JUST ENGAGE

The Justice Department has been in turmoil for quite some time now. Congressional Democrats have charged that President Bush and his second Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, politicized the Justice Department in an unprecedented way. Like most issues here in Washington, partisanship overshadows public policy. This was the context of Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s first visit to the Senate Judiciary Committee for an oversight hearing. I watched the hearing for about an hour and a half. At that point I was so dizzy I could barely concentrate.

Deep below the surface, beyond the partisanship and political posturing, there are substantial questions about the role of the Justice department in several controversial Bush Administration programs. I will focus on two: the warrantless wiretapping program dubbed the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Program.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is a pretty popular bill these days—all of the most powerful people in Washington are talking about it. It even made an appearance during the State of the Union. Yesterday, FISA was the first topic of discussion on Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA)’s agenda. Senator Specter, along with several other prominent Members of Congress have charged that the warrantless surveillance program was illegal and violated FISA. During the oversight hearing, the AG wouldn’t really respond. Basically the response was, that it is lawful now. That begs Senator Specter’s original question, was it unlawful when initiated? And around we go.

The second point of contention was waterboarding. This issue almost derailed the Attorney General’s confirmation. The issue is frustrating for the Administration. When reading between the lines, it seems that the President himself may have authorized the waterboarding of several detainees in CIA custody. (Unfortunately, we don’t have the tapes to know exactly what happened.)

One of the big issues is whether waterboarding “shocks the conscience.” If so, then most would agree that is clearly illegal. So then, does it? In a strange exchange with Senator Joe Biden (D-DE), the Attorney General claimed that “shocks the conscience” is really a balancing test between the quality and quantity of information extracted and the cruelty of the method. At the very least, that is a controversial claim. Many would argue that there isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, this type of relativism built into the definition of torture.

And in the end, all of this comes down to the struggle between the three branches of government. Can the President disregard laws passed by Congress? If so, under what circumstances? To collect foreign intelligence information—either electronically or by interrogation? This is best summed up by a exchange between Senator Specter and the Attorney General.

And around and around we go.

Big news in the baseball world today – the New York Mets are poised to sign Johan Santana arguably the best pitcher in baseball.  Seems the deal could be for something like $20-$25 million/year.  Good for him.

Here’s what bugs me about it.  It’s not the amount of money he’ll be making.  It’s that the way our tax infrastructure works, he’s going to be paying exactly the same amount of Social Security taxes that I pay.  And guess what – I make a LOT less than $20 million/year.  Not only that, if the Senate changes the economic stimulus package to give the administration what it originally wanted, the pitcher and I will get the same tax rebate.  I’m guessing he doesn’t really need that check that badly.  (In the House-passed version, neither of us get one.)

Consider the stats:  In 2005, the Pittsburgh Pirates had the lowest average salary for Major League Baseball -- $963,674.  In 2005, the American Federation of Teachers reported that the average teacher salary was $47,602.  The maximum earnings taxable for Social Security in 2005 was $90,000.

So…in 2005, the average teacher paid Social Security tax on 100% of his/her salary.  The average Pittsburgh Pirate player paid Social Security tax on less than 10% of his.

Fair or foul?

In my last post, I bemoaned the persistent scapegoating of China in US climate policy.  This approach is not only unproductive, it's especially inappropriate in light of China's emerging commitment to conservation.  As ksharp commented, China will ban the free distribution of plastic bags in June, a major accomplishment for a nation that currently uses up to 3-billion plastic bags daily.  Last June, China unveiled a national climate plan. And Chinese wind power productivity doubled in 2006 alone.

That's not to say that the US hasn't made any improvements in this area.  The new Energy Bill raises automobile fuel efficiency standards for the first time in 32 years.  It also effectively eliminates the incandescent lightbulb within the decade.  But before we get too smug, we should pause for a moment to consider China's progress in these areas. 
China manufactures 80% of the world's compact fluorescent lightbulbs.  And what of that 35 mpg CAFÉ standard we're so excited about?  China's fleet-wide efficiency will reach 36.7 mpg next year.

