Yesterday’s No Kings rally is described by Wikipedia as the largest political protest in US history. While the counting is not finished, some 8 to 9 million people participated in rallies and other events in 3,300 communities. Here in Hastings we had a great turnout, 500 or more rallied at the VFW Plaza before setting out for a rendezvous to the south with a similar large number of stalwarts marching north from Yonkers. Susan Rutman and others have posted lots of good photos and videos on our Facebook group, with (I’m sure) many more to come.
Where is our movement heading? Will we be able to stop/slow down/derail the war? Sadly, our main lever of power lies in the hands of the Democrats, a minority in both the House and the Senate and divided themselves on what to do. For the Democratic Party leadership, a lot of weight is given to the November congressional elections, and how the war will effect voting. To be crude, will a many-months war be good for the Democrats, with Trump’s support evaporating as the body bags come home? Or will the strong, grassroots opposition to the war, especially among Democratic voters, force the Democratic Party leadership to work effectively to end the war, tying up the government in whatever way necessary to stop the carnage?
With the people/groups behind No Kings now calling for a “general strike” on May 1st, we will have a test-run to see what The People can do. Can we light fires under Rep. Latimer, who is in the pay of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, or under Sen. Minority Leader Schumer, who has reiterated his support for weapons for Israel forever; or for Sen. Gillibrand, who could not be moved to express support for an end to the Israeli slaughter in Gaza? What kind of “general strike” can we pull together in Westchester?
As our rallies unfolded Saturday, the Trump people were sending several thousand more soldiers to the Middle East. The New York Times claims they don’t know where the troops are, as the Pentagon won’t tell them, but the Washington Post on Saturday put together a useful analysis of where the troops are and what they might do. A writer for the antiwar.com site put together a list of possible missions for the (relatively small) strike force, including harassment raids, occupying one or more Iranian islands, or going deep into Iran to try to retrieve the enriched uranium that may (or may not) have survived to June “obliteration” bombings. We should know more about the purpose of the US escalation in a day or two; for now, it looks like pointless disaster, perhaps in the belief that once a sufficient number of US troops are killed, the People will rally around the flag.
SOME ESSAYS ILLUMINATING THIS WEEK
(Video) “Quagmire”: Jeremy Scahill on Iran War, Strait of Hormuz, Market Manipulation & More
From Democracy Now! [March 27, 2026]
---- Drop Site News‘s Jeremy Scahill joins Democracy Now! to discuss the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, including President Donald Trump’s lies about U.S. strategy and negotiations with Iran, possible avenues of U.S. escalation and what Scahill has learned about Iranian strategy in conversations with Iranian officials. “They want to cause enough pain to the world economy … [so] that any nation that thinks of attacking Iran again is going to do so knowing that these are the consequences,” he explains. [See the Program]
(Video) Crude Capitalism: Trump’s War on Iran Disrupts Global Systems, from Agriculture to Oil to Shipping
From Democracy Now! [March 26, 2026]
---- The U.S. is threatening to intensify its bombardment of Iran as the country’s leadership rejects a 15-point U.S. proposal to end the war. Iran has issued a number of demands, including recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Since the war began, Iran has largely blocked ships from passing through the critical strait, causing a global crisis as the prices of oil, natural gas and fertilizer soar. “We’re not just talking about potential spikes in food prices … but also potentially key shortages in the commodities that are necessary to produce food, like fertilizers,” says Adam Hanieh, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London. “Many of the countries that are going to be most potentially impacted by this are already in conditions of famine or near famine.” [See the Program] ALSO OF INTEREST is Adam Hanieh’s essay in the current New York Review of Books, “Bottling the World Economy” [March 23, 2026] [Link].
