Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 4, 2019
Hello All – On matters of war and peace, the American political system is now gridlocked by what might be called "Russo-phobia" – an unreasonable hatred of Russia and its elected leader, Vladimir Putin. Even to write such a sentence risks raising cries of "treason" and suffering exclusion from respectable political discourse. But Russo-phobia so threatens the world with the possibility of nuclear war, and so degrades our political thinking, that we need to take this bull by the horns and discuss it.
Russo-phobia preceded and in some ways contributed to what we now call Russia-gate – the assertion that Russia significantly interfered with our 2016 election and, at its must extreme, that President Trump is an active agent of the Russian state, manipulated by his controller, Vladimir Putin. Such claims are now mainstream and thus led to characterizations of Russian interference in our last presidential election as "another Pearl Harbor." For many in the political and media elite, we are already at war with Russia. Thus contested terrains in Syria, in Ukraine, or in Venezuela, or in disarmament negotiations, cannot be bridged by Cold-War measures of détente, but are part of a new almost-Hot War.
We forget that Russo-phobia was/is not simply a rebranding of anti-Communism after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. For a half-decade of so the United States was enamored with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, with his perestroika and glasnost; and then in the 1990s President Clinton was a big fan of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, going so far as to "meddle" in the 1996 Russian presidential election to ensure Yeltsin's re-election. But in those same years the Russian populace was devastated by so-called Market Reforms, in part engineered by US economists and multinational corporations. Thus the USA that was greatly admired in Russia during the Gorbachev years lost its luster during the years of Clinton's disgraceful manipulation of the Yeltsin presidency.
We also forget that Russia was on the receiving end of some double-crosses and diplomatic bullying by the USA, as when (contrary to Bush Sr.'s promises to Gorbachev), formerly Soviet-bloc countries in Eastern Europe were absorbed into NATO, pushing the USA military alliance up to Russia's borders. And in 1999-2000 came NATO's attack on Russian ally Serbia. And in 2008 came what the Russians regarded as a US-instigated Russian war with Georgia. And in 2011 came what the Russians regarded as a double-cross when the USA used a Security Council Resolution to overthrow (and murder) of Libya's Kaddafi. And – most importantly – in 2013-14 came the US-supported coup in the Ukraine, which was part of a larger effort to entice Ukraine away from the Russians and into the EU and NATO. In short, in the quarter century following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, rather than working for sustained détente between the world's two main nuclear powers, Presidents Clinton, Bush, Jr., and Obama pursued a policy of global dominance that included many steps that the Russians saw as encircling and threatening them..
Since the year 2000, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, Russia has strongly opposed what they see as this aggression by successive US presidents. And over the last two decades, the US political and media establishment has come to demonize President Putin and to regard 21st-century Russia as an aggressive power, making unreasonable demands and – in the 2016 presidential election – directly intervening into US politics. No matter that Russian "interference" in our politics pales beside that of Israel, nor that – as argued in many previous newsletters – the evidence of Russian "meddling" is extremely thin. The practical outcome is that today we are entrapped in a political/media system in which there are almost no limits to the risky courses of "standing up to Russia" that can be advocated by the political mainstream, nor are there any steps that peace advocates can advocate without running the danger of being labeled "tools of Putin."
I don't see this changing in the near future. We have created for ourselves what some political scientists call a "social imaginary" – a belief system that need not be sustained by continuous reference to facts or history, but exists as wallpaper exists – it is simply there. By its nature, it is not discussable and not discussed. But unless and until Russo-phobia is transformed into an understanding that Russia is a nuclear weapons state and a state mindful of its own security needs, we will remain on a reckless ride into an insecure future. Work for Peace.
News Notes
Westchester's community of those working for a sustainable future came together last week to honor Gary Shaw, who died on May 24th at the age of 70. An obituary that honors him for his environmental work and for his gentle kindness towards all in the world can be read here.
June 1st marked the birthday of Vietnam Veterans against the War, founded in 1967. They have made powerful contributions to the fight for peace, not only during the Vietnam war, but also in the many wars that followed. Read about them here.
We take MapQuest and similar programs for granted; we can go anywhere from anywhere. Well, not quite. Check out this interesting article, "Palestinian cities are ghost towns between settlements, on Google Maps" [Link].
