The Blind-eyed Marriage of the Conservative Churches to the Excessive & Corrupt Business Practices

How supremely odd it is that conservative Christians--who have hammered and continue to hector the country on certain moral issues (which they find absolute)--have been so silent, so tongue-tied, on the massive corruption and greed that inhabits the world of business all around them.

Turning the Tables on Wall Street: America’s Temple or Torment? 
“Jesus Purifies the Temple” (John 2: 2:13-25) in an engraving
by the German Nazarene artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1860)

The failure of social conservative moral leadership to call into account the business practices and aggressive failures of the marketplace - to be fair and honest - is a significant contributor to the escalation of the imbalance of wealth (the 1% & the 99% ers) and the pervasive societal moral decay that comes with trying to keep up with the corporate Jones'.

The blind-eyed marriage of the church to the excessive and corrupt business practices of some corporations and the outright fraud found in so many of the slick practices of the marketplace and especially Wall Street have sold the birthright of many Evangelical Christians into a world of excessive debt, unbearable family financial pressures, and everyday stress producing anxiety created by (and compounded by) job insecurity. It is a world where loyalty and length of service are considered expendable by businesses in the search of greater profits and better bottomlines. Add in a high level of unemployment among these self-same Evangelicals and the staggering debt of their children, young Evangelicals, who have taken on student loans in quest of a step-up career.

All forms of benefits and delayed compensation are now being sucked back into their sources by a new kind of greed-Corporate Givers cum Corporate Takers.

When the church loses its prophetic role in calling the CEO/men of power to task, to account for their disrespect for the underprivileged and the planned, immoral conduct of business, the rampant dishonest practices, it loses the power to speak the truth. 

“Lazarus and Rich Man” (Luke 16:19-31) from a 10th Century fresco in
the Monastery of Saint Ivan of Rila in Bulgaria (Reconstructed 1937-1946)

The Biblical story of the rich man and the beggar - the pauper who once was confined to scrounging the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table was eventually released from this mortal realm into paradise. His story illustrates this point.

The beggar, now in Paradise, could name his price for a drop of water to assuage the hellish torment of the eternally damned CEO named in the story. That wealthy man - upon dying - found himself suffering eternal torment in hell for his evil marketplace behavior. Now a torment-bound, abject beggar himself, he pleads for meager humanitarian aid from a higher place. He now pleads "give me just a drop of water!"

Wealth and the where-with-all to have one's way in the greater community do not substitute for character and compassion. Social conservatives would do well to remember this.

Conservative Evangelical Christians Must Divorce Themselves From Corporate Greed & Evil 

Conservative Christians must return to voting in their own best economic interests, and not get caught up in clever manipulation. Evangelicals must act in light of their own history of championing social reform: speak out, and vote in light of the full weight of moral conviction and principles encompassing more than a narrow list of hot button social issues managed by the conniving Svengali mavens on the extremes who inflict on Evangelicals untold pain and suffering via the mega-wealthy, TeaPartisan and Corporatist politics destroying family values and the family itself.

On the Reader:
More on Christian Values and Greed on the Gazette.

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Michissippi (Michigan) as Gone from Conservative, Headlong Into Brazen Corporatocracy

Michissippi as Gone from Conservative, Headlong Into Brazen Corporatocracy: “Good institutions neglected and ancient moral principles ignored, the evil in us tends to predominate.”

"Change and reform, conservatives are convinced, are not identical: moral and political innovation can be destructive as well as beneficial..." "Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age."

-- Russell Kirk (Michigan Conservative and role model claimed by John Engler)

Intemperance in the pursuit of Corporate Supermacy, Corporatocracy, is no virtue. 

More from Russel Kirk:

"Men and women are not perfectible, conservatives know; and neither are political institutions."

"We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell. We all are creatures of mingled good and evil; and, good institutions neglected and ancient moral principles ignored, the evil in us tends to predominate."

"Therefore the conservative is suspicious of all utopian schemes."

"He does not believe that, by power of positive law, we can solve all the problems of humanity."

"We can hope to make our world tolerable, but we cannot make it perfect. When progress is achieved, it is through prudent recognition of the limitations of human nature."

Unfortunately we so soon forget the greatness of Kirk's integrity, art, and brilliance extolling the virtues of true and lasting Conservatism.

Shamefully, the TeaPublican Super Majority has ignored and degraded Kirk's wisdom in their willful slide from the ideals of a real Conservatives into the near Anarchy of a godless Corporatocracy.

Corporatocracy is a direct threat to everything GENUINELY Conservative.

Michigan is being sold out for pennies on the dollar! We are being propelled well on the way into being legislatively and morally bankrupt; as well as economically stillborn.

CORPORATOCRACY: A social theory that focus on conflicts and opposing interests within society, denotes "a system of government that serves the interest of, and may be run by, corporations and involves ties between government and business. Where corporations, conglomerates, and/or government entities with private components, control the direction and governance of a country, including carrying out economic planning notwithstanding the 'free market' label."

Change and reform, conservatives are convinced, are not identical: moral and political innovation can be destructive as well as beneficial; and if innovation is undertaken in a spirit of presumption and enthusiasm, probably it will be disastrous. 

 

 - All human institutions alter to some extent from age to age, for slow change is the means of conserving society, just as it is the means for renewing the human body.
- American conservatives endeavor to reconcile the growth and alteration essential to our life with the strength of our social and moral traditions. With Lord Falkland, they say, "When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."
- (Conservatives) understand that men and women are best content when they can feel that they live in A STABLE WORLD OF ENDURING VALUES.

Conservatism, then, is not simply: - the concern of the people who have much property and influence;
- it is not simply the defense of privilege and status.

Most conservatives are neither rich nor powerful;
- But they do, even the most humble of them, derive great benefits from our established Republic.
- They have liberty, security of person and home, equal protection of the laws,
- The right to the fruits of their industry, and opportunity to do the best that is in them.
- They have a right to personality in life, and a right to consolation in death.

Conservative principles shelter the hopes of everyone in society. And CONSERVATISM IS A SOCIAL CONCEPT IMPORTANT TO EVERYONE WHO DESIRES EQUAL JUSTICE AND PERSONAL FREEDOM AND ALL THE LOVABLE OLD WAYS OF HUMANITY. 

Conservatism is not simply a defense of "capitalism."

"Capitalism," indeed, is a word coined by Karl Marx, intended from the beginning to imply that the only thing conservatives defend is vast accumulations of private capital.) But the true conservative does stoutly defend private property and a free economy, both for their own sake and because these are means to great ends.

What are these "Great Ends"? 

Those great ends are more than economic and more than political. (Great ends) involve:
- Human dignity
- Human personality
- Human happiness
- The relationship between God and man

(T)he radical collectivism of our age is fiercely hostile to any other authority: modern radicalism detests religious faith, private virtue, traditional personality, and the life of simple satisfactions. EVERYTHING WORTH CONSERVING IS MENACED IN OUR GENERATION.

Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age.

A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination.

Note: This is an outline of conservatism by Russel Kirk.

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Corporate Supremacy - The Road To Ruin

Corporate Supremacy is a direct threat to democracy and the broad road to a devastating Second National Economic Depression. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis D. Brandeis was author of stellar quote in yesterday's post.

Brandeis further stated with blistering truth:

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

These are very serious times. Conservatives are serious people, with steady, substantive objective wisdom and a real commitment to the survival of our democracy and way of life.

Where is Michigan's Russell Kirk when we need him?

"The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character-with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at the highest." 

-- Russell Kirk

From one expert on the history and development of American Conservatism:

"Laissez-faire Conservatives, in contrast, view the world through the lens of liberty, particularly the economic liberty of the free market and the political liberty of the minimal state."

