American Theocracy

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American Theocracy

Postby professorpan » Sat Mar 18, 2006 4:18 am

via boingboing:<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/03/16/phillips/">www.salon.com/books/revie.../phillips/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.<br><br>Desperate economic times are not good for democracy. The Great Depression, which ushered in the New Deal, was an anomaly in this regard. In an Atlantic Monthly article published last summer, the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman wrote, "American history includes several episodes in which stagnating or declining incomes over an extended period have undermined the nation's tolerance and threatened citizens' freedoms." During the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s, when tens of thousands of families lost their land due to a combination of rising interest rates and falling crop prices, the Posse Comitatus, a far-right paramilitary network, made exceptional recruiting inroads. One poll had more than a quarter of Farm Belt respondents blaming "International Jewish bankers" for their region's woes. The right's ideological infrastructure has only grown stronger since then. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Kunstler may not have been exaggerating when he told Salon, "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar."</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=professorpan>professorpan</A> at: 3/18/06 1:18 am<br></i>
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Re: American Theocracy

Postby chiggerbit » Sat Mar 18, 2006 2:26 pm

A Jewish friend of mine assures me that Jewish kids ARE raised to know about money and how to make money work to earn money, that it is a typical topic of discussion at the dinner table and part of what Jewish parents impart to their children just as they do morals, language, etc. Now, I have no way of knowing how accurate this observation is, but if it is true of the typical Jewish family, then it would appear to show that handling money is something that can be taught.<br><br>Now, what I CAN speak to is how I was raised in the midwest, where I was taught that in order to get ahead in the world, you worked hard, as in physical labor kind of work, and that achievement and success should be measured by how hard a worker a person is. So, if my family was typical of my culture, can you imagine how unsettling it must be for these people to learn that no matter how hard they work, they can still be "failures", that the money institutions will always win, no matter what? So, when the bank is taking their home, they blame the bank, not their own parents, who never taught them how to make money work for them. <br><br>And when "my" people see that many news organizations are owned by Jews, they sit back and bitch about how the Jews control the news, instead of starting up their own news organizations. When my daughter was three, and she broke something, her answer was always, "A burgler did it." It would appear that whenever Jewish culture does well financially and the Christian culture doesn't, the Christian culture loves to blame their failure on the Jews. <br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=chiggerbit@rigorousintuition>chiggerbit</A> at: 3/18/06 11:31 am<br></i>
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Theocracy/Democracy

Postby LoganSquare » Sat Mar 18, 2006 3:27 pm

Semantics dooms a thread such as this one. For example, if you can except that all major religions are built around the concept of the Golden Rule, then when can the U.S be described as being theocratic? When has it ever been Democratic for that matter? Also, I'd like to see the citation for that poll concerning "International Jewish Bankers." <br><br>I grew up in a blue collar family in the Midwest too, Chiggerbit. My folks must have been a lot duller than yours, nobody even read the paper much less knew who owned it. <br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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