Letter to a Radio Host on the topic of "The Lazy Poor"

Dear [ ],

I heard you on the air talking with Congressman [ ]. I live in his urban district, but I grew up in the suburbs. In fact I was a Republican until I was around thirty. My problem with what I heard you saying doesn't come from a doctrinaire lefty mindset. I got where I am after an embarrassing period when I learned how unsavory and selfish and extreme Republicanism and the comfortable suburban mindset were becoming. It isn't Eisenhower's party anymore.

I heard you referring to lazy people gaming the system to get federal handouts. And I'm pretty sure you weren't referring to ExxonMobil.

I cringe a little when I hear this old chestnut rolled out on local radio. Usually it's confined to the more right wing talk stations, where racism and hatred of the poor is expected.

I can't remember who said it in the Bible, but the quote often goes "The poor will always be with us." If it was Jesus saying this you can bet he wasn't implying that there was no point in bothering to help them out. Jesus (pardon me if you're not a Christian) was pretty clear that our treatment of the poor was the key to everything, that if we failed to help them we were not to expect salvation. But the most aggressively "Christian" among us these days sound the least like Christ in this respect.

Then I hear people like Paul Ryan, who grew up and prospered because he was an early beneficiary of the federal safety net, saying the safety net is becoming a hammock. I can think of no more colossal gall than this. If it is a hammock now it must have been a full service hotel when Paul Ryan was growing up with federal help.

There is a habit among media personalities like yourself to avoid being impolite, to avoid admitting that some of the people in elected office these days are heartless hypocrites. But they are. They are deeply unChristian while pretending to be superChristian. They run endless interference for the huge subsidies given to the enormously profitable corporate farmers and Wall Street banks and oil companies while working just as hard to gut programs intended to help the helpless. To avoid saying this you end up saying the opposite is true. Or you smudge the clear moral difference between the two parties.

Because radio people like yourself are so polite you go through all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid saying that one party is by and large responsible for this systematic heartlessness. Namely the Republicans. To the extent that Dems are cutting aid to the most vulnerable, they are only doing so to try to get within bargaining distance of their GOP counterparts. And the media's rule of false equivalency is what forces them to do this.

Lazy people on Welfare? Do you realize the hard work it takes to collect Welfare? The Scrooges among us (the same ones who want govt off people's backs) make darn sure that every recipient of government largesse (but only those with a net worth less than a million dollars) gets the stink eye, gets endless scrutiny and probing insulting questions, is made to jump through endless hoops and fill out endless forms, and wait in endless lines. Not only is it unkind but it is expensive and inefficient. Anything to avoid helping the less fortunate...so more is left to help the corporation that needs a freer ride.

Consider that there are some people WHO EMPLOYERS SIMPLY WILL NOT EMPLOY. Persons with limitations, with disabilities (physical and mental) that will not go away. Many of them veterans with the wounds earned in our service. Public works jobs programs might help some, but those are stubbornly opposed by Republicans. If some corporate CEO is going to give a million dollars to a congressman to cut unemployment or other benefits perhaps he should obligate himself to hire the people who are losing aid. It won't happen. These people will not be hired because some people are simply unsuited for work. The reasons are rarely laziness or criminality, but that is the reason radio people trot out to gratify their smug and comfortable listeners--whose own benefits are sacred. Of course, to some being poor is criminal enough.

So, please: stop resorting to the worst kind of class stereotypes. The hardest working people are the poor who have to cobble together several jobs to raise themselves up to the pathetic minimum. The laziest? Perhaps it's people Mitt Romney clubs with, who are rich from being rich. Who make money from the pot they were born with. In Romney's case we have learned how the companies he took over were made profitable at the expense of the people working in them. That is what arbitrage is. Buying a company with its own assets, most often by looting the pension fund of retired workers. Legally of course.

Stereotype? The predatory model of the extremely wealthy is more prevalent than the much remarked "lazy model" of the poor. Just as criminality and psychopathy and sociopathy and greed and corruption and ungenerosity is more typical of the very rich than the very poor. (Jesus was on to something.)

