Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/us_politics/page/14/)
Tikkun magazine is a 501-c3 and hence prohibited from taking stands in support of or opposition to any candidate or political party. But we can and do present analyses of positions taken by political candidates and also allow our writers and readers to explain why they’ve decided to support candidate x or y. Below we present a pro-Hillary position by Tom Hayden and a pro-Bernie position by Art Pena.
Tikkun magazine does not endorse candidates for public office nor does it support any political party. Bernie Sanders Speech to the Vatican April 16
I am honored to be with you today and was pleased to receive your
invitation to speak to this conference of The Pontifical Academy of
Social Sciences. Today we celebrate the encyclical Centesimus Annus
and reflect on its meaning for our world a quarter-century after it
was presented by Pope John Paul II. With the fall of Communism, Pope
John Paul II gave a clarion call for human freedom in its truest
sense: freedom that defends the dignity of every person and that is
always oriented towards the common good. The Church’s social teachings, stretching back to the first modern
encyclical about the industrial economy, Rerum Novarum in 1891, to
Centesimus Annus, to Pope Francis’s inspiring encyclical Laudato Si’
this past year, have grappled with the challenges of the market
economy.
My Democracy Spring
by Michael Kramer, a member of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls
It started with an email many months ago about protesting the fact that what the people want has no influence in legislation, while money very much does. If we could get 1000 people willing to risk arrest for a protest of this sad state of affairs, then let’s do it! We got well over 1000 within 2 weeks, and 3000, ultimately. I arrived at the required preparatory meeting (for people intending to risk arrest) a few minutes early, and there was a group of about 30 people on the street waiting for the doors to open. Many had participated in the march from Philadelphia with a crowd that, reportedly, started at about 150. The crowd had grown and shrunk along the way, swelling to about 250 on the last day. There was great praise for the logistics: sometimes there was enough money to put everyone up at a motel, other times on church floors. The food was far better than expected – at least as good as at home. Marchers were joined by hundreds of others who arrived to participate in the protests at the Capitol this week, and the time of action at the Capitol would start the next day. Chatting with people waiting to enter the preparatory meeting, I met some from Washington (state), North Carolina, Michigan, New York, California, and Florida, converging here to be arrested for the sake of promoting a change from the existing plutocracy to the representative democracy that our constitution defines. I’d be surprised if any state was not represented. The attendance at this meeting was over capacity, so after about the first ~200, people had to be turned away for another meeting that was hastily set up. Other meetings would run twice daily for those who arrived later in the week. Presentations, discussions, and activities covered the history and effectiveness of civil disobedience, body language and tactics for dealing with the police, the legal implications and consequences of the coming action, and connection with each other, sharing why we had (individually) come. I was choking back tears a lot of the time, just over the inspiration of seeing so many who care about the miserable state of affairs in which we find ourselves – that big money donors have continued to increase their power in government at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. Bribery of our representatives has been legalized and given pretty names. Lobbyist.
Uri Avnery
April 9, 2015
The Case of Soldier A
IT SEEMS that everything possible has already been said, written, proclaimed, asserted and denied about the incident that is rocking Israel.
Everything except the main point.
THE INCIDENT revolves around “the Soldier of Hebron”. Military censorship does not allow him to be called by his name. He may be called “Soldier A”.
Entering Uncharted Territory in Washington
Are We in a New American World?
By Tom Engelhardt
The other week, feeling sick, I spent a day on my couch with the TV on and was reminded of an odd fact of American life. More than seven months before Election Day, you can watch the 2016 campaign for the presidency at any moment of your choosing, and that’s been true since at least late last year. There is essentially never a time when some network or news channel isn’t reporting on, discussing, debating, analyzing, speculating about, or simply drooling over some aspect of the primary campaign, of Hillary, Bernie, Ted, and above all — a million times above all — The Donald (from the violence at his rallies to the size of hishands). In case you’re young and think this is more or less the American norm, it isn’t. Or wasn’t.
