Across California, 6,600 prisoners have participated in the hunger strike begun on July 1 at Pelican Bay State prison’s security housing unit or solitary confinement.

On July 1st, 43 prisoners inside California Pelican Bay State Prison’s security housing unit (or SHU, a fancy name to get those of us not in prison to think it is something other than solitary confinement and all that entails) began a hunger strike against torture and for self-determination and liberation. Solidarity with prisoners who are organizing themselves for justice is just a click away. Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity, a San Francisco Bay Area coalition of grassroots organizations “committed to amplyifing the voices of and supporting the prisoners,” has a blog and I suggest you check out like I did by clicking here.

It’s day two and at the same time as these 43 prisoners refuse food in participate in this hunger strike at Pelican Bay, 2.3 million people are in similar conditions, marginalized in solitary confinement and isolating conditions within an already hidden and dehumanizing system. For those of you who have not thought about the prison industrial complex as a justice issue for people of faith specifically, just that number of people hidden in our society seems like something to pray on. Here’s a couple other reflections that convinced me to learn about mass incarceration as a social justice issue and now to write about and pray for the Pelican Bay prisoners:

In a well-received Op/Ed piece in the New York Times, Columbia law professor, Katherine M. Franke explains why she considers the New York marriage decision a “mixed blessing.” Why does she say that?

First, Franke is concerned that the decision to allow same-sex couples access to civil marriage in New York will most likely lead to the elimination of domestic partnership status. She sees this as unfortunate because having domestic partnership as an option provides “greater freedom than can be found in the one-size-fits-all rules of marriage.”

Second, Franke does not think people should be “forced” to get married in order to access their partners’ health insurance and other benefits. She believes domestic partnership ought to be an alternative way of accessing benefits for both gays and straights.

Finally, she does not want to “celebrate” the idea of having the state sanction and regulate personal relationships.

A lot of my friends recommended this op/ed piece on Facebook, but I found myself less than convinced by Franke’s claims for a number of reasons. First, while Franke insists that “domestic partnerships and civil unions aren’t a consolation prize made available to lesbian and gay couples because we are barred from legally marrying,” in most cases, that is exactly what they are.

This seems to be the case even in New York City, where Franke resides. According to the City, domestic partnership status is available only to “couples that have a close and committed personal relationship” and who “live together, and have been living together on a continuous basis.” It is not available to anyone who “is married or related by blood in a manner that would bar his or her marriage in New York State.” While it is open to gay and straight couples alike, the status seems to be aimed at those who are living together as if married, rather than alternative domestic configurations.

To give another example, my home state of Delaware just legalized civil unions for same-sex couples precisely because such couples are prohibited from marrying. The new status will provide all the state-level benefits of marriage, but because civil unions have no federal status, none of the federal ones. While I am happy that my relationship will soon have some legal protection in Delaware, I am not happy to be relegated to second-class status. But it was the best we could do politically.

The White House and congressional leaders are in final negotiations to raise the debt ceiling. Congress must raise the debt ceiling so the U.S. government can pay its current obligations. Yet in order to secure enough votes to raise the debt ceiling, some members of Congress are withholding their vote unless dramatic cuts are made to federal spending–including devastating and long-term cuts to programs for hungry and poor people.

Every deficit-reduction package of the last 30 years–under Republican and Democratic leaders–has exempted key programs for hungry and poor people from cuts. We must protect these programs now.

Final negotiations between President Obama and leaders in Congress are happening now. Call your senators through our special toll-free number (1-800-826-3688) and ask them to urge Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to create a circle of protection around funding for programs for hungry and poor people in the United States and abroad in the bill to raise the debt ceiling.

The City of Orlando has made over 20 arrests for sharing meals with the hungry at Lake Eola Park. The city limits the group to sharing twice a year per park.

Food Not Bombs has been sharing free vegetarian meals and literature in public for over 30 years. While many believe that hunger and poverty is the result of personal failing and the solution can be found by getting closer to God, Food Not Bombs thought the solution could be found in changing public policy, economics and society.

Risking arrest sharing food in Orlando (courtesy FNB website)

With fifty cents of every federal tax dollar going towards the military, no one in the world’s wealthiest country should have to stand in line to eat at a soup kitchen. It was clear that fliers and banners were not enough to motivate the public to take action to redirect military spending towards the real security of education, healthcare and other social services so the eight co-founders started to share meals at their literature table. People of all walks of life visited Food Not Bombs at Harvard Square and the Boston Commons. Visitors engaged one another in dialog. People new to the ideas of peace and social justice were introduced to groups organizing to end the war in Central America, the Nuclear Arms Race and the virtues of vegetarian meals.

