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.
Editorials & Actions
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.
Editorials & Actions
Decoding the Federal Budget by Jeffrey Sachs
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Editor’s Note: So many people avoid thinking about the federal budget because they didn’t do so well in math in high school and so thinking about it brings up feelings of inadequacy. Others avoid it because the details can become so boring and take so much energy. But read this one article by Jeffrey Sachs and you’ll see that a. you CAN understand it, and b. that it is crucial to understand to know what is really going on in American politics. Of course, what is missing so far is a strategy for how to change all this–but that is the focus of our “What Next for Progressives After the Elections?” day at the Tikkun 30th anniversary conference and celebration (more details at www.tikkun.org/30thcelebration Please do read this article below.
Editorials & Actions
Now What? After the Presidential Election – The Tikkun Strategy Conference and 30th Anniversary Celebration in Berkeley, Ca. Nov. 12 and 13
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Click here to register. Now What—After the Election? Join Us for Tikkun’s Strategy Conference and 30th Anniversary Celebration
November 12th and 13th in Berkeley, CA (Co-Sponsered by the Metta Center for Nonviolence)!
What: A two-day strategy conference for liberals and progressives about what direction the left should take after the results of the November election and a ceremony on Sunday to give out the Tikkun Award to a few of the many people whose lives are embodying Tikkun’s message of global healing and transformation. This year’s awards feature noted peace activist and singer Holly Near, award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone (most recently, the new movie “Snowden”), Rabbi Arik Ascherman (for 21 years chair of Rabbis for Human Rights), Stanford history professor and editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Clayborne Carson, cultural anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Aaron Davidman (creator of “Wrestling with Jerusalem”), Fania E. Davis (co-founder and executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth), and more!
Editorials & Actions
Bombs Åway: The Continuing Impact of 9/11
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Bombs Away!
Their Precision Weaponry and Ours
By Tom Engelhardt Thanks to TomDispatch.com our ally
On the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda launched its four-plane air force against the United States. On board were its precision weapons: 19 suicidal hijackers. One of those planes, thanks to the resistance of its passengers, crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The other three hit their targets — the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. — with the kind of “precision” we now associate with the laser-guided weaponry of the U.S. Air Force. From its opening salvo, in other words, this conflict has been an air war. With its 75% success rate, al-Qaeda’s 9/11 mission was a historic triumph, accurately striking three out of what assumedly were its four chosen targets. (Though no one knows just where that plane in Pennsylvania was heading, undoubtedly it was either the Capitol or the White House to complete the taking out of the icons of American financial, military, and political power.) In the process, almost 3,000 people who had no idea they were in the bombsights of an obscure movement on the other side of the planet were slaughtered.
Editorials & Actions
Interview with Jill Stein, Green Party Candidate for U.S. President
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Conducted by Tikkun Editor Rabbi Michael Lerner and Tikkun Managing Editor Ari Bloomekatz in August, 2016. __
JILL STEIN
I’m feeling so much appreciation for your work here as I look over some of your website and some of the really important things you’ve been talking about forever.
RABBI LERNER
Thanks you, Jill. As you know, Tikkun is a 501-c-3 nonprofit, and contributions to make Tikkun able to continue to function are tax-deductible. So we are not allowed by IRS rules to endorse a candidate or be identified with a candidate or, a political party.
Articles
5 Things the Sanders Revolution is Not
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Today Globalism has outsourced the factory proletariat. Rust belt cities and towns are full of former factory proletarians who are no longer led by trade unions and can be induced to vote for anyone on the right or left who speaks to their economic plight or even to their resentments. Trade unions are still prominent in the public sector as defenders of the alimentary needs of all wage workers, but just as often they are called upon to defend professional standards, for example in education, or the public stake in health care, pensions, and the commons in general. The political revolution is not an attempt to segregate them politically but to join them to the population as a whole to promote the public interest.
Articles
What would an Economy for the Common Good look like?
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This concept has never, to our knowledge, been scientifically proven. People just assume it to be true. Research has shown, however, that cooperation, not competition, is much more effective in terms of motivation, a key element regarding business innovation and efficiency(2). Competition does, of course, motivate people and market capitalism has proven this, but it motivates them in very problematic ways. Cooperation motivates people through successful relationships, recognition, esteem, mutual goals and mutual achievements.
Editorials & Actions
Democrats’ Platform Hawkish on Foreign Policy by Stephen Zunes
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“Most Progressive Dem Platform in History” Hawkish on Foreign Policy
Posted: July 27, 2016
Stephen Zunes
Image by Joeff Davis
The Democratic Party platform may indeed be, as some have proclaimed, the “most progressive” in the history of the party—at least on various important domestic issues. But some of its foreign policy planks reflect a disturbingly hawkish worldview consistent with those of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Declaring that “we must defeat ISIS, al-Qaeda and their affiliates,” the platform calls for the United States and its allies to “destroy ISIS” strongholds in Iraq and Syria. There is no acknowledgement that these strongholds are in heavily populated urban areas, thereby risking large-scale civilian casualties, and no mention that the rise of these extremist organizations are a direct consequence of previous U.S. military interventions in the region. Regarding Iran, while there are many legitimate criticisms of that country’s reactionary regime, the platform appears to go overboard with its accusations, such as the claim that “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” Many analysts would give that designation to Saudi Arabia, with whom the platform says the U.S. should “strengthen its security cooperation.”
