Economy/Poverty/Wealth

Uncovering the Truth About Global Poverty

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Beyond the Sustainable Development Goals: uncovering the truth about global poverty and demanding the universal realization of Article 25 and the adoption of a Global Marshall Plan www.tikkun.org/gmp
[Note from Tikkun: The report below from Share the World’s Resources, http://www.sharing.org/  shows that “The Sustainable Development Goals”  promoted by the United Nations and by many countries around the world – despite their positive and progressive rhetoric – by no means constitute a transformative agenda for meeting the basic needs of all people within the means of our shared planet. Reading this report in all its details will give you a full understanding of how serious the global crisis of poverty (including in the U.S.) really is and why it must be confronted now.  And as we have argued in Tikkun magazine, without dealing with poverty there is no way to solve the global environmental crisis, because people’s desperation to feed their families and provide shelter and health care force many around the globe to engage in environmentally destructive behaviors which can’t be stopped without dealing immediately with their survival needs. This report argues that we may never see an end to poverty “in all its forms everywhere” unless ordinary people unite in their millions and demand the universal realisation of fundamental human rights through huge, continuous and worldwide demonstrations for economic justice. Now more than ever, we need a movement to demand a Domestic and Global Marshall Plan as outlined at www.tikkun.org/gmp. Please go to that site and download the full 32 page color pamphlet and read it carefully–it is the outline of a plan for how to deal with the problem as described above.

Editorials & Actions

Challenge the Media Trivialization of the Pope’s Radical Message

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Save the Pope’s Radical Prophetic Message from Media Trivialization

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

 

The recent national conference of the Religion Newswriters Association in Philadelphia focused on preparing the several hundred media attendees for how to cover the Pope’s visit to the U.S. this week. But in panel after panel, we were presented with leaders of the Catholic Church who were unsympathetic to the Pope’s message. Too smart to directly critique the Pope, in session after session they presented a single message: the “real story” about Pope Francis is what a great guy he is, how caring he is personally for the poor and the downtrodden. The Pope, they insisted, has no politics—he’s above politics and only a humble servant of Jesus.  

Apparently the right-wingers in the Church hope that the media doesn’t know that Jesus himself was a revolutionary with a powerful call to challenge the way official Judaism at that time, represented by the priests of the Temple, had become assimilated to the values of the Roman occupiers of Judea rather than articulators of the prophetic message of the Torah to “love the stranger” and pursue justice and caring for all.

Editorials & Actions

Mazal Tov on Overcoming the Fearful & the War Mongers on the Iran Nuclear Deal

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Thank you so very much for your help in making it possible for the the major powers of the world, the U.N. and most of the people of the world to confirm the deal with Iran which will prevent them from developing nuclear weapons for the next ten to fifteen years. Your support for the Tikkun position, (a position we articulated in full page ads we bought in the NY Times, the Hill magazine read by most Congressional people and staffers), plus your willingness to share your reasons for supporting the nuclear deal, eventually became part of a powerful surge of voices that created the context critical to the ability of Democratic Senators to feel that they could reject the pressure from the right-wing of the Jewish world, represented by AIPAC, The Conference of Presidents of Major (sic) Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Congress, and many local Jewish Federations and synagogues and instead embrace a deal which, while flawed in some ways, was far better than any achievable alternative. (See, sometimes us little guys can make a difference if we pool our energies and resources.)

 

It was sad for us to see the Reform movement in Judaism unable to take a stand on this issue–the movement that had once proudly proclaimed itself a voice for tikkun olam, but we can have compassion for the leadership that feared it might lose some of its support in being in favor of a deal that raised fears among many Jews who had been influenced by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s manipulation of PTSD flashbacks from the Holocaust. Yet this is the same reason why so many Jewish leaders and rabbis fail to take courageous stands countering Israel’s horrendous treatment of the Palestinian people, behavior in sharp violation of the Torah’s commands “Do Not Oppress the Stranger/the Other.” The excuse of fear of breaking your organization apart or losing some of their supporters starts to wear thin, don’t you think, as we approach the 50th year of Occupation (in 2017)?

Editorials & Actions

The Best Way to Deal with ISIS

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Editor’s note:  The two perspectives articulated by Uri Avnery and Rabbi Arthur Waskow below deserve to be well known and discussed. We at Tikkun have a slightly different approach: we believe that the hate-filled and barbarous approach of ISIS will continue to manifest in a world that is fundamentally unjust, creates huge amounts of suffering in daily life for at least 2 of the 7 billion people on the planet, and privileges military power over kindness in its expenditures of money and in the organization of nation states. We have long argued that what we need is to convince the Western powers to privilege generosity over domination, and to launch as a first step in this process a Global Marshall Plan to once and for all eliminate global poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and health care, repair the global environment, resettle refugees, and eliminate the unjust global trade arrangements (read our proposed version at www.tikkun.org/gmp).  Yet Uri Avnery and Arthur Waskow, both strong allies of Tikkun, have proposals which differ from our approach and from each other, though because they fit into the “realistic” dialogue of power politics both might be achieved sooner than our plan, though Arthur’s seems much closer to us precisely because it does not envision the direct use of force but only the power of the US to implement it.  In my view, it is more likely to get the US population behind a fundamental change in worldview called for by the Strategy of Generosity than to get a piecemeal acceptance of Iran as an ally in the Middle East reconciled to Israel, unless we were simultaneously challenging the notion that their security depends on power over enemies (the Strategy of Domination).