The corporate machine’s drive for profit has resulted in a race to the bottom. The bottom line is profit at the expense of people, social justice, and the environment. In the United States, wages are stagnant, unemployment and homelessness grow, and more families are finding themselves unable to afford food.

Food Not Bombs is doing something about hunger. A worldwide all-volunteer organization that has existed for 30 years, Food Not Bombs feeds people vegetarian meals and protests war and poverty. Around the world, nearly one billion people go without food every day, and more than 25,000 die each day as a result. Hunger is growing in the United States, where more than 44 million people rely on food stamps and food pantries and kitchens are so overwhelmed that they are turning people away. This is unacceptable, especially in one of the richest nations of the world.

It is even more unacceptable that people are being arrested for sharing meals with the hungry. Volunteers with Food Not Bombs were first arrested in Orlando, FL, on June 1. They continue to return to feed the hungry and undergo arrest. Cities throughout Florida are introducing laws that could restrict Food Not Bombs to sharing food only twice a year per park. Can you imagine that now it is a crime to give food to hungry people?

On Friday, May 28, I attended a lecture at St. Paul AME Church in Berkeley, California by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. It was an interesting chance that Alexander’s lecture coincided with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the mandate for California to reduce its prison overcrowding by at least 30,000 prisoners.

While I have been aware of systemic racism within the prison industrial complex thanks in part to the community education efforts of organizations in the S.F. Bay Area and my seminary education at Starr King School for the Ministry, I was alarmed by the facts she offered as well as the links between Jim Crow laws enacted before 1965 institutionalizing social, economic and other disadvantages based on race and today’s mass incarceration. By the end of the lecture, I became acutely aware of what people of faith can gain from understanding racism and mass incarceration as well as sharing with others their reflective milestones. Together, these practices can help to unhinge the moral structuring of white supremacy and identify ways to protect those labeled criminals in the U.S..

Alexander revealed her own process of personal transformation in the midst of political and legal work on racial justice for the American Civil Liberties Union in Oakland, California. Through her story, she showed the development of her consciousness-raising that eventually led her to claim mass incarceration is the “moral equivalent to Jim Crow.” She argues that in the U.S., we have re-created a racial caste system that labels people of color as criminals.

In this video of a lecture previously recorded to the one I saw this past week, Alexander offers a challenge to all those concerned about mass incarceration:

Pres. Obama’s much publicized speech on the Middle East at the State Department on May 19th caused a stir by advocating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement based upon the pre-June 1967 borders (the so-called Green Line), with modifications in the form of “land swaps” negotiated between the parties. This has been the general framework that moderate and pro-peace Israelis and Palestinians have promoted since at least 1995, when it was realized that most West Bank settlers live in thickly-populated “settlement blocs” contiguous with the Green Line. Unfortunately, too many people (most importantly, Prime Minister Netanyahu) seized upon Obama’s statement about the pre-June ’67 lines, disregarding his call for trading territory.

That Netanyahu and so many others found this controversial, illustrates how far we’ve come from a peace agreement almost arrived at in 2008. It also indicates that the US needs to be more assertive in helping the parties finally achieve peace.

Jeremy Ben-Ami

I awoke on Friday morning, May 20, to watch Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, on Democracy Now, and I’m glad I did. He performed well under difficult circumstances, being double-teamed by anti-Israel author Norman Finkelstein and Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, who argued that international law and justice demand that Israel simply withdraw to the pre-’67 lines, without requiring an exchange of territories.

The program led me to some insights. For one thing, although he does not advocate Israel’s destruction (as many assume), Norman Finkelstein seems emotionally consumed by hostility toward Israel. (He’s suffered as a result–e.g., not obtaining tenure at a university–but he is a caustic polemicist and not a fair-minded scholar.) He–along with the very articulate and impressive Ms. Erakat–epitomizes doctrinaire and rigid thinking in insisting that Israel totally withdraw to the pre-June ’67 lines.

I hate to keep repeating myself, but the issue won’t go away. Torture is morally wrong, and it is clearly prohibited by international and American law. Thus, I find it shocking that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld openly admit to authorizing torture, and that they do so with impunity. And if Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi — who allegedly provided information that helped us locate Osama bin Laden — were prisoners of war, then their torturers committed war crimes.

Now, in the wake of bin Laden’s death, right-wing ideologues are once again defending the use of torture.

In response, opponents of torture are trying to prove that it did not play a positive role in the capture of bin Laden. For example, Eugene Robinson says in today’s Washington Post that “torture wasn’t the key to finding bin Laden.”

Well, it doesn’t matter if it was. Torture is wrong. Period. And it is a crime.

