A Christian Nation?

 by Joris Heise

          Many conservatives would like to understand us as a “Christian nation.” These conservatives claim that our “founding fathers” used Christian principles to establish our government as Christian. Now, these conservatives are telling the rest of us that we need to recover our Christian core.

     vs.   

I object. The heart of our national community beats not with religion, but with “independence,” an attitude based on natural mutual respect and individual dignity. Certainly, religion is part of our blood. Like the democratic Greeks and Rome’s republican principles, however, we have benefited from noble Judeo-Christian principles.

But it does not mean we are a Christian nation.

Unlike past Christian nations, the United States has created with our Constitution a system of government and polity which, while avoiding religious conformity, respects the diversity of our people. We the people see each other as individuals living together in a community, a res publica, a shared environment and culture.

Our diversity depends not on Christianity—and specifically not on any set of Christian rules, principles or dogmas. Our diversity arises from many sources—our various origins, our ability to learn from mistakes, and a hard-earned reluctance to control one another, though Conservatives buck this trend.

          ...but what difference would it make if we were a Christian nation? And why do conservatives find it so important?

The answer lies in the current ideology of Conservatism—they want perfection. They picture a “perfect America” as a nation where everybody is all alike—conforming to one ethical and religious standard. They cannot handle the disparate tensions that, in the view of liberals, are exactly the energy we need to improve our country.

          Conservatives believe theoretically in equality “under God.” In practice, however, these folks often emphasize inequality.  

On the one hand—they approve you if you are rich, white, and English-speaking—you are worthy of being American. On the other hand—they disdain the “unworthy”—people who poor, who are colored, who speak foreign tongues—i.e., the “rest of them.” Religion, for these Conservatives, would eliminate much of this diversity, and would emphasize instead an enforced harmony and conformity.

In other words, the practical consequences of such a claim would be horrendous!

We are not a Christian nation. We have never been—in any sense of the word—a Christian nation. We don’t want to become one, either!  And we won’t.

          Why? Why does the Constitution—and its spirit—shy away from a “Christian nation”? Reflection and history reveal the dangers of any one religion—or its efforts at “thought control”—as the basis of a political government. Fascism of the Nazi variety imposes thought control that is exactly the imposition of a religion. Communism of the Soviet variety imposes the same kind of control.

We are a growing, living idea of imperfect people shaping a world better than the one in which we matured into adulthood. A “Christian nation” goes backwards. It is not that Christianity is good or bad; as our heritage it is both. But we are a young nation, looking forward with the blood of Greece, and Jesus, Rome and rebellion, rationalism and science flowing in our veins, and ever so slowly continuously creating a liberal outlook, a re-invention of our past into a liberating and fruitful future.  

 As the Corporate Empire Goes, So Goes the US

Paul Heise 

The world sees an American Empire. Rather, the world's multinational corporations are using United States military and economic dominance to create a corporate empire. However you feel about that empire, it is now in trouble. Economic institutions and principles created to control the 20th century's Cold War are not fitted to 21st century globalization, technology, and religious militancy.

The prognosis isn't good. These mega-trends of the 21^st century are already working to thwart the corporate empire even as that power is reaching its zenith. Just as the multinational corporations were celebrating total victory with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the presidency of George Bush, the financial crisis and worldwide recession came along. The corporate agenda took the credit and got the blame. The American economy is now embedded in this empire and, sadly, we will all share its fate.

In the second half of the 20^th century, the need for world policy coordination, world governance if you will, led to multilateral institutions by which corporations were pretty much able to impose their policies on the world economy. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the WTO are the most important and powerful of these. All three are based on multilateralism (any market economy can join), free trade (at least in manufactures and agriculture) and the corporate values of efficiency and profit.

These institutions served the corporations well in the 20^th century but were early recognized as inadequate to the 21st. They were thus early abandoned in favor of neoliberalism which advocates tight monetary and fiscal policy, deregulation, privatization and market fundamentalism. In current jargon, this is the austerity option. Unfortunately for the corporations, this is also proving to be inadequate to the tasks of this new century.

The 21st century's struggle will be with the rise of China, the awakening of Islam and the future of Africa - Mediterranean, Nilotic and sub-Saharan. The periphery in Latin America and Southeast Asia has already fought off the corporate empire and its neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, whatever its failures, remains the preferred policy choice of the empire.

