Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Fostering a National Movement

A friend recently asked me, “What is missing in your life?” I replied, “I would like to participate in a massive grassroots movement to impact national policy.” She replied, “That’s a tall order” and changed the subject. Her response is typical. Interest in building a national movement is limited.

Nevertheless, I persist. From time to time, certain events encourage me. One example was the August 17 op-ed in Time magazine by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar @kaj33, the former basketball star. Titled “The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race,” the essay argued, “Ferguson is not just about systemic racism — it’s about class warfare and how America’s poor are held back.” The sentence that struck me most strongly was the following (the key phrase was emphasized with italics): “If we don’t have a specific agenda—a list of exactly what we want to change and how—we will be gathering over and over again beside the dead bodies of our murdered children, parents, and neighbors.”

Precisely. That is what I was trying to get at with “A Meditation on Deep Community,” which I presented to the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples on July 14. In that piece, I stated:

• Relieving suffering requires addressing root causes, getting deep.
• Addressing root causes requires correcting national policies that are the source of so much suffering.
• If we see a child drowning, we don’t tell her to pray. We change her environment.

The most problematic element in Abdul-Jabbar’s formulation is the “how.” One barrier that any such strategy must address is the social conditioning that has been embedded in each one of us. This dehumanization divides us and undermines our ability to work together effectively. To unite, we must unlearn this “internalized oppression.”

Different individuals have different issues. Trying to tell others how they need to change is counter-productive. Each individual can make their own decisions. But we can support one another in these efforts, if only by listening to one another report on our successes and challenges.

Growing a unified movement will be enhanced if we develop user-friendly tools, like Alcoholics Anonymous did, that concerned individuals, without going through any elaborate training, can easily use to meet the unmet need for deep connection. I would like to experiment with such options that could be easily replicated, and learn about other such efforts.

We also need to develop new structures that will facilitate broader political engagement between elections. The other night, a disturbing dream woke me up in the middle of the night. It involved a double murder, the first of which was a mistake. The dream left me with a sense that my dream of a national movement was dead. I had trouble going back to sleep.

But I woke up with a wrinkle on an old idea: get a group together to engage in a series of open-ended, problem-solving discussions with their Congressperson’s office about how the Congressperson and the community might work together to build that movement. One option that could be placed on the table at the outset would be monthly Congressional Community Dialogs, the carefully structured forums I’ve been proposing for some time.

Regardless, we need to keep on pressin’ on. If we do, eventually we can fulfill that dream that Abdul-Jabbar and so many others have articulated.

Obama and Krugman: What About Public Service Jobs?

Paul Krugman - CaricatureAfter reading “Obama Gets Obama Hope StickerReal,” Paul Krugman’s column in yesterday’s New York Times about President Obama’s “income inequality” speech, I went to the transcript with anticipation.

I was disappointed. The speech is narrow and superficial. It fails to affirm the most important way to increase economic opportunity and decrease inequality: tax the wealthy, decrease military spending, and send the money to local governments for public service jobs.

The needs are enormous. Child care, teachers’ aides, peer counselors for drug and alcohol rehab, nursing home aides, in-home caregiving, park and recreation staff, community center staff, cultural enrichment, paratransit drivers, and environmental cleanup are some of the more obvious example.

But when Obama cited positive programs implemented by Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt, he failed to mention the New Deal’s Work Projects Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps that hired people for those kind of jobs.

This neglect is all the more striking because the American people strongly support such measures. In March 2013, Gallup reported that more than 70%, including a majority of Republicans, support “a federal jobs creation law that would spend government money for a program designed to create more than 1 million new jobs.”

Instead, Obama said he wants “to make sure that every striving, hardworking, optimistic kid in America has the same incredible chance that this country gave me” to climb the ladder of success. The title of the speech on the White House website, “Remarks by the President on Economic Mobility,” indicates that it’s not really about substantially reducing economic inequality or assuring everyone a living-wage job opportunity (which is achievable). Rather, it’s about assuring “that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.” [emphasis added] Then, by rebuilding the middle class, “because of upward mobility, the guy on the factory floor could picture his kid running the company some day.”