Bin Laden’s capture does not justify torture. Terrorists do not need him in order to operate. I am happy we got him, but sadly it probably doesn’t really matter that much.

I attended my elderly aunt’s funeral in the Deep South last week and met some of my cousins’ children for the first time, which was great. Over dinner one of them, a young man in his 20′s, starting sharing with me about his “walk with Christ.” At first, I was worried, being a progressive Jew by choice and all, which none of them knew. Well they knew about my politics, just not my religious affiliation. It turned out to be a good conversation, and I did end up sharing with him that I am Jewish. At that point we just looked at each other and said “Jesus was Jewish.”

Anyway, in the course of our conversation, he told me that he is involved in a prison ministry. This struck a chord with me because I am very concerned about prisoner abuse, particularly at the hands of the US government. In fact, I’ve posted about it on this very site. I told him about an article I had just read in The Nation, called “Gitmo in the Heartland.” I told him I was particularly upset about the fact that prisoners are often moved away from their families, and the prison will sometimes not even let the families know where their loved ones are. He was unaware of the issues raised in the article, so I said I would send it to him.

Of course, I also asked him if he was familiar with Chuck Colson’s prison ministry, explaining how Colson did time for his role in the Watergate break-in, but found Christ in prison. While Colson is on the Christian Right, his organization is very concerned about the problem of prison rape, another concern of mine. Prison rape is openly acknowledged and commonly joked about. I think it is appalling.

I’m sure my cousin and I would not see eye to eye on many political issues, but the conversation did give me hope that religious people across the political spectrum might be able to work together to stop prisoner abuse — maybe even when the prisoners are Muslim. Too bad nobody is Washington seems to care about it.

The fires of democracy continue to burn brightly in Wisconsin.

With a Smile, Photo by Rebecca Congo

Recall campaigns are racing along, and a recent community meeting in Milwaukee, usually a sleepy, ill-attended affair, boasted several hundred attendants. When their representative, Chris Larson, one of the “Wisconsin 14″ showed up, they jumped to their feet in a standing ovation. Neighborhood listservs are boiling with activity.

Photo of and by Rebecca Congo+Friend

On Facebook and in a thousand union and church meetings, people solidify their connections with each other and their commitment to recover and strengthen our precious democracy.

Meaningful Individual Acts, Meaningful Collective Acts

April 4^th and 5^th, there were dozens of opportunities to participate in democracy both publicly and privately. At least five activities were planned for the South Bay (Please comment and post photos if you attended one of these.)

Bradley Manning pre-torture

“This weekend many actions are planned nationwide in solidarity with PFC Manning, and in protest of the US descent into the criminal insanity of torture,” writes Lynn Feinerman.

Torturing The Truth-Tellers, Silencing The Soothsayers

by Lynn Feinermann

Such distinguished heads as P.J. Crowley’s (the former United States Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs) are falling over the issue of the imprisonment without trial of Private First Class Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old U.S. Army soldier accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. And it has become quite clear that the conditions of PFC Manning’s detention in US military custody constitute torture – legally, morally and physically.

Private Manning is one of over 50,000 prisoners in the United States who are presently kept in cruel and inhumane solitary confinement. No other nation in the world comes close to isolating that many prisoners. Most nations have phased out solitary confinement, but its use has skyrocketed in the US, in a futile obsession with “security.” Further, through legislation like the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and Special Administrative Measures – both instituted during Clinton’s presidency – the US has made its treatment of those consigned to solitary even more draconian.

Read Glenn Greenwald’s writings online or listen to his reports on Democracy Now!, on the regimen imposed upon Bradley Manning, and you can grasp the brutality, cruelty and vengefulness with which he is treated. He has been locked up for almost one year without trial. From the looks of cases like that of Fahad Hashmi, it would appear that the attenuation of Bradley’s imprisonment without trial is purposely and deliberately intended to break him – to drive him to a state of insanity or incompetence.

It’s a sad day in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon in less than two hours, our Republican Senators — after insisting for a month that their union-busting law was needed because the state was broke — separated the collective bargaining sections of the bill from the financial parts and then passed it. They no longer needed a Democratic Senator for a quorum, since the bill was no longer ostensibly about finances! They unmasked themselves with this political maneuver. Now everyone can see that it never was about the money. It was an attack on workers’ rights all along. And despite massive protests last night and today, the Republican Assembly passed the bill as well.

