What Do the Koch Brothers Want?

Here is a very interesting article about the infamous Koch brothers, fossil fuel barons who aim to own America.
Thanks to Bill Moyers for sharing this article from Senator Bennie Sanders.


What Do the Koch Brothers Want?

As a result of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, billionaires and large corporations can now spend an unlimited amount of money to influence the political process.

Perhaps, the biggest winners of Citizens United are Charles and David Koch, owners of the second-largest privately run business in America Koch Industries.

Among other things, the Koch brothers own oil refineries in Texas, Alaska, and Minnesota and control some 4,000 miles of pipeline.

According to Forbes Magazine, the Koch brothers are now worth $80 billion, and have increased their wealth by $12 billion since last year alone.

For the Koch brothers, $80 billion in wealth, apparently, is not good enough. Owning the second largest private company in America is, apparently, not good enough.  It doesn’t appear that they will be satisfied until they are able to control the entire political process.

It is well known that the Koch brothers have provided the major source of funding to the Tea Party and want to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

What else do the Koch brothers want?

In 1980, David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980.

Let’s take a look at the 1980 Libertarian Party platform.

Here are just a few excerpts of the Libertarian Party platform that David Koch ran on in 1980:

“We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.”

“We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.”

“We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.”

“We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.”

“We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.”

“We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service. The present system, in addition to being inefficient, encourages governmental surveillance of private correspondence.  Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free competition in all aspects of postal service.”

“We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.”“We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.”

“As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.”

“We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.”

“We advocate the complete separation of education and State.  Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”

“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.”

“We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.”

“We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”

“We support abolition of the Department of Energy.”

“We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.”

“We demand the return of America's railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.”

“We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called "self-protection" equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.”

“We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.”

“We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.”

“We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.”

“We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.”

“We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.”

“We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.”

“We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”

“We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”

In other words, the agenda of the Koch brothers is not only to defund Obamacare.  The agenda of the Koch brothers is to repeal every major piece of legislation that has been signed into law over the past 80 years that has protected the middle class, the elderly, the children, the sick, and the most vulnerable in this country.

It is clear that the Koch brothers and other right wing billionaires are calling the shots and are pulling the strings of the Republican Party.

And because of the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, they now have the power to spend an unlimited amount of money to buy the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the next President of the United States.

If they are allowed to hijack the American political process to defund Obamacare they will be back for more.

Tomorrow it will be Social Security, ending Medicare as we know it, repealing the minimum wage.  It seems to me that the Koch brothers will not be content until they get everything they believe they are entitled to.

Our great nation can no longer be hijacked by right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers.

For the sake of our children and our grandchildren, for the sake of our economy, we have got to let democracy prevail.

Gay Marriage, Abortion, Contraceptives - Some Christians Say No Love For You!

So :"gay" rights are being supported all over the place recently and the "religious right" are fairly freaking out but not giving up their fight to have rights for themselves that they deny to others.
Michigan, where I live, just had their marriage ban declared unconstitutional, and in spite of supporting what is right - equality - our attorney general is hot to fight against it.
So, in light of all the change in the country to acceptance of recognition of equal rights for all, what is the TeaPartyChurch up to?
Two cases going up to the Supreme Court have big potential to sink them or set all of us up to live under fascism.

Thanks to Think Progress.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/03/24/3416549/hobby-lobby-they-have-a-plan/

AP Photo/Randy Squires, File

"Read This One Document To Understand What The Christian Right Hopes To Gain From Hobby Lobby"

By Ian Millhiser on March 24, 2014

2009 was a grim year for social conservatives. Barack Obama was an ambitious and popular new president. Republicans, and their conservative philosophy, were largely discredited in the public eye by a failed war and a massive recession. And the GOP’s effort to reshape its message was still in its awkward adolescence. If the conservative movement had a mascot, it would have been a white man dressed as Paul Revere and waving a misspelled sign.

Amidst this wreckage, more than two hundred of the nation’s leading Christian conservatives joined together in a statement expressing their dismay at the state of the nation. “Many in the present administration want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development,” their statement claimed, while “[m]ajorities in both houses of Congress hold pro-abortion views.” Meanwhile, they feared that the liberals who now controlled the country “are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.”
The signatories to this statement, which they named the “Manhattan Declaration,” included many of America’s most prominent Catholic bishops and clergy of similar prominence in other Christian sects. It included leaders of top anti-gay organizations like the National Organization for Marriage, and of more broadly focused conservative advocacy shops such as the Family Research Council. It included university presidents and deans from Christian conservative colleges. And it included the top editors from many of the Christian right’s leading publications.
Perhaps most significantly, however, the document’s signatories includes Alan Sears, the head of one of the two conservative legal groups litigating what are likely to be the two most important cases decided by the Supreme Court this term. Indeed, the Manhattan Declaration offers a virtual roadmap to understanding what religious conservatives hope to gain from Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood v. Sebelius, two cases the justices will hear Tuesday which present the question whether a business owner’s religious objections to birth control trump their legal obligation to include it in their employee’s health plan.

The Roadmap

“[F]reedom of religion and the rights of conscience” the Declaration claims, “are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.” In the eyes of the Declaration’s signers, liberal forces had captured the arms of government and they were now prepared to use their political dominance to force conservative Christians to betray their own moral values. And the signatories were particularly concerned about two items — abortion and gay rights:

We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain cases, even to perform or participate in abortions. We see it in the use of anti-discrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business.