Editorials & Actions

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The exchange below between Uri Avneri and Rabbi Arthur Waskow reflects the complicated issues raised by ISIS and how to respond to its barbarous behavior. We at Tikkun believe in a nonviolent response, which will take longer but is ultimately more likely to last–a change in US and Western countries from their current strategy of domination to  a strategy of generosity reflected in a Global Marshall Plan which could transform the way the world perceives the West and open the mind of even the most cynical to the possibility that love could triumph over fear, slowly melting away thousands of years of conditioning to the idea that only power over others gives us safety or security. . Both Uri Avneri and Arthur Waskow support that kind of approach in the long run, but here present shorter-run ideas that deserve to be discussed widely.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Uri Avnery
September 12, 2015
 
                                                The Real Menace
 
I AM AFRAID.  
I am not ashamed to admit it.

Spirituality

Guide to Repentance and Transformation

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Click here to download our 2015/5776 High Holidays Repentance Workbook and click here to download a PDF of the Al Cheyt Prayer. For the Ways We Have Missed the Mark and Gone Astray—Al Cheyt Prayer, Meditation, and Spur to Transformation

A Supplement to the High Holiday Prayer Book (not a replacement)

On Yom Kippur, we invite you to use the following supplement along with the traditional confessional prayer, Al Cheyt. Bring this supplement along with your own list to Yom Kippur services. Don’t just go through the rote reading the traditional “sins,” many of which actually reach to the ways we “miss the mark” in our contemporary reality. If you are not Jewish or aren’t attending any High Holiday service, use this supplement at your home or with your friends at any time during these ten days of repentance!

Editorials & Actions

Donald Trump and the Ghost of Totalitarianism

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Editor’s note: As a non-profit, Tikkun does not take stances on candidates or political parties during election periods, but our authors and readers are welcome to do so! Henry Giroux is one of the most creative theorists  on the Left these days, so it is an honor to publish him here. Donald Trump and the Ghost of Totalitarianism
 
Henry A. Giroux
 

In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination.  One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Donald Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgement rather than titillation.

Editorials & Actions

Tikkun Wins Best Magazine of the Year Award

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Tikkun Wins Best Magazine of the Year Award from the mainstream media’s Religion Newswriters Association

 

This year’s meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association was held in Philadelphia and its major focus was on how best to cover the Pope’s forthcoming visit. Panels filled with members of the Catholic Church hierarchy, many of them people who strongly disagree with the Pope’s progressive politics, were chosen to give the mainstream media people who attended this gathering a way to think about the pope’s visit. Their problem was obvious: as leaders of the Catholic Church they are not supposed to oppose the Pope, but they also don’t want his message too widely spread to the world, and particularly not to the Catholic world. Their solution was the same that many (not all) of the mainstream media often use when dealing with US elections—rarely report on what the candidates are advocating, focus instead on the personalities of the candidates and their standing in the latest polls.  

Translating that strategy into the Pope’s visit, many of the Church leaders urged the media to focus on what a nice guy the Pope is, how caring he is for the poor and down-trodden through personal visits to them, and to avoid politics altogether, including his recent encyclical which linked both global poverty and the accelerating destruction of the environment to the destructive materialism and selfishness and competitiveness that are rooted in the daily dynamics of global capitalism.

Editorials & Actions

News Flash: Native American Council Offers Amnesty to 240 Million Undocumented Whites

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Native American Council Offers Amnesty to 240 Million Undocumented Whites
The Native American National Council will offer amnesty to the estimated 240 million illegal white immigrants living in the United States. At a meeting on Friday in Taos, New Mexico, Native American leaders weighed a handful of proposals about the future of the United State’s large, illegal European population. After a long debate, NANC decided to extend a road to citizenship for those without criminal records or contagious diseases. “We will give Europeans the option to apply for Native Citizenship,” explained Chief Sauti of the Nez Perce tribe. “To obtain legal status, each applicant must write a heartfelt apology for their ancestors’ crimes, pay an application fee of $5,000, and, if currently on any ancestral Native land, they must relinquish that land to NANC or pay the market price, which we decide.

