Editor’s note: This was written after the election in November but before we knew with whom Trump would surround himself in his Cabinet and key government positions. So Eisenstein’s optimism about what might happen can be forgiven.
Editorials & Actions
2/3 of Israelis support Two States
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Last week, J Street commissioned a new poll of Israeli public opinion, conducted by a respected Israeli pollster. The poll posed a series of questions about Israelis’ views on the Obama administration and US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. We wanted to explain for you why we felt it was important for us to launch this poll right now, and to lift up some of its topline findings. Following the flurry of hotly debated activity by the US and the UN in the past month, we wanted to take the political temperature of Israelis on key questions related to the conflict and the peace process. Secretary Kerry’s speech, which laid down an important marker for the Obama administration’s eight years of work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, followed close on the heels of the administration’s abstention on UNSC Resolution 2334.
Editorials & Actions
Henry A. Giroux on Militant Hope in the Age of Trump
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Editor’s note:
We are proud to announce that Professor Henry A. Giroux has just joined Tikkun’s editorial board as a Contributing Editor. You can read his amazing article on education at https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/defending-educators-in-an-age-of-neoliberal-tyranny-2 (it appears in the Fall, 2016 issue of Tikkun magazine). We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are building the kind of broad based movement that Giroux calls for in this article, though we call it a movement for a world of love and justice (read about it at www.tikkun.org/covenant) and put great emphasis on our commitment to nonviolence because the means must be as ethical as the ends we seek. But nonviolence does not mean passivity, as MLK jr demonstrated so powerfully in the 1960s. — Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
by Henry A. Giroux
The United States stands at the endpoint of a long series of attacks on democracy, and the choices faced by the American public today point to the divide between those who are committed to democracy and those who are not.
Editorials & Actions
Obery Hendricks on MLK jr. and His Legacy
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Editor’s note: Having just returned (Monday, Jan. 16, 2016) from participating in a demonstration and march in Oakland, Ca. today in honor of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr, I was glad to receive this submission to Tikkun (below) by African American studies professor (and Tikkun magazine author) Obery Hendricks. It is an important counter to the kind of rhetoric and tone I heard at today’s demonstration. At the rally before the march began I heard one of the M.C.s ask the crowd to repeat “we will win by ANY MEANS NECESSARY” — a slogan I first heard from the Black Panther Party in 1968 — in clear attempt to repudiate King’s message both then and now about how to fight racism.
Editorials & Actions
Juan Cole: Is MLK’s Legacy Being Reversed
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Editor’s Note: Some of us are reacting to Trump as though he had emerged from nowhere with his reactionary agenda. Actually, the movement that came to his aid has been seeking for several decades to undo much of the liberal and progressive accomplishments of the past 80-some years. And they’ve often succeeded, in part thanks to liberals in Congress who confirmed for the Supreme Court seats truly reactionary justices appointed by Republican presidents (lacking the backbone to do what Republicans did to Obama’s appointment to replace Scalia, namely refusing to even consider those appointments even when the Democrats had majorities in the Senate). But part of that success has come from the rest of us shrugging our shoulders at the march toward reaction that has been happening in the U,.S. at the national level these past several decades, immersed as we’ve been in “local organizing” without any national strategy and often in “silos” of activism (as in “don’t try to get me involved in some larger transformation of the U.S.–I’ve got this one issue and I’m working on it locally, and I don’t want to get involved in some ideology, because we have to be realistic and pragmatic and all we can accomplish is x in my localiity”).
Editorials & Actions
Obama’s Farewell
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Editor’s Note: As is my custom in many of the articles I put up on this section of the website, I try to provide you with analyses that you are not likely to read in the mainstream media. In this case, I disagree with the tone and some of the substance both of the introduction by one person and the analysis of the other. In my own time, I’ll try to present a more balanced assessment of the Obama presidency. Yet there are important points mixed in with exaggerations in what is written below, so despite its being framed in utlra-leftie discourse which is at points really over the top, I thought I’d share it with you. But please remember, I DID NOT WRITE THIS–I’m just bringing it to your attention!
