Why is the Education Department not treating the exponentially increasing student loan debt and astonishingly high default rates as a national crisis?
US Politics
Oriental (Mizrachi) Israelis and the Coming Israeli Elections
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Uri Avnery on Oriental Jews in Israel and The Coming Elections
January 10, 2015
Half of Shas
THE SHAS party has split into two. Opinion polls show that both parts are hovering around the 3.12% threshold which is now necessary for entering the Knesset, after the minimum was raised by the last Knesset.
Many people in Israel would be glad if both parts do not make it, and Shas would disappear once and for all from our political landscape.
Not I.
SHAS IS the party of oriental orthodox Jewish Israelis. It is debatable whether it is foremost orthodox or foremost oriental. I believe that the oriental part of its outlook is far more important. (The term “oriental” needs some explanation.
Articles
The Demon in Darren Wilson’s Head
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The actions of police officers aren’t supposed to be governed by fear. But Darren Wilson’s were. Wilson’s actions, however, weren’t “his actions,” but rather an outcropping of what theologian Sarah Drummond aptly calls “an epigenetic, cellular memory of loss and its resultant need for a scapegoat.”
Articles
Jewish Education During the Nazis as Spiritual Resistance
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“Somehow Nazism and Martin Buber worked together to give a lot of us a much deeper feeling for what Judaism offers.”
Activism
Media Justice Is Social Justice: Why the Comcast-Time Warner Merger Matters
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Why does net neutrality matter? Because we’re treating a lifeline to the American economy and a lifeline for communities that need to organize as if it was just about profit, rather than as the essential human right that it is.
Articles
Is It Right to Compare Ferguson to Gaza? Reflections from a Jewish Protester
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I say to many of my American Jewish colleagues who have justifiably marched and even been arrested protesting the death of Eric Garner; where are you when similar injustices occur against Palestinians like him all the time? Where were you when you saw similar acts of violence in Five Broken Cameras?
Editorials & Actions
The Year of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey Sachs
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The Year of Sustainable Development
by Jeffrey Sachs December 9, 2014
NEW YORK – The year 2015 will be our generation’s greatest opportunity to move the world toward sustainable development. Three high-level negotiations between July and December can reshape the global development agenda, and give an important push to vital changes in the workings of the global economy. With United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call to action in his report “The Road to Dignity,” the Year of Sustainable Development has begun. In July 2015, world leaders will meet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to chart reforms of the global financial system. In September 2015, they will meet again to approve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide national and global policies to 2030.
Editorials & Actions
Invite to “Reclaim America–Strategy Conference” Dec. 14
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From Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org, the Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org, and the Metta Center for Non-violence
The new Congress is going to be a catastrophe for the environment and for those most dependent on everything from social security, safety and health protections for our food and work places, safety for our personal deposits in banks and financial institutions and Obamacare to social programs that provide some minimal protections from the worst impact of the competitive marketplace, not only for the poor and the powerless, but also for most of us in the middle class. That’s one reason it’s so important for you to come and invite everyone you know to a 6 hour strategy conference aimed at developing strategy for the years ahead (and if you know anyone in the media, contact them too and ask them to make sure this event gets covered–it’s a rare public confrontation by liberals and progressives of the need to rethink our direction, so it’s newsworthy though media people hate to “work” on Sunday). You’ve probably been at many meetings focused on “what’s wrong,” but this one is focused on “what we can do to change the dynamics in American society,” in short, strategizing in place of whining and blaming everyone else for why we are not winning. After the 2014 elections and facing a Congress determined to dismantle environmental protections and health and social benefits for middle income Americans and the poor in 2015-2016,
it’s critical that ethically sensitive people develop a strategy to:
RECLAIM AMERICA
YOU ARE INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN
A Town Hall Meeting & Strategy Discussion
Sunday December 14, 1 p.m.
