Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
March 11, 2018
Hello All – Thank you to all those who have called Senators Schumer and Gillibrand to ask that they support the Senate Resolution by Bernie Sanders and Mike Lee that would end US support for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. For those who haven't called yet, PLEASE do so. This would be a big step towards ending all the fighting.
As a reminder of what's at stake, the United Nations calls the war in Yemen "the world's greatest humanitarian disaster." Thousands have been killed, and millions of people are in danger because of starvation and disease. Yet, incredibly, for three years our government has helped Saudi Arabia wage this war against the people of Yemen. Some good/useful reading about the war is linked below.
The US role in the Yemen war has never been authorized by Congress. It is not covered by the law authorizing military force that Congress passed after 9/11. The proposed Resolution says that, under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, only Congress can declare a war; and this it has not done. This legislation is our best chance to end America's role in this unconstitutional war and push for peace, which is the only significant way to relieve the suffering of the Yemeni people. Our Senators need to know that people in Westchester want the war in Yemen to stop. The vote will be coming soon. Please call Senators Gillibrand (202-224-4451) and Schumer (202-224-6542). Ask them to support the Sanders-Lee Resolution and end US support for the Yemen war.
Negotiations with North Korea
The constructive diplomacy between North and South Korea may be what saves the planet from a disastrous war that could kill millions. In typical Trump fashion, our president impulsively accepted an invitation from North Korea, sent via a South Korean delegation to the White House, for face-to-face talks. Given the context and the extraordinary danger of the possibility for war, perhaps even nuclear war, one would think that this news would be received with great joy and dancing in the streets. But not so. As veteran journalist Jonathan Marshall notes, our political and pundit Establishment is issuing dire warnings about the dangers of US-North Korean talks, without "adequate preparation," etc., raising fears that the North Koreans will fool the US negotiators, gaining too many benefits from the talks. This is really crazy, but it underscores the war-like mood that has infected not just conservatives, but liberals as well. The immediate danger facing us is that the Democrats will attack the Trump team for supping with the Devil, as they have done each time that negotiations with Russia are discussed. Both North Korea and China have frequently suggested that negotiations can start with "a freeze for a freeze"; a freeze of North Korea's nuclear program in exchange for a halt to US military preparations for attacking North Korea and a freeze on sanctions. In light of the alternatives, this is certainly worth trying.
The Student Uprising
On March 14th, the one-month anniversary of the mass killing in Parkland, Florida, students at many schools will be "walking-out" for 17 minutes, one minute for each student killed. (You can see a list of schools planning a walk-out here.) The walkout from the Hastings middle school and high school will begin at 10 a.m. Some supporters of this action will meet at the Food Town parking lot at 9:30 and then walk to the schools to show solidarity. Please join us!
On Saturday, March 24th, there will be demonstrations in Washington, DC, NYC, and many other cities. Project SHARE in Hastings is organizing buses for high school students and parents. They are trying to raise $20,000 for this project. You can make a contribution via GoFundMe here. The Facebook page for the NYC demo is here and their GoFundMe page here.
News Notes
The West Virginia teachers have won their strike, getting a 5% pay raise for all state workers. Democracy Now's post-victory program features a high school teacher and union activist in Mingo County, West Virginia. [See the Program] And here is a good analysis of the strike from our leading source on the US labor movement, Labor Notes.
President Trump's plan for a fascistic military parade in Washington, DC on Veterans Day 2018 could cost up to $50 million. Antiwar people are planning some low-budget activities in protest. (Could it happen in Westchester?!!) Learn more here.
Nation writer Jon Nichols has an inspiring article about Iceland's new Prime Minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir. She is a feminist, a leftist, and an environmentalist. And perhaps not least, she had a leading role in this music video for the band Bang Gang back in the day.
Millions of people have now seen some video coverage of Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teenager who assaulted an Israeli soldier who was part of a raid on the Tamimi home in the West Bank. In this interesting short program, Aljazeera describes how the Israeli media has tried to deal with this event.
Fifteen years ago, just weeks before the US bombing of Iraq started the war, British intelligence analyst Katherine Gunn made her heroic decision to "leak" a request from the United States that the British wiretap UN delegations that were being stubborn about given the US a green light for war. (They ultimately did not, but the US/UK went ahead anyway.) At a conference last week, legendary leaker Daniel Ellsberg cited Gunn's heroism, encouraging others to "go and do likewise."
