Welcome to AlterNet readers! We love the new AlterNet site [where Harriet Fraad's Tikkun article was cross-posted] and we hope you will love this blog, which aims to refresh the souls of weary leftists. We challenge the religiophobic parts of the Left to engage in better strategies that connect with the American people, who find the crises of modernity to be spiritual as well as economic (but often it is only the Religious Right that speaks to the spiritual crisis). Atheists are as welcome here as believers: for us spirituality is more about how we act than what theological beliefs we hold. We have ideas for Obama, of course, but he’s not listening to us. Tikkun Olam means to heal and repair the world. Let us know in the comments whether you think our posts and our art gallery are helping to do that.

Our lead article in the current print issue of Tikkun is “American Depressions” by psychotherapist Harriet Fraad. The Table of Contents of the whole issue is here — check out Chris Hedges on Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand and other great pieces, most of which you still have to buy the print magazine to read: try your local bookstore or get one here. You can also subscribe to get the most visionary magazine on the American Left!

Harriet Fraad, on the public access TV show The Struggle (http://thestruggle.org/MediaP.htm)

Harriet Fraad says she wrote “American Depressions”

out of a great sadness that Americans have been unable to defend their lives and stop the bleeding of their wounded salaries, their jobs, their homes and their relationships. I read about the militant and successful demonstrations and other tactics that defended Europeans and wondered, what happened to us?

The Left is well known for providing a gloomy read on America — after all, somebody has to tell the truth. But it used to be that the Left was also the place to go for vision about this world, the dream of socialism. That dream has taken some knocks, just as the mainstream American dream has taken some knocks. What’s to keep a person’s spirits up?

We just had a State of the State address here in Wisconsin as well as a State of the Union address in Washington the day before. And then on Friday President Obama met with the Republican Caucus of the House of Representatives. I have to say, I wasn’t surprised, but I was saddened by the lack of civility that ensued after each of these encounters.

Here in Wisconsin, Assembly Minority Leader Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Horicon) retorted that Governor Doyle’s State of the State address “was a work of fiction…and Jim Doyle was trying to reinvent himself.” Is this a substantive response, one that can be used for a constructive dialogue about differences? No, it’s politically-motivated name calling.

During the State of the Union address in Washington, we saw a repeat of last year’s incivility when Obama addressed a joint session of Congress and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C) shouted out, “You lie!” This year it was Supreme Justice Samuel Alito who reprised last year’s lack of respect by muttering, “Not true” during the President’s remarks, shaking his head and furrowing his brow as he did so. This was an odd distraction, to say the least, since Supreme Court Justices don’t want to seem partial to issues that might some day come before them, so they usually sit silently when confronted with differences of opinion.

I guess we should be happy that the Republicans didn’t resort to the types of pranks they played during that health care speech last September. They didn’t hold up paper signs or interrupt. But House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) made frequent gestures in response to the president’s words, and when Obama asked rhetorically, “if anyone from either party has a better approach” to health care reform, a cocky Boehner stood up and raised his hand. I would call this rude, wouldn’t you? After Obama’s address, Boehner got a little closer to the issues when he pontificated that the president was shoving his job-killing agenda down the throats of the American people. But I doubt that such rhetoric will induce a useful conversation on how to get out of our financial mess and create more employment.

Thursday afternoon, I presented a resolution to the Board of Rio Arriba County Commissioners urging the President and Congress to speedily pass health care reform. It passed unanimously. I will pdf the resolution and forward it to New Mexico’s statewide papers, and will walk an orginal into the offices of Senators Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall.

The Commissioners discussion revolved around the need for our Senators to pressure Senate leadership into passing a sidecar “fix” through reconciliation to their HCR bill, enabling the House to support it.

Resolutions are often an excellent means of garnering press attention and telling your Congresscritters you are serious. Commissioners, Mayors, City Councilors represent constituencies and votes. Their resolutions matter.

Several years ago, Rio Arriba County became the first local government to pass a resolution condemning the leaked Patriot 2 document revoking citizenship of whomever for whatever. The resolution spurred a storm of statewide press, prompting a personal thank you to the Commissioners from constitutional advocate and then US Representative Tom Udall.

Of course, being a County Department head in a small rural county makes it easy for me to get the ear of my Commission. But you can, too. Try working through your county health department or through a locally well-known healthcare advocate.

I will post the text of the resolution below.

I’ve heard from hundreds of Tikkun readers and Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) members that they are confused, depressed and de-energized. It is totally understandable that these feelings now pervade the liberal and progressive world in light of the disappointments millions feel at the disjunction between Obama’s ability to touch our highest yearnings for a world of love, generosity and kindness on the one hand and his actual policies which are best characterized as Center-Right, plus the recent Supreme Court decisions giving the corporations the ability to dump billions into our elections, plus the continuing economic hardships facing tens of millions (not just the unemployed). It is understandable. Yet I know that it is this same set of feelings that creates the space for the fundamentalist Right and the Tea Party/ Sarah Palin phony populists to become the major shapers of American politics.

We don’t have to let this happen. And we won’t. That’s why it is so important for you personally to find a way to come to our conferences either in San Francisco this Feb 15 (the Monday of President’s Day weekend) or to our conference in D.C. June 11-14. And it’s important to get everyone you know who cares about all these developments to come also (so would you please email them a link to this post as well?).

At the conferences we will discuss and try to develop a coherent strategy. It’s not about bashing Obama, but it is about figuring out what we can do now that it is sinking that Obama is not going to champion peace (unless you like the war in Afghanistan), social justice, human rights, or environmentally sound policies (unless you like off-shore drilling and nuclear energy). So it’s up to us.

Well, of course we do. Some new invention that gets us all the energy we want from renewable sources? Isn’t that the holy grail of environmentalists these days, the only way to stave off global warming? Or is it?

The diagram that accompanies the latest story about progress in nuclear fusion, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Today’s headline news is about nuclear fusion again. Fission–splitting atoms apart–is what happens in atom bombs and today’s nuclear power stations; and as we all know, its biggest problem as a fix for our energy needs is the toxic radiation it creates. But fusion–the fusing of hydrogen atoms to make helium, which is what powers the Sun and all other stars–does not create that kind of harmful radiation. For decades now we have been confidently told that a working fusion reactor is only a decade away and that still seems to be optimistic. However, today my local paper reignites the story…

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported Thursday they have taken a major step toward harnessing the forces that power the sun in an effort to create unlimited energy on Earth.

A dear friend of mine died.

Every President has to balance two imperatives: defeating his political opponents, and dealing with the problems that the country faces, but only a few Presidents get the opportunity to do both at once. Barack Obama was one of the few, and all of the media attempts to explain why 2008 was not 1932 or 1936 or 1964 or whatever cannot obscure the fact that he failed to rise to the occasion. Without grasping that failure, the significance of his State of the Union Address cannot be understood. When we do grasp it, we see that Obama’s Presidency rests on a carefully drawn contrast in appearance with ill-informed opponents, and on a careful convergence with their actual politics, and not on a program to lead the country in a new direction. This was especially clear in the central theme of his speech last night, deficit reduction.

One of the main criticisms we at Tikkun have reluctantly had to make of the Obama administration from the start, has been his failure to even “pragmatically” include a genuine range of opinion in his cabinet. He took Geithner and co. from the corporate / financial world, but did not balance those “centrists” (in any European country they would be well to the right of center) with strong progressives. When he did take on a progressive leader — Van Jones — he dropped him like a hot potato as soon as criticisms came up from the Right.

Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA

One of the disappointments was the choice of Lisa Jackson to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She had done a lousy job as New Jersey’s environment chief and the environment activists groaned at her appointment. So it is very heartening to read a piece about her titled “The Eco-Warrior” in the new Rolling Stone. Some key quotes:

With a minimum of fanfare, new EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has established herself as the agency’s most progressive chief ever — and one of the most powerful members of Obama’s Cabinet.

… Under Jackson, the agency is once again basing decisions on science rather than politics. “The science is not something the Obama administration feels they have to guard themselves against,” says one clean-air staffer who was sidelined under Bush. “Because they are not trying to protect their industry buddies from environmental regulations.”

Interesting that that’s the New York Times headline about yesterday’s State of the Union speech. The author contrasts Obama’s “staying the course” with Clinton’s move to the right in 1996. The assumption here at Tikkun has been that Obama would continue to follow Clinton to the right.

