Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
August 12, 2019
Hello All – Perhaps only the late Toni Morrison could do justice to the racially saturated events of the past ten days. As if pulled from the darkest corners of the American psyche, last weekend President Trump held a baby-survivor of the El Paso massacre (a grinning photo-op) while, hundreds of miles away, his ICE storm troopers were arresting more than 800 Latinos and others working at poultry factories in Mississippi. The horror of this latter event was expressed eloquently by an 11-year-old girl, the daughter of an arrested worker.
The connecting tissue between the massacre in El Paso and the arrests in Mississippi ("planned for more than a year") lies in the white nationalism espoused by the El Paso shooter and the anti-immigrant rhetoric of President Trump and much of the rightwing establishment. The El Paso shooter wrote a substantial essay that attempted to justify his murder of dozens of Mexicans by using the "Great Replacement" theory, a political program developed in Europe that responded to the wave of war- and climate-refugees seeking shelter from the chaos of North Africa and the Middle East a decade ago. As the front page of today's New York Times illustrated extensively, the belief that "white Europeans" are threatened by waves of darker-skinned people entering their heimat is shared not only by the El Paso shooter, but also by President Trump, much of the Republican elite, and the fantasy worlds of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, et al.
The social imaginary that is reflected in the Great Replacement framework is by no means that of a tiny minority. We see it in the politics of several Eastern European countries, in Italy, and elsewhere. In these cases the "white people" are playing defense. In another guise, such as in California towards the Japanese in 1941, or in Israel towards Palestinians since 1948, or in India towards Kashmir bubbling over last week, the theory justifies offense, not just defense, claiming "white" or ethnic or religious/entitlement supremacy to seize the land and goods of a supposedly inferior people. These attitudes were the lubricants of imperialism for two centuries or more; now they are being turned on their heads to justify a war against those who are displaced from their traditional lands by war and climate change and seek refuge in el norte.
As the roots of white nationalism are deep in the United States, and the disruption of traditional communities in the Global South by war and the climate crisis are certain to continue, what the United States and Europe perceive as an "immigration crisis" is certain to continue for a long time. To fight the fascism and political cruelty emerging in the Age of Trump, we will need to pay attention to the deeper racism and imperialism that underlie our crisis.
News Notes
On Saturday, hundreds of New Yorkers protested the repression of refugees and asylum seekers on our southern border. More than 100 people were arrested, including CFOW's Andy Ryan. For a good video, showing the well-organized and spirited demonstration, go here.
For two months, people in Hong Kong have protested their government's proposed legislation that would allow extradition of some alleged criminals to mainland China; and more recently the protests have been broadened to include police brutality and other regime crimes. Today's Democracy Now! has an update on the weekend's protests, including the occupation of the airport. The Intercept framed their useful report around the protesters' apparent loss of fear of the police. The New York Times provided a useful video with helpful tips from Hong Kong on dealing with tear gas and other police tactics.
As the Democrats slowly move towards an impeachment investigation, many loose ends from the Mueller investigation remain, especially re: the question of the alleged primal crime, the Russian "hacking" of the DNC's computers and the publication of DNC strategy documents by WikiLeaks. Previous newsletters have linked a range of critiques; here's some critical analysis by Aaron Maté, "5 Big Holes in Mueller's Work."
The American Academy of Pediatrics has put out its first policy statement on "The Impact of Racism on Child and Adolescent Health." Not surprisingly, the impact begins in the womb and is a constant presence in growing up.
In recent weeks Russia/Moscow has seen large protest demonstrations for the first time in many years. Today's edition of Democracy Now! has an illuminating explanation and video. The New York Times also carried a good report on Saturday's demonstration of 50,000 people.' Good luck to the Concerned Families of Moscow!
