UNDERSTANDING THE TRANCE AND THE DENIAL ABOUT 9/11 AND THE CONCLUSION THAT CHENEY & RUMSFELD “MADE IT HAPPEN ON PURPOSE”
Before getting into the imposed secrecy and the strange facts of 9/11, we must keep in mind the vast personal, cultural, political, and economic shock that we are thus fostering. If we are right about the MHIOP massacre, and I believe we are, we are indicting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and certain other key moles within the government and security agencies for the almost unimaginable horror of intentionally murdering thousands and thousands of human beings.
Our government in our human psyche is something like a projection of our human parents. What would we adolescent children do if during a seemingly normal upbringing, we discovered that our parents, despite their parental façade, were actually murdering people and planning to enslave us, their own children? Would we deny the whole thing? Run? Run where? To some normal caring adults? How could we trust anybody else if we could not trust our own parents? Would we do what we had to do to survive? Shoot our parents? Steal? Hide? Forage? Kill ourselves? What community with other humans could we join? Nothing in our human experience has prepared us to deal with this. We do have the experience of the Holocaust, but neither Jews nor Gentiles did anything appropriate at the time to deal with it. We apparently have not ingested the lessons of the Holocaust to prevent its happening again in this new and different form.
Then let’s look at the external political-economic implications of the MHIOP massacre. Nothing happens in this country without the support and approval of the very wealthy and powerful, of their Wall Street financial interests, and of their Media. We know that Wall Street and the CIA have a revolving door relationship. If MHIOP is correct, we are indicting also our economic system, our mainstream media, and all our elected officials who participated in the cover-up. There remains no person and no institution that we can trust. We cannot bring ourselves even to think about it. It is an unimaginable nightmare. No wonder then that we have such trouble communicating the facts to our friends and neighbors. Our trouble in dealing with these implications has some similarity to the trouble of Germans following WWII. They denied the Holocaust. None of them “knew” what had been going on. They could not speak of it. It took decades and the birth of new generations of Germans before Germans could speak openly of the Holocaust and the shame of those who allowed it and implemented it.
However, we are not children. We are adults. We can learn from history. We have evolved. We have no alternative but to face the facts and deal with the conclusions they lead to, unless we all choose to self destruct. It is our ultimate challenge. Have we evolved enough to deal with it? We humans may succeed. We may not. We have to do what we can to survive as civilized humans.
My friend Creston founds his optimism and hope on his assumption that bright human beings like Bill and Hillary Clinton will eventually figure things out. I think he ignores the role of money and power that has always dominated the Clintons. They always do and say what money and power want.
However, it is true that human consciousness changes very slowly, maybe a little faster than evolution of body parts, but not much. That being the case, the probability is that it will take a hundred years for the full truth about 9/11 to come out. Capitalism will never fall suddenly and drastically enough to compel sudden change toward truth and democracy. The market impulse, the competitive impulse, and the trading impulse will always be in humans. The anti-social evils of capitalism will be very gradually recognized, and very slowly brought under some human control. The power of capitalism to create its own truths and its own reality by ownership and control of the media and by bribing elected representatives can be observed by bright humans and the truth slowly communicated on the internet. We do have to face the power of capitalists who will bitterly oppose the social controls of capitalism that we must have. The consciousness of some capitalists may evolve to some small degree, but we still have to deal with the consciousness of those capitalists who do not evolve. As to them, my way of dealing with their power is active nonviolence, including “sick outs,” sit down strikes, work stoppages, confrontations, buyers boycotts etc. Because the awesome power of naked capitalism will remain for a long time, there will be more wars, more killing of civilians, much more of our own blood shed, more loss of freedoms, and further lowering of living standards of ordinary people toward the level of the Third World. There will be increased polarization and increased levels of hatred, but gradually more and more people will see it our way.
Meanwhile, we can establish and live in alternate communities, living by our values, eating our own or local food, bartering, trading and the like.
So the upshot is that each of us should do the thing that we think will cause this elevation of consciousness. Voting for Democrats may help to keep things from getting worse. My zeal for informing others about the dynamics of capitalism, active nonviolence, exposing the Israel Lobby, and making “torture a moral issue” can and should continue, as should continued exposure of 9/11. It is all part of the effort. Change of consciousness will come very slowly. Nobody can make it come more quickly, and therefore we may lose the fight and slip into the dark ages. On the other hand, we may win only a little at a time over the years, but enough to keep civilization and democracy alive. Our survival instinct compels us to try.
Dated: September 28, 2007
Doug Page dougpage2@earthlink.net
Friday, September 28, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
THE REAL CLASS WAR, UNFORTUNATELY SUCCESSFUL
THE CONSERVATIVE COMMONSENSE FACTUAL AND POLICY ANALYSIS
OF
PROFESSOR MICHAEL HUDSON
Professor Michael Hudson of the University of Missouri in Kansas City and head of the Institute of Macroeconomic Policy Analysis is newly appointed Chief of Economic Policy for the Kucinich presidential campaign.
THE REAL CLASS WAR
The status quo politicians and the mainstream press immediately label anyone who examines solutions to the disparity between the rich and the rest of us in the United States as “proposing a class war.” The truth is that this charge masks the real long standing class war maintained against ordinary citizens.
Professor Hudson looks at the tax laws, state, local and federal, and the economic interests that cause them to be enacted. He comes to the insight that the wealthy have in fact long been conducting a class war against all employees, wage and salary earners. Their objective has been to remove or minimize taxes on the rich and on real property and to impose the entire burden of taxation on employees who work for a salary or wages. Using Hudson’s approach, one can see that these interests have been working at least since1913, and have become increasingly successful. Now in 2007, the power of these interests overwhelms the power of voters.
Hudson calls this group of interests the Finance, Insurance, Real Estate Lobby, in other words the FIRE Party that now is able to get whatever it wants from elected representatives and to stop what it does not want. FIRE is able to control our elected representatives because it is the source of 95% of the money that elected officials need to get re-elected. The FIRE Party controls the Federal Government, and each of the elected federal officials. It is almost always able to nullify the political implementation of majority will of voters. Hudson also now includes the pharmaceutical companies as important components of the FIRE party, but for some reason, he does not include the military industrial complex and the armaments manufacturers. Perhaps Hudson sees these latter as being mere appendages of the Finance interests. Hudson says that financial transactions in real estate, stocks, bonds, company buyouts and the like constitute 95% of the spending in the US and spending for goods and services are only a very minor part. The Financial interests thus have the money to become politically dominant.
Hudson begins with Republican Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive reaction to the excesses of the Golden Era, leading to the enactment of the 16th Amendment in 1913 making a progressive tax on incomes possible. (It is noteworthy that the private Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve Bank was also established in 1913.)
At the time of the Republican Progressive era most of the taxes were on land. In 1930 70 % of the state and local tax revenue came from taxes on land while in 2007 only 10% comes from land taxes. There was then a prevailing ethic and belief that the good of all involved having a sustainable healthy productive workforce. Those who worked were entitled to enough income for their own maintenance. This was the assumption of economist Adam Smith, and the moral and spiritual ethic of St. Thomas Aquinas who wrote in the 1200s that Work touches life itself—‘to live well is to work well’…that work means life and life means living with meaning and a sense of contributing to the community.
Another background insight to this former Republican position was that the amount of land on the planet is finite while the number of people is constantly increasing, and that land is the ultimate source of food for all these humans. Civilized humans can not leave land to the law of the jungle, and in the control of rich landowners who have the power to deprive people of food.
Still another background assumption was that human beings as producers, had dignity and value not only to themselves, but to the whole society. Employees had an opportunity for pride in their creativity and workmanship and in their contribution to community well being. At that time, there was the wisdom that human beings as consumers could only have greedy “wants” and that greedy consumption should be disciplined, limited and controlled.
In Republican tax policy at that time, most taxes were on land, and the assumption was that the amount of money a worker needed for his sustainable maintenance was exempt from all tax. Adjusted to today’s levels that would be around $40,000. The assumption was that land owners and wealthy people should pay the taxes because they got the most material benefit. Although all taxes were evil, the least evil tax was one based on land value.
Thus as late as 1980s the income to rate of our progressive income tax authorized by the 16th amendment was 72% at the top levels. States and local governments maintained property taxes sufficient to fund schools, colleges and universities. There was an Estate Tax imposed so that unearned income could not be transferred and compounded in successive generations.
Following World War II, the US thus had sufficient funds to provide 11 million veterans with a college education and home loans. (In ensuing decades these veterans have paid back that government investment many times over, in their own income taxes.)
The FIRE party began its counter-revolutionary class war in 1913 to cut taxes on the rich and impose the burden on wage earners. Hudson emphasizes that the Democratic Party has implemented each step of this class war, despite its false rhetoric about being for “the little guy.”
In 1913, FIRE established the Federal Reserve Bank, a private institution controlled by FIRE. The voters through the US Treasury until that time controlled money and credit, and the worth of the dollar was backed by gold. Control of credit, and the purposes for which credit could be used was thus placed in private hands, FIRE’s hands. FIRE thus had control of the economy and planned the economy to suit itself. FIRE usually wants higher interest rates, “tighter credit” and the people through the US Treasury wanted “easy credit.”
In 1935 FIRE had enough political clout to cause employees to finance their own ultimate retirement security through a regressive flat tax on a portion of their wages. FIRE also caused the income of wealthy employees to be exempt from the SS tax above a certain level. Social Security should have been paid from the general budget and funded by the steeply progressive income tax with no exemption for wealthy earners. FIRE prevented that, protected the wealthy, and increased the burden on ordinary wage earners.
In 1947 FIRE caused the enactment of the Taft Hartley Act which made it much more difficult for employees to organize unions by prohibiting membership to zealous radical union organizers and by making it illegal for a group of employees of one union to help another group of employees to organize, by means of secondary boycotts. The intended effect of Taft Hartley was to weaken unions politically so that they could not impede FIRE’s class war.
Beginning after WWII, FIRE began an immense PR campaign to emphasize the role of human beings, not as producers, but as consumers. Greedy consumption was not only good in itself, but it was necessary to “grow” the economy.
Along the way, FIRE obtained volume after volume of exemptions and benefits for land owners and imposed more and more taxes on wage earners such as:
a. FIRE obtained special “capital gains” taxes at rates less than taxes on earned income for increases in land value.
b. FIRE obtained the right to a phony depreciation deduction for a fictitious lessening of value on a building even though the building in fact increased in value.
c. FIRE obtained the right to an “IRC 1031 exchange” so that a land owner with fully depreciated property could exchange it for other property and repeat the depreciation anew on the exchanged property. Meanwhile the person who initiated the exchange could get his own depreciation deduction for the property he obtained in the exchange.
d. FIRE obtained the right to incorporate its businesses and to keep its business accounts in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands.
e. FIRE obtained the right to deduct the interest on money he borrowed in improving his land or in financing other business transactions.
f. FIRE obtained reduction after reduction in the Estate Tax with the ultimate objective of eliminating it entirely.
In 1983, FIRE had enough power world wide to take the dollar off of the gold standard in the Bretton Woods agreement. As a substitute, the US made a treaty with Saudi Arabia that oil would always be valued in dollars and not in any other currency. This deal is backed and enforced by the might of the US military in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire Middle East.
In 1980s, using Reagan as its persuasive spokesman, the top federal income tax rate was reduced to 27% from its former 72% level and corporate income taxes were reduced 12% to 34%. FIRE also caused Reagan to fire striking air traffic controllers in the implementation of FIRE’s class war.
