Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/us_politics/page/8/)
A 99% Manifesto
Dan Brook
A specter is haunting America and the world; the specter of gross inequality. The inequality is economic, to be sure, but also social, political, racial, sexual, educational, medical, occupational, gastronomical, geographical, and otherwise.
(Editor’s Note: Ariel Dorfman has been sharing his writing with Tikkun for several decades, so it is a joy to share this latest article, via our media allyTomDispatch.com . Dorfman was one of those profound thinkers who worked with the democratically elected Salvador Allende regime in Chile till the U.S. managed to support a coup by vicious military leaders whose subsequent murder of thousands of progressive Chileans Dorfman managed to escape. Please read his insights on Donald Trump below. For those of you who just received our latest issue of Tikkun magazine in the mail with its focus on Trump Trauma, consider Dorfman’s piece a fitting addition to the analyses put forward there, including the article on Leonard Cohen’s music as a way to help get through some of the worst of the Trump regime. Though not yet as murderous as the Chilean dictatorship, the Trump regime has the same instinctive hate-oriented and “power-over-others” orientation that is the cultural foundation for every variant of fascistic regimes.
[Editor’s Note: I still wish Nader had taken my advice in 2000 and told his voters in states where the election was close to not vote for him but vote instead for Nader. I also urged him to introduce spiritual progressive ideas and discourse into his public talks, but he didn’t, perhaps could not because it would take him so far from the narrow economism that is his worldview. But with all his limitations, he often speaks deeper truths than one hears even from some of the most “progressive” of liberal Democrats, and it is in that spirit that I invite you to read his latest thinking. –Rabbi Michael Lerner ]
Photo: Stephen Voss/Redux
RALPH NADER: THE DEMOCRATS ARE UNABLE TO DEFEND THE U.S. FROM THE “MOST VICIOUS” REPUBLICAN PARTY IN HISTORY
From TheIntercept.comJune 25 2017, 8:17 a.m.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is at its lowest ebb in the memory of everyone now alive. It’s lost the White House and both houses of Congress.
I’m republishing this article I wrote a few months before the 2016 election because it contains an analysis which is absolutely essential for anyone who wishes to participate in transforming American political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual reality. Some of it might feel a bit dated, but most of it is as true now as it will be in years to come until liberal and progressive forces really absorb its message and make fundamental changes in the cultural and political assumptions that limit their effectiveness.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
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.
What Berkeley needs is a Non-Violent Containment Squad
November 20, 1964: March to Regents’ Meeting; L to R: Mona Hutchin, Ron Anastasi, … John Leggett, John Searle, Michael Rossman, Jack Weinberg, Sallie Shawl, Mario Savio, Ken Cloke. Bob Johnson photo ©FSM Archives All rights reserved
by Jo Freeman, A.B.’65
As an alumnus of the 1964 Free Speech Movement and a veteran of the civil rights movement, I was appalled to read about the recent violent confrontations in Berkeley. Those reports took me back to the 1960s when I was doing voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marching against segregation in Birmingham and Mississippi. Then we were the equivalent of the “fascists” that Antifa and the black bloc are beating up in Berkeley. They called us Communists, not fascists, but like Antifa they believed we were invaders who held them and their Southern values in contempt.
We received this from our media ally Portside:
The Trump Administration’s Most Prominent Jews Disgrace Themselves
Dana Milbank
August 18, 2017
Washington Post
What Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin and Jared Kushner did – or, rather, what they didn’t do – is a shanda. They’ll know what that means, but, for the uninitiated, shanda is Yiddish for shame, disgrace. All three let it be known through anonymous friends and colleagues that they are disturbed and distressed by what Trump said after the white terrorist demonstration and attack in Charlottesville. But not in public. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner in July., credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post,
The three men, the most prominent Jews in President Trump’s administration, could have spoken out to say that those who march with neo-Nazis are not “very fine people,” as their boss claims. Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, and Cohn, the chief economic adviser, were actually standing with Trump when he said it.
WHERE DO WE STAND? by Rabbi Arthur Green
American Jews looked on with horror at the events unfolding in Charlottesville – and elsewhere – over this past weekend. Indeed, we have felt a shudder ever since the awful campaign of 2016 and much that has followed it, while our communal leadership has remained mostly silent. There were, after all, some Jewish voices in the White House, and it was best not to alienate the Republicans. “And who knows?” it was whispered, “maybe this crazy guy could do something for Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
But in Charlottesville the masks were off. Neo-Nazis with their swatstika flags were a welcome part of the celebration. You heard the k-word along with the n-word quite frequently, we are told. There was no longer any hasty “Judeo” hyphened on to the calls for a Christian America. Not among these folks.