And while many (including myself), hail the US Energy Bill as a major accomplishment, the final bill lacked many of the safeguards we hoped for.  Most notably, the bill's accomplishments came with the sacrifice of a proposed Renewable Electricity Standard, which would have required 15 percent of US electricity to be produced by renewables by 2030.  Yet China already obtains 17 percent of its electricity from renewables – and that number is projected to increase to 21 percent by 2020. 


That's not to say that China is perfect.  Certainly, I'm wary of our ability to truly combat climate change without having firm commitments from a nation with 1.3 billion people. I'm also worried about China's construction of an average of one new dirty coal-fired power plant each week.  But while we may still want to occasionally point a finger at China, we should also have the commonsense to use our hands to applaud its accomplishments.

[For more on China's accomplishments in this area, read the comprehensive analysis by the Worldwatch Institute, Powering China's Development: The Role of Renewable Energy or visit China Watch.]
 


[PS: Last week, Whole Foods announced that it, too, will be eliminating plastic bags this spring!]

With the Hollywood Writer’s strike in full bloom it seems that some writers, producers and directors may be moonlighting scripts in Gaza.

FADE IN: The villainous Israel (replete with Der Sturmer hooked nose and shifty eyes with a grubby hand in Uncle Sam’s pocket ) is continually making life miserable for the innocent, beleaguered Palestinian shepherd boy who just wants to roam the steppes of the Holy Land in peace. It’s David vs. Goliath, the Yankees v. the Cubs, and Godzilla v. Bambi.

But haven’t we seen this flick before? Do I not recall, a few years back, a “massacre” in Jenin where brutal Israelis, for no apparent reason, laid siege to an innocent hamlet... Or Muhammad Al-Dura, the tragedy involving the Palestinian boy caught in the crossfire and hastily and erroneously blamed on the Israelis.

And just like Jenin and the Al-Dura case, the usual suspects are swallowing this storyline hook line and sinker. The Presbyterians are outraged. The UN is up in arms. The Methodists threaten to divest. Peace Now calls again on Israel to “avoid actions that constitute collective punishment or cause disproportionate suffering or casualties among civilians.”

Where is their collective outrage about the 4,200 bombs that have fallen on the people of Sderot and the Northern Negev since Israel, under the specter of civil war, pulled out of Gaza? Where is the outrage that Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip in order to promote a peaceful solution yet in return received daily terror for close to 18 months?

Where is the outrage that civilian populations are targeted specifically at the times when parents are driving their kids to school? Where is the outrage when Lebanese troops aerially bombard similar “uprisings” in “refugee camps”? Where is the outrage over a constant flow of arms into Gaza to fight an “Occupation” army that left a year and a half ago?

When the lights faded on Gaza – a situation scripted and directed entirely by Hamas as the flow of electricity from Israel never ceased – why can’t the outraged see that the storyline simply illustratesthe cynical use of Gaza's residents by their own leadership? In fact, Israel has absolutely no interest in creating of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

None of this to say that life in Gaza is a picnic. But neither has life been a picnic is Sderot for the past 18 months after the disengagement. Remember the notion of two nations living side by side in peace? Israel has shown, time and again, it is capable of compromise.

It is time for the audience to realize that the problem is that the movie is based on a false premise. Namely, that the Occupation is not —or has never been—the sole cause of everything that has ever been wrong in the Middle East. Now, I’m hardly a pro-Occupation guy but I am definitively not pro-Obfuscation. If the Obfuscation is allowed to perpetually cloud our vision of what goes on in the Middle East then all the well-meaning people are, in fact, part of the problem and living off and perpetuating the violence they claim to abhor. And if you are part of the problem you don’t get to incessantly portray Israel as the bad guys.

