Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
April 9, 2023
Hello All – The Indian Point nuclear power plant is now closed. A corporation, Holtec International, has been hired to "decommission" it. Among much else that needs to be carted away, the plant holds more than a million gallons of radioactive water. This is water that was used in the cooling ponds to store the used, but still radioactive, spent fuel rods. Thus the water is filled with radioactive elements – strontium 90, cesium, and many more. What should be done with this water?
Many weeks ago, Holtec declared that it would simply dump the million gallons of radioactive water into the Hudson River. They asserted that the water would be filtered to remove most of the nuclear particles, and that the contaminated water would be dispersed in the giant river, harming no one. However, while many radioactive elements can be filtered from the water, tritium cannot be filtered out. It is simply "water." According to nuclear scientists testifying at two forums held by concerned environmental groups, if ingested, radioactive elements could cause cancer. One concern is that seven towns near Indian Point get their drinking water from the Hudson. Moreover, because the lower Hudson is an estuary, the tritium-water will not be washed out to sea, but will travel up and down the river with the tides. Another concern is that tritium and perhaps other elements would enter the food chain, eventually becoming embedded in fish. And of course the danger of ingesting contaminated particles would make using the river for recreational purposes more dangerous.
On Thursday, The Highlands Current reported that Holtec now plans to start dumping radioactive water as soon as May 4th. "I was kind of incredulous," Richard Webster, an environmental attorney who serves on the Decommissioning Oversight board, said of Holtec's announcement. "It seems totally unnecessary and just fans the flames." Indeed, the flames have been fanned; over the last two months both Westchester County and Rockland County have passed resolutions urging that no dumping take place, and a half-dozen towns (including Hastings) have done so as well. More than 400,000 people have signed a petition against Holtec's plan. And legislation now in Albany would ban the dumping of radioactive water. The bills by Senator Harckham (S.5181) and Assembly member Levenberg (A.5338) would "prohibit the discharge of any radiological agent into the waters of the state," with substantial fines for any/each violation.
Because what Holtec plans to do is legal under existing law and regulations, a court order may be our only short-term possibility to stop the dumping. Passing the legislation now pending in Albany may also be helpful. Please call the Albany offices of Assembly member MaryJane Shimsky (518-455-5753) and Senator Andrea Stewart Cousins (518-455-2585) – or your elected legislators if you live outside the Rivertowns - and ask them to support this legislation. Thank you.
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!
This week's Rewards for stalwart readers reflect the labor&union revival now underway. 60+ years ago, when I first encountered the music of Pete Seeger and his comrades, he opened my eyes and ears to the accomplishments of labor and social-justice movements that had been suppressed and deleted from the "history" we were taught in those days. If you missed that experience, or would like to remember it once more, here is Pete and The Almanac Singers with "Talking Union." Also of interest is this 2007 PBS documentary, "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song." If "the Movement" was our school, he was one of our teachers. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
Reclaiming Our Country
By Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. [April 5, 2023]
----We are undergoing the most vicious class war in U.S. history. Social inequality has reached its most extreme levels of disparity in over 200 years, surpassing the rapacious greed of the era of the robber barons. The legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, along with the media and universities, have been seized by a tiny cabal of billionaires and corporations who pass laws and legislation that consolidate their power and obscene wealth at our expense. We are sacrificial victims, whether on the left or the right, helpless before this modern incarnation of the Biblical idol Moloch. … Today, the top 10 percent of the richest people in the United States own almost 70 percent of the country's total wealth. The top 1 percent control 32 percent of the wealth. The bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population hold 3 percent of all U.S. wealth. These ruling oligarchs have us, not to mention the natural world, in a death grip. They have mobilized the organs of state security, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and deformed the courts to criminalize poverty. We are the most spied upon, watched, photographed and monitored population in human history, and I covered the Stasi state in East Germany. When the corporate state watches you 24-hours a day you cannot use the word liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. [Read More]
