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How Wall Street Occupied America
Why the rich keep getting richer and our democracy’s getting poorer
This article is adapted from a speech Bill Moyers gave in October at Public Citizen’s fortieth-anniversary gala.
During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us."
She should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as “fat cats,” then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.
That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. The president has raised more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and private equity managers than any Republican candidate, including Mitt Romney. Inch by inch he has conceded ground to them while espousing populist rhetoric that his very actions betray.
Let’s name this for what it is: hypocrisy made worse, the further perversion of democracy. Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy—fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics of Tony Soprano.
Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. Reporters keep scratching their heads and asking, “Why are you here?” But it’s clear they are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country. And that’s why in public places across the nation workaday Americans are standing up in solidarity. Did you see the sign a woman was carrying at a fraternal march in Iowa the other day? It read, I Can’t Afford to Buy a Politician So I Bought This Sign. Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want.
In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood says that our nation discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and pecuniary pursuits of happiness.” This democracy, he said, changed the lives of “hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.”
Those words moved me when I read them. They moved me because Henry and Ruby Moyers were “common laboring people.” My father dropped out of the fourth grade and never returned to school because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. Mother managed to finish the eighth grade before she followed him into the fields. They were tenant farmers when the Great Depression knocked them down and almost out. The year I was born my father was making $2 a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never took home more than $100 a week in his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union in the last job he held. I was one of the poorest white kids in town, but in many respects I was the equal of my friend who was the daughter of the richest man in town. I went to good public schools, had the use of a good public library, played sandlot baseball in a good public park and traveled far on good public roads with good public facilities to a good public university. Because these public goods were there for us, I never thought of myself as poor. When I began to piece the story together years later, I came to realize that people like the Moyerses had been included in the American deal. “We, the People” included us.
* * *
It’s heartbreaking to see what has become of that bargain. Nowadays it’s every man for himself. How did this happen? The rise of the money power in our time goes back forty years. We can pinpoint the date. On August 23, 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell—a board member of the death-dealing tobacco giant Philip Morris and a future justice of the Supreme Court—released a confidential memorandum for his friends at the US Chamber of Commerce. We look back on it now as a call to arms for class war waged from the top down.
Recall the context of Powell’s memo. Big business was being forced to clean up its act. Even Republicans had signed on. In 1970 President Nixon put his signature on the National Environmental Policy Act and named a White House Council to promote environmental quality. A few months later millions of Americans turned out for Earth Day. Nixon then agreed to create the Environmental Protection Agency. Congress acted swiftly to pass tough amendments to the Clean Air Act, and the EPA announced the first air pollution standards. There were new regulations directed at lead paint and pesticides. Corporations were no longer getting away with murder.
Powell was shocked by what he called an “attack on the American free enterprise system.” Not just from a few “extremists of the left” but also from “perfectly respectable elements of society,” including the media, politicians and leading intellectuals. Fight back and fight back hard, he urged his compatriots. Build a movement. Set speakers loose across the country. Take on prominent institutions of public opinion—especially the universities, the media and the courts. Keep television programs “monitored the same way textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.” And above all, recognize that political power must be “assiduously [sic] cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination” and “without embarrassment.”
Powell imagined the Chamber of Commerce as a council of war. Since business executives had “little stomach for hard-nosed contest with their critics” and “little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate,” they should create think tanks, legal foundations and front groups of every stripe. These groups could, he said, be aligned into a united front through “careful long-range planning and implementation…consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and united organizations.”
The public wouldn’t learn of the memo until after Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court that same year, 1971. By then his document had circulated widely in corporate suites. Within two years the board of the Chamber of Commerce had formed a task force of forty business executives—from US Steel, GE, GM, Phillips Petroleum, 3M, Amway, and ABC and CBS (two media companies, we should note). Their assignment was to coordinate the crusade, put Powell’s recommendations into effect and push the corporate agenda. Powell had set in motion a revolt of the rich. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein subsequently wrote, “Many who read the memo cited it afterward as inspiration for their political choices.”
They chose swiftly. The National Association of Manufacturers announced that it was moving its main offices to Washington. In 1971 only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in the capital; by 1982 nearly 2,500 did. Corporate PACs increased from fewer than 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 by the mid-’80s. From Powell’s impetus came the Business Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (precursor to what we now know as Americans for Prosperity) and other organizations united in pushing back against political equality and shared prosperity. They triggered an economic transformation that would in time touch every aspect of our lives.
