Editor’s note: Judge Pryor is one of the 3 top candidates Trump is said to be considering for the Supreme Court. The Freedom From Religion Foundation has issued a report on him which we are reprinting below.
Articles
George Lakey’s 10-point plan to stop Trump and make gains in justice and equality
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I was among the 100,000 who marched in San Francisco’s Women’s March the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. While enthusiasm for the struggle seemed high, an important question was looming: What’s the strategic plan, as we head into the Trump era? Although there’s no simple answer, I offer this 10-point plan — fully open for discussion and debate.1. Recognize that we represent the majority, not Trump.
Three times more people participated in the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., than were present at the inauguration the day before.
Editorials & Actions
Abby Caplin: The Day America Killed Itself
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THE DAY AMERICA KILLED ITSELF
by Abby Caplin
The day America killed itself,
I watched reruns of What’s My Line,
where Dorothy, Bennet, Martin,
and Arlene sat blindfolded, trying to decide
who the mystery guest was. I stared at the Worchestershire sauce
in the fridge thinking,
Of course it has expired. I bought it
years ago, a carbon copy
of petroleum in a bottle.
When America killed itself, the talkers
on TV couldn’t figure what happened
to all their fine-tuning,
all the polls that said
otherwise. But I’ll tell you what happened—
the guy said
the election was rigged,
rigged,
didn’t say how
exactly, but he let the message hang
like a dagger thrown
between a woman’s legs, and then
he won.
Editorials & Actions
Charles Eisenstein on The Election of Hate, Grief and a New Story
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Editor’s note: This was written after the election in November but before we knew with whom Trump would surround himself in his Cabinet and key government positions. So Eisenstein’s optimism about what might happen can be forgiven. But much of what he says is nevertheless quite important, and a useful framework for understanding the limitations of what the liberals seemed to be offering the country as the alternative to Trump. –Rabbi Michael Lerner RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com
http://charleseisenstein.net/hategriefandanewstory/
The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story
We’ve got to stop acting out hate. There is no less of it in the liberal media than there is in the right-wing media.
Editorials & Actions
Henry A. Giroux on Militant Hope in the Age of Trump
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Editor’s note:
We are proud to announce that Professor Henry A. Giroux has just joined Tikkun’s editorial board as a Contributing Editor. You can read his amazing article on education at https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/defending-educators-in-an-age-of-neoliberal-tyranny-2 (it appears in the Fall, 2016 issue of Tikkun magazine). We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are building the kind of broad based movement that Giroux calls for in this article, though we call it a movement for a world of love and justice (read about it at www.tikkun.org/covenant) and put great emphasis on our commitment to nonviolence because the means must be as ethical as the ends we seek. But nonviolence does not mean passivity, as MLK jr demonstrated so powerfully in the 1960s. — Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
by Henry A. Giroux
The United States stands at the endpoint of a long series of attacks on democracy, and the choices faced by the American public today point to the divide between those who are committed to democracy and those who are not.
Editorials & Actions
Juan Cole: Is MLK’s Legacy Being Reversed
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Editor’s Note: Some of us are reacting to Trump as though he had emerged from nowhere with his reactionary agenda. Actually, the movement that came to his aid has been seeking for several decades to undo much of the liberal and progressive accomplishments of the past 80-some years. And they’ve often succeeded, in part thanks to liberals in Congress who confirmed for the Supreme Court seats truly reactionary justices appointed by Republican presidents (lacking the backbone to do what Republicans did to Obama’s appointment to replace Scalia, namely refusing to even consider those appointments even when the Democrats had majorities in the Senate). But part of that success has come from the rest of us shrugging our shoulders at the march toward reaction that has been happening in the U,.S. at the national level these past several decades, immersed as we’ve been in “local organizing” without any national strategy and often in “silos” of activism (as in “don’t try to get me involved in some larger transformation of the U.S.–I’ve got this one issue and I’m working on it locally, and I don’t want to get involved in some ideology, because we have to be realistic and pragmatic and all we can accomplish is x in my localiity”).
