The Real War on Christmas

 

Each year Fox News broadcasts footage on the "war on Christmas," noting businesses that substitute the word "holiday" for "Christmas," or school districts that bow to non-Christian parents' demands to end singing of "Silent Night".   

The idea vehemently defended by Fox is the Christmas of modern culture.  But the first Christmas did not take place in a decorated home, around a tree bright with ornaments and flanked with piles of gifts, with the whole happy family gathered together singing carols.  It was not announced by department store fliers, displayed in colored lights, or celebrated with warm beverages and frosted cookies.  

Rather, the Creator of the Universe came to earth as a tiny infant in a dark and dangerous time of fear and repression.  The Lord of All was born to a teenage mother, far from home and family support, isolated and rejected, in an animal shelter.  His birth was not announced on the lawns of the government offices to the citizens of occupied Rome. It was announced to non-citizens on the outskirts of town, the working-class shepherds.  They would welcome the sign: a baby in a manger.  Christ the Savior is born, poor and homeless to non-citizens from Nazareth.

And the birth of the King of Kings was announced through the appearance of a star. This sign was heralded by foreign intellectuals. They traveled far to welcome the Christ. But it was not "good news" to the entrenched powers.  King Herod wielded his mighty arm to defend the empire by ordering the slaughter of every male child in Bethlehem under the age of two.

 

So Christmas really happened first in violence, fear, grief and despair.   "On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned." --Isaiah 9:2b.  

On one hand, Fox News defends the celebration of the Christmas holiday.  And then, commentators herald the steady promotion of consumerism, the defense of wealth and power (and bonuses for bank execs), and regularly belittle or attack efforts to overcome poverty or protect the vulnerable.

On the other hand, the first Christmas offers the joyful promise of peace and the hope of reconciliation with God and among people.  No other religion has its God becoming flesh, totally human and poor, born in such a vulnerable and dangerous environment with government oppression, yet bringing hope of complete salvation. Christ the Savior is born.

Fox News proffers the constant drumbeat of war, the reliance on military solutions to social conflict, the demonizing of our enemies, and trust in American dominance. It never mentions credible reports of over 160 children killed by American predator drones in Pakistan since we came up with this new weapon (civilian reports top 300, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Aug 2011).

The real Christmas lifts up the Virgin Mary's song of praise for her baby boy: "He has brought the mighty down from their thrones, and lifted the lowly, he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away."  How could Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Ann Rand avoid labeling this language from Mary's Magnificat as "class warfare?"

The real war on Christmas is lost to those who bury their noses in the sand of our commercial culture.  The effect is the same whether we never sing Silent Night in school, or we spin ourselves into a holiday frenzy that leaves no room for Christ. Christmas without God's true Salvation through Christ—the transformation of hearts, minds, people and powers­—is a hollow shell. Talking only about personal individual salvation, as powerful and important as it is, misses most of the Bible's reason for the season, and hides the real war on Christmas

Is there room this year, in our safe, warm inn, to welcome a homeless, vulnerable stranger, the Son of God?  Is there room in the most powerful nation on earth to trust in the Prince of Peace?

Here's Jim Wallis or Sojourners summary of this cultural war on Christmas, to whom I credit several of the ideas of my column:

http://www.sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/15/real-war-christmas-fox-news

 

The following is continued from Big Horn County News:

 

Quote from Jim Wallis:
"The real Christmas announces the birth of Jesus to a world of poverty, pain, and sin, and offers the hope of salvation and justice."

The first chapters of each of the four Gospels in the New Testament tell the story. Christmas is about the real presence of the Living God, Creator of the Universe, among us in real flesh—a tiny, vulnerable infant.  The theological term for this reality is incarnation.  No other religion has its God becoming flesh, prone to all the fallibility of humanity, born to a poor and homeless young mother in the midst of a military occupation by an empire.

 

"God's becoming flesh — human — and entering into history in the form of a vulnerable baby born to a poor, teenage mother in a dirty animal stall."—Jim Wallis of Sojourners

 

An interesting element is the origin of many of our commercial symbols of Christmas. Many of these originated with the Roman Empire, in its efforts to Christianize Europe, adopted the pagan symbols of the solstice celebrations. This includes the Christmas tree, the lights, and the date of December 25. The Empire just took away the pagan gods and left the symbols and the festivals and the date intact. But this history of tainted symbols has nothing to do either with the Bible's Christmas story, and while an interesting conflict, doesn't touch the Bible's allusion to a need for peace then and now.

 

While not overtly a Christmas story, Dr. Chi Huang's recounting of his medical service to street children of Bolivia comes as close as I have seen to a modern Christmas story. It really does reflect the values and struggles of the first Christmas story. This book is definitely adult material, When Invisible Children Sing, 1997. The author is a family friend.

 

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Fundamentally pro-life—The Advent of Christ

 

Infanticide was brutally common in the Roman empire of Mary and Joseph's time. Abortion was also practiced, but the trauma and poor chances of any survival made it a rare procedure. Yet the beginning of Christianity was fundamentally pro-life. What can we learn from those first Christians?

 

Near the time of Mary's surprise pregnancy, Sepphoris, the Greek/Jewish/Roman city of 30,000 barely 4 miles from Nazareth, was swept with turmoil. Infanticide and abortion, along with starvation and executions, were already present in Galilee with Pax Romana ruthlessly imposed by the Roman occupation and influx of Hellenic culture and idolatry. Civil war could only increase these practices. This new chapter began when Judas, son of the Jewish guerilla leader Ezekias executed by Herod, broke in and looted the Roman arsenal in Sepphoris. He distributed the weaponry and declared the city liberated. The Jewish population hoped the abominations practiced by the heathen occupation were ended.

 

But victory was brief. True to form, the Romans ruthlessly quelled the rebellion.  No Jew was left living in the city. Those who weren't able to escape to the countryside, or to risk surrender into slavery, were killed. Caesar, known to the Roman world as Filio Deus (Son of God) was to be worshiped by law as the god above all gods. He He permitted Herod Antipas to make Sepphoris his personal capital. He needed Jewish "tektones", carpenters and masons who previously farmed and were cheated out of their land by the economy of Rome. Being in virtual starvation and without hope to carve out an existence, they braved the journey into enemy territory. Daily they walked to Sepphoris from Nazareth and other nearby villages, and rebuilt the heathen temples, public baths and homes for the rich. Of course, most were not hired, and became the multitudes to which Jesus later ministered primarily.

