Famine starts slowly at first. While hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are “at risk,” only 339 have starved so far. But as bodies weaken, days of no food and medicine add up. Soon the body is beyond hope; it is only a matter of time. Even “emergency rescues” will come too late.
Famine is taking place along side a new Israeli assault on northern Gaza. The military plan is to clear the one million Palestinians living in northern Gaza and move them to the south, near the Egyptian border. The death toll continues to climb: “officially” it has just passed 63,000, with 160,000 wounded; but everyone agrees that thousands more bodies lie buried in the rubble of destroyed buildings. This week Democracy Now! broadcast an excellent interview with UNICEF spokesperson Tess Ingram describing what she is seeing in Gaza City.
The starvation of people in Gaza part of Israel’s plan to force Palestinians out of Gaza, one way or another. Israel has refused to allow food and medicine to enter Gaza. The UN food program says that 60,000 truckloads of food wait at the border, but Israel allows only a few dozen trucks to enter each day. Beginning a few months ago, Israel blocked the UN food sites in Gaza, substituting instead a “humanitarian” plan to provide food at only a handful of places in Gaza. This is how the scenes of food-rioting that you see on your TV screens come about. And while people are struggling for food, US mercenaries and Israeli snipers shoot at them: more than 2 thousand have been killed and 16 thousand wounded.
Israel is surely aware that its savagery towards people in Gaza, reported by intrepid Palestinian journalists around the world, is severely damaging Israel’s prestige and thus its influence in the region. Israel has responded to this disaster by killing journalists at an unheard-of rate. More than 200 media workers – more than were killed in World War 1, World War 2, and Vietnam – have been assassinated by Israel. Last week 5 journalists were killed while covering Israel’s bombing of Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. Please listen to Palestinian writer Muhamad Shehada’s gripping report on Israel’s war on the truth.
While Democratic Party leaders refuse to support Resolutions or legislation that would limit the US role in Israel’s genocide, many opinion polls show that they are seriously out of step with the views of their (so-called) political base. A new poll from Quinnipiac University, for example, shows that only 18% of Democrats support sending more military aid to Israel, and that 77% of Democrats think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Finally, this week saw yet another humiliation of the United States at the UN, as a Security Council discussion and vote on the questions of starvation in Gaza and sending more aid found the US out-voted 14 to 1. You can see a short video of the discussion and some analysis here. Also recommended is “Entire UN Security Council Except US Says Gaza Famine ‘Man-Made’ as 10 More People Starve to Death,” linked here.
THE FREEDOM FLOTILLA TO GAZA SAILS!
Dozens of ships including activists from 44 countries will join the Freedom Flotilla as it brings food and other aid to Gaza. The first ship left Barcelona today [short video]. Aboard this ship is activist and spokeswoman Greta Thunberg. In this interesting 12-minute video she explains why she and others are risking certain arrest (and perhaps worse) to bring aid to Gaza. Another participant, Melanie Schweizer, writes a short useful essay on "We Are Sailing to Gaza; Here's Why." Despite Israel’s starvation/genocide onslaught in Gaza, the US corporate media is unlikely recognize the existence of the Flotilla. Please follow the Flotilla on their website, share news and enthusiasm with your friends, and protest to our “elected officials” if/when the Flotilla/Americans on board are unlawfully intercepted by Israel.
LABOR DAY ACTION!
Nearly 1,000 Labor Day protests protests will take place tomorrow across the USA. The theme for the day is “Workers Over Billionaires.” Several protests will be in Westchester. CFOW is sponsoring one in NW Yonkers. It will take place near the Greystone train station, on Warburton Ave. at Odell. It will begin at 5:30 pm. For more information, and to RSVP, go here.
