Wellington church to bless same-sex unions

Shabnam Dastgheib            The Dominion Post/NZ                        9 October 2012

Wellington church St Andrew's on the Terrace has gone against its governing body to support same-sex marriage, saying sexual orientation in a relationship is irrelevant.

The same-sex marriage bill passed its first reading in Parliament last month and must now pass two more readings before it can become law.  The Presbyterian General Assembly opposes the bill but individual churches can choose their own stance.

Church moderator the Right Rev Ray Coster said the assembly's decision was made last week to uphold the "historic Christian" understanding that "marriage is a faithful, loving union between a man and woman". A small number had registered their dissent.  "Registering dissent is an accepted part of Presbyterian process, and is part of our tradition of open and robust debate."

Yesterday, St Andrew's on the Terrace restated its decision to support same-sex marriage and senior minister Margaret Mayman said it would be part of a small minority of churches doing so.  The church was looking forward to the passing of the bill which would make it able to perform and bless marriages for all couples, she said. 'We are relieved that the assembly left ministers with the freedom to make decisions about whom they will marry."

Marriage would be strengthened as a cultural and religious institution by involving more couples, she said. What mattered in marriage was love and commitment. 'At the moment we are forced to treat same-sex couples differently." -    

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/7786450/Wellington-church-to-bless-same-sex-unions

The Chávez victory will be felt far beyond Latin America

Seumas Milne in Caracas             Guardian/UK                   9 October 2012

The transformation of Latin America is one of the decisive changes reshaping the global order. The tide of progressive change that has swept the region over the last decade has brought a string of elected socialist and social-democratic governments to office that have redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination. In the process they have started to build the first truly independent South America for 500 years and demonstrated to the rest of the world that there are, after all, economic and social alternatives in the 21st century.

It is Venezuela that has spearheaded the movement of radical change across Latin America and underwritten the regional integration that is key to its renaissance. By doing so, the endlessly vilified Venezuelan leader has earned the enmity of the US and its camp followers, as well as the social and racial elites that have called the shots in Latin America for hundreds of years.

So Chávez's remarkable presidential election victory on Sunday – in which he won 55% of the vote on an 81% turnout after 14 years in power – has a significance far beyond Venezuela, or even Latin America. The stakes were enormous: if his oligarch challenger Henrique Capriles had won, not only would the revolution have come to a juddering halt, triggering privatisations and the axing of social programmes. So would its essential support for continental integration, mass sponsorship of Cuban doctors across the hemisphere – as well as Chávez's plans to reduce oil dependence on the US market.

As opposition leaders concede, Venezuela is a democracy, with exceptionally high levels of participation, its electoral process more fraud-proof than those in Britain or the US, and its media dominated by a vituperatively anti-government private sector. In reality, the greatest threat to Venezuelan democracy came in the form of the abortive US-backed coup of 2002.  Even senior western diplomats in Caracas roll their eyes at the absurdity of the anti-Chávez propaganda in the western media. Which gets to the heart of the reason so many got the Venezuelan election wrong. Despite claims that Latin America's progressive tide is exhausted, leftwing and centre-left governments continue to be re-elected – from Ecuador to Brazil and Bolivia to Argentina – because they have reduced poverty and inequality and taken control of energy resources to benefit the excluded majority.

That is what Chávez has been able to do on a grander scale, using Venezuela's oil income and publicly owned enterprises to slash poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70%, massively expanding access to health and education, sharply boosting the minimum wage and pension, halving unemployment, and giving slum communities direct control over social programmes.

To visit any rally or polling station during the election campaign was to be left in no doubt as to who Chávez represents: the poor, the non-white, the young, the disabled – in other words, the dispossessed majority who have again returned him to power. Euphoria at the result among the poor was palpable: in the foothills of the Andes on Monday groups of red-shirted hillside farmers chanted and waved flags at any passerby.

Of course there is also no shortage of government failures and weaknesses which the opposition was able to target: from runaway violent crime to corruption, lack of delivery and economic diversification, and over-dependence on one man's charismatic leadership. And the US-financed opposition campaign was a much more sophisticated affair than in the past. Capriles presented himself as "centre-left", despite his hard right background, and promised to maintain some Chavista social programmes.  But even so, the Venezuelan president ended up almost 11 points ahead. His re-election now gives him the chance to ensure Venezuela's transformation is deep enough to survive him, to overcome the administration's failures and help entrench the process of change across the continent.

Venezuela's revolution doesn't offer a political model that can be directly transplanted elsewhere, not least because oil revenues allow it to target resources on the poor without seriously attacking the interests of the wealthy. But its innovative social programmes, experiments in direct democracy and success in bringing resources under public control offer lessons to anyone interested in social justice and new forms of socialist politics in the rest of the world.

