Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
May 10, 2020
Hello All – The coronavirus has given us a national stress-test. Our healthcare system, for example, has dramatically failed this test. We now know that planning for public-health crises was virtually non-existent, that hospital facilities and supplies had been reduced to the minimum necessary for "normal" times, and that staffing levels were inadequate. And so the system cracked when stressed by the coronavirus. Now our economy and supporting infrastructure are facing a similar test. For example, our supply chains and "just-in-time" inventory controls, perhaps adequate in "normal" times, have collapsed. As Trump and his corporate support-team attempt to restart the economy – votes for Trump and profits for business – we see that "market incentives" cannot stimulate investment or restore a workforce. As we learned in the Great Depression, only state planning and public spending can do that.
A report issued by the Brookings Institution last Wednesday illustrates the failures of the going order. A survey of households with children 12 and under found that more than 17 percent of the children were not getting enough to eat. This is three times the level of the Great Recession of 2008-09. Another sample, the Covid Impact Survey, "found nearly 23 percent of households said they lacked money to get enough food, compared to about 16 percent at the worst of the Great Recession. Among households with children, the share without enough food was nearly 35 percent, up from about 21 percent in the previous downturn." [Link]. The report speculates that the end of school meals programs may be part of the problem here, but the basic reason is that people don't have enough money; and the Republicans' refusal to consider increasing the food stamp benefit or other food support programs illustrates the depravity of their party.
A report in last Friday's Guardian [UK] was headlined "Farmers Are Destroying Mountains of Food." "In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped lakes of fresh cow's milk [millions of gallons per day]… and crop growers plowed acres of vegetables into the ground as the nation's brittle and anarchic food supply chain began to snap and crumble." This article goes on to describe meat-packing plants and orchards shutting down, as immigrant workers became sick with Covid-19. Needless to say, many of these workers are ineligible for economic relief. The article concludes by observing that "America's food system meltdown amid the pandemic has been long-developing, and a primary cause is decades of corporate centralization and a chaotic array of policies designed to prop up agribusiness profits at any cost."
The failures of our medical and food supply systems, along with (real) unemployment numbers approaching Great Depression levels, describe a structural problem that requires structural solutions. Though the Great Depression required the war industries of World War II to re-stabilize capitalism, the planning initiatives of the New Deal, driven in part by a strong labor movement, prevented further collapse and perhaps fascism. Clearly a new Roosevelt is not in the offing; we can only rely on ourselves to drive the change we need to survive.
News Notes
The New York Democratic presidential primary election is ON; at least for now. Ten days ago the election (scheduled for June 23rd) was canceled by Gov. Cuomo and the New York Democratic Party election commissioners, but on May 4th a federal court judge issued an injunction and temporary restraining order restoring the election. The suit against the cancellation was brought by presidential candidate Andrew Yang, and was supported by some of the Sanders would-be delegates. Former candidate for NYS governor Zephyr Teachout wrote a good update/assessment – "Democracy Wins in New York—and Bernie's Back on the Ballot!" – for The Nation. Late last week Cuomo and the election commissioners appealed to the next highest federal court. Papers are due by midnight Monday, and the hearing on Cuomo's appeal may come as soon as Tuesday.
Last week's Newsletter assembled some factoids to point out that US-supported military operations against Venezuela's government seemed to be underway. And the next day, Monday, the Maduro government announced that it had foiled an attempted invasion by several dozen people, killing eight and capturing two Americans. According to some of the invaders, the plan was to kill Maduro and seize control of the airport, allowing supporters of the coup (who?) to fly in. The Trump people waffled about whether they knew about or supported this coup attempt, while the blabber-mouth leader of the coup, a former Green Beret, showed television viewers what he claimed was a contract signed by US puppet and would-be Venezuela "president" Juan Guido that promised to pay $212 million for a successful invasion. (And just in is an in-depth account of the invasion from the website Shadowproof:: "Trump Officials Knew Mercenary Group Was Plotting to Topple Maduro").
Our friend and CFOW stalwart Andy Ryan, known to many of you as a strong activist for peace and justice, has set up a GoFundMe page to raise money to help his son in Ohio hire a lawyer. Please check out Andy's explanation of the situation here, and make a contribution if you can. Thanks.
Finally, today is Mother's Day. Now framed with greeting cards and going out to dinner, the first incarnation of Mother's Day was a day against war and for peace. According to the Zinn Education Project, "Mother's Day began as a call to action to improve the lives of families through health and peace. Ann Jarvis of Appalachia founded Mother's Day in 1858 to promote sanitation in response to high infant mortality. After the Civil War, abolitionist Julia Ward Howe made a Mother's Day call to women to protest the carnage of war." In 1870, as the war between Germany and France raged, Howe proclaimed: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." To learn more, go here.
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.) 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!
