Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/18/)
Corporate tax cut propaganda
Jeffrey D. Sachs October 20, 2017
The White House is selling a tax cut designed for the rich as a boost for the working class. Cut taxes on capital, the White House claims, and investors will raise investment, hire more workers, and bid up wages — a.k.a. trickle-down economics.
Seeing and not seeing (through the prism of Noah and the Ark) Reflections on my trip to family in New York – Noach
I’m sitting on a flight back home from New York with my young son. Last night both of us danced the night away at the wedding of my niece. I am still savouring the joy of being with family, and observing the delight of my young child. Yet, my tradition, turns our attention to sadness amid joy. A glass is broken during the Jewish marriage ceremony to remind us of loss 1). Oddly, this sombre gesture is not honoured by a reflective silence, on the contrary, immediately after the crashing noise everyone erupts into joyous exclamations of Mazal Tov!
(Editor’s note: Noam Chomsky at 89 is one of the great gifts to all of us
who seek a world of peace and justice. Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing this with Tikkun magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives and our community of readers. –Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com)
The Trump Presidency
Or How to Further Enrich “The Masters of the Universe”
By Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian
[This interview has been excerpted from Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy, the new book by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian to be published this December.]
David Barsamian: You have spoken about the difference between Trump’s buffoonery, which gets endlessly covered by the media, and the actual policies he is striving to enact, which receive less attention. Do you think he has any coherent economic, political, or international policy goals? What has Trump actually managed to accomplish in his first months in office?
Noam Chomsky: There is a diversionary process under way, perhaps just a natural result of the propensities of the figure at center stage and those doing the work behind the curtains. At one level, Trump’s antics ensure that attention is focused on him, and it makes little difference how.
A lesson from Germany on eradicating a legacy of hate
by Martha Minow
EDU BAYER/THE NEW YORK TIMESA white nationalist carries a Nazi flag during a protest in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 12. By Martha Minow SEPTEMBER 29, 201
What does it take to remove evil and stop hatred? This question has plagued humans throughout centuries, and although there is no simple answer, Germany changed from a pariah state to exemplar of constitutional democracy through the combination of post-World War II criminal trials, reforms of law and media, and investment by new generations who asked their parents persistently, “Where were you during the war?” A crucial element came with the criminal trials, initially through the international military tribunal and then subsequent state-based prosecutions. Seventy years ago, on Sept.
Trump on the Warpath
Jeffrey Sachs || Sep 27, 2017 || Project Syndicate
The US suffers from an arrogance of military power disconnected from today’s geopolitical realities. The US is on this path again, heading for a collision with a nuclear-armed adversary, and it will remain on it unless other countries, other American leaders, and public opinion block the way. NEW YORK – Fifteen years after George W. Bush declared that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea formed “an axis of evil,” Donald Trump, in his maiden address to the United Nations, denounced Iran and North Korea in similarly vitriolic terms. Words have consequences, and Trump’s constitute a dire and immediate threat to global peace, just as Bush’s words did in 2002. Back then, Bush was widely praised for his response to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. It’s easy to rally the public to war, and that was especially true after 9/11.
FIRST DAY of ROSH HASHANAH
TALK BY CHERIE R BROWN
SEPTEMBER 21, 2017
It is an honor for me to be speaking today. When David called me shortly after the events in Charlottesville and asked me to try and say something that could reach people’s hearts, connecting the Torah reading for today to the issue of racism, I was first humbled, and then I totally panicked. The Torah reading is about Sarah telling Abraham to kick out Ishmael and Hagar and God telling Avram to listen to Sarah. It’s about Hagar and Ishmael wandering in the desert, about to die from lack of water and their crying out to God. The Torah reading is about racism; it’s about exile; it’s about nation building; it’s about starvation; and it’s about conflicting narratives. It becomes quickly overwhelming. And the growing list of issues we face today are just like that: they are overwhelming. White supremacists shouting racist and anti Semitic chants. Devastating floods in Texas, India, and Bangladesh. Hurricanes in the Caribbean and Florida and Puerto Rico. Not to mention all the contributing factors from climate change. A proliferation of nuclear weapons. And that doesn’t even begin to address all of the horrific policies of our 45th President. Where do we even begin? Several years ago, I was about to give a keynote speech at the University of Texas in Denton. Right before my talk, the international director of Amnesty International addressed the group. He gave a hard hitting speech about all the horrific human rights violations taking place worldwide. I happened to be in the women’s room right after his talk, and I overheard two young women commiserating with each other, “There are so many awful things going on in the world. After that talk, we are totally depressed. Nothing we do could possibly make a difference. Let’s just go home.” And yet, Rosh Hashanah is calling us, shouting to us to break through our numbness, to hear the sound of the Shofar–to dare to let our hearts break about what is happening all around us. To not just go home. So this morning, I want to try and break through the feelings of helplessness I know we all battle and to offer four specific actions or attitudes on the work on racism that we can each do now.
(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. Similarly, many Americans really know little about the actual history and workings of racism or anti-Semitism in this society. But if you have not been exposed to it directly, have never seen the t.v. series “Roots” or been given a mandatory course on racism, and been taught in your church or school about the way Christianity popularized anti-Semitism for 1700 years, and your family didn’t really understand how these hateful ideas are infused in popular culture, how would you know how pernicious they are? Rather than look down on those who don’t know, the society should be asking “How do we now engage in a massive educational venture for adults as well as for high school students to help them understand about racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and, very important, classism and age-ism?”
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.
Juan Cole argues that the real threat to homeland security isn’t “fringe radicals” in the Middle East but our own environmentally destructive habits.
(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.