Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
October 12, 2020
Hello All – Just three weeks before Election Day, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has a commanding lead over President Trump. While there are credible fears that Trump will somehow steal the election, his ability to do so will be weakened if it appears that he has lost the popular vote in a landslide. What can he do to save himself? None of the themes that Trump has tried to use to rally his base seem to gain him much traction: "law and order" and the "Marxist threat" are weak counters to the Covid-19 pandemic and economic chaos, and the Republicans in Congress appear unwilling to toss voters a stimulus bone or a $1,200 check in the mail.
As Michael Klare describes in his Nation magazine article linked below, a timely war may be Trump's last straw to clutch. Klare states that "it would be surprisingly easy for Trump to ignite a war" with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, because "the Pentagon has adopted an offensive stance toward all four of those putative adversaries." Indeed, we have been lucky so far that an "accident" has not already sparked a conflict with these countries, as Pentagon forces conduct intimidating military exercises on their doorsteps. If Trump were seeking a wag-the-dog conflict to divert attention from his many policy failures and rally the voters around the flag, he could raise the odds that this would happen by pressing the Pentagon to be still more aggressive in one or more of these regions.
Needless to say, defeating Trump next month will not end the threat of (more) war. Vice President Biden has surrounded himself with a hawkish foreign policy team largely inherited from the aggressive militarism of Clinton and Obama. (See here and here.) But this is a fight that we will begin on January 21, 2021; right now our goal is to remove Trump.
News Notes
While many towns, cities, and states are celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day today, almost all of Westchester and New York continues to honor Columbus Day. It's an interesting question why "progressive" New York lags behind so much of the country, especially as we have a rich and relatively well-known indigenous history and continuing Native American presence to draw on. The Zinn Education Project has assembled a teaching package for Indigenous Peoples' Day; check it out. For some background on how we ended up with Columbus Day in the first place, check out "The Invention of Christopher Columbus, American Hero" [Link] and "It's Time for Italian Americans to Give Up on Columbus" [Link].
Last weekend in Denver a Trump supporter was shot and killed by a newspaper reporter's bodyguard when the Trump supporter attacked him. This tragedy is being framed on-line as the responsibility of an Antifa member, which is not true. The Intercept has a useful article today.
Arundhati Roy is one of our bravest and best writer/reporters. What we read of hers in "the West" is usually big-picture, framed for our limited understanding of India. For that reason, I found especially interesting her article in an Indian publication, Scroll, about "two conspiracies and a creation." It dramatizes in some detail the chaos now engulfing India
Not least of the sins of the Trump administration has been its attack on basic science and medicine. In the 21st century, in a so-called Advanced Country, this is simply frightening. Last week the leading science and medical journals wrote eloquent pleas that we vote out the Trump administration. Check out powerful statements from The New England Journal of Medicine and Scientific American.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Taking the Covid Crisis into account, we meet (with safe distancing) for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 11 to 11:30 a.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Another vigil takes place on Mondays, from 6 to 6:30 pm, in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. In this time of coronavirus, we are meeting by Zoom conference; if you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, Tuesday and Thursday at noon and/or Saturday at 2 pm, please send a return email. 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!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
WAR AND THE THREAT OF WAR
An October Surprise of a Military Kind
By Michael T. Klare, The Nation [October 12, 2020]
---- With Joe Biden leading in the polls and President Trump's attempts to avoid addressing the Covid danger now undermined by his own encounter with the virus, the White House is scrambling for a new line of attack on his opponent. Trump's attempt to use "law and order" as a wedge in suburban areas has clearly failed, and his drive to shoehorn the Supreme Court appointment of Amy Coney Barrett is at risk because of Covid infections among key Senate Republicans. What remains, then, as a last-minute game-changer? Knowing Trump's impulsive nature, we cannot rule out war as a possible option. … The fact is, it would be surprisingly easy for Trump to ignite a war. That's because the Pentagon has adopted an offensive stance toward all four of those putative adversaries. At this very moment, American aircraft carriers with their accompanying cruisers and destroyers are patrolling in the vicinity of Iran, China, and North Korea, while other US warships are deployed in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. It would not be difficult, in those highly contested areas, to provoke a deadly incident, allowing Trump to order retaliatory strikes and commence the process of escalation. There are many locales on the borders of Eurasia where such a confrontation might occur. Here is a brief survey of the five most likely sites. [Read More]
How the United States Could End the War in Yemen
By Edward Hunt, The Progressive [September 15, 2020]
---- [On September 11th], former U.S. official Bruce Riedel told the House Intelligence Committee that the United States could take immediate action to end Saudi Arabia's brutal war in Yemen, where an estimated 100,000 people have died since the war began in 2015. Riedel, a senior fellow and director at the Brookings Institution, formerly spent thirty years working for the Central Intelligence Agency. He has served as a senior adviser to the last four U.S. Presidents. President Donald Trump vetoed resolutions passed by Congress in 2019 to end U.S. involvement in the war and block U.S. arms sales to Gulf nations, continuing U.S. support for the Saudi-led military operation. In his September 11, 2020, appearance before Congress, Riedel said that "only the United States of America and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom continue to provide the kind of support that allows this war to go on." … If the United States and United Kingdom cut off logistics support, he said, the Royal Saudi Air Force would be grounded and unable to operate. "That's how much influence we have over them," Riedel said. "That's how much responsibility we have." [Read More]
How can Americans support peace in Nagorno-Karabakh?
