CFOW Newsletter - Focus on the Climate Crisis and the Conference in Spain

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

December 9, 2019

 

Hello All – The nations of the world (minus the USA) will meet in Spain next week to discuss our climate crisis and what can be done. As President Trump will withdraw the USA from the Paris Climate Agreement (2015) on January 1^st, it is unlikely that our news media will give the climate summit much airtime.  But our climate situation remains desperate, as the Earth's temperature inches up, carbon emissions are high and remain steady, rightwing climate deniers are gaining power in the world, and the fossil fuel industries are holding their own, despite the growing grass-roots environmental movements.

 

Here are some notes on three developments that will have a great bearing on whether we can save ourselves from climate disaster. To keep up with what's happening at COP25, the best news coverage available will be via Democracy Now!, which will be broadcasting live from Spain all this week.

 

Fossil Fuel Subsidies

At a time when we desperately need to cut back on burning coal, gas, and oil, the United States, and the governments of many other countries, subsidize their fossil fuel industries.  Without these subsidies the fossil fuel industries would struggle to survive.  The United States, for example, helps out with about $20 billion each year; globally, the figure is about $500 billion.

 

And these are only the direct subsidies. If our coal companies were required to meet modern pollution standards, 98 percent could be unprofitable. For all US industries, allowing them not to pay for the costs of pollution and cleaning up their mess adds $200 billion per year (and $1.3 trillion globally) to the taxpayer help the fossil fuel industries get from our  governments.

 

In addition to lining the pockets of investors, the subsidies make the cost of gas, oil, and coal lower, thus making it harder for renewable energies (wind and solar) to attract customers.  In this way, state subsidies lock us into using fossil fuels.

 

Sharing the Costs of Fixing This

Since the start (1992) of world climate negotiations, governments have debated the question of "Who should pay?' Less-developed countries point out that the United States, Europe, and Russia have been polluting for centuries, and have caused the climate crisis we have now. If saving the planet meant less economic development and using renewable energy, the more developed countries should provide some financial help to less-developed countries to share the burden of transition. In 1992, a Green Climate Fund was created to address this problem: richer countries would contribute, and poorer countries would receive subsidies.

 

The (so far) failure of this project involves ethical as well as practical issues.  Should India and China, for example, delay raising the standard of living of their people to a moderate (not dirt poor) level, in order to not use coal and other fossil fuels? These (and similar) countries did not cause our climate crisis; indeed, even today, the per capita annual carbon emissions in India and China are 1.9 and 5 metric tons annually, while the capita emissions from the United States are 16.1 metric tons.  How can we find a just solution to the dilemma of raising the standard of living of the world's poor, while preventing a crisis of over-heating our common world?

 

Grassroots Mobilizations

Please read the article by Brian Tokar linked just below. It includes an excellent summary of COP25 expectations and summaries of the many reports about our climate crisis that will inform the delegates, while also pointing to the Other Superpower in the room, the world's grassroots climate movements.  He writes: "The most promising responses to the climate crisis are not being handed down by UN agencies or national governments, but rather emerge from the grassroots, popular efforts to resist continued fossil fuel development and other forms of accelerated resource extraction, and also to build local alternatives that can help inspire and facilitate like-minded efforts around the world. More than 2500 cities around the world have submitted plans to the UN to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, frequently in defiance of their national governments' far more cautious proposals, and well over 9000 municipalities have joined a Global Covenant of Mayors to reinforce their commitments to climate action. As US cities and towns have defied the Trump administration by declaring themselves as sanctuaries for refugees and immigrants, many are also advancing the most meaningful climate responses." 

 

Some Useful/Interesting Reading about Our Climate Crisis

Climate Talks in Madrid: What will it take to prevent climate collapse?

By Brian Tokar, ZNet [December 6, 2019]
---- The two-week marathon of the annual UN climate conference is underway in Madrid, and the world's expectations have perhaps never been lower. The Amazon is burning and unprecedented storms are raging worldwide, but the world's climate diplomats are still mostly talking business-as-usual. Never mind that this year's 25^th Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Climate Convention (UNFCCC) almost didn't happen, after it was disinvited by the fascistic Bolsonaro regime in Brazil and almost derailed again by the recent upheaval in the streets of Santiago, Chile, where it had been rescheduled to occur. And Trump's effort to withdraw US participation is not the most serious problem. The main obstacles have much more to do with how emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other climate-destabilizing gases are increasing again after appearing to plateau for a couple of years. [Read More]

 

Savoring What Remains: Taking in a Climate-Changed World
By Dahr Jamail, Tom Dispatch [December 8, 2019]