Houthis Enter War Against Israel
By Neil Partrick, Responsible Statecraft [March 28, 2026]
---- From northern Yemen, the Houthis are making clear that they are prepared for a new round of fighting, whether with the U.S. or Israel. From Iran, the message is being delivered that when, not if, American troops occupy any part of Iranian soil, the Houthis will enter the war. The Houthi-led Ansarullah movement emerged from the last round of fighting battered, but very much unbowed. … If the expected escalation of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran involves U.S. marines taking Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, then the countdown to a renewed war in the Red Sea will have begun. A senior figure close to Tehran commented in a private meeting involving the author that the arrival of American ground troops on Iranian territory would lead the Houthis to enter the war against the U.S. and Israel. Inside northern Yemen, the regime and the people assume this is almost inevitable. A senior Ansarullah figure said March 26 that the Houthis’ armed forces were standing by. Should Iran’s military prospects in the war be set back, then Ansarullah will enter the fight. [Read More]
(Video) Meanwhile, in Lebanon [one hour]
Peter Beinart interviews Rami Khouri on Israel’s less-discussed war [March 29, 2026]
---- In the shadow of the war with Iran, Israel is doing terrible things in Lebanon: demolishing homes, killing more than one thousand people, displacing close to a million from their homes and perhaps pushing the country toward civil war. Topics include: a primer on Hezbollah; Hezbollah’s motives; Israel’s goals in Lebanon; Lebanon’s interests vis-à-vis Israel and Hezbollah; and How the French colonial heritage effects Lebanese politics today. [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Netanyahu Went to War With Iran While Relying on an America That Doesn’t Exist Anymore,” by Joshua Leifer, Ha’aretz [Israel] [March 25, 2026] [Link]; and “An Iran Exit Plan,” by George Beebe and Trita Parsi, Foreign Policy [March 26, 2026] [Link].
NEWS NOTES
On Saturday, brave Israelis rallied in Jerusalem against the Iran war. See some footage here and read about it in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. The Israeli group Standing Together (Jews and Palestinians) says “Thousands of people in Israel took to the streets in protests across the country which we coordinated with a coalition of civil society groups in a call to end our government’s forever war in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, and its deepening occupation in the West Bank. At the main protest in Tel Aviv, Ben-Gvir’s police entered to violently and forcefully disperse over 1,000 participants, injuring some of our movement leaders and arresting several activists.”
At the UN this week, Ghana put forward a Resolution in the General Assembly calling for reparations for slavery. The Resolution was adopted by 123 in favor, 3 against, and 52 abstentions. The US voted No, along with Israel and Argentina. The countries in the European Union abstained as a bloc. The US and the UK representatives said that at the time of slavery and the slave trade, slavery was not against the law, and so …. For more on this, go here.
On Thursday, the New York Times published a full-page advertisement saying that more than 1 million people had signed petitions to impeach Trump and remove him from office. Read more about this here.
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!
Stalwart newsletter readers know that most newsletters include stories taken from the daily news program Democracy Now! Democracy Now! just celebrated its 30th anniversary with a giant concert at the historic Riverside Church in NYC. Two performances featuring Patti Smith and others were recently posted. In the first, (Video) “Patti Smith Remembers Rachel Corrie, Sings “Peaceable Kingdom” [Link]. The second Patti Smith performance closed out the evening’s program with (Video) “People Have the Power,” with Patti joined by Bruce Springsteen, Michael Stipe, and a dozen more. [Link] You can see the entire evening’s program here. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
The Most Dangerous Country: From 2003 to 2026 and Beyond
By David Bromwich, TomDispatch [March 26, 2026]
---- The joint US-Israeli killing of Iranian leaders on February 28th marked the second time in a year that the United States had used negotiations as a decoy for a surprise attack. On the pattern of Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, our own invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. under President Trump has indeed launched a criminal war of aggression. The run-up to the war, however, followed a discernible pattern. Throughout the months preceding it, the Trump administration was testing the American public’s tolerance for just such an adventure. First came the drone killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” on boats in the Caribbean Sea; then, the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela; and finally, the seizure of oil tankers said to originate from Venezuela (an act of piracy by any other name). Now, with the attack on Iran, the message to the world should be considered unmistakable. Nations concerned for their own survival, if they aren’t already U.S. vassal-states, are likely to avoid negotiations with the Trump administration. And what else could be expected? Its behavior leaves no room for the common trust on which diplomacy depends. There are only two choices: surrender or strengthen your military in anticipation of war. The United States is now widely judged to be the most dangerous country in the world. Machiavelli in The Prince advised all aspirants to the leadership of a state that it is good to be feared, but he added: take care that you are not more hated than feared. We may already have crossed that line. [Read More]
