Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/53/)
The New York Metro chapter of Physicians for a National
Health Program (PNHP), an 18,000-member national
organization, denounces the federal debt ceiling deal
signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday. “Politicians who say Medicare and Social Security are
spared cuts are not being honest,” said Dr. Oliver
Fein, Chair of PNHP-NY Metro.
We at Tikkun have been saying for the past 3 years what former Sec. of Labor and economist Robert Reich says below and what Paul Krugman has been saying for the past 2 years: there is no serious budget crisis. Instead, we have an employment and housing crisis. It is true, as Robert Reich says below, that the Republicans have been running with this lie for the past several years in order to prevent the Democrats, when they had the majority in both houses of Congress, and the presidency, 2009-2010, from doing what the country needed: a massive Work Progress Administration (WPA) employment program coupled with a freeze on mortgage foreclosures and a law requiring the banks to renegotiate mortgage interests to what it was when the mortgage was first offered to the buyers. But Reich plays down the huge culpability of Obama and his economic advisors (who could have been Reich and Krugman, and no Republican forced Obama to go with the pro-corporate advisors he actually chose form the start).
Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never seen and never will see. American Democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy. Public refers to people, acting together to provide what we all depend on: roads and bridges, public buildings and parks, a system of education, a strong economic system, a system of law and order with a fair and effective judiciary, dams, sewers, and a power grid, agencies to monitor disease, weather, food safety, clean air and water, and on and on.
When “Market Man” Consigns the Common Man to the Dustbin of History
July 28, 2011
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
PART I: “We’re All Entrepreneurs Now…”
Introduction
It’s very hard not to be mesmerized by the dispiriting spectacle now underway in the nation’s capital, with the sans-culottes of capitalism, the Republican Right, dictating terms to the President and the Democratic Party while holding them hostage under the ceilings of debt. What the Right proposes doesn’t surprise us so much; we’ve been students of these revolutionaries for three decades now. What is amazing is watching President Obama and far too much of the Democratic Party be willing to give them 80% of what they want. The President has made it very clear where he thinks the American left can go; in convincing us that we have no future in a Democratic Party that has turned its back on its own best traditions, ones that are still badly needed, and relevant for meeting the current crisis in our economic institutions. What’s happening in the summer of 2011, the fixation on debts and deficits, is so tragic because it obscures the fact that the old Washington “consensus” between the Right and the Center, going back to Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, presently has no answer for the nation’s unemployment and foreclosure calamities. These in turn are rooted in deep changes in the nature of international finance, trade and labor markets, and the high levels of private citizens’ debts, which were already swelling before the financial crisis, the debts being a form of compensatory consolation for the middle and working class’s stagnating wages. The crisis cannot be solved without a return to full employment, and the truth is the current economic arrangements can’t deliver anything remotely like it. Had the “grand bargain” been signed off on, we would still be staring at the great, radical experiment of the Right, acquiesced in by the Center, their fondest wish ever since they rose up to fight FDR in the latter half of the 1930’s: they will meet the deep troughs that capitalism historically sinks under by further shrinking the size of government and balancing budgets at all levels, and placing all human faith in the divinity of private markets. This essay looks at some of the current columns of one of the great cheerleaders for these economic arrangements which have caused such a calamity, Thomas L. Friedman of Bethesda, MD, as well as two of his longer and more famous works from the past ten years. As the title suggests, we are going to look at the role assigned to, and the likely fate of, the “common man” in these new labor markets, so well represented by the rise of Wal-Mart. When the French Revolution lost its mind, Edmund Burke gave the world a deep explanation for why it happened with his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and when that proved to be too much of an apology for the Ancien Regime, Thomas Paine gave him, and all of us, a spirited reply with The Rights of Man, just one year later, in 1791. What we claim in this essay is that Mr. Friedman has been celebrating the emergence of a “Market Man” who has been “designed” to meet a new revolutionary situation: the frantic demands of globalization and the utopian effort to construct one giant “free-market.” If one pays close attention to Friedman’s metaphors and parables for this “new man” caught up in the “revised” labor markets, as well as his prescriptions for pushing the older human types out of the way – as suggested by his remedy for unemployment – that we all become “start-ups” – it will become apparent that this is going to be more of a nightmare than a dream about human fulfillment.