 

Jesus almost certainly grew up to accompany his earthly carpenter father daily to work in Sepphoris, by then transformed into a center of Greek/Roman culture. Inevitably the Jewish families of Nazareth including Joseph, Mary and Jesus would have known about hunger, violence and sexual oppression rampant at the time near Roman frontier cities such as Sepphoris.

 

Such was the environment when Joseph discovered that his intended was pregnant.  The options were deadly, and certainly, as Scripture implies, Joseph knew precedents.  "Putting away" a young pregnant girl was an almost certain death sentence for mother and unborn.  In a law-abiding rich Jewish family, the Leviticus law provided the death penalty. Among poorer families, less able to keep the law, such unfortunate girls were more likely put away.  But this too was almost surely a death sentence. If they survived pregnancy, abortion, or suicidal depression, they could end up in a brothel working in the Roman baths or prostitution shrines for the occupation.

 

Because of these practices, combined with the economic and social pressure to birth male babies, by the end of the 2^nd century the Roman Empire suffered from gender imbalance. Especially in major cities, males outnumbered females 3:2. It was opposite in Christian communities where 60% or more were female.  This happened because Christians rescued girl babies found abandoned on city streets, really infanticide euphemistically called "expose the infant." Christians also rescued young women caught in the dilemma similar to Mary, but without an angel visitation to her and to her betrothed.

 

Christianity spread not simply because of miracles.  It also spread because Christian slaves such as those exiled from insurgency-prone provinces like Galilee and Judea advised their troubled masters "We Christians know how to live." Christians at that time fought against infanticide and abortion more as a symptom, showing unlimited compassion and care for the humanity of all, even enemies. Thus, by 250 AD, early Christians had built fundamentally pro-life communities throughout the Roman Empire. These communities featured disciplined training that amounted to pro-life transformation. It was essential to the astounding growth of Christianity exactly at the time of its greatest and most violent opposition. It was comprehensively and foundationally pro-life, unlike the narrow focus of today's pro-life activists.

 

This advent, along with Mary 2,000 years ago, let's connect the powerful few with the deprivation of many poor and lowly, down even to the preborn, and prioritize God's acts on all their behalf as she did in the pregnancy and birth of her Son:
"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior . . .
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;
He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."

            —Selections from Luke 1:45ff

Following is a brief list of books and a video supporting a scholarly understanding of early Christianity, most of which are on my shelf.

 

Myers, Chad, Binding the Strong Man (Orbis, 1997) 500 pages. Essentially this a commentary on Mark's Gospel.  But more than a commentary on individual words, it includes a plethora of ancient documents relevant to Mark's narrative and the background of its writing. Replete with scholarly sources cited, this reading of Mark's Gospel has a bias (p. xxii "forward" by Daniel Berrigan): "…an attentive analysis of the politics of Jesus; that Way of defiance, loving, albeit courageous, toward the worldly powers that in His time and ours ravage the world and legalize crime. Iniqitous authority, lawless and spurious, must be cast from its illegitimate throne; justice must be enthroned.  This is the work of Jesus. It proceeds in the community of Jesus. Love, defiance. Instinctive affection toward persons, even the worldly powers; defiance of their power, its malfunctioning and maleficence."

 

Claiborne, Shane and Christ Haw, Jesus for President (The Simple Way, 2008). Entertaining artistic layout of quotes of many historical documents reflected in my column of December 2011 in the Big Horn County News. An example from p. 183: "Tacitus said that people feared the peace of Rome…because streams of blood and tears of unimaginable proportions followed in the 'peace'."  And from a US soldier in Iraq, "We are dying and killing for abstract nouns like freedom and democracy…but this is not the gospel of Jesus Christ."

 

Heschel, Abraham, The Prophets (2007).  Heschel, a rabbinical Old Testament scholar, was a good friend and theological influence on Dr. Martin Luther King for many years.

 

Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor (2008). Sobrino is a Catholic theologian from Spain with vast experience in Central and South America.

 

Romero, Oscar, The Violence of Love (2004). Excerpts from Archbiship Romero's sermons and papers prior to his silencing by an assassin's bullets at the moment of consecration during Holy Mass at his church in El Salvador highlight this book.  Some of this content is used in the documentary film, Romero, available at video outlets. It traces the fascinating transformation of this scholarly priest from avowed theological conservative to radical liberal because of his years of living with the Indians and poor of El Salvador.

 

Stark, Rodney, The Rise of Christianity (1997). Historical documents are organized into a fascinating detailed account of the first centuries of Christianity by this respected scholar. This book is a primary source for my column of December 2011, "Foundationally pro-life: The Advent of Christ"

 

McClaren, Brian, Everything Must Change: When the World's Biggest Problems and Jesus' Good News Collide (Sep 2009) McLaren was invited to address a coalition of Christian leaders for a week in Ruwanda and Botswana following the genocide, trying to process the grief of the nation with Biblical vision. Participants discovered the Bible's words from Jesus and the prophets made clear that God's priorities focus on the greatest causes of human suffering and premature death, rather than on the "spiritual" agenda adopted by most denominations in Christian mission to Africa. The title of the book comes from an exclamation, with tears, of one of the participants.

 

From Jesus to Christ        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NLQfZdkzzM

First produced by PBS, this documentary in three parts and is long and detailed, but not boring.  It was shot on site in locations in which the history occurred. Important and little known documentation of early Christianity is in this series, but the narrative is tainted by an agenda to discredit some dearly-held Christian beliefs. It's an excellent video documentary except for this bias.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Has America gone lazy?

Last week, President Obama shared his thoughts about complacency in America over the last two decades – and he used the word lazy. The words were barely out of his lips last Tuesday when Republican presidential candidates pounced on the morsel and regurgitated it on their blogs. Buried under the ludicrous salivations is a huge cache of truth.