Many of us thought Republican legislators were shoving an undemocratic bill down our throats three weeks ago. But at least they gave us six days (a ridiculously short amount of time) to think and talk about it then. Yesterday’s two hours of discussion breaks that record by a yard. The upshot of all this is that 60 years of workers’ rights have been swept away using undemocratic methods for an undemocratic outcome (there will probably be a lawsuit about the tactics). This is especially hard to take, since polls show that anywhere from 65% – 74% of Wisconsinites believe that public workers should have the right to organize.

“Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be….”
Ophelia (Scene 5, Act 4Hamlet)

I was sitting a few feet behind a friend last Friday, as the man at the other end of the room sentenced him to life plus five years.

I can’t say it came as a surprise, though the whole story still seemed unbelievable to me. His Honour had just told us the whole story, justifying the sentence he was pronouncing, and he clearly found it believable. He might not have been willing to bet his own life on it, but he was evidently willing to bet Shareef’s life on it. And that was the bottom line.

It was four years and eight months since I had looked at the front page of the Toronto Star one otherwise unmemorable morning, and found that my ex-student of ten years ago, Shareef Abdelhaleem, was one of the “Toronto 18″, eighteen young Muslim men who were charged with planning to set off three tons of ammonium nitrate in downtown Toronto. Shareef had remained in touch with me, coming in to the high school in which we had met periodically after his graduation, so I returned the favour, going in to Maplehurst penitentiary to talk to him a few times as the first the months and then the years trickled by before his case, his conviction, and now his sentencing.

Started some 15 years ago after the first conference on The Politics of Meaning in Washington DC, The Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics (PISLAP) is a nationwide group of lawyers, law professors, and law students who seek to shift the focus of American law and legal institutions away from the individualism, self-interest, and materialism that undergirds all of American law and toward seeing law as a central cultural arena for fostering empathy, compassion, and mutual understanding.

We have taken to heart Martin Luther King Jr.’s definition of Justice as “love correcting that which revolts against love” and are seeking to build a new movement in law that makes restoring community through understanding and social healing our highest value. Sometimes out-and-out adversarial battles are necessary, but the principal shift that needs to take place in legal culture is toward the new bottom line articulated by the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) — that institutions be valued according to how much love and generosity they generate rather than only focusing on a material war of all against all in a socially separated, self-interested world. That’s why PISLAP is glad to be the “legal arm” of the NSP, serving as its task force in this important professional and cultural arena.

Below is the welcoming letter and agenda for our upcoming gathering in New York, an agenda-building gathering for the coming year among the organization’s leadership group. I’ll post follow-ups in Tikkun Daily, including the final plan we decide upon as we move forward toward fundamentally transforming law and legal culture. You out there in other professions: Why not do the same?

The Waterboard. Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Creative Commons/Waterboard.org

On February 14th, David Frum, the Bush speechwriter-turned-pundit, published an Op-Ed for CNN.com that was truly Orwellian in nature. For those who enjoy seeing politics and facts totally at odds in print, Frum’s column was cause for celebration. I’m calling it here — 2011 already has a strong contender for the top prize of most hilarious Doublespeak! Despite strong opposition, the winner for 2010 was Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s accusation that Europe’s general commitment to peace was a threat to its security. Gates’s “War is Peace” formulation was classic Age d’Or Bush administration rhetoric- a sentiment so at odds with reality that one has to laugh. Leave it then, to Frum, who gave the world the “Axis of Evil,” to deliver his own Valentine to fans of unintentionally hilarious authoritarianism.

Frum’s righteous indignation stems from a trip to Switzerland that former President Bush had to cancel over fear that he would be prosecuted for torture. Following the submission of a 2,500-page case against Bush by Human Rights groups, Frum argues that the  possibility that Swiss authorities might prosecute an admitted torturer is wrong. The idea of charging a torturer with War Crimes is so hateful to Frum that he declares:

This use of law as a weapon of politics is an assault upon the basic norms of American constitutional democracy.

And there we have our top contender for 2011!

How are we each implicated -- or refusing to be implicated -- in the horror of racially biased, mass incarceration?

On Saturday I attended the first annual “Love Warriors’ Convocation” – an event that was put together by Seminary of the Street, one of my favorite local organizations in Oakland.

For the last few years I have had the good fortune of having regular walks with Nichola Torbett. I accompanied her, in conversation, through a process of resigning from her last job and founding this organization. Hers is the courage that takes people into confronting their deepest fears and opening up to life.

Over the course of Saturday’s event we were asked to do just that. I was most struck by what happened in the first part of the afternoon, as part of continuing to digest what has happened in Oakland since Oscar Grant was killed. Sujatha Baliga from Communityworks invited us to share in a circle our response to the following question: “How are you implicated in police brutality and the criminal injustice system?”