Our Climate Fight-Back
By Iris Hiskey Arno
The push for an official DNC-sponsored Climate Debate continues. Eight state Democratic Party chairs have written a Resolution calling for a debate to focus on "Climate Change issues and solutions." The Resolution also states that if the DNC doesn't hold an officially sanctioned climate debate, all potential candidates should be free to participate in any and all such debates organized by other groups. This resolution will be voted on by the DNC in San Francisco in August. Meanwhile, CNN has announced it will hold a presidential town hall on climate change in NYC on September 4. (For more.)
Good news on the Hudson River Anchorages! A bill authored by Congressman Sean Patrick Mahoney has passed the House with bipartisan support and is headed to the Senate. This bill permanently bans
the anchoring of oil barges in the Hudson between Yonkers and Kingston and also states that any new oil barge storage on the Hudson River, wherever it is sited, requires 180 days notice to the Congress.
Off Fossil Fuels: No decision yet from the DEC on the Williams NESE fracked gas pipeline proposed to run across NY Harbor. This past week demonstrators gathered at Gov. Cuomo's Manhattan office to give him the message once more that we don't want or need this pipeline. Ongoing vigilance is needed to fight all new fossil fuel infrastructure projects like the Williams Pipeline and the Danskammer Power Plant proposed for the banks of the Hudson River in Newburgh. Calls to the governor on this topic are always needed—(518) 474-8390.
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Wednesday, August 14th – Voices of Resilience" – A protest against the cruelty directed at immigrants and refugee-seekers by our government. The call to protests says: "Our immigrant community lives moments of pain, fears, anguishes. Detentions, deportations and separation from families is increasingly cruel and inhuman. We cannot conform and remain silent. We cannot be indifferent to the pain of our brothers." We will gather at the White Plains Federal Court, 300 Quarropas St. in White Plains from 6:30 to 8 PM. For more information, go here.
Thursday, August 15th – The Sunrise Movement, WESPAC, and others will hold a rally at the Democratic Party headquarters in White Plains (200 Mamaroneck Ave. in White Plains), starting at 11 AM, to demand that the Democrats hold a presidential candidates' debate focused on our climate crisis. For more information, go here.
Monday, August 19th – SURJ ("Showing Up for Racial Justice") will hold its monthly meeting at the South Presbyterian Church, 343 Broadway in Dobbs Ferry, starting at 7 PM. The topic for the meeting will be "Identifying Our Roles in the Struggle for Migrant Justice." For more information, go here.
Thursday, September 5th – "Climate Emergency and the Green New Deal: Centering the Voices of Movements" is the title of a forum sponsored by Bronx Climate Justice North, from 7 to 9 PM. The panel discussion will feature several of the leaders in the NY-area fight for a Green New Deal. Location still to be determined; watch this space!
Sunday, September 8th – The next CFOW monthly meeting will be held at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs, from 7 to 9 PM. At these meetings we review our work & the events of the past month, and make plans going forward. 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 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. The next CFOW monthly meeting will be on Sunday, August 4th, at 7 PM, at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs. 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 some meditations on El Paso and guys and guns; some analysis of the crisis in Kashmir, the most dangerous spot on the planet; and an assessment of the new UN report on our climate crisis that highlights the global-warming consequences of the way we grow our food. And much more.
Rewards!
As stalwart readers know, the Newsletter's "Rewards" offer a brief moment of Deeper Cultural Appreciation before plunging into the nasty business of last week's news and analysis. For some reason, this week's "Rewards" are about endings and things not working out. But here they are: Leonard Cohen and "So Long Marianne"; Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard with "Pancho and Lefty"; and from Norah Jones, we have "Happy Pills." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Our Forever War: How a White Male Hegemony Clings to Power
By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian [UK] [August 8, 2019]
---- We were never not at war, but in recent years the cold civil war has heated up. The white men who expected unquestioned supremacy, by race and by gender, have launched a civil war against the rest of us, not least by allowing a huge number of high-capacity weapons of war to circulate throughout the country and supporting the NRA's propaganda project to further fortify a set of fears and identifications between freedom, guns, masculinity and white supremacy. The Republican party has in essence declared war against the United States – against the people, the environment, the constitution, the rule of law, against voting rights and free and fair elections. The threats are coming from inside the Capitol. After the El Paso massacre by a racist with an anti-immigrant manifesto, people are saying out loud that the president is culpable. But he is gasoline on a fire laid long before, an extreme version of old hates and problems. … The threat they pose to the old white Christian male hegemony is real. I think that in the long run the larger, more generous American "we" will win, but that does not make the carnage acceptable or map out how to dilute the divides, or whether the work to do so is going to be carried out entirely by the victims and not the perpetrators. The war is because the future USA will not look like the past USA, in who is here and who has rights and powers. The question is how we survive the transition – or rather how we shape it so that the vulnerable survive and thrive. [Read More] To pursue one of Solnit's threads, read "A Common Trait Among Mass Killers: Hatred Toward Women," by Julie Bosman, et al., New York Times [August 10, 2019] [Link].
