A time for heresy

From Bill Moyers, always a good read: A Time For Heresy. My attempt at a summary of the main points:

Bill Clinton is a Baptist. So is Pat Robertson. Jesse Jackson is a Baptist. So is Jesse Helms. Al Gore is a Baptist. So is Jerry Falwell. No wonder Baptists have been compared to jalapeno peppers: one or two make for a tasty dish, but a whole bunch together will bring tears to your eyes.

Many Baptists are fundamentalists; they believe in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible and the divine right of preachers to tell you what it means.

The Bible advocates violence like the Quran (burning witches, stoning adulteresses, endless massacres by Joshua and family, etc.), but with a higher illiteracy rate, Muslims hear Islam perverted by local preachers. For the literate, the only excuse for following preachers (and politicians), rather than the facts, is laziness.

They also believe in the separation of church and state only if they cannot control both. The only way to cooperate with fundamentalists, it has been said, is to obey them.

Baptists helped ... America’s great contribution to political science and practical politics – the independence of church and state... No religion was to become the official religion; you couldn’t be taxed to pay for my exercise of faith.

Said James Dunn: "The Supreme Court can’t ban prayer in school. Real prayer is always free." When the fundamentalists and their obliging politicians claimed that God had been expelled from the classroom, Dunn answered: "The god whom I worship and serve has a perfect attendance record and has never been tardy."

Unless your goal is to impress others with the amount of time you spend praying, talking about praying, and otherwise making your relationship with God as visible to your peers as possible. Not quite the goal, as I understand it.

Pain comes with freedom – it’s just the deal. The little gods don’t want you to grow, learn, think for yourself. But you have to test their truth claims against your own life’s experience – against your own faith and reason.

This is a time for heresy. American democracy is threatened by perversions of money, power, and religion. Money has bought our elections right out from under us. Power has turned government "of, by, and for the people" into the patron of privilege. And Christianity and Islam have been hijacked by fundamentalists who have made religion the language of power, the excuse for violence, and the alibi for empire.

In all countries, religious symbolism and rhetoric is power over those too lazy or igorant to try to understand the religion on their own, and to follow its implications. And as in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, patriotism (or "nationalism" if you're referring to any country but your own) can be inflated to religious proportions and distortions.

We were not supposed to be a country where the winners take all. The great progressive struggles in our history were waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich, share in the benefits of a free society. Today, however, the majority of Americans may support such broad social goals as affordable medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people, safe working conditions, a good education for every child, and clean air and water, but there’s no government "of, by, and for the people" to deliver on those aspirations.

How did this happen? By design. For a quarter of a century now a ferocious campaign has been conducted to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual, cultural, and religious frameworks that sustained America’s social contract.

For more details, use your favorite search engine on any of the organizations referenced in this article: Funding the Right.

Their economic strategy was to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe for even cheaper labor, and relieve investors of any responsibility for the cost of society.

And companies, of course: recent legislation on lawsuit "reform" restricts the options for American citizens, but not those of corporations, which file 75% of civil lawsuits.

Their political strategy was to neutralize the independent media, create their own propaganda machine with a partisan press, and flood their coffers with rivers of money from those who stand to benefit from the transfer of public resources to elite control. Along the way they would burden the nation with structural deficits that will last until our children’s children are ready to retire, systematically stripping government of its capacity, over time, to do little more than wage war and reward privilege.

This strategy is known as "starving the beast": cut taxes and raise national debt, all the while refusing to reduce spending. As debt increases, the only politically viable solution is to cut social programs (since money thrown at defense budgets is beyond criticism) - the goal all along.

Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the status of God’s favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral.

At the intersection of these three strategies was money: Big Money.

That money isn’t going to come from regular folks – less than one half of one percent of all Americans made a contribution of $200 or more to a federal candidate in 2004. No, the men and women who have mastered the money game have taken advantage of this fundamental weakness in our system – the high cost of campaigns – to sell democracy to the highest bidder.

The number of lobbyists registered to do business in Washington has more than doubled in the last five years. That’s 16,342 lobbyists in 2000 to 34,785 last year. Sixty-five lobbyists for every member of Congress.

The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month.

While the lobbyists are privately employed, it's a hard to take "small government" seriously when industry is spending such money sending more and more people to Washington. Given the span of their influence, this is evidently the situation Republicans want.

But it’s a small investment on the return. Just look at the most important legislation passed by Congress in the last decade.

