Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
October 5, 2020
Hello All – We have been warned. Repeatedly. For months, President Trump has stated that whether or not he leaves office depends on his view of the legitimacy of the November 3 election, and a "legitimate" election is one that he wins. And if an illegitimate election produces an apparent victory for Joe Biden, President Trump has vowed to fight this, both through the courts and, if necessary, by circling the wagons and refusing to leave office. What to do?
Newsletter articles linked below walk us through the first two steps in preventing a Trump election coup d'état. The first reminds us that a decisive win of the popular vote, as well as the electoral vote, is key. Wracking up a strong lead in the popular vote by late night on November 3rd will narrow Trump's options in declaring the election illegitimate. That means that voting early, as well as voting in person on November 3rd, has an extra importance. And that also means that a huge turnout in Blue states, way beyond what is necessary to win that state's electoral votes, carries significance in legitimizing a Biden win.
A second newsletter article reminds us that, given the significance of mailed-in ballots in this election, the late-night scoreboard on November 3rd is not the end of the story. In fact, Nation writer Joan Walsh urges us to think about "Election Month," not "Election Day." A common scenario for the November 3rd election is that Trump will show a lead in the popular vote and electoral votes at midnight on November 3rd, because polls show that far more Democrats than Republicans plan to vote by mail. And, given polling showing Biden is now ahead, a reasonable expectation is that, even if Trump is ahead in the popular vote and electoral votes on election night, this result will be turned around once the mail-in votes are counted.
If Trump's plan is to claim the mailed-in ballots are illegitimate, he may find support from the Courts and from many Republican-controlled state legislatures. Several scenarios suggest that states could send a Republican slate of presidential electors to Congress despite the apparent capture of the popular vote by Biden. In addition to following the guidance of steps 1 and 2 above, therefore, we must expect a sustained struggle that will ensue in the Courts and in the streets between November 3rd and January 20th. Useful guides to how this struggle might develop include those of Frances Fox Piven and Deepak Bhargave, Sasha Abramsky, and (video) George Lakey.
In addition to working for a huge voter turnout and counseling patience/reminding ourselves and others that "Election Month" means a month of vigilance and action, what else we might do is a work-in-progress. One idea is to organize supporters of Biden to gather at any polling places that might be threatened by Trump supporters/White Supremacists who plan to intimidate voters, esp. people of color. The president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law speaks about this here. A few weeks ago a band of Trump supporters attempted to intimidate early voters in Virginia. While this seems unlikely in the Rivertowns, we have had several Trump truck/car caravans, and so we are not immune from White Supremacist manifestations.
Finally, a group called The Election Defenders is offering several on-line trainings for useful things to do on November 3rd; learn more and if interested sign-up here. And several of us in CFOW are interested in the group Protect the Results, which is holding a two-session direct-action training (Zoom) starting Wednesday, October 7th [register here]. Let's get ready to get ready!
News Notes
Last week Columbia College undergraduates voted overwhelmingly to divest from companies that profit from or engage in the State of Israel's acts towards Palestinians under "apartheid" law. The university's president Lee Bollinger promptly repudiated the vote saying it was a "complex" issue on which no campus consensus exists. A similar vote was conducted recently at University of Illinois [Urbana Champaign]. Mondoweiss's Philiip Weiss interviewed Columbia's Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, who explains what was going on and its significance. [Link].
As reported by our military affairs expert Phyllis Bennis, the Trump Pentagon diverted $1 billion in stimulus funds that were supposed to go towards making masks and other protective equipment for the pandemic — and gave most of it to weapons manufacturers. Read more here.
This week marks the two-year anniversary of Saudi journalist (and Washington Post writer) Jamal Khashoggi. Despite an avalanche of denials, it is clear that the order to murder Khashoggi came from the top of the Saudi government. This Democracy Now! report introduces a new documentary (and its director) that explores the background to Khashoggi, and casts light on why he was killed.
