Hello All – The fate of the world – or certainly the fate of you and me – depends on stopping the fascist wave, led by our own Prez, that engulfs much of our world. There are many rays of hope – the election in Brazil, the uprisings in Europe and India, and thers. Tuesday’s election will be an important temperature check on our prospects for getting out of this alive. A win for the Democrats in Congress would lightly tap the brakes on the tsunami of darkness; a win by the Republicans would spell doom for much of what we value.
I was among the many who expected that Trump would mobilize his ICE-bots to terrorize voters, to provoke incidents that could “justify” martial law, and would use the courts and Republican control of Congress to steal the election. This has not fully emerged (yet), but there are some steps that we should all take to prepare for if and when we have to defend our tattered democracy. Here is a starter-kit:
Protecting the election starts Tuesday. If you see or learn something about voting or your polling place that doesn’t make sense, call 866-OUR VOTE.
Protecting the election continues after election day. Trump has promised to go to court if he doesn’t like the election outcome. This is unlikely to focus on New York, but we must be alert to conflicts arising in CD 17, where Democrat Cait Conley hopes to defeat the wretched Republican, Michael Lawler.
Trump’s final shot to steal the election if he doesn’t like the outcome would use the Republican majority in the current Congress to refuse to seat the newly elected Democrats. If this or something similar happens, we must do what we can.
In our fantasies, Trump may bow to the will of the disaffected majority, gracefully concede defeat, and attempt to govern harmoniously with a Loyal Opposition. In the real world, we can not expect him and his gangsters to relinquish the zillion-dollar payday Republican control of the government gives them
The Nation’s Elie Mystal made an interesting comment this week. He said: “The Republicans, at least the ones most devoted to the Trump cult, likely have no idea they are about to lose. That’s because Trump and the white-wing media have been feeding them a steady diet of lies, priming them to believe that the only way Democrats could win is if there is election fraud. Their reasons for doing this are clear: If Trump’s base thinks their loss is due to fraud, they will likely support the most antidemocratic measures Trump takes to hold on to power over the will of the people. If they really believe Trump, at least some of them will turn to violence to support his antidemocratic efforts.”
So this election will not be over on Election Day. As Henry David Thoreau enjoined us in his 1846 essay on “Civil Disobedience,” “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.” We can do it.
SOME COMMENTS ON TUESDAY’S ELECTION AND PROTECTING THE VOTE
Trump’s Strategy for Attacking the Midterm Election Results Takes Shape in the West
By Ben Rosenfeld, Counterpunch [October 30, 2026]
---- One of the few remaining guardrails preventing the U.S. from veering into totalitarianism is that we don’t have national elections, but state elections for national office. Aware of this roadblock, Trump in February brazenly called for nationalizing elections. We are watching this federal incursion into the states’ traditional election domain play out like a gathering zombie invasion. Read together, Trump & Co’s pre-midterm maneuvers to implement and enforce aspects of the SAVE Act sub rosa foretell their likely scheme to overturn Democratic victories. Already dealt substantial blows by courts, they have at least as good a chance of failing as succeeding. But we must identify the shape of things to come in order to remain vigilant against it. [See the Program]
(Video) Trump Is Already Undermining Confidence in Midterm Election Results from Alaska to California: ACLU
From Democracy Now! [October 26, 2026]
---- A competitive Senate race has gripped the once reliably Republican state of Alaska. If Democratic challenger Mary Peltola wins the election against incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, it could tip the balance of power in Washington. … The ACLU — on behalf of two Alaska voters, the League of Women Voters of Alaska and Common Cause — has moved to intervene in the case and has also filed a motion asking the court to dismiss it. “There is no merit to this claim,” says Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “We’ve asked the court to consider sanctions, because the courts shouldn’t be used to launder baseless claims into distrust in our elections. There should be consequences for that.” [See the Program]
(Video) When It Comes to Trump’s Corruption, You Haven’t Seen It All
By Jason Linkins, The New Republic [October 27, 2026]
---- On Tuesday, Defiance.org released Corruptionland, an investigation into the staggering scale of corruption in Trump’s Washington. The 35-minute film is streaming free here. “For two years, Trump’s scandals have hit one at a time, and each one gets buried under the next,” said Miles Taylor, executive producer of the film and the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration. “So we added them up. When you put 100 episodes in one place, the scale is staggering: $377 billion in a tangled web of alleged corruption that is without any precedent in American history. Even that number undersells it, because you can’t put a price on the president’s revenge agenda and his weaponization of federal power. Every American deserves to see the full picture before they vote, and now they can.” [See the Program]
IN YONKERS, CFOW ENDORSES…
There are two races for seats on the Westchester County Legislature that are up for grabs this year, and in each of them highly qualified young women are up against Spano-backed men. In District #17, we support Leslye Oquando-Thomas, who lost in the Democratic primary by 4 votes and is now (the more progressive candidate) running on the Working Families Party line. To learn about her campaign and how you can support her, go here. In District #15, we support Kisha Skipper, head of the Yonkers NAACP. To learn about her campaign and how to support it, go here. Last week, Kisha was harassed by supporters of her Republican opponent, and when the police came they “detained” Kisha. Par for the course for the Yonkers police, as described in the publication Black Westchester. Yonkers residents: Don’t forget to vote!
