The Civil War Never Ended

I came across this NYTimes essay today, which says the Civil War persists to this day. It's less simple than you think. The Civil War changed more than the slave issue; it recast our nation as an economy in which larger players dominated. Those who lost out economically were instructed to blame the freedom of the black man for their reduced status. The old hatred was recast and became very useful. The battlefield was still in the South.

The pleasure of old hatreds explains a lot about our present dysfunction. Hatred is a great business model; consider FoxNews. Disinformation is another wonderful profit engine, and Fox knows that too.

Here’s an example of how people’s ignorance and easy gullibility can be shaped into an eager and militant constituency.

A Union Soldier's grave allegedly predicted the disaster of having a black president.

What this dead Union Soldier and Republican did not know (and this ignorant readership would rather not know) is that the Democratic Party that favored slavery in the 19th century would repudiate racism in the 20th and that his and Lincoln’s beloved Republican Party would seize the opportunity to invite those white racists to become Republicans. Nixon’s White House would formally devise The Southern Strategy, which adopted all those unhappy worshippers of the Old Confederacy and made them diehard Republicans, who would vote down their own economic interests for the pure joy of suppressing black and brown people (…and women… and foreigners… and non-Evangelical Christians… and Muslims… etc.) “I may be poor and ignorant but I still get to feel superior to somebody!”

That is the legacy of the perpetual Civil War. Today’s Republicans are actually the New Confederacy. As a recent Washington Post essay pointed out.

It’s worth noting that Nixon, whose minions came up with the Southern Strategy also invented FoxNews.

The Washington Post reports on the invention of FoxNews by Nixon's backroom boys.

Bloomberg on the invention of the Southern Strategy.

The Republican Clown Car

Our news media forces itself to make “all things equal” when reporting on politics and policy.

The frequent stupidities of the pols on the Republican side are downplayed and underreported. If they were all reported it would make the mainstream media appear biased. Can’t have that. And the rare occasion when a Democrat goes slightly left of center calls for a media-wide news alert. Democratic stupidity is as rare as Republican stupidity is commonplace, but it’s the job of the media to balance the two, to make the two parties appear equally intelligent and equally right about everything.

It’s always best to err on the side of judging Democrats more harshly. It’s become a national habit. There’s a mindset that says Republican = Grown Up and Democratic = Radical. That hasn’t been true since we learned how radical and unevolved Nixon was and how consistently Democrats are on the right side of nearly every pressing national issue.

Here are a few bits I saw in the news stream today:

Lindsey Graham’s announced that he would order drone strikes on American citizens in this country if they “even thought about” getting involved with a terrorist group. "I’m not going to call a judge. I’m going to call a drone, and we will kill you.” He did not specify whether he thought the biker gangs who shot up that restaurant in Waco were terrorists. It would be safe to assume he’d restrict his drone kills to Muslims and persons of color. Senator Graham is running for president.

As reported at Slate.

Reported at Talking Points Memo.

David Brooks is the Right Side talking head in just about every two sides panel on radio and television. It’s his job to disagree with any policy proposed by any Democrat and to justify every policy enacted by every Republican. Which is why he’s never stopped loving George W. Bush’s War in Iraq.

David Brooks as Salon tries to make sense of him.

When Jeb Bush tried again to explain whether he’d invade Iraq, knowing what we know now, he said No, but carefully explained that his brother’s White House were unlucky and got bad intelligence about Saddam.

Which isn’t really true. Bad intelligence was all that they would accept. All they wanted was intel that told them to invade immediately and that our troops would be greeted as liberators and that it would be a cakewalk. Candy and flowers. (Candy and flowers are what you give your spouse when you’ve committed an unforgivable sin. I put the Iraq War in that category.)

Jeb Bush's very very bad week explained by Mother Jones.

Of course most “serious” news sources are more focused on whether he was able to dissemble skillfully. A well-told falsehood is more admirable than a sound foreign policy. If one Republican makes a fool of himself it’s always necessary to come up with one who didn’t.

The Hill does its best to put Jebbie's stumbles in context. (It's always inside baseball stuff in their minds.)

The really scary thing you don’t hear on the nightly news is this: Jeb Bush’s stellar foreign policy brain trust are the same idiot who brought us the Iraq War. They’re also the same guys who traded arms for hostages with Iran and illegally funded right wing death squads in Central America.

The Washington Post has a very useful Venn Diagram to explain why Republicans keep making the same mistakes and loving the same stupid policies.

And they’re also the same idiots who didn’t see 9/11 coming, even though the CIA was ringing the alarm bells for months.


FirstLook puts its finger on the crux of our problem, the biggest idiot of them all, the eminence grise behind the eight year train wreck we call the Bush presidency. (It should really be called the Cheney presidency.

Republican Rules of the Road

Republican Rule 1: Truth is whatever you like. If you don’t like the truth just ignore it and pretend the truth is whatever you like better.

(NYTimes explains how Texas revises the truth in America's textbooks.)

Republican Rule 1, subsection A: Anyone who refuses to share my intolerance is a bigot.

(Jeb Bush actually said this.)

Republican Rule 2: Money is truth. If you’re rich and scientists find that your company is making steeples fall off churches and groceries fall of shelves you can get the university to fire them.

(Reported in Bloomberg)

Republican Rule 3: The truth about America is always wonderful and happy and perfect and holy. The history that talks about slavery and stealing the continent from the Native Americans is simply false. And, by the way, Wyatt Earp didn’t take the guns away from the patriotic citizens in Tombstone.

(In Salon)

Republican Rule 4: If the state history test is saying bad things about America you can just change the answers. And then you can wish the historians who wrote the test into the cornfield. America is always perfect. See Rule 3, above.

(This happened in New Jersey)

Republican Rule 5: Science is confusing and sometimes figures new stuff out, so it’s obviously not true and you can ignore it. God never changes his mind.

(And if you don't understand the scientific method it does look confusing)

Republican Rule 6: When God (or his representatives on earth) are making you feel confused, seek help from your corporate overlord. He will have the answers. Safest to ignore the parts of the New Testament which say we need to take care of the poor. Better yet, ignore the New Testament because Jesus was obviously a socialist.

(Salon again, how the Pope is making GOP heads explode)

(And from Politico, another take on the Pope and American conservatives.)

Republican Rule 7: The best employees are either slaves or robots.

(From the NYTimes)

Wealthiness is next to Godliness

Jesus became a serious pure-market capitalist in the 1930s. Before then most Americans believed the Bible nonsense Jesus allegedly said about the wealthy man and the eye of the needle and about how we should feed and clothe the poor in His name. Boy did Jesus fool us! An excellent piece in today's NYTimes explains the history.

For a while not many people believed the truth about Jesus in a three-piece suit and expensive shoes. Eisenhower, who was a Republican, kept FDR’s New Deal in place and went right on taxing top earners more than working stiffs. American prosperity was broad and stable. Working people lived in nice safe neighborhoods with decent schools.

That changed with Reagan. Reagan had allies among the TV prophets who earned millions off of faithful viewers living in mobile home parks. The Reagan revolution, with Jesus’ almighty help, put working people back in difficulties, flattened working incomes, forcing families to have two earners to get by. Taxes on top earners went way down. Government help dried up for most of us but ballooned for special industries preferred by Republicans and Jesus, like weapons manufacturing and predatory lending. Who said you couldn’t worship both God and Mammon? (Hint: it was Jesus. And he was apparently wrong.) Christianity Today has an interesting piece explaining the so-called Prosperity Gospel. (Do you see any mention of Jesus weeping?)

This right wing alliance of wealth and Christianity is downright unholy. Its home is in the Republican Party. They’re the same ones who funded the Citizens United lawsuit making secret million dollar political donations sacred. (They’re also the ones funding the fight against affordable healthcare, because––as Jesus said––sickness and fear of death are best managed as a business model, a source of profits.) The Theocracy Watch website tracks this creepy phenomenon.

An interesting example: Joel Osteen, who lives in a $10.5 million property in Houston, which is a step up from the $3 million property he still owns. Jesus must really really really love him and not like the rest of us much. There's his house, on a map of the star's homes in Houston.

John Hagee is another one of these Elmer Gantrys. Less handsome, but mesmerizing. Intelligent responsible people used to laugh at charlatans like this. The powerful have learned these preachers are a good way to keep a leash on the working masses. American Prospect tells Hagee's story of Jesus-Went-To-Business-School.

There are a lot of busy churchy people out there who’ve carefully revised the Revised Standard Version of the Bible to explain why wealth and money and getting ahead of your neighbor is a true sign of God’s blessing. All of us would rather be Saved and own an expensive car than be Saved and live hand to mouth. People are very good at rationalizing themselves out of being kind to the poor. It’s much more rewarding and pleasant to ignore them. It’s nice to be rich without feeling any obligation to anyone else. The easiest way to do this is to believe the poor are wicked. Even though Jesus said the opposite.

There's no shame in vulgar wealth anymore. It's holy. It's a sign that Jesus loves you. Nobody hides it anymore. Why should they? Their tax rate is so low. Wall Street pros make more in a day than most people earn in a year. Which might explain why the bonuses given out in 2014 — $28.5 billion worth — were twice the combined earnings of all full-time minimum-wage workers in the US.

Language Held Hostage

The Guardian today has a trenchant discussion of the Rick Scott banning of the term Climate Change in Florida, written by Jeb Lund.

If words don’t exist the problem goes away. At least that's the Republican belief.

This analysis also uses another underused term: Regulatory Capture. Regulatory Capture is the main plank in the Republican platform. We should know what it is, and it should be discussed more in print and on TV…of course our news media is a prisoner too.

The power of money and influence shapes our laws, but it also shapes our thoughts by shaping our language. Why do conservatives, deregulators and pure market capitalists own the language? Because they own everything. Pulitzer prize winning financial journalist David Cay Johnston discusses the problem with his usual clarity and insight.

The Scandal About Global Warming

The big scandal about global warming isn't over whether it's happening. It's happening, and the effects are horrendous.

The scandal is that in most American living rooms the term "global warming" is taboo, Off limits. Censored. We get alarming reports about the latest storms, the vast wildfires, the horrible drought conditions, the deaths from the heat, but NOT ONE TV OR RADIO WEATHER REPORTER SAYS A WORD ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING.

Newspaper stories in Europe are linking the summer's powerful storms to global warming.

The New Scientist is connecting the dots between superstorms and climate change.

Business journals are beginning to track what business journals track: the huge economic downside of our doing nothing. If the climate doesn't kill us with weather events it will make us poorer and hungrier. I suppose the upside of that is there are business moguls who will find a way to profit from misery.

Global warming (surprise) causes inconveniences like power outages.

Scientists warn that global warming is killing off the world's coral reefs, which protect millions of coastal dwellers from being washed away by the ocean. Reefs also support the populations of fish we eat. Here's a trenchant and frightening analysis from the New York Times.

Still, there is a coordinated embargo of broadcast discussion of global warming. You won't hear about the embargo on TV, but you can read about it in print. Which means only people patient enough to read are aware of the censorship.

Inside Climate News sums it up.

The Houston Chronicle created a storm of controversy when it raised the issue in the newspaper. Houston's weather guys replied, basically claiming they believed in global warming, but thought it might be rude to discuss it on the air.

I've read articles about the heat waves across the U.S. and watched reports about catastrophic superstorms in middle America and millenial floods in Duluth and across Europe...

The Guardian reports.

But I have yet to hear ONE television meteorologist mention global warming or global climate change. Not one. Not once. Scientists, yes; weathercasters, no. Not once. Never. And when a scientist is brought on to discuss the issue a fossil fuel flunky is usually there to rebut it. We have facts and evidence on one side but, apparently, it's only fair to give enormous profits equal time. After all, they pay for it.

