NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) — Dave Ramsey has spent the past three decades trying to build what he calls the best place to work in America.
From his headquarters south of Nashville, the evangelical Christian personal finance guru runs a media and live events empire that includes a popular national talk radio show. Tickets to workshops on topics such as “EntreLeadership” run from $3,000 to $10,000.
Thousands of churches around the country, meanwhile, host Ramsey’s “Financial Peace University,” a 9-week program built around his principles for handling money “God’s way.”
. . . Ramsey’s intolerance for dissent has created what former employees call a cultlike environment, where leaders proclaim their love for staff and then fire people at a moment’s notice. . .
At a staff meeting in July, Ramsey railed at his staff after an employee sued Ramsey Solutions for firing her for having premarital sex, which is against company policy, and said he would pay the price to protect what he had built out of love for his employees.
“I am sick of dealing with all this stuff,” Ramsey bellowed, according to a recording obtained by Religion News Service. “I’m so tired of being falsely accused of being a jerk when all I’m doing is trying to help people stay in line.”
. . . Ramsey’s return to in-person work frustrated Heather Fulk. She has asthma, which puts her at higher risk if infected with COVID-19. After learning employees were being called back to headquarters, she made what she thought was an innocuous comment in a private Facebook post.
“Jon’s company wants to bring all 900 employees back asap when a majority can do their work from home,” she wrote on April 20. “I do *not* understand how people don’t see we are setting ourselves up for a huge second wave. Ugh, people make me so angry.”
Before long, Jon got a call from his supervisor who said a co-worker had reported Heather’s comment. They had a screenshot of the post, sent by the co-worker’s spouse.
A few weeks later, Jon was fired. In his exit interview, Armando Lopez, head of human resources at Ramsey, confirmed that the cause was his wife’s social media comment, according to a recording of the meeting.
Once again, Republicans (and many Democrats) are running around like Chicken Little warning about the economic sky collapsing now that Congress has passed the recent covid relief bill.
It is a tired, predictable, knee-jerk, conservative reaction to any government spending that aims to help the average American.
Remember that none of these folks expressed similar concerns about the folly of “deficit spending” when president Trump’s retrograde tax plan added between $1 to $2 trillion to the national debt.
None of these people complained about the CARES Act last March when a vast portion of that relief money, intended for the unemployed and small business owners, ended up lining the pockets of the richest Americans.
The litany of deficit-hawk hypocrisy could go on and on…
[For an excellent analysis of this misguided concern written by a well-regarded economist, I recommend reading the recent book by professor Stephanie Kelton called The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (PublicAffairs, 2021)].
At the DCReport, Bruce Bartlett has a good article exposing not only the
Bruce Bartlett
hypocrisy of this deficit fear mongering but also how very wrong the warnings have always been.
Predictably, conservatives are once again warning about inflation. This happens every time a Democrat takes office—even if he merely continues the identical policies of his Republican predecessor.
Unfortunately, these concerns, which always receive wide media attention, are costly both politically and economically.
Bill Clinton was forced to adopt a deficit reduction plan in 1993 that led to the defeat of many Democrats in 1994 and the installation of Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House.
Barack Obama was forced to scale back his stimulus plan in 2009 and was browbeaten into deficit reduction in 2011. That kept the economy running in slow gear throughout Obama’s presidency paving the way for Donald Trump.
Now that Joe Biden has gotten his stimulus, the inflation-mongers are just getting started again. . .
. . . It’s been an article of faith among conservatives since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 that inflation is right around the corner.
This conviction follows from a core conservative belief that inflation invariably results from increases in the money supply. As Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist put it a half-century ago in an oft-quoted line: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”
Thus, when the Federal Reserve vastly expanded the money supply in late 2008, conservatives anticipated a sharp rise in inflation. It didn’t happen. . .
. . . Yet, year after year, there was no inflation. In 2009 we saw prices fall slightly, the opposite of these predictions and warnings. The Federal Reserve couldn’t even hit its own target of 2% inflation. The average inflation rate for 2009 through 2020 was less than 1.3% annually.
That did nothing to dislodge right-wing orthodoxy, however. Conservatives continue to say that inflation was right around the corner. No amount of empirical data could shake their deeply held belief. . .
I like Glenn because he is an independent thinker. He does not follow the current of established media but offers “out of step” insights and analysis that we should all take seriously.
I have excerpted the article below. It is a bit long, but well worth your time:
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator. . .