NEWS NOTES
Jamaal Bowman, formerly our congressman in the 16th District, was the guest of Marc Lamont Hill for his weekly interview program “Up Front,” platformed on Aljazeera. The title of the program is a quote from Bowman, ‘If I had kept my mouth shut, I’d be in Congress’; and he goes on to talk about “the rise of democratic socialism, the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the political cost of his outspoken support for Palestinian rights.” See the 30-minute program here.
This week’s Nation magazine has a useful article by Joan Walsh, “Will the Progressive Insurgency in NY-17 Oust MAGA Loyalist Mike Lawler?” Walsh says, “The paradox of Conley’s race is that if she wins, the centrist will at least partly owe her victory to a progressive insurgency that came together after Lawler’s 2024 victory vowing to defeat him with a Democrat.” Read more here.
Local author! Hastings’ Ida Susser, a professor of anthropology scholar at Hunter College, has just published her book about the Yellow Vest movement in France. This was/is the grassroots movement that emerged in France a few years ago with a non-party protest about many things wrong with France and its political system. Ida is interviewed about her book here: “Ida Susser: The Enigma of the Yellow Vests and what they might tell us about the U.S.” Check it out.
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.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. 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. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364,é Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
For some reason it seems fitting that this week’s rewards for stalwart newsletter readers come from the oeuvre of the late catastrophic philosopher Leonard Cohen. If you need some amplification for your hopes and fears, I think you will find some comfort with his “Everybody Knows”; “First, We Take Manhattan”; and “The Future.” Enjoy! (or whatever).
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
(Video) Israeli Elections to Global Movements: Tariq Ali, Rashid Khalidi on New Book “The Neck and the Sword”
From Democracy Now! [October 28, 2026]
---- We get analysis of the Israeli elections, the upcoming U.S. midterms, the pro-Palestine movement and more from Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi and Pakistani British writer Tariq Ali. They are co-authors of the new book The Neck and the Sword: Palestine’s Unfinished Struggle. The book, an extended conversation between Khalidi and Ali over two years, offers an overview of Palestinian intellectual and political history, drawing its title from a famous phrase used by the renowned Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani to describe the futility of “peace talks” between occupier and occupied, saying it was akin to a “conversation between the sword and the neck.” … Public opinion about Israel has grown increasingly negative in the United States and across much of the world in the wake of the genocide in Gaza, and it’s “not going to shift back,” says Khalidi. “People have seen something that cannot be unseen. They’ve seen genocide. They’ve seen slaughter. And Israel has no defense.” [See the Program] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “Israeli Elections: Fanatics, Generals, and the Question of Palestine,” by Marwan Bishara, The Nation [October 26, 2026] [Link].