I'm not the only one who's noticing this, but an embargoed idea doesn't get discussed. That's the point of embargoes.

Why is the discussion of the embargo confined to sciency and lefty websites?

Is there an organized ban on broadcast meteorologists discussing global warming? TV weather forecasters are where most people learn about what's happening in the atmosphere. Most people think it's the best science there is.

If there is a TV ban on climate change talk (and it appears there is) why aren't major print media outlets reporting on it?

Who is behind it? Who is enforcing it? Why does a weathercaster on TV need to be "brave" to report consensus science in the first place?

My guess is that the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers and their paid and programmed pseudo-scientists have ordered the silencing of TV weathermen and weatherwomen. They've frightened program directors to obey their commands. They have successfully cast global warming as dangerously controversial, as something that will threaten friendships and endanger jobs.

This ban on climate change reporting is being enforced despite the fact that most Americans link the extreme weather with climate change. A new Washington Post/Stanford University poll backs this up.

But despite the evidence of our science and the direct experience of most Americans, the science is being censored, suppressed, silenced. This takes money, and the fossil fuel industry has it. Science groups are fighting back. Remember this organization: Forecast The Facts––forecastthefacts.org.

Sadly, good science has become risky for the first time since the Enlightenment.

Good science that helps the global population reduce and plan for risks is considered a risk itself. That's ironic. It's also big story. And it's another story that's too risky to report on.

George Will is intelligent enough to know when a fool is running for the Republican presidential nomination, but he has not mastered the basic Venn Diagram. What contains what? Climate contains weather, weather is or can be evidence of climate change but understanding of weather patterns and being able to predict rain a week in advance doesn't imply a mastery of the much greater complexity of climate. Weather is a wholly owned subsidiary of climate just as one company's finances are a tiny portion of the larger economy. And the big worry among climate scientists is that global warming will trigger, is already triggering, larger, more frequent, more powerful more sudden changes in weather.

Media Matters, discussing George Will's lame climate change denial commentary, uses an economics analogy, and it's apt. Because all economics is based on climate. All civilization is based on climate. And the ability of households and companies and economies and societies to survive is predicated on an ability to predict relevant trends, their specific climate, from one season to the next. An economy that gyrates, as ours did prior to the New Deal regulations that steadied and moderated it, is a hard environment to survive in. You would hope economists and corporations would appreciate that and want to ensure against volatility, but sadly short term profits, the weather that rains millions on CEOs, is all that matters to them.

During the winter, when heat sounds like a blessing, climate advocates argue back that "weather is not climate". They are trying to communicate that weather variability doesn't stop and cold weather doesn't entirely disappear just because the planet is heating up on average. It's crucial to note that they are saying this in response to those who claim a snowstorm or a cold snap refutes global warming. Big snowstorms are part of the climate change volatility too. The evidence of a single moment tends to convince most people, and the fossil fuel billionaires use that kind of persuasion. Weathermen also think short term; if their weekly forecast is off, they lose credibility. But climate science is a longer and more complex game than that, and what takes more than a soundbite to explain is usually too complex for Americans to understand. This shortness of attention span may kill us. It will kill our economy first.

The Red States Get the Government Spending, Blue States Pay the Bill

Ever wondered why we need journalism? Read this piece from Eric Black. He provides a useful and intelligent analysis of a very important piece of reporting from yesterdays' New York Times.

"Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It" is an eye-opening feature article from the New York Times. It includes an intriguing interactive map showing region by region breakdown of government spending and taxes paid.

Here's Krugman's commentary on it, with a useful chart.

The point is this: the places and people in the U.S. that oppose government the most are often the places that need it the most and rely on it the most, who take the most from the federal government in subsidies and programs and contracts, in dollars, but pay in the least in taxes.

These Red areas and people oppose the taxes they aren't paying anyway, and oppose the government payments they are receiving more than other bluer, more Democratic areas and people. The areas that pay MORE in tax dollars than they receive in government payouts? Mostly Democratic areas populated by Democrats.

