Frank Schaeffer's Blog, page 8

It Is Time For a Revolution Against the Rich (Two Articles that Are a Must Read)

OP-ED CONTRIBUTORFrom the NY Times

Stop Coddling the Super-RichBy WARREN E. BUFFETTPublished: August 14, 2011RECOMMENDTWITTERE-MAILPRINTREPRINTSSHARE

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Enlarge This Image Kelly Blair

RelatedTimes Topic: Income TaxRelated in OpinionEditorial: The Truth About Taxes(August 7, 2011)

OUR leaders have asked for "shared sacrifice." But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as "carried interest," thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they'd been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It's nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that's actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It's a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn't refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what's happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn't mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.

Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country's finances. They've been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It's vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country's fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can't fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

With an unprecedented sum of wealth held within the top one-tenth of one percent of the US population, we now have the most severe inequality of wealth in US history.



Amped Status / By David DeGraw Amped Status / By David DeGraw

Americans Don't Realize Just How Badly We're Getting Screwed by the Top 0.1 Percent Hoarding the Country's Wealth

(First Published in Alternet)

By August 14, 2011 | LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?Join our mailing list:Sign up to stay up to date on the latest Economy headlines via email. TAKE ACTIONChange.org|Get Widget|Start an Online Petition �

With an unprecedented sum of wealth, tens of trillions of dollars, held within the top one-tenth of one percent of the US population, we now have the most severe inequality of wealth in US history. Not even the robber barons of the Gilded Age were as greedy as the modern-day economic elite.

As American philosopher John Dewey said, "There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes."

In my report, The Economic Elite vs. the People, I reported on the strategic withholding of wealth from 99 percent of the US population over the past generation. Since the mid-1970s, worker production and wealth creation has exploded. As the statistics throughout this report prove, the dramatic increase in wealth has been almost entirely absorbed by the economic top one-tenth of one percent of the population, with most of it going to the top one-hundredth of one percent.

If you are wondering why a critical mass of people desperately struggling to make ends meet are still not fighting back with overwhelming force and running the mega-wealthy aristocrats out of town, let's consider two significant factors:

1) People are so busy trying to maintain their current standard of living that their energies are consumed by holding onto the little they have left.

2) People have very little understanding of how much wealth has been consolidated within the top economic one-tenth of one percent.

Considering the first factor, it is obvious that people have become beaten down psychologically and financially. A report in the Guardian titled, "Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage," suggests that people are so desperate to hold onto what they have that they are too busy looking down to look up: "As psychologists will tell you, fear of loss is more powerful than the prospect of gain. The struggling middle classes look down more anxiously than they look up, particularly in recession and sluggish recovery."

Considering the second factor, people do not understand how much wealth has been withheld from them. The average person has never personally experienced or seen the excessive wealth and luxury that the mega-rich live in. Wealth inequality has grown so extreme and the wealthy have become so far removed from average society, it is as if the rich exist in some outer stratosphere beyond the comprehension of the average person. As the Guardian report states:

"… having little daily contact with the rich and little knowledge of how they lived, they simply didn't think about inequality much, or regard the wealthy as direct competitors for resources. As the sociologist Garry Runciman observed: 'Envy is a difficult emotion to sustain across a broad social distance.'… Even now most underestimate the rewards of bankers and executives. Top pay has reached such levels that, rather like interstellar distances, what the figures mean is hard to grasp."

In fact, the average American vastly underestimates our nation's severe wealth disparity. This survey, featured in the NY Times, reveals that Americans think our society is far more equal than it actually is:

"In a recent survey of Americans, my colleague Dan Ariely and I found that Americans drastically underestimated the level of wealth inequality in the United States. While recent data indicates that the richest 20 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all wealth, people estimated that this group owned just 59 percent – believing that total wealth in this country is far more evenly divided among poorer Americans.

What's more, when we asked them how they thought wealth should be distributed, they told us they wanted an even more equitable distribution, with the richest 20 percent owning just 32 percent of the wealth. This was true of Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor – all groups we surveyed approved of some inequality, but their ideal was far more equal than the current level."

This chart shows the survey's results:

The overwhelming majority of the US population is unaware of the vast wealth at hand. An entire generation of unprecedented wealth creation has been concealed from 99 percent of the population for over 35 years. Having never personally experienced this wealth, the average American cannot comprehend what is possible if even a fraction of the money was used for the betterment of society.

Given modern technology and wealth, American citizens should not be living in poverty. The statistics demonstrate that we now live in a neo-feudal society. In comparison to the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the population, who are sitting on top of tens of trillions of dollars in wealth, we are essentially propagandized peasants.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are struggling to get by, while tens of trillions of dollars are consolidated within a small fraction of the population, is a crime against humanity.

