...But We Can't Get By On Nothin'

If one of these people killed a dozen Republican senators and you were on the jury what would you do? Would you take the rightist position and convict him or her? Or the leftist position and give him or her an award for extraordinary service to the country and to humanity? Or would you just sort of take the middle road and call it even and ask everyone to go home and think about the direction our country is taking? I don't think Inside the Beltway politicians, most of whom are millionaires, understand the issue. If some of them passed a few of their colleagues hanging from lamp posts on the way to work, it would come into clearer focus. I'm not advocating that; it's illegal. But the prosecutor wouldn't want me on the jury.

I consulted my pastor, who has just released a new book, Changing The Script, to see if I could get a read on the morality of this kind of action. He's a man of peace and a man of God and you kind of have to read between the lines:

It's been a rough week. Ireland got sold back into serfdom, unemployment benefits expired, and in a bid to bring the spirit of peace and generosity back to Christmas, Republicans threatened to filibuster the START treaty until tax cuts for the upper 2% of wealthy Americans were made permanent. Oh, and like a maraschino cherry high atop a lollapalooza of suck, we find out from Wikileaks that the Obama administration-- with GOP help-- basically has quashed the investigation into torture by slow-marching it to death.

...And where, might you ask, was the religious left (such as it is) during all of this? Begging for scraps, I'm afraid. They were "urging" Congress to pass the DREAM Act and "urging" them to ratify START and "asking"(!) the House to pass the Child Nutrition Act. These are all fine and worthy causes, to be sure. Yet somehow I don't think they're going to be effective. Put it to you this way, it's one thing to go up against a giant with a slingshot. It's quite another to take your rock out and replace it with a crumpled-up piece of paper.

I've been asked a lot over the course of this fall why we don't have a politically effective religious left in America. The short answer is that there's a significant trade-off between being nice (or engaging in "civil discourse," as it's called these days) and being potent. All the commitment to moral suasion, to building consensus, to reconciliation between political opponents, all the commitment in the world to "speaking out" about your values isn't going to accomplish squat.

What will? Identity politics. I'm afraid they’re everything these days. Simply put, the religious left is far less effective than the religious right because it won't turn political questions into us-versus-them. It's too divisive for them, to use one of the president's favorite terms.

Yet, as I seldom tire of pointing out, the God of the Bible is quite partisan and quite divisive. You can't read about camels and the eye of the needle, let alone the Magnificat, without understanding that God is on the side of the poor.

If the religious left (such as it is) wants to be effective on economic issues-- tax cuts, employment, child nutrition-- it's going to have to learn to take sides too. It's going to have to say:

My God is the God of the poor. Someday, that God is going to bring down the powerful and send the rich away hungry, but lift up the lowly and fill the hungry. I know which side I'm on. Which side are you on?

Or better:

My God is the God of the poor. He takes notes, and so do I.

Or:

My God is the God of the poor. A vote against [unemployment benefits, child nutrition] or a vote for tax breaks for the obscenely wealthy is a vote against that God, and it's a vote against those who follow him.

Or simplest and perhaps best:

My God is the God of the poor. You can be for the poor or you can go to hell.

There's nothing nice about that. But then there's nothing nice about the absurd, reactionary, vicious and apparently successful class war the rich and powerful are waging on the rest of the nation, either.

The was the most important part of this post. If you have a hockey game or something you can go now. Otherwise, here's the kinds of facts and figures about unemployment you're never going to find on TV or even in newspapers. It's a report from the Council of Economic Advisors, the entirety of which you can read here after the hockey game. Here's the summary:

Unemployment insurance (UI) provides a safety net for workers who have lost a job through no fault of their own, as long as they continue to search for new employment. During normal economic conditions, firms pay into state insurance systems that replace roughly half of the average individual’s lost earnings, up to 26 weeks. However, the federal government historically funds additional weeks of benefits in response to an economic downturn. The benefits allow recipients to continue to support their families while searching for their next job.

In response to the recession that began in December 2007, Congress expanded UI benefits by creating Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) and 100 percent federal funding of Extended Benefits (EB). These programs provide UI benefits after a worker exhausts state benefits, helping when it takes longer to find a job, such as in this severe downturn. These extensions began to expire on November 30, 2010. In this report, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) examines the effects of the extensions thus far and the potential impact on the economy if Congress fails to act soon to continue these emergency measures.