---- Recently, I was in Homer, Alaska, to talk about my book The End of Ice. Seconds after I had thanked those who brought me to the small University of Alaska campus there, overwhelmed with some mix of sadness, love, and grief about my adopted state -- and the planet generally -- I wept. I tried to speak but could only apologize and take a few moments to collect myself. … It's no secret that vast numbers of climate scientists are now grieving for the planet and humanity's future, with some even describing their symptoms as a climate-change version of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. … Listening to him describe the climate convulsions wracking his home state recently, I couldn't help but think of interviews I had done with family members in Iraq who had lost loved ones to U.S. military attacks. People with PTSD — and I know this from my own personal experience with it — tend to repetitively tell stories about the trauma they've experienced. It's our way of trying to process it. [Read More]

 

News Notes

War is good business.  A new report from the Swedish think tank SIPRI ("Weapons boom shows no signs of slowing") says that the 100 biggest weapons makers last year had $420 billion in sales, up 5 percent over the previous year and up 47 percent since 9/11.  The USA led the way, with the five biggest arms makers (Lockheed, Raytheon, etc.) have total sales of about $150 billion, or 35 percent of the world's total sales last year. [Link].

 

Anthony Swofford, the author of the Persian Gulf-war memoir Jarhead, has an insightful essay in the MIT Technology Review called "Drones and robots won't make war easier—they'll make it worse."  "It is that this reliance on technological cool," he writes, "the assumption that it lessens or alters the lethality of war, allows zero accountability for how, when, and why we fight. … When we believe the lie that war can be totally wired and digitized, that it can be a Wi-Fi effort waged from unmanned or barely manned fighting apparatus, or that an exoskeleton will help an infantryman fight longer, better, faster, and keep him safe, no one will be held responsible for saying yes to war." [Read More]

 

The Trump administration has changed the rules about who can get food stamps, with the results that 688,000 will lose their benefits soon, and millions more may be cut in the near future.  Read more here.

 

Is President Trump sending 14,000 new troops to the Middle East?  Is the USA planning a new confrontation with Iran from its bases in Iraq?  All is confusion in the mainstream media and probably in the White House.  Check out two good articles by Juan Cole and Gareth Porter for some clarifying analysis.

 

On November 18^th Secretary of State Pompeo announced that the US government was abandoning a 1978 State Department legal opinion that determined that settlement expansion in the occupied territories of the [Israel/Palestine] West Bank was in violation of international law.  Ten days ago, over 100 Democratic members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to President Trump strongly criticizing this step.  Sadly, Westchester's Reps Lowey and Engel did not sign this letter, nor did a majority of the House Democrats.  For some background on the settlements, Trump's policy, and the divisions among Democrats on the Israel/Palestine issue,  go here.

 

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 the climate crisis, 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!

 

Rewards!

Your Rewards for reading our newsletter this week include a wonderful short history about "How Turkish Muslims at Atlantic Records Marketed Motown, Jazz, Black Music to America" [Link]  Yes, Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, Arethea Franklin and many more giants of music found a home at Muslim-owned Atlantic.  For an equally wonderful short video, "25 Years: A History of Atlantic Records," go here.

 

Best wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

 

THIS WEEK'S FEATURED ESSAYS

 

Trump Was Right Before He Was Wrong: NATO Should Be Obsolete

By Medea Benjamin, Code Pink [December 9, 2019]

---- The three smartest words that Donald Trump uttered during his presidential campaign are "NATO is obsolete." … Rather than being a strong alliance with a clear purpose, this 70-year-old organization that is meeting in London on December 4 is a stale military holdover from the Cold War days that should have gracefully retired many years ago. … In an age where people around the world want to avoid war and to focus instead on the climate chaos that threatens future life on earth, NATO is an anachronism. It now accounts for about three-quarters of military spending and weapons dealing around the globe. Instead of preventing war, it promotes militarism, exacerbates global tensions and makes war more likely. This Cold War relic shouldn't be reconfigured to maintain US domination in Europe, or to mobilize against Russia or China, or to launch new wars in space. It should not be expanded, but disbanded. Seventy years of militarism is more than enough. [Read More]

 

Trump's Legacy Is Being Written Right Now [Impeachment … for what?]

