Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
August 5, 2018
Hello All – Monday will be the 73rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. As CFOW does each year, we marked the anniversary, this year with a vigil/rally in Hastings on Saturday. Focusing on the birth and first use of the atom bomb seems particularly appropriate this year. While our government initiates a plan for a one trillion dollar "modernization" of its nuclear arsenal, this year the UN General Assembly passed a Treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. The Treaty will become international law when 50 nations sign it. Needless to say, none of the current nuclear weapons states voted for the Treaty; but they were unable to stop it. Once the Treaty goes into effect, it will fall onto weapons-state citizens and the non-nuclear powers of the world to bring the nuclear-weapons states into compliance. This is a great step forward towards the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Most Americans, I believe, still think that using atom bombs on Japan in 1945 was justified, even if was regrettable, because it ended the war and thus saved American lives. For decades, the official line supporting the morality and lawfulness of the Hiroshima bombing has been that it saved up to one million US lives (and many Japanese lives) by ending the Pacific War without an invasion of the Japanese home islands. Historians now know that this is a myth, and that it was known not to be true at the time by President Truman and his advisors. Reading Japanese codes and messages to the USSR, the Americans in 1945 knew that Japan would surrender if Russia, which had a neutrality treaty with Japan, were to break it and declare war on Japan. Unknown to Japan, at the Yalta Conference in early 1945, Russia had agreed to declare war Japan three months after the German surrender in Europe (May 8, 1945). Thus the United States expected Russia to declare war in mid-August, and for Japan to surrender soon after. There was no need to make using the atom bomb, which was not even tested until July 16th, part of the military planning against Japan. An "invasion of the Japanese 'home islands'" would never be necessary, because the war would be over in August 1945, once Russia attacked.
Why then was the Bomb used? The most important publication addressing this question, imo, is a book by historian Gar Alperovitz called The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. The story is complex, but it appears that the decision to use the bomb was strongly influenced by the belief that, if the bomb were used and was successful, that it would scare the Russians into conceding US demands re: Eastern Europe and the postwar settlement. Going further, it appears that Truman and his close advisers rejected the possibility of a Japanese surrender in the late spring, keeping the war going so that the atomic bomb, if tested successfully, could be used against Japan. The strategy of Truman and his inner circle was to prolong the war until the atomic bomb was ready, and then to use it before Russia entered the war and Japan surrendered. This is a thought almost too horrible to contemplate. Yet it draws support from the frantic efforts of Truman and his supporters after the war to justify the use of the bomb with outlandish tales of a million US casualties if the bomb were not used, part of a campaign to counteract the postwar revulsion against the use of the bomb that threatened the development of a US nuclear arsenal. All this and much more are developed in Alperovitz's book. As William Faulkner once wrote, "the past is never dead. It's not even past." This is certainly true about the first use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
News Notes
The summer heat wave puts our climate crisis on the front burner, if not on the front page (see below). Check out this useful short video from The Sanders Institute, in which Bill McKibben talks about "How We Talk About Climate Change."
The website of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists links several informative articles from its journal discussing the first use of the bomb and how nuclear weapons have changed the world.
In July the majority of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, including Westchester's Eliot Engel and Nita Lowey, joined the Republican majority in voting for a $700 billion-plus Pentagon budget. Last week it was the turn of the Senate, where eight Democrats and two Republicans voted against the military budget. One of them was New York's Kirsten Gillibrand. Read more here.
Indivisible Rivertowns posted an interesting article on their Facebook page comparing the sources of contributions to the members of the "Independent Democratic Conference" to their more liberal ("real Democrats") challengers. The results are quite dramatic: "Just 2.1 percent of the campaign cash received by members of the recently shuttered Independent Democratic Conference, which caucused with Republicans, came in the form of donations of $200 or less." The rest of the IDC money came from big donations and corporations.
It would take many shelves-full of books to capture the drama and trauma being undergone by refugees and immigrants at our southern border, in their life-and-death struggles with the sadistic immigration police. For one well-told story, check out this video: "A Family Faces an Impossible Choice: Reunite Child With Her Detained Mother or Undocumented Father?" From The Intercept [[Link].
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Ongoing – CFOW holds a vigil/rally each Saturday at the VFW Plaza in Hastings (Warburton and Spring) from 12 to 1 p.m. Everyone invited; please join us!