Last June a Black Lives Matter demonstration in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx resulted in the arrest of 236 people, with at least 61 people injured at the hands of the police. This week the police riot was illuminated by a report from Human Rights Watch. The report makes it clear that the police action was both unjust/illegal and stupid/sadistic. "The police response to the peaceful Mott Haven protest was intentional, planned, and unjustified," the report concluded. "The protest was peaceful until the police responded with violence."
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; if you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, Tuesday and Thursday at noon and/or Saturday at 2 pm, please send a return email. 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!
We need some happy music this week. We haven't heard from Stephanie Trick in quite a while, so here she is with her husband, Paolo Alderighi, in "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise." And here she plays Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer" in stride-style. And finally, here she plays James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout." There's lots more of her on-line; enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
ELECTION 2020
Stop Trump from Stealing the Election: An Activist's Checklist for Winning the Election
By John W. Lawrence, ZNet [October 4, 2020]
---- Beating Trump in 2020 is going to take a massive organizing effort. This is not an ordinary election. According to reporter Greg Palast, Republicans are trying to steal the election. They are implementing a slew of voter suppression strategies. That is, they are trying to prevent people likely to vote for Biden, people of color and young people, from voting. In addition, they are working to make sure Democratic votes are undercounted. For example, in a recent court ruling, a federal judge stated Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was engaging in "an intentional effort on the part of the current Administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections." In the swing states, the Republicans only need to suppress a small percentage of votes to win the election. Below are the steps progressive activists need to take to beat Trump and the Republicans. [Read More]
Get Ready for Election Month 2020: We won't know on November 3 who won the White House.
By Joan Walsh, The Nation [October 1, 2020]
---- Get ready for much, much worse in November. If the networks and the mainstream newspapers cling to the outdated model of trying to call races on election night, we are headed for a presidential legitimacy crisis—regardless of who wins, but especially if Trump loses. The Covid-19 pandemic has inspired dozens of states to expand vote-by-mail options, with many others offering a choice of early voting, voting by mail, or absentee ballots, along with traditional Election Day voting. Some experts estimate that the number of ballots cast by mail could be double what it was in 2016. Meanwhile, polls say many races are currently dead heats. There could be many more tight races, protracted recounts, and more emphasis on slower-to-count absentee or mail-in ballots than ever before. … While there are many groups working overtime to ensure ballot access at the federal and local levels, some are also working to persuade the media to take a longer view in its election coverage. [Read More]
Trump's Turn From Immigration to the Enemy Within
By Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept [
---- Listening to Donald Trump describe the U.S. in 2016 was to hear a story of a nation in peril of losing its identity to waves of brown-skinned invaders. Immigration and the border, particularly the urgent need to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, dominated Trump's campaign rhetoric. Once in office, the president's top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, rammed through one punishing initiative after another, banning travelers from Muslim-majority countries, separating immigrant children from their parents to deter others from making the journey north, forcing tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in the border's most dangerous cities, and plowing through protected lands to stand up towering new sections of border wall. Today, asylum at the border is effectively dead, and Trump's Department of Homeland Security is using the coronavirus as a pretext to boot immigrants out of the country — including families, children, and babies — as swiftly as possible. So it may have come as a surprise to some that immigration hardly came up at all in the first presidential debate of 2020. …But with those efforts simultaneously in motion, the Trump administration has increasingly and prominently centered purported threats posed by leftists, anarchists, and anti-fascists in its bid to hold onto power. [Read More]
Trump's Praetorian Guard [The military and the militias]
By Jonathan Stevenson, New York Review of Books [October 22, 2020 Issue]
