Every day, people have to suffer and die because of the horrifying acts of the "moral" right wing. Iraq, Afghanistan, U$, all over the world. The same mentality drives it all. I am right, therefore you should die if you do not agree.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080728/ap_on_re_us/church_shooting
By DUNCAN MANSFIELD, Associated Press Writer
29 minutes ago
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - An unemployed man accused of opening fire with a shotgun and killing two people at a Unitarian church apparently targeted the congregation out of hatred for its liberal social policies, police said Monday.
ADVERTISEMENT
Knoxville Police Chief Sterling Owen IV said a letter had been been recovered from the SUV of Jim D. Adkisson, 58, by investigators seeking clues about the motive behind the attack. Authorities said he was an apparent stranger to the Tennessee church where gunfire punctuated a children's performance based on the musical "Annie." Two people were killed and seven wounded Sunday.
"It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that and his stated hatred of the liberal movement," Owen said at a news conference.
No children were hurt, but five people remained in serious or critical condition Monday. A burly usher who died is being hailed as a hero for shielding others from gunfire Sunday at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. Witnesses said some of the men present tackled a man who pulled a shotgun from a guitar case before at least three blasts rang out.
Showing posts with label morals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morals. Show all posts
Monday, July 28, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
Seeds--Bruce Springsteen--circa 1980
Well a great black river a man had found
So he put all his money in a hole in the ground
And sent a big steel arm drivin' down down down
Man now I live on the streets of Houston town
Packed up my wife and kids when winter came along
And we headed down south with just spit and a song
But they said "Sorry son it's gone gone gone"
Well there's men hunkered down by the railroad tracks
The Elkhorn Special blowin' my hair back
Tents pitched on the highway in the dirty moonlight
And I don't know where I'm gonna sleep tonight
Parked in the lumberyard freezin' our asses off
My kids in the back seat got a graveyard cough
Well I'm sleepin' up in front with my wife
Billy club tappin' on the windshield in the middle of the night
Says "Move along man move along"
Well big limousine long shiny and black
You don't look ahead you don't look back
How many times can you get up after you've been hit?
Well I swear if I could spare the spit
I'd lay one on your shiny chrome
And send you on your way back home
So if you're gonna leave your town where the north wind blow
To go on down where that sweet soda river flow
Well you better think twice on it Jack
You're better off buyin' a shotgun dead off the rack
You ain't gonna find nothin' down here friend
Except seeds blowin' up the highway in the south wind
Movin' on movin' on it's gone gone it's all gone
So he put all his money in a hole in the ground
And sent a big steel arm drivin' down down down
Man now I live on the streets of Houston town
Packed up my wife and kids when winter came along
And we headed down south with just spit and a song
But they said "Sorry son it's gone gone gone"
Well there's men hunkered down by the railroad tracks
The Elkhorn Special blowin' my hair back
Tents pitched on the highway in the dirty moonlight
And I don't know where I'm gonna sleep tonight
Parked in the lumberyard freezin' our asses off
My kids in the back seat got a graveyard cough
Well I'm sleepin' up in front with my wife
Billy club tappin' on the windshield in the middle of the night
Says "Move along man move along"
Well big limousine long shiny and black
You don't look ahead you don't look back
How many times can you get up after you've been hit?
Well I swear if I could spare the spit
I'd lay one on your shiny chrome
And send you on your way back home
So if you're gonna leave your town where the north wind blow
To go on down where that sweet soda river flow
Well you better think twice on it Jack
You're better off buyin' a shotgun dead off the rack
You ain't gonna find nothin' down here friend
Except seeds blowin' up the highway in the south wind
Movin' on movin' on it's gone gone it's all gone
Saturday, January 14, 2006
GOP Chat Room Rules
In my spare time, I visit Yahoo's political chatrooms. Its a great way to connect with like-minded people who are interested in social justice. I have met some wonderful people in these rooms and have forged important alliances. Along with that great benefit, come the Trolls. The trolls who visit the political chatrooms seem to have no grasp of the political theories that have helped America survive over these last two centuries. They support the neoconservative agenda, and want to rob Americans of their civil liberties.
The trolls all say the same things. After a while it became clear that they had a script from which they were working. It also seemed that since they were online so much, with the same dead arguments, that they must be getting paid.
Turns out that both speculations were true! A chatroom member went to a right-wing religious event and got a copy of the script from a Young Republican table.
He scanned it into his computer, and I copied the text verbatim, misspellings and all.
Here is it!
GOP Public Forum & Chat Room Handbook
Forward
Hello my young republican friend. You are apart of a breed of Patriotic Americans that will shape and mold the mighty GOP party. In today's times public forums and chat rooms have became the second most positive and influential place to get out the GOP platform. A few fellow young republicans have put together this little booklet as an aid to help you overcome liberal objections in a public forum or chat room. With YOUR help, we can take the USA and turn it Back into the Moral and Christian nation that God intended it to be.
Remember to check the closing message about logging and reporting any online activities. Donations will be given at random for you help getting the GOP message out.
Get the word out and also have some fun irritating some liberals. K.R.
GOP Public Forum & Chat Room Handbook
Listed here is the Rules for Public Forums and Chat room.. ..
1) CLINTON.. .... Always Blame Clinton (or anyone around him)
As a young republican you will come into contact with lost liberals that need a talking to. The chat room is a wonderful tool for this and spreading the GOP platform. This first rule is what we call a "GOLDEN RULE" The use of Clinton over and over will always frustrate a liberal. You may be in the wrong on the topic at hand but remember to ALWAYS use Clinton as a comeback.
2) ALIBI.. ..Always Alibi when needed.
There will come times when you are alone or out numbered in a public area or chat room. Don't sweet it! If the Clinton rule does not work, you can always ALIBI. Alibi your way out of the topic or to get out of the conversation or out of the chat room. When you do this, make sure you do not show the republicans have lost or make the party look bad. Examples: Say you lost a topic with a liberal.. ..You would go into Alibi mode. Attempt to turn the loss into a win by convincing the liberal he or she has actually lost and encourage them to try again.
3) Annoy
Always remember to annoy if possible. This not only provides fun for you but irritates a liberal to death. Examples: Liberal men hate to be called by the opposite gender. Refer to the male liberal as she or her. Liberal woman hate to be ordered around. When doing this, order the liberal women.
4) GOD (Golden Rule)
We are the GOP.. ..GODS OWN PARTY. Don't let liberals forget this! Always invoke God into anything and it usually gets the topic to change to yours. Liberals will take the bait every time.
5) Always remember to remind liberals that they are GOD LESS and Immoral at ALL COST.
6) CALL OUT ON WAR
Make sure to always call a liberal out on war issues. Remind them that the GOP is the Most Patriotic party. It is ok to wrap yourself the flag. If you have the flag symbol on your chat client, Use it.
7) ABORTION
Liberals hate abortion talk. Being a republican, it is up to US to get the liberals to understand that abortion is wrong! As a reminder, Always use key words such as the ones listed below. Remember to invoke morals and God. Keywords: Breathing, heartbeat, moving, murder and PRO-Abortion.
8) Death Penalty
The death penalty is a touchy subject. People on both sides have different views on it, but being GODS party, we have to do what he says. The bible says "An Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth." So we have to remind liberals of this. One good way to call a liberal on this one is to call them a hypocrite for being pro-choice to kill babies but anti death penalty to kill a murderer. You can use today's topics for examples.
9) GUNS
Always defend the NRA and other gun rights groups. The liberals will try to call you on this issue. Always remind them of the Second Amendment and accuse them of wanting to take your guns away even though you are not a criminal. Keep hitting the Second Amendment over and over if this subject comes up.
10) GAYS
When the topic of gays comes up always remind the liberals that GOD says it is WRONG. Never give into this argument or make any concessions. Always get your point across that gays shouldn't marry or have any rights.
11) GETTING POINT ACROSS
Although we are GODS own party, from time to time we have to do things that do not reflect ourselves. To get the point across you will have to DO ANY MEANS NESSESARY to get it across. This is a time that language or other courses of action are ok. Remember to Pray for Gods forgiveness afterwards.
12) SWAYING
Always remember to use tactics to sway the conversation or topic to make the GOP and Christians look good. Using points such as: Well you have to admit, the choice or law by the president or congress was good for both sides. Bipartisan is another good one. Gets a liberal every time.
13) BUILD YOURSELF UP
Always observe the room and take notes. The notes are your ammo to use against liberals later. You will hear about the education, backgrounds and such. Build yourself up by using some of these examples: Say you have more than one college degree and that makes you smarter or more qualified on the subject of topic.; Claim to have money, always more than any liberal.; Claim you work at a powerful job or own a company (non union of course) that made you millions.; Claim to know powerful people.; A good one is to claim you made money with stocks when the market had crashed.
14) SWAYING TO ADMIT
Always try to get a liberal to say he or she respects the office of president (unless it is a Democrat of course) . By doing this, the liberal will admit he respects the president by accident and you have them on the record now.
15) IGNORE FEATURE
We all know that if we cant be heard, we cant spread the message. If faced with the ignore feature always down play it. Use the "Freedom of Speech" has been taken away. Always claim to win if they ignore you. Lastly, tell the Liberal that they conceded to you because they used the ignore feature.
16) 911
Never let the liberals forget 911. Anytime Homeland security issues, war or terror issues always invoke this rule.
One good thing to do is get a conspiracy theory going and the liberals will fight one another. Always choose the liberal with the biggest mouth, bragger, claims to know everything to get this one started. Every chat room has one.