From the Rooftops of Tehran
By Anonymous, New York Review of Books [March 27, 2026]
---- It’s the second time in a year that we in Iran have found ourselves in the middle of a war—the first was launched by Israel with US aid, the second by the two armies hand in hand. In Tehran the night sky lights up when missiles hit the ground, and we look at one another with terror. Many people have already left the city. Between these two wars the Islamic Republic, our own government, killed thousands and thousands of Iranians around the country who were protesting the rulers’ incompetence and corruption, the rising price of goods, the economy’s stagnation, and the country’s lack of social and political freedom, and who by a certain point were asking for regime change. During all three of these horrors the Internet has been all but completely shut down. (I still have highly unreliable, limited access today.) Checkpoints have been set up across cities; militia forces threaten people in the streets. This paragraph is the shortest summary possible of what we have been living through since the beginning of last summer. As I write this, on the ninth day of the war, oil facilities have been hit and black columns of smoke have darkened the horizon, rising to the heart of the sky. I cannot tell where the sun is anymore, and I write quickly, for fear that at any moment I might be killed. [Read More]
How the US Became an International Serial Killer
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [March 25, 2026]
---- For decades, the United States moved from covert assassination plots to openly embracing assassination or “targeted killing” as policy. Now, in its war with Iran, that evolution is reaching its most dangerous phase. On March 17th and 18th, the United States and Israel assassinated three senior Iranian government officials in targeted air strikes: Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Basij domestic security forces; and Esmaeil Khatib, Iran’s Intelligence Minister. … The assassination of Ali Larijani is a blow to the already fraught chances for a negotiated peace between Iran and the United States and Israel. Ali Larijani was an experienced, pragmatic senior official who had played leading roles in negotiations with the US and other world powers since 2005. … If the US hoped to make peace and restore relations with Iran, Ali Larijani would have been a potential negotiating partner. The decision to assassinate Larijani two weeks into this war suggests that US leaders had no interest in negotiations. Another possibility is even more chilling. Israeli leaders may have viewed Larijani as a potential off-ramp and deliberately eliminated him to ensure the war continues. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “From Gaza to Minab, the Same Story — Children Paying the Price of War,” by Ramzy Baroud, Znet [March 28, 2026] [Link]; and “Everything that Rises Must Converge: Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” by Jonah Raskin, Counterpunch [March 27, 2026] [Link].
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
“Erasing the Lines”: How Settlers Are Seizing New Regions of the West Bank
By Oren Ziv with Ariel Caine, The Nation [March 24, 2026]
---- After decades consolidating their control over Area C, Israeli settlers are expanding into Areas B and A—nominally under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction—and displacing communities, an investigation reveals. … The expulsion of the families also epitomizes a broader pattern that has accelerated since October 2023: the proliferation of settler outposts and the mass displacement of Palestinian communities across the West Bank, including in areas that were until recently considered off limits, even by settlers. Since October 7, settlers have worked in tandem with the Israeli army to expel at least 76 entire Palestinian communities, while settlers have simultaneously established 152 new outposts. Among these outposts, at least 22 have are in Area B, including 12 in the “Agreed-Upon Reserve” (a plot of 167,000 dunams in the southern West Bank that is designated as Area B). One outpost has also appeared inside Area A. According to mapping by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Nation, based on data collected by the Israeli organizations Kerem Navot and Peace Now, the settlers living in these outposts have taken control of around 98,000 dunams (almost 25,000 acres) in Area B and Area A. In total, settlers living in outposts now wield effective control over roughly 1 million dunams (250,000 acres) across the West Bank. This dynamic has been building for a long time. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Amid Iran War, Israeli Army Backs Far-Right Annexation of Palestinian West Bank, by H. Scott Prosterman, Informed Comment [March 28, 2026] [Link]; and this just in: “Young Settler Sacrificed for the Land,” from Hastings journalist Jasper Nathaniel, Infinite Jaz [March 29, 2026] [Link].
