Culture

Quality of Life, the Tea Party, and Jack Kornfield

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What is a High Quality of Life? I once lived for an entire year as an exchange student with a British family in Bristol, UK. Their house, one end of a three-house row, contained three bedrooms, one bathroom, small living and dining rooms, and a tiny kitchen, too small for eating in. They owned one car, a little Vauxhall, and one TV, yet considered themselves well able to feed, house, and entertain a stranger for an entire year. By American middle-class standards, this family was practically poor, yet their four children received great educations.

Culture

What Would Frodo Do? JRR Tolkien and Political Economy

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I recently posted on Tikkun Daily the following quote on JRR Tolkien vs Ayn Rand:
“There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.” – John Rogers http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html
It’s been somewhat of a hit with Tikkun Daily readers (as I write this, it’s ranked #5 on our “most read posts of the past 7 days” list). This led me to wonder: Did Tolkien have a view on political economy?

Culture

Dennis Hopper: The man who showed us why America is going crazy

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Dennis Hopper had an unfortunate gift for self-marginalization. He played the buffoon, the drunk, the druggie, the sex addict whose foolish behavior obscured a serious sensibility. When he died on May 29 at the age of 74 from prostate cancer, his life was once again in chaos. On his deathbed, he was divorcing his wife of 18 years, getting a restraining order to keep from seeing her. The mainstream writers, with their unfailing instinct for the superficial, remembered him as a “Hollywood bad boy,” a “rebel,” a “hellraiser.”

Politics & Society

Chomsky Wept. Or: Think System, Act Systemically.

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The two halves of that headline don’t seem to go together. Weeping seems very personal and emotional, while thinking and acting systemically seems very abstract and intellectual. But when many relatively decent people–like many of us reading this blog–benefit from a system that causes other people at a great distance away to be wounded, starved, and killed, then we must weep with those people; and thinking systemically will make us weep the more, for understanding how often our systemic blindness stops us from seeing the effects our system has. These thoughts come from reading an email from our friend Fred Bronfman. Fred writes:
Dear Friends,
I’d be interested in any comments, particularly disagreements,  you might have on my article …

Environment

On the possible virtues of a rationally planned economy

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Come to our Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives conference in DC starting a week today if you possibly can! One of our major themes is how to build in social and environmental responsibility to the very idea of a corporation. We are proposing the ESRA, the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the constitution. The goal is to rid American democracy of corporate money, and to require large corporations to act responsibly. This will only be possible if something drastic is done to counteract the influence of corporate money in elections, which the Supreme Court gave the green light to in January when it ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in elections.

Politics & Society

2.5 Trillion and Counting

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The plan was perfect. Slash taxes for the wealthy, cutting 2.5 trillion out of the nation’s wallets, and spend another trillion or two on war, and by the time eight years are over, the nation will seem like it is teetering on the edge of insolvency. If anyone says that perhaps the giant tax cuts were a mistake, you sagely warn that “You can’t raise taxes during a recession!” Then, start screaming about the deficit and demand that social programs be slashed. Finally the beast has been starved, drowned, and crushed under a monster truck’s tires…

Politics & Society

American Liberals and Progressives Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity — or Are We ready to Change Directions?

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Progressives have been blessed in the past two years with three significant opportunities to change the fundamentals of American society. We’ve already blown the first and are missing the second and third. The first, of course, was the economic meltdown. What a moment that could have been for progressives in Congress or the White House to challenge the ideology of “leave it to the marketplace” or “leave it to the states” to work things out. Imagine if President Obama had told Wall Street and the Republicans, “OK, lets test your theories right now — lets just let the marketplace work its wonders as the banks fail.”

Environment

Connections and Values Create Biodiversity

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You may remember that I wrote about “Earth Day at 40” a couple of weeks ago. Since then, my brother-in-law has put a video of my sister Amy Vedder’s presentation online. It’s worth a look — with great photos and description of some of the innovative approaches Amy has developed over the last 30 years to successfully preserve animal species and their habitats. Amy, who is now senior vice president of the Wilderness Society, offered three examples of her successful projects during this talk. The most dramatic was setting up the Mountain Gorilla Project in Rwanda in the late 1970s.

Environment

Coal Worse Than Oil

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All eyes are on big oil these days, and for good reason, with possibly the worst oil spill in history happening as we watch. But coal, the other fossil fuel, is by far a worse culprit in the long run. From mining to processing to transportation to burning to disposal, coal has more environmental impacts than any other energy source. And we’re burning it everywhere in the U.S. — often without pollution-control equipment — even on our college campuses. Here in Wisconsin, a large percentage of our electricity has been produced with coal.

Empathy

Immigration Reform and Families

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I’m a total supporter of immigration reform that recognizes the impracticality of deporting nearly 12 million people who are in our country without proper documentation. Let’s find a way to bring them out of the shadows. But, I also look at the immigrants who are here WITH proper documentation, who have been working for years – separated from their families, and I implore Congress to consider and honor those people with reform legislation that helps reunite them with those they love. I’m half Gypsy – half Russian. My grandparents immigrated to this country a very long time ago.