Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 11, 2023
Hello All – On Wednesday the worldwide climate crisis hit home, as NYC experienced the most toxic air on the planet. The smoke from hundreds of fires in Quebec blanketed the northeast USA. There is no "Fortress America" when it comes to climate.
The fire tsunami in Canada is the result of global warming. Hotter weather, drier soil, trees ready-to-burn. This week the smoke drifted our way. Other days, someone else will be downwind. But on every day, the pollution and carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels (cars, industry, etc.) knows no boundaries. This is a global crisis; we need global solutions.
Just about everybody understands that burning fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming and of our climate crisis. This is documented by a zillion scientific reports; and scientists have offered many suggestions for how we can reshape our lives and economies while burning much less fossil fuel.
Why aren't we doing this? In a nutshell, our failure to make meaningful strides towards preventing or softening climate disaster reflects the power of the fossil fuel giants (worldwide) to prevent government action. They do this by lobbying and bribing politicians, blocking scientific information, and generating misinformation about the climate crisis.
How can the giant fossil fuel corporations be defeated, their political power ended, and the tyranny of coal, oil, and gas be ended? I think a major obstacle to mass mobilization and a fighting spirit is the waning of hope that there is still time to save ourselves. The steady, step-by-step growth of the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the now-traditional failures of governments to keep their promises about reducing emissions and funding the energy-transformation needs of poorer countries in the Global South, and now the distractions of the War in Ukraine frame our existential situation as one that is getting worse, and more dangerous, not better.
In a recent book called It's Not Too Late, Rebecca Solnit addresses our faint-heartedness head-on. She says:
It is late. We are deep in an emergency. But it is not too late, because the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We are deciding it now. The longer we wait to act, the more limited the options, but scientists tell us there are good options and great urgency to embrace them while we can.
We are deep in an emergency, and we need as many people as possible to do what they can to work toward the best-case scenarios and ward off the worst. Involvement depends on having a sense of personal power – the capacity to make an impact. Inseparable from that sense is the hope that it matters that you do it.
Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes the best, and assumes its inevitability, which leads to passivity, as do the pessimism and cynicism that assume the worst. Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss. It means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it.
Our main job is not to convince climate deniers and the indifferent. It's to engage and inspire those who care, but who don't see that they can and should have an active role in this movement, who don't see that what we do matters —that it's not too late, and we are making epic decisions now.
We are fated – doomed or privileged or perhaps both – to be living in the most important decade of human history. It is within the next few years that humans will rise to the occasion and prevent our climate crisis from dooming future generations to a truncated and perhaps miserable existence, or we will fail. We can't know now what the future will bring, but we don't have the privilege and luxury of giving up hope.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting, 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 is held in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. 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!
The passing of the Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto this week prompts us to recall her role in bringing Boss Nova music to the USA in 1964. In that year, her rendition of "The Girl from Ipanema," according to the NYTimes, "became one of the most-covered songs in pop music history. It has been featured in more than 50 films." To hear more of Astrud Gilberto's singing, go here. Saxophonist Stan Getz recorded lots of Bossa Nova and Samba music; you can listen to some of it here.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
The US Versus The Afghan People: 15 million Afghans On The Verge of Famine
By
---- Last Monday, the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UN World Food Programme (WFP) released a joint report listing Afghanistan among the nine countries that are "hotspots of highest concern." The details are harrowing: "In Afghanistan, approximately 15.3 million people (35 percent of the population analyzed) are estimated to face high acute food insecurity … including just under 2.8 million people in Emergency … Over 3.2 million children and 804,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are acutely malnourished." … The business press has a few ideas as to what is driving the current catastrophe. According to the Economist, "America and its allies have isolated the country. They have largely shut off the aid that once provided 75% of Afghanistan's budget, and withheld $9.5bn of its sovereign reserves … Its loss of Western support has triggered an economic crunch that threatens millions with starvation." [Read More]
The World Economy Is Changing—the People Know, but Their Leaders Don't
By
---- The year 2020 marked parity between the total GDP of the G7 (the U.S. plus allies) and the total GDP of the BRICS group (China plus allies). Since then, the BRICS economies grew faster than the G7 economies. Now a third of total world output comes from the BRICS countries, while the G7 accounts for below 30 percent. Beyond the obvious symbolism, this difference entails real political, cultural, and economic consequences. … The evident failure of the economic sanctions war against Russia offers yet more evidence of the relative strength of the BRICS alliance. That alliance now can and does offer nations alternatives to accommodating the demands and pressures of the once-hegemonic G7. The latter's efforts to isolate Russia seem to have boomeranged and exposed instead the relative isolation of the G7. [Read More]
AI Doesn't Pose an Existential Risk—but Silicon Valley Does
By Edward Ongweso Jr., The Nation [June 8, 2023]
---- These claims of an extinction-level threat come from the very same groups creating the technology, and their warning cries about future dangers is drowning out stories on the harms already occurring. … Scaremongering about AI is a tactic to sell more AI. But it's also part of a larger campaign that poses an actual threat to all of us. A deeply entrenched contempt for democracy, a desire to use the state as a vessel for reshaping society into something more amenable to unregulated development and profit-seeking, and a long-standing obsession with surveillance and social control will deliver eye-watering returns for a few. It will also leave us with a world dominated by innovative extraction, violent borders, robust and dynamic repression, and streamlined violence. Don't fall for the trick: Silicon Valley, not AI, is the existential risk to humanity. [Read More]
An Interview with Susan Sontag [On photography, 1975]
From The Boston Review [June 1, 1975]
Interviewer: - "The U.S. is probably the contemporary world's purest example of a society which is perpetually trying to abolish history, to avoid thinking in historical terms, to associate dynamism with premeditated amnesia." It struck me that, in your essays, you too are asserting about America that we are deracinated—we are not in possession of our past. Perhaps there is a redemptive impulse in our keeping photographic records.
