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It seems everyday now that Biden and his dysfunctional administration find new ways to emulate actions of communism, or even worse, total incompetence. Lets look at what happened just this week:

Home Loans: Biden signed a law beginning on May 1,2023, that will benefit people who have bad credit and punish those of us who live within our means and build a good credit rating. This law states those with bad credit will be assisted by adding a penalty of $40.00 a month to the mortgage payment of taxpayers who have a credit rating of 650 or higher. The bill does not state income limits for bad credit mortgage seekers who will benefit from his actions. In that case, a person who makes a salary of $100,000 a year ro more with a bad credit rating, would be subsidized. This huge communist type action redistributes income by force of law and punishes good hard working taxpaying citizens who struggle to pay their bills and keep a good credit rating. This should be struck down before it begins. It is a violation of our constitution.

Biden recently signed an order to allow trans men to compete in womens competition.

It was met with outrage by female athletes and today Congress approved a bill, totally opposed by Democrats, that will prevent biological men from competing in female sports. Bidens order is a violation of Title 9 goals and destroys the fairness of all womens sports. Consider this example: in a recent female championship swimming competition a male who had competed in mens sports in 2021 (He was ranked in top 500 male swimmers) was allowed to compete against the current record setting champion female swimmer. It ended in a tie. The male was given the trophy because the judge said it would make a great photograph. The female champion went home empty handed.

These two actions are not only wrong, they are damaging and demoralizing to the public. How can any American look at these two actions and not be angry and disgusted.

Noel Ison

4/20/2023

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A Case Of Communism, Incompetence And Politics? - Walterboro Live

Tonia Lechtman, a Polish Jewish woman living in the early twentieth century, could be any one of us. A member of a minority who continuously seeks space in mainstream society. A single mother overwhelmed with the shrinking possibilities of keeping her children safe. A migrant who left her home country hoping that her next destination would bring more options. A woman who became a refugee in a country she had chosen for her home, which now considered her an enemy. A woman who insisted on a right to a home. She was an ordinary woman who lived in extraordinary times.

My work on An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 19181996 coincided with me beginning to teach jailed men in the United States, as well as working with formerly incarcerated men and women. I had just finished a book on the life of political prisoners in Stalinist prisons in Poland in the years following World War II; I thus moved from thinking and writing about the darkness and violence of the Stalinist government that sentenced Polish patriots to ten years confinement, to interacting with men in the United States who carried thirty- or forty-year sentences (or even life sentences without any possibility of parole) for drugs or gang violence.

Such crimes often emerged from the circumstances in which many of these men of color were destined to live; some among them were also wrongfully convicted. What I have learned from a select group of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people was the power of self-reinvention and hope, and a deep sense of responsibility: for their families, for the students I brought to learn with them, and for their various real and imagined communities. I also learned that humanity is best discernible through vulnerability and a conscious decision to share life with others. This is where Tonias story fits in.

Tonia Lechtman experienced different forms of confinement six times at the hands of five different dictatorships. She was imprisoned either because of her identities (a Jew, a communist, a single mother) or because of her insistence that ideas and actions can change the world. She was both similar to and different than the incarcerated men I met. The reasons for their imprisonments as well as the choices they made in life could not be more different, but the drive to navigate difficult circumstances, the urge to reinvent hope, and the reasons to ask for (even demand) a right to full participation in the world were similar. At times, while facilitating conversations inside prison, I wondered what Tonia would say to these men who sought ways to redeem themselves, who attempted to understand their crimes and societal roles, and who embraced interdependence. The responsibility for each other and the critical value that we should attach to the recognition of individual dignity speak to us louder in moments of suffering. Tonia understood this well.

Tonia Lechtman (ne Bialer) was born in 1918 into a Jewish family of well-off industrialists in d, Poland. Early in her life, at the threshold of her childhood and teenage years, she embraced communism as a form of engagement with the world. Communist ideas matched her youthful idealism and sensitivity to social justice, while also grounding her by providing her with multiple social circles. Her commitment to communism strengthened in Palestine, where her parents moved in 1935 in the hope of escaping growing antisemitism in Eastern Europe.

