The Rise of the Pharisees

            The holy trinity of our three branches of government (executive, judicial and legislative) has a societal equivalent which mirrors it: commercial, religious and political. 

When these three large structural entities are properly and ethically functioning, they tend to channel the activities of the people into healthy and productive pursuits.  When these forces are properly aligned they allow democracy to work to the mutual and best benefit of all.  Normally when these three entities are true to themselves there is a natural tension and appropriate insularity between them.  When each is doing its job adequately and appropriately to its own duties the nation moves forward as balanced as a catamaran as each source of power is kept honestly in place by the other two.

Commerce.  Money is the oil to power.  When the economy is balanced and working, especially in a democracy, it is a balm which fairly distributes its resources and delivers prosperity, health, quality of goods, fair government practices and free markets and prosperity for the greatest number of people. 

Religion, for its part, tames our passions and enriches our soul.  It also brakes excesses and ensures that money is used ethically and honestly and purposefully and that the moral compass of the nation is kept properly calibrated to the public good while tempering the cruelty and prejudice of ignorance of our actions with compassion.  It provides solace to the downtrodden and hope of a higher end to all our enterprises.  

Political.  Democracy in government is the dynamic and secular equivalent of religion that  impartially balances the needs and requirements of business and labor, ensures freedom of religion and – free of a financial interest in the outcome of policy by a generous public payroll - remains objective itself while working for the greatest well being, health, freedom and happiness for all.  Through free and fair elections, the necessary well spring of good government, the best, most honest and most knowledgeable candidates are raised into offices and through accountability excellence is ensured.

Yet when each of these three forces lowers its standards and compromises its own ethics for pursuit of raw power and the achievement of unearned and injudicious leverage over their fellow citizens, they become the instruments of an acrid, concerted, smothering incompetence and repression. 

This is the Iron Triangle of oppression and injustice which has surfaced in many different guises since the beginning of time.  It is the fatal combination torn from the Tyrant’s Handbook of political control and suppression.  Big money, bad religion and bribed politicians when working together dispense only a bitter witch’s brew of corruption and oppression.  Once each group climbs incestuously into the same bed with the other two it can only be to harm and imbalance the country.

In this eventuality: dominant religion compromises its concern for political and business ethics and concern for equality and Christian sympathy for the poor, in hopes that laws may be passed to favor them against their theological opponents. 

Business and money give up all fine notions of free and fair markets and good competition and wallow in bad business practices in preference to ensuring unjust profits at the expense of their competitors, the consumers and the nation.  They prefer in this instance corrupt government over honest government.  They fall in love with quick money over sound business practices and spend more time and money in the enervating practice of bribing politicians and corrupting legislation than they do on modernization, fair competition and research and development.

Democracy enslaved to money and mouthing pseudo religious platitudes, is the contaminated and well greased pivot on which all of this corruption turns.  Corrupted politicians give up fair and equitable government for narrow and crassly political government which consistently elevates concern for their retention in office over their service to the best interests of the public. 

So bad government stands aside and looks the other way or participates in dishonest practices while religionists obstruct scientific advancement, limit educational possibilities and infringe on freedom of thought and the rights of others.  It also allows favored, established corporations unjust advantages over small and new businesses and grants them variance to victimize consumers, to pollute with impunity, manipulate markets unfairly and abuse their own workers rights.  Finally it stands idly by while key parts of our nation’s prosperity are dismantled and sold off cheap for parts, enriching other nations’ economies while our own economic vitality and vital American jobs are put up for sale to the lowest bidders overseas.    

Instead of opposing wrong behavior by each, each part in the unwritten conspiracy to abuse their positions, immediately accepts and sanctions the excesses of the other. 

So phony religionists tolerate the corrupt practices of big business with nary a whimper.  And big money doesn’t have to worry about a conscience or its effects on the public due to the nominal religious imprimatur they provide. 

In return business grants religion its pretensions, excesses and contentions of greater morality knowing that most of the public will be too preoccupied in defending their personal freedoms and separation of church and state to worry about blocking their continuing economic depredations against us.  