But when you read the whole piece it turns out that they are saying that staying the course for Obama means being unemotional, cool, an “anti-ideologue.”

“I wanted to speak to the lie that we can all wear the right thing or buy the right thing and then we can be American. They said, ‘This is what an American eats and this is what an American looks like.’ I wanted to insert stories about people who don’t fit in or can’t fit in.” – Beverly Naidus to Tikkun Daily, September 2009

Today, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision to end limits on corporate campaign spending, we check back in with Beverly Naidus, a culture-jamming artist we profiled in September 2009.

Beverly’s work commandeers the imagery of corporate marketing campaigns, adding provocative text and altering the imagery in an effort to compel viewers to address the ways they are manipulated by advertising.

(To view more of Beverly Naidus’s new work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

Pat Robertson’s latest claim that God punished Haiti for making a pact with the devil was rightly condemned by religious and political leaders across the spectrum. However, there is an irony here in that many of those leaders or religious laypeople who saw the cruelty in Robertson’s remark actually share his same underlying theology which is as equally disturbing. The disagreement lies in the timing and particular expression of the theology, but the essence of Robertson’s cruel statement is shared by many of those religious people who condemned it. The problem for many was not Robertson’s God–one that is insensitive, cruel and sadistic but rather it was the specific reason he posited for God allowing or commanding what “he” did. But let’s be clear–many people believe that God did have a reason for allowing the quake–albeit different than Robertson’s.

Anyone who believes in an omnipotent God who could have intervened to stop the Haiti earthquake is making the same moral claim about God as Robertson did. He gave his reason as to why God allowed the earthquake while others simply say that God is too awesome for us to know “his” true reasons. But ultimately the premise is the same–God makes conscious choices on a daily basis and allows (for whatever reason) people to suffer and die but has the power to save them if “he” wanted. Additionally as in the recent case of the man who was pulled from the rubble 11 days after the quake, some believe that this was a “miracle” of God as one of French rescue workers claimed. It is mind boggling to me to imagine how a God could have allowed perhaps over 100,000 people to suffer and die–in some cases being buried alive but yet choose to use “his” power to save a few people a week or so after. It is even more troubling to me how this God could be in any way, shape or form be considered good. It would seem more ethically consistent to posit a God that makes choices to allow people to die but to be able to accurately name this as bad. If a man allowed his child to be buried alive in a building no one in their right mind would excuse this by saying “he is too awesome for us to understand his reasons.” And this person certainly wouldn’t be called good, yet this is what many claim about God. Our sense of morality must apply to God because it is the only one that we have. We don’t have some extra worldly, supernatural way to say that in some cases the act of allowing someone to be buried alive is good. But yet this is the foundational theology of many religious people. God is good even if “he” is killing people or allowing others to die.

Complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM, which includes herbal medicine, chiropractic, acupuncture, Ayurveda, and traditional Chinese medicine, sits at the awkward intersection of medicine, spirituality, and tradition.

Often touted for being antiestablishment, CAM is increasingly finding its way into the mainstream, through doctors’ offices, insurance companies, supplements, and the media. There’s even a division of the National Institutes of Health, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), devoted entirely to CAM. Established in the early 90s, NCCAM’s mission is to determine which CAM therapies are effective and why. Medical schools, funded by NCCAM and private philanthropists, are now offering classes in and have their own research facilities devoted to CAM.

And while the recent popularization of CAM warrants analysis and criticism, this isn’t meant to be a post about whether CAM is good or bad, works or doesn’t; my aim is to gain a greater understanding of who (besides you, perhaps) benefits from the use of CAM and how our current fascination with CAM plays out in today’s market-driven world. For many of us, CAM has been instrumental in the healing process: whether because the treatments in and of themselves are more effective than a placebo; because of the placebo effect, or some other effect related to the mind-body connection; or whether time itself allowed healing to take place. While remaining agnostic to the role of CAM, my goal here is to understand how CAM is being distorted through the very process by which it is becoming “mainstreamed.”

Father Louie Vitale, Courtesy of Pace e Bene

Dear Father Louie,

Thank you for your work and witness for justice and especially for your willingness to go several extra steps in your protest against the School of the Americas (AKA WHINSEC) at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Crossing the line to enter Fort Benning, getting arrested, being tried, and now serving time in jail for your act of civil disobedience, would be great acts of courage for any American, let alone a 77 year old!

