To be effective the Left must learn to retell the story of America’s founding. In that sense, the Left needs America more than America needs a Left.
Editorials & Actions
Challenging the Power of the Banks
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The Stone That Brings Down Goliath? Richmond and Eminent Domain
Tuesday, 04 March 2014 10:09By Ellen Brown,
Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, California, in front of a boarded-up house in Richmond, December 20, 2013. Many Richmond residents owe more money on their houses than their houses are worth, but McLaughlin’s plan to use of eminent domain to prevent foreclosures has faced significant opposition. (Photo: Jim Wilson / The New York Times)
In a nearly $13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in November 2013, JPMorganChase admitted that it, along with every other large US bank, had engaged in mortgage fraud as a routine business practice, sowing the seeds of the mortgage meltdown. JPMorgan and other megabanks have now been caught in over a dozen major frauds, including LIBOR-rigging and bid-rigging; yet no prominent banker has gone to jail.
Editorials & Actions
Uri Avnery on Germany Trying to Deal with its Nazi Past?
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[Editor’s Note: Avnery doesn’t deal with another important aspect of Germans’ continuing feelings of guilt for what their Nazi past did to the world and to the Jewish people: the way that that guilt keeps Germany from actually doing what would be in the Jewish people’s best interest, namely putting economic and political pressure to end the Occupation and reconcile with the Palestinian people. Similarly, the guilt Christians feel for 2000 years of indoctrinating the world with hatred of Jews is now dealt with by refusing to do the one thing that would be of greatest service to the Jewish people: namely, pushing Israel toward reconciliation with the Palestinian people. So this is how guilt actually works against the goodness of people in the Christian Church and in the new generations of Germans–by condemning them to policies that are substantively bad for the Jewish people by being collaborators with Israel’s oppressive policies toward Palestinians. Yet the guilt feelings are legitimate in both cases, only they play out in ways that are bad for the Jews, because it is bad for the Jews to be identified with policies of a nation state that claims to be “THE Jewish State” while acting against Jewish values in its treatment of “the other.” Oy.
2014
Three Books Responding to the Repercussions of Slavery
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by Frederick Douglas, Byron Williams, and Jeannine Bell
2014
Beyond Allyship: Multiracial Work to End Racism
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How can we create powerful, cross-race movements for change? A child of the Civil Rights Movement wrestles with the idea of allyship.
2014
Trayvon Martin: Reflections on the Black and Jewish Struggle for Justice
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Since the 1960s, efforts at coalition building and solidarity work between Jewish and Black communities have suffered and never reached the pinnacle that was reached during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. In 2013, the lack of deep and abiding connections between Black and Jewish activists became apparent in the disparate responses from Jewish communities to the events surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. To reinvigorate a coalition among blacks and Jews we need to forge deeper ties across racial lines.
2014
You Can Help Stop America’s March to the Right
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I call this Love’s Rebellion—a refusal to accept the ethos of materialism and selfishness as the ultimate truth of our lives, an insistence on seeing the goodness in others, and a determination to replace “power over” with caring for each other and the earth! It’s time now to give Love’s Rebellion a political platform. And to make that happen, we need your help to push these issues into the public sphere. The most effective way to help introduce a spiritual progressive voice is for you to build a caucus in your union, professional organization, church, synagogue, mosque, political party, or run for some sort of office.
2014
Climate Disaster Demands an Ecological Left
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Scorching heat, floods, and wildfires are not just environmental crises—they’re social ones too. We need a Left that sees the primacy of this threat.
Articles
The Spiritual Truth of JFK (As Movie and Reality)
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To put the Kennedy assassination in a historical perspective that is both spiritual and political, we here reprint Peter Gabel’s brilliant article on the subject, “The Spiritual Truth of JFK (As Movie and Reality),” originally published in Tikkun in March/April 1992 in response to the original release of Stone’s film.
Editorials & Actions
Lerner in Seattle and Bellingham
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Bellingham, Wa. Nov. 14 (Thursday) at 7 PM:
Rabbi Lerner speaks on “The Spiritual Transformation and Healing of the World: Building a Spiritually Progressive Political Party.” Location: 210 Academic Instructional Center West at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington (park at Fairhaven College, then walk through the tunnel under the road headed toward the main campus buildings. Academic West is the first building on your left).
Seattle Nov.
2013
The Original Rainbow Coalition: An Example of Universal Identity Politics
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Are identity and class-based politics necessarily at odds? Jakobi Williams answers with a resounding no, recalling a historic period when identity and class-based politics were dynamically entwined: the moment when the original Rainbow Coalition came into being. Set up by the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, the Rainbow Coalition offers an inspiring example of how identity politics can result in cross-class and interracial solidarity, rather than a fragmentation of the Left.
Articles
My Response to “A Portrait of Jewish Americans”
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Are Jews in existential free-fall? According to the latest Pew Research Center report, 22 percent of Jews have abandoned Judaism and only 15 percent identify Judaism as essential to being Jewish. Rabbi Rami Shapiro delivers a stirring response.
2013
Gay Men in the Locker Room of the World – Big Whoop
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NBA player Jason Collins is the first active player in the four major U.S. sports to declare himself gay since Glenn Burke in the 1970s. For a nation that remains contemptuous of nonconforming notions of masculinity, the Collins event is not a question of tolerance for gays, but of masculine identity itself: can a man who falls in love with other men be integrated into the American ideal of manhood?
2013
Shifting U.S. Demographics Demand New Cross-Racial Coalitions
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Obama won by appealing to a broad swath of voters—the young, ethnically diverse, and non-affluent—who typically aren’t a part of the traditional political calculus. But he failed to garner much support among older, whiter Americans. If our political fights pit one group, one generation, or one race against all the multicultural “others,” then we all will surely lose.