Remember last month’s fight over whether anti-gay business owners in Arizona could invoke “religious liberty” and get away with denying services to gay people? Look no further than the Manhattan Declaration to find the intellectual origins of the bill that would have given those business owners that right.
Similarly, while the Declaration refers explicitly to “abortions,” the document calls for a vision of religious liberty that extends to birth control as well. According to Hobby Lobby’s brief in the Supreme Court, the company filed its lawsuit because it objects to “four drugs or devices that can prevent an embryo from implanting in the womb—namely, Plan
B, Ella, and two types of intrauterine devices.” Hobby Lobby’s owners believe that these drugs and devices “risk killing an embryo,” and that providing a health plan which covers these services “makes them complicit in abortion.”
It’s should be noted that Hobby Lobby’s concerns are not grounded in science. As a brief filed by multiple health provider groups — including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — explains, “there is a scientific distinction between a contraceptive and an abortifacient and the scientific record demonstrates that none of the FDA-approved contraceptives covered by the Mandate are abortifacients.” So Hobby Lobby isn’t just claiming the right to object to abortion, it is claiming the right to label many common forms of birth control a form of “abortion” and object to those as well — even though drugs and devices don’t actually cause abortions.
The Manhattan Declaration, in other words, predicts both of the major fights over “religious liberty” that confront the nation this year. While the Declaration warned about “anti-discrimination statutes” forcing business owners to take actions they object to on religious grounds, one of the leading lawmakers backing the Arizona bill admitted that it was intended as a response to instances in other states where anti-gay business owners were “punished for their religious beliefs” because they denied service to gay customers in violation of those states’ anti-discrimination laws. Similarly, where the Declaration speaks of conservative Christians being forced to “participate in abortions,” Hobby Lobby claims that the law is making it “complicit in abortion.”

The Firewall

In case there is any doubt, the Manhattan Declaration is a stunningly radical document. It opposes not just abortion and marriage equality, but also “non-marital sexual cohabitation” and “the discredited idea of unilateral divorce.” The Declaration also ends with a pledge to openly defy the law. “[W]e will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions . . . nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships [or] treat them as marriages or the equivalent[.]”
Shortly after Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) vetoed the Arizona bill, however, one of the nation’s most prominent social conservatives explained that conservative objections to reproductive liberty and marriage equality do not necessarily need to end in civil disobedience. Marriage equality, the New York Times‘ Ross Douthat claimed, is inevitable. Yet, when it comes, Douthat also hoped for a world where, if “a Mormon caterer or a Catholic photographer objected to working at a same-sex wedding,” the rest of the country would allow them to “opt out” of any legal obligation to comply with anti-discrimination laws.
Douthat framed this kind of arrangement as the terms of social conservatives’ “surrender,” although it is a weird kind of surrender that allows the losing side to dictate terms to the victors at the moment that society has recognized many of their longstanding views as abhorrent. If Brown v. Board of Education had followed Douthat’s logic, it would have said that segregated schools violate the Constitution — except that whites-only schools are fine in Alabama and Mississippi.
Nevertheless, Douthat’s column provides a helpful window into the kind of reasoning that animates the Hobby Lobby litigation, the bill Brewer vetoed and the Manhattan Declaration. The logic of all three is that religious conservatives must comply with the law — but only up to a point. When the law asks employers to cover abortions that aren’t actually abortions, or when it asks them to treat gay men, lesbians and bisexuals as if they are human beings entitled to the same dignity as straight men and women, then the Christian right must be given a special right to defy the law. And if the courts won’t give it to them, then the Manhattan Declaration calls upon conservative Christians to refuse to comply with the law regardless.
If Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood lose, then it remains to be seen whether either of them will actually take up this call for disobedience. Should they win, however, there should be no doubt what the Christian right’s next move will be. The Manhattan Declaration lays out two foes: reproductive liberty and gay rights. Hobby Lobby asks the Court to take care of the former. The next lawsuit will target the latter — and it will be able to cite Hobby Lobby as a powerful precedent supporting anti-gay discrimination.
Ian Millhiser is ThinkProgress’ Justice Editor. You can follow him on Twitter at @imillhiser.

When Christians Promote Intolerance and War

In a Pastor's Group discussion on whether "Christians" should take up arms in Ukraine;
I am always impressed at both the hostility of so many pastors and how they seem to prefer "the canon" of scripture over the teachings of Jesus and cannot reconcile his "turn the other cheek" philosophy to "an eye for an eye" - kill the unbelievers; which apparently to them is ok because unbelievers are to them somehow, "antichrist".
These pastors actually think that Jesus' message is just wrong (and say so) - but they claim to be "Jesus Christians" and teachers of Jesus' message!
Obviously that bothers me.
It's just amazing to me how the Old Testament idea of Dominionism is so popular, meaning that Christians (so called) should make all their ideas legally binding on everyone else and kick out (or worse) of the country anyone who won't accept their version of Jesus. (the hater-Jesus, that is)
It turns out (not surprisingly) that all the "carry a sword" talk in the NT did not originate with, nor was spoken by Jesus, but added later by people with a somewhat different agenda.
But I did appreciate a portion of a comment by one pastor that I wanted to pass on.

"This is easy for me to say when foreign troops aren't mounted against me as they are for you and your people.
So the passages I'm passing on to you are from Christians who faced the real threat of violence, beginning with Martin Luther King who in a sermon entitled 'Loving your enemies" said:

'To our most bitter opponents we say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."

"When Jesus disarmed Peter, he disarmed every Christian." Tertullian

"I've been thinking about A.J. Muste, who during the Vietnam War stood in front of the White House night after night with a candle. One rainy night a reporter asked him, "Mr. Muste, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?"
"Oh," Muste replied, "I don't do it to change the country, I do it so the country won't change me." taken from Anne Lamott's 'Plan B - Further Thoughts on Faith'

"People are unreasonable, illogical, self-centred
... love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives
... do good anyway.
If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies
... be successful anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow
... do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness will make you vulnerable
... be honest and frank anyway.
People love underdogs but follow only top dogs
... follow some underdog anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight
... build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you try to help
... help people anyway.
If you give the world the best you have, you may get kicked in the teeth
... but give the best you have
... Anyway."
- A poem Mother Theresa hung in the Calcutta orphanage "

Jesus promoted a pretty radical philosophy that asks people to go against nature - and while it is very hard for people to carry that cross, so to speak (I'm not a cross guy) there have been some good examples of people who appear to have taken that seriously.
Weirdly, they are often so busy serving others most basic needs, that they have no time to preach - and the others, the preachers - have all kinds of time to find all the scriptural ammunition they need to promote hate, fear, greed and murder.
Jesus set a high, perhaps impossibly high bar for us to aspire to and it seems to me that he would be much more comfortable in the company of Buddha, Lao Tsu, etc. than with (practically any) "Christians", who for the most part just want to love their enemies - dead.
I can understand how easy it is to just wish everyone who frustrates you would just get dead (in a hurry) - and that is the natural way; the idea of rising above animal instinct still being purely individual and experimental.
We may aspire to be "good" but should likely never think that we have actually arrived there.
If we are of the people who claim to believe Jesus, we might consider his claim (Mark 10:18), And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.
He still encouraged the rest of us (along with him) to try. (If that appeals to us)