In 1983, FIRE set up Greenspan to head a committee to deal with the social security “crisis” allegedly arising because the existing levels of funding would not be sufficient to pay the baby boomers by the year 2030. FIRE’s real fear was that steeply progressive income tax would be imposed to pay for the costs of social security, Medicare, universal health care and other needs everybody had in common. Greenspan’s recommendation was that the existing regressive social security taxes be increased and that the age of retirement be raised from 65 to 67. The earnings of wealthy employees remained exempt. At the same time, Bush set up his campaign to privatize social security by allowing the investment of a portion of their SS contribution in the stock market.
FIRE caused Bill Clinton “to do away with welfare as we know it” and to adopt no substitutes. FIRE caused Clinton to enact the free trade laws that are the basis for the outsourcing of the jobs of Americans to Mexico China and India with their much lower wage rates without any solutions for those who lost jobs in the US. FIRE caused Clinton to deregulate broadcasting and to give away public airwaves free of charge. This was the foundation for FIRE’s monopoly of the media and its pervasive right wing talk shows. FIRE thus controls our main sources of information, and it uses this control to enhance its power.
In the Bush times, FIRE grossly reduced taxes on the wealthy for a period of 10 years, the reduction being subject to a “sunset” termination in 2008. Implementing FIRE’s demands, Bush intentionally increased the federal debt many times over for the stated purpose of making it impossible for the federal government ever again to finance a welfare state, a GI Bill, a New Deal, Universal Health Coverage, or free education through college. FIRE’s agent, Alan Greenspan held interest rates at an artificially low level thereby stimulating the vast boom of real estate and financial transaction loans, all for the purpose of bringing billions of dollars in profits to FIRE. FIRE caused a deregulation of the market and its transactions. FIRE caused the enactment of a draconian Bankruptcy Act.
Now in 2007, fearing that a Republican might not win, FIRE is pouring immense amounts of money into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Obama knowing that they can be counted upon to do its bidding, and thus to perpetuate FIRE’s control of our government, and to continue wars and domination abroad.
In the entire Congress, only Democrat Dennis Kucinich and Republican Ron Paul attempt to bring this class war to the attention of voters. Hudson has now joined the Kucinch presidential campaign. He is writing a new proposed tax policy to undo the FIRE class war, and to provide facts and figures so that Kucinich can bring the foregoing to the attention of all voters, and to deal with the looming depression and financial disasters.
OF
PROFESSOR MICHAEL HUDSON
Professor Michael Hudson of the University of Missouri in Kansas City and head of the Institute of Macroeconomic Policy Analysis is newly appointed Chief of Economic Policy for the Kucinich presidential campaign.
THE REAL CLASS WAR
The status quo politicians and the mainstream press immediately label anyone who examines solutions to the disparity between the rich and the rest of us in the United States as “proposing a class war.” The truth is that this charge masks the real long standing class war maintained against ordinary citizens.
Professor Hudson looks at the tax laws, state, local and federal, and the economic interests that cause them to be enacted. He comes to the insight that the wealthy have in fact long been conducting a class war against all employees, wage and salary earners. Their objective has been to remove or minimize taxes on the rich and on real property and to impose the entire burden of taxation on employees who work for a salary or wages. Using Hudson’s approach, one can see that these interests have been working at least since1913, and have become increasingly successful. Now in 2007, the power of these interests overwhelms the power of voters.
Hudson calls this group of interests the Finance, Insurance, Real Estate Lobby, in other words the FIRE Party that now is able to get whatever it wants from elected representatives and to stop what it does not want. FIRE is able to control our elected representatives because it is the source of 95% of the money that elected officials need to get re-elected. The FIRE Party controls the Federal Government, and each of the elected federal officials. It is almost always able to nullify the political implementation of majority will of voters. Hudson also now includes the pharmaceutical companies as important components of the FIRE party, but for some reason, he does not include the military industrial complex and the armaments manufacturers. Perhaps Hudson sees these latter as being mere appendages of the Finance interests. Hudson says that financial transactions in real estate, stocks, bonds, company buyouts and the like constitute 95% of the spending in the US and spending for goods and services are only a very minor part. The Financial interests thus have the money to become politically dominant.
Hudson begins with Republican Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive reaction to the excesses of the Golden Era, leading to the enactment of the 16th Amendment in 1913 making a progressive tax on incomes possible. (It is noteworthy that the private Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve Bank was also established in 1913.)
At the time of the Republican Progressive era most of the taxes were on land. In 1930 70 % of the state and local tax revenue came from taxes on land while in 2007 only 10% comes from land taxes. There was then a prevailing ethic and belief that the good of all involved having a sustainable healthy productive workforce. Those who worked were entitled to enough income for their own maintenance. This was the assumption of economist Adam Smith, and the moral and spiritual ethic of St. Thomas Aquinas who wrote in the 1200s that Work touches life itself—‘to live well is to work well’…that work means life and life means living with meaning and a sense of contributing to the community.
Another background insight to this former Republican position was that the amount of land on the planet is finite while the number of people is constantly increasing, and that land is the ultimate source of food for all these humans. Civilized humans can not leave land to the law of the jungle, and in the control of rich landowners who have the power to deprive people of food.
Still another background assumption was that human beings as producers, had dignity and value not only to themselves, but to the whole society. Employees had an opportunity for pride in their creativity and workmanship and in their contribution to community well being. At that time, there was the wisdom that human beings as consumers could only have greedy “wants” and that greedy consumption should be disciplined, limited and controlled.
In Republican tax policy at that time, most taxes were on land, and the assumption was that the amount of money a worker needed for his sustainable maintenance was exempt from all tax. Adjusted to today’s levels that would be around $40,000. The assumption was that land owners and wealthy people should pay the taxes because they got the most material benefit. Although all taxes were evil, the least evil tax was one based on land value.
Thus as late as 1980s the income to rate of our progressive income tax authorized by the 16th amendment was 72% at the top levels. States and local governments maintained property taxes sufficient to fund schools, colleges and universities. There was an Estate Tax imposed so that unearned income could not be transferred and compounded in successive generations.
Following World War II, the US thus had sufficient funds to provide 11 million veterans with a college education and home loans. (In ensuing decades these veterans have paid back that government investment many times over, in their own income taxes.)
The FIRE party began its counter-revolutionary class war in 1913 to cut taxes on the rich and impose the burden on wage earners. Hudson emphasizes that the Democratic Party has implemented each step of this class war, despite its false rhetoric about being for “the little guy.”
In 1913, FIRE established the Federal Reserve Bank, a private institution controlled by FIRE. The voters through the US Treasury until that time controlled money and credit, and the worth of the dollar was backed by gold. Control of credit, and the purposes for which credit could be used was thus placed in private hands, FIRE’s hands. FIRE thus had control of the economy and planned the economy to suit itself. FIRE usually wants higher interest rates, “tighter credit” and the people through the US Treasury wanted “easy credit.”
In 1935 FIRE had enough political clout to cause employees to finance their own ultimate retirement security through a regressive flat tax on a portion of their wages. FIRE also caused the income of wealthy employees to be exempt from the SS tax above a certain level. Social Security should have been paid from the general budget and funded by the steeply progressive income tax with no exemption for wealthy earners. FIRE prevented that, protected the wealthy, and increased the burden on ordinary wage earners.
In 1947 FIRE caused the enactment of the Taft Hartley Act which made it much more difficult for employees to organize unions by prohibiting membership to zealous radical union organizers and by making it illegal for a group of employees of one union to help another group of employees to organize, by means of secondary boycotts. The intended effect of Taft Hartley was to weaken unions politically so that they could not impede FIRE’s class war.
Beginning after WWII, FIRE began an immense PR campaign to emphasize the role of human beings, not as producers, but as consumers. Greedy consumption was not only good in itself, but it was necessary to “grow” the economy.
Along the way, FIRE obtained volume after volume of exemptions and benefits for land owners and imposed more and more taxes on wage earners such as:
a. FIRE obtained special “capital gains” taxes at rates less than taxes on earned income for increases in land value.
b. FIRE obtained the right to a phony depreciation deduction for a fictitious lessening of value on a building even though the building in fact increased in value.
c. FIRE obtained the right to an “IRC 1031 exchange” so that a land owner with fully depreciated property could exchange it for other property and repeat the depreciation anew on the exchanged property. Meanwhile the person who initiated the exchange could get his own depreciation deduction for the property he obtained in the exchange.
d. FIRE obtained the right to incorporate its businesses and to keep its business accounts in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands.
e. FIRE obtained the right to deduct the interest on money he borrowed in improving his land or in financing other business transactions.
f. FIRE obtained reduction after reduction in the Estate Tax with the ultimate objective of eliminating it entirely.
In 1983, FIRE had enough power world wide to take the dollar off of the gold standard in the Bretton Woods agreement. As a substitute, the US made a treaty with Saudi Arabia that oil would always be valued in dollars and not in any other currency. This deal is backed and enforced by the might of the US military in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire Middle East.
In 1980s, using Reagan as its persuasive spokesman, the top federal income tax rate was reduced to 27% from its former 72% level and corporate income taxes were reduced 12% to 34%. FIRE also caused Reagan to fire striking air traffic controllers in the implementation of FIRE’s class war.
In 1983, FIRE set up Greenspan to head a committee to deal with the social security “crisis” allegedly arising because the existing levels of funding would not be sufficient to pay the baby boomers by the year 2030. FIRE’s real fear was that steeply progressive income tax would be imposed to pay for the costs of social security, Medicare, universal health care and other needs everybody had in common. Greenspan’s recommendation was that the existing regressive social security taxes be increased and that the age of retirement be raised from 65 to 67. The earnings of wealthy employees remained exempt. At the same time, Bush set up his campaign to privatize social security by allowing the investment of a portion of their SS contribution in the stock market.
FIRE caused Bill Clinton “to do away with welfare as we know it” and to adopt no substitutes. FIRE caused Clinton to enact the free trade laws that are the basis for the outsourcing of the jobs of Americans to Mexico China and India with their much lower wage rates without any solutions for those who lost jobs in the US. FIRE caused Clinton to deregulate broadcasting and to give away public airwaves free of charge. This was the foundation for FIRE’s monopoly of the media and its pervasive right wing talk shows. FIRE thus controls our main sources of information, and it uses this control to enhance its power.
In the Bush times, FIRE grossly reduced taxes on the wealthy for a period of 10 years, the reduction being subject to a “sunset” termination in 2008. Implementing FIRE’s demands, Bush intentionally increased the federal debt many times over for the stated purpose of making it impossible for the federal government ever again to finance a welfare state, a GI Bill, a New Deal, Universal Health Coverage, or free education through college. FIRE’s agent, Alan Greenspan held interest rates at an artificially low level thereby stimulating the vast boom of real estate and financial transaction loans, all for the purpose of bringing billions of dollars in profits to FIRE. FIRE caused a deregulation of the market and its transactions. FIRE caused the enactment of a draconian Bankruptcy Act.
Now in 2007, fearing that a Republican might not win, FIRE is pouring immense amounts of money into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Obama knowing that they can be counted upon to do its bidding, and thus to perpetuate FIRE’s control of our government, and to continue wars and domination abroad.
In the entire Congress, only Democrat Dennis Kucinich and Republican Ron Paul attempt to bring this class war to the attention of voters. Hudson has now joined the Kucinch presidential campaign. He is writing a new proposed tax policy to undo the FIRE class war, and to provide facts and figures so that Kucinich can bring the foregoing to the attention of all voters, and to deal with the looming depression and financial disasters.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
A STRATEGY FOR HUMAN SURVIVAL?
DOUG’S REVIEW OF RELIGION AND THE HUMAN PROSPECT
History Professor Emeritus at UCLA, Alexander Saxton has written a scholarly brilliant book in which he asks the question facing us all: Can the human species survive in face of coinciding ecological limits, runaway population growth, nuclear proliferation, a fragile multi-national market economy, conflicting religious fundamentalisms, Wars, preventive wars, pollution, over fishing? …..the list is frightening and endless. Saxton’s second question is: Can religion provide humans on this planet a collective belief system such as to make the massive changes in consciousness, behavior and life styles necessary to enable humans to live sustainably on the planet without killing each other?
The book is Saxton’s attempt to answer this question, and he is hopeful but very dubious.
Saxton was born in 1919, raised a Catholic and is now a left non-believer and brilliant academic. He has written for Monthly Review, and the Monthly Review Press has published his book.
In his attempts to answer his own questions, Saxton studies the works of other scholars who have examined religion, its successes, and its use by the powerful to maintain power, its conflicts within and without, and its many failures. Saxton is rational and scientific. He seems unconcerned with any field of human wisdom except the field based on science. He does not distinguish between the rigors of the scientific method and rationality.
Saxton says over and over that whatever solution religion comes up with must be credible to the nonbeliever.
At all times, Saxton looks only at institutional religions as contrasted with the private, individual spiritual impulse. They are different. Saxton might find support in spirituality when he finds little or none in institutional religion.
Saxton apparently has not read modern theologians for the actual substance and validity of their writings. See for example:
DOUG’S BIBLOGRAPHY OF PROGRESSIVE THEOLOGIANS AND SAGES
E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper & Row Publishers Inc. 1979)
Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (The Berkley Publishing Group, A division of Penguin Group [U.S.A.] Inc., 2002)
Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (Bantam Dell, A Division of Random House Inc., 2003)
Alan W. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Beacon Press,Boston, 1968)
Dorothee Soulee, Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian (Forest Press, Minneapolis, 1999)
Sjoerd L. Bonting, Chaos Theology (St. Paul University, Ottawa(2002)
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1992)
Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianityp (Harper, San Francisco, 2003)
Karen Armstrong, A History of God (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1993)
Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Bear & Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1983)
These modern progressive theologians offer such concepts as the following:
• Nobody can prove the existence or nonexistence of God or of a loving or creative intelligence and energy in the universe. However, most humans have always yearned for a reality beyond ordinary experience, and the yearning seems to be a part of human DNA. For many centuries, most sages have found it meaningful and useful to assume the existence of a loving God. Zen Buddhists put much more emphasis on the teachings of Buddha, but in effect Buddha occupies the place of a loving God. Today many nonbelievers or outright atheists addicted to alcohol find help in the spiritual program of Alcoholics Anonymous by “faking it until they make it,” that is by pretending that God exists and getting on with the Program.
• God is love…at least this is the reliable component that humans can experience. God is in us and acts through each of us. God is neither male nor female and is certainly not a bearded man in white robes sitting in the clouds making angry judgments about us and sending sinners to hell.
• Each of us has the capacity to be ongoing loving co-creators with God if we choose to do so because God is in us.
• God created all humans (along with the rest of creation), loves each of us humans, sinners included, and expects us humans to give each other sincere caring attention as God does. This may be a root of our socialist and constitutional concern with equality and socialist vision of a compassionate political economy.
• The Christian doctrines of Virgin birth and Resurrection from the Dead are not literally or historically true but are nevertheless profoundly meaningful stories and metaphors that give some humans meaning to their existence.
• Evil, sin, hell, the Holocaust, and wars are part of the chaos of the universe much like the entropy in modern physics. A loving God, and loving human co-creators with God, struggle to bring order and love to this chaos among humans and to make meaningful adjustments and accommodations to avoid the effects of natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes insofar as is possible. There is a realization that some chaos is a permanent part of the universe co-existing with a loving God as it is in nuclear particles.
• Ancient ritual and ceremony deserve respect for being reminders of the foregoing values and to maintain and preserve the human wisdom so far accumulated.
• Ritual and ceremony, long tested by human experience, can bring order to the irrational dark sides of us humans, which if unchanneled, can lead to mob behavior, National Socialism, holocausts, and insane doctrines such as those of Jim Jones in Guiana.
• Since the word love has so many meanings, progressive sages make clear that the love involved is caring for others, being cared for, sharing, cooperation, and the absence of angry violence.
• Institutional religion does as much harm as it does good. This is because basic insights and teachings have been codified, stripped of meaning, ignored, misinterpreted, or used by rulers to manipulate the people or to achieve secular political power. Religion has been and is the opiate of the masses. The Church continues to be the Chaplain of Empires.
• All privilege and inequality is founded on violence. Violence never achieves any idealistic objective. We humans must become aware that the 5000 year old Myth of Redemptive Violence is false.
At the outset Saxton discusses 3 different definitions of religion:
Religion is BELIEF in spiritual beings
Religion is KNOWLEDGE of spiritual beings
Religion is the IMAGINING OF spiritual beings.
Saxton is not happy with any of the choices, but he finds the first least offensive, but to be effective, it must be credible, and it’s utility scientifically provable.
I have yet another definition: Religion is a FIXED ASSUMPTION that a creative loving intelligence exists in the universe and within each human, and that humans and their communities need and benefit from this postulate.
I lean toward the existence of a loving creative intelligence in the universe (however baffling and mysterious) as being helpful to me personally, but I neither believe in, have knowledge of, nor imagine such a creative loving intelligence. For me, it is a rational very useful fixed assumption upon which to live. I think that I and my fellow humans on the planet are better off if we assume, if we behave and act as if, such a creative loving intelligence exists “out there” but more importantly in each of us. As the Bible says: God is in you.
