Politics & Society

News from France that has not received attention here

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My crude and abbreviated translation is below:
On the 12th of October 2010, three and a half million people (the official French count) participated in demonstrations organized by the French trade unions. This is a record turnout. The media and the police recognizes that the demonstrations here are growing. There were 244 demonstrations around France this time as opposed to 230 on Sept 23. They kept up in spite of a huge effort by Sarcozy to sell raising the onset of early retirement for French retirees from 60 years old to 62.

Education

Ecosocialism: Not Your Father's (or Grandfather's) Socialism

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A Rip Van Winkle Experience
When you have lived more than six decades, it is possible to have a Rip Van Winkle experience. Life may have assigned an aspect of the social universe you once followed closely to the bare horizon of your awareness, where it may have lurked for decades, and then events occur that make you again pay attention to it. When you do, it may seem that, like the fabled Van Winkle, you have been asleep and things, though not entirely different from what you once knew well, have substantially changed. The “Death” of Socialism? Not long ago socialism, especially in its Marxist varieties, was widely declared dead.

General News

Is the "Anti-Immigrant Tide" Reversible?

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Well, it’s only an apparent tide and to the extent to which it seems to have momentum, it is reversible. Those are conclusions of what is, in my opinion, an excellent analysis of the current political state of play on the immigration rights issue, in a just published article, “The Preventable Rise of Arizona’s SB 1070,” by Justin Akers Chacon. Last June the General Assembly of my Unitarian Universalist denomination adopted Immigration Rights as a 4-Year Study-Action Issue, orienting its associated congregations, as much as possible given UU pluralism, toward a single primary topic of shared conversation. Since then I have been looking for a coherent way to understand the causes, the political forces standing in the way of a just resolution, and a sense of how progressives might engage this issue with some chance of a positive outcome. Chacon’s article is the best analysis I have seen so far.

Healing Israel/Palestine

The Spirit of Sukkot Contradicts Israel's Occupation of Palestine

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The following note from Rabbi Arik Ascherman raises for us a very important question: is it anything more than hypocrisy for Jews to dwell in sukkot this holiday, pretending to make ourselves vulnerable to material insecurity, when in fact we have huge material and military security but instead are imposing insecurity on the Palestinian people? It’s a troubling question. Rabbi Ascherman is the courageous chair of the Israeli branch of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, and his experience this week in the Silwan section of East Jerusalem gives us a better understanding of what is at stake in the demand by Palestinians that Israel continue its temporary ban on settlement building or expansions or home demolitions or evicting Palestinians from East Jerusalem, at least while the negotiations are continuing. We in the U.S. might also add a note of our domestic hypocrisy in claiming to care about the poor and the oppressed, but allowing the Democrats to have spent this past year and a half providing almost no relief to those who are being thrown out of their homes for inability to pay off outrageously high mortgage rates — rates that were imposed on them by banks that made loans without adequately alerting the borrowers to the likelihood that their mortgages would be much more expensive soon. We Jews at least should be giving this issue a much higher priority than our Jewish community has done so far.

Culture

The Tea Party, a Middle Class Mob; and a Return to the Fifties

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In April, I was riding the DC Metro to the Capitol Mall, when several Tea Party demonstrators got on and sat a few seats away from me. The first, a young white man, wore red-and-white striped shoes with blue tops and other Uncle Sam garb; the young, white woman with him carried a hand-made sign on which was glued an old document titled “The Constitution” and the words, “Miss me yet?” Their origins, judging by hair, clothes, accent, and where they got on seemed to be lower middle class church goers. Not rich. Not sophisticates.

Christianity

On Left Prejudice and Living the Gospel

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Let’s say you’re a doctor in your thirties. You graduated from UCSF School of Medicine, earned a master’s in social medicine from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard (the last two ranked second and first respectively among the world’s universities by a Chinese university focused on science). Your husband received his education at Harvard, Stanford and UC Berkeley. Your son is pre-school. You’re in a big city.

Inter-Culturalism

Gershon Baskin, Rebecca Subar and Rabbi Arthur Waskow on BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction)

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We have just put up a transcript of a workshop at which veteran peace activists Gershon Baskin, Rebecca Subar and Arthur Waskow debated BDS with those present. (This was at our June conference and we apologize for the delay: our interns transcribed many speeches and workshops over the summer. We edited some for the print issue here, and more have been going online this month. Our thanks to long-time Tikkun activist Hayyim Feldman who just completed the lengthy task of proofing the text of this workshop to the audio.) Some quotes:
Israeli activist Gershon Baskin on Why a one state solution is no solution at all:
Now I believe very, very strongly that there is only one solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, if solution means end of conflict. There is no such thing as a one state solution.

The Economy--Wealth & Poverty

Grève Générale. Bring Down the House of Cards!

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Harriet Fraad sent us this French video with a comment from her husband, econ prof Richard Wolff:
The General Strike in France rallied, according to the CGT (France’s largest of the 6 national trade union federations who united to produce this strike), over 2.7 million demonstrators marching against raising the retirement age and against austerity around the slogan, “do not permit governments to make the mass of people pay for the failures of capitalism.” Not the least of the mechanisms helping to generate this support were video clips like this one:
Note: It does help to know that Greve means strike, and Lutte means struggle. Grève générale le 7 septembre
Uploaded by Solidairesnational. – News videos from around the world. So do I put this up because I want to see the kind of revolution where the house of cards collapses, leaving a vacuum that is all too likely to get filled with the moralistic Robespierres or Khomeinis or Cromwells (whether religious or secular in their moralism) of the French, Iranian or English revolutions, or with the true believers in some “scientific” advance of the working class led by its vanguard intellectuals, like Lenin?

Culture

The Uses of Unemployment: Art

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“AIDS is the best thing that ever happened to me.” Those words from an exhibit a decade ago at the California College of Arts, struck me speechless. I stood, riveted to the wall-sized set of panels. The honesty and courage of the words and images impressed me profoundly. I felt I was in the presence of something significant and wholly unexpected, something I would have thought impossible.