We can be free and insure our children; indeed, we can't be if we don't

I recently responded to an email equating life in a more progressive society with communism:

"So if you want to imagine what life will be like when the central planners and experts get complete control, just imagine being in the army for the rest of your life, with no chance to ever leave it :)"

I will try to remember that the next time I step outside, considering I live in a country now that has all the things "progressive say they want" and the contrast between Switzerland and the military could not be greater.   All the countries of Western Europe - and I have visited or lived in most of them - have universal healthcare and the idea that this leads inevitably to loss of freedom or stagnation of economic growth is beyond ludicrous.  If there is an exodus of French, Germans, or Swiss fleeing for the United States, I must have completely missed it.  No chains, no camps, no gulags.   Just healthier children and citizens and no risk of losing everything you ever worked for because you get sick between jobs.    On every parameter from infant mortality to teen pregnancy to life expectancy at birth, countries with universal healthcare do far better than we do.  Our own CIA (the same one who just killed Osama bin Laden) ranked us 49th in the world in life expectancy.   49th.

The Commonwealth Fund recently put out a survey of 7 leading countries and where do you think we ranked?  Dead last.   Although we were #1 in one category:  spending (@ $7,290 per citizen, about twice what the other surveyed countries spend).   They pay less and get more, so if you want to reduce waste, you must support healthcare reform (don't you?).   

There are many sorts of freedom and many forms of tyranny.   Europeans are free from having to save a fortune to send their kids to a private college or take them out of failing public schools or pay thousands a year for a for profit health insurance plan.   They pay more for a Big Mac though and our cell phone plans are a bit cheaper, so I guess there are some advantages to life in America.  Personally, I would rather my child did not die from a treatable illness because some gubment-hater was duped into believing that healthcare reform is a "government takeover of healthcare."  But that's just me.

You are confusing being in uniform and having each minute of your life orchestrated by a government with having to pay a nickel more in taxes each day (if that) but a thousand dollars less a month in private insurance premiums.    I think you're also confusing socialism and communism, but I  have given up trying to educate people on this (they do both end in -ism, after all, and the communists called themselves socialists; avoiding socialism because communists misused the word would be like shunning democracy because East Germany called itself "Democratic.")  

"I must be looking at the wrong government bashing websites.  The ones I look at don't say much about 'doing nothing right', but rather focus on government over-reach and over regulation, and massive, massive overspending."

Perhaps you have been out of the country for as long as I have.  Google "Tea Party" or "Koch brothers" or "John Birch Society" (a creation of David Koch's father).   Listen to the pronouncements of the freshmen class of Congress including one of our classmates.  Perhaps Reagan was stuttering when he said that government was not part of the problem, it was the problem.  

Re government over-reach and over-regulation, how does defunding Planned Parenthood, NPR, Head Start, healthcare for 9-11 first responders, or healthcare for poor children, the elderly, and disabled, fit into that scheme?  And I'm not sure increasing government intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship (when the patient is a woman) fits into your libertarian theme anymore than government telling citizens they cannot organize for better working conditions has anything to do with freedom.  

I agree the government, even under Obama, is continuing to deficit spend  (it tends to do that during wars and economic crises such as the one triggered by the deregulation of the smartest guys in the room who brought us the mortgage-backed securities and other job-crushing private initiatives) but I'm not sure I would agree that 5% of GDP is "massive, massive," especially if the deficit was created by a package of tax cuts that cost about 5% of GDP.   If the deficit is "massive, massive" then so are the tax cuts, so thanks for making the case for rolling them back to at least Clinton, if not Reagan, era levels. 

Most government spending is non-discretionary, determined decades ago by legislation, particularly the Great Society programs, and demographics.  You can't plug a 1.5T whole by ignoring 1.5T of tax cuts and defunding $30 or $60 or $90 billion from programs to the poor who did nothing to get us into this mess.   I personally do not mind paying a bit more in taxes so that someone's grandmother does not have to eat cat food or choose between groceries or medicine, or so that returning veterans will have fully-staffed clinics and no veteran will sleep under a bridge one day, but that seems a minority opinion in some circles.  

