Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife are illegal, immoral, and a world-class disaster. We strongly oppose Trump’s new war and call on the people of Westchester to stand up for peace. In the coming weeks we must work to prevent further escalation of this war by whatever means possible.
Trump’s war is illegal because it is a violation of the UN Charter and the US Constitution. There are no legal grounds – in either US or international law – for attacking a country that has not attacked the US, nor poses a threat to do so. Citing the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 does not make the war legal. Claiming that Venezuela has “stolen” its oil from the US defies the historical record. In its editorial yesterday, The New York Times called Trump’s war “illegal and unwise.” Nations, even US allies, are challenging the legality of the invasion and kidnapping, as we will see at tomorrow’s emergency meeting of the us Security Council.
Trump’s war is also immoral. Trump’s military has already killed at least 125 people in more than 30 attacks on small boats, and yesterday’s invasion and kidnapping left more than 40 people dead. Undoubtedly many more people will die as the US uses military force “to run” Venezuela and its oil fields. Trump has already promised “a second strike” if Venezuelan cooperation with the Godfather’s demands is not forthcoming. The violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty by military and economic means is also immoral. All people have a right to livelihood and safety. The idea that US policy in Latin American can be governed by the 1823 “Monroe Doctrine” rejects the universal consensus that a nation is sovereign and should not be governed by a foreign power.
And the war is and will be a disaster because it makes the world, and even the USA, live in an environment where many things can and will go wrong. The US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan lasted more than a decade, and there is no reason to think that a war on Venezuela – perhaps spreading to next-door Colombia and beyond – will be a short one. Nations in Latin America and Europe have condemned the US action. Congress’s right to decide on war and peace has been ignored. Other countries in Latin America – Mexico, Brazil, Cuba – are now under the gun: Who Will Be Next? We must show Trump that war is unacceptable. Work for peace!
NEWS NOTES
Early January is the time for making a scorecard for last year. Was it a good one? A bad one? Of interest, imo, are two completely different lists of “good things” from 2025. The Nation’s Katha Pollitt writes “Don’t Give Up Hope! Even 2025 Had Bright Spots” [Link] and Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin adds “10 Good Things That Happened in 2025.”[Link] Benjamin writes “2025 has been a hard year. It’s easy to focus on the disasters, and there have been many. But we also had real victories that moved us closer to a better world.” I agree.
Palestinian film maker Mohammad Bakri died last week. In the US he is most noted for his documentary film Jenin, Jenin (2002). The film is about life and survival in the West Bank refugee camp Jenin, and you can see it here. - 54 minutes
While a non-tech Luddite, I find the drama around “artificial intelligence” of great interest. Is Nirvana around the corner? Is the Apocalypse coming soon? Helpful imo for understanding the arc of this drama is a review of 4 books on AI by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books. His essay is titled “King of Cannibal Island” for reasons you will soon discover on reading this interesting (but wonkish) essay.
MAMDANI FOR NEW YORK
“A Breath of Fresh Air”: Eight New Yorkers on the Mamdani Inauguration
By Elsie Carson-Holt, The Indypendent [January 2, 2026]
---- The culmination of a year of door knocking, constant campaigning, videos on social media that garnered millions of views, and one of the biggest political upsets of the decade, reached its conclusion yesterday at City Hall Plaza, when Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as New York City’s first socialist mayor. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers waited in freezing temperatures to witness Mamdani’s inauguration in person at a block party organized by the administration. But the temperature and heightened security didn’t diminish the celebratory atmosphere. The arrival of Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwajji, at City Hall in a yellow cab driven by a driver Mamdani once went on hunger strike with, was met with whoops and cheers. So were speeches by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Jumaane Williams and Mark Levine, who were sworn in as public advocate and comptroller, respectively. [Read More]
Sanctuary City
By Tanyi Misra, New York Review of Books [January 2, 2026]
---- Come January, New York City will be led by an immigrant—and, in a series of firsts, by a Muslim Indian American from Uganda. This kind of representation is meaningful in and of itself for many New Yorkers who hail from elsewhere. ... But as the new mayor takes office, the bigger question is not what he symbolizes for immigrant communities but what benefits he might deliver for them if he can realize his vision of an affordable city. Immigrants are more likely than other New Yorkers to be rent burdened and make up over half of the city’s bus ridership; Mamdani’s plans could enable families to remain in apartments from which they would otherwise have been priced out, and make it easier for low-income people to traverse the city they have come to see as home. Mamdani has also underlined his commitment to protecting those immigrants most at risk from federal raids. [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.) 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, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers celebrate the work of the amazing Rhiannon Giddens. After Trump added his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, many singers and other artists scheduled to perform there withdrew from their contracts, refusing to participate in this latest Trump shenanigan. But Rhiannon Giddens had refused to perform last July, citing Trump’s firing of the Center’s board of directors and replacing them with his own non-entities. But back to Rhiannon: I think you will enjoy her renditions of “Cry No More,” “Julie,” and “Shake Sugaree.” Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