It was in Palestine where she engaged seriously with communist networks: she wrote communist slogans on walls, distributed flyers, and did propaganda work among Zionists promoting the view that the main enemy of the Jews was not Arabs but the British Empire. Doing this work she met and fell in love with a man Sioma Lechtman also committed to communism, and also experienced her first interrogation and imprisonment. Her first imprisonment was a menacing but also formative experience: she remembers it as a time of female solidarity, preparing and sharing food with Arab women prisoners, joining in back talk to the guards, and caring for people who had less. It was a moment of no return. The prison offered a lesson in persistence, community building, and strengthening commitment, despite the fear.

As pro-communist political prisoners, both Tonia and Sioma were expelled from Palestine. With only transit visas, they traveled to Paris the epicenter of world democracy, the place where the promise of equality was pushing forward hope. It was in Paris where the couple wanted to build a new life for themselves and a better world. That audacity was perhaps arrogant, but it was driven by a need to lessen helplessness. If fascism was on the rise and the world was crumbling in front of their eyes, then joining movements that tried to stop these developments was the only logical conclusion. One of the couples most intense desires was to leave for Spain, to fight fascism there. But Tonias pregnancy forced her to reconsider her involvement. While in December 1937 Sioma traveled to Spain, Tonia remained in France, supported by multiple people who offered help people who fed her, helped her find a temporary home, and, in July 1938, took her to a hospital when her time came to have her baby. These supporters kept her hope in communism alive while feeding her understanding of it as a responsibility for one another.

Life was already overwhelming for a single mother with no French-language skills, stable job, or family support. Her situation deteriorated when, at the beginning of World War II, almost overnight, Tonia turned from a migrant into a refugee who needed to run for her life. First, she ran toward the border with Spain, where she hoped to reconnect with Sioma, who was confined in Gurs, a camp for former members of the International Brigades that had fought in Spain. She visited him briefly a few times, one visit resulting in her second pregnancy. Her second child was born in March 1940, a few months before France fell to the Nazis. The Nazi-collaborationist and increasingly antisemitic Vichy regime assigned people like Tonia both Jewish citizens and foreigners an inferior position. People like her belonged to camps of concentration, as French officials often called them.

After trying to place her children for some time in a shelter for Jewish children in Limoges, she ran again, this time to Switzerland. She and her children spent the rest of the war there, first in various camps for refugees, then under the protection of a woman who ran a shelter for the displaced. The atmosphere of isolation and suspicion did not leave her for the rest of the war. A sense of exile accompanied her daily. To use the words in which Hannah Arendt described the refugee condition, Tonia had lost her language, the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.

In the early postwar months, Tonia learned about the death of her husband, who was killed in Auschwitz in January 1945. She had planned to change the world with him and for people like him displaced and persecuted minorities. Now that he was gone, the only thing that made sense was to return to the place where he died, to Poland. That return was supposed to end her rootlessness. Poland in 1946 promised a new and better future. This war-ravaged country was rising from the rubble while claiming its victory over fascism. It needed and also offered hope. Though it was largely a Soviet creation, the communist rule that had firmly established itself by 1948 appeared as an answer to all her dreams. Sioma was not there to witness it. But it was in Poland where she believed she could raise her children while following their shared dream.

She returned to work on reinstituting, with American financial help, a trauma hospital in Upper Silesia, and then moved to a job in public administration in Warsaw. Yet, as historian Marci Shore writes, the promised land of Communism was also the hell of Stalinism. Once again, Tonias dreams were shattered. The same communist state that she fought so hard to serve crushed her. In 1949 she was imprisoned as an enemy of the state (faced with orchestrated suspicion of conspiring against the Polish state) and kept under interrogation for five years. Before the war she was imprisoned for being a communist, during the war she was interned for being a Jew, and after the war she was confined because the Stalinist government considered her suspicious and untrustworthy. This third and last incarceration was no longer a lesson in strength and persistence, and not even a training in solitude. If anything, it was a school of how to mentally survive by believing herself and in herself, despite being imprisoned by people she had considered comrades, perhaps even friends.

After several years, she left prison still believing that communism or an ethical sense of responsibility for each other, one that can nullify racial and national inequalities was worth fighting for. She left prison both physically and mentally spent; a few years after leaving, she had a gallbladder attack, similar to one she experienced in jail. To deal with the pain, she ran on a square the size of her former cell, similar to what she did while incarcerated during her first painful attack. Although she left prison, the prison never left her. What ultimately broke her came a few years later: illnesses that affected her grandchildren with which Polish doctors in the context of the late 1960s could not deal. Poland looked increasingly like a caricature of a dream she wanted to dream. Withdrawing even further into herself, in 1971 she left Poland for Israel. She died there in 1996, surrounded by a family bewildered by the role that communism had occupied in her life.

