Untellable Truths. Materialist Perspectives The differences between Democratic progressives and the president over the tax deal the president has made with Republicans is being argued from a materialist perspective. That perspective is real. It matters who gets how much money and how our money is spent. But what is being ignored is that the answer to material policy questions depends on how Americans understand the issues, that is, on how the issues are realized in the brains of our citizens.
Such understanding is what determines political support or lack of it in all its forms, from voting to donations to political pressure to what is said in the media. What policies are proposed and adopted depend on how Americans understand policy and politics. From the progressive viewpoint, the president keeps surrendering in advance — giving in to conservatives before he has to and hence betraying Democratic principles.
Progressives differ on the reasons for the president’s behavior. Helping the Other Side. Progressive Blue. Open Left. We the People, Not We the Corporations. Look to the left. Look to the right. - Ken Honeywell. A little over three years ago, I found out what was really important to my neighbors. After almost 50 years on the planet, I finally understood what it was that would get them out in the streets, mad as hell, carrying, literally, torches and pitchforks and placards, shutting down traffic as they marched toward the Governor’s Mansion. It was not the sorry state of our public schools. It was not a recent escalation in crime that was creeping into the city’s tonier neighborhoods.
It was not the rising levels of poverty and homelessness and hunger, the growing problem of childhood obesity, or the fact that Forbes had ranked Indiana 49th of 50 states in environmental quality. It was not an ill-considered war that was killing our young men and women and costing the nation billions of dollars. It was property taxes. Our property taxes had shot up shockingly, all at once, and my neighbors were stunned. No matter: most of them were blowing smoke. Horrors! I mean that figuratively. For the 99 Percent. The release of the Vatican’s new declaration on reform of the world financial system, long in preparation, happened to be published as media interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement was in crescendo.
Headlines naturally drew a connection. While Catholic social teaching has often been at its most effective when social movements—labor unions, human rights movements, peace and environmental activists—have been its carriers, the still amorphous Occupy Wall Street movement and the Vatican report are not directly connected. Rather, they are parallel events responding to the suffering and loss of hope inflicted on so many by the current economic crisis. Unlike many protesters, however, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace offers an analysis of the problems underlying the sputtering world economy. In identifying inequality as a pressing social problem, the church that repeatedly opposed class conflict in Marxism cannot be charged with stirring up class warfare. The Vatican and Wall Street. It takes a movement - God's Politics Blog. Occupy Wall Street | NYC Protest for American Revolution.
"99 percent" - TONY B. CONSCIOUS. We Are The Many - Makana. Alec Baldwin: What Occupy Wall Street Has Taught Me. Have you seen Hard Times: Lost on Long Island? The film won the Audience Award/Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October. The documentary follows a group of unemployed men and women, ranging in age from their late thirties into their sixties, who are looking for work while living in certain middle class suburbs on Long Island. I had not seen the film during the festival itself, but when I screened it the other day, I realized the true meaning, for me, of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Hard Times is a disturbing film that puts a face to the unemployment crisis in America in a rather effective way.
In America today, we are told that unemployment now hovers at around nine percent, while other sources insist that those statistics are underreported and are closer to 12.5 percent. The rest of us try to go about our business. It is somewhat easier to sidestep the raw helplessness of one in eleven or even one in eight. Robert Kuttner: Time for Team B -- And a Movement. In the 1970s, the CIA appointed a "Team B" to challenge prevailing assumptions about national security.
Since then, there have been other Team B exercises to question prevailing views. This is a smart move. An in-group of experts often becomes an echo-chamber, reinforcing their own prejudices and excluding people with different views. If you are inside, you demonstrate your own loyalty by not frontally challenging the top people, no matter how disastrous. This, of course, is the road to foreign policy debacles like Iraq and Vietnam. But the same thing happens in politics and domestic policy.
As we've just seen, Obama's A-Team of political advisers did not exactly shine. It's not that others failed to warn of the disaster in the making. Columnists like Frank Rich and Bob Herbert, public opinion experts like Drew Westen and Stan Greenberg, scores of bloggers, as well as labor leaders like Rich Trumka, have been flagging these problems since mid-2009. And that's not all. Okay, fine. Robert Kuttner: Saving Progressivism From Obama.
What's the worst case, and the best case, that we can imagine for the next two years? Let's look at the economics first. Republicans and the White House both seem determined to make the recession worse by reducing the budget deficit long before the economy is in recovery. The deficit commission's two co-chairs have proposed that the cuts begin in October 2011, when unemployment is still expected to be at least nine percent. The economy needs a massive fiscal jolt, and instead is likely to get austerity. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve's experiment with buying Treasury bonds in order to keep interest rates low is not working very well. Obama's ill-fated Asia trip was intended to bring home a foreign policy victory to divert attention from the domestic economic and political carnage. So as President Obama gears up for a re-election battle in 2012, the economy is unlikely to be much different than the one that sank the Democrats in 2010.
Danny Goldberg made a similar point in The Nation: Robert Kuttner: Backbone, Please. If anything is more overrated than bipartisanship, it is post-partisanship. The Republicans surely get this. They dig in their heels, don't budge, and wait for the Democrats either to fail, or to come to them. But the media are infatuated with the idea that excessive partisanship is a symmetrical problem. If only the Republicans and the Democrats would meet each other halfway, the nation's ills would be solved. It is hard to watch the Sunday talk shows without seeing one interviewer after another demanding, why can't you people just compromise? There are two problems with this formulation, one tactical and the other substantive. The tactical problem is that the Republicans and Democrats aren't playing the same game.