Sunday, August 19th – Aida Touma-Sliman, an Arab Member of [Israel's] Knesset, will speak about "In the Face of Israel's New & Controversial Nation State Law, A Remarkable Opportunity." Ms. Touma-Sliman will be the guest speaker at Temple Israel of New Rochelle (100 Pinebrook Blvd.) The program starts at 7:30 p.m. It's free, open to the public, and will include light refreshment.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for our rallies are usually about war or climate change, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's immigration policies are often targeted, depending on current events. We meet on the first Sunday of each month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to make a financial contribution to our work, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
This Newsletter
Articles linked in the CFOW newsletter are intended to illuminate some of the main action-issues about which we are concerned. Coming mostly from the "dissenting media," they provide an alternative to the perspectives of the mainstream media. In addition to the excellent "Featured Essays," I especially recommend the sections on "The Whole World on Fire" and "Trump and Fascism"; two interesting articles on what seems to be (who knows?) a shift in the Trump administration's plans for Afghanistan; an interesting/alarming article about what's happening with wild fires in California; a set of thought-provoking articles on the large number of CIA and military veterans being supported by the Democrats in the November elections; and ("Our History") an article about the late Tony Mazzocchi, a leading labor leader and perhaps the most important US environmentalist in the 1960s and 1970s. Read on!
Rewards!
There is a lot of heavy reading in this newsletter, so why not pause for some musical refreshment? First up is a moving/interesting short video about jazz great Ella Fitzgerald (h/t MC). And next we have another great song from local favorites Hudson Valley Sally, "Annie." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
THE WHOLE WORLD ON FIRE
[FB – Today the Sunday New York Times Magazine included only one article. It is about "climate change," and the failure to address our climate breakdown in a meaningful way beginning in the 1970s, when the main facts about our emerging climate crisis were known. The article, by Nathaniel Rich, is full of interesting news and is linked below, as are two articles that are critical of it. Both Naomi Klein (The Intercept) and Kate Aronoff (The Nation) fault Rich for saying that "we/human nature" are to blame for our failure to stop the collapse of our climate, arguing instead that (Klein) the fossil fuel companies and "capitalism," and (Aronoff) mostly just the USA, not more than 100 other countries, must bear the responsibility for failure. On Thursday Rich and several other climate experts appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss our climate crisis. Linked just below are the articles by Rich, Klein, and Aronoff. More articles about the world's summer heat wave and what people are/are not doing about it are linked in the "Global Warming/Climate Crisis" section further down.]
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
---- In the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world's major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we've come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves. Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. … Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Why didn't we act? [Read More]
Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not "Human Nature"
By Naomi Klein, The Intercept [
---- This Sunday, the entire New York Times Magazine will be composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. … The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received. We have all heard the various excuses for why the small matter of despoiling our only home just doesn't cut it as an urgent news story: … Which is why it was so exciting to see the Times throw the full force of its editorial machine behind Rich's opus — teasing it with a promotional video, kicking it off with a live event at the Times Center, and accompanying educational materials. That's also why it is so enraging that the piece is spectacularly wrong in its central thesis. [Read More]
---- This Sunday, the entire New York Times Magazine will be composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. … The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received. We have all heard the various excuses for why the small matter of despoiling our only home just doesn't cut it as an urgent news story: … Which is why it was so exciting to see the Times throw the full force of its editorial machine behind Rich's opus — teasing it with a promotional video, kicking it off with a live event at the Times Center, and accompanying educational materials. That's also why it is so enraging that the piece is spectacularly wrong in its central thesis. [Read More]
What the 'New York Times' Climate Blockbuster Missed
By Kate Aronoff, The Nation [August 2, 2018]
---- His account still falls short in one important way: It's still not clear that it succeeds in showing how "we" as a species are to blame for failing to stop a threat fueled mainly by American corporations. … The fact remains that other nations—197 of them—haven't been quite as profligate on climate action as the United States, which accounts for around 15 percent of emissions worldwide. The kind of outright climate denial that helped arrest our participation in the Kyoto Protocol 21 years ago and, more recently, the Paris Agreement, isn't widespread outside of the United States, either. It's not that the global community has a fool-proof mitigation plan; it does not. But America's particular failure to address climate change isn't a failure of all of humanity. The Paris Agreement is "nonbinding, unenforceable and unheeded," as Rich correctly writes, for a number of reasons—many of them having to do with industry influence. What's more, the world's commitment to climate action has not rested solely with the small cadre Rich profiles. [Read More]
