[p2p-research] Fwd: Why I Disagree with Hedges and Nader on Obama

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner <rabbilerner at tikkun.org>
Date: Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 8:00 AM
Subject: Why I Disagree with Hedges and Nader on Obama
To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com


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*Why I Disagree with Hedges and Nader on Obama*
   By *Rabbi Michael Lerner*,
Editor of Tikkun and Chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives

 Many of the specific failures highlighted by the article I sent out
yesterday by Chris Hedges criticizing the performance of the Obama
Administration are legitimate points.   But the way Hedges's positions are
stated, and the conclusions drawn from them are not the path of spiritual
progressives, in my view.There was too much anger in his statement
overshadowing our spiritual progressive commitment to compassion and a
spirit of generosity toward others with whose politics we disagree. And not
enough sympathy for the problems anyone would face trying to get elected as
President and to repair the damage of the past 30 years.

I have great respect for Chris Hedges, as one of the very few people who was
a respected journalist at the New York Times and subsequently left the Times
in protest of the way they ignored those of us in the anti-war movement who
were warning about the lies of the Bush Administration and opposing the use
of violence to achieve US ends in the Middle East, and because I am grateful
that he has written a brilliant article in Tikkun on the Obama Brand and has
accepted our invite to speak at our conference in D.C.

Yet in this communication I want to state places where I disagree with
Hedges article, although I do at first affirm some things that are right
about Hedges' position even while I don't affirm the tone and style of his
communication (which, to be fair to him, was written for a different venue
and not at all like the more nuanced pieces he has put into Tikkun
magazine). I hope you read this through to the end, even while grumbling
that it is too  long (I know, but here is a basic truth about communication:
if you are referencing ideas that are already popular in the culture, you
can do so with a short slogan; but if you are trying to introduce new ideas
that do not resonate with the "established wisdom" or "common sense" of the
culture, it often takes a nuanced discussion that is longer-and hence the
nuanced position may feel too long to people who have been accustomed to the
dumbing down of popular discourse by the media and the politicians.)

 Despite what Chris Hedges wrote,  I have met Obama personally and privately
on several occasions and do not believe he is a liar or a conscious
manipulator. I do not agree with the decisions he has made since he won the
Democratic nomination for President, and particularly after he became
President, and I've gone out of my way to communicate in a clear, firm way
those criticisms, and to do so in a *positive language that showed exactly
what he could do to change his approach*.

I believe that Obama's failure to carry forward on addressing the deep
yearning of tens of millions of Americans for a different world than one
dominated by the moneyed interests and the fearful who rely on power and
domination of others to achieve security has been a dreadful mistake.  Obama
aroused in people a willingness to transcend the deep cynicism engendered in
many by 28 years of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II, encouraged us to
believe that he would stand for something really different, and that he
would above all fulfill his promise to tell us the truth (which I and others
understood to mean "the whole truth" facing him and moving him to make
decisions).

 It was this commitment by Obama which led many Americans to take what was
for them the huge risk of dropping their defenses and allowing themselves to
hope that the world that they wanted (but believed to be impossible) would
finally be on the agenda, and that someone in a position of power and
influence would provide leadership to achieve that world (albeit against
potentially insuperable odds). Few of them expected change overnight, none
of them expected change without compromise, but all of them expected that
Obama would unequivocally speak the same language and the same critique of
the corporate powerful and the same critique of the Bush abandonment of
human rights and civil liberties, to the whole country that he had spoken to
his supporters when telling them that "you are the people we've been waiting
for" and that he would deliver "change you can believe in." Most of the
criticism of Obama is not about what he compromised for, but why he did it
without first struggling hard for the progressive positions he articulated
during his previous career as a US Senator and to crowds he met with during
the campaign-that is, without trying to educate the country to the ideas he
said he believed in, before making compromises on those ideas.

