Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/us_politics/page/32/)
The current capitalist global crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007; therefore welcome to year five. The largest corporations and richest citizens long ago learned that if you want to sustain an extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income, you need a similarly unequal distribution of political power. An increasingly unequal capitalist economy pays for the increasingly undemocratic politics it needs.
The Netanyahu government is now just where it wants to be. It feels no need to take any action to accommodate the Palestinians or entertain President Obama’s suggestions for restarting negotiations.
By Rick Wolff
The current capitalist global crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007. Therefore welcome to Year Five. This inventory of where things stand may begin with the good news: the major banks, the stock market, and corporate profits have largely or completely “recovered” from the lows they reached early in 2009. The US dollar has fallen sharply against many currencies of countries with which the US trades and that has enabled US exports to rebound from their crisis lows. However, the bad news is what prevails notwithstanding the political and media hypes about “recovery.” The most widely cited unemployment rate remains at 9 % for workers without jobs but looking. If instead we use the more indicative U-6 unemployment statistic of the US Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, then the rate is 15%. The latter rate counts also those who want full-time but can only find part-time work and those who want work but have given up looking.
Socialism, contrary to generations of conservative (often also, liberal) propagandizing, may not be un-American after all. A review of “The ‘S’ Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism” by John Nichols.
Why the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of have seen in our lifetimes.
Whenever I talk publicly about the way that right-wingers in the Jewish world make it hard for other Jews to speak out against Israel, I’m challenged by some who insist that there is no such climate of repression in the Jewish world. Yet over and over again, I’ve encountered people who have taken Tikkun-like stances, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, and paid a high price for it. The impact of the Tony Kushner incident, described below, is not that it will silence Kushner–he has enough social power to resist this kind of attempt to silence him since as the author of Angels in America he has received so much public praise he is not in danger–but that it, like so many other similar acts of repression, gives a stark warning to younger or less economically secure people in academia, the media and in professional lives that they must keep their mouths closed about Israel or face dangers to their careers and futures. Two recent pieces about this incident are particularly worth reading: “CUNY Board Nixes Honorary Degree For Playwright Tony Kushner” in the Jewish Week by Doug Chandler and Tony Kushner’s response to the the CUNY Board Decision. Doug Chandler writes:
In what is believed to be a rare move, the City University of New York has turned down a request by one of its colleges to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner at its commencement ceremony this spring, The Jewish Week has learned.
Since 2006 a team of Buddhists based at the Berkeley Zen Center, have been using Buddhist practice to sustain and inform door-to-door political campaigning.
By acknowledging class as a social reality we can become aware of how much we have in common with the restless students in Tunis or the harried shopkeepers in Cairo.
Chris Hedges’ recent article “The Corporate State Will Continue its Inexorable Advance Until We’re Locked into a Permanent Underclass” is brilliant in its insights. Unfortunately, like most of what Hedges is writing these days, it is missing any picture of hope or possibility. The very existence of constituencies for his thinking, like those who read Tikkun, belies the extreme pessimism and shows that his analysis is too one-sided, ignoring all the factors that have produced him and produced us and produced the tens of millions who voted for Obama precisely because we falsely believed that he would articulate and fight for an alternative to the reality that Hedges so clearly explicates. Because his analysis leaves all of us out of the picture, it is not only depressing but one-sided and therefore inaccurate. And yet, it does describe the massive reality we face and gives us a very good picture of why we are in the mess we are in.
President Obama has done a major disservice to the American people by accepting the right-wing premise that cutting budgets in order to lower the deficit should take priority over creating jobs.
Editor’s Note: I received this information from a homeless woman named Bobbie. It reminds us of why the GMP is so important and why the budget reductions of help to those suffering from poverty is such an immoral reality. “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” –Mohandas Gandhi
NEED VS SUPPLY
Funding
•In 1978, HUD’s budget was over $83 billion. •In 1983, HUD’s budget was only $18 billion. Demolition
• In the last several years, HUD has been tearing down thousands of low-income units across the country. • From 1996 on, HUD has spent $0 on building low-income housing while thousands of units have been demolished.
Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
This can’t end well. But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose. Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast. I don’t know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this — truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad. The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?
In the absence of a progressive voice resonating from the White House, the radical Right continues to dominate the political noise, forcing its policy narratives into the media and policy decisions.
The budget is an ethical and spiritual issue–it is the concrete manifestation of our values both as individuals who vote for the candidates who shape the budget, and as a society. Below a few progressives make sense of the budget battles we are facing in the coming months. Budget Battles: Sound, Fury and Fakery
by Richard D. Wolff
Weeks of highly publicized debates — some in Congress, more in the mass media — brought Republicans and Democrats to a budget deal. To maximize public attention, they threatened a possible government shutdown. Both parties said that large government deficits and accumulated debt were “serious problems.”
The short answer is that social justice was not served by the passage of Obama’s health care law. Despite the early rhetoric from President Obama that health reform must cover everyone, control long-term costs, and improve the quality of health care delivery, none of these goals will be met by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).