The difference between evolution and being just plain a scoundrel

Last night Romney was at the Democratic convention. Not the Romney we are dealing with now, but the one who unsuccessfully challenged Ted Kennedy for the Senator position in Massachusetts. I'll never forget the debate from back then, and I got a refresher on it last night. It shows what a rascal and scumbag Romney really is. And the funny thing is, it shows what a rascal and scumbag he was then. And it is funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ7GixLTWPY Romney said back then:

"ROMNEY: “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it. And I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice.”"

Of course he doesn't support that position now. He was lying back then. You can't find his position on his website (though they will ask for money) but he was lying when he said the above, because while he was governor in 2005 he vetoed a birth control law that would have allowed the "morning after pill" to be legal.
The website About Mitt Romney gives us the contents of his veto message:

"To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives:

"... To those who believe that life begins at conception, the morning-after pill can destroy the human life that was created at the moment of fertilization.

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/ghost-of-ted-kennedy-haunts-mitt-romney-at-dnc-video.php?ref=fpa
Boston Globe - A letter to legislators on the veto (July 26, 2005)

The Revolting Rich

Review of "Revolt of the Rich" Article By Mike Lofgren • August 27, 2012 in, of all places, The American Conservative : http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/ writes:

"It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens.”"

He notes that at the time he heard this it seemed novel, but now it is not so surprising. I spent time hanging around academics as the "husband of" and if academic types find more in common with each other than those outside their fields, it shouldn't be surprising that the wealthy; who spend time at the same resorts, and places as each other, should be like this. But as he notes:

"That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness."[Article]

Mike Lofgren then says something interesting:

"There have been numerous books about globalization and how it would eliminate borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state."[Article]

This may be something different from what the prophets wanted. The prophets were thinking that the rich and globalization would bring the world together. But our wealthy get their power from factions, from controlling resources, and they are never going to consent to run those resources in the common interest. No, Lundren puts his finger on it. The wealthy have decided to create an identity and power outside the nation state. They've become nullifiers, bushwackers and filibusterers. Lundgren writes:

"I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot."[Article]

Essentially they've made the whole world a colonial Empire. Never mind the wars and insurrections -- those are business opportunities. They can rule from behind the scenes. Both revolutionaries and dictators need their money, and will do their bidding. And they can make money as long as they can make deals. The world has become their Colony, and governments their subjects:

"Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?"[Article]

This explains the reckless stone faced impunity with which they are trying to take over our country from top to bottom. The gloves are off. Why fear Marxists when the Marxist wealthy are in their country clubs? The modern wealthy are "in the country but not of it;" Zen and the art of multi-billion deals. The result is the rise of an aristocracy that just plain doesn't give a snit about you or me:

"In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse."

But of course it is "we rabble" who are to blame:

"Stephen Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”"

But of course the wealthy have it setup so they are exempt from that requirement.

"millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes do pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues. By 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950. By 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent. So who has skin in the game?"

The result is Islands of privilege with no willingness to share powers or shoulder any share of the common burden. Nothing common about these folks!

"Yet for the president’s heresy of advocating that billionaires who receive the bulk of their income from capital gains should pay taxes at the same rate as the rest of us, Schwarzman said this about Obama: “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” For a hedge-fund billionaire to defend his extraordinary tax privileges vis-à-vis the rest of the citizenry in such a manner shows an extraordinary capacity to be out-of-touch. He lives in a world apart, psychologically as well as in the flesh."

And that is what we are up against:

"The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened. But how did this evolve historically, what does it mean for the rest of us, and where is it likely to be going?"

For those of you like me, who love the history of these things:

Further reading:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/

The Unions are to Blame?

In the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, on September 2, writes:

"On Labor Day 2012, U.S. workers are in dire straits, and an increasing share of elite opinion says it’s their own damned fault."