The middle men politicians merely collect their bribes from both sides and hardly have to do any real democratic work at all.  They are free to unjustly enrich themselves and aggrandize their position in office by gerrymandering districts, shamelessly lying and propagandizing without price at the polls and inflating the costs of our elections beyond reach of all the more honest Americans who might seek them. 

It’s a seamy series of moral compromises in which all the players in the Iron Triangle immediately know the rules they are to play by.  “Religious” leaders look at their shoes and mindlessly get out the vote while the corrupting moneyed interests helps abet incompetent and ethically compromised politicians to their tainted reelections.

We’ve all seen too many instances of this triad’s operations at work by now to still pretend to be surprised how they cynically and continually seek to put us at odds with one another and divide the country against itself.  Their divisive tendencies move from the general to the specific and back again with alarming, seamlessness. 

One false contention concerned the Ten Commandments.  There was an attempt to post the Ten Commandments on a wall in a courtroom in Alabama.  The State Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional as an infringement of separation of church and state.  The whole issue revolved not around the freedom to display, much less honor or even follow the commandments, but whether a public wall was an appropriate place to display them.  This is really a distinction without a difference or a dispute without a basis, a crisis of style rather substance.  No one believes we shouldn’t follow the 10 rules or know them or honor them in our hearts.  At the very least, even if we don’t personally follow them we think everyone else should.  But when a judge says he wants to post them on “his” courtroom wall to make a political point and apparently preach his great moral superiority to the rest of society, he makes a fundamental mistake.

            It’s not his courtroom wall.  It is everyone else’s.  It’s as inappropriate to express his personal, arrogant, and grandstanding personal opinions in his courtroom as it would be for another judge to frame his favorite playboy centerfold, hang photos of his hunting dog with bleeding pheasant in its mouth or frame his favorite verse from the Koran.  Impartiality, not personality, is what is wanted.  Self-evidently such an issue as this, which was used to decide elections in Alabama, is bogus, frivolous and no honest American would ever sanction such a thing.  His supporters’ claim of a judge’s freedom to do such a thing is equivalent to a stranger walking into your house, hanging an oversized picture of themselves on your wall and then claiming it’s an infringement of “their” rights when you take it down. 

            No reputable politician (or judge) sworn to preserve the Constitution would support such absurdities and yet ours do.  These are the inescapable beginning shots across the bow of freedom in this country.  That our politicians inveigle on such topics that would have been dismissed out of hand by all honest public servants of our past, tells you much more of this current crop’s prejudice and vapidity than it works to inform the debate with any discernible legal or democratic or spiritual wisdom.  That businesses continue to shower campaign money on such provocateurs speaks louder than words to their mutual complicity to use one another as cover in their corrupt cabal against the public good.

            Hardly the most important but surely the most infamous recent example of the tyranny of ignorance and prejudice perpetrated on us by the Iron Triangle is the Terri Schiavo case.  This poor woman who had spent many years on life support became the center of a dispute over whether her artificial life support system should be removed or sustained.  Excruciatingly trying decisions like this must be made every day in this country.  It is hard to find right answers to such difficult emotional decisions.  Courts and legislatures have worked with families and the medical community quietly for years to mediate disputes when they arise. 

What would be the position of the politicians who are allegedly working for the best interests of all Americans when they notice a divided American family struggling with such a difficult life and death decision?  Would their actions be informed with care, impartiality and compassion?  Nope.  They descended like carrion and carnival clowns on the scene like so many greedy vultures in order to polarize the crisis as much as possible so they might generate a few campaign bucks for themselves on the side.  Unquestionably when you find politicians willing to piggy back on a crisis not to resolve it but make it worse, not to calm the waters of dissention but to intentionally stir them up you are looking directly at “public servants” who clearly have no right whatsoever to dare cash a taxpayer’s paycheck again.

Self evidently this is not an issue of suppressing some newly discovered, dangerous, mutant and irreligiously unchristian strain of thought suddenly arisen in American life as it is portrayed by its supporters but an assault on freedom of religion in this country for political purposes.  This is not a call to democracy and freedom but its antithesis.  Needless to say when Theodore Roosevelt spoke of a bully pulpit he was not speaking approvingly of a time when all our pulpits should have bullies in them.  Governments which restrict freedom of religion in the name of absolutism and endorse prejudice, abase free debate and eviscerate the vitality of science and education merely as a way to disguise their own corrupt political practices, systematically ensure their nation’s decline.