By Nicolas J.S. Davies, ZNet [October 11, 2020]
---- With so much of the world afflicted by 20 years of U.S.-led wars and the resulting political, humanitarian and refugee crises, we can't afford not to pay attention to the dangerous new outbreak of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a bloody war over Nagorno-Karabakh from 1988 to 1994, by the end of which at least 30,000 people had been killed and a million or more had fled or been driven out of their homes. By 1994, Armenian forces had occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts, all internationally recognized as parts of Azerbaijan. But now the war has flared up again, hundreds of people have been killed, and both sides are shelling civilian targets and terrorizing each other's civilian populations. … The greatest danger is that either Turkey, Russia, the U.S. or Iran should see some geopolitical advantage in escalating or becoming more involved in this conflict. [Read More]. For more on this new and dangerous conflict, read "War has broken out on the edge of Europe. What's behind it?" b[Link] and "Captive of the Caucasus: The Long War Over Nagorno-Karabakh" by Viken Berberian, The Nation [October 8, 2020] [Link].
With Crushing sanctions on 18 Iranian Banks, is Trump trying to leave a War behind for Biden?
---- As the dying Trump administration, literally on a sickbed, contemplates losing power, its hawks are lashing out at Iran in an attempt to ensure that the 2015 international nuclear deal is dead and buried, and that the US and Iran remain on a war footing. Trump's two main allies in the Middle East, Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel and Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, want at the least a rollback of Iranian influence in the region and at best regime change. They are small countries and have no hope of accomplishing the latter. Only a US war on Iran, repeating the 2003 invasion of Iraq could reliably change the regime and end the country's civilian nuclear energy program. The US Treasury Department has blocked financial transactions of 18 Iranian banks, and threatened anyone who does business with them with third party sanctions. This means that if a small French firm wanted to sell toasters to Iran, it can't use these banks to do so. There really aren't any banks left in Iran that aren't sanctioned by the Trump administration. So the message is to Europe, don't trade with Iran. This policy is unilateral and is ordered by one man, Trump. Congress has passed no such law. The United Nations Security Council is against these sanctions. [Read More] Also useful is "The undeniable cruelty of Trump's 'maximum pressure' on Iran" by Tyler Cullis, Responsible Statecraft [October 8, 2020] [Link].
