Joseph + the Amazing Technicolor Tax Plan*

“Okay, everybody, gather round; it’s time for a story!” Mr. Shepherd said with a big grin.

“What kind of story?” asked Miss Dollar, pretending she didn’t know.

“A Bible story!” Mr. Shepherd exclaimed.

And all the the children cried, “YAY!”

When everyone was still, Mr. Shepherd said, “Today’s story is about Joseph. How many of you remember him?”

“I do! I do!” said the children, raising their hands.

“Of course you do!” Mr. Shepherd said. “Joseph is a Bible hero! Does anyone remember why?”

“He’s a Bible hero because he loved his family!” said Ben.

“That’s right; Joseph loved his father and brothers very much, Ben. And what else?”

“Joseph refused to have premarital sex,” said Chastity. “He ran away naked when his boss's wife tried to…um…what do you call it?”

“When she tried to seduce him; that’s right Chastity! What else?”

“He’s a Bible hero because he always trusted God, even when everything looked hopeless.” said Will. 

“My, you all remember so much about Joseph! And because of all those great qualities, he was promoted to a position of tremendous honor and responsibility in the land of Egypt. Isn’t that wonderful?”

And all the children nodded their heads; except Elizabeth, who raised her hand and waited until she was called on. 

“You stopped asking, ‘And what else,’ before we got to the end,” she said.

“OK, Elizabeth,” Mr. Shepherd replied, throwing a little wink to Miss Dollar. "What else?"

“Joseph is also a Bible hero,” Elizabeth began, “because when he saw in a dream that a global food shortage was coming, he instituted a 20 percent tax on everything grown in Egypt for seven years and stored huge quantities of grain all over the country — so much that he stopped keeping records because no one could count it all." 

“Wait a minute!” interrupted Milton. “That doesn’t sound right! I thought you said Joseph followed God.”

“He did!” Elizabeth responded, but Milton cut her off again.

“No way! That's nanny state stuff! God would never tell a leader to do that!”

“Well, apparently, that’s what God told Joseph,” Elizabeth said. “Then, when the economy slid off the rails, Joseph opened the storehouses and sold grain back to the Egyptians.”

“They bought their own grain?” Milton demanded. “That’s crazy! That’s like a double tax! God hates taxes! Tell her Mr. Shepherd!”

But Mr. Shepherd just sat there, looking stunned.

Elizabeth pressed on: “And then the global food supply collapsed and everybody in the world came to buy grain from the Egyptian government.”

This horrified the other children, who looked to Miss Dollar for help. But she faked a coughing fit and buried her face in the crook of her arm. 

After an awkward moment, Milton intoned the words they were all thinking: “God believes in free market solutions, Elizabeth. You take that back.”

But Elizabeth didn’t take it back; she plowed ahead: “The famine was far from over, and Joseph sold food to the Egyptians until all their money was gone." 

Milton’s face was very red now. “He never!”

“When the money was gone, Joseph traded food for livestock. And when the government owned all the livestock, Joseph bought up all the land in Egypt — and everyone sold, because you can’t eat dirt every day. So the people were reduced to servitude from one end of Egypt to the other.”

“LIES!” Milton screamed, his eyes bulging.

“No!” Elizabeth countered. “It’s not! It’s part of why Joseph is a Bible hero! It’s right there in the book of Genesis! You could read it for yourself!”

Milton was crying freely now. “But we’re just children!” he sobbed, snot running down the little furrow between his nose and upper lip. “The adults would have told us if that was in the Bible…right?”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” said Elizabeth in a sad voice. She smiled gently. “After that, Joseph gave everyone seed to plant. And he made the 20 percent tax permanent. And do you know what the people did?”

Milton snuffled. “They rose up in a mighty tax revolt and demanded a return to true capitalism as God intended?”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “They thanked Joseph for saving their asses — also their camels and goats. Just kidding; the government owned the livestock. They thanked Joseph for saving their lives and got to work rebuilding the economy.

“And that’s how Joseph became a Bible hero,” Elizabeth concluded. “And it’s how his father and the rest of his family survived to become the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The rest of the story, you can read at your leisure.”

”I need to blow my nodes,” Milton moaned, and excused himself to search for a tissue.

* Apologies to Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Tim Rice, Moses . First published on these pages 02.20.2011

Martin Marty on the New York Times Food Writer Who Fasted | Updated 04.04.19

We were, as a people, in a somewhat different space when this came up eight years ago ... somewhat, but not entirely. We're not arguing much about cutting the Federal deficits this year, but we're finding plenty to clash about as relates to the poor — of whom it may be said, as David Beckmann is quoted as saying by Martin Marty: "They didn’t get us into this, and starving them isn’t going to get us out of it.” So, with that...

