Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
April 13, 2020
Hello All – Last Wednesday Senator Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign. In his speech announcing his decision, Bernie portrayed his campaign, accurately in my view, as having restored for millions of people the hope that things could be different, that a nation with healthcare, housing, and many other things FOR ALL was within our reach. He also explained that by suspending his campaign, not ending it, he hoped to continue to amass delegates and to be in a position to exert influence on the Democratic Party's platform and other party issues as people assembled in Milwaukee for the Convention. He indicated that he hoped that his campaign supporters would continue to strive to realize the goals that had united the campaign, and indicated that he would eventually endorse Joe Biden for president after the policy/platform discussions had been concluded.
The day after Sanders announcement, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviewed Sanders supporter Naomi Klein. She made many thoughtful points about the significance and impact of the Sanders campaign, starting with the observation that the 2016 and 2020 campaigns "helped us find each other." By this, she explained, she meant that since the Age of Reagan, the secular religion of the United States has been neo-liberalism, the claim that "the market" is the best and most efficient way to determine how government should operate and how we must live; and that by "breaking the spell" of neo-liberalism, the campaigns helped to "defeat the conspiracy of lowered expectations," teaching us that we had been lied to all this years about what was possible and why we should want so little. And the Sanders campaigns helped all those who thought this was garbage, suddenly learned that they were not alone. In concluding, Naomi Klein went on to make the interesting observation, new to me, that while Sanders was able to gain the support of younger people, older people – the generation of the 1960s [my generation] – was still traumatized by memories of state violence and the threat of a new Red Scare, and whatever their/our beliefs about the issues, were reluctant to challenge the powers that be. I wonder….
Our goal now is to defeat Donald Trump in November. As Noam Chomsky states in the video interview linked below, while the best we can hope from a President Biden is a re-run of the Obama presidency, with all its inadequacies, four more years of President Trump would likely be a world-class catastrophe and a threat to human civilization. Yet a cogent argument made by the Sanders campaign over the past few months is that the Biden campaign is unlikely to mobilize a sufficient number of voters to win the election. Lacking charisma and rejecting much of the political programs advocated by Senator Sanders that attracted young people and mobilized enthusiastic support, a successful Biden campaign will have to find a way to re-unite the party and mobilize millions of people. In an article (linked below) by Glenn Greenwald, the author assesses the reasons why so many people don't vote, especially low-income people, and finds that the main reason is the lack of any perceived difference in how contending candidates speak to their needs and hopes. It may be that fear of another four years of Trump will generate the mass mobilization of voters needed to defeat him, but we can't count on this. The dilemma now for supporters of Sanders and Warren – and for CFOW – is how to persuade the Official Democrats to change and become the more progressive political campaign that we need to win. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spells out in an interview in today's New York Times, the reunification of the party and the presidential campaign is a process, not simply a matter of a few generic statements about how we are all in this together: "And what I hope does not happen in this process is that everyone just tries to shoo it along and just brush that under the rug as an aesthetic difference of style." For the progressive wing of the party to fail to work hard to defeat Trump in November is unacceptable; but the official wing of the party – those who have supported Joe Biden – also needs to take strong measures to make party re-unification possible. We are, indeed, all in this together.
News Notes
As of Monday morning, more than 1.8 million cases of the coronavirus had been recorded worldwide, with 115,275 deaths. In the United States, more than half a million cases had been recorded, with 22,115 deaths. Continuously updated data can be found here.
Richard Brodsky, a political force in the Democratic Party for nearly three decades, died last week from the coronavirus. Brodsky served in both the Westchester County Board of Legislators and represented many of our communities in the New York State Assembly. MaryJane Shimsky, who represents the Rivertowns on the County Board of Legislators, began her political life as a staff member in Brodsky's office. This week she wrote: … intellectually brilliant and strongly principled, Richard fiercely stood up for the people of his district and for the entire State. Years of his dogged, and often lonely, legislative oversight resulted in the first major law regulating public authorities in a generation." Shortly before he died, Brodsky wrote an article for the Albany Times Union in which he stated that "The human carnage, and the economic carnage, of the coronavirus pandemic are well reported. There will be other consequences. There is also profound damage to the world of ideas that will persist long after the pandemic ends and we return to normal lives." A warning from someone who knew a lot about the world of politics. RIP.