FEATURED ESSAYS
Getting to Freedom City [Los Angeles in the 1960s]
By Robin D. G. Kelley, Boston Review [October 7, 2020]
---- My mother had fled to LA in search of peace, but instead she found a war zone. Six years after the Watts rebellion, the police patrolled the streets of South LA like a victorious occupying army. But as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener make clear in their monumental new book, Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties, the police under Mayor Sam Yorty treated the entire city like it was under siege. "No other major city outside of the Deep South," they write, "was subjected to such a fanatic and all-encompassing campaign to police space and control the night. Along with minorities, many young whites were also routinely victimized, leading hatred of the LAPD to grow into a common culture of resistance." When cops terrorized middle-class white kids for roaming Sunset Strip at night, their cries of "Free the Strip" quickly evolved into "All Power to the People" and "No More Murder of Black People." The image that lured my mother and millions like her to the City of Angels was painted by racial segregation, patriarchy, sexual norms, classism, and an iron fist used to crush dissent. And yet, the pervasiveness of state violence is not the whole story—it may not even be the main one. Set the Night on Fire is, above all, a historical account of how a rainbow of insurgent social movements tried to peel back the glitter, dismantle the police state, and replace elite white rule and its regimes of segregation, militarism, patriarchy, and conformity with a society oriented toward "serving the people." These social movements imagined a revolutionary culture of care, one that met all basic needs, that eliminated racism, patriarchy, and poverty, and that democratized knowledge and power. Diverse and complex, these movements entangled with one another as allies, affiliates, and adversaries. [Read More]
The Unprecedented and Illegal Campaign to Eliminate Julian Assange
By Charles Glass, The Intercept [
---- Over the 17 days of Julian Assange's extradition hearing in London, prosecutors succeeded in proving both crimes and conspiracy. The culprit, however, was not Assange. Instead, the lawbreakers and conspirators turned out to be the British and American governments. Witness after witness detailed illegal measures to violate Assange's right to a fair trial, destroy his health, assassinate his character, and imprison him in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Courtroom evidence exposed illegality on an unprecedented scale by America's and Britain's intelligence, military, police, and judicial agencies to eliminate Assange. … Barristers for the prosecution and defense have one month to submit closing arguments in writing to Baraitser, the magistrate, who will render her verdict on January 4. An impartial tribunal would have no option but to exonerate Assange — but fairness has not thus far featured in proceedings with the prosecution's 10-year head start on the defense; the inability of Assange's solicitor, Jennifer Robinson, to confer with him for six months; and the prosecution's possession of his confidential lawyer-client documents and transcripts of his conversations with his advocates in heavy-handed violation of the law. [Read More] Also interesting/useful is "Julian Assange's Prosecution for Publishing Leaked Government Documents Is an Extremely Dangerous Precedent," an interview with Kevin Gosztola, Jacobin Magazine [October 2020] [Link]. Gosztola reported daily during the 17 days of the trial.
A Reckoning Inside the Domestic-Violence Movement
By Zoƫ Carpenter, The Nation [October 7, 2020]
[FB – This is why "defund the police" is such an important issue. An excellent analysis, imo.]
---- Domestic abuse presents a deadly threat to millions of people across America. But as concerns about police misconduct grow, feminists are reconsidering the costs of criminalization. For the past four decades, a dominant project for American feminists has been getting the police and the legal system to respond seriously to the crisis of domestic violence. More than 10 million people in the US are abused by their partners each year. One in four women will be pushed, slapped, beaten, burned, strangled, or otherwise harmed by an intimate partner during her lifetime. Nearly half of the women who are murdered in the US each year are killed by a romantic partner. Until the 1970s, police and the legal system largely treated this kind of violence as a family issue best resolved quietly at home. As feminists worked to bring the problem into the public sphere, many advocates focused on toughening penalties for abusers and standardizing the way law enforcement responded to complaints. Jurisdictions around the country now have laws intended to ensure an aggressive law enforcement response, including laws that require police to make an arrest in response to a credible allegation and no-drop policies that force prosecutors to continue a case even without cooperation from witnesses. Today the anti-violence movement is in the midst of a painful reckoning with the collateral damage of this approach. Stricter criminal penalties have protected some survivors, but they've also led to the arrest and prosecution of others and contributed to a ballooning prison population that is disproportionately made up of men and women of color. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Trump's Overhaul of Immigration Is Worse Than You Think
Editorial, New York Times [October 10, 2020]
---- Through administrative orders, strict enforcement and mere threat, the White House has attacked virtually every aspect of immigration, legal and illegal. This transformation of the American immigration system has been perhaps the administration's boldest accomplishment, overseen with single-minded focus by Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Trump with an affinity for white nationalism. A report this summer from the Migration Policy Institute outlined over 400 actions on immigration that had been enacted by a sprawling array of federal departments in the Trump era. The effects are clear. Between 2016 and 2019, annual net immigration into the United States fell by almost half, to about 600,000 people per year — a level not seen since the 1980s. … But rolling back other measures will be difficult. "There's so much change that has happened in the last four years, there's no way a new administration could reverse things in four or even eight years," said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute who was a co-author of the group's July report. [Read More]