"All of human history is seen as either the inhibition or progression of liberty. America is lauded as the cradle of liberty, created out of the spirit of self-reliance. The American Revolution is seen as a revolt against despotism, a milestone in the achievement of human liberty. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are revered as sacred symbols of limited government and individual rights."

"The concept of liberty is inextricably bound to the concepts of the individual. As the primary element of society, the individual is seen as an autonomous, rational, self-interested actor. Laissez-faire conservatives view humans as endowed with free will, initiative, and self-reliance. Left on their own, individuals will be creative and productive. The aim of a good society is to elevate the potential of humans by bringing this nature to fruition. This is best accomplished by protecting the economic liberty of the free market and the political liberty of the limited state."

"In stark contrast, then, to the ideal world of social conservatism, in which moral authority restricts self-interest and thereby integrates individuals into a community, the laissez-faire ideal poses a society in which natural harmony exists through the very pursuit of self-interest. It is the marketplace, rather than God or moral authority, that creates social harmony out of individual interest." 

-- Insights from Rebecca Klatch, author.

Somewhere common sense and a sprit of unity-the need to pull together in crisis-has been lost on those who play games with politics and blindly serve the goals of the Wall Street Speculators and the corrupt Bankers who have taken us down in this low and ultra-dangerous vortex.

Snyder's Michigan Dictator Law-known euphemistically as the EMF legislation-is one clearly serious aspect of a troubling "business best knows how to govern" illustrates a TeaPublican dive toward an impoverished Michissippi and a failed state. This dangerous mechanism is being used to strip community for the profit, enhancement, and monopoly interests of corporations. Michigan's Dictator Law is a gigantic and frightening step toward the collapse of democratic government and the common good in Michigan.

As one commentator has expressed it there's a third group of conservatives, the Conservative Rebels: The "rebellious" expression of the radical right is a strange form of "conservatism" that fits nowhere in the order of conservatism as most of us have known it historically.

Bashing and melodramatic pronouncements, name calling and red herrings abound, but none of this is "classical conservatism" nor is it Laissez-faire Conservatism or Social Conservatism in their common expressions.

"It is the "payday" book writing, radical radio, lecturing-for-a-fee kind. Radical foment is what is needed to make the "almighty buck", not much more.

Actually these provocateurs aren't that far from anarchists.

The country comes up last against following these rebellious "pseudo-conservatives" who have little constructive to add to our present woes--except more woe and wailing.

What they have become good at is evoking fear. This is not the time for economic fear mongering if the economy is to be put back on track.


More  from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis D. Brandeis.

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Quotes: "... in the Hands of a Few" - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis D. Brandeis

"Through size, corporations, once merely an efficient tool employed by individuals in the conduct of private business have become an institution-an institution which has brought such concentration of economic power that so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state.

The typical business corporation of the last century, owned by a small group of individuals, managed by their owners, and limited in size by their private wealth, is being supplanted by huge concerns in which the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and the property of tens of hundreds of thousands of investors are subjected, through the corporate mechanism, to the control of a few men.

Ownership has been separated from control; and this separation has removed many of the checks which formerly operated to curb the misuse of wealth and power. And, as ownership of the shares is becoming continually more dispersed, the power which formerly accompanied ownership is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few... [and] coincident with the growth of these giant corporations, there has occurred a marked concentration of individual wealth; and that the resulting disparity in incomes is a major cause of the existing depression."


-- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis D. Brandeis

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Corporate Supremacy: Michissippi’s Reinvention of Involuntary Servitude and EFM Legislated Privatization of Nearly Every Community Asset - “Profitization”

Corporate profitazation: Under the guise of help for the troubled finances of civic institutions Rick Snyder and cronies have devised a quasi-legal device, the office of Emergency Finance Manager to facilitate the "public profitazation" of everything of value in Michissippian community assets.

