General News

Starhawk's Activist View of Palestine

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For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. And from the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, most recently supporting Palestinians in the occupied territories. After spending last week with Starhawk, I realized that she’s a “meta-activist,” a node of many different types of activism, and a font of knowledge about how to act most effectively when demonstrating, educating, and building a new world. She’s been active in the women’s movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, in creating greater sustainability and a permaculture for the Earth, as well as in supporting Palestinian non-violence for the creation of a Palestinian state.

Buddhism

Meet HuffPost's New Religion Editor, Paul Raushenbush

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On February 24, Rev. Paul Raushenbush issued a call for articles entitled “Dear Religious (and Sane) America” to inaugurate the launch of the Huffington Post’s new religion section. According to the article,
HuffPost Religion is dedicated to providing a provocative, respectful, and hopefully productive forum for addressing the ways in which religion intersects our personal, communal, national and international life. HuffPost Religion will demonstrate the vibrant diversity of religious traditions, perspectives and experiences that exist alongside and inform one another in America and throughout the world. Huffington is clearly trying to expand its reach and become one of the big players in religion media, much as it already has in politics, popular culture, and even business. Based on initial responses to the section, it appears to be well on its way.

Politics & Society

Chris Hedges: "Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama"

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Chris Hedges’ piece on Truthdig yesterday deserves to be widely read. He writes:

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives….

Health

The Current Health Care "Reform" Facing Congress

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Steffie Woolhandler’s “A faulty prescription for reform” and John Nichols’s “The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit” both show why it’s a huge mistake to be “realistic” in reforming the health care system. In order to be realistic, President Obama and the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate refused to give any attention to a “Medicare for Everyone” approach — the only approach that could actually solve some of the major problems facing health care in the United States. As long as our health care is not about “care” but about profits, there is little chance of arriving at a health care system that will actually serve the needs of Americans. This was the same mistake made by President Clinton in his approach, and it is fast becoming a major reason why Democrats may lose their congressional majority in 2010: people don’t trust a government whose interventions often seem more oriented toward the needs of corporations than the needs of ordinary American citizens, and the only force that is really articulating the resentment people feel at having to pay more and more taxes to fund programs that largely serve corporate power is the anti-government right wing. We need to build a counter-force to that, one which is truly understanding of why people would be opposed to government spending when it is not serving their interests, and the health care plan now being supported by Obama is likely to intensify this right-wing reactionary response to a real problem: the problem of corporate greed and the profit motive distorting medicine and making health about profits not about caring.

Culture

Dear Abercrombie & Fitch – Did you really fire a Muslim for wearing a head scarf?

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On Abercrombie & Fitch’s web site, they say “At Abercrombie & Fitch we are committed to increasing and leveraging the diversity of our associates and management across the organization. Those differences will be supported by a culture of inclusion, so that we better understand our customers, enhance our organizational effectiveness, capitalize on the talents of our workforce and represent the communities in which we do business.” If that’s true, how could one of their management team have fired a Muslim for wearing a head scarf? I’ve sent the following message to the Diversity Department at Abercrombie & Fitch, and have yet to hear back from them. Dear Diversity Staff,
I received a message from CAIR (Council of American Islamic Relations) saying that an A&F (Hollister) employee was fired for wearing a head scarf.

Health

Am I Missing Something? Why aren't most corporations pushing for health care reform?

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The top story at Huffington Post at this moment, is that Harry Reid walked out of a meeting with corporate titans in a huff, because he thought they were telling him to focus on them instead of on small businesses. One line in that story, however, was the big news for me. “At one point, Democrats in the room reached out to the corporate heads for help finishing health care reform and were met with silence.” This is something I just don’t understand! The United States spends twice as much on health care than any other industrialized nation.

Environment

Here's a good life: farming

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We had an email from a reader, Nancy Oden:

I’m an organic farmer up here on the North Coast of Maine, also political & environmental activist for over 40 years (yikes!) now. We have to come up with solutions as to how people can survive these manipulated economic crises – my response is on my website http://www.cleanearth.net. I checked it out. Some quotes from Survival: Here’s What We Can Do:
When working families lose their jobs, and then lose their homes, how can they stay afloat as a family, given that living in one’s vehicle is not acceptable? Maine has plenty of land and water, making us ideal for farming…

Environment

David Gershon's Cool Communities

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The year before I left small town New York for this job at Tikkun, a few of us in our Network of Spiritual Progressives chapter got together to reduce our carbon footprint. We used a workbook by David Gershon called Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds. It was interesting to me how different the small group experience was from just reading about the need to do various things. I already knew much of what the book said, but in our regular group meetings we discussed the details of how difficult or easy it was for each of us to implement the necessary changes. We became better friends and we developed a sense of upbeat possibility: “I’m really going to do this” turned into “I’m doing it!”

Environment

Obama on campaign: "I am not a nuclear energy proponent"

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You may have heard that The Obama administration has approved a $8 billion loan guarantee to support the construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia. If the project goes forward, the plants would be the first built in the United States since the 1970s. Conrad Miller, who wrote “Energy Generation in the Obama Years (No, Nuclear Power Is Not “Safe and Clean”)” for Tikkun last summer, has drawn our attention to what sounds very much like a promise by Obama on campaign that he would not promote nuclear energy until safety issues had been dealt with. Wednesday’s New York Times article on environmentalists’ disappointment with Obama stated that
Mr. Obama has long supported nuclear power, as a senator and as a candidate for president. Employees of the Exelon Corporation, the Chicago-based utility that is the largest operator of nuclear plants in the United States, have been among Mr. Obama’s biggest campaign donors, giving more than $330,000 over his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.