The Chamber of Commerce, in response to the memo, doubled its membership, tripled its budget and stepped up its lobbying efforts. It’s going stronger than ever. Most recently, it called in its agents in Congress to kill a bill to provide healthcare to 9/11 first responders for illnesses linked to their duty on that day. The bill would have paid for their medical care by ending a special tax loophole exploited by foreign corporations with business interests in America. The Chamber, along with nearly 1,300 business and trade groups, urged Congress to pass the new tax bill, signed into law just before this past Christmas and filled with all kinds of stocking stuffers, including about fifty tax breaks for businesses. The bill gave some of our biggest banks, financial companies and insurance firms another year’s exemption to shield their foreign profits from being taxed here in the United States; among the beneficiaries were giants Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, all of which survived the financial debacle of their own making because taxpayers bailed them out in 2008.
The coalition got another powerful jolt of adrenaline in the late ’70s from the wealthy right-winger who had served as Nixon’s treasury secretary, William Simon. His book A Time for Truth argued that “funds generated by business” must “rush by multimillions” into conservative causes to uproot the institutions and the “heretical strategy” of the New Deal. He called on “men of action in the capitalist world” to mount “a veritable crusade” against progressive America. BusinessWeek (October 12, 1974) somberly explained that “it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.”
Those “men of action in the capitalist world” were not content with their wealth just to buy more homes, more cars, more planes, more vacations and more gizmos than anyone else. They were determined to buy more democracy than anyone else. And they succeeded beyond their expectations. After their forty-year “veritable crusade” against our institutions, laws and regulations—against the ideas, norms and beliefs that helped to create America’s iconic middle class—the Gilded Age is back with a vengeance.
If you want to see the story pulled together in one compelling narrative, read Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. They wanted to know how America had turned into a society starkly divided into winners and losers. They found the culprit: the revolt triggered by Lewis Powell, fired up by William Simon and fueled by rich corporations and wealthy individuals. “Step by step,” they write, “and debate by debate America’s public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many."
There you have it. They bought off the gatekeeper, got inside and gamed the system. As the rich and powerful got richer and more powerful, they owned and operated the government, “saddling Americans with greater debt, tearing new holes in the safety net, and imposing broad financial risks on Americans as workers, investors, and taxpayers.” Now, write Hacker and Pierson, the United States is looking more and more like “the capitalist oligarchies, like Brazil, Mexico, and Russia,” where most of the wealth is concentrated at the top while the bottom grows larger and larger with everyone in between just barely getting by.
The revolt of the plutocrats was ratified by the Supreme Court in its notorious Citizens United decision last year. Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five pro-corporate conservative justices gave “artificial legal entities” the same rights of “free speech” as humans, they told our corporate sovereigns that the sky’s the limit when it comes to their pouring money into political campaigns.
The ink was hardly dry on the Citizens United decision when the Chamber of Commerce organized a covertly funded front and rained cash into the 2010 campaigns. According to the Sunlight Foundation, corporate front groups spent $126 million in the fall of 2010 while hiding the identities of the donors. Another corporate cover group—the American Action Network—spent more than $26 million of undisclosed corporate money in just six Senate races and twenty-six House elections. And Karl Rove’s groups, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, seized on Citizens United to raise and spend at least $38 million, which NBC News said came from “a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls”—all determined to water down financial reforms that might prevent another collapse of the financial system. Jim Hightower has said it well: today’s proponents of corporate plutocracy “have simply elevated money itself above votes, establishing cold, hard cash as the real coin of political power.”
No wonder so many Americans have felt that sense of political impotence that historian Lawrence Goodwyn described as “the mass resignation” of people who believe in the “dogma of democracy” on a superficial public level but whose hearts no longer burn with the conviction that they are part of the deal. Against such odds, discouragement comes easily. But if the generations before us had given up, slaves would still be waiting on their masters, women would still be turned away from the voting booths on election day and workers would still be committing a crime if they organized.
* * *
So take heart from the past, and don’t ever count the people out. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution created extraordinary wealth at the top and excruciating misery at the bottom. Embattled citizens rose up. Into their hearts, wrote the progressive Kansas journalist William Allen White, “had come a sense that their civilization needed recasting, that their government had fallen into the hands of self-seekers, that a new relation should be established between the haves and have-nots.” Not content to wring their hands and cry “Woe is us,” everyday citizens researched the issues, organized to educate their neighbors, held rallies, made speeches, petitioned and canvassed, marched and marched again. They plowed the fields and planted the seeds—sometimes on bloody ground—that twentieth-century leaders used to restore “the general welfare” as a pillar of American democracy. They laid down the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers’ safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels.
The lesson is clear: Democracy doesn’t begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls “The Patriot’s Dream.”
Living now here but for fortune
Placed by fate’s mysterious schemes
Who’d believe that we’re the ones asked
To try to rekindle the patriot’s dreamsArise sweet destiny, time runs short
All of your patience has heard their retort
Hear us now for alone we can’t seem
To try to rekindle the patriot’s dreamsCan you hear the words being whispered
All along the American stream
Tyrants freed, the just are imprisoned
Try to rekindle the patriot’s dreamsAh but perhaps too much is being asked of too few
You and your children with nothing to do
Hear us now for alone we can’t seem
To try to rekindle the patriot’s dreams
Who, in these cynical times, with democracy on the ropes and America’s body politic pounded again and again by the blows of organized money—who would dream such a radical thing? Look around.