THE WAR ON VENEZUELA
US Sanctions on Venezuela Continue: Corporate Beneficiaries and a Targeted Society
By Roger D. Harris, Antiwar.com [March 26, 2026]
---- In the wake of Washington’s January 3 military attack and then problematic détente with Caracas, corporate media suggest a meaningful shift in Venezuela policy, implying relief for a country long subjected to economic coercion. However, far from dismantling the sanctions regime, the US has merely adjusted its application through licensing mechanisms, leaving the core structure of coercive measures fully intact. Reuters reported “US lifts some Venezuela sanctions,” followed by news of sanctions being further “eased.” ... In fact, there is no evidence of any revocation of executive orders, removal of Venezuela-related sanctions authorities, and certainly no formal termination or suspension of Washington’s sanctions regime. [Read More]
THE WAR ON CUBA
What I Saw in Cuba Was Resilience
By Gerargo Delgado, Znet [March 27, 2026]
---- I traveled to Cuba this month. As a Cuban American, that sentence carries the weight of longing born of an estrangement from my roots. For much of my life, Cuba existed as a distant story, a place I knew only through descriptions from my father. I was there as part of an international solidarity convoy; over 500 representatives from more than 30 countries, united by a simple conviction: no country has the right to strangle another simply because it chose a different path. I cannot stand by while the island of my family’s heritage is suffocated. What I witnessed over those days was not the Cuba of Western propaganda. It was a country enduring a 66-year siege, and a people who, against all odds, continue to build, create, and care for one another. [Read More]
WAR WITH CHINA?
When the US Supported a Brutal Chinese Conquest of Taiwan
By Michael Holmes, Antiwar.com [March 27, 2026]
---- In the Western imagination, Taiwan is cast almost exclusively as a flourishing democracy under siege by a totalitarian neighbor, a moral clarity that fuels calls for military defense and ideological solidarity. Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s magisterial new history, The Struggle for Taiwan – published in 2024 – does not deny the island’s democratic vibrancy or the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China. However, Khan, a professor of international relations and history at the Fletcher School, complicates this tableau with a darker, more unsettling narrative. He unearths a history in which the United States was not the defender of Taiwanese self-determination, but the primary sponsor of its conquest by a brutal Chinese regime. Khan argues that the current peril in the Taiwan Strait is the bitter fruit of Japanese and American imperial map-making, a century of cynical maneuvering where the United States participated in the exploitation of China and then handed Taiwan over to a dictatorship that terrorized its population for decades. Khan forces the reader to confront the reality that Taiwan’s status is not a simple matter of ancient sovereignty but a product of empire and war. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
The Iran War is Revealing the Messy Middle of Our Renewable Energy Transition
By David Wallace-Wells, New York Times [March 27, 2026]
---- No one has ever started a war over solar panels, as any climate activist will tell you. And the economic blast radius of the Iran conflict is large enough that it’s hard to miss the argument it makes for rapid decarbonization. Why continue to rely so heavily on imports from erratic authoritarians overseas when you can instead harvest the bountiful sun, wind, hydropower and geothermal found nearly everywhere on earth? … This is all happening on a planet in the middle of its own transition, one that may well last thousands or even millions of years and to which few nations have even begun to properly adapt. In the meantime, vulnerabilities proliferate like heat. [Read More]
Global Warming Surges, Antarctic Seas Bubble
By Robert Hunziker, Znet [March 27, 2026]
---- Global warming is on a very ominous trend that has never happened throughout human history, according to a recent study in Geophysical Research Letters. The rate of global warming has doubled in only ten years. This rapid rate, outside of the influence of nature alone, should be unsustainable for any mass the size of Earth. However, if it is sustainable, danger signals today will be catastrophic results tomorrow. Indeed, new discoveries in the Antarctic region are cause for concern of additional acceleration of global warming. “The warming trend nearly doubled after 2014,” study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told Live Science in an email. “The acceleration of the global warming rate means we will cross the 1.5°C [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] limit earlier,’ he said, adding that they were surprised by the drastic surge as the warming trend nearly doubled after 2014.”[Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
(Video) “Torture & Genocide”: U.N. Expert Francesca Albanese Denounces Israeli Abuse of Palestinians
From Democracy Now! [March 26, 2026]
---- United Nations expert Francesca Albanese’s latest report warns that Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent” and that “torture has effectively become state policy” since October 2023. Of all the investigations Albanese has carried out, “this has been absolutely the most excruciating, that led me to say that Israel uses torture in a systematic and widespread fashion, intentionally and sadistically, to break the spirit of the Palestinians, not just as individuals, but as a people,” says Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory since 2022. This comes as Israeli forces reportedly tortured a Palestinian toddler earlier this month, by using a cigarette to burn one of the child’s legs and a nail to puncture the other, in order to coerce a confession from his father. [See the Program]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
People Die While Companies Profit: As Concentration Camps Metastasize Across the U.S.
