Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
November 14, 2021
Hello All – World leaders meeting this week in Glasgow, Scotland, for the 26th Climate Conference failed to take meaningful steps to head off Climate Chaos. While hundreds of thousands of people marched in protest, the "world leaders" have drafted a plan that barely mentions fossil fuels. If their "plans" continue, in another generation the Earth will heat up so much that the lives of billions of people will be ruined. These madmen must be stopped. Closer to home, we point our finger at the oil and coal companies that think only of profit, not human survival. And we note that the US military, the world's largest polluter, eats up hundreds of billions of collars that could be used to fight the Climate Crisis. How can this disaster be avoided?
The thinking brain in Glasgow was outside the COP26 meeting hall, in the streets. Dozens of practical proposals for doing what must be done to save us were shared. It's not as though we don't know what to do; our enemy is the political power of the Fossil Fuel Establishment and the national governments beholden to the millions of dollars of the Carbon Lobby. One succinct proposal was put forward by leaders of the Youth Climate Movement. Among other things, they proposed:
· Keep the precious goal of 1.5°C alive with immediate, drastic, annual emission reductions unlike anything the world has ever seen.
· End all fossil fuel investments, subsidies, and new projects immediately, and stop new exploration and extraction.
· End creative carbon accounting by publishing total emissions for all consumption indices, supply chains, and international aviation and shipping..
· Deliver the $100bn promised to the most vulnerable countries, with additional funds for climate disasters.
· Enact climate policies that protect workers and the most vulnerable, and reduce all forms of inequality.
"We can still do this," they proclaimed. "There is still time to avoid the worst consequences if we are prepared to change. It will take determined, visionary leadership. And it will take immense courage -- but know that when you rise, billions will be right behind you." We don't have much time, and it will take a Titanic Struggle to stop the fossil-fuel economy and turn it around, but we really don't have a choice. We know it's The End for us if we can't do it.
Some Useful/Insightful Reading/Viewing on Climate Crisis Solutions
(Video) "'We Are Not Responsible': Youth Climate Activists Rally in Glasgow to Demand World Leaders Act Now," from Democracy Now! [November 8, 2021] [Link].
"Leaders at COP26 Are 'Massively Killing the Paris Agreement,' Critics Say as Talks Drag On Past Deadline," by Julia Conley, Common Dreams [November 12, 2021] [Link].
"Youth Activists Fight for Their Future at COP 26," by Tina Gerhardt, The Nation [November 11, 2021] [Link].
"As COP26 Fizzles to an End, Biden Urged to Use Executive Action to Stop Fossil Fuel Expansion," by Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams [November 12, 2021] [Link].
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 illuminate two of our frontline struggles. First up is Thee Sacred Souls with "Give Us Justice"; and next, Rev. Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir meditate on "Fabulous Bad Weather." And as we edge into the Sacred Shopping Season, Rev. Billy asks "What Would Jesus Buy?" Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Let's Just be Honest and Call November 11 Forgetting Day
---- Back on November 11, 1918, with the end of World War I, once the most bloody war in history, and with a two-year deadly flu pandemic raging, caused in large part by the war and the rapid spread of the disease by infected troops returning to their homes, nobody was in the mood to celebrate anything. The four-year war, fought not to "defend democracy" as our national mythology tells us, but as a cat-fight among colonial empires fighting for bigger shares of each other's collapsing empires, ended up killing 10 million soldiers (116,000 of them US troops, who only entered that war during its final year) and wounding another 20 million — many of them grievously. As the first "modern" war, fought with industrial-scale killing machines and weapons like machine guns, tanks, enormous cannons, aerial bombings of cities, and the use of various types of poison gas, it also caused millions of civilian deaths. It may come as a surprise to today's US Americans, but when a day of commemoration was established on Nov. 11, 1919, a year to the day after the day all the fighting and killing stopped, it was called Armistice Day (Remembrance Day in the UK), and instead of the fireworks of Memorial Day, was commemorated here in the US by a national minute of silence and mourning at exactly 11 am. [Read More] On Thursday, CFOW joined the movement to reclaim Armistice Day; check out a short video of our rally in Hastings. To learn more about "Armistice Day" instead of "Veterans Day," visit this link at Veterans for Peace.
Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World
By Anatol Lieven, The Nation [November 13, 2021]
[FB – "Suddenly" (because we weren't paying attention) the nuclear-danger hot spots of the world are on the Pacific borders with China and on the border between Ukraine and Russia. Time to bone up, get out the map, be prepared. This essay is a good place to start on Ukraine.]
---- Of these potential crises, one of the most menacing is the armed standoff between the Ukrainian military and Russian-supported separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. … Only the most insane of US politicians and commentators actually want to go to war with Russia in Ukraine. But as the outbreak of World War I demonstrated, leaders who do not intend to go to war may stumble into a situation in which they are unable to stop or turn back. The consequences of a direct US-Russian clash in Ukraine would be catastrophic. A full-scale conventional war would have the strong potential to escalate into nuclear war and the annihilation of most of humanity. Even a limited war would cause a ruinous global economic crisis, necessitate the dispatch of huge US armed forces to Europe, and destroy for the foreseeable future any chance of serious action against climate change. … America's greatest interest in Ukraine is the prevention of a conflict there. Even a limited new war between Ukraine and Russia would distract the United States from much more important challenges elsewhere. If the US were drawn into such a war (not deliberately but as the result of a series of accidents), this would be a catastrophe for America, Russia, the world—and Ukraine itself. [Read More]
War & Peace
U.S. Absolves Drone Killers and Persecutes Whistleblowers
By Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept [November 4, 2021]
---- After the terrorist attack on the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, that killed more than 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. soldiers, President Joe Biden issued a warning to fighters from the Islamic State. "We will hunt you down and make you pay," he said on August 26. Three days later, Biden authorized a drone strike that the U.S. claimed took out a dangerous cell of ISIS fighters intent on staging another attack on the Kabul airport. Biden held up this strike, and another one a day earlier, as evidence of his commitment to take the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan even as he declared an end to the 20-year war there. "We struck ISIS-K remotely, days after they murdered 13 of our service members and dozens of innocent Afghans," he said in a White House speech. "And to ISIS-K: We are not done with you yet." But the Kabul strike, which targeted a white Toyota Corolla, did not kill any members of ISIS. The victims were 10 civilians, seven of them children. The driver of the car, Zemari Ahmadi, was a respected employee of a U.S. aid organization. Following a New York Times investigation that fully exposed the lie of the U.S. version of events, the Pentagon and the White House admitted that they had killed innocent civilians, calling it "a horrible tragedy of war." … This is part of a long-standing U.S. tradition to treat its widespread killings of civilians in the so-called war on terror as innocent mistakes made in pursuit of peace and security. [Read More] On the same topic, I recommend "No Accountability in Military Probe of Kabul Drone Strike — but Intelligence Failures Laid Bare" by Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept [November 4, 2021] [Link]. To learn more about drones and US policy, check out www.bankillerdrones.org.
Can the Runaway Pentagon Budget ever be Reined in?
By Mandy Smithberger and William Hartung, Tom Dispatch [November 10, 2021] | –
[FB – We never have enough money "to promote the general welfare," but somehow we can always find more money for the Pentagon. What if we limited military spending to defending the USA, rather than running the world? Just saying.]
---- Even as Congress moves to increase the Pentagon budget well beyond the astronomical levels proposed by the Biden administration, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has outlined three different ways to cut $1 trillion in Department of Defense spending over the next decade. A rational defense policy could yield far more in the way of reductions, but resistance from the Pentagon, weapons contractors, and their many allies in Congress would be fierce. After all, in its consideration of the bill that authorizes such budget levels for next year, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives recently voted to add $25 billion to the already staggering $750 billion the Biden administration requested for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. By any measure, that's an astonishing figure, given that the request itself was already far higher than spending at the peaks of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or President Ronald Reagan's military buildup of the 1980s. In any reasonable world, such a military budget should be considered both unaffordable and deeply unsuitable when it comes to addressing the true threats to this country's "defense," including cyberattacks, pandemics, and the devastation already being wrought by climate change. … Changing course would mean real reform and genuine accountability, starting with serious cuts to a budget for which "bloated" is far too kind an adjective. [Read More].
