From Frank Brodhead: Hello All – In less than a month, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have grabbed power and created chaos. We call this a “coup,” meaning an unconstitutional overturn of our government. They must be stopped. But how?
Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs, and millions more do not know who’s next. Useful programs have been destroyed. Immigrants live in fear. The two dictators exude cruelty, happy that people who didn’t vote for them are miserable.
The chaos is now worldwide. International aid to the sick and hungry is suddenly ended. The foolish use of “tariffs” to reward and punish other people is disrupting lives and economies. Trump’s plans to “cleanse” Gaza of 2 million people to grab beach-front property is both crazy and cruel. Mexico? Panama? Canada? Greenland? Our government has been seized by madmen. What to do?
Our first order of business is to not give up. RESIST. All of us can speak up, write letters, find a protest or a cause to join. Do parents want their children to get a good education? It’s a fight. Do we want to keep the immigration police out of our schools and places of worship? Another fight. If we let them, the dictators will bring back segregation, inflict great cruelty on people in need, and put billions of dollars into tax breaks for the rich and money for war.
Please talk with family and friends. Find a way to be helpful. Our democracy is far from perfect, but the two dictators want to end whatever rights and security we still have. Fight back. We can. We must.
SOME USEFUL ESSAYS ON THE TWO DICTATORS
(Video) Constitutional Crisis: Who Is Musk’s ”DOGE Army,” Gutting Gov’t Agencies as Courts Question Legality?
From Democracy Now! [February 10, 2025]
—- We look at how Elon Musk’s executive branch agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, known as ”DOGE,” is wreaking havoc, with young male software engineers slashing government services and funding in what legal experts are saying could amount to a “constitutional crisis.” Most of the DOGE staffers are pulled from Musk-linked tech companies and have limited work and educational experience. “Even if these young men are very technically gifted … some of them seem to have questionable backgrounds,” says Wired reporter Vittoria Elliott, who has revealed key details about the staffers in a series of articles. One DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, resigned and was later reinstated after he was traced to racist social media posts. DOGE’s lack of oversight, training and transparency poses “an incredible risk,” adds Elliott, as its unvetted and underqualified staffers take control of the sensitive data of Americans. https://www.democracynow.org/
By Refusing to Obey Court Orders, Trump is Provoking a Constitutional crisis
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [February 13, 2025]
—- No sooner did Donald Trump take the oath of office than he immediately took a wrecking ball to government agencies and programs that protect nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives. States, public interest organizations, schools, doctors, unions, immigrants, federal workers and individuals have filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging Trump’s legal authority to take these actions. At least nine judges throughout the country have temporarily halted several of them. Courts have put temporary holds on Trump’s attempts to: end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, freeze billions of dollars in federal spending appropriated by Congress, transfer incarcerated transgender women to men’s prisons, remove scientific data from the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, give his de facto co-president Elon Musk unfettered access to sensitive Treasury Department records, and put 2,200 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) employees on leave. … The White House alleged that rulings against the administration were made by “judicial activists” and their decisions constitute a “constitutional crisis.” But it is Trump’s noncompliance with some of those court orders that is threatening to end the rule of law in the U.S. https://truthout.org/articles/
Elon Musk’s Vision Is Coming Into Focus—and It Looks a Lot Like Neo-Apartheid
By Elie Mystal, The Nation [February 13, 2025
—- The he most explicitly racist thing Donald Trump has done in establishing his white supremacist regime these past three weeks has been his approach to South Africa. On February 7, Trump signed an executive order to cut off aid to the country (aid that mainly goes to South Africa’s HIV/AIDS prevention programs) because of its land reform laws. He went on to say that white South Africans should resettle in the United States where they will be accepted as “refugees” because they have been “persecuted” by the predominantly Black regime. The juxtaposition of Trump gleefully deporting actual Black and brown refugees already in the United States with his order throwing open the borders to white South Africans is the reason I know that Trump is racist, not just as a matter of policy but as a matter of personality. It’s also the reason I know that Trump is not fully in charge; Trump is just a puppet dictator, while the real power behind the throne is the white South African Elon Musk. It’s Musk’s language and framing that Trump merely parroted in his orders and tweets about South Africa. thttps://www.thenation.com/
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.) Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com, and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page 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, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
REWARDS!