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Ongoing – CFOW holds a vigil/rally each Saturday at the VFW Plaza in Hastings (Warburton and Spring) from 12 to 1 p.m. Everyone invited; please join us!
Ongoing – CFOW stalwart Elisa Zazzera manages Hastings' "Community Supported Agriculture" (CSA). The CSA partners with an upstate farm to provide fresh vegetables each Wednesday. Highly recommended. To learn more about this, and/or to sign up for the next growing season, go here.
Monday, March 19th – To mark the 15th anniversary of the US attack on Iraq, and to protest the ongoing war, the War Resisters League and many other organizations will hold a demonstration in NYC, starting at 11:30 a.m. at the NY Public Library steps, and then heading off for a march to the military recruiting station at Times Square. For more information, go here.
Sunday, April 8th – The CFOW monthly meeting will be held at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs, from 7 to 9 p.m. At these meetings we review what we've done over the past month and make plans for the next month. Everyone is welcome at these meetings.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for our rallies are usually about war or climate change, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's tax cut legislation are often targeted, depending on current events. We meet on the first Sunday of each month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to make a financial contribution to our work, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
This Newsletter
Articles linked in the CFOW newsletter are intended to illuminate some of the main action-issues about which we are concerned. Coming mostly from the "dissenting media," they provide an alternative to the perspectives of the mainstream media. In addition to the excellent "Featured Essays" and the set of articles about Yemen, I especially recommend the articles by Mike Klare and Nicholas Davies ("War & Peace") with interesting and challenging overviews of our military Empire; the article by Sean McElwee ("the State of the Union") on the need to abolish ICE ("Immigration and Customs Enforcement"); and the articles about the Vietnam War ("Our History'), coming on the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre.
Rewards!
1968-2018 – It's the 50th anniversary of a lot of heavy things, not least in Vietnam. Before Ken Burns got to define the war on national TV, there were several powerful antiwar film made back in the day. One of the best, I think, was Emile De Antonio's "Year of the Pig." Check it out. And almost 700 million people have seen this powerful antiwar music/video from The Cranberries; now you can too.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
THE WAR IN YEMEN – WE CAN STOP IT!
Congress Must Act Now to End America's Atrocities in Yemen
By
----Your taxpayer dollars and military forces are at work, on the other side of the world, in Yemen — one of the world's poorest countries. Every 10 minutes another child dies of preventable disease. It's not a natural disaster but a human made one: Saudi Arabia has cut off most supplies of food, fuel, and medicine from Yemeni ports. This has put more than eight million people on the brink of starvation. The destruction of infrastructure has also created the worst epidemic in the modern history of cholera, a waterborne disease that has sickened more than a million people there and has killed thousands. Saudi and Emirati planes have also killed more than 10,000 people, mostly civilians, with bombs. What does the US government have to do with this suffering, which has created the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today? Unfortunately, a lot. The US military is directly involved, providing mid-air refueling to Saudi and UAE warplanes during their bombing runs, as well as targeting assistance for their bombs, and other logistical aid. [Read More]
NGOs Push Senators to Support Yemen Resolution
By Derek Davison, LobeLog [March 8, 2018]
---- A group of over 40 NGOs have signed on to an open letter calling on senators to support SJRes54, a joint resolution introduced last month by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Chris Murphy (D-CT). The resolution calls for a vote to authorize the U.S. military role in Yemen's civil war under the 1973 War Powers Act. If that vote is held it could signal an end to U.S. involvement in Yemen and a reassertion of a congressional role in authorizing military action all over the world. … The Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen would likely be unsustainable without U.S. support. The U.S. refuels and helps maintain the coalition's aircraft. It shares targeting information with the coalition. Its naval vessels have helped to bolster the coalition blockade. And despite its occasional criticisms of the coalition's excesses the U.S. continues to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry to Saudi Arabia and the UAE while their war in Yemen rages. All this is happening while the U.S. is conducting a parallel war in Yemen against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)—a group that, ironically, has benefitted considerably from the chaos created by the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led intervention. That campaign against AQAP is not covered by the Sanders-Lee-Murphy resolution. The text of the letter is as follows…. [Read More]
Also useful/interesting re: stopping the war in Yemen – Ben Freeman, "The Lobbying War for War in Yemen,," [Link]; and Curt Mills, "The Congressional Battle Over Ending the War In Yemen," The National Interest [March 9, 2018] [Link].