This Simple Math Problem Could Be the Key to Solving Our Climate Crisis
By Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone [April 2, 2023]
---- The climate crisis many things: a test of whether we can overcome the vast gulfs between the Global North and the Global South, a challenge to a political system geared toward short-term thinking, a lens that magnifies past injustice and future deprivation. But it's also, at heart, a math problem. And not even a very hard one, at least conceptually. The atmosphere can only hold so much carbon before it overheats the Earth. Think of it as a one-gallon bucket: If you put more than a gallon of water in it, it will overflow. So that would be dumb. About a decade ago, I wrote an essay for this magazine that went quite viral, simply because it laid out the math of climate change as we understood it at the time. Scientists calculated that in order to have any real chance of meeting the climate goals the world had agreed on, our atmospheric bucket had space for about 585 gigatons more carbon dioxide. And new data showed that the fossil-fuel industry had in its reserves — the stuff it had told shareholders and banks it would dig up and burn — about 2,795 gigatons worth of CO2. Which is to say: five times too much. From that math, you could derive a powerful result: The fossil-fuel industry was a rogue enterprise. [Read More]
The Kidnapping of Europe According to Kundera
April 7, 2023]
---- Geographical Europe has always been divided into two halves that have evolved separately: one, linked to ancient Rome with the Latin alphabet as its hallmark, is anchored in the Catholic Church; the other is linked to Byzantium, the Orthodox Church and the Cyrillic alphabet. Since 1945, according to the novelist Milan Kundera in his essay "A Kidnapped West. The tragedy of Central Europe", the border between the two Europes has shifted several hundred kilometers to the West. In such a way that the inhabitants who had always thought they were Westerners woke up one day to find that they were from the East. These surprised inhabitants are those who occupy the cultural territory that the Czech-French writer calls Central Europe. [Read More]
This Week with Noam Chomsky
FB – Linked here are three interviews/discussions with Noam Chomsky. Much of the material develops ideas he has advanced many times before (nuclear war, the climate crisis), but there are many new observations as well. Please check out "Savage Capitalism: From Climate Change to Bank Failures to War" [Link]; "Q&A: Noam Chomsky on Palestine, Israel and the state of the world" [Aljazeera] [Link]; and (Video) "A Conversation with Noam Chomsky," [Princeton DSA] [Link].
War & Peace
The Tragic U.S. Choice to Prioritize War Over Peacemaking
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, World BEYOND War [April 3, 2023]
---- In a brilliant Op-Ed published in the New York Times, the Quincy Institute's Trita Parsi explained how China, with help from Iraq, was able to mediate and resolve the deeply-rooted conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, whereas the United States was in no position to do so after siding with the Saudi kingdom against Iran for decades. … For the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have caved to the "crazies" at every turn. For China, however, it is precisely its policy of neutrality that has enabled it to mediate a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the same applies to the African Union's successful peace negotiations in Ethiopia, and to Turkey's promising mediation between Russia and Ukraine, which might have ended the slaughter in Ukraine in its first two months but for American and British determination to keep trying to pressure and weaken Russia. [Read More]
To Help End the Yemen War, All China Had to Do Was Be Reasonable
By Ryan Grim, The Intercept [
---- The war in Yemen looks like it's coming to an end. U.S. media reported on Thursday that a cease-fire extending through 2023 had been agreed to, but those reports also included Houthi denials. On Friday, Al Mayadeen, a generally pro-Houthi Lebanese news outlet, reported optimism from the Houthi side that the deal is real and the war is winding down. Reuters later on Friday matched Al Mayadeen's reporting, confirming that Saudi envoys will be traveling to Sana'a to discuss the terms of a "permanent ceasefire." What's startling here is the apparent role of China — and complete absence of the U.S. and President Joe Biden — in the deal-making. [Read More]
Also of interest/importance – "The War in Ukraine and How Africa Surprised the West," bApril 3, 2023] [Link]; and "Preparing for War in the South China Sea," [The USA and the new military bases in the Philippines] – By Sarah Lazare, The Nation [April 7, 2023] [Link].