“Blood and Soil!” they were calling out in repeated marching chant. Hitler’s Blut und Boden, which meant, of course, that only “Aryan” blood truly belonged to the sacred German soil. Can you imagine the nerve of these people, saying that the beautiful God-given landscape of America belongs to white Anglo-Saxons, not to the native peoples whose blood indeed soaked the land as they were displaced and slaughtered by European invaders? Can they really claim that this soil belongs to the slaveowners whom Robert E. Lee was defending (his statue was the center of these events) and not to their victims, the poor slaves who died anonymously, so many of beating and lynching, pouring their own blood into the American earth? How dare they!
I was proud that there were rabbis and rabbinical students (including some of my own) present in the line of clergy who stood as the voice for human decency and sanity on that terrible morning. Yes, even though it was Shabbat, I am glad that some made that decision, one I would not permit myself to do. Shabbat was given us, we are told in the second version of the ten commandments, to help us recall that we were slaves in Egypt. That is a message too often forgotten by many achievement-driven (and often success-drunk) American Jews.
Charlottesville forces us to take a stand. It reminds us that we are a minority in American society, a religious and ethnic community that chooses to maintain a distinct identity. There is a price to be paid for that, one forgotten amid the great wave of acceptance into “whitehood” that has engulfed us in most American circles since the 1960’s. We need to remember how recent that acceptance was, and how it took the horrors of the Holocaust and the battle against Hitler to push most American Christians across the finish line of opposing anti-Semitism. Moments like Charlottesville remind us that we are a minority among minorities, and that a threat or an insult to any minority – African-American, Muslim, Latino, LGBT, or any other – is a threat to us all. To be a proud American Jew is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those who defend diversity and equality in our country.
Take a look at the alleged white privilege of Jews in Charlottesville, Virginia
At Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, VA, we are deeply grateful for the support and prayers of the broader Reform Jewish community. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of Heather Heyer and the two Virginia State Police officers, H. Jay Cullen and Berke Bates, who lost their lives on Saturday, and with the many people injured in the attack who are still recovering. The loss of life far outweighs any fear or concern felt by me or the Jewish community during the past several weeks as we braced for this Nazi rally – but the effects of both will each linger. On Saturday morning, I stood outside our synagogue with the armed security guard we hired after the police department refused to provide us with an officer during morning services. (Even the police department’s limited promise of an observer near our building was not kept — and note, we did not ask for protection of our property, only our people as they worshipped).
Editor’s note: this important article below shows a troubling development in American society. Yet like so much that comes from our leftwing allies, it shows no understanding of why these scary politics have emerged and how it could be responded to by the Left. Please read my book The Left Hand of God–Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right. For 31 plus years we at Tikkun have been sharing an analysis which emerged from the research I led at our parent body, the Institute for Labor and Mental Health: capitalist society’s scientism (not science but the creation of a religious worldview we call scientism–the notion that everything that really exists or can be know must be verifiable or falsifiable by empirical observation or be measurable) reduces all values to merely subjective emotional preferences that have no place in the public sphere, thereby freeing the capitalist order and its corporations and super-rich to accumulate money (the ultimately real and measurable reality) without regard to the human consequences. The result is to create a huge crisis for people all around the world and in the advanced industrial capitalist societies as they are told that their lives have no meaning or purpose except to serve the powerful and rich and to strive to become one of them.
Republicans’ immigration plan: A whiter America
By Emile Schepers
Jeanette Vizguerra, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in a church to avoid immigration authorities for the past three months, speaks after leaving the church May 12, in downtown Denver. Supporters say that Vizguerra has won a two-year deportation delay. | David Zalubowski / AP
On Wednesday August 2, President Trump announced his supportfor Senate Bill 1720, which aims to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act in line with the aims of a so-called “skills-based immigration system.” It purports to re-center U.S. immigrant admissions with a focus on those with high levels of education or in-demand economic skills, limit family-sponsored immigration to spouses and minor children, and sharply cut the number of people granted refugee status. Trump was flanked at the announcement by the bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and its only co-sponsor to date, Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga. The bill, also called the RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment) Act, which was originally introduced in February and is now re-introduced with Trump’s blessing, is not aimed at undocumented immigrants, but at people trying to come legally to the United States.