Climate Change Deniers In Congress Work The System As Climate Victims

From the Daily Kos  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/13/1238702/-The-states-that-get-the-most-natural-disaster-aid-sent-47-climate-change-deniers-to-Congress?detail=facebook

The states that get the most natural disaster aid sent 47 climate-change deniers to Congress

Fri Sep 13, 2013 at 01:51 PM PDT

by Meteor Blades 

At the Center for American Progress, Daniel J. Weiss, Jackie Weidman and Stephanie Pinkalla teamed up on a new study of the $62 billion that the federal government sent to the states in disaster aid during 2011-2012. Much of that money was spent to ameliorate the impact of extreme weather events during that period:

There is recent evidence that climate change played a role in the extreme weather events of 2012. The recently released analysis from the American Meteorological Society determined that:

Approximately half the analyses found some evidence that anthropogenically caused climate change was a contributing factor to the extreme event examined, though the effects of natural fluctuations of weather and climate on the evolution of many of the extreme events played key roles as well.

Interestingly, many of the states that received the most federal recovery aid to cope with climate-linked extreme weather have federal legislators who are climate-science deniers. The 10 states that received the most federal recovery aid in FY 2011 and 2012 elected 47 climate-science deniers to the Senate and the House. Nearly two-thirds of the senators from these top 10 recipient states voted against granting federal emergency aid to New Jersey and New York after Superstorm Sandy.

Now these 47 (and many like-minded colleagues in other states making up perhaps a third of Congress that can be called deniers) either don't accept the evidence of human-caused climate change because they're scientific illiterates or they do know that such change is happening but continue to spout their nonsense. Apparently those in the latter group are eager to keep collecting the campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies and various front groups that keep them in their congressional seats. Whatever the case, the situation, scientists tell us, is going to worsen. As the CAP study's authors point out, in the 1980s, there were an annual average of less than two extreme weather events causing more than a $1 billion (in inflation-adjusted dollars). From 2010 to 2012, the annual average of billion-dollar extreme weather events was more than nine.
The CAP authors make several recommendations:
• Support programs to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, including continued support for President Obama's Climate Action Plan.
• Improve federal and state budget planning by following the National Academy of Sciences proposal for “a national resource of disaster-related data should be established that documents injuries, loss of life, property loss, and impacts on economic activity.”
• Urge Congress to provide full funding for disaster relief in future budget and spending bills, which, among other things will make clear to everyone the costs of extreme weather.
• Invest more federal funds in community efforts "to become more resilient to extreme weather." CAP recent found that the feds spent $6 on disaster recovery for every $1 on reducing disaster damages, "even though resilience investments reduce economic damages 4-to-1."
These are all reasonable ideas. But transforming most of them into policy requires either getting them past the 47 know-nothings (and other clueless deniers in Congress) or throwing them out on their ear at the next election. Either is a tall order. The consequences of doing neither ought to be clear enough by now to anyone who is really listening.

Ignoring Climate Change - The END is Near! Stupid Humans!

 Climate Change is an issue, an Emergency for the World - that requires Leadership and Statesmanship, but all we have is Partisan Politics.  

Politics is slow, cumbersome and caters to vested, special interests, the very groups that are the cause of the problem.

This is a problem that soon will pass the point of no return, meaning we will not be able to do ANYTHING to return the planet to a habitable condition.

As the USA and many other nations attempt to create jobs for their citizens, it is just stupid to ignore the many jobs that could be created by embracing clean and sustainable, renewable energy while eliminating dirty, unsustainable, non-renewable and life-ending practices and products, ie. fossil fuels.

I suspect that if just the subsidies given to the fossil fuel industry were instead applied to new energy projects, not only would millions of jobs be created, but we would quickly begin to save instead of destroy our planet's ability to sustain life.

It seems obvious that our "politicians" are so bought and paid for that they will not even discuss this problem, precluding any attempt to resolve it.

At the recent World Climate Summit, the conference essentially concluded to do absolutely nothing, mostly based on the position of the USA to do nothing instead of leading on this most critical of issues.

If we do not have a planet where life can be sustained, what does anything else matter?

Some people think that hastening the end of life on Earth is actually hastening God's Plan, the Second Coming and Redemption of the Earth!

To those people I would say that it would be stupid to expect God to accept into Heaven anyone who participated in the destruction of God's Creation.

In "Christianity", the 1st and Great Commandment is to love and respect God and Creation.

Jesus illustrated that this is accomplished by treating others (including the Earth) as we would be treated.

"Christians" and others who proclaim to believe in a "God" should just change their perspective on "God's Plan" and their part in it.

For everyone else, they don't even bother to pretend to any excuse - even the "deniers" have now accepted the reality of this issue.

The time is NOW for every person to DEMAND of their governments to put aside politics and protect life.

 

