Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
September 4, 2023
Hello All – As part of the effort to stem the USA workers' insurgency of 1894 – most notably the nationwide "Pullman" strike of railway workers – President Grover Cleveland instituted Labor Day to offset the public abhorrence of the use of military troops to crush the strikes. And it has been ever thus: America and its labor movement remain a hard-fought terrain that belies the myth of class harmony and industrial peace. Yet without a strong labor movement, the struggle for basic human and civil rights in the USA has been greatly hampered, and the active intervention of the government against movements for unionization – especially in the South – has moved much of America to "Third World" country status. We all have a stake in Labor Day, what it celebrates and what it requires of us as conscientious citizens.
Unionization remains very low in the USA compared to the labor movements in many other countries, hovering around 10 percent of the work force. Moreover, the largest sector of unionized workers is among public workers: teachers, municipal employees, hospital workers, etc., all subject to repression by reactionary government power. The growing awareness of massive inequality and the recent success of several well-publicized strikes have brought a greater awareness of and sympathy towards unions among the general public - A 2021 Gallup poll found that almost 70% support unions — the highest mark in 56 years — including nearly half of Republicans; and support for unions and strikes is strongest among people under 30. The recent victory of the Teamsters in their contract negotiations raised hopes further; the coming negotiations/strike by the autoworkers' union (UAW) will be a significant test of whether forward momentum can be sustained.
Hampered as it is by the reactionary Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the Biden administration remains the most pro-labor administration in living memory. Some of this support comes indirectly, such as the tremendous benefit to employment and workers' rights embodied in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. Other benefits are more direct, such as Executive Orders and appoints to federal regulatory bodies such as the National Labor Relations Board.
"Labor," of course, is much broader than just union membership or union rights. The broad USA working class – recomposed from the archetypal male worker at his workbench to a class predominately of women and increasingly people of color – fights for its rights and subsistence through a myriad of community- and work-place-based struggles. In the fightback against white supremacy and neo-fascism, and against the technological changes built in to artificial intelligence and the "gig economy," supporters of peace and justice, of rights and "the pursuit of happiness," have much to learn and digest regarding the new terrain of "labor" and its struggles for a better world.
Events of Interest/Importance
Climate March – Sunday, September 17th
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called a September 20 Climate Ambition Summit to address the global climate emergency. On Sunday, September 17, a wide coalition of environmental, social justice, youth, indigenous, labor, and faith groups is converging in NYC for the March to End Fossil Fuels. We will demand that President Biden declare a climate emergency and take bold and immediate action to end our reliance on fossil fuels. Please join us! CD16 and CFOW will be on the first car on the MetroNorth train that stops in Hastings at 10:58 a.m. (Check times from Tarrytown to Riverdale for the same train). We will convene by the information booth in Grand Central between 11:45-noon and head to the start of the march (near Columbus Circle) together. The event will end around 4:30 near the UN. For detailed information on the march: https://www.endfossilfuels.us/.
Screening of "The Interview" – Sunday, September 10th
The documentary film "The Interview" will be shown at Temple Israel (1000 Pinebrook Boulevard) in New Rochelle on Sunday, September 10th, at 1 pm. The film asks viewers to confront their feelings about justice and redemption. The program is hosted by Temple Israel New Rochelle's Social Action Committee and co-sponsored by RAPP (Releasing Aging People from Prison), Bend the Arc, Riverdale Chapter, and the People's Campaign for Parole Justice. The film will be preceded by a free vegan lunch at 12 pm, sponsored by the Temple Israel Social Action Committee. For more information and to register for the event, go here.
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 week's Rewards for stalwart readers are brought to you by the US labor movement, the same people who gave us the weekend and the 8-hour day. This music has deep roots and was born in many regions. The songs and poetry of the time of early mega-industrialization are reflected in "Solidarity Forever," written by IWW activist Ralph Chaplin in 1915 and sung by Pete Seeger. Woody Guthrie was the singing poet of the Great Depression; here are his 1941 song "Pastures of Plenty" about migrant farm workers. In 1948, in response to an airplane crash that killed workers returning to Mexico, Guthrie wrote "Deportees," sung here by Joan Baez. Though often composed long ago, labor songs are updated and adapted to changes in the workers' struggle, as illustrated by Woody Guthrie's 1940 song "Union Maid," sung here by the New Harmony Sisterhood in the 1970s. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
You Can't Be a Socialist Alone
A discussion between wise women Astra Taylor and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, In These Times [August 31, 2023]
[FB – In this interesting dialogue, two intellectual and movement leaders talk candidly about the growing mass rejection of capitalism—and the challenges of converting that into real socialist organization.]
Astra: You mentioned Covid policies. There was this amazing expansion of the welfare state for a year or two, and now it's basically been totally decimated. They didn't roll it back because it was too expensive or because it didn't have positive social effects — but rather because it worked. Child poverty went down to historic lows, it was reduced by 30%. That's why it was stripped back: The expanded welfare state was more of a threat to the economy than Covid itself, in a sense. But also, that expansion wasn't really because of the strength of the Left. And so the Left wasn't there to protect it.
Keeanga: There are particular reforms — and then there's "reformism" as an approach that only sees politics within the confines of the existing political system. The contemporary example would be a steadfast belief in electoralism as the only way to conceive of political change. I think that idea of reformism is rapidly becoming nonviable for most people. … I think the failures of that campaign are why Occupy Wall Street was so explosive, why Black Lives Matter was so explosive, why #MeToo erupted. These were all a kind of acknowledgment that we're actually not going to vote our way out of this. I think the 2020 uprising in some ways reflected that. [Read More]
The Biden Administration Cuts and Runs From Haiti
By Amy Wilentz, The Nation [September 1, 2023]
---- We could begin with the list of gross human rights violations and massacres that have taken place in Haiti just in the past weeks, but there have been so many that the recitation has become over-familiar and even tedious to those who aren't watching closely and who haven't experienced what's happening there first hand or through relatives and friends. Ongoing bad news inures people to tragedy. … Haiti is indeed cursed because it has a neighbor to the north that has exploited its resources, created a Haitian government that runs on corruption, helped destroy the country's idiosyncratic but workable agricultural economy (now long defunct), and imposed and then interfered in election after election, extracting a popular leader here and defanging another there, while empowering the worst, and simultaneously undermining Haitians' belief in democratic elections. [Read More]
The 14th Amendment – Can Trump Get on the Presidential Ballot?
(Video) Jamie Raskin on Trump's Possible Disqualification
From Portside [September 1, 2023 ]
---- The 14th Amendment bars anyone who violates an oath to the Constitution by subsequently aiding insurrection.[See the short video]. Can this perspective gain/win support from Republicans? Read "The Conservatives Who Read the Constitution— and Found It Disqualifies Trump," by John Nichols, The Nation [September 2, 2023] [Link]. The obvious next question is asked by Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post: "How secretaries of state could keep Trump off the ballot" [August 29, 2023] [Link]. The Deep Thinking that interprets the 14th Amendment as meaning that Trump is ineligible for state or federal office can be found in "The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again," by J. Michel Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe, The Atlantic [August 20, 2023] [Link].
The War in Ukraine
Now in its 18th month, the war in Ukraine grinds on, with heartbreaking devastation to Ukraine and its people – including 200,000 war casualties – with the expectation now that Ukraine's "counteroffensive" will not achieve significant gains before the snows come, and that the war will continue well into 2024. While the Ukrainian government and the Pentagon are pushing back against claims that the war has become "a stalemate," I find the pessimistic analyses of Prof. John J. Mearsheimer ("Bound to Lose: Ukraine's 2023 Counteroffensive") and of the military blogger Big Serge ("Escaping Attrition: Ukraine Rolls the Dice") persuasive. Based on what we know now, it's "stalemate" as far into the future as we can see. This naturally raises the question about negotiations, about cutting a deal. Both the USA and the Ukrainian government remain adamantly against this; but the taboo on even raising the possibility of discussions, back-channel contacts, and negotiations is weakening. A useful/interesting survey of negotiation proposals put forward by some elite commentators - "The Case for Negotiating with Russia" – appears in a recent issue of The New Yorker. CFOW has joined with other peace groups – including Peace Action and Code Pink's "Peace in Ukraine" project – for more than a year now in agitating for a ceasefire and negotiations; and the growing opposition to continued support for Ukraine (esp. funding, etc.) in both the USA and Europe may begin to have an effect on the political-military elite, especially if "stalemate" continues into the US presidential election campaign.
Some Useful Reading on the Ukraine War
"Few Russians wanted the war in Ukraine – but they won't accept a Russian defeat either," by Anatol Lieven, The Guardian [UK] [August 30, 2023] [Link].
---- "From conversations I've had, it appears that a large majority of elite and ordinary Russians would accept a ceasefire along the present battle lines and would not mount any challenge if Putin proposed or agreed to such a ceasefire and presented it as a sufficient Russian victory."
"The Last Time A Foreign Military Threat Was Placed Near The US Border, The World Almost Ended," by Caitlin Johnstone [August 27, 2023] [Link].
---- "To demand that Russia and China tolerate foreign activities on their borders that the US would never even think about tolerating on its own borders is just demanding that the entire world lie down and submit to being ruled by Washington."
"Are US officials signaling a new 'forever war' in Ukraine?" by Branko Marcetic, Responsible Statecraft [August 23, 2023] [Link].
---- "Now that Kyiv's counteroffensive is foundering, goal posts in the timing for talks and a ceasefire are quietly being moved well past the date that the Biden administration had appeared to set last year."
War & Peace
Mechanistic Destruction
By Gabriel Kolko, ZNet [August, 2007]
[FB – The late Gabriel Kolko was a leading historian of war & peace, including two books about the origins of the Cold War that remain foundational to understand our era.]
---- The United States has rarely lost any conventional military battle since at least 1950. Nor has it, at the same time, ever won a war. It has successfully overthrown governments through interventions or subversion but the political results of all its efforts – as in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Iran in 1953 – have often made its subsequent geopolitical position far, far more tenuous. In a word, in international affairs it bumbles very badly and it has made an already highly unstable world far more precarious than it otherwise would be if only the U.S. had left the world alone. No less important, Americans would be far better off thereby. …All the factors I have mentioned – its myopia regarding technology, the policy consensus that binds ambitious politicians and often makes public opinion irrelevant, the arms makers and their local interests, or the limits of rational inputs – have all combined to deliver us to this impasse. [Read More]
The US Is Fanning the Flames of War With China
By Marjorie Cohn [September 2, 2023]
---- The United States is gunning for war with China. By cozying up to Taiwan and arming it to the teeth, President Joe Biden is undermining the "One China" policy which has been the cornerstone of U.S.-China relations since 1979. The Biden administration is enlisting South Korea and Japan to encircle China. The U.S. military is conducting provocative military maneuvers that exacerbate the conflict in the South China Sea. Biden is escalating tensions with China and intensifying the danger of nuclear war in the Asia-Pacific. And Republican presidential candidates are also fanning the flames of war with China. [Read More] Also of interest is "The US and China must unite to fight the climate crisis, not each other," by Bernie Sanders, The Guardian [UK] [August 21, 2023] [Link].
The Climate Crisis
Laid-off Sierra Club Staffers: 'We Can't Give Up on United Fronts'
By Brooke Anderson, Hop Hopkins, and Michelle Mascarenhas, Convergence Magazine [August 8, 2023]
[FB – This interview with two former leaders of the Sierra Club gives a rare insider look at the obstacles to developing a "climate justice" perspective within the world of a large environmental organizations. For some useful background, read "What the Hell Is Going On at the Sierra Club?" by Kate Aronoff, The New Republic (May 17, 2023)] [Link].