“Why We’re Fasting” is the title of columnist Mark Bittman’s essay in Wednesday's New York Times, the “we” being himself and David Beckmann, here described as a “reverend,” and “this year’s World Food Prize laureate.” The pastor heads “Bread for the World.” Yes, why fast? Readers can do their own sighting and hearing of all the media-reported clashes over the national budget, now in final crunch time. That scan will reveal the obvious: that lost in the necessary political and economic debates blighted by the side-tracking but focal partisan and sub-partisan disputes on the issue is one set of people. Biblical scholars in this “Judeo-” and “Christian” nation call them “God’s people.” They are the poor, disabled, disadvantaged, undersheltered and, yes, hungry, about whom some of the budget debates were supposed to have been waged.           

Bittman and Beckmann discuss Isaiah 58, essential reading for believers and bystanders alike at such a time and place as this. G. K. Chesterton famously observed that one can look at something 999 times and then, on the thousandth sighting, see something revelatory, as if for the first time. We are asked to do such looking now. To bid each other to do so will sound embarrassingly pious, and yet. . . .           

As Bittman tells it, he is fasting, or was, last Monday, when thousands of others also fasted to draw notice to those Congressional budget proposals (H.R. 1) which would “quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than they are doing now.” Adds Bittman: “And: The bill would increase defense spending.”

Bittman confessed to some skepticism about whether things work out the way Isaiah 58, reporting on God’s revelatory word, suggests. That chapter also reflected God’s being bored by all of Israel’s fussing about how strenuous the people were about holy fasting. The prophet—in my own loose translation—says, for God: “You think you are going to impress me by fasting, but all you do is get hungry and thus get angry and then beat up on each other. Is that the fast you think I want?”

greedy-grabby workers | Anne Lamott on Labor Day

I understand why politicians want to see labor as the cause of most of our societal and economic problems. It takes the focus off the banks, the corporations, the military-industrial complex. But public school teachers? I guess they really are sort of greedy and grabby — not to mention rich. Especially those greedy-grabby public school special ed teachers. My younger brother is one of them, and boy, is he raking it in. Talk about take, take, take. -- Anne Lamott

all we want is health care that works for everyone | yet another reason I like the Affordable Care Act

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Occupy | If You See Something, Say Something

— Department of Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano, August 17, 2011

If you see something, say something.

This is what citizens who identify with the Occupy movement in a thousand cities and towns across the U.S. are doing. They see suspicious behavior in the financial sector — acts that look fraud, bribery, confidence games, conspiracy and looting. And like the good citizens they are, the Occupiers are saying what they see.

The Occupiers point at smoke rising from the ruins of the real economy and say, "We think someone set this fire by negligence, if not on purpose; and we think it's probably the ones who devised ways to make mad sums without regard for consequences — including burning it down and collecting insurance after the fact in the form of bets laid against their own clients."

Occupiers would like to know if anyone is looking into this, because it's unclear that anyone is, while it's become quite clear there are serial offenders who will be happy to pay hundreds of millions in out-of-court settlements as long as that leaves open the option to take in billions committing the same infractions again and again.

We won't even debate the American Jobs Act?

Last night the United States Senate failed to muster 60 elected officials willing to even debate the merits of the American Jobs Act.

That's how things work under current Senate rules. The Act itself might be passed with a simple majority of 51 votes. But 60 votes are required to bring the matter up for debate.

What part of we need jobs makes this proposal so distasteful that it can't be discussed?

• Incentivizing employers to hire returning Iraq and Afghanistan Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines?
• Hiring, rehiring and preventing the layoff of tens of thousands of firefighters, law enforcement officers and teachers?
• Training to refit capable but unemployed American workers to take jobs requiring knowledge and skills they lack?
• Modernizing more than 30,000 schools across the U.S.?
• Adding — if Moody's Analytics is in the ballpark — 1.9 million jobs — lowering the unemployment rate by a full point and growing the U.S. economy by two percent? (Could your enterprise use a two percent bump at the closing of the year?)

Read the American Jobs Act for yourself. If your Senator voted against even debating the measure, you have a right to know why. Here's where you'll find Senate contact information. 

citizen journalism | cell phone captures remarkable Fox News interview

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Class Warfare | Elizabeth Warren on Tax Fairness

Headline from the Future | Health Coverage

Official Denied Emergency Treatment

(Arlington, VA) U.S. Senator Tom Brown died yesterday in the parking lot of a Washington area hospital after being denied entrance because he lacked proof of insurance. 

The senator was taking a run, an aide said, when he complained of chest pains. “We took him straight to the hospital, but he didn’t have his wallet and they wouldn’t let us in.” 

Speaking off the record, a hospital employee who is not authorized to speak to reporters told the Post, “They said, ‘He’s a United States Senator!’ I said, ‘I don’t care if he’s effing Ron Paul: No insurance equals no treatment.’ If I make an exception for some clown who says he’s a senator, where does it stop? Treat first, ask questions later? What kind of business model is that?”

Robert Reich connects the dots in the US economy in 2.5 minutes

University professor — and former US Secretary of Labor — Robert Reich connects the dots in the US economy in two and a half minutes .

