While the fundies have worked themselves into a frenzy over “Satanic socialism”, the truth is that the one they follow (Yeshua , aka Jesus) would much more likely have embraced socialism than capitalism. He’d have recognized by merely taking a stroll through the New York Stock Exchange, that capitalism represented an intrinsic and radical evil – designed to accentuate and expand human greed and selfishness to malignant proportions.
Capitalism's "systemic inequalities" are rooted in the corporations (by virtue of some of the lowest tax rates in the world) that contribute mightily to political campaigns in order to gain influence over future legislation. It is estimated, for example, that nearly all the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and 2003 Medicare Modernization Act featured major provisions written by corporate lobbyists themselves. (No surprise then, for the latter, according to one Goldman Sachs estimate, some $13 BILLION in pure profit will be reaped by Big Pharma and the HMOs by 2013- thanks to no allowance for government to bargain for the lowest drug prices.)Nor is it surprising, that we no longer have "free markets" where once more or less equal entrepreneurs competed one to one. Rather, laws are written to favor conglomerates and shared monopolies that control markets (and demand).
What we're now seeing is more and more the emergence of coercive markets, which are destructive to everyone but the wealthy corporate interests able to purchase legislative leverage. As author Charles Reich poignantly notes in his book, Opposing the System, Crown Books, 1995, p. 22:
"A free market produces results that favor the health of society as a whole, because an essential balance is maintained. But in a coercive market, the balance is destroyed, the earning power of work and the standard of living of workers declines, and society as a whole is devastated while those with economic power gain an ever more unbalanced share of the nation's economic wealth."
Meanwhile, other monstrosities that Yeshua would behold if he came back right now:
“Dead peasants insurance” – where large companies such as Walmart take out policies on workers (“associates”) of up to $350,000 each, so when they die the company can collect the total – sharing not one cent with the worker’s family. A tragic case was highlighted in the Michael Moore film ‘Capitalism – A Love Story’ in which one associate, a 26 year old woman named ‘LaDonna’ dies of asthma, and her family is left with owing $100,000 in medical bills and a $6,000 debt for the funeral. Meanwhile, Walmart collected an extra $81,000 because of the woman’s young age (viatical policies award more for an earlier death) but they paid not one dollar to help the grieving family.
Selfishness anyone? Cruel, cynical exploitation of workers' deaths to pad profit margins?
Since that crass example in Moore’s film things have gotten much worse – with assorted insurance derivatives now created to bet on whole cities failing, going broke or bankrupt- or experiencing a major calamity (e.g. bridge collapse due to lack of maintenance, from lack of public fudns) in which lives or lost.
One thing we know for sure, Yeshua as the loving rabbi he was, would never endorsed or embrace such a foul, ghoulish system of financial vampires. He’d have condemned them and said, as he did in scriptures, that it would be easier for them to pass through the eye of a needle than enter his kingdom.
Capitalism doesn’t end there, and its greed knows no bounds, especially in the stock market. Tempting people to put their life savings to work so they can retire, no one tells the poor working folk who entrust their hard earned money to the system, that it can be vaporized in one fell swoop.
Ask those who beheld the flash crash back in May, or those who lost 40% of their 401k savings with the credit derivatives-driven financial meltdown in 2008 –from which we’re still trying to recover.
The basis for the meltdown? Much of it engineered by capitalist-brainwashed financial “quants” working at Lehman Bros, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and other places – to create worthless securities comprised of mortgage fraud instruments they knew would fail. And people holding them would pay dearly for.
Investigations by the FBI have shown that 80% of the mortgage- securities fraud was “lender induced” as opposed to the common canard (circulated by clowns like Rush Limbaugh) that community organizers were responsible by enticing poor people with poor credit to purchase mortgages they couldn’t afford.
Of course, this doesn’t even get into the multiple ways by which the funds held by ordinary smallfry investors are gamed, including, “burning yield” and market timing, as well as exploitation by flash traders.
In the workplace, capitalism "productivity" is predicated upon a management tyranny – denying employees free speech rights they take for granted on the outside. Spying devices are common, even in restrooms. Those employees who work on computers are monitored every minute by their number of keystrokes, and if that falls below a certain rate their jobs are at risk. Other companies have installed computer micro-cameras that can spy on workers in their offices or cubicles. The micro-cameras are even mounted in rest rooms, and some inside toilet stalls.