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch [March 24, 2026]
---- Taken together, this network of prisons or, more accurately, concentration camps, constitutes an American gulag. “Gulag” is not so much a word as a Russian initialism that came to stand for the Soviet Union’s concentration camp program, originally developed under Joseph Stalin. The term stands for “Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps” and originally referred to the officials running the camps. Later, “gulag” came to indicate the camps themselves, which were a central instrument of Soviet political repression. Most Americans first learned about those camps through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 internationally bestselling memoir, The Gulag Archipelago. As Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has written, such institutions are a relatively recent phenomenon. While human beings have long contrived ways to isolate groups they identify as enemies — for example, in the enclosed Jewish ghettos of medieval Europe — the modern concentration camp evolved thanks to two key inventions: barbed wire and the machine gun. That pair of technological advances made it possible for a small number of guards to control and contain a large number of people in one place. Concentration camps have a number of defining features: [Read More].
It’s Time to Tax the Rich
By Lawrence S. Wittner, Znet [March 25, 2026]
---- With the deadline for paying federal income taxes fast approaching, the thoughts of American taxpayers turn naturally toward the age-old question: Why isn’t there a fairer tax system? Currently, in fact, campaigns for state tax-the-rich legislation are flourishing in California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia, and have already succeeded in getting such legislation adopted in Massachusetts and Washington. Similarly, in Congress, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Pramila Jayapal have introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, while Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna are sponsoring the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act. The tax-the-rich proposals range from increasing the tax rate for the very highest annual income earners, to instituting an annual wealth tax on the very richest Americans, to a combination of both. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
It Was One of the Cold War’s Greatest Crimes. No One Has Paid a Price.
By Stuart A. Reid, New York Times [March 26, 2026]
---- The legacy of Mr. Lumumba’s assassination is weighty and enduring. Early meddling distorted Congo’s politics, and in the 65 years since Mr. Lumumba’s killing, his country has been ruled by corrupt, unresponsive leaders of various stripes, often with the backing of foreign patrons. The vast majority of Congo’s population lives on less than $3 a day. Outside powers still treat it as little more than a source of violence and misery — and minerals, in which Congo is extraordinarily wealthy. Mr. Lumumba’s death was the culmination of a coordinated, largely foreign effort to remove him from power. An uncompromising nationalist whose party won Congo’s first free democratic elections, he became prime minister of the newly independent country in June 1960. Within weeks, an army mutiny and the Belgian-backed secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga plunged Congo into crisis. … What would actual atonement look like? For Belgium, it would entail a forthright apology and an admission of institutional responsibility. For the United States, it could mean the same, as well as investing in Congo’s governance, its institutions and its people, instead of merely racing to secure its cobalt. In other words, Washington could treat Congo as a nation with aspirations of its own rather than a mine to be managed. [Read More]
“The Spirit of 1945” [England]
---- In 1945, the Labour (socialist) Party won the first election held after the victories of WWII. Would/could the Party/the workers take the nation forward, or would they be pushed back by the likes of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher? Fabled documentary film maker Ken Loach explored this in his film “The Spirit of ‘45,” (2013). You can see a 2-minute trailer of the film here. If you have a Westchester library card, the film service Kanopy makes “The Spirit of ‘45” free at https://www.kanopy.com/en/wls/video/16101625.