Jobs, the Environment, and a Planet in Crisis: Unions vs. Environmentalists or Unions and Environmentalists?
By Aviva Chomsky, Tom Dispatch [August 7, 2019]
By Aviva Chomsky, Tom Dispatch [August 7, 2019]
---- When it comes to heat, extreme weather, wildfires, and melting glaciers, the planet is now in what the media increasingly refers to as "record" territory, as climate change's momentum outpaces predictions. In such a situation, in a country whose president and administration seem hell-bent on doing everything they conceivably can to make matters worse, the Green New Deal (GND) seems to offer at least a modest opening to a path forward. You know, the resolution introduced this February in the House of Representatives by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Edward Markey (D-MA). Unsurprisingly, the proposal has been roundly attacked by the right. But it's stirred up some controversy on the left as well. You might imagine that labor unions and environmental organizations would be wholeheartedly for a massive federal investment in good jobs and a just transition away from fossil fuels. But does organized labor actually support or oppose the Green New Deal? What about environmental organizations? If you're not even sure how to answer such questions, you're not alone. [Read More]
Criminalizing Compassion: The Unraveling of the Conspiracy Case Against No More Deaths Volunteer Scott Warren
By Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept [
---- For nearly a year and a half, Walters and his co-counsel, Anna Wright, had been working to put Warren in prison. The then-35-year-old geographer was arrested on January 17, 2018, along with two young migrants in the unincorporated community of Ajo, where Warren lives and works. He was accused of providing 23-year-old Kristian Perez-Villanueva, of El Salvador, and 20-year-old José Sacaria-Goday, of Honduras, with food, water, and a place to sleep over three days. … In the trial of U.S. v. Scott Daniel Warren, 12 jurors were presented with a set of events and told to come to a unanimous conclusion about its meaning. They would fail, but in doing so they became a mirror, reflecting a country deeply divided on the moral and legal questions raised by its border enforcement strategies. As much as the prosecution and defense worked to keep the jurors' eyes on the ball, there was simply no denying that virtually every element of the trial, right down to the way it ended, felt like a referendum not just on the current political moment, but on a multi-decade government policy of pushing migrants to the border's deadliest spaces. [Read More]
Toni Morrison, Revolutionary Political Thinker
By Angela Davis and Farah Jasmine Griffin, New York Times [August 7, 2019]
---- The tremendous literary achievement of our friend Toni Morrison has rightly been the focus of most of the commentary since her passing. However, her political vision — using language to combat the devastating effects of white supremacy, sexism and all dehumanizing ideologies — remains a profound and underexplored aspect of her identity and impact. Toni's aesthetic genius and her astute political sensibility are not antithetical. The work had to be "both political and beautiful," she said in the 1984 essay "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation." We should also remember her as a revolutionary political thinker, who used her gift to change the world. … Toni believed the writer had the duty to take a public stance. The novel was but one tool for doing this. Decades ago, she warned about the rising tide of authoritarianism in a series of astute and prescient lectures and essays. In 1995, she compelled us to heed the signs of people who "construct an internal enemy as both focus and diversion" and who "isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse." These, she warned, were the first steps toward "a final solution." These essays are as important today as they were when she wrote them. Perhaps even more so. [Read More] Among the many accolades to Morrison published this week I especially liked "Toni Morrison and 'the Human Project,'" by Robert Greene II, The Nation [August 7, 2019] [Link]. Among the essays and speeches by Morrison reposted this week, I suggest "Mourning for Whiteness," (November 2016), written after Trump's election, and her Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1993) on the "Radical Power of Language."
