In America, almost every issue offers irrefutable biblical “proof” that God sides with whoever is making a point. Some stories, like the parable of the money changers, have become so standard they’re clichés. But Rev. Morgan Guyton of Virginia’s Burke United Methodist Church breaks the cliché with a fresh idea – capitalism has its own theology. The eternal struggle between good and evil becomes the struggle between capitalists and anti-capitalists.

But first, some review for those decades-removed from Sunday school or, like me, secularists.

In this corner, the capitalists – Matthew 25:14-30 tells the story of a master who gives his three servants money to invest on his behalf. Two of them get a ROI roughly equal to a possibly illegal hedge fund – 100%.  The conservative servant/investor buries the money for fear of  being over-leveraged. He makes zero for the boss, which is probably much more likely than a 100% return. The master gives the two “entrepreneurs” a hefty quarterly bonus for taking a big risk with someone else’s money and punishes the “victim” by closing the sandal factory the other two bought and outsourcing his job to the Romans. Everyone lives happily ever after…except the poor sot who feared exactly what eventually happened – he’d lose the boss’s money and end up begging alms.

Money Laundering Down at the Temple

In this corner, the anti-capitalists – According to Matthew 21:12, Jesus goes all biblical on the money changers’ asses and tosses them out of the temple. Their sin was money laundering – changing one more-valuable currency for one with less silver, but the same face value. They split the profit between themselves and a high priest (the dude in the Popemobile knows of whom I speak) at the expense of religious pilgrims. The good folk from Main St., if you will. Ironically, they did this to allow the pilgrims to pay a church tax. With a sweet deal like that, today’s capitalists would convert from anti-tax zealots into prophets singing the praises of higher taxes overnight.

Matthew meant the parables as a comparison between Old Testament Grouchy God and New Testament Chillaxin’ Jesus. The problem is that it’s a long time between 2012 and the year to 1 AD. Why, Earth was only 4,000 years old back then.

In Matthew’s day, capital was a mushy concept. You didn’t trade a camel for a goat because you intended to develop a bitchin’ new goat roping app for an iPhone made by Chinese prison labor. You traded because goats taste better than camels and a goat sandwich sounds pretty tasty when your stomach is growling like, well, a camel. Today, capitalists brunch on money and all the goats and camels they can stuff in their mouths. Unfortunately, the money, goats, and camels usually come from those who can least afford it. It’s a bit like the Seinfeld Soup Nazi telling a hungry customer, “No goat sandwich for you”.

Today’s capitalists aren’t much like Grouchy God either. He may have been a mean SOB, but at least he was consistent and had a certain brutal honesty and fairness to his tantrums. The same story today would show the same meanness, but from a different source. The hedge fund managers would’ve skipped town for the Caymans with the master’s money and mugged the third servant on the way out of Dodge.

The Bible Proves Evolution is True

Of course, the ancient hedge fund managers didn’t break any laws. They were totally unregulated. Today’s hedge fund managers conveniently forget that our regulations came from two centuries of hedge fund managers and their bosses acting just like the guys in 1 AD. Of course that doesn’t stop them from complaining. They can make 1000% ROI and float everyone’s arks if we just let them run rampant and rapacious. We know this because the ethical standards in today’s Economic Bible are a bit loose. If you don’t like the law, just ignore it, pay a money changer to rewrite it, or buy the vote of a politician even more craven that yourself.

Matthew, a devotee of Chillaxin’ Jesus, would be appalled. He supported Jesus in a big way. He even worked for Jesus’s campaign. But, Jesus just wasn’t delivering the goods. In fact, Matt heard rumors Judas and Jesus had thrown in their lot with a band of grifters running a Ponzi scheme. Their honcho was a Jewish guy, Matt thought his name was Bernie Madoff or something.

So here’s my proof of a much-debated biblical construct – evolution (or at least reverse evolution) – and I use these two Bible chapters to bolster my case.

The ancient capitalists, the ones with disposable income to invest, honestly promoted entrepreneurial risk-taking by little guys. They came out on top and got a share of the wealth. True, the third servant got his ass kicked, but that’s how the literal “free market” at the heart of the Sumerian Dream worked.

However, capitalists began to consume Main St. while offering other organisms nothing in return. In the end, they evolved a “free market” ecosystem that resembled, “If I make manna, I’m rewarded. If I ruin the manna, I’m still rewarded,” construct. They developed an astonishing virulence and line the pockets of their Brooks Bros. exoskeletons with huge quantities of manna. They’ll lie, cheat, steal, or fence their Mother’s KitchenAid Automatic Manna Maker to do it. Today, they are a huge organism that takes over all it can touch to eat every scrap of manna.

Their scientific name, if I actually believed in science, is Pondus Scuminus.

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks! More than politics, more than pop culture & humor.

To hear the 1 percenters and those 99 percenters bent on voting against their own economic self-interests tell it, you could slap a bushy beard and crazy wig on Barack Obama and he’d be the new Karl Marx. That Karl Marx could take a Viennese sachertorte-sized chomp out of their ass and they wouldn’t know him is beside the point.