Is the audience so blinded by its own-sided view not see its own hypocrisy? Do they not see the patronizing “noblesse oblige” attitude when they can not place any blame on the Palestinians who “are from a different culture”? Not a very compelling character—kind of like a stick figure. As a people, isn’t it time the Palestinian Arabs start ponying up some collective responsibility? Or is self-reflection solely the province of Westerners? But nobody seems to want to buy tickets to that particular movie. It would put them out of their job of perpetually feeling bad about the Palestinians.

Hey. What about this plotline? Egypt takes back Gaza—which is won in a defensive war— and lets Cairo control Gaza’s borders, supplies them lights, jobs, health insurance, whatever. If the rockets continue this is a causus belli with a known address.

Or maybe this one: The IDF aerially bombards the Gaza Strip as did the Allies in Dresden. Oops. Sorry. Not a movie that will play well on CNN but you get the picture.

But for the avid fans of the Palestinian narrative to have their guy be anything other than beleaguered underdog, would require an admission too painful to accept. The inconvenient sub-plot here might just be that the perpetual Hollywood ending of a two-state solution might NOT actually be what the Palestinian leadership wants because, in the short term, it makes no strategic sense. For a successful de-militarized Palestinian state would never have the ability or the economic means to defeat Israel all by itself.

A successful Palestinian state would need a functioning government with roads that work, sewers that are not cannibalized for rockets directed at Israeli civilians, and actual twenty-first century jobs for the millions of people supposedly lined up to return back to Palestine. A successful Palestinian state would no longer be the media darling it has become accustomed to being. “I will NOT be ignored,” pronounced a jilted, manipulative Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

This, however, would imbue our main character with traits other than that of perpetual underdog and would require the audience to accept some very different character motivations. It would need to own up to a Palestinian hero who is a cagey geo-political manipulator waiting for time and demographics to play out in his favor, or a serial bungler, or an irredentist fanatic waiting for the right moment to claim back all of what he considers rightfully his—namely all of current Israel. Not exactly redeeming character traits for the guy in the white hat.

Today's Guest Blogget is author and journalist Philip Dine. He joins us today to share his thoughts on the role of labor in the 21st century. His new book is-  State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence.



There is more and more concern these days about what's happening to America's workers and middle class. It's reflected in campaign talk, largely by the Democratic candidates for president but also by Republican Mike Huckabee, about how the economy's working for Wall Street but not Main Street, about lagging wages, about the loss of  3 million good-paying American manufacturing jobs in the past six years. It shows up in economic data showing that the share of the Gross Domestic Product going to wages or salaries is the smallest in a half-century, while the portion going to profits is the largest in that span. And it's clear from polls that show for the first time in American history, people don't think their children will do as well as they've done.

So there's little doubt that economic insecurity and angst are on the rise, and are only fueled by the looming recession. Meanwhile, there's another development taking place that's far less discussed, and when it is it's generally seen as both inevitable and inconsequential -- the decline of the American labor movement. It's a dinosaur, conventional wisdom says, a product of another age when the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer, when immigrants were exploited and government fronted for business interests, when coal miners risked their lives to go to work, and so on. (Which of those conditions, one might ask, no longer obtains?) Lacking any role, labor's decline is said to inevitable.

In fact, any closer examination shows that labor has as significant a role to play as it ever has. It's no coincidence that the assault on workers and the middle class is taking place as labor has been in decline, nor was it a coincidence that labor's zenith, from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s was also the period of the greatest expansion of the middle class.

To argue that labor has become irrelevant is to conflate the lack of a role with the inability to fill that role. The proof that a strong labor movement is needed can be found in the very things people are lamenting: the export of jobs and the loss of pensions earned over a lifetime of work, often by wage concessions, in the decline in real wages and the downturn this decade -- rarely reported -- in job safety, and all the other ways average Americans are taking it on the chin.

