Hello All – Yesterday’s rally in Hastings drew 150 people in support of the People’s March, part of a nationwide outpouring of protest against the coming depredations of the Trump presidency. A project of the Women’s March against Fascism, the focus was on the broad range of misogynist legislation and “executive orders” that will emerge from Washington; but included in the protest agenda were the defense of immigrants, of civil liberties, and of Democracy Itself. Our message is that we will stand fast, and that we seek and welcome allies who will join us, while rejecting and reviling those who will collaborate with Trump’s fascist agenda.
Foremost on my mind today is the ceasefire in Gaza. Scenes broadcast live of the 3 Israeli hostages being reunited with their families, and the huge crowds of Palestinians eagerly awaiting the release of some 90 women and children from Israeli prisons, awaken hopes that peace is possible. Can this be so?
There is still much to learn about how and why the Biden/Netanyahu ceasefire proposal of last May, and agreed to by Hamas in July, was finally agreed to by Israel. Why did it take so long? Did Trump and his representative in the final negotiations play a role in coercing Israel, one that the Biden administration so pathetically refused to attempt? And what promises, if any, did the Trump make to Netanyahu that allowed him to agree to a ceasefire at the risk of the collapse of his government? Some of these questions are addressed in the two Democracy Now! segments linked immediately below; we should know more in the coming days and weeks.
A major task before us (among hundreds) is to persuade the Democratic Party that it can no longer sustain its profile as the party of war. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine must be ended, even if this means opposing the Democratic Party last-ditchers who are still mired in the Cold War. We can expect the Trump people to launch their own military adventures, such as re-starting nuclear testing, “invading” the Panama Canal, or increasing sanctions and pressure on Iran and its nuclear program. The Democrats must learn that we DO NOT have their backs for any pro-war collaboration with Trump and his Agenda. We need a broad, progressive coalition to resist the tentacles of fascism that will emerge in the coming month; working for peace should be high on our list.
EXPLAINING GAZA THIS WEEK
[FB – Democracy Now! provided excellent coverage this week on the background and significance of the Gaza ceasefire agreement. Linked below are three program segments.]
(Video) Daniel Levy, Muhammad Shehada, Jeremy Scahill on Ceasefire Deal, Trump’s Role & Palestine’s Future [January 16, 2025]
---- We host a roundtable on the planned Gaza ceasefire with former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy of the U.S./Middle East Project, Gazan analyst Muhammad Shehada of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor and journalist Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News. We discuss how incoming President Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff pressured Israel to accept the deal and what it reveals about the outgoing Biden administration’s refusal to use its own leverage for the same end. “Joe Biden could have ended this long ago,” and that he chose not to “exposes the utter moral rot that existed within the Biden White House,” says Scahill. Still, our guests say it’s unlikely that the ceasefire announcement signifies true relief for Palestinians beset by Israel’s genocidal violence. Levy says Netanyahu is already working to renege on the deal and continue a war that has helped him retain his political power, while Shehada warns that all signs point to the continued subjugation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in conditions “more painful than the war.” [See the Program]
(Video) Gideon Levy & Mouin Rabbani on Ceasefire: “Netanyahu Will Do Everything Possible” to Kill It Later [January 17, 2025]
---- Israel’s security cabinet has approved a long-awaited ceasefire deal with Hamas. If finalized, the ceasefire is expected to go into effect on Sunday. “The main challenge will be the second phase, and here there are many, many problems on the horizon,” says Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who stresses the importance of also freeing the thousands of Palestinians held by Israel. “Again and again, Israelis always think that they are the only victims.” The announcement comes in the final week of U.S. President Joe Biden’s term as Israel prepares for the incoming Trump administration. “The only reason that Israel did not agree to this text until this week is because it didn’t have to worry about U.S. pressure,” says Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani, who explains why the limited agreement will not shift politics in Israel and Palestine. “I believe Netanyahu will do everything possible, with the collusion of certain Trump officials, to try to scuttle it after the first phase.” [See the Program]
(Video) “Unbelievable Bravery”: Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya Abducted from Gaza Hospital; Advocates Call for Release [January 14, 2025]
---- Human rights advocates and healthcare professionals around the world are demanding the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the largest major hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan Hospital. Abu Safiya disappeared in December after Israeli forces raided and shut down Kamal Adwan. Released Palestinians say they saw him at Sde Teiman Israeli prison, which has been plagued by reports of gruesome abuses including torture and sexual violence against Palestinians in custody. It is now believed he is held at the Ofer Prison. Abu Safiya’s friend and former colleague, Dr. John Kahler, a co-founder of the medical humanitarian aid group MedGlobal, speaks to Democracy Now! about Abu Safiya’s tireless commitment to his medical work while suffering the pain, trauma and tragedy of Israel’s war on Gaza. “His bravery is a supreme act of resistance,” says Kahler. “What no oppressor will tolerate is that level of resistance.” [See the Program]
REMEMBERING BROTHER MARTIN
MLK Now
By Brandon Terry, Boston Review [September 18, 2018]
[FB – Martin Luther King’s birthday was on January 15, but is celebrated this year on January 20, the same day that Trump will be inaugurated. This essay from the Boston Review is one of several in a forum that reviews recent thinking about MLK’s life and messages.]