Why the extent of snooping? What do you expect after a company fires 4 of every ten workers then expect the remaining 6 to pick up the "slack"- without any enhancement of benefits or pay? Of course, knowing they'd reduced employees to slave status, they'd have to oversee them, at least electronically!
If Jesus had the basis of capitalist greed and power explained to him, in terms of “expropriation of labor”, he’d be outraged, perhaps more than he even displayed with the money changers. If he ever used language evocative of damnation, he’d use it in this case.
In expropriation, worker product is valued high while worker labor compensation is minimized. In this way, employers, companies make unseemly profit off the labor of their workers. For example, let’s say a worker makes chairs, and it takes one hour to make each. He makes eight per day, but he’s paid $12 per hour. The company then sells each hand crafted chair for $150 each. The overhead perhaps amounts to $40 per hour, to pay the utility costs, etc. – then the difference $150 - $62 = $88 marks the expropriation of the labor.
Socialism, by contrast, works because first, it controls the means of production for the benefit or interests of all, not just the few. Thereby, it doesn’t allow the legitimization of systemic greed. For example, no private concern would be permitted to manage such critical arenas as health care in a socialist nation. So, one wouldn't see people condemned to death because they're denied treatment - by virtue of lacking insurance, or forced into bankruptcy to line the pockets of rich turds- because they have a "pre-existing condtion".
By contrast, we know – from a Citibank memo released accidentally in 2005- that we are now a “Plutonomy” (variant of Plutocracy) instead of democracy or even Republic. The memo literally hyped the advantages of the new “managerial aristocracy” in which 1% of the populace earns more than the lower 95% and hence can control their choices. The memo also bemoaned the one threat that remained, people having a vote – since any “peasant” vote was still equal to each of the top 1%.
In the democratic socialist nations (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Barbados etc.) bank regulations were never repealed, so that the risky credit derivatives that crashed the U.S. financial system didn’t emerge. Commercial banks in those nations stuck to conservative lending operations, rather than engaging in risky speculative instruments.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall law (which had kept investment banks apart from commercial ones) paved the way for speculating with the public’s money – put into banks in trust.
In democratic socialist nations also, workers have far more rights than in the capitalist slave system of the U.S. For example, workers can take as many bathroom breaks as needed, not limited to one or two per day outside of normal breaks. Also, workers are not spied upon by micro-cameras, nor do they have their keystrokes counted. More importantly, workers can take up to two or three WEEKS of SICK DAYS without being docked pay, and can go on extended PAID family leave if loved ones are seriously ill. As for vacations, workers get up to 4 weeks in most democratic socialist states, because those states believe "all work and little play" makes Jack not only a dull boy- but a possibly crazed psycho who may off his fellow workers (as we've beheld numerous times in the U.S.)
In addition, workers have freedom of speech, and also can criticize their companies online- without fear of being tracked or googled for critical comments- like corporations do in the U.S. Also in such socialist nations, tax cuts are viewed as anathema. Tax cuts to the wealthy (wherever they are) eviscerate whatever security or safety net remains while widening the inequality already rampant at the same time. One major effect is to starve public funding so public benefits, services can no longer be provided in the quantities needed. This means the alternative of 'privatization' rears its ugly head, where people now pay through the roof for services (e.g. energy, or even water) formerly that were affordable. Debt - tragic, budget busting, impoverishing- is the inevitable outcome.
Another of the effects of massive tax cuts (as in the U.S.), as Andrew Tobin pointed out in his (2003) 'Parade' article, is that the Social Security Trust Funds must be raided to pay for them. Thus, in capitalist crypto-fascist finance societies the elderly and vulnerable end up paying for the toys of the rich - or their speculation, e.g. in credit derivatives. This means the future Social Security recipients, already below proletariat level, have to face (in addition) lower benefits and later retirement age. Meanwhile, rich corporate greedheads continue to retire whenever they want, blessed with $100 million or more wage -stock option packages.