Neoliberalism pretends a democracy that treats everyone the same. In the 20^th century, the advanced countries were supporting multilateral agreements that allow all to participate. But now they are doing the real deals in bilateral or regional agreements like NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership. The first of these puts a wall around Mexico and the second is being designed to exclude and isolate China. It is a rejection and undermining of globalization.

But neoliberalism is also free markets and, for instance, “liberalized” foreign direct investment. The corporations idolize markets but are willing to impose restrictions when they are in the form of patents, copyrights, software and intellectual property. The corporations might control the US market but others are rejecting the restrictions of “free trade.”Under previous economic rules, Brazil and India, among others, baulked at monopolistic pharmaceutical prices and won. The same thing is happening with genetically modified crops except that Monsanto is winning.

The Chinese are, of course, leading this challenge to neoliberalism. They have a managed capitalism that breaks all the neoliberal rules and succeeds beyond all expectations. They insist on the hiring of local managerial and technical staff. They do not allow foreign investment in certain specified industries. The entire financial system is owned and/or controlled by the government.

China has done exactly the opposite of what neoliberalism calls for and has had that astounding 9% annual growth rate for three decades. China prospered as all the world was falling apart. Russia, unhappily, followed the rules and ended up an economic disaster.

Others besides China successfully broke the money rules. Argentina was the first of the emerging market economies to directly challenge the IMF and the World Bank and it became an economic success story. Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador elected regimes that explicitly campaigned against neoliberalism. Well, 80 years ago we would have sent in the marines. Thirty years ago we did sent in the CIA. Of course, for a decade President Bush neglected Latin America and they learned they could well do without us.

In the first, but still minor, threat to the hegemony of the American dollar, the 16 countries of ASEAN, including China, Japan and South Korea, have set up a basket of currencies that, it is expected, will be an Asian Monetary Unit (AMU).

The empire is itself undermining globalization and free markets. It is trying to restrict technology with draconian patent, copyright and intellectual property laws. And it has no value system to put up against Islam or any kind of religious awakening.

In conclusion, the countries that follow neoliberal principles suffer for it – and that includes most of the EU. Those who rejected IMF, World Bank and WTO austerity prospered in difficult times.

To the extent that America turns toward the corporate agenda of tight money, paying off the debt, deregulation, privatization and the whole neoliberal schmear, we go down with the empire.  

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Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children.

Dwight D Eisenhower

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s

“The Forgotten Man” Speech

Albany, New York, April 7, 1932

By Kenan Heise

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pre-nomination speech, “The Forgotten Man,” rose from a deep understanding of the long-term Democratic Party concept that promoted the American Dream and called for a shared across-the-board prosperity.

In it he reminded the American people:

It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry—he staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial cavalry. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army.

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

The “Forgotten Man,” in the speech, meant especially the wage earner and farmhand who could not find work or who was not paid enough to support his or her family or to contribute meaningfully to the economy.

The American people understood this. It was about them.  They popularized a song based on the radio address:

Remember my forgotten man,

You had him cultivate the land;

He walked behind the plow,

The sweat fell fro his brow,

But look at him now.

Every generation to probe in the direction what Roosevelt did.

“Greed is good,”  “Take care of yourself,” and anti-worker propaganda are inciting us to be shallow thinkers.

Many of our corporate leaders and top economists lead this effort because they fail to see the need for the economy to be sound from the bottom up and instead construct plans that are supposed to trickle from the top down.

Our nation’s economy, which seems to be improving as the stock market indicates profits and production are rising, remains stuck because workers’ wages and job opportunities are.

It is not enough to criticize the message of Fox News and the Far Right if we do not embody and act on this opposing concept of which FDR spoke.

Put simply, the forgotten man and woman refer to those below us on the ladder of opportunity. They alone can produce an economy that is both productive and paycheck driven.

If a conviction that a successful economy relies on the forgotten among us seems radical, we perhaps need to consider embrace position that is even more thought provoking to prod others and ourselves into accepting it.

Dumpster Diving

A chapter from The Book of the Poor

by Kenan Heise (Marion Street Press, 2012)

The next time you feel like complaining, remember that your garbage disposal probably eats better than 30 percent of this world. —ROBERT ORBEN, ReADeR’S DIGeST, FEBRUARY 1979

Anumber of the interviews that I did with homeless people eventually focused on their experiences in “dumpster diving.” The poor commonly employ the term to describe scavenging food from the large receptacles behind grocery stores or apartment buildings.

