Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/page/13/)
(Editor’s note: All too often, people in the liberal and progressive world scorn those Americans who know little about their Constitutional rights or the rights of others. But actually it is more appropriate to respond with outrage at an educational system that has failed to inform them of these rights and how they work.
A 99% Manifesto
Dan Brook
A specter is haunting America and the world; the specter of gross inequality. The inequality is economic, to be sure, but also social, political, racial, sexual, educational, medical, occupational, gastronomical, geographical, and otherwise.
Directly inspired by the massive protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, Israel, India, Chile, Wisconsin, and elsewhere in 2011 as well as the hactivism of Anonymous and the shout out by Adbusters and other activists over that summer, Occupy Wall Street started on September 17th, 2011 as a reaction to the corpocracy — the big, powerful, wealthy corporations and their financial system with its limitless greed and disproportionate influence on our government and in our society, symbolized by Wall Street.
After being publicly maligned and forcefully suppressed, as well as internally divided and somewhat rudderless, the decentralized Occupy movement, now several years on, catalyzed many different local individuals and groups continuing the struggle in their own quieter and dispersed ways. To occupy is to make a bad situation better by seeking policies, situations, and systems that benefit the 99%, not simply the 1%.
(Editor’s Note: Ariel Dorfman has been sharing his writing with Tikkun for several decades, so it is a joy to share this latest article, via our media allyTomDispatch.com . Dorfman was one of those profound thinkers who worked with the democratically elected Salvador Allende regime in Chile till the U.S. managed to support a coup by vicious military leaders whose subsequent murder of thousands of progressive Chileans Dorfman managed to escape. Please read his insights on Donald Trump below. For those of you who just received our latest issue of Tikkun magazine in the mail with its focus on Trump Trauma, consider Dorfman’s piece a fitting addition to the analyses put forward there, including the article on Leonard Cohen’s music as a way to help get through some of the worst of the Trump regime. Though not yet as murderous as the Chilean dictatorship, the Trump regime has the same instinctive hate-oriented and “power-over-others” orientation that is the cultural foundation for every variant of fascistic regimes.
Uri Avnery
September 9, 2017
A Confession
TODAY IS the last day of the 93rd year of my life. Ridiculous.
Am I moderately satisfied with my life until now? Yes. I am.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2017
An enemy image is a vital munition of war
1) A shooting in Hebron shakes the Israeli society
The following article is due to be published in German by Internationaler Versoehnungsbund, the Austrian branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR). On March 24, 2016, a young Palestinian named Abdel Fattah al-Sharif tried to stab the soldiers guarding an enclave of extreme-right Israeli settlers in the heart of the city of Hebron on the West Bank. The soldiers shot and severely wounded him. Eleven minutes later, another Israeli soldier arrived on the spot, named Elior Azaria. A medic by training, Azaria did not try to give medical help to the severely wounded man lying on the ground.
The spiritual task of the ten days that start the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Wednesday Sept. 20 (10 days from now) and continue to its climax on Yom Kippur is to delve seriously into what changes we need in the way we conduct our own lives and changes that our society needs. Beyt Tikkun provides a support system for taking this task seriously. Our services have all the elements of the Jewish tradition including the traditional prayers and music, but we combine those with deep inner reflection, mediation, and inner work because the goal is “t’shuvah” (returning to our hightest selves in every dimension of our lives). Info and to Register: www.beyttikkun.org/hhd
Toward that t’shuvah goal and reflection, participants in our High Holiday services are given a work book to use in the intervening days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
(Editor’s Note: This article, coming to us from our media ally TomDispatch.com, should give us some perspective on the U.S. military role in the world. Perhaps it might even awaken us to another important question: why exactly are we risking nuclear war with North Korea in order to achieve what end? –Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com)
Worth Dying For?
When It Comes to the War in the Greater Middle East, Maybe We’re the Bad Guys
By Danny Sjursen
I used to command soldiers. Over the years, lots of them actually. In Iraq, Colorado, Afghanistan, and Kansas. And I’m still fixated on a few of them like this one private first class (PFC) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011.
[Editor’s Note: I still wish Nader had taken my advice in 2000 and told his voters in states where the election was close to not vote for him but vote instead for Nader. I also urged him to introduce spiritual progressive ideas and discourse into his public talks, but he didn’t, perhaps could not because it would take him so far from the narrow economism that is his worldview. But with all his limitations, he often speaks deeper truths than one hears even from some of the most “progressive” of liberal Democrats, and it is in that spirit that I invite you to read his latest thinking. –Rabbi Michael Lerner ]
Photo: Stephen Voss/Redux
RALPH NADER: THE DEMOCRATS ARE UNABLE TO DEFEND THE U.S. FROM THE “MOST VICIOUS” REPUBLICAN PARTY IN HISTORY
From TheIntercept.comJune 25 2017, 8:17 a.m.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is at its lowest ebb in the memory of everyone now alive. It’s lost the White House and both houses of Congress.
