Jesus Certainly Had It All Right But The Catholic Church Seems To Have Turned It All On Its Head

- by Mary Jean Collins

Watch out Catholic Bishops, it looks like the younger generation of Catholic elected officials are not going to continue the careful reverence or fear of the hierarchy the last generation displayed. In an act to courage, leadership and defiance, in October, Rep Patrick J. Kennedy (D-RI), called out the hierarchy for their lack of support for the health care reform bill. In an interview with Cybercast News Service on October 21, Kennedy said he could not understand “how the Catholic Church could be against the biggest social justice issue of our time” adding that its stance was fanning “flames of dissent and discord.” Representative Kennedy may feel a unique responsibility for passage of this bill since the death of his father, Senator Kennedy this last summer.

The day after Kennedy’s statements, Bishop Thomas J Tobin, the Bishop of the Providence Rhode Island Diocese called the comments “irresponsible and ignorant of the facts” and also called Kennedy “a disappointment” to the church.

Kennedy did not back down. On November 7, he voted against the amendment sponsored by Bart Stupak- (D-MI 1) and Joe Pitts (R-PA 16) that would prohibit federal funds from paying for any part of a health insurance plan that covers abortion. He was not the only Catholic Democrat to do so. In fact, only 36 Catholic Democrats voted for the amendment while 50 including Kennedy voted against it. Kennedy then voted to pass the Health Care legislation. Six Catholic Democrats voted for Stupak-Pitts and against health care reform. I wonder if they have heard from their Bishops about that vote.
 
After the House vote, Bishop Tobin issued an open letter to Representative Kennedy criticizing his vote and questioning his faith. Bishop Tobin called Kennedy’s support of abortion rights “a deliberate and obstinate act of the will” that was “unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members.”

Kennedy then revealed that Bishop Tobin had instructed him not to receive Communion (a central religious practice) and told priests in the diocese not to give Kennedy communion. Tobin admitted that he had written a letter in 2007 asking Kennedy to refrain from communion by denied it was an outright ban. A planned meeting between the Bishop and Representative Kennedy has been put on hold.

On Monday, another Catholic Representative took the initiative to speak out in defense of Representative Kennedy. Representative Patrick Murphy (D-PA8). Murphy stated: “We don’t legislate at the orders of the Vatican, we legislate what is in our conscience and what we think is good for our country." Ironically Murphy was at Harvard to receive a John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award from Caroline Kennedy, President Kennedy’s daughter. 

Murphy also discussed the punishment he had received at the hands of his parish priest when he married his wife Jenni in 2006. The priest refused to bless the marriage because of Murphy’s stand on abortion rights.

Murphy ran for Congress in 2006 as a returning Iraq vet against an incumbent Republican Thomas Fitzgerald. It was a very close race and in the end Murphy won by 1500 votes. I was impressed at the time at the courage of this candidate because he was unfailing in his support of reproductive right and LGBT rights. 

I’ve worked in various prochoice advocacy organizations for over 30 years. Having outspoken Catholic public officials is one excellent way of breaking the Bishop’s hold on Congress. It is long overdue to question whether a handful of Bishops actually speak for the Catholic people. When they go to the Hill it is time to make clear, the people are not following, not in policy and not in elections. The Bishops have hidden behind their support of social legislation to blunt criticism of their holding every issue hostage to the abortion issue. 

Winning health care reform without giving in to the Bishops demands will embolden Catholics, office holders and people to expect a Church that pretends to support social justice to put up or shut up.

Apparently That Hope And Change Thing Doesn't Include Wall Street Predators

American president's, regardless of party, usually pick an economic team friendly to Wall Street. In fact, key Wall Street players usually are the heart and "soul" of presidential economic teams. Peter Orszag may be a decent OMB director but the team is mostly a bunch of predatory bankster shills, barely an iota better than the disastrous team Bush fielded. Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin and the rest of the team may get high marks from Villagers for being "bipartisan," but, clearly, they work for the corporate managerial elites and ownership class, not for the American people. Geithner, under attack from the right-- an attack motivated exclusively by partisan rancor-- for advocating basically GOP approaches to economic policies, has few progressive voices defending him. Progressives don't want to attack Obama but they sure wish Geithner and Summers would fall off a cliff-- or onto their swords. Today the White House seems to be floating rumors that they could get someone even worse than Geithner for Treasury Secretary, someone like JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon.

Right now Geithner is as busy defending the status quo as any Republican Secretary of the Treasury would. He vociferously opposes the kind of financial transaction tax that the world needs the U.S. to buy into before moving forward.