Even if it were rare for a billionaire to be rich by less than ethical means, one billionaire guilty of theft will end up with more than all the petty criminals combined, and he (as seen in the case of Jamie Dimon) will be the one who isn't required to do time. He will be the one who is allowed to deduct his government penalty from his taxes.

If you can get your head around this, perhaps a more enlightened and tolerant and generous point of view will creep into your conversations on air. Not insulting rich or poor, but showing a bit more tolerance toward the unlucky people who are down and a bit less latitude toward the lucky ones who already have all the advantages of money, access, power, influence and the paid up ownership of politicians on their side. Jesus was a stern critic of smugness. We should remind ourselves of that.

Pasquino

Hedge Fund Billionaires are Saints and Schoolteachers are Greedy Bastards

So, let's try and understand this...

Fifth grade teachers and firefighters who rescue kittens from trees are greedy bastards.

And hedge fund billionaires are saints devoted to the wellbeing of the community.

I will pause while your mind explodes.

This is really happening. Voters in Rhode Island have elected a fearless crusader who is going after the greedy schoolteachers on behalf of the heroic hedge funds.

The people who worked their whole lives on behalf of the community, teaching children, fighting fires, cleaning streets, policing parks, taking less pay in exchange for a pension, are actually terrible selfish greedy monsters who must be reined in and their retirement must be confiscated by the good, honest, crusading friend of Wall Street who is working diligently to return those pension dollars to the offshore bank accounts of the brave, honest hedge fund billionaires who know best what to do with that money.

Up is down. Good is bad. Greed is admirable. Unselfishness must be punished. Jesus was wrong. Hitler was right. ...Wait a minute, Obama is Hitler... I'm confused.

What do we know for certain?

Questioning billion dollar bonuses for Wall Street bankers is like lynching. We know that. It was in the papers the other day.

ObamaCare is like what Hitler did to the Jews. That was in the paper the other day too.

The CEO of Goldman Sachs is more saintly than Mother Teresa. That was also reported this week.

Mr. Rogers, who talked about kindness and unselfishness, was a sick individual who sapped the life force from two generations of Americans. I heard that on FoxNews.

And, yes, public school teachers and firefighters are horrible greedy bastards. It's been widely reported.

It's so hard to keep a solid grip on reality, on our values. Luckily America has talk radio to tell us what to believe.

The Un-Christian Super-Religious Republican Party

Today there's an excellent Washington Post article by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, who explains how un-Christian the Republican Party's economic policies really are. Worth reading and worth sharing.

This well-argued opinion piece from the Rev. Jennifer Butler, Executive Director of Faith in Public Life, says the same thing, calling the Republican efforts in Congress downright immoral.

Luckily, even though there are millions of dollars and hundreds of radio and television platforms pushing it, Americans aren't buying this strange Anti-Christian brand of Christian Capitalism. This poll from the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service found that more Americans think capitalism is at odds with Christian values.

Actually, when you sit down and read the New Testament, read it with your heart not your bank book, Jesus does sound like a Socialist, if not a downright Marxist. This liberal Jesus doesn't jibe with the Romney/Bachmann/Perry/ Cain/Santorum/Paul/Christie/Boehner wing of the Republican Party (all of the Republican Party these days) who think Jesus was sent by our Heavenly Father to make us very wealthy and provide us with an affordable servant class. The Republican Big Idea is that the poor should learn how to obey their masters.

This article from Religion Dispatches speaks to this harsh anti-worker, anti-union thread. Republican strategists have been aggressively pushing in that direction, using carefully lifted Bible verses. Verses that spoke to the lives of slaves in Biblical times are being used to justify slavery today, sometimes saying, as Bachmann has, that slaves had it better than today's unemployed. Suggesting that slavery would be a good solution to today's problems. That Jesus was, by some bizarre misinterpretation, a hard capitalist, an anti-liberal, pro-slavery, anti-tax anti-public school right winger. Fruitcake theology.

