Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
September 6, 2020
Hello All – President Trump has sent out many signals that he may not accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. We don't know what he is thinking (and he probably doesn't know either), but there is a growing awareness in the country that the outcome of the election may be tangled up in the courts for weeks or months. If something like this were to happen, it would be a mistake to repeat the disaster of the 2000 election, when the grassroots were largely passive while the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George Bush. How can we prevent this from happening again?
We have begun discussing this problem in CFOW. We have affiliated ourselves with the Protect the Results coalition, a new network of several dozen left/liberal organizations working for united/coordinated action if Trump appears to be defeated at the polls, but contests the results and refuses to leave on January 20. As you can see from their website, the coalition was launched by national Indivisible and similar organizations – moderate supporters of the Democratic Party. But the coalition also includes some unions and the Working Families Party, so it may have some mobilizing capacity. It does not appear that the Westchester groupings of Indivisible are involved in this yet; perhaps later. What we hope to do between now and the election – and after the election, if things go South – is to encourage awareness of the dangers we face and build a democratic network to initiate responses as needed. Obviously, we are playing in the dark.
If Trump refuses to leave office, what responses would be most effective is a discussion just getting started. The Protect the Results coalition projects "non-violent" and "peaceful" action. Is this in conflict with the proposals of Frances Fox Piven in her essay "What if Trump Won't Leave?", published in The Intercept last month and widely reprinted, in which she urges "disruption" of business-as-usual? Movement veterans Ron Jacobs and Peter Bohmer propose a "general strike," essentially an Occupy action in every city and town. Can "disruption" and "Occupy" be "peaceful" and conflict-free? Can any serious mobilization? At CFOW, we think it is time to start thinking about these and similar ideas, and how those of us in Westchester can contribute to the success of the national effort to remove Trump if/when. Please join us!
Remembering David Graeber
Activist-anarchist-academic David Graeber died this week at the age of 59. In his short life he accomplished so much. He may be best known as one of the founders of Occupy, helping to coin the slogan "We are the 99%," and contributing in many ways to publicizing and explaining the goals and methods of Occupy, with a focus on small assemblies and direct democracy. Nine years ago, at the beginning of Occupy, Graeber had just published his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which presented a nontraditional explanation of economic life that directly confronted the market-fetishism of the Neo-Liberalists. Many tributes to the life and work of David Graeber are appearing on-line and in-print: here are a few that may be interesting to the friends of CFOW.
(Video) David Graeber: The Debt of the American Poor Should Be Forgiven
From Democracy Now! [September 19, 2011 – just days after Occupy began.]
----As President Obama prepares to outline a deficit-reduction plan that includes tax increases, as well as cuts to programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, anthropologist David Graeber proposes a radical solution: cancel the debt of the nation's poor. "Debts between the very wealthy or between governments can always be renegotiated and always have been throughout world history. They're not anything set in stone," says Graeber, author of "Debt: The First 5,000 Years." "It's, generally speaking, when you have debts owed by the poor to the rich that suddenly debts become a sacred obligation, more important than anything else. The idea of renegotiating them becomes unthinkable." [See the Program]
The New York Review of Books is putting up a dozen-plus tributes and memoirs from those who knew David Graeber over the years. I especially recommend the memories of Beka Economopoulos, who worked with him before, during, and after Occupy. The complete collection can be read here.
One of David Graeber's last writing projects was some work on Kropotkin's classic book from 1902, "Mutual Aid." His writing partner on this project, Andrej Grubačić, gives us a brief memoir and publishes the Introduction to their forthcoming book, Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution. [Link].
News Notes
Thanks to Stacy Abrams, we've known for years that the (Republican) government of Georgia rigged the 2016 election for governor by disenfranchising thousands of voters. Last week a report by Greg Palast and the ACLU revealed the incredible dimensions of this voting purge. Last October Georgia had published the names of more than 300,000 citizens who had been purged from the voter roll because "they had moved." Palast's investigation found that almost 200,000 of these people had not moved! In addition to revealing Georgia's crime, the ACLU report is of interest because it describes the painstaking methodology by which the crime was detected. Read the (user-friendly) Report here.