At the University of San Francisco McLaren Hall
(Golden Gate Ave near Roselyn Terrace)
(If you can’t come, would you organize a similar event in your area–and some of us might be available to come to speak. For more info: cat@spiritualprogressives.org)
Among the presenters at our strategy conference:
Marianne Williamson Author: Healing the Soul of America, A Return to Love, and Imagine What America Could Be in the 21st Century
George Lakoff Prof of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, author of Don’t Think of an Elephant and Moral Politics,
Rabbi Michael Lerner Editor of Tikkun, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue, Author: The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right and Spirit Matters,
Matthew Fox Liberation Theologian, Author of Original Blessing, and The Coming of the Cosmic Christ
Cat Zavis Attorney, Executive Director, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and teacher of Empathic Communication
Other speakers that day include: Reginald W. Lyles (from Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland former advisor to Assemblyman Sandre Swanson), liberation theologian Jorge Aquino (of the Theology and Religious Studies Dept. of USF), Oakland city council chair Rebecca Kaplan and more.
Editorials & Actions
Reclaim America Conference Dec. 14
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After the 2014 Elections and Facing a Congress determined to dismantle environmental, health and social benefits for middle income Americans and the poor in 2015-2016
It’s critical that ethically sensitive people develop a strategy to:
RECLAIM AMERICA YOU ARE INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN
A Town Hall Meeting & Strategy Discussion
Sunday December 14, 1 p.m.
At the University of San Francisco McLaren Hall
(Golden Gate Ave near Roselyn Terrace)
Among the presenters at our strategy conference:
Mathew Fox Liberation Theologian, Author of Original Blessing, and The Coming of the Cosmic Christ
Rebecca Kaplan Oakland City Council President,
George Lakoff Prof of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, author of Don’t Think of an Elephant and Moral Politics,
Rabbi Michael Lerner Editor of Tikkun, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue, Author: The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right and Spirit Matters,
Marianne Williamson, author: Healing the Soul of America, A Return to Love, and Imagine What America Could Be in the 21st Century, ,
Cat Zavis Attorney, Executive Director, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and teacher of Empathic Communication
And more. (Our speakers will start the discussion, but the most important person to be there is YOU). Pre-registration at: spiritualprogressives.org/reclaimAmerica
The Congress that will shape America in the next two years is committed to defunding government so that it cannot enforce the minimal environmental protections currently in place, provide health care coverage for those who need it,so that it, provide safety and health protection for our food or for our work places, or protect the old, the young, the vulnerable—while at the same time that Congress will seek to decrease still further the taxes on the super-rich and the corporations they own and control. This is an ethical and spiritual and religious crisis of monumental proportions—and calls for secular liberals and progressives to join with spiritual or religious activists to work together to develop strategies to save our planet earth and protect middle income and working people and the unemployed from the assaults of the selfish. That’s why we, spiritual progressives of every variant (including atheists and secular humanists as well as people in every religious community) must now take action to present a different worldview, one based on the Biblical call to “love our neighbor” but also “love the stranger (the Other/the powerless)., to pursue justice and peace.
Editorials & Actions
After Ferguson
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Repetitive Motion Disorder: Black Reality and White Denial in America
by Tim Wise
I suppose there is no longer much point in debating the facts surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown. First, because Officer Darren Wilson has been cleared by a grand jury, and even the collective brilliance of a thousand bloggers pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in his version of events that August day won’t result in a different outcome. And second, because Wilson’s guilt or innocence was always somewhat secondary to the larger issue: namely, the issue of this gigantic national inkblot staring us in the face, and what we see when we look at it—and more to the point, why? Because it is a kind of racial Rorschach (is it not?) into which each of these cases—not just Brown but all the others, from Trayvon Martin to Sean Bell to Patrick Dorismond to Aswan Watson and beyond—inevitably and without fail morph. That we see such different things when we look upon them must mean something.
Editorials & Actions
Ferguson and American Racism After the Killer of Michael Brown Goes Free
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This is a sad day. The grand jury’s decision is yet another sign that all of America’s sons’ lives are not yet valued equally in the eyes of our courts. All of America’s fathers, mothers and children should stay outraged and in motion for progress until we are finally what we say we are: One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All. We must finally ensure police can be held accountable for killing unarmed civilians. We must win national standards for both the use of force and use of force training.