MORE FEATURED ESSAYS
(Audio and Text) Delightful Listening: A Conversation Between Viet Thanh Nguyen with Arundhati Roy
From The Los Angeles Review of Books [July 31, 2018]
---- [Arundhati Roy] In my case, the thing is I have a very peculiar background for an Indian. India is a society that from the outside, or from the hippie side, everybody looks at as anarchic, Bollywood, yoga, Gandhi, vegetarian, whatever. But in truth, it's a very, very policed society. It's a society that lives in the fine grid of caste and ethnicity and religion and all that. Like most of the people in this book, I don't fit into that grid. My mother married outside the community then got divorced, and was not from a big city, so we grew up, my brother and I, in this little village in which The God of Small Things is set. It was made clear to me, especially to me as a girl, that no one was going to marry me, I didn't belong there, blah, blah, blah — not asking me whether I wanted to marry them, which I didn't, but anyway. So I grew up sort of on the edge, watching all this and trying to understand it at a time when I was very, very young. Watching my mother for example, who is like someone who escaped from the set of a Fellini film. At times she was very, very harsh to me and my brother, but because there was so much harshness directed at her for the choices she had made … And so, as a very young person, you're struggling to understand things in adult ways, and of course you misunderstand things too. This began for me very early. [Read More/Hear the Program]
The Homecoming: How Ahed Tamimi Became the Symbol of Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Oppression
By Alice Speri, The Intercept [
---- If Israeli soldiers were hoping a show of force would remind Palestinians who's in charge, Ahed Tamimi responded much like she did last winter, when she slapped and pushed a soldier who had broken into her backyard. "The resistance continues," she declared shortly after her release, as she visited the family of another young member of the Tamimi family, killed in June by soldiers. Swarmed by hundreds of cameras that followed her every step, she then paid tribute to the grave of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, before returning to a village that had been decked out with dozens of posters of her and her mother — but mostly her. Children, teenagers, and elderly relatives waited for her return among hundreds of activists and journalists, as music blasted from loudspeakers and relatives chronicled the family's long history of resistance to the Israeli occupation. When Ahed finally arrived home, the crowd broke into triumphant cheers, dancing, and hugs. [Read More]
Why We Know So Little About the U.S.-Backed War in Yemen
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone [July 27, 2018]
---- Thursday, from Al Jazeera: "Yemen 'on Brink of New Cholera Epidemic,' Charity Warns." The piece details how recent developments in the Yemeni civil war — specifically, the possible siege of the port city of Hodeidah — may cause a surge in cholera cases. There were over a million reported cases of cholera between the fall of 2016 and spring of 2018, the largest documented outbreak in modern times. The rate of infection had slowed, but observers now fear resurgence. Since the conflict began, medical services have been devastated across the war-torn country, and children in particular have been affected, with as many as 400,000 at imminent risk of starvation. In April, U.N. General Secretary Antonio Guterres said that 8 million people in Yemen didn't know where they were getting their next meal. Yemen is a catastrophe on a scale similar to Syria, but coverage in the United States has been sporadic at best. PBS News Hour did a thorough three-part series, but MSNBC, for instance, has barely mentioned the crisis in a year, during a period when it has done 455 segments on Stormy Daniels (this according to media reporter Adam Johnson). The reason for inattention is obvious: The United States bears real responsibility for the crisis. [Read More]
TRUMP AND FASCISM
One Question - Fascism
By Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes
[FB – "One Question" is a monthly series in which they ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question. Last December, "One Question" asked about 20 Deep Thinkers, "Is Fascism making a comeback?" The short but quite varied responses are an interesting/useful introduction to the problem of thinking about "fascism" today: Part One and Part Two. ]
Neoliberal Fascism and the Echoes of History
By Henry Giroux, Truth Dig [August 2, 2018]
---- The nightmares that have shaped the past and await return slightly just below the surface of American society are poised to wreak havoc on us again. America has reached a distinctive crossroads in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged to produce what Philip Roth once called "the terror of the unforeseen." Since the 1970s, American society has lived with the curse of neoliberalism, or what can be called the latest and most extreme stage of predatory capitalism. As part of a broader comprehensive design, neoliberalism's overriding goal is to consolidate power in the hands of the financial elite. As a mode of rationality, it functions pedagogically in multiple cultural sites to ensure no alternatives to its mode of governance can be imagined or constructed. … In this mix of economic barbarism, political nihilism, racial purity, economic orthodoxy and ethical somnambulance, a distinctive economic-political formation has been produced that I term neoliberal fascism. [Read More] Also recommended are two previous articles by Giroux on fascism: "Mainstream Politicians Switch Sides Under Trump" [April 30, 2018] [Link]; and "Reading Against Fascism" [July 19, 2018] [Link].