ILLUMINATING THE WEEK THAT WAS
(Video) “Time to Cut Ties with Israel”: U.N. Expert Francesca Albanese on Gaza Hospital Bombing
From Democracy Now! [August 26, 2025]
Israel’s war on Gaza is the deadliest conflict for journalists in recorded history. In an attack on Nasser Hospital in Gaza Monday, Israel killed five more journalists in addition to over a dozen others. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the hospital attack was a “tragic mishap,” but just hours later, Israeli forces killed a sixth journalist. “There is a pattern of targeting and killing journalists that lets us think that there is an intention,” says Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. As countries prepare for the U.N. General Assembly, Albanese notes the complicity of Western states in the genocide in Gaza, particularly the United States. “There has been a tolerance of Israel’s impunity for decades,” says Albanese. “However, the United States is the single most important factor of crisis in the United Nations.” [See the Program]
Trump’s War on Workers
By Robert L Borosage and Sara Steffens, The Nation [August 29, 2025]
---- Campaigning for president, Donald Trump assured workers that he would fight for them. “You’re going to have the American Dream back,” he said at his campaign rallies. “We’re going to be in the golden age.” His spokesperson now boasts that under Trump, workers already enjoy “increased job opportunities, better wages, and more bargaining power.” Trump promises his tariffs will produce a renaissance of American manufacturing. His unpopular Republican budget bill—which slashes Medicaid and health care to fund tax breaks for the rich—is peddled as providing “working family tax cuts.” Buried beneath the daily barrage of bluster is a systematic, multifront war on workers and their unions. Trump brandished his true colors when he paraded billionaires around him for his inauguration. Both Trump and the Republican party remain wedded to the trickle-down shibboleths of the executive suite: tax breaks for the rich and corporations, deregulation, and rigging the system against working people. Ahead of Labor Day weekend, as Trump once more masquerades as a champion of workers, it is worth summarizing how extensive this assault has been in his first months in office. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
Students are heading back to school, including (gasp!) Columbia University. For a reminder of what’s gone down and what may come, watch this interesting interview, from Peter Beinart, with Columbia graduate Mohsen Mahdawi, arrested and exonerated last year for the crime of speaking up for Palestinians on Columbia’s campus.
The Deep Thinkers in the US State Department have refused to give visas to Palestinian leaders, blocking them from attending the opening of the next session of the United Nations. This happened once before, when Yasser Arafat of the PLO was blocked from speaking the UN in 1988. That time the UN moved it’s meeting to Geneva; but times have changed, and today the UN cowers in fear at the wrath of Trump. This is all illegal, according to the founding principles locating the UN in New York. Who will protest? Anyone?
As reported in last week’s newsletter, a 16-year-old Palestinian American boy remains in detention in Israel, under terrible conditions. He has been held without contact with his family since February, when he was arrested and charged with throwing rocks. This week more than 100 faith-based, civil rights and human rights organizations demanded his release in a letter to Secretary of State Rubio. The boy, Mohammed Ibrahim, is from Florida, but you can call/write your elected officials to say you are concerned about his condition and demand that he be free.
On the inside pages of newspapers small articles have appeared noting the sailing of a US naval armada into the Gulf of Mexico, closer and closer to Venezuela. Though Trump’s stated purpose/lie is that he is attacking “drug cartels,” Venezuela is treating this is preparations for an attack and perhaps an invasion. What’s going on? A segment of Aljazeera’s esteemed program “The Take” asks: “Is Trump’s aggressive move about fighting drugs or a signal of broader US intervention?” [See the Program]
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 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!
It wouldn’t be Labor Day without some old labor songs. When I was a newbie in the activism business, I learned our history from songs more than from books. Listen now to Pete Seeger with "Solidarity Forever”; The New Harmony Sisterhood with "Union Maid"; Billy Bragg with "There is Power in the Union"; Paul Robeson sings "The Song of Joe Hill”; and the Almanac Singers with "You Gotta Go Down and Join the Union." Solidarity!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
We Were Made for This
By Rebecca Solnit, Meditations in an Emergency [August 31,2025]
---- Twenty years ago, on August 29, 2005, a huge hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. New Orleans's levees failed, as had been predicted, and much of the city went underwater. Although the authorities had issued a mandatory evacuation order, they had provided no resources to the many who were too poor to evacuate. They were left behind. The levees broke, the city flooded with water polluted by sewage and by the oil refineries all around, the power went out, supplies were scarce. Almost immediately after the storm hit and the city flooded, mainstream news organizations and government leaders began cooking up stories about those mostly poor, mostly Black people who were left in the city--racist stories that they were marauding hordes, murderous gangs, rampaging looters. There is a story about human nature that serves authoritarianism well: the idea that we are either too feckless or too vicious to function in the absence of strong authority backed by the threat of violence. That our weak, chaotic nature requires them and their domination and brutality. Authoritarians love to tell stories of crime and depravity, usually about whoever is portrayed as the outsider, the intruder--nonwhite, non-Christian, non-straight, non-native people, stories in which harsh measures, suppression of freedom and dissent, are necessary to institute a kind of order that is in fact repression and forced homogeneity. We are seeing that now coming from the current administration, with its invasion of Los Angeles and then Washington D.C., its persecution of immigrants and anyone who resembles them. … But disasters tell us a different story about human nature, about who we really are, one that is profoundly important for everyday life. Because despite the grotesque stories and institutional panic, there was bumper to bumper boat traffic the morning after the storm hit, of people trying to launch their boats to see what they could do for the people of New Orleans. The flotilla was dubbed the Cajun Navy. The Cajun Navy has always served as a beautiful example for me of active hope. No one went there knowing for sure that they could save people, some must have worried about the reported chaos, but they went. They plunged into the utter unknown of a flooded, ruined, abandoned city. [Read More]
Arundhati Roy on How to Survive in a ‘Culture of Fear’
By Lulu Garcia-Navarro, New York Times [August 30, 2025]
[FB - Arundhati Roy is admired around the world as both an extraordinary novelist AND as a fearless critic of injustice, whether in India, the USA, or elsewhere. This article includes a video of the writer’s interview with Roy.]