The tactical asymmetry connects to the substantive problem -- the fact that the solution to what ails the economy is somewhere to the left of most Democrats, not midway between, say, President Obama and Mitch McConnell. Obama started out as a wishful post-partisan. Spare me! Robert Kuttner: Wall Street: From Protest to Politics. "There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.
" --Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, French politician (1807-1874). When elected leaders largely ignore a disgrace like the financial collapse of 2008, sooner or later popular protest fills the vacuum. The Wall Street protests are heartening -- but also a measure of the utter failure of the usual machinery of democracy to remedy the worst pillaging of regular Americans by financial elites since the 1920s. For three years, we have been wondering, where is the outrage? The ingenuity of occupywallst.org, its spread to other cities, its blending of internet-organizing with on-the-ground protest, is inspiring.
But sooner or later, protest will need to turn to politics. And God knows, we missed the rendezvous we were supposed to have with democratic politics in January 2009. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, despite heroic efforts by progressives, stopped just short of separating financial speculation from ordinary banking. Rabbi Michael Lerner: 10 Commandments to Revive Progressives After the November Defeat. 1. Don't let the media frame this as a defeat of progressives. Had Obama embraced and fought for a progressive agenda, even if he had passed none of it, he would have entered the 2010 elections as the champion of the huge idealism of the American people that was elicited in 2008 and which would have led the Democrats to an electoral sweep in 2010.
Being seen as fighting for the needs of ordinary people -- never letting anyone forget for a moment that he had inherited the mess that Republican and pro-corporate Democrats had created, positioning himself as the champion of those who resented the Wall Street and corporate interests -- his popularity would have grown; he could have won a much bigger victory for the Democrats in 2010, and that would have allowed him to actually legislate the policies of a progressive vision. 2.
Challenge the elitism in the Left. 3. Challenge the religo-phobia in the Left. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Rabbi Michael Lerner: Obama (and Biden) Have No Clue About What's Bothering Their Political Base. Shortly before the California Democratic primary in 2008, the San Fransisco Chronicle invited me to write a short article explaining why I, chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, was supporting Barack Obama.
Like most other progressive activists, I understood that a president is limited in what s/he can accomplish in limiting the power of America's economic and political elites and in restraining the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and health care profiteers, the oil industry's relentless destruction of the environment, or the selfishness and materialism that had become the hallmark of Wall Street and increasingly the "common sense" that was conveyed by the media and advertising into the consciousness of many Americans. President Obama is now traveling the country seeking to rebuild the enthusiasm he generated in 2008, and seems clueless as to why it is not there. And the Democrats who followed his lead seem similarly clueless.
So what happened? Rabbi Michael Lerner: American Liberals and Progressive Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity -- or Are We ready to Change Directions. Progressives have been blessed in the past two years with three significant opportunities to change the fundamentals of American society. We've already blown the first and are missing the second and third. The first, of course, was the economic meltdown. What a moment that could have been for progressives in Congress or the White House to challenge the ideology of "leave it to the marketplace" or "leave it to the states" to work things out.
Imagine if President Obama had told Wall Street and the Republicans, "OK, lets test your theories right now -- lets just let the marketplace work its wonders as the banks fail. " The second opportunity is now being blown by the Obama Administration: the Gulf Oil spill. The President should be calling this a national emergency as serious as that of 9/11, and should declare a war on those who are destroying the environment. Unfortunately, most progressive and liberal groups are following this mistaken path. Rabbi Michael Lerner: The Message and Strategy That Is Needed by Occupy Wall Street. This past weekend, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations were held in over 951 cities in 82 countries as people around the globe joined in an international day of solidarity against the greed and corruption of the 1%. The media, trying to discredit all the demonstrators, say we don't know what we are for, only what we are against.
So I believe there is much to be gained were we to embrace the following 20 second sound bite for "what we are for. " We want to replace a society based on selfishness and materialism with a society based on caring for each other and caring for the planet. Ok, it was two minutes instead of 20 seconds, but we deserve that amount of time. Strategy? For direct action, we need to begin non-violent sit-ins aimed at disrupting the normal operations of those corporations that have acted illegally and immorally, but gotten away with it because their friends control the Democratic Party as well as the Republican.
Rabbi Michael Lerner: Praying With Our Feet at Occupy Oakland. When my teacher and mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary Abraham Joshua Heschel told me and others that he had been "praying with his feet" when he participated in the Selma Freedom march in 1965, he confirmed for many a way of overcoming the dichotomy between my religious practice and my radical politics. In many ways, the anti-war movements of the '60s and early '70s of the last century felt like that kind of community prayer. I had that experience again at my various visits to Occupy Oakland, most intensely this past Wednesday, November 2, 2011. It was a strong protest of the class war that has been waged by the wealthiest 1 percent of the population -- and their hired guns in the media, political world, and educational institutions -- against the 99 percent of the population who have suffered both materially and spiritually in the past four decades.
Some of the scenes I liked best: And, like the '60s, there were also problems. But the key is to have compassion for everyone.