Marginal Christianity

Some thoughts from Erich Fromm: "for the scholastic theologians, such economic categories as price and private property were part of moral theology...Through a number of steps eighteenth-century capitalism underwent a radical change: economic behavior became separate from ethics and human values. Indeed, the economic machine was supposed to be an autonomous entity, independent of human needs and human will. It was a system that ran by itself and according to its own laws. The development of this economic system was no longer determined by the question: What is good for [humanity]? but by the question: What is good for the growth of the system? One tried to hide the sharpness of this conflict by making the assumption that what was good for the growth of the system (or even for a single big corporation) was also good for the people. This construction was bolstered by an auxiliary construction: that the very qualities that the system required of human beings egotism, selfishness,...

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 BY  TIM SUTTLE    0 COMMENTS      The most powerful religion in the Western world is no longer Christianity. It is economics. It can actually be quite instructive to consider economics not as a science or sociology but as a religion, complete with doctrines, priests, and constant references to faith. So says John Rapley in  his essay  from  The Guardian  last July. “Think about it.  Economics  offers a comprehensive doctrine with a moral code promising adherents salvation in this world; an ideology so compelling that the faithful remake whole societies to conform to its demands. It has its gnostics, mystics and magicians who conjure money out of thin air, using spells such as “derivative” or “structured investment vehicle” … it has its prophets, reformists, moralists and above all, its high priests who uphold orthodoxy in the face of heresy.” If the economy is the new rel...

Elizabeth Farrelly I knew an unemployed artist who found work with a registered training organisation. Not teaching art. Teaching forklift drivers. "You ever drive a forklift?" I asked in surprise. He said no, unnecessary. He'd done a short course (not in forklift driving). He'd ticked the VET boxes for the TAE certificate from the RTO. All good. To me it made no sense, even sans the alphabet soup. Still doesn't. But this is what we have now instead of an education system: a market. Caveat emptor. It has to end. Neoliberalism was always based on a fundamental failure of self-knowledge. Now surely it has run its course. For decades, belief in The Market as divine presence – guaranteeing fairness and quality and providing a universal template for everything from museums to democracy to prisons – has been sewn like a nasty neoliberal pellet under our social skin. Gradually, as it released its low-dose toxicity into our bloodstream, we've depriv...

                                        George Monbiot Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is? Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness , the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump . But we resp...

James Gordon Wednesday, March 9, 2016 6:15 am In his poem, "From the Bleak Liturgies," R.S. Thomas condemns those "kings" who launder their feet in the tears of the poor, Gordon says. Economics eventually lead back to God. Justice and injustice, generosity and greed, compassion and callousness, sharing and possessiveness, these and many other contrasts in the human condition are inextricably woven into the fabric of human ethics, and for people of faith, provide the texture of holiness in practical terms. Living in contemporary Western affluence, there was a time not so long ago when we could say that at least people didn't starve, that there is a welfare safety net and that our economy budgets for the vulnerable. We believed that at its best our benefit system seeks to be all those positive things listed above: just, generous, compassionate, sharing.  See more at: http://ethicsdaily.com/when-the-...

The Reason Why We Should be Depressed About Bernie Sanders' Success by Charles Mudede • Feb 9, 2016 at 11:35 am   The key and devastating idea in Thomas Piketty's masterpiece Capital in the Twenty-First Century , an idea that many missed or failed to appreciate, is that there is no law-like link between democracy and capitalism. As he points out at the beginning of the book, there was after the Second World War great belief in the Kuznets Curve . The economist Simon Kuznets devised this hypothesis, which was eagerly accepted by those on the right and the left of his time (the 1950s). By using tax records, he saw a movement in the history of capitalism that began with things being very unequal and brutal for the poor to, step by step, things being more equal and democratic. It was therefore a law of capitalism that, as it accumulated more wealth, more of this wealth was distributed downward. But what did Piketty show? This curve was not a law but the result of a h...

by Benjamin Studebaker Lately the internet has become full of arguments about the merits and demerits of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been discussing and pondering all the various views about this, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that most of the people engaging in this debate don’t really understand what is at stake in the democratic primary. This is in part because many Americans don’t really understand the history of American left wing politics and don’t think about policy issues in a holistic, structural way. So in this post, I want to really dig into what the difference is between Bernie and Hillary and why that difference is extremely important. We have a tendency in American politics to focus too much on individuals and personal narratives, especially in presidential campaigns. Who’s in touch with ordinary people? Who is experienced? Who is a nice person? Who connects better with different identity groups? Who would you like to h...