---- Roy has spent her career writing about the rich lives and deep struggles of marginalized and oppressed people in India. Her Booker Prize-winning first novel, “The God of Small Things,” made her an international literary star when it came out in 1997 — a celebrity that made her very uncomfortable, she told me. While she did publish a second novel in 2017, Roy spent most of the years after the Booker Prize writing articles about a range of injustices, from India’s caste system to the treatment of Muslims, especially in the India-administered portion of Kashmir. Because of that work and her political activism, Roy has been targeted repeatedly by India’s government under the populist leader Prime Minister Narendra Modi. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST – The UK Guardian published what seems to be a chapter from Roy’s new book. The title of the excerpt is “Arundhati Roy on her fugitive childhood: ‘My knees were full of scars and cuts – a sign of my wild, imperfect, fatherless life.’” Read it here.
The False Choice Between Identity Politics and Economic Populism
By Michael A. McCarthy, Hammer and Hope [Summer 2025]
---- A left that ignores the differences within the working class will never build power. … In building a politics to fight the right, economic populism is necessary but insufficient. Policies and rhetoric framed in the interests of the working class as a whole are crucial. But organizers have always known that in order to build a movement, you need to address specific yet important concerns that affect only some parts of your coalition while also speaking to the issues shared by everyone you want to draw into your base. Because the U.S. working class is already segmented, an emancipatory class politics that can beat the right must do both. But recent conventional wisdom says otherwise. … But this new common sense contradicts reality. Setting forms of identity, such as race, against class as fundamentally opposed bases of politics misrepresents how building working-class power works on the ground, both today and throughout history. Dismissing the social differences between working-class people as irrelevant ignores the key building blocks of class politics. And a left that embraces the right’s divide-and-conquer rhetoric on criminal justice, gender, race, and immigration will only deepen political divisions within the working class. Subscribing to either view would doom the working-class solidarity needed to win. [Read More]
The Border is Invading America
By Jean Guerrero, New York Times [August 29, 2025]
---- The border is invading America. It hunts people, reappearing wherever they try to rebuild their lives. It is no longer a place; perhaps it never was. It is a stalking power, a mobile regime of racial control that snakes through the Americas, leaving bruises, breaking bones, ending lives. … The Southern Border Communities Coalition, a project of Alliance San Diego, has tracked fatal encounters with the Border Patrol since 2010, when Mr. Hernandez Rojas was killed. Their data shows something uncomfortable: Fatal encounters with Customs and Border Protection have tended to be higher under Democratic administrations than Republican ones. In their desperation to appear “tough on the border,” it’s possible that Democrats have at times had a stronger bite than Mr. Trump’s bark. As Democratic leaders appear to see it, their party’s failure isn’t inhumanity or incoherence, but rather an overabundance of compassion for the foreign-born. This delusion is a gift for the anti-immigrant movement, which uses the disconnectedness of Democrats to stoke resentment toward all liberals — and to bolster the false perception that immigrants are to blame for everything. We need a reckoning with the structural abuses embedded in our immigration system, and with how elites in both parties play a role in sustaining them. Otherwise, the border will continue to coil inward like an ouroboros, devouring not just immigrant rights, but the rights of all but an elite few. That is the final shape of our immigration system as it stands. [Read More]
From Mourning to Rage to Transformation
By Sarah Jaffe, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation [August 2025]
