Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/23/)
I was among the 100,000 who marched in San Francisco’s Women’s March the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. While enthusiasm for the struggle seemed high, an important question was looming: What’s the strategic plan, as we head into the Trump era?
THE DAY AMERICA KILLED ITSELF
by Abby Caplin
The day America killed itself,
I watched reruns of What’s My Line,
where Dorothy, Bennet, Martin,
and Arlene sat blindfolded, trying to decide
who the mystery guest was. I stared at the Worchestershire sauce
in the fridge thinking,
Of course it has expired. I bought it
years ago, a carbon copy
of petroleum in a bottle.
When America killed itself, the talkers
on TV couldn’t figure what happened
to all their fine-tuning,
all the polls that said
otherwise. But I’ll tell you what happened—
the guy said
the election was rigged,
rigged,
didn’t say how
exactly, but he let the message hang
like a dagger thrown
between a woman’s legs, and then
he won.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama spent the last months of his term leading a coalition in Syria and Iraq that killed hundreds of civilians. As liberals mourn the end of the Barack Obama administration, a monitoring group reported that the U.S.-led coalition killed 450 or more civilians in Syria and Iraq since October. 70% Spike in Civilian Deaths by US-Led Coalition in Syria, Iraq
“With reported fatalities from coalition strikes at record levels we would have expected significant media engagement,” said Chris Woods, director of Airwars, a London-based monitoring group that has been tallying the death toll of coalition strikes by compiling official and local reports. “Instead, anything beyond local reporting has been almost non-existent.”
The count begins from and largely includes casualties from the intense operation in Mosul, which the U.N. says is the largest such offensive since World War II. Most of the rest of the remaining deaths are from the Raqqa governorate but do not include fatalities from the Iraqi Security Forces or Air Force.
Editor’s note: This was written after the election in November but before we knew with whom Trump would surround himself in his Cabinet and key government positions. So Eisenstein’s optimism about what might happen can be forgiven. But much of what he says is nevertheless quite important, and a useful framework for understanding the limitations of what the liberals seemed to be offering the country as the alternative to Trump. –Rabbi Michael Lerner RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com
http://charleseisenstein.net/hategriefandanewstory/
The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story
We’ve got to stop acting out hate. There is no less of it in the liberal media than there is in the right-wing media.
Last week, J Street commissioned a new poll of Israeli public opinion, conducted by a respected Israeli pollster. The poll posed a series of questions about Israelis’ views on the Obama administration and US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. We wanted to explain for you why we felt it was important for us to launch this poll right now, and to lift up some of its topline findings. Following the flurry of hotly debated activity by the US and the UN in the past month, we wanted to take the political temperature of Israelis on key questions related to the conflict and the peace process. Secretary Kerry’s speech, which laid down an important marker for the Obama administration’s eight years of work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, followed close on the heels of the administration’s abstention on UNSC Resolution 2334.
Editor’s note:
We are proud to announce that Professor Henry A. Giroux has just joined Tikkun’s editorial board as a Contributing Editor. You can read his amazing article on education at https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/defending-educators-in-an-age-of-neoliberal-tyranny-2 (it appears in the Fall, 2016 issue of Tikkun magazine). We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are building the kind of broad based movement that Giroux calls for in this article, though we call it a movement for a world of love and justice (read about it at www.tikkun.org/covenant) and put great emphasis on our commitment to nonviolence because the means must be as ethical as the ends we seek. But nonviolence does not mean passivity, as MLK jr demonstrated so powerfully in the 1960s. — Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
by Henry A. Giroux
The United States stands at the endpoint of a long series of attacks on democracy, and the choices faced by the American public today point to the divide between those who are committed to democracy and those who are not.
Editor’s note: Having just returned (Monday, Jan. 16, 2016) from participating in a demonstration and march in Oakland, Ca. today in honor of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr, I was glad to receive this submission to Tikkun (below) by African American studies professor (and Tikkun magazine author) Obery Hendricks. It is an important counter to the kind of rhetoric and tone I heard at today’s demonstration. At the rally before the march began I heard one of the M.C.s ask the crowd to repeat “we will win by ANY MEANS NECESSARY” — a slogan I first heard from the Black Panther Party in 1968 — in clear attempt to repudiate King’s message both then and now about how to fight racism.
Editor’s Note: Some of us are reacting to Trump as though he had emerged from nowhere with his reactionary agenda. Actually, the movement that came to his aid has been seeking for several decades to undo much of the liberal and progressive accomplishments of the past 80-some years. And they’ve often succeeded, in part thanks to liberals in Congress who confirmed for the Supreme Court seats truly reactionary justices appointed by Republican presidents (lacking the backbone to do what Republicans did to Obama’s appointment to replace Scalia, namely refusing to even consider those appointments even when the Democrats had majorities in the Senate). But part of that success has come from the rest of us shrugging our shoulders at the march toward reaction that has been happening in the U,.S. at the national level these past several decades, immersed as we’ve been in “local organizing” without any national strategy and often in “silos” of activism (as in “don’t try to get me involved in some larger transformation of the U.S.–I’ve got this one issue and I’m working on it locally, and I don’t want to get involved in some ideology, because we have to be realistic and pragmatic and all we can accomplish is x in my localiity”).