Editorials & Actions
U.S. Misguided Policy Assumptions Out of Touch With the World’s Reality
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5 Bedrock Washington Assumptions That Are Hot Air
by Andrew Bacevich
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
“Iraq no longer exists.” My young friend M, sipping a cappuccino, is deadly serious. We are sitting in a scruffy restaurant across the street from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It’s been years since we’ve last seen each another. It may be years before our paths cross again. As if to drive his point home, M repeats himself: “Iraq just doesn’t exist.”
His is an opinion grounded in experience. As an enlisted soldier, he completed two Iraq tours, serving as a member of a rifle company, before and during the famous Petraeus “surge.” After separating from the Army, he went on to graduate school where he is now writing a dissertation on insurgencies. Choosing the American war in Iraq as one of his cases, M has returned there to continue his research. Indeed, he was heading back again that very evening. As a researcher, his perch provides him with an excellent vantage point for taking stock of the ongoing crisis, now that the Islamic State, or IS, has made it impossible for Americans to sustain the pretense that the Iraq War ever ended.
Editorials & Actions
China Overtakes the US as World’s Largest Economy
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China’s New Global Leadership
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
The biggest economic news of the year came almost without notice: China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy, according to the scorekeepers at the International Monetary Fund. And, while China’s geopolitical status is rising rapidly, alongside its economic might, the US continues to squander its global leadership, owing to the unchecked greed of its political and economic elites and the self-made trap of perpetual war in the Middle East. According to the IMF, China’s GDP will be $17.6 trillion in 2014, outstripping US output of $17.4 trillion. Of course, because China’s population is more than four times larger, its per capita GDP, at $12,900, is still less than a quarter of the $54,700 recorded in the US, which highlights America’s much higher living standards. China’s rise is momentous, but it also signifies a return.
Editorials & Actions
Reclaim America after 2014 elections–Please come to our conference Dec. 14th
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After the 2014 Elections and Facing a Congress determined to dismantle environmental, health and social benefits for middle income Americans and the poor in 2015-2016
It’s critical that ethically sensitive people develop a strategy to:
RECLAIM AMERICA
You, dear reader, are invited to:
A Town Hall Meeting & Strategy Discussion
Sunday December 14, 1 p.m.
At the University of San Francisco McLaren Hall
(Golden Gate Ave near Roselyn Terrace)
Among the presenters at our strategy conference:
Mathew Fox Liberation Theologian, Author of Original Blessing, and The Coming of the Cosmic Christ
Rebecca Kaplan Oakland City Council President,
George Lakoff Prof of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, author of Don’t Think of an Elephant and Moral Politics,
Rabbi Michael Lerner Editor of Tikkun, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue, Author: The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right and Spirit Matters,
Marianne Williamson, author: Healing the Soul of America, A Return to Love, and Imagine What America Could Be in the 21st Century, ,
Cat Zavis Attorney, Executive Director, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and teacher of Empathic Communication
And more. (Our speakers will start the discussion, but the most important person to be there is YOU). Pre-registration at: spiritualprogressives.org/reclaimAmerica
The Congress that will shape America in the next two years is committed to defunding government so that it cannot enforce the minimal environmental protections currently in place, provide health care coverage for those who need it,so that it, provide safety and health protection for our food or for our work places, or protect the old, the young, the vulnerable—while at the same time that Congress will seek to decrease still further the taxes on the super-rich and the corporations they own and control. This is an ethical and spiritual and religious crisis of monumental proportions—and calls for secular liberals and progressives to join with spiritual or religious activists to work together to develop strategies to save our planet earth and protect middle income and working people and the unemployed from the assaults of the selfish. That’s why we, spiritual progressives of every variant (including atheists and secular humanists as well as people in every religious community) must now take action to present a different worldview, one based on the Biblical call to “love our neighbor” but also “love the stranger (the Other/the powerless)., to pursue justice and peace.
Articles
Why the Right Keeps Winning and the Left Keeps Losing
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Why does the Right keep winning in American politics, sometimes through electoral victories, sometimes by having the Democrats and others on the Left adopt what were traditionally right-wing policies and perspectives?