Religion in Politics

Religion plays a role in our politics, as it did in Fifth Century Rome, but then it was largely a monopoly after the early 500's. Any pagan practices had to be private, (there were still many, not only in the hinterlands, among peasants and serfs, but even in Rome, among the Senators who thought they ran things). The pagan god, Victory, in the Senate was removed, and only Christian rites were approved, or allowed publicly.

Now, religion is more diverse, but still, 'The Christians' believe they should have a monopoly, with a slight nod to Judaism. Jews, after all, have to be converted to Christianity for the Last Days to arrive.

Our new anointed is: Ted Cruz, or so he seems to act. His father, Raphael, after all is a well-known and outspoken evangelist. Some conservative Christians subscribe to a "dominionist" doctrine that advocates a theocratic state run by "believers," and their leaders, of course.

That's actually what The Church in Rome and Ravenna attempted to do in the fifth century. Maybe it's why Emperor Theodosius was denoted "the Great:" he capitulated to Church dominance. His legacy: Goths, Vandals and other heretical Germanic tribes overran his successors and their subjects.

The Church was unable to prevent the barbarian takeover, but was able to weight the game towards a barbarian tribe that converted to the Catholic (Universal, or official) Church--the Franks.

Pagans survived largely in the countryside--the word 'pagan' is derived from the word for peasant or villager.

Today, among the believers of Cruz-type Christianity, the greatest threat is not from pagans or heretics, but from Communists, Socialists or The State. They label Obama a Kenyan Socialist, or a Communist, it doesn't matter which.

Since only a minority, probably smaller than media hype tells us, adheres to extreme fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity, the Ted Cruz's of politics feel compelled to play obstructionist to any progressive change. Gay marriage, according to Raphael Cruz, is a government conspiracy; the Affordable Care Act is a conspiracy to take "our fortunes."

It isn't a stretch for his son, Senator Cruz, to mount a 21-hour filibuster aimed at defunding Obamacare. If saner heads hadn't prevailed, we could have had not only the days of government shutdown but a credit default that would have spelled doom for the most powerful asset the US still has: the US dollar as global reserve currency.

In Rome, the Church, with the reigning Emperor, staged the Adventus (installing holy relics), many times, in an attempt to magic the barbarians away. There were no saner heads to prevail.

Perhaps it's lucky that Wall Street conservatism is not particularly religious: evangelical or fundamentalist. It's unlucky that the establishment believes in other magic: austerity will reduce unemployment; yet it's demonstrated repeatedly that cutting government programs promotes joblessness, while raising taxes on the wealthy will promote prosperity.

Whee! Ain't This Fun!

Guvmint shut down, so we won't have to pay no taxes no more. Guvmint shut down so we don't have to have no guvmint health care. So, poor folks can still die when they're no longer useful. And enterprising people--like us--can still buy the finest healthcare in the world.

You'll see. Everybody will be better off without guvmint--except for keeping gangs in the keeps and off the streets, if you know what I mean, while smart folk in the suites can make off with the green.

The Tea Party represents two elements: racists, who want to prove that a black man should never be President, and 'those people' should stay in their place; and predators, who want all government out of the way, so they can make off with ALL the wealth everyone else produces. The second element funds the first, of course, and primes it on what to say.

So, every day that the government is shut down, and we notice the things that can go wrong when it's not doing its job, the more the Tea Party/Republicans will lose credibility--except with the racist and vengeful 20%. The predators don't lose: they make out like the bandits they are.

The extremism of people like Ted Cruz is not unlike the Taliban and al Qaeda in its nihilism. It's hard to know what a zealot like Cruz or Mullah Mohammed really believe. Cruz gets others to believe, for example, that the Affordable Care Act is going to unleash the apocalypse, although it's an almost Republican attempt at providing universal health care (even Mexico precedes us), so that people won't be in perpetual fear of the illness that loses them their job, their insurance and drives them into bankruptcy. Cruz and the Republican crazies in the House are absolutely determined to stop this potentially extremely popular program from ever happening. They fear its effects: already, in one day, the website insurance exchanges have had far more traffic and demand than either opponents or proponents predicted, with the predictable screw ups giving opponents something to exploit.

Tea Party funders want people desperate, not secure. Consciously or not, they have encouraged the progressive impoverishment of the middle class, because anxious employees will work harder. They won't dare challenge elite rip-offs.

Capital buys technology and dis-employs, but also enables world-wide use of the cheapest labor--and even creates it, since global competition drives down wages--and weakens all those other things self-respecting business leaders despise, like unions.

Affordable Care could actually begin to change that dynamic: it would give employees greater independence: they wouldn't have to fear losing their insurance, possibly their lives, if they changed jobs.

This has to be stopped--says Cruz--and especially, the people behind him. In Rome, these same people, the predatory Senatorial class, drove the Empire bankrupt--and most soon lost everything themselves. And so did almost everyone else: Rome was reduced to a village.