Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/us_politics/page/15/)
Editor’s note: Henry Giroux, a frequent contributor to Tikkun, highlights some of the destructive tendencies in American and global capitalism, in this introduction he wrote to a new book on inequality. At times he may be going beyond what I could agree to.
Editor’s Note: Just as we are prohibited from endorsing candidates, so we are also prohibited from critiquing them. But as a 1st amendment protected 501-c-3, we can priint the wide variety of views held by our readers (hey, that’s YOU). So far, most of what we’ve gotten from our readers has been pro-Bernie. Now finally we get something that is a critique of Bernie. We are still looking for readers to submit pro-Hillary articles, or pro-some Republican party candidates for the presidency, or pro Jill Stein of the Greens, or pro any other 3rd party candidates.
Editor’s Note: I once again want to encourage those who support Hillary, or Jill Stein, or other candidates, to write articles for us about why they do so. We don’t endorse any candidate or political party–can’t because we are a non-profit–but we will publish smart articles from many different perspectives on the election. If we keep on getting mainly pro-Bernie, we may have to stop publishing anything because this tilt may give the appearance of us endorsing a candidate, which we don’t do. –Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor Tikkun, RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com
Hillary Clinton’s Record on Foreign Policy
by Stephen Zunes
Despite being an icon for many liberals and an anathema to the Republican right, former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s positions on the Middle East have more closely resembled those of the latter than the former. Her hawkish views go well beyond her strident support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent occupation and counter-insurgency war.
Editor’s Note: I once again want to encourage those who support Hillary, or Jill Stein, or other candidates, to write articles for us about why they do so. We don’t endorse any candidate or political party–can’t because we are a non-profit–but we will publish smart articles from many different perspectives on the election. If we keep on getting mainly pro-Bernie, we may have to stop publishing anything because this tilt may give the appearance of us endorsing a candidate, which we don’t do.–Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor Tikkun RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com
52 Righteous Reasons to Support Progressive Bernie Sanders Over Establishment Hillary Clinton and the Regressive Republicans
Dan Brook
There are many vast and critical differences when you compare progressive Bernie to moderate Hillary and the regressive GOP. Here are 52 righteous reasons to support Bernie Sanders for President. There are undoubtedly others.
Editor’s note:
Tikkun magazine does not endorse any candidate or political party. But as I’ve said in several previous emails, we will send out articles that have a serious or substantial intellectual content challenging the ideas of any of the candidates, or supporting those ideas. I had expected to get lots of serious submissions, but so far I’ve only gotten critiques of Hillary Clinton. We will share those, but again want to make clear that we’d also share serious critiques of the policy positions of Senator Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Senator Marco Rubio, the Green party presidential candidates, etc. You can also send rebuttals to this or anything else we send out! At this point, we really want to encourage those who support Hillary or Jill Stein of the Greens or any of the Republican candidates to send us their arguments, because otherwise we are going to be perceived as supporting a candidate, and we don’t intend to be doing that.
Israel shoots the messenger: An open letter to Ban Ki-Moon
Richard Falk
Saturday 6 February 2016
While I was special rapporteur for Palestine, you chose to attack me in public on several occasions. Now Israel has turned its fire on you. Dear UN Secretary-General,
Having read of the vicious attacks on you for venturing some moderate, incontestable criticisms of Israel’s behaviour, I understand well the discomfort you clearly feel. Not since Richard Goldstone chaired the group that released the report detailing apparent Israeli war crimes during its massive attack on Gaza at the end of 2008 have Israel’s big political guns responded with such unwarranted fury, magnified as usual by ultra-Zionist media commentary. Netanyahu has the audacity to claim that your acknowledgement that it is not unnatural for the Palestinians oppressed for half a century to resist and resort to extremism is tantamount to the encouragement of terrorism, what he described as giving a “tailwind to terrorism.”
The fact that your intention was quite the opposite hardly matters.
Editor’s Note: As we’ve noted each time we post something about the election, we are NOT endorsing any candidate or party, but allowing members of our community to explain why they have chosen who they’ve chosen to support. JANUARY 29 ,2016
BY DAVID SWANSON
Jill Stein’s platform more viable than Bernie’s
David Swanson conducted this exclusive interview with Jill Stein for American Herald Tribune. 5.1K SHARES
I asked Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein about her platform this week and came away believing it had a better chance of winning than Bernie Sanders’. I know that platforms don’t run, people do, and they do so within a two-party dominated system. But this already crazy presidential election could turn into a crazier five-way race.
Editor’s note: Tikkun as a 501-=c-3 non profit does not take stands in support of candidates or political parties. But our readers do have positions and we are happy to put any coherent and insightful piece of writing about the elections, candidates (for president) and political parties up on this website and/or to send it out to our broad readership. But what we put up here or send out does NOT represent Tikkun’s position though it may represent the position of some of the members of our editorial board, but may not. Meanwhile, Steve Weisman, whom I haven’t seen for many decades, was one of the brightest leaders of the Free Speech Movement. It was he who asked me (21 years old and in my first year as a graduate student in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley), on December 2nd, 1964, to lead the Chanukah service at 1 a.m. in Sproul Hall during the FSM sit-in to shut down the university, and then around 6 a.m. he asked me to climb down a rope with him from the second story of the building so we could explain to the thousands of students standing outside what we were seeing as the police arrested and brutally hurt many of the nonviolent demonstrators who had taken the nonviolent resistance pose sitting on the floors of the hallways of this University of California administration building.
