Author: Alan Bean

What the Bible really says about helping the poor

· 8 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

Jesus’ observation that the poor will be with us always may be the most abused passage in the Bible.  Fred Clark, the Slacktivist, thinks so anyway.

It always struck me as ironic that farmers in the Texas panhandle were death on welfare while feeling perfectly entitled to the farm subsidies that kept them afloat once farming was no longer a viable livelihood.  The biblical teaching on poverty is simple, straightforward, consistent, and invisible.  If you wonder what I mean by that, read on.

Dives will always be with us — and so will selfish rich jackwagons who misquote the Bible

May 30, 2013 By  

Southern Beale is not impressed with the exegetical skills of kleptocratic Tennessee Republican Stephen Fincher:

Rep. Stephen Fincher, you are a horrible person who uses the Bible to selectively justify your greedy, selfish ways. Woe unto you.

Repent, asshole.

This is not Sunday school language, and the Civility Police will no doubt be horrified that Southern Beale is stating truth so directly and so accurately. (When someone like Fincher extravagantly flaunts his bad faith arguments, the Civility Police always insist we must pretend he hasn’t done so. Pretending, euphemistic inaccuracy, and never, ever calling out self-serving liars are the hallmarks of their idea of “civility.”)

But those who fret about such blunt honesty should note that Southern Beale’s condemnation isn’t nearly half as harsh as the rebuke Jesus himself delivers in the Bible passage the congressman misquotes. Nor is it anywhere near as stiletto-sharp as the rebuke that Moses delivers in the passage from the Bible that Jesus is reciting there.

Fincher, you see, does not like Food Stamps. He wants to cut $21 billion from food aid for poor people. (more…)

HOMELESS

· 3 Comments ·
20130527_085457.jpg
The view from our motel room

By Alan Bean

Homeless, homeless
Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake

These old Paul Simon lyrics have been running like a soundtrack through the back of my mind for the past few days.  My wife and I are homeless.  We moved out of our old home late Friday night and can’t occupy our new place until Tuesday afternoon.  Don’t ask how this happened.  It’s a long story.

A technical and temporary kind of homelessness, to be sure.  Not at all like the real homelessness some of my friends are forced to live with.  We are staying in a motel that serves a hot breakfast.  The Quality Inn is surround by The Highlands, a comically upscale shopping area where the muzak runs day and night and you can find an old-main-street shop hawking every imaginable kind of food and supplying every sort of consumer item.

We have two cars at our disposal, and plenty of credit cards.

We have wonderful friends who have helped with our mad dash midnight move and invited us to share fine meals in their gracious homes.

I have my father’s old classical guitar, so my musical addiction has been regularly sated.

We have H. Stephen Shoemaker’s wonderful God Stories to feed our hungry souls.

All our worldly belongings have been stuffed into a 17-foot U-Haul, a 26-foot Penske, and the garage and shed of our old home.  Tomorrow, a team of movers will help us transfer this decadent haul into a lovely new home  with four bedrooms, granite counter tops, and an over-the-top master bathroom.

Our real estate agent is even springing for the motel room, and most of our out-of-pocket expenses are covered during our brief time of exile.

So why do I feel so lost?  Why has the mere fact that I have no home to go left me dazed and disoriented? (more…)

Money for Nothing: how racial bias destroyed six lives, stymied a Black owned business and outraged a congregation

· 12 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

Six devout and dedicated executives are serving hard time in a Colorado prison and their loved ones don’t understand why.  From the perspective of those who worked and worshiped with these men, the fingerprints of racial bias are visible to the naked eye.  FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors never saw this as a civil matter, a case of well-intentioned businessmen incurring business debt.  Instead, scores of federal officials concluded, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that a Colorado software development company had no prospects of success, no interest in success, and existed for the sole purpose of defrauding business partners.  Until you realize that five of the six men at the heart of this story, the public face of the company, are African American, nothing else makes sense.

This instance of wrongful prosecution didn’t just damage individuals, families and businesses, it partially explains why, after more than a decade of effort and the fruitless expenditure of more than a billion tax dollars, the security issues that left America vulnerable on 9-11 remain unresolved.  It explains why criminal investigators in Philadelphia and New York City continue to use typewriters and why FBI agents still crank out hard copies of their investigative reports.