There was the energy bill that gave oil companies huge tax breaks at the same time that Exxon Mobil just posted $36 billion in profits in 2005, while our gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time high.

There was the bankruptcy “reform” bill written by credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe.

Note that the bill places no additional restrictions on corporate bankruptcies - only the much smaller bankruptcies of private citizens.

There was the deregulation of the banking, securities, and insurance sectors, which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors.

There was the deregulation of the telecommunications sector which led to cable industry price-gouging and the abandonment of news coverage by the big media companies.

There was the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opening a P.O. box in an off-shore tax haven like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands.

And in every case, the religious right was cheering for the winners.

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The cost of corruption is passed on to the people.

These charlatans and demagogues know that by controlling a society’s most emotionally-laden symbols, they can control America, too. Davidson Loehr reminds us that holding preachers and politicians to a higher standard than they want to serve has marked the entire history of both religion and politics. It is the conflict between the religion of the priests – ancient and modern – and the religion of the prophets.

It is the vast difference between the religion about Jesus and the religion of Jesus.

For the greatest heretic of all is Jesus of Nazareth, who drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem as we must now drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.

Faith-based security

From the "what the f***?" department, for your (in)digestion: Executive Order: Responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security with Respect to Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. No, this is not a joke, at least not an intentional one. Some of the lowlights of this directive:

The Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary) shall establish within the Department of Homeland Security (Department) a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (Center).

The purpose of the Center shall be to coordinate agency efforts to eliminate regulatory, contracting, and other programmatic obstacles to the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the provision of social and community services.

... coordinate a comprehensive departmental effort to incorporate faith-based and other community organizations in Department programs and initiatives to the greatest extent possible...

That's right - faith-based homeland security! Good for the entire family! If I were more cynical I'd take this as the administration finally admitting that prayer is about the only option left, in lieu of smart policies and fiscal decisions which could fund reasonable security recommendations.

Nuclear par

From George Monbiot's A Self-Vindicating Policy.

Israel, citing the threat from Iran, insists on retaining its nuclear missiles. Threatened by them (and prompted, among other reasons, by his anti-semitism), the Iranian president says he wants to wipe Israel off the map, and appears to be developing a means of doing so. Israel sees his response as vindicating its nuclear programme. It threatens an air strike, which grants retrospective validity to Ahmadinejad’s designs. And so it goes on. Everyone turns out to be right in the end.

Some leadership from the U.S. on this issue, some relatively trivial embrace of nonproliferation in practice (not just in words), could possibly help here, and at little real risk. But the banner of terrorism has given us, apparently, justification for redesign of the nuclear payload, as well as development of new weapons. How these would have prevented 9/11 or even helped defend the homeland is a matter for those with expansive imaginations.

The defence secretary [of the UK] explains that a new missile system is necessary because “some countries” have not been “complying with their obligations under the non-proliferation treaty”(5). In response, therefore, the UK will refuse to comply with its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty. This provides other countries with their justification for … well, you’ve got the general idea.

When Iran is referred to the UN Security Council, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be able to turn every accusation it makes back on his accusers. He will insist that the council’s members are asserting a monopoly of ultimate violence; that while there is as yet no definitive evidence that he is in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, no one can doubt that they are. He will point to America’s tacit endorsement of Israel’s nuclear status and its overt endorsement of India’s. He will assert that the enforcement of the global nuclear regime discriminates against Muslim states. And though he is wrong about many things, he will be right about all that.

While no one pretends all states are even remotely the same with regard to aggression, our schizophrenic policy supports only self-interest while waving the banner of diplomacy. Our

... the US Congress ... has bravely sought to block a new nuclear weapons programme. For two years in a row it has refused to approve the money for George Bush’s “robust nuclear earth penetrator”, a mini-nuke which could have reduced the threshold for first use. But now it seems to have been duped.

Last year it approved initial funding for something called the “reliable replacement warhead” programme. The administration maintained that this was nothing more than the refurbishment of existing nuclear weapons. The legislators chose to believe it.

They seemed naïve then and they seem more naïve today. The US has already spent about $60 billion maintaining and refurbishing its weapons under a separate programme, called “stockpile stewardship”. It wasn’t easy to see why it needed a new scheme. Even before the reliable replacement warhead programme had been approved, the outgoing deputy head of the Nuclear National Security Administration (NNSA) had let slip that a new generation of weapons was “not the primary objective, but [it] would be a fortuitous associated event.”