Anybody without a net worth of 250,000$ and a legacy ought to be offended by this. Yet at the same moment you hear these folks beating the war drum against the rest of us (and getting some of us to march with them) with the comment "We Built this" -- as if. These same pundits, even some of them so-called liberals and progressives, make commentary about how it's our workers own fault. Nevermind outsourcing. Never mind abusive use of the B-1B program, never mind offshoring -- it's "our own fault!" You heard it all through the Republican Nomination Convention.

Meyerson: "Not quite so bluntly, of course. But it’s impossible to read the business press and the editorial pages without encountering the argument that the economy hasn’t perked up because of the “skills gap.” U.S. workers, this thinking goes, just don’t have the skills required by our advanced economy. If only our workers and schools were better, if only teachers unions ceased to exist, all would be well." [Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]

I've seen it put pretty bluntly. I've watched companies advertize for jobs I can do, I go to interview and the wish list of skills, credits and abilities is so great that they seem to want a giant performer whose spent hundreds of thousands on training. But then I did a llittle digging and I found out they were just looking for an excuse to bring in a worker who'd work for half the usual salary, or for an excuse to contract that job to another country. Suddenly the requirement is a warm body who will work for less. Harold gives them more credit than they should get on this:

Harold Meyerson: "There are indeed some skills-gap problems plaguing the economy, but the downward mobility of U.S. workers results far more from their lack of power than their lack of skills."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]

To me this is an abusive narrative that justifies the exercise of power. This is the elites blaming the victims and justifying their outsourcing and offshoring on that basis. In the Republican Convention; workers, engineers, teachers and other non-entrepreneurs got no credit for the mutual enterprise that is the USA economy. And we've gotten no credit materially:

Meyerson wrote: "Since the recession bottomed out in June 2009, median household income has fallen by $2,544, to $50,964 — a 5 percent drop — according to a new report by Sentier Research. It’s no mystery why wages are falling even during the recovery. In a study released last week, the National Employment Law Project found that 58 percent of the jobs created since 2010 pay between $7.69 and $13.83 an hour. New jobs in the mid-range of the wage distribution, paying $13.84 to $21.13, account for just 22 percent of the positions created since the recovery began, though they constituted 60 percent of the jobs lost in the downturn. Higher-wage jobs are just 20 percent of the newly created positions. The biggest increase in jobs has come in food preparation and retail sales."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]

What these facts say is that the benefits of all these increases in productivity, some of them from the hard work of workers using new automation tools, and some of them coming from their own hard work went ot the already wealthy. This lack of gratitude is getting obvious.

Meyerson: "These numbers underscore the question of whether our primary problem is the lack of skills or, rather, the lack of good jobs. And the problem isn’t just that mid-range jobs were offshored or fell prey to the construction bust. It’s also the declining or stagnating wages and benefits in a far wider range of sectors — even where U.S. workers have the skills they need and then some."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]

And this is not the stupidity of our workers, maybe our naivity in trusting business leaders whose only concern is the size of their next bonus, and the amount of gold in their golden parachute. So, as Meyerson writes:

"Is it really insufficient education that’s dragging down Americans? Since 1979, the share of U.S. workers with college degrees has increased from 19.7 percent to 34.3 percent, the Center for Economic and Policy Research found this summer. Yet the percentage of college graduates with good jobs — which the center defines as jobs paying at least $37,000 and providing health insurance and some kind of retirement plan — had declined from 43 percent in 1979 to 40 percent in 2010."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]

So it's not that we are unproductive, lazy, ignorant, poorly educated, or even poorly trained:

Meyerson: "Are American workers becoming less productive? On the contrary, a Wall Street Journal survey of the Standard & Poor’s 500, the nation’s largest publicly traded companies, found that their revenue per worker increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2010. The problem is that workers get none of that increase. As economists Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon have shown, all productivity gains in recent decades have gone to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, in sharp contrast to the three decades following World War II, when Americans at all income levels shared in the productivity increases."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]

Thus:

Meyerson: "The primary plight of U.S. workers isn’t their lack of skills. It’s their lack of power. With the collapse of unions, which represented a third of the private-sector workforce in the mid-20th century but just 7 percent today, workers simply have no capacity to bargain for their share of the revenue they produce."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]

Meyerson attributes this weakness to the destruction of our Union movement:

"This is not to say that there is no skills gap or that U.S. schools don’t need improvement. But the decline of unions has both weakened workers’ bargaining power and diminished the kind of apprenticeship programs that the building trades unions have long (and ably) provided. Under increasing right-wing pressure to justify their very existence, however, some unions in other sectors are embarking on skills training or professional development programs."[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]

This is a good trend. I think that Unions should channel the old concept of apprenticeship from their heritage in the middle age guilds. They should allow non-Union members to get a provisional or apprenticeship membership and train them and help them get a job once they are trained. Combine that with creating an independendent institutionalization from the closed shop and with open membership -- they might be able to defeat "Right to [not] Work, laws".

Meyerson writes: "The most notable is that of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which has created an interactive professional development Web site for teachers called Share My Lesson in response to school districts cutting back on their ongoing teacher education. “Teachers want and need to share best practices with each other,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told me, so her union is rolling out this site as the school year begins."

But in the long run:

Meyerson: "Unions can address the skills gap just as, in the days when they were larger, they could address the economic power gap. But if the war that business and Republicans are waging on labor isn’t defeated, good jobs will continue to dwindle and work in America will grow steadily less rewarding."

We need an alternative to the New Jersey Corporation.

And like Meyerson: "And a happy Labor Day to you."

[Harold Meyerson, Published: September 2]

You might enjoy this from last year:

Demagoguing Politicians in Shepherd's clothing

To be fair many Christians do follow Jesus' teachings, but many of their preachers, ministers, priests exploit those teachings, parse them, or quote conveniently from different passages of the bible, often out of context; and add to the materials their own distorted exegesis.

The Catholic Church has alternately practiced, exploited, profited from, or paid lip service to his teachings; and the Church has a 1900 year history of persecuting people who took the Bible too seriously. When they took the old testament too seriously they were burned as judaisers. When they took the New Testament too seriously they were burned as Heretics. The teachings require wisdom to resolve contradictory passages, and people tend to take literal admonishments too literally, figurative turns of speeches or mythic parts literally, and to completely miss context, even when they try to practice Jesus' teachings. Unfortunately they aren't alone. When the protestants revolted against them, they continued many of the same practices they'd rebelled against. Christians have been fighting over material issues using religion as a cover for centuries, as have other members of other religious groups.

It's not as simple as deliberate evil. Much of what goes on comes from three sources: deluded thinking caused by emotions of anger, hatred, or hurt; perverse thinking caused by emotions of hunger, greed, or jealousy; and manipulation related also to greed and ambition. This happens with other religions too, as I found out to my shame when I spent 30 years studying an Eastern Religion only to find myself being recruited by both sides of an internal war between religious factions I'd over-estimated the wisdom of. Many religious leaders are religious politicians in Shepherds clothing.

Redeeming religion starts with the humble recognition that even our best teachers are frail human beings like ourselves, and the scoundrels among us are potentially within all of us. Their roles are to comfort the sick and grieving, teach their flocks and guide them to enlightenment and redemption, and to master their own spirituality so that they can do these things wisely.  When they step into politics or power and money they step into it.

Juries and the Supreme Court Process

Marbury versus Madison was part of a Federalist part to preserve influence with the Federal Government once the Federalists were voted out of office in 1800.  In the last days of the Adams Administration a whole series of Federal officers were appointed by Adams and approved by Congress.  Some of those people did not arrive in the capital in time to take their appointments before the new administration took office.  The New President refused to accept these appointments. One of the appointees sued.  In Marbury versus Madison, John Marshal affirmed the right of Jefferson to refuse their appointment but established a ruling which ruled:

“All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void.” Marbury vs Madison 5 U.S. 137, 174, 176.

“The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void and ineffective for any purpose; since its unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment… In legal contemplation, it is as inoperative as if it had never been passed… Since an unconstitutional law is void, the general principles follow that it imposes no duties, confers no rights, creates no office, bestows no power or authority on anyone, affords no protection and justifies no acts performed under it… A void act cannot be legally consistent with a valid law. Indeed, insofar as a statute runs counter to the fundamental law of the land, it is superceded thereby. No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.” 16 Am Jur 2d S177, late Am Jur 2d S256”

This angered Jefferson, and over time it angered him more. He saw this decision as the  “usurp[ation]  of exclusively explaining the constitution.” And over time he realized that:

“the constitution had  deprived the people control “Over the judiciary department.” And that therefore he wrote that even after years of Republican government the Federalists “ therefore, has continued the reprobated system, and although new matter has been occasionally incorporated into the old, yet the leaven of the old mass seems to assimilate to itself the new, and after twenty years' confirmation of the federal system by the voice of the nation, declared through the medium of elections, we find the judiciary on every occasion, still driving us into consolidation.” [1]

The Republicans could not do things in the national interest, or enforce their conception of what is constitutional or not because the Supreme court was dominated by Federalists appointed by Adams and would strike down their laws as unconstitutional.  In Jefferson’s view:

“The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please”

Jefferson felt that the constitution had made the Supreme Court a potential locus of absolutist and undemocratic government:

“It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only, at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice, as fast as that relaxes. Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.”

Jefferson believed that:

“each department [should be] truly independent of the others, and ha[ve] an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially, where it is to act ultimately and without appeal.”

Jefferson was referring to the autonomous right of each branch of government (Judiciary, executive, and legislative”) to decide its own cases.  In some cases the judiciary has since respected Jefferson’s perspective but not in all.  They typically defer to the executive on some legal matters.  So, while the Judiciary has frequently overruled the executive and the legislative on matters where the court assumes the executive knows what they are doing [which is what Jefferson is inferring]. This is sometimes appropriate.  Thus the courts have protected the rights of minorities and the oppressed, but sometimes the appeal to the Supreme Court has been an instrument of tyranny [Private Separate Advantage].[2]

A “mere thing of wax in the hands” of either Judges or Executive.

To me Marbury Versus Madison exposed a process issue where both sides had issues that needed to be resolved, not with merely the courts overriding the executive, but with better process.  Andrew Jackson applied Jefferson’s theory when the Supreme Court overruled his decisions on ethnic cleansing of American Indian Indigenous peoples living in territories he had control over.  He told the court ‘you made the decision, now you enforce it” and then dispossessed and murdered thousands of human beings with impunity.  The executive with the concurrence of docile courts or in spite of them have also treated the constitution as a “thing of wax.”

When there is injustice there needs to be judicial review. But that review in many cases deserves to be heard by an independent jury, prosecuted by experts representing all legitimate points of view, and subject to the old principle of separation of powers; “No man should be judge, jury and executioner, in the same case. Jefferson rightly noted:

“The nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle, and electing those of another, in the two branches, executive and legislative, submitted to their election. Over the judiciary department, the constitution had deprived them of their control.”

On first perusal, it is hard to see how the nation could establish democratic controls over the Judiciary. But there is an age old way, which while under assault in our modern times, represents an even more pure exercise of democracy than that of elections. It is the Jury.  A body of independent citizens, not ignorant or totally unbiased, but selected at random from the general population, could form commission style juries that could make better, more fair, and more representative decisions than a panel of paid permanent jurists who are selected from professional judges and serve for life.  The ancient Greeks didn’t trust to elections, they believed that volunteers should directly make decisions, and in our modern society volunteers, national guard, and juries are the best democratic institutions we still have.  The process problem Jefferson identified with Marbury versus Madison is in how to have judicial controls on decision making that represent the people, and not special interests such as the Federalists represented in his times.

If disputes were subject to jury review [Juridical Controls, Judicial Oversight] in the governments departments and agencies, there too would be better process.  For independent juries composed of a representative (and temporary) sample of the American people would embody Jefferson’s principle that  ”Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass.” The purest expression of democracy in action is the Jury. If a jury had ruled on Marbury versus Madison, what would Jefferson have been willing to say?

Footnotes:

---

[1]http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_18s16.html

[2] Reference is to John locke’s definition of tyranny in “Twin Treatises on Government”

The Empire Strikes Back -- Trying to Avoid Responsibility

Right now we are in the middle of something like an episode of the "Empire Strikes Back" fueled by people who think they have, or at least want to convince others that they have divine wisdom and divine purpose. This may be the result of having the power to influence others and not having spiritual wisdom, or it may simply be the result of misplaced fanaticism, but in either case at least some of the folks involved are showing massive cynicism.  When people are convinced that they are right and everyone else is wrong, in the pursuit of their ends they justify the means, but after a while they simply wind up using corrupt means to achieve corrupt ends.  For that reason this sort of Machievellian thinking has been a source of tyranny and violence for 1900 years. The person who would set themselves up as omnisicent inquisitor is stepping into a realm where they can only be poseurs usurpers, but never the real thing. In my [previous post]

So it is that religious politics is just as vicious as electoral politics, office politics or any other kind. And when prelates invade secular politics they become even more corrupt than the secular world they seek to control. And there is nothing like fear to propel folks to heights of absurdity. The same Catholic Church that chose to cover up the misbehavior of it's priests for years, now is using an alliance with Republicans to try to avoid responsibility for the crimes their own people committed:
http://www.cathnewsusa.com/2012/08/bishops-god-votes-republican/
Bishop Dolan is:

"Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is scheduled to deliver the concluding benediction at the Republican National Convention next week, after Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech."

But I take heart. If Dolan is channeling the darkside, egged on by his Pope Benedict (formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, of the former Inquisition and the enforcement arm of the Catholic Church), you have these wonderful Sisters traveling the country preaching the liberating theology taught by their founder. The Church can't burn them yet. At least I can hope. I pray they don't face the inquisition.
But the Church can play legal games. Right now they are claiming that they are having their religious liberty to oppress their flock, employees, and priests; infringed on by the Affordable Health Care Act -- and suing.

And because the Democrats, including Catholic Democrats, won't champion their cause, they are planning to run a fear and hate campaign to vilify us Democrats as attacking their freedom. And of course evil minded priests can only get away with going to the dark-side if they have perverse or ignorant and ambitious lay leaders to support them:

"The news — both its substance and the venue in which it was conveyed — make clear three things: that Romney intends to make the Bishops’ bogus arguments about religious liberty infringements a centerpiece of his campaign’s faith outreach; that any efforts the Obama administration made to placate the Bishops’ unattainable demands on insurance coverage for contraception were a fool’s errand; and that the USCCB has unequivocally attached itself at the hip to the Republican Party." [Same article as picture]

This article: http://www.religioustolerance.org/relfreebctrl.htm sums up the issues well enough that I won't go into detail. But the argument that somehow requiring the Church as a corporate entity to pay for women's medical needs is tyranny butts up against the fact that many of those women aren't even Catholic and are working for the Church in its secular capacity as an educator and provider of places of healing. The article talks about Ontario, and the reality is that the Church is campaigning worldwide:

"The religious freedom claimed by the Roman Catholic Church to restrict the use of contraception by the employees and students in the Church's affiliated hospitals, universities, colleges, schools, social service agencies, etc. Typically, these employees and students identify with the Catholic Church, other Christian denominations, non-Christian religions, or have no religious affiliation at all."

This is tyranny, not religious freedom. Nobody should have the right to take away individual rights because they are a collective claiming that God told them they could deny those rights.

"The religious freedom claimed by those students and employees who have examined their conscience about the use of contraceptives on religious, ethical and moral grounds, and have personally decided that they wish to freely use contraceptives. Some wish to use them in order to regulate or avoid conception and pregnancy; others wish to use them to treat one of many medical problems unrelated to conception."

One Man's freedom is a woman's tyranny. But this hasn't changed since the Church first discovered witchcraft and heresy during the later Roman Empire. The Catholic Church has claimed the right to be a Corporation not subject to Secular law, to be a Secular State not subject to rule of law, and to be a religious institution over and above it's own moral codes. Birth Control is the modern version of the kind of apothocary, medicine that midwives and herbalists used to practice in order to be identified as Witches by the Doctors of the Church, who would dunk them and if they survived that, burn them. This is a form of 1984 newspeak. They claim they deserve the right to the religious liberty to deny religious liberty to their employees and members. A kind of newspeak where honesty and freedom of consciousness becomes heresy and was tyranny becomes "liberty." Corporate liberty = individual tyranny for the employee, or in the case of the US Church, the non-employee not subject to labor law because he/she is not really employed by the Church, even though they are.

And the irony is that they advance the right to put shackles on their employees and deny women medical insurance coverage in the name of religious liberty and their corporate rights as a church. But in the meantime they are trying to avoid responsibility for their members and employees on the grounds that they don't really work for them! Who'd have thunk it? How'd they get away with that? They didn't get away with it in Britain, but here our courts are either intimidated or thoroughly corrupt. When they get into trouble because of their own crimes they shout "our priests "don't work here!":

In the USA "a judge ruled that the Holy See is not the employer of molester priests."

[Source: Vatican not employer: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/20/vatican-not-priests-employer-us-judge-says_n_1813001.html]
But this is not merely tyranny at work. The Catholic Church is losing money. They've started borrowing from Wall Street, always a bad move, instead of raising money from their employees. And that is making them nuts. The problem isn't just tyranny, it is financial incompetence looking to recoup losses:

"The picture that emerges is not flattering. The church’s finances look poorly co-ordinated considering (or perhaps because of) their complexity. The management of money is often sloppy. And some parts of the church have indulged in ungainly financial contortions in some cases—it is alleged—both to divert funds away from uses intended by donors and to frustrate creditors with legitimate claims, including its own nuns and priests. The dioceses that have filed for bankruptcy may not be typical of the church as a whole. But given the overall lack of openness there is no way of knowing to what extent they are outliers."

So to deal with their finances, they stick it to their congregants who've been damaged by scumbag priests whose behavior they'd covered up and hidden from those same congregants.

"Thousands of claims for damages following sexual-abuse cases, which typically cost the church over $1m per victim, according to lawyers involved, have led to a liquidity crisis. This seems to have encouraged a pre-existing trend towards replacing dollars from the faithful with publicly raised debt as a way of financing church business. The church is also increasingly keen to defend its access to public health-care subsidies while claiming a right not to provide certain medical services to which it objects, such as contraception. This increased reliance on taxpayers has not been matched by increased openness and accountability. The church, like other religious groups in America, is not subject to the same disclosure requirements as other non-profits or private entities."

I guess I'm supposed to feel sorry for the Vatican, but then it doesn't employ all those wonderful, fully human and frail priests and nuns, monks and lay-people that I've come to know and love over the years. Even though it had senior prelates relocating perverted priests and sometimes moving them to out of the way places where they could practice their perversions with impunity. [See this article http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/22/nation/la-na-nn-priest-sex-abuse-trial-20120622]

ROME — "The Vatican on Friday reaffirmed its position that the future Pope Benedict XVI "had no knowledge" of a decision to allow a known pedophile priest to resume pastoral duties when the pope was archbishop in Munich in 1980. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said an article that appeared in The New York Times on Friday that said the future pope had been sent a..."[was false"

Of course if the future pope hadn't known that then he was recklessly incompetant, and the article was sourced, but I can only judge facts and if they say he didn't know about what his Church was doing when it moved priests around, sent them to special retreats for Pedophiles, tried to rehabilitate them, and allegedly covered up for them, then, well. What can I say? But what would be funny is that after all those efforts which show just how closely the priests worked with the Vatican and worked for the Vatican, it is Ironic that the Church now claims they were mere independent contractors and on that ground the Church isn't responsible!
It claims it didn't employ the Pedophiles! -- though a British court didn't buy that argument.