This "public-to-private profitization" of assets across Michissippi includes currently real property: Public school facilities and real estate, waste treatment plants e.g. Pontiac, brownfield real estate with high value waterfront development potential, public works facilities and equipment, city buildings and auxiliary operations...the list goes on. It's the replacement of "we the people government with corporatism.

This is just the beginning, the number of high value targets for the privatizing zealots in the Snyder/McLellan/Dillon combine is yet to be unveiled. With clever scheming and with grand opportunism known as "disaster capitalism" these greedy men are taking down the state for money and for profit. They represent a very troubling trend toward "corporate supremacy."

Note carefully how this "illegal community asset grab" is unfolding. The attacks are in predominately minority centers and urban pockets of extreme poverty. Who cares? Snyder believes indifference gives his administration license.

The biggest of the predicable goals is the profitization seizure of Detroit's high value public waterworks, a gem of a coup, if it can be pulled off for surrounding suburban jurisdictions especially Brooks Patterson's Oakland County. Strip majority minority Detroit of its one high value asset, and move on to huge tactical advantage and profit for the Corporate Supremacists.

When the lustful eye of pro-EFM backers took a look at Jackson and saw an opportunity to move in last week, Dillon put a quick kibosh on that recommendation. For the Dillon/Snyder stratagem to work, the stripping of assets and the dictatorial take-overs must be in areas of long-term distress, cities and urban centers long under debit problems and "dysfunction."

As long as the EFM process can be portrayed as an aberrant form of "help" - legislative benevolence - and the public continues its cynical opinion of minority "lack of responsibility" for "their" abandoned and troubled areas such as Benton Harbor, there will be little effective protest elsewhere. So just bide the time.

This does not mean that Jackson city and other predominately "white" areas are not on the short list or at risk it; only means those godfathers who set the pace; such as Richard D. Mclellan, will choose the time to swoop in to pluck the low hanging fruit anywhere he chooses, across Michissippi. After all, if there isn't a massive "corporate supremacist" plan, why has Andy Dillon pre-trained over 300 Emergency Finance Managers?

Snyder led "Corporate Supremacy" has virulent and dangerous elements: bigotry and racial bias. What is being legislated from TeaPublican Lansing, with its irresponsible super-majority drunk and high on power, is the equivalent of pushing minorities back over the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge into Jim Crow Land.

This lingering bias was expressed in the written opine in the Detroit/Mackinac Center News which blamed the recent brown down/blackouts in Detroit on Black political leadership over the past decades. And true to form, the Det/News suggested the solution: Sell off Detroit's Power and Light, municipal power works to the Corporate Supremacists eagerly awaiting another takeover. Never mind that brown outs occurred concurrently in Ann Arbor and in other diversified areas across Michissippi.

All of this fits the Koch Brothers A.L.E.C. plug and play legislation such as has been introduced in Wisconsin. The Kochs want Wisconsin to sell off, privatize, all municipal utilities, let Corporate Supremacists have a profitization monopoly. These same elements are at play here in Michissippi.

In the Holland area, to operate a machine shop inside the service area of the Holland Board of Public Works means getting three phase industrial electric service at a much lower price than that offered by Consumers Energy. Maybe that is because Holland Board of Public Works isn't headed up with a CEO like Consumers Energy's David Joos-who in his last year with Consumers received a salary in excess of $3 million and over his entire tenure, tens of millions in salary and benefits. Consumers customers chipped in for the Joos booty: Every time the lights came on, Joos got his cut!

Oh yes, check out Richard D. McLellan, Mackinac Center's godfather, he has had a turn with ITC Holdings as a board member. ITC is in the power game. ITC is the largest independent electricity transmission company in the nation its holdings includes the Michigan Electric Transmission Company (METC).

On way or the other McLellan is a major player in Michissippi power and how it is supplied. Everywhere you turn in Snyder's Michissippi there's a Nerd business crony, a Corporate Supremacist, getting or planning his accumulating cut.

All this on top of a near $2 billion tax-funded bailout!

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