The turmoil in Belarus now begins its fifth week, as thousands of protesters demand a new election, after the apparently rigged re-election of President Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for 26 years. Complicating the struggle is the interest of Belarus' neighbors – Russia and NATO – to influence the outcome. For a user-friendly introduction to this important but complex mess, I recommend this week's program from Democracy Now!, (Video)"Putin "Can't Afford to See Belarus Fall" as Protests Calling for Lukashenko's Ouster Enter 4th Week."
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Taking the Covid Crisis into account, we meet (with safe distancing) for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 11 to 11:30 a.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Another vigil takes place on Mondays, from 6 to 6:30 pm, in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. In this time of coronavirus, we are meeting (by Zoom conference) 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!
Labor Day – from factory battles to backyard barbeques. Going against the current, for many of us it's a day to remember the hard-fighting people – in and out of the labor movement – who made things better for those who came after them, not least giving us "the weekend." Helping us to remember where we came from, we start with the "Commonwealth of Toil," written by IWW bard Ralph Chaplin (1910) and sung by Joe Glazer. Next up is a bakers-dozen of labor songs from the Almanac Singers (1941 – the apex of the CIO), with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and many more. Moving on, here is "Union Maid," sung by the New Harmony Sisterhood (about 1974). The lead singer on this song is Marcia Diehl, a wonderful musician and friend to many, who was killed riding her bike five year ago. A typical theme of all these songs – Wobblies, CIO-era, and modern – is the fight for dignity and independence, not just another dollar a day. But things didn't always work out, as testified to by this beautiful song by the UK's Leon Rosselson, "Song of the Old Communist." Nevertheless, we persist…. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
UPRISING AND CRISIS
Black Lives Matter & the Now Moment
By Anthony Bogues, Against the Current [September 2020]
---- We live in an extraordinary moment. One in which many cross currents tussle for sustained dominance. A moment when armed white supremacy groups attempt break-ins to legislative offices in states like Michigan. One in which the science of contagion is in battle with a myopic individualism, wherein the wearing of a mask for medical protection becomes a signifier for a political symbolic battle around hegemony. All this occurs in a moment when there is a historic pandemic, which should make us as a human species reflect on our contemporary ways of life. A pandemic that exposes the structures of the American health system, where race and class determines those who will survive and live and those who disproportionately die. In the midst of this crisis in which lockdowns and shelter-in-place are everyday practices, we witnessed one of the most significant global protests that the world has seen for some time. The protests upended many commentators, shattered many conventional wisdoms about politics, and at least for a time punctured the everyday normal to which many of us had become accustomed. So what was at the root of this upsurge? What are its significances? And, therefore, how might we understand it? [Read More]
Eviction Moratorium Delays Crisis Until January, When Tenants Will Owe Back Rent
By Alexis Goldstein, Truthout [September 2, 2020]
---- The nationwide eviction moratorium announced Tuesday by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will provide immediate and welcome relief through the end of the year for certain renters, but housing rights advocates say the move is woefully inadequate because it fails to provide any payment assistance to renters. Tenants will still owe back rent plus interest and fees once the moratorium ends in January. ...Ending the moratorium on December 31, 2020, could create a new evictions cliff. If Trump loses to Biden, the new administration won't begin until after inauguration on January 20, 2021. This could mean renters ring in New Year's Day with a sheriff evicting them from their home — with a three-week gap before the next administration could extend the moratorium. … The nation's housing and homelessness crisis exacerbates the threats of our health crisis. This new eviction moratorium will provide temporary relief for millions, but it delays the core problem. The evictions crisis is still waiting for us, and unless Congress or the Trump administration takes further action, millions may be spending New Year's Day being kicked out of their homes. [Read More]
THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
You Think Things Couldn't Get Any Worse With the Pandemic?
