Paul Krugman writes for the New York Times.  I am a self professed cynic about our government and its ability to make systemic change.  Ours is a distracted, consuming culture.   I’m not even sure that if millions of people dropped what they were doing, not work, not school, not shopping, went to Washington and took up residence on the mall if that would wake the minority party from their desire to regain control (or serve their lobbyists masters) and work with the majority party to govern for all the people.  Alas, this is not the 1960’s anymore.  We are captive to debt, to “American Idol”, or any number of legal consumption narcotics.  Krugman’s latest for the NYTimes online is interesting.  A few paragraphs with a link follows.

America Is Not Yet Lost
by Paul Krugman | Feb. 7, 2010

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

In the past, holds were used sparingly. That’s because, as a Congressional Research Service report on the practice says, the Senate used to be ruled by “traditions of comity, courtesy, reciprocity, and accommodation.” But that was then. Rules that used to be workable have become crippling now that one of the nation’s major political parties has descended into nihilism, seeing no harm — in fact, political dividends — in making the nation ungovernable.

Click here to read the entire article.

I am about at the end of my patience with the threat of a filibuster in the senate to block legislation.  It is time for the democrats in congress as well as President Obama to say, “You want to filibuster this legislation, well get on with it.”  Cue up C-Span and the pundits.  Do politicians have a lot of hot air?  Yes, but I don’t think this political age or those we call politicians have the nerve to follow through with the threats they make.  Do the Republicans really wish to argue that the government does not need to help create jobs for the working poor and working middle class even if that means increasing the debt?  Do they really think that it is better for Wall Street to prosper before working people?  If so, let them stand up in the senate with the cameras rolling and talk.  I think they will look like clowns rather than Jimmy Stewart (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) because they are the very ones that have accepted graft from any number of multi-national corporations or American corporations that have moved jobs overseas or downsized someone you know to make another dime of profit and boost their stock prices another nickle.  Thus, if the Republicans wish to stand on the side of corporations (the Lords) rather than work for the common good of the people (the surfs – working poor and middle class) in our society they should be forced to talk, talk, talk; and while they are talking they should explain in detail and by specific example how lower taxes on the top 1% have trickled down or will trickle down to the single parent with two kids or the forty year old that was laid off for a second.

As a citizen I would like to bring a piece of legislation to the floor.  I move that the salaries paid to all Senators and Representatives to the House be suspended until such time that the nation is showing positive GDP growth for 5 quarters and unemployment is less than 3%.  I further move that members of congress (Senators and House Reps) also forgo receiving free health care as part of their benefits and that payments to their retirement funds be suspended to be reinstated when salaries begin again.  I also urge the President to do the same.

Though this is a symbolic act, when compared to the entire federal budget and given that most in the House and Senate are millionaires, it would signal an understanding and acceptance of responsibility by our elected representatives to work for the common good and begin the long task of creating a level playing field and fair regulation of industry, again.  That is the populists stance, but more importantly the responsible act of mature adults serving the people.

An Amendment: The funds from the salaries this first year should be placed in the “Jobs Bill” that President Obama requested Congress to create.  In the years following the funds should be use to pay down the national debt.  No other amendments will be attached to this legislation.  Hold an “up or down” vote as soon as possible that the public can watch on C-Span and allow network news cover the debate and vote.

It is not uncommon to find a reprint (digital) of Martin Marty’s “Sightings” on this blog.  My apologies if you are a “Sightings” subscriber, but sometimes they are too good to not digitally republish.  This is the kind of weekly writing (one could call it journalism) our expression of Christian witness, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) needs to be receiving from the OGMP or from seminary professors teaching at a DOC related seminary.  Yes, I plan on purchasing Wallis’s new book.

Jim Wallis on Values and Morals
February 1, 2010
by Martin E. Marty

In 1957, young Harvard-bred historian Timothy Smith, of the Church of the Nazarene, knocked a lot of us budding ordinary historians – secular, “mainstream,” and whatnot – off our library stools with his book Revivalism and Social Reform.  We had been trained to look for the roots of American social Christianity in the liberal Protestant Social Gospel (post-1907) and progressive Catholicism (post-1919).  Smith back-dated such movements by a half-century, to revivals around 1857, which, he argued, added concern for morality and ethics in the social order to the private-and-personal moral agenda of older evangelicalism.  Having fought against dueling, profanity, Sunday mails, et cetera, these revivalists found new ways to address slavery, poverty, and inequality.  Imperfect, they did chart a course.

Smith died in 1997, but historians in his train often remind us of how things were back when evangelicals were evangelical and not Evangelical, as if a quasi-political party.  These years their ancient cause – dated from the eighth century before Christ, among the Hebrew prophets – is revived on many fronts.  This week we will sight one of them, Jim Wallis’s Sojourners, which we have been reading for two-score years.  This is not a blurb for the magazine – Sightings sights, it does not blurb – but it is time we put into print (or online) some notice of the kind of concern it’s shown through the decades.  Jim and a colleague dropped by the other for day a chat, in the week when he’d made a repeat visit to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and we made up a bit for lost time.

