Politics & Society

Another Betrayal: Obama Begs U.S. Corporations to “Invest In America”

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To mostly positive media reviews, President Obama yesterday addressed the Chamber of Commerce in Washington. Though a number of stories describe the reception afforded the president as rather chilly, the coverage tends to present him as focused on the economic recovery, and reaching out to his political opponents in order to spark job creation. ABC World News said the president
delivered an urgent message to the companies to get in the game, start spending money and hiring workers — throwing down a gauntlet but also trying to build a bridge. The CBS Evening News said:
Obama continued his campaign to improve relations with business, … [urging] corporate America to invest the nearly $2 trillion it has saved up and start hiring again.

Politics & Society

Obama Abandons Egyptian Democracy Demonstrators’ Demand to Oust Mubarak

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With the political crisis unresolved in Egypt, the volume of U.S. media coverage continues to dwindle — but remains considerable. For the first time since the protests began, not all three networks led with the story, which continues to receive coverage on the front pages of major dailies. Reports and analyses agree that the Obama administration, after what the AP describes as “several days of mixed messages about whether it wants to see [Hosni] Mubarak stay or go,” yesterday “conceded Monday that it will not endorse the demands of Egyptian protesters” for the “embattled” president Mubarak “to step down immediately, saying a precipitous exit could set back the country’s democratic transition.” The administration “coalesced around a position that cautiously welcomes nascent reform efforts begun by newly appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman that may or may not result in Mubarak’s resignation before September.” The CBS Evening News reported that President Obama “said …

art

Invitation to Join In Some Political Theater on the Subway

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Harriet Fraad forwarded us this beautiful email from someone she knows in New York this week:
I experimented yesterday with a Steve Colbert-like agitprop stunt, the purpose of which was to mock the absurdity of Bloomberg’s and Cuomo’s refusal to tax the rich and their preference for budget cuts that penalize working people and ordinary citizens in the city and the state. I wrote up a text, which I attach, which I then performed three times in subway cars. The results were quite encouraging. People laughed, and my girlfriend, who was with me at the time, was impressed by people’s receptiveness, their attention, and the fact that they accepted and carefully read the text of the speech, which I distributed after I was done. The text is a bit long, so my performance usually omitted the middle paragraphs.

Christianity

Values at Davos? Jim Wallis' Moral Economics

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Jim Wallis, at Sojourners, walks a tightrope that gains him many critics. He is probably the best known “left” evangelical Christian in America, and yet he eschews the term “left.” He prefers to use the word “moral” and wants to see a moral politics, a moral federal budget, moral business, etc. And when he says “moral” he means primarily following the Bible’s injunctions to help the poor, the prisoner, the sick. What’s not to like about that?

Politics & Society

Scheer's "Hogwash, Mr. President!" And Here's How Your Speech Could Have Reflected the State of the Spirit Today

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“Hogwash, Mr. President,” Robert Scheer’s critique of President Obama’s State of the Union talk last night, is worth reading. Both that and my own analysis of the State of the Spirit in the Winter 2011 issue of Tikkun, written over a month ago, have important elements of truth. My approach, if applied to Obama’s talk last night, would agree with many of Scheer’s points, yet take a more compassionate approach, balancing Scheer’s correct righteous indignation with a larger view of the crisis facing the human race. Our NSP point of view would address what was even worse about the Obama talk: the reiteration of the dominant values of the capitalist order — such as that the real goal of society should be to enhance our capacities to compete with each other, that what we need is a return to economic nationalism in which the U.S. is number one, that education should be primarily in science and technology in order to make sure that we can beat the other countries of the world and retain our previous position as the most powerful force in the world, and that to do that we must build our military might and make our education focused on getting more power. As the writers of Tikkun magazine have repeatedly stressed, these ideas generate a world in which there is a struggle of all against all to “make it,” and a world of endless warfare in which our resources are aimed not at satisfying human needs but at achieving dominance.

Politics & Society

Politics is not at bottom about the struggle for power

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At one time in my life I taught sociology to both young undergrads and older social work students. I had a great time with the older students, some of whom had been working for many years already and really wanted to understand and change the world. But the younger, middle class students, many of them from Catholic high schools and homes where obedience had been taught more than curiosity and argument, needed a showman, an entertainer, to wake them up, and someone brilliant with ideas to give them something deep to think about once awake. That person did exist in our department: Bruce Luske. He was way to the left of most others at the college, but was able to put radical ideas across in highly popular classes.

Culture

The State of Our Stuff

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Our union’s present way of life is not sustainable: the miles of cavernous malls full of stuff (made elsewhere) staffed by underpaid workers who can’t afford to buy much stuff. Why then is our goal to make more stuff, so that we can cling to our slipping superpower status?

Empathy

When Generosity, Love, and Kindness are Public Policy, the Violence We Saw in Arizona will Dramatically Diminish

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The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of so many others in Arizona has elicited a number of policy suggestions, from gun control to private protection for elected officials, to banning incitement to violence on websites either directly or more subtly (e.g., Sarah Palin’s putting a bull’s-eye target on Giffords’ congressional district to indicate how important it would be to remove her from the Congress). On the other hand, we hear endless pleas to recognize that the assassin was a lonely and disturbed person whose choice of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books reflects his own troubled soul, not his affinity to the “hatred of the Other” that has manifested in anti-immigrant movements that have spread from Arizona to many other states and in the United States and has taken the form of anti-Islam, discrimination against Latinos, and the more extreme right-wing groups that preach hatred toward Jews. The problem with this debate is that the explanatory frame is too superficial and seeks to discredit rather than to analyze. I fell into this myself in the immediate aftermath of the murders and attempted assassination. I wrote an op-ed pointing to the right wing’s tendency to use violent language and demean liberals and progressives, and its historical tie to anti-Semitism and anti-feminism.

Politics & Society

Are We At A Tipping Point? State of the Dream 2011

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For quite a few years, whenever the opportunity has presented itself, I’ve talked and written about the real state of “wealth redistribution” in America. My company, Reach And Teach, worked with HS teacher Tamara Sober and United for A Fair Economy (UFE) to create a web site to help teach a different view of economics than what is found in the typical High School economics textbook. Despite tons of clear data showing how much harm the last 30 years’ of economic policies have caused for the majority of Americans, that data has seemed to fall on deaf ears. Just the other day, though, one of my more socially liberal friends forwarded a story about how the top 1% has seen massive wealth increases in the last 30 years while the lowest 40% have seen not only a drop, but have fallen into the negative wealth zone (owing more money with very little assets). Could this finally be a tipping point?

Culture

The Politics of the Present Imperfect

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It is a time of year when many of us take special occasion to reflect on whether we’ve been living our lives the way we mean to, whether our communities and our society as a whole have become a little more sane-minded, more sustainable, more beautiful, a little more just in the past year. In my experience this exercise often leads to heartburn and nausea: the gap between the way things are and the way I hope for them to be is so vast as to seem impossible to bridge.Health care reform didn’t turn out nearly as well as many of us hoped. The DREAM act failed for unconscionable unreasons. Climate legislation isn’t even on the table. The Bush tax cuts for the super-wealthy were extended, at the expense of desperately needed social services.