Editor’s Note: It’s important for us to know what the foreign policy of the next President is likely to be. Since the wars we in Western countries helped create or finance in the Middle East, our interventions in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine,etc for the past fifty years, and the fallout from those wars and interventions, will inevitably play a significant role both in foreign policy and in domestic policies concerning “homeland security,” it’s worth our time to study carefully what the leading candidates are saying on these issues. The talks below given on March 21, 2016, are worth reading and re-reading to get the feell and direction you can expect should one of these people be the next president of the U.S.
For a Tikkun Network of Spiritual Progressives approach to foreign policy, please read our proposed Global Marshall Plan at www.tikkun.org/gmp and for our specifc plan for how to bring peace to the Middle East, please order our book Embracing Israel and Palestine at www.tikkun.org/eip. Hillary Clinton
It is wonderful to be here and see so many friends. I’ve spoken at a lot of AIPAC conferences in the past, but this has to be one of the biggest yet, and there are so many young people here, thousands of college students…
(APPLAUSE) … from hundreds of campuses around the country.
What Can We Learn from The Presidential Race? Michael N. Nagler
I have never voted Republican, but I stand with those Republicans today who are aghast at what Donald Trump has done to the level of political discourse in this country and the future of their party. I also stand with the smaller number – but I will have more to say on this in a second – who realize that Mr. Trump did not spring from nowhere but is in fact the logical extension of the direction in which this party has been going for some time. After all, as Rosalyn Carter said astutely of then-Governor Reagan when her husband was running against him, “The trouble with that man is that he makes us feel good about our prejudices.” Is this not exactly what Mr. Trump is doing? The only thing different now is the greater openness of the appeal to egotism and prejudice. And therein lies its value as a teaching moment. A number of people, most recently the President of Mexico (of whom I’m not otherwise an admirer) have compared Mr. Trump to Hitler. Well, to use an important term in the field of peace studies and nonviolence, Hitler inadvertently did one useful thing: he delegitimized racism by carrying it out on such a scale that the world was shocked. To delegitimize is not necessarily to eliminate – that takes a bit more work; but the possibility here, if we would only make use of it, is that this year’s campaign could delegitimize prejudice, vulgarity, and incivility (they’re closely connected). As conservative columnist E.R. Dionne writes (March 7, 2016), “the crudest, most vulgar, and most thoroughly disgusting campaign in our nation’s history.” It has therefore created an opportunity for us to restore some dignity to our political culture.
To do that, however, we have to get deeper into what is driving this race to the bottom that has made this year’s campaign a national disgrace.
In his keynote address to the March 18 “Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?” conference, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described where he would take, and what he would say to, a U.S. congressional delegation to Israel. He would take them, Levy said, to meet the Abu Khoussa family in Gaza, whose 6-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son were killed in an Israeli missile strike on their home. He would tell them about 16-year-old American Mahmoud Saalan of Tampa, Florida, who had been shot dead at a military checkpoint by Israeli soldiers, allegedly for carrying a knife. And, Levy said, he would also take the American legislators to Hebron, because “I never met an honest human being who had been to Hebron and didn’t come back after a few hours in shock.”
Days later and blocks away, members of Congress and three of the four remaining presidential candidates were professing their undying allegiance to Israel at the yearly policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s Washington, DC lobby. Aware of this annual parade of elected U.S. officials, Levy knew that, in his remarks at the National Press Club, he was describing a “virtual tour of those congressmen who would never come to listen to me and will never let me take them around.”
Levy’s presentation at the 2015 conference “The Israel Lobby: Is It Good for the U.S.?
Philip Roth’s warning
by Arthur J. Magida
Posted on Mar. 16, 2016 at 8:43 am
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Cover of Roth’s “The Plot Against America”
Slightly more than a decade ago, Philip Roth warned how fascism would come to America – legally, of course, since we’re a nation of laws, and attached to a hero, a legend, a star: the aviator ex machina himself, Charles Lindbergh, since Roth was writing about the U.S. in the late 30’s and early 40s, the years when Lucky Lindy’s popularity peaked. Roth cautioned about all this in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America — an almost plausible schematic of a Nazi takeover of the United States. We foolishly paid no heed to Roth’s prophecy because we’re supposedly too smart, too wedded to democracy, too cynical of salesmen pitching quickie panaceas, and too… well, too gosh darn decent to let that Nazi stuff sully our certainty that we’re a beacon for the world, a gleaming city on a hill. No way, we crowed, thumping our chests in pride: it can’t happen here.