Not much to comment on here; this continues the current administration's behavioral pattern of secrecy and duplicity to implement its whims, regardless of the opinions of the pesky elected officials composing the legislative branch, the one which is only now gathering the chutzpah to check and balance as was its mandate. While such actions are hardly unique to this administration, their mastery of the domain certainly is.

This is not to say that the horripilation Iran’s nuclear programme inspires is unjustified. Nor is it to claim that no other state would seek to develop or maintain nuclear weapons if the official nuclear powers gave theirs up. But the refusal of the members of the security council to make any moves towards disarmament, their threats of pre-emptive bombing and their quiet development of new weapons systems guarantees the failure of both the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nothing could make us less secure than the billions we are spending in the name of security.

The only possible justification for such a stance is, of course, that we are Right and Just, and that They are not, and therefore cannot be trusted with such weapons. Whether this statement is true or not, and to what degree, is completely irrelevant - making the statement undercuts any legitimate moral authority we would otherwise have had. Actions, as always, speak louder than words.

Fossil fools

As true today as it was then - from The Fossil Fools by the inimitable George Monbiot:

There is a discussion about whether global warming is due to anthropogenic (manmade) effects. But it is not – or is only seldom – taking place among scientists. It is taking place in the media, and it seems to consist of a competition to establish the outer reaches of imbecility.

Science ... learns from its mistakes. A hypothesis is advanced and tested. If the evidence suggests it is wrong, it is discarded. If the evidence appears to support it, it is refined and subjected to further testing. That some climatologists predicted an ice age in the 1970s, and that the idea was dropped when others found that their predictions were flawed, is a cause for confidence in climatology.

But these dolts are rather less dangerous than the BBC, and its insistence on “balancing” its coverage of climate change. It appears to be incapable of running an item on the subject without inviting a sceptic to comment on it. Usually this is either someone from a corporate-funded thinktank (who is, of course, never introduced as such) or the professional anti-environmentalist Philip Stott. Professor Stott is a retired biogeographer. Like almost all the prominent sceptics he has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change. But he has made himself available to dismiss climatologists’ peer-reviewed work as the “lies” of eco-fundamentalists.

This wouldn’t be so objectionable, if the BBC made it clear that these people are not climatologists, and the overwhelming majority of qualified scientific opinion is against them. Instead, it leaves us with the impression that professional opinion is split down the middle. It’s a bit like continually bringing people onto the programme to suggest that there is no link between HIV and AIDS.

Sounds more than a little like our own Fox "News," and the other new organs which have shamefully attempted to emulate its innovations in truth. But since Monbiot's standards of reporting are higher than the American public's, I suspect the BBC leans much closer toward "fair and balanced."

In any event - just because you can find skeptic doesn't mean he or she should actually be listened to. See http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm for information on how the earth is really flat. Really.

But hey, if you don't believe George, you could always listen to a slightly more conservative source: The Pentagon. See Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us, and for more on the Pentagon's report, see links at http://www.climate.org/topics/climate/pentagon.shtml, and MSNBC. Granted that this is a Pentagon visionary, but the current administration has certainly listened to him on ballistic missile defense...

Messiahs and Imperialists

Some notes on why a state of "minimum and permanent level of international tension" is desirable to U.S. policymakers: Messiahs and Imperialists:

... the main differences among the different schools are tactical—liberal internationalists, for example, tend to value multilateralism and a sense of prudence, they believe in the magical healing powers of global capital, and they don't usually descend into the trance-like messianism of George W. Bush...

... a president with a divine sense of purpose is hardly the scariest religious impulse in American foreign policy. That honor belongs to the various forms of millennialism in the United States, which can hold that it's America's duty to bring about the millennium...

... the standard bearer of a "non-apocalyptic view of means and ends, capabilities and challenges" tends to be the "realists" within the foreign policy establishment—those, like Jeanne Kirkpatrick or Condoleeza Rice, who believe that America must remake the world in its own image, but should be cautious about how to do so. ... But even if these "realists" don't drink from the same millennial Kool-Aid as the neoconservatives, they very much serve their own master: namely, American militarism.

On the one hand, there's the widespread, quasi-religious idea that America is the chosen nation called on to transform the world, with all the genuinely noble and appallingly ugly impulses that brings. On the other hand, there's a security establishment that doesn't buy into these millennial fantasies, but still remains committed to the endless "maintenance and expansion of U.S. global military power." Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is held in high regard by the Democratic establishment, sees the world as a "Grand Chessboard," which gives a sense for what that's all about. If this is all correct, then any hopes for a sensible foreign policy in the near future are probably foolish.