The next time you are stressed out, struggling to make ends meet and pay off your debts, just think about the trillions of dollars sitting in the obscenely bloated pockets of the financial elites. I still cling to the hope that once enough people become aware of this fact, we can have the non-violent revolution we so urgently need. Until then, the rich get richer as a critical mass with increasingly dire economic prospects desperately struggles to make ends meet.

My MSNBC Interview on Why Obama Will Win in 2012

MSNBC On GOP Faith: Bachmann, Palin, Perry Use Religion Like Snake Oil Salesmen NakedEmperorNews1 481 videos Subscribe6,880 Like Add to Share

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MSNBC On GOP Faith: Bachmann, Palin, Perry Use Religion Like Snake Oil Salesmen & Religious Right Are Racist Who Want Obama To Fail Because He Is Black

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Roger Ailes Traitor to America and Truth

The Guardian / By Tim Dickinson (Reprinted form Alternet)How the Head of Fox News Is Making Americans More Right-Wing, More Ignorant and Ever More TerrifiedEven his boss Rupert Murdoch is afraid of Roger Ailes.August 10, 2011 | LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?Join our mailing list:Sign up to stay up to date on the latest Tea Party and the Right headlines via email. TAKE ACTIONChange.org|Get Widget|Start an Online Petition �

At the Fox News Chrismas party the year the network overtook arch-rival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network's founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.

"It was as though we were looking at Mao," recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. "It's like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders," says a former executive with the network's parent, News Corp. "There are people who turn people in."

The key to decoding Fox News isn't hosts Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn't even News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. "He is Fox News," says Jane Hall, a Fox commentator for 10 years, who defected over Ailes's embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. "It's his vision. It's a reflection of him."

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816m last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch's global haul. The cable channel's earnings rivalled those of News Corp's entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch's beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3bn writedown after acquiring the Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones newsgathering operation – Fox News has one-third of the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50%. Nearly half comes from advertising and the rest is fees from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100m households, attracting more viewers than all other cable news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to "throw off a billion in profits".

The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. "Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all," says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp researching a biography of the Australian media giant. "People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News."

Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: his network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces such as the planned "terror mosque" near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Qur'an. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes's business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. "You know Roger is crazy," Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. "He really believes that stuff."

To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that is held to the same standard of evidence as a political campaign attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican party. As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan's budding Alzheimer's in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail healthcare reform in 1993. "He was the premier guy in the business," says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. "He was our Michelangelo."

In the fable Ailes tells about his own life, he made a clean break with his dirty political past long before 1996, when he joined forces with Murdoch to launch Fox News. "I quit politics," he has claimed, "because I hated it." But an examination of his career reveals that Ailes has used Fox News to pioneer a new form of political campaign – one that enables the Republican party to bypass sceptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion. The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.

The result is one of the most powerful political machines in American history. One that plays a leading role in defining Republican talking points and advancing the agenda of the far right. Fox News tilted the electoral balance to George W Bush in 2000, prematurely declaring him president in a move that prompted every other network to follow suit. It helped create the Tea Party, transforming it from the butt of late-night jokes into a nationwide insurgency capable of electing US senators. Fox News turbocharged the Republican takeover of the House last autumn, and even helped elect former Fox News host John Kasich as the union-busting governor of Ohio – with the help of $1.26m in campaign contributions from News Corp. And by incubating a host of potential Republican contenders on the Fox News payroll – including Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – Ailes seems determined to add a fifth presidential notch to his belt in 2012. "Everything Roger wanted to do when he started out in politics, he's now doing 24/7 with his network," says a former News Corp executive. "It's come full circle."

The 71-year-old Ailes presents the classic figure of a cinematic villain: bald and obese, with dainty hands, Hitchcockian jowls and a lumbering gait. Friends describe him as loyal, generous and funny. But Ailes is also, by turns, a tyrant: "I only understand friendship or scorched earth," he has said. One former deputy pegs him as a cross between Don Rickles, the venomous comic, and Don Corleone. "What's fun for Roger is the destruction," says Dan Cooper, a key member of the team that founded Fox News. "When the lightbulb goes on and he's got the trick to outmanoeuvre the enemy – that's his passion." Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by al-Qaida for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun.

Ailes was born in 1940 in Warren, Ohio, a manufacturing outpost near Youngstown. His father worked at the Packard plant producing wiring for GM cars, and Roger grew up resenting the abuse his father had to take from the "college boys" who managed the line. Roger spent much of his youth in convalescence. A sickly child – haemophilia forced him to sit out breaktime at school – he had to learn to walk again after getting hit by a car aged eight. His mother worked, so he was raised in equal measure by his grandmother and TV. "Television and I grew up together," he later wrote.