By Gregg Gonsalves, The Nation [September 3, 2020]
[FB - Gregg Gonsalves is the co-director of the Global Health Justice Partnership and an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.]
---- As we head toward the November election, the stakes couldn't be higher—and I am afraid that, after all these months, there is now a method to the Trump crew's madness on Covid-19. They do think that trying to sequester the elderly will stave off the worst of the pandemic—and thus have no interest in protecting the rest of us. No matter that plans to shield our seniors will be almost impossible to carry out, as most of the elderly are integrated into our communities and do not reside in skilled nursing facilities. No matter that with the rates of underlying medical conditions in this country, the vulnerable also include millions of people who are far from old…. We've had the tools to stop the pandemic—or to at least slow its relentless march—in front of us all the time: the very basic public health measures that people from the left and right have been crying out for for months. But as we head toward the fall, with the prospect of a resurgence of the virus, we've had an utter and complete abdication of responsibility from the federal government. It turns out that has been the plan all along. [Read More]
The Color of Contagion
By Patricia J. Williams, The Nation [August 24, 2020]
---- As of the first week of August, there have been at least 160,000 deaths in the United States from Covid-19. There is data indicating race and ethnicity for approximately 90 percent of these deaths; in age-adjusted numbers analyzed by the American Public Media Research Lab, the widest disparities afflicted Black, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and Latinx populations. Black mortality rates range from more than twice to almost four times as high as for white people. Among Indigenous people, the rates are as much as three and a half times as high and are two times as high for Latinx people. The death rate for predominantly Black counties is six times that of predominantly white ones. … Meanwhile, Covid-19 makes snacks of us. The fact that there may be variations in death rates based on age or exposure or preexisting immunological compromise should not obscure the epidemiological bottom line of its lethality. Covid-19 kills infants; it kills teenagers; it kills centenarians. It kills rich and poor, Black and white, overworked doctors and buff triathletes, police and prisoners, fathers and mothers, Democrats and Republicans. We can divide ourselves up into races and castes and neighborhoods and nations all we like, but to the virus—if not, alas, to us—we are one glorious, shimmering, and singular species. [Read More]
FEATURED ESSAYS
(Video) The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange [2020]
---- Journalists are under attack globally for doing their jobs. Julian Assange is facing a 175 year sentence for publishing if extradited to the United States. The Trump administration has gone from denigrating journalists as 'enemies of the people' to now criminalizing common practices in journalism that have long served the public interest. WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange's extradition is being sought by the Trump administration for publishing US government documents which exposed war crimes and human rights abuses. He is being held in maximum security HMP Belmarsh in London and faces a 175 years sentence if extradited. There is a war on journalism - Julian Assange is at the centre of that war. If this precedent is set then what happens to Assange can happen to any journalist. [See the Program] Also important: Kevin Gosztola, who runs an excellent news blog, will be covering Assange's extradition hearing in London all week. Here he interviews Barry Pollack, who is Julian Assange's US lawyer, about the charges against Assange in the US and what he will face if his is extradited from the UK.
