There was the Election, and now there is “the election.” A fierce battle is underway, both within and between the Republicans and the Democrats, about what happened last Tuesday. Was it a “political realignment”? An “end of the GOP”? A referendum of the working class v. the oligarchs? Within the Democratic Party, do the election results demand a repudiation of the Party leadership and a re-orientation towards the “populist base” that the election results revealed? This fight to “frame” the election will be fought out in the mainstream media, itself a player in the game with a bias towards proclaiming that it was (surprise!) a victory for “moderates” and nothing more. (See the excellent press survey from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, linked here. )
Here are two useful overviews, by Rebecca Solnit and by Mike Albert, founder/editor at Znet:
“The Dam Broke, the River Roared: More on That Magnificent Election,” by Rebecca Solnit, Meditations in an Emergency [November 7, 2026]
---- It was a landslide, an earthquake, a tsunami, a watershed, an extinction-level event, they said of the colossal shift in the nation’s destiny as the result of Tuesday’s epic election. They’re all good metaphors drawn from nature. I want to propose one more: it was a dam breaking, the dam that held back the will of the people, the people of the world’s most diverse country, the people who believed in their own rights and equality and in the rights and equality of others. [Read More]
“What Now? Elections, AOC, DSA, or What?” by Michael Albert, Znet [November 6, 2026]
---- To reject fascism is a necessary and good thing. The 2026 election results are part of that. But we should also acknowledge a sad reality. We have not overnight entered another better world. Glass half full says Trumpism is on the way out. We celebrate that. Glass half empty says we are celebrating lesser enemies of the people re-empowered, not people’s emissaries finally triumphant. To have lived sixty years after having decided with my generation that my society needed comprehensive revolution, and to be watching election returns, and to smile because the Democratic Party has gotten back in the saddle—yes, it is what we immediately needed, but no it is very far from what we ultimately want. [Read More]
There were also many excellent reports this week that focused on specific issues or Democratic Party constituencies that went into the election tsunami. They can only be linked here, but I recommend Juan Gonzalez on Latinos, useful articles on Women and the “New South,” and good articles on Israel, by Westchester’s Phil Weiss, and on Corruption and affordability. On how the election might affect issues of war and peace and open new organizing paths, two useful articles are “Here is what a new Democratic Party foreign policy should look like following the Blue Tsunami,” by Mitchell Plitnick [Link] and “The Democrats have a mandate for peace — here are 4 urgent priorities,” by William D. Hartung and David Cortright, Waging Nonviolence, [Link]
Finally, what about the war? Trump, VP JDVance, and many actual analysts have asigned a large share of the Republican defeat to Trump’s disastrous war against Iran. Backing away from a new round of war would seem to make sense; yet today’s news supports the view that further escalation is just around the corner. The possibility that Trump might use a nuclear weapon is “mentioned” too often to make this horror just go away. Our clamor for peace must continue.
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364,é Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
Last week’s rewards for stalwart newsletter readers came from the prophet of catastrophe, Leonard Cohen. Excellent at always, but this week we can move on to things joyful, thanks to some music from Playing for Change. So here are their renditions of “Peace Train” (with Cat Stevens and Rhiannon Giddens); “Ripple” (Grateful Dead); and “One Love” (Bob Marley). Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Defeating Zionism to Free Palestine
By Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, The Intercept [November 6 2026]
---- Three years on from the onset of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, we are at a crucial hinge point. The world today, when it comes to Palestine, stands at the crossroads: meaningful support for liberation and decolonization, or the normalization of colonial expansion and erasure. … Palestinian opposition to Zionism and the imperatives of decolonization — for political emancipation, material survival, and cultural flourishing — are the central thrust of our work. The colonial origins and early legal mechanics of Zionist settler colonialism and Israel’s apartheid regime reveal how Zionism functioned both as a colonial initiative and a racializing project. This manifested in colonial institutions even before the state was established in 1948, after which they were enshrined in racist legal regimes. A broad structural analysis of the institutional and economic processes of land and capital accumulation that have occurred under settler colonialism in Palestine is necessary to understand the machinery of conquest and dispossession — and the role that racism has played in driving it forward. Drawing on the anti-colonial Palestinian intellectual tradition, we can see that an antiracist analysis has been organic to the Palestinian liberation struggle and is precisely what shaped U.N. initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s that condemned Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination alongside apartheid and colonialism. [Read More]
Europe’s Streets Reject the Economy of War
By Vijay Prashad, Counterpunch [November 6,2026]
---- When the same anger reached the French capital and its suburbs, it became a national crisis. From there, images of marches, school occupations, and confrontations travelled across a continent where millions recognise the same predicament: everything necessary for life becomes more expensive, while the institutions meant to sustain life are steadily weakened. There is no single European uprising, with one organisation or an agreed programme, but there is an unfolding of unsettled anger and frustration. … Four grievances recur: the erosion of social provision alongside enrichment at the top, police repression of dissent, restrictions on solidarity with Palestine, and the diversion of political energy and public resources into warfare. These grievances increasingly encounter one another in the streets. What connects them is a crisis of confidence in governments that demand sacrifice while insulating wealth and military expenditure from popular scrutiny. [Read More] - ALSO OF INTEREST is “Mapping how France’s protest wave spread across Europe,” by Hanna Duggal, Aljazeera [November 8, 2026] [Link].
Rebecca Solnit’s (Mis)Adventures in the Manosphere
By Rebecca Solnit, The Nation [October 13, 2026]
---- Usually treated as mysterious or somehow authentically arising from the grass roots, what came to be known as “the manosphere” was to a large degree a racket run on Internet platforms that let lies, hate, and manipulation proliferate because they were profitable. It has become a miasma that engulfs everyone from the titans of Silicon Valley to teenage boys recruited for the right by those titans’ platforms. The manosphere is a shared set of references and perspectives that began on the Internet and ended up as real-life consequences shaped by the beliefs and values slurped up online. The much-discussed crisis of masculinity is in no small part a product of the exploitation of masculinity as identity politics and marketing schemes (and the most harmful identity politics in the United States have been all along the nexus of whiteness and maleness). Its many facets are often treated separately, but they are all connected. [Read More]
The Flood of Life –
[“Nature” and “Civilization”]
By Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Review of Books [November 19, 2026]
[FB – This is a review of In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life it Brings, by James A. Scott. It is also something of an overview of the writing and work of this marvelous man, alas recently deceased.]
---- As for agriculture, it gave rise, in Scott’s view, not to civilization broadly, but to early versions of the state, which strove (as it still strives, in different ways) “to create a legible, measured, and fairly uniform landscape of taxable grain crops and to hold on this land a large population available for corvée labor, conscription, and, of course, grain production.” In contrast, the yields from “pastoralism or shifting agriculture” were much harder to count or commandeer, as were the “mobile peoples” who engaged in them and who preferred a peripheral relationship with the state. “ Putting it epigraphically,” Scott writes, “there is sedentary grain growing without the state but there is no early state without sedentary farming.” Scott encourages the reader to wonder, as he does, just how we humans came to be “cereal-growing, livestock-rearing subjects governed by the novel institution we now call the state”—an institution that in Scott’s accurate view is “determined to refashion nature for the benefit of a single species.” https://archive.ph/TrqKg
THE US-ISRAEL WAR AGAINST IRAN
Major losses could spur Trump to escalate war before year’s end
By Trita Parsi, Responsible Statecraft [November 4, 2026]
---- As much as the Iran war is the key reason Trump and the GOP were crushed tonight, it is important to recognize that the pressure for war is now likely to increase. This does not mean that Trump will restart the war. But the balance of pressure for and against war will likely favor escalation. Trump was under a degree of pressure to strike a deal before the midterms, hoping to soften the blow in the polls. But now that the midterms are over, that pressure will dissipate somewhat. Gas prices are still high, but the political cost has already been paid. There won’t be another point on the political calendar for some time when that cost can be exacted again. But two other factors will intensify. First, pro-war elements in Israel and in Washington will see the next two months as the last period in which Trump has wide maneuverability to restart the war. By January, the Democrats will control both chambers, will control the purse, and can begin impeaching Trump’s secretaries, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. While Trump’s freedom of maneuver will not be completely constrained, it will be significantly reduced. … Secondly, while Trump’s decision to start the war in February was driven by hubris and criminally erroneous Israeli advice, another emotion may dominate his thinking going forward: vengeance. There has been a vindictive element to his calculations in the past weeks because of his anger over how Iran — in Trump’s mind — has ruined his presidency. That anger must be going through the roof tonight. [Read More]
If Trump Resumes attacking Iran, US and Europe will Pay an Extreme Price
By Peiman Salehi, Informed Comment [November 7, 2026]
---- The region has entered its most intense phase of diplomacy since the war began. Senior Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani officials came to Tehran on 26 October, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Tuesday that talks with Riyadh are continuing, with the aim of regional security arrangements free of foreign military involvement. He describes the indirect contacts with Washington, carried by Qatar and Pakistan, as “very intensive.” Iran has said it could reopen Hormuz within two days if Washington accepts its conditions, which include lifting recent sanctions, restoring the oil waivers granted in June and ending hostilities on every front, including Lebanon. Vance wants a nuclear commitment first. The dispute is over sequence, and sequence can be negotiated, provided Washington stops treating threats as a substitute for an answer. Europe’s interest lies in pressing for that answer before the window closes. The weeks between today’s vote and the new Congress on 3 January carry particular risk. An administration absorbing domestic losses may see a short operation as a way to change the subject, and Qeshm shows how easily a “limited” strike can be presented as routine. European governments can make clear that their territory and airspace will not serve such an operation, and they can push Washington toward terms Tehran can accept. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
‘They Competed in Cruelty’: Palestinian Doctor Recalls 127 Days in Israeli Prison
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz [Israel] [November 5, 2026]
---- The 127 days that Mazen Rantisi, a Palestinian family physician, was held in an Israeli prison were long enough for him to come out looking like the other Palestinians who have left Israeli prisons over the past three years. He walked out emaciated, wearing flip-flops, a gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt (the clothes and shoes in which prisoners are arrested are not returned to them), scratching incessantly; his gaze conveyed several things at once: shock, sadness and anxiety, bewilderment that the world continues as usual, and joy. Only a bleeding bruise on his forehead distinguished him from the others. His period of incarceration – between his arrest on June 21 and his release less than two weeks ago, on October 25 – was also long enough that when he went for a walk in his Ramallah neighborhood, he unwittingly walked with a stooped back and bowed head. This is the torturous posture that the Israel Prison Service imposes on Palestinian prisoners, while their legs and hands are chained, when they move from one place in the prison to another. [Read More]
The Apocalypse Came Early – and Israel May Be Better off for It
By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz [Israel] [November 5, 2026]
---- The end of U.S. military aid will have significant, immediate consequences. Israel will be forced to reduce its offensive, belligerent, conquering, genocidal and settlement activities. It won’t have the money for them. It won’t have the money for grotesque showcase operations, like the “operation” in Hebron that just ended, where a massive military force evacuated three residential neighborhoods, staying for 11 days and finding a whole four rifles, all to appease the Israeli right before the election. … Israel also will no longer be able to attack half of the Middle East and conquer more territory than it already has once the newly rebalanced Congress removes the diplomatic umbrella. The Israel Defense Forces, and the state itself, will be forced to return to its natural dimensions. The destruction made possible by the American money that poured into Israel is coming to an end. This is precisely what we dreamed of when we called for sanctions. Those who understood that Israel would never stop racing toward the abyss on its own, and that it would continue to speak solely in the language of military force, given to it without limits or conditions by its American sugar daddy, ought to be rejoicing now. We didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. Now that the reins will be tightened, the pace will accelerate even more. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “In Jericho, Israeli Settlers Violently Seize and Occupy Palestinian Homes,” By Katrine Dige Houmøller, Drop Site News [November 7, 2026] [Link]; and “In Gaza, the specter of famine is returning,” by Ahmed Dremly, +972 Magazine [November 3, 2026] [Link].
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Time for the Green New Deal 2.0
By Jeremy Brecher, Znet [November 7, 2026]
----
With Trump’s repudiation in the 2026 midterm elections, it is time to end Green New Deal hushing and instead consider what a Green New Deal revamped for today should be. The Green New Deal project has been promoted by a wide array of social forces. It has brought together people operating inside political systems with social movements organizing outside of them. It has used both the institutions of representative democracy and the direct-action power of the people to implement its objectives. The Green New Deal 2.0 will draw on comparable sources of power. No doubt there are many in both the Republican and Democratic parties who would like to see the Green New Deal where Trump believed he consigned it – in the grave. But the Green New Deal has proven perennial because it addresses the basic problems faced by our people and planet. It is a project that in all its varied manifestations takes the necessity for climate protection as the basis for a broad program for social reconstruction — a visionary program designed to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. It will rise again transformed. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
The Loyalist
[Stephen Miller]
Bu David Klion, The Nation [March 10, 2025]
---- How to make sense of Miller and his trajectory? While he has made his share of public appearances to push his ultra-nativist views, he rarely speaks about his own political evolution. To date, the only authoritative biography of Miller is Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, by the reporter Jean Guerrero. Published in 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and during a presidential election that saw voters reject Trump, the book was well received by reviewers but arrived at a moment when Miller seemed, mercifully, to be fading in relevance. But the story Guerrero recounts is an urgent one, packed with insights into the kind of personality that self-radicalizes toward the far right in the unlikeliest of circumstances. As we now know, Miller was only just getting started during Trump’s first term. The particular brand of virulent xenophobia he represents is now politically ascendant, and his biography is inescapably central to the history of the present. [Read More]