The CFOW “Rewards!” for this week brings back Kurt Jooss’ short ballet, “The Green Table.” Written and performed on the eve of World War II, the “Green Table;s depiction of War and the diplomatists’ failure to stop it remains (alas) timeless and relevant to our world. To see the 18-minute performance, For some background and interpretation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
(Video) Palestinian Writer Mohammed El-Kurd on “Perfect Victims,” Trump & Israel’s Criminalization of Thought
From Democracy Now! [February 11, 2025]
—- We speak with the acclaimed Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd on the publication day for his new book, Perfect Victims. It comes at a time of heightened censorship and attacks on Palestinian expression in Israel and the OccupiedY
Palestinian Territories, as well as in the United States and elsewhere. Perfect Victims explores ongoing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and human rights abuses and the “impossible demand made of the Palestinians” to be sympathetic in the eyes of international observers. He says that pressure leads to “curating yourself in a way that is not offensive to the Western gaze.” El-Kurd also discusses U.S. attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement, President Donald Trump’s calls for ethnically cleansing Gaza, Israeli attacks in the occupied West Bank and his own family’s history of fighting eviction from their home in East Jerusalem. https://www.democracynow.org/
The Boomerange Comes Back
By Noura Erakat, Boston Review [February 5, 2025]
—- In the fallout of the election, a stream of social media content—some from passionate Harris supporters, some from lesser-evil Democratic voters, and some, presumably, from people simply lashing out, horrified and distraught at Trump’s win—took to blaming Palestinians for the outcome. …. But beyond a lack of awareness of the vast devastation, many Americans also haven’t heard what it has to do with the United States, and with the Democratic Party in particular: the fact that, in the year following October 7, the Biden administration sent nearly $23 billion to Israel with no red lines; that it vetoed four UN Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire; [etc]. … imply put, most people have no idea to what extent this genocide is being perpetrated not only by Israel but also by the United States. For a solid majority of the center-left, what is happening in Gaza is tragic but ultimately less important than the most significant existential threat: the ascendance of Trump. During the run-up to the election, the argument goes, we Palestinian and Arab Americans should have understood that resisting fascism in the United States is the primary goal and gotten in line accordingly. But resisting fascism is our collective goal. We just know that in order to resist it, we have to fight it on two fronts of U.S. state violence: at home and abroad. Because if the United States, together with Israel, manages to disembowel the ICJ, the ICC, the UN, and a broader global order built after the Holocaust and World War II, no one is safe. https://www.bostonreview.net/
The Next Great Threat to Israel’s National Security: An Educational Bookshop
By Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Haaretz [Israel] [February 11, 2025]
—- While the Educational Bookshop is prized for its very well-curated stock of publications that relate to the Middle East in general, and to Palestine, and the Palestine–Israel question in particular, with books, journals, and magazines in English, Arabic, French, and other languages, the Munas’ business has never really been “just” about books, or about shopping for that matter. … This, the Munas have managed to build, bit by bit, book by book, between the brimming shelves and coffee cups. And this is the great threat – the “violation of public order” (later updated to incitement) – that prompted the police’s aggressive raid on one of the most non-violent places we know in an all-too-violent city. Against multiple odds, and with remarkable calm and generosity, the Munas have striven to teach both locals and foreigners about Palestine and Palestinian dignity, Palestinian lives. https://archive.ph/VjaAO
The Intricate Connection of Birdsongs to Human Language
By Erika Schelby, Counterpunch [February 14, 2025]
—- Birdsongs have inspired poets and lovers, becoming one of the philosophical focal points in ancient Greece and Rome. They have also led to several long-ago debates about the relationship between birdsong and human language. “A robust body of evidence accrued over approximately 100 years demonstrates striking analogies between birdsong and speech, both learned forms of vocalization,” states the Royal Society journal. Some thinkers have argued that humans are the only rational animals since they have a language, unlike nonhuman animals. Yet bird communications through melodious songs sound very much like a language, casting doubts on these views. No nonhuman animals other than birds, specifically songbirds, display such fine musical articulation and use these communication skills among their species. … Songbirds [4,000 species] can execute various tasks and performances with their vocal organs. They use short, practical calls to communicate details about food or predators and long, learned, and practiced songs to find and seduce mates, defend territories, compete, and develop social bonds. Perhaps even more fascinating is that they all do it in their own way. For example, the males of the highly social Australian zebra finches do not sing to defend territory and do not perform to impress potential mates. They wait until they find their love partner and then serenade her, often daily and for years to come. Songbirds are actively involved in learning, listening to, and practicing the complex creations we call songs. Birds of the same species use different dialects in various locations.
