CFOW Newsletter
June 19, 2022
Hello All – Some commentators have compared the war in Ukraine to the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914. "Great Powers" maneuvered inch-by-inch, step-by-step, and suddenly "war breaks out." No one planned it; war happened. Other commentators warn of the danger of another Cuban Missile Crisis: as Russia finds itself boxed in, encircled by sanctions and facing defeat, a desperate Putin may respond to some new development in the war by using a nuclear weapon. Escalation follows. Eyeball to eyeball. Good-bye to much of our "civilization."
And yet is seems that the leaders of the Free World are sleep-walking into this mess without hesitation. For several months now, the announced policy of the USA has been not only to defend Ukraine, but to weaken Russia; in the best case, "regime change." After several months of hesitation by some of the NATO nations, especially over the consequences to their own economies of sanctions on Russia, France, Germany, and the rest seem to have fallen in line. A massive arms build-up for Ukraine, full sanctions on the Russia economy, further integration of Ukraine, Moldova, Finland, and Sweden into NATO and the EU, and increased military budgets everywhere. Step-by-step. No one planned this. More war happens.
How irrational all this is will be evident to anyone paying attention. According to polls, about half of the US population is "extremely concerned" or "very concerned" about the war in Ukraine leading to a US-Russia conflict. Yet there are no discernable efforts to start negotiations, just as there were no efforts from the US in the months before the war to use diplomacy to prevent what has now happened. As Noam Chomsky notes in the interview linked below:
There's only one way to bring it to an end. That's diplomacy. Now, diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don't like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer Putin some kind of escape hatch. That's one possibility. The other is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we'll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence. Those are the options. Well, with near 100% unanimity, the United States and most of Europe want to pick the no-diplomacy option. It's explicit. We have to keep going to hurt Russia.
Historians spent decades trying to prove how one "Great Power" or the other was responsible for the carnage and destruction of the First World War. What small step was the decisive one, before which the cataclysm could have been prevented, but after which there was no turning back. What will future historians say – if there are any – about the war in Ukraine, and how it was not stopped before it could no longer be stopped?
Some useful reading on the USA and the Ukraine War
An interview with Noam Chomsky, "In Ukraine, diplomacy has been ruled out," Tom Dispatch [June 16, 2022] [Link].
"Why is the US not pushing for an end to the Ukraine war?" from Aljazeera [June 16, 2022] [LInk].
"Should The Left Support Biden in Ukraine?" b [Link].
(Video) "$1B More in U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine: Weapons Expert Urges Negotiation vs. 'Military-First Approach,'" from Democracy Now! [June 16, 2022] [Link].
"We should've known sanctions on Russia wouldn't work as intended," by Daniel Larison, Responsible Statecraft [June 17, 2022] [Link].
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held each Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. To learn about our new project, "Beauty as Fuel for Change," go here; and to make a financial contribution to the project, go here. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. Our 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 support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks
Rewards!
This week's Rewards for stalwart readers come from a (new to me) very popular UK ensemble, Florence and the Machine, from their latest album, "Dance Fever." (h/t FC). Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
(Video) Arundhati Roy: 'India is becoming a Hindu fascist enterprise'
From Aljazeera English [June 17, 2022]
---- Over the last few months, authorities in Indian states governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have started bulldozing the homes, shops, and places of business that belong to Muslims merely suspected of participating in anti-government protests. The Chief Ministers of these states have proudly flaunted this policy in their election campaigns. To my mind, this marks the moment when a deeply flawed, fragile democracy has transitioned – openly and brazenly – into a criminal, Hindu-fascist enterprise with tremendous popular support. We now appear to be ruled by gangsters fitted out as Hindu godmen. In their book, Muslims are public enemy number one. In the past, Muslims have been punished with pogroms, lynchings, targeted murders, custodial killings, fake police "encounters" and imprisonment under false pretexts. Bulldozing their homes and businesses is only a new – and highly effective – weapon added to this list. [See the Program]. To read Roy's entire article on the "Hindu fascist enterprise," go here.