FEATURED ESSAYS
Feminists Have Slowly Shifted Power. There's No Going Back
By
---- This International Women's Day comes five months after the revelations about Harvey Weinstein's long campaign of misogynist punishments of women first broke, and with them more things broke. Excuses broke. Silence was broken. The respectable appearance of a lot of institutions broke. You could say a dam broke, and a wall of women's stories came spilling forth – which has happened before, but never the way that this round has. … Something had shifted. What's often overlooked is that it had shifted beforehand so that this could happen. Something invisible had made it possible for these highly visible upheavals and transformations. People often position revolution and incrementalism as opposites, but if a revolution is something that changes things suddenly, incrementalism often lays the groundwork that makes it possible. Something happens suddenly, and that's mistaken for something happening out of the blue. But out of the blue usually means out of the things that most people were not paying attention to, out of the slow work done by somebody or many somebodies out of the limelight for months or years or decades. [Read More]
Teaching Class Solidarity
By Caroline Preston, The Nation [March 8, 2018]
---- The young woman in the black sweatshirt was indignant. Across the negotiating table, a stern, occasionally sharp-tongued adversary was refusing to budge—first on wages and then on the organization's social-media policy. "We're a hospital," the woman said with marked intensity. "Don't you agree that our first responsibility is to our patients? … The speakers weren't impassioned union representatives or managers concerned with the bottom line. They were juniors at Niles West High, an economically diverse school in the Chicago suburbs serving approximately 2,500 students. The collective-bargaining simulation was organized by the DePaul University Labor Education Center, which runs the exercise in 10 high schools to introduce students to economic justice and the negotiating power of unions. For most of the teenagers, it was the first time they were exposed to what unions do. [Read More]
The Left and East Ghouta
---- While reports filter out of East Ghouta about suffering on a massive scale reminiscent of the siege of Leningrad in 1941, some on the left support Assad's war crimes because they see them as necessary for winning the war on terror just as Germans supported the war on Bolshevism back then. The revolutionary struggle in Syria certainly had goals that seem quite modest in comparison with the July 26th Movement in Cuba or any other leftist cause I have been involved with over the past half-century. But in order to overthrow capitalism, you need the freedom to organize the workers movement. That is why Marx and Lenin always stressed the need to oppose absolutism whether it took the guise of the Junkers monarchy or Czarism. That the left has lost track of such an elementary need is a terrible deficit. To build a worldwide revolutionary movement that can abolish class rule once and for all, we have to support the right of people to speak freely and to form political parties without fear of being tortured or killed. It is impossible to say how events will unfold in the Middle East and North Africa over the next 25 years or so but if we can't defend basic liberties such as the kind the Arab Spring demanded, we are useless. [Read More]
Dennis Peron: Anti-War Activist
[FB – Fred Gardner started the GI coffee house movement 50+ years ago. More recently, he has been a leader in California in efforts to legalize medical marijuana, now successfully accomplished.]
---- Dennis Peron died in January. On Sunday March 11 there's going to be a memorial for him at Café Flor in the Castro. Everybody knows that Dennis was an indispensable leader in the medical marijuana movement and in the fight for gay rights. Not everybody knows about his role in the peace movement. After Dennis had been shot in the thigh by a San Francisco narc, he was laid up with his leg in traction at St. Vincent"s hospital, which was up the hill from the Castro, near Buena Vista Park. A beautiful building, long ago converted to condos. This was 40 years ago. I sat at his bedside and took down his story. [Read More]
WAR & PEACE
The New Cold War Is Here—and Now Three Major Powers Are Involved
By Michael T. Klare, The Nation [March 8, 2018]
---- First, the release of the Trump administration's Nuclear Posture Review, a blueprint for an expanded nuclear arsenal and a more permissive policy regarding nuclear-weapons use. Second, the decision by Chinese officials to eliminate term limits for the country's president, paving the way for Xi Jinping to remain in office after his next five-year term ends in 2023. And third, Russian President Vladimir Putin's state-of-the-nation address on March 1, in which he announced the development of a new family of nuclear weapons intended to foil US antimissile systems and strike the heart of America. … Taken together, these three events have done much to create an international environment of suspicion, hostility, and bellicosity, not unlike the nightmarish climate of the early Cold War. As was true back then, assertions by one side regarding weapons development by the other are being used to justify yet more new weapons, inevitably sparking reciprocal action in a perpetual arms race. As in that era, moreover, military measures are being accompanied by a slide toward authoritarianism and suppression of dissident views. But this era is different because there are three, rather than two, major powers involved, increasing the space for miscalculation, and because the world contains more potential flash points than ever before, including some involving other nuclear-armed states, such as India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. [Read More]