---- For the last decade, climate justice organizers have seen the Sierra Club as a critical lever for moving a climate agenda that centers equity and just transition. It has the largest grassroots base outside of labor, the most substantial infrastructure of any national green group in the US, and roots in a movement that at times was not afraid to go toe-to-toe with large corporations or development-oriented pro-business government entities. But beginning in May, the organization accelerated a restructuring process that included layoffs of the entire equity and environmental justice teams and of senior staffers, several Black women and other women of color among them. … It is a harbinger of a shift away from equity and towards green capital just as the 2024 election nears—and reflects an anti-woke backlash occurring in liberal organizations across many sectors of the movement. [Read More]
Civil Liberties
What Prison? Censorship Has Never Been Worse at Guantánamo Bay
By Elise Swain, The Intercept [August 27 2023]
---- The rocky cliffs of Cuba split the ocean from the sky as our flight descended toward the tarmac at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. It was a clear afternoon in late June, and the first thing we were told before boarding the flight from Joint Base Andrews was not to photograph from the tarmac or plane. It was the start of a week at America's most notorious military base, where absurd restrictions would dictate what I, and other journalists, could and could not see. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
Spectres of Palestinian history: an interview with Isabella Hammad
By Bill V. Mullen, Mondoweiss [September 1, 2023]
---- Isabella Hammad's first two novels are powerful and artful meditations on Palestinian history and diaspora. In The Parisian (2019) Midhat Kamal, the son of a wealthy textile merchant in Nablus, travels to Paris to study medicine. He returns home after a broken love affair to find Palestine under British rule, and becomes witness to a surge of Palestinian nationalism culminating in the 1936 Arab revolt. In Enter Ghost (2023) Sonia Nasir, a British-Palestinian actress living in London, returns to Haifa to visit her sister Haneen and ends up playing the part of Gertrude in a West Bank production of Hamlet which Israeli authorities attempt to shut down. Both novels test the main characters' capacity to fathom and participate in forms of political resistance, while offering astute portraits of Palestinian civil society fueled by desires for national liberation and personal freedom. In this conversation, Hammad talks about her approach to history as a novelist, her sense of political commitment as an artist, and shares thoughts on the prospects for Palestinian liberation. [Read More]
'It's like 1948': Israel cleanses vast West Bank region of nearly all Palestinians
By Oren Ziv, +972 Magazine [Israel/Palestine] [August 31, 2023]
---- There are almost no Palestinians remaining in a vast area stretching east from Ramallah to the outskirts of Jericho. Most of the communities who lived in the area — which covers around 150,000 dunams, or 150 square kilometers, of the occupied West Bank — have fled for their lives in recent months as a result of intensifying Israeli settler violence and land seizures, backed by the Israeli army and state institutions. The near-total emptying of the region's Palestinian population shows how Israel's slow but gradual process of ethnic cleansing is continuing apace, effectively annexing large swathes of the occupied territory for exclusive Jewish settlement. … The few small Palestinian communities that remain in the area may also soon be forced to leave, out of grave fear for their physical safety and mental wellbeing. In the last year alone, hundreds of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced in this way. [Read More]
Our History
The Forgotten Radicalism of the March on Washington
By Jamelle Bouie, New York Times [August 29, 2023]
---- As remembered and commemorated by most Americans, the 1963 March on Washington — its 60th anniversary fell on Monday — represents the essence of the civil rights movement, defined in our national mythology as a colorblind demand for neutrality and fairness in the face of discrimination, embodied in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. …Less well remembered, in our collective memory at least, is the fact that both the march and King's speech were organized around much more than opposition to anti-Black discrimination. It was officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with a far more expansive vision for society than formal equality under the law. The march wasn't a demand for a more inclusive arrangement under the umbrella of postwar American liberalism, as it might seem today. It was a demand for something more — for a social democracy of equals, grounded in the long Black American struggle to realize the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the potential of Reconstruction. [Read More] For some interesting details, read "The Civil Rights Movement Was Filled to the Brim With Leftists," Jacobin Magazine [August 2023] [Link]. 