Much of the economic pathology that can be laid at the feet of U.S. virulent capitalism has two primary effects at work: i) the incessant crass commercialism of everything - yielding a lowest common denominator culture and "minds" to match it. ii) A continuing enhancement in inequality - with ever fewer slices of 'pie' for the lowest 95% while the top one percent gorges itself on 98% of the resources. This sets up de facto economic warfare amongst all groups in the lower echelons, pitting one against the other for the few scraps that remain. As Charles Reich poignantly notes (op. cit.), p. 22:
"We have built a machine for dehumanization of such force and destructive power, thorough its accumulated assaults on human dignity, that we are creating kinds and degrees of damage to human beings beyond anything ever known, with totally unforeseeable consequences. "
The best analogy I can give to what is occurring in the U.S. is a malignant cancer. As in cancer, when one limited group of cells grows too much - it does so at the expense of the whole body. So also in the U.S., when run amok crony capitalism enables a tiny elite segment of the body politic (and social ) to run amok at the expense of the health of the whole. Sadly, the tale of history is that diseased cultures and corrosive societies do not last. The U.S. is - in that sense- now on the respirator, and hasn't too long to go. Before the end, as Morris Berman notes (The Twilight of American Culture) there'll be a new Dark Age, lasting perhaps hundreds of years.
Would Jesus therefore be a socialist if he somehow returned - not for a mythical "Second Coming" - but merely to see how his message of love, service and fellowship was received? To see 14 million out of work in the richest nation on Earth because greedy corporations were hoarding over $860 billion in cash, and not prepared to use it to make jobs? Or, to see other companies sending even more jobs -work to India, China and Mexico? To see 1 in 5 children in poverty and have to dumpster dive for their next meal? To see 48 million citizens with no options for health care other than to pack into crowded ERs, and wait 8-12 hours for treatment?
To see rich bankers stuffing their porcine faces with foie de gras, while millions were losing their homes, and having to live in underground sewers or water conveyance areas, as now in Las Vegas?
I'm not sure, since the nuances of exact economic policy (on which socialism is based) may not be issues at the tips of his fingers. But I'm 100% certain he'd at least be a liberal in outlook, and express liberal values - including demanding a hand up for the homeless, the malnourished, the unemployed and millions of others ground under the evil jackboot of greedy pig captalists. (And btw, lest our fundie friends somehow confuse capitalism with "freedom", flag, goodness, Mom and apple pie, let's not forget that THE most successful CAPITALISTS on the planet right now are the COMMUNIST CHINESE! To whom the U.S. owes (at last count) nearly $900 billion - and growing more with every extra dollar we plow into that waste hole known as Afghanistan)
Capitalism's "systemic inequalities" are rooted in the corporations (by virtue of some of the lowest tax rates in the world) that contribute mightily to political campaigns in order to gain influence over future legislation. It is estimated, for example, that nearly all the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and 2003 Medicare Modernization Act featured major provisions written by corporate lobbyists themselves. (No surprise then, for the latter, according to one Goldman Sachs estimate, some $13 BILLION in pure profit will be reaped by Big Pharma and the HMOs by 2013- thanks to no allowance for government to bargain for the lowest drug prices.)Nor is it surprising, that we no longer have "free markets" where once more or less equal entrepreneurs competed one to one. Rather, laws are written to favor conglomerates and shared monopolies that control markets (and demand).
What we're now seeing is more and more the emergence of coercive markets, which are destructive to everyone but the wealthy corporate interests able to purchase legislative leverage. As author Charles Reich poignantly notes in his book, Opposing the System, Crown Books, 1995, p. 22:
"A free market produces results that favor the health of society as a whole, because an essential balance is maintained. But in a coercive market, the balance is destroyed, the earning power of work and the standard of living of workers declines, and society as a whole is devastated while those with economic power gain an ever more unbalanced share of the nation's economic wealth."
Meanwhile, other monstrosities that Yeshua would behold if he came back right now:
“Dead peasants insurance” – where large companies such as Walmart take out policies on workers (“associates”) of up to $350,000 each, so when they die the company can collect the total – sharing not one cent with the worker’s family. A tragic case was highlighted in the Michael Moore film ‘Capitalism – A Love Story’ in which one associate, a 26 year old woman named ‘LaDonna’ dies of asthma, and her family is left with owing $100,000 in medical bills and a $6,000 debt for the funeral. Meanwhile, Walmart collected an extra $81,000 because of the woman’s young age (viatical policies award more for an earlier death) but they paid not one dollar to help the grieving family.
Selfishness anyone? Cruel, cynical exploitation of workers' deaths to pad profit margins?