By Carolyn Eisenberg, New York Times [December 5, 2019]

---- For House Democrats, there is a powerful temptation to narrow the grounds for impeachment. By adhering to a simple narrative about President Trump's criminal actions in relation to Ukraine, they hope it will be easier to mobilize public support than if they levied a more complex set of charges. In the impeachment of Richard Nixon, the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee faced a similar choice … For Nixon's impeachment, there was actually a fourth article of impeachment. It encompassed more serious offenses and incited intense debate among the members. Introduced by Representative John Conyers of Michigan, it charged the president with "the submission to the Congress of false and misleading statements concerning the existence, scope and nature of American bombing operations in Cambodia in derogation of the power of Congress to declare war, to make appropriations and to raise and support armies." … In introducing Article IV, Mr. Conyers and other liberal colleagues were trying to show how the crimes of Watergate were directly tied to the excesses of the Vietnam War. Yet it was partly for this reason that the committee chairman, Peter Rodino, wanted to scrap the item. In his assessment, too tight a link between the process of impeachment and the Vietnam War would be needlessly divisive at a time when he was seeking consensus and bipartisanship. [Read More]

 

The Effects and Consequences of Congress' Endless Permissions for War

By Matthew Hoh, Antiwar.com [December 9, 2019]

---- For the first time in decades, passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has been delayed due to disagreements between Democrats and Republicans. … This delay in passage of a reconciled NDAA between the two houses of Congress, however offers an opportunity, because buried within the NDAA are possibilities to repeal the pieces of legislation that have brought mass human, financial and moral consequences to the US, have wrecked entire nations and societies abroad, and have made the United States less safe…. With the NDAA stalled in conference committee an opportunity now exists for members of Congress to hear from their constituents that the wars must come to an end. While revoking the AUMFs would by no means wave a magic wand that would end the bloodshed, it would be a crucial first step in forcing the Trump administration, and subsequent administrations, to return to Congress for approval to start another war or to even continue with those wars that are now well into their second decade. [Read More]

 

From Now On, Every Palestinian Is an anti-Semite

By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [December 8, 2019]

---- The plague is spreading. Under cover of the (just) war against anti-Semitism, Europe and the United States silence every voice daring to criticize Israel. Under cover of this war, they are undermining their freedom of speech. Incredibly, this new phenomenon is not triggering any protest, as one would expect. Laws labeling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism and the anti-occupation movement as anti-Semitic, are passed with overwhelming majorities. Now they are playing into the hands of Israel and the Jewish establishment, but they are liable to ignite anti-Semitism when questions arise about the extent of their meddling. Last week, the phenomenon hit France, cradle of the revolution. The French National Assembly passed by a sweeping majority a bill that adopts the definition of anti-Semitism issued by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Liberty? Equality? Fraternity? Not when it involves Israel. Here, these values are rendered mute. [Read More]

 

Our History

The Way We Live Now [The AIDS crisis/panic of the early 1980s]

By Susan Sontag, The New Yorker [November 16, 1986]

---- At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn't call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson …. [Read More]

 

How the Battle of Seattle Made the Truth About Globalization True

By Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus [December 4, 2019]

---- The Battle of Seattle in late November 1999 is, for me, memorable in many ways. … But for me the main takeaway from Seattle was that it takes action to make the truth true. In the decade prior to Seattle, there were a lot of studies, including United Nations reports, that questioned the claim that globalization and free market policies were leading to sustained growth and prosperity. Instead, the data showed that globalization and pro-market policies were promoting more inequality and more poverty and consolidating economic stagnation, especially in the Global South. However, these figures remained "factoids" rather than "facts" in the eyes of academics, the press, and policymakers, who dutifully repeated the neoliberal mantra that economic liberalization promoted growth and prosperity. … Then we had Seattle. It was not just a World Trade Organization ministerial that collapsed, but also a creed that had been widely believed to be true. After Seattle, the press began to talk about the "dark side of globalization" — about the inequalities and poverty being created by globalization. [Read More]

 

CFOW Newsletter - Focus on the Climate Crisis and the Conference in Spain

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

December 9, 2019

 

Hello All – The nations of the world (minus the USA) will meet in Spain next week to discuss our climate crisis and what can be done. As President Trump will withdraw the USA from the Paris Climate Agreement (2015) on January 1^st, it is unlikely that our news media will give the climate summit much airtime.  But our climate situation remains desperate, as the Earth's temperature inches up, carbon emissions are high and remain steady, rightwing climate deniers are gaining power in the world, and the fossil fuel industries are holding their own, despite the growing grass-roots environmental movements.

 

Here are some notes on three developments that will have a great bearing on whether we can save ourselves from climate disaster. To keep up with what's happening at COP25, the best news coverage available will be via Democracy Now!, which will be broadcasting live from Spain all this week.

 

Fossil Fuel Subsidies

At a time when we desperately need to cut back on burning coal, gas, and oil, the United States, and the governments of many other countries, subsidize their fossil fuel industries.  Without these subsidies the fossil fuel industries would struggle to survive.  The United States, for example, helps out with about $20 billion each year; globally, the figure is about $500 billion.

