Category: Culture
Make Them Talk
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 or third time.
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 only to be reinstated when their 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. A millionaire may be able to afford being swindled of a few hundred thousand dollars, but a person on minimum wage or even making $50k a year cannot afford to loose $1k in the free market of buyer beware. 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.
Sighting’s Reminding Me Why I Like Jim Wallis
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.