There is something seriously wrong with this picture. And there's something wrong that you don't hear this repeated every time a Republican stands up and hollers about gummint spendin'. All he needs to do is reject it. And if he doesn't it would be less hypocritical if he'd agree to pony up for the government millions he brings to his district. He won't though.

And it's not a new story. Simply underreported. Suppressed you could say. Don't believe the New York Times? Read on.

From Business Insider, reported in 2011.

A tax professor's commentary on the same bizarre red-state paradox, from 2004.

A 2002 paper from the ultra conservative Hoover Institution and Ohio State about The Red State Paradox.

The Washington Post's economist Ezra Klein posted a map of this bizarre but true correlation in 2010.

Data from the Tax Foundation

A 2010 article from SLATE.

You also hear Republicans shouting about the immorality of Democrats. But it's the Red States that have higher measures of the usual moral failures, divorce, teen pregnancy, murder and smut.

From Vox Nova, a Catholic blog, a chart of the correlation between Red States and high divorce, teen pregnancy and pornography rates.

From James Wolcott, a 2006 article on the higher "moral failure" rate in the "ultra-moral" Red States vs. the allegedly immoral Blue States.

It's factual and downright stunning. Especially because Americans in large numbers are angry about something that is not true. Which also shows the power of journalism...or "journalism" in the case of FoxNews, which is a player in the spreading of bad information and the shaping of ignorant opinion.

The Fairy Tales of the Business Press

Brad Delong does a pretty thorough job of dissecting the inconsistencies in the so-called "conservative" economic line, the anti-Keynesian, austerity, drown-it-in-the-bathtub anti-government side of the economic argument we've been stuck in for three years. Why isn't the conservative side subjected to any logical analysis by the business press?

Is it just too complicated for business readers? Even for those "superheroes" who are supposed to know more than ordinary workers and citizens? Come on. Superheroes are capable of digesting this, even if they are busy. They ought to find time to think.

Or is it just too embarrassing for business readers? Businesspeople are worshipped as "job creators." Is it wrong to question their beliefs? Is it heresy to doubt the prevailing business thinking––which says that only private sector spending is holy?

Is it only heresy to doubt business orthodoxy if it endangers ad pages and TV air those businesspeople tend to buy as business owners?

How is it that conservatives, who seem to believe in an invisible hand of the market, who believe our economy is magically protected by fairies and elves (no government regulation required), are allowed to call Keynesian economics "a fairy tale" without being challenged about their own magical thinking?

Keynes, who was no liberal, had a fully rounded theory that was borne out by sustained prosperity and growth (and the absence of panics) during the best forty year period in the history of our country––and the planet.

The problem believers in unfettered capitalism had with Keynes was that he advised behaving more like ants than grasshoppers (to borrow from a cautionary fable. Keynesians prefer fables to fairy tales.) That we be prudent and save for rainy days, that we rein in our appetites during up times (with regulation and fair taxation) and support a flagging economy by spending and building during down times. Which is pretty middle-of-the-road stuff, economicswise. Or was Eisenhower a Communist?

The nagging suspicion that I keep having is that these so-called business conservatives, in order to help their Republican operatives, have been sitting on their capital for three years, not spending it, not hiring, not lending, blocking stimulus packages through their elected proxies, keeping the economy down, hoping to hang a bad economy around President Obama's neck like a burning tire. They hoped it might put a Republican regime back in the White House.

(It would be interesting to read the Republican emails with their corporate and banking clients, hoping and planning to foil Obama's recovery efforts. I don't doubt they exist. Airing them would be a good thing. It'd only be fair, considering the Republicans in Congress surreptitiously read the Democrats' emails for over a year in '03 and '04.)

The business sector wants Republicans back in full control. Oh how they want it. But we all know how clever the last Republican regime was. Taking a record surplus and making into a record deficit. Their energy policy resulted soaring fuel prices. Their laissez faire economic policy set up economic collapse. But that Republican president was a businessman. A failed businessman several times over, but a member of the club.