Editorials & Actions
Dems help defeat lower costs for prescription medications
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I found the following on the internet, do not know who authored it, but do believe that it is accurate in reporting who voted against lowering costs for prescription medications by allowing them to be brought in from Canada which offers the very same drugs we get, but at a substantially lower cost. That’s one advantage Canadians get by having their government rather than the market shape their health care system. It could have been ours had President Obama, in his first two years with a Democratic Congress, fought for “Medicare for All,” simply taking the existing system that works well for the elderly, and extending it to everyone else, plus insisting on getting lower costs for medications by allowing us to import the lower priced medications from Canada. But this is only one of a dozen areas in which he capitulated to the capitalist elites without even engaging in a public struggle for a single day. PAY ATTENTION: this is not a matter only of different philosophical beliefs about free markets–because many people in the U.S. are too poor to afford the medications that they need while big Pharma gets away with murder (literally) in putting profits before people.
Editorials & Actions
Israel Embassy in UK Caught Plotting to “Take Down” a Senior Tory Minister
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From Alfred Gluecksmann of the ArgentumPost.com
Israel Embassy in the UK Caught Plotting To “Take Down” a Senior Tory Minister
While the US “Fourth Estate” MSM in collusion with the” Deep State” is busy disseminating U.S. best interests by by engaging in damaging Russophobia hate and fear mongering so-called “news” based on unsubstantiated content (see “The Deep State Goes to War With President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer” by The Intercept’s illustrious Glenn Greenwald whose reporting on the NSA for The Guardian earned it the Pulitzer award) , the real news about the exposure of major consequence of the scandalous threat made by an Israeli diplomat of the Israeli embassy in London who was caught discussing the possible “take down” of a British minister for his criticism of the international law violating settlements in illegally Israel occupied Palestine, remains scandalously largely ignored in the US media. This is even more astounding during these critical times when the UN Security Council in its historic Resolution 2334 has, without opposition even from the United States, thanks to President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, excoriated Israel for its continuing violation of international law by its brazenly defiant continuing construction of illegal settlements, something which also constitutes a violation of the Geneva Fourth Convention. This comes at a time when, incredibly the President “elect” who lost by 3 million votes when the votes are counted on the democratic one man/one woman vote basis, has in conjunction with advice from his orthodox Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner…, decided to pick a man for the post of U.S. ambassador for Israel the colossally unqualified David Friedman. David Friedman is an ultra right-wing, fundamentalist, Zionist extremist who is hell-bent to raise hell by his stated objective to move the United States embassy, against the most fundamental interests and principles of the United States from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. No country in the world has dared to even suggest such an illegal move which would have literally catastrophic consequences and would destroy all possibilities for a final peace plan to take effect, and therefore this represents the groundstone for the take over of all of Palestine by what will then become the Apartheid “state” of Israel, an unsustainable entity in a world which long ago dissolved its last Apartheid state of South Africa (notably Israel engaged in lucrative deals with said racist white supremacist state and went as far as proliferating and assisting in assembling in said Apartheid state the technology for the weaponization of nuclear energy – see “The Unspoken Alliance : Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa” by the brilliant and dedicated Jewish author Sasha Polakow-Suransky ).
Christianity
Rev. Richard Rohr on How Jesus Interpreted Scripture–if only Contemporary Christians could Follow Rohr!
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Rev. Rohr is one of the most creative thinkers in the contemporary Christian world. He seeks to do for Christianity what many of us in the Jewish Renewal movement are seeking to do for Judaism, namely make it spiritually alive and ethically coherent with the highest aspirations of our Abrahamic religions: for a world based on love, generosity, social and economic justice and environmental sanity. To see what that would might look like, please read www.tikkun.org/covenant. –Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun
How Jesus Interpreted Scripture
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Biblical messages often proceed from historical incidents, but the actual message does not depend upon communicating those events with perfect factual accuracy. Any good writer knows that! Spiritual writers are not primarily journalists.
Editorials & Actions
Unions Facing the Trump Era
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By Jonathan Rosenblum
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.