The Climate Crisis
The last Time there was this much CO2, there were Sabertooth Tigers, California Monsoons and an Undersea Florida
---- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that for the 11th consecutive year, human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases increased at the same rate as has been common for the past decade. In other words, nothing the world has so far done has caused the rate of growth in the production of carbon dioxide to decline. NOAA says that "The global surface average for CO2 rose by 2.13 parts per million (ppm) to 417.06 ppm." … And apparently we are not done. We continue to blast carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Last year our global emissions were up nearly 1%, to 36.8 billion metric tons. We aren't even stabilizing our massive annual carbon pollution, much less reducing it. [Read More]
It's Not Just Willow: Oil and Gas Projects Are Back in a Big Way
---- When the Biden administration greenlighted the enormous $8 billion Willow oil project on Alaska's North Slope last month, many decried the move as a betrayal of the United States' pledge to move away from fossil fuels in the fight against climate change. But an analysis of global data shows that Willow represents a small fraction of hundreds of new oil and gas extraction projects approved in the past year across the world, including many more in the United States. And in the coming months, dozens of additional projects are expected to be approved. [Read More]
Civil Liberties
(Video) Q&A with Stella Assange and Yanis Varoufakis: Ithaca film screening – A Fight to Free Julian Assange
---- The most important political prisoner of our time remains for the fourth year in the maximum security prison of Belmarsh in Britain, awaiting extradition to the USA where he is threatened with a 175-year prison sentence. The 'crime' for which Julian Assange is suffering this slow death sentence was his courageous contribution to exposing the war crimes and government corruption of the powerful of the earth. The defence of the founder of Wikileaks is currently the leading battle for freedom of speech internationally. mέta, DiEM25's Centre for Post-Capitalist Civilisation does not want to be absent from this battle. It was a great pleasure and honour to welcome the wife of the Wikileaks founder and pioneer of the fight for his release, Stella Morris-Assange, who addressed the audience following the screening of Ithaca, together with the secretary of MeRA25 and co-founder of DiEM25 and the Progressive International, Yanis Varoufakis. [See the Program]
The State of the Union
(Video) "The Undertow": Author Jeff Sharlet on Trump, the Far Right & the Growing Threat of Fascism in U.S.
From Democracy Now! [April 6, 2023]
---- We speak with award-winning journalist and author Jeff Sharlet, who has spent the last decade reporting on the growing threat of fascism across the United States. In his new book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, Sharlet says the language of "civil war" has become central to right-wing rhetoric, mainstreamed by former President Donald Trump, Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republicans. [See the Program]
The High Cost of Being Poor
By Matthew Desmond, New York Review of Books [April 20, 2023 issue]
---- When welfare dependency dominated public debate in the 1980s and 1990s, researchers set out to study the issue. They found that most young mothers on welfare stopped relying on it within two years of starting the program. Most of those mothers returned to welfare sometime down the road, leaning on it for limited periods between jobs or after a divorce. Those who stayed on the rolls for long stretches were the exception to the rule. A review of the research in Science concluded that "the welfare system does not foster reliance on welfare so much as it acts as insurance against temporary misfortune." … The irony is that while politicians and pundits fume about long-term welfare addiction among the poor, members of the protected classes have grown increasingly dependent on their welfare programs. If you count all benefits offered, America's welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France's. But that's true only if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line. If you put aside these tax breaks and judge the United States solely by the share of its GDP allocated to programs directed at low-income citizens, then our investment in poverty reduction is much smaller than that of other rich nations. The American welfare state is lopsided. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine [What is Al-Aqsa and Why is It Important?]
