Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
February 3, 2020
Hello All – The final week of the Senate's trial of President Trump raised hopes and then quickly snuffed them out. The cynical predictions of last summer have come true; no matter what the facts and the law dictated, the Senate Republicans would not vote to convict the Godfather, and President Trump will be acquitted.
Before we launch into Plan B, let's take a moment to reflect on what we have just experienced. The USA has always been a flawed democracy, but last week the Senate showed the true face of the wealthy people and interests – the one percent – who rule us. Their credo is "more for us, nothing for others," and President Trump is their front-man to give them this. As the New York Times said yesterday morning, "The vote brings the nation face to face with the reality that the Senate has become nothing more than an arena for the most base and brutal — and stupid — power politics."
The "base and brutal and stupid power politics" prevails in Washington. Senator Elizabeth Warren acted on our behalf when she forced Chief Justice to read her question: "At a time when large majorities of Americans have lost faith in government, does the fact that the chief justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican senators have thus far refused to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the chief justice, the Supreme Court, or Constitution?"
Thus what is at stake now in the USA is democracy itself. What we have now is a crisis of legitimacy, a clearer understanding that the people, the class, that now rules us does their ruling on the basis of power only, and without our consent. So our Plan B includes reclaiming democracy. The Trump regime is illegitimate; we should resist its illegitimacy whenever and wherever we can.
Another part of Plan B would be continuing investigation into Trump's corruption. We should demand that the House of Representatives give a forum to John Bolton and other witnesses who the Senate did not want to hear, and subpoena the documents that the Senate did not want to read. And the investigation of lawlessness should not be confined to Ukraine, etc., but broadened.
We can expect the President will feel empowered by his phony acquittal and double-down on political repression and civil liberties violations, with attacks on the poorest and darkest people as his signature MO. Defending the right to dissent, the right to protest, and the right to seek refuge from wars and the climate crisis will be an important part of our work to reclaim democracy.
And finally, a successful Plan B will include being aware of the divisions within the Democratic Party, and working to strengthen those in the Party who are most active in working against war and the climate crisis and the attack on our civil liberties. During the Impeachment hearings, for example, the focus on military aid to Ukraine led the Democrats to once again exaggerate the Russian threat to the United States. This should be unacceptable. The Democrat Party is the political vehicle available to us now to reclaim democracy; we can't let it be hijacked by militarists and neo-Cold Warriors.
News Notes
Hazaea Alomaisi, known to the Peekskill community as Anwar, went for his regularly scheduled check-in with immigration officials on Friday. He was arrested by ICE and deported to Yemen on Tuesday, being given no time to see his lawyer or file an appeal. Anwar had lived for 22 years in the USA, and was well-known in the community for his wildlife photography and his kindness to all. His lawyer says Anwar fears for his life in Yemen, one of the most dangerous places in the world. For more on this story, go here.
Last week the House of Representatives voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force act, on which Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump have relied for the legal justification to wage war all over the world [Link]. Useful background explanations of how/why this came about and what it means can be found here and here. This morning the New York Times published a straw-in-the-wind column, "Americans Demand a Rethinking of the 'Forever War'" in response to the House vote.
As of Sunday night, the Corona virus has infected 17,205 people in China, of whom 361 have died. Already the epidemic has exceeded that of the SARS outbreak in 2002-3. Eleven cases have been confirmed in the USA. Laurie Garrett, an author of several books on epidemics and how that can be/are not being contained, spoke cogently about the issues on this morning's Democracy Now! ("How Trump Has Sabotaged America's Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic.") Interesting and thought-provoking about how diseases like the Coronavirus get started is "We Made the Coronavirus Epidemic: It may have started with a bat in a cave, but human activity set it loose," by David Quammen, New York Times.
Finally, on this day of the Iowa Caucuses, no newsletter would be complete without a human-interest take on what the good people of Iowa are doing to re-set the nation's political direction. I particularly liked "Primary Colors: Live From the Iowa Caucuses, Biden, Pence and Trump" by Matthew Stevenson, and here it is.
P.S. Don't Forget! If you are not registered as a Democrat, and if you want to vote in the Democratic primary (April 28th), you must by February 14th. Do it now!
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. Also, we (usually) have a general meeting on the first Saturday afternoon of each month. 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!
We haven't heard from Hudson Valley Sally for too long, and so this week's rewards are some of my favorites. Check out "Sister Moon," "Just Deportees," and "Billy in Air." Hudson Valley Sally will be at the Walkabout Clearwater Coffeehouse on April 11th; save the date!