AFTER EL PASO
From El Paso to the War on Terror, the Dangers of Historical Amnesia
By Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept [
---- When historians look back on the Trump years, El Paso will stand out. It was the place where the government first tested its family separation policy and, more recently, it's been the focus of outrage and horror directed at ghastly conditions experienced by immigrants, including children, held in federal detention facilities. But El Paso is more than that. In the face of the Trump administration's border crackdown, the city has provided a model of compassion and empathy toward migrants. That those features made it a target for a white supremacist attack, one of the deadliest massacres of Mexicans the state has ever seen, is particularly devastating, Muñoz Martínez said. … There's been a war on terror at home for nearly two decades. It's been felt in Muslim communities infiltrated by undercover informants, and it's been expressed in the militarization of police departments across the country. Second, the existing war on terror shattered entire regions of the world, fueled the growth of the very groups it sought to eliminate, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, created black sites where Americans engaged in torture, resulted in the creation of a perpetually troubled constellation of agencies known as the Department of Homeland Security, spawned secret watchlists used overwhelmingly against Muslims, and paved the way for the president of the United States to execute an American citizen without trial. [Read More]
Hate, Murder and Perversity: El Paso 2019, Mississippi 1964
---- It was while reading an article about the massacre in El Paso that I noticed a link in the sidebar to a video clip of Trump at a rally in Florida in May. As I watched the clip of a smiling Trump and his exultant followers an image flashed through my mind. It was a photo taken in Mississippi in December of 1964. It is a photo of Deputy Cecil Price and Sheriff Lawrence Rainey at their arraignment after the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi on June 21.[4] Price and Rainey are grinning, Rainey while stuffing a wad of Redman tobacco in his mouth. Behind them are all their white male cohorts, also laughing and smiling. … There is a line that one can trace from Mississippi 1964 to Florida and El Paso 2019. There is a line from the grinning faces of Cecil Price and Lawrence Rainey to the grinning faces beneath the MAGA hats, the people who revel in the words "shoot 'em!" and "Send her back!" And to the buffoon who leads them on and wallows in the hate his malignant words bring forth. The perverse sexuality that is part of their hate cannot be missed. Trump is a pathological liar accused of rape by numerous credible women. Chaney the murdered black civil rights worker in Mississippi was also castrated. One wonders what Sade and Krafft-Ebbing would make of Trump and his yahoos. As I write, twenty-two dead in El Paso. [Read More]
We're Raising a Generation That Views Mass Murder as Normal
By Peter Dreier, The Nation [August 9, 2019]
---- On Tuesday night my 22-year-old daughter, Sarah, posted a short comment on her Facebook page: "I was at a show in Times Square tonight and we were held in the theatre on lockdown because there was talk of a potential shooter. Turns out it was a motorcycle that backfired and led people to thinking they were gun shots. With everything going on in this country of course we all assumed the worst." … Around the world, young people confront war, hunger, displacement, rape, and other traumatizing experiences. But the impact of gun violence is uniquely devastating. The victims of America's plague of gun violence include not only the dead and injured and their families and friends but also the rest of society. The collateral damage is the prospect of an entire generation living with the fear that anyone can be the target of random violence. We have normalized massive child trauma because we have allowed racists and psychopaths to easily obtain guns, including military-style assault weapons. [Read More] For more about guns and gun control, read "It's Time to Repeal—and Replace—the Second Amendment," by Elie Mystal, The Nation [August 7, 2019] [Link]; "It's Too Late to Ban Assault Weapons," by [Link]; and "Epidemic: Firearms are the Second Leading Cause of Death for US Children and Teens," by Marc Zimmerman, et al., The Conversation [August 7, 2019] [Link].