17) WAR ON TERROR
The war on terror is one issue the liberals like to fight about. It is not helped when the Press is making the war on terror
look bad. Always remind the liberals that the GOP government is keeping them safe and protecting their freedoms.
18) LIBERALS LOVING TERRORIST
One way to get a liberal going is to accuse them of loving terrorist. Beat it in the ground to them if you start this. A good Example is: Call them a Bin Laden lover or supporter.
19) MORE ON WAR
It is important to remind the liberals over and over again that the GOP Army is fighting the terrorist or bad guys over there and not here. If war press is bad, I would suggest not sticking around to much on this topic.
20) TROOPS
Always, Always, Always down the liberals when it comes to the troops. Call them troop haters ... Commies you name it. Most liberals are anti-war but support having a m i l i t q when the cause is on their side. So calling them troop haters will get them going every time.
21) PATRIOTISEM
One way to get a whole room of liberals going mad is to question their patriotism. While in the chat room always remember to call them un-American or unpatriotic as much as possible. Hey we can’t help it if they are not smart enough to be with us! We are the GOP and WE are the ONLY REAL AMERICANS. *note, we don't suggest doing this rule if you are in public and not in a chat room behind the screen.
22) UNIONS
Unions are bad for America. Always remember to put unions down at all cost, at all times. Unions don't create jobs, they take them away by asking for outrageous demands for workers that didn't spend a dime starting the company to begin with. Unions are the REAL reason that jobs leave and people are laid off. Go after them at all cost. Beware though, liberals WILL fight you on this one.
23) FREE TRADE
Free trade will come up very often in the public setting and chat rooms. Usually it is brought up by liberals that are pro union and when the press is giving some bad news about another company leaving the country with jobs.
You will usually get the NAFA topic on this issue. If so. Always remind the liberal that Clinton signed NAFTA into law. *Note* Be careful, this is a topic a liberal might be schooled in and have a lot of ammo on. If they mention Bush Sr. and the people surrounding him drafting the NAFTA bill.. . . . ..&11 the conversation! At all cost kill it. Leave the room if you must.
24) POLLS
As a general rule, Polls are ONLY good when the GOP numbers are positive. If liberals use poll numbers in the argument, always down play them. Always Accuse any poll not conservative to be slant or bias. Note though, if the numbers are high for our cause, issues or office holders, by all means use them.
25) REMINDERS
Another way to break the thread in a room or get under a liberals skin is to remind them they are not in control. Almost like nagging. Example: We won and you lost or We rule and you don't.
26) LIBERAL PRESS
We all know that the press has taken a curve towards the middle and the right over the last 10 years. If there is negative press on the GOP, always ACCUSE the Press of being LIBERAL. Note a good one to go after is the NY TIMES.
27) STATEMENTS
Always make your point. But if something is not going in your direction Start posting your items but refuse to list or Show your sources or links to your sources.
Always make your statement but......Do whatever it takes to make your point, but if something is not totally going your way.....here is how to get it away from you. Post your items and text but remember not to give a source or link. Alibi if ness.
28) CREDITALBE SOURCES
For good issues and support for your cause always use creditable sources. To help you here are a few to help you out. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage to name a few. If you need Christian sources use anything by Pat Robertson, James Dobson.
29) OFFER TO DEBATE
Always offer to debate just to get into the conversation. If it is not going your way in the debate if the liberal takes the challenge, Get YOUR points out and don't acknowledge theirs.
30) ECONOMY
Always point to Ronald Reagan as the source for great economic times. Always try to place Reagan on a pedestal for he is the Father of the Modern GOP party.
31) STOCK MARKET
Never admit the stock market is doing bad. When the market is doing great, credit Reagan or the Current president if he is a GOP one. One way to have fun with liberals on the Stock Market is to claim you own stocks that did great during the crashes.
32) LIBERAL VETS
Liberals are not military men, republicans are. Liberals do not understand war and how it works. So how could a
democrat be a military leader or of importance? Always go after liberal vets. Make sure to know Great republican
war leaders and push it down their throats.
33) GOP MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND
Always remind the liberals that the GOP is to thank for EVERYTHING they enjoy. All the Services, Military and Great, Strong Leadership. Don't let the liberals forget it.
34) WELFARE
Accuse ALL liberals to be on welfare. Always claim the get a check and don't deserve it. Food stamps is another good one. Let them know that the GOP is keeping their lazy asses up and they should go get a job.
35) DIEBOLD
Diebold is a great company that gives back to us. The owners of Diebold are good, God fearing republican members.
They do us and America a great service. Do NOT let liberals trash them.
36) BLACK VOTE
When election talks come up, always accuse the liberals of needing the black vote to even get anyone in office. Tell them if it wasn't for the black vote a third party would finish higher than they would.
37) JEW'S
As God fearing people, we are to defend Israel as a state. God says so! One point is to point out that most American Jews are liberals.
38) U.N.
As the Giant, Mighty and Greatest Country in the world. We DON'T need others to tell us what to do and not to do. The UN is a weak group and not even worthy of topic time if brought up. We would say change subject.
39) ENERGY & OIL
Never allow a liberal to get oil or energy in a topic. They will claim OIL is the root of all evil and the reasons for high prices. Oil and energy companies are our friends and we need to keep them protected.
40) NAMES
Always make chat nick names that will get you recognized right away. This allows you to get in then and not later.
41) WEAK DEMOCRATS
You will come upon weak liberals from time to time. These liberals may can be changed to the GOP. If done right. Take their side. Agree that the USA wants you to vote for the Lesser of two evils. Agree with them that Both Parties are bad and messing things up. Once you get them in. GO for it.
The trolls all say the same things. After a while it became clear that they had a script from which they were working. It also seemed that since they were online so much, with the same dead arguments, that they must be getting paid.
Turns out that both speculations were true! A chatroom member went to a right-wing religious event and got a copy of the script from a Young Republican table.
He scanned it into his computer, and I copied the text verbatim, misspellings and all.
Here is it!
GOP Public Forum & Chat Room Handbook
Forward
Hello my young republican friend. You are apart of a breed of Patriotic Americans that will shape and mold the mighty GOP party. In today's times public forums and chat rooms have became the second most positive and influential place to get out the GOP platform. A few fellow young republicans have put together this little booklet as an aid to help you overcome liberal objections in a public forum or chat room. With YOUR help, we can take the USA and turn it Back into the Moral and Christian nation that God intended it to be.
Remember to check the closing message about logging and reporting any online activities. Donations will be given at random for you help getting the GOP message out.
Get the word out and also have some fun irritating some liberals. K.R.
GOP Public Forum & Chat Room Handbook
Listed here is the Rules for Public Forums and Chat room.. ..
1) CLINTON.. .... Always Blame Clinton (or anyone around him)
As a young republican you will come into contact with lost liberals that need a talking to. The chat room is a wonderful tool for this and spreading the GOP platform. This first rule is what we call a "GOLDEN RULE" The use of Clinton over and over will always frustrate a liberal. You may be in the wrong on the topic at hand but remember to ALWAYS use Clinton as a comeback.
2) ALIBI.. ..Always Alibi when needed.
There will come times when you are alone or out numbered in a public area or chat room. Don't sweet it! If the Clinton rule does not work, you can always ALIBI. Alibi your way out of the topic or to get out of the conversation or out of the chat room. When you do this, make sure you do not show the republicans have lost or make the party look bad. Examples: Say you lost a topic with a liberal.. ..You would go into Alibi mode. Attempt to turn the loss into a win by convincing the liberal he or she has actually lost and encourage them to try again.
3) Annoy
Always remember to annoy if possible. This not only provides fun for you but irritates a liberal to death. Examples: Liberal men hate to be called by the opposite gender. Refer to the male liberal as she or her. Liberal woman hate to be ordered around. When doing this, order the liberal women.
4) GOD (Golden Rule)
We are the GOP.. ..GODS OWN PARTY. Don't let liberals forget this! Always invoke God into anything and it usually gets the topic to change to yours. Liberals will take the bait every time.
5) Always remember to remind liberals that they are GOD LESS and Immoral at ALL COST.
6) CALL OUT ON WAR
Make sure to always call a liberal out on war issues. Remind them that the GOP is the Most Patriotic party. It is ok to wrap yourself the flag. If you have the flag symbol on your chat client, Use it.
7) ABORTION
Liberals hate abortion talk. Being a republican, it is up to US to get the liberals to understand that abortion is wrong! As a reminder, Always use key words such as the ones listed below. Remember to invoke morals and God. Keywords: Breathing, heartbeat, moving, murder and PRO-Abortion.
8) Death Penalty
The death penalty is a touchy subject. People on both sides have different views on it, but being GODS party, we have to do what he says. The bible says "An Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth." So we have to remind liberals of this. One good way to call a liberal on this one is to call them a hypocrite for being pro-choice to kill babies but anti death penalty to kill a murderer. You can use today's topics for examples.
9) GUNS
Always defend the NRA and other gun rights groups. The liberals will try to call you on this issue. Always remind them of the Second Amendment and accuse them of wanting to take your guns away even though you are not a criminal. Keep hitting the Second Amendment over and over if this subject comes up.
10) GAYS
When the topic of gays comes up always remind the liberals that GOD says it is WRONG. Never give into this argument or make any concessions. Always get your point across that gays shouldn't marry or have any rights.
11) GETTING POINT ACROSS
Although we are GODS own party, from time to time we have to do things that do not reflect ourselves. To get the point across you will have to DO ANY MEANS NESSESARY to get it across. This is a time that language or other courses of action are ok. Remember to Pray for Gods forgiveness afterwards.
