Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/10/)
Is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan a Religious Hypocrite? From Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Dear Speaker and Congressman Paul Ryan,
As a priest who commemorates his 50th year in the priesthood this year (28 as a Roman Catholic and 22 as an Episcopalian), and as your elder, I am writing you this letter because I am worried about your soul.
In May 2016, The Shalom Center began exploring a proposal to make the year from April 4, 2017, to April 4, 2018, an American Jubilee Year of Truth and Transformation — through action as well as emotional and spiritual reflection and repentance.
I was among the 100,000 who marched in San Francisco’s Women’s March the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. While enthusiasm for the struggle seemed high, an important question was looming: What’s the strategic plan, as we head into the Trump era? Although there’s no simple answer, I offer this 10-point plan — fully open for discussion and debate.1. Recognize that we represent the majority, not Trump.
Three times more people participated in the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., than were present at the inauguration the day before.
I didn’t know what it meant to be killed. Didn’t know anyone who had died, hadn’t seen death on television, and hadn’t even lost a goldfish. But every day, Bobby waited at the bottom of the hill to taunt and follow me to school. As much as I wanted to run, I knew I’d get caught. Bobby was bigger and older than I was. So I listened to the calming sound of gravel underfoot and said nothing, my throat burning, my pace quickening.
Beginning in 1979 in Seattle, WA, Jim Levitt expertly fabricated custom aircraft parts and tools, helping make the Boeing Company one of the most successful businesses in the world. But in 2013, corporate executives issued a threat: They demanded that Levitt and his fellow machinists surrender their pensions, and that Washington State political leaders hand over a record $8.7 billion in tax benefits. In exchange the company promised to keep production jobs in-state. The Democratic governor of Washington, along with virtually the entire political establishment, caved in to the blackmail. So did Levitt’s international union leadership – they had bargained the deal secretly with the company.
I sit in one of the greasy truck stops on Interstate 5, near Red Bluff, dizzy and scared.
Decades of hope seem suddenly to turn to bullshit.
Dread and rage swirl around the country, but the lunch counter is quiet with snoozing baseball caps tipping into coffee cups.
Editor’s Note: Russia’s dictatorship is a far cry from the hopes that the Russian people had when they overthrew their communist regime and bought into the neo-liberal fantasies sold to them by global capitalism. The subsequent history has led many Russians to regret that they didn’t try to replace an oppressive oligarchy claiming to be communist with a democratic socialism instead of a new capitalist dictatorship. Yet none of that is reason to dismiss Russia’s legitimate fears about NATO encirclement and the neo-con thirst for yet more wars to advance an imperialist agenda to serve global capitalist economic expansionism. Russia’s disgraceful and murderous policies in Syria are good reason to hope that Putin, Assad and their allies should be brought to justice for crimes against humanity, but that is not a good reason for the US and Nato to take steps which might accidentally lead the U.S. into a nuclear war with Russia–a point that led some otherwise decent people to not want to support Hillary Clinton who represented the side of the Democratic Party more aligned with those imperial interests than with the aspiration of many Americans to not be involved in more wars. But those forces are just as strong in the Republican Party, so there are many who fear the worst as Obama leaves office by further stroking tensions with Russia (if he was so concerned about the “integrity” of our democratic voting system he should have begun a campaign as soon as he was elected in 2008 for a constitutional amendment that would have replaced the electoral system with a direct vote for Congress and that would have incorporated the ESRA’s plan to ban all money from elections except public funding, and he should have insisted that the 2016 election was not valid until all those who had been prevented from voting in the racist states had been allowed to vote–and certainly should have made known to the American people what the Russians were suspected of doing in September when he learned about it, rather than let their alleged manipulation of the elections stand).
The 2016 election may be the most confounding political event in living memory. And the need to understand it is urgent. That a candidate so obviously lacking in virtue, principal, and understanding of the world beyond his own narrow ambitions should break out from the large field of Republican contenders and win the nomination speaks volumes about the failure of the Republican establishment to offer a credible vision for America’s future. That so many Americans would choose an outcome that is so obviously to their detriment calls for an explanation. And on the other hand, that the tone-deaf Democratic Party establishment considered Hillary Clinton entitled to their loyalty may at first be understandable.