Photo: r.a. paterson / Flickr

Even Karl or Barack tarted up like Karl know most people in a society must work to live and the oligarchy needs workers to keep their class alive. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and rich people don’t create jobs – only other people with jobs create jobs.

Many Americans don’t have jobs because the upper class is so greedily incompetent they are ruining things for everyone, including themselves. They want to remove regulation falsely thinking they can trust each other to do the right thing. But capitalism is an economic system based on greed and hoping greedy people will also be honorable people is counter-intuitive, stupid, and criminally naive.

Cheapster Pixie Gods, Magic Job Creators

The upper classes also believe they are magic job creators – cheapster pixie Gods who can live tax free, transfer all their money to the Caymans, and send all the American jobs overseas yet still create jobs. That is why the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says Mitt’s economic plan is “mathematically impossible“. It relies on hopelessly optimistic tax and employment rates coupled with insane budget deficit reductions.

Folks without tax accountants to find ways to avoid taxes and balance clients’ checkbooks, can tell you that if little money comes in and all the money left goes to essentials like food and a roof, the checkbook won’t balance…ever…not even if you cut everything except the food and roof.

If you aren’t working, all the money disappears fast and if you can’t find a job, it isn’t coming back. This is not called bankruptcy. This is called up Homeless Creek without a paddle and heading over the lip of Niagara Falls.

Read the rest of this entry →

PUT 'EM UP! - Chase CEO Jaime Demon will go to the mat to block banking regulations that are anti-American. He apparently doesn't feel the patriotism for American regs either. Click photo for more >>

There are few things Tea Partiers and I both believe, but this is one: there should be as little business regulation as possible. Past that, the brewerskies start making tea while wearing tri-cornered hats and carrying signs that read, “Don’t Tread on Me”.

Then, I tune them out when my ears begin to bleed.

The baggers argue there should be little or no regulation so that businesses make a lot of money (this is the true part). They argue that the dearth of regulations (this is the not so true part) will allow them to make enough money to hire more workers and have the economy fixed as quick as they can toss the regulators’ gavels on the dung heap.

The lack of regulations frees business to act as businesses normally do…profit becomes a Holy Grail that overrides everything else, including the safety of their workers and real public damage from companies that continue to do unscrupulous things, even when they know a lot is at stake.

For instance, there was that little oil spill a while back. The one where BP said all that leaking oil was only a smidge of the total volume of the Gulf of Mexico so things were A-OKAY…I’m sure the fishermen and crabbers totally agreement with that.

Regulations? Regulations? We Don’t Need No Regulations
The latest example of a corporation that just doesn’t get it is JPMorgan Chase – a bank that ends up on many, “Worst of the Worst Lists“. Chase CEO Jaime Dimon thinks most international banking regulations are a bunch of piffle that are “anti-American.

“I’m very close to thinking the U.S. shouldn’t be in Basel anymore,” Dimon said. “I would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-American.” In other words, he can’t agree with current regulations unless he writes them and gets to vote on whether he’ll follow those pesky laws he didn’t write. Read the rest of this entry →

It’s de rigueur for small government advocates to carp about government intrusion, over-regulation, or the wisdom of forcing laws down to local levels, sometimes at the risk of being inconsistent.

Inconsistency is bipartisan and a product of trying to solve difficult problems without context or tainted by personal economic preferences or moral beliefs that others don’t share.

Fair-Weather Libertarians
For example, gay marriage. Many fair-weather libertarians, Tea Partiers, and conservatives support the federal Defense of Marriage Act, despite its codifying government meddling in personal lives. The position creates a conflict between a personal moral decision and a fear of Big Brotherism. One can’t make a black and white argument for both. You either have to sacrifice a little personal morality or soften some iron-clad objections to government meddling.

So, let’s look at a new issue within the paradigm of small government, regulation, and personal freedom – the state of California requiring porn actors use condoms to cut STDs for professional pud-wielders and, by extension, the rest of us.

The decision’s already at a state level, so one point for the local decision crowd.

But, it should be a regulation bother for the strict, anti-regulation folks. More unsheathed boffing, more big bonuses for horny porny CEOs. Almost nothing is more profitable than porn in a free-market.

Schtuping for Hire
Yet, many with a pantload of self-proclaimed piety wouldn’t object if Big Brother and the Choking Company moved in and outlawed porn altogether, not withstanding government’s interference in schtuping for hire.

Most people would prefer a sharply delineated world where decisions are a binary yes or no. But, they also want exclusive moral notions of right or wrong, despite what that means to everyone else.

When they catch others in their inconsistency trap, they’re powerful anti-inconsistency wolverines scarfing up the carrion. When they catch their leg in the trap they’ll chew it off to explain their own inconsistencies with arguments as weak as an elementary school debate team’s.

News flash. The world is complex. The world is capricious. Big, small, or medium government isn’t the answer on its own. Neither is keeping everything we’re already swimming in. Sometimes yes is no and sometimes no is yes. Anyone who thinks the world should always be totally fair or consistent or based solely on their morals or ideology is a dog pissing on an imaginary tree.

And, it gets the rest of our shoes smelly and wet.

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!