As a result of these emergency expansions to UI:

• EUC and EB have helped 14 million unemployed workers as of October 2010. As of that date, there were almost 5 million unemployed workers benefiting from these programs each week.

• In total, these programs have benefited about 40 million people who have received, or lived with a recipient of, EUC or EB. This total includes 10.5 million children.

If these measures are not extended, the maximum eligibility for benefits in most states will revert to the pre-recessionary level of 26 weeks. The Department of Labor estimates that, relative to a month-long extension, 2 million unemployed workers will lose coverage in December 2010. And, relative to a year-long extension, nearly 7 million unemployed workers in total will lose coverage by November 2011.

Further, EUC and EB make up a substantial portion of household income. Without EUC and EB, the typical household receiving these benefits will see their income fall by a third. In the 42 percent of households where the EUC or EB recipient is the sole wage-earner, 90 percent of income will be lost.

This important income replacement allows individuals that have suffered from job loss to avoid a dramatic drop in their spending levels. Research studies have documented that UI is an extremely effective form of support for the economy relative to other government programs, both in terms of bang-for-the-buck and timeliness. EUC and EB recipients spend their benefit checks, rather than saving them, and a drop in this income will translate into a sizeable drop in aggregate spending.
Specifically, CEA estimates that:

• Employment was about 800,000 higher, and the level of GDP 0.8 percent higher, in September 2010 than would have been the case without EUC and EB.

• Without an extension, employment would be about 600,000 lower, and GDP 0.6 percent lower, in December 2011 than if a year-long extension were passed.

Previously, Congress continued federal expansions of UI until the economy was much further along the road to recovery. With 10 consecutive months of private sector job growth and half a percentage point drop in the unemployment rate since its peak, the economy is beginning to recover. However, the unemployment rate remains unacceptably high and there are still 5 job seekers for every job opening. For the last half-century, Congress has consistently extended UI benefits when economic circumstances substantially increased the difficulty of finding a job. Given the current labor market conditions, failing to continue UI extensions now would be unprecedented.

I live in California and if the Senate Republicans filibuster unemployment insurance to death 1,013,384 victims of corporate economic policies shoved down the public's throat by the Bush Administration and their GOP congressional allies will lose their unemployment insurance. That's the worst of any state in the Union. But even some of the Confederate states will be big losers. Florida will wind up with 531,029 unemployed people with no means of feeding their families. Texas will have 334,410, Georgia will have 301,688 and North Carolina will have 232,285. I know Republicans go no further than calculating that these people are mostly Democratic voters-- or not voters at all-- anyway. But you think God thinks that way too?

Maine just elected a teabagging imbecile for a governor and capped it off with Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature. There are 18,485 unemployed Mainers who will lose the meager benefits they have to keep their families from freezing to death this winter. I wonder what they'll tell Mr. LePage about that. People are less likely to wind up with frozen children in Arizona, but one has to wonder how the country's most clueless and unqualified governor-- working together with a heartless and venal state legislature-- will cope with 127,560 unemployed men and women who can't feed their children. Multimillionaires John McCain and Jon Kyl have vowed to filibuster any attempt to extend unemployment benefits. In fact, Kyl thinks unemployment benefits are counterproductive. They just keep people from working and insisting on getting paid at least the minimum wage.





Yeah, prosecutors better hope I'm not on the jury, especially if someone gets Kyl.

Right-wing junk religionists are at their beloved game of trying to undermine separation of church and state, which protects both church and state

"When religious leaders endorse candidates from the pulpit, they weaken both the sanctity of religion and the integrity of democracy. The IRS allows – and the Interfaith Alliance encourages – religious leaders to speak out on the important political issues of the day, but when clergy endorse specific candidates or parties in their official capacity, they abuse their pastoral authority."

--C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance

"The section of the tax code barring nonprofits from intervening in political campaigns has long frustrated clergy. Many ministers consider the provision an inappropriate government intrusion, blocking the duty of clergy to advise congregants."

--from a Wall Street Journal report on the Alliance Defense Fund's campaign to get ministers "to preach about election candidates this September, defying a tax law that bars churches from engaging in politics"

"I have yet to meet a pastor who feels this way. Responsible ministers understand that the First Amendment does as much or more to protect their congregations than it does to muffle their voice. More important, they understand that the mission of the church is to be the church, not an adjunct to a political movement."

--Pastor Dan, in his Street Prophets commentary today on the ADF's "double-dog daring churches to step over the line of Separation"

It took me a long time to understand that religious people aren't per se better or worse than other people. Just as there are folks whose faith inspires them to lead lives of inspiring morality and humanity, there are those who use religion as a tool, or even a weapon, to secure power or privilege or just make themselves feel better than other folks (and of course the unfortunate folks who take guidance from them, who just want to be told how to live their lives).

This shouldn't be all that surprising, of course. People are what people are. I'm guessing you find just about the same mix in most any walk of life. It was a heck of a shock for me to discover, as a youthful devotee of the fine arts, that the people on the inside of the arts profession, far from representing a higher order of being, incarnate the same mix of the good, the bad, and the in-between.

There's not much doubt in my mind that the folks at the forefront of America's epidemic of junk religion would have been bad people whatever career path they chose. It just strikes my delicate sensibilities as that much more reprehensible when they practice their evil in the name of "morality" or "decency"--or, bluntly, in the name of God. By the same token, the religious folk who are driven to work for the spiritual and practical well-being and betterment of their fellow homo sapiens would have been admirable human beings however their lives had been charted.

Today our good friend Pastor Dan of Street Prophets latched on to an important story about an outrageous abuse of this country's famous religious tolerance, a carefully worked-out plan by junk religionists to try to blast a hole in the separation of church and state (which as Pastor Dan likes to point out serves the best interests of both churches and the state):

Alliance Defense Fund: We Must Destroy First Amendment In Order To Save It
by pastordan
Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:04:17 AM PDT

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the ADF is double-dog daring churches to step over the line of Separation:

A conservative legal-advocacy group is enlisting ministers to use their pulpits to preach about election candidates this September, defying a tax law that bars churches from engaging in politics.

Alliance Defense Fund, a Scottsdale, Ariz., nonprofit, is hoping at least one sermon will prompt the Internal Revenue Service to investigate, sparking a court battle that could get the tax provision declared unconstitutional. Alliance lawyers represent churches in disputes with the IRS over alleged partisan activity.

The action marks the latest attempt by a conservative organization to help clergy harness their congregations to sway elections. The protest is scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 28, a little more than a month before the general election, in a year when religious concerns and preachers have been a regular part of the political debate.

...

Alliance fund staff hopes 40 or 50 houses of worship will take part in the action, including clerics from liberal-leaning congregations. About 80 ministers have expressed interest, including one Catholic priest, says Erik Stanley, the Alliance's senior legal counsel.

Translation: we're hoping to partisanize conservative congregations, since who knows how many Justice Sundays did squat for us before. The law is quite settled here, and IRS complaints take a long time to settle, much less litigate. So the legal effect for 2006 is basically nil, meaning this is a political maneuver.

Oh yeah, and this is crap:

The section of the tax code barring nonprofits from intervening in political campaigns has long frustrated clergy. Many ministers consider the provision an inappropriate government intrusion, blocking the duty of clergy to advise congregants.

I have yet to meet a pastor who feels this way. Responsible ministers understand that the First Amendment does as much or more to protect their congregations than it does to muffle their voice. More important, they understand that the mission of the church is to be the church, not an adjunct to a political movement.

C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance had a statement on the ADF's move that seems on-the-money:

Houses of worship belong to divine authority – they are not the property of either political party. The Alliance Defense Fund’s call for pastors to break the law represents the height of irresponsibility. They are putting churches across the country unnecessarily at risk to costly and time-consuming investigations that could result in harsh financial penalties. Putting churches in legal and financial jeopardy seems a bizarre way of defending religious freedom, which the ADF claims to defend.

