Lawrence O’Donnell: Jesus Wanted Us to Have a Super Intense Progressive Tax Structure!!!!!
This is pretty repulsive. Progressive income tax is “Christ’s path to righteousness”? Is this guy trying to be “The Voice”?
His whole argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of words like “give” and “take”, and an inability to comprehend even the simplest stories. Jesus will accept whatever is given; he will “take” nothing. This story is about giving - you know, voluntary contributions - and was separate from the taxes given to Caesar.
He wouldn’t take from each according to his ability to pay, but he judges the value of each offering based on the giver’s ability to pay and attitude while paying. If you want to get technical, the Law instituted a flat “tax” - everyone was to give 10%. Eat that Larry!
The poor resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim. We shouldn’t forget, too, that other things may be more important in their lives than food…
This could explain why they focus on the here and…
this ticks me off. the separation of church and state was enacted to protect the church from the government, not to exclude religion from politics.
Nah, you’re wrong. The early settlers in America were tired of King George’s Theocracy imposing rules for prayer. This was when separatists and the Great Awakening were beginning to drive people from the Church, and when the church lost money back then so did the State. So they made sure to have a “Wall of separation between church and state” so that the state couldn’t mandate a religion.
In God We Trust was added in the early 50s because this country feared the “Godless Commies”
No, Colonel Sanders…
You misunderstand the difference between “the church” from the OP (Christianity in general) and “the church” you mention (the Church of England). People had already been drawn from the Church of England to other churches (not “away from the church”), but that wasn’t the issue.
The “wall of separation” was put in place so that the federal government couldn’t mandate a denomination, though states were free to do so (and did) until the 14th amendment. It had nothing to do with taxation, nothing to do with a “theocracy”, and the separatists were in operation quite a long time before anyone thought of crossing the Atlantic.
The Republican legislature in Michigan is trying to push through a truly frightening bill. Basically, House Bill 4465 would punish striking teachers by revoking their license for two years.
Honestly, there is no domestic issue that disgusts me more than this anti-union propaganda in 2011. I guess the rich will be happy when 99% of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals. (We’re accelerating in that direction)
I’ll leave you with a few words from Republican Dwight Eisenhower:
“Workers have a right to organize into unions and to bargain collectively with their employers. And a strong, free labor movement is an invigorating and necessary part of our industrial society”
You’re right. If we allow the government to restrict the power of public-sector unions, all wealth in the country will be immediately and irrevocably absorbed by greedy rich folk. I’m glad you’ve pointed that out.
Workers have the right to organize and bargain with their employers. You seem to have forgotten, though (like many others) that in bargaining, both sides have rights. So employers have the right to refuse the contract terms offered by the union. They can propose their own nonnegotiables. In this case, the employer is setting up a consequence for choosing to go on strike: you can’t work here for two years.
The employers can do this because (a) the employees choose whether or not to go on strike with full knowledge of the likely consequence, and (b) they clearly have the upper hand in the situation, because there are more teachers than there are jobs.
If that situation changes, or the teachers are able to hold their members in check so they don’t cross picket lines when the state starts offering the jobs of the striking teachers, they would then have the power to return to the table and have the state eliminate that provision from the contract (or from the state books, in this case). Either way, they have to weigh the costs and benefits of striking and choose for themselves.
“…if I add the context that Googling ‘George Bush monkey’ gives you over 3 million hits, and most of them are jokes where President Bush’s face is transposed on a monkey, you see what’s really going on. Democrats and advocates of civil rights are using the media to further an agenda at the expense of a woman who was probably so non-racist that the photo in question didn’t set off her alarms…”
— “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams • On the topic of Orange County Republican official Marilyn Davenport, who emailed a photo of an Obama “family portrait,” showing two grinning adult chimpanzees with a chimp-ish baby Barack. First of all — the Dilbert guy? What? Why!? But second of all, we agree wholeheartedly with the folks at Mediaite on this one. To compare Bush monkey/chimp jokes to ones directed at Obama is at best silly and at worst willfully evasive and/or ignorant. You don’t have to be a scholarly social critic to understand why a joke aimed at two different people could be construed as racist against one, and at worst stupid or unfunny against the other. To deny this seems like digging your head in the sand about what are and aren’t racial stereotypes in our society. Wanting to excise racism doesn’t necessitate pretending not to recognize it. source(via • follow)
Without a doubt, the same “joke aimed at two different people could be construed as racist against one,” and no doubt it could be construed this way here. But before this woman is denounced as a racist, we ought to consider what she intended, not how it would be construed by others. In other words, her sin may be ignorance and not intolerance. That distinction matters, because ignorance is forgivable. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge, sometimes baffling ones.
Moreover, there is something progressive about the woman’s mistake here. If you take her at her word … that is, if she really didn’t realize the potentially racist undertone, perhaps it’s because we’ve evolved to a point where it wouldn’t even occur to a lot of people that placing a black man’s face on a monkey would be racist. I think this is more plausible that you think.
The solution for all of this, I think, is to strive towards a kind of dignity, which would entail, at a minimum, that we all stop putting politician faces on monkeys. Maybe we could all stop drawing Hitler mustaches while we’re at it. Maybe we could all stop acting like children. Because if this woman had corresponded like an adult, and not an idiot, she wouldn’t be under fire.
Based on this interview, I’m inclined to cut her some slack. If those closest to her are really surprised, that means she doesn’t have a history of racist behavior.
I’ll let you in on a secret: white people - elderly, middle aged, and young, from all parts of the country and types of environments - say insensitive things about racial minorities all the time. About half the time they don’t even know or realize; most of the rest are attempts to be racially sensitive, which come out sideways and unrefined. A small sliver are intentional.
It’s about time we stop castigating people for unintentional insensitivity, especially when they are of longstanding good repute.
It’s a sick society that worries about the marginal cost to the guy making $100,000 a year more than the basic living conditions of those in poverty.” I think it’s a sick society that sees their fates as being in conflict; who sees this as a zero sum game. Every day, the man making $100,000 a year buys things from people that employ people who make less than he does. When you raise his taxes, who does it hurt? Does it hurt him because he has to cut a few expenses? Or does it hurt the guy who used to cut his grass? The woman who used to serve his coffee? The installer who used to service his cable?
