8 More Things the Rich Do Every Day

November 20, 2013 By Fred Clark

Dave Ramsey blames victims and preaches a false gospel of Anti-Jubilee.

I understand he speaks in churches. I picture him walking to the pulpit, turning to the same words of Isaiah that Jesus preached from, reading the same passage Jesus read, and then saying, “Today, this scripture has been renounced in your hearing.”

But then maybe, besides all that, he’s a nice guy on some kind of compartmentalized personal level. And maybe there’s no such thing as karma, and so he’ll never have to pay a price for promoting odious crap like Tom Corley’s “20 Things the Rich Do Every Day.” Corley might as well have called this list: “A Rich Guy Finds 20 Different Ways to Accuse the Poor of Being Lazy.” Or maybe, “20 Reasons I, Tom Corley, Should Be First Up Against the Wall When the Revolution Comes.”

In the spirit of that nasty little kick-’em-while-they’re-down manifesto, here’s an extension of that list from Corley that Dave Ramsey likes so much:

8 More Things the Rich Do Every Day

21. Collect debts owed to them, with interest. (99.99 percent of wealthy people collect interest from those who owe them money. They do this every single day. Nearly all poor people lazily fail to do this.)

22. Fully exploit every tax break, government subsidy and taxpayer-handout available to them. Wealthy people don’t leave money on the table by failing to take 100 percent — or even 150 percent — of every penny available to them through corporate tax breaks, investment subsidies, the home-mortgage deduction, loopholes and the like. Wealthy people even take the responsible step of hiring professionals to ensure that they’ve milked every cent that an expansive reading of the law might technically allow. Poor people almost never hire such professionals. Participation rates for things like SNAP, Medicaid, Head Start, and even unemployment insurance show that poor people tend to be utterly irresponsible when it comes to efficiently exploiting all the taxpayer money they’re legally due. Lazy.

23. Withhold wages. It’s been estimated that about 20 percent of employers — i.e., wealthy people — routinely practice some form of wage theft. Poor people, on the other hand, almost never take advantage of the free labor available from their workers due to lax regulation, an unlevel legal playing field, and blatant corruption.

24. Take sole responsibility for their financial status. Ask any wealthy person who is responsible for their wealth and most of them will tell you that no one is responsible other than they themselves. Poor people never step up like that. They’re always looking to blame somebody else for laying them off, or ripping them off, or they’re whining about not being paid a living wage or about being charged more because poverty makes for a lousy credit score. Failing to take full personal responsibility for your personal financial status is just lazy,

25. Borrow money from their parents. Wealthy people are able to borrow money from their parents because their parents also tend to be wealthy. Poor people are unable to borrow money from their parents because their parents also tend to be poor. This proves that laziness and irresponsibility are genetic.

26. Declare bankruptcy. While only a small percentage of wealthy people declare bankruptcy personally, many have learned that it’s often quite profitable to purchase a company, drive it into the ground, run up its debt, lay off its workers, sell off its parts, and then dissolve it in bankruptcy. Poor people never bother to learn this technique. And whereas some billionaires, like Donald Trump, have enjoyed bankruptcy multiple times, the vast majority of poor people have been too lazy to put together the kind of vast personal fortune that would allow them to do so legally or quasi-legally.

27. Lobby lawmakers to rig the game in their favor. Do you know what you call a lobbyist who works to skew legislation in favor of the wealthy? “A lobbyist.” Do you know what you call a lobbyist who works on behalf of poor people and their interests? That’s a trick question — there’s no such thing.* Wealthy people take the personal responsibility to hire lobbyists to protect, pursue and privilege their interests — not just in Washington, but in every statehouse, city hall and county office building in America. Lazy poor people just sit back, never spending a penny on such advocacy.

28. Oppress widows, orphans and strangers. Wealthy people know that while there doesn’t seem to be much money to be gained from exploiting those who have the least, the secret to such success is volume. Poor people lack the self-discipline to exploit the powerless. They’re too busy lazily being exploited themselves.