Exit and Exception - [Gaza and the “Board of Peace”]
By Noura Erakat, Boston Review [September 24, 2026]
---- It has now been ten months since the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2803 establishing a “ceasefire” in Gaza and approving the U.S.-led Board of Peace to oversee its reconstruction and governance. While the arrangement stipulated that Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Hamas disarmament would be a phased process, Israel rejected the terms after Hamas agreed to them. As a result, the “yellow line,” a demarcation set by the ceasefire separating Israeli forces from Palestinian enclaves that split the territory in half, has steadily crept inward, expanding Israeli control to 70 percent of Gaza. … Several aspects of the Board stand out in sharp relief: its absolute illegality in international and U.S. law; its imposition of what a legal expert calls an “illegal trusteeship” over Gaza; its likely function as another failed enterprise for the Trump dynasty to launder and make money. But it also reflects a new form of global governance that has the potential to serve as an alternative to the United Nations: the exit model. [Read More]
(Video) Brazil: Lula Wins Stunning Upset Over Flávio Bolsonaro in Blow to Far Right & Trump
From Democracy Now! [October 26, 2026]
---- Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won a record fourth term in office, defeating far-right challenger Flávio Bolsonaro by 4 million votes in a runoff election on Sunday. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who remains under house arrest for plotting a coup against Lula four years ago. The younger Bolsonaro, who narrowly defeated Lula in the first round of voting earlier this month, is now refusing to concede. Lula’s surprise comeback comes after weeks of student-led organizing and campaigning on his behalf, and amid accusations that U.S.-based tech companies were suppressing Lula’s reach online in favor of his Trump-aligned opponent. “The amount of organizing, the amount of marches and rallies, campaigning, pamphlets that we’ve seen the last three weeks has been something that I have never seen in my entire life, ever, covering elections for decades in so many different countries. It is absolutely unprecedented,” says Brazil-based journalist Michael Fox. “It is an absolute game-changer for the region.” [See the Program]
Gleaner, Cobbler, Commons [Re: John Berger]
By Peter Linebaugh, Boston Review [October 28, 2026]
---- [In the early 1980s,] Berger entered my life with and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, a book of essays, without narrative and titled in lowercase letters, that offered a tenderness, wisdom, and mixture of poetry and prose that inspires me to this day. Its sensitivity was not achieved by diluting its passion for justice or by its lyric aspiration to beauty. Faces wrinkle, hearts fail, and photos yellow. The sense of the temporary present in all Berger’s work is why history lurks behind everything he writes. Whatever happened in my life—and some beautiful things did—I was determined as a young historian to contribute to the growing corpus of historical materialism and its lively sidekick, history from below. … In his “Historical Afterword” to Pig Earth, the first novel in the Into Their Labours trilogy, Berger writes that “the remarkable continuity of peasant experience and the peasant view of the world acquires, as it is threatened with extinction, an unprecedented and unexpected urgency.” The revolutionary project of the commons is part of that urgency. Reconstituting it—from micro forms of mutuality to macro forms against the waste of civilization—will oppose the blindness of the commodity form and the systematic cruelty of the ruling class with its addictive accumulation, its unhinged greed of extraction, and its concupiscence of war. [Read More]
THE US-ISRAEL WAR AGAINST IRAN
The Incredible Shrinking Superpower
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [October 28 2026]
---- The failure of Tel Aviv and Washington to achieve their war aims in Iran has resulted in the most dramatic American retreat from a region since the U.S. flight from Vietnam in 1975. This startling American defeat — after a generation of forever war failures and stalemates — has been thrown into broad relief by the resumption of another regional conflict that has received far less attention than the Trump administration’s sputtering war with Tehran. This fall, the forces that most Americans know as “the Houthis” have conducted a blitzkrieg in their native Yemen and have been pummeling Saudi Arabia’s aviation and energy infrastructure with missiles and drones. In doing so, they have put a spotlight on the limits of American power, and the shrinking U.S. military footprint, in the Middle East. … The American refusal to join Saudi Arabia’s war signals a profound degradation in U.S. capabilities and standing in the Middle East. The U.S. military had, for decades, dominated the region from a network of about 20 major bases. The U.S. Navy operated out of the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain. The U.S. Air Force flew missions from the massive al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which housed 10,000 U.S. personnel. Thousands of ground troops were barracked in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. The Pentagon admitted that “Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict. In addition, dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged during OEF.” [Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “Will players in the Gulf establish a new security framework?” From Aljazeera [October 27, 2026] [Link].
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
(Video) “Ungrounding”: Eyal Weizman on Gaza Genocide & Israel’s “Permanent Architecture of Control”
From Democracy Now! [October 30, 2026]
---- We speak with Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman about his new book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, a meticulous investigation into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the physical destruction of the territory and its impact on the Palestinian people. Forensic Architecture was founded in 2010 as an interdisciplinary research group focused on investigating state violence and human rights violations. Since 2023, Forensic Architecture has focused on producing evidence for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Weizman says “ungrounding” is “a kind of destruction that we have not seen anywhere else,” with Israeli bulldozers “terraforming” the landscape to erase all traces of Palestinian life. With thousands of bodies still unrecovered from under destroyed buildings, Israel’s flattening, extraction and reshaping of the rubble in Gaza is a continuation of its crimes, says Weizman. “Israel is actively and against court order, against the order of the ICJ, destroying the evidence of the genocide that it has perpetrated,” he says. [Read More]. - ALSO OF INTEREST – is this discussion with Francesca Albanse and Weizman, “Truth Under the Rubble,” from Palestine Deep Dive [October 25, 2026] [Link].