12) SWAYING
Always remember to use tactics to sway the conversation or topic to make the GOP and Christians look good. Using points such as: Well you have to admit, the choice or law by the president or congress was good for both sides. Bipartisan is another good one. Gets a liberal every time.
13) BUILD YOURSELF UP
Always observe the room and take notes. The notes are your ammo to use against liberals later. You will hear about the education, backgrounds and such. Build yourself up by using some of these examples: Say you have more than one college degree and that makes you smarter or more qualified on the subject of topic.; Claim to have money, always more than any liberal.; Claim you work at a powerful job or own a company (non union of course) that made you millions.; Claim to know powerful people.; A good one is to claim you made money with stocks when the market had crashed.
14) SWAYING TO ADMIT
Always try to get a liberal to say he or she respects the office of president (unless it is a Democrat of course) . By doing this, the liberal will admit he respects the president by accident and you have them on the record now.
15) IGNORE FEATURE
We all know that if we cant be heard, we cant spread the message. If faced with the ignore feature always down play it. Use the "Freedom of Speech" has been taken away. Always claim to win if they ignore you. Lastly, tell the Liberal that they conceded to you because they used the ignore feature.
16) 911
Never let the liberals forget 911. Anytime Homeland security issues, war or terror issues always invoke this rule.
One good thing to do is get a conspiracy theory going and the liberals will fight one another. Always choose the liberal with the biggest mouth, bragger, claims to know everything to get this one started. Every chat room has one.
17) WAR ON TERROR
The war on terror is one issue the liberals like to fight about. It is not helped when the Press is making the war on terror
look bad. Always remind the liberals that the GOP government is keeping them safe and protecting their freedoms.
18) LIBERALS LOVING TERRORIST
One way to get a liberal going is to accuse them of loving terrorist. Beat it in the ground to them if you start this. A good Example is: Call them a Bin Laden lover or supporter.
19) MORE ON WAR
It is important to remind the liberals over and over again that the GOP Army is fighting the terrorist or bad guys over there and not here. If war press is bad, I would suggest not sticking around to much on this topic.
20) TROOPS
Always, Always, Always down the liberals when it comes to the troops. Call them troop haters ... Commies you name it. Most liberals are anti-war but support having a m i l i t q when the cause is on their side. So calling them troop haters will get them going every time.
21) PATRIOTISEM
One way to get a whole room of liberals going mad is to question their patriotism. While in the chat room always remember to call them un-American or unpatriotic as much as possible. Hey we can’t help it if they are not smart enough to be with us! We are the GOP and WE are the ONLY REAL AMERICANS. *note, we don't suggest doing this rule if you are in public and not in a chat room behind the screen.
22) UNIONS
Unions are bad for America. Always remember to put unions down at all cost, at all times. Unions don't create jobs, they take them away by asking for outrageous demands for workers that didn't spend a dime starting the company to begin with. Unions are the REAL reason that jobs leave and people are laid off. Go after them at all cost. Beware though, liberals WILL fight you on this one.
23) FREE TRADE
Free trade will come up very often in the public setting and chat rooms. Usually it is brought up by liberals that are pro union and when the press is giving some bad news about another company leaving the country with jobs.
You will usually get the NAFA topic on this issue. If so. Always remind the liberal that Clinton signed NAFTA into law. *Note* Be careful, this is a topic a liberal might be schooled in and have a lot of ammo on. If they mention Bush Sr. and the people surrounding him drafting the NAFTA bill.. . . . ..&11 the conversation! At all cost kill it. Leave the room if you must.
24) POLLS
As a general rule, Polls are ONLY good when the GOP numbers are positive. If liberals use poll numbers in the argument, always down play them. Always Accuse any poll not conservative to be slant or bias. Note though, if the numbers are high for our cause, issues or office holders, by all means use them.
25) REMINDERS
Another way to break the thread in a room or get under a liberals skin is to remind them they are not in control. Almost like nagging. Example: We won and you lost or We rule and you don't.
26) LIBERAL PRESS
We all know that the press has taken a curve towards the middle and the right over the last 10 years. If there is negative press on the GOP, always ACCUSE the Press of being LIBERAL. Note a good one to go after is the NY TIMES.
27) STATEMENTS
Always make your point. But if something is not going in your direction Start posting your items but refuse to list or Show your sources or links to your sources.
Always make your statement but......Do whatever it takes to make your point, but if something is not totally going your way.....here is how to get it away from you. Post your items and text but remember not to give a source or link. Alibi if ness.
28) CREDITALBE SOURCES
For good issues and support for your cause always use creditable sources. To help you here are a few to help you out. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage to name a few. If you need Christian sources use anything by Pat Robertson, James Dobson.
29) OFFER TO DEBATE
Always offer to debate just to get into the conversation. If it is not going your way in the debate if the liberal takes the challenge, Get YOUR points out and don't acknowledge theirs.
30) ECONOMY
Always point to Ronald Reagan as the source for great economic times. Always try to place Reagan on a pedestal for he is the Father of the Modern GOP party.
31) STOCK MARKET
Never admit the stock market is doing bad. When the market is doing great, credit Reagan or the Current president if he is a GOP one. One way to have fun with liberals on the Stock Market is to claim you own stocks that did great during the crashes.
32) LIBERAL VETS
Liberals are not military men, republicans are. Liberals do not understand war and how it works. So how could a
democrat be a military leader or of importance? Always go after liberal vets. Make sure to know Great republican
war leaders and push it down their throats.
33) GOP MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND
Always remind the liberals that the GOP is to thank for EVERYTHING they enjoy. All the Services, Military and Great, Strong Leadership. Don't let the liberals forget it.
34) WELFARE
Accuse ALL liberals to be on welfare. Always claim the get a check and don't deserve it. Food stamps is another good one. Let them know that the GOP is keeping their lazy asses up and they should go get a job.
35) DIEBOLD
Diebold is a great company that gives back to us. The owners of Diebold are good, God fearing republican members.
They do us and America a great service. Do NOT let liberals trash them.
36) BLACK VOTE
When election talks come up, always accuse the liberals of needing the black vote to even get anyone in office. Tell them if it wasn't for the black vote a third party would finish higher than they would.
37) JEW'S
As God fearing people, we are to defend Israel as a state. God says so! One point is to point out that most American Jews are liberals.
38) U.N.
As the Giant, Mighty and Greatest Country in the world. We DON'T need others to tell us what to do and not to do. The UN is a weak group and not even worthy of topic time if brought up. We would say change subject.
39) ENERGY & OIL
Never allow a liberal to get oil or energy in a topic. They will claim OIL is the root of all evil and the reasons for high prices. Oil and energy companies are our friends and we need to keep them protected.
40) NAMES
Always make chat nick names that will get you recognized right away. This allows you to get in then and not later.
41) WEAK DEMOCRATS
You will come upon weak liberals from time to time. These liberals may can be changed to the GOP. If done right. Take their side. Agree that the USA wants you to vote for the Lesser of two evils. Agree with them that Both Parties are bad and messing things up. Once you get them in. GO for it.
Monday, December 19, 2005
On Charity-Super Rich Not So Generous
Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous
David Cay Johnston, a reporter for the New York Times, has been reporting on income taxes and related issues for decades. Here is his latest. This article points out why we cannot rely on "trickle down" charity to take care of the needs of the most vulnerable of us.
The tax nuts, those who want to abolish all taxes, claim that the needs of the less fortunate will be taken care of by the private charity sector. That has never been the case, and it is not the case now, even in these days of spendthrift giveways to the ultra rich on the part of a government gone insane. Charitable giving has actually dropped as a percentage of income among the rich since the tax cuts took effect.
The proliferation of non-profit organizations is the privatization of what should be government functions. I am not complaining, mind you, that we have non-profit organizations, but rather, that the government uses them to shirk its ministerial duties.
I strongly recommend a sober and well-researched book by Johnston: Perfectly Legal.
December 19, 2005
Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Working-age Americans who make $50,000 to $100,000 a year are two to six times more generous in the share of their investment assets that they give to charity than those Americans who make more than $10 million, a pioneering study of federal tax data shows.
The least generous of all working-age Americans in 2003, the latest year for which Internal Revenue Service data is available, were among the young and prosperous - the 285 taxpayers age 35 and under who made more than $10 million - and the 18,600 taxpayers making $500,000 to $1 million. The top group had on average $101 million of investment assets while the other group had on average $2.4 million of investment assets.
On average these two groups made charitable gifts equal to 0.4 percent of their assets, while people the same age who made $50,000 to $100,000 gave gifts equal to more than 2.5 percent of their investment assets, six times that of their far wealthier peers.
Go to Original--Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous
David Cay Johnston, a reporter for the New York Times, has been reporting on income taxes and related issues for decades. Here is his latest. This article points out why we cannot rely on "trickle down" charity to take care of the needs of the most vulnerable of us.
The tax nuts, those who want to abolish all taxes, claim that the needs of the less fortunate will be taken care of by the private charity sector. That has never been the case, and it is not the case now, even in these days of spendthrift giveways to the ultra rich on the part of a government gone insane. Charitable giving has actually dropped as a percentage of income among the rich since the tax cuts took effect.
The proliferation of non-profit organizations is the privatization of what should be government functions. I am not complaining, mind you, that we have non-profit organizations, but rather, that the government uses them to shirk its ministerial duties.
I strongly recommend a sober and well-researched book by Johnston: Perfectly Legal.
December 19, 2005
Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Working-age Americans who make $50,000 to $100,000 a year are two to six times more generous in the share of their investment assets that they give to charity than those Americans who make more than $10 million, a pioneering study of federal tax data shows.