When I was writing and then editing this book on Tonia, the world was seemingly falling apart again. It began with COVID-19 and continued through the Black Lives Matter protests, the consequences of the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine: more pain, more death, more refugees, but also more signs that the struggle for dignity never dies. The country where Tonia was born and one that I call my home Poland closed its borders to Syrian refugees while opening them to Ukrainian refugees just a few years later.

The pandemic is a portal, said philosopher Arundhati Roy in 2020 while watching growing suffering and hoping for it to become an opening to a new and better future, as if pain could become a conduit of change. The rupture of COVID or perhaps the multiple ruptures that followed it was supposed to make us rethink the kind of normalcy we wanted to return to, but it seems as if our prejudices and hatred have walked through the portal with us. Now, almost everywhere we look, the world looks grimmer. There is something wrong with the world, said Polish writer and activist Olga Tokarczuk upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 as she called on us to narrate the world not through oneself but through others exactly the way Tonia wanted to live her life.

In summer 2022, I traveled to the frontier between Switzerland and France near Geneva to try to find the spot where Tonia crossed the border. On the French side, to my surprise, I ran into a historical marker with a quote from Rosa Luxemburg: La liberte cest toujours la liberte de lautre (Our freedom is always the freedom of others). Tonia survived her lonely life in France, Nazi roundups, an illegal and dangerous crossing to Switzerland, and separation from her children in Switzerland thanks to numerous and often anonymous gestures of help. Various people supported her when all else was failing. A family of German socialists offered her a home in the last months of her pregnancy. A French policeman warned her about an imminent roundup. A soldier protected her from being caught by the Nazis when she embarked with two small children on a journey into the unknown. A guard on the French-Swiss border fed her and her children. Are people that good and ready to help, or did she simply decide to remember what was good in her life, rather than reflect on the losses?

While in times of crises almost boundless suffering and pain arise, some good also emerges. Amidst overwhelming misery and suffering, help often goes unnoticed. Early on during her life in Paris, Tonia found herself in a circle of women a new generation of social activists who worked with young women living in various shelters and who believed that by creating the right conditions one can help those who appear to be lost. Hannah Eisfelder Grnwald, for example, thought about her social work as a mission aimed at restoring an individuals sense of worth and not just offering passive help. Margaret Locher fought hard for Tonia and her children while trying to move them from a refugee camp to her home. Lily Volker, in beautiful Ascona surrounded by Swiss lakes and mountains, decided to turn her family business a hotel into a place for refugee children, which at the time meant Jewish children. Love and respect were supposed to help them to move past war traumas. No monuments are devoted to these women; they are hardly ever mentioned or remembered as harbingers of good in dark times. In Ascona, by accident I came upon the grave of Volker, which has the inscription Lily Volker. Ciao and Grazie and a globe with silhouettes of children. Help to one is help to us all.

Tonia built her world from a place of vulnerability as a minority, woman, migrant, single mother, and refugee. She recognized this vulnerability and welcomed any assistance she could receive, but she also lived to assist. She chose life with others and through others. Was communism a necessary or the even only ethical and moral framework for her? Probably not. At the time of her youth, socialism and communism were only some of the responses to Jewish exclusion from the mainstream. Communism was Tonias choice in response to being pushed to the margins and a growing fear of fascism. As a means of dealing with fear and alienation, it was also her response to solitude, a means of feeling grounded in the world and embracing fears with newfound courage and tenderness. As an ideology, communism is distrusted in the part of the world Tonia and I come from, and stories of committed communists make many people uneasy. A story of Tonias trust in communism can make others question her reasoning.

Tokarczuk calls for tenderness as an antidote to alienation in the world: it is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself. Tenderness should guide us through our attempts to understand people unlike us, those who make different choices, those who follow an idea that is incomprehensible to us, and those who fail and attempt to stand up again. Placing people and their choices in their contexts is a big part of that process.

Tonia saw happiness not only as an emotion or psychic state but rather as a way of acting in the world. That acting also meant accepting her dependence on others, which feminist Lynne Segal sees as embracing our humanity. Accepting the fragilities of life means being fully human. Sharing her vulnerability and committing to protect others who were also vulnerable, Tonia made an ethical and political decision a responsibility for others because it is the quickest way to changing the world. She remained fearless in believing that only with others and through others, in small and big gestures of tenderness, in consciously deciding that the personal is political, she could remain faithful to herself, her late husbands ideals, and all the people who died or did not have a chance to fully live because their own state, society, and the world failed them. Her story a story of someone so ordinary teaches us to give and receive and to participate in sharing small gestures of tenderness, which can be life-sustaining. It takes courage to give and receive these gestures on a path to rebuilding oneself.