But there is an even greater issue at stake in this campaign than violating the law. When religious leaders endorse candidates from the pulpit, they weaken both the sanctity of religion and the integrity of democracy. The IRS allows – and the Interfaith Alliance encourages – religious leaders to speak out on the important political issues of the day, but when clergy endorse specific candidates or parties in their official capacity, they abuse their pastoral authority.

Damn skippy.

#

Of course nothing is more important presidentially than keeping McCranky out of the White House. But isn't it clear who the better candidate is?

The other day I brought up the "gas-tax holiday" business, not for the issue's sake--since it seemed to me that Howie had been covering that perfectly well, and the bad things it told us about both holiday proponents, "Crazy" McCranky and our Hillary--but because of what was suggested to me by the way the Crankyman was making, or, rather, failing to make, his case, what it told us about the quality and condition of his "mind"--for want of a more descriptive word. (I did come up with a possibly more descriptive word: miasma.)

Which was not to dispute the dangerous foolishness of the proposals of the Tax Holiday Twins, Senators McCranky and Clinton. I have yet to hear a hint of disagreement on this point from anyone familiar with either the economics or energy impact of the subject. The only dissenters appear to be the aficionados of pandering to public ignorance.

I'm just catching up on yesterday's news, and in the pile I find breaking news (well, I guess it's broken by now, but still alarmingly pertinent) from A Siegel. In the way that Pastor Dan of Street Prophets is my go-to webguy on matters religious, A Siegel (of Energy Smart) is my go-to webguy on energy and environmental matters. (Please, no complaints about sexism. I have go-to webgals too--like Firedoglake's Christy Hardin-Smith and Marcy Wheeler on legal and governmental matters. I suppose we could make them all "go-to webgurus," but that seems somehow wrong as well as unnecessary.) And yesterday he was excited to report that Friends of the Earth has endorsed Barack Obama:

Until quite recently, those who focused primarily on energy and global warming issues could see reasons to be supporting Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama. In this arena, both have plans and records with strengths … and weaknesses. Both could learn from each other and strengthen their own programs. Thus, with real legitimacy, an “environmentalist”, those concerned about Peak Oil or Global Warming or related issues, could easily defend their position supporting either (or neither) of the candidates. And, again, their platforms/records are certainly light years ahead of this Administration’s and of McSame McCain’s, but have weaknesses and are ‘reasonably good’ but not the best that they could be. Thus, many of us were ’sitting on the sidelines’ when it came to the Presidential campaign.

Well, this has changed.

The precipitating event: Hillary Clinton’s determined foray into the Energy Dumb ranks with her vociferous and highly counter-productive calls for a gas tax moratorium.

Well, this morning, Friends of the Earth jumped off the fence and endorsed Barack Obama for President.

And, for FOE, the defining event, the precipating development: the gas tax holiday. . . .

A (if I may be so familiar) made clear: "[I]t was not just the gas tax holiday proposals from Clinton and McSame McCain, but Barack Obama’s forceful rejection of the idea as wrong-headed and counter-productive. -1 Hillary, +1 Barack. As far as FOE is concerned: Game, Set, Match for its endorsement."

And he concluded: "Again, let us not do things that dig our hole deeper, 'sham solutions,' but look forward to actually changing our path for the better."

I'm sure nobody's noticed that I haven't been writing much about the Obama vs. Clinton contest. I actually said pretty much everything I've (still) got to say on the subject in one of the less-noticed (which is saying quite a lot) pieces I've written here: "Sure, I'll vote for the monster, almost surely, if she's the Dem nominee--even though I don't think she and Bill will support the nominee if she isn't" early last month.

I know I'm far from alone in feeling that where the "major" contenders in the 2008 Democratic presidential field were concerned, it was a field of quite acceptable candidates--especially set alongside whatever life form the Republicans were likely to extract from their candidate freak show--but with no one to gladden a progressive's heart. (I made, and make, a slight exception for John Edwards, but even there, I remain unconvinced of what he would actually advance and fight for as president.)