The least generous of all working-age Americans in 2003, the latest year for which Internal Revenue Service data is available, were among the young and prosperous - the 285 taxpayers age 35 and under who made more than $10 million - and the 18,600 taxpayers making $500,000 to $1 million. The top group had on average $101 million of investment assets while the other group had on average $2.4 million of investment assets.
On average these two groups made charitable gifts equal to 0.4 percent of their assets, while people the same age who made $50,000 to $100,000 gave gifts equal to more than 2.5 percent of their investment assets, six times that of their far wealthier peers.
Go to Original--Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous
Monday, December 12, 2005
Jesus welcome in the public square, but not Calvin Klein
Go to article
Jennifer Moses writes a good commentary on the "religion in public" issue. However, as a left wing radical grandmother of three, I have to say this. Equating liberalism with the inability to comprehend why people are horrified to see 16 year olds in CK undies on billboards across America, and hear music that incites violence and sexual license is "radically" off the mark.
Liberals do not find this sort of thing acceptable. It coarsens the culture and turns children into base consumers of titillation that leads them to purchase products that will help them realize some advertising executive's idea of fantasy. The only people who find this commercialization of sex and violence reasonable are corporations. They increase their market shares by shoving these messages down the throats of our children.
Liberalism, rather, is the ability to appreciate and tolerate other lifestyles without passing judgment. It is NOT a free ticket to display coarsely sensual or degrading material in the public domain.
I think that if you polled a hundred people in San Francisco or St. Louis, you would come up with the same answer if you asked this question: do you want to see billboards with pictures of 20 foot high people clad in flimsy panties, you would get the same answer: NO!
In other words, if you want to stop this sort of cheapening and demeaning imagery in the public square, limit corporate free speech. Jesus would approve and so would I.
» fact's blog login or register to post comments
Jennifer Moses writes a good commentary on the "religion in public" issue. However, as a left wing radical grandmother of three, I have to say this. Equating liberalism with the inability to comprehend why people are horrified to see 16 year olds in CK undies on billboards across America, and hear music that incites violence and sexual license is "radically" off the mark.
Liberals do not find this sort of thing acceptable. It coarsens the culture and turns children into base consumers of titillation that leads them to purchase products that will help them realize some advertising executive's idea of fantasy. The only people who find this commercialization of sex and violence reasonable are corporations. They increase their market shares by shoving these messages down the throats of our children.
Liberalism, rather, is the ability to appreciate and tolerate other lifestyles without passing judgment. It is NOT a free ticket to display coarsely sensual or degrading material in the public domain.
I think that if you polled a hundred people in San Francisco or St. Louis, you would come up with the same answer if you asked this question: do you want to see billboards with pictures of 20 foot high people clad in flimsy panties, you would get the same answer: NO!
In other words, if you want to stop this sort of cheapening and demeaning imagery in the public square, limit corporate free speech. Jesus would approve and so would I.
» fact's blog login or register to post comments
Better Off Without Religious Fundamentalism
ZNet Commentary
Better Off Without Him October 23, 2005
By George Monbiot
Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for athiests to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up - whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes - do so in the name of God. In India, we see men whose religion forbids them to harm insects setting light to human beings.
A 14th-century Pope with a 21st-century communications network sustains his church's mission of persecuting gays and denying women ownership of their bodies. Bishops and rabbis in Britain have just united in the cause of prolonging human suffering, by opposing the legalisation of assisted suicide. We know that the most dangerous human trait is an absence of self-doubt, and that self-doubt is more likely to be absent from the mind of the believer than the infidel.
But we also know that few religious governments have committed atrocities on the scale of Hitler's, Mao's or Stalin's (though, given their more limited means, the Spanish and British in the Americas, the British, Germans and Belgians in Africa and the British in Australia and India could be said to have done their best).
It is hard to dismiss Dostoyevsky's suspicion that "if God does not exist, then everything is permissible."(1) Nor can we wholly disagree with the new Pope when he warns that "we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which ... has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."(2)
(We must trust, of course, that a man who has spent his life campaigning to become God's go-between, and who now believes he is infallible, is immune to such impulses).
The creationists in the United States might be as mad as a box of ferrets, but what they claim to fear is the question which troubles almost everyone who has stopped to think about it: if our lives have no purpose, why should we care about other people's?
We know too, as Roy Hattersley argued in the Guardian last month, that "good works ... are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists. The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand."(3)
The only two heroes I have met are both Catholic missionaries. Joe Haas, an Austrian I stayed with in the swamp forests of West Papua, had spent his life acting as a human shield for the indigenous people of Indonesia: every few months soldiers threatened to kill him when he prevented them from murdering his parishioners and grabbing their land.(4)
Frei Adolfo, the German I met in the savannahs of north-eastern Brazil, thought, when I first knocked on his door, that I was a gunman the ranchers had sent for him. Yet still he opened it. With the other liberation theologists in the Catholic church, he offered the only consistent support to the peasants being attacked by landowners and the government.(5) If they did not believe in God, these men would never have taken such risks for other people.
Remarkably, no one, until now, has attempted systematically to answer the question with which this column began. But in the current edition of the Journal of Religion and Society, a researcher called Gregory Paul tests the hypothesis propounded by evangelists in the Bush administration, that religion is associated with lower rates of "lethal violence, suicide, non-monogamous sexual activity and abortion". He compared data from 18 developed democracies, and discovered that the Christian fundamentalists couldn't have got it more wrong.(6)
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion ... None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction."
Within the United States "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the Northeast where ... secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms".
Three sets of findings stand out: the associations between religion - especially absolute belief - and juvenile mortality, venereal disease and adolescent abortion.
Paul's graphs show far higher rates of death among the under-5s in Portugal, the US and Ireland and put the US - the most religious country in his survey - in a league of its own for gonorrhea and syphilis. Strangest of all for those who believe that Christian societies are "pro-life" is the finding that "increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator ... Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore contradicted by the quantitative data."(7)
These findings appear to match the studies of teenage pregnancy I've read. The rich countries in which sexual abstinence campaigns, generally inspired by religious belief, are strongest have the highest early pregnancy rates(8). The US is the only rich nation with teenage pregnancy levels comparable to those of developing nations: it has a worse record than India, the Philippines and Rwanda(9). Because they're poorly educated about sex and in denial about what they're doing (and so less likely to use contraceptives), boys who participate in abstinence programmes are more likely to get their partners pregnant than those who don't(10).
Is it fair to blame all this on religion? While the rankings cannot reflect national poverty - the US has the world's 4th highest GDP per head, Ireland the 8th - the nations which do well in Paul's study also have higher levels of social spending and distribution than those which do badly. Is this a cause or an association? In other words, are religious societies less likely to distribute wealth than secular ones?
In the US, where governments are still guided by the Puritan notions that money is a sign that you've been chosen by God and poverty is a mark of moral weakness, Christian belief seems to be at odds with the dispersal of wealth. But the UK - one of the most secular societies in Paul's study - is also one of the least inclusive, and does rather worse in his charts than countries with similar levels of religion. The broad trend, however, looks clear: "the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have ... come closest to achieving practical "cultures of life"."(11)
I don't know whether these findings can be extrapolated to other countries and other issues: the study doesn't look, for example, at whether religious belief is associated with a nation's preparedness to go to war (though I think we could hazard a pretty good guess) or whether religious countries in the poor world are more violent and have weaker cultures of life than secular ones. Nor - because, with the exception of Japan, the countries in his study are predominantly Christian or post-Christian - is it clear whether there's an association between social dysfunction and religion in general or simply between social dysfunction and Christianity.
But if we are to accept the findings of this one - and so far only - wide survey of belief and human welfare, the message to those who claim in any sense to be pro-life is unequivocal. If you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1879. The Brothers Karamazov.
2. Joseph Ratzinger, 18th April 2005. Homily. Vatican Radio.
http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?id=33987.
3. Roy Hattersley, 12th September 2005. Faith does breed charity. The Guardian.
4. See George Monbiot 1989, Poisoned Arrows: an investigative journey through Indonesia. Republished 2004 by Green Books.
5. George Monbiot, 1991. Amazon Watershed. Michael Joseph, London.
6. Gregory S. Paul, 2005. Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. The Journal of Religion and Society, Volume 7.
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
7. ibid.
8. Figures from the UNFPA's State of World Population report 2003 for births per 1000 women between 15 and 19 years old are presented in graph and graphic form at:
http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=127&country=GB#rowGB
9. ibid.
10. Alba DiCenso et al, 15th June 2002. Interventions To Reduce Unintended Pregnancies Among Adolescents: Systematic Review Of Randomised Controlled Trials. British Medical Journal 324:1426.
11. Gregory S. Paul, ibid.
================================================
Democracy in the Balance, Sojourners Magazine/August 2004
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0408&article=040810
by Bill Moyers
How do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state?
I trace my spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England named Thomas Helwys who believed that God, and not the King, was Lord of conscience. In 1612 Roman Catholics were the embattled target of the Crown and Thomas Helwys, the Baptist, came to their defense with the first tract in English demanding full religious liberty. Here's what he said "Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic] consciences than ours, and that is none at all. …For men's religion is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer it; neither may the King be judge betwixt God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatever. It appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure."
The king was the good King James I - yes, that King James, as in the King James Bible. Challenges to his authority did not cause his head to rest easily on his pillow, so James had Thomas Helwys thrown into prison, where he died.