WAR & PEACE
Long After Hiroshima
---- How do we honor victims? We can remember them and appreciate who they were. But there were too many of them, and too many unknown to us. So, we can remember a sample of them, examples of them. And we can honor the living survivors, get to know and appreciate them while they are still alive. We can remember the horrific way in which those killed were victimized, in hopes of manipulating ourselves into doing something serious about it. We can remember those who were instantly vaporized, but also those half-burnt, partially melted, those eaten out from the inside by maggots, those who died slowly in excruciating pain and in the presence of their screaming children, those who died from drinking water they knew would kill them but who were driven to it by thirst. And then, when we are ready to take action, when we have built up a righteous anger, what is it we should do? …Perhaps we can imagine Shelley speaking to the nuclear victims, saying "Rise like Lions after slumber/ In unvanquishable number, /Shake your chains to earth like dew/ Which in sleep had fallen on you/ – Ye are many – they are few." [Read More]
Kashmir: (Nuclear) War Between India and Pakistan?
[FB – Kashmir, and the conflict over it between India and Pakistan, is probably the most dangerous spot on the planet now. People in Kashmir have protested India's rule for decades, and India's step-up of the occupation will presumably mean a step-up in resistance. India and Pakistan have gone to war before, including a war after each country had acquired nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, scientists realized that a nuclear war (presumably between the USSR and the USA) would create a "nuclear winter," which would block the sun and cause climate and agricultural devastation. More recently, scientists have realized that even a "small" nuclear war between e.g. India and Pakistan would have similar effects. For some analysis,, read "Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk?" from the Physicians for Social Responsibility [Link].
(Video) Kashmir Under Siege: India Moves to Annex Territory, Heightening Tensions with Nuclear Rival Pakistan
From Democracy Now! [August 8, 2019]
---- Tensions are escalating over the disputed region of Kashmir following India's revocation earlier this week of its special status, which granted the area some autonomy. Kashmir remains on lockdown, with internet and other communications blocked and leaders placed under house arrest. The Modi government has also deployed tens of thousands of additional troops in Kashmir. Pakistan announced Wednesday it would expel India's ambassador and stop its newly appointed envoy from assuming his position in New Delhi. It also announced it was cutting off all bilateral trade with India. [See the Program]
Also useful/illuminating on the Kashmir crisis – Perhaps the best source for up-to-date news from Kashmir is Aljazeera. In March, acclaimed Indian author wrote a still-useful analysis, "Kashmir is Potentially the Flashpoint for a Future Nuclear War," Huffington Post [Link]. For an in-depth analysis, read "Jammu and Kashmir Loses 'Special Status,'" by Pieter J. Friedrich, Antiwar.com [Link]. Also useful is "Modi's Majoritarian March to Kashmir," by Haseeb A. Drabu, New York Times [August 8, 2019]; Mr. Drabu is a former finance minister of Jammu and Kashmit. [Link]. Rep. Eliot Engel, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Representatives, issued a mealy-mouthed response to India's illegal takeover of Kashmir, which can be read here.
The Saudi, UAE, and USA war in Yemen
[FB – For several years, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have cooperated in attempting to defeat the Houthi rebels in Yemen's civil war. The USA has provided critical support – including massive arms sales –for this effort. The war is complicated beyond belief, and it just became more complicated as the UAE seems to have split from Saudi Arabia and is sponsoring a takeover-attack on Aden, Yemen's second city and home to the nominal "capital" of the former Yemen president/dictator, who is personally sitting out the war in Saudi Arabia. Southern Yemen was once a separate, independent country, and it may be once again.]
Trump-Saudi War on Yemen Collapsing as Southern Separatists Take Aden
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [August 12, 2019]
---- Yemen, a country of 28 million and one of the poorest in the world, had already become a byword for misery over the course of the last four years of war. Now, believe it or not, things have abruptly worsened.
