Election 2016 and the Growing Global Nuclear Threat

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Playing a Game of Chicken with Nuclear Strategy 
By Michael T. Klare

Once upon a time, when choosing a new president, a factor for many voters was the perennial question: “Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?” Of all the responsibilities of America’s top executive, none may be more momentous than deciding whether, and under what circumstances, to activate the “nuclear codes” — the secret alphanumeric messages that would inform missile officers in silos and submarines that the fearful moment had finally arrived to launch their intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) toward a foreign adversary, igniting a thermonuclear war. Until recently in the post-Cold War world, however, nuclear weapons seemed to drop from sight, and that question along with it.

Culture

Monetizing the Chicago Cubs & Entertaining Angels

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by S.L. Wisenberg

 

 

My husband came in the front door and said I needed to go out and amuse our neighbor, Sharon. She was trying to sell her parking space to Cubs fans and was getting bored. Before she stood with her sign, her husband John had tried his luck for about 15 minutes.  

Sharon was leaning against a parked car with her sign for E-Z Out Parking, $40. In a couple of hours Game Four of the World Series!

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Bernie Sanders is America’s Most Popular Politicians

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The Popular Populist

Bernie Sanders is the most-liked politician in the United States. What does that mean for the future of left politics here? by Matt Karp/Jacobin/October 18, 2016

 

The general election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump has gone pretty much as everyone expected: a months-long carnival of the absurd and the grotesque, culminating in Trump’s self-destruction and Clinton’s methodical march to power. Quietly, though, something less predictable has happened. Bernie Sanders has become — by a considerable margin — the most popular politician in the United States.

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Throwing in the Towel What the Bankruptcy of White House Policy Means for the Israelis and Palestinians By Sandy Tolan

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Editor’s note: Another excellent analysis from our ally TomDispatch.com introduced by their editor Tom Engelhardt

 

Okay, here’s your quiz of the day: What country, according to the Congressional Research Service, has been the “largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,” to the tune of $124.3 billion, and most of it military in nature?  Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Philippines?  The answer: none of the above.  The correct response is Israel.  In the midst of an election campaign in which almost nothing can’t be brawled about, military aid to Israel might be the only nonpartisan issue left.  After all, President Obama, who hasn’t exactly had a chummy relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ascendant Israeli right, recently agreed to a deal that, even compared to the present stratospheric levels of military aid to Israel, the White House has termed “the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history.”  You’re talking about a 10-year deal (2019-2028) for this country’s most advanced weaponry (and a lot of less advanced but no less destructive stuff as well) adding up to $38 billion, or about 27% higher than the previous aid package — though Netanyahu originally asked for $45 billion, which represents chutzpah of a major sort). This was undoubtedly the Obama administration’s way of throwing a sop (and quite a sop it is) to the Israeli prime minister in return for the Iran nuclear deal, which he so fervently opposed, and to congressional Republicans who also failed to block that deal (and many of whom are now relatively quiet but eager to pony up yet more military aid for the Israelis).  In fact, in an era in which hardly a move the U.S. has made across the Greater Middle East hasn’t come a cropper, resulting in collapsing states and spreading terror movements, you could say that Washington has had just one genuine success.  As befits the reigning arms trader on the planet, it has poured staggering amounts of weaponry into that embroiled region.  Only recently, for instance, we learned from a study by arms expert William Hartung that, since 2009, the Obama administration has offered the Saudis $115 billion worth of arms and advanced weapons systems in 42 separate deals — a record even for the Saudi-U.S. relationship — and don’t forget similar, if somewhat smaller scale sales, often of advanced weaponry, to Kuwait, Qatar, and other countries in the region. It’s quite a record. (U.S.A.!  U.S.A.!) Now, TomDispatch regular Sandy Tolan, author ofChildren of the Stone, puts that future $38 billion worth of weaponry for Israel in the context of the larger Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” in order to suggest just how bankrupt Washington’s policies in the Middle East actually are. Tom
Throwing in the Towel 
What the Bankruptcy of White House Policy Means for the Israelis and Palestinians
By Sandy Tolan

Washington has finally thrown in the towel on its long, tortured efforts to establish peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You won’t find any acknowledgement of this in the official record.