Since that crass example in Moore’s film things have gotten much worse – with assorted insurance derivatives now created to bet on whole cities failing, going broke or bankrupt- or experiencing a major calamity (e.g. bridge collapse due to lack of maintenance, from lack of public fudns) in which lives or lost.
One thing we know for sure, Yeshua as the loving rabbi he was, would never endorsed or embrace such a foul, ghoulish system of financial vampires. He’d have condemned them and said, as he did in scriptures, that it would be easier for them to pass through the eye of a needle than enter his kingdom.
Capitalism doesn’t end there, and its greed knows no bounds, especially in the stock market. Tempting people to put their life savings to work so they can retire, no one tells the poor working folk who entrust their hard earned money to the system, that it can be vaporized in one fell swoop.
Ask those who beheld the flash crash back in May, or those who lost 40% of their 401k savings with the credit derivatives-driven financial meltdown in 2008 –from which we’re still trying to recover.
The basis for the meltdown? Much of it engineered by capitalist-brainwashed financial “quants” working at Lehman Bros, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and other places – to create worthless securities comprised of mortgage fraud instruments they knew would fail. And people holding them would pay dearly for.
Investigations by the FBI have shown that 80% of the mortgage- securities fraud was “lender induced” as opposed to the common canard (circulated by clowns like Rush Limbaugh) that community organizers were responsible by enticing poor people with poor credit to purchase mortgages they couldn’t afford.
Of course, this doesn’t even get into the multiple ways by which the funds held by ordinary smallfry investors are gamed, including, “burning yield” and market timing, as well as exploitation by flash traders.
In the workplace, capitalism "productivity" is predicated upon a management tyranny – denying employees free speech rights they take for granted on the outside. Spying devices are common, even in restrooms. Those employees who work on computers are monitored every minute by their number of keystrokes, and if that falls below a certain rate their jobs are at risk. Other companies have installed computer micro-cameras that can spy on workers in their offices or cubicles. The micro-cameras are even mounted in rest rooms, and some inside toilet stalls.
Why the extent of snooping? What do you expect after a company fires 4 of every ten workers then expect the remaining 6 to pick up the "slack"- without any enhancement of benefits or pay? Of course, knowing they'd reduced employees to slave status, they'd have to oversee them, at least electronically!
If Jesus had the basis of capitalist greed and power explained to him, in terms of “expropriation of labor”, he’d be outraged, perhaps more than he even displayed with the money changers. If he ever used language evocative of damnation, he’d use it in this case.
In expropriation, worker product is valued high while worker labor compensation is minimized. In this way, employers, companies make unseemly profit off the labor of their workers. For example, let’s say a worker makes chairs, and it takes one hour to make each. He makes eight per day, but he’s paid $12 per hour. The company then sells each hand crafted chair for $150 each. The overhead perhaps amounts to $40 per hour, to pay the utility costs, etc. – then the difference $150 - $62 = $88 marks the expropriation of the labor.
Socialism, by contrast, works because first, it controls the means of production for the benefit or interests of all, not just the few. Thereby, it doesn’t allow the legitimization of systemic greed. For example, no private concern would be permitted to manage such critical arenas as health care in a socialist nation. So, one wouldn't see people condemned to death because they're denied treatment - by virtue of lacking insurance, or forced into bankruptcy to line the pockets of rich turds- because they have a "pre-existing condtion".
By contrast, we know – from a Citibank memo released accidentally in 2005- that we are now a “Plutonomy” (variant of Plutocracy) instead of democracy or even Republic. The memo literally hyped the advantages of the new “managerial aristocracy” in which 1% of the populace earns more than the lower 95% and hence can control their choices. The memo also bemoaned the one threat that remained, people having a vote – since any “peasant” vote was still equal to each of the top 1%.
In the democratic socialist nations (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Barbados etc.) bank regulations were never repealed, so that the risky credit derivatives that crashed the U.S. financial system didn’t emerge. Commercial banks in those nations stuck to conservative lending operations, rather than engaging in risky speculative instruments.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall law (which had kept investment banks apart from commercial ones) paved the way for speculating with the public’s money – put into banks in trust.