Editor’s Note: We at Tikkun have been involved for the last decade in supporting the important work of the SOA, the religious progressive organization that challenges the U.S. government to shut down its school (formerly known as the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, and operating out of Fort Benning in Georgia) that trains torturers and murderers who go back to Central and South America and uses the latest techniques and equipment that they’ve learned at the School of the Americas to intimidate, torture or murder those whom they consider a threat to the oligarchs whose oppressive rule they are asked to protect. The SOA organization brings thousands of people to Ft. Benning the weekend before Thanksgiving each year to protest and demand that this horrific school be closed by the US Army. The demonstration also mourns the thousands of people killed by the actions of the graduates of this horrific institution.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
Twelve of the Eighteen Former Military Arrested in Guatemala are SOA Graduates
Michael,
Last week, eighteen former military officials were arrested on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in one of the largest mass arrests of military officers Latin America has ever seen. Twelve of them were trained at the SOA. The arrests happened one week before the January 14th inauguration of newly elected President Jimmy Morales, of the National Convergence Front (FCN). Morales, whose party has close ties to the military, faces pressure in the face of the current developments. Morales’ right hand man, Edgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, who is also the FCN party co-founder, newly elected congressman, and retired colonel, is also facing similar charges, though he was not arrested because of his immunity as a congressman.
America Revisits the Dark Side
Candidates Compete to Promise the Most Torture and Slaughter
By Rebecca Gordon
They’re back! From the look of the presidential campaign, war crimes are back on the American agenda. We really shouldn’t be surprised, because American officials got away with it last time — and in the case of the drone wars continue to get away with it today. Still, there’s nothing like the heady combination of a “populist” Republican race for the presidency and a national hysteria over terrorism to make Americans want to reach for those “enhanced interrogation techniques.” That, as critics have long argued, is what usually happens if war crimes aren’t prosecuted. In August 2014, when President Obama finally admitted that “we tortured some folks,” he added a warning.
Editor’s note: Amitai Etzioni’s article below is a powerful critique of approaches we often take in Tikkun magazine. We welcome this kind of challenge to the vision we put forward, particularly at www.spiritualprogressives.org/covenant. Please read that along with this article. One question we have to ask Etzioni: what level of consumption reduction would be sufficient to prevent humanity living in capitalist socieites around the globe from continuing the destruction of the life support system of the planet that is a regular feature of the capitalist marketplace’s endless search for profits–and how could that search be stopped as long as capitalism depends on private investment to fuel its bottom line and meet the growing demands from all around the world for a standard of living comparable to that in the U.S. Middle class? The New Normal
Amitai Etzioni
If the people of the world cannot return to what is being called the ‘old normal’ (paid for by strongly growing economies), what will the new normal look like?
Editor’s Note: Tikkun magazine is a 501-c-3 non profit that is precluded by law from endorsing political candidates or opposing them. But we are not precluded from publishing articles by our readers who take strong stands about electoral issues. We have a tiny staff and do not have the capacity to verify empirical claims made by our authors–so it’s up to you to make those inquiries on your own. On the other hand, as the magazine that came into existence as “the voice of Jewish liberals and progressives and the alternative to Commentary magazine and the voices of Jewish conservatism and conformism in American society,” even though we are now ALSO both a Jewish voice AND an INTERFAITH voice for secular humanists and militant atheists AS WELL as for Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and any other religion that cares about human rights, social justice, environmental sanity and peace, we have a special interest in challenging fascism and other anti-democratic or hate-promoting social movements whether they be in the U.S., Israel, or any other society. So we are proud to present below one such inquiry into whether we are now facing the emergence of a fascist movement in the U.S., and welcome responses from our readers and invite other analyses including those that challenge we are printing here.
Forgiveness involves seeking forgiveness for ourselves after genuine repentance, and then forgiving others. Forgiveness does not mean giving others a continuing right to oppress or hurt other people. We can both forgive those who tortured prisoners or supported economic or political policies that caused the death of thousands and nevertheless still insist that they be punished for their behavior. The practice of forgiveness frees us from the burden of carrying with us negative feelings that may limit our capacity for empathy and weaken our ability to love. It is not meant to disempower us from the righteous indignation at global capitalism that is destroying the life-support system of Earth and at those who accumulate huge amounts of wealth while turning their backs and closing their ears to the cries of the homeless, the hungry, the refugees, the powerless.
Editor’s note: Tikkun is a nonprofit and prohibited from supporting candidates or political parties. So we don’t. But we can publicize views from our readers and writers on these issues, or from others. We welcome anyone with a coherent argument to present to us articles supporting presidential candidates in any major political party including Republicans, Greens and Democrats. Mail them to me at RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com We do not have the staff to investigate the truth or falsity of claims being made on behalf of any political party or candidate.
Emperor Weather
Turning Up the Heat on History
By Tom Engelhardt
For six centuries or more, history was, above all, the story of the great game of empires. From the time the first wooden ships mounted with cannons left Europe’s shores, they began to compete for global power and control. Three, four, even five empires, rising and falling, on an increasingly commandeered and colonized planet. The story, as usually told, is a tale of concentration and of destruction until, in the wake of the second great bloodletting of the twentieth century, there were just two imperial powers left standing: the United States and the Soviet Union. Where the other empires, European and Japanese, had been, little remained but the dead, rubble, refugees, and scenes that today would be associated only with a place like Syria.