Editorials & Actions

Working with the Refugees on the Island of Lesvos Greece by Cecilia Wambach

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We are proud to share with you a talk given at our Yom Kippur services by a member of Beyt Tikkun and Tikkun’s interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives who just returned from working with refugees on Lesvos, Greece
–Rabbi Michael Lerner

Working with the Refugees on the Island of Lesvos Greece 
by Cecila Wambach
I have just returned (the day before Yom Kippur) from the island of Lesvos Greece, where 500.000 refugees have crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey to find a new home in Europe.  Because of the recent agreements between Europe and Turkey, many of these refugees are stuck—approximately 7,000 on the island of Lesvos, in refugee camps.  

I am honored to be speaking to you during the high holydays.  Thank you, Rabbi Lerner.  But I want to move on from the thank yous.  Because I want to say that I am now so full of questions about what I did and what to do next because this experience has dumped me squarely into a great big pile of debris—not the debris of the island of Lesbos, which is full of life jackets and clothes and large rubber boats, but  a great big dump pile of Questions.  I am, frankly, stumped.  But I know myself, and I know that being in the question has always been a place of great reflection for me.  The Buddhists call it “mindfulness”, where I examine everything that places itself in front of me.  The New Age Folks call it “watching for signs”, where because you are in the state of being led by the spirit or the universe, you look for where to go next.  And surprisingly, answers come.  And the Jews call it “being in the fourth world” where living one’s life fully in all worlds, action, emotion, relationship, and the divine self become part of one’s being if you consciously practice and know it.  

I want to tell you about my experiences.  How and why I went to Lesvos,  the learning I experienced once I got there, understanding the refugee crisis, and what I will do next.  But I think it is important to look at what I did with a framework—the framework of Jewish practice.  What resonates for me are two practices:  The practice of blessing, and the practice of the four worlds, which I have already mentioned.  

Really, I do not understand fully, the four worlds.  It is a highly sophisticated mystical understanding.  But I have translated it for me, and it works.  In the first world we live our lives, action—we eat, we sleep, we wake up, we brush our teeth, we go to work.  Yes, I am in that world.  In the second world, I do all of the above, with feeling– the world of emotion.  I try to call up upon awakening the feelings of gratitude, love, generosity, and I revisit these during the day.  Yes, I am in that world.  And the third world, the world of relationship– I am open hearted and I know that I am you and you are me—we are one, as Kat told us last night.  We are in this together, because we are one.  Yes, I get that.  I am in that world.  And the fourth world! Look at the beauty of the sunset, the dark sky at night,  the ocean, the dazzling beauty of the world—the Divine Self.  Really understanding that there is something more than all of this!  The Divine Principle in all of it—for me, the God Self, the power of love and transformation, the divine energy, Yad Hey Vav Hey, the life force, the love energy!  Wow!  The power of this fourth world!

Editorials & Actions

Wiki Leaks Show How the Ruling Class Shapes the Democratic Party–and how to challenge that

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Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About Hillary Clinton
What John Podesta’s emails from 2008 reveal about the way power works in the Democratic Party. BY DAVID DAYEN
October 14, 2016

The most important revelation in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. The messages go all the way back to 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. And a month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast. MOST POPULAR

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Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address.

Editorials & Actions

American Politics: The U.S. Needs Repentance and Atonement

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by Rabbi Michael Lerner

Watching American politics these past months, culminating in the revelation of Donald Trump’s disgusting comments about women that he groped, I was overwhelmed by the sense of how much American politics needs a fundamental re-orientation. We need a New Bottom Line of love and generosity that could reshape every dimension of our economic, political, cultural and spiritual assumptions about reality. To get there, we need a fundamental transformation of consciousness. Although not in the same league of outrage as what Trump has done to legitimate misogyny, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, the Democrats would also be challenged by a New Bottom Line–and even Hillary Clinton’s call for a “no fly zone” in Syria would have to be scrutinized against the alternative approach to foreign policy a New Bottom Line would suggest (namely, seeking homeland security through generosity and a Global Marshall Plan so that the US becomes known as the most generous and caring society in the world, not the toughest and most militarist).  Unrealistic?

Editorials & Actions

American Power at the Crossroads: a Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action

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American Power at the Crossroads
A Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action
By Dilip Hiro   and sent to us by our ally TomDispatch.com

In the strangest election year in recent American history — one in which the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson couldn’t even conjure up the name of a foreign leader he “admired” while Donald Trump remained intent on building his “fat, beautiful wall” and “taking” Iraq oil — the world may be out of focus for many Americans right now.  So a little introduction to the planet we actually inhabit is in order.  Welcome to a multipolar world.  One fact stands out: Earth is no longer the property of the globe’s “sole superpower.”