The Martys welcome all kinds of company, even someone like Wallis, whom Christian anti-Communist Crusaders (there are still such) call “pro-Marxist, pro-Communist, even pro-Socialist,” the third of which is a term applied to anyone to the left of Genghis Khan these days.  Wallis was on a book tour for his new Rediscovering Values on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy.  This is not a blurb for the book – Sightings sights, it does not blurb – but he gave us a theme for the week, as did a chapter from the book in the February Sojourners.  His choice of words like “Values” and “Morals” instead of “Biblical” or “Christian” may enlarge the zone of discourse, but he has not left his evangelicalism behind.

Wallis has always been puzzled by the way some Evangelicals specialize in quoting the six biblical verses which refer or may refer to homosexuality, but consider it out of bounds for believers to notice the six hundred or six thousand that reference Mammon, money, riches-and-poverty.  Like the ancient prophets, he names names:  not Edom and Moab, Assyria and Babylon, but Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citigroup, which, bailed out with the public’s money, had rewarded themselves at the time he wrote with $8.66 billion (that’s eight thousand six hundred and sixty million) in bonuses, while, Wallis adds, “the average bank teller at Bank of America makes only $10.75 an hour – just over $22,000 a year.”

He notices that the financial services industry spent $223 million lobbying Congress to fight any regulations or restrictions.  (He wrote that before the recent Supreme Court decision that will allow the banking industry and others to advertise and lobby and influence Congress in amounts that will make that $223 million look like peanuts.)  You get the idea.  Next week Sightings may be back to appraising our moral framework from a Crypto-Capitalist viewpoint.  After all, we’ll now have to do something compensatory lest this column get typed as – gasp! – not “prophetic” but – sh-h-h-h! – populist.

References:
Watch Stewart and Wallis:  http://www.hulu.com/watch/122028/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-jim-wallis.

Sojourners is online at www.sojo.net.

Martin E. Marty’s biography, current projects, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

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In 2010’s first edition of the Religion and Culture Web Forum (“The Uses and Misuses of Polytheism and Monotheism in Hinduism”), Wendy Doniger explores the complex nature of Hindu theology and its relationship to historical and political issues by focusing on a simple question: “Is Hinduism monotheistic or polytheistic?”  Her answer offers intriguing implications for the distinction between theological identities of “one” and “many” in Hinduism and–as respondents with expertise in other theological traditions reflect–beyond.  With invited responses from Martin Marty, Willemien Otten, Katherine E. Ulrich, and Ananya Vajpeyi.  http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/index.shtml
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Attribution

Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author of the column, Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Watching Gov. McDonnell give the response to the SOTU address made me laugh.  It was the latest test setting for the Republican party as they search for the next face to hang their platform on rather than doing some serious reform of their brand.  (BTW, the Tea Part is not reform).  It has always puzzled me why those that overtly prop up corporate America have such success convincing poor working persons, traditionally poor or the working poor whites, to vote against their best interest.  This article from the BBC gave me more to think about.

Why Do People Vote Against Their Own Interests?

The Republicans’ shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US.

Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.

Last year, in a series of “town-hall meetings” across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms.

What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.

Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.  Click here to read more.

Those that know me know that I don’t think my vote, in national elections, matters.  I believe, even in the face of the 2008 election, that corporations, national and mult-national, decide elections for governor to President.  Voting allows the public to feel involved and allows the venting of emotion without the need for violence.  It was a revolutionary idea by our founders.  Today, it is more an opiate that keeps the public consuming, spending, divided, and distracted.  The decision by the Supreme Court giving corporations first amendment rights assures that we can now claim, and factually follow, that we have the best politicians bought and paid for by . . . (you fill in the corporate name or logo here).  I recall from civics class that one function of our government is to protect citizens through regulation of business, services, and the greed of capitalism.  No more.

I am not a constitutional lawyer.  The idea of the Supreme Court is tarnished just a bit more with the person-hood ruling granted by a 5-4 vote.  Here is the summary of the decision by Howard Fineman about the cancer of cash that the court has unleashed on the adolescent experiment called democracy.

The Sweeping Impact of SCOTUS’s Campaign-Spending Decision
January 22, 2010 | by Howard Fineman | Newsweek Online

It’s nothing short of revolutionary. Here’s how I add up the possible consequences:

• It adds to Republican chances of pickups in red states with small, cheap media markets.
• It turns the cottage industry of campaign consulting into a Hollywood-lucrative major media sector.
• It reduces candidates and political parties to mere appendages in their own campaigns.
• It will turn corporate boardrooms into political cockfighting pits, since that is where the key decisions will be made.
• It gives President Obama a populist issue, if he has the cojones and imagination and sense of injustice to take it on.
• It rips the veil of “conservatism” from this court, which just rendered one of the most wildly “activist” opinions in decades. It makes a mockery of the legal theory of “original intent.” The Founders would be rolling over in their graves.