Published on Sunday, January 6, 2013 by TomDispatch.com

Obama Versus Physics: Why Climate Change Won’t Wait for the President

by Bill McKibben

Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents.  Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.(Photo: 350.org)
Take, for instance, “the problem of our schools.” Don’t worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published “A Nation at Risk,” insisting that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened our schools. The nation’s biggest foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We’ve had Race to the Top, and Teach for America, and charters, and vouchers, and… we’re still in the midst of “fixing” education, many generations of students later.
Even facing undeniably real problems -- say, discrimination against gay people -- one can make the case that gradual change has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been swift and severe.  There’s certainly an argument to be made that moving state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately made the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations came of age.
Which is not to say that there weren’t millions of people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are built to move slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have years or even decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out the conflicts between people.
And that’s always been the difficulty with climate change -- the greatest problem we’ve ever faced. It’s not a fight, like education reform or abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It couldn’t be more different at a fundamental level.
We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn't care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable.
Physics doesn’t understand that rapid action on climate change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets.  Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare on your hands.
We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be terrible -- all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by physics, there’s not much reason to act at all.
Unless you understand these distinctions you don’t understand climate change -- and it’s not at all clear that President Obama understands them.
That’s why his administration is sometimes peeved when they don’t get the credit they think they deserve for tackling the issue in his first term in office. The measure they point to most often is the increase in average mileage for automobiles, which will slowly go into effect over the next decade.
It’s precisely the kind of gradual transformation that people -- and politicians -- like. We should have adopted it long ago (and would have, except that it challenged the power of Detroit and its unions, and so both Republicans and Democrats kept it at bay). But here’s the terrible thing: it’s no longer a measure that impresses physics.  After all, physics isn’t kidding around or negotiating.  While we were discussing whether climate change was even a permissible subject to bring up in the last presidential campaign, it was melting the Arctic. If we’re to slow it down, we need to be cutting emissions globally at a sensational rate, by something like 5% a year to make a real difference.
It’s not Obama’s fault that that’s not happening. He can’t force it to happen. Consider the moment when the great president of the last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was confronted with an implacable enemy, Adolf Hitler (the closest analog to physics we’re going to get, in that he was insanely solipsistic, though in his case also evil). Even as the German armies started to roll through Europe, however, FDR couldn’t muster America to get off the couch and fight.
There were even the equivalent of climate deniers at that time, happy to make the case that Hitler presented no threat to America.  Indeed, some of them were the same institutions.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, vociferously opposed Lend-Lease.
So Roosevelt did all he could on his own authority, and then when Pearl Harbor offered him his moment, he pushed as hard as he possibly could. Hard, in this case, meant, for instance, telling the car companies that they were out of the car business for a while and instead in the tank and fighter-plane business.
For Obama, faced with a Congress bought off by the fossil fuel industry, a realistic approach would be to do absolutely everything he could on his own authority -- new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, for example; and of course, he should refuse to grant the permit for the building of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, something that requires no permission from John Boehner or the rest of Congress.
So far, however, he’s been half-hearted at best when it comes to such measures.  The White House, for instance, overruled the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog regulations in 2011, and last year opened up the Arctic for oil drilling, while selling off vast swaths of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin at bargain-basement prices to coal miners. His State Department flubbed the global climate-change negotiations.  (It’s hard to remember a higher profile diplomatic failure than the Copenhagen summit.)  And now Washington rings with rumors that he’ll approve the Keystone pipeline, which would deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest crude oil on Earth.  Almost to the drop, that’s the amount his new auto mileage regulations would save.
If he were serious, Obama would be doing more than just the obvious and easy.  He’d also be looking for that Pearl Harbor moment. God knows he had his chances in 2012: the hottest year in the history of the continental United States, the deepest drought of his lifetime, and a melt of the Arctic so severe that the federal government’s premier climate scientist declared it a “planetary emergency.”
In fact, he didn’t even appear to notice those phenomena, campaigning for a second term as if from an air-conditioned bubble, even as people in the crowds greeting him were fainting en masse from the heat. Throughout campaign 2012, he kept declaring his love for an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, where apparently oil and natural gas were exactly as virtuous as sun and wind.
Only at the very end of the campaign, when Hurricane Sandy seemed to present a political opening, did he even hint at seizing it -- his people letting reporters know on background that climate change would now be one of his top three priorities (or maybe, post-Newtown, top four) for a second term. That’s a start, I suppose, but it’s a long way from telling the car companies they better retool to start churning out wind turbines.
And anyway, he took it back at the first opportunity. At his post-election press conference, he announced that climate change was “real,” thus marking his agreement with, say, President George H.W. Bush in 1988. In deference to “future generations,” he also agreed that we should “do more.” But addressing climate change, he added, would involve “tough political choices.” Indeed, too tough, it seems, for here were his key lines:

“I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody is going to go for that. I won’t go for that.”

It’s as if World War II British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had declared, “I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears, and sweat. And God knows that polls badly, so just forget about it.”
The president must be pressed to do all he can -- and more.  That’s why thousands of us will descend on Washington D.C. on President’s Day weekend, in what will be the largest environmental demonstration in years. But there’s another possibility we need to consider: that perhaps he’s simply not up to this task, and that we’re going to have to do it for him, as best we can.
If he won’t take on the fossil fuel industry, we will. That’s why on 192 campuses nationwide active divestment movements are now doing their best to highlight the fact that the fossil fuel industry threatens their futures.
If he won’t use our position as a superpower to drive international climate-change negotiations out of their rut, we’ll try.  That’s why young people from 190 nations are gathering in Istanbul in June in an effort to shame the U.N. into action. If he won’t listen to scientists -- like the 20 top climatologists who told him that the Keystone pipeline was a mistake -- then top scientists are increasingly clear that they’ll need to get arrested to make their point.
Those of us in the growing grassroots climate movement are going as fast and hard as we know how (though not, I fear, as fast as physics demands). Maybe if we go fast enough even this all-too-patient president will get caught up in the draft. But we’re not waiting for him. We can’t.

Copyright 2013 Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

The Emerging Age of Irrationality

Today, Kita shared this fascinating article with me about the effort to eliminate thinking and the teaching of thinking in the education industry.  Apparently, the GOP believes that a thinking public is detrimental to GOP success and control.

I don't have much to say about it except that I support the teaching of critical thinking - I think it is critical to a successful life and society.  

The teaching of fairy tales as real is interesting.  It would be good, I think, if we taught the concepts and history behind fairy tales as well as their perceived and actual impact on society.  That would likely be more interesting than the fairy tales themselves.