In upcoming months, President Obama alone will decide on the fate of the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would bring dirty, muddy oil from Canada down to Texas to be cooked and processed to feed our addiction to this temporary resource. Please consider writing a letter to friends, family, or co-workers, or coming out to Washington between the and of August and early September. Warm Regards,
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Here’s a letter you can use to reach out to your friends, family, and local networks to help spread the word:
Dear _______,
President Barack Obama will decide as early as September whether to light a fuse to the largest carbon bomb in North America. That bomb is the massive tar sands field in Canada’s Alberta province. And the fuse is the 1,700-mile long Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport this dirtiest of petroleum fuels all the way to Texas refineries.
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
I was honored to be invited to be on a panel with the Dalai Lama July 18 in Chicago. This is the third time I’ve been invited to be on a panel with him, and by now he recognizes me. His first words when we embraced yesterday were: “Last time your kippah was red, now it’s white–but very nice!” He was referring to the head covering that religious Jews wear on our heads, also known as “yalmekah” or skullcap. (He doesn’t seem to change his outfit very often–it’s beautiful color and simplicity bespeaks his philosophy).
In mid July the Israeli Knesset passed a law making it illegal to advocate for boycotting, sanctioning or divesting from Israel–including boycotting products made in the Occupied territories by Israeli settlers. This in turn has set off an explosion of opposition inside Israel by peace oriented groups and civil liberties and human rights groups.
The racism of these rabbis is outrageous. Please ask your rabbi whether she or he will introduce a resolution to his or her rabbinical organization condemning these racist policies that are apparently gaining ground in Israel today.
The White House and congressional leaders are in final negotiations to raise the debt ceiling. Call your senators through our special toll-free number (1-800-826-3688) and ask them to urge Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to create a circle of protection around funding for programs for hungry and poor people in the United States and abroad in the bill to raise the debt ceiling.
The Supreme Court’s June 27 narrow 5-4 decision called McComish v. Bennett continues the Roberts Court’s retreat on fairness in elections, striking down trigger provisions that allowed publicly financed candidates in Arizona to receive additional funds for their campaigns when their spending was outstripped by their privately financed opponents.
Make July 4 INTER-DEPENDENCE DAY! Do July 4 with a community of people who are not into the reactionary nationalist rah-rah, but into seriously thinking about and celebrating what is good in America! If you happen to be in the Bay Area July 4, come to the Tikkun, NSP, Beyt Tikkun picnic! If not, you can read and utilize in any way you can our guide to ideas to share at a picnic or July 4th celebration of your own, no matter how small! Just go to: https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/an-interdependence-day-celebration-for-july-4.
Osama bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida is relatively crippled. We don’t need to continue fighting in Afghanistan.
Last night, President Obama announced a plan for Afghanistan that will leave nearly 70,000 troops on the ground at the end of his first term. That’s still almost double the number of troops President Bush had in Afghanistan.
Tikkun ally and policy analyst M.J. Rosenberg looks at the recent behavior of the right wing pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and detects an agenda of undermining and discrediting Obama, not to mention anyone seeking peace between Israel and Palestine. That demand for “negotiations now” is shown to be a non-starter in the editorial today in Ha’aretz newspaper and in the analysis provided by the moderate King of Jordan. Please read this to understand why, unless Palestinians get more leverage through the UN, no move toward peace is going to happen as long as Netanyahu or his right-wing supporters are still shaping Israeli policy.
A report on the child abuse scandal in the U.S. Catholic Church — released in mid-May and reported in the Guardian — “concluded that the permissive society of the 1960s was to blame for the rise in sexual offences by priests.” Why are conservatives still so focused on the 1960s? Why are they so deeply interested in invalidating the experiences of that epoch? Why do they hold on so deeply to the cultural struggles that emerged in that period?
The Netanyahu government is now just where it wants to be. It feels no need to take any action to accommodate the Palestinians or entertain President Obama’s suggestions for restarting negotiations.