Stop Calling It an ‘Operation.’ Israeli Soldiers Aren’t Exercising
By Amira Hass, Ha’aretz [Israel] [October 28, 2026]
---- This isn’t an “operation.” Stop this collaborationist use of military jargon that throws sand in people’s eyes. Forcing people out of their homes, even if it’s “until further notice,” is not an operation. What the most moral army in the universe is perpetrating in Hebron since last Friday is another stage, another circle of hell in Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan.” Nineteen-year-old soldiers and 24-year-old officers (your children and nephews and fiancés) may just be following orders, but they aren’t participating in a nighttime field exercise. They are E.X.P.E.L.L.I.N.G people. They’re expelling women, elderly people, youth and children. Under the bayonets of their rifles and the movement restrictions they have imposed, around 5,000 people, according to Hebron’s municipality, have been forced to leave their homes. Some left in pajamas with a little bit of cash and the gold jewelry from their weddings – if it hasn’t been sold long ago to mitigate the effects of the financial attacks Smotrich has perpetrated against the Palestinian subjects and the Palestinian Authority. Bulldozer drivers, who have been destroying residential, agricultural and commercial buildings and structures in the Hebron area during the past week – aren’t “enforcing the law.” That phrase, too, is a smokescreen behind which generations of gray bureaucrats and zealous officers hide. All are engaged in mass expulsion. They enforce military orders that were designed from the outset to make life worse for a particular group of people – in other words, dispossession orders disguised as “planning and good governance.” [Read More]
Jamming the War Machine – [The Dockworkers and the War]
By the Progressive International [October 31, 2026]
---- On 30 October, dockworkers at 113 ports in 22 countries and regions joined an international day of action against militarisation and war. From Gioia Tauro to Genoa, from Oakland to Hamburg and Veracruz, workers withdrew the labour that keeps the war machine moving. The mobilisation grew out of the Istanbul Declaration agreed by Mediterranean port unions in May. Its reach is now global. In Italy, workers at nine ports took action, and the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) called a general strike across every sector. In France, the largest dockworkers’ union said that nearly all maritime shipping capacity in the country was affected. The workers’ demands reach beyond Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They call for stopping all movements of arms through civilian ports; ending the use of ports as bases for NATO, US, and EU militaries; halting European rearmament; and raising the wages of the workers who keep the ports running. [Read More]
THE WAR ON UKRAINE
Ukraine: Time to End the War
By Robert L. Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation [October 28, 2026 I
---- It is long past time to bring the brutal war between Russia and Ukraine to an end. Now, just as both countries seem open to serious negotiations, Donald Trump perversely seems intent on giving peace a bad name. Even as his amateur emissaries—real estate investors Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law—launched separate discussions with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Trump decided to tilt the board for Putin. … The understandable fury at Trump’s antics should not blind us to reality. This is a war that needs to come to an end. For both Russia and Ukraine, the war has taken a staggering toll. Russia has suffered an estimated 1.5 million casualties; Ukraine, 500,000. Both find it harder to replace the losses. A million Russians have fled the country, disproportionately the most educated and skilled of the young. Over 20 percent of the Ukrainian population has been displaced, with over 5 million leaving the country. The Russian Navy has been driven out of the Black Sea; the key Ukrainian port of Odesa, center of its grain trade, has been shut down. Ukraine, with 80 percent of its power generation and 90 percent of its food logistics infrastructure destroyed, faces a brutal winter. Russia is suffering far greater damage than Putin would have imagined. Recent attacks on its oil industry have shut down some 30 percent of its refining capacity. [Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “Slouching toward Kaliningrad, NATO dismisses a nuclear threat,” by Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft [October 23, 2026] [Link].