The strategic port of Aden has fallen to southern separatists, just as it did in 1967, when the Communists took over and created the People's Republic of South Yemen. The Southern Transitional Council took over the strategic port of Aden with four hundred armed vehicles that had been supplied to it by the United Arab Emirates. The UAE had joined the Saudi war on Yemen after it was launched by Mohammed Bin Salman in spring of 2015. The Saudis are now riposting against the allies of their ally. This is not about Iran but about regional power rivalry. In essence, Yemen is now split in 3, with 1) the Southern secessionists, 2) what's left of the government of Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi, and 3) Houthi rebels in the West. There are also some areas of intense al-Qaeda influence, in the interstices of the struggle. [Read More]
For more on the Yemen war – "As top allies scale back in Yemen, Saudi Arabia faces prospect of an unwinnable war," by Nabih Bulos and David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times [August 11, 2019] [Link]; "Saudi Arabia and the UAE's rivalry is driving Yemen's Internal Violence," by Jonathan Fenton-Harvey, Informed Comment [August 10, 2019] [Link]; "Yemeni Separatists Oust Government in Key City, Complicating Peace Efforts," by Ben Hubbard and 1,000 child casualties in Yemen since 2018 school bus bombing, aid group says,," by Conor Finnegan, ABC News [August 7, 2019] [Link].
HUMAN-CAUSED CLIMATE CHAOS
(Video) Supersizing Climate Change: U.N. Says Meat Production Destroys Land & Diminishes Key Water Sources
From Democracy Now! [August 9, 2019]
---- The United Nations' top panel of climate scientists warns that humans are consuming land and water resources at an unprecedented rate, with the destructive effects of the climate crisis increasingly threatening the planet's biodiversity and the food security of hundreds of millions of people. In its latest climate change and land special report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that without dramatic action, extreme weather and rising temperatures will turn even more fertile land into desert, shrinking the global food supply, even as the world's population rises to more than 7.5 billion people. The IPCC recommends dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, along with more efficient farming methods and a shift in diets away from dairy and meat — which produce vast amounts of methane and carbon dioxide while using large amounts of land. [See the Program] For more on the UN climate report, read "To Avoid Boiling the Earth, we Need a New Agriculture: Farming emits 1/3 of Greenhouse Gases," by Mark Howden, The Conversation [August 12, 2019] [Link]; and "Climate Change Threatens the World's Food Supply, United Nations Warns," by Christopher Flavelle, New York Times [August 8, 2019] [Link]. As if you didn't know, July was the hottest month in recorded history: read "How Hot Was July? Hotter Than Ever, Global Data Shows," by [Link].
Farmers Don't Need to Read the Science. We Are Living It.
By
---- Many farmers probably haven't read the new report from the United Nations warning of threats to the global food supply from climate change and land misuse. But we don't need to read the science — we're living it. Here in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the world's most productive agricultural regions, there's not much debate anymore that the climate is changing. The drought of recent years made it hard to ignore; we had limited surface water for irrigation, and the groundwater was so depleted that land sank right under our feet. Temperatures in nearby Fresno rose to 100 degrees or above on 15 days last month, which was the hottest month worldwide on record, following the hottest June ever. … The latest report from the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforces our anxiety. It warns of declines in food yields, instability in food supplies, increased soil erosion and threats to water availability in coming decades. The global food supply system is a big contributor of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet, the report added. [Read More]
THE DEMOCRATS AND 2020
Biden Is Doubling Down on Iraq War Lies
---- For the second consecutive Democratic debate, Joe Biden has failed to come to terms about his critical role in supporting the illegal, unnecessary, and predictably disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. There is nothing new about this. Biden has a long history of inaccurate claims regarding that oil-rich country. For example, in the lead-up to the critical Senate vote authorizing the invasion, Biden used his role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to insist that Iraq somehow reconstituted a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, a nuclear weapons program and sophisticated delivery systems that had long since been eliminated. … In the recent second Democratic debate, however, Biden took his lies about Iraq to new heights by claiming, "From the moment 'shock and awe' started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress." That was patently untrue. More than three months after UN inspectors returned, Biden defended the imminent launch of the invasion by saying, "I support the president. Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead. … I do not see any alternative. It is not as if we can back away now." He added, "Let loose the dogs of war. I'm confident we will win." He then co-sponsored a resolution supporting Bush and the invasion. [Read More]