For Palestinians, Al-Aqsa Goes Beyond Religion. It's a Symbol of Freedom and Resistance
By Amira Hass, Haaretz [Israel] [April 9, 2023]
---- This is not the place to discuss the role of faith in Allah in shaping and maintaining Palestinians' resilience in the face of the Israeli rule imposed on them. But on a more prosaic level, the more the balance of international political powers is to their detriment, and the more that Israel advances unceasingly its plans to take over their vacant lands and profits from their political fragmentation and weakness, the national, political, social and emotional importance of Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque – and not only the self-evident religious importance – becomes more clear. This religious compound, which Muslims call Haram al-Sharif and Jews the Temple Mount, is also the only open space available to residents of the crowded Old City. Every Jerusalemite emphasizes this fact – and says that sometimes this is the only place where Palestinians do not encounter police officers and soldiers and where they feel almost free, if only for a few hours. As the number of provocative visits to the complex by Jews who intend to pray and also to build the Third Temple increases, it loses this quality of an almost-free zone. [Read More]
World's Most Dangerous Flashpoint: Israeli Forces Repeatedly Invade Sacred al-Aqsa Mosque, Beat, Expel Worshipers, on behalf of Jewish Extremists
---- The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that both on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, Israeli security forces invaded the al-Aqsa Mosque complex, the third holiest shrine in the Muslim world and expelled Palestinians who had been conducting an all-night retreat (i`tikaf) there for the holy fasting month of Ramadan. Video emerged from the Wednesday assault showing troops viciously assaulting worshipers. The BBC and other Western press actually called these barbaric beatings by armed occupation troops "clashes," and said they were over a "disputed" religious site. But there is no dispute in international law about al-Aqsa Mosque. It is governed by an endowment deed that is overseen by the Jordanian government. No responsible person in a position of power disputes this. [Read More]
Our History
The Things They Left Behind: How the U.S. Laid Waste to Southeast Asia
April 1, 2023]
[FB – This is a review of George Black's new book, "The Long Reckoning," which describes the environmental devastation of the Vietnam War]
---- In "The Long Reckoning," Black, a British journalist living in New York and the author of several books on foreign policy, unites his areas of expertise in international affairs and the environment to explore a landscape littered with the detritus of war: scrap metal, unexploded ordnance, soil and water contaminated by herbicides Americans sprayed, spilled and dumped over swaths of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. … A massive defoliation campaign to reduce cover for Vietnamese ambushes, known as Operation Ranch Hand, began in 1961. Soon, the U.S. government began to authorize crop destruction as well. Black describes Ranch Hand as "without precedent in history, using all the tools of science, technology and air power to lay waste to a country's natural environment." By contrast, when the destruction of Japan's rice crop had been proposed in 1944, Adm. William Leahy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief of staff, "vetoed the idea, saying it 'would violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all known laws of war.'" [Read More]
The Red Scare Took Aim at Black Radicals Like Langston Hughes
By Peter Dreier, Jacobin Magazine [March 31, 2023]
---- In the fall of 1947, the Eagle Rock Council for Civic Unity scheduled a talk by Langston Hughes to be held at Occidental College's eight-hundred-seat Thorne Hall on March 31, 1948. But days before Hughes was scheduled to arrive on campus, the Los Angeles college's board of trustees hastily called a meeting and canceled his talk. Hughes was one of America's most well-known black writers, with many volumes of poetry, short stories, magazine articles, radio scripts, a Broadway play, a Broadway musical, a Hollywood screenplay, song lyrics, and a popular newspaper column under his belt. But this was the dawn of McCarthyism, and when the trustees looked at Hughes, all they saw was a Red…. The goal was not simply to root out Communists, but to scare Americans against criticizing American racism, foreign policy, and violations of workers' rights, among other concerns. The Red Scare sought not only to stifle the right to dissent but also the will to dissent by making certain critiques taboo. For example, in the 1949 film The Red Menace, Communists are depicted protesting at a real estate office — a not-so-subtle message that anyone who advocated for housing for veterans or black Americans, common activist issues at the time, must be a Communist. [Read More]