"The ruling by the High Court in London for the first time defined in British law the relationship of a priest to his bishop as that of an employee to an employer, instead of seeing the priest as effectively self-employed."

When Cardinal Dolan endorses Romney and joins the attempted coup against Democracy in our country I will feel sorry for the Catholic Church -- the one that is pictured in "The City of God." But I can't feel sorry for the pedophiles and the priests who covered up for them, or the many women who may be reduced to coat hanger abortions if the Church gets its way. My sense of history and historical outrage won't let me. I feel sorry for their victims.
Previous Post: http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/08/love-hierarchy-and-tyranny.html
Source for last two quotes; http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/08/while-were-on-the-subject-.html
British court decision: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2011/11/10/court-rules-that-church-is-liable-for-crimes-of-priests/

Love, Hierarchy and Tyranny

I have mixed feelings about Christianity. I was baptized when I was a baby, and when I was little I sincerely sang "Jesus Loves me Yes I know, for the Bible Tells me so." And attended Church. I was a weird kid. I actually enjoyed theology class. My bible study teacher thought I was going to grow up to be a theologian. It might have happened but I met born again Christians who convinced me that there was something wrong with history. And my study of history and it's 19 and 1/2 century history of conflict, intolerance and authoritarianism convinced me to abandon it and go on what I now would call a "walk about." I had a severe argument with the concept of God on High, and had even worse troubles reconciling the trinity. Eventually I got into Eastern Religion, got into critiquing esotericism, and that led me to study and critique Kaballa, which led me to fall in love with Judaism and appreciate both the good and bad of religion all over again. So I still have mixed feelings about Christianity, but I appreciate it better. My main problem is with Christians and the sometimes demagogic way that their leaders mislead them. I no longer blame true believers, or even believers, it's the teachers who get on my nerves.

So it is with regret, but not surprise, that I observe current trends in a few of the major religions. My old Church, the Episcopal church is wracked in a war between fundamentalists who are also rather intolerant, and the remnants of the enlightenment movement, who've been on the decline for 100+ years. The result is that the fundamentalists sometimes become Catholics.

And in studying all this stuff I encountered the ancestral church of most Western Europeans. The one that held the monopoly, until Luther and Calvin came along, in the Western part of Europe. It too had had an enlightenment of sorts, that culminated in Vatican II, but it seems that it too has a civil war of sorts as well. One side of that Civil war resembles enlightened Episcopalians of the Church I grew up with. I remember the Berrigans, and how they became Episcopalians when they left the Church and got married. There is no theologically integral reason that a priest can't marry. At one time it was De-riguer that priests married. Judaism required their Rabbis to marry, and Cohain couldn't be proper priests unless they had progeny to pass their post to. Early Christians included women priests and all sorts of priests, and there are even stories of priests married to each other. But that is not dogma today.

Did I tell you my main fight when I was 13 was with Dogma?

So of course Vatican II, Ecumenicism, and enlightenment all sound good. In Polyanna the Priest has a high minded conversion when he engages in some exegesis and counts the amount of times the Bible talks about love. But talking about love doesn't stop the hemorrhaging of believers or the outflow of money. Fundamentally all Churches are among the oldest forms of corporations, and priests, ministers, bishops, etc... are in one of the oldest professions and can't live without donations; so letting people come and go at will from their churches guarantees them a secular job and a Church that hangs a new moniker on it. Formerly Catholic or Episcopal churches now house fundamentalist or Born Again Churches now because the priests failed to hold on to their flock. So how do they do that?

