Doing Great, Obama!  Email Article To a Friend View Printable Version 

Editor's note: This page was posted April 1, 2009.

Our ad gives President Obama supportive feedback about how to increase consistency between his message and his programs.

 

 

Here's how you can help!

 

Rationale for the Ad:

A large majority of Americans want to see Obama succeed. But too many of his supporters have remained silent while he gets attacked from the Right, on the one hand, and on the other hand capitulates to an inside-the-Beltway, pro-Wall Street, pro-military consensus that has nothing to do with why most Americans voted for him. He is at grave risk of appearing to make his major priority the restoration of the economic system that favored the rich and powerful, encouraged an ethos of selfishness and materialism, and was on a collision course with the environmental needs of the planet. As though Humpty-Dumpty could be put together again. It can't, and it shouldn't.

The problem is that Obama is not presenting a coherent vision or programs that match such a vision. Without that, it's hard to mobilize people to provide him with the support he needs. Of course, anyone who watches Obama with some care realizes that he actually does hold higher values, and that he is an amazingly decent and good person. But because he does not have spiritual or progressive leadership or voices around him, and because he has not fully been presented with our thinking, he may inadvertently recreate the existing system because he thinks he has to, in order to stabilize the economy. And he may simultaneously inadvertently demobilize his base because he hasn't engaged them in a higher-vision driven agenda. If so, the combination of the Right's unrelenting attacks and the drifting-away of the base that has not been sufficiently mobilized will prevent Obama from helping to being about the world that he himself desires.

We watched something similar happen to the Clinton administration, which promised health care, then came up with a program that was so convoluted by its desire to appeal to the rich and powerful insurance companies, health care profiteers, and inside-the-Beltway commentators and power brokers that it was unable to generate public support, and thus became a sitting duck for the forces of reaction.

The Obama administration is at grave risk of making the same kind of mistake: failing to have a clear vision of the society it wants or to develop programs that cohere with that vision. Without that, he is slowly losing the enthusiasm of the very forces that made it possible for him to win the Democratic Party nomination for president -- including the activists, community organizers, students, and youth who believed that Obama was really interested in ushering in a new age of peace, social justice, and ecological sanity. These are the people who could mobilize a populist movement to support a progressive agenda; but they are being demobilized by the inconsistencies of Obama's vision and programs. Moreover, Obama has largely excluded them from his cabinet and sub-cabinet positions, so that very few of the peace, social justice, ecological, and other activists are even heard by him. Instead, he is surrounded by the same people who advised Clinton in the 1990s, and whose advice helped create the various disasters that now afflict our society.

Part of the problem is that the progressives themselves don't fully understand the psychodynamics of American society, so they are unable to help Obama know how to speak about the need for fundamental change of the economy. Many on the left know how to say what's wrong, but few have tried to develop a positive vision of what could replace the current realities.

That's why it is so important for Obama to hear the voices of our Network of Spiritual Progressives. We have that alternative vision, articulated more fully in our Spiritual Covenant with America, our Global Marshall Plan, and in the writings that appear in Tikkun magazine and in Rabbi Michael Lerner's book The Left Hand of God.
 
In our ad, we are attempting to put some of that thinking in front of Obama and other opinion shapers. The review of Obama that happens around the end of his "first 100 days" provides us with a unique opportunity to get his attention and bring this message to him.

That's why we hope you will sign the ad and donate to make it possible for us to place it in the Washington Post and other major media. And please forward this message to everyone you know who might help us get the support we need!

 

Text of the Ad:

 

President Obama:
You are doing great!
Yet your presidency is in grave danger.

Your success depends on helping people believe that they can count on each other, that they are not alone in a ruthless world in which people are just out for themselves, and that there is a possibility of building a society based on kindness, generosity, and caring for each other.

Unless your programs actually allow people to feel in their own lives that they are part of building a new society based on love and generosity of spirit, they will soon fall back into the older paranoid views—that we are all competing with each other and have to look out first for number one. And that will likely lead them right back into the hands of the most conservative forces in this society.

It’s this simple, President Obama: if your policies do not give people a personal experience of caring and generosity, people will quickly succumb to the fearmongers who compete in the media over who can make people most afraid, most cynical, and most angry.

Our Concerns about Your Policies

There is a growing sense of confusion about what your administration is really trying to achieve among the activists, community organizers, and others who formed the backbone of your presidential campaign.

Much as they continue to cheer you on when you reach out globally for peace and reconciliation with former enemies, they are feeling demobilized because they cannot explain:

•  why you seem to be guided by a desire to restore an economic system that collapsed due to its internal contradictions and that, when “functioning,” was fostering selfishness, materialism, and environmental destruction

•  why you are bailing out the bankers and the Wall Street crowd rather than prioritizing the needs of people who have lost their jobs and homes

•  why you are not backing single-payer health care but are instead preserving the interests of the health care profiteers and insurance companies that make our health care system so costly

•  why you are escalating the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, when you must know that these are no-win situations, and

•  why you have failed to bring into your administration more leaders of the peace, social justice, labor, and environmental movements that gave you the critical support you needed to win the Democratic nomination for president.