See more here:
Tonia Lechtman's Life Embodied the Struggle for Human Dignity - Jacobin magazine

In the years immediately following World War II, voters on the left and right in Western countries both backed liberal internationalism. They found common cause in their support for policies that sought to expand international trade and cooperation and prevent the spread of communism. For decades, this vital center, as Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., termed it, held. But times have changed. Since the early 1990s, an antiglobalist backlash has seen the support of Western voters for parties favoring trade liberalization and multilateral cooperation fall by nearly 50 percent. The British vote to leave the European Union and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, both in 2016, famously symbolized this transformation.

The current phase of antiglobalism in the West was birthed in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakdown of the postwar compromise between free-market capitalism and social democracy. During the Cold War, political parties across the Westleft and right alikewere united in their commitment to combating the threat of communism. On the home front, they maintained a broad consensus in favor of preserving welfare states. When the Soviet Union collapsed, however, the Wests politics changed. Foreign policy was no longer focused on the threat from the east. Political discourse moved on, and new growth strategies were fashioned in a world free of great-power conflict. Liberalizing markets and the rolling back of social protections to promote globalization eroded manufacturing and created a climate of economic insecurity. As voters lost their economic security and their sense of national autonomy, they grew increasingly receptive to appeals from parties on the extremes.

The success of the antiglobalists has proven costly for the West, domestically as well as internationally. At home, a fragmented electorate has made it difficult for governments to muster the power and authority needed to govern in a number of countries, including Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. This failure has fueled voter dissatisfaction, which, in turn, leads to greater political volatility and dysfunction. Internationally, this fragmentation has weakened support for Western priorities in multilateral institutions and fueled doubts about the benefits of liberal democracy. Early hopes that the unified response of Western democracies to Russian President Vladimir Putins war in Ukraine would help break the antiglobalist fever have not been fulfilled. Instead, since the invasion, antiglobalists have made deeper inroads in France, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the possibility persists that Trump may return to the White House in 2025.

If Western governments hope to tame the antiglobalist passions roiling their societies, they must restore the balance between staying open to the world and safeguarding economic security at home. History is not the guide that many think it is. Turning inward or replaying the Cold War will not fix this problem. A new approach is needed to revitalize the center.

During the Cold War, the professed commitment of Western leaders to a liberal world order won considerable electoral support. In the United States, liberal internationalism was backed by Democratic and Republican voters alike, as well as by major segments of business, labor, and agriculture. In Europe, voters across the spectrum favored closer economic and security ties with their neighbors, as well as with Washington. In Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party also supported liberal internationalism, willingly tying its security to the United States, at the same time as relying on state-led development, which secured the support of workers and farmers.

Cold War imperatives gave Western voters reason to support liberal internationalism. So did the generous social protections granted by the postwar welfare state. The nature of these welfare provisions varied across the West, and support for them was always stronger on the left. But publics widely accepted the idea that governments were responsible for balancing the imperatives of free markets and economic security. Indeed, postwar Western policymakers viewed the welfare state as an essential part of the East-West struggle for ideological dominance; it softened the rough edges of market capitalism for working-class voters and countered Soviet claims that only communism offered a workers paradise.

To be sure, Western support for liberal internationalism was never unanimous. Every country had its naysayers. In the United States, progressive Democrats, including Senators Frank Church of Idaho and Vance Hartke of Indiana, worried about unchecked executive power and consequently opposed excessive military spending and interventionism. On the right, isolationist Republicans, including Senators John Bricker of Ohio, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, and William Knowland of California, derided the United Nations and strong transatlantic ties as infringements on U.S. sovereignty. In France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, some dissenting voices fiercely resisted cooperation with the United States, fearing its hegemony. At the same time, debates over neutrality raged in Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland. The critical dividing line in these disputes remained between those parties in the vital center and those on the extremes.