From 2001 to 2003 while I was in China, I was questioned over and over by workers, college students and business leaders – whenever people gathered to practice their English on an American. The question they asked was so repetitive that in time it became nauseating – "When do you think China will overtake America?"

"In what?" I learned to counter. Sometimes I queried further, "In good will and civilized behavior to ethnic minorities?" They always had another agenda.

Beneath their anti-American rhetoric was the same truth. Chinese citizens know how to work with their hands, and Americans have forgotten how. However, this is nto the result of laziness. It's the result of a service-based economy and a focus on information jobs instead of growth in industrial and manufacturing positions that are more hands on.

It's true that the economy of China is rapidly overtaking that of the U.S. in practically every measure. It's been that way for almost a decade. Some measures indicate China is already ahead of America.

In September, an article in The Economist predicted China's economy would surpass America's by 2016. We have outsourced our "blue collar" jobs out of our borders. Actually, the wealthy one percent have outsourced our talented labor force. That doesn't make those of us who are out of work lazy, but it has almost fatally damaged our nation's economic engine — workers.

All this should give pause to the naysayers on talk radio defending the few skilled technical hand laborers left in this country in the face of computer driven and information technology skills. It's true, as Romney and Perry proclaim, that the working few of this nation are still the world's best. But those jobs are becoming more and more scarce.

Meanwhile, our children grow up not knowing how to use their hands.

It's not just because automotive technology has advanced to the point where tools and technical know-how are now too complex for any farmer to dig into engine overhaul or even replacing brake pads. While that's definitely part of the problem, there is also too much time spent away from learning about how "real stuff" works – that which can't be replicated on a computer.

Young people, by and large, no longer know how to move dirt with a shovel to block or open a field ditch, how to mulch potato plants, strip out the last of the milk in a back quarter, scald and pluck a chicken, let alone pound a nail or fasten a hose on a bib.

Here on the Back 40, family and friends have been joining us in building models of sustainable solar-assisted and energy efficient systems for heating, cooling, sewage treatment and farm production. Successes, mostly from borrowed technical information on the web, slightly overbalance failures.

But the greatest success has been the young people who come with zero experience working with their hands, yet end up with a strong value for learning such skills. They practiced with the stuff of vegetable, animal, metal, wood, rubber tire, soil and stone products and found they could be successful and useful with their hands. Stop in at the Back 40 and see the results.

This is a huge difference from when I was their age in 1960. Back then, I knew no one who was as ignorant about using their hands intelligently as most young people seem to be now.

No, President Obama and hopeful GOP candidates, laziness is not precisely the focal point. Greed is more the problem, and the hope of making more money with less physical and mental effort. It has been cultivated by the unfortunate collaboration of big government and big business, who do things for us we would be better off doing for ourselves, at obscene profits for the one percent.

So in this Thanksgiving season, I'm grateful for the young people who are moving out of the comfort of the corporate-government box to experience handling stuff with their own hands, in order to provide for themselves and their family. Work really does work, and it's enormously fulfilling when it connects to real stuff and builds real human relationships. The future of our nation depends on it.

Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The Economist gets it wrong.

The Economist pretends laissez faire economics is American as apple pie.

The Economist, along with the media from NPR to Fox, propagates the knee-jerk falsehood that a growing segment of world citizens are attacking American capitalism per se. I was expecting hard-nosed reality from The Economist, with Greece teetering on economic collapse and the biggest bank failure ever on Wall Street last week. Then I opened my mailbox and saw the cover caption, "Rage Against the Machine: Capitalism and its critics."

Sure, some are critical of capitalism, and a few Americans dislike apple pie too.

But it's not true for the vast majority of us who have learned capitalism can work for all of us. We've learned recently to distrust Wall Street and our government. We the people, even in Big Horn County, MT, have the savvy to see through their smoke. Our governing CEO's and elected representatives have failed to live up to the foundational principles of our capitalist economy laid down during out nation's infancy. We have been fed a dose of propaganda that laissez faire economics is the American way.

In fact, it seems no media outlet is discussing this term I learned in 8^th grade Civics class in 1957. So I checked to see if my kids learned it in the 80's in Big Horn County schools. Sure enough, they did. And they knew it meant "let go" of government regulations of our economy. They also knew it was a major factor in the Great Depression.

To recover, our elected representatives in 1933 restored old rules for banks and mortgage institutions. Some provisions restoring the kind of capitalism our founders envisioned, counter balancing laissez faire were:

Glass-Steagall Act of 1933: This act separated commercial from investment banking and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect small deposits.

Farm Credit Act: This act refinanced a fifth of all farm mortgages and created the Farm Credit Administration.

National Industrial Recovery Act: This act created a massive program of public works, guaranteed workers the right to bargain collectively, established codes of fair practice and trade, and created the National Recovery Administration to carry them out.

Truth-in-Securities Act: This act requires anyone offering stocks, bonds or other securities for sale to make a "full and fair disclosure" of financial and other information relating to the issues involved. It also mandated that companies disclose the securities holdings of their officers and directors. This was after years of dishonest dealings by investors seeking to cut their losses short as the Depression worsened.

These provisions and more were nullified or disempowered during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and now we continue similar steps under Obama (look up huppi-kangaroo-timeline). We must return to those principles reaffirmed and clarified during the recovery from the Great Depression, principles spelled out with the warning that failure to keep them will bring on the next Depression.

I cannot understand why the October 22 issue of The Economist, the premier weekly magazine worldwide on economics, gets it so wrong. In four lead articles, the October 22 edition fails to mention laissez faire economics, and the subsequent abdication of our national economy to financial executives rather than elected governance. The Wall Street Occupation is not to protest capitalism but to call capitalism to it's proper role: to serve the economy of our great nation, for our common good.

The danger is not that we could be leaving capitalism, going Marxist, nor is it that capitalism itself is the big bad bugaboo. But corporations must put shareholder profit above all other considerations, including the stability of our national economy. And over the past decade we've seen the results of deregulation. Only our elected representatives in congress are answerable to the American people. Whom shall we trust?