Republicans Don't Know Fact From Satire

Is it more honest and representative to be stupid if your voters are stupid? Is stupid the new preferred profile? Is it smart to pretend to be stupid if you're representing a Republican district?

John Fleming, R-Louisiana posted a outrageous piece of nonsense from The Onion as if it were true. Luckily for him the nonsense he posted to Facebook fit in perfectly with the nonsense "facts" that other Republicans say about Planned Parenthood. Was he being stupid or is he smart enough to know his constituents don't know the difference between truth and fiction?

On a recent Colbert Report we hear Republican John Kyl stating a falsehood about Planned Parenthood and then defending it by saying he didn't mean for it to be taken factually... Colbert cracks up several times trying to tell this story, but it's more pathetic than funny. Kyl expected to be believed.

The thing is John Kyl isn't a satirist the way the Onion or Stephen Colbert are satirists. People expect him to know fact from nonsense. When he doesn't know truth from satiric exaggeration or fiction or lies his constituents don't either, which is exactly what the Republicans want. Satirists make fun of stupidity, Republicans exploit it.

O'Reilly: The American Revolution is Over

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION IS DEAD

By William O'Reilly (from the archives)

In the beginning, there was some sympathy toward the revolutionaries, who believe the parliament in London should lift its monarchist and commercial tyranny from our shores. In the face of the present conditions, that message is a powerful one, and so the folks who wanted independence got some traction.

But the more we saw and heard, the more fair-minded Americans came to believe that this rebel movement was not interested in legitimate issues. Many of them simply want to blow up the economic system.

In addition, some of their behavior was and is reprehensible: shooting at British soldiers from behind trees, throwing expensive imported tea into Boston harbor, tarring and feathering their opponents, speaking treason in public, all kinds of provocation against our British rulers, all kinds of depraved behavior in general.

A picture taken by the New York Post shows empty rum bottles that were taken out of the encampment of the Continental Army. Isn't that nice? I don't believe we've seen any rum bottles at respectable Tory tea gatherings, or am I wrong?

The pamphleteers (and we know their names) are still trying to portray these so-called “Freedom Lovers” as the liberal equivalent to respectable Tory business leaders. One simple question: Would you prefer that your daughter have tea in a respectable drawing room in a fine Tory household or in the ugly squalor of Valley Forge? You make the call, remembering the rum bottles.

A recent Wall Street Journal poll asked: Do you consider yourself a supporter of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence? Sixty-three percent of Americans say they do not support the movement; just 28 percent say they do.

Because troublemakers George Washington and John Adams and John Hancock were sympathetic to the movement in the beginning, along with many members of that radical crowd, such as known alcoholic Samuel Adams and notorious atheist Ben Franklin, this presents a big political problem for them. And so officials in 11 cities got together to discuss how to deal with this “American Revolution.”

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
TORY MAYOR OF NEW YORK: “What had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them.”
(END AUDIO CLIP)

And that's true. To be fair -- and we always are on "The Factor" -- some of the Revolutionary movement are well-intentioned folks who believe the British colonial system is no longer fair. That's a legitimate debate. But they have been overrun by thugs, anarchists and the crazies who intimidate. If you are a violent person, people usually back off. And George Washington's army, which is comprised mostly of people who can't get any other kind of job, has lost most of its battles anyway. Who can support such sorry ineptness? These lowlife characters are ragged and dirty from sleeping in the open, and many of them don't have any shoes. They probably don't bathe very often. A bunch of bearded longhaired hippies. How can any decent person say they are legitimate?

So the "American Revolution" movement is dead, finished as a legitimate political force in this country. And that's a good thing.
And that's "The Memo."

Hello Child Labor

Newt Gingrich said the other day that he would fire all school janitors and have children clean the schools themselves. (Story from the LA Times)

This is the new GOP. And he is their resident genius.