            Of course, all such attempts to jam minority religious opinions down the throats of the majority are just a perverse and covert side show and cover to the real business of corruption which the Iron Triangle is really all about.  These are not instances that exist in isolation but rather there is an intricate correlation between all these trends.  Each is just a small metaphor for the larger issue of how pseudo science and phony theology, big money and corrupt politicians unite in common cause, each tolerating the abuses and excesses of each other, watching each others’ backs like so many criminals on a caper, in order to victimize us all in the end.

 This provides them with an ever turning wheel of corruption in which each gets its shot at the public weal in its own turn.  It presupposes a close and corrupting determination and partnership between so-called religious leaders, venal politicians and the bankrolling moneyed interests designed to victimize the rest of us.  This unwholesome alliance shows how bad religion corrupts politics and bad politicians corrupt religion and big money profits either way. 

The real culprit here and the despicable root of all these evils is the pursuit of political power.  That which makes these other abuses possible is the presence of a corrupted political class.  Naturally when politicians place their offices for sale they have found it only logical and efficient to prostrate themselves at the feet of the people with the most money.  Since in our society the top ten percent of the people control more wealth than the other ninety percent of the lower end of the economy combined, it’s in their zeal to serve these few that they acquiesce and indenture the rest of America to a slave economy.     

Congress runs for office every two years promising they will cut your taxes.  Of course by your taxes they mean theirs.  Since 1980 Congress has engaged in unrelenting pressure to increase the tax burden on the rest of society by continually cutting taxes (and their corresponding onus of responsibility to the nation) to the wealthy.  This increases the economic pressure on the lower and middle class even as they deny us the good governmental services we have already been promised, been highly taxed to provide and polls show we desire. 

So since 1980, 90% of the actual tax “relief” engineered by Congress, if computed in aggregate, has accrued almost exclusively to the wealthiest 10% of the people.   This is the same group who carried a much lighter burden of taxation than the rest of us to begin with.  Of course the wealth of the top 10% has responded by exploding exponentially upwards, meaning the wealthiest 1% has increased its holdings even disproportionately to the next 9% beneath them.

            At the same time, the lower 90% has neither seen their basic tax burden decline nor has their basic wealth increased at all, even as social services and the general across the board effectiveness of government has been steadily reduced. 

So when politicians are for sale the rich get richer and the poor get poorer as they rig the tax code and all the provinces of government selectively to aggrandize their positions in an increasingly unfairly structured economy. 

To accelerate the increasing centralization of wealth into fewer and fewer hands they have suppressed the viability of unions and any ability of the working class to hold their own let alone better itself.  Their own corrupt anti-science crusades, selectively ignoring environmentalist warnings, the best scientific, economic and social evidence which doesn’t profit them and gutting their own watchdog agencies (like the FDA or FCC or IRS or FEC et al) uniformly increase costs and discomforts to the population. 

Meanwhile the remuneration to chief executives is allowed to reach obscene levels and is restricted only by how much they can get away with stealing.  Then they dare complain to Congress that their taxes have increased due to the massive increase in their incomes they have just illicitly engineered.  So Congress asks “how high” one more time and compliantly cuts their taxes.  This is a little bit like the security guards at the bank helping the hold up men with the money bags to the getaway car because there are not enough crooks to handle all the loot.

The Iron Triangle is hollowing out the economy of the United States from below.  The wages of their sins is to gut the middle class, oppress the impoverished, starve the nation of its resources, hamstring our ability to invest in and insure the future strength of the country and break the social contract between rich and poor.  These policies not only are robbing us today but are robbing our children of their future and by impoverishing most of us today will by and by impoverish us all.   

The government is now more single mindedly and recklessly devoted to imbalancing the economic interests of the nation than it has been at any time since the 1920’s.  Business has been allowed to become more shamelessly predatory than it has been for a century.  Both parties are involved and it is not a recent phenomenon.  Emblematic of their activities going back years was Savings and Loan deregulation in the 1980s.  Congress was bribed to engage in an ill-advised deregulation which soon allowed every nimble crook in the country to infest those organizations and rob them blind.  In a few years, by extremely conservative estimates, half a trillion dollars was pilfered from the taxpayers who are legally held liable to make good all the failings of our bankers. 

