From Miss Pink Slip, a blogger who realizes the self-help she's addicted to isn't helping her. But it isn't helping us get a better stimulus package either. Her post is at: http://misspinkslip.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/i-need-help-for-self-help/

If 15 million people are unemployed at the same time, are they each individually to blame? Of course not. How could they be? You can discuss that with us on our Tikkun Phone Forum topic tomorrow night (more below).

The Rate

If you count the “discouraged workers” (who gave up looking in the last year) and the “marginally attached workers” (who gave up before that but would take a job if offered) and those who need a full time job but are meanwhile working part time, the number of unemployed is more like 27 million people.

I found this explanation in plain English helpful and took the current (September) stats from two Bureau of Labor Statistics reports: the first is a press release that manages to avoid ever saying that number of 27 million, though its figures do add up to it, and the other has an easy-to-read table showing the rates of the different categories of the unemployed and underemployed. The full rate, the U6 rate, was at 17% for September.

We are told the unemployment rate hit 25% in the Great Depression. How many of the underemployed that are included in today’s U6 rate were included in that? And what about all the self-employed whose incomes tanked, then and now: are they counted anywhere?

Beware of Self-Blame

So are you one of the 27 million? The Self-Help movement, if that’s what it is, or publishing scam, which is all it often is, may tell you you have to shape up and visualize success. There may be an ounce of truth in that. If I was fired for poor performance, of course, I would learn whatever lessons I could from it. If I could use my unemployment to take classes and get better at my field, of course I would try to crank myself up to do so.

BUT: self-blame may just make you miserable and alone, and prevent you from joining with other unemployed people to change the economic system!

Our friend Bill Distler, a Vietnam veteran on disability in Washington state working with Iraq vets and others against the current wars, wrote this op-ed hoping to get it in the Seattle Times before the anniversary of the bombing of Afghanistan on Oct. 7th, 2001. They didn’t print it so we are presenting it here.

Afghanistan: Success Means Ending the War

by Bill Distler

Protesters on last weekend's National Equality March in Washington, DC. Which war? Both, I'm sure.

We are now in the ninth year of our war against Afghanistan. The conversation about Afghanistan centers on the concept of “success”. Success is described as defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda and “stabilizing ” Afghanistan. This is a vision of success defined in military terms. This will be good for General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, and General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. They will win new medals and their careers will be crowned with “victory”. But who else will it be good for?

In moral terms, which are the only terms that really count, we are suffering a monumental failure. We are asked to think of war only in terms of winning and losing. This makes the lives of Afghans less important than our pride. This is the same moral failure that we suffered in Vietnam. We could have won militarily in Vietnam and still have lost morally.

George Bush failed us by not seeking justice against the perpetrators of 9/11. Instead, he brought the injustice of war to the entire population of Afghanistan. President Obama has so far failed to do the right thing by seeking a cease-fire and negotiations to end the war. Those of us who want peace have failed to build a large enough movement to make demands on him.

Starting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was a moral failure. Continuing the wars is a moral failure. Winning the wars will be a moral failure. Ending the wars will be a moral success.

I’ve noticed that increasingly I’ve been getting irritated with friends when they refer to me as “retired”. They seem, fairly enough, puzzled by this. Wasn’t it Peter who held a wonderful online retirement party when he stopped teaching high school in 2003, who happily lives on the pension with which the Ontario Teachers Pension fund continues to supply him, and who collect Canadian Pension payments from the federal government? Most of all it puzzles them because I described myself as retired. And now all of a sudden I’m bridling and sputtering that I’m not retired? How does that work?

Today at The Immanent Frame, Professors Robbie Barnett, Cameron David Warner, Carole Ann McGranahan, and Edward Friedman respond to our questions about President Obama’s recent decision to postpone meeting with the Dalai Lama until after his upcoming summit with Chinese head of state Hu Jintao:

What does Obama’s decision say about his strategy regarding the protection of human rights and the competing demands of geopolitical gamesmanship? What do the decision and the strong reactions it has provoked say about the Dalai Lama’s authority as both a religious and a political leader? How does the intrinsic duality of his position play out on the international stage?