* Actually, there a several awesome lobby groups that champion the interests of the poor. Some, like ACORN, have been destroyed as punishment for doing so, but groups like Bread for the World and Network are still alive and kicking. They leverage a lot of bang for the buck, but still, if you compare the total budgets of groups like that with the total lobbying budget for the other side you’ll come up with a percentage that looks like a rounding error for zero.

7 things @ 9 o’clock (10.28)

October 28, 2013 By Fred Clark

1. Jim Macdonald at Making Light points us to a fascinating older post by Maciej Ceglowski on “Scott and Scurvy.” It reads like a parable.

2. The Consumerist asks “What Kind of Jerk Refuses to Tip a Waiter Because He’s Gay?”

Can you guess what kind of jerk? Did you guess the sanctimonious religious type who demonizes others in a desperate attempt to pretend they’re holy?

Because that, it turns out, is the kind of jerk who does this jerky thing. Because “religious liberty.”

3. Also from Consumerist: “Americans Racking Up Debt Faster Than We Save for Retirement.” A new study finds that 60 percent of American households are accumulating debt faster than retirement savings. (What are these “retirement savings” you speak of?)

This is news to the researchers conducting this study, but it’s not news, of course, to 60 percent of American households, except maybe the news that what is true for them is true for three-fifths of the rest of the country. Or maybe the news that life is somehow not like this for about two fifths of the country.

Jubilee. We await the year of God’s favor. It really is our only hope.

4. Spoiler Alert: Mark Driscoll’s Jesus is Tyler Durden, which means …. OMG!

“Why do people think that I’m you? Answer me! Why do people think that I’m you?”

5. Here’s Scot McKnight discussing Claude Mariottini’s discussion of one of my favorite biblical idioms: “any that pisseth against the wall.” They argue that something meaningful is lost when this phrase gets sanitized into a polite, neutral euphemism for “males.” I enjoyed this discussion for the same silly reasons I enjoyed all those “pisseth against the wall” verses when I was a kid in KJV-only fundie circles, but there’s a more serious point here too. The biblical writers knew the word for “males” and — in these instances — they chose not to use it. Ignoring that rude choice, or contradicting it, disregards and disrespects the text. Yet because this disregard and disrespect is based on a notion of “inspiration” that plays down the human agency of the biblical writers, it’s inaccurately referred to as a “high view of scripture.”

6. Corporations may be powers and principalities, but the legal agreement creating them does not breathe into them a living soul:

By incorporating his business, Potter voluntarily forfeited his rights to bring individual actions for alleged corporate injuries in exchange for the liability and financial protections otherwise afforded him by utilization of the corporate form. Adoption of Potter’s argument that he should not be liable individually for corporate debts and wrongs, but still should be allowed to challenge, as an individual, duties and restrictions placed upon the corporation would undermine completely the principles upon which our nation’s corporate laws and structures are based. We are not inclined to so ignore law, precedent, and reason.

7. Yesterday was the Slacktivixen’s birthday, so how’s about a love song?

Scenes from the class war

October 24, 2013 By Fred Clark

“3) You are advertising around the world — how do you advise your clients to get to your shelter in the event of the kind of disaster for which you are preparing?”

“Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages, and healthy food isn’t just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It’s killing them.”

“Once upon a time the saying on Wall Street was what’s good for business is good for America, but that has it backwards, tragically, woefully backwards. It’s what’s good for America is good for business.”

“But manipulation of costs and other data by oil companies is keeping billions of dollars in royalties out of the hands of private and government landholders, an investigation by ProPublica has found.”

“They just send unlicensed, unregulated people who break down doors and do whatever they want.”

“Most people seem to think that First Amendment-ish freedoms — the freedom of not merely speech but of expression, of personal style, etc. — apply in the workplace. They don’t.”

“If wages in food-service and other service jobs are not lifted, it is hard to see where adequate consumer demand will come from to generate and sustain a real recovery.”

“McDonald’s workers alone receive an estimated $1.2 billion in public assistance from taxpayers.”

“There are over two million such low-wage workers in the U.S. — over twice as many low-wage workers as there are at Walmart, which makes the federal government, surprisingly, the nation’s largest low-wage employer.”

