There are prophecies in the Bible which indicate that a time is coming in which powerful religio-political forces will persecute a non-conformist minority, attempting to intimidate them into submission, and eventually using deadly force against them. I agree with my Seventh-day Adventist Church in its application of one such prophecy to the United States government. The prophecy has been studied in this respect for over 100 years, comparing the machinations of the Federal Government with the words of the Bible. The Book of Revelation contains one such prophecy:
Revelation 13:15-17, “He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark.
This prophecy connects the power of commerce “buy or sell” with the power to exert deadly force. The introduction of digital banking, check-cards, and identification numbers was a first step toward the ability to bar access to commerce to hand-picked members of the population. To my mind, however, the deadly force aspect was vague; I couldn’t see yet how a large number of American citizens could be militarized and authorized to use lethal force against their fellow Americans. Then the following story was told on my local Pacifica radio station, and I sat there stunned as I listened to it, the implications of it creating a sick feeling in my stomach.
The FBI is partnering with businesses ostensibly to help guard our nation’s economic infrastructure from terrorist threats, but in so doing is granting business leaders the right to the prosecution-free use of deadly force when martial law is declared.
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I’m ashamed that the last place I bought gasoline was a Chevron station. If the city of Berkeley can pull off a boycott of Chevron, I too can go down to the next station (by the way, Chevron owns Texaco). I already had good reason to do this, but Monday’s Flashpoints settled it for me. Listen to it, see if this ten minutes of radio interview doesn’t change your mind, too.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Americans are turning out in record numbers to vote in the early primaries. Florida just had record turnouts, as did South Carolina. This is an encouraging sign. So many are turning out that it appears to be throwing off polling numbers. Since New Hampshire’s public pollster embarrassment, there is growing evidence that people can tell a poll questioner how they may vote, but the next day or even that afternoon they reserve the right to make up their own mind despite what polls are saying or even what they said to the polls.
The voters of each state are making up their own minds despite the media spin cycle’s attempts to tell them what’s on their minds.
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I just can’t believe how similar this last address was to last years’, and all the others since the major changes in domestic and foreign policy undertaken by this administration began 6 years ago.
Domestically, the “missing class,” missing because they never get mentioned by Congress or President, were missing from Bush’s last State of the Union Address. I found that a glaring omission since I have been a part of that group ever since I started my job as a teacher. We work full-time, and our spouses work full time, but health-care, housing, and transportation costs rise so much faster than wages that we live under the awful specter of One-Emergency-Away-From-Homelessness.
This missing class is NOT the middle class. The middle class can afford to get sick, buy a home, have more than two cars, send their kids to private schools, etc. The middle class isn’t getting any favors from government these last 7 years, but they don’t have the crisis hanging over there heads; they have a safety net. The missing class isn’t the Officially Poor, those who fall below the nationally set poverty line. $21,200.00 per year or less in earnings for a family of four is currently the officially definition of poverty in the United States. That class qualifies for all the most aggressive anti-poverty assistance measures of government, such as welfare, job-training, food-stamps, Medicaid, and even those measures are being chipped away by this President and his Congress.
On Democracy Now! this morning, I heard Amy Goodman’s guests discussing this, and they estimate that about 50 million people belong in this “missing class.” And then the President suggests his domestic solutions to our Union’s ills, and it amounts to permanent tax cuts for the middle and upper classes.
Really, how do they sleep at night, these so-called “representatives” of us? You know how? By willful ignorance. By never giving any meaningful thought or attention to real families in the lowest classes, by avoiding any serious contact with those who are members of the missing and lower classes, they simply can put a whole slice of the population out of mind. The constant grinding terrifying daily challenges of millions of real people recede into the oblivion of economic statistics on a cost/benefit balance sheet. These are the exploiters of positions of power that my Bible says have an unpleasant surprise waiting for them at the End. I would say “it must be nice to be able to forget unpleasant realities,” but ultimately we are going to be held accountable for our actions, more than just in the historical legacy we create, and I don’t think the temporary fantasy world that exploiters live in will have been worth the cost in the Judgment.