Watch Moyers' full remarks below:
- Posted in
129 Comments so far
Show AllThe main problem in government in the US is that legions of corporate lobbyists have drowned the Congress and the White House in corrupt cash. The president is so co-opted by these parasites that he has become more reactionary then anything the Republican Party could imagine. That is why the Republicans cannot field any presidential candidates but the current parade of buffoons that have dominated the national TV screens. This scene would be hilarious if were not such a tragedy.
"Nowadays in America its every man for himself" UNLESS you have the money to bribe politicians , in which case you have the full force of the White House, Congress, Supreme Court and US Treasury gunning for you !
The Republicans are fielding the current parade of buffoons so to assist the election of Obama. (You think the two corporate parties are in competition with each other? Guess again!) This parade of buffoons will cause Democrats who are most displeased with Obama to hold their noses and vote for him again because the Republicans are the bigger evil. Another misconception. There is no lesser evil. They are both evil.
The current Congress is corrupt to the core. All the bankers evil deeds were approved in advance by the Congress under Democrat Clinton. Congress also did not cut funding for the endless wars. Congress did not even vote on Single Payer when polls showed a 74% approval rate of the public. Now Congress has given up their Constitutional duty to make a budget for our nation and has passed that off to a group of twelve appointed people and the President. THis group of 13 (what a lucky number!) will decide to fully fund the wars and cut our domestic programs and give the working people a tad of austerity.
We need to vote NO on all incumbents. ALL of them are in the pay of the top 1%. We need a clean sweep. Kick out the corrupt and we can make the needed changes that the people want. People want to end the wars. Tax the rich, Care for the people and protect the environment. This can not be done by the creatures in Congress now. Vote no on your 'rep' because he/she is not representing you, but is working hard for the top 1%.
Visiting Professor,
Yes, I do and you know my position.
Almost everyone here knows regardless which pigs you vote the end results will be the same. In another words, you are guarantees to get slaughter regardless Obama or whoever the Repug nominee.
But one thing I know for sure if the Repug in the WH, you can count on the Dims (pigs) to endlessly hound at the Repug administration, like they did to during Dubya administration. Remember Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, Cheney, Gen Betrayal, John Ashcroft. Still remember how they tried to make Ashcroft approved torture and refused while he was near death in the hospital. Look at the stool pigeon Eric Hold, continue torture, murder not a word from the progressive, liberal or whatever..... All the Dim remain silence, except one.
What have you got to loose, either way you are a dead duck, why reward pigs and liars?
I agree with your basic assessment. But I can tell you as someone who works with rescued pigs that the greedy crooks of which you speak don't deserve to be compared to pigs. These much-maligned animals have a lot more integrity and loyalty than people like Cheney and Ashcroft ever will.
Just because they are not currently in office does not automatically make them a good candidate. Vote out the incumbents is a non-started and will take us no where. You've got to have a strategy for replacing what is there with something of value. Maybe a whole new system.
I remember when Mr. Moyers was President Johnson's Press Secretary, his journey from Texas to becoming one of our finest journalists is to be commended. Great speech.
"Inch by inch he has conceded ground to them while espousing populist rhetoric that his very actions betray."
Inch by inch??!
Give us a break, Bill.
We're talking "light-year by light-year"* here.
Obama has been literally giving away the country in back rooms while out in the open he has been claiming "victory" (and selling "hope" and "change", of course) for ordinary Americans.
The guy is the worst of the worst precisely because of the totally deceptive way he has "facilitated" (not orchestrated, because that was actually done by others) the direct transfer of TRILLIONS of dollars from the US Treasury to the banksters and other corporate crooks -- in the guise of "health care", "economic recovery", "national security", etc
But this should really come as no surprise.
Obama has lived his entire adult life in a lie.
"Barack Obama" IS a lie.
* A light year is the distance light travels in a year = about 6 trillion miles.
Amen.
Dittos
BHO is the chief of the populist liars. Name a populist, who couldn't be bought.
Teddy Roosevelt successfully set the monopolist back a few years.
Only recently has the US government become so emasculated. Teddy would not recognize DC. Only recently, has one populist had the control of the senate (Reed) and congress (Pelosi) to exercise a theft of over $2 Trillion from my grandchildren.
The best Trojan Horse since Troy.
" I went to good public schools, had the use of a good public library, played sandlot baseball in a good public park and traveled far on good public roads with good public facilities to a good public university. Because these public goods were there for us"
Not for long. Privatization will end all that. It's already ended much of it.