Was Jesus a socialist or was he a banker? When you read him do you think his heaven on earth would look like Scandinavia or would it look like pre-Mandela South Africa? This post on the Real Economics blog sorts the different threads of Christian economics.

Jesus Was a Socialist:

"The Protestant Reformation may have started in Martin Luther's Germany, but the reformist impulse would not stop there. Luther had one especially radical notion—that everyone could through the tools of literacy and study come to an understanding of his or her relationship to God. With this idea, the authoritarian relationship of the church was shattered. The Protestant Reformation shattered Christianity into thousands of sects large and small. Yet out of this cacophony would emerge dominant themes.

"In political terms, the center would be occupied by Luther and his followers. On one hand, his teachings about the worth of the lowliest among us would inspire the Peasant's Revolt of 1524-25. On the other, he would encourage the secular authorities to brutally suppress the uprising. Lutherans would run the governments of the Nordic countries for hundreds of years and were a part of feudalism, yet there were plenty good Lutherans in those countries who could find reasons to explain why Jesus and Luther would have loved cooperatives and become Social Democrats. Lutherans have more or less put themselves out of business as a religion but their cultural heritage still makes it true that if a social welfare system works anywhere, there's a good chance it is happening where Lutherans once roamed the earth.

"The Reformation's left would be occupied by the followers of Menno Simon—the Swiss Anabaptist. Now it may be pretty hard to imagine the very culturally conservative Mennonites and Amish as lefties but consider this—Christianity had managed to keep silent or encourage the practices of human slavery for over 15 centuries before Simon and friends wrote principled objections to it in 1534. They are SERIOUS about staying out of wars and have been since their founding. Their economic beliefs encourage sharing and community, and because they are so honest, a lot of the expensive apparatus of contracts is avoided. Not surprisingly, they are usually very prosperous. You can think of them as hippies—only with skills and excellent work habits."

Or Jesus Was a Pure Market Capitalist:

"And then we come to the right. John Calvin was Frenchman living in Geneva who would literally set Christianity on its head. For example, usury had been considered the mortal sin for over 1000 years. Now Calvin would teach that Jesus did not mind moneychangers so much—he just didn't want them setting up shop in the temples. For most of history, Christians were the poor, the folks with the shit jobs, the slaves. Now Calvin would teach that God made people rich to show that he loved them.

"Calvinism would migrate to USA in many forms but the dominant one was through the Puritans who came to Massachusetts. These folks would organize our most prestigious schools like Harvard and Yale. When people talk about WASPs, they are talking about worship-the-rich Calvinists. But the Calvinists are not limited to the snooty set. Oh no, no, no. Find some mouth-breather that denies evolution or climate change and thinks Jesus rode a dinosaur to church and in USA, the chances are about 99% you are talking to a Calvinist. Calvinism so defines the American culture that one is not wrong to think that when someone calls themselves a Christian and is not Catholic, that person is an off-shoot of the Calvinist impulse."

Do we believe the Martin Luther King Jesus or the Milton Friedman Jesus? The Jesus of "feed the poor, help the afflicted" or "money grows on trees"? Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney believe Jesus was an MBA, that being rich is the most crucial part of Christianity. The richer you are the more Christian you are. Whose Bible did that come out of? The Gospel of Riches version of Christianity is the church of Swiss Bankers and Wall Street.

American voters need to know the difference. We need to be worried about what the hard Right Wing has in mind. The bankers' side is all Republican. Wall Street's Jesus is Republican. The former slave states are all Republican. What does that tell you? Jesus wasn't necessarily anti-capitalist, but he preached a softening of capitalism's hard edge. That is Liberalism. Jesus was a Liberal. He was on the side of the little guy, of the masses, the owner of the hardware store down the street, the small farmer, the public school teacher with forty kids in her class, the two-earner family whose earners are unemployed and have a mortgage to pay.