“They have depended on diverting attention from obvious questions, such as just how does a smaller tax bill for the Koch brothers benefit us?”

“It may at first have seemed odd for a Fortune 500 corporation to have anything to do with the SNAP program, but Xerox, JPMorgan Chase and eFunds Corporation have all successfully turned poverty into a profit center.”

“In other words, our tax dollars are compensating private contractor executives at a level three times higher than Joe Biden’s paycheck.”

“We are looking for ways to reopen the portions of the government that we agree with.”

“I’m not going to raise the debt ceiling.”

“With these 300 fraudulent votes created by one Republican candidate alone, that’s 300 more fraudulent votes than have ever been created by ACORN or anybody who has ever worked for them.”

“There must be a story behind how all the major media outlets are falling all over themselves to talk about the scourge of disabled people going through immense amounts of major red tape and legal hassles in order to maybe, just maybe, score the golden ticket of $1000/month benefits.”

“Just to be absolutely clear, LePage’s statistic is completely wrong. Currently, around 65 percent of Mainers over the age of 15 are working or are unemployed and actively seeking work. Of the remaining 35 percent, almost all are retired, are caring for children or other family members, are pursuing education or training or have a disability that prevents them from working.”

“Despite spending $700,000 a year on eight additional fraud inspectors who fielded about 1,100 leads, the governor reported that only 45 cases of alleged fraud were referred to law enforcement.”

“In Texas, the state that will be depriving the most people of insurance by rejecting the expansion, only families under 25 percent of the poverty level, or $4,894 for a family of three, will be eligible for Medicaid. I’m guessing that’s about what Rick Perry spends on boots every year.”

“While Mr. Keltner’s research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power.”

“These are some of the most promising programs the Department of Education has available to heavily indebted students.”

“There’s no single answer. The only thing these countries have in common is a simple commitment to taking poverty seriously and doing something about it.”

“What we really need is a bigger Social Security system.”

“I’m glad we are a religious nation.”

7 things @ 9 o’clock (10.22)

October 22, 2013 By Fred Clark

1. Israel awards first $1 million Genesis Prize to a multi-billionaire.

2. Brad Leithauser deserves to be cited for this piece on “Unusable Words.”

3. “Not hearing any substantive, worthy objections, I will proceed …” and “As appears to have become the norm for these things, the ground did not open up to swallow anyone involved in today’s ceremonies …”

4. Congratulations to Antje Jackelen, the bishop of Lund, who just became the first woman elected archbishop of the Church of Sweden. That’s good news. The other piece of religious news from Sweden is not: 49 percent of Swedish Jews say they avoid wearing a kippah or anything else that would publicly identify them as Jewish, fearing anti-Semitism.

5. States of dismay: Florida. Florida. Florida. Florida. Florida. Florida. Florida. Florida. (Trigger warning for those last two.)

6. Jessica Bluemke engages the creepy logic of something called Chastity Project. The whole post is fun, but one image she uses stood out for me:

They kick off by basically saying the same thing I would when waiting tables: “I know, ma’am. If it were up to me, I would totally allow you to substitute your side of fries for an additional steak, but my d-bag manager says I can’t!”

That’s a terrific description of something I see all the time in my evangelical church and subculture — a kind of reluctant, guilty obedience. And I think it derives from an idea of God as just exactly this kind of overbearing, capriciously cruel boss whose edicts must be obeyed even when they seem unnecessary or unjust.

7. Jubilee, one way or another:

7 things @ 11 o’clock (8.26)

August 26, 2013 By Fred Clark

1. “There’s a certain beauty in anyone doing anything about as well as it can possibly be done,” Mark Evanier writes in a fine post on the great Vin Scully, who will be returning next year for his 65th season as the voice of the Dodgers. That same statement could just as easily describe a more recent post from ME — with video — about the terrific moment in which Kristin Chenoweth picked a volunteer from the audience to sing with her. That volunteer, music teacher Sarah Horn, nailed it.

