Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/67/)
“Life in Just Peace,” the joint statement on liberation theology reprinted in full within Ulrich Duchrow’s article “A European Revival of Liberation Theology” (Tikkun, Winter 2011), is quite commendable but, like other declarations made by religious leaders, it runs the risk of remaining “on high” instead of fueling the struggles of ordinary people. In the interest of broadening this discussion in Tikkun I’d like to offer a response.
A work of taut and absorbing beauty, Christopher de Bellaigue’s “Rebel Land” documents the author’s exploration of the area known as eastern Turkey, where history is simultaneously elusive and oppressive, cloaked and hiding in plain sight. From the weather-beaten ruins of a church; to a slip of the tongue over drinks; or to a conversation where commission, at least of a conceptual sort, is betrayed by an important omission in one’s account of a massacre that occurred almost one hundred years ago–in places like these, history hangs in the air.
The Supreme Court’s June 27 narrow 5-4 decision called McComish v. Bennett continues the Roberts Court’s retreat on fairness in elections, striking down trigger provisions that allowed publicly financed candidates in Arizona to receive additional funds for their campaigns when their spending was outstripped by their privately financed opponents.
Make July 4 INTER-DEPENDENCE DAY! Do July 4 with a community of people who are not into the reactionary nationalist rah-rah, but into seriously thinking about and celebrating what is good in America! If you happen to be in the Bay Area July 4, come to the Tikkun, NSP, Beyt Tikkun picnic! If not, you can read and utilize in any way you can our guide to ideas to share at a picnic or July 4th celebration of your own, no matter how small! Just go to: https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/an-interdependence-day-celebration-for-july-4.
Osama bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida is relatively crippled. We don’t need to continue fighting in Afghanistan.
Last night, President Obama announced a plan for Afghanistan that will leave nearly 70,000 troops on the ground at the end of his first term. That’s still almost double the number of troops President Bush had in Afghanistan.
The current capitalist global crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007; therefore welcome to year five. The largest corporations and richest citizens long ago learned that if you want to sustain an extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income, you need a similarly unequal distribution of political power. An increasingly unequal capitalist economy pays for the increasingly undemocratic politics it needs.
The Netanyahu government is now just where it wants to be. It feels no need to take any action to accommodate the Palestinians or entertain President Obama’s suggestions for restarting negotiations.
By Rick Wolff
The current capitalist global crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007. Therefore welcome to Year Five. This inventory of where things stand may begin with the good news: the major banks, the stock market, and corporate profits have largely or completely “recovered” from the lows they reached early in 2009. The US dollar has fallen sharply against many currencies of countries with which the US trades and that has enabled US exports to rebound from their crisis lows. However, the bad news is what prevails notwithstanding the political and media hypes about “recovery.” The most widely cited unemployment rate remains at 9 % for workers without jobs but looking. If instead we use the more indicative U-6 unemployment statistic of the US Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, then the rate is 15%. The latter rate counts also those who want full-time but can only find part-time work and those who want work but have given up looking.
A three-way conversation about the United States and Pakistan with Shaykh Kabir Helminski, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and Abbas Bilgrami, the director of a natural gas distribution company in Pakistan.
Phil Wolfson’s Noe describes the experience of a family facing the serious illness and eventual death of Noah, their sixteen-year-old son. This wasn’t an easy book for a bereaved father to write: “The memory of losing him still ignites the most intense feeling of emptiness and longing. It took me ten years after he died to complete the chapter on the last days of his life…. Even now, writing this is complete torment.”
Socialism, contrary to generations of conservative (often also, liberal) propagandizing, may not be un-American after all. A review of “The ‘S’ Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism” by John Nichols.
Why the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of have seen in our lifetimes.
One thing is for certain already: the present international trading order will not be here in ten years, and quite likely not in five. The unsustainable American trade deficit alone makes this a certainty.
Whenever I talk publicly about the way that right-wingers in the Jewish world make it hard for other Jews to speak out against Israel, I’m challenged by some who insist that there is no such climate of repression in the Jewish world. Yet over and over again, I’ve encountered people who have taken Tikkun-like stances, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, and paid a high price for it. The impact of the Tony Kushner incident, described below, is not that it will silence Kushner–he has enough social power to resist this kind of attempt to silence him since as the author of Angels in America he has received so much public praise he is not in danger–but that it, like so many other similar acts of repression, gives a stark warning to younger or less economically secure people in academia, the media and in professional lives that they must keep their mouths closed about Israel or face dangers to their careers and futures. Two recent pieces about this incident are particularly worth reading: “CUNY Board Nixes Honorary Degree For Playwright Tony Kushner” in the Jewish Week by Doug Chandler and Tony Kushner’s response to the the CUNY Board Decision. Doug Chandler writes:
In what is believed to be a rare move, the City University of New York has turned down a request by one of its colleges to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner at its commencement ceremony this spring, The Jewish Week has learned.
Since 2006 a team of Buddhists based at the Berkeley Zen Center, have been using Buddhist practice to sustain and inform door-to-door political campaigning.