Sontag: The contrast between America and Vietnam couldn't be more striking. In Trip to Hanoi, the short book I wrote after my first trip to North Vietnam, in 1968, I described how struck I was by the Vietnamese taste for making historical connections and analogies, however crude or simple we might find them. Talking about the American aggression, the Vietnamese would cite something that the French had done, or something that happened during the thousands of years of invasions from China. The Vietnamese situate themselves in an historical continuum. That continuum contains repetitions. … Americans have a completely linear sense of history—insofar as they have one at all. The essential American relation to the past is not to carry too much of it. The past impedes action, saps energy. It's a burden because it modifies or contradicts optimism. If photographs are our connection with the past, it's a very peculiar, fragile, sentimental connection. You take a photograph before you destroy something. The photograph is its posthumous existence. [Read More]
The War in Ukraine
Ukraine launched its long-anticipated "counteroffensive" against Russian forces occupying Ukraine's southeast and the Donbas. The offensive is spearheaded by 14 battalions trained by NATO forces in Germany, and armed by recently acquired military equipment such as German "Leopard" tanks and USA "Bradley" fighting vehicles. Given the declining popular support for giving Ukraine a blank check to continue the war without end, the success or failure (whatever they are) of this Ukrainian offensive may determine whether the USA/NATO continues to hold to "war until victory" or pressures Ukraine to consider a negotiated outcome.
Also this week, the Biden administration announced a new $2.1 billion wapons package for Ukraine, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister once again rejected calls to "freeze" the fighting so that peace talks could take place, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday that Ukraine has received a "powerful offer" from countries that are willing to provide their American-made F-16 fighter jets, and the collapse of a major dam (cause & perpetrators still debated).on the Dnieper River threatens the the safety of Europe's largest nuclear power plant.
For some useful reading on the state of war/peace in Ukraine, recommended are "A War Long Wanted: Diplomatic Malpractice in Ukraine," by former State Department official and member of Veterans for Peace Matthew Hoh, [Link]; and "Annals of the Ukraine War: Year Two," b [Link].
The Climate Crisis
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [June 7, 2023]
--- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Monday that parts per million of carbon dioxide in our planet's atmosphere averaged 424 ppm [parts per million] in the month of May, reaching a level not seen for millions of years. In May 2022 it was only 421 ppm, so this is a tremendous jump on a year over year basis. … Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas which prevents the heat of the sun's rays from radiating back out into outer space through the atmosphere at the same rate they used to before the industrial revolution. Keeping more heat on earth means hotter oceans and more powerful hurricanes and cyclones, along with hotter air and more desiccation of soil and forests, leading to more wildfires. Those newly common wildfires in Canada are now blanketing the US Midwest and Northeast with heavy smog. The only way to stop this march to a fully tropical globe is to stop burning gasoline and diesel in our vehicles, and to stop generating electricity and heating our homes with coal and fossil gas. [Read More]
Civil Liberties
Supreme Court Weakened Legal Protections for Striking. Only Jackson Dissented.
By
---- In a shameful decision last week, eight members of the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the right to strike. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stood up for the workers. In her 27-page dissent in Glacier Northwest, Inc. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Jackson wrote, "The right to strike is fundamental to American labor law." Indeed, it is the threat of a strike that gives workers leverage during contract negotiations with an employer. Jackson continued: "Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their masters. They are employees whose collective and peaceful decision to withhold their labor is protected by the [National Labor Relations Act] even if economic injury results." [Read More] Also of interest is "This Is Not the End of the Supreme Court's War on Labor," by Elie Mystal, The Nation [June 4, 2023] Link].