The Far Right in Government: Six Cases From Across Europe
By Stefanie Ehmsen and Albert Scharenberg, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation [June 2018]
By Stefanie Ehmsen and Albert Scharenberg, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation [June 2018]
[FB – The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation has an office and interesting programs in NYC. It is connected with the German political party Die Linke ("Left"). This is the introduction to a lengthy pamphlet with incisive case studies on the question of fascism in relation to authoritarian governments in seven countries.]
---- We are currently witnessing a tidal change in global politics. The far right, which seemed to be on the retreat for decades, has staged a huge comeback. From Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines to Narendra Modi in India, from Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, from Michel Temer in Brazil to Donald Trump in the United States, far-right politicians have risen to the highest ranks of world power. From these newly acquired positions of strength, they have initiated deeply disturbing authoritarian transformations of their respective countries. In this endeavor, they form part of the same phenomenon: They represent the underside of neoliberal globalization. Neoliberalism is, after all, the latest form of capitalism, and it is deepening the contradictions inherent in capitalism in a very substantial way. We are producing so much more wealth than in, say, 1980, but the working classes have seen nothing of it. In addition, austerity policies have produced a steep increase in social inequality and economic insecurity, in turn undermining notions of community and solidarity, and leading to increased competition and individualism. [Read More]
WAR & PEACE
Trump's Foreign Policy Is Awful, But There's a Better Alternative than the Establishment's Version
---- Since the advent of the Trump administration, large numbers of Americans have been aghast at its narrow nationalist approach to world affairs. But many of them are also uneasy about the alternative championed by the foreign policy Establishment. … However, at the same time that the nationalist and alliance approaches dominated U.S. foreign policy, there emerged a third alternative: global governance. [Read More]
Marching for Peace: From Helmand to Hiroshima
By Maya Evans, ZNet [August 5, 2018]
[FB - Maya Evans is co-coordinator for Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK and has visited Afghanistan 9 times since 2011; she is a writer and a Councilor for her town in Hastings, England.]
[FB - Maya Evans is co-coordinator for Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK and has visited Afghanistan 9 times since 2011; she is a writer and a Councilor for her town in Hastings, England.]
---- I have just arrived in Hiroshima with a group of Japanese "Okinawa to Hiroshima peace walkers" who had spent nearly two months walking Japanese roads protesting U.S. militarism. While we were walking, an Afghan peace march that had set off in May was enduring 700km of Afghan roadsides, poorly shod, from Helmand province to Afghanistan's capital of Kabul. Our march watched the progress of theirs with interest and awe. … The Japanese peace walkers marched to specifically halt the construction of a U.S. airfield and port with an ammunition depot in Henoko, Okinawa, which will be accomplished by landfilling Oura Bay, a habitat for the dugong and unique coral hundreds of years old, but many more lives are endangered. Kamoshita Shonin, a peace walk organizer who lives in Okinawa, says: "People in mainland Japan do not hear about the extensive bombings by the U.S. in the Middle East and Afghanistan, they are told that the bases are a deterrent against North Korea and China, but the bases are not about protecting us, they are about invading other countries. This is why I organised the walk." Sadly, the two unconnected marches shared one tragic cause as motivation. [Read More]
The War in Afghanistan
Will Donald Trump Get in the Way of the Best Chance in More Than a Decade to End the War in Afghanistan?
By Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept [
---- For a brief few days this June, the long-suffering people of Afghanistan had a glimpse of what their country might look like at peace. Out of respect for the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Fitr, the Taliban and the Afghan government announced a historic three-day truce, building on previous temporary ceasefire agreements made by the warring parties. The agreement led to scenes reminiscent of the famous World War I "Christmas Truce," with Taliban and government fighters — who had just days earlier been trying to kill each other — embracing, taking selfies, and exchanging gifts. After several decades of nearly unremitting warfare — triggered by the Soviet Union's invasion of the country in the 1979 and punctuated by civil wars and NATO intervention — many Afghans have clearly had enough. In recent months, a grassroots peace movement emerged, consisting of ordinary people who have held protest marches across the country to demand an end to the violence. While recent ceasefires have not been extended indefinitely, there are indications that the political leadership on both sides, as well as the U.S. military, is taking seriously the idea of negotiating an end to the conflict. … So is Afghanistan heading towards a new era of peace, free from the nightmare of armed conflict? And is the United States on the precipice of ending its grueling 17-year military occupation of the country? Despite significant challenges, including elites on all sides who have vested interest in the conflict continuing, recent developments may offer the best opportunity for putting an end to the decades-long violence that has ravaged Afghan society. [Read More] Also good/useful is Gil Barndollar, "Can Trump Get America Out of Afghanistan?" [Link]
The War in Yemen
U.S.-Backed Saudi Airstrike on Family With Nine Children Shows "Clear Violations" of the Laws of War
By Iona Craig and Shuaib Almosawa, The Intercept [August 2, 2018]
---- Though the U.S. is not known to have used its own fighter pilots and attack aircraft in Yemen, it is more directly involved in the coalition's air war than it has been in any other foreign-led bombing campaign in modern history. As the intelligence report shows, the U.S. maintains a significant presence in the Saudi operations center. It also sells munitions and aircraft to the coalition and provides maintenance, training, targeting assistance, and mid-air refueling for fighter jets carrying out bombing runs. Potential U.S. complicity in violations of the laws of war described in the report is more relevant than ever. The U.S. reportedly increased its role in selecting targets for coalition airstrikes soon after the May 14 attack. … In mid-June, the coalition launched a major military offensive against Yemen's port city of Hodeidah, which, along with the surrounding area, was home to 400,000 people. That assault has relied heavily on airstrikes from coalition fighter jets flown by American-trained pilots, armed with American-made missiles, and refueled in the air by U.S. planes. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the expanded U.S. role in target selection is meant to "minimize the number of civilian casualties and the harm to critical infrastructure" in the Hodeidah operation, which the United Nations humanitarian chief in Yemen has said could put 250,000 lives at risk. Some 47,230 households have so far been displaced from the governorate as a result of the fighting. [Read More]
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
California Burning
By William Finnegan, New York Review of Books [August 16, 2018 Issue]
[FB – This is an interesting/alarming review of three books about wildfires and fire-management (mostly in California) and the relationship of increasing wildfire danger to global warming/climate breakdown.]
---- In early July 2018, there were twenty-nine large uncontained fires burning across the United States. "We shouldn't be seeing this type of fire behavior this early in the year," Chris Anthony, a division chief at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told The New York Times. It has been an unusually dry winter and spring in much of the West, however, and by the end of June three times as much land had already burned in California as burned in the first half of 2017, which was the state's worst fire year ever. On July 7, my childhood suburb, Woodland Hills, was 117 degrees. On the UCLA campus, it was 111 degrees. Wildfires broke out in San Diego and up near the Oregon border, where a major blaze closed Interstate 5 and killed one civilian. The governor, Jerry Brown, has declared yet another state of emergency in Santa Barbara County. [Read More]
This Summer's Heat Waves Could Be the Strongest Climate Signal Yet
By Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News [July 28, 2018]
---- Earth's global warming fever spiked to deadly new highs across the Northern Hemisphere this summer, and we're feeling the results—extreme heat is now blamed for hundreds of deaths, droughts threaten food supplies, wildfires have raced through neighborhoods in the western United States, Greece and as far north as the Arctic Circle. At sea, record and near-record warm oceans have sent soggy masses of air surging landward, fueling extreme rainfall and flooding in Japan and the eastern U.S. In Europe, the Baltic Sea is so warm that potentially toxic blue-green algae is spreading across its surface. … In mid-July, temperatures reached all-time record highs above the Arctic Circle, around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and hovered in the 80s for weeks at a time. In the Norwegian glacier area that Lars Holger Pilø studies, the average temperature has been 9 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the past 30 days. [Read More]