Editor’s note: Below, another analysis of America’s wars from our media ally TomDispatch.com. As you know, the way to overcome all this is not only to protest against this militarism, but to convince the Left that it needs to promote an alternative path to Homeland Security. That’s the point of our Global Marshall Plan www.tikkun.org/gmp which proposes that we replace the Strategy of Domination which has been tried for the past 10,000 years and doesn’t work with a Strategy of Generosity so that the U.S. becomes known as the most generous country in the world rather than just the most powerful dominator. Until we insist that this is a major part of what liberals and progressives are presenting to the Americna people, the fear that ISIS and Al Queda have generated (the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers remain ever-present in the consciousness of Americans as a source of fear about safety, and the ruthlessness of ISIS and its clones does give even the most nonviolent people a reason to wonder what could change all this) will not abate and the militarists will keep winning inside not just the Right, but the Center of the Democratic Party as well. (side note: we give the same advice to Israelis: want security?
In this article, originally published on Gush Shalom, Uri Avnery begins to move closer to our worldview–that peace can better be secured through generosity of spirit than through military domination. That’s why we advocate in the U.S. for a Global Marshall Plan as a partial embodiment of the strategy of generosity, and we think the same approach could secure Israel’s security far more powerfully than any military technology. Read our Global Marshall Plan, endorsed by Congressman Keith Ellision, one of Bernie Sanders’ appointees to the Democratic National Convention’s Platform Committee who in this past February came within a few votes of becoming the national chair of the Democratic National Committee and is now one of its vice-chairs. www.tikkun.org/gmp (download the full version there). And Adam Keller gives you a personal reflection on his decades as an Israeli peace activist. — Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor Tikkun Magazine rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
Eyeless in Gaza
by Uri Avnery
I HAVE a unique confession to make: I like Gaza.
Are liberals having second thoughts about immigration? Posted Jul 03, 2017 by David L. Wilson
Topics: Immigration , Inequality , Labor ,Media
On June 20 The Atlantic posted an article by Peter Beinart claiming that the Democrats had “lost their way on immigration.”
Beinart is a respected liberal centrist—of the sort that supported the 2003 Iraq invasion until it started going bad—so the article created a stir among opinion makers. Rightwingers at Breitbart and National Review gloated. Liberals took Beinart’s thesis to heart: Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum endorsed the article, and Thomas Edsall quoted it in the New York Times. A Chicago Tribune columnist cited it as an “important essay.”
It’s true that Beinart makes some good points. He suggests that the Democratic Party’s current pro-immigrant stance is largely just pandering to Latino voters.
Celebrating July 4th in the Trump Years: Make it Inter-Dependence Day to Challenge the Ideology of Right Wing Ultra-Nationalism
by Rabbi Michael Lerner editor Tikkun magazine
A July 4th “ Seder”
In past years, faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turned July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports and fireworks while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast. During the Trump years we all have a moral obligation to
use this holiday to challenge the “America First” ultra-nationalist worldview that Trump and Right-wing activists are trying to popularize as they shift the mainstream dialogue from its previous center-right blandly pro-capitalist worldview to an extremist right-wing nationalism, already mobilized against environmental protections, that could provide the foundation both for new wars (against Iran, North Korea, or even Russia or China) and for an assault on whatever remains standing of the New Deal of the 1930s (workers’ rights to organize unions, safety and health regulations, Medicare, retirement benefits, public education, social security, etc.)
Yet the key to challenging this direction is to not fall into two traps that have limited the support for liberal and progressive forces: a. thinking that the alternative to ultra-nationalism is to focus only on what is wrong with America, thereby handing to the extremists the banner of being the only pro-American voice; or b. demeaning all those who have supported Trump as racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, antiSemites or just plain stupid. The shaming and blaming only strengthens the support of many for Trumpist politics, and must cease. Instead, we need to reclaim all that is good in America, and reframe that in terms of celebrating July 4th as Inter-dependence day. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives believe that that there is much worth celebrating in American history that deserves attention on July 4th, though it is rarely the focus of the public events.
We at Tikkun were glad to hear Senator Bernie Sanders unequivocally condemn the shooting by Bernie supporter, James Hodgkinson, who injured five Republicans, one of them a Congressman, who were part of the Republican Congressional group going to play a for fun annual baseball game with Democratic Congresspeople in Washington DC this morning, June 14th. In his statement, Senator Sanders said: “I am sickened by this despicable act. Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society, and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only be obtained through nonviolent action and anything else runs counter to our most deeply held American values.” We at Tikkun are fully aligned in our opposition to violence of any sort and condemn it in the strongest possible terms. We do so on spiritual, religious, and ethical grounds. Human life is sacred and should be protected and helped to flourish.