---- On February 23, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., took to the stage at a sold-out Carnegie Hall. He had not come to rally the flagging spirits of bloodied civil rights demonstrators, shake loose the pennies of liberal philanthropists, or even to testify to God’s grace. A more solemn task was at hand. King was the keynote speaker for a celebration of W. E. B. Du Bois’s birth, following remarks by Ossie Davis, James Baldwin, Jack O’Dell, Cynthia Belgrave, Pete Seeger, and Eleanor McCoy. Arguably the greatest political thinker and propagandist black America ever produced, Du Bois spent his last days in relative ignominy in Ghana, his passport canceled by the U.S. State Department in retaliation for anti-nuclear, anti-racist, and socialist politics. Du Bois died on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington, denied the chance to witness the moral authority of the civil rights movement crystallize before the world. … In the year before King’s death, he faced intense isolation owing to his strident criticisms of the Vietnam War and the Democratic Party, his heated debates with black nationalists, and his headlong quest to mobilize the nation’s poor against economic injustice. Abandoned by allies, fearing his death was near, King could only lament that his critics “have never really known me, my commitment, or my calling.” Fifty years after his death, we are perhaps subject to the same indictment. As we grasp for a proper accounting of King’s intellectual, ethical, and political bequest, commemoration may present a greater obstacle to an honest reckoning with his legacy than disfavor did in the case of Du Bois. There are costs to canonization. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
Democrats Will Regret Helping to Pass the Laken Riley Act
---- So reads the title of an op-ed by the Times’ Michelle Goldberg, after this dangerous anti-immigrant legislation passed the House of Representatives. And yesterday, thanks to Democrats’ votes, the legislation gained 61 votes in the Senate, one more than was needed. (Both Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand voted No.) The bill now goes back to the House for a final vote, where it is expected to pass. In her op-ed, Goldberg wrote: “This sweeping bill will upend our immigration system in ways that will outlast Donald Trump’s presidency, ruining lives and handcuffing future Democratic administrations. Democrats who vote for it may dodge right-wing attacks in the next election, but once its true scope becomes clear, they’ll be answering for it for years to come. [[Read More]. For more information, read “Democrats Are About to Surrender to Trump in a Hugely Damaging Way,” by Greg Sergent, The New Republic [Link].
No Clemency for Leonard Peltier
---- In the UK Guardian, Rose Styron and Alex Matthiessen write: “A member of the Chippewa and Lakota Nations, Peltier was convicted in 1976 for the deaths, the year before, of two FBI agents killed during a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. While he was in the area at the time of the shootout, Peltier, who maintains his innocence, has served nearly 50 years and counting for a murder he was never proved to have committed – or even to have aided and abetted.” For decades, US Presidents have feared the wrath of the FBI if they granted clemency to Peltier or commuted his sentence. Now Peltier, who is ill, is likely to die in prison for a crime he did not commit. [Read More]
A Good Year for Big Banks
---- 2024 was a bonanza year for big banks, and for stock market investors generally. According to a New York Times article, “The largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, reported bumper profits on Wednesday. “JPMorgan, the nation’s biggest bank, said it earned $14 billion in profits in the fourth quarter, and nearly $59 billion for the full year. Wells Fargo made $5.1 billion in the fourth quarter and $20 billion for the year and said wealthy depositors were plowing more money into its higher-end savings products. Citi, which also topped estimates, reported net income of $2.9 billion in the quarter and $12.7 billion for the full year. … To some degree, the results were not a surprise: Bank stocks rose even faster than the broader market in 2024, which ended the year up 23.3 percent, as lenders took advantage of a hot stock market and pickup in corporate financing activity to fatten profits.” You suckers who failed to own shares in the banks or the markets can read more 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.) 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 make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
REWARDS!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers start off with music from Arooj Aftab. According to our source, “Pakistani-born, Brooklyn-based musician and composer Arooj Aftab is known for her innovative approach to traditional South Asian classical music. Integrating elements of Pakistani classical and Sufi music with various contemporary styles such as jazz and folk.” To hear some of this interesting music, go here. Also this week, I think you will like this set from "Playing for Change," which includes “Rastaman Chant” and “Amazing Grace.” Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAYS
Empire’s Critic: The Worlds of Noam Chomsky
By Daniel Bessner, The Nation [January 13, 2025]