Let's just all thank the gods that this strike on Osama bin Laden was not outsourced to a private firm but left to professionals whose primary motivation is service to others, not service to self. 

Beck Like Marx Should Stop Theorizing About Capital and Go Out and Earn Some (Honestly)

1.0 out of 5 stars Beck Like Marx Should Stop Theorizing About Capital and Go Out and Earn Some (Honestly), March 28, 2011

By 

Mark Vakkur - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure (Hardcover)

I must admit that this looks like a carefully-thought-out book. It has side bars and historical quotations and is even peppered with some facts. It stretches over a few hundred pages. And the writing style is at times amusing, at times amusingly pompous, but rarely boring. However, appearances are deceptive as any Fox News viewer should have discovered long ago, and anyone who expects to be enlightened by this book by a former chemically dependent Top 40 DJ turned part über-patriot, part televangelist Fox employee, will be as disappointed as one should expect considering the source. Beck illustrates the dangers of trying to get historical, political, or economic advice from professional entertainers. 

Let's start as Beck does, with religion. On page 6, Beck cites the fact that 12% of Americans state they have "no religion" in 2008 versus 2% in 1948. Since he gives this sidebar along with other indicators establishing the decline of what he calls American "empire," and inserts it in a parallel discussion of the decline of the Roman empire, we can only conclude that he believes that a decline in religious affiliation (and he elsewhere says of the Judeo-Christian variety) is associated with a decline in empire. Perhaps he does not realize this, but early Christian writers such as Augustine were tortured by it: the Roman Empire which lasted centuries collapsed shortly after adopting Christianity as the official state religion. This may have been true, true, and unrelated, but it does not support his case that religiosity is important to empire maintenance. There was a correlation between Christianity and empire in the case of the Romans - an inverse one. 

It is unclear why Beck holds up the Roman Empire as a model to emulate anyway, since only a minority of wealthy men could engage in politics, slavery was a cherished institution, and torture, aggressive war, and mass crucifixions were considered appropriate powers to be granted to a central government. This hardly seems the stuff of the "Don't Tread on Me" Tea Party. 

The "simple" recipe that Beck gives for the decline of this Empire, however little it is analogous to the world we live in, is that "the state encroaches on freedom... people want more handouts ... taxes go up to pay for the handouts." Now I will admit to not being a Roman historian by trade, but I have read and studied the works of those who are, and have never heard this theory. Beck is the first person I know of who has ever described ancient Rome as a welfare state. Rome's fall was complex, but it wasn't that it cared for its poor or paid its teachers too much (it didn't have any publicly paid teachers anyway). 

"God's hand has been evident throughout American history" he tells us on page 13, and he attributes to this deity the additional gift of books, technology, and history. This is an interesting theory since European Christians spent so much energy destroying the works of pre-Christian Greece that many were lost forever and those that we have were largely preserved in the Muslim world. The Romans were far more steeped in the intricacies of Greek history and civilization than Mr. Beck - many sent their children to be educated in Athens - but that did not prevent their empire from collapsing. 

At any rate, and this seems a far bigger flaw, Beck repeatedly confuses freedom and empire. Many would argue they are diametrically opposed. Yes, being a subject of a great empire such as Rome gives you a certain freedom - from raids by enemies of that empire, for example - but you must exchange certain freedoms and pay tribute (taxes, Mr. Beck, lots of them) to Rome and provide men for the Roman Army. You must pledge loyalty to the Roman emperor and in the final days of the Roman empire you had to renounce your religion in favor of the state religion (Christianity). Whether these losses of freedom (to worship according to your conscience, to be loyal to your local leaders, government, and tribe, and to retain money and men that would have to be handed over to the state) were offset by the freedoms membership in that empire gave you is debatable, but the fact that the Roman Empire generally expanded through the sword, not persuasion or buy-in of the conquered, argues otherwise. Even after many areas were conquered, such as Judea or present-day Germany, the Romans were subject to frequent violent uprisings; Jews and Germanic tribes and Gauls and many others apparently did not share Beck's rosy view of the Roman legions as liberators. 