"From Powell’s impetus came the Business Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (precursor to what we now know as Americans for Prosperity"
We should all be aware of these institutions and what their agendas are. Many in the American public are not. We listen to media sound bites and congressional statements that quote their studies and recommendations. But few ever question the source.
I can remember a time when our nightly news didn't start with an update on the DOW, when the financial reports were in the back of the newspaper, not headlines and front page columns. It's time we reprioritized. Sure economics are important, but they shouldn't be setting the agendas of the world.
"Sure economics are important, but they shouldn't be setting the agendas of the world."
What an excellent way to put it.
Good points. Moyers didn't mention it, but it was around the same time (1971) that the Chamber of Commerce launched a concerted attack on the unions. They were very successful in busting up unions, and thwarting people's ability to form unions. Unionization is down to something like 9% of the private work force today. It was WAY higher then. And, as Noam Chomsky and others have said, the level of unionization is a good metric for how much *real* democracy a nation has.
Good point. I didn't know about these organization until just a few years ago. They call themselves "Think Tanks". I was naive enough to believe because of what they called themselves, that they were objective and non-partisan. They are not "Think Tanks." You can not explore new concepts when you start with a predetermined agenda with a predetermined end in mind.
These people have not stopped with private Think Tanks. They own entire "public research universities." Most notably, George Mason University.
We have a long battle ahead but We Shall Over Come.
I grew up in a town of 300 people. Every 2 weeks the bookmobile would come and I'd check out 6 books. This was in the 50's and was a public good.
Yes I remember "do you know where your children are?" Most Americans are asleep at the wheel I am afraid, very afraid.
"1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, 'Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us'."
thanks for another great piece of speech writing, bill! i'd not heard of ms, lease before, but her words sure ring loud and clear today. also, i learned a new word: "pecuniary" useful in lots of discussions. just last evening i mused over humorist, will roger's wry observation, "we have the best congress money can buy." we the people must accept our share of the blame for jumping on the gravy train giving lip service to equality while reveling in our collective best-of-the-best, richest most powerful nation definition of presumed superiority. an excellent point that "Democracy doesn’t begin at the top; it begins at the bottom." i thrill to the sights and sounds of the occupy movements because emulating Nature, new growth begins as young shoots break ground. we're learning all over again to respect the wealth of Nature and quality of life over vain quantity of possessions.
Lease is mentioned in Ellen Brown's book about monetary reform, Web of Debt.
I believe Mark Twain said "We've got the best congress money can buy." Otherwise I like your comments.
Great piece, good summary. I think it's missing an important piece, though. Part of how the plan was implemented was through a two-part political strategy that has affected elections and activism since the mid-70's: divide and conquer. 1. The Southern strategy of subtle racist campaigning was used to persuade enough southern Democrats to vote GOP. 2: GOP allies like Ailes and fundamentalist activists like Schaeffer agreed on a strategy of focusing on gays and abortion to drive a wedge between religious people and liberals. It worked very well, as witnessed by the continuing mistrust and namecalling going on to this day. Internecine warfare among progressives is crucial to the 1%'s success, more important numerically than the Southern strategy, because in terms of population the South alone can't win national elections or hold Congress. Ending this divide among us is crucial to the victory of the 99%.
On reflection, I felt I should clarify: I don't defend the susceptibility of Christians to rhetoric about gay rights and abortion. And churches bear a great deal of responsibility for what has happened. But speaking as one who has been inside both worlds (secular progressives and church culture), it's clear to me that all the trends among religious people were towards progressive positions, a trend which was disrupted by the strategy to which I referred. No excuses for the backsliding, but good coalition tactics requires forgiveness and intentional bridge-building. The left only shoots itself in the foot by hating on church people, it's carrying water for Ailes and Rove and the Koch brothers. Past successes always involved Jewish activists, secular intellectuals, and progressive Christians (such as MLK and Dorothy Day, to name a couple of well-known cases), working together on social justice. The deep issues about sexual freedom and reproductive rights won't magically disappear, but they are issues we need to work on directly as a people, not "wedge" issues that should keep us apart when our livelihoods and our ecosystem are at stake. There are vast areas of agreement that link the best of the secular left and the best of the religious left. Our children's future is more important than our grudges, and in fact these questions will only find good outcomes when we are in discussion, not at war. The left within the church wants to be used for justice, and does not support hard-right positions on sexuality and the drug war and militarism and the rest of it. Humility on both sides won't come easily or without rough spots, but it is the way forward in my opinion. What matters is removing the pernicious influence of the StarChamberOfCommerce, so to speak. We can do it, our ancestors did it before, and we can do it again.