---- President Trump is attempting to turn "law and order versus anarchy" into an election issue that will distract voters from the White House's incompetence in dealing with Covid-19 and the economic consequences of the pandemic, and provide cover for its perpetuation of systemic racial injustice. He has sent armed federal agents into majority-Democratic cities on the pretext of quelling unrest stemming from Black Lives Matter protests. At the same time, he appears to be encouraging his supporters to sow chaos in Democratic cities in order to create an excuse for redeploying federal forces and to reinforce fears of disorder. Trump's first martial response to the protests, which have been overwhelmingly though not exclusively peaceful, was to use the active-duty military. … After the Lafayette Square incident, senior US military officers, both retired and active, made it clear that they do not believe the military should intervene against protesters and that present conditions do not warrant military involvement to ensure public safety and order. … However, with the help of Barr—a leading proponent of the crypto-monarchist "unitary executive" theory of presidential power—Trump has forged a detour around the military's principled disengagement through the Department of Homeland Security's statutory mandate to "protect the buildings, grounds, and property that are owned, occupied, or secured by the Federal Government…. Trump has not only made "law and order" the centerpiece of his reelection campaign and the DHS its vanguard. He has also tried to muster a kind of praetorian guard for himself, composed mainly of government loyalists rounded out, it seems, by sympathetic mercenaries. Its evident purpose is not to maintain order and the rule of law through conventional policing but rather to support his presidency with the use of extralegal paramilitary tactics in American cities. [Read More]
FEATURED ESSAYS
(Video) A Message from the Future II: The Years of Repair
By Naomi Klein, The Intercept [
---- Do we even have a right to be hopeful? With political and ecological fires raging all around, is it irresponsible to imagine a future world radically better than our own? A world without prisons? Of beautiful, green public housing? Of buried border walls? Of healed ecosystems? A world where governments fear the people instead of the other way around? These are questions we wrestled with as we conceived of a sequel to last year's Emmy-nominated short, "A Message From the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez." The first film, co-written by the congresswoman and illustrated by Molly Crabapple, was set in a can-do, cli-fi future: one in which bold, progressive politicians joined with grassroots movements to launch the "Decade of the Green New Deal," battling poverty, injustice, and climate disruption all at the same time. The film touched a nerve and ended up being viewed more than 12 million times, convincing our little team of the need for more art that departs from well-worn apocalyptic scripts. Then Covid-19 hit. [Read more and see the 8-minute video]
here. IMO, the journalists raise many interesting points about things there were NOT said as well as what was said. Also of interest is an Intercept podcast ("Deconstructed") with Ryan Grim and Kevin Gosztola, in which they assess the dangers to press freedom threatened by a successful prosecution of Assange.
Why We're on a Long Road to COVID-19 Immunity Even With Vaccines
By Prabir Purkayastha, ZNet [October 3, 2020]
---- As the pandemic continues to spread throughout the world, many countries seem to have given up the fight against COVID-19 and are now waiting for a vaccine to protect against the virus. With cases exceeding 32 million, and more than a million dead, the world economy has taken a bigger hit than at any other time since the end of the Great Depression of 1929-39. … Normally, vaccine development and testing take from five to ten years, so it would be a significant achievement if we succeed in making effective vaccines available by the end of 2020 or early 2021. The progress so far also shows that we have the scientific capacity to develop a large number of vaccines for infectious diseases. The reason we have not done so for diseases other than COVID-19 is that such infectious diseases were thought to be the diseases of poor countries, and do not provide enough profits for global big pharma to invest in vaccines against infectious diseases. It required a public health emergency in the rich countries for vaccine development to take a front seat in medical science again. [Read More]
For some perspectives on Trump & Covid - (Video) "After Recklessness, a Coronavirus Outbreak at the White House; Will Admin Cover Up or Contract Trace?" from Democracy Now! [October 5, 2020] [Link]; and (Video) "Naomi Klein: I Fear Trump Will Exploit His COVID Infection to Further Destabilize the Election," from Democracy Now! [October 2, 2020] [Link].
By Robert Klemko and Greg Jaffe, Washington Post [October 3, 2020]
[FB – I was fascinated by this story. It presents a totally different picture from what I thought was going on the night of the murders in Kenosha. More like an Errol Morris film than a mere newspaper report. Check it out.]