The fourth highest ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, John Larson, has put forward a plan to impose a 0.25% tax on derivatives transactions. Another congressman, Peter DeFazio, has recruited five colleagues and an array of unions to champion his proposal for a much broader tax... Wall Street remains opposed, arguing that any measure would hurt wealth generation. But Dean Baker, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the US treasury could be persuaded to see a tax as an aid in plugging a huge looming budget deficit. "I think it has a chance," said Baker. "People are really, really angry with the financial industry. We do have budget deficits and this is getting a lot of interest."

Among those signed up to DeFazio's plan are America's largest union confederation, the AFL-CIO, and activist groups such as Americans for Financial Reform and the Campaign for America's Future.

The Obama administration, which has been reluctant to cast itself as anti-Wall Street, is unenthusiastic. The US treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, said this week that he has "not seen a version of that tax that I think would be appropriate for our country," though activists suggested this was a softening of his line from earlier in the month, when Geithner simply said that a financial transaction tax was "not something we are prepared to support."

The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said a Tobin tax was "not a priority" but she did not rule it out, saying simply that the US could not act single-handedly: "We couldn't do it alone, we'd have to do it as an international initiative."

Wall Street, having largely dodged any substantive crackdown on bonuses, is yet to take the idea seriously. Americans, who are less likely than the British to have employer-managed pension plans, invest directly in the stockmarket more commonly than Europeans, and any tax would face stiff opposition from free marketeers.

The Democratic House leadership, despite signals from Obama's Wall Streeters, are moving forward, albeit cautiously, with a tax on large financial transactions to help pay for jobs-creation legislation. The Democrats pushing it-- populists Pete DeFazio (D-OR), Michael Arcuri (D-NY), Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), Bruce Braley (D-IA), Betty Sutton (D-OH), Bob Filner (D-CA) and Tom Perriello (D-VA)-- want to raise $150 billion a year with the transaction tax, half to pay down the deficit and half to fund job creation efforts.

The tax rate would range from 0.02 percent for swaps, futures and credit-default swaps to 0.25 percent for stocks, according to the lawmakers’ letter. Options would be taxed at the rate that applies to the type of the underlying asset.

The tax would eliminate the incentive for “excessive speculation because much of the excessive risk on Wall Street is high-volume, short-term speculative trading,” the letter said. “We must make it clear to our constituents that we know Main Street is suffering and a restored Wall Street should now share in its recovery with everyone else.”

The tax would be refunded for transactions less than $100,000 and for those involving assets kept in individual retirement accounts, education savings accounts and health savings accounts, according to the letter.

The organizations that control and carefully steer the teabagger groups are hysterically opposed but feel there is little to fear because of adamant opposition in the highly bought-off Senate. Surely it won't help that yesterday reports seeped out that Goldman Sachs only pays an effective 1% corporate income tax-- $14 million for Bush's last year in office (2008), down drastically from the $6 billion they paid in 2007.

U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said steps by Goldman Sachs and other banks shifting income to countries with lower taxes is cause for concern.

“This problem is larger than Goldman Sachs,” Doggett said. “With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore.”

WHY SHOULD THE CITIZENS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL NEXT NOVEMBER FOR JOHN SUNUNU TO BE REMOVED FROM THE SENATE? AND WHY ISN'T ROVE IN PRISON?

For several years now DWT has been following the case of New Hampshire's stolen U.S. Senate election of 2002, when John Sununu managed to slip into office the same way Bush did two years earlier-- by cheating. Several of the Republican operatives involved in stealing the election were charged, convicted and imprisoned. But they were low-level Republican slime-for-hire, and no real investigation of the people from whom they took their orders, or who paid them, was ever undertaken. Mehlman, Rove and, of course, Sununu were the ones who should have been in prison. Instead they all got away scot-free... until now.

One of the perps, Allen Raymond, has written a book about how the GOP stole a U.S. Senate seat, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, due out from Simon & Schuster in January. Raymond explains the cover-up and "offers a raw, inside glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all costs."

Next year Sununu will face the woman, (now former Gov.) Jeanne Shaheen, he stole the 2002 election from once again, and every poll shows him trailing badly. That's good, but not nearly enough. He should be tried for a very grave crime, along with the Republican Party officials who enabled and him and their party, starting with Rove and Mehlman.


UPDATE ON GOP ELECTION STEALING IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

Will it surprise you to read that successful attempts to steal a desperately needed U.S. Senate in New Hampshire went beyond Republican Party officials and right into the heart of the Bush Regime? Today the McClatchy newspapers are reporting that "the Justice Department delayed prosecuting a key Republican official [subsequently convicted Karl Rove stooge James Tobin] for jamming the phones of New Hampshire Democrats until after the 2004 election, protecting top GOP officials from the scandal until the voting was over... [T]he official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, told McClatchy that senior Justice Department officials slowed the inquiry. The official didn't know whether top department officials ordered the delays or what motivated those decisions." Who would like to venture a guess?