Friday is May Day, the traditional workers’ holiday and day of protest. Founded in the USA in the late 1880s, May Day became an annual international event, the work of trade unions and socialist parties in dozens of countries. Even though support for May Day was eclipsed in the USA during the era of Joe McCarthy, today it is making a comeback. According to the website for this year’s May Day, more than 3,000 events will take place across the USA – “No work, no school, no shopping.”
IN HASTINGS, Concerned Families of Westchester will hold a May Day rally on Friday from 2 to 4 pm at the VFW Plaza, Warburton Ave. and Spring St. We’ll have speakers, music, a banner and signs, and an “open mic” so that all who wish to say a few words can co so.
To the official slogan of the day, “Workers Over Billionaires,” we will add our antiwar message. This is a natural fit, for nothing promotes income inequality, the poverty of our “social safety net,” and the day-to-day violence suffered by immigrants and people of color more than our war system. Today “we” spend about a trillion dollars a year on wars – past, present, and future. For next year, Trump wants $1.5 trillion. And there is talk of an additional set of taxes and borrowing to raise another $200 billion to pay for the war against Iran. If this is not acceptable to you, please join us in Hastings on Friday from 2 to 4 pm. ALL OUT FOR MAY DAY!
To add to your reading/viewing pleasure, BELOW I’ve linked some items about the war in Iran, the genocide in Gaza, and our “military-industrial complex.” I’ve also added a statement from Concerned Families in Westchester critical of our pro-war congressman, George Latimer, which may or may not be published in our local newspaper on May 1.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
SOME GOOD/USEFUL READING/VIEWING
(Video) “Political Disaster for Donald Trump”: Jeremy Scahill on Stalled U.S.-Iran Talks
From Democracy Now! [April 29, 2026]
---- Negotiations between the United States and Iran to end the war are at an impasse as the conflict enters its third month. The Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday that Trump has told aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iranian ports to ramp up the pressure on Tehran. Iran is saying it will enter into direct talks with the U.S. “when President Trump lifts what Iran considers to be the illegal military naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz,” says Drop Site News co-founder Jeremy Scahill. “Iran has maintained that it’s not shut down the strait, but that it’s just shut it down for any vessels that are linked to the U.S. war in any way.” Scahill says a disorganized Trump administration is pushing a “total propaganda narrative” that it has the upper hand in negotiations, while Iran believes it has the “three M’s” on its side: munitions, markets and the midterms. [See the Program]
Reining in the Pentagon: Can the Military-Industrial Beast Be Tamed?
By William D. Hartung, Tom Dispatch
---- Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans. … The challenge now is to build a movement that not only turns back Trump’s policies, but gets at the underlying economic, political, and cultural forces that have kept the United States in a permanent state of war for so long, while robbing us of opportunities to build a better, more peaceful, tolerant, and just future. Given the pace of destruction and chaos being visited upon us, it’s important to act now and continue to do so until we build enough power to rein in the war machine and begin creating actual structures of peace. [Read more]
All they will find is sand: the demolition of Gaza
By Eval Weizman, London Review of Books [April 23, 2025 issue]
[FB – To the literature supporting the claim that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, this essay adds a focus – part of the original Genocide Convention of 1948 – on Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s built environment: its public and private buildings, historical and cultural institutions, etc. I found it an amazing, insightful analysis; perhaps you will too.]
---- The UN Genocide Convention of 1948 lists five acts that constitute genocide when committed with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. The first two concern mass killing and serious bodily or mental harm. The fourth and fifth are concerned with interrupting the biological continuity of a group. The third prohibition, framed in Article II(c), forbids ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’. This refers to indirect forms of killing, those that don’t target human bodies but the environment that sustains them. Sufficient ‘conditions of life’ require buildings, hospitals, social infrastructure, sewage and water systems, power grids, agriculture. The intentional destruction or degradation of such structures undermines a people’s ability to survive, leading to a slower and more tortuous form of annihilation. … Two and a half years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries. … A lived-in landscape has been turned into what a former Israeli general, Giora Eiland, described as a place ‘where no human being can exist’. [Read More]
Congressman Latimer Writes to Jews – A Statement by CFOW
[A letter to the Rivertowns Dispatch, April 2026]
To the Editor:
—— Congressman George Latimer, apparently using a mailing list of Jewish constituents, recently sent them a letter extolling his legislative record regarding Israel and the Jewish community. In it he singled out his support for the (annual) US appropriation of $3.8 billion for Israel, claiming that this would “ensure the United States stands firmly with our ally and continues to support the values we share.” [View the letter on our Facebook group.]
We would like to suggest a different reading of his record. First, there is the undeniable fact that Israel’s war on Gaza, which he supports, has been divisive among Americans Jews (and, indeed, among all Americans). A recent Washington Post poll found that a plurality of American Jews oppose Netanyahu’s war on Gaza. And a recent Pew Poll showed that 60 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel; and that the “unfavorable” view is growing and is especially true among young voters and Democratic voters. Perhaps Mr. Latimer’s support for Israel’s wars – not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran— has contributed to these dramatic changes.
Second, contrary to Mr. Latimer’s assertions, it is precisely the values they don’t share that has led to the rupture between war-making Israel and many American Jews. In the eyes of most Americans, and most of the world, the Gaza war has been a humanitarian disaster, a genocide according to the International Court of Justice and many human rights organizations and Holocaust historians. The incompatibility between what is happening in Palestine and traditional Jewish values of Peace, Justice, and Human Dignity s stark, and rejection of the war in the name of Jewish values has given rise to heroic antiwar opponents such as Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Combatants for Peace, and Standing Together.
We do not expect Mr. Latimer to change his views. He received millions of dollars from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC for his successful primary election to defeat Rep. Jamaal Bowman, and we do not expect him to bite the hand that feeds him. But we do ask that he stop his pro-war propaganda regarding “support for Israel” as if this was a “Jewish” position. It is not and it never will be.
—— From Concerned Families of Westchester