 

And these are only the direct subsidies. If our coal companies were required to meet modern pollution standards, 98 percent could be unprofitable. For all US industries, allowing them not to pay for the costs of pollution and cleaning up their mess adds $200 billion per year (and $1.3 trillion globally) to the taxpayer help the fossil fuel industries get from our  governments.

 

In addition to lining the pockets of investors, the subsidies make the cost of gas, oil, and coal lower, thus making it harder for renewable energies (wind and solar) to attract customers.  In this way, state subsidies lock us into using fossil fuels.

 

Sharing the Costs of Fixing This

Since the start (1992) of world climate negotiations, governments have debated the question of "Who should pay?' Less-developed countries point out that the United States, Europe, and Russia have been polluting for centuries, and have caused the climate crisis we have now. If saving the planet meant less economic development and using renewable energy, the more developed countries should provide some financial help to less-developed countries to share the burden of transition. In 1992, a Green Climate Fund was created to address this problem: richer countries would contribute, and poorer countries would receive subsidies.

 

The (so far) failure of this project involves ethical as well as practical issues.  Should India and China, for example, delay raising the standard of living of their people to a moderate (not dirt poor) level, in order to not use coal and other fossil fuels? These (and similar) countries did not cause our climate crisis; indeed, even today, the per capita annual carbon emissions in India and China are 1.9 and 5 metric tons annually, while the capita emissions from the United States are 16.1 metric tons.  How can we find a just solution to the dilemma of raising the standard of living of the world's poor, while preventing a crisis of over-heating our common world?

 

Grassroots Mobilizations

Please read the article by Brian Tokar linked just below. It includes an excellent summary of COP25 expectations and summaries of the many reports about our climate crisis that will inform the delegates, while also pointing to the Other Superpower in the room, the world's grassroots climate movements.  He writes: "The most promising responses to the climate crisis are not being handed down by UN agencies or national governments, but rather emerge from the grassroots, popular efforts to resist continued fossil fuel development and other forms of accelerated resource extraction, and also to build local alternatives that can help inspire and facilitate like-minded efforts around the world. More than 2500 cities around the world have submitted plans to the UN to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, frequently in defiance of their national governments' far more cautious proposals, and well over 9000 municipalities have joined a Global Covenant of Mayors to reinforce their commitments to climate action. As US cities and towns have defied the Trump administration by declaring themselves as sanctuaries for refugees and immigrants, many are also advancing the most meaningful climate responses." 

 

Some Useful/Interesting Reading about Our Climate Crisis

Climate Talks in Madrid: What will it take to prevent climate collapse?

By Brian Tokar, ZNet [December 6, 2019]
---- The two-week marathon of the annual UN climate conference is underway in Madrid, and the world's expectations have perhaps never been lower. The Amazon is burning and unprecedented storms are raging worldwide, but the world's climate diplomats are still mostly talking business-as-usual. Never mind that this year's 25^th Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Climate Convention (UNFCCC) almost didn't happen, after it was disinvited by the fascistic Bolsonaro regime in Brazil and almost derailed again by the recent upheaval in the streets of Santiago, Chile, where it had been rescheduled to occur. And Trump's effort to withdraw US participation is not the most serious problem. The main obstacles have much more to do with how emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other climate-destabilizing gases are increasing again after appearing to plateau for a couple of years. [Read More]

 

Savoring What Remains: Taking in a Climate-Changed World
By Dahr Jamail, Tom Dispatch [December 8, 2019]

---- Recently, I was in Homer, Alaska, to talk about my book The End of Ice. Seconds after I had thanked those who brought me to the small University of Alaska campus there, overwhelmed with some mix of sadness, love, and grief about my adopted state -- and the planet generally -- I wept. I tried to speak but could only apologize and take a few moments to collect myself. … It's no secret that vast numbers of climate scientists are now grieving for the planet and humanity's future, with some even describing their symptoms as a climate-change version of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. … Listening to him describe the climate convulsions wracking his home state recently, I couldn't help but think of interviews I had done with family members in Iraq who had lost loved ones to U.S. military attacks. People with PTSD — and I know this from my own personal experience with it — tend to repetitively tell stories about the trauma they've experienced. It's our way of trying to process it. [Read More]

 

News Notes

War is good business.  A new report from the Swedish think tank SIPRI ("Weapons boom shows no signs of slowing") says that the 100 biggest weapons makers last year had $420 billion in sales, up 5 percent over the previous year and up 47 percent since 9/11.  The USA led the way, with the five biggest arms makers (Lockheed, Raytheon, etc.) have total sales of about $150 billion, or 35 percent of the world's total sales last year. [Link].

