Gangster Capitalism and Nostalgic Authoritarianism

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Gangster capitalism and nostalgic authoritarianism in Trump’s America

by HENRY A. GIROUX

Just one year into the Donald Trump presidency, not only have the failures of American democracy become clear, but many of the darkest elements of its history have been catapulted to the center of power. A dystopian ideology, a kind of nostalgic yearning for older authoritarian relations of power, now shapes and legitimates a mode of governance that generates obscene levels of inequality, expands the ranks of corrupt legislators, places white supremacists and zealous ideologues in positions of power, threatens to jail its opponents, and sanctions an expanding network of state violence both at home and abroad. Trump has accelerated a culture of cruelty, a machinery of terminal exclusion and social abandonment that wages a war on undocumented immigrants, poor minorities of color and young people.

Articles

Walden on the Rocks

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Editor’s note: Ariel Dorfman is one of the greatest living writers. Read and enjoy his reflections, inspired in part by the 200th anniversary of the birth of Thoreau. Walden on the Rocks

Ariel Dorfman

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/Bridgeman Images

J.M.W. Turner: Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, 1834

 

THE bodies are strewn everywhere along the beach. Burials are complicated because nobody knows the names of the dead—mostly women and children fleeing famine and poverty, trying to reach the land of plenty that has been promised to them but finding, instead, an early end in turbulent waters. Spectators gape at the debris from the recent shipwreck “cracked up like an eggshell on the rocks,” while others go about their business.

Editorials & Actions

Stopping Nuclear War …by Andrew Lichterman

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Editor’s Note: Andrew Lichterman’s analysis (below and online at https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/donald-trump-destroyer-of-worlds. You can share to social media from this link and there are buttons at the end of the piece that allow you to share the piece that way) is an important review of why Trump’s threats of nuclear war are illegal, and why the underlying nationalism to which he appeals is destructive. Lichterman’s work is important to understand and circulate to others. Yet there is a missing element here, namely that we need to understand the legitimate fear Americans have about terrorism after 9/11 and about other irresponsible leaders (including Trump) having access to nuclear weapons.We’ve argued that the key to reducing the risk of nuclear war is not to deny the possibility of threats from other nations (the young leader of North Korea at times seems as much a delusional narcissist as Trump) but to understand that we have to focus on the core beliefs about what will bring real security. We have been arguing for the past thirty years that for both the US and  Israel the best path to achieve homeland security is to abandon the failed strategy of domination over others as the best path to homeland security and to replace that with the strtegy of generosity as manifested in Tikkun’s proposed Global Marshall Plan (Tikkun ally Congressman Keith Ellison of Minneapoli  introduced House Resolution 87 to Congress in February–supporting our reasoning for a Global Marshall Plan.

Editorials & Actions

Thanksgiving 2017: How to be More Effective at a Thanksgiving Gathering

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Ever had a frustrating experience on Thanksgiving with friends or family? Your progressive ideas are dismissed as unrealistic or seem to offend people? Here are some tips on how to navigate that at your Thanksgiving table 2017. First, remember that there is a lot to give thanks for in our world today.  We ought not let our celebration of all that is miraculous in the universe, our celebration of the continuing bountiful reality of planet Earth, and our appreciation of all the good people in this would be undermined or ruined by having all the conversation focusing on the Trumpists. So step one: encourage friends and family to spend some time celebrating the good, even at the expense of not watching the t.v. or focusing on everything wrong with the world.

Articles

The Republican Tax Cuts Could Bankrupt Our Country

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Dear senators: Don’t bankrupt our country
Jeffrey Sachs     ||     November 20, 2017     ||     CNN

Jeffrey Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. Dear Sens. Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Ron Johnson, John McCain and Lisa Murkowski:

I fear for the future of our country. I know that you do as well.

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Thanksgiving Mythology and Reality

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The Thanksgiving Myth
by Cliff DuRand
[This talk was given at the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship of San Miguel of Allende, November 23, 2008]

In many ways the Thanksgiving celebration is a unique festivity. As harvest festivals go it’s not particularly unusual: families gathering for a special meal to enjoy the bounty of nature and the fruit of the growing season’s labor. Most societies in the temperate zones of the earth have such harvest festivals. In the more northerly latitudes of Canada it comes in October as it does also in north China at the time of the harvest moon. At the latitudes of the United States Thanksgiving comes in late November, after the harvests are in.

Editorials & Actions

Saudis Can’t Win Their War in Yemen

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Saudi Arabia is embroiled in a war in Yemen that it can’t win. Saudi Arabia seems to have bitten off more than it can chew in Yemen. On March 26, 2015, the kingdom launched Operation Decisive Storm, a broad Arab-Islamic initiative ostensibly aimed at reinstating the government of Yemeni President Abd Rabboh Mansour Hadi, whom insurgents had forced from the capital, Sanaa, a month earlier. More than two and a half years on, Saudi Arabia is no closer to its goal, embroiled in a war that it can’t win. How did the country wind up making such a strategic blunder?

Editorials & Actions

EU Member States Take a Major Step Toward a European Arm

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EU member states take major step toward a European army
By Peter Schwarz
14 November 2017
The European Union has taken a major step toward developing the capacity to wage war in the future independently of and, if necessary, against the United States. Foreign and defence ministers from 23 of the 28 EU member states signed a framework document on a common defence policy in Brussels on Monday. Along with Britain, which will leave the EU in 2019, only four smaller countries—Denmark, Ireland, Malta and Portugal—did not sign on to the deal. However, they can do so at any time. With the “agreement on permanent structured cooperation” (PESCO), the EU states committed themselves to close cooperation in the development and purchase of weapons, and in making available troops and equipment for joint military interventions.