Trump's in London and the baby Trump balloon is back! (For the New York Times version, go here.)
We're at the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, which marked a turning point in gay liberation history. How we remember this event is interesting. Check out "The best US exhibitions celebrating Stonewall at 50" [Link].
We are also at the 52nd anniversary of Israel's "Six-Day War" (1967), which led to the capture/conquering of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan, and East Jerusalem. This is celebrated annually as Jerusalem Day, often a day of nationalist assertion by Israelis. And so it was again this year. See (Video) "Israeli forces storm al-Aqsa on Jerusalem Day," from Middle East Eye [June 2, 2019] [Link].
Finally, I encourage everyone to get to know Action Corps NYC. They agitate for progressive action on the environment and also against the war in Yemen. In this they are the only group I know of with this singular antiwar focus. Yesterday and today Action Corps NYC was among the several sponsors of an excellent full-page advertisement in the Journal News calling on Congressman Eliot Engel to "do all you can" to stop the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia that will be used to kill more thousands of people in Yemen. Please check them out and, if so moved, sign up to receive their important information on Yemen.
Election Integrity
The CFOW Election Integrity team invites us to join them in Albany on Thursday, June 6th, for a rally organized by Smart Elections. The rally will demand that the NY State Board of Election Commissioners say YES to hand-marked paper ballots and secure, well-maintained ballot-marking devices for voters with disabilities; and NO to risky "hybrid" voting machines, NO to touch-screen voting machines, and NO to counting votes with barcodes. The rally will take place at the NY State Board of Elections meeting at 40 North Pearl St. in Albany at 11 AM. For more information and to RSVP, go here..
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Ongoing – Weather permitting, the CFOW stalwarts gather every Saturday from 12 to 1 PM at the VFW Plaza in Hastings (Warburton and Spring St.) to protest war and other evils. Please join us!
Wednesday, June 5th – Food & Water Watch and other organizations will rally at the office of Senate leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, 28 Wells St., Building #3 (behind the Riverfront library) at 3 PM to demand that she take more aggressive leadership on fossil fuels and combating the climate crisis. For more information and to RSVP, go here.
Thursday, June 6th – Rally at the NY State Board of Elections in Albany. For info, go here and see the note above in "Election Integrity."
Thursday, July 4th – Mark your calendars for the more-or-less annual CFOW 4th of July Picnic. Details coming soon.
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 immigration policies are often targeted, depending on current events. We (usually) 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. And if you would like to support our work by making a contribution, 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. As always, we have some excellent "Featured Essays," I also highly recommend the set of articles on the danger of war against Iran, and two articles on "Our History" – the story of the pre-Roe abortion-providing organization "Jane," and an interesting review of an interesting-sounding book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Read on!
Rewards!
As always, the Newsletter's Rewards are an almost relaxing stopping place where stalwart readers can catch their breath before diving into the deeper stuff. First up this week is the historic one-time re-do of Norman Lear's "All in the Family" and "The Jeffersons," with a new cast and the surprisingly (or not) old/current issues. Check it out here. And for something completely different, linked here is the fabulous 1953 film "Salt of the Earth." Made by a blacklisted Hollywood director, producer, etc., the film tells the story of Mexican-American mineworkers on strike, with a mostly amateur cast and a strong feminist perspective. (For some of the back story, go here.) One of America's great, inspiring films. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
American History and the 2020 Election
---- Whatever distractions candidates promote to win voters, some underlying issues will wield their influence on 2020 election outcomes in any case. The biggest of these are the historically accumulated anger and betrayal felt by millions of working class Americans. Since the 1970s, their relative position within income and wealth distributions has declined. Real wages stagnated while workers' rising productivity made ever more profits for employers, widening inequality. That alone depressed the class, but US society is structured to add many political, cultural, and social demotions onto those whose relative economic position declines. …The history summarized above holds lessons for 2020. A return to the past in Democratic Party rhetoric, symbolism, and personalities (such as Biden) is a recipe to repeat political mistakes and losses since 2016. … Another lesson is that Sanders is the Democrats' best hope unless and until other plausible candidates take clear, strong positions to Sanders' left. [Read More] Also interesting/useful on the divisions among the Democrats is (Video) "Democratic Divide: Ryan Grim on the New Progressives in the Party at Odds with the Establishment," from Democracy Now! [June 4, 2019]
Over a Year on, Why Haven't the Gaza Protests Succeeded?