 

Anthony Swofford, the author of the Persian Gulf-war memoir Jarhead, has an insightful essay in the MIT Technology Review called "Drones and robots won't make war easier—they'll make it worse."  "It is that this reliance on technological cool," he writes, "the assumption that it lessens or alters the lethality of war, allows zero accountability for how, when, and why we fight. … When we believe the lie that war can be totally wired and digitized, that it can be a Wi-Fi effort waged from unmanned or barely manned fighting apparatus, or that an exoskeleton will help an infantryman fight longer, better, faster, and keep him safe, no one will be held responsible for saying yes to war." [Read More]

 

The Trump administration has changed the rules about who can get food stamps, with the results that 688,000 will lose their benefits soon, and millions more may be cut in the near future.  Read more here.

 

Is President Trump sending 14,000 new troops to the Middle East?  Is the USA planning a new confrontation with Iran from its bases in Iraq?  All is confusion in the mainstream media and probably in the White House.  Check out two good articles by Juan Cole and Gareth Porter for some clarifying analysis.

 

On November 18^th Secretary of State Pompeo announced that the US government was abandoning a 1978 State Department legal opinion that determined that settlement expansion in the occupied territories of the [Israel/Palestine] West Bank was in violation of international law.  Ten days ago, over 100 Democratic members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to President Trump strongly criticizing this step.  Sadly, Westchester's Reps Lowey and Engel did not sign this letter, nor did a majority of the House Democrats.  For some background on the settlements, Trump's policy, and the divisions among Democrats on the Israel/Palestine issue,  go here.

 

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 the climate crisis, 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!

 

Rewards!

Your Rewards for reading our newsletter this week include a wonderful short history about "How Turkish Muslims at Atlantic Records Marketed Motown, Jazz, Black Music to America" [Link]  Yes, Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, Arethea Franklin and many more giants of music found a home at Muslim-owned Atlantic.  For an equally wonderful short video, "25 Years: A History of Atlantic Records," go here.

 

Best wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

 

THIS WEEK'S FEATURED ESSAYS

 

Trump Was Right Before He Was Wrong: NATO Should Be Obsolete

By Medea Benjamin, Code Pink [December 9, 2019]

---- The three smartest words that Donald Trump uttered during his presidential campaign are "NATO is obsolete." … Rather than being a strong alliance with a clear purpose, this 70-year-old organization that is meeting in London on December 4 is a stale military holdover from the Cold War days that should have gracefully retired many years ago. … In an age where people around the world want to avoid war and to focus instead on the climate chaos that threatens future life on earth, NATO is an anachronism. It now accounts for about three-quarters of military spending and weapons dealing around the globe. Instead of preventing war, it promotes militarism, exacerbates global tensions and makes war more likely. This Cold War relic shouldn't be reconfigured to maintain US domination in Europe, or to mobilize against Russia or China, or to launch new wars in space. It should not be expanded, but disbanded. Seventy years of militarism is more than enough. [Read More]

 

Trump's Legacy Is Being Written Right Now [Impeachment … for what?]

By Carolyn Eisenberg, New York Times [December 5, 2019]

---- For House Democrats, there is a powerful temptation to narrow the grounds for impeachment. By adhering to a simple narrative about President Trump's criminal actions in relation to Ukraine, they hope it will be easier to mobilize public support than if they levied a more complex set of charges. In the impeachment of Richard Nixon, the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee faced a similar choice … For Nixon's impeachment, there was actually a fourth article of impeachment. It encompassed more serious offenses and incited intense debate among the members. Introduced by Representative John Conyers of Michigan, it charged the president with "the submission to the Congress of false and misleading statements concerning the existence, scope and nature of American bombing operations in Cambodia in derogation of the power of Congress to declare war, to make appropriations and to raise and support armies." … In introducing Article IV, Mr. Conyers and other liberal colleagues were trying to show how the crimes of Watergate were directly tied to the excesses of the Vietnam War. Yet it was partly for this reason that the committee chairman, Peter Rodino, wanted to scrap the item. In his assessment, too tight a link between the process of impeachment and the Vietnam War would be needlessly divisive at a time when he was seeking consensus and bipartisanship. [Read More]

 

The Effects and Consequences of Congress' Endless Permissions for War

By Matthew Hoh, Antiwar.com [December 9, 2019]

---- For the first time in decades, passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has been delayed due to disagreements between Democrats and Republicans. … This delay in passage of a reconciled NDAA between the two houses of Congress, however offers an opportunity, because buried within the NDAA are possibilities to repeal the pieces of legislation that have brought mass human, financial and moral consequences to the US, have wrecked entire nations and societies abroad, and have made the United States less safe…. With the NDAA stalled in conference committee an opportunity now exists for members of Congress to hear from their constituents that the wars must come to an end. While revoking the AUMFs would by no means wave a magic wand that would end the bloodshed, it would be a crucial first step in forcing the Trump administration, and subsequent administrations, to return to Congress for approval to start another war or to even continue with those wars that are now well into their second decade. [Read More]