. . . The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ). . .
. . .Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The real political powers in America today.
. . . But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
. . . The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
“The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.”
. . . Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants which are thriving, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
. . . These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
. . . The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
Dr. Francis Collins is a devout Christian who has never been hesitant in talking publicly about his faith. Thoughtful, responsible churchgoers ought
FILE – In this May 7, 2020 file photo, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins speaks during a Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool, file)
to pay attention to his advise.
NPR has posted an article by Tom Gjelten accompanied by a 4 minute video describing Collins’ advice to the country.
The fact is that both rates of infection and death from covid19 are MUCH higherthan they were earlier in the year when the initial lockdown orders were issued.
This past Wednesday, more than 3,500 Americans died of covid….in a single day. The virus is running rampant in large part because people are ignoring medical advice and listening to right-wing disinformation campaigns instead.
Why are any churches continuing to hold on sight congregational services right now at a time when the virus is infecting and killing more people than ever before?
All those who continue to insist that the new infection rate is itself proof that lock downs and isolation don’t work are conveniently ignoring the fact many locations across the country have never abided by the lock down measures or mask wearing from the beginning.
Below is an excerpt of the NPR article, or you can read the entire story here.
With COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths at record levels, a top public health official called on religious leaders to keep their worship spaces closed, despite rising protests from some church leaders.
“The virus is having a wonderful time right now, taking advantage of circumstances where people have let their guard go down,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “Churches gathering in person is a source of considerable concern and has certainly been an instance where super spreading has happened and could happen again.”
Collins, himself a regular churchgoer who speaks often about his Christian faith, discussed measures that church leaders can take to protect their congregations in a Zoom conversation on Thursday with Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“Most churches really ought to be advised to go to remote services, if they’re not already doing so,” Collins said.
Rodney Kennedy is a professor at Palmer Theological Seminary. He recently posted an interesting article at Righting America: A forum for scholarly conversation about Christianity, culture, and politics in the US, analyzing evangelicalism’s antagonism to modern science.
Perhaps the most dangerous — at least, from a public health standpoint — expression of the tragic alliance between anti-science evangelicalism and right-wing politics is the decision at Fox News to (1) downplay the dangers of covid19 transmission by (2) demeaning the medical professionals who disagree with Trump and (3) promoting the early end of current stay-at-home orders.
Kennedy’s article is entitled “A Scopes Trial Redux: Evolution, Coronavirus, and the Evangelical War on Science.”
You can read an excerpt below:
“…From the Scopes Trial to the coronavirus pandemic, the pandemonium among evangelicals has always been about opposition to evolution. The symbolic epicenter of the anti-coronavirus movement is the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Inside the tech-savvy Disney theme park edifice is
Anti-Evolution League, at the Scopes Trial, Dayton Tennessee From Literary Digest, July 25, 1925. Image by Mike Licht – Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons
enthroned the king of anti- evolution – Ken Ham. Neither scientist nor theologian he routinely rips apart science and theology. He assures his adoring fans that he doesn’t interpret the Bible; he merely reads it and its message is at once plain and clear. Ham is perhaps the quintessential example of the evangelicals who routinely believe that the Bible gives up its treasures to nothing more complicated than “common sense.”
“The Creation Museum is the Temple of Doom, as it defiles, denies, and attacks science. Ham’s obsession with painting evolution as the “beast out of the bowels of Darwin” provides the foundational ideology for the anti-coronavirus movement. Behind the mistrust of science and expertise, behind the denial of the pandemic’s scope, behind the spectacle of pastors holding mass services in states where people are fighting for their lives : behind all this is the anti-evolution movement.
“Ken Ham’s message has found ardent support among the millions of evangelical Christians who are easily persuaded that science and scientific expertise is an attack on the Bible, the American way of life, and on Christianity itself. So, it is that the ghosts of fundamentalism’s last stand at the Scopes Monkey Trial have returned in evangelicals like ancient witches and wizards gathering for the triumphant return of Voldemort. At the opening of the Creation Museum Ham expressed this residual resentment against Darrow and spoke of repairing the damage: The Scopes Trial “was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America. We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum.”
“The declaration of the continuing war could not be clearer. Every week, some business person or politician with evangelical ties adds to the creationist-inspired movement against science movement. Hobby Lobby, in direct violation of orders to be closed, reopened its stores, before announcing they would close again. The mayor of Cummings, GA rescinded his lock-down order and re-opened his city. The governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, has chosen prayer over following the recommendation of health officials. The governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, resisted issuing any order to shut down before relenting by telling the people of Alabama a shutdown was the only way to salvage football season. Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, has appealed to Christian convictions in his call to reopen schools and businesses.