By Colter Louwerse, LobeLog [May 31, 2019]
---- It is no modest feat that Gaza's Great March of Return and the End of the Blockade now arguably claims the mantle of being the longest ongoing mass protest movement on the planet. On every Friday for over a year, tens of thousands of men, women, and children have desperately sought to draw international attention to their plight by approaching Gaza's Israeli-controlled perimeter fence en-masse. The people of Gaza have undertaken this initiative at monumental personal cost. Israel's response has been as incontrovertibly murderous as the protests are largely nonviolent. Human rights organizations have chronicled the tens of thousands of injuries inflicted by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) live fire, while a United Nations fact-finding mission of all 189 fatalities in 2018 concluded that—with the "possible exception" of two isolated cases—"the use of live ammunition by Israeli security forces against demonstrators was unlawful". … Yet despite Gaza's great venture, a year has passed and neither of movement's two goals—to lift the illegal Israeli blockade and to actualize the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes inside of Israel proper—has been accomplished. Impressive as the demonstrations are, the uncomfortable question lingers: Why haven't they succeeded? [Read More]
Russiagate Trumps Environmental Catastrophe for the Dismal Democrats
By Paul Street, Counterpunch [May 31, 2019]
---- If historians still exist years from now, some of them will be struck by how Donald Trump's Democratic Party critics and their media allies obsessed over the 45th United States President's real and alleged connections to Russia while saying comparatively little about his enactment of a soulless anti-environmental agenda that accelerated humanity's march towards extinction in service to the United States' own homegrown corporate polluters. The reigning national media politics culture has been mired in the Russia-Gate drama for the last two-plus years. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been all too quietly speeding up the end of history with a broad sweep of horrific ecological policies and practices…. In the absence of a dramatic transformation to renewable energy and sustainable practices (something more "radical" than the good starting point of a Green New Deal), we are now speeding towards a not-so historically distant termination point for the planet's basic life-support systems. …There's a lot to hate about the vile, creeping fascist Trump administration, of course, but there's a strong case to be made that the current White House's worst characteristic is its determination to increase the rate at which the United States and the global capitalist order turn the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. [Read More]
30th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square
Surviving Tiananmen: The Price of Dissent in China
By Rowena He, The Nation [June 4, 2019]
---- The Tiananmen Movement remains a taboo topic in China, banned from academic and popular realms. Even the actual number of the dead and wounded remains unknown. In the immediate aftermath, after mass arrests and purges throughout the country, the CCP constructed a narrative portraying the Tiananmen Movement as a Western conspiracy to weaken and divide China. Reporting to the National People's Congress on June 30, 1989, Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong asserted that the movement was "planned, organized, and premeditated" by those who "unite with all hostile forces overseas and in foreign countries to launch a battle against us to the last." The official justification for the clampdown was that the students were "counterrevolutionaries" who threatened the country's stability and prosperity. Yet, in 1989, they were hoping the regime would transform itself. They were not seeking regime change, just asking the CCP to live up to its ideals. Their actions were rooted in the Chinese tradition of Confucian dissent—helping the rulers to improve, but not seeking to overthrow them. [Read More]
For some background/history on Tiananmen in 1989 - "The New Tiananmen Papers: Inside the Secret Meeting That Changed China," b [Link]; and "China's 'Black Week-end'" by Ian Johnson, New York Review of Books [June 27, 2019 issue] [A review of The Last Secret: The Final Documents from the June Fourth Crackdown] [Link]
WAR AGAINST IRAN?
Is Trump Yet Another U.S. President Provoking a War?