 

From Now On, Every Palestinian Is an anti-Semite

By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [December 8, 2019]

---- The plague is spreading. Under cover of the (just) war against anti-Semitism, Europe and the United States silence every voice daring to criticize Israel. Under cover of this war, they are undermining their freedom of speech. Incredibly, this new phenomenon is not triggering any protest, as one would expect. Laws labeling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism and the anti-occupation movement as anti-Semitic, are passed with overwhelming majorities. Now they are playing into the hands of Israel and the Jewish establishment, but they are liable to ignite anti-Semitism when questions arise about the extent of their meddling. Last week, the phenomenon hit France, cradle of the revolution. The French National Assembly passed by a sweeping majority a bill that adopts the definition of anti-Semitism issued by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Liberty? Equality? Fraternity? Not when it involves Israel. Here, these values are rendered mute. [Read More]

 

Our History

The Way We Live Now [The AIDS crisis/panic of the early 1980s]

By Susan Sontag, The New Yorker [November 16, 1986]

---- At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn't call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson …. [Read More]

 

How the Battle of Seattle Made the Truth About Globalization True

By Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus [December 4, 2019]

---- The Battle of Seattle in late November 1999 is, for me, memorable in many ways. … But for me the main takeaway from Seattle was that it takes action to make the truth true. In the decade prior to Seattle, there were a lot of studies, including United Nations reports, that questioned the claim that globalization and free market policies were leading to sustained growth and prosperity. Instead, the data showed that globalization and pro-market policies were promoting more inequality and more poverty and consolidating economic stagnation, especially in the Global South. However, these figures remained "factoids" rather than "facts" in the eyes of academics, the press, and policymakers, who dutifully repeated the neoliberal mantra that economic liberalization promoted growth and prosperity. … Then we had Seattle. It was not just a World Trade Organization ministerial that collapsed, but also a creed that had been widely believed to be true. After Seattle, the press began to talk about the "dark side of globalization" — about the inequalities and poverty being created by globalization. [Read More]

 

CFOW Newsletter - Focus on Iraq uprising and US collapse

Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter

December 1, 2019

 

Hello All – After two months of protests, resulted in 400 protesters being killed, the Prime Minister of Iraq has announced his resignation.  Yet this is far from sufficient to end the protests, which according to Al Jazeera "are demanding the overthrow of a political class seen as corrupt and serving foreign powers, while many Iraqis languish in poverty without jobs, healthcare, or education."  The total collapse of the US project in Iraq, after 16 years of invasion and occupation, should induce some serious thought about what the USA is doing in the world.

 

Like so many of the protests that are sweeping the world this year, whatever is the trigger that sets them off, the backbeat of dissent is motored by deep poverty and rampant inequality, and very often fueled by the massive corruption of the ruling elite. The case of Iraq is illuminated this week by a useful article by Nicolas J. S. Davies that calls our attention to "16 Years of 'Made in the USA' Corruption."  Much of the corruption stems from the massive sums of "reconstruction aid" that flowed into the pockets of Iraq's politically connected, a great many of whom had been in "exile" in the West and flowed back into Iraq in the wake of the 2003 US invasion.  "The government Iraqis are protesting against today," Davies says, "is still led by the same gang of U.S.-backed Iraqi exiles who wove a web of lies to stage manage the invasion of their own country in 2003, and then hid behind the walls of the Green Zone while U.S. forces and death squads slaughtered their people to make the country "safe" for their corrupt government."

 

We have learned little about the Iraqi protests, and especially their background or context; why is this? One clue might come from the extensive media coverage of the protests in Hong Kong, the subject of hundreds of news reports and New York Times editorials.  In Hong Kong, I believe only two protesters have died, while (noted above) about 400 have been killed in Iraq.  Given the US involvement in Iraq and the expenditure of billions of dollars to create a pro-US government there, one would think that the Iraq protests, and the government overturn, would receive at least as much media coverage as the events in Hong Kong.  But this has not been the case.  One way to unravel this knot is to employ the concept of "worthy" and "unworthy" victims, often used by Noam Chomsky.  In Hong Kong, the protesters are (at least indirectly) challenging the US rival China; while in Iraq, the protesters are challenging a US-created regime.  Consequently, according to this Iron Law of media analysis, the former are "worthy victims," deserving our attention and concern, while the latter are "unworthy victims," un-persons expiring in non-events. (Similar comparisons can be made between the "worthy" victims of state violence in Venezuela, and the nearly invisible indigenous victims of the recent military coup in Bolivia.)  In sum: as is so often the case, the War on Terror generates an increase in upheaval and turmoil, requiring more US military adventures and a compliant mass media to help the medicine go down easier.  Bring the troops home!