Thomas Helwys was not the first or last dissenter to pay the supreme price for conscience. While we are not called upon in America today to make a similar sacrifice, we are in need of his generous vision of religious freedom. We are heading into a new religious landscape. For most of our history our religious discourse was dominated by white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage, people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of faith, race, and gender, rarely reached the mainstream. It's different now. Immigration has added more than 30 million people to our population since the late 1960s. The American gene pool is mutating into one in which people like me will be a minority within half a century.
America is being re-created right before our eyes. The world keeps moving to America, bringing new stories from the four corners of the globe. Gerard Bruns calls it a "contest of narratives" competing to shape a new American drama.
The old story had a paradox at its core. In no small part because of Baptists like Thomas Helwys and other "freethinkers," the men who framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance in a secular republic. The state was not to choose sides among competing claims of faith. So they embodied freedom of religion in the First Amendment. Another person's belief, said Thomas Jefferson, "neither picks my pocket not breaks my bones." It was a noble sentiment often breached in practice. The Indians who lived here first had more than their pockets picked; the Africans brought here forcibly against their will had more than their bones broken. Even when most Americans claimed a Protestant heritage and practically everyone looked alike, we often failed the tolerance test; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons had to struggle to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant mix-master of American assimilation.
So our troubled past with tolerance requires us to ask how, in this new era when we are looking even less and less alike, are we to avoid the intolerance, the chauvinism, the fanaticism, the bitter fruits that mark the long history of world religions when they jostle each other in busy, crowded streets?
It is no rhetorical question. My friend Elaine Pagels, the noted scholar of religion, says "There's practically no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the other's choice." You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one's own kin, one's own clan, one's own country, and one's own church.
These ties that bind are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also be twisted into a noose.
Religion has a healing side, but it also has a killing side. In the opening chapter of Genesis - the founding document of three great faiths - the first murder rises from a religious act. You know the story: Adam and Eve become the first parents to discover what it means to raise Cain. God plays favorites and chooses Abel's offering over Cain. Cain is so jealous he strikes out at his brother and kills him. Sibling rivalry for God's favor leads to violence and ends in death.
Once this pattern is established, it's played out in the story of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and down through the centuries in generation after generation of conflict between Muslims and Jews, Jews and Christians, Christians and Muslims, so that the red thread of religiously spilled blood runs directly from East of Eden to Bosnia, Beirut, Belfast, and Baghdad.
In our time alone the litany is horrendous. I keep a file marked "Holy War."
It bulges with stories of Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict. Of teenage girls in Algeria shot in the face for not wearing a veil. Of professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female students in the same classroom.
Of the fanatical Jewish doctor with a machine gun mowing down 30 praying Muslims in a mosque. Of Muslim suicide bombers bent on the obliteration of Jews. Of the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced to the world that "Everything I did, I did for the glory of God." Of Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of Christians and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each another in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, groups calling themselves the Christian Identity Movement and the Christian Patriot League arm themselves, and Christians intoxicated with the delusional doctrine of two 19th-century preachers not only await the rapture but believe they have an obligation to get involved politically to hasten the divine scenario for the Apocalypse that will bring an end to the world.
Sadly, Christians, too, can invoke God for the purpose of waging religious war.
"Onward Christian Soldiers" is back in vogue and the 2lst century version of the Crusades has taken on aspects of the righteous ferocity that marked its predecessors. "To be furious in religion," said the Quaker William Penn, "is to be furiously irreligious."
THIS IS A TIME of testing - for people of faith and for people who believe in democracy. How do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy against the contagion of a triumphalist theology in the service of an imperial state? At stake is America's role in the world. At stake is the very character of the American Experiment - whether "we, the people" is the political incarnation of a spiritual truth - one nation, indivisible - or a stupendous fraud.
There are two Americas today. You could see this division in a little-noticed action this spring in the House of Representatives. Republicans in the House approved new tax credits for the children of families earning as much as $309,000 a year - families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts - while doing next to nothing for those at the low end of the income scale. This, said The Washington Post in an editorial called "Leave No Rich Child Behind," is "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy.
You'd think they'd be embarrassed but they're not."
Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did 20 years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours just to stay in place; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans - eight out of 10 of them in working families -
are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.
Nor is the political class embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years - the worst inequality among all Western nations. They don't seem to have noticed that we have been experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said that single jobless mothers are down there at the bottom. For years it was said that work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it - among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. These are the people our political and business class expects to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.
For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75-fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society was benefiting proportionately and equality was growing.
That's not the case. As an organization called The Commonwealth Foundation Center for the Renewal of American Democracy sets forth in well-documented research, working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
And household economics "is not the only area where inequality is growing in America." We are also losing the historic balance between wealth and commonwealth. The report goes on to describe "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." That drive is succeeding, with drastic consequences for an equitable access to and control of public resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From land, water, and other natural resources to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.
And what is driving this shift? Contrary to what you learned in civics class in high school, it is not the so-called "democratic debate." That is merely a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on - the none-too-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power so that you can divide up the spoils.
If you want to know what's changing America, follow the money.
Veteran Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years - in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here - has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly 20 years for the Wall Street Journal, put it even more strongly "[Campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives."
It is widely accepted in Washington today that there is nothing wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. But of course there is. Money has democracy in a stranglehold and is suffocating it. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the Religious Right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."
THAT'S THE SHAME of politics today. The consequences: "When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price, and most of them never see it coming," according to Time magazine. Time concludes that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."
That's why so many people are turned off by politics. It's why we can't put things right. And it's wrong. Hear the great Justice Learned Hand on this "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: ‘Thou shalt not ration justice.'" He got it right: The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars, more clothes, or more vacations than anyone else. But they don't have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
I know: This sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by a wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. By the end of the '70s, corporate America had begun a stealthy assault on the rest of our society and the principles of our democracy. Looking backward, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time.
What has been happening to the middle and working classes is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual collusion, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that has made an idol of wealth and power, and a host of political decisions favoring the powerful monied interests who were determined to get back the privileges they had lost with the Depression and the New Deal. They set out to trash the social contract; to cut workforces and their wages; to scour the globe in search of cheap labor; and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less….It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks - the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute - that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.
To put political muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post, one of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the Religious Right - Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who happily contrived a cultural war as a smokescreen to hide the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the war.
And they won. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in America and the savviest investor of them all, put it this way: "If there was a class war, my class won." Well, there was, Mr. Buffett, and as a recent headline in The Washington Post proclaimed: ‘Business Wins With Bush."
Look at the spoils of victory: Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts. More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest 1 percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services and raise taxes on middle class working America.
Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next 10 years. These deficits have been part of their strategy. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us, when he predicted that President Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions.
President Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much. Now the leading right-wing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" - with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the U.S. government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.
Take note: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and Religious Right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement; and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.
And, yes, they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of producing a news magazine I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't have made up the things that this crew in Washington have been saying. The president's chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic Advisers reports that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers. The president's labor secretary says it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter." And the president's Federal Reserve chair says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in Social Security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway.
You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.
But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans and the poor - and to the workings of American democracy - is no laughing matter. It calls for righteous indignation and action. Otherwise our democracy will degenerate into a shell of itself in which the privileged and the powerful sustain their own way of life at the expense of others and the United States becomes another Latin America with a small crust of the rich at the top governing a nation of serfs.
OVER THE PAST few years, as the poor got poorer, the health care crisis worsened, wealth and media became more and more concentrated, and our political system was bought out from under us, prophetic Christianity lost its voice.
The Religious Right drowned everyone else out.
And they hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor." The very Jesus who told 5,000 hungry people that all of you will be fed, not just some of you. The very Jesus who challenged the religious orthodoxy of the day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath, who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast, who raised the status of women and treated even the tax collector like a child of God. The very Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple. This Jesus has been hijacked and turned into a guardian of privilege instead of a champion of the dispossessed. Hijacked, he was made over into a militarist, hedonist, and lobbyist, sent prowling the halls of Congress in Guccis, seeking tax breaks and loopholes for the powerful, costly new weapon systems that don't work, and punitive public policies.
Let's get Jesus back. The Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight-hour work day.
Let's get back the Jesus who caused Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop.
The Jesus who called a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor - 10 years before the New Deal. The Jesus in whose name Dorothy Day challenged the church to march alongside auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. The Jesus who led Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.
That Jesus has been scourged by his own followers, dragged through the streets by pious crowds, and crucified on a cross of privilege. Mel Gibson missed that. He missed the resurrection - the spiritual awakening that followed the death of Jesus. He missed Pentecost.
Our times cry out for a new politics of justice. This is no partisan issue.
It doesn't matter if you're a liberal or a conservative, Jesus is both and neither. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican, Jesus is both and neither. We need a faith that takes on the corruption of both parties. We need a faith that challenges complacency of all power. If you're a Democrat, shake them up. If you're a Republican, shame them. Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. We must drive them from the temples of democracy. Let's get Jesus back.
But let's do it in love. I know it can sound banal and facile to say this.
The word "love" gets thrown around too casually these days. And brute reality can mock the whole idea of loving one another. We're still living in the shadow of Dachau and Buchenwald. The smoke still rises above Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and East Timor. The walls of Abu Ghraib still shriek of pain. What has love done? Where is there any real milk of human kindness?
But the love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book of essays Justice and Mercy, where he writes: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind."
What I'm talking about will be hard, devoid of sentiment and practical as nails. But love is action, not sentiment. When the church was young and fair, and people passed by her doors, they did not comment on the difference or the doctrines. Those stern and taciturn pagans said of the Christians: "How they love one another!" It started that way soon after the death of Jesus. His disciple Peter said to the first churches, "Above all things, have unfailing love toward one another." I looked in my old Greek concordance the other day.
