Christianity

“What Would Jesus Cut?” and Other Questions: Religious Responses to Economic Hardship

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I have to admit that I am an angry American. I am angry that the Republican Party has been successful at undercutting the country’s revenue base by giving huge tax reductions to the extremely wealthy and has now seemingly convinced the country that the resulting deficit must be addressed immediately and by systematically destroying government-supported programs aimed at the middle and working classes and the poor. I am furious that President Obama supported the tax give-away and now concedes the need to radically slash social programs, even if he claims to be less draconian. And I am livid that some Democrats are now starting to side with Republicans who want to use the debt ceiling issue to advance their radical budget-cutting agenda. And of course no one is talking about the cost of the three wars.

Politics & Society

Religious Responses to Budget Debate

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This post will say nothing that you don’t already know, though it will provide a couple of very interesting links for you.Though there’s nothing new here, I need to vent. It is as astonishing to me as to most of you who read Tikkun that there is ANY support coming from religious folks for the Republican budget proposal. It is a revoltingly immoral and unjust attempt to solve a deficit problem (largely created by Republican policies, wars, and tax cuts for the wealthy) on the backs of the poor and the vulnerable. In order to pay for an unjust war in Iraq, and a highly questionable, perhaps dead-end war in Afghanistan, and in order to sustain the lowest tax rates for the wealthy since President Hoover–the very same affluent demographic that had nearly everything to do with the rise of speculative markets and bubbles and thus the collapse and recession and increasing precariousness of our whole market economy–Paul Ryan’s “courageous” new plan is to cut the deficit by completely gutting and nearly destroying our nation’s already too modest social welfare programs. The moral logic in this is really insidiously wicked. Now, I completely agree that we’ve got a HUGE problem with our growing deficit.

Christianity

The Fast for a Moral Budget Goes Viral

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From the listserve at a Unitarian Universalist congregation today, a classic Tikkunish rumination, a discovery by a humanist that religious progressives (in this case our good friends at Sojourners) can be inspiring allies:
I find myself connecting to an evangelical Christian organization, Sojourners, even though I’m a died-in-the-wool humanist… because of their message and action around social justice. I subscribe to their magazine as well as their e-newsletter, SojoMail. This group has turned me around from feeling uncomfortable about their theological positions to very appreciative of their social justice positions. Right now they are in the midst of a fast so that they can focus in on what’s really important with our national “budget debate” and that we can turn towards a moral budget.

Education

Meet Mr. G: A Greedy, Grasping Schoolteacher

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Meet Mr. G. He’s been teaching high school in Santa Fe for twenty years. You might ask,”Is that a neck brace he’s wearing?” Now that you mentioned it, yes. Mr. G. is wearing a neck brace. This is the story of how, after an excruciating year of teaching, Mr. G. discovered he’d been standing at the blackboard with multiple neck fractures.

Education

April 4th and 5th: Catch the Wisconsin Fire

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The fires of democracy continue to burn brightly in Wisconsin. Recall campaigns are racing along, and a recent community meeting in Milwaukee, usually a sleepy, ill-attended affair, boasted several hundred attendants. When their representative, Chris Larson, one of the “Wisconsin 14” showed up, they jumped to their feet in a standing ovation. Neighborhood listservs are boiling with activity. On Facebook and in a thousand union and church meetings, people solidify their connections with each other and their commitment to recover and strengthen our precious democracy.

art

The Right of Return for New Orleanians and Palestinians: An Interview with Jordan Flaherty

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When I first picked up Floodlines on assignment to write a review for Bitch magazine, I thought I knew something about what went down in New Orleans after Katrina, but after reading this firsthand account of surviving the storm, I realized I didn’t know much at all. It reminded me of the first time I read a leftist account of the history of Zionism. Only then did I realize how much the US mainstream media had framed my perception of Palestine by focusing on individual acts of violence by Palestinians taken out of context from the larger frame of Israeli state violence. Similarly, while reading Floodlines, I was forced to confront how my understanding of New Orleans has been shaped by mainstream media reports that focused obsessively on individual acts of violence while ignoring the large-scale state violence imposed on mostly poor communities of color. I was moved by how Flaherty, a white journalist and organizer based in New Orleans, manages to tell a story that encompasses both the staggering injustice of structural racism and the inspiring grassroots activism of New Orleanians.

Environment

Japan's Crisis: Nuclear Power and Methadone

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There is no doubt that nuclear power has some real advantages over coal and oil. In the short run it probably has fewer toxic emissions (mercury from coal fired plants is a significant health problem, for example). Mining uranium, while implicated in toxic waste, probably has less damaging effects than the large-scale land and ocean pollution from oil (oil tankers routinely take more cargo than they can handle and if the weather acts up, they simply jettison it). Though a Native American, with cancer rates eighteen times the national average from uranium mining on Indian land, might disagree. As well, in the long run, nuclear power produces far less in the way of Greenhouse gases.

Christianity

Christian Right calls Christian Left "A Rising Power"

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According to a recent post by the Family Research Council, “the Christian Left is a rising power in American politics, finding allies at all levels of government. Arguably, the movement played an important role in electing Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008.” In the following video, Dr. Mark Smith of Cedarville University gives a very interesting and informative (albeit long) lecture on the differences between the Christian Right and the Christian Left. At the end of the talk, Smith offers his own critique of the Christian Left’s call for government intervention to create a more socially just society:

1) Government-imposed social justice is unjust because plans for redistribution cannot distinguish between those who are rich or poor through oppression and those who deserve their status. According to Smith many poor people “deserve to be poor through their behavior” — as Proverbs puts it, through their “laziness,” “love of sleep,” “love of pleasure,” “love of food,” and “love of wine.”

Environment

Sad Day in Wisconsin, Sad Day in US

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It’s a sad day in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon in less than two hours, our Republican Senators — after insisting for a month that their union-busting law was needed because the state was broke — separated the collective bargaining sections of the bill from the financial parts and then passed it. They no longer needed a Democratic Senator for a quorum, since the bill was no longer ostensibly about finances! They unmasked themselves with this political maneuver. Now everyone can see that it never was about the money.

Politics & Society

What's the Matter with White People? A Look at Data from the "Race and Recession Survey"

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The Washington Post reports that according to a recent survey, “fully half of all whites without college degrees identify as Republicans or are GOP-leaning independents, and 42 percent call themselves conservatives, more than other groups.” How can this be? Why would presumably working class whites support the party of Big Business that favors outsourcing, benefit-cutting, and other policies that immiserate working people? Indeed, it was Republican policies that got us into this economic mess, and the GOP is currently trying to make things worse with their job-killing budget cuts and cold-hearted attempts to shred what little remains of the safety net. Is it time to revive the term “false consciousness”?