Editorials & Actions
Obama’s Farewell
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Editor’s Note: As is my custom in many of the articles I put up on this section of the website, I try to provide you with analyses that you are not likely to read in the mainstream media. In this case, I disagree with the tone and some of the substance both of the introduction by one person and the analysis of the other. In my own time, I’ll try to present a more balanced assessment of the Obama presidency. Yet there are important points mixed in with exaggerations in what is written below, so despite its being framed in utlra-leftie discourse which is at points really over the top, I thought I’d share it with you. But please remember, I DID NOT WRITE THIS–I’m just bringing it to your attention!
Editorials & Actions
Unions Facing the Trump Era
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By Jonathan Rosenblum
Beginning in 1979 in Seattle, WA, Jim Levitt expertly fabricated custom aircraft parts and tools, helping make the Boeing Company one of the most successful businesses in the world. But in 2013, corporate executives issued a threat: They demanded that Levitt and his fellow machinists surrender their pensions, and that Washington State political leaders hand over a record $8.7 billion in tax benefits. In exchange the company promised to keep production jobs in-state. The Democratic governor of Washington, along with virtually the entire political establishment, caved in to the blackmail. So did Levitt’s international union leadership – they had bargained the deal secretly with the company.
Editorials & Actions
Drowning the World in Oil : Trump’s Carbon-Obsessed Energy Policy and the Planetary Nightmare to Come
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Editor’s note: here is another important article from our media ally tomdispacth.com and the introduction is written by its editor Tom Engelhardt Sadly, the Left can point out the problems, but has no serious strategy to change the consciousness of Americans so that they might not go further down the road toward a self-destructive society. We at Tikkun have that strategy–a plan that could split the Right, because not all of those who moved in that direction in 2016 are actually racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, antiSemites, or otherwise deranged. Many, in fact, are not any of these things. But to reach them, we need a significant change in the culture and consciousness of the Left. We have the strategy for how to do that.
Editorials & Actions
Taking on Trump by Ted Glick
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Taking on Trump
By Ted Glick
There is only one way that I can see Trump succeeding with his outrageous efforts—such as his Cabinet nominations–to turn back the clock to the 50’s, or further: if most of us who supported the Bernie movement of 2015-2016 shut up, take no action, allow this pathological liar to do what he wants to do without any serious resistance.
I can’t see that happening, I really can’t. There are too many of us. 15 million voted for Bernie in the primaries, and there are hundreds of thousands of us, at least, probably more like millions, who, irrespective of Bernie, see ourselves as activists for a better society, a new world, a more just, peaceful and environmentally sustainable future.
I know that Bernie isn’t shutting up.
Editorials & Actions
Chanukah and Christmas in the Shadow of Trump
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Don’t Let Trump Ruin Your Holidays
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Don’t let the latest outrageous appointment to his administration of racists and anti-Semites or the oppressive policy “the Donald” plans to implement as soon as he takes office, or the upsurge of hate crimes after the election ruin your opportunity to rejoice at all that is good in our world and in your own life! How about starting with this to put things in perspective: a very clear and strong majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton–she won the popular vote by over one and half million. So celebrate the fact that the American voting majority preferred her to Trump, and if we lived in a democracy, she would be taking office in January. After Al Gore similarly won the majority and still was not allowed to become president, the Dems could have used the first two years of the Obama presidency, when they controlled both Houses of Congress, to start the process of amending the Constitution to both end the electoral college (added to the Constitution to prevent a majority from eliminating slavery in southern states, and continuing to give American racists disproportionate say in public policy) and to end the role of money in politics (the ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would do that, please read it at www.tikkun.org/esra). And it’s not too late for President Obama to proclaim: “Hillary Clinton is the real president of the majority of Americans, so I’ve asked her to appoint a Cabinet composed on the kinds of people she would have had helping her run the government, so that they can articulate for the American majority the policies and practices the majority voted for.
