GRAPHIC: Who is redistributing wealth?

The latest right wing talking point is that Barack Obama wants to redistribute wealth.

You would think the right would want to steer away from that issue since for the last thirty years at least, they have done everything possible to redistribute wealth UPWARD.

While worker productivity and corporate profits have gone up, and CEO salaries have gone up exponentially, wages for most of us have remained flat or even declined.

Conservatives try to squirm away from a basic economic truth: it's not just capital that creates wealth, but labor does too. And one of the ways a business makes a profit is paying you less for your labor than it is worth (if they paid you exactly what it was worth, they would break even).

It seems like basic fairness that wages would at least keep pace with productivity and profits.

As it says in the Bible,

For it is written in the Law of Moses: "Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain." Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn't he? Yes, this was written for us, because when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest.

(1 Corinthians 9)

I guess this is a part of the Bible "God's Own Party" missed.

click to see full-sized:

From The New York Times based on Federal Reserve data:




In 1984, George Orwell had a creepy explanation for why this income inequality persists.

Sam Harris vs. Obama & Harriet Beecher Stowe on slavery

Sam Harris, an atheist who has written several excellent books on atheism and destructive power of religion, has written one of the few legitimate criticisms of Obama's historic race speech, saying Obama could NOT walk away from his church because it would call his Christianity into question, a guaranteed lethal political wound that would make the effects of Wright's comments look like a stubbed toe. The sad part was Harris' accurate closing statement:

But Obama’s candidacy is also depressing, for it demonstrates that even a person of the greatest candor and eloquence must still claim to believe the unbelievable in order to have a political career in this country. We may be ready for the audacity of hope. Will we ever be ready for the audacity of reason?

FULL TEXT

Sam Harris is dead on as usual with one exception: he treats religion as a cause rather than effect or tool of an even deeper cause, greed.
He mentioned Southerners giving their lives for slavery because their churches told them to:

The Confederate soldiers who eagerly laid down their lives at three times the rate of Union men, for the pleasure of keeping blacks in bondage and using them as farm equipment, did so with the conscious understanding that they were doing the Lord’s work.

FULL TEXT

But he has it backwards. The churches were telling them what they wanted to hear, that their sociopathic behavior that made them a lot of money was morally acceptable.
Harriet Beecher Stowe put these words in the mouth of a guilt-ridden slave owner in chapter 16 of Uncle Tom's Cabin:

"suppose that something should bring down the price of cotton once and forever, and make the whole slave property a drug in the market, don't you think we should soon have another version of the Scripture doctrine? What a flood of light would pour into the church, all at once, and how immediately it would be discovered that everything in the Bible and reason went the other way!"
CONTEXT

I sometimes wonder if this isn't exactly what happened. Slaves were replaced by sharecroppers who instead of getting a subsistence living from their masters ended up owing them money, and today, we have illegal immigrants who rather than being fed and clothed year round as slaves were can be dismissed to starve on their own dime after the harvest or even removed by a call to la migra (now ICE).

PARABLE: The rich man with many sheep who stole Iraq's one

If you are familiar this story, it has some slight changes.

1 The LORD sent a prophet to the king. When he came to him, he said, "There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. 2 The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, 3 but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.

4 "Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him."

5 The king did not see the point of this story, said he didn't understand hypotheticals, and sent the prophet away since he was waiting for some very important traders. 6 The prophet went to the people in the street who always sang the king's praises, and told them the story of the same crime. 7 Some of them had trouble with hypotheticals too, some said the poor man didn't deserve even one ewe since he was poor, but many burned with anger against the man and said to the prophet "As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to be punished! 8 He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity."

9 The prophet said, "Your king, George W. Bush, is that man. 10 He rules a land of great and many riches, but when his oil company friends came to him, he killed the people of Iraq, stopped their running water and electricity, buried their grandmothers in rubble, and burned their children alive, and gave their one ewe, their oil, to his friends who were already wealthy."

11 And lo, suddenly nearly everyone had trouble with hypotheticals for they thought the king would give them some of the ewe even though he and his friends planned to sell it to them for as much as the market would bear, and even withhold the hindquarters so the price would go still higher 12 just as they did with everything else, healers, water, electricity, and soon the air that they breathed. 13 For the people saw themselves as the king's children, but he saw them as the poor man's ewe that was his to kill and give to his friends.

Portions from the New International Version of the Holy Bible.

Jesus talks to George W Bush at his ranch

IRAQ OIL THEFT RESOURCES