Chenoweth is a fantastic singer and performer (see this, for example), but seeing her sing beautifully doesn’t bring a lump to the throat the way it does when we see someone unexpectedly come through like Susan Horn or David Tolley or Susan Boyle or Michael Pollack did. Regarding his return for another season as the soundtrack of summer, Vin Scully said, “I have always felt that I am the most ordinary of men who was given an extraordinary break of doing what I love to do at an early age.” It’s always beautiful to see someone given such a break and making the most of it.

2. “The Battle of Blair Mountain is one of the least known major events in American history,” Erik Loomis writes in Sunday’s installment of his “This Day in Labor History” series. I had never read about this before, and perhaps you haven’t either — that’s by design, not by accident. Chris Hedges wrote about the Battle of Blair Mountain last year. Here are some amazing newspaper photos from the uprising. (For another taste of little-known American history, see also Loomis’ post on visiting the grave of Henry Clay Frick, American super-villain.)

3. Here’s a horrible, if all-too predictable story, about NSA agents abusing their access to spy on and stalk their ex-girlfriends. Paul Bibeau of Goblinbooks notes that reality is outpacing his best efforts to make fun of it. But screenwriters take note: what you’ve got here is the basis for a heart-pounding Hollywood thriller with all the conventions of a innocent underdog vs. shadowy powers story — and at the same time a subversive vehicle for a pointed critique of unaccountable government surveillance and of misogynist rape culture.

4. Evangelism is hospitality. Inhospitality is the opposite of evangelism. The Ridgedale Church of Christ may be in Ridgedale, Tenn., but every other word in its name is a damnable lie.

5. Rep. Spencer Bachus is a very conservative Republican representing the very conservative Republican 6th District of Alabama. But here’s what Bachus recently told constituents on the question of immigration reform:

Y’all may think I’m copping out, but with my Christian faith, it’s hard for me to say that I’m gonna divide these families up. … Bring ’em into our system. Give them legal status. They will pay Social Security. They’ll work hard. […]

I’ll tell you this, as your congressman, I am not gonna separate families or send them back.

Good for him. Immigration reform has everything to do with hospitality. Given Bachus’ reference to “my Christian faith,” the congressman’s remarks also has quite a bit to do with evangelism. Atrios’ response to Bachus shows, again, that inhospitality is a form of anti-evangelism: “Spencer Bachus doesn’t have the best record on this stuff, but kudos at least for him deciding that maybe he doesn’t want to be a total a–hole.”

Deciding that maybe we don’t want to be total a–holes is still a long way from creating a compelling public witness for our faith. But it’s still a big improvement over continuing to think that we do want to be total a–holes. Baby steps.

6. Corey Robin notes the passing of Jean Bethke Elshtain: “Many people were fans of her work; I was not.”

7. “Our Turn to Dream” Jubilee, for God’s sake. Jubilee.

7 things @ 6 o’clock (7.29)

July 29, 2013 By Fred Clark

1. “A woman who discovered huge errors in her Equifax credit report and couldn’t get them fixed was awarded a total of $18.6 million in damages. She contacted Equifax eight times about the errors between 2009 and 2011, but they remained on her report.”

That big number will, as usual, likely be whittled way down on appeal — particularly the $18.4 million of it that the jury awarded as punitive damages. But this is still a positive sign of push-back against the unelected, usually unaccountable overlords of the credit reporting agencies, whose vast and growing influence on our lives is relentlessly awful.

2. Steve Wiggins reminisces about an obscure tribal debate among white evangelicals of a certain age: What about the Violent Femmes? My short answer: Frontman Gordon Gano is, like Alice Cooper, an American Baptist PK (pastor’s kid), who has described himself in the past as a “devout Baptist.” But if you’re looking for “Christian themes in rock music” from Gano, check out the delicious self-titled album from Mercy Seat — his gospel-punk side project with Zena Von Heppinstall. Check out “I’ve Got a Feeling” or “Let the Church Roll On.”

