Economic bill of rights

The economy has been in recession since last December, food banks are struggling and the pain is spreading.

It fell to Mary Nelson, president emeritus of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation on the west side of Chicago, to rediscover Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 Economic Bill of Rights. They include:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job.
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
• The right of every family to a decent home.
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
• The right to a good education.

Relatively modest, altogether worthy, still-unachieved goals of 64 years’ vintage.

Update

Unmet goals receded a bit more from our grasp as the Dow plunged 700 points on news of the ongoing and likely prolonged recession.

Taking a mental health break to watch the movie What Would Jesus Buy?

Clear-eyed in Bollywood

On the religion and politics of terrorism, Bollywood actor Aamir Khan got it exactly right on his blog:

• Terrorists are “people who have no religion or God. … They are people who have gone totally sick in their head and have to be dealt with in that manner.”
• Politicians should not “use this tragedy to further their political careers. At least now they should learn to not divide people and instead become responsible leaders.”

No variant of the Bush administration’s politics of fear and division, which has done this country such grave harm, is evident in his remarks.

Religious torture’s backlash

Use of the Qur’an as an instrument of torture is a Guantánamo mistake that may rebound on the United States for generations, warns Michael Peppard in the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

Peppard says:

Religious torture generates determined resistance and long-lasting resentments. What has been a mere footnote for us may be the main story for the Muslim world. The U.S. military knows that desecration of the Qur’an leads to hunger strikes and suicide attempts, that playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over the call to prayer is demoralizing. But they seem not to have considered the long-term effects of such tactics.

Principal among those long-term effects is creation of a stream if new enemies, as a former Special Operations interrogator warns today in the Washington Post. President-elect Obama has promised to outlaw that torture and close Guantanamo.