Lest you think that this is somehow a rarified critique coming from a few
intellectuals, please note the report in the New York Times today, March 3,
2010, page B1, in which leaders of the labor movement expressed strong
critique of Obama's policies and indicated that it is unlikely that Labor
will be able to mobilize their local unions to work for many Democrats in
the 2010 elections. The story goes on to quote one typical steelworker who
worked for Obama in 2008 who says "People aren't feeling so good about the
president…people really believe that he bailed out Wall Street and forgot
about Main Street. I think it's going to be a real challenge for organized
labor to try to reenergize its base" in 2010 and beyond. A firefighter in
Michigan is quoted as saying: "He's not what he purported to be, which was
'I'm going to change things, Im going to fight for you, the average guy in
the street.' He's no;t fighting hard enough for what he believes. The ones
that voted for Obama, they're not as enthusiastic."  So, please understand
that when we critique Obama, we predicted all this a year ago, and now we
are seeing what happened when Obama followed the path he did-but we are not
the ones who have created the mass defection from Obama and his weak-kneed
Democratic Congress. I'll go on to say why I disagree with Chris Hedges'
article in a few more paragraphs, but please get that it is Obama, not his
progressive critics, that have caused the great disappointment that flowed
from his prioritizing the needs of corporations and banks and investment
companies over the needs of middle income people and the poor. No one
expected a magic wand-but they did expect him to fight for a progressive
vision and to speak openly about what he was encountering when he was
engaged in such a fight.

So when Obama failed to do that, failed to do the one thing that was in his
power to do, namely, to tell the truth, to say honestly and openly to us
what was happening and why he was taking the moves that he took, and to
relate what he was doing to what he had said he would  do,  and when
abandoning what he had said, to explain why and to acknowledge the pain and
disappointment that any such abandonment would reasonably cause among those
who had supported him precisely because they believed he would stick with
his promises and would explain what he was doing and why.

 So when Obama failed to stay honest and open with us about what he was
doing, he caused a tremendous disappointment and humiliation among many who
had opened themselves in this way, and they have reacted in part by
despairing of government at all (and yes, part of the resurgent populist Tea
Party movement comes from reactionaries, but part of it also comes from
people who, watching Obama use big government to fund the very entrenched
interests of the rich and powerful that they had understood him to promise
to challenge, feel rage and anger at this betrayal, even if they didn't vote
for him but secretly nurtured a fantasy that maybe finally something
different would happen in government).

Another group has turned to deep despair and an unwillingness to get
involved again in politics, and this may be a major factor in the triumph of
right-wing forces or even fascistic forces in the next decade or two,
because it's going to take a long time to get people to hope again. And
finally, another group, represented by Hedges, is just so angry at having
been disappointed once again, are coming to the conclusion that they were
consciously manipulated and want to express their anger. And they too have a
legitimate reason to be upset.

And, no, I don't buy the argument that there was nothing that Obama could do
differently. Over and over again in the past six issues of Tikkun we've
described in detail what he could have done differently and still could . In
Tikkun we printed Memos to Obama by some of the most creative thinkers in
America, and we were assured by people close to Obama that he received
these. We bought a full page ad in the Washington Post and again in a very
respectful manner proposed some specific steps he could take to retain the
energy and hopefulness of his campaign even within the constraints of
"inside-the-beltway" consciousness that was being championed by writers like
E.J. Dionne and other liberals in the first months of his presidency.

The key thing that is right about Hedges is that we all need to STAND UP and
become visible again now that Obama's wrong turn has made invisible the tens
of millions of people who supported him in the primaries and our shared
desire for a different kind of world-because to the extent that we become
invisible to others and to each other, the crushing weight of the current
global capitalist system-- and all its violence, injustice, and preaching of
the values of selfishness, materialism, and looking out for number one and
assuming that everyone else only cares about themselves and will seek to
dominate us unless we dominate them first-makes people despair about
changing anything, and makes plausible the rage of proto-fascist movements
on the Right which give expression to the frustrations about the
contemporary world but do so in destructive ways. Hedges is trying to say to
the attempts to erase the yearnings of tens of millions of people for a
different world: NO, WE ARE HERE, DON'T LOSE OUR PROPHETIC VOICE AND THE
VALUE OF ARTICULATING OUR MESSIANIC ASPIRATIONS-and in this respect he is
saying something that deserves respect. This is what is good about Hedges
article.

So then where do I disagree with Hedges? Let me count the ways:

1.  Hedges' analysis and particularly the harsh way he expresses it leads to
despair and to the "blame game" that has little usefulness in politics. Our
difference here is partly the difference between two styles of prophetic
leadership: one that rails against injustice, the other that moves beyond
the legitimate outrage and seeks to find a way to change the reality. My own
work as a social change activist and psychotherapist for forty years has led
me to believe that people's ideas and perspective can be changed in
fundamental ways, but that requires a mixture of prophetic outrage with
genuine compassion and a spirit of generosity and respect for those with
whom we disagree (even respect for the humanity of people who are doing or
saying things that we feel to be outrageous-though that shouldn't stop us
from strongly critiquing those perspectives). In my books over the course of
the past twenty years I've shared with tens of thousands of people
strategies for how those changes can take place, and they are strategies
that are as much a challenge to the Left as to the Right, insisting, as I
do, on the importance of psychological and spiritual sensitivity (and
acknowledging that I sometimes fail to live up to my own values and deserve
criticism as well).