During the Cold War, parties calling for an alternate foreign policy stood little chance of winning public backing. Consistently high levels of Western economic growth, caused by the huge expansion in trade resulting from the postwar economic recovery and the removal of tariffs, helped strengthen this consensus. Suspicions of Soviet intentions and fears of nuclear war also made voters skeptical of left-wing parties that seemed too soft on communism, as well as of right-wing parties that were considered too reckless or belligerent to be entrusted with the countrys security. Politicians who strayed too far to the right or to the leftas did U.S. presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and George McGovern in 1964 and 1972, respectivelyproved themselves to be unelectable.

Mainstream party support for liberal internationalism remained consistently strong and resilient, despite occasional challenges. The most serious came in the 1970s, when the combination of sluggish growth and runaway inflation caused a strong disagreement between the center-leftwhich called for increased government spending and market regulationand the center-right, which argued for privatization, deregulation, and welfare reform. The center-right won. In the early 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and U.S. President Ronald Reagan each began experimenting with different center-right economic policies. The success of their programs put pressure on other Western governments to follow suit. Even French President Franois Mitterrands socialist government found it necessary to pivot toward greater market liberalization.

In the 1990s, however, everything changed. After the end of the Cold War, Western leaders began to see political advantage in liberalizing trade and granting greater authority to international technocrats. Parties on the center-left as well as the center-right saw the resulting market-driven form of globalization as a way to win the support of the most internationally competitive sectors of business and attract younger, educated, and middle-class voters who benefited from market liberalization. The agendas of the leaders in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States were cut from the same neoliberal cloth.

The enthusiasm of Western leaders for globalization after the Cold War succeeded in expanding markets and the reach of multilateral institutions. The EU and the World Trade Organization took on functions that had once been the exclusive preserve of the nation-state. With the lifting of the Iron Curtain, many industries in western Europe moved east as workers from eastern Europe moved west in search of better jobs. U.S. and Western investment in China accelerated. At the same time, the ideologies and alignments that were frozen by the Cold War began to thaw. As fears of communist expansion and nuclear Armageddon receded, voting for a maverick was no longer potentially fatal. Western voters, accordingly, became more willing to take a chance on those parties, candidates, and platforms that were once considered beyond the pale.

Recognizing this new reality, parties on the far left and far right began to reinvent and reposition themselves. Left-wing parties such as Denmarks Red-Green Alliance, Frances Communist Party, and Swedens Left Party combined traditional antiglobalist politics of trade protectionism with positions on transnational issues, such as global justice, climate change, and nuclear proliferation, to broaden their appeal among younger voters. On the right, parties including Austrias Freedom Party and Frances Front National jettisoned long-standing rhetorical commitments to laissez-faire capitalism in favor of antiglobalism and social protection, hoping to appeal to disenchanted working-class voters.

Although liberal internationalism has come under sustained assault, it is needed now more than ever.

In the following years, left- and right-wing parties also became adept at using antiglobalism to mobilize voters experiencing hard times. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash and ensuing eurozone crisis, Syriza, a left-wing party in Greece, and Podemos, an anti-neoliberal party in Spain, exploited growing Euroskepticism and opposition to the EUs demand for austerity to rally voters to their side. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party, made gains in northern and eastern England by fusing an anti-immigration message with opposition to EU membership. In 2017, Marine Le Pen, the leader of Frances Front National, unsuccessfully ran for president, merging the partys long-standing opposition to mass immigration with a new strategic plan for reindustrialization aimed at French regions hit hard by globalization.

These efforts did not catapult antiglobalist, populist parties into national government, although they did succeed in putting mainstream parties on the defensive by capturing a larger share of the national vote. Parties on the hard right, in particular, experienced unprecedented success in these years, their share of the national vote in Western democracies tripling between 1990 and 2017. This success was due in no small part to these parties willingness to fuse the explosive issue of immigration with opposition to trade liberalization and supranational institutions such as the EU; they succeeded in expanding their vote share, especially in impoverished regions.

Antiglobalism also became a driver of change within mainstream parties. Feeling pressure from antiglobalists over trade, immigration, and international cooperation, center-right parties became more nationalist and nativist and, in many cases, more protectionist. On the center-left, social democratic parties in northern Europe sought to outflank those on their left who criticized globalization as a race to the bottom by urging that welfare standards beharmonized to curb the advantage of low-wage countries in southern Europe. In the United States, Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders ran campaigns in 2016 that appealed to white working- and middle-class voters who felt left behind by globalization. At the height of the Cold War, parties on the center-left and center-right had more in common with each other than they did with the parties and factions on the political extremes. Today, in many cases, this is no longer true.