Example and explanation: In 12 step programs, the person beginning his quest for sobriety is told as the 1st step, to recognize that he is powerless and to turn his will over to God. The person who says he does not believe in God is told to “fake it until you make it.” Thousands of such nonbelieving persons have thus achieved sobriety.
The actual dynamics in a 12 step group are quite human and observable. Assume further with me, that God is love, that God is in each of us, and that each of us has the power to be caring, (and to receive caring), forgiving, understanding and helpful. Believers find this power to be divine. However, nonbelievers also have this power to be caring, (and to receive caring), forgiving, understanding and helpful In the 12 step group, the person seeking sobriety looks cautiously around the group and receives this caring help of “God” in the faces of each other group member.
Active nonviolence, as taught in the training manuals, and in the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi proceeds on the fixed assumption that there is a kernel of decency, the ability to care and to receive caring, in every human.
It is this human capacity for caring, and to receive caring that is foreign to the scientific method, and to Marxian “scientific” socialism. The human need for this quality is completely rational. It is not irrational. We humans desperately yearn for this quality from our government, from our political parties, from our friends and our families. We yearn for communities where we can give and receive caring.
This capacity for caring is honored, respected and promoted in each of the major faiths.
The point of all of this is that a worldwide mass political movement could be based on the recognition of this non rational value of caring. Whatever else the fundamentalists in each faith believe, at the core of their faiths, they share a need and recognition of this value, with the rest of us.
My scientist PhD. daughter is a ferocious atheist, but she has at least as much capacity for caring as any believer. So do atheists, nonbelievers, and cynics.
The core of each religion offers a vision of a better life on earth (as well as in heaven) and thus offers a strategy for penetrating the trance imposed on us by the oligarchy.
We all, believers, nonbelievers, and fundamentalists, share respect for some version of the Golden Rule.
At some level, we all wish to sustain and preserve our planet home for practical as well as spiritual reasons.
We can all share the discipline of active nonviolence and recognize the falseness of what Walter Wink labels The Myth of Redemptive Violence.
While institutional religion will not be on the cutting edge of a planet wide political movement, those with a private subjective spirituality, theologians and sages could be.
It is important to realize that one’s spirituality and one’s view of his own religion, are subjective and private. They are not, and cannot be, subjects for rational debate in the civic arena. There is immense wisdom in a strict separation of church and state. Rabbi Michael Lerner and his political movement, The Network of Spiritual Progressives, have not learned this. His members never do anything, but debate endlessly exactly what their mission is.
Sages and theologians of each faith might be crucial to the survival of humans on this planet. They should take the lead and publicly teach the golden rule and the value of caring and receiving caring at the root of each major faith.
September 9, 2007
Doug Page, Tucson AZ dougpage2@earthlink.net
History Professor Emeritus at UCLA, Alexander Saxton has written a scholarly brilliant book in which he asks the question facing us all: Can the human species survive in face of coinciding ecological limits, runaway population growth, nuclear proliferation, a fragile multi-national market economy, conflicting religious fundamentalisms, Wars, preventive wars, pollution, over fishing? …..the list is frightening and endless. Saxton’s second question is: Can religion provide humans on this planet a collective belief system such as to make the massive changes in consciousness, behavior and life styles necessary to enable humans to live sustainably on the planet without killing each other?
The book is Saxton’s attempt to answer this question, and he is hopeful but very dubious.
Saxton was born in 1919, raised a Catholic and is now a left non-believer and brilliant academic. He has written for Monthly Review, and the Monthly Review Press has published his book.
In his attempts to answer his own questions, Saxton studies the works of other scholars who have examined religion, its successes, and its use by the powerful to maintain power, its conflicts within and without, and its many failures. Saxton is rational and scientific. He seems unconcerned with any field of human wisdom except the field based on science. He does not distinguish between the rigors of the scientific method and rationality.
Saxton says over and over that whatever solution religion comes up with must be credible to the nonbeliever.
At all times, Saxton looks only at institutional religions as contrasted with the private, individual spiritual impulse. They are different. Saxton might find support in spirituality when he finds little or none in institutional religion.
Saxton apparently has not read modern theologians for the actual substance and validity of their writings. See for example:
DOUG’S BIBLOGRAPHY OF PROGRESSIVE THEOLOGIANS AND SAGES
E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper & Row Publishers Inc. 1979)
Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (The Berkley Publishing Group, A division of Penguin Group [U.S.A.] Inc., 2002)
Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (Bantam Dell, A Division of Random House Inc., 2003)
Alan W. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Beacon Press,Boston, 1968)
Dorothee Soulee, Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian (Forest Press, Minneapolis, 1999)
Sjoerd L. Bonting, Chaos Theology (St. Paul University, Ottawa(2002)
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1992)
Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianityp (Harper, San Francisco, 2003)
Karen Armstrong, A History of God (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1993)
Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Bear & Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1983)
These modern progressive theologians offer such concepts as the following:
• Nobody can prove the existence or nonexistence of God or of a loving or creative intelligence and energy in the universe. However, most humans have always yearned for a reality beyond ordinary experience, and the yearning seems to be a part of human DNA. For many centuries, most sages have found it meaningful and useful to assume the existence of a loving God. Zen Buddhists put much more emphasis on the teachings of Buddha, but in effect Buddha occupies the place of a loving God. Today many nonbelievers or outright atheists addicted to alcohol find help in the spiritual program of Alcoholics Anonymous by “faking it until they make it,” that is by pretending that God exists and getting on with the Program.
• God is love…at least this is the reliable component that humans can experience. God is in us and acts through each of us. God is neither male nor female and is certainly not a bearded man in white robes sitting in the clouds making angry judgments about us and sending sinners to hell.
• Each of us has the capacity to be ongoing loving co-creators with God if we choose to do so because God is in us.
• God created all humans (along with the rest of creation), loves each of us humans, sinners included, and expects us humans to give each other sincere caring attention as God does. This may be a root of our socialist and constitutional concern with equality and socialist vision of a compassionate political economy.