If the people who made your presidency possible stop feeling excited about your present direction, the populist energies that could be mobilized for fundamental change will instead be mobilized by the Right for reactionary goals, and you may find yourself without the base of support you need even for your scaled-down goals.

Your Unique Opportunity

You have an amazing opportunity: to begin a national dialogue on how to build a new kind of economic order that embodies our highest values. We Spiritual Progressives do not want a return to the system that was ethically and environmentally destructive, nor do we want a bureaucratic socialism that has failed elsewhere. What we need is a society reconstructed along the ethical and spiritual principles that predominate across all religious, spiritual, and humanistic boundaries: a society that seeks to channel human energies toward mutual caring and love; caring for the environment; generosity; peace; social justice; and a non-instrumentalizing, non-utilitarian attitude that encourages awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe.

This is the historical moment, President Obama, in which to reject the notion that “progress” can be measured solely by material wealth or by how many new inventions and new objects for consumption are produced. People yearn for a higher meaning to life than the quest for money and power. That’s why, although we must certainly ensure that people all around the world have their basic material needs met, it would be a terrible mistake to rebuild an economic system that only values that which can be measured and counted, while ignoring and undermining the ethical and spiritual values that are central to human life. The challenge of this historical moment is building an
economy and society that integrates ethical and spiritual values with the pursuit of adequate material well-being. You need to mobilize the American people to join with you in fully embracing the opportunity that this moment presents to you and to us.

This is why you need to have fewer “realists” and more Spiritual Progressives and prophetic voices around you—people who are willing to challenge your policies by this criterion: do the policies strengthen our capacities to be loving, caring, generous, and hopeful about each other and about our world?

A Domestic and Global Marshall Plan…

America’s well-being depends on the well-being of every person on the planet. It also depends on the well-being of the earth itself. For that reason, we must adopt (and encourage all the other advanced industrial societies to join us in adopting) a Domestic and Global Marshall Plan in which we dedicate between 2 percent and 5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of our society every year for the next twenty years to end global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate health care, as well as repair the global environment. Nothing would better revive our global markets than ensuring that the poor had purchasing power for real needs—food, clothing, and shelter (read details at www.spiritualprogressives.org). Immigration pressures on the United States would decrease dramatically if people could get their material needs met in their home countries. The underlying idea here is that “homeland security” can best be achieved through a Strategy of Generosity. Only when people around the world come to believe that we in the West no longer seek to dominate or control them will they be willing to say no to the terrorists and fundamentalists who offer them a sense of cultural dignity achieved by rejecting Western ways and also offer a way to express outrage at a global capitalist system in which 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day and
millions of children die every year because of inadequate food and health care.

…Could Start With Israel/Palestine

You could start implementing the Global Marshall Plan by helping to rebuild Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, and by repairing the damage done to Israel by rocket assaults and other acts of terror. Lead by this act of generosity. Then, instead of being dragged into endless negotiations with a Netanyahu/Lieberman government (which would gladly keep those talks going forever), or into creating a Palestinian state that is a set of cities surrounded by Israeli settlements and the Israeli army, you should educate the American public and make direct appeals to the Israeli public with a substantive vision of what a lasting peace accord must include. Indispensable elements would be an economically and politically viable Palestinian state; ironclad security guarantees for Israel and Palestine both (protection from each other’s extremist elements, which will do all they can to undermine peace); reparations for the Palestinian people adequate to provide a decent standard of living for all the Palestinian refugees (as well as reparations for Jews who had to flee Arab lands from 1947–67); systematic mechanisms to root out and permanently bar the teaching of hatred in the public and private schools, mosques, synagogues, churches, and media; and a “truth and reconciliation” process that educates both sides to the realities of the pain and fear each side has caused the other from the very beginning of this conflict. Use your enormous credibility in the world to challenge the irrational hatred directed against Israel and the Jewish people and help the world understand why the Jewish people have come to believe that they need the protection of a Jewish state. Challenge the hatred in the United States and Israel against Palestinians and Muslims, and help Americans and Israelis understand the Palestinian narrative. Enlist in this campaign those Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians who can speak in a way that reflects this understanding of the legitimacy of both sides, and who can embrace genuine reconciliation and reflect open-heartedness. Use this moment to form a new global consensus that will make both sides feel safe enough to make real concessions.

