Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/66/)
When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s documentary A Lot Like You premier at the Seattle International Film Festival this year, one of my first responses to this moving and complex film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. The film brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context.
Over the last ten years, New York firefighters have been lionized, demonized, and everything in between. Often the reality of the vulnerable, emotional individuals under the fire hats gets lost. Time and again, firefighters’ stories have been sensationalized by the media or appropriated by conservative groups to bolster calls for war. But a deeper look at the experience of New York City firefighters brings us back to a core truth: that we are all vulnerable, scared, hurting people, and what we need to heal is not violence but a renewed sense of our interconnection.
Published in the New York Times by Niel MacFarquhar:
UNITED NATIONS — The global economy faces a decade-long
stagnation because governments are pursuing deficit cuts
and other austerity measures rather than providing the
needed stimulus packages, said a United Nations economic
report released Tuesday. Instead of new regulation of the financial system to
address the problems that helped bring on the recession in
2007-8, governments in the United States and Europe are
trying to woo the very speculators who helped cause the
problem, said the report by the Geneva-based United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which is
known by its acronym, Unctad. “Those who support fiscal tightening argue that it is
indispensable for restoring the confidence of financial
markets, which is perceived as key to economic recovery,”
the report said. “This is despite the almost universal recognition that the
crisis was the result of financial market failure in the
first place.” Read the rest of the article here.
Tuesday 30 August 2011
Lessons and False Lessons From Libya
by Stephen Zunes, Truthout | News Analysis
Rebels celebrate outside Col. Moammar Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli, Libya, August 29, 2011. Residents returning to their homes have found that many have been heavily damaged by gunfire after they were used as fighting positions during the rebellion. (Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)
The downfall of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime is very good news, particularly for the people of Libya. However, it is critically important that the world not learn the wrong lessons from the dictator’s overthrow.
This is a critical debate which evokes significant differences among secular and spiritual progressives. I hope you’ll let me know your reactions to it. I’m a huge fan of Avnery, whose articles regularly appear on our Tikkun web magazine site www.tikkun.org. And a dear friend of Michael Nagler whose writings have been an inspiration to me and many others. I can easily understand the power of Avnery’s argument, though personally I’m on the side of non-violence.
Who Funds All The Muslim-Baiting? by M.J.Rosenberg
It has been just about a decade since Islamophobia exploded in this country. That was of moment that the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by al Qaeda terrorists. It existed prior to 9/11, but the losses that day and the general terror it inflicted upon this country made many, many Americans much more wary of Arabs and, fairly quickly, fearful of the religion the terrorists professed. The first sign that 9/11 would be exploited to advance various agendas came from Binyamin Netanyahu, who was quoted in the New York Times as saying the attacks would be good for Israel:
Asked tonight [September 11, 2001] what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ”It’s very good.” Then he edited himself: ”Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” He predicted that the attack would ”strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
While Juan Cole’s article (below) may be a bit too quick to declare that the Libyan revolution has succeeded, given the ongoing fighting in Tripoli and the possibility that there still might be an ongoing civil war for months or longer, and even though it plays down tribal rivalries and tensions that have always been part of the Libyan scene in the past hundred or more years, Cole does provide us with a very useful analysis as well as a critique of those in the liberal or progressive world who dismissed the whole struggle as nothing but another example of Western imperialism. Sometimes even the Western powers can do good things, and a sophisticated spiritual progressive always seeks to understand the complexities rather than embracing one dimensional analyses. And this one could be wrong also! That’s how we have to approach the world–with open heart, genuine caring about the well-being for others, and modesty about how much we know about the details of any given situation and how best to be helpful. That’s why, in calling for the overthrow of another dictator, Asad of Syria, I placed that call within the framework of a commitment to non-violence, hoping that there could be in Syria a less violent resolution to the conflict than has happened so far in Libya, and Libya is not over yet!
The New York Metro chapter of Physicians for a National
Health Program (PNHP), an 18,000-member national
organization, denounces the federal debt ceiling deal
signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday. “Politicians who say Medicare and Social Security are
spared cuts are not being honest,” said Dr. Oliver
Fein, Chair of PNHP-NY Metro. “Plans to cut these vital
programs are simply being delayed until later in the
year. Balancing the books by cutting programs that help
the sick and the elderly is unconscionable.” The Budget Control Act includes a 2% across-the-board
cut to Medicare, which will be triggered automatically
unless Congress accepts a budget reduction plan by a
12-member “Supercommittee” before December 23.
We at Tikkun have been saying for the past 3 years what former Sec. of Labor and economist Robert Reich says below and what Paul Krugman has been saying for the past 2 years: there is no serious budget crisis. Instead, we have an employment and housing crisis. It is true, as Robert Reich says below, that the Republicans have been running with this lie for the past several years in order to prevent the Democrats, when they had the majority in both houses of Congress, and the presidency, 2009-2010, from doing what the country needed: a massive Work Progress Administration (WPA) employment program coupled with a freeze on mortgage foreclosures and a law requiring the banks to renegotiate mortgage interests to what it was when the mortgage was first offered to the buyers. But Reich plays down the huge culpability of Obama and his economic advisors (who could have been Reich and Krugman, and no Republican forced Obama to go with the pro-corporate advisors he actually chose form the start).
The number of contemporary American Jewish political artists is enormous — and growing in the early years of the twenty-first century. These creative visual artists follow in the paths of their distinguished Social Realist predecessors by inviting, even compelling, audiences to reflect on such problems as global warming and environmental degradation, continuing manifestations of racism, sexism, and homophobia, seemingly intractable global warfare and American military adventurism, domestic poverty, economic injustice, excessive incarceration, and scores of others.
Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never seen and never will see. American Democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy. Public refers to people, acting together to provide what we all depend on: roads and bridges, public buildings and parks, a system of education, a strong economic system, a system of law and order with a fair and effective judiciary, dams, sewers, and a power grid, agencies to monitor disease, weather, food safety, clean air and water, and on and on.
Editor’s Note: Leonardo Boff is a noted South American liberation theologian. Is the Crisis of Capitalism Terminal? Leonardo Boff*
I believe the present crisis of capitalism is more than cyclical and structural. It is terminal. Are we seeing the end of the genius of capitalism, of always being able to adapt to any circumstance?
The founding mothers of the Women’s Liberation Movement were socialists. We were activists who came from committees against the war in Vietnam. We believed that since we were at the bottom of the wage scale, if we demanded an equal chance for all women, we would rise and bring everyone with us to create an America with full equality for all. Instead, we helped to create near equality for women within a system of ever greater class inequality. A new kind of movement is clearly needed to re-energize our struggles for equality and for a society that values the happiness of all over the power or profits of a few.
The United States of America is the biggest and worst terrorist nation of the world. And most Americans approve enthusiastically. Those two statements need careful corroboration. They need a careful reading of history.
The White House and congressional leaders are in final negotiations to raise the debt ceiling. Call your senators through our special toll-free number (1-800-826-3688) and ask them to urge Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to create a circle of protection around funding for programs for hungry and poor people in the United States and abroad in the bill to raise the debt ceiling.