It also says the party will “push back” against Iran’s “support for terrorist groups like Hamas.” While there was a brief period of some limited past Iranian support of that Palestinian Islamist organization, there is no apparent evidence that it continues.
Editorials & Actions
What Are We Doing in Syria by Jeffrey Sachs
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America’s True Role in Syria
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in Ankara with Turkish President Erdogan last month. (Photo: Turkish Govt/via Twitter)
Syria’s civil war is the most dangerous and destructive crisis on the planet. Since early 2011, hundreds of thousands have died; around ten million Syrians have been displaced; Europe has been convulsed with Islamic State (ISIS) terror and the political fallout of refugees; and the United States and its NATO allies have more than once come perilously close to direct confrontation with Russia. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama has greatly compounded the dangers by hiding the US role in Syria from the American people and from world opinion. An end to the Syrian war requires an honest accounting by the US of its ongoing, often secretive role in the Syrian conflict since 2011, including who is funding, arming, training, and abetting the various sides. Such exposure would help bring to an end many countries’ reckless actions.
Home Page Featured
An Exchange Between Wendy Elisheva Somerson and Yotam Marom on Anti-Semitism in the Left and the Jewish Left
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Wendy Elisheva Somerson in response to an article Tikkun published on our website a week ago written by Yotam Marom titled Toward the Next Jewish Rebellion: Facing Anti-Semitism and Assimilation in the Movement. And a response from Yotam Marom to Somerson.
Home Page Featured
30th Anniversary Special Editorial: Tikkun at 30
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Ok, I’ll admit it — I am proud of our role as a prophetic voice for peace, love, environmental sanity, social transformation, and unabashedly utopian aspirations for the world that can be. Over these past thirty years Tikkun has been a platform for young writers to emerge as public intellectuals and for established thinkers and academics to posit groundbreaking philosophies and radical ideas. It has also been a stage for novelists and poets to flex their minds and for spiritual progressives and social change activists to urge self-reflection, inner psychological and spiritual healing, and direct action. Our goal of tikkun olam — the healing and transformation of the world — is far from having been achieved (duh!). But the Tikkun community has made some important contributions along the way, including a perspective on the psychodynamics of American politics which, had it been adopted by liberals and progressives, might have spared us some of the most troubling features of American politics in 2016.
Articles
War or Peace: The Essential Question Before Voters on November 8th
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In the 1992 presidential election, the campaign team of Bill Clinton had the remarkable insight to simplify the choice before the American electorate in November, encapsulating the whole thought process in the phrase “it’s the economy, stupid.” Following this advice, voters ignored the foreign policy triumphs of President George H. W. Bush’s administration, including the recently won war against Iraq to liberate occupied Kuwait, and the slightly more remote “victory” in the Cold War, which Bush recalled to the nation in the forlorn hope of eliciting gratitude. Indeed, going into the elections, the economy was anemic, for cyclical reasons, and it was not to the incumbent’s advantage that this fact be highlighted.
Editorials & Actions
The Mess in Syria by Robert F. Kennedy , Jr. & response by Stephen Zunes
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Ediotr’s Note; We found this analysis of why Western powers got involved in the Syrian war in EcoWatch. We then asked Tikkun contributing editor Stephen Zunes for his response. Both are printed below. One thing stands out for us: though Obama assured me when he met with me in 2006 that he would support Tikkun’s proposed Global Marshall Plan (www.tikkun.org/gmp), once elected he allowed the militarists to frame the alternatives in foreign policy in ways that ignored the impact a Strategy of Generosity could have had in preventing the emergence of ISIS (ISIL or The Islamic State) and hence the muddying of the lines between a popular democratic opposition to the Assad regime and a Sunni struggle to achieve dominance through meeting the brutality of Syrian Prime President Assad’s regime with even greater brutality. The nonviolent generosity approach to the region, had it been a central part of Obama’s agenda in his first two years in office when he had a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, could have precluded the rise of ISIS and other Sunni extremist groups and made it easier for the democractic opposition in Syria to rally the majority of their own country against the human rights violating regime of Assad in Syria.
Editorials & Actions
Glenn Greenwald on Why the Saudi Regime and Other Gulf Tyrannies Donate Millions to the Clinton Foundation
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Why Did the Saudi Regime and Other Gulf Tyrannies Donate Millions to the Clinton Foundation? By Glenn Greenwald [ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/staff/glenn-greenwald/]
Aug. 25 2016, 7:42 a.m.
As the numerous and obvious ethical conflicts surrounding the Clinton Foundation receive more media scrutiny, the tactic of Clinton-loyal journalists is to highlight the charitable work done by the foundation, and then insinuate — or even outright state — that anyone raising these questions is opposed to its charity. James Carville announced [ http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/james-carville-clinton-foundation-attacks-227305 ] that those who criticize the foundation are “going to hell.” Other Clinton loyalists insinuated that Clinton Foundation critics are indifferent to the lives of HIV-positive babies[ https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/768556490202505216 ] or are anti-gay bigots [ https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/768556697120047104 ].