Texas GOP Declares: "No More Teaching of 'Critical Thinking Skills' in Texas Public Schools"

Saturday, 07 July 2012 08:03 By Danny Weil, Truthout | News Analysis

Textbooks, which are assigned and shared, in a classroom at Hutto High School in Hutto, Texas, April 5, 2012. (Photo: Ben Sklar / The New York Times)The Republican Party of Texas has issued their 2012 political platform and has come out and blatantly opposed critical thinking in public schools throughout the state. If you wonder what took them so long to actually state that publicly, it is really a matter of timing. With irrationality now the norm and an election hovering over the 2012 horizon, the timing of the Republican GOP announcement against "critical thinking" instruction couldn't be better.  It helps gin up their anti-intellectual base.
The Texas GOP's declarative position against critical thinking in public schools, or any schools, for that matter, is now an official part of their political platform. It is public record in the Republican Party of Texas 2012 platform. With regard to critical thinking, the Republican Party of Texas document states: "Knowledge-Based Education - We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." (page 20, Republican Party of Texas, 2012).
Yes, challenging beliefs or claims is considered insubordinate, immoral and could lead to rebellion, disobedience or perhaps worse: revolution. For the Republican Party and their followers, thinking is subversive, imagination is a sin and the Republican Party in Texas and elsewhere is working to codify this into public policy. The plutocrats can't have a working-class citizenry that is asking questions of those in power, be they parents or bosses; instead, the people must be taught the ideology of what is morally acceptable, what rules and regulations to follow. and even more importantly, how to accept and internalize hierarchical authoritarianism. Critical thinking is a direct challenge to the "leaders" and their claims on authority, and any opposition to vertical arrangements is ethically unacceptable to those in power.
Reactionaries have long known that enshrining ignorance and hierarchy in both thought and practice within the school curriculum is essential if the control of young minds is to be accomplished softly and quietly yet profoundly through propaganda and perception management. In the quarters of obedience training, "education" has nothing to do with "schooling" under capitalism.
Read more: The Public Intellectual
This thinking is not new. The ideological underpinnings for such repugnant beliefs sorrowfully tread back throughout the history of the 20th century and undoubtedly before. William Bagley's book, "Classroom Management," published in 1907 and widely used as a teacher-training manual throughout America in the early 1900s, was so highly praised at the time that it went through 30 printed editions. The book echoed the morbid thinking of many so-called Gilded Age educators at the time. One such passage from the book sums up the thinking regarding children and childhood: "One who studies educational theory aright can see in the mechanical routine of the classroom the educative forces that are slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature of law and order, fit for the life of civilized society."
Law and order is what counts, and critical education, of course, seeks to subject all laws and claims to order to the lens of critical scrutiny, something the powerful disdain. Schooling under the neofeudalistic capitalist relations that are now emerging in the new Gilded Age of the 21st century is no different than in the past, where learning how not to think critically was the norm. The Texas GOP is simply creating the new conditions for a technological form of Plato's Cave with zero tolerance and the school-to-prison pipeline.
The Republican Party platform gets worse when it comes to prohibiting thinking critically about science or the scientific method. Take the section on " controversial theories," found on page 20:

Controversial Theories - We support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories. We believe theories such as life origins and environmental change should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. Teachers and students should be able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly and without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.

Alternative beliefs such as creationism are now cleverly invited into the curriculum as so-called science or theories to debunk the purportedly false notions of the theory of evolution. But if critical thinking is not to be used in the classroom, how would these beliefs be examined for evidence? Science, the scientific method, critical thinking and the process of subjecting claims to evidentiary experimentation - all related activities - pose a threat to self-proclaimed power and the harbingers of supernaturalism.
IDEA Public Schools
One of the purveyors of such rubbish is Texas educational retail chain IDEA Public Schools. IDEA is a retail charter outfit that standardizes curriculum downwards, away from critical thinking, embracing instead rote memorization and regurgitation, or what I call the "anorexic/bulimic" learning model of intellectual atrophy, ossification, and decay.
IDEA is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. This status was obtained for tax purposes, and it would take another article to demonstrate how nonprofit status has been hijacked by special interests (charter schools in this case) in the interest of profit extraction.  In fact, IDEA Public Schools is public only because it takes public subsidies to stay alive.
IDEA's board members include representatives from JPMorgan, Teach for America, International Bank of Commerce, Wells Fargo and other Wall Street banking concerns. In spite of the fact that the board of IDEA is filled with Wall Street banking interests, IDEA says it works to assure students get what they call a "core curriculum." Critical thinking is never even mentioned in the IDEA core curriculum - let alone entertained in IDEA classrooms, either by faculty or students; instead, IDEA is devoted to turning education into a commodity, students into customers mounted with saddlebags for tax funds that subsidize IDEA and turn schools into fortresses of profit.
According to IDEA's online blurb, the company is all about growth and expansion using taxpayer monies to grease the wheel: "In addition to its exemplary academic achievement, IDEA is moving forward with growth and expansion efforts to help serve more students throughout the Valley and Central Texas. IDEA currently enrolls over 9,000 students, with campuses in ten communities throughout the Rio Grande Valley. When all IDEA schools are at full scale (serving students in K-12th grade), IDEA will serve 15,000 from communities throughout the Rio Grande Valley."
The company is moving across the Texas prairie, taking down traditional public schools like locusts consuming wheat fields. Keeping with the Republican platform, they promise to make obedience training and anti-intellectualism the cornerstone and foundation of education in Texas, to the detriment of students and society.
The Age of Irrationality and the Abdication of Reason
In the case of the Texas Republican Party, they have really upped the stakes. Supernaturalism and supernatural beliefs no doubt will continue to snake their way into public school lesson plans, and as Texas will have significant impact on the content of all the nation's texts through its textbook purchasing power, we may find that the tale of the Loch Ness Monster is now told to children as if it were a true story in science classes. Don't laugh! This is now the case in Louisiana where, as The Washington Post reported, "A biology textbook used by a Christian school in Louisiana that will be accepting students with publicly funded vouchers in the fall says that the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland is real. And it isn't just any monster but a dinosaur - an effort to debunk evolution and bolster creationist theory."
Remember: In Louisiana, taxpayer money is given in the form of school vouchers so that parents can now see their tax monies spent on a supernatural curriculum bent on teaching that the Loch Ness Monster and other fairy tales are true.
All of this can be seen as part and parcel of the emerging Age of Irrationality, the hemorrhaging of a post-literate society where reason is abdicated in favor of irrationality and appeals to supernaturalism. The sad part is that all of this is now encouraged, by forces bent on enslaving the minds of children, as the new "curriculum circus" in schools.
In the New Digital Dark Ages, where the landscape is packed with scurrilous corporate politicians on the take, textbook companies clawing for educational profits, and tent preachers looking for a congregation of sheep-le and a quick Elmer Gantry buck, the people who suffer are students, teachers and the average citizen.
It Doesn't Stop There
Prohibitions against thinking critically or scientifically comprise just one of 30 pages of the anti-Enlightenment thinking seen in the Texas GOP platform document. Here is some more of its chilling content:

•  Abstinence-only sex education
• Trying juveniles as adults
• Emphasis on faith-based drug rehab
• Opposition to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
• Flat-rate income tax
• Repeal of the minimum wage
• Opposition to homosexuality in the military
• Opposition to red light cameras
• Opposition to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, because firms should be able to fire people for what they consider "sinful and sexually immoral behavior."
• Continued opposition to ACORN (even though it has not existed since 2010!)
• Opposition to statehood or even Congressional voting rights for the citizens of the District of Columbia
• And no-questions-asked support for Israel because, and this is another direct quote: "Our policy is based on God's biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel and we further invite other nations and organizations to enjoy the benefits of that promise."