The ceasefire did what it was meant to do – make Gaza invisible
By Eman Abu Zayed, Aljazeera [January 2, 2026]
---- When rumours about a ceasefire started circulating in October, it felt like a distant dream. We clung to any thread of hope, even though deep inside we feared believing it. For two years, we had become accustomed to hearing about “ceasefires” that never lasted. When the announcement was finally made, the streets erupted with ululations and cheers. Yet, fear crept into my heart that this calm might just be a pause before another round of attacks. My fears were justified. Israel’s daily deadly attacks have continued; more than 400 people have been killed so far by its army. Many others have died in circumstances caused by Israel’s decimation of the Strip. And yet the level of global attention began to decline. In November, I noticed that engagement with what I wrote about Gaza started to diminish, whether on social media or media outlets – something other Palestinian journalists and writers also observed. The world’s interest waned because the global public was easily convinced that the war had ended. It became clear to me that the real goal of the ceasefire was not to stop the violence or death, nor to protect people or limit bloodshed and genocide. The real goal was to stop the world from talking about Gaza, about the crimes being committed there, and about the daily suffering of people. Gaza has now become mostly invisible, as other news and other “hot spots” have taken the global media spotlight. Meanwhile, mass death continues. [Read More]
Francesca Albanese and the Lonely Road of Defiance
By Chris Hedges [December 30, 2025]
---- It is a late November afternoon. I am driving to Genoa, Italy with Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. We are traveling to join striking dockworkers. The dockworkers call for a moratorium on weapons bound for Israel and a halt to the Italian government’s plans to increase military spending. Francesca — tall with flecks of gray in her hair and wearing large black-framed glasses and hoop earrings — is the bête noire of Israel and the United States. She was placed on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list of the U.S. Treasury Department — normally used to sanction those accused of money laundering or being involved with terrorist organizations — six days after the release of her report, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide.” … In her report, Francesca lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as BlackRock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law, are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians. [Read More]
Why I am on hunger strike in solidarity with Palestine Action detainees
By Mansoor Adayfi, Aljazeera [January 2, 2026]
---- I know this road. I have its map etched into my bones. I carry scars that won’t heal without justice, without accountability. I learned it in Guantanamo, when the only thing I could control was my own body. … At least eight imprisoned pro-Palestine activists in the UK have refused food. One has been on hunger strike for more than two months. Others have passed 50 days without eating. Some have already been taken to hospital. They are scattered across prisons, cut off from each other, torn from their families, buried under the word “terrorist” so cruelty can be dressed up as law. They are Heba Muraisi, Qesser Zurah, Amu Gib, Teuta Hoxha, Kamran Ahmed, Lewie Chiaramello, Jon Cink, and Umer Khalid. … I am not writing this as an observer. I am writing as someone who has already lived the ending. I am telling you plainly, without euphemism and without distance. Systems like this do not correct themselves. They do not slow down out of shame. They only stop when they are confronted, directly and without fear. Now. [Read More]
THE WAR ON VENEZUELA
Five Facets of the Attack on Venezuela by the Rogue Nation the US Has Become|
By Rebecca Solnit, Meditations in an Emergency [January 3, 2026]
----They are saying it baldly: this is an oil grab. There is a history of oil grabs going back to British imperialism in the middle east in the late nineteenth century and murders of Osage Nation tribal members in Oklahoma when oil made them rich in the early twentieth century, of a US-backed coup against the democratic government of Iran in the 1950s and the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. … The carnage associated with fossil fuel is why speeding the transition to renewables is good for international stability as well as everything else. Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence, and dependence on it it has created a brutal world order in which some states have corrosive outsize power due to their possession of oil and gas while others have corrosive dependency on these often-human-rights-abusing regimes. [Read More]
Trump’s War
By David Cole, New York Review of Books [January 3, 2026]
---- “It was a brilliant operation, actually.” So claimed Donald Trump early this morning in a phone call with The New York Times. ... It was an illegal operation, actually. Illegal on so many fronts that it can be challenging to keep them straight. First, and most importantly, it violates the bedrock rule of international law, which prohibits nations from attacking other sovereign states except when authorized by the UN itself or when acting in self-defense. … The attack also violated the US Constitution, which gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war and authorize the use of military force. The only situation in which presidents can constitutionally conduct unilateral military action is, again, in self-defense against an ongoing or imminent armed attack. The Venezuelan operation also violated the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to notify Congress before introducing troops into any situation of ongoing or imminent hostilities. … That is not law enforcement; it is imperialism, pure and simple. [Read More]