• The Christian doctrines of Virgin birth and Resurrection from the Dead are not literally or historically true but are nevertheless profoundly meaningful stories and metaphors that give some humans meaning to their existence.
• Evil, sin, hell, the Holocaust, and wars are part of the chaos of the universe much like the entropy in modern physics. A loving God, and loving human co-creators with God, struggle to bring order and love to this chaos among humans and to make meaningful adjustments and accommodations to avoid the effects of natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes insofar as is possible. There is a realization that some chaos is a permanent part of the universe co-existing with a loving God as it is in nuclear particles.
• Ancient ritual and ceremony deserve respect for being reminders of the foregoing values and to maintain and preserve the human wisdom so far accumulated.
• Ritual and ceremony, long tested by human experience, can bring order to the irrational dark sides of us humans, which if unchanneled, can lead to mob behavior, National Socialism, holocausts, and insane doctrines such as those of Jim Jones in Guiana.
• Since the word love has so many meanings, progressive sages make clear that the love involved is caring for others, being cared for, sharing, cooperation, and the absence of angry violence.
• Institutional religion does as much harm as it does good. This is because basic insights and teachings have been codified, stripped of meaning, ignored, misinterpreted, or used by rulers to manipulate the people or to achieve secular political power. Religion has been and is the opiate of the masses. The Church continues to be the Chaplain of Empires.
• All privilege and inequality is founded on violence. Violence never achieves any idealistic objective. We humans must become aware that the 5000 year old Myth of Redemptive Violence is false.
At the outset Saxton discusses 3 different definitions of religion:
Religion is BELIEF in spiritual beings
Religion is KNOWLEDGE of spiritual beings
Religion is the IMAGINING OF spiritual beings.
Saxton is not happy with any of the choices, but he finds the first least offensive, but to be effective, it must be credible, and it’s utility scientifically provable.
I have yet another definition: Religion is a FIXED ASSUMPTION that a creative loving intelligence exists in the universe and within each human, and that humans and their communities need and benefit from this postulate.
I lean toward the existence of a loving creative intelligence in the universe (however baffling and mysterious) as being helpful to me personally, but I neither believe in, have knowledge of, nor imagine such a creative loving intelligence. For me, it is a rational very useful fixed assumption upon which to live. I think that I and my fellow humans on the planet are better off if we assume, if we behave and act as if, such a creative loving intelligence exists “out there” but more importantly in each of us. As the Bible says: God is in you.
Example and explanation: In 12 step programs, the person beginning his quest for sobriety is told as the 1st step, to recognize that he is powerless and to turn his will over to God. The person who says he does not believe in God is told to “fake it until you make it.” Thousands of such nonbelieving persons have thus achieved sobriety.
The actual dynamics in a 12 step group are quite human and observable. Assume further with me, that God is love, that God is in each of us, and that each of us has the power to be caring, (and to receive caring), forgiving, understanding and helpful. Believers find this power to be divine. However, nonbelievers also have this power to be caring, (and to receive caring), forgiving, understanding and helpful In the 12 step group, the person seeking sobriety looks cautiously around the group and receives this caring help of “God” in the faces of each other group member.
Active nonviolence, as taught in the training manuals, and in the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi proceeds on the fixed assumption that there is a kernel of decency, the ability to care and to receive caring, in every human.
It is this human capacity for caring, and to receive caring that is foreign to the scientific method, and to Marxian “scientific” socialism. The human need for this quality is completely rational. It is not irrational. We humans desperately yearn for this quality from our government, from our political parties, from our friends and our families. We yearn for communities where we can give and receive caring.
This capacity for caring is honored, respected and promoted in each of the major faiths.
The point of all of this is that a worldwide mass political movement could be based on the recognition of this non rational value of caring. Whatever else the fundamentalists in each faith believe, at the core of their faiths, they share a need and recognition of this value, with the rest of us.
My scientist PhD. daughter is a ferocious atheist, but she has at least as much capacity for caring as any believer. So do atheists, nonbelievers, and cynics.
The core of each religion offers a vision of a better life on earth (as well as in heaven) and thus offers a strategy for penetrating the trance imposed on us by the oligarchy.
We all, believers, nonbelievers, and fundamentalists, share respect for some version of the Golden Rule.
At some level, we all wish to sustain and preserve our planet home for practical as well as spiritual reasons.
We can all share the discipline of active nonviolence and recognize the falseness of what Walter Wink labels The Myth of Redemptive Violence.
While institutional religion will not be on the cutting edge of a planet wide political movement, those with a private subjective spirituality, theologians and sages could be.
It is important to realize that one’s spirituality and one’s view of his own religion, are subjective and private. They are not, and cannot be, subjects for rational debate in the civic arena. There is immense wisdom in a strict separation of church and state. Rabbi Michael Lerner and his political movement, The Network of Spiritual Progressives, have not learned this. His members never do anything, but debate endlessly exactly what their mission is.
Sages and theologians of each faith might be crucial to the survival of humans on this planet. They should take the lead and publicly teach the golden rule and the value of caring and receiving caring at the root of each major faith.
September 9, 2007
Doug Page, Tucson AZ dougpage2@earthlink.net
BETRAYED DEMOCRATS MANIFESTO
THE BETRAYED DEMOCRATS MAINIFESTO
A Strategy for Betrayed Democratic Voters
OUR GOALS
1. We seek elected officials who care about us and will support policies that enable us to care for each other so as to meet our spiritual, creative, and material needs.
2. We want acts and conduct abroad that foster our interdependence and interconnectedness with human beings everywhere and meet our common need for peace and justice for all.
3. We want the US to withdraw our troops from Iraq NOW. We demand that our elected representatives use their constitutional power to vote against further funding of this war and against funding for the looming attack on Iran, and to vote only for funding a prompt orderly safe withdrawal of troops.