There were about 22 of us in the room. The object that was held by each speaker kept moving through the room. As each of us spoke, I felt a growing sense of honesty, a bond of truth between us. Everyone present contributed to a growing tapestry of clarity about what keeps it all in place. One by one we shared stories, small and large, of moments in which we had opportunities to stand up, to make a difference, and to show our humanity, and didn’t because of fear.

Last week in the House, eight Tea Party Republicans (along with 18 others) joined with 122 Democrats in Congress in refusing to extend the Patriot Act.

Opposition was expressed in particular towards parts of the Patriot Act that would authorize the government to continue to monitor the library records of American citizens, use roving wiretaps during surveillance operations, and spy on non-citizens who are not connected to any identified terrorist group. In an interview on MSNBC, progressive Rep. Dennis Kucinich praised the Tea Party Congressmen who opposed the Patriot Act, saying they are clearly serious about civil liberties and about preventing the government from reaching into people’s private affairs. He hopes to work with Tea Party Caucus members in the future on anti-war initiatives.

What Kucinich failed to mention, however, was that 44 out of 52 members of the Tea Party Caucus actually backed the extension of the Patriot Act, which is stunning, given the libertarian principles professed by the movement. It will be interesting to see what happens when Republicans bring the Patriot Act up for another vote this coming week.

No matter how it all turns out, I think it is refreshing to see at least some Tea Party libertarians stand on principle. The White House, however, was reportedly not happy.

During the interview on MSNBC, Kucinich offered the White House the following advice:

This is about the Constitution. And I think it would behoove the White House to align itself with the Constitution. That’s a very strong position to take…. The people from the Tea Party take the First Amendment seriously — right of free speech, freedom of association. They take the Fourth Amendment very seriously, right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. These are things that the White House would, I think, find even more support, if it chose to align itself with the Constitution of the United States.

Jews and spiritual progressives of every religious community are rejoicing at the triumph of the democratic uprising in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities and at the resignation of President Mubarak. But we have no illusions that the struggle for democracy has been won.

We are fearful that the United States and others who seek “stability” rather than democracy may accept a new autocratic regime under the leadership of Vice President Omar Suleiman (the U.S. ally who played a significant role in the torture operations in Egypt) or under the leadership of a “soft” military coup in which the Army becomes the primary force in Egypt. Nor would we welcome a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, though they have a legitimate role to play in any new government. It remains to be seen if a genuine democratic process takes place, or merely a process controlled by the military and security forces resulting in elections that reflect the desires of the military, which might continue to control the media.

Here is what we would look for to see if this is really a democratic transformation:

(a new People's History poster by Tim Simons)

The Egyptian Revolution is the latest, and most important of a new type of revolution that originated in the 1960s: spontaneous, bottom-up, decentralized, youth-dominated, non-ideological, non-violent, fueled by new media, and profoundly generative of dignity, media, social theory, and new moral practices. Predecessors include the French May of 1968, the Philippine Revolution of 1986, the East European and Chinese Revolutions of 1989, the Palestinian intifada of 2000 and the Tunisian Revolution of 2011. Unlike previous revolutions, made by parties and states, no one owns this new type of revolution, which is anti-authoritarian, anti-patriarchal, and even anti-organizational, at root.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 was another example of this new, post-Marxist revolutionary wave. It seemed to come from nowhere, to be coordinated in new, polymorphous ways, and to represent the deepest instincts of youth. The median age in the Middle East is 22; overwhelmingly, most people in the world are young. Added to that, most are people of color. Given Obama’s place as the anti-war candidate, the person who called not just for a changed policy but a changed mind-set, those who supported Obama hoped that he represented this coming wave in global politics. No one could have predicted the wonderful news from Egypt but anyone who traveled and read and followed the media must have known that this sort of shift was in the works, and it remains in the works, for the rest of the Middle East, for Iran, for Thailand, for Burma, for Mexico, for Colombia and elsewhere.

Egyptians Demand Democracy in Tahrir Square. Creative Commons/Ahmad Hammoud.

With the political crisis unresolved in Egypt, the volume of U.S. media coverage continues to dwindle — but remains considerable. For the first time since the protests began, not all three networks led with the story, which continues to receive coverage on the front pages of major dailies.

Reports and analyses agree that the Obama administration, after what the AP describes as “several days of mixed messages about whether it wants to see [Hosni] Mubarak stay or go,” yesterday “conceded Monday that it will not endorse the demands of Egyptian protesters” for the “embattled” president Mubarak “to step down immediately, saying a precipitous exit could set back the country’s democratic transition.” The administration “coalesced around a position that cautiously welcomes nascent reform efforts begun by newly appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman that may or may not result in Mubarak’s resignation before September.”