Trump Needs Accomplices at Every Level of Government to Pull Off a Coup
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [October 4, 2020]
---- For months, Donald Trump has been mounting a preemptive strike against the democratic election process. He signals his intent to manipulate — indeed, steal — the presidential election in the event that Joe Biden wins. With no evidence to support him, Trump repeats the mantra "voter fraud" to lay the groundwork for political, legal and extra-legal challenges to a Biden victory. … The prospects for a peaceful transition to a Biden administration if Trump is in charge are dubious. Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, is optimistic, however. "For those worried that Donald Trump could single-handedly defy the election results and hold on to power, fear not — he cannot do that," Bassin wrote in an email to Truthout. "In order to do that, he'd need accomplices at every level, throughout the country — in the executive branch, in the Congress, in the courts, in state legislatures, in the media." But a landslide in favor of Biden could make potential accomplices feel less confident in supporting Trump if he were to claim that the results are ambiguous or fraudulent. Voting is absolutely critical for democracy. But at the end of the day, stopping a coup attempt will depend on far more than the ballot, and will require creative and courageous acts of civic and political engagement from all of us. Let's get to it! [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Despite ambiguity in international law, Palestinians are winning the 'legitimacy war' [An interview with former UN Rapporteur Richard Falk]
---- 'International law' remains one of the most discussed terms in the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is almost always present, whether the discussion pertains to the Israeli wars and siege on Gaza, the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank or the encroaching apartheid throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories. Despite the importance and relevance of the term, however, it rarely translates into anything tangible. The Israeli siege on Gaza, for example, has continued, unabated, for nearly 14 years, without international law serving as a protector of Palestinian civilians against Israeli violations of human rights. More recently, on September 13, the Israeli government approved 1,000 illegal settlement units in the West Bank, in stark violation of international law. It is likely that Israel will go ahead with it, anyway. With regard to violating international law, Israel is in a unique category of its own, for Israel's behavior is always governed by its military strength and the backing of its Western allies. To gain more insight into the relationship between international law, conflict resolution and accountability, I spoke with Professor Richard Falk, one of the world's leading experts on international law and former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights. [Read More] Also of interest is "Israel to massively expand settlements after UAE normalization" b[Link].
OUR HISTORY
The Day Nuclear War Almost Broke Out
By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker [October 5, 2020]
[FB – This is a review of Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Martin Sherwin, and a meditation on the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. At that time I was a sophomore at Wesleyan, and the tiny antiwar demo of our peace group was overwhelmed by a mob of students supporting war. They almost got their wish, and war was avoided by luck and the brave actions of a Soviet submarine crew, as this story tells.]
----In the nearly sixty years since the Cuban missile crisis, the story of near-catastrophe has only grown more complicated. What lessons can we draw from such a close call? Sherwin summarizes the "official" narrative of the "thirteen days" as follows. Members of ExComm, through "their careful consideration of the challenge, their firmness in the face of terrifying danger, and their wise counsel," steered the world to a peaceful resolution of a potentially civilization-ending conflict. Nothing, he writes, "could be further from the truth." The guidance J.F.K. received was, for the most part, lousy. Some of it was loony. Had he heeded ExComm's "wise counsel," chances are I would not be writing this, or you reading it. As the President told a friend not long after the crisis ended, "You have no idea how much bad advice I had in those days." [Read More]
What activists who fought the AIDS crisis can teach us about organizing during a pandemic
By Loretta Graceffo, Waging Nonviolence [October 10, 2020]
---- For Avram Finklestein, a 68-year-old artist and activist who lives in Brooklyn, witnessing the U.S. government stand by as the death toll climbs to over 200,000 is especially painful. As a survivor of the AIDS crisis, the current pandemic has been what he calls "a revisitation of suffering that can only be triggered by America at its most cruel." At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Finklestein was galvanized into action by the death of his partner, Don. In 1987, Finklestein helped found the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, a grassroots direct action group advocating for AIDS research, treatment and policy change. "We were fighting for our lives first," he said. "It was a moment that was enraging, terrifying, solidifying." … Lawyer Terry McGovern, who has spent much of her life providing legal advocacy for low-income HIV positive individuals, describes the U.S. government's catastrophic response to COVID-19 as "completely predictable." "So many times throughout this whole experience, I thought about those early days of AIDS," she said. [Read More]