4. We insist on foreign policies that will provide a sustainable peaceful just life for all humans on this planet. We insist on having elected officials who will deal promptly and creatively with the looming, coinciding crises of nuclear proliferation, oil and energy shortages, over fishing, deforestation, global warming, ecological destruction, overpopulation, the compounding differences in wealth between the rich and the poor, pollution, and a fragile economy
5. We are willing to give up our unnecessary material goods and to make the changes and sacrifices in our personal lives that implementation of the above demands will make necessary.
6. We demand open access to all information necessary for us to govern ourselves wisely and a clear open public discussion of all issues of public concern, specifically including the most controversial: Israel-Palestine, the Israel Lobby, and an opening to public access all of the classified facts about the tragedy of the 9-11 World Trade Center.
7. We have become aware that it is the controlling financial oligarchy with its media that is determined to maintain the war. This is the same financial oligarchy that provides campaign funds to our elected representatives. We demand that our elected representatives confront this financial oligarchy, reject its financial contributions to their campaigns, their trips abroad, and their lobbyists, and betray the interests of that financial oligarchy instead of betraying us voters.
OUR STRATEGY OF ACTIVE NONVIOLENCE TO ACHIEVE OUR GOALS
We recognize at long last that the Democrats, bought and paid for by the money of the rich and powerful, vote on all important issues with the Republicans. We now realize that the rich and powerful constitute a governing financial oligarchy that now controls both the Republicans and the Democrats. We note that with each additional outrageous act of George W. Bush, the puppet of the Oligarchy, the Democrats simply cringe, acquiescence, and fund even more outrageous acts.
We acknowledge that there are only two viable political parties in the US. Despite its betrayal of us voters, the Democratic Party is the more likely of the two to make changes to meet our needs. We reject the self serving propaganda of the Democratic Leadership Committee that the Democrats are “the lesser evil” that it uses to get our votes and then to betray us. We perceive that the power of the Democratic Party to deceive us, to betray us, and to perpetuate Oligarchic control depends on two things: 1. the money of the Oligarchy for their campaign costs. 2. Our votes. The tragedy is that our votes for the “lesser evil” enable the Democrats to continue to do bad things.
We are determined to overcome our fear, our despair, our alienation from each other, and our silent immobilization. We choose to act constructively together.
THEREFORE
We the undersigned Democrats, in a campaign of active nonviolence in the tradition of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., do hereby pledge to withhold our votes from each Democratic candidate unless that candidate makes a sincere credible pledge to honor and implement each and every one of our goals. We shall monitor every single vote that each elected person makes, and we shall work actively to defeat that representative if he or she breaches his pledge.
Dated: September 9, 2007
Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net
A Strategy for Betrayed Democratic Voters
OUR GOALS
1. We seek elected officials who care about us and will support policies that enable us to care for each other so as to meet our spiritual, creative, and material needs.
2. We want acts and conduct abroad that foster our interdependence and interconnectedness with human beings everywhere and meet our common need for peace and justice for all.
3. We want the US to withdraw our troops from Iraq NOW. We demand that our elected representatives use their constitutional power to vote against further funding of this war and against funding for the looming attack on Iran, and to vote only for funding a prompt orderly safe withdrawal of troops.
4. We insist on foreign policies that will provide a sustainable peaceful just life for all humans on this planet. We insist on having elected officials who will deal promptly and creatively with the looming, coinciding crises of nuclear proliferation, oil and energy shortages, over fishing, deforestation, global warming, ecological destruction, overpopulation, the compounding differences in wealth between the rich and the poor, pollution, and a fragile economy
5. We are willing to give up our unnecessary material goods and to make the changes and sacrifices in our personal lives that implementation of the above demands will make necessary.
6. We demand open access to all information necessary for us to govern ourselves wisely and a clear open public discussion of all issues of public concern, specifically including the most controversial: Israel-Palestine, the Israel Lobby, and an opening to public access all of the classified facts about the tragedy of the 9-11 World Trade Center.
7. We have become aware that it is the controlling financial oligarchy with its media that is determined to maintain the war. This is the same financial oligarchy that provides campaign funds to our elected representatives. We demand that our elected representatives confront this financial oligarchy, reject its financial contributions to their campaigns, their trips abroad, and their lobbyists, and betray the interests of that financial oligarchy instead of betraying us voters.
OUR STRATEGY OF ACTIVE NONVIOLENCE TO ACHIEVE OUR GOALS
We recognize at long last that the Democrats, bought and paid for by the money of the rich and powerful, vote on all important issues with the Republicans. We now realize that the rich and powerful constitute a governing financial oligarchy that now controls both the Republicans and the Democrats. We note that with each additional outrageous act of George W. Bush, the puppet of the Oligarchy, the Democrats simply cringe, acquiescence, and fund even more outrageous acts.
We acknowledge that there are only two viable political parties in the US. Despite its betrayal of us voters, the Democratic Party is the more likely of the two to make changes to meet our needs. We reject the self serving propaganda of the Democratic Leadership Committee that the Democrats are “the lesser evil” that it uses to get our votes and then to betray us. We perceive that the power of the Democratic Party to deceive us, to betray us, and to perpetuate Oligarchic control depends on two things: 1. the money of the Oligarchy for their campaign costs. 2. Our votes. The tragedy is that our votes for the “lesser evil” enable the Democrats to continue to do bad things.
We are determined to overcome our fear, our despair, our alienation from each other, and our silent immobilization. We choose to act constructively together.
THEREFORE
We the undersigned Democrats, in a campaign of active nonviolence in the tradition of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., do hereby pledge to withhold our votes from each Democratic candidate unless that candidate makes a sincere credible pledge to honor and implement each and every one of our goals. We shall monitor every single vote that each elected person makes, and we shall work actively to defeat that representative if he or she breaches his pledge.
Dated: September 9, 2007
Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net
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