On Foreign policy, Bush has the temerity to suggest that we’re on our way out of Iraq (20,000 military troops are now permanently home from Iraq, he said). In reality, there are half a million people on the U.S. payroll over there, between regular military, contractors (which more than match the number of regulars), and Iraqi security forces-in-training. The biggest US embassy on planet earth is being built in Iraq, and so are at least 3 military bases. I’ll go with what Senator McCain suggested; we could be there another hundred years. That has been the PNAC/Neocon plan for 25 years, and there isn’t a force on earth that could have prevented it from happening. September 11 was simply a catalyst that allowed the establishment of permanent US allied nations in the Muslim Middle East to come to fruition. And anyone who doesn’t yet think it’s all about oil needs to leave the room.
The question is: Will Obama, Clinton II, McCain, or Romney do anything substantive to change any of the above? I want to believe that change is inevitable, and yet I somehow doubt it…
House Republicans are trying to pass a bill that establishes the United States as a Christian nation. Their tactic is to rewrite the early history of our nation to look like it was a band of Christian pilgrims carving out a new empire of Christendom in the New World. Or something.
The Nation article has all the goods:
Here is an event I have no intention of honoring: American Religious History Week. OK, it’s not official yet. But it is spelled out as Resolution 888 in the bowels of a House committee, sponsored by Republican Congressman Randy Forbes and backed by thirty-one other Representatives. This is an insidious attempt by the radical Christian right to rewrite American history, to turn the founding fathers from deists into Christian fundamentalists, to proclaim us officially to be a Christian nation. If you want to know why Mike Huckabee is dangerous, why his brand of right-wing Christian populism is so frightening, you should read this resolution.Sent to me by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the resolution has passages like this: “Whereas political scientists have documented that the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible” and “Whereas the United States Supreme Court has declared throughout the course of our Nation’s history that the United States is ‘a Christian country’, ‘a Christian nation’, ‘a Christian people’, ‘a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being’ and that ‘we cannot read into the Bill of Rights a philosophy of hostility to religion….’”
The resolution is staggering for its sheer volume of falsehoods about our history, our system of government and our democracy. It asserts that Thomas Jefferson “urged local governments to make land available specifically for Christian purposes, provided Federal funding for missionary work among Indian tribes, and declared that religious schools would receive ‘the patronage of the government.’” There are seventy-six preambular clauses like these, leading up to four resolution clauses, the third of which states that the House “rejects, in the strongest possible terms, any effort to remove, obscure, or purposely omit such history from our Nation’s public buildings and educational resources.”
“House Resolution 888 is perhaps the most disgraceful, shocking and tragic example yet of the pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of the unconstitutional rape of our bedrock American citizens’ religious freedoms by the fundamentalist Christian right,” says Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and a former White House counsel for President Reagan.
The resolution may never work its way out of committee, and even if it does, it may never be passed. But it is important because it expresses an increasingly influential ideology. It underlies the ideological appeal of the Huckabee campaign, however adroitly the Republican candidate dodges these issues when speaking to the general public. “I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ,” Huckabee told a Baptist convention in 1998. He assured the crowd that he had not entered politics “because I thought government had a better answer. I got into
politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.” And this ideology, as illustrated by Mitt Romney’s coded appeal to Christian fundamentalists when giving his recent Texas speech on faith, or even John McCain’s humbling trip to Liberty University, has a powerful pull on Republican candidates.
I saw a persistent rewriting of history in numerous Christian history textbooks, used by hundreds of thousands of children, when I wrote American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. The revisionists take a minor historical event–in the case of the missionaries, drawing from very rare decisions to provide funds for mission schools or the building of a church on Indian lands–and use it to create a false portrait of a Christian nation. The resolution asserts that the Fourth of July was designed as a Christian holiday, and that in 1977 Congress authorized that Bibles be “printed under their care” and imported for dissemination to the American public. Congress never imported Bibles. But facts matter little.
It is a mistake, despite the seeming implosion of the Republican Party, to count these people out. The Christian radicals have, as the Huckabee candidacy illustrates, broken free from the fetters of their corporate and neocon handlers. They have unleashed a frightening populism that, in the event of an economic meltdown or period of instability, could see the movement ride the wave of a massive right-wing backlash. So when you get tired of the cute sound bites that constitute most coverage of these campaigns, pull out this resolution to remind yourself that we are playing with dynamite, that unless we begin to re-enfranchise tens of millions of Americans–and this means economically–back into the mainstream, unless we again give our workers the chance to earn a living wage, we will fail to blunt this movement and could well fall victim to it.
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/hedges
Christianizing US History
by CHRIS HEDGES
[from the January 28, 2008 issue]
From the press kit of Alex Gibney’s new film, Taxi To The Dark Side, releasing in January of 2008:
[T]he issue of “torture” is not really about interrogation techniques. It is about a pandemic of corruption that ensues when the rule of law is weakened. He taught me that torture is like a virulent virus – spreading, mutating, building resistance to attempts to stop it – that infects everything in its path. It haunts the psyche of the soldier who administers it; it corrupts the officials who look the other way; it discredits the information obtained from it; it weakens the evidence in a search for justice, and it strengthens a despotic strain that takes hold in men and women who run hot with a peculiar patriotic fever: believing that, because they are “pure of heart,” they are entitled to be above the law.
Click here to go to Wikipedia’s article on the Geneva Conventions
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Just one of the many positive and workable suggestions made by The Smirking Chimp’s Stephen Fleischman is to Soak the Rich. Here’s a quote from the article, found at smirkingchimp.com:
- Reverse Reaganomics. Re-institute regulation of industry. Make the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, do their jobs, so that we don’t have US corporations off-shoring their manufacturing to another country, like China, for example, and then importing their product, like toys, for example, painted with lead, for our children to play with.
- Soak the Rich, a phrase coined by FDR when he spoke about the “Economic Royalists” who brought this country to its knees. Instead of cutting taxes for the rich, as Bush has been doing, raise taxes for the rich and their corporate enterprises, as they did during the great depression when FDR laid a tax rate on them of over 90% in the upper brackets.
- Marshal Plan on Energy — Go cold turkey on our addiction to oil. Massive investment in the new technologies of alternative energy sources, wind, solar, geothermal. Halt the return to nuclear, and head off the development of biofuels that will put our food into your gas tanks. We can create new high-tech industries and high-paying jobs with a new energy world.
- Single Payer Universal Health Care - end the merry-go-round on health care by political candidates. Get rid of the blood-sucking health insurance companies, once and for all. And make health care for our citizens a right and not a privilege. Any candidate for office will get elected on that platform.
- Stop the Hemorrhaging in Afghanistan and Iraq - Four thousand dead American soldiers is four thousand too many. Two trillion dollars to destroy two countries is two trillion dollars that could have been used to rebuild the infrastructure of our country and have enough left to enhance the lives of our young and our old.
David Korten says, “Capitalism, which means quite literally rule by financial capital–by money and those who have it–in disregard of all non-financial values, has triumphed over democracy, markets, justice, life, and spirit. There are other ways to organize human societies to actualize the positive benefits of markets and private ownership. They require strong, active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce rules that assure costs are internalized, equity is maintained, and market forces are channeled to the service of democracy, justice, life, and spirit.”
How to Get Rich Quick: Be Rich
Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington who characterizes the Bush administration’s policies as YOYO economics, based on You (Are) On Your Own, said the differences in income growth explained why so many Americans have told pollsters that they are feeling squeezed.
“A lot of people justifiably feel they are working harder and smarter, they are baking a bigger and better pie, and yet their slice is not growing much at all,” Mr. Bernstein said. “It is meaningless to middle- and low-income families to say we have a great economy because their economy looks so much different than folks at the top of the scale because this is an economy that is working, but not working for everyone.”
At every income level Americans had more income, after adjusting for inflation in 2005 than in 2003, but the increases ranged from almost imperceptible for the poor to modest for the middle class and largest for those at the top.
On average, incomes for the top 1 percent of households rose by $465,700 each, or 42.6 percent after adjusting for inflation. The incomes of the poorest fifth rose by $200, or 1.3 percent, and the middle fifth increased by $2,400 or 4.3 percent.
thanks to thinkprogress (wherein some really good comments are being generated from this horrible holiday news)
original source: NYTimes
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