If you want proof, you can start by checking out Moscow’s recent role in reshaping the civil war in Syria and frustrating Washington’s agenda to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.  And that’s just one of a number of developments that highlight America’s diminishing power globally in both the military and the diplomatic arenas.  On a peaceable note, consider the way China has successfully launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a rival to the World Bank, not to speak of its implementation of a plan to link numerous countries in Asia and Europe to China in a vast multinational transportation and pipeline network it grandly calls the One Belt and One Road system, or the New Silk Road project.  In such developments, one can see ways in which the previously overwhelming economic power of the U.S. is gradually being challenged and curtailed internationally. Moscow Calling the Shots in Syria

The Moscow-Washington agreement of September 10th on Syria, reached after 10 months of hard bargaining and now in shambles after another broken truce, had one crucial if little noted aspect. For the first time since the Soviet Union imploded, Russia managed to put itself on the same diplomatic footing as the U.S. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented, “This is not the end of the road… just the beginning of our new relations” with Washington. Even though those relations are now in a state of suspension and exacerbation, it’s indisputable that the Kremlin’s limited military intervention in Syria was tailored to achieve a multiplier effect, yielding returns both in that war-ravaged, devastated land and in international diplomacy.

Editorials & Actions

Jacob Neusner: In Memoriam by Shaul Magid

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Jacob Neunser: In Memoriam

Shaul Magid,

Indiana University/Bloomington

Jacob Neunser (1932-2016) died early shabbat morning of Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat between Rosh Ha-Shana and Yom Kippur. The New York Times called him the most published individual in history. In his excellent book, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (NYU Press, 2016) Aaron Hughes suggests he is the greatest Jewish scholar of Judaism born in the United States. Whether either of these claims are true, and they are certainly reasonably so, he was surely one of the most towering figures in the study of Judaism in the past half century. An irascible and often difficult personality, Jacob Neusner could also be extremely generous toward those with whom he shared mutual interest.

Editorials & Actions

Philip Cushman on Rosh Hashanah 2016

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Rosh Hashanah, 2016

Philip Cushman

 
       The Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, is one of the most disturbing stories in the Hebrew Bible.  In it, Abraham was instructed by what he thought was God’s voice to make a human sacrifice of his son, Isaac.  At the last second, God interceded, speaking through a malach, an angel, to stop him.  Predictably, the midrashic rabbis of late antiquity devoted many stories to its interpretation.  What are we to make of it?  And why was this passage of all passages chosen, on this the beginning of the Days of Awe, for us to read and wrestle with?          Erich Fromm, a 20th century philosopher and psychoanalyst ¾ and not coincidentally a former yeshiva buchar ¾ reminds us that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are not prescriptive, they are descriptive; they describe and demonstrate understandings of God, humans, and the relation betweeen the two.  For instance, the Garden of Eden story is not in Jewish tradition a theory about Original Sin, and it is not thought to be a Fall (as it is in Christian traditions).  Instead, Fromm teaches, it is a story about how animals became human: in some mysterious way, humans gained the capacity to be conscious, to know the difference between good and evil, thus aquiring the ability to notice the separateness between people, feel vulnerable, and make moral choices.  Similarly, the Akedah can be interpreted as a story about how humans came to confront and then forbid  the hideousness of human sacrifice.   There are, of course, many many prescriptions in the Torah, but for the most part, mercifully, the mythopoeic stories in Beresheet are not.          The Akedah to this day has much to teach us about the folly of communities and parents who sacrifice their children because of some well-meaning but tragically flawed fantasy.