[Editor’s Note: We Americans have barely a clue about the mischief the U.S. military has been up to for most of the past decades. It has often been provocative when it hasn’t gone the full length of military interventions, sometimes carefully hidden to the U.S. public. On the other hand, we have no sympathy for the repressive regime in North Korea, which in comparison makes the U.S. regime look almost humane. But before thinking that maybe the U.S. is motivated by good values, remember the massive U.S. sales of arms to Saudi Arabia while it continues its near genocidal war against Yemen, and its attempts to build a justification for a future intervention in Venezuela–and these were both part of U.S. policy under Obama.–Rabbi Michael Lerner]
9/4： What the Media isn’t Telling You About North Korea’s Missile Tests
By Mike Whitney
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/04/what-the-media-isnt-telling-you-about-north-koreas-missile-tests/
September 04, 2017 “Information Clearing House” – Here’s what the media isn’t telling you about North Korea’s recent missile tests. Last Monday, the DPRK fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan’s Hokkaido Island.
I’m republishing this article I wrote a few months before the 2016 election because it contains an analysis which is absolutely essential for anyone who wishes to participate in transforming American political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual reality. Some of it might feel a bit dated, but most of it is as true now as it will be in years to come until liberal and progressive forces really absorb its message and make fundamental changes in the cultural and political assumptions that limit their effectiveness.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
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.
What Berkeley needs is a Non-Violent Containment Squad
November 20, 1964: March to Regents’ Meeting; L to R: Mona Hutchin, Ron Anastasi, … John Leggett, John Searle, Michael Rossman, Jack Weinberg, Sallie Shawl, Mario Savio, Ken Cloke. Bob Johnson photo ©FSM Archives All rights reserved
by Jo Freeman, A.B.’65
As an alumnus of the 1964 Free Speech Movement and a veteran of the civil rights movement, I was appalled to read about the recent violent confrontations in Berkeley. Those reports took me back to the 1960s when I was doing voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marching against segregation in Birmingham and Mississippi. Then we were the equivalent of the “fascists” that Antifa and the black bloc are beating up in Berkeley. They called us Communists, not fascists, but like Antifa they believed we were invaders who held them and their Southern values in contempt.
(Editor’s Note: When we’ve talked about a New Bottom Line as a central part of Tikkun’s message, some people react negatively to the last few words where we call for “awe, wonder and radical amazement at the universe.” What they tell me is that this sounds like a slippery slope to religion which they believe must necessarily be either reactionary or at least irrational. Kirk Schneider’s approach to awe should reassure them, both in its focus on how it might be helpful in healing our world and in his use of awe devoid of any automatic theological consequences. Please read it and read his book which gives a fuller picture of awe!–Rabbi Michael Lerner). AWE TRUMPS POLARIZATION
Kirk J. Schneider, Ph.D.
The sense of awe–or humility and wonder, sense of adventure toward living–is becoming a cherished value in our emerging age.
{Editor’s Note: Most of us in the West have very little familiarity with the complexities of sophisticated intellectual and theological debate that takes place in the Islamic world. Just as in the Jewish world a tradition of interpretation developed which takes harsh or even cruel elements in our Torah and reinterprets them to “really mean” something more in tune with the subsequent development of Jewish ethical consciousness (e.g. “an eye for an eye” reinterpreted to mean financial compensation for the losses experienced by someone who has lost an eye or the injunction to wipe out Amalek later understood to refer to wiping out the kind of hurtfulness that Amalek had engaged in toward the Israelites), so in the world of Islamic theologians there has been a constant process of reinterpretation and contextualization of parts of the Koran and other holy texts to reflect the ongoing spiritual and ethical growth of Islamic teachers and scholars. And of course, just as we in the Jewish world find ourselves challenging extremists among the West Bank settlers and their cheerleaders in many synagogues around the world as they seek to justify through reference to Torah or other holy texts their occupation and cruelty toward the Palestinian people, our Muslim allies are engaged in a similar struggle to challenge those who, like , Isis, the Taliban, and the Saudi Arabian Wahabi interpreters of Islam, have appropriated the Koran and subsequent elements of their holy tradition to justify terrorism, murder, rape of captive women, and more. In each case, the struggle is of great importance to the extent that it wins people to a worldview of love and generosity. I invite you to read the two articles in discussion below by two inspired Muslim thinkers.
https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11177
The Real Price of Trump’s Venezuela Sanctions
https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13332
By RYAN MALLETT-OUTTRIM, August 25th 2017
TAGS
economic crisis 2017
U.S. sanctions
Five hundred and sixty seven thousand dead children. That was the death toll of international sanctions on Saddam’s Iraq, according to a 1995 study published in The Lancet by researchers from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation. The conclusions of the study were shocking: five years after sanctions had been first implemented, UN humanitarian workers found a once rich, oil producing nation wracked with famine. The sanctions were aimed at pressuring Saddam, though in reality their impact was felt most by the poorest Iraqis. One researcher found that around a third of children under the age of 10 in Baghdad showed signs of stunted growth, while 12 percent were in urgent need of immediate medical attention due to extreme malnutrition.
We received this from our media ally Portside:
The Trump Administration’s Most Prominent Jews Disgrace Themselves
Dana Milbank
August 18, 2017
Washington Post
What Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin and Jared Kushner did – or, rather, what they didn’t do – is a shanda. They’ll know what that means, but, for the uninitiated, shanda is Yiddish for shame, disgrace. All three let it be known through anonymous friends and colleagues that they are disturbed and distressed by what Trump said after the white terrorist demonstration and attack in Charlottesville. But not in public. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner in July., credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post,
The three men, the most prominent Jews in President Trump’s administration, could have spoken out to say that those who march with neo-Nazis are not “very fine people,” as their boss claims. Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, and Cohn, the chief economic adviser, were actually standing with Trump when he said it.