---- Anti-police-brutality demonstrators were converging on Kenosha from all over Wisconsin for a second night of marches. An armed right-wing group had put out a call for "patriots willing to take up arms and defend [our] City tonight from the evil thugs." Joseph Rosenbaum — depressed, homeless and alone — didn't belong to either side. He had spent most of his adult life in prison for sexual conduct with children when he was 18 and struggled with bipolar disorder. That day, Aug. 25, Rosenbaum was discharged from a Milwaukee hospital following his second suicide attempt in as many months and dumped on the streets of Kenosha. His confrontation hours later with Kyle Rittenhouse, a heavily armed teenager who had answered the call for "patriots," kicked off a chain of violence — the deadliest of the summer — that left Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, dead. … The real story of the Kenosha shootings offers a different view of the sometimes-chaotic protests and counterprotests that have shaken American cities this summer. The confrontation between Rittenhouse and Rosenbaum, and the bloodshed that followed, was more accidental than political — the product of anger, alienation and a tragic, chance encounter between a mentally ill man and a heavily armed teenager. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Top US Scientist: A Second Trump Term Would be 'Game Over' for the Climate
By Mark Hertsgaard, The Guardian [UK] [October 2, 2020]
---- Michael Mann, one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, believes averting climate catastrophe on a global scale would be "essentially impossible" if Donald Trump is re-elected. … "If we are going to avert ever more catastrophic climate change impacts, we need to limit warming below a degree and a half Celsius, a little less than three degrees Fahrenheit," Mann said. "Another four years of what we've seen under Trump, which is to outsource environmental and energy policy to the polluters and dismantle protections put in place by the previous administration … would make that essentially impossible." … "The future of this planet is now in the hands of American citizens," he says. "It's up to us. The way we end this national and global nightmare is by coming out and voting for optimism over pessimism, for hope and justice and progress over fear and malice and superstition. This is a Tolkienesque battle between good and evil, and Sauron needs to be defeated on election day here in the United States." [Read More]
Also useful/interesting about the crisis - (Video) "Kate Aronoff: The Climate Crisis Can't Take 4 More Years of Trump. We Must Push Biden from the Left," from Democracy Now! [September 30, 2020] [See the Program]; and "Climate Disasters Are Leaving Families With Nowhere to Go" by Zoë Carpenter, The Nation [September 25, 2020] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
Antifa and America's Revamped Red Scare [Red Scares then and now]
By Patrick Strickland, Aljazeera [September 29, 2020]
---- Throughout the 2016 presidential election campaign and since Donald Trump came to office in January 2017, a resurgent far-right has sparked in response a revived anti-fascist movement. On August 12, 2017, thousands of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, where they protested against the city's decision to remove a Confederate statue. Throughout the day, the far-right protesters attacked locals and counterdemonstrators and clashed with anti-fascists. By the end of the day, a far-right marcher named James Alex Fields Jr had rammed his car into a crowd of anti-racist counter-demonstrators, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring dozens. … Although the rhetoric over anti-fascists has turned increasingly fiery, research consistently suggests that far-right violence remains the most dominant domestic "terror" threat in the country. … Neither an organisation nor a group, Antifa is both an ideology and a decentralised movement that includes people from across the left – anarchists, communists, and socialists, among others – fighting back against the rise of the far right. Anti-fascists engage in a wide range of activism – public education, protests, and monitoring the far right, for instance – but it is the movement's willingness to use direct confrontation and to damage property that has captured much of the public's attention. [Read More]
Twenty Years After the Second Intifada, the Israeli Victory Is Nearly Complete
By Amira Hass, Haaretz [Israel[ [October 2, 2020]
---- The second intifada erupted because Israel exploited the negotiations with the Palestinians to advance its land grab project. The hypocrisy cried out to the heavens – talk of peace on one hand while continuing to take over Palestinian expanse for the benefit of the Jews. The hypocrisy cried out, but the Israelis didn't listen. The anger and disgust at Israeli underhandedness built up over years of disappointment and sobriety following the Oslo Accords, erupting on September 29, 2000 (the day after the provocation by Ariel Sharon, with the approval of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak). But the second intifada was not an intifada in the standard sense of the word: Aside from its first days, it was not a popular civil event and a majority of the public did not participate in it, unlike the uprising that erupted in 1987. [Read More]
