Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
September 5, 2021
Hello All – The Texas anti-abortion law and the scandalous action of the Supreme Court in letting it go into effect without even a hearing is a "tocsin in the night." It would be irresponsible not to anticipate that many other states will follow suit, simply Xeroxing and passing the Texas law. We should also anticipate that there is a high probability that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade when it hears a case from Mississippi that will do just that. Reading the powerful dissent from Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor underscores the gravity of this moment for democracy and the rule of law, as well as for the millions of women now threatened with loss of control over their reproduction plans and preferences.
The imminent end to legal abortion in the USA is bad enough. I would like to suggest also that we should frame this as part of the growing fascist movement in this country. The history of the anti-abortion movement (e.g. here and here) shows how a fringe and largely Catholic-based demand was absorbed into a post-Vietnam War "New Right," a rebellion against the gains of feminists and the civil rights movement, and the counter-culture of the '60s. By the mid-late 1970s, this "New Right" had gained hegemony within the Republican Party, electing Ronald Reagan in 1980. And this movement only strengthened in the decades between Reagan and the election of Donald Trump.
In an imo prescient article last month in The Nation, Katha Pollitt warned "If Roe v. Wade Is Overturned, the Future Will Be Worse Than the Past." She pointed to the well-organized, indeed militarized, anti-abortion right wing of today, compared to the disparate protesters of yesteryear. Can we imagine that "Call Jane" would work unmolested in Texas and other conservative states? That organizations collecting funds for women to travel out of state for abortions would not soon see their day in court? I read with interest another Nation article, this one by Amy Littlefield from last April, in which she wrote about the abortion medication available through the mail; will anti-abortion states like Texas allow this? How will the Court rule when cases like this and other work-arounds to heinous state laws reach them?
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the House will vote on legislation to guarantee access to abortion soon after its return to Washington on September 20th [Link]. Needless to say, even if the Democratic-controlled House passes such legislation, it will face the certainty of a Republican filibuster in the Senate. To stop "The Handmaid's Tale" from becoming a reality, we have our work cut out from us.
News Notes
The Biden administration will mark Labor Day by ending the Covid-linked program that gives unemployed workers an additional $300 per week. Some 9.2 million people will lose this benefit, which will affect a total of 34 million household members. [Link] There is no visible support in Congress for extending this benefit, whose termination is driven in part by a labor shortage that has resulted in a rise in real wages and a decline in the poverty level of working people, which of course must be nipped in the bud.
Coming soon is the 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall St. Many CFOW stalwarts participated in the action at Zuccotti Park, and we even held a (small) "Occupy" event at the Hastings Community Center. For those paying attention, Occupy made some significant changes in US politics, not least by putting "the 1 percent" and "the 99 percent" into play. Here is a useful Occupy timeline from Rolling Stone; and here is a great album of Occupy pictures. Movement documentarian Erik McGregor ("he is everywhere") will participate in a photo exhibition at the Revelation Gallery at St. John's in the Village (224 Waverly Place) that runs from September 7th to October 3rd. For more information, go here.
Finally, the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion falls on Thursday, September 9th. The prisoners demanded basic, humanitarian reforms; and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller responded with force and violence on September 13th, with great loss of life. The number of prisoners in the USA in 1970 was 300,000, a number that has now grown to 2.4 million. As the organizers of a commemorative event note, "five decades later we look back at the uprising and how we continue to fight to make the vision of the Attica Brothers a reality." For a preview, check out this video from the 40th anniversary commemoration,, with Cornell West.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil takes place every Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. 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!
This week's Rewards for stalwart readers are all about Labor Day, the American imitation of May Day. There are lots of great labor songs out there; for Rewards this week I have chosen "Labor Day" by John McCutheon; "Union Maid" by Marcia Diehl and the New Harmony Sisterhood; Woody Guthrie's "Deportees" by Ani DiFranco and Ry Cooder, and "There is Power in a Union" by Billy Bragg. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Afghanistan Update
As we noted in the last Newsletter, CFOW suggests framing our peace & justice demands for USA policy towards "postwar" Afghanistan along the following lines:
Let Them In! – To the vast amount of media coverage about people desperate to leave Afghanistan, we want to speak up for an inclusive, rather than a restrictive, approach to immigrant rules. We should resist bureaucratic distinctions between "deserving" and "not deserving" refugees. Welcome them all.
Feed Them! – The UN's World Food Program estimates that more than14 million people urgently need food assistance. The US can help with funding and by taking no military or other steps that might endanger the program. Put the Afghan people first.
Give Peace a Chance! – The United States should accept the fact that the Taliban will control the new state, and not engage in further military or other actions pointing to "regime change. Aid and development assistance should be sent to Afghanistan.
Investigate Who Was Responsible for This Disaster – Congress should investigate the decisions to start the war in 2001. CIA and Pentagon liars, war-profiteers, and the media should be held accountable. We must prevent future wars.
Regarding the above, US immigration policy for Afghanistan refugees is still unclear; the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has a petition for us to sign: [Link]. The food crisis in Afghanistan continues to grow: This "Infographic" illuminates the extent of the crisis. Kathy Kelly, who visited Afghanistan dozens of times during the war, spoke on Democracy Now! about the reparations we must make for the damage we've done to Afghanistan.