Summary

This is corporate American culture and education today, or at least a great and growing part of it. Learning to identify assumptions and differentiating them from facts, questioning assumptions in light of evidence, engaging in wonder and inquiry, exchanging other points of view in an atmosphere of civility and inquiry (especially entertaining those points of view one does not agree with), learning the art of critical self reflection, asking for evidence for claims made by oneself and others, and testing hypotheses through the development of methods and protocols of thinking - opposition to all of this has emerged from the Texas GOP's "hidden curriculum" and is now under the magnifying glass of scrutiny - and secured a place in the Texas Republican platform.
This is not only a telling moment for a complex empire in spiraling decline, but also a frightening moment, for we can see evolution transformed into devolution and schools converted into the supernatural rabbit holes that lead to Alice-in-Wonderland gated communities of ignorance governed by a chilling hierarchy of totalitarianism and fear.

Feed My Sheep - Food Stamps in America

I was shocked to get this from my sister today on FB.
She "liked" it.
I was horrified!
The author is pretty ignorant about the food stamp program and apparently doesn't know that we are in a Depression where many people can not get work and the work that can be had will not provide a living wage.
Now, I have to say that I love my sister and that she is generally a good-hearted person who has extended herself to help the less fortunate, so it is very unsettling to me to see her show disdain for those in need who are not of her personal acquaintance.
I really think that if she met the people who have lost their jobs, their homes, who cannot afford health care, who cannot feed themselves or their children, she would feel differently.
If she had to find a job that would support her family and pay her own way, she would think very differently about this.  Really with all the unfairness and discrimination she has been subjected to over the years, I am astounded by her social perspectives.
I think she is a victim of listening to those greedy, fear-mongering, power hungry purveyors of evil who permeate todays political scene (especially the GOP) and who spew their hatred on so called "Conservative" TV and Radio.

The food stamp program provides an average of one dollar per meal, not the kind of living one would want to become dependent on.
Our social safety net programs are too deficient to allow people to "lift themselves out of poverty".
We need to provide more assistance, not less.

And this is an excellent example of the misdirection used by those who would deceive us about what is right and moral behavior.
This example considers animals in their "natural habitat" being encouraged to take advantage of the abundance of food that is available to them simply for the taking.
Humans, who do not live in the wild - do not have the same opportunity to feed themselves from the land.
If we were free to eat our neighbors and their pets, freely enter each others habitats (homes, stores) and take whatever we wanted (like animals) - then maybe I could agree with the sad, sick and wrong analogy in this little editorial piece.  
I can hardly believe any responsible newspaper would publish it!

For those who think it an over-reach to propose that the poor could simply eat each other, some relatively recent history could serve as a wake up call to the inherent evil of their greed and selfish thinking.

As reported in the New York Times
Horror of a Hidden Chinese Famine
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: February 05, 1997

"Near the end of 1959, with China in the midst of Chairman Mao Zedong's crazily utopian Great Leap Forward, the official Communist Party newspaper issued some dietary instruction for the masses of the country's newly collectivized agricultural workers. ''The peasants must practice strict economy,'' The People's Daily intoned. ''Live with the utmost frugality and eat only two meals a day, one of which should be soft and liquid.''

For the party newspaper to tell people that it was good for them to eat less at a time when it was also spinning fantasies about the bounty being engendered by the Great Leap was a relatively small, if telling, irony. At the larger, horrific center of Mr. Becker's account is the widespread resort among the Chinese people to...the selling of human flesh on the market, the swapping of children so people could use them for food without committing the additional sin of eating their own."

Certainly this "solution" would reduce the potential of the poor becoming "dependent" like bears in Yellowstone, on handouts from those who can afford the luxury of vacations instead of having to worry about having a home to live in or food for their children!

I mean, if we deny food to those who do not have the means to purchase it - what do we expect them to do?  Are they supposed to pull food out of their ass?  If we say, "They should just get a job!" doesn't that place us in the position of total ignorance of the condition of our national economy and employment opportunity!  How ridiculous we would be to suggest that the poor should just "get a job!"

My sister has 9 children and many grandchildren, certainly she could spare a few to feed the hungry!
I'd rather of course, that she endorsed food stamps - but you know, people do have to eat.
Survival competes with sex for our strongest instinct.
Even those who resist or lose interest in sex, still seem to want to eat - no matter what that requires of them, including crime and cannibalism.

It's amazing how easy it is to tell who only gets their  news and opinions from FOX NEWS and "conservative" radio.
They admire sentiments like these and then have the gall to call themselves Christians!
Hitler considered himself a Christian too and sold the holocaust as a service to God!

Pres. Clinton (a Democrat) years ago effectively got rid of the "Welfare Queen" that this short article proposes the recipients of food stamps essentially are - shiftless, lazy people who could care for themselves but would rather "live the good life" on the backs of hardworking neighbors.

Nothing today, could be further from the truth.

Since Clinton's days in office those on public assistance have been those who really need it.  
Especially since Pres. Bush and his cronies robbed the nation in 2008 has public assistance been of critical importance.
But for years now Republicans have been keeping people in poverty at home, bullying and demeaning the poor, vilifying and eliminating needed social programs, while spending billions to murder innocent people abroad and make their corporate buddies richer than rich.

Oh, and of course, those who deny aid to the needy proclaim long and loud that they are all Christians!