Lets acknowledge that the Democratic Party has been overwhelmingly catering
to the interests of America's ruling elites. It has also been a major force
for legitimating some of the program of liberals and progressives,
particularly in regard to the struggles against some of the more egregious
forms of racism, sexism and homopobia in our society, it has fought for the
rights of immigrants, it has weakly but nevertheless consistently opposed
giving priority to defense spending over social programs. I know that this
has not been anything close to what I've wanted. But the party remains a
mechanism by which liberal and progressive ideas can be communicated to
ordinary Americans, and, if we could get enough of those Americans to
actually vote in primary elections, we could get candidates at every level
of government who shared a progressive agenda. Yes, we are up against huge
odds, because the wealthy will step in to fund the most conservative and
corporate-friendly and rich-friendly candidates. But in the final analysis,
if enough of us reach out to other people in our own communities and
convince them of the need for a spiritual progressive politics, it is we who
could win in the primaries and even in the general elections. I know that
this is a very difficult route, but primarily difficult because it takes a
lot of effort on our part to make it happen. But the Democratic Party could
be taken over by people who share the analysis of the spiritual
progressives.





 I salute liberals who are trying to do this very thing, but I don't believe
that they will succeed unless they adopt a language that is more loving,
compassionate, and generous than that reflected in the piece that Hedges
wrote and which we at Tikkun sent out (albeit explaining that we often send
out pieces with which we disagree because the views are ones that don't get
a hearing in the mainstream media and deserve to be heard even if we think
they are in some important respects mistaken or "off").



Please don't misunderstand what I'm saying here: I am not advocating that
people follow the strategy of transforming the Democratic Party-I'm only
saying that it remains a possibility that could be tried, that groups like
the Progressive Democrats of America are trying precisely that and with
excellent leadership from the Progressive Caucus of the House of
Representatives, and that had Nader type people with more emotional nuance
and psychological sophistication and genuine empathy for the American public
run in the primaries for the Presidency and the US CONGRESS, and had those
people been able to articulate their critique in a language that emphasized
the spiritual and ethical dimension and the need for love, generosity,
caring for others and provided the kind of alternatives that we have
articulated in our Spiritual Covenant with America, including the Generosity
Strategy as represented in our Global Marshall Plan (see all this at
www.spiritualprogressives.org<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=%2F7EfPpU4US0c7Swnr6tXy8NbDjOu%2FgO4>)
those people might have become the Senators and Congresspeople from the
states where we now have Rahm-Emanuel-chosen Blue Dog Democrats. And one
such person might have been the presidential candidate in 2008.

Moreover, it remains the case that the majority of those who vote in
communities of color, poverty, or low income still identify with the
Democratic Party, and running in that party is a powerful way to communicate
to people with whom we cannot ordinarily communicate through the
corporate-controlled media that didn't even bother to cover our Strategy
Conference in SF two weeks ago, though it was larger and at least as
significant as the smaller sized Tea Party gatherings over which the media
makes such a fuss.



To leave these people behind and turn one's back on them without having a
serious strategy to reach them outside the Democratic Party is not a
satisfactory political strategy, no matter how righteous and good it feels
to those who have finally said no to the Democrats only to embrace a party
of excessive political correctness but also excessive self-involvement and
little serious outreach beyond their own fringe.





2.    Hedges is wrong to characterize all liberals as lacking in emotion or
leaving legitimate rage only to the proto-fascists. Here, as in Hedges'
critique of the Democratic Party, there is a failure to recognize the
efforts of so many very decent and ethically powerful people who have not
been fully represented by their leaders. Who does he think turned out in the
millions to demonstrate against the War in Iraq-all Greens? No, it was many
of these Democrats. It's true that leadership like Nancy Pelosi failed to
forcefully represent them, and that Obama is to some extent repeating that
failure now and failing to articulate a clear worldview that could rally
people and make them understand the alternative to "capitalism is the only
option and domination is the only path to security" that underlies the
"common wisdom" inside-the-beltway and throughout much of our society, but
it is not fair to dismiss the vast majority of Democrats in this way. Doing
so will not help us build a powerful anti-war movement again to counter the
war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and head off wars with Iran or Yemen. Just
read the platform of the Democratic Party of California to see that there
are voices within the Democratic Party that reflect much of what the secular
progressives outside that party are calling for (though definitely not the
New Bottom Line that spiritual progressives champion).