---- The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World is Chomsky’s latest book and, given his advanced age, probably his last. Coauthored with Nathan Robinson, the prolific editor of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs, it contains all of Chomsky’s hallmarks. Written in a direct, no-nonsense style, full of shrewd analysis and layered with potent details, it is an excellent summary—and condemnation—of how the United States has shaped the world since it became a global superpower after World War II. Like almost all of Chomsky’s books, it fulfills the intellectual’s responsibility to speak the truth and to expose lies—including what Chomsky considers the biggest falsehood of them all: Americans’ naïve belief that their country is “committed to promoting democracy and human rights” around the world. This is the “myth of American idealism” referenced in the book’s title, and it is a myth that Chomsky and Robinson dismantle piece by piece. [Read More]
Fire Weather
By Chris Hedge, Scheer Post [January 13, 2025]
---- The apocalyptic wildfires that have erupted in the boreal forest in Siberia, the Russian Far East and Canada, climate scientists repeatedly warned, would inevitably move southwards as rising global temperatures created hotter, more fire-prone landscapes. Now they have. The failures in California, where Los Angeles has had no significant rainfall in eight months, are not only failures of preparedness — the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, decreased funds for the fire department by $17 million — but a failure globally to halt the extraction of fossil fuel. The only surprise is that we are surprised. Welcome to the age of the “Pyrocene” where cities burn and water does not come out of the hydrants…. We have harnessed the concentrated energy of 300 million years and set it alight. We are addicted to fossil fuels. But it is a suicide pact. We ignore the freakish weather patterns and disintegration of the planet, retreating into our electronic hallucinations, pretending the inevitable is not inevitable. This vast cognitive dissonance, fed to us by mass culture, makes us the most self-deluded population in human history. The cost of this self-delusion will be mass death. The devastation in California is the harbinger of the apocalypse. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST is “The Best Time to Fireproof Los Angeles Was Yesterday,” by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times [January 11, 2025] [Link].
(Video) “The Party of War”: Matt Duss on Biden, Gaza & How Democrats Lost Foreign Policy Argument to Trump
From Democracy Now! [January 14, 2025]
---- After Biden’s major foreign policy address Monday at the State Department, we go to Jerusalem and get an analysis of Biden’s foreign policy decisions in Israel and Palestine from Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. “There’s simply no question at this point that the laws of war have been egregiously violated,” he says of the Israeli military’s genocidal conduct against Palestinians in Gaza. “When it comes to America’s friends and allies, he has a different standard.” [See the Program]
Why My Memories of Being Taken From My Mom at the Border Came Flooding Back
By Najenyi Dominguez, The Intercept [January 19, 2025]
---- I don’t really know what happened to me in 2018 or how it really affected me. I was 10 then, when I was separated from my mother at the border. We had just come to the U.S from Honduras. We’d stepped into Texas, turned ourselves in to Border Patrol agents, and asked them for help. Instead, I was taken from my mother a few hours later. I later found out that she was put on trial for crossing illegally and locked up with a lot of other immigrants. I was put on a plane and flown to someplace I didn’t know. My mother didn’t know either. We were separated for over two months. The experience was formative — and traumatic. I’ve been thinking lately that trauma can make you forget. But it seems it can also make you remember, not always in good ways. … Especially with Trump coming into office again, with my and my family’s future cast into doubt, I wonder what things our own government might try to make us forget if it could. And what may we end up remembering, even against our will? [Read More]
THE WAR ON GAZA
When Israeli Warplanes Rain Death on Gaza, the Copilot is Uncle Sam
By Stan Cox, TomDispatch [January 16, 2025]
---- In recent weeks, political soothsayers have speculated about a wide variety of odious new policies the incoming Trump administration and its allies in Congress may or may not pursue. No one can predict with certainty which of those measures they will inflict on us and which they’ll forget about. But we can make one prediction with utter confidence. The White House and large bipartisan majorities in Congress will continue their lavish support for Israel’s war on Gaza, however catastrophic the results. Washington has supplied a large share of the armaments that have allowed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to rain death and destruction on Gaza (not to speak of Lebanon) over the past year and a quarter. Before October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other groups attacked southern Israel, that country was receiving $3.8 billion worth of American military aid annually. Since then, the floodgates have opened and $18 billion worth of arms have flowed out. The ghastly results have shocked people and governments across the globe. [Read More]
How U.S. Media Hide Truths About the Gaza War
By Norman Solomon, ZNet [January 13, 2025]
---- A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.” The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972 — in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media — has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets. +972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information” — which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different. [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Ukrainian Neutrality Is Still the Key to Peace