Beck passes off another myth of the religious right, that the "United States was founded on Judeo-Christian principles." Adams and Jefferson are both on record, as is Congress in a resolution to that effect, that the United States is in "no sense a Christian nation." God is mentioned not at all in the Constitution and only twice in the Declaration of Independence (in passing as the god of nature, not Jesus or Yahweh). "In God we trust" did not appear on our coins until the Civil War and the words "under God" were not inserted into our Pledge of Allegiance until the height of the McCarthyist hysteria in 1954. Most of the founders were Deists. At least one (Jefferson) was an atheist. 

Beck bemoans the fact that 12% of Americans cite no religion in 2008 but only 18% of Americans belonged to a church in 1776. True, the 82% who did not attend church may have told a pollster back then that they still considered themselves to have some sort of religious affiliation, but the generation of the Minute Men and the (real) Tea Party was far less religious than Beck's generation (slightly fewer than 60% of Americans belong to a church today). 

The idea of the "Judeo" part of that Judeo-Christian formulation would have been particularly curious to our founders. After all, we were a country that had strict quotas limiting the number of Jewish immigrants even during the Holocaust or that limited Jews from joining certain clubs or even attending certain universities (the SAT was developed in part to counter claims of Jewish preference by those who felt too many Jewish students were getting into the nation's top colleges). 

Beck's frequent quotations of Benjamin Franklin and even Aesop's fables on the importance of frugality and hard work are curious coming from a man who spent most of his life as a Top 40s DJ and by his own admission was often chemically altered and spiritually lost. If Beck, who now works as a highly paid entertainer, had a real job at some point in his life, it's not evident on his CV. Yet he feels he is in a position to lecture to the millions of hard-working Americans who do that they should stop whining about their working conditions or compensation and help him keep the hundreds of thousands he saves each years in taxes on his multi-million income stream as a Fox News and radio entertainer. 

There is something almost offensive about a man such as Beck misrepresenting Benjamin Franklin who fought so hard to keep religiosity out of the public square. Franklin successfully argued for substituting the phrase "self-evident" (reflecting his enlightenment preference for observation and reason) instead of "sacred and undeniable" (Thomas Jefferson's original wording) in the Declaration of Independence. He said light houses are more useful than churches. Franklin also had some progressive ideas that Beck would ridicule (if he knew about them, which apparently he does not). For example, Franklin never patented his inventions, believed scientific inventions should all benefit mankind. Greed did not motivate him. He had made his fortune by hard work at age 42, but said he wanted to spend the rest of his life finding a way to "do well by doing good." He invented the Franklin stove in 1741 because other designs led to frequent house fires and burn accidents, as well as smoke inhalation. He created in 1751 the first hospital in America, Pennsylvania Hospital. It still stands today. It was raised using matching private-public grants. He found the Philadelphia Academy which became University of Pennsylvania to promote public curiosity and service through the liberal arts in its students. Yes, LIBERAL arts, Mr. Beck. 

It's also interesting that nowhere does Beck mention one of my favorite Benjamin Franklin quotations, in which Franklin chastises people like Beck who whine about their high taxes. "Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly." In other words: get over it. We tax ourselves far more than our government does (but which do you think it easier to complain about?). 

And let's not forget - before getting too misty-eyed about the days of Ben Franklin and his fear of a government that might tax one tenth of his income that in his America, fully 1 out of 5 Americans had a 100% tax rate. Slaves - who of course were not paid at all - in effect had all of their wages taxed away even though it flowed not to the government but to their owners. That works out to an average American tax rate of 20% before any other taxes are even considered, far higher than the current 15% (of GDP) tax "burden." The much higher tariffs of the time not just internationally but between states represented an embedded tax in every product. Beck ignores slavery in this book and in his calculations about the burden of government, but it is hard to see why we should be trying to hard to turn back the clock to a time when our government collaborated with slave-owners to insure they could expropriate 100% of their income and even beat them to death or sell them like animals if they chose. Of all the evil powers Beck believes our out-of-control federal government, it does not - thank God! - have that one. 