Nor is Hedges being fair or accurate when he says: "The timidity of the left
exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting political
impotence. The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and the Democrats
have done is immense. But the damage liberals do the longer they beg Obama
and the Democrats for a few scraps is worse."  This is unfair both because
it ignores the genuine desire of people on the Left to heal and transform
American society, and because it ignores the real dilemma facing those who
vote for "the lesser evil"-namely their legitimate concern about the
well-being of those who they perceive will be better off under a Democratic
President than under a Republican President-particularly the poorest
elements in our society. Their conclusion, with which I do not agree but
which I believe deserves a complex and respectful response and not the
dismissive and disrespectful tone that Hedges shows toward them, is that the
suffering of those people will be somewhat less under a Democratic
administration than under a Republican Administration, and that things like
family leave, lifting the restrictions on providing birth control
information in federally funded birth control centers, banning torture like
waterboarding in our military bases, and other such steps, small they may
be, make a big difference to those who are impacted by them and hence are
worth compromising to achieve.

I'm not going to go into my arguments against that position and why I
believe that taking the risks of creating an alternative party might be
worth it under some circumstances, though in my view such a party would have
to be very different from the Greens, and would have to have a commitment to
the kind of political strategy I outline in my book *The Left Hand of God*,
and would have to emerge from a movement to transform the Democratic party
which, having obtained massive support, would then leave that party to form
a spiritual progressive party, but what I will say is that the argument of
those who wish to stay in the Democratic Party and make small but
significant changes in the life of the most powerless is an argument that
deserves respect and a more careful consideration than Hedges gives in this
piece that we sent out.

Let me give just one example of what still feels compelling to me about the
argument made by those who wish to transform the Democrats rather than
abandon them. It's the story of the guy who sees a young child on the beach
throwing back into the water some of the thousands of fish who have been
swept up onto the beach after a huge tsunami. The many approaches the child
and says, "What's the point of throwing those fish back in the water. Unless
there is a massive movement of people down on this beach, or unless the
government sends a bunch of equipment to quickly push these fish back into
the sea, most of them will die. Don't you see that what you are doing can't
make any difference?" To which the child responds, "To these fish I'm
throwing back, it makes a difference." It is in my view hard to deny that
the Democrats in power are doing more to help the poor and the oppressed, or
to take steps to preserve the environment, or to take steps to protect
workers' rights, than would the Republicans were they in power and than they
did when they were in power. Those who argue that "there is no difference"
like Nader did in 2000 really do us a disservice. It's one thing to argue
that the differences are not significant enough, quite another to pretend
that these two parties deliver exactly the same thing in power. It just
isn't true.

I'm not convinced by that argument, because I believe that we could in fact
make much important changes in this society if even twenty million people
were willing to join an alternative party. But they are not convinced now,
and to get them to be convinced, we need a strategy that starts with respect
for those who disagree with a "leave the Democratic Party" strategy. I
didn't feel enough of that respect in this particular writing of Chris
Hedges. And what's ironic about that to me is that I know Chris Hedges, and
know him to be a person of humility as well as passionate intensity, and so
I don't dismiss him but embrace him even as  I critique this particular
piece. And I sent it out precisely to engender this kind of discussion. What
troubles me with some of the responses that I got was that they seemed to
think it wrong for us to send out articles with which we disagree. But that
has always been Tikkun's policy-including printing in the magazine articles
with which we disagree. It's part of our belief that the deepest truth
emerges from a marketplace of ideas within which respectful debate and
struggling with alternative positions can emerge (credit due to John Stuart
Mill). We respect our readers enough to believe that they can hear positions
with which we and they may disagree, and struggle with those positions. In
fact, I've found that when people don't have that opportunity, be it on the
Left, Right or the Center of politics, they end up really not fully
understanding their own positions and unable to defend them when critiqued.
So for that reason we've always warned our readers: if you want to know OUR
position, read our editorials in the magazine, but don't assume that we
agree with everything we print or send out.