By Robin Wright, The New Yorker [May 13, 2019]
---- Today, the question in Washington—and surely in Tehran, too—is whether President Trump is making moves that will provoke, instigate, or inadvertently drag the United States into a war with Iran. Trump's threats began twelve days after he took office, in 2017, when his national-security adviser at the time, Michael Flynn, declared, in the White House press room, "As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice." Flynn, a former three-star general, was fired several weeks later and subsequently indicted for lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russia. The Administration's campaign against Iran, though, has steadily escalated, particularly in the past two weeks. [Read More]
American Militarism, Its Agents, and Its Next Target: Iran
By Shaahed Pooyandeh and Setareh Shohadaei, LobeLog [May 30, 2019]
---- A dangerous, insidious public relations campaign has begun to prepare Western public opinion for economic and military intervention in Iran. This campaign has already brought the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, a Patriot missile defense battery, and a bomber task force to the Persian Gulf. The Pentagon just announced the deployment of 1,500 American troops, along with drones and fighter jets, to the Middle East. The U.S. President has declared an emergency over Iran—a rarely used provision that allows the president to bypass congressional review—to sell over $8 billion worth of weapons and military equipment to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan, for defense against Iran's so-called "threat." Several of these escalations took place after Iran removed any perceived threats by unloading missiles from the small boats its military operates in the Persian Gulf…. This is the path upon which we now tread towards Iran. [Read More]
What About the "Evidence"? – "Pentagon's Phony Iran 'Evidence': New Rationale for US Intervention?" bJune 4, 2019] [Link]; "Israel's Mossad Behind Allegations Iran Sabotaged Oil Tankers," b[Link]; "New York Times Supports False Trump Claims About An "Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program" That Does Not Exist," from Moon of Alabama [May 27, 2019] [Link]; and "How Mainstream U.S. Media Is Failing Us On Trump And Bolton's March To War With Iran," by Ben Armbruster, LobeLog [May 31, 2019] [Link].
HUMAN-CAUSED CLIMATE CHAOS
Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement on Climate Justice, the Green New Deal, and Revolution
By Wen Stephenson, The Nation [June 4, 2019]
---- For 40 years, Democrats have been saying that they understand the science—and they've been in large part kicking the can down the road for the last few decades. When we were starting Sunrise, we saw how it took Obama five years to put any kind of powerful climate plan forward, and it took a ton of movement energy to make that happen. It took the Keystone XL fight, it took divestment taking off, reaching a sort of fever pitch, with all the civil disobedience and marches and all of that. The climate movement was effervescing in a new way, and when push came to shove, that was the thing that caused Obama to do a lot of things. And so for us, a great example is the confrontation that the young people had with Dianne Feinstein [in February], and her saying, "I've been doing this for 30 years, I've got it." And we're looking around, saying, "We have nothing. No, you don't. So we're going to push you to step up, too, because we believe that you actually care about this issue and want to do something about it." [Read the Interview]
Also useful/illuminating on the fight against climate disaster – "Global Rebellion to Save Our Planet," b [Link]; and "Trump administration's attack on climate science goes full-Orwell," by John Mecklin, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [May 28, 2019] [Link]
KILLING JULIAN ASSANGE
(Video) U.N. Special Rapporteur Calls for Julian Assange to Be Freed, Citing "Psychological Torture"
From Democracy Now! [May 31, 2019]
---- The United Nations special rapporteur on torture is warning that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is suffering from the effects of "psychological torture" due to his ongoing detention and threats of possible extradition to the United States. The U.N. expert, Nils Melzer, also warned that Assange would likely face a "politicized show trial" if he were to be extradited to the United States. Melzer writes, "In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution, I have never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual for such a long time." [See the Program]
The attack on Assange is an attack on investigative journalism - "Assange indictment marks alarming new stage in US war on leaks," from the Committee to Protect Journalists [May 24, 2019] [Link]; and "Trump's Charges Against Julian Assange Would Effectively Criminalize Investigative Journalism," by Bruce Shapiro, The Nation [May 31, 2019] [Link].
WHY NOT IMPEACHMENT?
(Video) Why All the Arguments Against Impeachment are BS
With Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept [10 minutes] [See the Program]
Democratic Voters Want Impeachment. The House Dawdles.
By Michelle Goldberg, New York Times [June 3, 2019]
---- According to a CNN poll conducted last week, 76 percent of Democrats favor impeachment. (The poll did not ask about simply beginning an impeachment investigation, which is what some House Democrats are calling for.) Impeachment is favored by 41 percent of voters overall, not a majority, but far more than supported impeachment at the beginning of the Watergate hearings. It's no wonder so many Democrats want their representatives to take a more aggressive approach to the president. It has now been five months since the party took control of the House of Representatives, a month and a half since the redacted report by the special counsel Robert Mueller was released, and almost a week since Mueller stood before the nation and all but asked Congress to hold a lawless president accountable. Yet Democrats have largely failed to even begin presenting a cohesive case to the public about Trump's corruption and criminality. [Read More] For more, read "Robert Mueller Just Told Congress to Do Its Damn Job," by Joan Walsh, The Nation [May 29, 2019] [Link].