Beck claims, without any supporting data (a theme of his approach to just about everything he writes), that "frugality ignites freedom." Is this really true? Do nations with higher savings rates have higher freedom? By that measure Japan should have far greater freedom than the United States. So too should socialist Germany and communist China (which he condemns elsewhere despite its eagerness to buy our debt). If it is government frugality he extols, is it true that governments that spend less as a percentage of GDP are found in countries enjoying greater freedom? Was the United States freer at its founding when the central government was so small and spent so little that it essentially did not work, requiring the Articles of Confederation to be scrapped for our current system? I imagine if Beck had surveyed the one out of five Americans who were slaves in Colonial America, his answer not only would have been no, but hell no. If he had asked the 50% of citizens who were female and therefore unable to vote, own property directly, or have their testimony fully counted in court, they would have also not given a glowing endorsement of Beck's freedom through frugality thesis. 

On page 33, he takes one of the first of his gratuitous swipes at "progressives" who did not appreciate the fruits of the "Tree of Liberty." No, in those days which Beck wants us to believe were so golden because the government spent less and had less debt, progressives felt that our country should be judged by more than one variable, and that freedom should not be the gift of a few white men (only 7% of the country could vote in Beck's Golden Age of Low Government Spending) but the right of all people, including women and people of color. One of those crazy progressives who had such subversive ideas? None other than Ben Franklin whom Beck spent so many earlier pages praising. Not only did Franklin promote progressive societies for improving public education and public health using public funds but he also was one of the first proponents of this radical notion that would become known as emancipation. What a liberal! 

Beck goes on to praise Lincoln while somehow sidestepping the fact that Lincoln introduced the first federal income tax (to pay for the Civil War). 

He gives a cartoon-like summary of the Cold War on page 320, stating that we wisely outspent the Soviets, driving them into bankruptcy by patiently waiting for oil prices to decline "drying up one of their main sources of income." Hmmm. A cursory examination of oil prices will show that the glasnost and the revolt against Soviet communism was relatively uncorrelated with oil prices, and Russian dependence on oil revenues increased exponentially after the collapse of communism, not before, as improvements in technology and better East-West partnerships led to more efficient exploitation of this natural resource. Again, Beck offers an idiosyncratic view of history that is generally not taught because it is generally not true. 

One of the most maddening things about Beck's approach is that he claims as his ideological soul-mates people who espoused progressive ideas radically different than Beck's. Besides Franklin and Lincoln (and Jesus), Beck also feels compelled to quote President Dwight Eisenhower on page 321, who made the point that security is the product of economic and military strength. Fair enough, but Eisenhower also railed against the "military-industrial complex" (a term he coined) that Beck adores, and reminded us that ever dollar spent on bombs is a dollar that cannot be spent on schools or roads or the poor. He slammed those who now form the ideological core of Beck's Tea Party, calling them "a splinter group" that wants to "abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs," and that "among them are a few Texas oil millionaires" but "their number is negligible and they are stupid." (- Dwight David Eisenhower, 11/8/1954). Today such a remark would probably merit a special place of honor for President Eisenhower on Beck's chalkboard of shame, perhaps with an arrow pointing straight back at Mao. 

"Warriors aren't whiners," Beck intones. "Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are the best damn [sic] people on the planet. Period." Yet despite this high praise, Beck did not feel it necessary when younger to serve in the military. He did cheer them on from the sidelines, however, spinning tunes for them as a disc jockey and this is something perhaps, but his absence of service undercuts the credibility of his praise. In his defense, though, he does advocate slashing military spending by 30-40% but his means of doing (reducing overhead) is beyond idealistic. I would argue, as would Eisenhower, that we need to move away from a permanent wartime level of spending in which every politician and many American workers and contractors have a deep dependence on military contracts. It is unclear what advantage we gain from having 6,000 nuclear warheads (6,000!) in an age when 19 guys with box cutters make those weapons beyond obsolete. 

I agree with Beck that our tax code is complicated, but there is a difference between complexity and fairness. He deliberately conflates the two. He states that a progressive tax code punishes the wealthy but offers no example to support this. The wealthiest countries in the world all have progressive tax codes. The poorest and most corrupt don't. A progressive tax code is not an advanced, wealthy society's obstacle, but its natural byproduct. Taxes are the dues for living in a civil society. 