3. Steve Benen has a smart piece about the blue-state/red-state patchwork taking shape as the 2014 arrival of Obamacare approaches. In places like New York, California and Maryland, residents will be very pleased to find better coverage and lower premiums. But in places like Indiana and Ohio, where Republican governors have been working hard to make sure residents won’t be pleased with the law, it’s benefits won’t be nearly as obvious or as beneficial. That’s been the goal of GOP attempts to obstruct Obamacare at every turn — to prevent residents from enjoying the benefits it can provide.

Benen asks the key question: “What happens in those red states when residents start looking across borders and they wonder to themselves, ‘Why aren’t my benefits as great as theirs?'” (The answer, I think, is that they’ll start telling lies about New York and California just as they have, for years, about Canada. Expect to hear scary stories and urban legends about death panels, waiting lists and the “undeserving” — i.e., non-white — somehow stealing health coverage that rightly belongs only to real ‘murkans.)

4. Once again, here is a quote I love, attributed to St. Augustine: “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” (Trigger warning for that link to Sarah Moon’s “When Anger Saved My Life,” which is hopeful, beautiful, angry and courageous, but also frankly discusses and describes abusive violence and sexual violence.)

5. “Operation Cross Country.” The FBI held a news conference this morning, “in which they announced that 105 children have been rescued from a child sex-trafficking scheme that spanned 76 U.S. cities and has landed over 150 people in cuffs.”

6. “Willie Reed (Louis) died last week at the age of 76.” I did not recognize his name and I did not know his story, although I knew about the larger story in which he played a courageous role. He was, as Paul Campos describes him, “An American Hero.”

7. No vengeance in Jubilee. At Internet Monk, Mike Bell discusses Jesus’ first public sermon — his “mission statement,” taken from the book of Isaiah:

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.

To fully catch what’s going on there, Bell notes, you have to look at the passage Jesus is quoting, from Isaiah 61. He stops reading mid-sentence. Isaiah says, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.” Jesus got to that bit about vengeance, “And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.” Hmmm.

7 things @ 11 o’clock (7.26)

July 26, 2013 By Fred Clark

1. Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the best thing I ever did and of the best thing anybody ever did for me.

2. Jubilee. Jubilee. Jubilee.

3. The Rowan County (N.C.) Board of Commissioners has been rebuked by a U.S. District Court on account of their unconstitutional disagreeable animadversions.

Related: Anderson County, Tenn., has decided to put a sectarian religious statement on its courthouse. A local pastor, Steve McDonald, said it didn’t matter if this privileged one religion over others because of “majority rule.” McDonald is pastor of Calvary “Baptist” Church, but apparently that refers to the brand name of the staatskirche in his part of Tennessee and not to the form of Protestantism that practices believers’ baptism. McDonald’s logic is precisely the same as that of Mohamed Morsi, but it not compatible with anything describable as “Baptist.”

4. Again, the problem is not only that social conservatives oppose scientifically accurate sex education, but that social conservatives have never had scientifically accurate sex education.

5. “It is so disrespectful of women, and what’s really stunning about it is they don’t even realize, they don’t have a clue,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. She’s talking about Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner and Democratic San Diego Mayor Bob Filner. And she’s right: “If they need therapy, do it in private.” TBogg adds some appropriate (but NSFW) commentary.

6. It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. “You guys are dancin’ to truth!”

7. Richard Beck on “Being Hopeful and Dogmatic“:

I think universal reconciliation in Christ is the only view of the afterlife that gives the Christian faith moral, biblical, intellectual and theological coherence. I’m dogmatic about that, about how universal reconciliation in Christ is the only view that makes sense when you really investigate the other options. In light of that, I’d say I’m more of a polemical universalist than a dogmatic universalist. I’m polemical in that I argue — strongly — that universal reconciliation in Christ is the only view that makes Christianity morally, biblically and theologically coherent and that all the other options — e.g., eternal conscious torment, conditionalism, and annihilationism — make Christianity morally, biblically and theologically incoherent (if not monstrous). I’ll argue that deep into the night and into the next day. That’s the polemical part. But being polemical — arguing the merits of your view against the weaknesses of alternative views — isn’t the same as being dogmatic. Because at the end of the day, do I know if any of this is really true? I don’t.