For all their problems and weaknesses, Venezuela and its Latin American allies have demonstrated that it's no longer necessary to accept a failed economic model, as many social democrats in Europe still do. They have shown it's possible to be both genuinely progressive and popular. Cynicism and media-fuelled ignorance have prevented many who would naturally identify with Latin America's transformation from recognising its significance. But Chávez's re-election has now ensured that the process will continue – and that the space for 21st-century alternatives will grow. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/09/chavez-victory-beyond-latin-america

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/09/chavez-victory-beyond-latin-america

American Empire: A Disaster on Autopilot

by Tom Engelhardt                  Pub. by TomDispatch.com                 October 9, 2012

Americans lived in a “victory culture” for much of the twentieth century. We experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism. From World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off.  When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so obvious.  Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush. The United States was, after all, the last standing superpower, after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries on the planet.  It had a military beyond compare and no enemy on the horizon

And here’s the odd thing, little has changed since then and yet everything seems different.  Everywhere there are now “threats” against our well-being which seem to demand action.  Everywhere the U.S. military still reigns supreme, and yet nowhere can it achieve its goals, however modest.

The Planet’s Top Gun   And yet the more dominant the U.S. military becomes in its ability to destroy the more the defeats and semi-defeats pile up, the more the missteps and mistakes grow, the more the strains show, the more the nation’s treasure disappears down a black hole -- and in response to all of this, the more moves the Pentagon makes.

A great power without a significant enemy?  You might have to go back to the Roman Empire at its height or some Chinese dynasty in full flower to find anything like it.  The U.S. has 1,000 or more bases around the world; other countries, a handful.  The U.S. spends as much on its military as the next 14 powers (mostly allies) combined.  The U.S. military is singular in other ways, too.  It alone has divided the globe -- the complete world -- into six “commands.” No other country on the planet thinks of itself in faintly comparable military terms.

The president now has at his command not one, but two private armies.  The first is the CIA, which in recent years has been heavily militarized, is overseen by a former four-star general, and is running its own private assassination campaigns and drone air wars throughout the Greater Middle East.  The second is an expanding elite, the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military, members of whom are now deployed to hot spots around the globe. The U.S. Navy, with its 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carrier task forces, is dominant on the global waves in a way that only the British Navy might once have been; and the U.S. Air Force controls the global skies in much of the world in a totally uncontested fashion.  In fact, by every measure (except success), the likes of it has never been seen.

Blindsided by Predictably Unintended Consequences    By all the usual measuring sticks, the U.S. should be supreme in a historically unprecedented way.  And yet it’s not.  Quite the opposite, U.S. military power has been remarkably discredited globally by the most pitiful of forces.  Resistance of one sort or another arises and failure ensues in some often long-drawn-out and spectacular fashion. Even as military power has proven itself a bust again and again, our policymakers have come to rely ever more completely on a military-first response to global problems. A deeply militarized mindset and the global maneuvers that go with it are by now just part of the way of life of a Washington eternally “at war.” 

What remains is, of course, a self-evident formula for disaster on autopilot. But don’t tell Washington. It won’t matter. Its denizens can’t take it in.        [Abridged]         via Common Dreams website

© 2012   Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com             http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/09-4

Ian Harris on Free Market Myths

       Otago Daily Times        Sept. 28, 2012

Wouldn’t it be nice if the free market really freed – that is, made people free not just to buy and sell in an open market, but in rounded human terms?  An open-slather market certainly does not deliver that – all too often it ends up exploiting the vulnerable and leaving them helpless. What’s freeing about that?

These and other questions bubbled up from an address on The Myth of the Free Market by Professor William Cavanaugh, of DePaul Catholic University, Chicago, in Wellington last month. Cavanaugh was a visiting scholar in religion at Victoria University, sponsored by St John’s Presbyterian Church.  The free market is not usually thought of as a myth, but to Cavanaugh the ideology behind it has a huge hole at its core: it confuses the accumulation of wealth with human flourishing.

In the free-market worldview, freedom means unfettered market transactions, with no standards, guidance or concerns beyond the marketplace, least of all for what will serve the common good. Economist Milton Friedman’s definition of a free-market economy makes that clear: “one that gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want.”  That defines freedom negatively, as freedom from others. Something may be good or bad, beneficial or harmful, necessary or indulgent, but none of that matters: if you can pay the price, you should be free to have it.

Cavanaugh contrasted that with Christianity’s positive definition of freedom as a capacity to achieve a good end. That end might be God, compassion, showing care for others, or anything else that serves the common good. This takes the question way beyond “Can I have this without interference?” to “Is what I want a good or bad thing?”

“The alcoholic with plenty of money and access to an open liquor store may, in a purely negative sense, be free from anything interfering with getting what he wants,” said Cavanaugh. “But he is in reality profoundly unfree . . . He can only be free by being liberated from his false desires and moved to desire rightly.”
   

Among forces undermining freedom are the market manipulators who spend heavily to persuade consumers to want their products, whether they need them or not. Advertising provides a vital function when it equips consumers to make an informed choice about products. Much advertising, however, is geared towards associating products with images of glamour, sex, friendship and success (especially sporting success) that tell us nothing about the qualities of the product.  Such advertising limits the consumer’s freedom. “To pretend, as Friedman does, that the consumer simply stands apart from such pervasive control of information is to engage in fantasy,” Cavanaugh said.