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Code Pink [January 14, 2025]
---- President-elect Trump said on January 9th that he is planning a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine. He said “Putin wants to meet,” because “we have to get that war over with.” So what are the chances that a new administration in Washington can break the deadlock and finally bring peace to Ukraine? ….. Of all these crises, the one that Trump keeps insisting he really wants to resolve is the war in Ukraine, which Russia launched and the U.S. and NATO then chose to prolong, leading to hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian casualties. The Western powers have until now been determined to fight this war of attrition to the last Ukrainian, in the vain hope that they can somehow eventually defeat and weaken Russia without triggering a nuclear war. …Trump’s peace plan is rumored to entail freezing the current geographical positions and shelving Ukraine’s accession to NATO for 20 years. But continuing to dangle NATO membership in front of Ukraine, as the U.S. has bullied NATO into doing since 2008, is a root cause of this conflict, not a solution. Neutrality, on the other hand, resolves the root causes of the conflict for all the countries involved, and therefore provides a stable and sustainable solution. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
'Nobody Can Embargo Sunlight': Jimmy Carter and the US Solar Revolution That Wasn't
By Bill Mckibben, Common Dreams [January 7, 2025]
---- As Jimmy Carter is laid to rest this week, I think it’s worth paying attention to just exactly how out front he was on solar energy. Driven by both the upheaval of the OPEC embargoes and the lingering echoes of Earth Day at the start of the 1970s, and with “Limits to Growth” and “Small is Beautiful” as two of the decade’s big bestsellers (Carter had a reception for E.F. Schumacher at the White House!), the administration decided that solar was the way out. (The idea of the greenhouse effect was beginning to be talked about in these circles too, but it wasn’t yet a public idea, and it wasn’t driving policy). Everyone knows about the solar panels on the White House roof, but that was the least of it. Jimmy Carter, in his 1980 budget, pledged truly serious cash for solar research, and for building out panels on roofs across America. “Nobody can embargo sunlight,” he said in his most important speech, from the government’s mountaintop solar energy lab in Golden, Colorado. “No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters.” Carter—with characteristic bad luck—was giving this speech outside in a driving rainstorm, not the backdrop his handlers had hoped for. But he was resolute. “The question is no longer whether solar energy works,” he said. “We know it works. The only question is how to cut costs.” [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Blocking Planned Parenthood From Medicaid Will Only Worsen the US Maternal Health Crisis
By Rachel Rebouché, The Nation [January 17, 2025]
---- Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, tasked to lead Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, recently pledged to strip federal funding from “progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.” That might seem like one consequence of an election: Groups and causes fall out of favor with a new administration. But their reference to defunding Planned Parenthood is misleading. The statement feeds into a long-standing campaign to suggest that federal dollars broadly pay for abortion in states, which they do not, and that Planned Parenthood clinics are unique beneficiaries of federal programs, which they are not. … Stripping Planned Parenthood clinics of federal funding is discriminatory, since it treats the organization differently from others that provide the same services; more urgently, it threatens to deny medical services to those who need them the most. For the most part, healthcare in this country is treated not as a right, but as a privilege available only to those who can afford it. Any reduction in funding to clinics that deliver a spectrum of care, from contraceptives to prenatal care, will deepen these disparities. The damage to reproductive care for low-income Americans already is clear in states that have blocked Planned Parenthood from participation in Medicaid. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
José 'Cha Cha' Jiménez, human rights activist and former chair of Young Lords, dead at 76
By Violet Miller, Chicago Sun-Times [January 12, 2025]
---- José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, a human rights activist who co-founded the Rainbow Coalition and served as chairperson of the Young Lords organization, died Friday. He was 76. Mr. Jiménez spent much of the late 1960s and early 1970s fighting gentrification in Lincoln Park, allying with other organizations in Chicago to uplift minority and low-income communities, and rallying for an independent Puerto Rico. Bobby Rush, former member of Congress, co-founder of the Illinois Black Panther Party and longtime friend of Jiménez, called him a “premier fighter” with a quiet demeanor who could move mountains — always for the oppressed — by simply speaking, even from a young age. “Cha Cha never stopped working for ordinary people,” Rush told the Sun-Times on Saturday afternoon. “He made an absolutely unalterable commitment to protect the Puerto Rican community. He refused to let them be gentrified ... He made our society and our world better. Cha Cha was a beacon for us all.” [Read More]