Editorials & Actions

A Spiritual Practice of Forgiveness

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A Spiritual Practice of Forgiveness

(Inviting people of all faiths as well as secular humanists and secular humanists to adopt this practice and adapt it in ways that you can actually use it in your own life every day. It flows from the Jewish tradition of the High Holy Days, but should be used all year round! And if you happen to be in the SF Bay Area at the time of our High Holy Day celebrations (starting this year Sept. 13), please join us at Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls in Berkeley–info and registration at www.beyttikkun.org/hhd

 

Every night before going to sleep or every morning before engaging in your various tasks, projects or interactions with others, review your life, recall who you feel has hurt or betrayed you and toward whom you are still holding resentment or anger. Then, find a place to say this out loud:

 

YOU, my ETERNAL FRIEND, Yud Hey Vav Hey, Shechinah, Adonai (or whatever name you give to the God or the spiritual energy of the universe), THE POWER OF TRANSFORMATION AND HEALING IN THE UNIVERSE, WITNESS now that:

 

 I forgive anyone who hurt or upset me or who offended me

…..by damaging my body, my property, my reputation, hurting my feelings, shaming me, undermining my friendships or hurting my income or scaring me or making me angry  or damaging people that I love — whether by accident or purposely — with words, deeds, thoughts, or attitudes.

High Holiday Repentance Workbook 2015 / 5776

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The Jewish High Holy Days are meant to be days for reflection on where we may have missed the mark, both as individuals, as part of the Jewish people, as Americans, and as members of the human race. It is a practice that every human being on the planet should take on as their own, shaping it to their own realities. This practice takes some real time and energy, which is why the Jewish tradition gives in ten days, from the beginning of Rosh Hashanah (this year: Sunday eve, Sept. 13 2015) to the end of Yom Kippur (at dark the night ofWednesday Sept. 23).

Culture

The Rich Take Over “Burning Man”

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Why the Rich Love Burning Man
 

Burning Man became a festival that rich libertarians love because it never had a radical critique at its core.  

by Keith A. Spencer

Trey Ratcliff / Flickr

 

46.1k

1.62k

In principle the annual Burning Man festival sounds a bit like a socialist utopia: bring thousands of people to an empty desert to create an alternative society. Ban money and advertisements and make it a gift economy. Encourage members to bring the necessary ingredients of this new world with them, according to their ability. Introduce “radical inclusion,” “radical self-expression,” and “decommodification” as tenets, and designate the alternative society as a free space, where sex and gender boundaries are fluid and meant to be transgressed.

Editorials & Actions

Mourning the Suffering of the Refugees

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Editor’s note:  The poem below presents the most authentic understanding of the situation of the world’s refugees in the contemporary world. They are  momentarily in the consciousness of the world’s humanity, but will too soon fade. People have momentarily been moved by the great suffering of these refugees, and particularly their children, but politely ignore the role that the US and other “advanced” industrial societies have played in creating the economic and political conditions which have led to the vast increase of refugees in the past twenty years. For the U.S., that responsibility includes both the economic devastation wrought in South and Central America, Africa and Asia by the trade agreements (championed by the Clintons and more recently by Obama) that destroyed subsistence farming and forced millions of people into the barrios and slums of the big cities where they were often forced to choose between armed opposition to ruling elites or selling their children into slavery or sexual exploitation rather than see them starve to death; and also the devastation created by the U.S. wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and drone strikes in Yemen all of which gave rise to the Islamic State of Iraq & Syris (ISIS) with its brutality now spreading through populations driven crazy by the violence that the US and its allies intensified in the Middle East. So while Americans sit around looking in shock at this situation, deploring the growing xenophobia that not only is growing in Europe but which is being played to by the Trump candidacy and other candidates for the Republic Presidential nomination, many wilfully ignore the role of our own country in creating the preconditions for this growing horror show.

Editorials & Actions

Two more Brilliant Articles by Henry Giroux

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Editor’s note: Henry Giroux is one of the most brilliant analysts of the humanly destructive impatct of global capitalism as it plays itself out not only in the economic sphere, but in every aspect of daily life. It is an honor for us that he writes for Tikkun and gives us permission to post on our website articles that he has published elsewhere. Whatever he addresses he manages to pull together a coherent and deeply insightful overview that illuminates and deepens our understanding of the world. So even if the ostensible topic of any given article may not interest you, as you read through his articles you will learn so much about the way to think about our world that it’s almost like being back in the very best college course you ever had!–Rabbi Michael Lerner

SEPTEMBER 2, 2015
Global Capitalism and the Culture of Mad Violence
by HENRY GIROUX

 

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Mohsen Abdelmoumen: The concept of  “disposability” frequently returns in your writing, whether speaking of youth, politics, the future, etc. Why do you insist on this theme?