7 things @ 11 o’clock (7.19)

July 19, 2013 By Fred Clark

1. You can get killed just for living in your American skin.

2. Republican House members Pete King, Michael Grimm, Christopher Gibson, Richard Hanna, Tom Reed II, and Chris Collins are going to have a hard time explaining to their constituents in New York state why they all voted 37 times to repeal a law that will mean considerable savings in health insurance costs for those same constituents. “Health Plan Cost for New Yorkers Set to Fall 50%” The New York Times reports:

State insurance regulators say they have approved rates for 2014 that are at least 50 percent lower on average than those currently available in New York. Beginning in October, individuals in New York City who now pay $1,000 a month or more for coverage will be able to shop for health insurance for as little as $308 monthly. With federal subsidies, the cost will be even lower.

3. The final, official confirmation of the legalization of marriage equality in England and Wales is a big freaking deal. The queen’s “Royal Assent” is bound to have a ripple effect throughout the Commonwealth and even to stir things up a bit in the Anglican communion. It wasn’t major screaming-headline news, though, in part because all the major hurdles had already been cleared and we knew this was coming, but also because we’re all getting more used to this. It’s no longer earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting news, but more like one more in a growing list of milestones on a long, still-incomplete journey on which we seem to be gaining momentum.

So once again it’s kind of Big News that this story isn’t bigger news. Opponents of marriage equality barely had the energy to rend their garments and proclaim that the sky will fall. We heard a few perfunctory lamentations from the usual suspects, but that was it.

The Texas Freedom Network has another dog-that-didn’t-bark story on San Antonio’s efforts to “pass a non-discrimination ordinance that, among other things, says businesses can’t tell prospective patrons to take their business elsewhere simply because they’re gay or lesbian.” The city’s most vocal and visible Catholic and evangelical leaders, TFN notes, “have been somewhat mum on the matter.”

It’s not that San Antonio mega-church pastor and “Bible prophecy scholar” John Hagee has renounced his virulently anti-gay preaching, but as TFN writes, “In a few short years he went from the intolerant rhetoric of blaming Adam and Steve for the worst natural disaster to strike this country to ‘no comment’ when approached by a reporter. And that is, um … progress?” Yes, it is.

4. Here’s another, more tangible bit of progress, and excellent news for 99 percent of Americans: “Senate Confirms Richard Cordray as Consumer Watchdog.” They’ve got all the money, but we’ve still got a few laws and rights to defend ourselves. And now we’ve got the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in place to ensure those laws and rights actually mean something.

Related, from Consumerist: “5 Sample Letters That Get Debt Collectors Out of Your Face.” And from the CFPB: “New ways to combat harmful debt collection practices.” I hope you never need that information, but there it is just in case. It’s useful stuff in a country where money is power and where nearly all of the church continues to ignore the first thing Jesus ever preached: Jubilee is everything.

5. Seriously, here is everything you need to know about American Christianity: Leviticus 20:13 is widely known and discussed as a clobber text and the litmus test for any Christians’ fidelity to the Bible. Deuteronomy 15:1 is not.

Sometimes I think we almost need a Westboro-style protest group with signs that say “God hates banks.” But instead we got Dave Ramsey and the perverse notion that debt is immoral only for the debtors.

6. Eric Bradenson courageously challenges his fellow Republicans to stop “denying the science” of climate change and to “admit that 97 percent of scientists just might be right.” Bradenson thinks small-government conservatives “have better answers than the other side” when it comes to the challenge of climate change and he boldly urges the GOP to change course — to lead rather than to obstruct in meeting that challenge.

Bradenson’s words are brave, but, as Steve Benen reports, the writer himself is a bit more prudently cautious. “Eric Bradenson” is actually a pseudonym, used “for job security reasons” to protect “his boss and himself.”

“In other words,” Benen says, “to write a piece making the case that Republicans can ‘win the climate debate’ by pushing conservative solutions to a real problem, is to put one’s job in Republican politics in jeopardy. This really isn’t healthy.”

7. The kids are all right. (And they’re also kind of adorable.)