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Manifest Destinies: The tangled history of American and Israeli exceptionalism.
By Rashid Khalidi, The Nation [June 3, 2019]
---- American publishing industry does not skimp when it comes to Israel. It has provided us with bookshelves groaning with hagiographies of generations of Israeli leaders, acres of glossy coffee-table books lauding the Israeli miracle in the desert, and a plethora of studies of Israel and its relations with the world. … Even the best of these studies often ignore the cultural, intellectual, religious, and emotional forces that have also played a role in shaping Israeli-US relations since the end of World War II. Amy Kaplan's Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance helps fill that void. A tour de force of both history and cultural studies, it is the first work to describe, fully and rigorously, America's relationship with Israel in terms of the profound cultural ties that bind the two countries so closely together and to examine their evolving relationship over several generations. The title of Kaplan's book is extremely telling: This is a story of how a national and colonial settler project in a distant and seemingly exotic part of the world was normalized and Americanized to the point that, in the American imagination, Israelis are seen as close kin. In a certain sense, for many Americans, Israel is a part of us. [Read More]
(Video) Denied Entry to US, Palestinian Diplomat Hanan Ashrawi on US "Peace Plan" & Israeli Political Crisis
From Democracy Now! [May 30, 2019]
---- Israel will hold new elections after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a coalition government in six weeks of negotiations following the April 9 election. This marks the first time in Israeli history a prime minister-designate has failed to form a coalition government. The news comes as the United States is continuing to promote a controversial Middle East peace plan drawn up by President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is in Israel today along with special envoy Jason Greenblatt. But the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the political crisis in Israel could kill the U.S. plan, which will be partially unveiled at a conference in Bahrain next month. Palestinian officials have vowed to boycott the conference and dismissed any attempts to tackle peace talks in the region without addressing human rights and the Israeli occupation. We speak with longtime Palestinian diplomat Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's executive committee. The United States recently denied Ashrawi a visa to enter the country. [See the Program]
For more on Israel's election politics – "(Video) Netanyahu Government Falls – Will New Elections Change Anything?" from Real News [May 30, 2019] [Link] – [20 minutes]; "More Israeli Elections: What Happens Now?" by Mitchell Plitnick, LobeLog [May 30, 2019] [Link]; and "The right wing in Israel is in a deep crisis," by Meron Rapoport, +972 Magazine [June 2, 2019] [Link]
OUR HISTORY
How Capitalism Puts a Price on Everything
---- Your first reaction to a book titled A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things that consists of 312 pages is to wonder if it is the first in a series of volumes since a single volume hardly seems capable of packing in everything from Ancient Egypt to the 2007 financial crisis. Yet, oddly enough, it does an excellent job by using a singular perspective, namely how "cheapness" has become the sine qua non for class society's dubious advances over millennia. … As a paradigm of the co-dependency between ecological despoliation and the capitalist production of cheap commodities, Patel and Moore refer to the extraordinary history of the island of Madeira throughout the book. Known mostly today as a fortified wine that originated there, it was also a place where sugar was first produced at the expense of everything else on the island—including human beings and nature. … As for the seven cheap things mentioned in the title, they consist of the raw material of class society from time immemorial: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. A major asset of "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" is being able to show the connection between the ancient world and our world today in terms of how cheap things are produced and why. [Read More]
(Video) Ask for Jane: Meet the Underground Feminist Group That Provided Abortions Before Roe v. Wade
From Democracy Now! [May 31, 2019]
---- "Ask for Jane." Those were the magic words that provided thousands of women access to safe abortions before the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 that guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion. With abortion services outlawed in most of the country, women often had to risk their own lives in order to terminate pregnancy. So, in 1969, a group of women in Chicago decided to take matters into their own hands and set up a hotline, offering counseling and eventually providing abortion services themselves. To reach the underground feminist abortion service, all you had to do was call a phone number and ask for Jane. We speak with two former members of Jane: Laura Kaplan and Alice Fox. Laura Kaplan is the author of "The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service." [See the Program]