By fear, vilification, and hate.

while I was studying Eastern Religion I spent most of that time with a Buddhist sect founded by a teacher Named Nichiren. He talked a lot about misuse of religion, which his disciples used mostly to vilify rivals, but one day it hit me that his teachings were universal, which meant that the enemy is the tendency to misuse religion itself, all the ways that religion is misused. He called the teaching Six devils and Three powerful enemies; and the three powerful enemies were ignorant lay people, manipulative priests and incorrect sages. Well that teaching did apply potentially to their rivals, but it also applied to the leaders who embraced that teaching -- and like all people possessing a mirror they tried to use it to look at everyone else. That doesn't change.

Misapplied it leads to esotericism for the initiated and exotericism for everyone else. It leads to efforts to vilify rivals instead of teaching distinctions. It doesn't help. And that is what is going on within the Churches, just as it has done since Christianity started having second and third generation disciples of it's founder and the believers started conflating the Messenger, the once and future King of Jewish theory, with God himself. You see it in Acts, where Paul notes all the people who identified Jesus with Apollo. This shouldn't be surprising, when the Prophets condemn Israel for worshiping the Baalim, the most popular of the Baalim was Baal Peor, or the Lord Son of God, who died each spring so that crops could grow. It's amazing how similar the concept of Jesus is to that of Baal. He goes from being a teacher to a God, and his priests from being teachers and missionaries to being priests of a God, thanks to human frailty on the part of ordinary folks, and human ambition on the part of their teachers.

So I'm not in the least surprised to see corruption in the various churches. On the contrary as I get older, I'm simply mighty pleased to discover there are brief exceptions, or sometimes even enduring one, to the rule about the three powerful enemies, religious exploitation and the evolution of divine revolution into profane dogma; because the temptations are impossible to risk.

In studying the weaknesses of religion I discovered realities about human psychology and spirituality that I could have used to establish myself as a Ron Hubbard type Messiah. Indeed I'm sure that is what he did. I love the Catholic Church, the Jewish Sages, the Buddhist founders, the Sufi and the Sikhs; even Moses, David, Mohammed, Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard -- all the more for knowing that they are, after all, only frail human beings in the end. What do I know? When the divine talks directly to us, it always takes the form of a vision, something so much realer than real that it can shake the sanity of those who experience it. I've come to listen to those messages. I am a poet and that means I hear them. I've been right about events way too often to be arrogant about my powers or to discount the power of Insight either. Religion should be about Enlightenment and Religion, not about tyranny.

Nevertheless we have a duty to love and take seriously all truths, but aslo to combat all lies and false dogmas; and all misuse of the gifts of spirituality to manipulate people. For no matter how high and mighty, or frail and holy, a person might seem, we are all ultimately only frail human beings -- and because of that frailty we are all subject to the darkside.

Right now we are in the middle of a situation which resembles an episode of the "Empire Strikes Back." The darkside, hiding as usual in the minds of both friends and enemies alike, has infiltrated the minds of great people, sages, educators, politicians and turned good teachings into angry mush, clear teachings into deliberate lies, and made people who should be rockes we can rely on into untrustworthy liars. People who should be teaching love and things like "honor thy father" or "love thy enemy" are teaching enmity and fear instead. Bishops who ought to be on the side of the poor and dispossessed are fighting to preserve their possessions by igniting anger in their parishoners and reviving dogmas that in the past burned down civilization and destroyed learning. The barbarians are not always at the gates, they are often in the Gates, and now we have people who insist that they have ownership of God and the Truth, when the reality is that that is delusion. When the sages say "Judge not lest ye be Judged, the sages are warning that none of us dare take on the role of inquisitor without possibly taking on the role of the "Accuser", a word that in Hebrew is rendered as Satan.

This is the first essay in a series. The next one is:

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-empire-strikes-back-trying-to-avoid.html