National And State Media Failing To Connect Recent Extreme Heat Events To Climate Change
From Citizen.org [August 1, 2018]
---- The media is mostly ignoring the leading cause of record-breaking temperatures seen by several states in recent weeks, a Public Citizen report (PDF) found. The report, which examined media coverage of extreme heat and climate change from Jan. 1 to July 8, found that among the top 50 U.S. newspapers by circulation, a total of 760 articles mentioned extreme heat, heatwaves, record heat, or record temperatures, but only 134 of these pieces, or 17.6 percent, also mentioned climate change. … Television networks performed the worst of all outlets. National programming from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Network, and MSNBC mentioned climate change in 16 heat-related pieces out of 226 total pieces to date in 2018, or only about 7 percent of the time, and connected heat to climate change just once during the recent heatwave. ABC has not discussed the topics together all year, nor has Fox News Network, with arguable the exception of one segment in which the host engages in climate denial in response to a cold snap. [Read More] For more on the media and the climate crisis, read "Hot but not bothered: Major media are ignoring the climate crisis," by Dawn Stover, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [July 31, 2018] [Link].
THE STATE OF THE UNION
The Return of the Super-Elite
By Meagan Day, Jacobin Magazine [July 2017]
---- New research reveals inequality levels not seen in a century — and it shows where these new super-elites live, too. American economic inequality hit a historic peak in 1928, when the country's richest 1 percent captured nearly a quarter of the nation's total income. But now, in thirty American metro areas and five whole states, the 1 percent has broken that previous record — and in some cases has doubled it. Economists Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price released a paper last week through the Economic Policy Institute titled "The new gilded age: Income inequality in the U.S. by state, metropolitan area, and county." Their research concludes that, on average, the income of American's 1 percent is twenty-six times higher than the average of the bottom 99 percent. … Sommeiller and Price looked at economic data from 1917 to 2015, and found that "growth was broadly shared from 1945 to 1973 and highly unequal from 1973 to 2007." After the Great Recession, which caused a small hiccup in the trend, the pattern of widening inequality resumed with even greater force. Sommelier and Price found that so far during the recovery from the Great Recession, the American top 1 percent has captured nearly 42 percent of all income growth. [Read More]
Report: US Has Highest Poverty Rate In Developed World
By David Brooks, Resumen-english.org [August 1, 2018]
---- A UN report released last weekend ranks the United States as the country with the highest poverty rate in the developed world. This explains the social problems facing the country, which, among other phenomena, have increased hatred towards migrants. … Last Friday, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, presented his report on the United States to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, where he documented the existence of 40 million poor people (18.5 million of them in extreme poverty) and that since 1980 the average income of the poorest half of the population had stagnated, while the 1 percent had soared to record levels. The report details examples of this inequality, for example, that the infant mortality rate is the highest in the advanced world, African-American mortality rates have nearly doubled the one in Thailand, 18 percent of children live in poverty, and that a baby born in China today has a longer and healthier life expectancy than its peers in the United States. … In his report, Alston points out that in practice, the United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights to protect their citizens from starvation, or to die from lack of access to health care, or to grow up in a context of total deprivation. [Read More]
The US Deported 468 Parents—but Kept Their Children
By Zoë Carpenter, The Nation [July 31, 2018]
---- Last week the judge overseeing the ACLU's case ordered the government to hand over a list of names of all the families considered ineligible for reunification. (The government said Friday that it has done so.) That will make the search for deported parents a bit easier—still, the burden of locating those 400-plus people and making sure that reunification happens will be almost entirely borne by civil-society groups, many of whom have limited staff and funding. "It's shocking to me that we're even in this situation—that civil society has to mount this response," said Nan Schivone, the legal director of Justice In Motion. Her nonprofit organization is small, with eight attorneys working on the separation issue in the Northern Triangle. They happen to be well-positioned to help find deported parents, but that's not the work they were initially tasked with, and funded for. "It should not be civil society's job to find people who the government separated from their children and then sent home," Schivone said. [Read More]
The CIA Democrats: From the State Department to Capitol Hill
By Patrick Martin, World Socialist Web Site [March 9, 2018]
[FB – This is the third and concluding part of a series that looks in-depth at who the national Democratic Party is supporting in the November congressional elections. Also recommended are Part One and Part Two of the series. NB this was written last March, and there has been some progress for the progressive wing of the Democrats since then.]