---- Despair is common these days in the US, far more so than it was in the first Trump era. People in 2016 were outraged; somehow, in 2025, they seem shocked — shocked in the sense that Naomi Klein wrote in The Shock Doctrine, intentionally stunned in order to further destroy any remaining bits of the state that serve the public good rather than private profit. Somehow, even after Trump had been president once, his return itself feels catastrophic, like the storms and wildfires rushing across the country in the months that preceded his re-election. And yet I can’t help feeling angry at the shock, at least from the people who ought to have known better. The Democratic Party, for a start. The professional political class which had access to the Right’s Project 2025, its plan for remaking the state for months. They had time to grieve the idea of an America that was too good for Trump eight years ago. They have no excuse for not acting now. Instead, the resistance such as it is is being led by workers: federal employees who have been fed into the metaphorical woodchipper that Elon Musk bragged about, who are staging a day-by-day class in what the government actually does, parks workers and engineers who build floodwalls and nurses at the Veterans Health Administration and so many more. They are marching alongside teachers and professors and scientists whose work has been slashed by budget cuts. Other people are giving Know your Rights trainings to undocumented immigrants in Trump’s crosshairs, or stockpiling hormones for trans friends who may lose access to healthcare. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Refusing to Serve in Gaza Is the Only Way to Save Israel
By Yotam Vilk, New York Times [August 30, 2025]
[FB - Mr. Vilk is a reserve captain in the Israel Defense Forces.]
---- If we went to war on Oct. 7 to save what was dearest to us, it soon became clear to me that we were fighting because our leaders were never planning to stop. It was a war waged by nationalist populists who refused to pay the political price necessary to make the decisions to bring an end to the war, and instead demanded that we, the soldiers, the hostages and the Palestinians, pay it in blood. Gaza became a lawless zone, with little effective oversight of the military and almost no personal accountability for soldiers. We came to wage a war without a timeline, without attainable goals, without an exit strategy — a status quo that undermines the idea of a modern state. On Oct. 9, 2024, a group of Israel Defense Force soldiers, including me, issued a public letter declaring that our service had become untenable in light of Israel’s policy in Gaza and mounting evidence that the government was deliberately sabotaging hostage deals. My brigade commander immediately suspended me from my unit, despite the protests of my subordinate soldiers. Today, as the government calls on tens of thousands of reservists to participate in the cruel re-occupation of Gaza City, I implore my fellow soldiers: Refuse to report. Thousands have already stopped showing up. Some have been sent to prison. Many remain silent. This is the time to speak. It is your duty. [Read More]
A Gaza City Neighborhood Is Now a Wasteland, Satellite Images Show
By Adam Rasgon, et al., New York Times [August 28, 2025]
---- While Israel’s government has announced that the military is planning a full-scale assault of Gaza City, soldiers have not yet moved into a majority of the city. In Zeitoun, forces have already been operating for weeks, dropping bombs on buildings and ordering residents to evacuate. A satellite image from Aug. 8 showed scores of buildings intact and what appear to be several tent encampments. A separate image of the same area from Aug. 25 showed many, if not most, of the buildings reduced to piles of rubble and the apparent encampments gone. In recent days, Israeli tanks were seen in Zeitoun, according to satellite images. The scale of the destruction resembles that of places in Gaza that have been largely flattened over the course of the war, such as Rafah in the south and Beit Hanoun in the north. [Read More]
(Video) Killed Gaza journalist Mariam Abu Daqqa’s letter to her son
From Aljazeera [August 26, 2025]
---- Before she was killed in an Israeli air attack on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, Palestinian journalist Mariam Abu Daqqa had written a goodbye letter to her young son, Gaith. These are Mariam’s words, narrated by a fellow Palestinian journalist. [See the Program].
ALSO OF INTEREST is this short memoir by one of Maryam’s colleagues, “Maryam was my friend. Israel killed her and four other Gaza journalists,” by Ruwaida Amer, 972 Magazine [August 27, 2025] [Link].
