Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
April 19, 2020
Hello All – Hello All – Last week small groups of rightwing activists received massive publicity on cable news for their protests against the economic lockdown and "social-distancing" measures put in place to slow the virus crisis. Demonstrations, usually at state capitols, took place in California, Kentucky, North Carolina, Wyoming, Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas, Maryland, Utah, and Ohio, and probably in other places as well. Numerous reports (e.g. here and here) describe the participants as a mix of Trump supporters and people associated with far-right organizations. The protests in Michigan, the largest I believe, are credibly linked to the wealthy DeVos family, of which Betsy DeVos is US Education Secretary. And in broad daylight President Trump has encouraged these protests (here and here), targeting especially the governors of those states (mostly Democrats) who are (mostly) resisting the President's campaign to re-open the nation's economy for business.
What is this about? Why is this happening? An explanation that fits the fact-pattern is that Trump and his billionaire supporters see an economic recovery and a booming stock market as the key to retaining power in 2021. Conversely, a sustained Depression or Recession foretells political ruin. Deluded by their own deep-thinking, they believe that vast stretches of the country, conveniently including the "battle-ground" states of the Mid-West, are relatively virus free, and that the risk in lives (to workers) is outweighed by the consequences (to them) of a failure to restart the economic machine. A friendly amendment to this explanation is that conservatives, in and out of Congress, fear the effects of successful/popular relief programs for those displaced from the economy, and want to return to normal-suffering as soon as possible, before a social-democratic version of capitalism gets too popular. Many medical people, of course, say that it is only a matter of time before waves of the virus reach territories so far untouched, and ending social distancing and opening for business would accelerate the spread of the virus. Thus the pushback against the protesters' and Trump's calls to restart the economy is an attempt to save thousands of lives and minimize chaos.
Finally, how ominous is it that the demonstrations demanding the re-opening of the economy, though small, seem to have a broad representation from the 57 varieties of USA fascist groups, some of them armed? Historian Juan Cole points to an analogy in the rise of Mussolini, and cites another historian who describes Mussolini's fascist movement as "the marriage of an electoral party and a private militia." "There has all along been a danger," writes Cole, which became dramatically apparent at Charlottesville, that Trump's fascist rhetoric would unleash violence by the far right. With millions out of work and a pandemic threatening us with a second wave of mass infections if we end social distancing too soon, the country is a powder keg. And we have a firebug for president" [Link]. So we have been warned.
News Notes
In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Bernie Sanders writes: "In the midst of the twin crises that we face — the coronavirus pandemic and the meltdown of our economy — it's imperative that we re-examine some of the foundations of American society, understand why they are failing us, and fight for a fairer and more just nation. … If there is any silver lining in the horrible pandemic and economic collapse we're experiencing, it is that many in our country are now beginning to rethink the basic assumptions underlying the American value system."
Responding to the anger and dismay among younger activists that Joe Biden is the only thing standing between them and another four years of King Trump, leaders of the 1960s Students for a Democratic Society write an Open Letter to the New New Left urging them to support the Democratic candidate while working to make the campaign more radical.
The fight to save the Postal Service is real, as its already shaky financial condition has been further shaken by the expected loss of $13 billion this year because of the pandemic. This useful New York Times editorial explains that it is not "the market," but foolish congressional legislation that is imposing impossible-to-meet financial burdens on the Postal Service, setting it up for economic collapse and privatization. A bill to rescue the Postal Service by removing some of these burdens is sponsored by Elizabeth Warren and Ro Khanna (HR 2382). It passed the House with a strong, bi-partisan majority and now awaits Senate action. The point is that the "crisis" of the Postal Service is a self-imposed one, motivated by neo-liberalism gone amuck.
Hastings and nearby towns are served each year by a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, now planning to open on June 3 and seeking more households to participate in the weekly "shares" of fresh produce grown locally. For information about how this works, here's the link - www.stoneledge.farm/csa-program/csa.cfm?csaID=11. To contact the local coordinator, email hastingscsa@gmail.com.