Very well stated, kdhymes! I often see religion and religious people slammed and degraded by posters on this site. It makes me wonder how a progressive coalition can ever be built when left-leaning folks air such rancor. If they speak this way with friends, relatives and co-workers, they won't be recruiting many to our cause. My Grandpa used to say, "You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."
Well stated and very true. But that kind of intolerance and bigotry exist among every group, it just has to be overlooked for what it is.
You three are dead wrong. The loss of religious people from progressive groups didn’t happen, because with a few exceptions, they never were part of any progressive movements. Conceited self-righteous dogs who claim that people speak for God. Let them bark all they want. Love each other is all the religion anyone needs. Period. Meanwhile, let's refresh our memory on their progressiveness...
Gotta kill the scientists.. Catholics
Gotta kill the witches..... Puritans
Gotta kill the savages.... Protestants
Gotta kill the niggers.…. Baptists
Gotta kill the fags…...... Evangelicals
Gotta kill the Muslims…. ORGY… Can we help scream the Jews!
Thank you for the perfect example.
Stop ducking and quacking.... I said "The loss of religious people from progressive groups didn’t happen, because with a few exceptions, they never were part of any progressive movements."
Now you tell me what help any of these religions ever were for mankind that even comes close to the weight of their crimes?.
Our accomplishments are in spite of, not because of religion.
Your comment reminded me of trying to convince my co-workers (1 christian/1 nra) to not re-elect bush jr. It seemed no matter how hard I tried to show them that they were voting against their own interests I just could not sway them. At this same time I was attending church with my young daughter and hearing the pastor state that we needed to support the troops (no scriptural evidence provided). So I asked my preacher uncle who stated that it was based on the future's duty to bless isreal in genesis and could not be convinced of Jesus' admonition to "love your neighbor/enemy" Maybe things will change... And this topic also reminds me of one senator telling Huey Long, who couldn't get his progressive bills passed during FDRs admin, that it would be hard to get them to pass the "Lord's Prayer" I remain hopeful.
Well said kdhymes. The left's acrimony against any and all religion and spirituality has hurt the cause of progressivism terribly, as Michael Lerner has eloquently pointed out in his books; because most Americans are religious, or at least spiritual. I see those same dismissive, contemptuous attitudes often here on CD too. Sometimes I wonder if a good deal of the people promulgating it are not agents of the 'other side' because it is so self-defeating for progressives, and follows a familiar "divide-and-conquer" strategy.
The problem with many dogmatic, rabidly anti-religious leftists is that they mistake the dirty bath water for the baby. Yes, we've established that superstitious Medieval religiosity was (and still is) a scourge, and that the Enlightenment clearly lifted humanity. But enough of the victory dancing, already. There's more to the story.
In many ways, the core beliefs of the secular left (the struggle for justice, the desire for peace, the recognition of the value of community, the belief in stewardship of the planet; etc) mirror the spiritual yearning at the core of most religious individuals. The spiritual worldview is based in an often personal experience of the sacred foundation of all existence. The experience of Divine Unity or Ultimate Being (or whatever you want to call it: God, Allah, Atman) has inspired countless activists to join the struggle for Justice. It is this consciousness of this sacred foundation that drives many of us toward a desire to transcend petty ego-mind, with its tedious sibling rivalry dramas, its infantile grandiosity, its depressing, anxiety-inducing alienation, and its fear of death. For many of us, the struggle to create a new politics (i.e. a new landscape of human power relations) is inextricably tied to our worship of the Divine Essence.
The fact that organized religion seems to have invariably descended into authoritarian cultism certainly does not help the spiritual perspective. But I think the pseudo-rationality that some people use to ridicule the spiritually-minded is primarily based on the fact that these individuals may have never had the direct experience of ego-transcendence. I do not fault them for this. But I think it's a glaring example of hubris to then relegate all such experience to the category of un-scientific superstition.
Pure faith in anything at all is, by definition, "un-scientific", even including the faith of scientists themselves in the scientific method for determining all "truth" concerning the universe and our place in it. On the other hand, religious dogma seems like a very poor substitute for any kind of rational thought process whatever.
Granting that there are some close-minded people on both sides of the issue, I think perhaps it's mainly the dogmatic (and often self-contradictory) hypocrisy, rather than faith itself, that draws the most criticisms -- or at least the most valid criticisms.
I think you are right, unfortunately, the close-minded people on both sides of the issue cause the most trouble and scream the loudest about intolerance while exhibiting the epitome of intolerance.
Any Dogma is a poor excuse for thinking, but faith is faith and everyone in our country is entitled to their own.