At best, the lead article leaves unquestioned this mistaken bias in order to sound the alarm that Wall Street Occupations nationwide are unfocused and leaderless. At least this issue does cite the research proving that loss of a middle class brings social disorder to a nation. At least the congressional action under Clinton's administration repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 is mentioned (see my blog for info). There is some consensus between Occupy Wall Street and The Economist on this. But leaving intact the phony idea that this populist movement in America is anti-capitalism is irresponsible, even if some Wall Street Occupiers think they are protesting capitalism per se.

It's difficult to find the facts from the media. Wall Street's political insiders in Washington then as now propelled the government into fewer regulations against super sizing and secret insider trading. So the elected governance of our economy again continues shrinking and the un-elected governance of corporations skyrockets in power and wealth acquisition. At the same time, our elected government gets bigger and bigger punitive authority over governance of smaller and smaller units of human relationship, now down to mother and unborn infant. Witness the new personhood laws, and its explanations covering up the huge growth of government as promoted by the tea party and Republicans.

Recovery again requires reform of our American capitalism back to the intentions of our nation's founders, and repudiation of the singular focus on ending oversight and transparency regulations by the people of this country of our economy, labeled erroneously "big government." Our governing business-owned media flails against Keynes and "Keynesian economics" as the only option to their unnamed obsession with laissez faire economics. So now we have the growth of bigger and badder businesses we cannot afford to allow to fail, businesses that abuse and cheat masses of this country's citizens, wealth concentrations that dictate to Obama who dictates to Europe and Greece what must happen to save American banks—and citizens— from the emerging Greater Depression.

These occupiers are the ones taking seriously our history, and saying we should learn to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 30's depression. Why should we have to go to the independent media to read our history? Why cannot The Economist tell us the truth and connect the real dots? Does The Economist deliberately lead our departure from free, open transparent capitalism with the common good the bottom line? Does it support the distortions leading us astray by the elite's cronies who dominate talk shows and the media, financed and censored by their owners?

A rash of letters with a perspective similar to this column is posted on line at The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/21536537

What happened to our nation's economy since 1970 is fortunately well documented: http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/152811/

A timeline of events leading up to the depression of the 1930's and the recovery into the 40's: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Timeline.htm .

Michael Hudson, at UMKC.edu, tells the truth in detail with the evidence in his latest book : Super Imperialism - New Edition: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance. See it reviewed on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Super-Imperialism-Origin-Fundamentals-Dominanc/dp/0745319890/ref=wl_it_dp_o_npd?ie=UTF8&coliid=I19B9M2MEC46GX&colid=2UL2N592BVKVD

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The Wall Street Sandbox

Who doesn’t like toys? A newly installed sandbox with bulldozers and backhoes was tantalizing for our flock of neighborhood children. Two strong-willed three-year-olds set the tone—the more I have, the more I want, and you can’t have it. The scene degenerated until sand throwing and tears turned the attention of my neighbor and me from tractor repair to our children. With a few firm words, parity in the power to acquire equity was restored.

Our nation has lost that parity. This is the second time in our history. A century ago it led to the Great Depression. We have become so accustomed to greedy children acting out in the Wall Street Sandbox that we as a nation simply roll our eyes and repeat, “That’s Wall Street.”

The year Ronald Reagan was elected, the wealthiest 1 percent collected 10 percent of the nation’s income, and the rest of us shared the remaining 90 percent. Now that 1 percent owns more than the bottom 50 percent of all American citizens. Since 1980 we all contributed to a great national success of our GNP, but the upward redistribution of wealth, because of rule changes, “translates into a trillion extra dollars a year for the richest 1 percent.” (Josh Holland in Alternet.org, October 4, 2011, “If the Top 1% hadn’t ripped off trillions…”)

We adults used to monitor the Wall Street Sandbox. Our oversight through our government stopped unregulated accumulation before it started. Back then, we knew we owned Wall Street and took responsibility for its role in our economy.

Such government intervention after the great depression led to a fairer economy, highways, airports, schools, a safe banking system, libraries, a common defense, etc. and all benefited. Even more importantly, it led to a progressive system of taxation to pay for these priorities and discourage the escalation of massive wealth accumulation that has now made our society unstable.

When Wall Street rolled in crisis as our nation’s biggest banks threatened to collapse, Obama didn’t regulate, he conceded. When the profit-driven medical insurance machine protested Obamacare, Baucus and Obama conceded again to exclude the public option. Like in the Savings & Loan Scandal of the 80’s, we now need a government take-over and jail time, not just a few weak threats, for those who grab our citizens’ earnings and put our nation at risk.

I hoped in vain to hear someone in congress or in the presidential debates speak the truth of what’s gone wrong. Instead they either attack each other, or, following the finger pointing of Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, attack designated whipping boys like Frances Fox Piven. The really patriotic Americans are those who speak the truth our Wall Street Sandbox children need to hear, without personal attacks.

Just last Monday, a poll was released saying a majority of citizen Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Partiers would agree on Obama’s plan to restore some of the Reagan era tax rates on the 1% richest. Yet the Republican congress maintains its opposition to Obama’s jobs bill, because they can attach the label “tax raise.” They don’t want our American president working to fix that sandbox fracas causing not just a few eye scratches, but massive human deprivation and death world wild.

Some three weeks ago, for the first time in my life I heard massive numbers of grownup citizen voices speaking this truth about Wall Street. Amazingly, these are mostly college kids, or kids who dropped out because they couldn’t get jobs or afford college.

So we can take hope. Not only has the Arab Spring become the American Autumn, we are also building a new private sector on values of “Social Entrepreneurs.” Our private sector with worldwide support is leading the way to restore grownup rules to the world economy, which is similarly in shambles. There really are large international corporations bringing corporate interests of the world back into adult responsibility in our world economy. One of many credible organizations facilitating this revolution is “Bioneers.” Look them up on line, or find

greenwoodback40.blogspot.com

(the following is continued from the shorter version in Big Horn County News)

As the economic equity of our nation is increasingly concentrated among fewer of our citizens, consequences more dire than sand in the eyes threaten our nation and the world. This is hidden from our awareness in America by subtle but pervasive censorship. The institutions of a fair economy, a free press, law-abiding armed forces and police, our system of jurisprudence, and even our capitalist democracy are in trouble, and we are left in the dark as to how and why.