Who's Afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone [August 9, 2019]
---- "It just shows," says Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, "that launching a smear campaign is the only response to the truth." Gabbard, 38, burst into headlines after a July 31 Democratic Party presidential debate, when she went after California Senator Kamala Harris's record as Attorney General of the State of California. The "smear campaign" refers to the bizarre avalanche of negative press that ensued, as reporters seemed to circle wagons around a Harris, a party favorite. … She is like many soldiers (and embedded reporters for that matter) who returned disillusioned from the Middle Eastern theater. Of concern: the extreme loss of life among both Americans and resident populations, and the outrageous profiteering amid abuse of foreign contract workers who are used to staff and service American bases. In a long-ranging interview with myself and my co-host Katie Halper, for a new Rolling Stone-produced podcast, Gabbard spoke about her political evolution, Iraq, the 2018 nuclear scare in Hawaii, her decision to run for president, the confrontation with Harris, and the state of both the media and the Democratic Party. [Read More] For some media analysis, read "Tulsi Gabbard has done the unpardonable: criticized US global hegemony," by David Bromwich, Mondoweiss [August 3, 2019] [Link].
CIVIL LIBERTIES/ "THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR"
Chelsea Manning Can Remain in Jail for Another Year, Judge Rules
By Dell Cameron, Gizmodo.com [August 7, 2019]
---- Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst-turned-whistleblower, may remain behind bars for up to another year and face nearly a half-million dollars in fines over her ongoing refusal to testify before a grand jury about her disclosure of classified information to WikiLeaks. A federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia on Monday denied a motion filed by Manning's lawyers for a hearing requested to press the court to reconsider its sanctions, which include jail time—not to exceed 18 months—and financial penalties that may ultimately total around $441,000. … Manning has stated that she has a moral objection to testifying before the grand jury and that no amount of jail time will compel her to testify. Legally, she can only be imprisoned as part of an effort by the court to coerce her into testifying. Her time in jail is not supposed to be punitive. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
(Video) Mass ICE Raids in Mississippi After Workers Fought for Better Conditions Leave Kids Without Parents
From Democracy Now! [August 9, 2019]
---- Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swept through seven poultry processing plants in Mississippi this week and arrested 680 people. It was the largest single-state raid in U.S. history. The mass arrests also came on the first day of the school year, and some children walked home from school only to find their doors locked and their family members missing. Wednesday's raids targeted chicken processing plants operated by Koch Foods, one of the largest poultry producers in the U.S. Last year, the company paid out $3.75 million to settle an Equal Employment Opportunities Commission class-action suit charging the company with sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination, and retaliation against Latino workers at one of its Mississippi plants. Labor activists say it's the latest raid to target factories where immigrant workers have organized unions, fought back against discrimination or challenged unsafe and unsanitary conditions. We speak with Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and L. Patricia Ice, legal projects director at the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. [See the Program]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
(Video) Meet Janna Jihad, the 13-Year-Old Palestinian Journalist Exposing the Israeli Occupation
From Democracy Now! [August 8, 2019]
---- "My camera is my weapon." Those are the words of a celebrated Palestinian journalist who has been reporting on the Israeli occupation from the West Bank for more than six years. But Janna Jihad isn't any journalist — she's just 13 years old. She started telling stories about her home of Nabi Saleh when she was only 7, after her cousin and uncle were killed in her village. She recently joined us in our New York studio. "I always say that my camera is my weapon of choice, because using my camera, it's a very peaceful and nice way to resist this occupation," she says. "By using my camera, I can send a message, and it can be even more effective than a gun, more effective than violence, more effective than killing people." [See the Program]