TURBOGLO: You raise excellent points. So far no one has spoken about the desire on the part of well-financed authoritarians to use the church and its numbers as a means to set up a Christian Theocracy in this nation. 30 years ago, I would have thought that was a ridiculous assertion; but now, seeing the rise in hate groups, the way "illegal aliens" are tossed out, the banal acceptance of torture camps along with a totally inverted justice system, and reading Chris Hedges' book, "American Fascists," lots of dots connect and the resulting image ain't pretty. Nor does it in any shape or form resemble the warm and cuddly images suggested by some of the previous posts.as they sing Hosannas to orthodox religion.
I would add that there's a telling relationship between the uptick in foreign wars and the masses attending the growing network of fundamentalist Christian churches. These are the "Conservatives Without Compassion" that John Dean revealed much about, and they are far more locked into fear (and its homeland security apparatus) than love. Their mantra might as well be "punishment for all you sinners!" The Hell and damnation that's part and parcel to their religious beliefs has indeed become the NORM of our shared secular world experience.
I agree with all of this. My central point is that some of us with a strong religious perspective are aware of this profound corruption and perversion of religion and see it in the context of the religious worldview itself.
It is no accident that the central figure of the Christian tradition railed against religious hypocrisy. There is no greater evil in the world than that which is at the core of most organized authoritarian religions, because it represents the hijacking of the Sacred and Divine for the ends of profane human greed and power-lust. According to my understanding, this is the essence of the so-called satanic force: that which imprisons the human soul, either through force or seduction, in service to systems of organized elite power.
Part of the problem - as I hinted at in my post below - is that human beings often attack and destroy those who would help them toward spiritual liberation. Humans are suffering from "soul-sickness", loss of direct connection with the Living Cosmos, isolated, material egos in a dead cosmos, and in their pathological condition, attack those who point this out. All the excessive greed, power-lust and lack of compassion you see in the world today is a result of this almost complete loss of connection with the Living Cosmos, this alienation from life itself.
This reminds me of an interesting little book by Wilhelm Reich call "The Murder of Christ."
I found "The Function of Orgasm" pretty powerful. Then to compare that with Rajneesh's take on how Western culture views sexuality, interesting stuff. And for the uninitiated, I'm talking about the political implications of these books, along with what the state of autonomy FEELS like.
Reich was a staunch opponent of thousands of years of the authoritarian patriarchal mind-set.
Yup, and as I have mentioned here many times, it was Wilhelm Reich who called humanity's mass affliction, "The Emotional Plague." Though a materialist scientist, Reich, sought to biologically understand the Freudian concept of the libido followed a vitalist course which led him to question the Einsteinian elimination of the luminiferous ether from scientific theory, which he re-introduced and called Orgone Energy, a distinctly biological form of electricity. In other words, his science led him back to the idea of a living Cosmos. If you put Reich's ideas about bioenergetics, together with Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and the archetypes you get a fairly complete picture of the human psyche.
__________________________________________________________
Reich was also a Marxist, and the Psychoanalytic field rejected him for that; the Marxists rejected him for being a Freudian, he wrote a book about the Nazis called "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" for which the Nazis put a price on his head and he died in an American prison where he had been sentenced for contempt of court in a case about his scientific theories.
@Siouxrose
You have accurately depicted exactly what has taken place. I was forced to relocate into just such an area at Lancaster, Pennsylvania by Bush,senior, applying the tax on inventory. The employer of the household breadwinner suggested that we try finding work at Lebanon,Pa. (which was already in the throes of Depression). We used to enjoy a very academic community existence with the social amenities of a very civilized life. I immediately sought out the Amish for suggestions on how to find a place to live because the realtors were already designing Mortgage-Gate. In a short while, I began to discover other people who had been relocated. Joining a forum at the nytimes.com, I made the acquaintance of another previous resident of Princeton whose husband was a physicist researching alternative energy sources and they had also been ordered out or let go, no longer employed during that period of time when Poppy Bush spent an exaggerate amount of time hanging out around Princeton campus and enjoying the company of New Jersey's Moderate Republicans. It was here that he got the idea of putting the daughter of the local head of party,former governor Christie Whitman into his son's eventual cabinet as head of E.P.A. The physicist aptly found a job on faculty at Lehigh.. The rest of us were less happy about the employment situation without unions, without OSHA, no union representatives or advisors,"officially" but surprisingly much does get done by those experienced in these areas while locally less experienced residents had been given advancements to middle class "floor management"positions and had no idea what the norm was supposed to be. Our unofficial representatives advised them of when they were in error;you might think of this as diplomacy. I was well aware of it because I had passed the State Department exams before Bush,sr. was still a National Security Advisor. At which point,about the time of the invasion of the Grenadines, I received an inquiry from a group of women asking if I would join them in a class action suit as I had passed my exam at State Dept the first time that I took it in the early 1980s. Of course, when you look back at what happened to April Glasbie when Hussein had been enticed into invading Kuwait. maybe you don't want an Equal Opportunity employer who overturns the rules. Encountering Evangelicals for the first time was really quite shocking. I tried to describe these encounters to Europeans exchanging insights at The New York Times on-line forum for Western Europe. I'm sure it was quite baffling but then the domestic policies of our government at this period were even more shocking to them I think that I should just end on the note that experiencing being on the receiving end of Evangelical guile at a time when they had been put in charge of administering welfare as a charity project by Bush,jr. who pretended with some guile of his own that he didn't know any better, and didn't know what he was doing, was an eye-opening experience. The killing of the Amish schoolgirls at Nickel Mines schoolhouse by one of these should have alerted the Nation's sensibilities when it made headlines everywhere in all the media.