By Patrick J. Deneen | September 25, 2015 The steady drumbeat of criticisms aimed at Pope Francis from the conservative American commentariat continue to accumulate. Following George Will’s scurrilous column of last week, Rich Lowry of America’s main conservative journal, National Review , similarly weighed in to condemn the pope’s poor grasp of economics, echoing a set of now well-worn talking points that lead one to suspect that a memo has gone out to leading conservatives in order to launch a coordinated attack. The pope has not departed from longstanding Catholic teaching on the immorality of an economic system grounded in greed and self-interest, a position established  in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s first social encyclical, De Rerum Novarum . Read more at https://ethikapolitika.org/2015/09/25/if-only-ann-coulter-had-reason-to-worry/

Rethinking the narrative of economic development, with sustainability in mind Jeremy Caradonna Sep 9, 2014 The stock narrative of the Industrial Revolution is one of moral and economic progress. Indeed, economic progress is cast as moral progress. The story tends to go something like this: Inventors, economists, and statesmen in Western Europe dreamed up a new industrialized world. Fueled by the optimism and scientific know-how of the Enlightenment, a series of heroic men—James Watt, Adam Smith, William Huskisson, and so on—fought back against the stultifying effects of regulated economies, irrational laws and customs, and a traditional guild structure that quashed innovation. By the mid-19th century, they had managed to implement a laissez-faire (“free”) economy that ran on new machines and was centered around modern factories and an urban working class. It was a long and difficult process, but this revolution eventually bro...

  It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. By Matt Taibbi May 10, 2012   President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside members of Congress in 2010. ROD LAMKEY JR/AFP/Getty Images Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history ." Th...

Robert Reich Monday, May 5, 2014                  Even though French economist Thomas Piketty has made an air-tight case that we’re heading toward levels of inequality not seen since the days of the nineteenth-century robber barons, right-wing conservatives haven’t stopped lying about what’s happening and what to do about it. Herewith, the four biggest right-wing lies about inequality, followed by the truth. Lie number one: The rich and CEOs are America’s job creators.  So we dare not tax them. The truth is the middle class and poor are the job-creators through their purchases of goods and services. If they don’t have enough purchasing power because they’re not paid enough, companies won’t create more jobs and economy won’t grow. We’ve endured the most anemic recovery on record because most Americans don’t have enough money to get the economy out of first gear. The economy is barely g...

  By Alanna Petroff   @AlannaPetroff Replay America: Land of shrinking opportunity   Wealth does not trickle down from the rich to the poor. Period. That's not Senator Elizabeth Warren talking. That's the latest conclusion of new research from the International Monetary Fund.   In fact, researchers found that when the top earners in society make more money, it actually slows down economic growth. On the other hand, when poorer people earn more, society as a whole benefits. The researchers calculated that when the richest 20% of society increase their income by one percentage point, the annual rate of growth shrinks by nearly 0.1% within five years. This shows that "the benefits do not trickle down," the researchers wrote in their report, which analyzed over 150 countries. By contrast, when the lowest 20% of earners see their income grow by one percentage point, the rate of growth increases...

                             Ross Gittins                                     In both capitalism and Christianity, the more you've sinned, the bigger the dollop of forgiveness. Photo: Ron Tandberg At this time of our greatest Christian holy-days, what does the Bible have to say about economics? A lot more than you may think. That's according to the Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek, whose book, Economics of Good and Evil , I'll be heavily relying on in this column. When God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden after they had disobeyed him, part of their pu...

It might be a division between social identities based on class or region or race or gender, but it is certainly not a clash between different ideas.        Crispin Sartwell Jun 20 2014, 12:02 PM ET   The French Estates-General in 1789 (Isidore-Stanislaus Helman via Wikimedia Commons) Americans are more divided than ever by political ideology, as a recent Pew Research Center study makes clear. About a third of people on each side say of the other that its proponents "are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being." They're both right about that. My prescription isn't civility or dialogue, which though admirable are boring and in this case evidently impossible. Rather, my approach is “philosophical”: to try to confront both sides with the fact that their positions are incoherent. The left-right divide might be a division between social identities based o...