THE WEST BANK
UN: Over 1000 Attacks on Palestinians by Israelis in the West Bank Recorded Since January
By Amira Hass, Ha’aretz [Israel] [August 28, 2025]
---- According to the United Nations' reports, which only include attacks that resulted in deaths, injuries or property damage, 11 Palestinians were killed and 696 were injured so far in 2025. The data indicate a continued upward trend in the number of violent incidents by Israelis in the West Bank. In the first eight months of this year, the UN has recorded more than 1,000 assaults carried out by Israeli civilians against Palestinians and their property, in dozens of locations across the West Bank. 11 Palestinians were killed during those attacks while trying to protect their homes, flocks of sheep, fields and groves, either at the hands of soldiers or the attacking civilians. 696 others were injured. These figures attest to the growing trend of violence employed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians since 2021, in which 532 such cases were documented. In 2024, there were 1,449 similar violent incidents, in which soldiers and Israeli civilians killed 11 Palestinians and injured 486 others. All these attacks were and are carried out in areas that are under the full security responsibility of the IDF – in areas B and C (a definition that arbitrarily divided authority in the West Bank between the IDF and the Palestinian Authority, with the division scheduled to be terminated in 1999). According to international law, this means the army must protect the local population, their lives, livelihood and property. [Read More]
Israel wanted to punish a Palestinian village. So it destroyed 10,000 of its olive trees. By Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss [August 26, 2025]
---- Israel uprooted 10,000 olive trees in al-Mughayyir during a three-day siege of the West Bank Palestinian village. The Israeli army stated that uprooting the trees was intended to “deter” village residents and make them “pay a heavy price.” … Israel just decimated the olive groves of the Palestinian village of Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, where olive oil production is an important part of the yearly income of most families. The Israeli army had imposed a curfew on the village last Thursday and began to search homes, arresting an unspecified number of Palestinians, including the village mayor, Ameen Abu Alia, over the course of three days. The siege on al-Mughayyir came following reports that an Israeli settler had been attacked near the village, after which the Israeli army’s bulldozers uprooted some 10,000 olive trees in the eastern plain of the village, according to the local farmers’ association. Some of the trees were up to 100 years old. [Read More]
WAR WITH IRAN?
European Powers Trigger ‘Snapback’ Sanctions on Iran
By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com [August 28, 2025]
---- The UK, France, and Germany have begun the process of reimposing UN Security Council sanctions on Iran under the “snapback” mechanism of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, a step that makes another US-Israeli war on Iran more likely. The European countries, known as the E3, sent a letter to the UN Security Council notifying it that they were triggering the sanctions, which will take effect in 30 days. Iran has said that the E3 countries don’t have the right to reimpose the sanctions since it was the US that withdrew from and violated the JCPOA in 2018. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
The Myth of Clean Energy
By Trevor Jackson, The Nation [August 25, 2025]
--- Is all the hope placed in renewables an illusion? … In universities, labs, corporate research departments, think tanks, and intergovernmental organizations, thousands of smart, qualified experts are working away (or at least those who still have funding are working away), devoting billions of dollars and millions of hours to a problem they collectively refer to as “the energy transition.” The idea is simple: Human society once ran exclusively on photosynthetic sources of energy such as wood and animal power; then the Industrial Revolution brought about a transition to fossil fuel energy in the form of coal, which was later replaced by oil. The fossil fuel economy has become untenable on a planetary scale, so we must now bring about another transition, to renewable energy, through a huge project of innovation (facilitated by a heretofore unseen level of collaboration between the public and private sectors). The transitions of the past, the experts say, should provide helpful examples for how we can pull off such a feat. This monumental effort, we are told, is our best hope for surviving climate change. But according to the French historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, the battle is already lost. We are in a lot of trouble. In More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy, Fressoz sets out to show that there is no such thing as an “energy transition,” and there never has been. To put it bluntly: “After two centuries of ‘energy transitions,’ humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood. Today around 2 billion cubic metres of wood are felled each year to be burned, three times more than a century ago.” Instead, Fressoz’s coruscating history looks to explain “why all primary energies have grown together and why they have accumulated without replacing each other.” Far from being an established empirical fact about the past, the “energy transition” began as “a heterodox and mercantile futurology—a mere industrial slogan—which, from the 1970s onwards, became the future of experts, governments and companies, including those that had no interest whatsoever in seeing it happen.” [Read More]
TRUMP INVADES CITIES
The DC Night Patrols Are Showing Cities How To Fight Trump’s Occupation
By Dave Zirin and Chuck Modiano, The Nation [August 29, 2025]
---- When the night comes, it is not just the National Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a jumpy police department walking the streets. In an otherwise eerily quiet city, the people are present as well. Armed only with cell phones, medical kits, and the confidence to assert their dwindling rights, groups of local residents trail and record Trump’s occupation forces. They’re known as the night patrols. These night patrols watch over the city to ensure that people are protected from state violence, false arrest, abduction, and harassment. Failing that, their goal is to document the constitutional violations or brutality they witness, so people can see the truths about the occupation that a compliant, largely incurious media are not showing. Their footage has gone viral and exposed the mainstream media’s lies about how happy DC residents are to see the South Carolina National Guard marching by their kid’s elementary school. There is no centralized night-patrol planning committee. People in different groups don’t necessarily know each other, but everyone with whom we spoke was either experienced in this kind of work through previous cop-watch trainings or are compelled by what is happening to play their part in making sure the foot soldiers of the surveillance state know they too are being surveilled. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “How LA is uniting to provide mutual aid for those impacted by ICE raids,” by Victoria Valenzuela, Waging Nonviolence [August 22, 2025] [Link]. One report finds that “Trump’s Invasion of D.C. Costs Over $1 Million a Day,” and points out that this is four times the amount needed simply to house the unhoused. A National Guard publication spells out “What National Guard troops legally can and can’t do in Washington, DC.” It notes that “National Guard troops called to duty in Washington, D.C. face complex legal rules about what they can and can't do — rules that will be even less clear if they are sent to Chicago or other cities.” Learn more here.