The Rotten Roots of the IMF and the World Bank
By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Nation [June 15, 2022]
----- In his new book, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Governance, Jamie Martin argues that if we truly want to understand the disastrous consequences of the IMF's and the World Bank's interference in the domestic policies of sovereign states, it is necessary to understand the first international institutions of economic governance, such as the League of Nations and the Bank for International Settlement, which emerged in the wake of World War I. These institutions gave civil servants, bankers, and colonial authorities from Europe and the United States the extraordinary power to enforce austerity, oversee development programs, and regulate commodity prices. Many of them had civilizational, paternalistic, and white supremacist assumptions, which they used to justify meddling in the economies of other states. Martin argues that these institutions were, in fact, repackaging 19th-century practices of financial imperialism in a new, more sanitized form, given the decline of the European empires and the rising claims to self-determination. In making this analysis, Martin offers an alternative perspective on the crisis of global economic governance today, showing how the interventionist powers of the IMF and the World Bank have all along been rooted in empire and colonialism. [Read More]
Boston's Colonial Universities Grab Land for Profit, War, and Medical Apartheid
[FB – I found this article very interesting, not only for its description of Non-profit Imperialism, but also for its "mapping" methodology.]
---- Universities are land-grabbing, land-transmogrifying, land-capitalizing machines. Indigenous land theft, and profits from slavery, enabled these universities to be built in the first place – and they still collect profits from stolen lands. With this accumulated capital, major US universities have become colonial real estate agents. In the Boston area, too, Harvard and other universities grab land and put it to work for private profit, war, and perpetuation of medical apartheid. These land-grabs increase property values and rents, fuel the displacement and ethnic cleansing of local communities, and make it harder for grassroots organizations to survive in the city. Today, Greater Boston's major universities control many expensive land parcels (Figure 1). As of 2021, the estimated total market value of Harvard's lands and buildings in Massachusetts comes to a staggering $9.8 billion. Harvard is followed by MIT, whose lands and buildings are "valued" at $6.7 billion, and Boston University ($2.7 billion). These massive footprints are the spoils of an 80-year expansion strategy. Harvard and MIT have built up large "land banks – property holdings so vast that universities' policies can harm entire communities. … For the colonial university, Cambridge is a "success" story: if you visit today, you'll find a booming industry that works for capital and empire, built on the ruins of displaced communities. [Read More]
January 6th and Trump's Attempted Coup d'Etat
Jan. 6 Hearings Seek to Remind a Forgetful Nation About the Day Donald Trump Almost Engineered a Coup
By James Risen, The Intercept [June 10, 2022]
---- For those who have already chosen to forget, the January 6, 2021, insurrection was the worst domestic attack on the U.S. government since the Civil War, involving a mob of thousands who were hellbent on stopping the congressional certification of the election of Joe Biden as president in order to keep Donald Trump in power. Incited to march on the U.S. Capitol by Trump, the mob overwhelmed the police guarding the Capitol and succeeded in delaying the certification and nearly stopping it. In the process, the mob threatened the lives of members of Congress, who were forced to flee the House and Senate chambers. … Despite the historic importance of the insurrection, many reporters and pundits in the mainstream press spent the days leading up to the hearings downplaying their significance, as if they were ready to move on from reporting on the riot. But for anyone who still doubts the importance of developing a comprehensive record of January 6 and Trump's efforts to subvert democracy, all you need to do is see what Trump said Thursday. Trump said on his new "Truth Social" site that the insurrection was "not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again." [Read More]
Who Is Financing Trump's 'Big Lie' Caucus? Corporations You Know.