The issues of US policy towards a Taliban government, and how/why the USA got into this mess, are complex. In The Intercept, James Risen ("A War's Epitaph") has written an in-depth analysis of the cascade of government and media lies that enabled 20 years of evil in Afghanistan [Link]; and Gareth Porter has an excellent essay on the continuing "Beltway media's loyalty to permanent war state" [Link]. Further analysis about US policy going forward can be found in the readings below"
Some useful reading on Afghanistan
America Is Giving the World a Disturbing New Kind of War
---- More humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy. Earlier wars had not needed to appear humane to win legitimacy from the public, but new ones returned in an altered moral climate. By the post-Cold War era, both American political parties were committed to a more principled use of American power. Doctrines like democracy promotion and human rights became elaborate rationales for doubling down on militarism. [Read More]
Afghan Crisis Must End America's Empire of War, Corruption and Poverty
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Common Dreams [August 30, 2021]
---- To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies' 20-year war was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide healthcare, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban. The reality is quite different, and not so hard to understand. The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the U.S. military occupation, drop over 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghans, pay private contractors, and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years. [Read More]
(Video) A CIA Drone Analyst Apologizes to the People of Afghanistan
From Democracy Now! [September 3, 2021]
As the United States ends a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, a former intelligence analyst for the CIA's drone program offers an apology to the people of Afghanistan "from not only myself, but from the rest of our society as Americans." During deployments to Afghanistan, Christopher Aaron says he was able to see "the human toll, the resource toll of these wars, as well as the fact that the policy of dropping 'guided missiles' at people from remote controlled airplanes was not allowing us to actually win the war." [See the Program]
War & Peace
Over Two Decades, U.S.'s Global War on Terror Has Taken Nearly 1 Million Lives and Cost $8 Trillion
By Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept [
---- The U.S.-led global war on terror has killed nearly 1 million people globally and cost more than $8 trillion since it began two decades ago. These staggering figures come from a landmark report issued Wednesday by Brown University's Costs of War Project, an ongoing research effort to document the economic and human impact of post-9/11 military operations. … The staggering economic costs of the war on terror pale in comparison to the direct human impact, measured in people killed, wounded, and driven from their homes. The Costs of War Project's latest estimates hold that 897,000 to 929,000 people have been killed during the wars. Of those killed, 387,000 are categorized as civilians, 207,000 as members of national military and police forces, and a further 301,000 as opposition fighters killed by U.S.-led coalition troops and their allies. The report also found that around 15,000 U.S. military service members and contractors have been killed in the wars, along with a similar number of allied Western troops deployed to the conflicts and several hundred journalists and humanitarian aid workers. [Read More]
Civil Liberties
'I Helped Destroy People' [The FBI and Muslims}
---- This article is a product of close to three years of interviews with Terry Albury, whom I met for the first time in November 2018, shortly before he went to prison. … "I was very idealistic when I joined the F.B.I.," Albury says. "I really wanted to make the world a better place, and I stayed as long as I did because I continued to believe that I could help make things better, as naïve as that sounds. But the war on terror is like this game, right? We've built this entire apparatus and convinced the world that there is a terrorist in every mosque, and that every newly arrived Muslim immigrant is secretly anti-American, and because we have promoted that false notion, we have to validate it. So we catch some kid who doesn't know his ear from his [expletive] for building a bomb fed to them by the F.B.I., or we take people from foreign countries where they have secret police and recruit them as informants and capitalize on their fear to ensure there is compliance. It's a very dangerous and toxic environment, and we have not come to terms with the fact that maybe we really screwed up here," he says. "Maybe what we're doing is wrong." [Read More] – Terry Albury gave his documents to The Intercept, which edited and published them in an informative package of articles. Read "The FBI's Secret Rules" by Cora Currier, The Intercept [[Link]
Creeping Fascism
The new alliance between anti-vaxxers and the far right is a deadly threat [UK]
By Paul Mason, The New Statesman [UK] [September 1, 2021]
[FB – This imo interesting article from the UK by Paul Mason, one of their most insightful correspondents, assesses the strenuous UK "anti-vaxxer" movement in relation to the growth of the UK far right. I found myself thinking about how/whether this analysis is useful for thinking about the development of the far right in the USA.]
---- The anti-vax movement has become a magnet for people engaged in anti-truth and anti-science politics, and an open conduit to the extreme right. Surveying press photography of the 28 August demos, it is clear that this is not the demographic of the Brexit Party – elderly white conservatives – and nor is it the demographic of Extinction Rebellion: educated, progressive, young and old. It is attracting ex-soldiers; young mothers conned by the idea that their children My impression is also that the movement is attracting a much larger number of low-income young people than mainstream politics does. They are, in short, what the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich described in the 1930s as "people in trouble" – the raw material of early fascism. And all over the democratic world, both the populist right and the fascist right have latched on to their concerns and begun to mobilise them. [Read More]
Our History
The Biggest Uprising Since the Civil War Happened Here 100 Years Ago [Blair Mountain.]
By Samuel Fleischman, The Nation [August 30, 2021]
---- Heading east from here, County Road 17 snakes up and down craggy hills for several miles before crossing an unremarkable intersection. A deserted church sits on one corner. On the other, a small bronze plaque recounts the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor dispute that saw almost 10,000 miners face off against a union-busting sheriff, several thousand deputized locals, and the US military. It was the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War. This year marks the 100th anniversary, yet hardly a soul today remembers it. … The situation only escalated in the summer of 1921 after hundreds of striking workers were arrested and held indefinitely. Hatfield's death was the final straw. By August, thousands of miners were marching toward Matewan, intent on freeing their comrades and bringing their guerilla version of class warfare into action. [Read More] A prelude to the Battle of Blair Mountain was the Battle of Matewan (1920), the subject of a great film by John Sayles ("Matewan"), which you can see here for free.