For those who might be nostalgic for those "wonderful days" when children died in machinery and up chimneys and never went to school, but were usefully and profitably employed at low wages undermining the pay scale of their parents, here's a bit of background on child labor. It wasn't very picturesque or charming, but children were a lot easier for employers to bully, exploit and abuse. "Suffer the little children" I guess. TR would be appalled at the modern version of his Republican Party.

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.

Big Lies

Two and a half years later we continue to hear Obama being blamed for the big deficit. Deficits are inevitable during recessions, but Obama didn't create the famous 1.3 Trillion dollar deficit of 2009. Bush created it, as the ultra conservative Cato Institute points out.

Honesty has never inconvenienced FoxNews though. If there's a useful lie, repeat it, louder if possible. Eventually it will collect a consensus around it, giving it "truthiness", and it'll become what people believe is true.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels

The Republicans have also learned it's useful to exhume the Founders and use them like sock puppets. (There's a good story about this in the Atlantic. They call it Zombie Economics.) Never mind that the Founders would never have said what the Republicans pretend they said. Remember, Alexander Hamilton created the National Debt to help our economy grow, and Washington used the military to enforce tax collections. It didn't end there. Our greatest presidents supported what the Republican Party opposes today, and deplored what the Republican Party now stands for. Lincoln favored Labor over Capital. Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive lion who pushed worker protections and aggressively broke up the largest corporations of his time. Eisenhower opposed massive military spending. Even our bad presidents are better than the current Republican leadership: Nixon proposed universal health care and created the EPA.

A Republican Speaks Out

It's refreshing to hear the truth, even when you already know it.

We live in strange times. "Conservatives" are hell bent on destroying the middle class and all the functioning institutions from the best half-century in American history.

We have clean water, and the Republicans are working hard to repoison it, and the air, and rape the environment generally.

They hate good government, because they want no government. They want no government because that would remove the inconvenience of democracy.

Republicans have presented and passed laws all across the country to remove young people, old people, poor people and people of color and ethnicity from the voter lists. Why? Because fewer voters make them likelier to win elections. Whiter and richer voters are likelier to vote Republican.

Mike Lofgren spent 16 years as a Republican congressional staffer. He's no fan of Democrats, but he's learned to loathe and fear Republicans and what they are trying to do. Republicans aren't conservatives, they are radicals. Lofgren calls them terrorists. They are happy to destroy America because most of their antitax corporate clients are by now safely offshore. They have succeeded in turning the U.S. into a third world country.

Here is a list of the bills Republicans have blocked in Congress. It isn't spending they are against, they are against government doing good. They are against anything that would help Americans while a Democrat is in the White House.

Sanitized for Your Protection

There's an excellent piece at CommonDreams.org, written by an Austin Texas high school history teacher who tells how the Texas history curriculum has been purged of impure thoughts and inconvenient truths.

Texas has sanitized the high school curriculum, not for the protection of the students but to protect the ruling elite. The textbooks are sanitized to keep students from learning about any proto-socialist or communitarian views held by the Founding Fathers, to disguise the founders' occasional agnosticism and open-minded theism, to erase any useful understanding of how the union movement in the twentieth century led to the forty hour week, the weekend, the paid vacation, to the idea of giving employees raises and benefits like health insurance and pensions. Instead of learning about how Washington and Hamilton introduced the idea of a national debt to spur investment and economic growth, Texas school children will learn about Estée Lauder and a handful of other business tycoons. They'll learn how the House Un-American Activities Committee bravely saved America from the march of Communism––no mention of the witch-hunt, the censorship, the careers ended, the innocent lives destroyed or the broad fear they created. In Texas textbooks, Westward Expansion did not drive native Americans from their ancestral lands or kill millions with disease and privation, it saved their souls. History is all about how you look at it. Conservatives and Republicans have warned us about propaganda; this is it.

Last year the CSMonitor reported on the "whitening" effort in Texas education, to make slavery less significant in the history books, to whitewash it. Maybe this is how Michele Bachmann got her notions about how slavery was happier than the lives of African Americans today. In case you don't remember, this is how the Soviets taught history. I guess Texans and Republicans learned something from the Cold War.