In 2012 Cornelius, an older homeless man who has been living in a suburb north of Chicago, started by telling me of the first time he ever tried dumpster diving.

I did it because I was hungry. I was proud and I did not want anyone to see me doing it. I went through dumpsters behind apart- ment buildings in Chicago. In the first block, I did not find anything, but in the next one I discovered a large pizza with only half eaten. I took it over to the house of a friend, who heated it up so everybody there had some. I did not tell them from where I got it.

I used to do it to find clothes. You would find a pair of pants or shirt and take it the laundry to clean it. I want decent clothing. I don’t want people to know I am poor.

Behind grocery stores, I’ve gotten polish sausages, hamburger meat, and even steaks. Often, I’d find corn, butter and milk and, recently, cottage cheese. I don’t like it, but my friend did, and I gave it to him.

Sometimes, he and I find a lot of food and we take what we can get and share it with others.

I never go to the bottom of the dumpster, but he does. Often, that is where the best stuff is and you have to go there after it, but I still don’t.

You find a lot of broken glass in there and you got to be careful.

There is one woman, who is a friend of ours, who just jumps into a dumpster and goes through it like nobody else.

If people want to throw away a television set or something like that, they know a lot of us dumpster dive and they will put it next to a dumpster. If they carefully place the remote on top, then that tells you it works.

We also go through the dumpsters people rent when they are moving and want to throw things away. You’d be surprised what you can find and then sell.

You find DVDs, furniture, jewelry, and other things you can sell. Once, I found a bag of coins in with a box that contained cloth- ing. It only contained nickels, dimes, and quarters, but it was a big bag and the total came to almost $100.

Once you get into one of those dumpsters, you never know what you are going to find.

His friend added: “I keep what I need, and I share the rest with other people. I usually keep any meat.”

To get the following account of his dumpster diving in 1965, I inter- viewed Karl Meyer, a friend and a frequent dumpster diver. “Are there many people in the area in Chicago where you live who do it?” I asked.

His answer:

I think there are 100 people in the Cabrini-Green Projects neigh- borhood who go to grocery store garbage cans for food regularly. I would say 100 at least. A lot of them are really dependent on that food. When they come to the end of their welfare check, and if they dig diligently, they can live it out.

The ones you see are mainly the old people and the more odd types you see walking around with shopping bags. They always have the shopping bags.

The best time is Saturday night just before the store closes for the weekend or the night before a holiday like Christmas. When they have all the special food and can’t keep it. However, any time during the day might be good. They throw things out all day. When it gets really cold, there are not as many people hunting for food. We can tell. We get a lot more stuff.

From practically any garbage can in the neighborhood we can always get partial loaves of bread that doesn’t get stale real easy.

In the summer, the bottle gangs move in. They try to get a

box of something and peddle it. The irresponsible ones dump the garbage all over the place. Others try to leave the place at least as decent as when they came.

You have to be careful and wear gloves. There are often broken bottles in the cans.

Here is a list some of the things we’ve gotten at different times:

• 8-ounce bags of shelled walnuts.
• After Halloween, a bushel of Halloween candy.
• Eggs on numerous occasions—as many as three dozen eggs as 
many as three or four times a day. One or two eggs in a carton 
break and drip down the carton and they throw them away.
• Once, a bushel of apples in good condition.
• Any kind of boxed commodity in which they slit into it when 
opening it with a knife—flour and dried eggs for example.
• Any kind of can goods with a label.
• Jelly or syrup from a case in which one bottle broke and 
dropped down onto others.
• In summer, bushels every day of the outside stalks of celery.
• Fruit—once six lemons in excellent condition.
• Broccoli, bunches of it and often.
• One winter night, a whole bag of onions, slightly frostbitten. 
If they put the food in a special place instead of the dump- sters and garbage cans, it would become respectable and everyone would go there. Then, the really destitute wouldn’t get it.  

Religion as a test for office

 by Joris John Heise

          These days, why does your choice to vote for someone so often seem to hinge on a candidate’s religious views?  Are you pro-choice or pro-life—a question that is not about the legality or abortion, but about its morality—a religious test.

The candidate is asked this and similar questions, and the voters want to know.  Are you a creationist or not?  Do you think the “gay agenda” is harmful to society? Is marriage only for a man and a woman? Do you believe in human-caused climate change?

Every one of these questions rests on a religious foundation. In essence, the questions ask: Are your views for or against the Bible? 