Editor’s Note: As is my custom in many of the articles I put up on this section of the website, I try to provide you with analyses that you are not likely to read in the mainstream media. In this case, I disagree with the tone and some of the substance both of the introduction by one person and the analysis of the other. In my own time, I’ll try to present a more balanced assessment of the Obama presidency. Yet there are important points mixed in with exaggerations in what is written below, so despite its being framed in utlra-leftie discourse which is at points really over the top, I thought I’d share it with you. But please remember, I DID NOT WRITE THIS–I’m just bringing it to your attention!
I found the following on the internet, do not know who authored it, but do believe that it is accurate in reporting who voted against lowering costs for prescription medications by allowing them to be brought in from Canada which offers the very same drugs we get, but at a substantially lower cost. That’s one advantage Canadians get by having their government rather than the market shape their health care system. It could have been ours had President Obama, in his first two years with a Democratic Congress, fought for “Medicare for All,” simply taking the existing system that works well for the elderly, and extending it to everyone else, plus insisting on getting lower costs for medications by allowing us to import the lower priced medications from Canada. But this is only one of a dozen areas in which he capitulated to the capitalist elites without even engaging in a public struggle for a single day. PAY ATTENTION: this is not a matter only of different philosophical beliefs about free markets–because many people in the U.S. are too poor to afford the medications that they need while big Pharma gets away with murder (literally) in putting profits before people.
Beginning in 1979 in Seattle, WA, Jim Levitt expertly fabricated custom aircraft parts and tools, helping make the Boeing Company one of the most successful businesses in the world. But in 2013, corporate executives issued a threat: They demanded that Levitt and his fellow machinists surrender their pensions, and that Washington State political leaders hand over a record $8.7 billion in tax benefits. In exchange the company promised to keep production jobs in-state. The Democratic governor of Washington, along with virtually the entire political establishment, caved in to the blackmail. So did Levitt’s international union leadership – they had bargained the deal secretly with the company.
By Jonathan Rosenblum
Beginning in 1979 in Seattle, WA, Jim Levitt expertly fabricated custom aircraft parts and tools, helping make the Boeing Company one of the most successful businesses in the world. But in 2013, corporate executives issued a threat: They demanded that Levitt and his fellow machinists surrender their pensions, and that Washington State political leaders hand over a record $8.7 billion in tax benefits. In exchange the company promised to keep production jobs in-state. The Democratic governor of Washington, along with virtually the entire political establishment, caved in to the blackmail. So did Levitt’s international union leadership – they had bargained the deal secretly with the company.
Editor’s Note: Russia’s dictatorship is a far cry from the hopes that the Russian people had when they overthrew their communist regime and bought into the neo-liberal fantasies sold to them by global capitalism. The subsequent history has led many Russians to regret that they didn’t try to replace an oppressive oligarchy claiming to be communist with a democratic socialism instead of a new capitalist dictatorship. Yet none of that is reason to dismiss Russia’s legitimate fears about NATO encirclement and the neo-con thirst for yet more wars to advance an imperialist agenda to serve global capitalist economic expansionism. Russia’s disgraceful and murderous policies in Syria are good reason to hope that Putin, Assad and their allies should be brought to justice for crimes against humanity, but that is not a good reason for the US and Nato to take steps which might accidentally lead the U.S. into a nuclear war with Russia–a point that led some otherwise decent people to not want to support Hillary Clinton who represented the side of the Democratic Party more aligned with those imperial interests than with the aspiration of many Americans to not be involved in more wars. But those forces are just as strong in the Republican Party, so there are many who fear the worst as Obama leaves office by further stroking tensions with Russia (if he was so concerned about the “integrity” of our democratic voting system he should have begun a campaign as soon as he was elected in 2008 for a constitutional amendment that would have replaced the electoral system with a direct vote for Congress and that would have incorporated the ESRA’s plan to ban all money from elections except public funding, and he should have insisted that the 2016 election was not valid until all those who had been prevented from voting in the racist states had been allowed to vote–and certainly should have made known to the American people what the Russians were suspected of doing in September when he learned about it, rather than let their alleged manipulation of the elections stand).
Editor’s note: here is another important article from our media ally tomdispacth.com and the introduction is written by its editor Tom Engelhardt Sadly, the Left can point out the problems, but has no serious strategy to change the consciousness of Americans so that they might not go further down the road toward a self-destructive society. We at Tikkun have that strategy–a plan that could split the Right, because not all of those who moved in that direction in 2016 are actually racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, antiSemites, or otherwise deranged. Many, in fact, are not any of these things. But to reach them, we need a significant change in the culture and consciousness of the Left. We have the strategy for how to do that.
Taking on Trump
By Ted Glick
There is only one way that I can see Trump succeeding with his outrageous efforts—such as his Cabinet nominations–to turn back the clock to the 50’s, or further: if most of us who supported the Bernie movement of 2015-2016 shut up, take no action, allow this pathological liar to do what he wants to do without any serious resistance.
I can’t see that happening, I really can’t. There are too many of us. 15 million voted for Bernie in the primaries, and there are hundreds of thousands of us, at least, probably more like millions, who, irrespective of Bernie, see ourselves as activists for a better society, a new world, a more just, peaceful and environmentally sustainable future.
I know that Bernie isn’t shutting up.