We should respect and care for ALL of God's children and not begrudge those in difficult circumstances a roof over their head, shoes on their feet, a meal on their table and the means to improve their place in society.
When we INVEST in each other, we invest in ourselves and promote our own security, safety and happiness.

Those who promote the "let them die" mentality suggested by this little article, are too ignorant to recognise the true cost of NOT caring for the poor.  The price of health care, crime, social instability, prosecution and incarceration and the attendant degradation of family and social development that accompanies these components of poverty are tremendously more costly than providing housing, food, cash assistance and training to those in need.
It's true that "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".  The cost follows the same prescription.
And the moral costs of denying assistance to those in need cannot be tallied in dollars.
It simply destroys society when we take an immoral posture of ignoring, demeaning and denying the poor among us.

In the "old days" there was a common saying, "There but for the Grace of God - go I".
We can almost instantly fall from comfort and wealth to total social insecurity.
It is wrong and really pretty stupid for us to demean, begrudge and deny those who are for whatever reason less fortunate than we, the basic requirements of life.

I am so saddened to see that we have become ruled by greedy, traitorous vultures and that they have convinced nearly half (or more) of the population to cheer them on as they devour our neighbors and the fruits of the American Revolution.
That they do this in the guise of Christians and convince Christians to hate their neighbor and turn against God is amazing and especially revolting.

Jesus dictated a different kind of behavior - that we feed and care for the poor, that every man is his brother's keeper, that the whole of the Law and the teachings of the Prophets was that we treat others as we would be treated if we were in their circumstances. 

Proverbs 14:
31 He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.

Matthew 25  KJV

 40 And the King [Christ] shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
 41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
 42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
 43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

 44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

 45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

John 21:
15 So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, [son] of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs.
16 He saith to him again the second time, Simon, [son] of Jonas, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep.
17 He saith unto him the third time, Simon, [son] of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.
18  Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry [thee] whither thou wouldest not.

Matthew 7
 1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
 2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
 3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
 4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
 5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
 7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
 8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
 9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?
10 Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?
11 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?
12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

Luke 10: (KJV)
25 And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
26 He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?
27 And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
28 And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.
29 But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?
30 And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,
34 And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.
36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?
37 And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

Mark 10
13 And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them.
14 But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.
15 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.
16 And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.
17 And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?
21 Then Jesus ... said unto him, ...go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.

Stated in several ways for over 100 years by various indiviuals, including (but not limited to) Churchill, Pope John Paul II, Dostoyevsky, Truman, etc. Very recently by Cardinal Roger Mahony (1998):

    "Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members ; the last, the least, the littlest."

Matthew 25: NIV
41 "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,
43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
44 "They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'
45 "He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'
46 "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

James 1
21 Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.
22 But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.
23 For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass:
24 For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.
25 But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.
26 If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain.
27 Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

James 2  (KJV)
1 My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons.
2 For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment;
3 And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool:
4 Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?
5 Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?
6 But ye have despised the poor. Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats?
7 Do not they blaspheme that worthy name by the which ye are called?

8 If ye fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well:
9 But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors.

10 For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.

12 So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.
13 For he shall have judgment without mercy, that hath shewed no mercy; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment.

14 What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?

15 If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food,
16 And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?
17 Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.
18 Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.
19 Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.
20 But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?

"Jesus had a special sense of mission to poor and oppressed people. At the outset of his ministry, sometimes referred to as Jesus' mission statement, Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth and read from the prophet Isaiah:

"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Luke 4:18-19)

The biographies of Jesus depict him repeatedly reaching out to those at the bottom of the social pyramid--poor people, women, Samaritans, lepers, children, prostitutes and tax collectors. Jesus was also eager to accept people who were well-placed, but he made clear that all, regardless of social position, needed to repent. For this reason, he invited the rich young man to sell all of his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. (Matthew 19:16-30, Luke 18:18-30, Mark 10:17-31)

Jesus commanded, "Love your neighbor." When asked to define "neighbor," Jesus expanded the traditional meaning of the word--defining our neighbor as anyone who is in need, including social outcasts: "But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed." (Luke 14:13)

In his portrayal of the day of judgment, Jesus pictured people from all nations gathered before him, separated into "sheep" and "goats." (Matthew 25:31-46) To the "sheep" he says, "Come you blessed of my Father, for I was hungry and you fed me..." In their astonishment they ask, "When did we do that?" And he answers, "When you did it to the lowliest of my brothers (and sisters)." Conversely, to the "goats" he says, "Out of my sight, you who are condemned, for I was hungry and you did not feed me..."

Jesus himself cared for those in need by feeding the hungry. Crowds of four thousand (Mark 8:1-13) and five thousand (Mark 6:30-44) had assembled to listen to Jesus. They soon became hungry. When his disciples suggested that Jesus send the people away to buy food, he responded by saying "I have compassion on these people..." and "you give them something to eat." He proceeded to perform miracles to feed these large crowds of hungry people."

(Adapted from J. Bennett Guess, "Biblical Foundations for Justice Advocacy," UCC Justice and Witness Ministries.)

I could go on all day about what Jesus and the Prophets have said about this topic.  When I was young I was taught that ALL money and ALL the resources of the earth belonged to God and were given us to do His work, not to care for ourselves beyond our most basic needs but to care for His children.

Those who claim to be Christian and claim that the USA is a Christian Nation would do well to consider a little just what Jesus actually said about what it means to be His follower.