https://www.counterpunch.org/
THE WAR ON GAZA
The Settler Plot to Recolonize Gaza
By Joshua Leifer, The Nation [February 11, 2025]
—- The announcement of a ceasefire agreement briefly slowed the Gaza resettlement movement’s momentum, but it has not stalled it. The ceasefire is fragile, dangerously so: There is no guarantee that it will last beyond the initial six-week phase, which involves only a partial Israeli withdrawal from the territory. Indeed, within days of its announcement, reports began to leak out that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to keep his hard-right government together, has conceded to Smotrich’s demand that Israel restart the war after the first phase ends and gradually assert full Israeli control over the Gaza Strip. Amid this initial uncertainty, the settler movement continued to press its eliminationist vision of recolonizing Gaza. Then, last week, Donald Trump announced his surprise plan to ethnically cleanse the entire Strip of Palestinians and take over the territory. Israel’s far right—and, indeed, much of the center—has greeted the proposal with unmasked enthusiasm. Weiss was euphoric. “Assuming that Trump’s announcement regarding the transfer of Gazans to the nations of the world is translated into action,” she said in a Feb. 5 statement, “we must hasten to establish settlements in every part of the Gaza Strip.” https://www.thenation.com/
Netanyahu Is Preparing to Sabotage the Gaza Ceasefire…Again
By Jeremy Scahill, Dropsite News [February 10, 2025]
—- From the moment Israel accepted the ceasefire deal, its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides have characterized it as a limited agreement aimed at securing the release of as many Israeli captives as possible and not a comprehensive plan to end the war. Now, emboldened by his recent meetings at the White House and riding a tsunami of giddiness over President Donald Trump’s proposal for the U.S. to seize control of Gaza, Netanyahu returned to Israel on Sunday ready to sabotage the already frangible agreement and expand his forces’ siege of the West Bank. … Soon after Netanyahu spoke, Abu Obeida, the spokesman for Al Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, announced that the group would be delaying the release of the next three Israelis scheduled for exchange on Saturday, citing Israeli violations of the ceasefire. … Since the ceasefire officially went into effect on January 19, Israel has continued to carry out targeted attacks inside the Gaza Strip on an almost daily basis. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 110 Palestinians have been killed in such attacks over the past three weeks. … Under the original terms of the deal, Hamas agreed to release 33 Israeli captives in the first 42-day phase. To date, it has freed 16 of them in addition to five Thai nationals not included in the deal. Of the 17 other Israelis slated for release, nine of them, including a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, are believed to be alive. By the end of Phase 1, roughly 60 Israeli captives will remain in Gaza.
If Anyone Should ‘Not Forget nor Forgive,’ It’s the Palestinians
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [February 16, 2025]
—- A picture is worth a thousand words: Hundreds of Palestinian detainees and prisoners who were released on Saturday are seen on their knees, in prison, wearing white T-shirts bearing a blue Star of David and the words “we will not forget nor forgive.” Israel thereby forced them into becoming walking banners of Zionism in its most despicable form. Last week it was bracelets with a similar message: “The ‘eternal people’ never forget, I will pursue and find my enemies.” … The world, including Israel, forgot when it came to Nazi Germany, Vietnam forgot when it came to the U.S., the Algerians forgot as far as France goes and the Indians did the same regarding Britain – only the “eternal people” will never forget. How ridiculous. If anyone should “not forget nor forgive” one day, it will be the Palestinians, after 100 years of torment, including the prisoners who were released on Saturday. They will not forget under what conditions they were held in, and some will not forgive their wrongful detention, with no trial ever held in their case. … Judging by the treatment of prisoners and hostages – a very meaningful index – it’s hard to know which society is more humane. Does Israel abide by the Geneva Convention more than Hamas does? It cannot claim so anymore. This harsh impression can no longer be amended, not even with T-shirts emblazoned with a blue Star of David. https://www.haaretz.com/
THE WEST BANK
(Video) Mustafa Barghouti on Trump, Ethnic Cleansing & Israel “Moving the War” from Gaza to the West Bank
From Democracy Now! [February 10, 2025]
—- Israel “has moved the war from Gaza to the West Bank,” says the Palestinian National Initiative’s Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, who joins us from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli military’s ongoing assault there has displaced over 35,000 Palestinians through evictions, destruction of infrastructure and indiscriminate attacks resulting in over 80 deaths. Barghouti also condemns Donald Trump’s declaration that the U.S. should take over the Gaza Strip. He calls both the “theft of Gaza” and the military campaign in the West Bank war crimes. https://www.democracynow.org/
THE WAR ON UKRAINE
Trump Gives Peace A Chance in Ukraine
By Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies, Code Pink [February 14, 2025]
—- As we approach the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a monumental shift is taking place that might just lead to the end of this calamitous war. This is not a breakthrough on the battlefield, but a stark reversal of the U.S. position from being the major supplier of weapons and funding to prolong the war to one of peacemaker. Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine if he was re-elected as president. On February 12th, he started to make good on that promise by holding a 90-minute call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Biden had refused to talk to since the war began. They agreed that they were ready to begin peace negotiations “immediately,” and Trump then called President Zelensky and spent an hour discussing the conditions for what Zelensky called a “lasting and reliable peace.” At the same time, the new U.S. Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, unveiled Trump’s new policy in more detail at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, saying, “The bloodshed must stop. And this war must end.” There are two parts to the new policy that Hegseth announced. First, he said that Trump “intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table.” Secondly, he said that the United States is handing off the prime responsibility for arming Ukraine and guaranteeing its future security to the European members of NATO. … There has also been a backlash from Republican war hawks, while the Democrats, who have been united as the party of war when it comes to Ukraine, will likely try to sabotage Trump’s efforts. On the other hand, maybe a few brave Democrats will recognize this as a chance to reclaim their party’s lost heritage as the more dovish of America’s two legacy parties, and to provide desperately needed new progressive foreign policy leadership in Congress. https://www.codepink.org/
How Ukraine Pitched Trump on a Deal for Critical Minerals
By Constant Méheut, New York Times [February 12, 2025]
—- Ukraine’s vast and valuable mineral resources have suddenly become a prominent component in the maneuvering over the country’s future. Over the past week, Mr. Trump has repeatedly pushed the idea of trading U.S. aid for Ukraine’s critical minerals. He told Fox News on Monday that he wanted “the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earths,” a group of minerals crucial for many high-tech products, in exchange for American aid. Ukraine had “essentially agreed to do that,” he said…. As Mr. Trump pushes for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, Kyiv’s campaign around critical minerals has underscored Mr. Zelensky’s evolving strategy for retaining American support. Moving away from the moral appeals he used with the Biden administration, he has embraced a more transactional approach closer to Mr. Trump’s style. Mr. Zelensky recently said that he would also be interested in purchasing American liquefied natural gas. … Ukrainian authorities say the country holds deposits of nearly half the 50 minerals the United States has identified as critical for its economy and national security. The Kyiv School of Economics says Ukraine holds the largest titanium reserves in Europe and a third of the continent’s lithium reserves. Groups like SecDev, a Canadian firm, have valued the reserves at several trillion dollars. https://archive.ph/WqNwM
WAR WITH IRAN?
Trump stuns: Top Iranians ‘do not want…a nuclear weapon’
By Trita Parsi, Responsible Statecraft [February 4, 2025]
—- While signing a new presidential memorandum calling for maximum pressure sanctions on Iran, Trump poured cold water on it and openly expressed his dissatisfaction with the policy. “So this is one that I am torn about,” he said during Tuesday’s signing ceremony. “I am signing this, but I am unhappy to do it.” Yet, this was the least stunning moment of his comments about Iran during a gaggle with journalists in the Oval Office. Even more remarkable was what he said about the intent — or lack thereof — of decision-makers in Iran. “There are many people at the top ranks of Iran that do not want to have a nuclear weapon,” he declared I cannot recall any U.S. president ever deviating from the quasi-official American line that Tehran is dead set on getting nukes. U.S. officials rarely allow any nuance, or any shades of gray: Iranians always want a nuclear weapon and the only way to stop them from getting one is by preventing them from having access to the necessary material, know-how, or technology. If they have access, they will invariably build a bomb. It’s an unchallengeable certainty. https://responsiblestatecraft.
Israel likely to strike Iran in coming months, warns U.S. intelligence
By John Hudson, et al., Washington Post [February 12, 2025]
—- Israel is likely to attempt a strike on Iran’s nuclear program in the coming months in a preemptive attack that would set back Tehran’s program by weeks or perhaps months but escalate tensions across the Middle East and renew the prospect of a wider regional conflagration, according to U.S. intelligence. The warnings about a potential Israeli strike are included in multiple intelligence reports spanning the end of the Biden administration and the beginning of the Trump administration, none more comprehensive than an early January report produced by the intelligence directorate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. https://www.washingtonpost.
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
How We Make Progress Now: Pushing Back, Short-Term and Long
By Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years [February 10, 2025]
—- First things first—this is the most desperate moment I can remember in my life as an American, and neither I, nor anyone else, has any plan that’s going to fix it in short order…. Yes, everything is going wrong except for one big thing, which is that the price of clean energy keeps falling and falling, and hence it gets easier and easier to put up more and more of it. So our job is to make sure that everyone knows that. At the moment, as I’ve said a couple of times, even environmentalists still think of sun and wind as ‘alternative energy,’ the Whole Foods of power—nice but pricy. But that’s wrong. This is the Costco of energy. And around the world it’s being installed faster than anything else—a lot faster. We just learned that renewables reached 60% of Germany’s power generation mix last year—Germany, where no one has ever taken a beach vacation. Pakistanis have put up the equivalent of half their national electric grid in solar panels in the last year. If we can get that message across, the fossil fuel industry’s control of our political machine will matter somewhat less—the pressure for change will build. And as we confront the craven billionaires now doing Trump’s bidding, we can also get across to everyone the idea that now we have access to energy that can’t be hoarded, can’t be kept in ‘reserves.’ The sun rises every day; the breeze washes across the whole globe. This is liberatory power.
CIVIL LIBERTIES
The Columbia Network Pushing Behind the Scenes to Deport and Arrest Student Protesters
By Natasha Lennad and Akela Lacy, The Intercept [February 15, 2025]
—-When President Donald Trump issued an executive order threatening to deport international students involved in pro-Palestine protests, advocates expressed immediate that the move would target demonstrators — particularly Muslim and Arab students — for engaging in activity protected by the First Amendment. Some members of the Columbia University community, however, leapt at the chance to get young people they claim are “supporters of Hamas” detained and deported. Several people on a large WhatsApp group, Columbia Alumni for Israel — which counts over 1,000 members, including parents, at least one current student, and Columbia professors — welcomed Trump’s plan. Deporting Gaza protesters was already a topic of conversation in the Columbia Alumni for Israel group before Trump’s order came down. On the president’s first day in office, group members shared flyers advertising a pro-Palestine January 21 walkout to push the school to drop disciplinary actions against anti-war protesters. https://theintercept.com/2025/
THE STATE OF THE UNION
When ‘Just Asking Questions’ About Science Turns Into 300,000 Dead
By Gregg Gonsalves, New York Times, February 13, 2025]
—- The Senate has just confirmed as health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a science denialist who once said there is no vaccine that is safe and effective, who has suggested that Covid might have been genetically engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people and who spent more than 100 pages in his recent book breathing new life into the idea that H.I.V. does not cause AIDS. All of this is nonsense, of course, but hardly a laughing matter. I am afraid for our country because I know what happens when science denialism comes into power. https://archive.ph/Ulr9q
OUR HISTORY
The War on Memory: Learning from the Jewish Labor Bund
By Molly Crabapple, The Funambulist [December 17, 2024]
—- By the time this issue of The Funambulist is published, Israel will have committed a year of genocide in Gaza. It is a genocide so thorough that it has spurred new words: Scholasticide, or the murder of institutions and agents of knowledge. Urbanicide. The murder of a city. Not content with murdering living Palestinians, the Israeli military has dug up cemeteries, seizing corpses and running their tanks over the graves so that the tracks form a Star of David, an act of blasphemy above all against Palestinians, but also against Jewish history. My history…. “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious,” wrote Walter Benjamin, the great German-Jewish intellectual who committed suicide rather than be deported back to Nazi-occupied France in On the Concept of History (1945). I have thought about this quote often since October 7, 2023. For this reason, I want to look back to Russia-Poland, the blood-soaked crescent of land that was the birthplace of most of Zionism’s major leaders, as well that of their great rivals, the Jewish Labor Bund, the secular, socialist, and anti-Zionist revolutionary party that has been the subject of the last five years of my work. https://thefunambulist.net/
The Left Needs Its “Schools of Enlightenment and Revolution”
By Steve Fraser and Nelson Lichtenstein, Jacobin Magazine [February 14, 2025]
—- Challenging the status quo and imagining new worlds heightens the desire for new knowledge. Indeed, the demand for education of any sort was at one time the cry of working people, when formal schooling was a mark of the privileged. Education was seen as central to emancipation. … When the Socialist Party opened the Rand School of the Social Sciences in 1906, few could have imagined the scale of its success over the next fifteen years. This was the period of greatest popularity for the Socialist Party in the city and around the country. The school grew accordingly. Beginning its first year with a handful of courses and 250 students, it was soon enrolling thousands, mostly from the working class, a large percentage of them union members. Initially most students belonged to the party, but soon the school enrolled nonmembers in growing numbers, many of whom later joined the party. Most classes were at night or on the weekend. They covered the waterfront: introductions to the history and economics of socialism, lectures on ethics and philosophy, specialized courses on the history of the labor movement, socialism, and art, the “evolution of race antagonism,” as well as an introduction to trade unionism, classes on child labor and women workers, immigration, housing, and “proletarian diseases.” https://portside.org/2025-02-