I have a copy on my desk of the most recent edition of Project Censored, released last week. See greenwoodback40.blogspot for a short review.

On Project Censored

Every two years a group of writers and scholars, inspired by reporters such as Walter Cronkite, have been gathering with editor Peter Philips, sociology professor at Sonoma State University, to assemble the research.

A wave of real reform in the worldwide economic institutions of finance and banking is escaping the attention of mainstream American business. Some of the biggest corporations are abandoning venture capitalism, hedge funds, and the modern wave of complex economic risk taking that has burst our American economic bubble. Well before any danger was detected in Wall Street, these reforms were burgeoning.

We are so entrenched in the profound changes in our rules, changes coordinated by the elite of Wall Street and confirmed by all three branches of our government, that we have forgotten the prosperity and freedoms we enjoyed prior to our departure from our original values of American capitalism and from the freedoms enshrined in our constitution and our form of government. The world has noticed, and reacted. Most of the reaction has been building on the writings and history of America.

On the Wall Street Occupation: If it’s like the first Wall Street Occupation of the late 1800’s, these young people will continue for decades to be routed, attacked and arrested by police, and an election will repudiate their dreams and voices until the next Great Depression decades later. I hope and pray this doesn’t happen for us. We Americans, at least 99% of us, need to act grownup about our ownership of that sandbox now. Newly grownup players like Warren Buffet and the Gates family will help us restore grownup rules to the economy now run by our Wall Street Sandbox. Unbelievably, Congress remains stubbornly opposed. Having failed to learn from our history with Wall Street and the Great Depression, we seem destined to repeat it.

On “Bioneers”

It’s not always been this way. The dramatic changes in rules facilitating greed in Walls Street are the focus of a paper by Economists Thomas Picketty and Emanuel Saez of UC Berkeley (elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/pikettyqje.pdf). Some of their recollections:

Rabobank International's Manager of Corporate Social Responsibility from Holland, which was voted World's Third Most Sustainable Bank; Meiny Prins, CEO of Priva, a leading Dutch environmental services company, who was voted "Dutch Businesswoman of the Year"; Michael Jacobson, Director of Intel's Corporate Responsibility Office; and Hugo Steensma, former director of Sustainable Asset Management and CEO of Rabobank North America.

"Business-As-Unusual: New Models of Enterprise, Ownership and Social Entrepreneurship" will survey the emerging topography of new organizational business and financial species to harness commerce and trade for the common good. Hosted by Michael Marx, Executive Director of Corporate Ethics International and Business Ethics network, the panel also features Steven Hill, leading political thinker and groundbreaking author of Europe's Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope for an Insecure Age; Deborah Hirsh of B Lab, a nonprofit supporting the community of Certified "B Corporations" with comprehensive social and environmental standards; Bodhi Garrett, eco-tourism entrepreneur and founder of North Andaman Tsunami Relief in Thailand; and Jenny Kassan, Managing Director of Katovich Law Group, and board member of the Sustainable Business Alliance.

Unlike the many pessimistic scape-goating pundits on talk radio promoting their side show interests, I believe many of the options we embarked upon in Obama’s election of 2008 are right. The way forward is clear. But overwhelmed by the size of the changes needed, by scary side shows pummeling the populace, the decision itself to move in the right direction has become stymied. We have ground the Obama administration and the nation to a stop.

Christopher Ketcham's essay "The Reign of the One Percenters," was published on Orion's website, is available on Alternet Oct 7, “the_reign_of_the_one_percenters” and is forthcoming in the November/December 2011 issue of the magazine.

Wall street criminals arrested to date: 0

“Occupy Wall Street” citizens protesting Wall Street crimes arrested: over 700.

The largest mass arrest in US history took place last Saturday, October 1, when citizens demonstrating against Wall Street CEO’s who have profited enormously through bailouts from citizen taxpayers while their insider trading and deceptive wealth grabbing schemes remains uninvestigated and not one arrested. There is evidence the NYPD entrapped the Wall Street demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge by clearing a traffic lane, then blocking both ends of the bridge and arresting everyone.

http://www.nationofchange.org/eric-cantors-hyper-partisan-hypocrisy-he-hails-tea-party-fighting-condemns-occupy-wall-street-mo

Another dictator falls

 

It was astounding to watch the news about Tunisia, Egypt, and now Libya as nations throw off ruthless dictatorships. Now, without dictators, how will those nations stay unified? Will the masses of citizens, with habits of conforming to coordinates coercively enforced, willingly build a consensus and find democratic coexistence?

 

The answer can be found in God's creation and God's Word. 

 

Last week it occurred to me that all creation seems to wait expectantly for human beings to find their way to God's plan. That's when I stopped to watch the usual fall starling pre-migration clouds (look up "boid" or "swarm behavior" on Wikipedia or an encyclopedia).

 

My fencing work was interrupted by white noise emanating from of hundreds of thousands of chirping starlings in a massive cloud. They undulated in synchronized flight down from the rims across the river and over the back 40, darting in perfect synchronicity to the left and then right. Were they synchronized in response to a threat to flock security?  I stood still in amazement as I saw another cloud moving with more southerly coordinates about to intersect with the first cloud over my west fence line.  What would happen if they collided?

 

The encounter was amazingly smooth and uneventful. It looked for a while they would morph into one, maybe choosing a compromised set of coordinates. But they didn't. As the intersecting boundaries pulled back toward separate clouds again, several individuals in flight seemed confused. These few were reversing, changing directions, and occasionally stopping and fluttering in the air.  This was the only stressed behavior I detected, and it was instantly gone. By the time I realized what was happening, the boundaries were clarified, those individuals previously perplexed figured it out and took off into the nearby morphing flowing cloud of leaderless synchronized flying starlings, apparently still with precise distances apart in all three dimensions. 