*3.*    It is wrong to describe Israel as an apartheid society. I abhor
Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and we at
Tikkun were the leading voice against the Occupation for 22 years until J
Street,  a much better financed enterprise, took our place in Washington
D.C.  (and is doing a terrific job of getting the message heard which we and
others in similar movements pioneered in the US-though they omit from their
message our prophetic Biblically-based insistence not only on the "rights"
of Palestinians but also on their fundamental humanity and why a spiritual
or religious person must care equally for their wellbeing as the wellbeing
of Americans, Jews, Israelis and everyone else on the planet.)

But Apartheid describes the situation that existed in South Africa, not the
one that exists inside the pre-67 borders of Israel. In South Africa Blacks
did not vote in the election of the prime minister or of the parties who ran
the country; in Israel its Palestinian residents in the pre-67 borders do
vote and have ten percent of the Knesset populated by Arab representatives
(and would have more if the Arabs didn't vote for Labor or other parties).
In South Africa Blacks were prohibited from going to the same schools or
universities a Blacks, from attending the same movie theatres or swimming on
the same beaches; in Israel Arabs go to the same beaches, attend the same
university classes, and in most other respects have the same political
rights as Israeli Jews. True, they face the same kind of discrimination that
Blacks still face in many parts of the US-it's not right and its
discriminatory, and its deplorable, but it's not apartheid. Why use a term
that can so easily be shot down by the Right-wingers, when what Israel is
doing is not that, though arguably worse than apartheid in some important
respects? The answer, I suspect, is that many activists are so frustrated at
their failure to have won a majority of Westerners to our critical
perspective about the Occupation that they think that if they label Israel
with some well known disparaging term, that that will make it easier for
Westerners to understand. But that is not a legitimate approach-you can't
jump over the difficult task of explaining what is wrong with what Israel is
doing by using incendiary language that actually can be refuted. Moreover,
you can't really win over Westerners with a simplistic account-because many
in the West remember that Israel was created in the wake of eighteen hundred
years of global anti-Semitism and a twentieth century genocided that
murdered one out of three Jews alive. We at Tikkun do not believe that that
suffering is reason to excuse Israeli treatment of Palestinians, but we do
believe it is a reason why the world had a right to return those Jews who
wished to return to their ancient homeland from which they had been expelled
by force, violence and repression, in an instance of global affirmative
action which, unfortunately, displaced (in our view, unjustly) hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians. This story too is too complicated to try to
summarize here, but it must be told with compassion for both sides,
recognizing that both sides have a legitimate story to tell, and both sides
have been cruel and violent toward the other side (as for example when Jews
were climbing out of the crematoria and gas chambers of Europe and
Palestinian leadership refused to allow them to enter Palestine because they
were Jews, while allowing non-Jews to come to Palestine). Every part of this
story has two sides at least, and it doesn't help to label one side the
"evil other" and the other "the righteous victim," but to develop a sense of
compassion for both sides-if the goal is to seek peace and reconciliation,
rather than simply to achieve some rhetorical advance. As one who sometimes
falls into this mistake, I understand the frustration felt by all who are
outraged at Israeli behavior-and I believe that outrage is legitimate-but I
think that the prophetic condemnation is only one part of the story, and we
also need to act strategically and with generosity of spirit if we want to
change the situation and alleviate the current suffering of both Israelis
and Palestinians.

 Inside the West Bank and Gaza there's a totally different story, and there
the conditions do resemble apartheid. Jews who settle on the West Bank have
a totally different set of laws, roads, water, and much else. But again,
that discrimination is not based on being Arabs so much as being part of a
society that has tolerated violent attacks on Israeli civilians. I do not
think that that argument is sufficient to justify Israeli behavior, but
neither do I think that the Israeli behavior stems from racism as much as
from fear.