He makes ludicrous claims about a monolithic movement of which I am unaware he calls "progressives" who, he tells us on page 351, want "to take this country from self-sufficiency to serfdom; from pursuit of happiness for all, to guaranteed happiness for none." I have never heard anyone advocating such a plan. I have heard them advocating a return of marginal tax rates to Clinton era levels (or the even higher Reagan era levels in some cases), or doing something about the 59 million Americans without health insurance, or enacting sensible firearm legislation to prevent someone so mentally unstable he was evicted from a college and rejected from the Army from purchasing a 9 mm semiautomatic weapon with an extended round magazine. That sort of thing. The "guaranteed happiness for none" part is alien to me. 

Beck has lots of quotations and some cute sidebars, but what he lacks is any sense of context. As is true with many self-educated and self-declared pundits who seem to confuse a large (but shrinking) television audience with credibility, Beck's gaping holes in scholarship make his premises so full of holes that his conclusions cannot be taken seriously. Only a man who does not understand (or perhaps does not care) about the horrors slaves had to endure in Colonial America or those conquered and crucified by the Roman empire (including one long-haired, bearded pacifist who preached a far more radical form of wealth redistribution than any contemporary progressive) would hold these periods up up as worthy of emulation. Only someone who is clueless about Benjamin Franklin's progressive secularism would devote so much of the early part of the book to him. And only someone who does not understand that tax cuts and out of control spending on a military equipped to fight an enemy that no longer exists have led us into our fiscal crisis, not the relative pittance we spend to help the least among us, can write this book and expect anyone to take it seriously. 

Beck is on record as calling our first African American president a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred of white people." He condemned those who rose up for democratic reform in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya as a "virus" that would infect the entire region. Never has a man who had been so wrong so loudly and so repeatedly been paid so much to do so little. We could say the same thing about Beck and other right wing blowhards that the mother of another wildly speculating but generally unproductive and incorrect pseudo-intellectual, Karl Marx, once said: I wish he would stop theorizing about capital and go out and earn some. Honestly. 

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Has the Radical Right Incited Violence? You be the judge...

In their own words, some choice quotations from Republicans inciting violence directly or indirectly against Democrats and progressives:


"People are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out." - Palin-backed (losing) Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle in pre-election interview with Lars Larson


Obama is a racist with a "deep-seated hatred for white people." Glenn Beck, 2009. This sort of comment would get you fired at most jobs, probably escorted out with security. 


"This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture....I'm not saying he doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist." - Beck on President Obama, sparking an advertiser exodus from his FOX News show 

"I have been nervous about this interview with you because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies. ... And I know you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way." –interviewing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim U.S. congressman, Glen Beck's show on CNN's Headline News, Nov. 14, 2006

"I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. ... No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong?"
 - Glenn Beck musing about what he would do for $50 million.


"Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization...And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did. That's what Al Gore, the U.N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing]." 
 –"The Glenn Beck Program," May 1, 2007  [This is more indirect, but if you hear night after night someone on television saying that public officials "on the global warming bandwagon" are really just on the verge of doing "what Hitler did" what would you do? If armed resistance does not follow logically from such a provocative leap of logic, then why not? 


"So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research. ... Eugenics. In case you don't know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. ... The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening." –"The Glenn Beck Program," March 9, 2009 


"Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution, and it was designed to eat the Constitution, to progress past the Constitution." - Glenn Beck


"[Obama's] new science czar, what is this guy's first name, Jones? Van Jones. Van Jones is a guy that was all caught up in the Rodney King trial and he was actually arrested. He was a radical communist. He hasn't shed that. He's still a radical. He is still a black nationalist. He is also now your green job czar. . . . Your country is being hijacked. They are using things like green jobs as a front. They are using health care as a front. In the context of Obama-style reparations, that's what they're doing. [Jones] is yet another community organizer. This is yet another black nationalist in the same way that Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a black nationalist. . . . America, you need to wake up, because this country is being transformed. It is way beyond socialism. It is into black nationalism." - July 23, 2009


"Reload." Palin's message to her followers March, 2009. She later backtracked a bit, making the rather strange comment: "It's telling people that their arms are their votes."