Although liberal internationalism has come under sustained assault, it is needed now more than ever. The rise of China, and increasing Russian aggression, have inaugurated a new age of great-power rivalry. In order to understand how to proceed, many foreign policy analysts such as Michael Beckley, Hal Brands, and Dominic Tierney have begun to study the Cold War for clues on how to revive the vital center. Some suggest that policymakers today can capitalize on voters worries about growing Chinese power and assertiveness, just as their predecessors used the specter of Soviet power during the Cold War to steer public opinion. Some go further, drawing stark parallels between a new axis of autocracy led by China and the threat posed by the former Soviet Union and its allies in the 1950s.

Foreign threats can certainly boost domestic solidarity. But the Cold War analogy can be misleading. Western solidarity then stemmed from more than fears of Soviet expansion. Western democracies also found common purpose in their commitment to domestic social protections and liberal democracy. Social protection was seen as a complement to fighting communism during the Cold War because the conflict compelled Western leaders to prove that democratic capitalism, rather than communism, could offer workers greater economic security, equality, and opportunity. As U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it in 1950: There is no longer any difference between foreign questions and domestic questions. They are all part of the same question. Without renewing this embrace of economic security and inclusive growth, invoking the threat of China is not enough to bring antiglobalists back into the fold.

Nor is fearmongering about China likely to unite Western democracies. Some capitals are more concerned by Beijings geopolitical ambitions than others. Western governments differ on how best to deal with China, even on the explosive issue of Taiwan. French President Emmanuel Macrons recent statement that Europe should not become a vassal in Washingtons rivalry with Beijing dramatically illustrated the lack of consensus. Most Western leaders favor a mix of carrots and sticks, hoping to maintain access to Chinas markets and labor at the same time as they benefit from the protection of U.S. military power. For most Western democracies, dealing with China is not a zero-sum game. Here, too, the Cold War analogy breaks down.

Isolating China is not an option. Chinas role in the global economy is too big for it to be cordoned off through decoupling. Combating climate change also necessitates Beijings involvement, as China is the worlds largest carbon emitter. Chinese cooperation will be indispensable to any attempt to determine the climate future.

Today, Western democracies are struggling to keep foreign and domestic policy in balance. Commentators including Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, and Kori Schake see the war in Ukraine as a watershed moment for reaffirming the Wests commitment to the liberal order. But the revitalization of the liberal order will depend on more than the resolve of Western democracies in the current international crisis. To rebuild popular support for liberal internationalism, Western leaders must reimagine the relationship between foreign and domestic policy. They must do so by reconnecting their international policies to recognizable benefits at home for working families.

At a time when trade liberalization and other traditional foreign policies have fallen into disfavor, and the domestic coalitions associated with them have splintered, leaders must find new arguments about the necessity of international openness and cooperation. They must also forge new domestic bargains and political alliances to support them. Western democracies cannot return to the postwar liberal order. They can, however, search for new ways of securing the benefits that the former order brought.

Renewal will require innovation, investment, and sustainable development. Some of these processes are already underway. Yet given the depth of the antiglobalist backlash, far more action and vision are needed if Western democracies can hope to revive the political center while still competing geopolitically. It is urgent that they begin.

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Make the Center Vital Again - Foreign Affairs Magazine

Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP celebrates the centenary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima at St Marys Cathedral on 13 May 2017. Photo: Alphonsus Fok

By Fr Chris de Sousa CRS

From May to October in 1917, Our Lady appeared a total of six times, to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal.

Lcia dos Santos, Francisco and Jacinta Marto were asked by Our Lady to pray the rosary, make sacrifices for the salvation of sinners and to encourage others to do the same for peace.

On 13 October, some 70,000 people witnessed a supernatural phenomenon, popularly known as the miracle of the Sun, that validated the childrens visions.

So after over a century, why are these events still relevant and why should we continue to live out the messages of Fatima?

In her July apparition, Our Lady warned the three children about the evils of communism that would begin in Russia and spread throughout the world.

She foretold of the horrors of the 20th century and the wars and persecutions that would result in the greatest destruction of human life that the world has ever seen.

Though the Soviet Union collapsed and Pope Saint John Paul II publicly consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, we are still afflicted by many of the same evils three decades later.

An atheistic Russia under communism did not recognise any God-given dignity to human life and it is clear today, as countries continue to make the gravest of sins against life legal, that the rest of the world dont either.