Read the responses here.

An artist whose work does often give me joy and nourishment for life. Andy Goldsworthy's "Rowan Leaves With Hole."

So let’s imagine you are a progressive, committed to social justice and peace — and close to burning out. You once had tons of social change energy, but now are deeply despondent about the state of the world or the corner of it you have been trying to improve, and just as despondent about your relationships with your activist colleagues who are, to say it politely, difficult. It happens.

So you turn to — what? Banned substances? Passivity? Republicanism? You know better than that, so you turn to spiritual teachings, practices, meditation, prayer, the mountains, whatever it is that floats your spirit boat. You go to classes in relating to difficult people. You read Tikkun.

My question is: do you also turn to art? Let’s leave fiction, theater and poetry aside for now. Do you turn to the visual arts? Does a quick gallery tour in your city help revive your spirits? Does an art magazine, or the art section of your bookstore?

I have to say that a long time ago I stopped looking to art for that kind of help: for inspiration and nourishment in leading my life and helping heal the world in whatever way I can. That way, when it does help, I’m nicely surprised, instead of being in a further state of disappointed rage at the art world and the pervasive harm I feel in my incoherent bones that it inflicts on us all.

OK, there are many exceptions. BUT. How to find them? Gallery tours and scouring the magazines and art bookshelves rarely if ever pay off for me. I haven’t tried to express these thoughts in public before, probably because I’m intimidated by high culture, by the idea that some art professor will tell me I’m shallow. Am I a lazy, petulant Philistine? Probably. But why should I have to search that hard through the haystack? I’m not only looking for modern Fra Angelicos, I’m not posing an impossibly high standard. Why should I have to read so much fine print next to an incomprehensible artwork in order to find out that the artist has good intentions? When that is all I get, it enrages rather than nourishes me. I still feel that Art in our time is not helping!

Lauren Reichelt, an expert on health care, has taken my blog concerning the health care debate to task on several grounds. First, she has criticized me because I am not familiar with the details of the six bills currently circulating, but instead have focused on what I called the meaning of the legislation. Second, she criticizes me for confusing cost reduction and spending reduction. Finally, she criticizes me because various arguments that I made seem to echo right wing arguments. I would like to respond all three of these criticisms.

First, although the details of the bill are not yet known, its essential content is clear, and has been clear for months; long before the congressional antics the basic ideas were worked out by the administration along with insurance companies, hospitals, drug companies, large corporations and other “players.” That, however, was not my point.

My point is that it is my right as a citizen to discuss whatever aspects of the bill I want to discuss. I need not become a policy wonk to weigh in. My blog concerned the political discourse surrounding the health care bill. In order to explain why I am so critical of the way that Obama has framed this issue, I will state how I think he should have proceeded.

Earth Day 1970 found me protesting for greater environmental protections. But for many years afterwards, I figured that the issue was a no-brainer. You just don’t destroy the biosphere, the food and shelter your species depends on for survival. I put my efforts into the women’s movement instead, because there seemed to be a lot of inertia about women’s rights and society was crying out for greater gender equality.

In retrospect, I was right about my second assumption — there was a lot of inertia concerning women’s rights — but I was wrong about my first — environmental action wasn’t a no-brainer after all. We’ve made a lot of advances in women’s rights. And we’ve made some progress on the environment, but not anywhere near enough. As a result, we’re headed for a lot of trouble. Why? In part because we environmentalists lost the P.R. battle. Somehow we didn’t make it clear that our issue wasn’t just an issue. It was survival we were talking about.