 How could they fear when they are so much more powerful than the Arabs they
dominate? Well, if you were part of a people who had been traumatized by
1800 years of discrimination, oppression, murder and rape, and then had 1
out of every three of you murdered in the twentieth century, you too might
have a difficulty in seeing things straight and recognizing yourself as the
powerful one. If the US can have a majority of its citizens think that the
outrageous and immoral attack on the Twin Towers provides evidence that the
US itself is in danger of being destroyed by terrorists, when the US is the
most powerful military force in the world, how can you doubt that the Jews
could be so traumatized by our history to be acting out of
Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder rather than out of racism and a desire to
dominate others for the sake of domination and lust for power? My point is
that it doesn't help move things toward peace to be demeaning the Jewish
people, or the State of Israel, though it is perfectly legitimate to oppose
its policies and do what we can to change them (including using the full
power of the US to do so). We at Tikkun fully support the call by the
Goldstone report for an international inquiry into Israeli and Hamas war
crimes if each party does not itself engage in such an inquiry in an
objective and credible way. And we believe it fully appropriate for the
peoples of the world to do what they can to end the Occupation of the West
Bank, as long as they also use similar methods to end the occupation of
Tibet by China, the end of repression in Iran, the end of the occupation of
Chechnya by Russia, the end of the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by the
US, the end of the genocide in Darfur, and other such moral outrages. For a
fuller discussion of this issue, please read my *book Healing
Israel/Palestine.*

4.    It is not a mistake for people to be demanding of Obama that he BE the
Obama they voted for. But what would be a mistake is to think that such a
demand is going to be given credence until we form a powerful movement of
our own that is ready to take action and bring people into the streets and
into nonviolent civil disobedience against the policies of the Obama
Administration that are most abhorrent (e.g. the escalation of war or the
funding of the banks and investment companies or its willingness to allow
foreclosures on homes to continue or the give-aways to pharmaceuticals and
health insurance profiteers). The huge mistake is to have treated Obama as a
messiah and then expected him to deliver for us. Obama never named or
targeted corporate power, and we need to do so, not just by saying what we
are against, but by fighting for what we are FOR-e.g. the Global Marshall
Plan and the Environmental and Ethical Amendments to the Constitution about
which you can read at
www.spiritualprogressives.org<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=dQpDTLfnjTnuMO7VTEUJOsNbDjOu%2FgO4>.
We need to be more self-critical about not having built such a movement, and
not as much at Obama who, facing the corporate power structure without the
help of such a movement, could have been predicted to have caved as he did.

5.    It is a mistake to allow Obama to face the wild charges of the
right-wingers and Republican opportunists (who will oppose everything Obama
calls for because they believe that his failure will bring them electoral
victory in 2010) without the support and defense from people in the liberal
and progressive world. Chris Hedges is correct in saying that the intensity
of that assault has been aided by the failure of Obama and Congressional
Democrats to passionately advocate for a different ethical vision, but
instead to seem to be in bed with the corporate interests. But we should
also acknowledge that at least some part of the anger against Obama stems
from the same racism that has led many Americans to hate Obama with
passionate intensity far out of proportion to anything he has done or failed
to do. I do not minimize the impact of the humiliation that many faced who
hoped for a different set of possibilities and Obama's betrayal of that
hope, but I also do not believe that that accounts for all or even a
majority of those who ruthlessly and unceasingly and irrationally attack
everything he does.

None of this is to challenge the importance of this discussion, a discussion
that will also take place at our conference in DC June 11-14 (details at
www.spiritualprogressives.org)--though<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=eTW%2FdZEyQLxKiL81KvCDCsNbDjOu%2FgO4>
 we will also focus on the creation of a Constitutional Amendment to
overturn the Supreme Court's decision empowering corporations, and on an
Amendment that requires corporate environmental and ethical responsibility
(please see various versions we are considering-at the Current Thinking
section of www.spiritualprogressives.org. Nor will it prevent us from
demonstrating at the White House on June 13th with the call to Obama: *BE
the Obama We Voted For*, not the inside-the-beltway pragmatist/realist whose
compromises have lost support for liberal and progressive causes and aided
the upsurge of Tea Party conservatives.

And by the way, we don't mean to be disrespectful to all Tea Party people
either-some of them have a righteous anger at the way government has served
the interests of the powerful, and they are responding to a right wing
populism because they have not encountered enough of a progressive populism,
and certainly not a progressive populism that has let go of the
relgio-phobia that often cripples progressive movements from being heard by
masses of Americans who might otherwise agree with them.

So I hope Chris will still come to our conference, and that others who agree
or disagree with him but understand the importance of discussing this in a
comradely and caring way among those of us committed to peace, social
justice, ecological sanity, love, generosity, and caring for others do also
sign up for the conference before it fills up and closes registration as did
our San Francisco conference two weeks ago. Sign up now at
www.spiritualprogressives.org.

Respectfully,

Rabbi Michael Lerner    RabbiLerner at Tikkun.org

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