That word "unfailing" would be more accurately rendered "intense."
Glenn Tinder reminds us that none are good but all are sacred. I want to think this is what the founders meant when they included the not-so-self-evident assertion that "all men are created equal." Truly life is not fair and it is never equal. But I believe the founders were speaking a powerful spiritual truth that is the heart of our hope for this country. They saw America as a great promise - and it is.
But America is a broken promise, and we are called to do what we can to fix it - to get America back on the track. St. Augustine shows us how: "One loving soul sets another on fire." But to move beyond sentimentality, what begins in love must lead on to justice. We are called to the fight of our lives.
Bill Moyers, host of PBS' Now with Bill Moyers, has received more than 30 Emmy Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism. Moyers was senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News and Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. This article is adapted from Moyers' keynote address ( available by clicking here) at Call to Renewal's Pentecost 2004 conference this May in Washington, D.C.
Better Off Without Him October 23, 2005
By George Monbiot
Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for athiests to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up - whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes - do so in the name of God. In India, we see men whose religion forbids them to harm insects setting light to human beings.
A 14th-century Pope with a 21st-century communications network sustains his church's mission of persecuting gays and denying women ownership of their bodies. Bishops and rabbis in Britain have just united in the cause of prolonging human suffering, by opposing the legalisation of assisted suicide. We know that the most dangerous human trait is an absence of self-doubt, and that self-doubt is more likely to be absent from the mind of the believer than the infidel.
But we also know that few religious governments have committed atrocities on the scale of Hitler's, Mao's or Stalin's (though, given their more limited means, the Spanish and British in the Americas, the British, Germans and Belgians in Africa and the British in Australia and India could be said to have done their best).
It is hard to dismiss Dostoyevsky's suspicion that "if God does not exist, then everything is permissible."(1) Nor can we wholly disagree with the new Pope when he warns that "we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which ... has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."(2)
(We must trust, of course, that a man who has spent his life campaigning to become God's go-between, and who now believes he is infallible, is immune to such impulses).
The creationists in the United States might be as mad as a box of ferrets, but what they claim to fear is the question which troubles almost everyone who has stopped to think about it: if our lives have no purpose, why should we care about other people's?
We know too, as Roy Hattersley argued in the Guardian last month, that "good works ... are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists. The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand."(3)
The only two heroes I have met are both Catholic missionaries. Joe Haas, an Austrian I stayed with in the swamp forests of West Papua, had spent his life acting as a human shield for the indigenous people of Indonesia: every few months soldiers threatened to kill him when he prevented them from murdering his parishioners and grabbing their land.(4)
Frei Adolfo, the German I met in the savannahs of north-eastern Brazil, thought, when I first knocked on his door, that I was a gunman the ranchers had sent for him. Yet still he opened it. With the other liberation theologists in the Catholic church, he offered the only consistent support to the peasants being attacked by landowners and the government.(5) If they did not believe in God, these men would never have taken such risks for other people.
Remarkably, no one, until now, has attempted systematically to answer the question with which this column began. But in the current edition of the Journal of Religion and Society, a researcher called Gregory Paul tests the hypothesis propounded by evangelists in the Bush administration, that religion is associated with lower rates of "lethal violence, suicide, non-monogamous sexual activity and abortion". He compared data from 18 developed democracies, and discovered that the Christian fundamentalists couldn't have got it more wrong.(6)
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion ... None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction."
Within the United States "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the Northeast where ... secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms".
Three sets of findings stand out: the associations between religion - especially absolute belief - and juvenile mortality, venereal disease and adolescent abortion.
Paul's graphs show far higher rates of death among the under-5s in Portugal, the US and Ireland and put the US - the most religious country in his survey - in a league of its own for gonorrhea and syphilis. Strangest of all for those who believe that Christian societies are "pro-life" is the finding that "increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator ... Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore contradicted by the quantitative data."(7)
These findings appear to match the studies of teenage pregnancy I've read. The rich countries in which sexual abstinence campaigns, generally inspired by religious belief, are strongest have the highest early pregnancy rates(8). The US is the only rich nation with teenage pregnancy levels comparable to those of developing nations: it has a worse record than India, the Philippines and Rwanda(9). Because they're poorly educated about sex and in denial about what they're doing (and so less likely to use contraceptives), boys who participate in abstinence programmes are more likely to get their partners pregnant than those who don't(10).
Is it fair to blame all this on religion? While the rankings cannot reflect national poverty - the US has the world's 4th highest GDP per head, Ireland the 8th - the nations which do well in Paul's study also have higher levels of social spending and distribution than those which do badly. Is this a cause or an association? In other words, are religious societies less likely to distribute wealth than secular ones?
In the US, where governments are still guided by the Puritan notions that money is a sign that you've been chosen by God and poverty is a mark of moral weakness, Christian belief seems to be at odds with the dispersal of wealth. But the UK - one of the most secular societies in Paul's study - is also one of the least inclusive, and does rather worse in his charts than countries with similar levels of religion. The broad trend, however, looks clear: "the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have ... come closest to achieving practical "cultures of life"."(11)
I don't know whether these findings can be extrapolated to other countries and other issues: the study doesn't look, for example, at whether religious belief is associated with a nation's preparedness to go to war (though I think we could hazard a pretty good guess) or whether religious countries in the poor world are more violent and have weaker cultures of life than secular ones. Nor - because, with the exception of Japan, the countries in his study are predominantly Christian or post-Christian - is it clear whether there's an association between social dysfunction and religion in general or simply between social dysfunction and Christianity.
But if we are to accept the findings of this one - and so far only - wide survey of belief and human welfare, the message to those who claim in any sense to be pro-life is unequivocal. If you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1879. The Brothers Karamazov.
2. Joseph Ratzinger, 18th April 2005. Homily. Vatican Radio.
http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?id=33987.
3. Roy Hattersley, 12th September 2005. Faith does breed charity. The Guardian.
4. See George Monbiot 1989, Poisoned Arrows: an investigative journey through Indonesia. Republished 2004 by Green Books.
5. George Monbiot, 1991. Amazon Watershed. Michael Joseph, London.
6. Gregory S. Paul, 2005. Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. The Journal of Religion and Society, Volume 7.
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
7. ibid.
8. Figures from the UNFPA's State of World Population report 2003 for births per 1000 women between 15 and 19 years old are presented in graph and graphic form at:
http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=127&country=GB#rowGB
9. ibid.
10. Alba DiCenso et al, 15th June 2002. Interventions To Reduce Unintended Pregnancies Among Adolescents: Systematic Review Of Randomised Controlled Trials. British Medical Journal 324:1426.
11. Gregory S. Paul, ibid.
================================================
Democracy in the Balance, Sojourners Magazine/August 2004
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0408&article=040810
by Bill Moyers
How do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state?
I trace my spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England named Thomas Helwys who believed that God, and not the King, was Lord of conscience. In 1612 Roman Catholics were the embattled target of the Crown and Thomas Helwys, the Baptist, came to their defense with the first tract in English demanding full religious liberty. Here's what he said "Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic] consciences than ours, and that is none at all. …For men's religion is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer it; neither may the King be judge betwixt God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatever. It appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure."
The king was the good King James I - yes, that King James, as in the King James Bible. Challenges to his authority did not cause his head to rest easily on his pillow, so James had Thomas Helwys thrown into prison, where he died.
Thomas Helwys was not the first or last dissenter to pay the supreme price for conscience. While we are not called upon in America today to make a similar sacrifice, we are in need of his generous vision of religious freedom. We are heading into a new religious landscape. For most of our history our religious discourse was dominated by white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage, people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of faith, race, and gender, rarely reached the mainstream. It's different now. Immigration has added more than 30 million people to our population since the late 1960s. The American gene pool is mutating into one in which people like me will be a minority within half a century.
America is being re-created right before our eyes. The world keeps moving to America, bringing new stories from the four corners of the globe. Gerard Bruns calls it a "contest of narratives" competing to shape a new American drama.
The old story had a paradox at its core. In no small part because of Baptists like Thomas Helwys and other "freethinkers," the men who framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance in a secular republic. The state was not to choose sides among competing claims of faith. So they embodied freedom of religion in the First Amendment. Another person's belief, said Thomas Jefferson, "neither picks my pocket not breaks my bones." It was a noble sentiment often breached in practice. The Indians who lived here first had more than their pockets picked; the Africans brought here forcibly against their will had more than their bones broken. Even when most Americans claimed a Protestant heritage and practically everyone looked alike, we often failed the tolerance test; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons had to struggle to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant mix-master of American assimilation.
So our troubled past with tolerance requires us to ask how, in this new era when we are looking even less and less alike, are we to avoid the intolerance, the chauvinism, the fanaticism, the bitter fruits that mark the long history of world religions when they jostle each other in busy, crowded streets?
It is no rhetorical question. My friend Elaine Pagels, the noted scholar of religion, says "There's practically no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the other's choice." You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one's own kin, one's own clan, one's own country, and one's own church.
These ties that bind are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also be twisted into a noose.
Religion has a healing side, but it also has a killing side. In the opening chapter of Genesis - the founding document of three great faiths - the first murder rises from a religious act. You know the story: Adam and Eve become the first parents to discover what it means to raise Cain. God plays favorites and chooses Abel's offering over Cain. Cain is so jealous he strikes out at his brother and kills him. Sibling rivalry for God's favor leads to violence and ends in death.