The Trump administration is making a strong effort to shut down the Post Office. Without something happening, the Post Office will run out of money in June. The Washington Post reported Saturday that "Trump threatened to veto the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or Cares Act, if the legislation contained any money directed to bail out the postal agency." A useful background article on the Post Office crisis was posted last week on Common Dreams. In The Nation, Mike Davis suggests saving the Post Office by nationalizing Amazon "and the rest of the essential infrastructure of the digital age."
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Until shut down by the virus, we have been meeting 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 the 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. In this time of coronavirus, we are meeting (by Zoom conference) each Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. If you would like to join our meeting, please send a return email to get the meeting's access code. 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!
For stalwart readers, here are some Rewards. John Prine died from the virus last week. He made thoughtful/protest music for decades; and this week the excellent news site Shadowproof posted Prine's song about "Paradise," where his father had worked as a miner before the strip mining Peabody Coal Co. "had hauled it away." And after another week of President Trump's leadership, I thought of late Mario Savio, who said a few words in December 1964 that has him living in our hearts forever.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
THIS WEEK'S FEATURED ESSAYS
(Video) Noam Chomsky on Trump's Disastrous Coronavirus Response, Bernie Sanders & What Gives Him Hope
From Democracy Now! [April 10, 2020]
---- How did the United States — the richest country in the world — become the worldwide epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, with one person dying of COVID-19 every 47 seconds? We spend the hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, discussing this unprecedented moment in history, and its political implications, as Senator Bernie Sanders announces he is suspending his campaign for the presidency. Chomsky also describes how frontline medical workers and progressive organizing are giving him hope. [See the Program]
Nonvoters Are Not Privileged. They Are Disproportionately Lower-Income, Nonwhite, and Dissatisfied With the Two Parties.
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept [
---- Those who choose not to vote because of dissatisfaction with the choices offered are disproportionately poorer and nonwhite, while rich white people vote in far larger percentages. And the data also makes clear that the primary motive for nonvoting among those demographic groups is not voter suppression but a belief that election outcomes do not matter because both parties are corrupt or interested only in the lives of the wealthy. … While voter suppression is unquestionably a serious stain on U.S. political life that does (by design) impede voting, the overwhelming reason people stay home is due to cynicism toward or dissatisfaction with the political process and the choices they were presented. … Those who make the choice to abstain from voting in presidential and midterm elections are overwhelmingly anything but "privileged." The claim that they are is deliberate disinformation spread by the political and media elite class to suppress the reality of their own systemic failures when it comes to serving the needs of the vast majority of the population and to try to shame, rather than persuade, disaffected people to vote for their candidate. [Read More]
Why Americans Are Dying from Despair
e, The New Yorker [March 16, 2020]
[FB – This is a review of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Annie Case and Angus Deaton.]
---- Why has the steep rise in deaths of despair been so uniquely American? Case and Deaton identify a few factors. The United States has provided unusually casual access to means of death. The availability of opioids has indeed played a role, and the same goes for firearms (involved in more than half of suicides); we all but load the weapons of self-destruction for people in misery. The U.S. has also embraced automation and globalization with greater alacrity and fewer restrictions than other countries have. Displaced workers here get relatively little in the way of protection and support. And we've enabled capital to take a larger share of the economic gains. … A more unexpected culprit identified by Case and Deaton is our complicated and costly health-care system. There is, to be sure, a strong correlation between lack of health coverage and increased risk of suicide (not to mention over-all mortality), but the problem doesn't end with the plight of the uninsured. The focus of Case and Deaton's indictment is on the fact that America's health-care system is peculiarly reliant on employer-provided insurance. [Read More]
Fear, bigotry and misinformation – this reminds me of the 1980s Aids pandemic
[FB – Edmund White writes interesting fiction and nonfiction. I recently read his book on Proust and was astounded to learn that all the girls/women in In Search of Lost Time were actually transposed from the personalities of the men in Proust's life!]
