- What the Money for Wall Street Means

The Magnitude and Meaning of the Proposed Bailout:
What $700 Billion for Wall Street means on Main Street

Northampton, MA – September 23, 2008 – The plan proposed by President Bush and Secretary Paulson for a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street is difficult for most people to comprehend. National Priorities Project, a non-partisan organization that offers research and analysis of federal spending priorities, is offering an analysis of what $700 billion means to taxpayers.

“It is extremely difficult for most of us to get our minds around what this extraordinary amount of money means,” says Jo Comerford, Executive Director of National Priorities Project. “We hear every day about spending cuts to infrastructure and social services. Now the current Administration is proposing to spend more than what is currently allocated for the U.S. War in Iraq on this Wall Street bailout. It is critically important that we urge our elected representatives to take a close and careful look at the trade offs involved in their decisions.”

A healthy and productive economy requires substantial investment in affordable housing, health care, education and renewable energy. Taxpayers in the United States who will be required to pay $700 billion for the Wall Street bailout should also know that for the same amount of money, they could secure the following:

• 51.6 million people with health care for four years OR

• 181.2 million homes with renewable electricity for four years OR

• 2.9 million elementary school teachers for four years OR

• 27 million four-year scholarships for university students

$700 billion is more than what is currently allocated for the U.S. war in Iraq. This amount would allow us to repair all of our nation’s 77,000 deteriorated bridges and still have $519 billion to spend; or it would allow us to rebuild all of our nations 33,000 deteriorating schools and still have $664 billion to spend.

For more analysis and trade-offs at the State and Congressional District level, please visit National Priorities Project’s Trade-offs page online (www.nationalpriorities.org/tradeoffs).

The National Priorities Project (NPP) is a 501(c)(3) research organization that analyzes and clarifies federal data so that people can understand and influence how their tax dollars are spent. Located in Northampton, MA, since 1983, NPP focuses on the impact of federal spending and other policies at the national, state, congressional district and local levels. For more information, go to http://nationalpriorities.org.

- Nobel Peace Prize awarded to make war NOT happen

by Audrey deCoursey

The clever Rev. Peter Sawtell, of Eco-Justice Ministries, explains why a peace prize going to Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is in perfect keeping with the Prize’s tradition of honoring controversial activists working to prevent the need for war in the future.  He cites various previous awards as precedent for this year’s award:

Environmentalism is a peace issue: thus the 2004 award to Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai.

Preventing war is as crucial for peace as ending active conflict: thus the 2005 award to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Taking sides in ongoing peace struggles is what the Nobel Prize is all about: thus the 1964 award to Martin Luther King, Jr., the 1984 award to South Africa’s Desmond Tutu, and the 1991 award to Burma’s (still-imprisoned) Aung San Suu Kyi.

Thanks, Nobel people!  We sure do need your support!

- Peace Week Events!

Peace Week at the Pacific School of Religion
September 17-21, 2007

Coordinated by PSR students and PSR Peace Particles
(Seminarians to End War and Sow Peace, a.k.a. SEW Peace)
All events are free and open to the public.
For more information, please contact sewpeace <at> gmail.com.

Schedule of Events for Education, Witness, and Action

All Week Growing Art Piece on PSR Quad

Monday

12:30 pm – Mudd Building Consecration of the Art, with music and free peace T-shirts

Tuesday
PSR Chapel Service 11:10 am, PSR Chapel — Luke 16:1-13, “Drop the Debt, not Bombs” – Robyn Morrison, preaching

Wednesday
Taize Worship 7:30 pm, PSR Chapel

Thursday
Healing Prayer Worship Service 6:30 pm, PSR Chapel — Psalm 79

Thursday-Friday
24-Hour Peace Pray-in Buckham Chapel – 6:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Friday – International Day of Prayer for Peace
Peace Teach-in – all workshops take place in the Mudd Building
10:30 am – Workshops:
1. Pastoral Care for Veterans, with VA Hospital Chaplain Carolyn Talmadge
2. Peace for Israel and Palestine, with the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ Nichola Torbett
3. Rebecca Ann Parker sermon, “Theological Education in a Time of Wars,” podcast and discussion
1:30 pm – Workshops:
1. Veterans for Peace, with Ted Arrindal and other PSR veterans
2. Creative Writing for Peace, led by Christina Hutchins
3. ENGAGE Training, with Pace e Bene trainers Ryan Baum and Robyn Morrison (session runs 1:30-4:30 pm)
3:00 pm – Workshops:
1. Peace Pilgrim – movies and discussion, led by Sheryl Butler
2. “Ground Truth” – movie about the Iraq war, hosted by James Leveque

Public Panel 6:30 pm – PSR Bade Museum, “Resisting Imperial Peace: Theological Reflections”

Worship Service 8:30 pm – PSR Quad, Preaching by Lynice Pinkard of First Congregational Church of Oakland, “There is a Balm in Gilead”
Party for the Peaceful 9:30 pm – Mudd 100

- Funny (and Scary) Videos on the State of Bush’s Union

If you like Harry Potter and progressive politics, this memorial to Karl Rove’s stint running our country is for you:

For those who like blogs and don’t like Bush: (Be warned that this includes some expletives)

The facial tics and jumbled verbiage of this actor are uncannily realistic. The truth of it is scary.

- Hip-hop and War

Corbin invites you to check out this video:

This is the new video from the Seattle based hip-hop crew blue scholars.
Made up of Geologic (emcee) and Sabazi (producer/Dj) they bring a political
refelction to their art form. This is their latest video.