 

It was obvious mass confusion was avoided by simple respect of equal access to resources of air and flying space. All individuals except these few adapted quickly to new directions with impunity. No few went off to the side to shout hostilities at one bird propped up by others as the decide.  In all the massive direction changes—evident bird mind changing, I saw no policebirds, no attempt even to distrust these few deviants let alone punish them, no opposition to the immigration of one cloud into the other.

 

As the clouds separated again I watched as each with portions stretched out and slowed where the colliding encounter occurred. Orderliness  continued. Every individual again remained properly respectful of every other's space.  One of the clouds executed several instant direction changes, still in total synchronization, and still with no discernable mass fear.

 

Khadafy had for decades been able to keep his nation unified around his leadership through arrest, torture and disappearance. In his mind they all belonged to him, and he loved them all, unless they departed for other flock coordinates. That's when his depraved arrogance took over.  It took a civil war and his violent death to end his tragic failure. Learning from Big Horn County birds was beyond his beliefs.

 

We in America have leaders with similar little belief in the masses of Americans nationwide. Yet that's where, by our constitution, the power of the ship of state resides.  Just like the birds could be trusted to change directions and follow coordinates not owned or imposed by a few, so the new democratic movements in the Middle East like Egypt and Libra now need their powerful people to trust their masses too.  Few do, and that's a problem.

 

We Americans are entering a new era, beginning to trust the flocks morphing now in nearly every major city, the flocks of Occupy Wall Street. They represent the best the world can get from America: our tradition of leadership empowered by the authority of the governed over the government.  Even our president is and should be just one of the flocking cloud.  We the people should not follow the example of the world's dictators in believing we should model our family economies or our life coordinates upon a few powerful elite. It's true we are fortunate that the power of the few in America over the many is not exerted by violent abusive force and fear, at least not much yet. But we do have massive numbers of our citizens dropping out in frustration, unable to find their space in our economic flock.  Such power imbalance as ours, currently focused on Wall Street, cannot make for successful synchronicity in family economic navigation toward the freedom to find the space to breath, live, and move together in a more perfect union.

 

The following is not posted in the Big Horn County News:

 

Read the writings in the New Testament by Dr. Luke, St. Paul's personal physician, "Luke" and "Acts." Read all Bible passages surrounding words like "masses" "multitudes" "families" "Israel" "church" and "koinonia."

 

Our national conversation

 

It's a knee-jerk reaction. Whenever we see a group of people synchronized in religion, economics, politics, war, sexual mores or any life or death pursuit we look for leaders. Often, we can't really find them. People get coordinated like birds do, and for much the same, but vastly less complex, reasons.

 

Belief that God has a specific plan for each person's life is linked now with ending or reducing government social programs. Belief that there is no ultimate truth is linked with bigger government programs to benefit citizens, especially the poor. Whose side would Jesus have been on? It depends how you read the Bible.  

 

http://www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?action=story&story=100503

 

http://www.baylor.edu/newsclips/index.php?id=85125

 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/unemployment-religion-baylor-survey_n_970772.html

 

"People who cannot state this belief clearly are only pretending belief; they really are not True Believers."

 

In a way, I'm glad we humans are not bird-brained.  On the other hand…

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

From the Trenches of Class Warfare in America…

 

What we fight over

Why has the nation's reservoir of wealth drained away to unprecedented disparity from those of us working for a living? How did it get concentrated at the top?

 

Is it class warfare?

Some people are accusing Obama of class warfare, as he suggests letting tax cuts for the wealthy expire.  But evangelical leader Jim Wallis, of sojo.net, gets it right:  " ...let's be clear:  There really is a class war going on, and the upper class is winning." Former President Bill Clinton rightly pointed out last week that 90 percent of income gains in the last decade went to the top 10 percent, and 40 percent of the increased wealth went to the top 1 percent--those are folks who make their money on money, not on work.   That has left the rest of us who do real work watching our take home pay get cut and the cost of living keep rising.

 

The reasons aren't palatable at the top. The nation's top plutocratic politicians and pundits stir up deceptive froth to hide the truth, like this:

 

 "…The top 10% income pay 70% of the nation's income taxes!"  Fortunately, this time it fell dead on the floor. Not included in the finding was the percent of the nation's total personal income that lands in the pockets of those 10%. Plus, with so many loopholes for dividend income, billionaires and millionaires usually end up paying taxes at a lower rate than middle class wage-earners (Chris Hayes on MSNBC Sept. 24).

 

We hear this daily on the media, "But we can't tax the super rich... they provide jobs!"  If that's true, why have employment rates and real wages both continued to decline even with Bush's generous tax cuts in place?  Furthermore, what corporation hasn't benefitted from transportation, security, infrastructure, and educated employees... all provided by the public?  Shouldn't corporations invest back in the public works and services that make our nation stable?

 

Government Social Programs

The froth of this debate is so confusing most Americans just sip on. A 2008 poll of 1,400 Americans by the Cornell Survey Research Institute is revealing. Ninety-four percent of those Americans who said they were not beneficiaries of any government social programs actually were receiving government subsidy costing money to tax payers. Those making this false claim had in fact benefited from at least one; the average "I haven't participated!" respondent benefited from four (Susan Mettler, New York Times, Sept. 20, Cornell Survey).

 

Froth gets attention, unfortunately. So it was with the survey's first question: "Have you ever been a beneficiary of a government social program?" True to the emotional bias of those three words, of course they said no. Their second question was to examine a list of some 20 federal government programs, indicate if they had participated, and rate their experience. This included Social Security, unemployment insurance, the home-mortgage-interest deduction and student loans. That's when the truth became visible.

 

While the average American complains about big government, that same American most likely appreciates and participates in government social programs.  The reality is that nearly all of us like what government does for us. Case in point: Social Security.

 

What a lazy way to cut the national debt: renege on the promise of Social Security. Perry's Ponzi scheme charge, and that congressmen who agree with him, is really a double entendre Ponzi scheme to reduce our benefits to satisfy economic problems brought on by Wall Street's under-cover wealth concentration. We the taxpayers have already funded wealth-concentrating bailouts.