--- I am a gay man who lived through the Aids pandemic, so many people have asked me to compare that crisis with the one we now face. The main difference between the two is that Aids at first appeared to afflict specific populations, while coronavirus is an equal opportunity malady. … Aids bore a badge of shame even in the gay community – if you were infected it was your own fault for not practising safe sex – whereas everyone feels sympathy for coronavirus victims. Whereas Aids was a death sentence for almost all who were afflicted, most people with coronavirus show only mild symptoms and even those who are hospitalised mostly recover. … Ironically, the same doctor, Anthony Fauci, was the "villain" of the Aids epidemic (the activist group Act-Up accused him of not releasing life-saving drugs) and is the hero of coronavirus (the voice of scientific reason in the Trump administration). In both epidemics he has insisted on running studies of new drugs. In the crazy Trumpian far right he has been accused of undermining the president's looniest pronouncements. [Read More]
A Malignant Contagion: Trumpism's Mindlessness on Coronavirus and Albert Camus' 'The Plague'
---- Albert Camus' The Plague evokes the malign contagion of Trumpism — the mindless death cult that contaminates America with its disdain for facts, science, experience, democracy and human life. In Camus' 1947 novel, the plague begins with infected rats invading the Algerian city of Oran. Like the Nazis who invaded France with a toxic ideology, the plague-carrying rats occupy the city, infect the population, provoke terror and suspicion, bring about police-enforced imprisonment in death camps, and unleash widespread suffering and death. Once the graves become overcrowded, the Oran authorities are forced to use mass burials and the crematoria leaving no doubt as to Camus' historical reference. The Plague is both a grim account of a city under invisible siege by a pathogen as well as a vivid allegory of the then-recent Nazi occupation of wartime France, the so-called "brown plague." The fascist plague that inspired the novel may have been defeated, but in the 80 years since The Plague was written, other varieties of political pestilence keep this book urgently relevant. "No one will ever be free as long as there are pestilences," wrote Camus, a fighter in the French Resistance and an existentialist philosopher. [Read Moe]
Annals of the Plague Years
He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump's Failure on the Virus
By Eric Lipton, et al., New York Times [April 11, 2020]
---- Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action. The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen. [Read More] (Eric Lipton discussed his article on Democracy Now! on Monday morning.) For more on "they should've known," "The Military Knew Years Ago That a Coronavirus Was Coming," by Ken Klippenstein, The Nation [April 1, 2020] [Link]. And when they finally get in gear, they're incompetent: "How Did the U.S. End Up with Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags?" br, The New Yorker [April 9, 2020] [Link].
(Video) "Exposing U.S. Racism in a Stark New Way": COVID-19 Kills Disproportionate Number of Black Americans
From Democracy Now! [April 9, 2020]
---- We speak with family physician and epidemiologist Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones about how the coronavirus is taking a devastating toll on black Americans, who are disproportionately dying from the virus across the country as a result of entrenched racial inequality. Black Americans are more likely to have chronic health problems and less likely to have insurance. They also make up significant numbers of frontline workers that are still going to work amid the pandemic. Jones is the former president of the American Public Health Association. [See the Program] For Part 2 of this interview, go here. For Dr. Jones' recent piece for Newsweek magazine, "Coronavirus Disease Discriminates. Our Health Care Doesn't Have To," go here. AOC spoke on Democracy Now! last week about the impact of the coronavirus on her district in Queens and the Bronx, "the epicenter of the epicenter" in the USA [Link]; and for a New York Times' perspective, "Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States" [April 7, 2020] go here.
The Political Economy of the Virus/Crisis
The Deficit Is Exploding! And That's a Good Thing.