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Sodomites in our own time

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Rabbi Rothbaum presents a humorous yet actually very serious account of what it means to be a Sodomite today. Though we in the liberal and progressive world might immediately identify his description with the policies of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party, with considerable justice in so doing, we ought to also acknowledge that when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, their efforts to end homelessness and hunger in the U.S. (much less around the world) were feeble when compared to the spending that they did for the U.S. military. And when inheriting the economic crisis in 2009, the Dems funded a massive bailout of….no, not the people losing their homes because of deceitful or misleading mortgage practices of the banks and investment companies, but rather the large corporations and the investment companies, without getting in return any serious lasting commitment to change their destructive policies. So we are all implicated in the Sodomite sins of our government until we elect candidates who are unequivocally giving priority to ending the suffering of the most vulnerable in our society and around the world (e.g. through Tikkun’s proposed Global Marshall Plan www.tikkun.org/gmp –Rabbi Michael Lerner

How to become a Sodomite in five easy steps! BY RABBI MICHAEL ROTHBAUM | JULY 7, 2017

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been approached by people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, all asking me the same thing: “Rabbi, I’d like to be a Sodomite, but I just don’t know how to start.”

Believe me, I understand.

Articles

North Korea: A Logical Path to Peace

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Jonathan Granoff,
President Global Security Institute, UN Representative of the World Summits of Nobel Peace Laureates, and Ambassador for Peace, Security and Nuclear Disarmament of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Chair of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Nuclear Nonproliferation and a member of Tikkun Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. NORTH KOREA: A LOGICAL PATH TO PEACE

11/05/2017 09:40 pm ET
 

(Ambassador Susan Burk, Jonathan Granoff, Ambassador Douglas Roche, President Jimmy Carter)

President Carter dignified America while in office, started no wars, and since leaving office has exemplified dignity and character and is an expert in dealing with North Korea, successfully. He has offered his help. At each news cycle we hear President Trump reiterate dangerous provocations toward North Korea, only increasing the risk of crisis leading to miscalculation resulting in war and the possibility of nuclear catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. It is shocking to reflect on how extreme his expressions on behalf of our nation actually are. He threatened to “destroy North Korea” in his recent UN speech before the General Assembly thereby defying the laws of war, which require military actions to be proportionate and discriminate between combatants and civilians, thus threatening a crime against humanity, a genocide against over 25 million people. America is a nation based on the rule of law, degrading international law degrades America.

Editorials & Actions

Tom Engelhardt on Osama bin Laden’s America

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Osama Bin Laden’s America 
Niger, 9/11, and Apocalyptic Humiliation
By Tom Engelhardt

Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body wasconsigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald Trump recently offered aides and former campaign officials for their legal troubles in the Russia investigation (on which he’s unlikely to deliver) — a mere $400,000 to $500,000 — bin Laden managed to launch the American war on terror. He did so with little but a clever game plan, a few fanatical followers, and a remarkably intuitive sense of how this country works. He had those 19 mostly Saudi hijackers, a scattering of supporters elsewhere in the world, and the “training camps” in Afghanistan, but his was a ragged and understaffed movement.  And keep in mind that his sworn enemy was the country that then prided itself on being the last superpower, the final winner of the imperial sweepstakes that had gone on for five centuries until, in 1991, the Soviet Union imploded. The question was: With such limited resources, what kind of self-destructive behavior could he goad a triumphalist Washington into?

Articles

How America Spreads Global Chaos

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Editor’s Note: The day before Haloween it’s traditional to focus on witches and goblins and walking skeletons and other scary things. None of those things can compare with the scare we can get by looking at the role the U.S. has played and plays today in the world–and how much worse it may soon get if the Trump Administration follows through on its threats.  Yet there is also a more nuanced story to tell. As we often say, Tikkun sends out articles and prints articles that we think have important perspectives that are rarely available in the mainstream media–even if we do not necessarily agree with them. Nicholaw Davies (article below) has a lot important facts to bolster his case, and if we look at the US government and its actions, they come out looking rather shabby, brutal, hurtful and destructive.

Articles

The (still) Hidden Injuries of Class

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The (still) Hidden Injuries of Class

by 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 the Democrats and their supporters in the liberal and progressive social change movements are living in fantasy land if they think that the way the Trumpites are exacerbating that inequality gap will be sufficient to win them control of the Congress and the presidency by 2021.  What  most progressive and liberal politicians and movements  miss are the hidden injuries of class that become dramatically intensified when the underlying psychological and spiritual dysfunction of global capitalism interact 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 liberal/left politics focused on providing economic entitlements and political rights to those who had been previously disenfranchised while seeming to ignore or even dismiss as “white privilege” or “male privilege” the ways that many people are in pain. For many, the fact that people of color are more likely to get killed by police than whites or that women face outrageous sexual harassment does not register as a “privilege” to those who have their own forms of suffering, both economic and psychological, which make them feel frustrated with their lives and misunderstood and angry at those who tell them that they are the beneficiaries of a racist and sexist system (which they did not create and which they often feel powerless to change). Sadly, many turn to authoritarian leaders in the hope that their own fears and pain can be alleviated, in part because the liberal and progressive world makes them feel “less than” and disrespected.