In democratic socialist nations also, workers have far more rights than in the capitalist slave system of the U.S. For example, workers can take as many bathroom breaks as needed, not limited to one or two per day outside of normal breaks. Also, workers are not spied upon by micro-cameras, nor do they have their keystrokes counted. More importantly, workers can take up to two or three WEEKS of SICK DAYS without being docked pay, and can go on extended PAID family leave if loved ones are seriously ill. As for vacations, workers get up to 4 weeks in most democratic socialist states, because those states believe "all work and little play" makes Jack not only a dull boy- but a possibly crazed psycho who may off his fellow workers (as we've beheld numerous times in the U.S.)
In addition, workers have freedom of speech, and also can criticize their companies online- without fear of being tracked or googled for critical comments- like corporations do in the U.S. Also in such socialist nations, tax cuts are viewed as anathema. Tax cuts to the wealthy (wherever they are) eviscerate whatever security or safety net remains while widening the inequality already rampant at the same time. One major effect is to starve public funding so public benefits, services can no longer be provided in the quantities needed. This means the alternative of 'privatization' rears its ugly head, where people now pay through the roof for services (e.g. energy, or even water) formerly that were affordable. Debt - tragic, budget busting, impoverishing- is the inevitable outcome.
Another of the effects of massive tax cuts (as in the U.S.), as Andrew Tobin pointed out in his (2003) 'Parade' article, is that the Social Security Trust Funds must be raided to pay for them. Thus, in capitalist crypto-fascist finance societies the elderly and vulnerable end up paying for the toys of the rich - or their speculation, e.g. in credit derivatives. This means the future Social Security recipients, already below proletariat level, have to face (in addition) lower benefits and later retirement age. Meanwhile, rich corporate greedheads continue to retire whenever they want, blessed with $100 million or more wage -stock option packages.
Much of the economic pathology that can be laid at the feet of U.S. virulent capitalism has two primary effects at work: i) the incessant crass commercialism of everything - yielding a lowest common denominator culture and "minds" to match it. ii) A continuing enhancement in inequality - with ever fewer slices of 'pie' for the lowest 95% while the top one percent gorges itself on 98% of the resources. This sets up de facto economic warfare amongst all groups in the lower echelons, pitting one against the other for the few scraps that remain. As Charles Reich poignantly notes (op. cit.), p. 22:
"We have built a machine for dehumanization of such force and destructive power, thorough its accumulated assaults on human dignity, that we are creating kinds and degrees of damage to human beings beyond anything ever known, with totally unforeseeable consequences. "
The best analogy I can give to what is occurring in the U.S. is a malignant cancer. As in cancer, when one limited group of cells grows too much - it does so at the expense of the whole body. So also in the U.S., when run amok crony capitalism enables a tiny elite segment of the body politic (and social ) to run amok at the expense of the health of the whole. Sadly, the tale of history is that diseased cultures and corrosive societies do not last. The U.S. is - in that sense- now on the respirator, and hasn't too long to go. Before the end, as Morris Berman notes (The Twilight of American Culture) there'll be a new Dark Age, lasting perhaps hundreds of years.
Would Jesus therefore be a socialist if he somehow returned - not for a mythical "Second Coming" - but merely to see how his message of love, service and fellowship was received? To see 14 million out of work in the richest nation on Earth because greedy corporations were hoarding over $860 billion in cash, and not prepared to use it to make jobs? Or, to see other companies sending even more jobs -work to India, China and Mexico? To see 1 in 5 children in poverty and have to dumpster dive for their next meal? To see 48 million citizens with no options for health care other than to pack into crowded ERs, and wait 8-12 hours for treatment?
To see rich bankers stuffing their porcine faces with foie de gras, while millions were losing their homes, and having to live in underground sewers or water conveyance areas, as now in Las Vegas?
I'm not sure, since the nuances of exact economic policy (on which socialism is based) may not be issues at the tips of his fingers. But I'm 100% certain he'd at least be a liberal in outlook, and express liberal values - including demanding a hand up for the homeless, the malnourished, the unemployed and millions of others ground under the evil jackboot of greedy pig captalists. (And btw, lest our fundie friends somehow confuse capitalism with "freedom", flag, goodness, Mom and apple pie, let's not forget that THE most successful CAPITALISTS on the planet right now are the COMMUNIST CHINESE! To whom the U.S. owes (at last count) nearly $900 billion - and growing more with every extra dollar we plow into that waste hole known as Afghanistan)
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