The Illusion of War Without Casualties
---- In the past 16 years, the US has invaded, occupied and dropped 200,000 bombs and missiles on seven countries, but it has lost only 6,939 American troops killed and 50,000 wounded in these wars. To put this in the context of US military history, 58,000 US troops were killed in Vietnam, 54,000 in Korea, 405,000 in the Second World War and 116,000 in the First World War. But low US casualties do not mean that our current wars are less violent than previous wars. Our post-2001 wars have probably killed between 2 and 5 million people. The use of massive aerial and artillery bombardment has reduced cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, Sirte, Kobane, Mosul and Raqqa to rubble, and our wars have plunged entire societies into endless violence and chaos. But by bombing and firing from a distance with very powerful weapons, the US has wreaked all this slaughter and destruction at an extraordinary low rate of US casualties. The US's technological war-making has not reduced the violence and horror of war, but it has "externalized" it, at least temporarily. But do these low casualty rates represent a kind of "new normal" that the US can replicate whenever it attacks or invades other countries? Can it keep waging war around the world and remain so uniquely immune from the horrors it unleashes on others? Or are the low US casualty rates in these wars against relatively weak military forces and lightly armed resistance fighters giving Americans a false picture of war, one that is enthusiastically embellished by Hollywood and the corporate media? [Read More]
Also interesting useful on the Empire's wars – Daniel Lazare, "The National Endowment for (Meddling in) Democracy," Consortium News [March 8, 2018] [Link]; and Willilam D,. Hartung, "The Military-Industrial Complex Is on Corporate Welfare," The Nation [February 28, 2018] [Link].
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
20,000 Scientists are Deeply Alarmed about Humanity and So Should You Be
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [March 9, 2018]
---- The "Letter Warning Humanity" from scientists has now been signed by over 20,000 scientists, as The Independent notes. The reason for this alarm is given in these charts:. … They show alarmingly accelerating carbon dioxide emissions (we were up worldwide again last year), declining access to fresh water, and endangered species and other dangers facing the globe. Only a redesign of our energy grid and the way we do industrialized society, including giving up most use of plastics and many pesticides and burning fossil fuels, can avert the catastrophes they describe. So far, no sign they are being taken seriously. [Read More]
Six Major Findings From the U.S. Federal Climate Science Special Report That Trump Will Probably Deny
By Mary Mazzoni, Alternet [March 1, 2018]
---- Climate change took center stage as business leaders and heads of state poured into Davos, Switzerland, recently for the World Economic Forum. The WEF Global Risks report, launched each year in advance of the Forum, cited "extreme weather events," "natural disasters," and "failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation" as the most dangerous challenges facing the global community. So it came as no surprise when world leaders used the event to sound the climate alarm yet again. … Trump's laissez-faire approach to climate change is already taking a significant toll on U.S. policy. After stacking his administration with unapologetic climate deniers, Trump moved to slash environmental regulations, cut funding for the EPA and pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. The Pentagon's National Defense Strategy, made public in January, made no mention of climate change for the first time since 2008. This stubborn stance not only defies that of world leaders and the majority of American voters, but also flies in the face of the federal government's own scientists. Late last year, 13 federal agencies released an exhaustive report detailing how climate change impacts the United States—and vice-versa. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Bigoted Election Campaigns, Not Terror Attacks, Drive Anti-Muslim Activity
By Murtaza Hussain and Maryam Saleh, The Intercept [
---- An upsurge in anti-Muslim activities across the United States in recent years has tracked closely with changes in the political cycle, according to data released in a new report by the New America Foundation. The report, "Anti-Muslim Activities in the United States: Violence, Threats, and Discrimination at the Local Level," tracks more than 650 separate anti-Muslim incidents across the country since 2012. These incidents include public denunciations of Islam and Muslims by elected officials, proposed laws targeting Muslim religious practice, mosque vandalism, and acts of violence. According to the data, these incidents have markedly increased in recent years, with public attitudes toward Islam and Muslims darkening significantly. But it's not clear that these attitudes are being driven solely by acts of terror committed by Muslim terrorism. … "That means that Islamophobia is a manufactured phenomenon," Mogahed said last year. "It is not an organic regrettable outcome of bad Muslims doing bad things. It is something that is being deliberately created in the public, and there's research that proves that there is an entire industry dedicated to manufacturing fear." [Read More]