The State of the Union
We Abandon Low-Income Voters at Our Peril
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, The Nation [November 12, 2021]
---- When President Biden first unveiled the Build Back Better agenda, it appeared that this country was on the path to a new war on poverty. All eyes are now on the future of this Build Back Better plan, whether it will pass and whether it will include paid sick leave, reduced prescription drug prices, expanded child tax credits, expanded earned income tax credits for those without children, universal pre-K, climate resilience and green jobs, and other important domestic policy investments. For months, the nation has witnessed a debate taking place in Congress over how much to invest in this plan. What hasn't been discussed, however, is the cost of not investing (or not investing sufficiently) in health care expansion, early childhood education, the care economy, paid sick leave, living-wage jobs, and the like. Similarly missing have been the voices of those affected, especially the 140 million poor and low-income people who have the most to lose if a bold bill is not passed. [Read More] On the same topic, I recommend "Joe Manchin, This Is What We Can't Afford" b
[Link] and "Setting the Record Straight About What Biden's Proposed Social Programs Would Do" by Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research [Link].
Our History
(Video) East Timor Massacre Remembered: U.S.-Armed Indonesian Troops Killed 270 Timorese 30 Years Ago Today
From Democracy Now! [November 12, 2021]
[FB – A gripping story and powerful film footage. As a pre-Democracy Now! radio reporter for WBAI, Amy Goodman and journalist Alan Nairn were nearly killed as they covered this US-supported massacre of East Timorese by Indonesian soldiers 30 years ago.]
---- Today marks the 30th anniversary of the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor, when Indonesian troops armed with U.S. M16s fired on a peaceful memorial procession in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, killing more than 270 East Timorese. Indonesia had invaded East Timor in 1975 and maintained a brutal occupation until 1999, when East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence in a United Nations referendum. The massacre on November 12, 1991, sparked widespread outrage against the Indonesian government led by dictator General Suharto, a staunch U.S. ally, and marked a turning point in international public opinion. We play an excerpt of "Massacre: The Story of East Timor," a 1992 documentary produced by Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn, who witnessed and survived the killings after being severely beaten by Indonesian troops. [See the Program]
Sheila Rowbotham's Dream Deferred
By Rachel Collett, Tribune Magazine [UK] October 2021
[FB – Sheila Rowbotham is that unusual combination of thinker, activist, and organizer that I totally admire. Get to know her and check out some of her many books.]
[FB – Sheila Rowbotham is that unusual combination of thinker, activist, and organizer that I totally admire. Get to know her and check out some of her many books.]
---- Known as an influential British historian, activist and theorist of socialist-feminism, Sheila Rowbotham played a crucial role in the formation and development of the Women's Liberation Movement in 1970s Britain. In Daring to Hope: My Life in the '70s – her latest frank, powerful and vibrant memoir – she looks back at her involvement with second-wave feminism (and broader left politics) during that tumultuous decade, weaving together personal memories and witty reflections with sharp historical analysis. Her first memoir, Promise of a Dream (2000), charted her political transition from Methodist schoolgirl and Parisian Beatnik to seasoned socialist activist, relating her subjective experiences to a wider narrative of social, political and cultural change in the 1960s. Daring to Hope picks up where this left off in 1969. … As we follow Rowbotham's life through the following decade, year by year, we get a sense of how pioneering, transformative and all-encompassing the women's movement was. Her remarkably detailed accounts of different discussions and activities highlights Rowbotham's centrality as an active participant in so many feminist developments (and disagreements). … In the final words of the book, Rowbotham passes her baton to a new generation of energetic young activists, confident that the daring resolve of 1970s radicalism will be remembered and, hopefully, surpassed: 'Suffice to say that as I write, time, and the wasteful contradictions in capitalism, throw up many surprises, including a rippling mood of rebellion among many young women worldwide, whose hopes are higher and whose confidence is far stronger than anything I could have imagined in 1970.' [Read More]
