Trump’s minions went after the defenseless first, and specifically those made vulnerable not only by their immigration status but by a 15-month-and-running bipartisan campaign to repress opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, an effort in which nearly every political, educational, and cultural institution in American society has taken part. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Reflections on the 57th anniversary of King's assassination
By Bill Fletcher Jr, Liberation Road [April 4, 2025]
---- MLK was murdered 57 years ago today...and many of us have still not come to grips with the fact that there is no one leader of the Black Freedom Movement (or, for that matter, any movement!).King represented a symbolic unity within the Black Freedom Movement—and its allies—that was not quite accurate. Due to the way history has been written, one can erroneously conclude that the Black Freedom Movement was lined up behind Dr. King and that it fell apart (plateaued, declined, etc.) due to his murder. While Dr. King was a very significant leader of the Black Freedom Movement, he was far from the only one and his leadership was constantly contested. He began as a 26-year-old minister who found himself in the middle of a struggle in Montgomery, Alabama, that he had never anticipated. Who would have expected a 26-year-old leader at that point in time? Yet, there he was, and his age became one of the issues he had to struggle around, particularly with older veterans of the Black Freedom struggle. [Read More]