IRP (The Investigative Resource Planning Company), an information tech (IT) firm headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado had the answers, but the federal government was asking the wrong questions. (more…)

Prosecutor pleads for humane and flexible immigration law

·

This CQ op-ed from former prosecutor Robert Johnson (no, he’s not the crossroads guy) touches on the  often bizarre structural issues prosecutors and judges face when they handle immigration cases.  Too often, their hands are tied by punitive laws created by opportunistic politicians.  As Johnson makes clear, there is little room for common sense and compassion in the present system.  It would be tragic if, in the name of compromise, immigration reform reduced the discretion of judges and prosecutors still further.  AGB

Justice System Should Determine Which Immigrants Are Public Safety Risk

By Robert Johnson

May 16, 2013

We are on the cusp of finally realizing federal immigration reform in the United States. As our nation’s lawmakers debate this much anticipated bill, it is essential that we are diligent in ensuring that all aspiring citizens have a fair shot at the pathway to citizenship. There are those who believe that anyone with a criminal conviction, no matter how minor or old, should be shut out of this process and deported. I strongly disagree. (more…)

Does bias equal badness?

· 5 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

Recently, I have been looking into the possibility of doing some consulting work as a diversity trainer.  After spending fifteen years driving the back roads of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi confronting racial bias in the criminal justice system, I am extremely sensitive to the often subtle nuances of racial bias and racial resentment.

Many of the narrative campaigns Friends of Justice have sponsored have provoked entirely different reactions from people of color and people of non-color.  There are always a few exceptions, of course, but most white people get extremely defensive when phrases like “racial injustice”, “racial oppression” or “racial bias” are slipped into the conversation.  The same reactions rise when words like “homophobia”, and “sexism” are introduced.

My assumption was that diversity trainers would need to anticipate and defuse the strong emotions they inevitably encounter in workplace settings.  To test my hunch, I ordered Howard Ross’s Reinventing Diversity.  Ross feels like a minority because he is Jewish and like a member of the dominant group because he is white.  He has worked as a diversity consultant for several decades and his thinking has shifted dramatically in recent years.

At a training in central Louisiana, a white man with roots in the region admitted that the stories he was hearing left him feeling torn and confused.  “Here’s my problem,” he said.  “My father and grandfather were the most important people in my life.  They’re both gone now, but they taught me everything I know.  They taught me fishing from the time I was this high.” He motioned with his hand.  “They were leaders in our community, helped people.  My grandfather was the pastor of my church.  They taught me to be a good father . . .”

And then he dropped the bomb.  “But they were both members of the Klan. (more…)

Why you’re in Deep Trouble if You Can’t Afford a Lawyer

·

If you’re wondering why indigent defendants rarely get a fair break check out this graph.  Law enforcement expansion has kept pace with an exploding prison population, but money for courts, judges, prosecutors has lagged and funding for public defenders, has hardly changed at all.  The result: your public defender or court appointed attorney simply doesn’t have the time to defend you.   This goes a long way to explaining why so many cases are settled by plea bargain regardless of the merits: the system can’t afford to take cases to trial even when the facts are murky.   Read the full article at Mother Jones.

Republicans take the lead on criminal justice reform

·

By Alan Bean

Politics is behind the cancerous growth of the prison-industrial complex.  Tough on crime rhetoric only works on the stump if it translates into legislation after the election.  Politicians run on their records and everyone had a vested interest in establishing the right kind of record on public safety.  This article in CQ gives the impression that Democrats have long been in support of ending mandatory minimums and introducing lighter sentences.  It would be more accurate to say that some Democrats would have embraced the politics of compassion and common sense had that been an option.  But since the mid-1970s, it hasn’t been an option.

The ship of fools that brought us the prison-industrial complex is beginning to turn.  Big ships don’t turn quickly.  In fact, the federal prison system has been growing in recent years, largely thanks to nasty immigration policies shaped by post 9-11 hysteria.  But Republican politicians are in search of a kinder-gentler face (no one wants to look like the guy in the cartoon), so the reform agenda has a chance.  How far this new mood takes us remains uncertain.  Everything depends on how far and how fast Republican politicians are willing to move.  This is a Nixon Goes to China moment.  Democrats are still too fearful of political backlash to take the real risks reform demands.

An End to the Jailhouse Blues?

By John Gramlich, CQ Staff
May 13, 2013

Congressional Democrats have argued for years that too many low-level drug offenders are locked away in federal prisons and that mandatory-sentencing laws disproportionately harm minorities and tie judges’ hands. Lately, they have been joined in those criticisms by Sen. Rand Paul, a tea-party-backed Republican with White House aspirations. (more…)

Learning to love a Thermostat God

· 2 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

“Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?”

This question was originally scrawled in the margin of an Alabama newspaper by an exasperated Martin Luther King Jr.  The church was once a thermostat “that transformed the mores of society,” King told the white clergymen of Birmingham, but it has degenerated into a thermometer that merely reflects the “ideas and principles of public opinion.”

Organized religion takes a dreadful beating in the final section of King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.  From the earliest days of the civil rights movement, King alleges, most religious leaders have “remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.”

In the midst of “a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic justice,” white clergymen have stood on the sidelines mouthing “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”

Preachers have preached the heretical notion that the gospel is unrelated to social issues.  They have concocted “a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, unbiblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.”

The comes the most chilling indictment of all:

On sweltering summer summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward . . . Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here?  Who is their God?”

A thermometer church speaks for a thermometer God who reflects “the ideas and principles of public opinion.”  Fifty years ago, the church was, to use King’s phrase, “the arch defender of the status quo”.  Now we can’t even manage that.  While the larger society inches graceward, we cling to our cherished bigotries.  Our thermometer God lies shattered on the floor and no power on earth can put the pieces back together.

When the Richmond Baptist Association refused to discipline Ginter Park Baptist Church for ordaining a gay man to minister to persons with disabilities and special needs, it was simply acknowledging a change in the social temperature.  Ginter Park wasn’t taking a principled stand on gay rights or marriage equality; the congregation was simply recognizing the gifts of God in a particular believer.  The Richmond Association was neither condoning nor condemning the congregation’s action; it merely decided, albeit by a slim margin, to sweep the matter under the ecclesiastical carpet.

Conflict avoidance worked just fine when the church served as a social thermometer, but those days are gone.

And that’s just fine.  In fact, it’s great!  Only a thermostat God can save us.

When was the last time you heard a Baptist minister, conservative or moderate, talk about God’s love for undocumented immigrants?

I don’t want to hear partisan politics from the pulpit anymore than you do; but the gospel of the kingdom transcends politics because the biblical God transcends borders, skin color, language, gender, nationality or any other arbitrary human distinction.

Our preaching must reckon with a thermostat God who is eternally fiddling with the social temperature.  But what can a thermostat God do with a church that, having lost the power to reinforce the moral statues quo, stands on the sidelines mumbling “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”

Not much of anything, it seems.

The church will leaven the social order when the gospel of the kingdom leavens the church.  Light generates heat.  A thermostat God can’t thaw a frozen culture without cranking up the temperature in the Body of Christ.

Conservatives divide over immigration reform

·
Jim DeMint of the Heritage Foundation

By Alan Bean

The immigration reform debate is dividing politicians and pundits on both sides of the ideological divide.

At the liberal end of the spectrum, activists fear that the “seal the border” rhetoric emerging from the bipartisan “gang of eight” will be a boon for the private prison industry and a disaster for civil rights.  Moderate democrats (President Obama among them) respond with the argument that asking for everything could mean getting nothing.

On the right, as Jennifer Rubin’s column in the Washington Post suggests, the fight is between pro-reform Republicans who realize the GOP can’t afford to be labeled anti-Latino, and hard line partisans who have built careers on a foundation of white racial resentment.  The extreme ideologues oppose immigration reform for the simple reason that Barack Obama (the arch liberal in their view) is for it.  The Democrats can pander to their minority base with give away and amnesty programs if they like, the conservatives say, we’re on the side of hardworking, honest, decent (that is, white) Americans.

The consistently conservative Rubin is particularly alarmed by a recent Heritage Foundation report that laments the prospect of millions of freeloading Mexicans overloading the American welfare system.  This approach isn’t just insulting to Latinos, Rubin says, it unwittingly embraces the liberal heresy of a static economic pie.  Since there are only so many human and natural resources to go around, liberals say, we’ve got to conserve resources while adopting Small is Beautiful economic policies.

Rubin rends her garments in horror.  Because the economy is a dynamic and growing organism, she says, millions of motivated Latino workers taking jobs, paying taxes and building homes is a sure-fire recipe for economic expansion.

Conservative leaders slam Heritage for shoddy immigration study

Posted by Jennifer Rubin on May 6, 2013 at 5:06 pm

In what was almost certainly an unprecedented press call, top fiscal conservatives from Americans for Tax Reform, the Cato Institute, the Kemp Foundation and the American Action Network took what had once been the premier conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, to the woodshed for its immigration report that sees trillions in cost and no benefits from immigration reform.

With a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, Josh Culling of ATR said that while Heritage was a “treasured ally,” its work was a rehash of a flawed 2007 study that ignored all the benefits of immigration reform. Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh was even more outspoken saying “how disappointed” he was that Heritage abandoned conservative dynamic scoring (i.e. the impact a piece of legislation’s impact on the economy). He accused Heritage of not following years of their own work, which has striven to look at the impact on behavior of changes resulting from reforming the tax code and other innovations. “They ignored GDP, they ignored productivity,” he said in reeling off the list of items in the Gang of 8 legislationleft out of Heritage. Cato’s study, which did use dynamic scoring, found that immigration reform would add $1.5 trillion in growth over ten years while forcing out 11 million immigrants (the Heritage solution) would lower GDP by $2.6 trillion over ten years. (more…)