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862):

I said to myself, — I said to others, –

“There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived.” The morning and the evening were sweet to me, and I led a life aloof from society of men. I wondered if a mortal had ever known what I knew. I looked in books for some recognition of a kindred experience, but, strange to say, I found none. Indeed, I was slow to discover that other men had had this experience, for it had been possible to read books and to associate with men on other grounds. The maker of me was improving me. When I detected this interference I was profoundly moved. For years I marched as to a music in comparison with which the military music of the streets is noise and discord. I was daily intoxicated, and yet no man could call [me] intemperate. With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?

– Journal, July 16, 1851

Longtime NSP member Jed Downhill sent us this alert from Amnesty International. If you can, please take a few minutes to do this.

Amnesty International USA: TAKE ACTION NOW!

The self-imposed deadline set by President Obama for his administration to finally close the Guantanamo detention facility came and went to no avail. In fact, the Administration took steps to undermine everything the date was supposed to represent.

Pick up the phone and demand that all Guantanamo detainees be tried, charged with a crime or released!

On Friday, we told you about the Justice Department-led task force releasing appalling recommendations to continue holding nearly 50 Guantanamo detainees without charge, trial or options for legal recourse.

One of the most read pieces on this blog in the last week is Eli Zaretsky’s “Proto-Fascist Elements in America Today.” It’s a powerful piece, and I disagree with it only in two regards: I don’t think the problem is particularly American, and I don’t think it’s about fascism. Zaretsky’s concerns certainly apply as much to Canada and the UK as they do to the US. And the core of what is wrong with what is happening in these countries isn’t a potential slide into proto-fascism, it’s that what is making that possible is the destruction of the legal protections that were once taken for granted.

Paul Craig Roberts, in CounterPunch, cuts to the heart of the issue:

The greatest human achievement is the subordination of government to law. This was an English achievement that required eight centuries of struggle, beginning in the ninth century when King Alfred the Great codified the common law, moving forward with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century and culminating with the Glorious Revolution in the late seventeenth century.
The success of this long struggle made law a shield of the people. As an English colony, America inherited this unique achievement that made English speaking peoples the most free in the world. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this achievement was lost in the United States and, perhaps, in England as well.

It is this willful and demonstrable loss of the protection of law that is the core of what is wrong with what is happening in the West today.

Liberty -- just an idea in a museum?

I have dived into our last two weeks of getting the print issue of Tikkun to press and have not found time to blog or visit the blogosphere. But this says what I want to say better than I could: an email from my friend Phil who had it from his friend Joanne, so pass it on:

People may remember a Hollywood film not too long ago called Indecent Proposal which featured actor Robert Redford offering a lot of money to “Woody” from Cheers (Woody Harrelson) to be able to get the latter’s wife Demi Moore for a night. I always wondered what the indecency in that film was all about. Was it the immorality of adultery? Was it the crassness of commodified trafficking in human beings? Or the commodification of love and, of course, sex? Despite the plausibility of all the above, I remain convinced that the indecency was primarily in the quantity of money offered by Robert Redford – not a few thousands, but a whole million – to a young couple in financial distress.

What is reasonable to expect from our government?  What ought we to expect from our elected representatives?  After a year of effort, of back and forth in both houses of Congress, of hearings and work in subcommittees and committees, of opinions left, right and center in the public discourse in all the various aspects of our hyper –media; after the Sturm and Drang of single payer/public opinion/Medicare buy-ins, of triggers for the public option and opt ins and opt outs, the worth of co-ops and insurance exchanges with not-for-profit companies; after raucous town hall meetings, after foolishness about death panels and pulling the plug on grandma; after misrepresentations about undocumented workers and shocking disrespect for the President of the United States speaking before a joint session of Congress; after disingenuous Republican rhetoric about a government take-over of healthcare;  after backroom bargaining, hours and hours of debate, after Republican obstructionism and votes taken in the wee-small hours of the morning; after a Christmas Eve vote in the Senate that brought a glimmer of hope that the United States, at long last, would finally join the rest of the developed world and provide universal healthcare for its citizens, our elected representatives have yet to pass a comprehensive health care bill.  There is doubt whether or not they will.