 

Social Security is different. The nest egg is transparent, we the people own it, and for decades it has been lowering the poverty rate of seniors from 50% at its inception to 10% now.  Unlike a Ponzi scheme, that money does not flow into the coffers of a few.  That's why the program is popular, valuable and solvent. That's why the elite get bug-eyed with greed at the mention of Social Security. See on line "WPIX-is-social-security-a-ponzi-scheme."

 

You elite Republicans, misguided Democrats, and Tea Party naysayers, don't mess with our Social Security. If you want to be in government, stop the scheme of our earned benefits leaving our middle class and piling up in the top one percent. You will eat those dregs yet.

 

Our media pushes the froth of political drama, hyperbole, and outright deception across the government bar to us the public. It's so comical. How can we avoid sipping froth? It's less inebriating to imbibe the reality of how and why the nation's reservoir of wealth has been extracted from those of us working for a living. 

 

The first tax of the first US Continental Congress was a property tax on the rich. Look up any source anywhere to find why they chose a property tax, and why they chose the rich to tax, leaving most first-generation Americans with no federal tax.

If we do swallow a few dregs of truth, would we really rather not know about it?

Look up 2011/09/21/inside-the-list-facts-and-figures  Forbes Magazine. 

 

Perry's Ponzi Schemes

Governor Perry hatched a Ponzi scheme that never really got off the ground, thanks to some fine Christian fundamentalist folk from the Texas countryside. With mandatory participation by every girl in Texas ages 12 and 13, and the profit from the scheme set to go to a big Pharma corporation that contributed heavily to his campaign, it looked like a done deal.  Who funded it? The government—that is, the Texas tax-payers, all of them. Read on line how Perry's Texas government Ponzi scheme was caught before it started, look up "texas-perrys-vaccine-mandate."

 

To top it off, Perry has divided Republicans with his charge that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, to the delight of the talking heads in the media.  This even filtered down to Big Horn County.  So let's cut the froth and connect the dregs to those who work for a living, especially those whose compensation is barely enough to float a family.  Look up

http://blogs.reuters.com/reuters-money/2011/09/28/heres-the-real-social-security-ponzi-scheme/

 

When government/business colludes to the benefit of jobs for many, as in the subsidy to retool Ford factories to build its electric "Focus," it works. So Republicans this past weekend went after that money. Why don't Republicans and Tea Partiers go after the squandered tax-payer money of the Wall Street/government collusion that's at the root of our economic doldrums?  When have they criticized the Ponzi-like schemes that really have taken wealth from all of us for the benefit of a few?

 

The Economist Sept. 24-30 features the cover title "Hunting the Rich" and articles on class warfare in America.  Very informative, for all sides:      

http://www.economist.com/node/21530104 

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Is our war on terrorism doing what it takes?

 

This Sunday morning, Pentagon head General Crowley called us again to "do what it takes" to fight terrorism.  His implication was that our vengeance must continue because more terrorists have vowed to wreak havoc on our nation.  In his thinking, responding in kind honors not only the three thousand deaths on that terrible day, but also honors the thousands—we should acknowledge millions—of innocents who have suffered since that day.

This error in national policy is dragging us down. We have forgotten a fundamental portion of God's law from our Old and New Testaments, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord," Isaiah 63.4, Romans 12.19, and "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."  We are called by our faith not to respond in kind.

The reason is the more powerful way God commands in our Bible. Many of the world's peoples look at our American response to 9/11 with concern and curiosity. To them, we have become weak, even suicidal, with our juvenile theory that we must continue paying back a bigger, badder dose of the terrorists' own medicine.

After ten years there still is no serious national discussion on alternative responses to this heinous crime we remember on this tenth anniversary; we rather assume closure depends on an exception for us to God's law on revenge and murder.  We have still not asked our most qualified theologians, scientists and philosophers to lead such a discussion.

Let's be rational. It makes no more sense psychologically, scientifically, or theologically to find and delete—read ex-judicially execute or rendition—the world's terrorists than it does to set out to bully bullies into stopping their bullying. It works at first; we had and still have the power to eliminate evildoers all over the world. But it sends an unwise message: to survive in this world of multiplying evil people and suffering good people, what one needs is more power, more lethal weapons, and an improved ability to terrorize bullies and terrorists. In other words, pre-empt God's role in handling bullying terrorists like Bin Laden.

There's a better, stronger way. Part of it is training and upgrading national police forces worldwide to be responsible and accountable to their citizen's interest in democracy.  This is happening already with some thousand or more special ops teaching troops deployed in several terrorism-prone nations. But there's more, much more needing change in our international policy.

Let's start with our terrible intelligence on the "Arab Spring" sweeping tyrants off their terrorist tactics against their own citizens. Our government and media community told us this happened because people living under these oppressive regimes were suddenly fed up to a breaking point.

It's not true. Millions in the Middle East have been reading for decades, taken to heart and followed the principles of the book by Gene Sharp: "From Dictatorship to Democracy," It's now available in thirty different languages and free on line through hundreds of links, to the consternation of the governments of Syria and Bahrain. Using his book as a manual for unseating tyrants, citizens have organized seminars with teachers such as Dr. Sharp and spawned opposition groups across the Middle East, rebuilding hope for democracy.

Our government was caught off guard. The people of Egypt rebelled against a tyrant we considered a friend. His American-made military should have guaranteed stability for his regime. Yet his army hardware was rendered ineffective. Instead of tens of thousands dying and the nation's infrastructure in shreds as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Tripoli, only several hundred were killed. And they were unarmed citizens, easy prey for his snipers. The discipline of the citizen movement held. Mubarak lost.

Our own politicians, media and government should stop ignoring this worldwide strategy for countering tyranny and apply it to terrorism, its twin. It is homegrown American common sense, deployed now to the Middle East. Let's be proud.

We Americans will solve our economic woes and stand more proud and secure when our government views terrorism as a world problem, rather than a unique American problem. This requires the courage to change course toward the principles of the Arab Spring, and to achieve parity among the nations rather than our current vast superiority in military strength to deal with it. Plus, we have national heroes to honor such as Gene Sharp whose contribution merits acknowledgement if not full pursuit. Our national survival must now drive us to rediscover our heritage of a better, stronger defense against terrorism than the one laid out by Bush and Obama, and supported by our current political parties.