An article authored by Eli Zaretsky entitled A Bill to Cut Health Care Spending appeared yesterday on Tikkun Daily, ostensibly to assist in the creation “an independent left.” Zaretsky argues that the current health care proposal is actually an effort to cut spending by eliminating Medicare. Not only is his premise blatantly false; it is a repetition of right wing talking points introduced by the insurance industry to kill health care reform.

We at Tikkun should be asking ourselves, “Do I want to demonstrate my left-leaning independence by repeating everything Glenn Beck says?”

I want to repeat a comment here that was just posted on our website under Michael Lerner’s interview with Judge Richard Goldstone. (Incidentally, that interview is getting around: my former wife in the north of England just emailed me that someone had sent it to her, without knowing she knew anything about Tikkun). This comment is by Carol Horwitz of “Jews Say No!” She writes:

Please read this letter and petition thanking Judge Goldstone for his report, and for his objective reporting of the facts — no matter how much the making making these facts public offends Israel and its often tunnelvisioned supporters.

If you haven’t done so already, you can still add your name to the Jewish letter in support of the Goldstone report. Because we have had so many responses over the past 24 hours and so many more people who have wanted to sign on, we are continuing it as an on-line petition. You can sign on at : http://www.petitiononline.com/UNreport/petition.html

We will be getting it out as widely as possible so please send to anyone you think might be interested in signing on.
Thanks,
Jews Say No!

This is great. I wish I had time right now to listen to more of these stories. Let it load, click on the tiny faces on the wall and a video pops up and people tell their health care stories.

From the folks who launched the site today:

Read through the stories, add your name to the wall of supporters and then forward the site to your family and friends.

We need you to help us spread the word. We want EVERYONE to visit this website and click the “add your voice” button to join our movement. We have seen these pictures, and read all the stories, and are convinced that once someone spends time on this site, they will become believers that we need to come together now to make health care affordable for all families.

We truly appreciate all your work. God Bless,

Gloria, Christy & Danyrea

Faith leaders from San Diego Organizing Project, a member of PICO National Network

I have joined this blog because I want to encourage the development of an independent left. For that to happen, we need to get beyond Obama, and to do that we need to understand his limitations. I welcome comments and further discussion. Today I will take up health care.

Universal health care has long been the central plank of a progressive or left platform, and at first glance it would appear that Obama is on the verge of achieving this. However, this is a mistake, and not only because many people would be left out of any of the bills that will pass.

What counts in a bill is the meaning of the bill. The details get modified later. When Social Security passed in 1935 it had the clear meaning that the American people collectively were responsible for making sure that the aged had enough to live on; they didn’t need to rely on their families alone. The bill was flawed but the meaning was clear. As Roosevelt explained in his Second Inaugural: “In every land there are always at work forces that drive men apart and forces that draw men together. In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people.” Because the meaning was clear, later generations could build on, for example: Medicare.

Yesterday, I wrote about an unusual British gag order in a diary entitled “Free Speech News Round-Up.” The UK Guardian had mysteriously reported that a parlaimentarian had asked a question that was tabled until the following week. According to the October 12 issue of The Guardian:

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

It seems that an aggressive band of bloggers and twitterers solved the mystery and forced Carter-Ruck to rescind the gag order within a matter of hours (Thanks to Mary O’Grady, who commented on my story yesterday, for the tip!).

Meredith Gould is always worth reading on Jewish-Catholic relations (I first blogged about her Jewish in identity, Christian in faith, and Catholic in religious practice). Today, she comments on an attempt by the U.S. Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to recover from their blunder earlier this year, but in ways that do not touch the core problem. Some quotes:

Despite artfully worded proclamations, anti-Judaism (i.e., hatred of the Jewish religion) and anti-Semitism (i.e., hatred of Jews as an ethnic group) are alive and sick. At least one disturbingly hefty segment of the Catholic population is clue-free about the debt of gratitude all Christians owe to Judaism and the Jewish people.

I suppose I should, in some bizarre way, be grateful for validating proof of persistent ignorance about Jews and Judaism. Instead, I’m mostly annoyed and discouraged by bungled communications from those entrusted with church leadership.