Matthew 7
⁵ Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
¹⁶ Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
¹⁷ Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
¹⁸ A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
¹⁹ Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
²⁰ Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
²¹ Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
²² Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
²³ And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

Over 100K "Christian" Public School Students To Get Lessons Advocating Killing Unbelievers

Reposted From http://www.dailykos.com

Fri Jun 01, 2012 at 12:03 PM PDT

"Biblical" Genocide? Over 100K Public School Students To Get Lessons On Killing Unbelievers

by TroutfishingFollow

In a May 30, 2012 story in The Guardian, journalist Katherine Stewart, author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children reveals that next Fall over 100,000 elementary school students in American public schools will receive explicit coaching on the scriptural justification for killing unbelievers, every last one - drawing on Old Testament scripture that, according to Pennsylvania State professor Philip Jenkins, author of Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses, has historically been used by the Pilgrims to justify slaughtering Native Americans, by Catholics and Protestants to justify slaughtering each other, and during the early 1990s in Rwanda, to justify killing Tutsis.
The genocide lessons - which emphasize that divinely-mandated instructions to kill unbelievers must be carried out thoroughly and without reservation, will be taught next year in "Good News" clubs in over 3200 public schools across America, by the Christian fundamentalist ministry Child Evangelism Fellowship.
As Stewart describes, the CEF's new curriculum is quite direct - there's nothing "spiritualized" or metaphorical about its use of scripture.
Paraphrasing the Old Testament scripture I Samuel 15:2-3, the Child Evangelism Fellowship's new lesson plan teaches, "You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left." The manual then instructs the teacher to tell students, "That was pretty clear, wasn't it?" Stewart continues,

"Even more important, the Good News Club wants the children to know, the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads:

"The Amalekites had heard about Israel's true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment."

The instruction manual goes on to champion obedience in all things. In fact, pretty much every lesson that the Good News Club gives involves reminding children that they must, at all costs, obey. If God tells you to kill nonbelievers, he really wants you to kill them all. No questions asked, no exceptions allowed."

Stewart emphasizes, it doesn't stop there. As I Samuel describes, Saul was not fully compliant with God's orders to kill every last one of the Amalekites and their livestock - he let the king and some of the animals live. The lesson repeatedly hammers the point to students that Saul did not pass the "test" of obedience to God's word. The lesson ends with the declaration, "If only Saul had been willing to seek God for strength to obey!"
In The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children, Katherine Stewart explains that this deeply disturbing indoctrination, carried out in public schoolroom classes after the school day has ended, is fully legal according to a 2001 Supreme Court decision that ruled that it was unconstitutional to prevent religious clubs such as the "Good News Clubs" from setting up in schools because religion really amounts to speech from a religious viewpoint - in other words, it was a free speech issue.
Emphasizes Stewart, these new clubs that have sprung up in schools across America tend to be run by people from outside the local community, typically fundamentalist Christians who use stealthy and deceptive methods to evangelize children. According to Stewart, the clubs themselves often split entire communities, creating inter-community conflict where none had previously existed.
Stewart's deeply disturbing news comes only days after the release of a new book by one of the original architects of the contemporary politicized Christian right,  Colonel V. Doner, whose Christian Jihad: Neo-Fundamentalists and the Polarization of America warns that the evangelical right's "neo-fundamentalism" is coming to mirror the radical Islamic fundamentalism behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Writes Doner,

"While many fear the Islamic fundamentalists' plot to place the world under Islamic Law, the Sharia, most Americans may not know that Christian conservatives, long the dominant wing of the Republican Party, are increasingly falling under the spell of theocratic utopianism with its goal of establishing "God's Law" as the law of the land."

In the book, Colonel Doner ("Colonel" is his name, not a title) describes his background, as a "Christian Jihadist", and his break with the Christian right movement he'd helped to create, writing,

"I realized that the main difference between "our people" and "their people" (Islamic fundamentalists) was that ours (with the notable exception of bombing abortion clinics and assassinating doctors) had not (yet) resorted to violence."

At the core of Doner's book are two chapters devoted to Sarah Palin and the New Apostolic Reformation - possibly the most radical, and perhaps the fastest growing, segment of American evangelicalism - a faction of "Neo-Fundamentalism" so politically and ideologically extreme that Doner worries its leaders might trigger a second American civil war. The New Apostolic Reformation is the charismatic evangelical tendency in evidence in the 2006 documentary Jesus Camp, which covers a Christian summer youth camp run by child evangelist Becky Fischer, who, in the documentary, expresses her hope that the Christian children at her camp will learn to be as dedicated to their faith as Palestinian suicide bombers.
Making a major appearance in the documentary, at Fischer's camp, was NAR prophet and The Call ministry founder Lou Engle, whose The Call stadium events have included exhortations from Engle and his young disciples, from onstage, for their followers to become martyrs for the cause.
Youth pastors from Engle's ministry are currently running after-school evangelism clubs, similar to Child Evangelism Fellowship's "Good News" clubs, in California public schools.
Engle's ministry played a major role, in 2008, in helping mobilize churches in California to pass the anti-same sex marriage voter amendment Proposition Eight. In May 2010, Engle took his The Call event to Kampala, Uganda, in apparent support of a bill, looming before Uganda's parliament since 2009, that in its original form would allow the execution of gay Ugandans for something termed "aggravated homosexuality".
Speaking to BBC reporter Sorious Samura, at the Kampala The Call rally, powerful Ugandan evangelist Julius Oyet, who openly calls for the execution of homosexuals, stated that "Lou Engle is a strong ally" and interpreted Engle's The Call rally as clear support for the bill.
Beyond advocacy of martyrdom and virulent opposition to LGBTI rights, another theme that the New Apostolic Reformation shares with militant Islam is its desire to destroy objects associated with competing faiths.
In March 2001 in Afghanistan, the Taliban dynamited the mammoth 6th Century "Buddhas of Bamiyan". New Apostolic Reformation doctrine teaches that followers of competing belief systems practice idolatry and witchcraft, and NAR leaders advise their followers to burn, smash, or otherwise destroy or dispose of books, art, and other objects associated with competing beliefs, such as Catholicism, Mormonism, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hinduism, Buddhism and other eastern religions, Christian Science, native religions, and Baha'i.
This June 2nd, 2012, United States Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) will be a featured speaker at a conference hosted by the Fort Mill, South Carolina ministry of Rick Joyner,  a major apostle and prophet in the New Apostolic Reformation. In a 2007 "prophetic" writing, that seemed to envision a coming Christian version of Sharia law, Joyner declared,

The kingdom of God will not be socialism, but a freedom even greater than anyone on earth knows at this time. At first it may seem like totalitarianism, as the Lord will destroy the antichrist spirit now dominating the world with "the sword of His mouth" and will shatter many nations like pottery... the kingdom will move from a point of necessary control while people are learning truth, integrity, honor, and how to make decisions, to increasing liberty so that they can.

   

Originally posted to Troutfishing on Fri Jun 01, 2012 at 12:03 PM PDT.

Also republished by Street Prophets .