A New Bottom Line to Reshape the Economy and Society

In tandem with a Strategy of Generosity, the world needs a NEW BOTTOM LINE. We got into the current economic mess because our market-driven capitalist economic system taught people to see themselves as fundamentally alone, taught them that the highest good was to be a “rational maximizer of self-interest,” and made them believe that the only real security they could ever achieve involved maximizing money and power for themselves. That’s the Old Bottom Line. Instead, we need to judge our corporations, our governmental policies, our schools, our health care system, proposed legislation, and even our own personal behaviors by a new way of understanding criteria of rationality, productivity, or efficiency: Do these institutions or policies or behaviors maximize our capacity to be loving and caring, kind and generous, ethically and ecologically sensitive, and able to overcome our tendencies to see other people instrumentally (will they serve our own goals)? Do these institutions and policies enable us to see others as embodiments of the sacred? Do they enable us to respond with awe, wonder, and radical amazement to the grandeur and mystery of the universe? Mr. Obama, if you can get this new way of thinking into the public sphere, you have a real chance of making a historic contribution to the world.

Specific steps that your administration could take might include:

•  Adding a Social Responsibility Requirement to every corporate charter: every corporation with income of over $50 million a year (not mom-and-pop small businesses) would be required to get a new corporate charter every ten years. The charter would only be granted to those corporations that could prove a satisfactory history of social responsibility (including ecological responsibility and caring for the well-being of workers) to a jury of ordinary citizens.

•  Creating a national bank that gives LOANS WITHOUT CHARGING INTEREST. The biblical mandate against loaning money for interest to “your people” must now have a universal application as we recognize that all people on this planet are part of one universal family. The model of Hebrew Free Loans, which worked effectively for several thousand years in the Jewish community, should become a model for a new kind of banking system funded by our government and allowing people to borrow money for the purposes of education, purchasing or repairing a home, starting or expanding a small business, or other goals that potentially contribute to the well-
being of the community.

•  Raising the minimum wage to a living wage determined to be adequate for any given area of the country by the religious, labor, and health organizations of that community, and providing several years of unemployment insurance for anyone willing to obtain new skills relevant to future employment.

•  Creating a national health care system that removes the profit motive from health care. This could be achieved with a single-payer system. In addition, medical schools should be expanded and students of medicine-, health care-, pharmacy-, chemistry-, biology-, and psychology-related research and training programs should be given full tuition scholarships plus living stipends adequate to support their families as they go through the many years of training. In return, health care personnel should be recruited to their vocation not on the basis of expectations of monetary reward higher than that of others providing necessary societal services, but on the basis of a genuine desire to contribute to the common good.

We don’t expect you’d win on all of these. But we do know that framing the national discourse around the fundamental issues raised by this new kind of thinking could have a lasting impact beyond your presidency. It would help all of us imagine a world in which love, generosity, and caring became the real content of our lives. This process could help Americans experience our yearning for a life of higher meaning and purpose, and our yearning for a community of people who seek each other’s well-being, as realistic possibilities and not just utopian ideals.

We invite you, President Obama, to join with our Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) in further exploring these ideas. And we invite others reading this to join with us in re-focusing the national discourse along the lines outlined above and challenging the cynical realists who currently control the national discourse. Please JOIN the NSP.  (You receive a free subscription to Tikkun Magazine, which discusses these issues in more depth, when you join the NSP.)

Rabbi Michael Lerner, Professor Cornel West, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister

Co-chairs of the (interfaith) Network of Spiritual Progressives
www.spiritualprogressives.org     www.tikkun.org     Contact: RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org

Tikkun Magazine
The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP)

To be a “spiritual progressive,” you don’t have to believe in God or be part of a particular religious or spiritual community if you share our vision of a New Bottom Line. You are a spiritual progressive already if you can get behind the notion that love, kindness, generosity, peace, ecological sanity, social justice, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe are appropriate criteria for judging whether a given policy or way of life is rational, productive, or efficient, even though they can’t be measured in the ways that you’d measure money or power.

 

q YES, I want to help get this message to President Obama and to America’s opinion shapers.

You can use my name as a signatory to this ad. And I’ll  make a tax-deductible contribution to your national campaign to get these ideas brought into the public discussions about how we should rebuild America. I’ll donate q$1,000  q$500  q$300  q$150  q$100  q$75  qother____________________________

Check: Make out to the Network of Spiritual Progressives

Credit Card: You can donate online at www.spiritualprogressives.org or www.tikkun.org and click ‘Help us with this ad’ (preferred) OR supply your name, email address, billing address, city, state, zip, credit card type and no., expiration date, security code, and phone … Send this info to: “Tikkun, Ad Campaign” c/o TIKKUN, 2342 Shattuck Ave, Suite 1200, Berkeley, CA 94704. OR, if you prefer to give your credit card info on the phone, call us M-F 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PDT, at 510-644-1200.

 

 

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