If the USCCB can’t adhere to the standard set forth in Matthew 7:12 when they attempt to clarify Catholic-Jewish dialogue, they should at least consider adopting this one from the Hippocratic Corpus: “First, do no harm.”

Now this is one kind of interfaith work I can get behind: where we criticize our own church or religious organization for insensitivity to another that we know well and also love. Instead of the bland niceness that’s so often a hallmark of interfaith work, in which you always wonder what people are really thinking, here is passion, truth-telling, and love for both sides.

The BBC uses this NASA image with the caption "Average temperatures have not increased for over a decade." But NASA itself contradicts that assertion.

There is joy today among science skeptics who can’t stand the idea that human freedom might be curtailed by nature. Or who don’t want their profits curtailed by regulations to deal with it. Or don’t want something curtailed by anything.

I can understand oil and fossil fuel fanatics hating the idea that human-generated global warming might be real. Tobacco execs didn’t like news of lung cancer for the same reason. But if there’s half a chance global warming is as real as the great preponderance of climate scientists say, isn’t the conservative thing to do to try and conserve the climate we have?

Apparently not.

The web is suddenly awash with op-eds like Debra Saunders’ “The Global Warming Consensus Cools” today. It goes back to a BBC report “What happened to global warming?” which Instapundit and loads of others have linked to. The BBC of all sources, queen of the liberal media, has said that global warming might not be happening after all. Well, the report isn’t quite as one sided as all the crowing would suggest: it does report that the jury is still out and the proof will be in the sweating or lack of it in the next few years. It concludes:

So what can we expect in the next few years?

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

Today’s post: a news round-up of noteworthy stories that are not being widely reported elsewhere in the mainstream media or blogging world.

Police attack peaceful protesters in Rochester.

This BlipTV episode appearing on buzzflash was reported by all over the board. A small cohort of students gathered in a park in Rochester to protest military recruiting practices in public schools and to demand an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. About a hundred young people waving colorful banners chanted and banged on drums while marching in a peaceful and orderly fashion down a street.

Twenty seven police cars suddenly appeared, sirens wailing. The students, including several small children, walked around the cars. At this point, the police jumped out and began to arrest and physically assault protesters.

Over the last few years, India has made much news on the global stage for its impressive economic growth rates and its “shining democracy” (a campaign slogan from the 1990s that sits well among ruling classes and a shrinking middle-class even today). However, like all shining images, this one too wears thin quickly when one is able to discern the growth of inequality, the fact that India ranks 94 / 119 on the Global hunger Index (of 2009) and has 27% of the world’s undernourished population while boasting of billionaires every year added to the list.

The following is a statement of appeal to the Government of India put out by a progressive group in the US, Sanhati that is a deeply concerned and superbly informed document offering a glimpse into the realities of India. The kind of violence that is unleashed by the Indian state on the pretext of quelling mass uprisings that have themselves become armed movements over time reminds me of Bishop Dom Helder Camara’s powerful insights in 1970s from northeast Brazil on the Spiral of Violence — where he spoke of three violences — violence of poverty and dependent development (Violence 1), armed violence of resistance of the poor and those acting on their behalf (Violence 2) and the crushing violence of the state to suppress this resistance (Violence 3). Not surprisingly, India’s aboriginal population of more than 75 million is at the receiving end of this state violence that brings the state and capital directly into conflict with the welfare of citizens.

As one of the newest interns at Tikkun I was pretty eager to prove my dedication to the magazine as we were nearing our print deadline, so I was a little more than irritated when my boyfriend asked me to take off to attend LovEvolution with him in San Francisco last Saturday. “I don’t think they’d appreciate it if I took off to go to a rave,” I said with just a tinge of impatience.