"It's not a time to retreat, it's a time to reload." - Palin at Tea Party Rally in Searchlight, Nevada. 


"You, sir, are a self-avowed communist." - Beck's response to Van Jones 6 months after Jones was forced out of the Obama administration by Beck


Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez [is a] "terrific danger" to the United States. "You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," Robertson said. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop." - Republican Presidential Candidate Pat Robertson on "The 700 Club" (Whether you like him or not, Chavez at the time was an elected head of state.)


"[NPR executives] are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view." - Fox News Channel Chief Roger Ailes, November, 2010


"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." 
 -Sarah Palin, in a message posted on Facebook about Obama's health care plan, Aug. 7, 2009 [true, this fabrication was not directly threatening President Obama, but if such an outrageous claim were true (as 40% of Americans believe it is), then a logical response would be the sort of violent uprising against Democrats such as Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat who voted for this dreaded death panel system (and whose office was vandalized following this vote).]


"Our opponent voted to cut off funding for our troops," Palin lied on 10/7/08 at a rally. Her remarks clearly incited violence among her followers, one of whom called out "Treason!" At a similar campaign rally, one of her supporters called out "Kill him!" when John McCain mentioned President Obama's name. 


"I’m afraid this [Obama] is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country... He didn’t know that he had launched his career in the living room of a domestic terrorist?"  
 - Sarah Palin at a rally in Clearwater, Florida. "She was referring to a decades-old relationship with Bill Ayers, which she made sound contemporary and dangerous. Again, a logical conclusion among her followers would be to respond violently and pre-emptively to terroristic threats, making no distinction between those who are terrorists and those who support or harbor them (although she didn't know what it was when asked, she actually strongly supports the so-called Bush doctrine).


"America is now a socialist economy. The definition of a socialist economy is when 50% or more your economy is dependent on the federal government."
  - Christine O'Donnell; given the loopy math and the loopier misunderstanding of socialism versus communism of many of her followers, this sort of statement is inflammatory - wouldn't you resist a communist takeover of your country?




Oh, and one quotation to show the right has not reserved its weighing in on why we are having so many mass shootings:
"We took the Bible and prayer out of public schools. Now we're having weekly shootings. We had the 60s sexual revolution, and now people are dying of AIDS." 
 - Christine O'Donnell on Politically Incorrect [no, not on topic, but it is a goofy quote, isn't it?]

To my conservative friends who believe unemployment insurance is some communist plot

Calling anyone who wants to help families right before Christmas stay in their homes, pay their utilities, or get a present or two for their kids a Maoist is just plain silly (and once again insensitive to the victims of those mass movements that killed so many). 
Jobless benefits are not "largesse"; they are returned premiums paid by employers and employees into a compulsory federal unemployment insurance system. Workers received less money for years in exchange for the benefits they are receiving now. They have already paid for them. If the system runs a deficit, it will be replenished once the economy recovers. This is how it has always worked (unlike communism, which generally hasn't).
Tax cuts to the wealthiest 1%, on the other hand, are completely un-financed and un-budgeted. Most of those dollars will not be spent, so are taken out of the economy. They represent a redistribution of wealth by fiat from a central government to a well-connected and well-represented elite. Although such historical allusions are hyperbolic, there is far more evidence to support the idea that this transfer is far more reminiscent of Soviet-era handouts of cash, cars, privileges, and dachas to a well-connected few. Communism didn't fail because it professed concern for the worker but because it, like Republicans today, instituted policies that were ultimately harmful to them. No, I'm not calling Republicans communists, but simply because Boehner says he loves free markets does not mean he is to be trusted anymore than Stalin when he said he believed in the universal rights of man.
If you think jobless benefits are trivial, you clearly have not talked to a family who depends on them. Or to local businesses who are disproportionate recipients of the benefits. Or to their employees whose jobs will be lost if those benefits are cut off prematurely.
No recession lasts forever. I have faith in the long-term strength of the United States economy and believe most of those out of work today won't be in 12 to 18 months.
But in a sustained downturn we have a moral obligation to help those who are less fortunate than ourselves. I am willing to help. Are you?