And I know I'm far from alone in feeling that, since the Democratic field narrowed to the present two-horse race, the two candidates have been separating themselves to a near-astonishing degree--that Obama has emerged as steadily more sensible (as in the case of the gas-tax holiday) and committed to bringing people to his agenda, while Clinton has turned into a pandering horror show, trying desperately (and I don't think "desperately" is an exaggeration--just look at her, for goodness' sake) to be the centrist or even right-wing "strongman" that her low-life advisers (and again, her political advisers seem to me truly among the vilest people on the planet--and I don't see how we can ignore the implications of this for the kind of people she would surround herself with in the White House) tell her some deeply muddled and deeply moronic band of "centrist" voters want her to be.

Let me say again that I truly don't believe that this is what Clinton has always been, though of course in some form the potential must always have been part of her. No, I like my friend Peter's explanation: that she has turned into the monster that the sociopathic Clinton-haters of the '80s and '90s portrayed her as.

Which is why I've written so little about the race. I think any prospective voter to the left of, say, Richard Mellon Scaife needs to be prepared to support either Obama or Clinton unambiguously in November. (Oh wait, is Senator Clinton really to the left of her new booster RMS, one of the principal bankrollers of what someone once described as "a vast right-wing conspiracy" aimed at Bill Clinton and, er, someone else?)

A McCranky victory would be a horror of almost unimaginable proportions. After eight years of the Hurricane Katrina of presidential administrations, the next president has to deal with an executive branch in which nearly everything that hasn't been simply decimated is in an advanced state of corrosion. All the issues, great and small, that have been bungled or ignored these last eight years will have to be dealt with.

In addition, the next president has a backlog of judicial appointments to make. And while they will now have to be made over the veto power of the Senate's Right-Wing Obstruction Machine, would we rather that those appointments be made by a President Obama or Clinton or by Crazy McCranky? (Let me say again that in a sane world, all that would be necessary to make the point would be a big picture of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, whose replacement will all but certainly be named by the next president.)

It's clear already that whoever emerges with the Democratic nomination will have to deal with a large bloc of voters who think that not voting or even voting for McCranky is an acceptable or even somehow morally superior option. Well, that's a summer-and-fall discussion, though one that scares the daylights out of me.

If I may venture one further observation. In 2000, there were people who persuaded themselves they were taking the moral high ground by voting for Ralph Nader over either Al Gore or, um, the other guy (please don't make me say his name) and, when it was pointed out to them that they were effectively voting for, um, the other guy, they didn't care! They said something like: "Well, maybe that's for the best. Maybe what the system needs is to be thoroughly broken in order to build something better."

Well, I ask, how'd that work out?

#

Today it's not just me fulminating about the Reverend Huckypoop's savage ignorance on immigration--I've shanghaied Pastor Dan as a guest fulminator

"The fact is the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds. It's about people that can come with a shoulder fired missile and can do serious damage and harm to us, and that's what we need to be worried about. And the unsecure borders that we have pose a real national security threat."
--"Mad Mike" Huckabee, ranting in Iowa, trying to show Republican single-issue psycho-voters that he isn't soft on immigration, no matter what those left-wing meanies say

"While privileged men work their games of power, it is the children of the poor and dispossessed who get stuck with the tab."
--Pastor Dan, in a Holy Innocents' Day post on Street Prophets

Poor Hucko was raving about 660 "illegal Pakistanis" crossing into the U.S., er, carrying shoulder-fired missiles, apparently. Of course what the Huckababy doesn't know about U.S. immigration can be summed up in a single word: everything. The missile-launching Pakistanis swimming across the Rio Grande exist nowhere except in the lurid psycho-instead-of-sexual fantasies of people like Minister Mike. (Don't you get the feeling sometimes that what wingnut loons need to knock the crap out of their brains is some decent, honest--i.e., non-Republican--sex?)

Of course the immigration issue is about people coming to pick lettuce and make beds and do all those other sub-minimum-wage jobs nobody else is willing to do. These people are so tightly woven into our economy that if they were suddenly deported en masse, in accord with the wishes of the loopiest anti-immigration loons, nobody would be more surprised than those loons to see hardly any sector of American life continue functioning intact.

At this point, since dishonesty and stupidity on this scale, especially unchallenged dishonesty and stupidity, make me kind of nuts, I'm going to turn the podium over to one of the sanest and most grounded people I know, Pastor Dan of the "Street Prophets" website, in this excerpt from a post he did for Holy Innocents' Day:

Just today, Mike Huckabee linked Benazir Bhutto's assassination to illegal immigration:

In his speech today, Huckabee said it should be of concern to Americans that 660 illegal Pakistanis crossed the American border last year.