THE STATE OF THE UNION
How Democrats Flubbed the Gerrymandering Arms Race
By Elie Mystal, The Nation [August 29, 2025]
---- New York State is a case study in Democrats’ failure to understand the evolving political landscape. … There is no obviously right solution to gerrymandering, but most people understand that the answer we’ve arrived at is wrong. John Roberts has decided that Republicans must be allowed to do the very worst thing they can think of at all times, and places like Texas excel at coming up with the absolute worst thing. New York State Democrats, and Democrats more broadly, cannot continue to fight while hamstrung by their own best intentions. Instead of perpetually fighting the good fight, Democrats should try fighting to win. They should get rid of their anti-gerrymandering chastity belt, and then gerrymander this state so hard that a pan of Chicago soufflé they call “pizza” has a better chance of winning a contest here than a Republican. I know Democrats won’t, but I no longer understand why. I too once thought the 2014 amendment was a good idea. Then I grew up and changed my position based on new information from the Supreme Court. It would be nice if the state Democratic Party joined me in adulting. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY – Hurricane Katrina – 20 Years Later
(Video) “Race Against Time”: 20 Years After Hurricane Katrina, Docuseries Reckons with Aftermath
From Democracy Now! [August 29, 2025]
---- Twenty years ago today, on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina roared ashore in southeastern Louisiana, tearing through the Gulf Coast with catastrophic force and gushing winds, driving a massive storm surge toward New Orleans. Thousands were abandoned by state and federal officials, left to fight for survival in the rising floodwaters — many stranded on the rooftops of their sinking homes without water, food or medical care. The storm and its aftermath are the focus of the acclaimed new documentary series, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time. It offers an historical record of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and examines how it was a catalyst that revealed preexisting systemic failures. Democracy Now! speaks with the film’s Academy Award-nominated director, Traci A. Curry. [See the Program]
How Hurricane Katrina Paved the Way for American Fascism
From Current Affairs [August 28, 2025] – [h/t JW]
FB – The hurricane that struck the city 20 years ago marked a pivotal moment in America’s shift toward the political right. Current Affairs interviews Black Panther community organizer Malik Rahim [Common Ground] and author Sarah Fouts [Rebuilding New Orleans].
---- The story of Katrina is a story of resilience by groups like Common Ground, but also one of defeat. The city was rebuilt, slowly, but it was a highly unequal and unjust recovery, with the worst burdens inflicted on the poorest residents. Both evacuation and return were stratified by race and class, and while the middle class and affluent actually experienced something of a renaissance in New Orleans in the years after Katrina, much of the social fabric of the city was permanently wiped out, never to return. No other major American city has ever suffered anything like Katrina. The population never fully recovered. There were 460,000 people in New Orleans in 2004, and less than half that the year after the storm. By 2008, half of the city’s pre-storm working poor, elderly, and disabled residents had not returned. Decades on, there are still only 360,000 people here. Even Chicago after the Great Fire and San Francisco after its 1906 earthquake did not experience such lasting decimation. And, of course, the collapse wasn’t equal across neighborhoods, with some predominantly Black areas like the Lower Ninth Ward losing nearly two-thirds of their population. Some tragedies were immediate. Others were long-term. [Read More]