Venezuela: The Precedents
By Timothy Snyder [January 4, 2026]
---- Now that the United States has extracted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, it might help to consider four precedents. No event of the moment is exactly like any episode in the past. But in recalling history, we can see elements of the present that will otherwise be shrouded by propaganda or emotion. [1. American intervention in Latin America. … 2. The Second Iraq War. … 3. The Russian invasion of Ukraine. … 4. The fascist wars ]… Trump is weak at home, and he can be stopped -- so long as the domestic political logic of foreign intervention is recognized and turned against him. This act of war is more about regime change in the United States than it was about anything in Venezuela. It only succeeds as fascism if Americans allow it to do so. … The point of these four comparisons is not that history repeats. It is that history reveals. It can help us see around corners, into possible futures. Each of these examples, I hope, provides a useful perspective: that American imperialism is a tradition; that removing something or someone does not lead to predictable results; that dispensing with international law is not only wrong but undesirable; that foreign military actions can be about domestic regime change. What we see we can stop; what we understand we can change. [Read More]
Trump and His Cronies Want a War in the Western Hemisphere
By William D. Hartung, The Nation [January 2, 2026]
---- In December, the Trump administration released its new National Security Strategy, or NSS. Normally, such documents are poor predictors of what’s likely to happen in the real world. They are more like branding tools that communicate the attitudes of a given administration while rarely offering a detailed or accurate picture of its likely policies. The reason documents like the NSS are of limited import is simple enough: Foreign and military policies aren’t set by documents but by power and ideology. Typically enough, the current US approach to the world flows from struggles among representatives of contending interest groups, some of which, like the military-industrial complex (MIC), have a significant advantage in the fight. The weapons industry and its allies in the Pentagon and Congress wield a wide array of tools of influence, including tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions, more than 1,000 lobbyists, and jobs tied to military-related facilities in the states and districts of key members of Congress. … The aspect of the newly announced military strategy that has gotten the most attention (and may be the closest to the president’s heart) is its focus not on the rest of the world but on the Western Hemisphere, including what the president has called the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, or what’s come to be known as the “Donroe Doctrine.” [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Amid disastrous flooding of displacement camps in Gaza, Israel bans humanitarian organizations providing relief
By Tareq S. Hajjajk Mondoweiss [January 1, 2026]
---- What is unfolding across Gaza is not simply the result of winter storms, but the product of Israel’s continued policy of denying access to humanitarian aid meant to provide Palestinians with shelter, food, medicine, and other forms of relief. Now Israel is also curtailing the work of 37 international humanitarian organizations attempting to provide relief to the people of Gaza, who have endured over two years of genocidal war and live in conditions designed to bring about their destruction. Israel’s continued closure of border crossings, its restrictions on the entry of aid needed for reconstruction, and its ban on prefabricated homes and tents are the primary drivers of the recurring disasters that continue to result from severe weather in Gaza. In addition, local aid workers in Gaza told Mondoweiss that the Israeli army deliberately opened dams inside Israel that ended up flooding Gaza, further exacerbating humanitarian conditions. [Read More]
What being a woman in Gaza means in this genocidal war?
By Hind Khoudary, Aljazeera [December 31, 2025\
---- Women in Gaza are surviving the unsurvivable. They are managing daily food scarcity while caring for their children under conditions of absolute deprivation; although a ceasefire stipulation, Israel continues to block tents and caravans, among other critical winter aid. Women in Gaza continue to navigate repeated displacement, packing and unpacking their families’ lives over and over again under heavy bombardment. They are caring not only for their own children, but also for the injured, the elderly, and the orphaned. Above all, they carry the invisible but crushing emotional labour of holding families together through grief, terror, uncertainty and unrelenting loss amid unprecedented destruction. [Read More]
Policies of Denial – [Gaza]
An interview with Sara Roy, New York Review of Books [January 3, 2026]
---- From her influential 1995 study The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of Development to her books and articles on such subjects as women’s health in the Strip, the failures of the Oslo Accords, and civil society under Hamas, Roy has long been a preeminent expert on the political-economic methods with which—as she put it in her recent essay for the Review—Israel has “thwarted the viable development of the Gaza Strip, with the primary goal of precluding the establishment of a Palestinian state by weakening if not eliminating the economic foundation on which it could be built.” These policies, as Roy explained in our pages in 2023, in effect “created a humanitarian problem to manage a political problem,” turning “ordinary life into war by other means.” Over the past month Roy and I emailed about her time living in Gaza before the first intifada, the aftermath of Israel’s “disengagement” from the Strip in 2005, and the “polarized and fearful environment” around Palestine studies at universities today. [Read More]
WAR ON IRAN?