By Alex Kingsbury, New York Times [June 15, 2022]
---- In the year and a half since the attack, rivers of cash from once skittish donors have resumed flowing to election deniers. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes just a thousand. But it adds up. In the month of April alone, the last month for which data is available, Fortune 500 companies and trade organizations gave more than $1.4 million to members of Congress who voted not to certify the election results, according to an analysis by the transparency group Accountable.US. AT&T led the pack, giving $95,000 to election objectors. Of all the revelations so far from the hearings on the Jan. 6 attack, the most important is that the effort to undermine democratic elections in the United States is continuing. More than a dozen men and women who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection or the rallies leading up to it have run for elected office this year. Supporters of Mr. Trump have also run for public offices that oversee elections. And according to an investigation by The Times, at least 357 Republican legislators in nine states have used the power of their offices to attack the results of the 2020 election. [Read More]
Also of interest on Trump's attempted coup d'ėtat - (Video) "Hang Mike Pence!": Jan. 6 Hearing Shows Trump Targeted VP, Knew Plan to Overturn Vote Was Illegal, from Democracy Now! [June 17, 2022] [Link]; and "Corporate Interests Have Now Donated Over $16M To Election Objectors Since The Jan. 6 Coup Attempt," by Accountable.US [Link].
War & Peace
The Nuclear Weapons Treaty Ban in the Footsteps of 1982's Million-Person March
---- Last Sunday marked the 40th anniversary of the June 12, 1982 million-person march in New York City for a "freeze" on nuclear weapons building, followed two days later by a mass nonviolent action at the consular offices of nuclear weapons states. … We've pushed on for decades in spite of ridicule, harassment, and imprisonment, seeing to the slashing of the U.S. nuclear arsenal from over 60,000 in those days, to today's approximately 5,000 — an amount still grotesque enough to incinerate and contaminate most of the living beings on Earth. … Fast-forward 40 years, and this week Vienna, Austria is hosting the First Meeting of States Parties, UN member states that have agreed to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Over 100 governments will participate. The great majority of the world's representatives — 122 countries — voted their approval of the TPNW in 2017, and 62 have since ratified it. The treaty has entered into force, and only the tiny minority of nuclear-armed governments and their military allies continue to reject it — for "deterrence" reasons that have been shown to be irrational and unachievable. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
It's Cars That Done It
By Bill McKibben [June 17, 2022]
[FB – Bill McKibben is the founder of the climate-action group 350.org and the author of many books on the climate crisis.]
---- For the second time in my lifetime, we're about to make a crucial political mistake as a nation based on high gas prices. In 1980, after the oil shocks and gas lines of the previous decade, we elected Ronald Reagan, ushering in forty years of a world where "government is the problem, not the solution"—and therefore ushering in ecological crisis, cartoonish inequality, and racial backsliding. … How did this happen? Of all the forces unleashed in America, it seems to me that the rise of the automobile was most important. When World War II ended, there were less than 25 million cars on the road in this country; twenty years later that number was 118 million and rising fast, and in the meantime we'd built the interstate highway system. The car was the essential ingredient for the great American project in those postwar years: building bigger houses farther apart from each other. And that suburbanization rapidly changed who we were: from people linked to each other by the constraints of geography to people centrifugally flung from each other by the apparently liberating power of the private automobile. [Read More]
The Martyrdom of Julian Assange
(Video) Punished for Exposing War Crimes? U.K. Approves Assange Extradition to U.S., Faces 175 Years in Prison
From Democracy Now! [June 17, 2022]
---- In a blow to press freedom, the United Kingdom has approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to face espionage charges related to the publication of classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes. Home Secretary Priti Patel signed off on the transfer after the U.K. Supreme Court denied Assange's appeals earlier this year, part of a years-long legal battle that rights groups have decried as an attack on journalism and free speech. Assange faces up to 175 years in prison if convicted for violations of the Espionage Act, and his case represents a "once-in-a-lifetime fight for press freedom," says Gabriel Shipton, Assange's half-brother. [See the Program] For two excellent, in-depths essays on Assange's captivity and extradition, read "'Another Dark Day': UK Government Approves Assange's Extradition To United States," from The Dissenter [June 17, 2022]; and "The UK's Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK's Freedom Lectures Are a Farce," by Glenn Greenwald [June 16, 2022] [Link].