But wait, you might ask, aren't workers leaving unions in droves? Isn't that part of labor's problem, and the cause of its numerical decline? If even workers don't care about unions, why should anyone else? In fact, that's not remotely what's happening. First, the union movement as a whole isn't shrinking; it's simply unable to organize new workers fast enough to keep up its share of an expanding workforce. Second, workers aren't leaving the unions, union jobs are leaving the country, or heading south to right-to-work states. Finally, employers have grown far more skillful -- and aggressive -- in preventing unionizing drives at the workplace, which is borne out by National Labor Relations Board figures about the rise in the number of employers sanctioned for improperly penalizing or firing workers involved in union drives.

So the questions shifts from whether unions remain relevant to how they can revitalize themselves so they have the strength to meet the institutional challenges they face from public policies and corporate practices that have weakened them, and, more importantly to meet the challenges increasingly faced by working Americans.

That is another discussion -- for which there are some answers -- but for the moment, the next time you hear someone say that unions are a thing of the past, ask yourself who then is supposed to defend the interests of the middle class and workers as corporate power grows ever stronger, more concentrated and more remote? Ask also, how an industrial relations system that has long been a key element in America's economic success, depending as it did on rigorous interaction between three robust entities -- management, labor and government -- to produce balanced policies can function when one of those parties is rendered so weak as to be unable to fill its role? And wonder, perhaps, exactly who will give voice to those otherwise voiceless individuals long represented by labor. Finally, ask who would benefit most from labor's demise, whether the resulting imbalance in labor-management relations would benefit the county as a whole, and what the impact on social and economi justice would be.

A couple of years ago my favorite TV show, “The West Wing” (if you read this blog you shouldn’t be shocked this is my favorite) had a Presidential election to replace President Bartlet. In an episode in season 6 entitled “In G-d We Trust”, Arnold Vinick, the Republican nominee, and President Bartlet have a conversation about Vinick not attending church. Below is there conversation:

Vinick: "Whatever happened to the separation of church and state?"
Bartlet: "It's hanging in there, but I'm afraid the constitution doesn't say anything about the separation of church and politics."
Vinick: "You saying that's a good thing?"
Bartlet: "I'm saying that's the way it is: always has been."
Vinick: "You think a voter really needs to know if I go to church?"
Bartlet: "I don't need to know but then I'm not going to vote for you anyway. It's not up to us to decide what the voters get to use in evaluating us."

I thought about this episode earlier today after reading a JTA article titled, “Obama criticized over efforts to tout himself as a Christian” in which they wrote about fliers distributed in South Carolina that say Obama is “committed Christian.” The flier also shows Obama standing in front of churches, one in front of a cross. The flier reads, "Guided by his Christian faith, Barack Obama is the leader we can trust to challenge the ways of Washington." This comes after Governor Mike Huckabee said last week he wanted to change the Constitution to reflect the bible and Senator McCain said the United States was a “Christian Nation.”

Obama did this all apparently in an effort to make certain South Carolinians know that Senator Obama is Christian and not Muslim. I know that Senator Obama is Christian, but wouldn’t it be great if he used this as an opportunity to talk about tolerance towards all religions particularly Islam, instead of using this situation to talk about his Christian bona fids. Just as it would have been great if Governor Romney did the same and talked about religious tolerance a little more instead of people’s perceptions of Mormonism.

But, apparently I live in a dream world called the “The West Wing.” I have to agree with Vinick, as a member of a minority religion I’m personally offended when so much emphasis is put on religious credentials. Don’t prove to me you go to Church, that probably will make it less likely that I vote for you. Prove to me you understand policy—and I’d love to know your opinion on Separation of Church and State.  I’ll leave you all with this quote…

Vinick: "I don't see how we can have a separation of church and state in this government if you have to pass a religious test to get in this government. And I want to warn everyone in the press and all the voters out there, if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to. They won't all lie to you but a lot of them will. And it will be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes. So, every day until the end of this campaign, I'll answer any question anyone has on government, But if you have a question on religion, please go to church."