Fred Gillen, Jr. and friends have put together a 12-hour virtual concert in honor of Toshi Seeger and to raise funds for Clearwater Environmental Action. To join and listen in, go here. On a different note, Rewards! Curator AW sent along links to the music site Pitchfork's appreciation of the 1972 album by Archie Shepp, "Attica Blues." The album was a protest in response to the massacre of prisoners at upstate New York's Attica prison the previous year. I was not able to find a link to the entire album, but several cuts/songs from album are available on YouTube, including this one, "Blues for Brother George Jackson."
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
Annals of the Plague Year
Other Countries get Testing, Contact Tracing and Open Economies: We get President Lysol and Malign Neglect
By Ann Jones, TomDispatch [May 8, 2020]
---- The records of other countries make this clear. South Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, and Norway have all had commendable success in protecting their people. Could it be by chance that seven out of eight of the most successful nations in combating the Covid-19 pandemic are headed by women? Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, Sanna Marin of Finland, Angela Merkel of Germany, KatrÃn Jakobsdóttir of Iceland, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, and Erna Solberg of Norway have all been described in similar terms: as calm, confident, and compassionate leaders. All of them have been commended for thorough preparations, quick decisive action, and clear, empathic communication. Erna Solberg has even been hailed as the "landets mor," the mother of her country. … I know something about the difference good leadership makes because I've been locked down now in two different countries. One kept me safe, the other nearly killed me. I happened to be in Norway when the virus arrived and saw firsthand what a well-run government can actually do. [Read More]
Socially Necessary Work
By Dianne Feeley, Solidarity-US [May 6, 2020]
---- As the pandemic rages we realize that "necessary work" is not Wall Street and its stock market or the manufacturing of cars but the health and well-being of society. That is, the work that is central to society turns out to be what socialist feminists call "social reproduction." These are the functions necessary to sustain human life, whether performed inside or outside the home, whether paid or unpaid. For the most part this has been considered "women's work," and if paid work, generally poorly paid. In the midst of the pandemic, women are over-represented among workers deemed "essential" — 52% compared to 47% in the workforce as a whole. Of the 19 million U.S. health care workers, four out of five are women. At the lower end of the pay scale of the industry are 5.8 million who are working for less than $30,000 a year, with few benefits. Of those, half are people of color, 83% of the total are women. Shockingly, the Centers for Disease Control found that 73% of the health care workers who have been infected with the novel coronavirus are women. [Read More]
Mass Incarceration Poses a Uniquely American Risk in the Coronavirus Pandemic
By Alice Speri, The Intercept [
---- There is a fundamental flaw in the models that Trump administration officials have used to project the curve of the coronavirus outbreak as it rips across the United States. Those models were based on other countries' experiences with the virus — from China to Italy — and do not account for a uniquely American risk factor: mass incarceration. There are currently 2.3 million people incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. The U.S. accounts for 4 percent of the world's population and 21 percent of its prisoners. While incarcerated people have been released in trickles across the country as the U.S. has become the global epicenter of the pandemic, those releases are hardly making a dent in the density of prisons and jails, and they pale in comparison to the tens of thousands of people freed by other countries with far lower incarceration rates. [Read More]
The First 100 Days of the U.S. Government's COVID-19 Response
By Nick Schwellenbach, Project on Government Oversight [May 6, 2020]
---- The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has compiled a day-by-day timeline of the first 100 days of the U.S. federal government's response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, which began in China in late 2019 and became a global pandemic. The timeline begins with the glimmers of initial international awareness of this virus that causes COVID-19. But, for the purpose of assessing the U.S. federal government's response to COVID-19, Day 1 is the first day in which there is public information that a cabinet official was made aware of the outbreak: January 3, 2020. [Read More]
It Is Too Soon to Re-open the Economy
(Video) As Trump Claims "Fantastic Job" on COVID, Reporter Laurie Garrett Warns Pandemic May Last 36+ Months
From Democracy Now! [May 6, 2020]
---- As President Trump starts to reopen the country, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett predicts the pandemic will last at least 36 months. Meanwhile, a top government vaccine specialist says he was forced from his job after he resisted the administration's promotion of untested treatments for COVID-19. Garrett predicted the pandemic. In an extended interview, she discusses what's next. [See the Program]
(Video) As States Loosen Pandemic Restrictions, Dr. Leana Wen Warns "We Are Not Ready for a Safe Reopening"
From Democracy Now! [May 8, 2020]
---- As more than 40 states begin to reopen, President Trump is downplaying the need for mass COVID-19 testing, even as he himself is now being tested every day for the virus. We speak with emergency physician Dr. Leana Wen, who says, "Widespread testing is so critical. … Why shouldn't this testing be available to all Americans?" [See the Program]
Don't Be Fooled by America's Flattening Curve
By May 6, 2020]
---- America's current "plateau" isn't good news, he said. Infections from the earliest-hit metropolitan areas are now spawning outbreaks of their own across the country. What's happening is a series of "mini-epidemics," each following the predictable curve that rises and falls as the virus runs out of susceptible people to infect, he said. Meanwhile, the national numbers offer a deceptive picture: All the mini-epidemics are laid on top of one another, coming at different moments and infecting different populations. The pattern is repeating in states all across the country, with new outbreaks emerging after the initial, localized epidemic waned. These mini-epidemics take off regionally and put hundreds of lives at risk while the statewide numbers appear to be flat or dropping. [Read More]