THE WAR ON CUBA
Report from Cuba: Polycrisis, Slow Death, Cruel Optimism
By Carolee Bengelsdorf and Margaret Cerullo, Security in Context [November 1, 2026]
---- How to narrate the story of Cuba’s current near total economic and social collapse? The evolving catastrophic human reality, as Cuban writer Leonardo Padura reflects, “is sometimes difficult to decipher even for those of us who live it day to day.” What follows is an effort, as of September 2026, to examine the impact of the crisis on daily life, to search out its roots, and to try to read the tea leaves of what the US administration might be contemplating based on actions it has already taken. The immediate catastrophe has been unfolding since the Trump administration blocked all oil shipments to Cuba in January 2026. This came after he implemented the “Donroe Doctrine” to remove Nicholas Maduro from power in Venezuela, Cuba’s principal oil supplier since 2000 following the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998. One ally after another (Russia, Mexico) succumbed to Trump’s threats and stopped sending oil to the island and Cuba’s slim reserves were exhausted. The country faces ever longer daily blackouts, lasting twenty to twenty-two hours daily in Havana, even longer in the provinces. As we write in September, Cuba is undergoing its seventh total national collapse of the power grid since January. Darkness descends on streets emptied of people every night, and barrios look like ghost towns. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Operations in US History
By Ali Winston, Wired [October 28, 2026]
---- ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations is engaged in far-reaching spying against left-wing activists that rivals the FBI and CIA crackdowns on the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Attorneys for 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy charges have obtained evidence of a sweeping, possibly unconstitutional spying operation carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement against left-wing social movements in Minnesota and beyond. The high-profile Minnesota 15 prosecution makes clear that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), flush with federal funds and newly hired personnel, is now President Donald Trump’s primary tool against dissent, with a powerful array of post-9/11 investigative authorities brought to bear against everyday Americans organizing their communities. Nothing of this scale has been seen in the United States, experts say, since the federal government’s counterinsurgency against the New Left and the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
We Know What You’re Against. What Are You For?
By Peter Dreier, Portside [October 29, 2026]
---- A humane and decent society provides people with the opportunity to fulfill their potential and find happiness and meaning, including meaningful work. Two key ingredients make this more likely: shared prosperity and robust democracy. They are both essential. … Back in 1900, people who called for women’s suffrage, laws protecting the environment and consumers, an end to lynching, the right of workers to form unions, a progressive income tax, a federal minimum wage, old-age insurance, dismantling of Jim Crow laws, the eight-hour workday, and government-subsidized health care and housing were considered impractical idealists, utopian dreamers, or dangerous socialists. Now we take these ideas for granted. Many of the so-called “radical” ideas of one generation have become the common sense of subsequent generations. History reveals that change that improves the lives of most Americans is possible. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Eric Hobsbawm and the history of the defeated
By Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz, Jacobin Magazine [October 27, 2026]
[FB – This is a review of The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian, by Emile Chabal. One of the great historians of our time, Hobsbawm was also a very interesting person, a member of the Communist Party who hung on through many world/party disasters. Some think his failure to quit the Party (1956, for example) shows him to be in great error; I think the case can be made that his continuing connection to “the Party” informed his history writing and made it greater.]
---- Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm published his best-selling history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes. The book presented a man coming to terms with the fate of the political project to which he had committed his adult life while trying to understand the twentieth century as a historical epoch. Though famous for its pessimism, the book, like the work of many left-wing authors in the 1990s, was also an opportunity to rethink what the project of the Left might become after the collapse of communism. [Read More]
The Communist Thrillers of Anna Seghers
By Alex Ross, The New Yorker [October 12, 2026]
---- Dante, Dostoyevsky, Kafka—oh, those were bagatelles. Minor inconveniences that blew over,” the German novelist Anna Seghers wrote in late 1940, in a letter from the South of France. “This is serious.” Seghers was one of many German-speaking artists who had sought refuge in France when the Nazis took power, and she was now trying to leave Europe with her family. As a Jewish Communist, she had little chance of survival if she did not get out. But the bureaucratic maze that she had to navigate—obtaining exit visas, transit visas, entrance visas, affidavits, ship bookings—seemed contrived to make escape impossible. Adding to the dark absurdity of the situation was the fact that Seghers’s husband, the Hungarian Marxist scholar László Radványi, was being held in a French internment camp, on the basis that Hungary was a German ally. Finally, in March, 1941, Seghers, Radványi, and their two children boarded the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, bound for Martinique. Other passengers included André Breton, Victor Serge, and Claude Lévi-Strauss—all fleeing the inferno. Flight was Seghers’s great literary theme. Between 1933 and 1944, she wrote three extraordinary novels that feature young men racing just ahead of the closing jaws of fate. [Read More]