Is Homophobia a Core Teaching of Christianity?

With the tragic death of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi exemplifying an ugly recent homophobic trend, the central question emerges as to 

whether one can be a good Christian without condemning homosexual behavior (along with the ingestion of shellfish, wearing clothes of a mixed fiber (polyester-cotton blends come to mind), rotating crops, and allowing menstruating women to enter a church or temple (which is apparently offensive to the Lord)).   Most of us find homophobia abhorrent, just as we find Biblically-sanctioned slavery and stoning of adulteresses abhorrent, but there is no evidence that Jesus explicitly condemned the passages in Leviticus used to condemn homosexuality. However, there is one enormous piece of evidence that Jesus was no homophobe: he never once mentioned homosexuality, although he had a lot to say about other specific "transgressions" including adultery.

Thank Zeus that most modern Christians have abandoned these Leviticus injunctions but not because of anything Jesus said.  Rather, times have evolved and so have our mores.  Most importantly, Western governments are now secular, so the church no longer has the power of life and death over citizens as it did as recently as the 1700s.

Although the potential universal appeal of Jesus's message has been seized upon to - among other things - justify its spread to Gentiles, Jesus was a Jew preaching to an all-Jewish audience about how to be a better Jew. The lost sheep he had come to save were Jews who were not properly following the mitzvahs (collected in what Christians have since come to call the Old Testament, although he would have found such a name strange, since of course there was no New Testament that had been written, nor would one be written until decades after he died).
The idea that he had come to replace the law would have been news to him; in Matthew, he told his followers that only if they followed the laws with perfection, every one of them, would they get into the Kingdom of Heaven, which he spent a great deal of time and energy describing:

• 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.    
• 5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.   
• 5:19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
• 5:20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.  

                    - Matthew 5:17-20, emphasis added

When asked which of the many Jewish laws were most important, he gave various responses, but usually they involved the idea of loving God (Yahweh) with all your heart, not committing adultery, lying, or stealing, and not judging others lest you be judged yourself. The novelty of his message was his expansion on some of the mitzvahs.
He took Rabbi Hillel the Elder's formulation of what has become the Golden Rule to a new level, stating that you should not just tolerate but love your enemy, and if you have a falling out you should promptly make your peace (lest he be arrested and out you), and if he hits you, you should not just not hit him back, but turn the other cheek so he can hit that too!
His message of radical social justice and redistribution of wealth should be familiar to any reader of the Jewish prophets Amos or Isiah The rich are going to hell, Jesus said, unless they give away everything to the poor and follow him.
The only explicitly sexual message he gave was an expanded definition of adultery to include not just actual acts of sex but even sexual fantasies (what Jimmy Carter admitted to in a 1976 Playboy Interview) or remarrying following divorce. These last teachings in particular are said to have left his followers "amazed" but they certainly do not replace the Jewish laws he felt he was enforcing.
He did state that what comes from our bodies (our words and deeds) will condemn us far more than what we put into them (meaning pork or shellfish, for example), but that does not mean he was saying the teachings of Leviticus should be abandoned, only that they could not substitute for being kind to your enemies and treating the poor and outcast with justice.
It is quite clear from his teachings that he envisioned an imminent final judgment approaching that would come before his followers "tasted death" meaning in their lifetimes, which clearly was not the case, but may have explained why he didn't write anything down or if he did, why it was not preserved.
My fear of Christianity is the same as that of Chinese communism: although both have mellowed out quite a bit from their more blood-soaked days, there have been no statutory or formal doctrine amendments that would guarantee that Christians would not attempt to reimpose public executions of adulterers or Chinese would not shut down free markets and go back to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.
Until and unless Christians come forward and formally renounce those doctrines such as slavery, the murder of accused adulterers or witches, misogyny, and homophobia (which most often involve other Christians), there is always the danger that the darker side of this faith will emerge again.

History and Current Events Home Page

For a more complete compilation of clipped articles, musings, and assorted facts gathered over the year on a range of topics from military history to communism to civil rights to religion, visit http://www.vakkur.com/hx/history.htm.