Large international corporations exercise another kind of free-market power, especially in poorer countries but not only there. Many keep wages as low as possible to boost profits, dividends and share prices.  Cavanaugh cited a company selling jackets in the United States for $US178, and paying the El Salvador workers who made them 56c an hour, or 77c a jacket. They accepted the job and the hourly rate, which meets the free-market test. But with no concept of a common good to moderate the harshness of the market, exploitation runs amok.

Boards offer executives incentives to favour the interests of shareholders over employees and communities, and those at the top wallow in the wealth produced. In 1980 American CEOs received on average 42 times the wage of an average production worker. In 1999 the difference was 475 times.

If there is no consensus on serving the common good, Cavanaugh said, the one with the most power wins. Working for less than a living wage may be free in Friedman’s terms, but for the workers it is a crushing unfreedom.  Meanwhile the freedom of consumers is curbed when large conglomerates absorb or drive out smaller competitors. Yet state power favours the corporates, and governments have recently poured billions of dollars into bailing out failing financial institutions.

Christianity, by contrast, holds that human freedom involves a lot more than ensuring that markets give people what they want. It offers a comprehensive vision of the true ends of human life – “yet such ends are precisely what free-market advocates would banish from the definition of free market”. The word “love” sums them up.

“Giving free rein to power without ends is more likely to produce unfreedom than freedom,” Cavanaugh said. “The practical task is to judge what kinds of exchange are conducive to the flourishing of life on earth, and what kinds are not.”

Drones and Revenge:

How a Pashtun Man Pursues Justice

by Medea Benjamin           Pub. by Common Dreams                 October 4, 2012

During the CODEPINK delegation to Pakistan, the delegates had a chance to meet with many of the drone victims and family members from Waziristan. One man they met was Karim Khan, from the village of Machikhel in North Waziristan. Khan, a man in his fifties with striking features, and wearing traditional tribal garb, surprised them when he revealed that he spoke English and has worked as a journalist for outlets such as Al Jazeera.  Khan told how on December 31, 2009, a drone strike leveled his home, killing his 18 year-old son and his brother. The third man that died the night of that strike was a stonemason who had come to the town to work on the village mosque.

The news reports alleged that the target of the drone had been a Taliban commander, Haji Omar, but Khan insisted that Haji Omar had been nowhere near the village that night. He also said that the Taliban commander was reported dead several times by the media and Khan wondered aloud, how many times could this man be killed?

Khan said his son had just graduated from high school, and his brother was a teacher at the local school. Khan’s brother tried to teach his students that education was far more powerful than weapons. The drone strike that killed him sent them a very different message. Khan became visibly upset as he showed the photos of his dead son and brother, and recalled picking up their body parts to prepare them for the Muslim burial.

A CODEPINK delegate asked Khan how the US government could make amends. Would he accept an apology and compensation? He scowled at the idea of compensation. “How can money ever replace the loss of my beloved son?” As for apologies, he ridiculed the idea. “You can say sorry, you can say sorry twice, you can say sorry three times, but I will never accept it.” He went on to explain that revenge is a key part of Pashtun culture. “I will never, never, forget or forgive what the Americans did, and if I had the chance to kill an American soldier, I would do it.”

This seemed inconsistent coming from an educated man, a journalist, who until then had maintained a warm demeanor. He seemed very far from someone who would pick up a gun. Some people in the delegation were clearly jarred by this blunt response, thinking he seemed like someone an who would pursue a more nonviolent approach, but then he reminded us that US culture is not that different. “After 9/11,” he asked, “would the Americans have accepted an apology from Al Qaeda? Never.” True enough. The torrent of violence the US has unleashed in exacting revenge post-9/11 has by far surpassed the number of people killed in the 9/11 attack.

Leah Bolger, president of the antiwar group Veterans for Peace, tried to convince Khan that it wouldn’t be right to exact revenge upon US soldiers because they’re not the ones responsible for the policy, but Khan would have none of it. “I hold the American soldiers directly responsible for the death of our loved ones,” he said. “They should not even be in this region.” Khan insisted that there would never be peace until the Americans leave Afghanistan.

After the meeting broke up, Toby Blome, a delegate from San Francisco who has spent many days and nights vigiling outside of the Creech Air Force Base where the drones are remotely piloted, asked what he would do with drones if he had access to the technology. He said he would use the drones to attack other drones. When asked if he would fly a drone over the United States and drop missiles, he looked astonished at the mere suggestion. “Of course I wouldn’t do that,” he said, “because I might kill innocent people.”

Blome, recalling the exchange, was moved by Khan’s insistence that innocents not be caught up in his desire for revenge, unlike the American response to 9/11, which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan. “How ironic that through the eyes of Americans, said Blome, “that it is Khan who would be considered the terrorist.”

A year after his family was killed, Karim Khan spoke outside a police station after he had lodged a complaint. As Robert Naiman, a delegate and policy analyst with Just Foreign Policy, pointed out, “While Karim Khan talks about revenge, he lives his life in an exemplary fashion, using nonviolent means to pursue justice.” The US government would do well to follow his example.        [Abridged]    http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/04-1