The State of the Union
Our Epidemic of Mass Shootings Is Traumatizing a Generation and Threatening Democracy
By Firmin DeBrabander, Jacobin Magazine [June 2023]
---- At the gleaming new Fruitport High School in Michigan, the entrance opens to a spacious atrium, with floating rows of lockers arrayed diagonally from the front door. They are noticeably short so students can peer over them. Overlooking the atrium is a walkway fenced with metal sheets and pockmarked with slits through which you can survey the space below if you were to crouch. … This is school design for the depressing reality of twenty-first-century America, where gun violence has become the leading cause of death for youths, and the number of mass shootings continues to soar — to more than one a day in 2023 so far. Among the most horrifying massacres are those at schools. Reasonable societies would respond to these trends by curtailing access to guns and making it harder to carry them in public. We have decided instead to make it easier to access and carry guns — and use them — in public and to transform our schools into fortresses, traumatizing an entire generation in the process. [Read More]
The Racist, Insulting Resurgence of Work Requirements
By Bryce Covert, The Nation [June 8, 2023]
---- Work requirements are part of the racist drive to keep the poor from getting benefits that might help them survive. They were born of President Reagan's hammering away at the "welfare queen" trope, which paved the way for Americans to see "welfare" as something that mostly serves Black people (though white people are the biggest group of public benefit recipients) who are lazy and therefore deserve cuts to the program they rely on. The racism lives on. … Work requirements expose the nasty underbelly of the vaunted American work ethic. We think the poor don't work because they can't be bothered to, and are willing to deprive them of the basics that are required to stay alive—food, housing, health care—to force them to, in McCarthy's words, get off the couch. We would rather they and their children starve than risk that they might spend less time on the job. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
Biden Embraces Antisemitism Definition That Has Upended Free Speech in Europe
By Alice Speri, The Intercept [June 6 2023]
---- During a graduation speech at the City University of New York's law school last month, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Yemeni American student, criticized "Israeli settler colonialism" and advocated for "the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism." Her words, which the university administration condemned as "hate speech," kicked off a new round of public debate about the distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. And it comes on the heels of President Joe Biden nodding to the definition in the White House's national strategy to combat antisemitism, released in late May…. The push for U.S. entities to adopt the IHRA definition has had limited success so far. While 31 states and dozens of counties and municipalities have embraced it in resolutions, strong constitutional protections for free speech have made more meaningful implementation challenging. [Read More]
Our History
History Is a Human Right
May 24, 2023]
---- With almost half of all students in the United States attending a school whose educators have been given educational gag orders to prohibit them from teaching honestly about the history of systemic racism, a grassroots network of educators, parents, and students across the country are organizing a #TeachTruth National Day of Action on June 10, 2023, to fight back. … Faced with this assault on the truth, educators around the country are turning the world into their classroom on June 10 and defying the billionaires funding the attack on antiracist education with public pedagogy at an array of creative events. In Lansing, Michigan, organizers are gathering at the corner where Earl Little — father of Malcolm X — was almost certainly lynched by being thrown in front of a streetcar. They're walking to the hospital where he died to deliver banned children's books to the kids in their care. Along the way, they plan to chalk the sidewalks with historical information about the Black Freedom Struggle. [Read More]
The Millions We Failed to Save
By Ruth Franklin, New York Review of Books [June 22, 2023 issue]
---- As demonstrated in The US and the Holocaust—a six-hour documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein that aired on PBS last fall and is now available for streaming—antisemitic, xenophobic, and racist groups in American society had long used their political power to keep out immigrants perceived as undesirable, including Jews. The influence of these groups increased just as Jews were becoming more and more desperate to leave Germany and the ever-expanding territory it occupied. Not only did the US prove unwilling to relax its rigid immigration laws to help them, but it introduced new restrictions, resulting in the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of potential immigrants who soon met their deaths at the hands of the Nazis—among them Edith, Margot, and Anne Frank. The question of whether it was within the power of the US to prevent the Holocaust—or at least to reduce the number of its victims—is usually posed as a military one: Should the Allies have directed some of the war effort toward disrupting the operation of concentration camps, for example by bombing the railroad lines to Auschwitz? This searching, compulsively watchable documentary, which juxtaposes archival photographs and news footage with interviews with Holocaust refugees, survivors, and historians, puts the question differently: Why did the US turn away the flood of Jewish refugees who sought to escape Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s? To read more, paste this link - https://archive.ph/2QK9n – into your browser.