[FB – This is the third and concluding part of a series that looks in-depth at who the national Democratic Party is supporting in the November congressional elections. Also recommended are Part One and Part Two of the series. NB this was written last March, and there has been some progress for the progressive wing of the Democrats since then.]
---- It is by no means certain that the Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm election on November 6. But the details presented in this report demonstrate that a Democratic victory would in no sense represent a shift to the left in capitalist politics. In a sense, the Democratic Party's promotion of a large number of military-intelligence candidates for competitive districts represents an insurance policy for the US ruling elite. In the event of a major swing to the Democrats, the House of Representatives will receive an influx of new members drawn primarily from the national security apparatus, trusted servants of American imperialism. Parenthetically, it should be noted that there would be no comparable influx of Bernie Sanders supporters or other "left"-talking candidates in the event of a Democratic landslide. Only five of the 221 candidates reviewed in this study had links to Sanders or billed themselves as "progressive." [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Deported Swedish Gaza Activist: "The ships will continue to sail until Gaza is free."
[Palestine] [August 5, 2018]
---- Levrini told Ma'an that the ship was 42 nautical miles in international waters when they ship was boarded by the Israeli navy. :They had talked to our radio operator, who repeatedly told them that we were on international waters and had no intention to cross the border to Israel. That it is a right according to international law to travel on international waters." "They tasered many of the peace activists. Some got tasered in both head and neck, which could be deadly," Levrini said. [Read More] For more on the hijacking, read "Gaza Flotilla Ship Al Awda Violently Seized By Israelis, USS Liberty Survivor Amongst Those Captured," by Joe Lauria, Consortium News [July 31, 2018] [Link].
A New Wave Of Hardline Anti-BDS Tactics Are Targeting Students, And No One Knows Who's Behind It
August 2, 2018']
[FB – This is an interesting two-part story about "Canary Mission," a hidden/mysterious group/network that is targeting US students and student groups critical of Israel. Here is Part One and Part Two.]
OUR HISTORY
Victory Over the Sun
By Connor Kilpatrick, Jacobin Magazine [July 2018]
---- Postwar America's greatest environmentalist was a labor leader. The greatest environmentalist of postwar America wasn't a scientist or a wonk. He didn't even finish high school. Brooklyn native Tony Mazzocchi, who passed away in 2002, isn't a household name — yet. But when a future socialist society on the other side of the climate crisis goes looking for statues to build and parks to name, he will be at the top of the list. … For nearly a decade in the 1960s and '70s, environmentalism seemed to be on the cusp of a popular reckoning against the powers of capital. And it found an ally in the labor movement which, for a few years, looked like it might be able to not only cling to life but find a way back into the heart of American society. Mazzocchi and his union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International (OCAW), were the primary muscle behind the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), signed into law by Richard Nixon. [Read More]
The Neglected History of the May '68 Uprising in France
By Cole Stangler, The Nation [August 3, 2018]
---- The unprecedented wave of protests and strikes that swept across France for a few weeks in 1968—known today simply as "May '68"—was, at its core, a workers' movement. This was the largest wildcat general strike in the history of capitalism: a mass revolt against low pay, poor working conditions, and the hierarchical, dehumanizing organization of the capitalist workplace itself. Events in the Left Bank of Paris simply provided the spark. Ironically, they've since become better known than the actual strike movement. On May 3, hundreds of college students gathered for a general assembly in the courtyard of the Sorbonne University. Administrators responded by calling the riot police—the infamous CRS—who subsequently marched onto campus and arrested hundreds of protesters, including student leaders. This, in turn, enraged the burgeoning student movement, culminating in nighttime skirmishes with the CRS known as the "Night of the Barricades." On the morning of May 11, French people woke up to images of smoldering barricades in the heart of Paris, of overturned cobblestones, of riot cops beating students. Then, the most important phase of the revolt kicked off. [Read More]