What would Congress do to investigate this massive fraud to ensure that it would never occur again?  Nothing.  As both parties were equally guilty of the corruption they egregiously colluded to cover up their parts in it and hold no investigations into their compound failures.  More recently energy policy is determined in secret by entirely corrupt corporations like Enron not to help the consumer or the economy but to plunder us with government’s help. 

More recently still, still trying to pander to and appease banks and credit institutions, Congress tightens bankruptcy laws and obliterates restrictions on usury.  Not only do these acts ensure that historically high personal credit card debt will continue to rise but within a year or two every street corner in every poor neighborhood is lined with quick loan shops eager to make victims of the already victimized. 

The insane mix of money, democracy and theology often becomes grotesque.  In return for its corrupt bargain with churches Congress, in its great theological insight, has even taken the common received wisdom of “you can’t take it with you”, and decided that if you are wealthy enough you can. 

They have tendentiously claimed that the estate tax is actually levied on dead billionaires.  To alleviate the pain the corpse must feel at this injustice they call it a “death” tax and decry it as “double” taxation and paint visions of coffins exhumed by the IRS to resurrect a proportion of the money from the bones buried inside.  Naively, most of us thought that an inheritance tax was a one time tax levied not on the deceased but on the heir. 

At the same time our increasingly discredited “religious” leaders are groveling to the beck and call of big money (just like Jesus would do) and dithering about where to place the Ten Commandments amid their own concern for never to be born embryos.  Congress is itself busied trying to eliminate all future taxes on the unborn children of billionaires while refusing to raise the minimum wage to a living wage for hundreds of thousands of parents of malnourished children who are already living.  It’s with excruciatingly subtle theological gymnastics like these our politicians show more concern for the well being of dead billionaires’ yet to be born children than they do with the well being of all the rest of society’s children. 

 In these ways religion supports in every way it can a Congress that cheats us on behalf of big money and thereby makes honest churches as complicit in the corruption as if they had authored it.

            All of this cynical malfeasance is disguised with tedious carnival-like side shows.  Like ladies of the evening, as they grow older and less virtuous with fewer charms to entice, our politicians begin to dress their policies ever more outlandishly and garishly to disguise their fading charms.  More carnival barkers than sober legislators, they increasingly don a kind of absurdist finery, wrap themselves in the flag and light sparklers, adopt holier than thou poses and situate themselves amidst ever more superficially elegant and elaborately outlandish deception to disguise their intentions. 

This is what happens when Pharisees rise.

            It’s in these moral compromises that freedoms are lost and constitutions fatally compromised.  It’s in these conditions that increasingly corrupted politicians thrive.  It’s in times like these that the weight of money overwhelms the logic and persistence of ideals and that political structures are pretzeled into caricatures of what they were intended.  When good becomes bad and ugly is good, honesty is false and dishonesty proliferates then simple integrity goes begging, unable to find anyone to personify it and even the meaning of words are changed.  This is when ends begin to justify all available means, when budget deficits explode, when “free” elections are priced beyond reach of honest citizens, cronyism and lack of excellence is enshrined and charlatans rise.  This is when good precedents are pushed aside and trampled under shallow expedience and policies are not designed to help majorities but only the fewest of the fewest of the few.  Here’s when hypocrisy becomes the coin of the realm and propaganda and disinformation are employed to destroy honest discourse.  When tax codes are written with corruption in mind, then pay-offs and kickbacks predominate and predetermine fair policy to fail.   At the same time, those adept at corruption are not despised but promoted and valued and prosper while those who raise reasoned qualifications and honest objections are demerited by a corrupt system designed with dishonesty in mind.  These are the times of division when, in the name of unity, freedoms are suppressed, unjust wars are dishonestly entered into and even torture is held to be virtuous and people are held without trial.  In the way wrongdoers always hate the light the unmitigated vice of secrecy of government from its own citizens is claimed to be vital.  When the rich get obscenely more rich and the poor disgracefully poorer then greed reigns triumphant over truth.

            These are the fateful signs of the times when the Pharisees rise.