By Robert Pollin, The Nation [April 9, 2020]
---- The fact that nobody's asking where the money is coming from shows how much our politics have changed since 2008. … The US government today possesses the unique financial capacity to mount an effective fight at the historically unprecedented scale required against both the pandemic and the economic collapse. It also has the wherewithal to move the economy onto an ecologically sustainable recovery path, with Green New Deal investments generating jobs and new opportunities throughout the country. Whether the government embraces these challenges, or, instead, continues to squander its resources on giveaways to giant corporations and Wall Street, will depend on the balance of political forces in the months ahead. Effective political mobilization will therefore be imperative for pushing this balance in the direction that it so badly needs to go. [Read More]
Colonialism Made Puerto Rico Vulnerable to Coronavirus Catastrophe
By Chris Gelardi, The Nation [April 9, 2020]
---- The New York Times, The Washington Post, [etc.] have all published maps tracking the spread of Covid-19 across the United States. None of them have included the entire country in their graphics. Missing are all or most of the five non-state US territories—four of which have confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus. Even though they're home to more than 3.5 million US citizens and nationals, and they're administered by the US government, the territories—Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa—are often forgotten. During this crisis, inattention from the mainland—in the form of disregarded pleas for supplies, funds, or relief from the colonial framework—could spell disaster. ,,, Yet even with Washington and Wall Street working against it, Puerto Rico's officials, health care workers, citizens, and diaspora are mounting a defense against the coronavirus. As of today, the island has 573 confirmed infections and 23 deaths. Facing its third major public health crisis in as many years, the territory is hoping to prevent a worst-case scenario: overrun hospitals, economic collapse, and thousands of deaths. … US territories have a difficult battle ahead. And for Puerto Rico, this pandemic is just the latest tribulation. [Read More]
The EU's new coronavirus relief deal is a gift to Europe's enemies
By Yanis Varoufakis, The Guardian [UK] [April 11, 2020]
[FB – Yanis Varoufakis is an economist and the former finance minister in the Greek government, serving in the Syriza government, an initially radical government that appeared willing to challenge the European central banks' austerity program for Greece. This didn't end well for Varoufakis – or Greece.]
---- The challenge facing the 19 countries of the eurozone is unique. The massive boost in public debt that is now so necessary is hampered by the quaint arrangement of sharing a central bank that, on the one hand, has no common treasury to lean against and, on the other, is banned from backing directly the 19 treasuries that must borrow in euros to fight the crisis. The euro crisis that began in 2010 stretched this monetary architecture to its limits. The coronavirus recession is now pushing it beyond them. … The message today to Italians, Spaniards and Greeks is: your government can borrow large amounts from Europe's bailout fund. No conditions. You will also receive help to pay for unemployment benefits from countries where employment holds up better. But, within a year or two, as your economies are recovering, huge new austerity measures will be demanded to bring your government's finances back into line, including the repayment of the monies spent on your unemployment benefits. This is equivalent to helping the fallen get up but striking them over the head as they begin to rise. [Read More]
Our History
(Video) "Supreme Inequality": The Supreme Court's 50-Year Battle Against Justice
From Democracy Now! [March 6, 2020]
[FB – Thanks to the coronavirus lockdown, I read this book and highly recommend it as user-friendly for those knowing little/nothing about the Court.]
---- The makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court has come under intense criticism in recent years after two Trump-nominated justices joined the bench. Senate Republicans confirmed Neil Gorsuch in 2017 after having refused to consider President Barack Obama's nominee in his final year in office, and they confirmed Brett Kavanaugh a year later despite multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against the judge. During the 2020 Democratic presidential contest, several candidates floated the idea of "packing the court" — appointing more than nine justices — in order to counter the court's rightward drift. But while the current Supreme Court often earns the ire of progressive lawmakers and activists, our guest Adam Cohen says it has actually been a force for injustice for the last 50 years, despite what Americans are taught about the court's role in protecting the rights of marginalized people. "The Supreme Court — which is an institution that we think of as the bastion of fairness, the advocate for the underdog — has actually been a major driver of inequality," says Cohen. His new book is "Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America." [See the Program]
How Generals Fueled 1918 Flu Pandemic to Win Their World War
By Gareth Porter, American Conservative [April 4, 2020]
---- On Thursday, the captain of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, on which the virus was reportedly spreading, was relieved of command. He was blamed by his superiors for the leak of a letter he wrote warning the Navy that failure to act rapidly threatened the health of his 5,000 sailors. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper justified his decision to continue many military activities as usual by declaring these activities are "critical to national security… Esper's decisions reflect a deeply ingrained Pentagon habit of protecting its parochial military interests at the expense of the health of American troops. This pattern of behavior recalls the far worse case of the U.S. service chiefs once managing the war in Europe. They acted with even greater callousness toward the troops being called off to war in Europe during the devastating "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 million people worldwide. It was called the "Spanish flu" only because, while the United States, Britain and France were all censoring news about the spread of the pandemic in their countries to maintain domestic morale, the press in neutralist Spain was reporting freely on influenza cases there. In fact, the first major wave of infections in the United States came in U.S. training camps set up to serve the war. [Read More]
