Religion’s Demand For Obedience Keeps Us In The Dark Ages

The Article: How Religion’s Demand for Obedience Keeps Us in the Dark Ages by Adam Lee in AlterNet.

The Text: For the vast majority of human history, the only form of government was the few ruling over the many. As human societies became settled and stratified, tribal chiefs and conquering warlords rose to become kings, pharaohs and emperors, all ruling with absolute power and passing on their thrones to their children. To justify this obvious inequality and explain why they should reign over everyone else, most of these ancient rulers claimed that the gods had chosen them, and priesthoods and holy books obligingly came on the scene to promote and defend the theory of divine right.

It’s true that religion has often served to unite people against tyranny, as well as to justify it. But in many cases, when a religious rebellion overcame a tyrant, it was only to install a different tyrant whose beliefs matched those of the revolutionaries. Christians were at first ruthlessly persecuted by the Roman Empire, but when they ascended to power, they in turn banned all the pagan religions that had previously persecuted them. Protestant reformers like John Calvin broke away from the decrees of the Pope, but Calvinists created their own theocratic city-states where their will would reign supreme.

Similarly, when King Henry VIII split England away from the Catholic church, it wasn’t so he could create a utopia of religious liberty; it was so he could create a theocracy where his preferred beliefs, rather than the Vatican’s, would be the law of the land. And in just the same way, when the Puritans fled England and migrated to the New World, it wasn’t to uphold religious tolerance; it was to impose their beliefs, rather than the Church of England’s.

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When Doing Good Is Actually Bad

The Article: Syria: The evil results of doing good by Robert Grenier in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: Kofi Annan is a good man. We know that. We have all watched him for years. Where there is conflict and misunderstanding, whether among individuals, groups, or nations, he seeks conciliation. When two parties are in armed conflict, he does not take sides; instead, he tries to make peace.

But we also know that his instincts, however noble, have sometimes served him badly. That was true in Rwanda, when Annan’s forbearance provided evil men with an opportunity they should not have had. It was also occasionally true at the UN, where the corrupt and the abusive sometimes found sanctuary in the nurturing environment of the then-Secretary General’s tolerant understanding. And now, once again, we see Kofi Annan on a world stage, following, as usual, his noble instincts.

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Disposable Citizens: Corporate America’s Greatest Achievement

The Article: The Corporate Achievement Of Disposable Citizens To Enhance Profits in Sinclair News.

The Text: Nature’s havoc has an uncanny ability to peel back the facade of an evil government and lay bear the darkness of its soul. There has never been a more insidious environmental cover-up that will ultimately sacrifice or harmfully alter millions of lives in the future for the sake of profit than the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. The ongoing cover-up jointly managed by the governments of Japan and the United States over the facts and future consequences of the ongoing global radiation poisoning emanating from the Fukushima nuclear site reflects the depth of evil that both governments are capable of.

For the United States, this is just another in a long series of environmental disaster cover-ups designed to protect the profits of corporations. The political process that appoints corporate insiders to key government management and policy positions has been put in place to protect corporate interests at the expense of the public. The incestuous relationship that exists between the government and corporations is the tap root of a poisonous vine wrapped around the global economy whose nourishment is derived from Federal Reserve monetary policies, tax avoidance as well as the exploitation of the global environment and global working class.

Much of the evil that permeates American society is streamed through the abuse of government power on behalf of corporations and is perpetrated on innocent people by the ability of the corporate lobby to corrupt government power for self interest, suffocate democracy and thereby molest societies as they see fit. This is the evil lurking behind the Republican Faustian quest to dismantle regulations, the last road block preventing corporations from having free reign to abuse the environment, the rights of individuals, and the heritage of Americans for the sake of profits that pay no taxes.

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The ‘Land Of The Free’ Is A Farce

The Article: The myth of freedom in the land of the free by John Stoer in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: In 1893, a massive financial panic sent demand for the Pullman Palace Car Company into a downward spiral. The luxury rail car company reacted by slashing workers’ wages and increasing their work load. After negotiations with ownership broke down the following year, the American Railway Union, in solidarity with Pullman factory workers, launched a boycott that eventually shut down railroads across the US. It was a full-scale insurrection, as the late historian Howard Zinn put it, that soon “met with the full force of the capitalist state”.

The US Attorney General won a court order to stop the strike, but the union and its leader, Eugene V Debs, refused to quit. President Grover Cleveland, over the objections of Illinois’ governor, ordered federal troops to Chicago under the pretense of maintaining public safety. Soldiers fired their bayoneted rifles into the crowd of 5,000, killing 13 strike sympathisers. Seven hundred, including Debs, were arrested. Debs wasn’t a socialist before the strike, but he was after. The event radicalised him. “In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle,” Debs said later on, “the class struggle was revealed”.

I imagine a similar revelation for the tens of thousands of Americans who participated in last fall’s Occupy Wall Street protests. As you know, the movement began in New York City and spread quickly, inspiring activists in the biggest cities and the smallest hamlets. Outraged by the broken promise of the US and inspired by democratic revolts of Egypt and Tunisia, they assembled to protest economic injustice and corrupt corporate power in Washington.

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Why Austerity Measures Are Failing The UK’s Economy

The Article: U.K. Conservatives Come Up Short in Austerity Experiment by Clive Crook in Bloomberg News.

The Text: Since 2010 Britain has been a laboratory for an important experiment in economic policy. The question: When economies slump and public borrowing soars, can fiscal restraint speed the recovery? Preliminary findings: No, and whatever made you think it could?

The unemployed weren’t asked whether it was all right with them, but Britain was a good place for the experiment. For a start, its government actually controls fiscal policy. On Wednesday, Finance Minister George Osborne will set out his new budget in the House of Commons and, strange as it seems in Washington, that will be that. Osborne won’t call for Parliament to change tax rates or urge it (perhaps seriously, perhaps not) to do one thing or another. He will set policy, period.

As a place for this test, Britain had another advantage. Like the U.S. but unlike France or Germany, it has its own currency and runs its own monetary policy. Osborne doesn’t have to frame his budgets knowing, as governments in the euro area know, that interest rates will be set somewhere else according to somebody else’s needs.

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