Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/global_capitalism/economypovertywealth-ecological/page/10/)
I am the first Jew to live in this cloistered Benedictine monastery. I don’t blend. I wear a kippah everywhere I go, and I observe the Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. I’m studying to become a rabbi, and I live here in this remote community of Catholic monks vowed to chastity and obedience.
On the same day that millions of people watched Lebron James announce he was going to Miami, twelve jurors in Oscar Grant’s case decided that, unless he can put a ball through a hoop, a black man’s life is worth little in America. Two decisions — both resulting from five hundred years of white supremacy.
At $708 billion, the Pentagon gets nearly 60 percent of our discretionary budget (the money Congress is free to allocate). Meanwhile our schools are in crisis, lacking the money for teachers and books, and social welfare programs are weakening, depriving the most vulnerable members of our community of vital support and health care.
Our country badly needs your vision and your spiritual and moral energy to help us chart a path based on generosity, inclusion, and love. The two things I want to talk to you about are where I think we are in our country and where I think we should go.
In this conversation U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, endorses economic equality and workplace democracy, and discusses how to accomplish the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ economic goals, with which he sympathizes.
A different queer politics, focused on racial and economic justice and grassroots activism, has been growing stronger.
Yet what the critics maintain is that Obama and congressional Democrats, inheriting an economy and political system in crisis after decades of ideological Republican policies committed to downsizing government and serving the tax-cutting interests of the rich and the corporate elites, blew a unique opportunity to teach Americans a new way of thinking about politics and economy.
Four years ago when several key labor unions formed Change to Win as an alternative umbrella organization to the AFL-CIO, many of us hoped that a new vision of the labor movement was being born–one that would go beyond the economics-only focus of industrial unionism and see unions as an important social context for building a greater sense of community and a new universal vision of a society based on empathy and compassion for other human beings.
Abolish Wall Street. Build Real Wealth.
Post-September 11, much remains the same. The recession that officially began in March of 2001 got a bit deeper. Globalization remains the defining trend. As before, the key operating principle that underlies the Washington/Wall Street consensus comes to this: “maximize financial returns and–trust us–everything will work out fine.” We’ve now got $17 trillion in the hands of U.S. money managers, invested with faith in that neoliberal premise.