Give me a break. Unemployed workers and the working poor need more than a dream for their children and “a chance” to get ahead.

Though Obama mentions how reducing taxes on the wealthy contributed to today’s inequality, he does not propose reversing those reductions. Again, strong majorities support such measures, but he fails to push for them.

Concerning the role of education in the reduction of poverty, Krugman states:

What struck me about this speech, however, was what he had to say about the sources of rising inequality. Much of our political and pundit class remains devoted to the notion that rising inequality, to the extent that it’s an issue at all, is all about workers lacking the right skills and education. But the president now seems to accept progressive arguments that education is at best one of a number of concerns…,

Krugman is correct about the exaggerated emphasis on education as a solution, but I read Obama’s speech differently than he does. I see far too much emphasis on education in that speech.

We need better education for many reasons, including the inherent value of learning. But the best way to enable people to lift themselves out of poverty is to offer them a living-wage job – now, not after they get “educated.”

If all of the unemployed were suddenly trained overnight by virtue of some miracle, most of them would still be unemployed. There are only a limited number of seats in the theater. And there are many more patrons outside wanting to get in.

Obama probably really believes in the Horatio Alger myth. Upward mobility seems to have worked for him. But many success stories forget one key fact: they were lucky.

We need to offer our people more than “a chance” to get lucky.

Report: Half of U.S. Families Live on the Edge of ‘Economic Chaos’ (plus more)

cashregister-thumb-640xauto-9805Report: Half of U.S. Families Live on the Edge of ‘Economic Chaos’ 
by Imara Jones

Half of all families in the United States are poor, near poor or face economic insecurity where “one major setback in income could push them into poverty.” That’s the shocking conclusion of a report released today by The Hamilton Project.

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Is Pope Francis Leaving Vatican At Night To Minister To Homeless?

…A knowledgable source in Rome told The Huffington Post that “Swiss guards confirmed that the pope has ventured out at night, dressed as a regular priest, to meet with homeless men and women.”

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Is Wall Street Too Giddy?
The stock market reaches record highs as incomes stagnate. Tech companies with no revenue are valued in the billions of dollars. More analysts are seeing something unpleasantly familiar.

Are we in a stock market bubble that could soon burst?

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‘TipsForJesus’ Is Leaving Thousands Of Dollars For Servers
By Mark Memmot

…TipsForJesus has been chronicling its good deeds on Instagram, saying its mission is “doing the Lords [sic] work, one tip at a time.” Gawker estimates about $54,000 has been handed out in the past several months.

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Third Way’s Anti-Populist, Anti-Warren and Deceptive “Dead End”
By Richard Eskow

An almost palpable air of desperation clings to the anti-“populist,” anti-Elizabeth Warren editorial by Jonathan Cowan and Jim Kessler of the corporate-funded Third Way organization. If they’re worried, they’re right to worry. The world is changing.

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Rumsfeld’s War and Its Consequences Now
By Mark Danner

A review of:

The Unknown Known
a film directed by Errol Morris

Known and Unknown: A Memoir
by Donald Rumsfeld
Sentinel, 815 pp., $36.00

By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld
by Bradley Graham
PublicAffairs, 803 pp., $18.95 (paper)

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’Tis the Season to Be Food-Insecure
BY: EDWARD WYCKOFF WILLIAMS

It is a strange and ironic truth that in the world’s richest democracy, many Americans are going to work in the morning, but they and their families are going to bed hungry at night.

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Homage to the Idols of Idleness
By JESSICA KERWIN JENKINS

…What could be gained from a single day set free from the clock’s tyranny, one spent wandering or daydreaming the hours away?

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The Stem and the Flower
By DAVID BROOKS

…How much emotional and psychic space should politics take up in a normal healthy brain?… politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture and fun. I wish our talk-show culture reflected that balance, and that the emotional register around politics were more in keeping with its low but steady nature.

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The Families We Invent
By FRANK BRUNI

…As good as we humans are at division, we’re better still at connection.

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The Pope and the Right
By ROSS DOUTHAT

…This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral.