Category: economics

Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus

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This article requires no introduction or explanation, so I’ll shut up and let you read.  Comments welcome.  AGB

Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus

Phil Zuckerman. Professor of Sociology, Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.  Dan Cady, assistant professor of history at California State University, Fresno.

The results from a recent poll published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Tea-Party-and-Religion.aspx) reveal what social scientists have known for a long time: White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus. It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to reject his teachings and despise his radical message. (more…)

The drug war is a long way from over

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When the Wall Street Journal endorses the growing shift from mass incarceration to rehabilitation and diversion programs, something is in the wind.  But let’s not pop the champagne corks too quickly.  Politicians are beginning to understand that long prison terms for drug offenses have failed to deter drug abuse or the illegal drug trade.  Furthermore, prisons, even if run on the cheap, are unspeakably expensive.  All of this is good.

Mass incarceration is primarily a function of the war on drugs, a slash and burn campaign that–its own propaganda notwithstanding–was never about getting drugs and drug dealers off the streets.  The drug war is about social control.  When a nation turns its back on its poorest citizens (as American did in late 197os) bad things are bound to happen.  Desperate people take desperate measures.  Those with little access to legitimate work will turn to illegitimate work–like selling drugs.  Middle class addicts can fund their habits, but poor addicts sling drugs and commit property crime to keep the supply flowing.  Entire neighborhoods become economically dependent on the trade in illegal drugs even as they are afflicted by unbearably high crime rates.  (more…)

Wisconsin: ‘Welcome to our world’

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If Wisconsin workers wanted to live in North Carolina, they’d move there.  As Chris Kromm argues over at Facing South, union-busting politics is really about the Dixification of America. 

Southern workers to Wisconsin: ‘Welcome to our world!’

By Chris Kromm
In 1959, the state of Wisconsin, a hotbed of labor activism and progressive politics, became the first state in the nation to give public workers the right to bargain collectively.

That same year, 1,000 miles away in North Carolina, state lawmakers — stoked by Cold War anti-unionism and Jim Crow-era fears of interracial cooperation — took a step in the opposite direction, passing one of a few laws in the nation that still ban public employees from having bargaining rights.

Today, the issue of labor rights for public workers is once again on the national agenda, sparked by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) move on February 11 to rescind bargaining rights there. (more…)

“To save money, let’s all quit our jobs and drop out of school!”

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A week ago, Gerald Britt wrote a column for the Dallas Morning News questioning the sanity of the program-cutting frenzy in Washington (see below).  In his blog, Rev. Britt updates his crique.  The striking conclusion to the blog post sums things up nicely:

The Rev. Gerald Britt

“In order to rebuild the economy, we must cut education spending, cut job training, cut supports for the low-income and elderly, cut access to health care for those who can least afford it AND give tax cuts to those who have no track record of utilizing tax cuts for 10 years to provide jobs to stimulate the economy?! And, after we have enacted all of these cuts, the poor and low income, the untrained, the elderly, the homeless, the hungry, the incarcerated, the sick and the poorly educated and the inadequately educated will provide the foundation for a new and revived economy?

Seriously?

It’s the equivalent of a family deciding that, in order to save money on gas, we will all quit our jobs and drop out of school.” (more…)

McWhorter: end the drug war and racial tension evaporates

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John McWhorter

John McWhorter is a conservative African-American who enjoys needling white liberals and the “racism-is-still-real” brand of civil rights advocacy.  For over a year now McWhorter’s take on race has taken on a decidedly libertarian tone.  He’s for legalizing drugs; all of them.

The Cato Institute’s current newsletter contains a PDF version of McWhorter’s new message.  The version I have pasted below appeared last year in The New Republic.

If you are a fan of HBO’s The Wire (the best television of all time in my opinion), the essential features of McWhorter’s argument will come as no surprise.  African-American youth have little incentive to look for conventional work because drug money comes so easy.  As a result, hundreds of thousands of black males are doing time on drug charges, inner city street gangs slaughter one another in turf battles, black children have no fathers, black women give up on finding a marriage partner, and everything goes to hell. (more…)

Texas history texts ripped by conservative group

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By Alan Bean

“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”  – George Orwell, 1984

George Orwell learned how easily the past is misremembered as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War and during his years with the BBC in WWII.  Orwell is a hero to both the left and the right because he believed in relating historical fact as objectively and honestly as fallible flesh is able. 

As the culture wars rage, it is incumbent upon partisans on the left and right to police their own side of the conflict.  When 57% of Republicans believe the president is a Muslim, 45% believe he was born outside the United States, and 24% believe Mr. Obama may be the antiChrist, we’ve got a problem that only Republican leaders can effectively address.  We aren’t selling out when we critique our own people; we’re ensuring that the game is fairly played.

That is precisely what the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute has done in its report on the historical curricula taught in American schools.  Their dissection of the Texas State Board of Education’s distorted historical vision is utterly devastating.  I have pasted some of the pithy highlights below, but I urge you to read the entire report. (more…)

Jesus, Ayn Rand and the art of the impossible

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Maybe Jesus didn't really mean it

By Alan Bean

My wife Nancy and I are teaching a confirmation class at our Methodist church in Arlington, Texas.  While we are stuffing our students’ heads with information about the Bible, God, Jesus, the Church and Christian discipleship, we thought we should also let the Bible speak on its own terms.  We decided to work through an entire book of the Bible in the course of nine months and settled on the Gospel of Mark; it’s the shortest and most succinct of the Gospels. 

Mark is also the most brutal document in the Christian New Testament, in the sense of assaulting modern sensibilities.  It isn’t just that Jesus performs miracles of healing every time he turns around (we moderns could attribute that to the power of suggestion); it’s the bits about money and power that sting the most. (more…)

Was the Moynihan Report racist?

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By Alan Bean

A recent post touched on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”  (You can read Moynihan’s report here.)  A New York Times article celebrating the political incorrectness of Jonathan Haidt suggested that many prominent sociologists now agreed with Moynihan’s controversial ideas.  Below I have pasted two examples of this phenomenon, one by Harvard’s William Julius Wilson, the other by James T. Patterson, a Brown University history professor.

First, let me share a few of my own thoughts.  We must distinguish between Moynihan’s actual report and the version of that report reflected in contemporary media accounts.  Moynihan, a trained sociologist, touched on a wide variety of issues, but the media chose to focus on his “tangle of pathology” in the black family.  In Moynihan’s defense, he didn’t actually say that all black families were disintegrating.  Middle class blacks were doing just fine, he acknowledged; it was the folks in the urban slums he worried about.  (more…)

Does banning the noose change anything?

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For the fourth straight year, Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has introduced an anti-noose bill.  The Noose Hate Crime Act of 201 stipulates that “Whoever, with intent to harass or intimidate any person because of that person’s race, color, religion, or national origin, displays a noose in public shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.”

Hate crimes legislation, though admirable at first glance, raises serious First Amendment issues.  In practice, it will be difficult to prove that a specific noose hanger was motivated by a desire to “harass or intimidate”. 

Jackson Lee’s bill was first introduced as a response to the noose hanging in Jena Louisiana, but I’m not sure it would (or should) apply to that kind of situation.  What would have been gained by locking up the Jena noose hangers for two years?  Would this teach them a lesson they would never forget, or would it simply harden the racial resentment that motivated their act in the first place? (more…)

Budget Crunch Offers No Hope for Reduction in Incarceration in Texas

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By Dr. Charles Kiker

Some pundits have speculated that the budget crises in the states could result in reduced incarceration. After all, reduction in prison populations could save states a bundle. Alan Bean has a couple of recent posts on the Friends of Justice blog that deal with this prospect: “Why are Newt and Grover jumping on the prison reform bandwagon?” (January 8, 2011) and “Is mass incarceration history?” (January 18, 2011). Bean doesn’t hold out much hope, as indicated by his comment in the latter article: “We may see a year or two of minor decline in the prison population, but when happy days are here again politicians will start banging the ‘tough on crime’ drum? (more…)