Featured Essays
Screen New Deal: Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia
By Naomi Klein, The Intercept [
---- It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the "Screen New Deal." Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future. …It's a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor's offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. … Thanks to Cuomo and his various billionaire partnerships (including one with Michael Bloomberg for testing and tracing), New York state is being positioned as the gleaming showroom for this grim future — but the ambitions reach far beyond the borders of any one state or country. [Read More] For an account of how educators are pushing back, read "'A Dangerous Idea': Public School Advocates Denounce Cuomo-Gates Plan Seizing on Pandemic to 'Reimagine' New York's Education System," by May 6, 2020' [cites Jamaal Bowman] [Link]
Israel's New Government Is Exploiting Pandemic to Annex 30 Percent of West Bank
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [May 5, 2020]
---- After three indecisive elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponent Benny Gantz agreed to form a unity government in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the central pillars of this new regime is the unlawful annexation of the Jordan Valley and illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. The annexation has the full backing of U.S. President Donald Trump. … The annexation, slated to begin in July, will ostensibly include about 30 percent of the occupied West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, and Jewish settlements containing over 620,000 settlers. [Read More]
Trump is Igniting a Cold War With China to Try to Win Re-election
By Robert Fisk, The Independent [UK] [May 5, 2020]
---- President Trump is having some success in demonising China: he says that that he has a "high degree of confidence" that the deadly virus emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan, though he cannot reveal the source of his information. The purpose of Trump's lies is not to convince by rational argument but to dominate the news agenda by outrageous allegations. This simple PR trick has previously worked well for him, but scapegoating China may not be enough to divert attention away from the price Americans have paid for his calamitous mishandling of the pandemic. … The strategy is crude, but demonising China as "The Yellow Peril" might just work on election day. "Don't defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban – attack China," says a 57-page memo sent out by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to Republican candidates, advising them on how to rebut criticism of the president's actions. Joe Biden, the Democratic Party presidential candidate, is already being pilloried by the Republicans as "Beijing Biden". In an epidemic, people are frightened and seek a scapegoat, foreigners at home and abroad being an obvious target. Probably only a hate-driven conspiracy theory can keep Trump in the White House when 30 million Americans are unemployed. [Read More]
---- President Trump is having some success in demonising China: he says that that he has a "high degree of confidence" that the deadly virus emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan, though he cannot reveal the source of his information. The purpose of Trump's lies is not to convince by rational argument but to dominate the news agenda by outrageous allegations. This simple PR trick has previously worked well for him, but scapegoating China may not be enough to divert attention away from the price Americans have paid for his calamitous mishandling of the pandemic. … The strategy is crude, but demonising China as "The Yellow Peril" might just work on election day. "Don't defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban – attack China," says a 57-page memo sent out by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to Republican candidates, advising them on how to rebut criticism of the president's actions. Joe Biden, the Democratic Party presidential candidate, is already being pilloried by the Republicans as "Beijing Biden". In an epidemic, people are frightened and seek a scapegoat, foreigners at home and abroad being an obvious target. Probably only a hate-driven conspiracy theory can keep Trump in the White House when 30 million Americans are unemployed. [Read More]
Our History
Remembering the Jackson State Tragedy
By Nancy K. Bristow, The Nation [May 5, 2020]
---- If the shootings at Kent State University have been misrepresented and misremembered, the targets of the deadly assault by law enforcement at Jackson State College have been twice victimized, their story erased from the nation's public narrative, their trauma largely forgotten.
But this was not the only misleading story line. The notion that what had happened at Jackson State could be understood as another Kent State held broad appeal in the white liberal media, and among white young people as well. Identifying with the students at Jackson State, many held memorial services, signed resolutions, lowered their flags, or boycotted classes for a day or more as part of the nationwide student strike, but often without acknowledging the essential role of race in the Jackson State violence. [Read More]
Little Richard, the Great Innovator of Rock and Roll
k, The New Yorker [May 9, 2020] [And links to lots of his songs]
---- The core of Little Richard's career was brief—he recorded an incandescent string of hits in the mid-fifties and then went off to rediscover his faith. In the years that followed, he'd dip in and out of show business, and there were some inspired moments, but he was a comet, not a planet. The trail of light that he left behind was, and is, everywhere. … Banging boogie-woogie time with his right hand and singing miles beyond anyone's idea of a "register," he is a human thrill ride. There is more voltage in one of those three-minute performances than there is in a municipal power station. . Or, as Little Richard himself described his effect on body and spirit, "My music made your liver quiver, your bladder splatter, your knees freeze—and your big toe shoot right up in your boot!" [Read More]