          The truly surprising thing, however, is that the “yes” answers to these questions hang together, interdependent on one another. The issues themselves are unrelated. What do abortion issues and climate change issues really have in common? Why should gay marriage be an issue in any way related to “creationism.”

          It is clear that, for many Americans a specific religious outlook underlies and connects these issues. Not faith in God in general. We are “One Nation, Under God,” but this “God” is somewhat religious-neutral. A Muslim, Jew—or even atheist—can see this slogan as true, whether anyone likes it or not.

 These candidate-questions, though, depend on a Christian, Bible-based religion, and a specific view of that religion which says that they are all aspects of the same guiding principle.

          It is my contention that this outlook is much less a faith in God than a worship of the Bible as an idol.  I argue that conservatives who maintain this view are in danger of violating the First Commandments. More than the God who provided the Bible and its Commandments, they may be idolizing the bible.

Thoughtful people appreciate that we Christians pick and choose among bible texts, bible versions, and even bible issues. Some emphasize the anger of God, and others the Love God has for us. Conservatives, however, in general tend to emphasize clear-cut verses—homosexuality, for example, as an abomination, or Adam and Eve as history—or “Don’t read Harry Potter because one verse condemns wizards and sorcerers.”  

          Reasonable arguments do not faze many of these folks. If other places in scripture speak of mercy, humility, justice and love—and mean more than single verses about a particular vice—they disregard such verses.

          And it is here that we reach my point. Political choices based on filtered Christian beliefs destroy democracy.  Such an attitude means setting religion above the democratic tolerance and respect that we Americans hold as fundamental—more fundamental than a religious book.

The more general virtues of the Christian faith and religion, such as mercy, humility, justice and love, are so embedded in our culture that we rarely preach them, but often show them. It is easy to find examples where we celebrate them—the last few minutes in evening newscasts, heart-warming articles in newspapers and magazines, in the satisfactory outcomes of TV shows, and so on.

These more general virtues, however, are not specifically Christian at all. Not only do most religions of the world embrace them, but they are humane virtues held by atheists, agnostics and people completely indifferent to religion.

What has happened in these energetic and passionate debates has frequently backfired for religion. The discussion has often led the rest of us to reject these “religionists” as somehow bad people, and to dispute their self-admiration for their moral superiority. Their efforts to impose specific religious principles on a democratically tolerant nation will continue to find resistance. 

In many ways, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are senior high school boys, stuck in a mentality that looks down on the rest of the world. Unwittingly arrogant and unconsciously chauvinistic, these three consistently disparage better-educated people—scientists, writers, nuanced thinkers, and teachers.

          Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck—all three Conservative pundits dropped out of college. Although they all started, they did not finish it.

          Going to college takes hard work—a special kind of work. Not at first. No, college often starts as fun and freedom. Once the first euphoria passes, though, tough problems confront students newly graduated from high school.

Students are surprised to find themselves looking at different ideas, uncomfortable ones that contradict long-held beliefs. To challenge them or accept them, the student starts to grow up into an independence that is scary.

The student has to draw on, or create, a more adult courage and persistence as well as deepen a more mature curiosity absent in high school. College requires a more adult courage to meet this challenge. It also takes a deeper, tougher persistence than high school to finish harder assignments demanded by college teachers. College, in still another way, demands a full-grown curiosity to dig past the entrenched habits, myths and assumptions of a whole lifetime.

In the end, college takes growing-up to face a surprisingly larger, more complicated world.    

College, for sure, is not for everybody. Unlike other Founding Fathers, George Washington did OK without college—though he wanted to go. Lincoln and Sojourner Truth and the Heise parents did well without college. Many a farmer chooses not to attend college, as does a whole range of people who spend their careers with the earth and the sea.

          These three men, however, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, entered college, and then dropped out. Whatever reasons might arise to explain this, in my opinion, however, they missed the deepening process for which college offers a unique opportunity. They failed in a fundamental way to learn how to deal with disagreement.

What they read, it seems, is selective, and used to buttress their own convictions, not to confront them, or correct them—to learn what is the more precise truth, or the disagreeable truth.

 Their dialogues are one-sided; they disrespect any one in disagreement with them, and frequently label any divergence whatsoever as evil. Rather than risk a true conversation that tries for common ground, they pre-judge others and turn them off ahead of time. This practice a decent college tries hard to eliminate.

In their inability to talk with disagreeing adults as their equals, in short, these three—though their physical ages say otherwise--remain high school boys, and time after time demonstrate that fact.