It's Time to Abolish ICE
By Sean McElwee, The Nation [March 10, 2018]
---- The idea of defunding ICE has gained traction among immigrant-rights groups horrified by the speed at which, under President Donald Trump, the agency has ramped up an already brutal deportation process. Mary Small, policy director at Detention Watch Network, said, "Responsible policymakers need to be honest about the fact that the core of the agency is broken." Her group led the charge to defund ICE with its #DefundHate campaign last year. Groups like Indivisible Project and the Center for Popular Democracy have also called for defunding ICE. Brand New Congress, a progressive PAC, has the proposal in its immigration platform. "ICE is terrorizing American communities right now," said Angel Padilla, policy director of the Indivisible Project. "They're going into schools, entering hospitals, conducting massive raids, and separating children from parents every day. We are funding those activities, and we need to use all the leverage we have to stop it." Though ICE abolition is spreading on the left, it quickly meets extreme skepticism elsewhere. In part, this is because the mainstream political discourse has a huge blind spot for the agency's increasingly brutal policies. While elites have generally become concerned with rising authoritarianism, they have mainly ignored the purges ICE is conducting in immigrant communities. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
"Rise and Kill First" Explores the Corrupting Effects of Israel's Assassination Program
By Charles Glass, The Intercept [
---- As Ronen Bergman makes clear in his penetrating exposé of Israel's mostly secret assassination program, "Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations," the agents who Israel sent out to murder its enemies were never very funny. Israel is a rarity among nations: Rather than confine its assassins to the shadows, it promotes them to prime minister. Bergman's history records extra-judicial, face-to-face murders by Menachem Begin, Yitzak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Barak, all of whom rose to head the Israeli government. This meticulously researched book, written over seven and a half years, exposes a state apparatus that blurs distinctions between intelligence-gathering and operations, soldiers and assassins, politicians and killers, yet claims more triumphs than defeats. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Why Vietnam Still Matters: In Search of Its Bright Shining Lie
[FB – On the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive and much more in Vietnam, Matthew Stevenson is visiting war sites, biking from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. This is his third report for Counterpunch. I think these essays are interesting and thought-provoking. Check 'em out!]
---- If the Americans had won the war in Vietnam, this landscape would be recalled in history in the same context as Antietam Creek. But because the U.S. was driven out of Vietnam, Kontum is as forgotten as the War of Jenkins' Ear. In these now barren hills (a number have never recovered from being hit by defoliants), the American army constructed a number of fire-support bases, both to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail as it worked its way south toward Saigon, and to assist infantry operations that were launched in the direction of enemy formations that also poured across the nearby borders with Laos and Cambodia. The most distinctive hillside on the drive, just north of Kontum, had the nickname "Rocket Ridge" The Americans turned it into a medieval fortress that—in the numerous attacks against Dak To and Kontum—the North Vietnamese often tried to storm, as if scaling the walls of a medieval castle. … Aside from a few North Vietnamese memorials, the battlefields have been lost in time. Even the NVA monuments have a forlorn quality. Many were locked behind rusting fences and covered with fallen leaves. Needless to say, there are no American markers, and the only South Vietnamese memorial, by the side of a busy road, implies that its war dead were scattered to the wind—a sacrilege in the local culture. [Read More]
Mỹ Lai Amnesia Fifty Years On
---- When I ask a class of college students how many have heard of Mỹ Lai, only a few if any raise their hands, tentatively. Even they are unsure what it was, or where, or when, or who was involved. Why have we forgotten the nadir of the Vietnam War? Is our collective amnesia accidental or willful? March 16 marks the 50th anniversary of the date that does not live in infamy. Does it for any Americans? In 1968, American soldiers slaughtered animals, raped villagers, and murdered 109 "Oriental human beings" in Mỹ Lai. That was the number cited in a court-martial 18 months later. The memorial there today, however, lists 504 men, women, and children. Lieutenant Calley was found guilty of murdering "not less than 22 victims" and sentenced to life in prison. Four of five Americans disagreed with that verdict. His sentence was reduced to 20 years, then to 10. He was released after 42 months of house arrest. His captain was found not guilty. No one else faced court-martial. [Read More]