The US role in the Honduras coup and subsequent violence
People carry the coffin of indigenous leader and environmental activist Berta Caceres after a five-hour autopsy at the Forensic Medicine Center in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, March 3. (CNS/EPA/Stringer)
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Stephen Zunes | Mar. 14, 2016NCR Today
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On March 3, Berta Cáceres, a brave and outspoken indigenous Honduran environmental activist and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, was gunned down in her hometown of La Esperanza. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director for Amnesty International, noted how “For years, she had been the victim of a sustained campaign of harassment and threats to stop her from defending the rights of indigenous communities.” She is just one of thousands of indigenous activists, peasant leaders, trade unionists, journalists, environmentalists, judges, opposition political candidates, human rights activists, and others murdered since a military coup ousted the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Despite being a wealthy logger and rancher from the centrist Liberal Party, Zelaya had moved his government to the left during his four years in office.
Pentagon Excess Has Fueled a Civil-Military Crisis
How Civilian Control of the Military Has Become a Fantasy
By Gregory D. Foster
Item: Two U.S. Navy patrol boats, with 10 sailors aboard, “stray” into Iranian territorial waters, and are apprehended and held by Iranian revolutionary guards, precipitating a 24-hour international incident involving negotiations at the highest levels of government to secure their release. The Pentagon offers conflicting reports on why this happened: navigational error, mechanical breakdown, fuel depletion — but not intelligence-gathering, intentional provocation, or hormonally induced hot-dogging. Item: The Pentagon, according to a Reuters exposé, has been consciously and systematically engaged in thwarting White House efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and release cleared detainees. Pentagon officials have repeatedly refused to provide basic documentation to foreign governments willing to take those detainees and have made it increasingly difficult for foreign delegations to visit Guantanamo to assess them. Ninety-one of the 779 detainees held there over the years remain, 34 of whom have been cleared for release.
Let’s stop talking about whether Trump will, has or should disavow the KKK and start asking who will disavow the policies that perpetuate racial disparities and prevent us from achieving freedom and justice for all.
Here’s the story of one of the many “solidarity with American Muslims” events that the NSP has been supporting around the country. It appeared today, Monday Feb 29th, in the San Jose Mercury. I thought you might want to see it to know that your voice is being heard–because it is your support of Tikkun and the NSP that makes alot of these kinds of events to happen. The story is not bad for mainstream media–about half right which ismore than most mainstream media stories in my experience. At the bottom, I’ll tell you what I really said in the 3 minutes that I got to speak.
Dr. Shaik Ubaid:
The irony that the Rise of Trump Can Be Good for American Pluralism
I dislike Donald Trump. Yet I am grateful to him. No not because I believe in his particular philosophy of making America great again but because he can save America from people like him. Islamophobia has been on the rise for many years and it had become politically acceptable. But before the bombastic and narcissistic Mr. Trump joined the race to lead this nation, the media and the political leaders including Mr. Obama, were not paying much attention to it. Like an insidious cancer, this poison was spreading in the body of our great nation. Mr. Trump was a symptom that finally led the physicians to take notice. Trump is not the pain of hemorrhoids but of the deadly and insidious pancreatic cancer.Before Mr. Trump, Congressman Tancredo of Colorado had suggested that America should bomb the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
by Leonardo Boff
Theologian-Philosopher
Earthcharter Commission
If it is true that climatic disturbances are anthropogenic, that is, that they have their genesis in the irresponsible behavior of humans (less of the poor, but much more of the great industrial corporations), then it is clear that the issue is more an ethical than a scientific one. This is so because the quality of our relationships with nature and with our Common Home were not, and they still are not, adequate and positive. Pope Francis says in his inspiring encyclical letter, Laudato Sii: on the caring of the Common Home, (2015): «Never have we mistreated and hurt our Common Home so much as in the last two centuries…These situations provoke the howls of Sister Earth, joining the wails of the abandoned of the world, with a cry that demands that we take a different path» (n. 53). That different path urgently implies a regenerative ethic for the Earth.