The State of the Union
'Poverty Is Violence!' Thousands of Demonstrators in DC Demand Economic Justice
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams [June 18, 2022]
---- Led by the Poor People's Campaign, advocacy groups and low-income individuals gathered in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to demand that policymakers "fight poverty, not the poor." "We are the 140 million poor and low-wealth people, standing together to declare we won't be silent anymore," said Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the campaign. "Poverty is a policy choice and we will hold our leaders accountable." Fellow campaign co-chair Bishop William Barber echoed that message in a speech at the Mass Poor People's and Low-Wage Workers' Assembly and Moral March on Washington, which drew thousands to the nation's capital. [Read More] On Friday's edition of Democracy Now!, Bishop Barber and Rev. Theoharis talked about the goals of the Poor People's March and plans for Saturday's events. To learn more about the Poor People's Campaign, check out their excellent website.
Gun Sellers' Message to Americans: Man Up
Mike McIntire, et al., New York Times [June 18, 2022]
---- Last November, hours after a jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse of two shooting deaths during antiracism protests in 2020, a Florida gun dealer created an image of him brandishing an assault rifle, with the slogan: "BE A MAN AMONG MEN." … Gun companies have spent the last two decades scrutinizing their market and refocusing their message away from hunting toward selling handguns for personal safety, as well as military-style weapons attractive to mostly young men. The sales pitch — rooted in self-defense, machismo and an overarching sense of fear — has been remarkably successful. … An examination by The New York Times of firearms marketing research, along with legal and lobbying efforts by gun rights groups, finds that behind the shift in gun culture is an array of interests that share a commercial and political imperative: more guns and freer access to them. Working together, gun makers, advocates and elected officials have convinced a large swath of Americans that they should have a firearm, and eased the legal path for them to do so. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
Al Jazeera: Image of Bullet that killed American Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh Proves it came from an Israeli M4
---- The Al Jazeera news network, based in Qatar, has received from the Palestine Authority an image of the bullet that killed American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and has concluded that it was certainly fired from an Israeli M4 rifle. The green-tipped, 5.56mm caliber bullet is deadly when fired at a human being and would only be used with an intent to kill. It was recovered from her skull. Abu Akleh, 51, a US citizen of Palestinian heritage, was covering an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank with a camera crew on May 12, 2022, when she was shot dead by an Israeli sniper with a bullet just below her helmet–a skilled kill shot. … It seems likely that the Israeli army intended to do things to the refugees in Jenin that they did not want filmed by Al Jazeera. Abu Akleh had been covering the millions of Palestinians under Israeli military rule since the late 1990s and was a beloved figure among Palestinians, who hung on every word of her reports. [Read More] For one of the many commentaries and analyses of Shireen's murder broadcast by Aljazeera, see (Video) "Will new evidence force Israel to act on Abu Akleh's killing?" by [Link].
Our History
Remembering George Lamming
Sandra Pouchet Paquet, The Guardian [UK] [June 14, 2022]
[FB – The death of Barbadian writer George Lamming this week may mark the end of the remarkable cohort of writers and political intellectuals who gave shape to the independence struggles and post-colonial thinking forcing the collapse of the British Empire in the aftermath of World War II. So much creative thinking! George Lamming – get to know him, honor his memory.]
---- The six novels and the collections of essays by George Lamming, who has died aged 94, did much to shape Caribbean literary culture. He also contributed to it as an educator and activist intellectual, mentoring a host of young writers and scholars in the Caribbean and beyond. Intensely aware of the impact of colonialism on individual lives and the evolutionary process of social, political and economic reconstruction in the region, Lamming was inspired by the idea of a unified Caribbean. The West Indies Federation (1958-62) had aimed to bring together various islands into a single political unit, but failed. While accepting this outcome, Lamming remained committed to the ideal of a regional community rooted in shared cultural and political aspirations. His first and most famous novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), drawing on his upbringing in Barbados, was published in Britain after he had gone there from Trinidad in 1950. It is an autobiographical novel that recreates the author's life between the ages of nine and 16 against the backdrop of major labour unrest in June 1937 that presaged the movement toward independence from colonial rule. [Read More]