“But with the coronavirus pandemic, evangelicals may have overplayed their hand, and finally exposed the soft underbelly of their anti-science, anti-intelligence, anti-history bias. Evolution isn’t as scary as COVID-19. Evangelicals may have once again picked the wrong enemy, allowing Americans, who usually pay no attention to evangelicals, to see just how dangerous they can be. This seems like a foolish attack akin to Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. When General Lee told General Pickett to rally his division, Pickett allegedly told him, “Sir I have no division.” When this current battle over science plays itself out, one can only hope that the forces of anti-science evangelicals will have been shredded and sent back to the woods from whence they emerged. Perhaps we will look back and say that the Trump presidency was the “high watermark of the evangelical movement,” before its collapse. If that is the case, it will be a tragic end to a once proud movement.”
He details some of the ways our entrenched establishment leaders have
Murtaza Hussain
prioritized and heavily funded US military adventurism around the world, leaving the domestic cupboard bare in the face of national emergencies like the one we now face.
I have an excerpt below, or click on the title above to see the full article.
But first let me also plug the newest film (16:30) from journalist Abby Martin at The Empire Files. It is called “US Empire Exploits COVID-19 For More War.” Click on the title to watch.
Abby graphically explains the president’s escalation of US military attacks around the world, few of which have received any coverage in the corporate media, while the public is distracted by the corona virus pandemic.
Here is the article excerpt:
“THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC now ravaging the United States should lead every American to a series of important questions: What are the real threats that I face? What has my government been prioritizing in terms of my — and the nation’s — security? And where has all my tax money been going?
“Considering these questions, it’s hard not to conclude that the American government’s national security priorities have been so askew of reality that they
left the country dramatically unprepared for an acute threat to millions of its people.
“. . . Over a period of two decades, the United States spent trillions of dollars waging wars and occupations across the region. These confrontations have won America an ever-growing list of enemies around the world. They are still making life miserable for millions in the Middle East. But their impact on the United States itself is now also being painfully revealed: a country that has spent trillions on foreign wars but is unable to defend its citizens from basic threats like disease and economic collapse.
“The last few weeks have revealed a spectacle of a federal government apparently incapable of doing what is required to stop the spread of a pandemic
An Italian nurse falls asleep during a night shift at a hospital in Cremona, Italy March 8, 2020. Francesca Mangiatordi/@france_exa/via REUTERS.- THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – RC20JF99B9HL
on American soil. Not only has testing capacity lagged far behind much smaller and less wealthy countries like Taiwan and South Korea, but shortages of critical health infrastructure will likely mean the excess deaths of potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans in the foreseeable future. Governors of large states have been publicly begging the federal government for ventilators, masks, and other basic tools to deal with the outbreak. There is little sign that the capacity even exists at present to respond to these requests.
“Meanwhile, the avalanche of military spending that was released after the September 11 attacks continues to roll onwards. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the U.S. government has spent a staggering $6.4 trillion on its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan since 2001. This gargantuan number
GLENDALE, ARIZONA – MARCH 13: General view of empty shelves at a Target store on March 13, 2020 (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
does not even account for interest payments on the borrowing needed to pay for the wars, which could run to as much as $8 trillion by midcentury, let alone the opportunity costs to American society of this massive spending on foreign adventurism. Then there are the attendant inflations of the Pentagon’s base budget; domestic “war on terror” spending at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security; and of course the wild expansion of our intelligence apparatuses, all but unaccountable to the general public in both their acts and spending.
“That American counterterrorism wars have killed hundreds of thousands of people while failing to achieve any clear political or strategic benefit makes the squandering of this generational wealth even more bitter.”
From his headquarters south of Nashville, the evangelical Christian personal finance guru runs a media and live events empire that includes a popular national talk radio show. Tickets to workshops on topics such as “EntreLeadership” run from $3,000 to $10,000.
[For an excellent analysis of this misguided concern written by a well-regarded economist, I recommend reading the recent book by professor Stephanie Kelton called The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (PublicAffairs, 2021)].
Abby graphically explains the president’s escalation of US military attacks around the world, few of which have received any coverage in the corporate media, while the public is distracted by the corona virus pandemic.