The UN Human Rights Council held an emergency session today in which they passed a resolution condemning Israeli military action in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and demanding that Israel lift the fuel blockade on Gaza. The resolution proposed by Arab and Muslim countries passed with 30 votes in favor and 15 abstentions. European Union countries abstained from the vote because the resolution made no mention of the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel and their effect on Israeli civilians.

While the UN forgot to mention the suffering of the residents of Sderot and southern Israel who have lived with a constant bombardment of Kassam rockets since Israel left Gaza in 2005, the Israeli Consulate in NY placed 4,200 powerful reminders on their front door.

4,200 balloons representing each Kassam rocket that has been fired into Israel from Gaza since 2005.

To read more on this check out Jpost.com

As a Jewish community professional that works on interfaith relations, I am looking forward to this new resource.  The Jewish Connection to Israel, the Promised Land: A Brief Introduction for Christians, by Rabbi Eugene Korn, PhD, guides Christians through the essential meanings of Israel for the Jewish People and for the world.  Written especially for Christians, it explores the achievements and disappointments, joys and tragedies, dreams and realities of Israel today while addressing topics of particular importance to Christians.  The book examines how the existence of Israel is critically important to modern Christian identity and the possibilities it creates between the Church and the Jewish People; how the return of the Jewish People to their biblical homeland can be viewed as a strengthening of Christian sacred history and the Jewish covenant on which the Christian faith rests; and how the rejection of supersessionism cleared the way for an understanding of a common spiritual heritage between Christianity and Judaism. 

Rabbi Eugene Korn, PhD, is executive director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding of Sacred Heart University and editor of Meorot—A Forum of Modern Orthodox Discourse. He has written widely on Israel, Jewish thought, and interfaith relations, and coedited End of an Exile: Israel, the Jews and the Gentile World and Two Faiths, One Covenant? Jewish and Christian Identity in the Presence of the Other.

Attached, please find a copy of the book cover and the entire press release.  The Jewish Connection to Israel, the Promised Land: A Brief Introduction for Christians is published by Jewish Lights, and you can purchase it for $14.99 from the Jewish Lights website at www.jewishlights.com.

I recently returned from a fabulous cruise to the Caribbean . I always enjoy getting away, not just for the relaxation and ability to recharge, but also because on vacation I meet people I wouldn’t meet everyday, allowing me to interact positively with other kinds of people of different backgrounds, faiths, and countries. Being observant gives me the opportunity to strengthen my own beliefs and give some thought to my own practices.

Keeping Kosher on a cruise ship is very noticeable. Our food looked very different from everyone else’s, as it arrived in double-wrapped plastic and we ate it on paper plates. But it tasted delicious. It is inevitable that we were asked some questions about our unusual eating habits.

It’s useful to have a helpful answer to those questions, and I love the following explanation, which I heard from my husband. (Keeping kosher and kosher supervision is not about the food “being blessed by a rabbi” as many who are unfamiliar with kashrut mistakenly believe.)

“Kosher” means “fit” or “proper” and “treif” means “unfit.” One reason for the kashrut laws is that it prevents us from ingesting things that have their root in cruelty. This idea translates into rules about animals that we eat, which are all herbivores; separating milk and meat, which is rooted in the biblical command not to cook the calf in the mother’s milk, since this would be especially cruel; and ritual slaughter, which is the least painful method of killing an animal. Kosher supervision ensures that the final product that we eat does not violate any of these standards, so that we take nourishment based on kindness, not cruelty.

Jewish law is very concerned that we not eat something which has its roots in cruelty. In a sense, we are what we eat. It also makes sense that if our food should be so carefully prepared, so too should our actions be steeped in kindness, not cruelty.

It is gratifying to work for the JCPA, which is steeped in these same traditions – the idea that we want to make our society a just society, not steeped in cruelty, but in kindness.

******

As an aside, here’s a link to an interesting article about how China is now using Kosher certification to try and prove that their food is safe.