The Wages of Whiteness
By Hari Kunzru, New York Review of Books [September 24, 2020 Issue]
---- In 1981 members of a revolutionary group called the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brink's armored van at the Nanuet Mall in Rockland County, just outside New York City. In the robbery and a subsequent shootout with police, a guard and two police officers were killed. Assisting this Black Nationalist "expropriation" operation were four white Communists, members of a faction of the Weather Underground called the May 19 Communist Organization. They acted as getaway drivers, and three of the four were unarmed, yet they were convicted of murder and sentenced to decades in prison. One of these white participants, Kathy Boudin, told a skeptical Elizabeth Kolbert, who interviewed her in prison for a 2001 profile in The New Yorker, that she didn't know anything about the target of the robbery, how it was planned, who was going to commit it, or the intended purpose of the money. … The political moment in which [Boudin] acted seems distant, but her choice echoes now, as a younger generation of Americans tries to formulate a politics to address systemic racism. One idea inherited from 1960s radicalism is that of "white privilege," a protean concept that has found its way into conversations about political power, material prosperity, social status, and even cognition. Invoking whiteness can stand in for older leftist ideas about class and power, or it can be a way of modifying those ideas. Whiteness can name a specifically American caste system—a historical product of plantation slavery—or a set of unexamined beliefs about a person's own centrality, neutrality, authority, and objectivity. It can also take on a transhistorical, even transcendental quality, naming something more like a spiritual condition, a fallen state that is paradoxically also one of culpable innocence. [Read More]
Andrzej Wajda's Hidden History of the Polish Working Class
By Jakub Majmurek, Jacobin Magazine [August 2020]
---- Forty years ago this week, Poland's independent trade union movement, Solidarność, burst onto the scene after a wildcat strike wave. The movement posed a direct challenge to the Polish Communist regime, which temporarily granted Solidarność freedom to organize, but later drove it underground after imposing martial law in December 1981. … y the time the opposition movement Solidarność ("Solidarity") burst onto the Polish political scene in August 1980, Andrzej Wajda had been one of the country's leading film directors for more than two decades. Films like Ashes and Diamonds and The Promised Land had won Wajda an international reputation and thrust Polish filmmaking to the forefront of European cinema as it experienced a golden age. But nothing could compare to the impact of Wajda's Man of Marble (1977) and its 1981 sequel, Man of Iron. The first movie anticipated — and contributed to — the rise of Solidarity, while the second documented the movement's triumphal emergence, before the coup of December 1981 that drove it underground. Three decades later, after returning from exile in France, Wajda revisited the subject of working-class opposition to Polish Communism with 2013's Wałęsa: Man of Hope, completing a trilogy that sheds a great deal of light on modern Polish history. The films stand to this day as a landmark of European cinema, whose political impact may never be surpassed. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Revolutionary Thoreau
By R.H. Lossin, New York Review of Books [September 4, 2020]
---- What most people know about Henry David Thoreau comes down to this: In 1845, he retreated from civilized life for two years and two months and "lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor… on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts." He was in his late twenties. The land was owned by his benefactor, the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Several years after the experiment ended, he published a version of the journals he kept during this time. The book was called Walden. … Thoreau delivered his famous essay Resistance to Civil Government as a lyceum lecture in January of 1848. It was published roughly a year later. The main argument advanced in Resistance was that a person had not only a right but also a moral obligation to flout the authority of an unjust government. This resistance may have been passive, in the sense that Thoreau did not advocate armed rebellion—though he came close to doing so—but it was not simply the nonviolent protest of our understanding. He went further than suggesting that a citizen should disobey unjust laws. The very legitimacy and authority of civil government as a whole was at issue here. Thoreau did not, he announced, recognize the United States government as fit to govern him. For, in 1848, the United States was a country where, by Thoreau's estimate, four million people were held as slaves. [Read More]
Oliver Cromwell Cox and the Capitalist Sources of Racism
By Todd Cronan, Jacobin Magazine [September 2020]
---- What would it be like to merge the politics of race with the politics of class? In a time when politics has hardened along the lines of Team Race or Team Class, a rigorous sense of their interrelationship is more urgent than ever. And yet, despite constant pleas for the inseparability of class and race, the emphasis in political analysis still falls hard on one side or the other as the structuring force of history and current events. … As Cox saw it, the continuous effort to unbind race and class was a barely concealed attempt to divide workers, pitting poor blacks against poor whites. At the center of his concerns was class solidarity for the exploited. Race antagonism, in Cox's view, was the primary weapon used by the ruling class to divide the proletariat. According to Cox, "racial antagonism" was an integral part of class struggle, "because it developed within the capitalist system as one of its fundamental traits." The specific nature of the race problem in the United States "arose from its inception in slavery, out of the need to keep Negroes proletarianized." [Read More]