Once this pattern is established, it's played out in the story of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and down through the centuries in generation after generation of conflict between Muslims and Jews, Jews and Christians, Christians and Muslims, so that the red thread of religiously spilled blood runs directly from East of Eden to Bosnia, Beirut, Belfast, and Baghdad.
In our time alone the litany is horrendous. I keep a file marked "Holy War."
It bulges with stories of Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict. Of teenage girls in Algeria shot in the face for not wearing a veil. Of professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female students in the same classroom.
Of the fanatical Jewish doctor with a machine gun mowing down 30 praying Muslims in a mosque. Of Muslim suicide bombers bent on the obliteration of Jews. Of the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced to the world that "Everything I did, I did for the glory of God." Of Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of Christians and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each another in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, groups calling themselves the Christian Identity Movement and the Christian Patriot League arm themselves, and Christians intoxicated with the delusional doctrine of two 19th-century preachers not only await the rapture but believe they have an obligation to get involved politically to hasten the divine scenario for the Apocalypse that will bring an end to the world.
Sadly, Christians, too, can invoke God for the purpose of waging religious war.
"Onward Christian Soldiers" is back in vogue and the 2lst century version of the Crusades has taken on aspects of the righteous ferocity that marked its predecessors. "To be furious in religion," said the Quaker William Penn, "is to be furiously irreligious."
THIS IS A TIME of testing - for people of faith and for people who believe in democracy. How do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy against the contagion of a triumphalist theology in the service of an imperial state? At stake is America's role in the world. At stake is the very character of the American Experiment - whether "we, the people" is the political incarnation of a spiritual truth - one nation, indivisible - or a stupendous fraud.
There are two Americas today. You could see this division in a little-noticed action this spring in the House of Representatives. Republicans in the House approved new tax credits for the children of families earning as much as $309,000 a year - families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts - while doing next to nothing for those at the low end of the income scale. This, said The Washington Post in an editorial called "Leave No Rich Child Behind," is "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy.
You'd think they'd be embarrassed but they're not."
Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did 20 years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours just to stay in place; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans - eight out of 10 of them in working families -
are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.
Nor is the political class embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years - the worst inequality among all Western nations. They don't seem to have noticed that we have been experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said that single jobless mothers are down there at the bottom. For years it was said that work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it - among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. These are the people our political and business class expects to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.
For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75-fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society was benefiting proportionately and equality was growing.
That's not the case. As an organization called The Commonwealth Foundation Center for the Renewal of American Democracy sets forth in well-documented research, working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
And household economics "is not the only area where inequality is growing in America." We are also losing the historic balance between wealth and commonwealth. The report goes on to describe "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." That drive is succeeding, with drastic consequences for an equitable access to and control of public resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From land, water, and other natural resources to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.
And what is driving this shift? Contrary to what you learned in civics class in high school, it is not the so-called "democratic debate." That is merely a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on - the none-too-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power so that you can divide up the spoils.
If you want to know what's changing America, follow the money.
Veteran Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years - in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here - has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly 20 years for the Wall Street Journal, put it even more strongly "[Campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives."
It is widely accepted in Washington today that there is nothing wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. But of course there is. Money has democracy in a stranglehold and is suffocating it. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the Religious Right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."
THAT'S THE SHAME of politics today. The consequences: "When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price, and most of them never see it coming," according to Time magazine. Time concludes that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."
That's why so many people are turned off by politics. It's why we can't put things right. And it's wrong. Hear the great Justice Learned Hand on this "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: ‘Thou shalt not ration justice.'" He got it right: The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars, more clothes, or more vacations than anyone else. But they don't have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
I know: This sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by a wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. By the end of the '70s, corporate America had begun a stealthy assault on the rest of our society and the principles of our democracy. Looking backward, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time.
What has been happening to the middle and working classes is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual collusion, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that has made an idol of wealth and power, and a host of political decisions favoring the powerful monied interests who were determined to get back the privileges they had lost with the Depression and the New Deal. They set out to trash the social contract; to cut workforces and their wages; to scour the globe in search of cheap labor; and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less….It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks - the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute - that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.
To put political muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post, one of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the Religious Right - Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who happily contrived a cultural war as a smokescreen to hide the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the war.
And they won. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in America and the savviest investor of them all, put it this way: "If there was a class war, my class won." Well, there was, Mr. Buffett, and as a recent headline in The Washington Post proclaimed: ‘Business Wins With Bush."
Look at the spoils of victory: Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts. More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest 1 percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services and raise taxes on middle class working America.
Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next 10 years. These deficits have been part of their strategy. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us, when he predicted that President Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions.
President Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much. Now the leading right-wing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" - with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the U.S. government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.
Take note: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and Religious Right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement; and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.
And, yes, they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of producing a news magazine I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't have made up the things that this crew in Washington have been saying. The president's chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic Advisers reports that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers. The president's labor secretary says it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter." And the president's Federal Reserve chair says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in Social Security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway.
You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.
But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans and the poor - and to the workings of American democracy - is no laughing matter. It calls for righteous indignation and action. Otherwise our democracy will degenerate into a shell of itself in which the privileged and the powerful sustain their own way of life at the expense of others and the United States becomes another Latin America with a small crust of the rich at the top governing a nation of serfs.
OVER THE PAST few years, as the poor got poorer, the health care crisis worsened, wealth and media became more and more concentrated, and our political system was bought out from under us, prophetic Christianity lost its voice.
The Religious Right drowned everyone else out.
And they hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor." The very Jesus who told 5,000 hungry people that all of you will be fed, not just some of you. The very Jesus who challenged the religious orthodoxy of the day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath, who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast, who raised the status of women and treated even the tax collector like a child of God. The very Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple. This Jesus has been hijacked and turned into a guardian of privilege instead of a champion of the dispossessed. Hijacked, he was made over into a militarist, hedonist, and lobbyist, sent prowling the halls of Congress in Guccis, seeking tax breaks and loopholes for the powerful, costly new weapon systems that don't work, and punitive public policies.
Let's get Jesus back. The Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight-hour work day.
Let's get back the Jesus who caused Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop.
The Jesus who called a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor - 10 years before the New Deal. The Jesus in whose name Dorothy Day challenged the church to march alongside auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. The Jesus who led Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.
That Jesus has been scourged by his own followers, dragged through the streets by pious crowds, and crucified on a cross of privilege. Mel Gibson missed that. He missed the resurrection - the spiritual awakening that followed the death of Jesus. He missed Pentecost.
Our times cry out for a new politics of justice. This is no partisan issue.
It doesn't matter if you're a liberal or a conservative, Jesus is both and neither. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican, Jesus is both and neither. We need a faith that takes on the corruption of both parties. We need a faith that challenges complacency of all power. If you're a Democrat, shake them up. If you're a Republican, shame them. Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. We must drive them from the temples of democracy. Let's get Jesus back.
But let's do it in love. I know it can sound banal and facile to say this.
The word "love" gets thrown around too casually these days. And brute reality can mock the whole idea of loving one another. We're still living in the shadow of Dachau and Buchenwald. The smoke still rises above Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and East Timor. The walls of Abu Ghraib still shriek of pain. What has love done? Where is there any real milk of human kindness?
But the love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book of essays Justice and Mercy, where he writes: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind."
What I'm talking about will be hard, devoid of sentiment and practical as nails. But love is action, not sentiment. When the church was young and fair, and people passed by her doors, they did not comment on the difference or the doctrines. Those stern and taciturn pagans said of the Christians: "How they love one another!" It started that way soon after the death of Jesus. His disciple Peter said to the first churches, "Above all things, have unfailing love toward one another." I looked in my old Greek concordance the other day.
That word "unfailing" would be more accurately rendered "intense."
Glenn Tinder reminds us that none are good but all are sacred. I want to think this is what the founders meant when they included the not-so-self-evident assertion that "all men are created equal." Truly life is not fair and it is never equal. But I believe the founders were speaking a powerful spiritual truth that is the heart of our hope for this country. They saw America as a great promise - and it is.
But America is a broken promise, and we are called to do what we can to fix it - to get America back on the track. St. Augustine shows us how: "One loving soul sets another on fire." But to move beyond sentimentality, what begins in love must lead on to justice. We are called to the fight of our lives.
Bill Moyers, host of PBS' Now with Bill Moyers, has received more than 30 Emmy Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism. Moyers was senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News and Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. This article is adapted from Moyers' keynote address ( available by clicking here) at Call to Renewal's Pentecost 2004 conference this May in Washington, D.C.
Liberals more moral than Conservatives
Go to original
WILLIAM V. D'ANTONIO
Walking the walk on family values
By William V. D'Antonio October 31, 2004
PRESIDENT Bush and Vice President Cheney make reference to "Massachusetts liberals" as if they were referring to people with some kind of disease. I decided it was time to do some research on these people, and here is what I found.
The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.
But don't take the US government's word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates.
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that "the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
How to explain these differences? The following factors provide a partial answer:
More couples in the South enter their first marriage at a younger age.
Average household incomes are lower in the South.
Southern states have a lower percentage of Roman Catholics, "a denomination that does not recognize divorce." Barna's study showed that 21 percent of Catholics had been divorced, compared with 29 percent of Baptists.
Education. Massachusetts has about the highest rate of education in the country, with 85 percent completing high school. For Texas the rate is 76 percent. One third of Massachusetts residents have completed college, compared with 23 percent of Texans, and the other Northeast states are right behind Massachusetts.
The liberals from Massachusetts have long prided themselves on their emphasis on education, and it has paid off: People who stay in school longer get married at a later age, when they are more mature, are more likely to secure a better job, and job income increases with each level of formal education. As a result, Massachusetts also leads in per capita and family income while births by teenagers, as a percent of total births, was 7.4 for Massachusetts and 16.1 for Texas.