The full column, with more on a rational approach, continues: It's amazing how totally gullible our government was to Bin Laden's strategy behind organizing the bombing of the twin towers. He said it way back then, and his words are remembered among anti-American Islamists today:

"…He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them." That's Bin Laden's script for fighting us. We need a different, much better script for fighting his ilk, not to respond in kind at Bin Laden with his own medicine, but to choose a stronger moral deterrent."
The American Conservative, quoting Bin Laden on this issue, May 20, 2011, by Eric Margolis. 

We Americans will stand more proud and secure when we acquire the courage to change course and deal with world terrorism responsibly, collaboratively and collectively on parity with the world's nations, instead of as the world's bully setting out to single-handedly to defeat the ghost of Bin Laden.

http://www.aeinstein.org/ the website of the Albert Einstein Institute.

Does this mean we should change our foreign policy? If America reads this book and follows it we citizens will be changing it. See also Noam Chomsky's article http://www.truth-out.org/after-911-was-war-only-option/1315582873 : "The jihadist movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11, if the "crime against humanity," as the attacks were rightly called, had been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered in the rush to war. It is worth adding that bin Laden was condemned in much of the Arab world for his part in the attacks."

Our Obama administration has even denied the message of our national hero, Martin Luther King Jr., claiming he would support our government's policy of targeting our own citizens for covert executions contrary to due process language in our constitution. See my blog Jan. 26, 2011, for details, "What Would Martin Luther King Say."

Foreign aid works far better for our national interests when it helps other nations democratize their own society with schooling, access to health care, access to a fair economy, fair systems of jurisprudence, and helps them and us to see acts of terror for what they are: a crime problem.  Plus, it is almost infinitely more cost effective than bombing the daylights out of three Middle East Nations (four with the coming war against Pakistan or Iran), so our biggest corporations can reap billions in profits through our obligation to rebuild what we destroy at huge taxpayer expense each time.

Also Look up Gregg Mortensen from Bozeman, his book, "Three Cups of Tea."
Check out more details of Gene Sharp's research influencing the Middle East:
http://blog.sojo.net/2011/03/21/how-to-start-a-revolution-a-new-film-about-gene-sharp/

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034

Deconstructing deadlocks

A rancorous tide of deadlocked issues is rising to create a nationally historic flood. Remember when we had a more independent media which facilitated honest debate of real issues? Back then, deadlocks were deconstructed. One or both sides won because truth was employed to deconstruct the deadlocks. We had a freer press, honest investigative journalism, and much less simple regurgitation of party lines of conspiring government-big business oligarchies.

When I came home from college in the mid-sixties, I had formed a new interest in national politics. Investigative reporters with Reuters and the NY Times wrote about President Nixon's secret commitment of our nation's armed forces in the nation of Cambodia. American blood was being shed in a secret war. American bombing pilots crashed in inaccessible places. Bodies were not recovered. The official Pentagon news was that they all died in Vietnam. Nixon fought to keep the war secret, but after the Pentagon papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg and were carried by the entire media, the deadlock began to be deconstructed. Then, Watergate happened.

After my mother found out about Watergate, her faith in God and country was shaken. To her, God had placed Richard Nixon into the nation's presidency. That meant opposing him was like opposing God.

"Mom," I said, home from college on Christmas vacation in the late sixties, "If Nixon is a Christian, he's not our kind of Christian. He lies, cheats, and has blood on his hands—blood of American soldiers."

She cried. I was mortified. She had experienced the deconstruction of a deadlock which had been built by the media over Richard Nixon's integrity.

This personal deadlock with my mother was the first I had ever experienced with my family over politics. Across the country, information the media released which showed President Nixon had indulged in criminal behavior was pitted against the traditional views of people like my mother. The deadlock was deconstructed with real information. It was stressful, but keeping Nixon's secrets was far from our best interests.

We were fortunate then to have independent investigative reporters – we don't have many anymore. With the internet, we can access international sources like The Guardian, Ha'aretz or Al Jazeera. Wikileaks is piercing the wall of secrecy erected by our government-business collusion, and doing it for our ultimate national interests. Yet, Wikileaks has been soundly attacked and discredited to the max possible by our government's military-industrial complex. Some of us are familiar with this deadlock.

This brings up our central deadlock desperately needing deconstruction. Some people say our response to 9/11 was right. Others say we are wrong. It's a deadlock going way back. Deconstruction will ultimately reveal government, religious and political leaders have led us down the wrong path – leading us anywhere and doing anything to anyone we happen to momentarily hate.

What do we get from being the world's policeman? Enormous national debt, cuts of essential services and inevitable tax increases used to take over lands and send record numbers of military and private citizens to build military bases in the ludicrous quest of being the world's policeman. We invoke fear of imprisonment, torture and death in anyone who opposes the friends we have chosen to support on foreign soil. In doing so, we have ruined indigenous infrastructures far more capable of fighting against the hatred we deplore. We have failed to deconstruct the deadlocks which mistakenly diagnose our much-hyped religious and political fears as a reason to war.

As a nation, we can still build on our primary strength: our citizen's capacity to address wrongs and make them right. Neither our government nor its wealthy corporate controllers will. This is demonstrated by the immense profiteering of publicly endorsed private sectors during our recent wars.

We have an awesome history of a strength that now trumps our capacity for war. We faced down the wall of racial segregation in America and deconstructed intractable deadlocked issues with their false perceptions. We won battles in Birmingham, Atlanta, Selma, and the entire South for a fair and just society. It doesn't get nearly as much attention as bombs and bullets, but we can do it again.

Last week, the largest statue on the mall in Washington, D. C. was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He battled the wave of deadlocked racial animosity that escalated into enormous civil unrest and shed his life-blood doing so. In deconstructing the deadlocked racial divide in America, the primary battle he won for the nation was the battle against our second civil war. That war was beginning in the early sixties and many warfare experts said then it was inevitable. It didn't happen. The American civil war of the 1960's was defeated. See Dr. Vincent Harding's recent book, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero. It's a book founded on the true strength of America.