Best Wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
THIS WEEK'S FEATURED ESSAYS
The Apartheid Deal of the Century
By Jeff Halper, Middle East Monitor [January 31, 2020]
[FB – Jeff Halper is one of our best analysts/reporters re: Israel/Palestine. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions has done outstanding work. Learn about him and his work here.] ---- The Trump "deal of the century" is nothing if not predictable. The product of a small group of Orthodox Jewish Americans willingly adopting the long-standing plans of the Israeli right, it merely reaffirms what Israeli policy has in fact done "on the ground" over the past 53 years. In fact, we in the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) made a map 15 years ago that corresponds closely to Trump's map. Once we knew the route of the Separation Wall, the Apartheid Wall, it was easy to draw the map that would eventually emerge. … Needless to say, the plan is a non-starter. Rather than even a mini-state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine as proposed in the two-state option, the Palestinians – who are both the indigenous and the majority population in the country – will have to do with only 15 per cent of their country. … While Israel expands from 78-85 per cent of the country, the Palestinians are left with a sterile Bantustan: no contiguous territory, no border with the Arab states, no control over water or other vital resources, loss of Jerusalem as a religious, cultural and political center, not to mention its loss as a tourist site – economically non-viable patches of barren land, whether you call it a state or a prison. [Read More]
For more on "the Deal of the Century" – "Top 5 ways Trump plan for Palestinians is a Crime against Humanity," by Juan Cole, Informed Comment [January 29, 2020] [Link]; and legal analyst Noura Erakat gives a (video) cogent overview here. The plan is already a non-starter; read "In Humiliating Rebuke, Arab League and Palestine Slap Down Kushner Plan, as Palestine severs all Relations with US and Israel" by Juan Cole [February 2, 2020] here. Acquittal
"Public Charge" Ruling Shows the Supreme Court Won't Save Us From Trump's Anti-Immigrant Agenda
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [January 28, 2020]
---- Expanding the "public charge" rule, rightly described as a "wealth test" for immigrants, has long been on the Trump administration's fascistic agenda wish list. The new policy — which would make it harder for legal immigrants to obtain green cards if they use, or have ever used, public benefits, including food programs and Medicaid — constitutes a dramatic and draconian shift in immigration policy. After it was first announced last August, immigrant rights advocates and numerous states rushed to oppose the rule; lower courts upheld a national injunction against the cruel policy shift, which could see permanent residency status denied to even employed, documented immigrants who have used government assistance programs. It should come as no surprise that on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4, along predictable political lines, that the injunction be lifted and that the new "public charge" policy could be enforced. The ruling is just the latest reminder that righteous appeals to judicial checks and balances, and to a constitutional bulwark against Trumpian policy excess, come to a dead end in the nation's highest court. As in the case of the so-called Muslim ban, and the decision to allow billions of dollars in Pentagon funds to go toward building the border wall, the Supreme Court has once again made painfully clear the limits of legal challenges to Trump's anti-immigrant agenda. [Read More] And for more bad news about immigration, read "One Year into "Remain in Mexico," the U.S. Is Enlisting Central America In Its Crackdown on Asylum" by Sandra Cuffe, The Intercept [January 29, 2020] [Link].
Snowden Warns Targeting of Greenwald and Assange Shows Governments 'Ready to Stop the Presses—If They Can'
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams [January 27, 2020]
---- In an op-ed published Sunday night by the Washington Post, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden connected Brazilian federal prosecutors' recent decision to file charges against American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald to the U.S. government's efforts to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. … As Common Dreams reported last week, the NSA whistleblower, who has lived with asylum protection in Russia for the past several years, is also among the political observers who have pointed out that although even some of Greenwald's critics have rallied behind him in recent days, Assange has not experienced such solidarity. Assange is being held in a London prison, under conditions that have raised global alarm, while he fights against extradition to the United States…. In his Post op-ed, "Trump Has Created a Global Playbook to Attack Those Revealing Uncomfortable Truths," Snowden wrote of Greenwald's case that "as ridiculous as these charges are, they are also dangerous—and not only to Greenwald: They are a threat to press freedom everywhere. The legal theory used by the Brazilian prosecutors—that journalists who publish leaked documents are engaged in a criminal 'conspiracy' with the sources who provide those documents—is virtually identical to the one advanced in the Trump administration's indictment of [Assange] in a new application of the historically dubious Espionage Act." [Read More] For more on Assange, Greenwald, and threats to freedom of the press, read "Reporters Face New Threats From the Governments They Cover" by James Risen, New York Times [January 26, 2020] [Link]. In an interview last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture speaks of the many outrages and horrors of the US/UK torture of Assange. [Link].
Media on Climate Crisis: Don't Organize, Mourn
By Neil deMause, FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [January 31, 2020]
---- The year 2019 was, by all accounts, the year of climate awareness. To an unprecedented degree, in the three decades since scientists first warned of the imminent dangers of rising carbon emissions and the resulting global warming, we were transfixed by record-setting heat waves, wildfires in California and Australia, and, of course, Greta Thunberg's sailboat visit to the US, capped off by her selection as Time's Person of the Year. Yet the newfound attention to climate came with a strange disjunction: Being aware of this massive threat to humanity hasn't translated into much concerted action to stop it… The media's shift toward acknowledging the reality of climate change is welcome, if three decades too late, given that the IPCC has been sounding essentially the same alarm about a warming planet since 1988. But the public presentation of the climate crisis remains carefully constrained to focus on the horrors awaiting us, not on what can be done to ward off the worst, or who stands in the way of doing so. When climate coverage leaves that out, it amounts to mourning the Earth without trying to save it. [Read More]
Our History
Why American Socialism Failed—and How It Could Prevail Today
By Ross Barkan, The Nation [February 1, 2020]
---- Income inequality was surging, a racist president was ruthlessly deporting immigrants, and the world was struggling to recover from a brutal war. The political scene, like America itself, was a deeply volatile, unpredictable place. Meanwhile, a new wave of lawmakers, many of them under the age of 30, had stormed into office, promising radical change. They were disdainful of Democratic machine politics, furiously opposed to conservative Republicans, and unafraid to call themselves socialists. The year, though, was not 2020—it was 1920. The war was the First World War, which had just ended, killing millions and devastating Europe. The president of the United States was Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who segregated the civil service and was, by the dawn of the '20s, arresting and deporting Eastern European and Italian immigrants, along with the leftists of the era—socialists, communists, and anarchists. The first Red Scare was in full swing. … Harrington's vision, of a DSA transforming the Democratic Party from within, is more plausible than ever before because of both DSA's booming membership and the relative frailness of the Democratic Party's power structure. Today, DSA succeeds by endorsing leftist Democrats in primaries and securing pledges to socialist ideals in exchange for a vigorous volunteer operation. Urban bosses and elite gatekeepers no longer dominate the party, and there are no singularly influential establishment actors who can tamp down the party's left wing, Barack Obama included. [Read More]