The Northeast corridor, with Massachusetts as the hub, does have one of the highest levels of Catholics per state total. And it is also the case that these are among the states most strongly supportive of the Catholic Church's teaching on social justice issues such as minimum and living wages and universal healthcare.
For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry's home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the "blue" states, led led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over time to foster the reality of what it means to leave no children behind. And they have been among the nation's leaders in promoting a living wage as their goal in public employment. The money they have invested in their future is known more popularly as taxes; these so-called liberal people see that money is their investment to help insure a compassionate, humane society. Family values are much more likely to be found in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family life through the way they live their family values. William V. D'Antonio is professor emeritus at University of Connecticut and a visiting research professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
» fact's blog login or register to post comments
WILLIAM V. D'ANTONIO
Walking the walk on family values
By William V. D'Antonio October 31, 2004
PRESIDENT Bush and Vice President Cheney make reference to "Massachusetts liberals" as if they were referring to people with some kind of disease. I decided it was time to do some research on these people, and here is what I found.
The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.
But don't take the US government's word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates.
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that "the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
How to explain these differences? The following factors provide a partial answer:
More couples in the South enter their first marriage at a younger age.
Average household incomes are lower in the South.
Southern states have a lower percentage of Roman Catholics, "a denomination that does not recognize divorce." Barna's study showed that 21 percent of Catholics had been divorced, compared with 29 percent of Baptists.
Education. Massachusetts has about the highest rate of education in the country, with 85 percent completing high school. For Texas the rate is 76 percent. One third of Massachusetts residents have completed college, compared with 23 percent of Texans, and the other Northeast states are right behind Massachusetts.
The liberals from Massachusetts have long prided themselves on their emphasis on education, and it has paid off: People who stay in school longer get married at a later age, when they are more mature, are more likely to secure a better job, and job income increases with each level of formal education. As a result, Massachusetts also leads in per capita and family income while births by teenagers, as a percent of total births, was 7.4 for Massachusetts and 16.1 for Texas.
The Northeast corridor, with Massachusetts as the hub, does have one of the highest levels of Catholics per state total. And it is also the case that these are among the states most strongly supportive of the Catholic Church's teaching on social justice issues such as minimum and living wages and universal healthcare.
For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry's home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the "blue" states, led led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over time to foster the reality of what it means to leave no children behind. And they have been among the nation's leaders in promoting a living wage as their goal in public employment. The money they have invested in their future is known more popularly as taxes; these so-called liberal people see that money is their investment to help insure a compassionate, humane society. Family values are much more likely to be found in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family life through the way they live their family values. William V. D'Antonio is professor emeritus at University of Connecticut and a visiting research professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
» fact's blog login or register to post comments
Friday, December 09, 2005
Extreme bias: a mental disorder?
Damn straight.
Psychiatry ponders whether extreme bias can be an illness. Of course it is. Have you ever driven anywhere with a peace sign affixed to your car? I have. As a result of my simple exercise in self-expression, I have been closely followed, boxed in, and suffered various other forms of vehicular intimidation while traveling at 70 miles an hour.
A few months ago, after two young people were RUN OVER BY A TRUCK at a rally in Garden Grove, CA, I wrote an article titled Driving While Peaceful. In it, I described several incidents I personally witnessed wherein some crazy rightwingnut threatened perfectly innocent people with suffering and death.
Here ya go:
I was driving into the city the other day. I was in the fast lane in preparation to transition to another freeway. I glanced in my rearview mirror, and saw a large vehicle close on my tail. I speeded up thinking that I could open space between us.
No good. The vehicle stayed right on my bumper. I considered tapping the brake pedal, but feared that would lead to a traffic hazard. Next I knew, the vehicle was only about three feet back. My adrenalin surged in anticipation of a collision. Rather, he changed lanes in the narrowest space imaginable, and pressed ahead of me in the lane to my right, nearly sideswiping me.
Now, what could explain such dangerous behavior? The vehicle was a Ford Expedition, the hugest piece of polluting iron that Ford makes. The Expedition averages 13 mpg on premium fuel. I had a peace sign on my rear window. He had an American Flag on his. Oh, you could try to explain this by surmising that he was in a terrible hurry to get somewhere. But it seemed not. He simply pulled a carlength ahead and stayed there for four miles, until his offramp appeared.
This is not the first time that I have been vehicularly intimidated due to my plea for peace. I travel down a major interstate several times a year to visit family. Seldom do more than a hundred miles go by without some jerk in a big car or pickup truck either sitting on my bumper or pacing me so they can stare at me.
Here's my question. Now what on earth would make people so angry that they would risk a traffic collision? The idea of peace? The idea that I want it? The idea that I say that I want it publicly?
Why are those who are most anxious to declare their patriotism the angriest at me? At least 75% of the time, these angry drivers have American Flags on their windows, bumpers, or on their antennas. And I look about as american as anyone else.
If I could hear what they were saying it bet it would sound something like this: I bet she's oneathem America-haters. I would like to dispute that contention. I am an American who seeks peace. How can I be an America-hater when I am American? Next, someone will call me a self-hating American. Giggle.
This is not the first time I have noted this bad behavior. After the 2000 election debacle, I was standing in front of my local courthouse with other concerned Americans talking about what happened. Community leaders had called a meeting. Some of the people were standing near the curb. I watched in horror as an gray-haired white man in a Jeep Wrangler aimed his vehicle along the curbline and accelerated to 60 miles an hour. Many people had to fling themselves out of his path.
Now, I bet he thinks he is just a regular American patriot. But I wonder what his defense would have been in the Court Room had he injured or killed someone in his fit of rage.
Unfortunately, injuries occurred in the last public incident, near Los Angeles. A supporter of the Minutemen struck two young people with his vehicle, then ran. What a hero!
As I was driving home from school one afternoon in 2003, I sat behind a Mercedes Benz. We were stopped at a light. An elderly homeless woman's shopping cart projected slightly into the crosswalk. When the light turned green, the Mercedes driver aimed his car directly at her cart as he accelerated, then swerved at the last minute.
Now, after he did that, I wonder if he thought to himself...I must be crazy.
Psychiatry ponders whether extreme bias can be an illness. Of course it is. Have you ever driven anywhere with a peace sign affixed to your car? I have. As a result of my simple exercise in self-expression, I have been closely followed, boxed in, and suffered various other forms of vehicular intimidation while traveling at 70 miles an hour.
A few months ago, after two young people were RUN OVER BY A TRUCK at a rally in Garden Grove, CA, I wrote an article titled Driving While Peaceful. In it, I described several incidents I personally witnessed wherein some crazy rightwingnut threatened perfectly innocent people with suffering and death.
Here ya go:
I was driving into the city the other day. I was in the fast lane in preparation to transition to another freeway. I glanced in my rearview mirror, and saw a large vehicle close on my tail. I speeded up thinking that I could open space between us.
No good. The vehicle stayed right on my bumper. I considered tapping the brake pedal, but feared that would lead to a traffic hazard. Next I knew, the vehicle was only about three feet back. My adrenalin surged in anticipation of a collision. Rather, he changed lanes in the narrowest space imaginable, and pressed ahead of me in the lane to my right, nearly sideswiping me.
Now, what could explain such dangerous behavior? The vehicle was a Ford Expedition, the hugest piece of polluting iron that Ford makes. The Expedition averages 13 mpg on premium fuel. I had a peace sign on my rear window. He had an American Flag on his. Oh, you could try to explain this by surmising that he was in a terrible hurry to get somewhere. But it seemed not. He simply pulled a carlength ahead and stayed there for four miles, until his offramp appeared.
This is not the first time that I have been vehicularly intimidated due to my plea for peace. I travel down a major interstate several times a year to visit family. Seldom do more than a hundred miles go by without some jerk in a big car or pickup truck either sitting on my bumper or pacing me so they can stare at me.
Here's my question. Now what on earth would make people so angry that they would risk a traffic collision? The idea of peace? The idea that I want it? The idea that I say that I want it publicly?
Why are those who are most anxious to declare their patriotism the angriest at me? At least 75% of the time, these angry drivers have American Flags on their windows, bumpers, or on their antennas. And I look about as american as anyone else.
If I could hear what they were saying it bet it would sound something like this: I bet she's oneathem America-haters. I would like to dispute that contention. I am an American who seeks peace. How can I be an America-hater when I am American? Next, someone will call me a self-hating American. Giggle.
This is not the first time I have noted this bad behavior. After the 2000 election debacle, I was standing in front of my local courthouse with other concerned Americans talking about what happened. Community leaders had called a meeting. Some of the people were standing near the curb. I watched in horror as an gray-haired white man in a Jeep Wrangler aimed his vehicle along the curbline and accelerated to 60 miles an hour. Many people had to fling themselves out of his path.
Now, I bet he thinks he is just a regular American patriot. But I wonder what his defense would have been in the Court Room had he injured or killed someone in his fit of rage.
Unfortunately, injuries occurred in the last public incident, near Los Angeles. A supporter of the Minutemen struck two young people with his vehicle, then ran. What a hero!
As I was driving home from school one afternoon in 2003, I sat behind a Mercedes Benz. We were stopped at a light. An elderly homeless woman's shopping cart projected slightly into the crosswalk. When the light turned green, the Mercedes driver aimed his car directly at her cart as he accelerated, then swerved at the last minute.
Now, after he did that, I wonder if he thought to himself...I must be crazy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