Under this culture of death, the evils of abortion and euthanasia eliminates the most vulnerable as precious lives are seen as an inconvenience and a drain on the states resources.

The sexual revolution in the late 1960s set the course for the legalisation of divorce, cohabitation and same-sex unions.

It has promoted a society of sexual immorality that weakened marriages, fractured the family and has ultimately turned Christ-centred communities into self-centred relativists with no regard for the dignity of the human person.

But if we are to build a culture of life, we must put into practice Our Ladys messages and turn back to her son.

In her July message, Our Lady asked the children of Fatima, and us today, to make penances in reparation for offences against God, the conversion of sinners and for the salvation of souls.

Penance simply means a turning away from sin, and a turning back to God, and in order to do this, we must seek to undo the vices in our spiritual lives.

Whether it be fasting from a meal to combat gluttony, taking on acts of mercy to combat sloth or donating a little extra money to combat our greed, these penances help save the soul you offer them for, as well as your own.

In all six of her apparitions at Fatima, Our Lady emphasised the daily recitation of the rosary for peace in the world.

The rosary is our prayer to God through the intercession of the Virgin Mary and her immaculate heart.

When we meditate on the mysteries of the rosary and enter into the key moments of the life of Jesus Christ, our hearts are transformed and our faith in God increased.

Prayed together at home and in public, the recitation of the rosary has the power to unite families, foster Christ-centric communities and change lives.

With this in mind, I invite you all to join the bishops, clergy and faithful of the Archdiocese of Sydney in the recitation of the rosary and public candlelit procession at St Marys Cathedral on 13 May, commencing with a Mass at 6pm.

Fr Chris de Sousa CRS is assistant priest at St Josephs Moorebank and St Christophers Holsworthy.

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Why the world still needs Fatima - The Catholic Weekly

This piece is the first in a month-long blog series that celebrates Labor History Month and examines how the labor movements past struggles and victories can inform the present fight for workers rights.

Just after announcing his reelection campaign, President Bidens first address was to the North Americas Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference. Biden called himself the most pro-union president in American history, telling the assembled crowd that he sees the country through the eyes of the working people I grew up with through the eyes of people like you.

The announcement suggests the possibility that Biden might center labor in his reelection campaign. The labor movement and workers rights were once at the center of the American political and legal system. However, as the neoliberal order came into shape over the past half-century, labor issues have receded. Today, we are witnessing new and exciting forms of worker mobilization, and as progressives frame a strategy for moving beyond neoliberalism, a vision fusing work and care may be a promising path forward.

Labor Primacy in the New Deal

In the late nineteenth century, on the heels of the Civil War and with the Industrial Revolution roaring, the labor question was a core part of American political and legal discourse. The labor movement, intellectuals, and political leaders struggled with the implications of a society increasingly composed of workers in firms and this realitys implications for democracy, republican values, and freedom.

Conflicts over labor and laws role in labor relations evolved throughout the Progressive Era and into the New Deal. Then, labor issues came to the center of a broad constitutional discourse. Labor organizations and a host of other social movement actors worked successfully to put into place a workers constitution, composed of the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security Act, and Fair Labor Standards Act. These three statutes redefined economic freedom for workers around security and sought to entrench worker security in the constitutional fabric.

The New Deal was defined by its labor primacyby its centering of labor in the efforts to build an economic constitutional order. Indeed, when envisioning building an economic constitutional order in 1932, FDR placed at its foundations the right to make a comfortable living and right to security when work dried up or injuries occurred on the job. Of course, the New Deal was about so much more; it involved, among other things, significant legislative achievements involving banking and securities, the environment, and public works. But the eras fiercest social and political mobilizations were about work and workers. And those mobilizations helped to frame and personalize the problems of economic power that animated the New Deal transformation.

The New Deal also had significant limits. They include the ways its policies baked in patterns of exclusion along the lines of race and gender and failed to protect domestic and agricultural workers. New Deal policies brought stability and security for many workers, but also left many behind.

Labors Decline & the Neoliberalism of the Left

The New Deal order ultimately ceded to the neoliberal order, and the decline of labor primacy looms large in that transition. In the 1970s, neoliberalismwith its focus on reducing the power of government in society and shifting power (and government solicitude) to marketsbegan to take hold in the United States. Many factors made its rise possible, including currents in international affairs, the economic challenges of the 1970s, and the unraveling of the New Deal coalition around civil rights issues. But the rise of neoliberalism is also a story about labor, Democrats, and the left.