The main problem is that too many people dont understand that exoteric religion is a degenerated remnant of esoteric spirituality, and esoteric spirituality is based upon experiential and experimental evidence and is therefore "scientific" in its own way. A shaman is a scientist; a yogi is a scientist, they are simply studying the interior of experience, not the exterior. And they use/create technologies of Self-Transformation, not material manipulation.
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The problem is that few understand this distinction. And few seem to be aware of the tremendous research in comparative esoteric spirituality, psychedelics/entheogens and transpersonal psychology. Two good, short intros that happen to be on the Internet are:
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http://twm.co.nz/Alt_Cosmol.html
http://twm.co.nz/kwilb_eyspir.html
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And many more just from this http://twm.co.nz/ind3.html page of links alone!
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As Wilber points out, researchers from around the world are mapping the full spectrum of human Consciousness. And as Wilber and others have demonstrated, cosmic reality is a transfinite fractal holarchy - holonomic levels within levels within levels ad infinitum. And all those who have explored the farthest reaches of Consciousness report that the entire multidimensional holarchy - you, me, trees rocks, all kinds of astral worlds, subtle worlds, causal worlds are all temporary modifications of Infinite Light-Being-Love, just as waves are temporary modifications of the ocean.
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The reason why many engage in knee-jerk rejection of spirituality is because of not just authoritarian fundamentalism but also egalitarian fundamentalism, usually linked with fundamentalist materialism but not always. For some reason these people reject the idea that evolutionary direction is toward an ever-more-inclusive universality, such that each holonic level becomes a subset of a larger whole - ad infinitum. The ultimate Realization is realizing ones Supreme Identity as the Absolute, that which transcends AND includes ALL polarities/dualities, thus being beyond life and death and, of course, beyond conceptuality, because it leaves the limited conceptual human mind in the dust
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And fundamentalist egalitarianism, like fundamentalist authoritarianism, opposes the idea of moving beyond the conventional egoic-sensory level, but for opposite reasons, though the result is the same in the end: humans remain stuck in arrested development, whereas the imperative of evolution is to expand to infinity, and this arrested development then becomes the root of human psychopathology.
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Spiritual realizations are participatory, intuitive, metaconceptual apprehensions, and this kind of perception/knowledge was dumped overboard by western science back around the time of Issac Newton. Thus, these aspects of the psyche have been repressed for centuries, and are therefore not part of consensus-reality and its stultifying cousin, adjustment-normality.
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This whole esoteric tradition then went underground - in large part it always been underground since the days of the Gnostics because the Church considered it heresy, because IT wanted to control people by denying them knowledge of their own Divinity. Through alchemists, Rosicrucians, Freemasons and etc. this Knowledge was preserved and passed on. Note that many of the founders of this country were Freemasons and were at least aware of the Freemasonic program of enlightening humanity and restoring true spirituality. America was to be the place for this spiritual revolution to take hold.
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It is astounding to me how few progressives are aware of all this. even more astounding is how many actually oppose humanity evolving to its full potential. The human being has the capacity to operate at levels of Consciousness-Intelligence that are so far beyond the present norm that it isnt funny. Seems obvious to me that if human beings want to solve their problems, understanding the full range of their own Consciousness-spectrum would be the place to start, learning to resonate and integrate into communion with the Living Cosmos, instead of being isolated egos in a dead, lifeless material cosmos.
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Why do fundamentalist egalitarians reject higher spirituality? Yes, that is the question. Why the taboo?
Thanks for these thoughts. Funny, I'm reading Wilbur's "Eye of Spirit" at the moment.
Ah, synchronicity. Seems to be happening more and more. I'm re-reading his magnum opus, "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution." I dont agree with everything he has to say; however, he has made a bold attempt to create a deep and wide integrating conceptual framework.
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I am reading Annie Besant, "Esoteric Christianity"
Thomas Gilbert-
Wow, KITAJ, I am seriously impressed. A VERY, VERY fine post... I wonder if it will penetrate the intellectual defenses of those who generally rail against this type of understanding (or conjecture). Brilliant stuff! Definitely a keeper!
Kitaj,
Who are you! Excellent offering..