Editorials & Actions
Pope Francis: Capitalism is Terrorism Against All Humanity
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http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/12/23/pope-francis-capitalism-is-terrorism-against-all-of-humanity/
Collective Evolution December 23, 2016
Pope Francis: capitalism is “terrorism against all of humanity”
Alanna Ketler
Once again, Pope Francis has made global headlines, shocking reporters late Sunday after blaming the “god of money” for the extremist violence that is taking place in Europe and the Middle East. A ruthless global economy, he argues, leads disenfranchised people to violence. Responding to a question from a journalist about whether or not there is a link between Islam and terrorism, more specifically addressing the fatal attack on a priest by a Muslim extremist in France last week, Pope Francis said, “Terrorism grows when there is no other option, and as long as the world economy has at its center the god of money and not the person.” “This is fundamental terrorism, against all humanity,” he continued. “I ask myself how many young people that we Europeans have left devoid of ideals, who do not have work. Then they turn to drugs and alcohol or enlist in [the Islamic State, or ISIS],” he said.
Articles
Russia’s Legitimate Fears
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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).
Editorials & Actions
Chanukah and Christmas as we approach a Trump presidency
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A Return to Hope in Troubling Times: Chanukah and Christmas
Honestly, do you know anyone who hasn’t been suffering from a case of acute despair, depression or cynicism about the world in the past few months? *For some it might have started long, long ago, when three of the more hopeful public figures of the 20th century, President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr were assassinated between 1963 and 1968. *For others, it may have come when President Clinton abolished welfare for the poor and embraced globalization and elimination of protections against Wall Street and the “too big to fail” banks’ irresponsiblity that would economically devastate much of middle American while making it in the interest of corporations to abandon the workers who had made their goods and relocate in other countries that could pay their workers much less by avoiding unions and environmental protections. *Or when President Bush lied us into a war with Iraq. *Or when President Obama refused to create a single-payer “medicare for all” health program and instead created a plan that allowed insurance companies to raise their rates to make huge profits (thereby discrediting the system enough to allow demagogues to benefit from its unpopularity, or when he failed to bail out people who were losing their homes and instead bailed out Wall Street or when he failed to cancel the pipeline threatening Native Americans but only postponed it, or when he failed to issue a blanket pardon to young immigrants to whom he had originally promised safety in the U.S. or when he prosecuted instead of rewarding whistle blowers but failed to prosecute those who had ordered torture at Guantanamo and many other US military sites around the world thus setting the stage for the return of torture in the next presidential administration, or when he failed to launch a campaign for a constitutional amendment to eliminate the electoral college or a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics).
Editorials & Actions
Drowning the World in Oil : Trump’s Carbon-Obsessed Energy Policy and the Planetary Nightmare to Come
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Editor’s note: here is another important article from our media ally tomdispacth.com and the introduction is written by its editor Tom Engelhardt Sadly, the Left can point out the problems, but has no serious strategy to change the consciousness of Americans so that they might not go further down the road toward a self-destructive society. We at Tikkun have that strategy–a plan that could split the Right, because not all of those who moved in that direction in 2016 are actually racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, antiSemites, or otherwise deranged. Many, in fact, are not any of these things. But to reach them, we need a significant change in the culture and consciousness of the Left. We have the strategy for how to do that.
Editorials & Actions
Taking on Trump by Ted Glick
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Taking on Trump
By Ted Glick
There is only one way that I can see Trump succeeding with his outrageous efforts—such as his Cabinet nominations–to turn back the clock to the 50’s, or further: if most of us who supported the Bernie movement of 2015-2016 shut up, take no action, allow this pathological liar to do what he wants to do without any serious resistance.
I can’t see that happening, I really can’t. There are too many of us. 15 million voted for Bernie in the primaries, and there are hundreds of thousands of us, at least, probably more like millions, who, irrespective of Bernie, see ourselves as activists for a better society, a new world, a more just, peaceful and environmentally sustainable future.
I know that Bernie isn’t shutting up.