Editorials & Actions
Another perspective on the November Election
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LESSONS OF NOVEMBER
Gennady Shkliarevsky
Several days have passed since New York real-estate tycoon Donald J. Trump became a new President-Elect of the United States. The high drama of his election has generated a great deal of hype, hysteria, anxiety, and even re-enactments of apocalypse replete with car torches, broken windows and looted stores. The liberals are in despair and the Democrats are in disarray, scrambling for answers that may explain their demise and searching for policies that may lead them out of their current conundrum—needless to say, all without much success.
Explanations for the phenomenon of Donald Trump are a mix of pseudo sociology combined with statistical voodoo practices. They stitch together a narrative that is trivial and wrong. It tells the all-too-familiar story about the rapidly advancing society on the march toward a bright technological future and some less fortunate members of our society who have either failed to anticipate changes or have few means to cope with them. It is a familiar story of the downtrodden whose response to the rapidly changing conditions reaches into reactionary values of sexism, racism, and xenophobia.
As it is, this narrative spewed from the pages of major liberal publications and news media has ignored some obvious facts: that supporters of Donald Trump are not all white and not all poor, that many of them have gainful employments and are not necessarily intolerant toward minorities, women or foreigners. Why are these misperceptions and misrepresentations? These are generally not intentional distortions of reality designed for political manipulation. They are, what one could call, honest mistakes–acts of self-deception—that provide intellectual comfort and gratification but not much else. They give one the narcissistic pleasure of observing one’s own image projected on reality wrapped in an aura of knowledge and intellectual respectability.
These misrepresentations would be harmless and even amusing had they not concealed the dangers of intellectual laziness and smug arrogance. And these qualities are neither harmless nor amusing. They create an illusion of mental safety and intellectual invulnerability amidst the danger of our tumultuous world. This world will not leave such laziness and arrogance unpunished. It will exact a price in pain, suffering, and human lives.
So, what lessons one can draw from the experience of the last several months? What insights are there to be derived from the high drama of the political theater of this season?
Editorials & Actions
Shaming Whites and Men Has Backfired
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Stop Shaming Whites and Men! by Rabbi Michael Lerner RabbiLerner.Tikkun@gmail.com
It turns out that shaming the tens of millions of people who were supporters of Donald J. Trump is not a good political strategy. The liberal and left world was 100% right to be fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia. But the way that it did so often involved blaming or seeming to blame all whites and all men, and that contributed to the anger that exploded in the U.S. during the election and to the result: a Trump presidency that may soon be very destructive to the values that liberals and progressives hold dear. Already we are seeing violence in the streets and in the schools of America and the unleashing of violent attacks on minorities on women by some who were influenced by Trump’s rhetoric–though again it is not ALL Trump’s supporters who are involved or who support such violence, just as it was the case in the 1960s that it was not ALL of the anti-war movement that was involved in the violence that a section of the anti-war demonstrators practiced.
Trump Republican Supremacists
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One of the most intriguing questions about this election is why the Republican establishment supports Donald Trump. Not why the masses of white Americans do it, this is pretty obvious. Settlers want the new lands for themselves – they build a new society, culture, and State for themselves. They displace, dispossess, and kill, if necessary, local inhabitants, and when they need workers they encourage immigration, sometimes forced, like the African slaves. Their problem is “demography,” when migrants become the majority and “take” their country.
Articles
Psychopathology in the 2016 Election
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IT’S NO SECRET that the past several decades have witnessed growing economic inequality and deepening economic insecurity for a very large section of working people both in the U.S. and other capitalist countries around the world. Yet what most analysts miss are the hidden injuries of class that become dramatically intensified when the underlying psychological and spiritual dysfunction of global capitalism interacts with economic insecurity. Right-wing, ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist, and/or racist movements gain support as more people begin to lose faith in the efficacy of democratic governments and turn to authoritarian leaders in the hope that their own fears and pain can be alleviated. This has been happening around the world, not just in the U.S. As a nonprofit we are prohibited from endorsing any political candidate or party, so the reflections here are not meant to influence your voting in 2016, but to shape an agenda for how to build a healthier and more just society in the coming decades. In his presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders addressed some of these economic inequalities by advocating for New Deal-type reforms, but he shied away from any systematic critique of the capitalist order itself.