Thomas Gilbert-
~♦~yes in deed, thanks, Kitaj! the word "exoteric" gave me pause so i checked my micro-word dictionary to find this definition: understood by ALL. had to laugh at myself for not grasping what All grasp. then the following from your post, "The main problem is that too many people don't understand that exoteric religion is a degenerated remnant of esoteric spirituality, and esoteric spirituality is based upon experiential and experimental evidence and is therefore 'scientific' in its own way."~♦~
"As Wilber points out, researchers from around the world are mapping the full spectrum of human Consciousness..."
~♦~at what point in life's evolutionary process does one gain "self" awareness or conscious recognition, "i live!"? i remember my mother telling me that when two cells join in the womb, beginning the approximately nine month journey which emulates evolution because the fetus as all life on earth begins in water and develops into a bunny baby or in our case, a primate. i even have a friend who had gills when born. my mother suggested that deep within the subconscious mind we store the history of life from the big bang, (punny?) to this point. E = M C/squared, therefore all mass as perceived in our three dimensional world view is rational atomic energy. okay, i don't qualify as physicist, but hope you get my meaning. the sounds, the sights and all that excite one or more of the five senses miss most of the heat exchange--"even the rocks themselves begin to sing"--make up a minuscule part of what takes place in and around us. how much of that constant activity, i wonder, bypasses the conscious mind to be stored in that cluttered basement or subconscious? how much do we know that we don't know we know? those we call intuitive may have conscious awareness of energies most self-absorbed folks cannot sense.
now, those cultures our from a pro-"judeo-christian" bias, we call primitive acknowledge the life-spirit in all manifestations, therefore feel connected with the life force. for example, the spirit of the wolf teaches about hunting skills and returning to the pack to share food and experiences--family values. christianity, introduced the idea of the human "soul" allowing an individual human ego a free pass to eternal life. of course, that began all the in depth discussions of how many angels can dance upon the head of a pin and which of us have souls and which are but soulless animals. why, even females of our exalted above reproach species remained soulless until recent history. from my empirical approach, i think we sophomoric humans do ourselves a disservice to examine "human consciousness" as separate from all consciousness. we create governments which attempt to "establish" justice in terms of what promotes human civilazation as separate and "above" the laws of nature which rule the animal and savage barbarian kingdoms. the euros fear "the big bad wolf" and what humans fear, humans try to destroy.~♦~
"humans remain stuck in arrested development"
~♦~egg-zackly! even the majority of the "open-minded" left seem caught by our own glorious reflection in the pond, believing our man-made institutions have the power to give and take life. we look to human authority figures to lead us from here into eternity. like the teacher in ecclesiasts warned. "for all is vanity!"
watch out! Mother Nature is giving us an important lesson and humanity is about to experience some excruciating growing pains. good luck and "god bless us every ONE!"~♦~
Dogmatic ranting, case in point.
Thank you for the excellent earlier response to my post.
Knights of Columbus: You confuse what a percentage of GOOD, caring people do, as a result of the Love in their hearts, with the legacy and policies of the "Mother" church. You conveniently left out the way the church was behind the slaughter of thousands of uppity women who were defined conveniently as witches, or the way it granted its nod to the decimation of "the natives" here in America when the Spaniards crossed the great seas.
There will always be persons who transcend their faith. Father John Dear, Martin Luther King, and even Bill Moyers are examples. In my view, that's because these individuals began their earth-walk as already enlightened beings. They embraced the framework they were born into without it limiting them in the way it does the multitudes.
The thing about "us Leftists" is that we would not care what YOUR religious beliefs were or are, so long as they stay out of political policy making circles, and stop imposing on citizens all over the world what your narrow perception of the Deity consigns you to. For instance, should I wish to use birth control, it's neither your business, nor that of the all-mighty church. And that's but one example of many.
If a brain had eyes, you'd be blind. You absolutely cannot hear anyone else's words or take in the truth of their argument(s). I said NOTHING about atheism, which again, reflects the narrowness of your dogma. It's pretty sinister to confuse God/Creator with the church... and therein lies YOUR rub and chief limitation. When I stand in a forest I feel GOD. When I enter the ocean's waves, I feel God, nor do I see God as a man or male figure. In any case, I feel no reason to provide you with any more of my time. You're as impermeable as a stone, and for all your talk of God, your closed mind suggests a heart equally cut off. You need to be right and grant others no space to find their own truth therefore your idea of love is reserved for those who see the world through the same prism you do; and you think it's the ONLY way to perceive the Deity, and therefore consider it your mission (shades of "The White Man's Burden") to go out and spread it, at gun-point, if necessary. (The gun part is related to all the lies told by US elites when it comes to missions intent on taming the Natives of the Middle East when what's really wanted--and at stake--is their oil.)
Eventually, even a mind like yours will be forced to evolve.