SF’s City Hall During LovEvolution

“Erin, it’s not just a rave. It’s LovEvolution!” He proceeded to explain how, for the nonreligious like himself, festivals like LovEvolution are the closest he ever gets to an opportunity for congregationalism. Now I’ll admit, I was skeptical, but come on. Techno music, drug use, and half-naked girls in furry boots are a far cry from the congregationalism I experienced in small, country Methodist churches in rural Maryland. “You just wanna party.” But trying to be open-minded and supportive, I agreed to go. Let me just say, I was not prepared.

In his first post on Tikkun Daily, Eli Zaretsky succinctly laid out what he sees as the “Obama shell game:” a method that a president committed to “rightist and neo-liberal policies” uses to paralyze and preempt any opposition to his left. The left in Zaretsky’s view is “easily misled.” Obama, who knows the left well from his university days, is a master at misleading it by the occasional speech or promise that holds out hope. He is then free to enact his center-right policies.

Is this correct? The part that interests me most is this point that the left is easily misled. Can one say anything more contemptuous of a large group of people? Sheep, who don’t think for themselves, who just can’t see through the woolly sweater to the wolf beneath. It’s not that they are bad, selfish, cruel — there’s some respect implied in that — it’s that they are foolish, lacking analysis, toughness, and what it takes.

They — even the college-based left, replete with degrees in analytical wizardry — are as prone to illusions, Zaretsky, says, as those saps the Russian peasants, who always believed the Czar loved them, really, if only they could reach him. Of course it was not just the Russians. This was equally a theme in, say, English and French history, until the peasants’ descendants rose up and cut off their kings’ heads. Every middle class, and especially the intellectuals of that class, have always defined themselves as not peasants. Peasants! What a put down.

This is an enormously frustrating time and it is tempting to be contemptuous. It’s a traditional tendency in the left I have known all my life. Mostly, the contempt has been towards the right, though the deeper one gets into actual left political organizations, the more it is towards rivals on the left. This tone of contempt is one of the reasons I lost enthusiasm for reading left journalism for many years.

Yosemite in winter. Credit: Tuan Luong

A pleasure of doing this blog is the people who write in suggesting ideas and then make good on them. Last week someone I don’t know emailed me with the above heading and the suggestion that we should cover it on Tikkun Daily because “Spiritual Progressives can draw sustenance from it.” I asked him if he could write a post explaining why. Here it is, in three parts, with our thanks, from Jan Garrett, who is a (nearly) life-long Unitarian Universalist and a professor of philosophy at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green KY.

I

Like many others in this country, last week I spent my evenings watching “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” directed by Ken Burns and co-produced by Dayton Duncan, on my local public television network. The series contains five nearly 2-hour episodes, with inspirational scenery, powerful wildlife footage, and an engrossing, often inspiring, human story spanning more than a 150 years, replete with heroes and villains, mystics, poets, journalists and scientists with hearts, and statesmen who occasionally do the right thing.

John Muir

Full episodes have been available online since their original showing but they will be removed after October 9. Perhaps shorter clips from the series will still be available. The series will apparently also be run on PBS stations beginning at a rate of one episode per week. In the following notes, based mainly on the first and sixth episode in the series, which I viewed a second time online, I hope to interest Tikkun Daily readers in the spiritual experience of immersing yourself in the entire series.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1

In awarding the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace to President Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee has put its faith in the ability of the president to inspire the world and thereby to push it closer to peace. According to Geir Lundestad, secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, it was a vote of encouragement. It was a vote of support for President Obama’s vision. It was a vote that put the gravitas of the Nobel Prize behind President Obama’s aspirations for peace through global cooperation.

Awarding this prize to President Obama after so short a time on the world stage makes sense when we view it through the lens of just peace theory. Unlike just war theory that comes to the fore at the point of crisis, just peace theory strives to keep the conflicts from coming to the point of a crisis that requires armed intervention. Just peace theory takes preventative steps to solve problems. Just peace is a process. Just peace theory may be understood within the context of three broad categories: truth, respect, and security.