 

News Notes

In local news, a Hastings Board of Education hearing will be held tomorrow, Monday, December 2, at 7:30 in the Lecture Room of the Farragut Complex, 27 Farragut Ave. in Hastings. One purpose of the meeting is to use/empty the BoE reserve funds to supplement expenditures approved earlier for the Hillside school. (BoE info here.) Also of interest is a proposal to hire a consultant for three days at $9,900 per day.  (Can this be right?) So if the use of your tax money is of interest, go to the hearing!

 

Media reporting on why life expectancy is declining in the USA has focused on "the plight of white Americans in rural areas who were dying from so-called deaths of despair: drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide." But a new study has found that increased deaths rates are affecting a broad range of people in midlife, in urban and suburban as well as rural areas.  "Death rates are actually improving among children and older Americans, perhaps because they may have more reliable health care — Medicaid for many children and Medicare for older people." Read more here.

 

For the first time in (my) living memory, Westchester's two congressional seats will have serious primary contests.  Rep. Eliot Engel has two challengers; and as Nita Lowey retires, her open seat has attracted at least seven candidates.  I'll post useful articles as they appear: this week, The Intercept has an article focusing on the issue of Israel/Palestine in the coming primaries; Riverdale's Jennifer Scarlet has an article reviewing  "Eliot Engel's real record on the environment"; and Mondaire Jones, a candidate for Rep. Lowey's seat, writes about  "Why I'm running to be America's first black, gay congressman."

 

This week the House Judiciary Committee will receive a report from the joint committee that has held hearings on Impeachment, and will begin to put together Articles of Impeachment.  These are likely to include the "obstruction" issue left over from the Mueller investigation, as well as issues relating to the July 25 phone call with the President of Ukraine and the withholding of military aid to Ukraine last summer.  Perhaps much more. News reports say that the Articles of Impeachment will be ready by Christmas, and then sent over to the Senate for a trial.  Will all this be good for the Democrats?  Here is a useful assessment of the pitfalls that may await the Democrats if/as they proceed with a trial in the Senate. In connection with this, please read the article about "the Whistleblower" by Scott Ritter (also linked below), an illustration of how a Republican-run impeachment trial could go off the rails for the Democrats. As the Senate will almost certainly vote to acquit Trump, should the Democrats consider "censoring" Trump rather than going on to the Full Monty Impeachment?  Is this even an alternative?  We will see.

 

Things to Do/Coming Attractions

Sunday, December 8^th – CFOW meets (usually) on the first Sunday of the month at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs, from 7 to 9 pm.  We review our work of the previous month and make plans for the month to come.  Everyone is welcome at these meetings.

 

Friday, December 6^th – The next youth-led climate mobilization will take place across the USA.  It coincides with the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference.  There will be a demonstration at City Hall Park in NYC from 12 to 3 pm; and the Rivertowns students will be rallying in Ardsley at Pacone Park from 3 to 4 pm.  More news when we get it.

 

Saturday, December 7^th – WESPAC'S annual "Margaret Eberle Fair Trade and Crafts Festival" will be held from 10 am to 4 pm at the Memorial United Methodist Church, 250 Bryant Ave. in White Plains.  Fair-trade crafts and good food for sale; suggested admission $5, but no one wll be turned away.  Live music through the day; always an enjoyable visit/event.

 

Sunday, December 8^th – Dr. Elizabeth Rosenthal of the New York Metro chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program will speak about "Universal Healthcare: The Road Ahead," at the Riverfront branch of the Yonkers Public Library, 1 Larkin Center in Yonkers, from 2 to 4 pm.  The program is sponsored by NYCD-Indivisible, Indivisible Westchester, Indivisible White Plains and BlueBlast! Free.  To register (necessary), go here.

 

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 the climate crisis, 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!

