The conservatives’ religious test

When Texas Pastor Robert Jeffress called Mormonism a cult during the recent Values Voters Summit, the media went crazy. The political classes went to town and Mormonism and evangelical Christians were under the microscope.

But the narrow focus on the cult comment meant that the media missed the larger issue — which is that Jeffress (and by extension, the larger conservative evangelical movement) believes that only Christians should be elected to the presidency.

“In a few months, when the smoke has cleared, those of us who are evangelical Christians are going to have a choice to make,” Jeffress said. “Do we want a candidate who is skilled in rhetoric, or one who is skilled in leadership? Do we want a candidate who is a conservative out of convenience, or one who is conservative out of deep conviction? Do we want a candidate who is a good moral person, or do we want a candidate who is a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?”

Perry, arriving on stage after Jeffress’ introduction, said the pastor had “hit it out of the park.”

In remarks to reporters after Perry’s speech, Jeffress called the Mormon church “a cult,” according to another reporter who was present.

Jeffress has made similar comments in the past.

“I believe we should always support a Christian over a non-Christian,” Jeffress said in 2008. “The value of electing a Christian goes beyond public policies. … Christians are uniquely favored by God, [while] Mormons, Hindus and Muslims worship a false god. The eternal consequences outweigh political ones. It is worse to legitimize a faith that would lead people to a separation from God.”

The Perry campaign responded by saying Mormonism was not a cult and other major Republican candidates — Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman — have refused to weigh in on the question.

Mormonism, as I said, is not the issue here. What is the issue is Jeffress’ assertion that non-Christians should not be considered for public office — a point none of the candidates has been asked to comment on. As far as Jeffress is concerned,

Such a belief should be anathema in a nation that protects the rights of its citizens to worship — or not — as they like that has explicitly avoided any religious test or oath for office-holders. Every candidate should be asked where they stand on this.

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#OccupyWallStreet: The Times gets it — a surprise

The New York Times has weighed in on the protests in lower Manhattan and its verdict is a bit of a surprise, given that much of the media coverage has been pretty dismissive until now.

The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.

At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people.

While the protest was triggered by college-age men and women, it is “more than a youth uprising.”

The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery.

The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer.

It is an analysis the left has been making since before the crash of 2008 and the failed bailouts of American industry. The restructuring of the American economy over the last 40-plus years — the move away from manufacturing to finance — has meant that the economy no longer supports the working and middle classes. Wage-earners have no place in an economy built on speculation, which uses money as raw material to make more money without leaving anything of value behind.

It leads to a redistribution of wealth — but not one that aids the poor. It pushes money upward, into the hands of those who already have it, stagnating wages and leaving the poor with few options and no safety net.

Think about it: The economy, by traditional measures, is stalled and yet we have witnessed record corporate profits. Unemployment — both the official number and the broader measures designed to describe the real employment situation — remains at numbers not seen since the early 1980s. We are laying off teachers and police officers, allowing our school buildings, bridges and roads to decay, but we are not willing to bump up tax rates for the rich to Clinton-era rates — which were not exactly onerous.

How has this happened? First, we are the victims of a corporate coup. Corporations control our lawmakers and run our government.

Second, we have stayed silent. The left, in particular, has allowed itself to be co-opted by the Democratic Party, silenced by a fear that breaking ranks with the Democrats will create an opening for a Republican victory at the polls.

In practical terms, this has been a disaster. President Barack Obama, called a socialist by the know-nothing right, has repaid support from his left flank with derision and triangulation, following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton.

So the protests stand as the best news on the political front in years — a chance for the left to separate itself from the Democrats and stake out their own responses to the shifting economic sands on which we are forced to rebuild.

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Sputter, cough, stall — welcome to the new economy

The Huffington Post headline from earlier today pretty much says it all:

Stuck in the Mud

The headline, since replaced, neatly sums up the fate of the American economy as we steam toward the end of 2011 and full-bore into a presidential election year. The numbers back this up. As The Huffington Post reports,

The U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in September, while the unemployment rate held steady at 9.1 percent, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers beat economists’ expectations but barely keep pace with population growth, reinforcing the growing fear among many that the labor market recovery is dead in the water.

“We are still making no progress on a recovery that’s going to bring people back to work,” said Harvard economist Lawrence Katz. “What I see is an economy that can’t create enough opportunity to do more than just absorb the new population. Which is not much of a feat.”

A chunk of today’s headline number is attributed to the 45,000 striking Verizon workers who were not counted in last month’s report and are now back to work. The report revised the number of new jobs added in July and August upward, but the average over the last four months was still a paltry 64,000 new positions — well below the 100,000 to 150,000 jobs that economists generally believe are needed to account for population growth and lower than the average of the prior 14 months of job creation.

Meanwhile, the share of the unemployed who have been out of work for six months or longer crept up to 44.6 percent from 42.9 percent, as the number of long-term jobless increased from roughly 6 million to 6.2 million — up from a year ago. More than 2 million of those Americans have been out of a job for more than 99 weeks. Another grim detail: The number of Americans working part-time because they have been unable to find full-time work increased by 444,000 to nearly 9.3 million.

The nicest thing we can say is that the economy is stagnant. There is no growth, nothing that offers any sense of optimism in the economy. That is why the protests on Wall Street are spreading.

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The revolution starts now

Jon Stewart, as always, has found a way to cut through the absurdity of a mainstream press trying to marginalize a growing populist movement just two years after it overplayed the conservative Tea Party’s import, helping the right-wing movement grow.

But rather than explain this, I’ll leave it to Mr. Stewart to explain:

Let’s be clear. The protests in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street are more than a side show. They are a natural outgrowth of the disregard with which the government and America’s financial elites hold the American people. Like Peter Finch’s Howard Beale in Network, they are screaming “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore.”

That’s why the specifics of the demands are irrelevant.

It’s true, as many have pointed out, that they don’t have a list of well thought out demands, but the demand to have such a list is just their elders trying to bring them to heel. The fact is, they don’t have to know just what they’re doing, any more than a writer or filmmaker has to understand the book being written or the film shot. It’s not a necessity. It’s not the price of admission. If there’s one thing that’s obvious and heartening, as my friend, the novelist Beverly Gologorsky, said to me while we oldsters circumnavigated the park, “The overwhelming feeling I have is that no one here is planning to go home any time soon.”

Never have they been more needed. Theirs is certainly a movement, like the ones in the Middle East, inspired in part by economic disaster and aimed at an airless political as well as corporate/financial system controlled by the 1% left out of the signs in the park hailing the 99% of Americans whom Occupy Wall Street hopes to represent. It’s a world set on screwing just about everyone in that vast cohort of Americans without compunction, shame, or even, these days, plausible deniability.

And screw us they have. Unemployment remains high, foreclosures have not abated, the cost of health care continues to rise, as do taxes on middle class taxpayers (in the form of state and local taxes), and we are told that our problems are being caused by greedy teachers and cops and not by a war-addicted government whose election campaigns are funded by the very people who should be brought to account for the country’s downward spiral.

But the TV pundits still make fun of the hippies in the crowd (forgetting the absurd site of grown men dressed as colonial revolutionaries and wearing tea bags from their tri-cornered hats). What we are witnessing in lower Manhattan and throughout the country is exactly what is needed — a rebellion designed to take back the American government from the financial elites, who think they own our government.

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  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
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Congratulations, Mr. Transtromer

The work of Tomas Transtromer is not always easy, but the effort is worth it. Congratulations to Sweden’s treasure for winning this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.

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  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.