IT’S NO SECRET that the past several decades have witnessed growing economic inequality and deepening economic insecurity for a very large section of working people both in the U.S. and other capitalist countries around the world. Yet what most analysts miss are the hidden injuries of class that become dramatically intensified when the underlying psychological and spiritual dysfunction of global capitalism interacts with economic insecurity. Right-wing, ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist, and/or racist movements gain support as more people begin to lose faith in the efficacy of democratic governments and turn to authoritarian leaders in the hope that their own fears and pain can be alleviated. This has been happening around the world, not just in the U.S. As a nonprofit we are prohibited from endorsing any political candidate or party, so the reflections here are not meant to influence your voting in 2016, but to shape an agenda for how to build a healthier and more just society in the coming decades. In his presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders addressed some of these economic inequalities by advocating for New Deal-type reforms, but he shied away from any systematic critique of the capitalist order itself.
One often hears commentators argue that the Republican party is in danger of following the Whig party into oblivion. The implication is that the Whig party was as out of place in the modern world as the Stegosaurus, and that the contemporary Republicans resemble them in their quaint archaism. This is of course unfair to the Whigs, who on most cultural, economic, and moral issues were more forward thinking than the Democrats of the Jacksonian era were, and, as the pro-business party of their era, embraced a noblesse oblige public spiritedness very different from the predatory social Darwinism of their immediate successors, the Republicans of the Gilded Age. More than this, however, the analogy betrays an inaccurate understanding of what brought the Whig party down. The Whig party was destroyed because it sought compromise and accommodation on issues about which the majority of Americans had chosen to confront each other.
The Bible is a speck in the eye of American civilization. It is an irritant, it cannot be ignored, and it is an impediment to vision.
A brief note to the reader: I’ve been writing this piece for a year and a half. I’ve thought a lot about how complicated it is to share something like this in a time of such upheaval — in a country where an unarmed Black person is murdered by cops practically every day, at a time when our movement is in a period of intense grieving and fierce uprising around this and so many other life and death struggles. What I didn’t expect, however, was that folks would be actively talking about anti-Semitism in the movement at exactly the time I wanted to publish this. The brilliant and powerful Vision for Black Lives and the responses to it from a dozen different directions have put debate about anti-Semitism back on the Facebook feeds of many of my movement partners and friends. It’s important to me to be clear that this piece is not a response to those events or statements.
On November 29, 1947, the UN voted 33 yes, 13 no, with 10 abstentions, to create two states: one Palestinian Arab, the other Jewish. Once the UN vote registered, a new anti-Jewish campaign exploded in Iraq. This time, it was not just pogroms but systematic pauperization, taking a cue from the confiscatory techniques developed by the Nazis who had now infested the government. Jews were charged with trumped-up offenses and fined exorbitant amounts. All the while, mob chants of “death to the Jews” became ever more commonplace.
Today Globalism has outsourced the factory proletariat. Rust belt cities and towns are full of former factory proletarians who are no longer led by trade unions and can be induced to vote for anyone on the right or left who speaks to their economic plight or even to their resentments. Trade unions are still prominent in the public sector as defenders of the alimentary needs of all wage workers, but just as often they are called upon to defend professional standards, for example in education, or the public stake in health care, pensions, and the commons in general. The political revolution is not an attempt to segregate them politically but to join them to the population as a whole to promote the public interest.
This concept has never, to our knowledge, been scientifically proven. People just assume it to be true. Research has shown, however, that cooperation, not competition, is much more effective in terms of motivation, a key element regarding business innovation and efficiency(2). Competition does, of course, motivate people and market capitalism has proven this, but it motivates them in very problematic ways. Cooperation motivates people through successful relationships, recognition, esteem, mutual goals and mutual achievements.