Gary Gerstles recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, outlines various waysincluding surprising onesthat Democrats and the left contributed to the rise of neoliberalism. Gerstle argues that the neoliberal shift was facilitated by Ralph Nader and Jimmy Carters presidency. Nader, who had significant influence in the Carter presidency, shifted the terrain from workers to consumers, and framed as evils both corporate and governmental power, undermining New Deal faith in the affirmative power of government. President Carter, torn between New Dealers and deregulatory forces within his own ranks, began a path of deregulation that would continue strongly not only in the Reagan presidency but also the Clinton presidency.

For Gerstle, too, the fall of the Soviet Union features in the rise of neoliberalism and decline of labor. The fear of communism, he writes, made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order, and the collapse of communism cleared the way of capitalisms most ardent opponent. As a result, the need for compromise with working people dissipated.

Across these examples, a connecting thread is that a political order characterized by its labor primacy shifted to one where labor was decentered. Along the way, faith in government and its ability to reshape economic power relationships and provide for the security of workers was also shaken.

Towards the Future: Fusing Work and Care

The question of what will replace neoliberalismif the neoliberal era is coming to an end or has endedis on the minds of many progressives. The future of labor will surely center in that conversation. A new political order, however, would have in its sights so much more, including climate change, voter suppression and disenfranchisement, student debt, childcare and healthcare, the power of big tech, and mass incarceration.

Gerstles book, however, reminds us that a political order is much more than an arrangement of policies and electoral victories; it also grows from and is sustained by a vision that reaches people where they are, drawing from the stuff of their lives to demonstrate the pitfalls of the old order and the promise of a new one. Progressives and New Dealers spoke to the insecurity that people felt on the heels of the Industrial Revolution and Great Depression; they promised that government could tame markets and provide security for workers. Neoliberals, including forces such as Ronald Reagan and Ayn Rand, offered those facing a growing bureaucratic state an ecstatic vision of freedomof being unbound, spontaneous, innovative, and unconstrained. The idea of freedom as throwing off restraint also resounded with the new Left and its critiques of the system. As with the rise of neoliberalism, its replacementto the extent there is onewill likely arise from articulating what neoliberalism robs and what a new order can bring or restore.

Today, in charting such a path forward beyond neoliberalism, it would be a mistake to return to a strategy of pure labor primacy. As that strategy developed in the New Deal, it focused too much on the workplace as a unit of emphasis and linked too many goodsincluding healthcareto that unit. But this does not mean that it would be wise to decenter labor, either. Instead, a promising path forward may be articulating a progressive vision fusing labor and care.

At the most basic level, these things hit home. So many of us spend our lives primarily engaged in work and care. A progressive vision centering these core life activities can meet people where they are and offer an opportunity to think about these activities and their relationship in broader and more inclusive ways. Such a vision might address the exclusion of housework and caregiving from how we understand the economy. And it might offer opportunities for the focus on labor to be expanded beyond its narrow historical lens. As an example, workers are increasingly bargaining for the common good, allying with other organizations to expand the sphere of bargaining to encompass broader policy and community issues, including healthcare, student nutrition, racial justice, and immigration issues. A progressive politics centering work and care thus provides an opportunity to think about how we define and support these endeavors and how we can engage in acts of solidarity and countervailing power to give people the security for which so many yearn.

Centering labor and care also holds the possibility of reaching and mobilizing people worn out by life under the neoliberal order. Neoliberalism affects peoples ability to work, care, and exist together securely. It takes the public spaces where people might gather, converting them for private gain. And it makes other spaces ones where people must bear sometimes maddening insecurity: where paying for childcare or elder care seems impossible; where family picnics go on the credit card; where job insecurity makes keeping the family afloat all the more difficult, while long hours take away time with loved ones; where an education brings with it debt that weighs heavily on young lives; where healthcare decisions pinch in painful ways; where the carceral state tears people apart; and so much more. As a society, we are impoverished by neoliberalism.

A progressive future might be sustained by a rejuvenated vision of securityof being together with a good measure of stability, being supported and healthy as we work and care, and doing so in a system that values human flourishing in engaging in these core life activities. A vision of labor and care is less ecstatic than the vision of freedom that neoliberals put forward, but potentially more cathartic, more attuned to present-day challenges and needs.

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Luke Norris is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law.

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Labor's Past and Future: The New Deal Order, the Neoliberal Order ... - American Constitution Society