Editorials & Actions

Police Assaults on African American Women: Close Encounters of a Dangerous Kind by Rev. Daniel Buford

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Close Encounters of the Dangerous Kind :

Unarmed Women, Girls of African Descent and Violent Police Encounters- Arbitrary Punishments, Detentions, Killings, Torture, Extra Judicial Punishments, Summary Executions 1982-2015

Complied by Daniel A. Buford, Executive Director

Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute Berkeley, CA

September 3, 2016

The list is a compilation of thirty cases of unarmed African women and female children and the violent encounters they experienced at the hands of law enforcement agencies from every region of the United States. This list is an excerpt of a “Shadow Report” that I am in the process of preparing to be submitted to the United Nations human rights treaty bodies over the next five years of periodic treaty review in New York and Geneva, Switzerland. Cases that are listed here are noteworthy in the current national discussions about the Black Lives Matter movement. While most of the Black Lives Matter discussions and media attention have focused on the foul law enforcement treatment accorded to African American men and boys, very little attention or scrutiny is being devoted to the alarming numbers of African American women and girls who are often treated even worse than Black men in unarmed encounters with police officers. An example of this is the rough physical treatment that mothers, girls, and pregnant women experience.

Editorials & Actions

Obama screws chances for peace with his unprecedented $38 billion military aid package to Israel

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Unprecedented Ten-Year, $38 Billion Military Aid To Israel Is Harmful To Both Countries

THE UNPRECEDENTED TEN-YEAR $380 BILLION MILITARY AID PACKAGE FOR
ISRAEL IS HARMFUL TO BOTH COUNTRIES
                   BY
  ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
———————————————————————————————————–
In September, the U.S. signed an unprecedented pact with Israel that will provide it with the largest amount of military aid ever awarded to any country—-$3.8 billion annually for ten years, with promises of the latest in fighter jets, missile defense systems and cutting-edge technology. All of this comes with no strings attached. The U.S., under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has held that Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are in violation of international law and an impediment to peace. The U.S. has  always advocated a two-state solution, with the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has escalated its settlement activity, and prominent voices in the Israeli government reject the two-state solution and call for annexing the occupied territories.

Editorials & Actions

There Oughta Be a Law… Should Prison Really Be the American Way? By Rebecca Gordon

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Editor’s note: Here is another piece from our ally TomDispatch.com by Rebecca Gordon  with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt. To understand America, you have to understand the “friendly fascism” that already exists for a section of the population that regularly rotates through our criminal justice system. –Rabbi Michael Lerner

The figures boggle the mind.  Approximately 11 million Americans cycle through our jails and prisons each year (including a vast “pre-trial population” of those arrested and not convicted and those who simply can’t make bail).  At any moment, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, there are more than 2.3 million people in our “1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.”  In some parts of the country, there are more people in jail than at college. If you want a partial explanation for this, keep in mind that there are cities in this country that register more arrests for minor infractions each year than inhabitants. Take Ferguson, Missouri, now mainly known as the home of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot and killed in 2014 by a town policeman.

Editorials & Actions

Henry Giroux on the Pathology of Politics in our Warfare State

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Editor’s note: Living as we do in the 15th year of the war that began with Afghanistan and Iraq and has now spread to Syria, Yemen, Libya, etc. it is sometimes possible for many of us to accept the militarization of our society as just normal. When I first read Henry Giroux’s article sent to Tikkun this morning I thought, “wow, he is over the top this time.” Then I realized that the problem was how much I myself have gotten used to the bizarre develpments that have happened in American politics. In an article I sent out earlier this morning from Tom Engelhardt I read and shook my head at the ways that the Obama administration has moved from its original promise to seek a world without nukes to planning a trillion dollar modernizaiton of our nuclear arsenal and just thought, “oh well, that’s just another part of Obama’s consistent abandonment of the ideals he promised, so why should I be shocked?”

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American World of Frustration by Tom Engelhardt

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Editor’s note: As Jews enter the High Holiday season (Rosh HaShanah, Oct 2nd eve,  the beginning of ten days of reflection on our lives and how far we may have strayed from our own highest values), it is also a period of reflection on our communal “sins” (actually, the Jewish concept of “sin” is that of thinking of ourselves as an arrow aimed at a target of being the most loving and compassionate and generous person we could possibly be, but which has now gone slightly off course and is missing the target, so the period from Rosh HaShanah through Yom Kippur, Oct. 12, is one of trying to get that arrow back on course, a mid-course correction, a soul tune-up). Part of that process is getting a clearer sense of where our society has gone astray. In the article below, in a tone that reflects deep frustration, our ally Tom Engelhardt takes on some of the dimensions of where we have missed the mark, by not really holding accountable the political leadership that we helped elect. The point, of course, is not to make ourselves feel bad, but to think of steps that we must take to correct where our society has gone astray.