One reporter asked if that was ethnic baiting?

"No, not at all. I'm just saying maybe that a lot of Americans who live in Pella, Iowa maybe look halfway around the world and say, how does that affect me?" said Huckabee.

"And the way it affects them is that we need to understand that violence and terror is significant when it happens in Pakistan, it's more significant when it happens in our own cities, and it happens if people can slip across our border and we have no control over it," he continued.

"The fact is the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds. It's about people that can come with a shoulder fired missile and can do serious damage and harm to us, and that's what we need to be worried about. And the unsecure borders that we have pose a real national security threat."

It's true that those 660 Pakistanis may have brought surface-to-air missiles with them. Given that most illegal immigrants overstay visas rather than swim the Rio Grande, it seems unlikely, but anything's possible.

Or they may have been like Joseph and Mary, frightened young parents fleeing a dangerous, chaotic situation to protect their lives and the life of their child. It may have even been that two of them were toting a new messiah with them.

Who knows? Anything's possible.

I want to be surprised that Huckabee, the Southern Baptist pastor, could miss such obvious symbolism. But I'm not, and for the very reason that underscores the importance of this lesson: while privileged men work their games of power, it is the children of the poor and dispossessed who get stuck with the tab.

If Mr. Huckabee were much of a Christian, he would have drawn the obvious line between anti-democratic violence in Pakistan and instability outside its borders. He could have articulated the faith claim that God has and does act decisively to establish peace and justice, and calls his disciples to do the same. He might even have said that stable, peaceful, democratic regimes around the globe are not only consistent with the Christian faith, but in the best interests of our own nation.

But apparently, that would have provoked a hostile response. He would have been deluged with accusations of being "soft" on illegal immigration and "not serious" on foreign policy. Both those charges seem to translate into being insufficiently bloodthirsty, or at the least not punitive enough to salve the hardened hearts of many Americans. Collateral damage be damned, we want to be safe at any cost, and if a few hundred brown children more or less get greased, well, it's their own fault for being born into such a f***ed-up part of the world. Which means, unfortunately, that Rachel will continue to weep for her children. Today - and every day - is Holy Innocents' day.

FINAL BIT OF FULMINATION: A NOTE ON NOMENCLATURE

The last time I wrote about Itty-Bitty-Brained Mikie Huckababy, I was taken to task for having fun with his name and that of other famous far-right-wing sociopaths like Chimpy the Prez, the squatter in the White House who has spent seven years doing everything chimpanically possible to turn the U.S. into chimp poop.

Undoubtedly the complainer has finished reading the riot act to the lying scumbags of the Right-Wing Noise Machine like "OxyContin Rush" Limbaugh, who habitually traduce all manner of folk whose toes they aren't fit to lick.

I guess for me it comes down to a matter of respect. Lying, demagogic piles of filth like Chimpy the Prez and the Reverend Huckster have devoted their lives and diseased egos to trashing every shred of human sanity and decency.

Now we have the Reverend Huckypoop, of whom it could formerly be said that he had on occasion shown a glimmer of sanity on the immigration issue, showing that there are truly no depths of intellectual dishonesty and hate-mongering to which he won't sink if that's what he has to do to show that he's just as brain-damaged as any of the other Republican presidential hopefuls.


WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF NOMENCLATURE AND RESPECT

I hope it will be noted that I take care always to refer to ministers, even ones as debased as the Reverend Huckypoop, as the Reverend Huckypoop, rather than plain old Reverend Huckypoop. I was trained by a persnickety veteran copy editor to apprecdiate that "reverend" is a term of honor rather than a title. And so I extend the courtesy even to practitioners of the kind of junk Christianity peddled by Minister Huckster and his ilk, a bogus Christianity that would have shocked and appalled Jesus, who is ritually fetishized but has had his beliefs and teachings systematically expunged from the carnival.

My goodness, can you imagine how Jesus would have responded to the anti-immigrant hate-mongering being carried out even in his name? It would have left him with a lot of souls in need of saving.

#