 

Best wishes,

Frank Brodhead

For CFOW

 

THIS WEEK'S FEATURED ESSAYS

 

The 'Whistleblower' and the Politicization of Intelligence

By Scott Ritter, Consortium News [November 27, 2019]

[FB - Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.]
---- While the whistleblower, through counsel, had expressed a desire to testify before the House Intelligence Committee about the issues set forth in his complaint, he was never called to do so, even in closed-door session. The ostensible reason behind this failure to testify was the need to protect his anonymity. …But the apparent reason Schiff and Bakaj refused to allow the whistleblower to testify, or to be identified, was to avoid legitimate questions likely to be asked by Republican committee members. … Answers to these questions, and more, would have been useful in understanding not only the motives of the whistleblower in filing his complaint—was he simply a concerned citizen and patriot, or was he part of a larger conspiracy to undermine the political viability of a sitting president? [Read More]

 

Meet the Men Fueling the Climate Crisis

By Ben Ehrenreich, The Nation [November 27, 2019]

---- Earlier this year, the climate writer Kate Aronoff laid out the case for trying fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity. The effort, she argued, "would put names and faces to a problem too often discussed in the abstract" and "channel some populist rage at the climate's 1 percent." Not all of us anthropoids, after all, are equally responsible for anthropogenic climate change: More than 60 percent of all the carbon spat into the atmosphere since 1854 can be traced to 90 corporations and state-owned industries. Over the last half century, just 20 firms produced more than a third of all emissions. … As the seas rise, the fires burn, the storms swell, and the Arctic melts, remember that we are in this disastrous predicament because the leaders of a few dozen companies—including lobbyists, financiers, various government enablers, think tank hacks, and related shills and swindlers, perhaps a few thousand people over a century and half—enriched themselves by selling off the future…, but no language yet has come up with a term large enough to contain the guilt of fossil fuel executives. Last month, New York prosecutors put Aronoff's most-wanted climate criminal Rex Tillerson on the stand in a fraud suit against Exxon Mobil, and a Massachusetts DA filed a second case against the oil giant for its long history of deceptive denialism. Activists elsewhere are fighting to get the International Criminal Court to recognize ecocide as an offense up there with genocide and war crimes. Real accountability is still likely a long way off, but there is no need to wait on the lawyers, or the revolution: Let the populist rage begin. [Read More]

 

You Can Have Brandeis or You Can Have Debs [That is, Warren or Sanders]

By Shawn Gude, Jacobin Magazine [February 19, 2019]

---- Elizabeth Warren's political tradition is the left edge of middle-class liberalism; Bernie Sanders hails from America's socialist tradition. Don't confuse the two. Elizabeth Warren understands better than most the difference between her and Bernie Sanders. "He's a socialist," Warren explains, "and I believe in markets." She's a "capitalist to [her] bones," and Sanders is a democratic socialist. … She and Sanders draw their lineage from distinct political traditions. Warren is a regulator at heart who believes that capitalism works well as long as fair competition exists; Sanders is a class-conscious tribune who sees capitalism as fundamentally unjust. Warren frames her most ambitious reforms as bids to make capitalism "accountable"; Sanders pushes legislation called the "Stop BEZOS Act" and denounces ceos for exploiting workers. Warren seeks a harmonious accord between workers and employers; Sanders encourages workers to fight back. … Warren's political tradition is the left edge of middle-class liberalism; Sanders hails from America's socialist tradition. Or, to put the distinction in more personal terms: Warren is Louis Brandeis, Sanders is Eugene Debs. [Read More]

 

Our History

(Video) 20 Years After The Battle of Seattle: The Historic 1999 World Trade Organization  Protests

From Democracy Now! [November 27, 2019]

---- Twenty years ago this week, tens of thousands of activists gathered in Seattle to shut down a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. Grassroots organizers successfully blocked world leaders, government trade ministers and corporate executives from meeting to sign a global trade deal that many called deeply undemocratic, harmful to workers' rights, the environment and Indigenous people globally. On November 30, 1999, activists formed a human chain around the Seattle convention center and shut down the city's downtown. Police responded by firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the mostly peaceful crowd. The protests went on for five days and resulted in 600 arrests and in the eventual collapse of the talks, as well as the resignation of Seattle's police chief. See the Program  The same Democracy Now!  broadcast also featured a segment on " Reflections on 20 Years of Indymedia, a Radical Media Movement," which is also very interesting. See it here.

 

The Invention—and Reinvention—of Impeachment

By Jill Lepore, The New Yorker [October 21, 2019]

---- Impeachment is a terrible power because it was forged to counter a terrible power: the despot who deems himself to be above the law. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention included impeachment in the Constitution as a consequence of their knowledge of history, a study they believed to be a prerequisite for holding a position in government. From their study of English history, they learned what might be called the law of knavery: there aren't any good ways to get rid of a bad king. Really, there were only three ways and they were all horrible: civil war, revolution, or assassination. England had already endured the first and America the second, and no one could endorse the third. "  … Because impeachment happens so infrequently, it's hard to draw conclusions about what it does, or even how it works, and, on each occasion, people spend a lot of time fighting over the meaning of the words and the nature of the crimes. Every impeachment is a political experiment. Read More]