Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/45/)
It was very hard to come to grips with the fact that on the third anniversary of the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution, tens of thousands of Egyptians were chanting nationalist slogans while waving photos, placards, banners and posters of General Abdel Fattah El-Sissi, exhibiting a kind of hero worship and cult of personality that was unimaginable in the Mubarak era.
One of the foci of the interfaith and atheist or secular humanist welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives (you DO NOT have to be religious or believe in God to be a spiritual progressive) is to build consciousness changing groups in every profession. The goal: to help professionals envision what their profession could look like if the “bottom line” in their profession was not making more money and accumulating more power, but was instead at least equally seeking to maximize through the practice of their profession the fostering of human beings who gave priority to building a world based on love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical behavior and ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe. What might that look like? I developed some initial ideas on this in my book in 2000 called Spirit Matters. Below, I reprint my chapter on a Transformative Medicine to give you an idea of what kind of visioning we have in mind.
The Stone That Brings Down Goliath? Richmond and Eminent Domain
Tuesday, 04 March 2014 10:09By Ellen Brown,
Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, California, in front of a boarded-up house in Richmond, December 20, 2013. Many Richmond residents owe more money on their houses than their houses are worth, but McLaughlin’s plan to use of eminent domain to prevent foreclosures has faced significant opposition. (Photo: Jim Wilson / The New York Times)
In a nearly $13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in November 2013, JPMorganChase admitted that it, along with every other large US bank, had engaged in mortgage fraud as a routine business practice, sowing the seeds of the mortgage meltdown. JPMorgan and other megabanks have now been caught in over a dozen major frauds, including LIBOR-rigging and bid-rigging; yet no prominent banker has gone to jail.
Editor’s Note from Rabbi Michael Lerner:
One thing I’m sure of is that media accounts available in the United States are so tainted by anti-Russia and U.S. nationalist and capitalist interests that we have no idea of what is really happening in Ukraine. It is clear that the U.S. involvement is not “out of the blue,” but part of an ongoing campaign to increase NATO power and Western economic penetration of the countries surrounding Russia, stimulating for some Russians reminders of the previous trauma of being attacked by the Nazis and others through the Ukraine, where pro-fascist, anti-communist and anti-Semitic sentiments ran strong and welcomed foreign interventions. While we at Tikkun have some doubts about parts of the analyses by Robert Parry and Norman Solomon presented below, I am sharing them because they have the advantage of momentarily challenging the dominant discourse, though in ways that represent its own peculiar perspective. And they do have some plausibility—we know that much of the neo-con perspective on the world is based on an amalgam to two somewhat different commitments that have been welded together:
the neo-cons whose primary goal is to maintain and expand the U.S. economic and political empire and
the neo-cons whose primary goal is to protect Israel and destroy all of its potential enemies–a list that grows longer and longer as long as Israel retains its dominance over the Palestinian people and denies them fundamental human rights. These two goals come together as long as the United States is perceived by the neo-cons as the primary and sole reliable ally of Israel, and all others are suspected of being willing to see Israel destroyed.
[Editor’s Note: Avnery doesn’t deal with another important aspect of Germans’ continuing feelings of guilt for what their Nazi past did to the world and to the Jewish people: the way that that guilt keeps Germany from actually doing what would be in the Jewish people’s best interest, namely putting economic and political pressure to end the Occupation and reconcile with the Palestinian people. Similarly, the guilt Christians feel for 2000 years of indoctrinating the world with hatred of Jews is now dealt with by refusing to do the one thing that would be of greatest service to the Jewish people: namely, pushing Israel toward reconciliation with the Palestinian people. So this is how guilt actually works against the goodness of people in the Christian Church and in the new generations of Germans–by condemning them to policies that are substantively bad for the Jewish people by being collaborators with Israel’s oppressive policies toward Palestinians. Yet the guilt feelings are legitimate in both cases, only they play out in ways that are bad for the Jews, because it is bad for the Jews to be identified with policies of a nation state that claims to be “THE Jewish State” while acting against Jewish values in its treatment of “the other.” Oy.
It’s time to join in a campaign to Move Our Money/Protect Our Planet—a spiritually rooted, strategically focused plan of action on the climate crisis!
By championing this detailed peace plan, the United States could change the psychodynamics of the struggle between Israel and Palestine and make negotiations fruitful.
by Frederick Douglas, Byron Williams, and Jeannine Bell
How can we create powerful, cross-race movements for change? A child of the Civil Rights Movement wrestles with the idea of allyship.
Since the 1960s, efforts at coalition building and solidarity work between Jewish and Black communities have suffered and never reached the pinnacle that was reached during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. In 2013, the lack of deep and abiding connections between Black and Jewish activists became apparent in the disparate responses from Jewish communities to the events surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. To reinvigorate a coalition among blacks and Jews we need to forge deeper ties across racial lines.
Meeting the family of the man who bombed the Hebrew University cafeteria in Jerusalem was the first step toward healing from the traumatic attack.
I have to admit: I enjoyed {title}Atlas Shrugged{/title}. Something about it resonated, even for me, on the far opposite end of the political and religious spectrum.
by Joel Magnuson, Lester R. Brown, and James Gustave Speth
I call this Love’s Rebellion—a refusal to accept the ethos of materialism and selfishness as the ultimate truth of our lives, an insistence on seeing the goodness in others, and a determination to replace “power over” with caring for each other and the earth! It’s time now to give Love’s Rebellion a political platform. And to make that happen, we need your help to push these issues into the public sphere. The most effective way to help introduce a spiritual progressive voice is for you to build a caucus in your union, professional organization, church, synagogue, mosque, political party, or run for some sort of office.
When gender-based violence occurs in the Global South, how should feminists in the Global North respond?