Finally, today – April 19th – is the anniversary (1775) of the American Revolution. When the British army occupying Boston sent a routine search-and-destroy mission to nearby Lexington and Concord, they were met by local militia lined up on Lexington Common and later (at the "rude bridge that spanned the flood") in Concord. It is thought provoking that, unlike, say, the French and their "Bastille Day," Americans commemorate their birthing moment from the signing of a manifesto by slave owners and lawyers some 14 months after the armed struggle was underway, rather than credit the rank and file on the battlefields. But the USA has always been "exceptional," and so we struggle to remember our true history and wish it Happy Birthday!
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Until shut down by the virus, we have been meeting for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) In this time of coronavirus, we are meeting (by Zoom conference) each Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. If you would like to join our meeting, please send a return email to get the meeting's access code. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. And if you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
Singer John Prine died recently from the coronavirus. This week The Nation put up an interesting article about Prine, his life, and his music. In "John Prine Taught Us New Ways to Listen," author Shuja Haider writes "Prine loved music; he'd had his dad mail him his guitar while he was in the Army, and he and his buddies would stay up late singing their favorite songs, … but it was on his mail route that he really started doing what he would go on to do for the rest of his life, better than nearly anyone else who did it." The article comes with a link to all the songs on Prine's first (1971) album, "John Prine." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
Annals of the Plague Year
The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead
By
---- The coronavirus is spreading from America's biggest cities to its suburbs, and has begun encroaching on the nation's rural regions. The virus is believed to have infected millions of citizens and has killed more than 34,000. Yet President Trump this week proposed guidelines for reopening the economy and suggested that a swath of the United States would soon resume something resembling normalcy. For weeks now, the administration's view of the crisis and our future has been rosier than that of its own medical advisers, and of scientists generally. In truth, it is not clear to anyone where this crisis is leading us. … Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us. [Read More]
Coronavirus Advice From Abroad: 7 Lessons America's Governors Should Not Ignore as They Reopen Their Economies
By Stephen Engelberg, et al., ProPublica [April 18, 2020]
---- Figuring out how and when to let people go back to work during an outbreak of life-threatening disease is the most consequential decision any of you will ever face. You've already seen the stakes in New York, New Jersey and Michigan. Get this wrong and thousands of people in your state will die. As the presidential election campaign heats up, count on the president to blast you for high unemployment rates in your state (you lifted restrictions too slowly) or clusters of deaths (you went too far, too soon). To help you and your aides think about this decision over the next few weeks, we've interviewed experts and frontline officials from Italy, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. While they differ on the details, their views formed a startlingly united consensus of what's needed …. We also asked American experts whether states can meet all or most of these benchmarks. Their answers coalesced around a single point: None of you are close to being ready. [Read More]
(Video) Pandemic Is a Portal: Arundhati Roy on COVID-19 in India, Imagining Another World & Fighting for It
From Democracy Now! [April 16, 2020]
---- Officials in India say six major cities are coronavirus hot spots, including the capital city, New Delhi. We go there to speak with writer and activist Arundhati Roy, who has a new essay on how "The Pandemic Is a Portal." She says, "You have the sense that you're sitting on some kind of explosive substance," and describes how the government of Narendra Modi is using the pandemic to crack down on opponents and dissidents. [See the Program]
De-Funding the World Health Organization: Unethical, Cruel, and Dangerous for the World
By
---- Just when we thought things couldn't get any worse than a global pandemic that has reached all corners of the earth, infecting over 2 million people and killing over 146,000 — over 33,000 so far in the U.S. — President Trump has announced that the U.S. will suspend all funding to the World Health Organization. Trump's reasoning — supported by such Republican Senators such as Tom Cotton and Todd Young — is that China has too much influence over the WHO, that the WHO failed to disseminate accurate information to governments in the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis, and that the U.S. is best positioned to address the crisis on its own without global cooperation. This is wrong and dangerous not only for the U.S., but for the entire world. For countries whose COVID-19 responses are already crippled by U.S. sanctions and U.S.-supported wars, it is especially and unimaginably cruel. According to Richard Horton, editor of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, it is "a crime against humanity" and healthcare providers, scientists, and everyday citizens must "rebel against" it. [Read More]
More good essays about the virus and our times – "The Epicenter: A week inside New York's public hospitals," a photo essay by Philip Mongomery and Jonathan Mahler, New York Times [April 15, 2020] [Link]; "I Want My Death to Make You Angry," by Emily Pierskalla, RN, Minnesota Nurses Association [Link]; "Coronavirus does discriminate, because that's what humans do," b, The Guardian [UK] [April 17, 2020] [Link]; "Learning From Coronavirus: We Can't Rely on Capitalism to Serve Our Most Basic Social Needs" by [Link]; and "'The most stressful time ever': how coronavirus affects children's mental health," The Guardian [UK] [April 17, 2020] [Link].
This Week's Featured Essays
America Can Afford a World-Class Health System. Why Don't We Have One?
By Anne Case and
[FB – Professors Case and Deaton are the authors of the important book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, reviewed in an essay in the last Newsletter. It investigates the causes of the dramatic increase in the death rate for esp. middle- and lower-income white men in the USA over the last two decades.]
---- In March, Congress passed a coronavirus bill including $3.1 billion to develop and produce drugs and vaccines. The bipartisan consensus was unusual. Less unusual was the successful lobbying by pharmaceutical companies to weaken or kill provisions that addressed affordability — measures that could be used to control prices or invalidate patents for any new drugs. The notion of price control is anathema to health care companies. It threatens their basic business model, in which the government grants them approvals and patents, pays whatever they ask, and works hand in hand with them as they deliver the worst health outcomes at the highest costs in the rich world. The American health care industry is not good at promoting health, but it excels at taking money from all of us for its benefit. It is an engine of inequality. … But the virus also provides an opportunity for systemic change. The United States spends more than any other nation on health care, and yet we have the lowest life expectancy among rich countries. And although perhaps no system can prepare for such an event, we were no better prepared for the pandemic than countries that spend far less. [Read More]
UN Ceasefire Defines War As a Non-Essential Activity
By
---- At least 70 countries have signed on to the March 23 call by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for a worldwide ceasefire during the Covid-19 pandemic. … But 23 of the original 53 countries that signed on to the UN's ceasefire declaration still have armed forces in Afghanistan as part of the NATO coalition fighting the Taliban, while Qatar and the UAE are part of the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen. Have all 25 countries ceased firing now? To put some meat on the bones of the UN initiative, countries that are serious about this commitment should tell the world exactly what they are doing to live up to it. … Let's insist that the U.S. government call off its airstrikes, artillery and night raids in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and West Africa, and support ceasefires in Yemen, Libya and around the world. Then, when the pandemic is over, let's insist that the U.S. honor the UN Charter's prohibition against the threat or use of force, which wise American leaders drafted and signed in 1945, and start living at peace with all our neighbors around the world. The U.S. has not tried that in a very long time, but maybe it's an idea whose time has finally come. [Read More] Also useful/interesting is "We Need a Coronavirus Truce" by , Foreign Policy in Focus [April 1, 2020] [Link].
(Video) Mehdi Hasan and Noam Chomsky on Biden vs. Trump
From The Intercept [April 15, 2020] – 30 minutes
---- The Intercept's Mehdi Hasan spoke with world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky on the 2020 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Now that Bernie Sanders has dropped out and endorsed Biden, does the progressive left have a moral obligation to hold their noses and vote for the former vice president, despite his many sins? [See the Program] Also this week, Democracy Now! broadcast the second part of its interview with Chomsky, (Video) "Gangster in the White House": Noam Chomsky on COVID-19, WHO, China, Gaza and Global Capitalism" [Link]. If you missed Part I, linked in last week's Newsletter, see it here.
'We Don't Just Interview People Once' [Filmmaker Julia Reichert]
By Karen Nussbaum, American Prospect [April 10, 2020]
[FB - A discussion with documentary filmmaker Julia Reichert, whose work chronicles labor, women, and the American left, and who won an Oscar this year for "American Factory" [available on Netflix]. Reichert also made the film "Union Maids" (1976) and other fine documentaries. Her interviewer, Karen Nussbaum, was a co-founder of the clerical workers' organization 9 to 5, the subject of Reichert's current film project.]
KN: I'm interested in how your films were situated in the historical moment and what you were trying to accomplish with them.
JR: They all come out of a historical context. Another significant thread is how it came out of me personally—growing up female in the '50s into the '60s, but also me as a person who did not come from any kind of privileged background. Working-class Republican union dad, working mom, four kids in the house. I didn't realize until I went to college that we were working-class. I just thought we were fine. So there's two things going on. One is the movements for social change which I luckily ended up being part of. We came of age in the '60s, we get swept up into all these amazing movements, but for me it was a first time ever. We didn't know about it in our little town. So it's partly the movements, the history I was swept up in and partly just who I was. And it has a huge impact on all the films. [Read More]
What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy
By Corey Robin, New York Review of Books [April 17, 2020]
---- If we cannot gather to assemble or vote, much less deliberate, in what sense can we have a democracy? How do we do politics in a pandemic, self-governance under quarantine? Is it possible to supervise the supervisors if we're too sequestered—or sick—to vote? Yet the end of mass populist rallies has also entailed (Wisconsin aside) the postponement of primaries and elimination of voting booths—the suspension of politics itself, as least as that term is conventionally understood in the United States. Must it be so? Denied access to existing political institutions, they must find ways to discover that connection, that power. They must turn themselves, writes Dewey, from an "inchoate, unorganized" and "formless" collection into a self-conscious collective. They must "break existing political forms" and create new ones; they must destroy old connections and forge fresh ones. Democracy, in this account, is never "the product of democracy," that is, of current political institutions. It is "the convergence of a great number of social movements" working to "remedy evils experienced in consequence of prior political institutions." [Read More]
Our History
How ACT UP forever changed patients' rights, protests and American political organizing as it's practiced today. [The AIDS epidemic]
April 13, 2020]
[FB – The AIDS epidemic is still with us: according to the UN, 32 million people have died from the disease, including an estimated 770,000 during 2018. The "curve is flattened," but people continue to die.]
---- Submicroscopic infectious agents have a way of revealing the worst in us, and the best. That is the story of the AIDS epidemic generally, and in particular of ACT UP — the 33-year-old radical direct-action group formally and loftily called the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. For nearly a decade in the 1980s and 1990s, ACT UP was a ubiquitous and unnerving presence, not only in America but in 19 countries worldwide. At its peak, it claimed 148 chapters, and though its ranks remained relatively small — numbering perhaps no more than 10,000 — it terrified and angered much of the population. … Generally, the news media didn't think much of their work, branding the group both vulgar and counterproductive. "Far from inspiring sympathy," The New York Times said of ACT UP in 1989, their methods were "another reason to reject both the offensive protesters and their ideas." Coverage wasn't much warmer in some gay newspapers, which were owned by older and more conservative types who saw them as churlish mobsters, spoiled and rude. ACT UP didn't entirely disagree. They were, as their motto goes, "united in anger." [Read More] As part of this main essay, read "12 People on Joining ACT UP: 'I Went to That First Meeting and Never Left' [Link].
The Radical '70s Magazine That Shaped the Hong Kong Left
By Promise Li, The Nation [April 17, 2020]
[FB – The spectacular pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong some months ago set records for imaginative tactics and all-around stalwartism. Where did this movement come from? In this essay, the author finds the roots of Hong Kong's resistance to authoritarianism in the days of the '60s student movement. Check out this fabulous story.]
---- When Ng Chung-yin met Augustine Mok Chiu-yu, they were doing a sit-in protest on the steps of Chu Hai College in Hong Kong. It was August 1969, and 12 students had just been expelled from the college for criticizing the administration—namely, its censorship of student newspapers, corruption, and ties to the Nationalist Party in Taiwan. Ng, then 23, was a former student leader who had just graduated from Chu Hai. Mok, 22, had recently returned to the city after studying in Australia. The Chu Hai protests were the first in Hong Kong history in which student unions from schools across the city took to the streets together. The protests ended in failure, and local newspapers smeared the students, claiming they were disrupting public order. Nonetheless, the short-lived movement marked the beginning of a new generation of activism. It had politicized young Hong Kongers, getting them ready for a larger fight. … The 70's Biweekly was a profoundly DIY operation. It was only published for a few years. … Nonetheless, The 70's Biweekly's dedication to organizing students and workers, its demands for new kinds of engagement, informed the Hong Kong political scene far beyond the publication's brief lifetime. Its most enduring lesson may be that the model for liberation can only be found in solidarity with all marginalized people—that no single dogma or past experience can show us how to do that best. In a fight that involves millions, the Hong Kong left is still finding its way forward. [Read More]