Martin Marty on Torture, Then + Now

Torture, including torture by Americans: Who could have predicted that this would be a live topic here in the twenty-first century? We know how to associate torture with the accused and accusing other, with Inquisitors and witch hunters five centuries ago, or with far-away twentieth century totalitarian regimes and religious terrorists. But today the theological, humanistic, and tactical themes connected with torture have appeared close to home, giving new significance to those distant times, places, and events.

Accordingly, a very distinguished historian, Princeton 's expert on the Renaissance, is speaking up. Not known for ideology or pamphleteering, Anthony Grafton takes pains not to oversell the relevance of his subjects. He favors patient historical work and writes in a moderate mode. Recently he looked up from his Renaissance research to see how things are going today. Alert to contemporary controversies and mildly allusive about events in America, he stops short of issuing indictments. Grafton seems to be writing in the haze of "where there's smoke there's fire," but clearly sees enough to issue cautionary words.

His article in the November 5th [2007] New Republic, entitled "Say Anything," refers to what he has learned from the transcripts of those Inquisitors and witch-hunters. He knows enough to say enough about the practical ineffectiveness of torture. Americans, we were always told, do not torture for a number of reasons: Torture violates our moral codes, including those based on religious notions that humans are made in the image of God; religious leadership is almost unanimously against torture, and America is a religious nation; for us to torture is to enter a dangerous game, since if we torture we have no moral claim to demand that "the other," our enemies, should not torture our people when they are captured; and we are a practical people and like to work with things that work. Grafton concentrates on this last piece, the ineffectiveness of torture.

Limbaugh + O'Donnell Disagree about Nothing...And Everything

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Jon Stewart | Tax Cheats + Grannies

updated link : https://www.cc.com/video/zfcq36/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-that-s-tariffic?fbclid=IwAR2ZHQ-hlrY7RC2ci9ql6kfELVFTfM9E1TIvtKeihxheSTblz8lQZGJ46f0

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Plato | Benefactors of One Another

You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State.

— Plato, The Republic, Book VII

"Do as You Would Be Done By" | One More from Professor Lewis

I have said that we should never get a Christian society unless most of us became Christian individuals. That does not mean, of course, that we can put off doing anything about society until some imaginary date in the far future. It means that we must begin both jobs at once—(1) the job of seeing how ‘Do as you would be done by’ can be applied in detail to modern society, and (2) the job of becoming the sort of people who really would apply it if we saw how.

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001 edition, p. 88

C.S. Lewis | ...the same old game under the new system

What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001 edition, p. 73

This is not the least of our problems just now ... substituting — perhaps mistaking — agreement or compliance for goodness; and excusing bad behavior ... illegal, immoral, cruel, dehumanizing behavior ... because the perpetrators are on the side we call good. As the saying goes: God is not mocked; we reap what we sow.

So … sow fair and equitable dealing, maybe?

To that, add this: Of citizens surveyed by Pew in 25 nations, more people in the U.S. — more than half — see their fellow citizens as morally bad. 

It's one thing to look at our neighbors and see badness; it's another, far worse thing to believe they are irredeemably bad.

Getting over *that* is gonna take some work.

source

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-country-survey-americans-especially-likely-to-view-fellow-citizens-as-morally-bad/

Follow the Money: Jon Stewart on Teachers + Wall Street

The Daily Show - Crisis in the Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street
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Follow the Money: What's a Teacher's Worth?

OK, First:

In the same time frame as the screen above, the average salary in Wisconsin for:

Gaming Managers was $65,760

Securities, Commodities and Financial Services Sales Agents was $72,550

Art Directors was $72,840

Fashion Designers was $77,780

Broadcast News Analysts was $79,610

Public Relations Managers was $84,900

Athletes and Sports Competitors was $97,250

Marketing Managers was $103,150

I don't begrudge the salary of anyone doing honorable work — certainly not teachers. On average, I don't think practitioners in any of these categories add more value to Wisconsin's (or the U.S.) economy than teachers.

Second: Aren't some of the people moaning about teacher salaries today the same ones who steadfastly argued two years ago that $250,000 a year is barely a living wage? You know who you are; pick a side.

Don't Be Silly | Lawrence O'Donnell + Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) wrangle over how many bullets constitute a full load

On September 10, 2004 my post in this space included this:

They [the Administration of George W. Bush) have de-clawed law enforcement. The Brady Bill—the Assault Weapons ban—will expire next Monday after proving its worth over ten years. Mr. Bush has shown zero leadership in calling for the extension of the ban on weapons needed by no one except soldiers. On Tuesday the National Rifle Association will endorse Bush/Cheney 04. I will hold Mr. Bush responsible for every assault-weapon death from Tuesday on. 

The January 2011 gun violence in Tucson was an ugly episode of the sort of lethality I feared.

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Now It's Personal: The Costs of Repealing Health Reform