By acknowledging class as a social reality we can become aware of how much we have in common with the restless students in Tunis or the harried shopkeepers in Cairo.
Articles
Tikkun’s Spiritual Response to the Assassination of Osama bin Laden
|
The sort of raucous celebration of Osama bin Laden’s killing that took place outside the White House and in the media erodes our moral and spiritual center. Self-defense is sometimes necessary in this violent world, but let’s remember that a strategy relying on killing the “bad guys” is as futile as trying to end malaria by killing every mosquito on the planet. Drain the swamps of hatred! And violence isn’t the path for that! Now that Osama is dead, lets get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan NOW!
Editorials & Actions
The Tragic Political Reality in the U.S.
|
Chris Hedges’ recent article “The Corporate State Will Continue its Inexorable Advance Until We’re Locked into a Permanent Underclass” is brilliant in its insights. Unfortunately, like most of what Hedges is writing these days, it is missing any picture of hope or possibility. The very existence of constituencies for his thinking, like those who read Tikkun, belies the extreme pessimism and shows that his analysis is too one-sided, ignoring all the factors that have produced him and produced us and produced the tens of millions who voted for Obama precisely because we falsely believed that he would articulate and fight for an alternative to the reality that Hedges so clearly explicates. Because his analysis leaves all of us out of the picture, it is not only depressing but one-sided and therefore inaccurate. And yet, it does describe the massive reality we face and gives us a very good picture of why we are in the mess we are in.
Economy/Poverty/Wealth
Just Say No to the Budget Cutters in Both Parties
|
President Obama has done a major disservice to the American people by accepting the right-wing premise that cutting budgets in order to lower the deficit should take priority over creating jobs.
Editorials & Actions
Notes on Homelessness
|
Editor’s Note: I received this information from a homeless woman named Bobbie. It reminds us of why the GMP is so important and why the budget reductions of help to those suffering from poverty is such an immoral reality. “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” –Mohandas Gandhi
NEED VS SUPPLY
Funding
•In 1978, HUD’s budget was over $83 billion. •In 1983, HUD’s budget was only $18 billion. Demolition
• In the last several years, HUD has been tearing down thousands of low-income units across the country. • From 1996 on, HUD has spent $0 on building low-income housing while thousands of units have been demolished.
Editorials & Actions
Tom Engelhardt on What it Feels Like when a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks!
|
Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
This can’t end well. But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose. Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast. I don’t know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this — truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad. The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?
Articles
The Empty Pulpit: The Obama Problem
|
In the absence of a progressive voice resonating from the White House, the radical Right continues to dominate the political noise, forcing its policy narratives into the media and policy decisions.
Editorials & Actions
The Budget Battles–from the standpoint of progressives
|
The budget is an ethical and spiritual issue–it is the concrete manifestation of our values both as individuals who vote for the candidates who shape the budget, and as a society. Below a few progressives make sense of the budget battles we are facing in the coming months. Budget Battles: Sound, Fury and Fakery
by Richard D. Wolff
Weeks of highly publicized debates — some in Congress, more in the mass media — brought Republicans and Democrats to a budget deal. To maximize public attention, they threatened a possible government shutdown. Both parties said that large government deficits and accumulated debt were “serious problems.”
Articles
What Happened to Social Justice in Health Care Reform?
|
The short answer is that social justice was not served by the passage of Obama’s health care law. Despite the early rhetoric from President Obama that health reform must cover everyone, control long-term costs, and improve the quality of health care delivery, none of these goals will be met by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).
2011
Napoleon’s Dictum
|
Some people condemn the “Libyan intervention” because there is no similar action against Bahrain or Yemen. Sure, it is a case of blatant discrimination. But that is like demanding a murderer go unpunished because other murderers are still free. Two minuses make a plus, but two murders do not become a non-murder.
Editorials & Actions
Violence in Libya
|
It’s not enough to oppose violence. That’s the deep weakness of an anti-war movement that focuses only on what it is against. The world needs to hear what we are for.
Articles
When Facts Are Not Enough: Treating Mass Psychosis
|
One of the biggest, long-lasting delusions of progressives is that people are moved mainly by rational arguments. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Articles
Cosmic Wonder, Human Opportunity
|
THE NEW UNIVERSE AND THE HUMAN FUTURE: HOW A SHARED COSMOLOGY COULD TRANSFORM THE WORLD by Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack, Yale Press, 2011.
Editorials & Actions
Is Intervention in Libya the Morally Correct Thing to Do?
|
Progressives have sharp differences with each other on whether the Libyan intervention by the United States and other Western countries is morally justified. Here we present a variety of such perspectives.
Articles
Educating for Peace
|
Overcoming violence is one of the great intellectual, moral, and spiritual challenges we face as a human community — yet U.S. schools rarely see peace-building as their goal. It’s time for us to rethink our understanding of the purpose of education.