- Peace and Hip-Hop

- CPT hostage refuses to testify against Iraqi captors

James Loney, one of the four Christian Peacemaker Team volunteers who was kidnapped and held hostage in Iraq for four months this past winter, is refusing to testify against his kidnappers because they will not receive fair trial from the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI). Loney writes about his decision at CPTNet.

Our Lifestyles and their Complicity in Oppression

Ryan points out that simply switching to alternative energy sources to sustain our lifestyles will not solve all the problems our world is racing toward and is already in the thick of, as shown by a UN study covered in the Guardian:

The global rush to switch from oil to energy derived from plants will drive deforestation, push small farmers off the land and lead to serious food shortages and increased poverty unless carefully managed, says the most comprehensive survey yet completed of energy crops.

Thoughts?

Nonviolence has failed. Or has it?

by Matthew Harris-Gloyer

Is Nonviolence THE Way? I ponder this question as I read an article in the most recent UTNE reader. (Read it at www.utne.com)

In the article, Peter Gelderloos writes that nonviolence has utterly failed all throughout history. Even MLK, Gandhi, U.S. peace movement and others have all failed in their attempts to bring about change, says Gelderloos. I must admit that he proffers a convincing argument. He writes that the peace movement distorts the full story concerning the self-proclaimed achievenments of the peace and nonviolence movements. The fact that there were numerous factors leading up to Indian independence, the U.S. Civil Rights in the 50′s and 60′s, and the ending of the Vietnam war in the 70′s are forgotten and distorted by many who advocate nonviolence. Gelderloos is correct that there was a militant wing that helped to force British capitulation to the Indians and the Black Panther Party was gaining in its militancy and the fact of disaster in Vietnam is well documented.

I think that Gelderloos is correct in all of the above and that history is complex. Yet, I also wonder what happens when we forgo all attempts at making change through an alternative method to violence. What happens to our souls when we make that short step to picking up the gun?

And, I also think about how I have the luxury and privilege to even consider such a question. It seems to me that perhaps many who do pick up the gun do not have much of a choice. Isn’t there a Zapatista saying that goes something like, “It is land or death.”? For the Zapatistas of the Mexican Yucatan, their very livelihood and their lives were (and continue to be) threatened by the inauguration of NAFTA brought about by U.S. President Bill Clinton. Thus, on the 1st of Jan 1994, the Zapatistas took by armed force several towns and have been struggling for their life ever since. Who am I to declare that their action was not the best thing to do?

I would like to return to the peace and nonviolence movements to end this short essay. If Gelderloos is correct, that the nonviolence movements have utterly failed, then what is stopping me from picking up a gun? For, if a gun has proven itself to be the better change maker, then what am I waiting for? Perhaps my answer to that question will arise in a forthcoming essay. Until then…

Iraqis Betrayed

Prof. Lynn Rhodes recommends this article from the New Yorker magazine, about the fighting between Sunnis and Shias, and the betrayal many Iraqis feel at the uselessness of US Americans in securing their safety when they sacrificed their security in order to help the US’s cause.  She says, “I received this from a friend who is a political scientist and has spend a lot of time in the Middle East.  She says that it is one of the best articles she’s read on the Iraq war.”

Othman began a campaign of burning. He went into the yard or up on the roof of his parents’ house with a jerrican of kerosene and set fire to papers, identity badges, books in English, photographs—anything that might incriminate him as an Iraqi who worked with foreigners. If Othman had to flee Iraq, he wanted to leave nothing behind that might harm him or his family. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy a few items, though: his diaries, his weekly notes from the hospital where he had once worked. “I have this bad habit of keeping everything like memories,” he said.

[As another obsessive archivist, with too much memorabilia for my own good, I can definitely sympathize with this part of the man's plight. Stories like this one drive home for me how horrible this and any war is - that it interrupts the real lives of real people who are no different than me except that their life stories are playing out through atrocities that no one should have to live through. No one should have to throw out his diaries, for fear of incrimination by being associated with US Americans. No one should have to flee her home to be safe. No one should have to live in fear. Do we not understand this, or do we just not understand how to make that sort of world/Kingdom come about? Just wondering. -Audrey]

Liberal Foreign Policy – revived from the Cold War?

A great exploration of the new sort of liberal foreign policy needed today can be found in the article by Peter Beinart in the New York Times of last year, April 30, 2006, entitled “The Rehabilitation of the Cold War Liberal.”

… But before Vietnam, and the disappointment and confusion it spawned, liberals did have a clear story of their own. In the late 1940′s and 1950′s, intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr and policymakers like George F. Kennan described America’s cold-war struggle differently from their conservative counterparts: as a struggle not merely for democracy but for economic opportunity as well, in the belief that the former required the latter to survive. Even more important, they described America itself differently. Americans may fight evil, they argued, but that does not make us inherently good. And paradoxically, that very recognition makes national greatness possible. Knowing that we, too, can be corrupted by power, we seek the constraints that empires refuse. And knowing that democracy is something we pursue rather than something we embody, we advance it not merely by exhorting others but by battling the evil in ourselves. The irony of American exceptionalism is that by acknowledging our common fallibility, we inspire the world….

The thesis of the article, that liberal politicians need to figure out what script they’re reading from in their foreign policy decisions, can be found also in Beinart’s new book, from which the article is excerpted, “The Good Fight: Why Liberals — And Only Liberals –Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.”