Inflation, Protests and the Shadow of Another War on Iran
By Mohammad Eslami, Informed Comment [December 31, 2025]
---- The 12-day war of the summer of 2025 ended as abruptly as it began. The guns fell silent, but few observers believed the conflict had been resolved. Almost from the moment the cease-fire took hold, analysts described it not as peace but as a tactical pause, an intermission before the next act of a war whose underlying drivers remained untouched. … Whether war begins in the next hours or unfolds after months of maneuvering, the trajectory is increasingly clear. Diplomatic off-ramps appear narrow, domestic pressures inside Iran are intensifying, and regional actors are preparing for scenarios they publicly deny seeking. Another conflict is not inevitable, but it is no longer abstract. It is being planned, debated and budgeted for, even as ordinary people from Tel Aviv to Tehran brace for the consequences. The pause that followed the 12-day war is ending, and the shadow of another, potentially bloodier confrontation is lengthening across the region. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship Seeks to Further Codify White Supremacy
By Camilo Pérez-Bustillo , Truthout [December 30, 2025]
---- The Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing early next year regarding historic challenges to the Trump administration’s attempt to undermine the Fourteenth Amendment’s longstanding guarantee of birthright citizenship, which was enacted in 1868. The administration proposed to get rid of birthright citizenship by means of an executive order issued on inauguration day, and not through a proposed constitutional amendment, which most scholars argue is legally required. The administration’s assault on birthright citizenship firmly anchors its campaign of terror against migrant communities in a white supremacist framework, one that extends the militarization and politics of racial subordination of the U.S-Mexico border region throughout the country. Now, more than ever, it is clear that the border is present wherever immigrant communities are present — wherever our sisters and brothers live, work, and struggle. This is why immigrant rights groups like Witness at the Border decided to launch our “Blue Triangle” campaign in response to the Trump administration’s criminalization of migrants. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Food Fight, Anyone?
By Jeremy Brecherm STRIKE! [January 3, 2026]
---- The US currently has two overlapping food crises. One is the elimination of food programs for the needy. According to the Center for American Progress, “Project 2025 and the Republican Study Committee budget envisioned a transformative dismantling of federal nutrition assistance programs. In January, the Trump administration chaotically froze federal funding, leaving farmers reeling and nonprofits serving the needy worrying about steady access to support from SNAP and Meals on Wheels. In March, the administration cut more than $1 billion of funding from two programs that supply schools and food banks with food from local farms and ranches. These cuts affected schoolchildren and small farmers in all 50 states.” …There is also another food crisis that affects everyone – poor and less poor — the fast-rising cost of food. As you may have noticed, the price of food in American supermarkets has soared. As surveys indicate, the cost of groceries has become a major source of stress for American consumers. [Read More]
American Pogrom: the Year in ICE Abductions
By Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch [January 1, 2026]
---- A year into Trump’s mass purge of immigrants from the United States, it’s beyond debate that the people orchestrating and conducting the raids, round-ups and deportations have committed more grievous crimes than the vast majority of the people they’ve harassed, assaulted, arrested, jailed and sent into exile. They’ve committed crimes against the Constitution of the government they’re acting in the name of and they’ve used the force, often violent force, of the federal government against innocent people. They’ve lied to Congress and federal judges. They’ve systematically violated judicial orders. They’ve denied people the most fundamental right guaranteed to residents, regardless of legal status, in the US: the right to due process of law. … The vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record. Many of them were arrested at their jobs washing cars, mowing lawns, cultivating plants, putting roofs on houses. Others were arrested while checking in with their immigration officers or showing up for scheduled court hearings. Apparently, it’s much easier to abduct people who are abiding by the law, than those who aren’t. Who knew? [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Too Big To Heal” – [Healthcare] - By Helen Santoro and Joel Warner, The Lever [December 27, 2025] [Link]; and “As Electricity Bills Rise, Activists Are Demanding Public Control of Utilities,” by Derek Seidman, Truthout [January 2, 2026] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
Since When Is It Radical to Reclaim New York for New Yorkers?
By Kim Phillips-Fein, New York Times [January 1, 2026]
---- As Zohran Mamdani takes office, there is rightly a great emphasis on the many ways in which his mayoralty is a first for New York City. He is the first Muslim mayor of the city, the first born in Africa, the first of South Asian descent, the first to make being a democratic socialist central to his politics. On the campaign trail, his opponents repeatedly depicted him as a radical, a foreigner, an outsider to the city and its politics. But they are all wrong. Mr. Mamdani is an entirely familiar type of New York politician. The central issues of his campaign — holding down the costs of housing and transit so that all New Yorkers can enjoy the city’s glories — are the same ones that have animated working-class politics in the city going back to the 1886 mayoral campaign of Henry George, the 1917 campaign of the Socialist Morris Hillquit and the 1933 campaign of Fiorello La Guardia (who won, unlike the other two). Mr. Mamdani is part of a long tradition in New York City that has framed itself as seeking to reclaim the democratic community of the city from wealth, power and greed. [Link].