A teenage booze hound – "I was hammered all the time" – Ailes said he "went to state school because they told me I could drink". In fact, his father kicked him out of the house when he graduated from high school. During his stint at Ohio University, where he studied radio and television, his parents divorced and left the house where he had spent so much of his childhood recovering from illness and injury. "I went back, the house was sold, all my stuff was gone," he recalled. "I never found my shit!" The shock seems to have left him with an almost pathological nostalgia for the trappings of small-town America.

In college, Ailes tried to join the Air Force reserve officer training corps but was rejected because of his health. So he became a drama geek, acting in college productions. The thespian streak never left Ailes: His first job out of college was as a gofer on The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally syndicated daytime variety show that featured ageing stars such as Jack Benny and Pearl Bailey in a world swooning for Elvis and the Beatles. In many ways, Ailes remains a creature of that earlier era. His 1950s manners, martini-dry ripostes and unreconstructed sexism give the feeling, says one intimate, "like you're talking to someone who's been under a rock for a couple of decades".

Ailes found his calling in television. He proved to be a TV wunderkind, charting a meteoric rise to executive producer by the age of 25. Ailes had an uncanny feel for stagecraft and how to make conversational performances pop on live television. But it was behind the scenes at Mike Douglas in 1967 that Ailes met the man who would set him on his path as the greatest political operative of his generation: Richard Milhous Nixon. The former vice-president – whose stilted and sweaty debate performance against John F Kennedy had helped doom his presidential bid in 1960 – was on a media tour to rehabilitate his image. Waiting with Nixon in his office before the show, Ailes needled his powerful guest. "The camera doesn't like you," he said. Nixon wasn't pleased. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like television to get elected," he grumbled. "Television is not a gimmick," Ailes said. "And if you think it is, you'll lose again."

The exchange was a defining moment for both men. Nixon became convinced that he had met a boy genius who could market him to the American public. Ailes had fallen hard for his first candidate. He soon abandoned his high-powered job producing Mike Douglas and signed on as Nixon's "executive producer for television". For Ailes, the infatuation was personal – and it is telling that the man who got him into politics would prove to be one of he most paranoid and dirty campaigners in the history of American politics. "I don't know anyone else around that I would have done it for," Ailes has said, "other than Nixon."

Like Nixon, Rupert Murdoch found Ailes captivating: powerful, politically connected, funny as hell. By the time the two men teamed up in 1996 both had been married twice and both shared an open contempt for the traditional rules of journalism. Murdoch also had a direct self-interest in targeting regulation-minded liberals, whose policies threatened to interfere with his plans for expansion.

Even before he hired Ailes, Murdoch had several teams at work on an early version of Fox News that he intended to air through News Corp affiliates. The false starts included a 60 Minutes-style programme that, under the guise of straight news, would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social programme. "The idea of a masquerade was already around prior to Roger arriving," says Dan Cooper, managing editor of that first iteration of Fox News. Murdoch envisioned his new network as a counterweight to the "leftwing bias" of CNN. "There's your answer right there to whether Fox News is a conventional news network or whether it has an agenda," says Eric Burns, who served for a decade as media critic at Fox News. "That's its original sin."

Before signing on to run the new network, Ailes demanded that Murdoch get "carriage" – distribution on cable systems nationwide. In the normal course of business, cable outfits such as Time Warner pay content providers such as CNN or MTV for the right to air their programmes. But Murdoch turned the business model on its head. He didn't just give Fox News away – he paid the cable companies to air it. To get Fox News into 25m homes, Murdoch paid cable companies as much as $20 a subscriber. "Murdoch's offer shocked the industry," writes biographer Neil Chenoweth. "He was prepared to shell out half a billion dollars just to buy a news voice." Even before it took to the air, Fox News was guaranteed access to a mass audience, bought and paid for. Ailes hailed Murdoch's "nerve", adding: "This is capitalism and one of the things that made this country great."

Ailes was also determined not to let the professional ethics of journalism get in the way of his political agenda. To secure a pliable news staff, he led what he called a "jailbreak" from his old employers, NBC, bringing dozens of top staffers with him to Fox News.

Ailes then embarked on a purge of existing staffers at Fox News. "There was a litmus test," recalled Joe Peyronnin, whom Ailes displaced as head of the network. "He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals." When Ailes suspected a journalist wasn't far enough to the right for his tastes, he'd spring an accusation: "Why are you a liberal?" If staffers had worked at one of the major news networks, Ailes would force them to defend working at a place such as CBS – which he spat out as "the Communist Broadcast System". To replace the veterans he fired, Ailes brought in droves of inexperienced up-and-comers – enabling him to weave his own political biases into the network's DNA. Reporters understood that a rightwing bias was hard-wired into what they did from the start. "All outward appearances were that it was just like any other newsroom," says a former anchor. "But you knew that the way to get ahead was to show your colour – and that your colour was red." Red state, that is.

Befitting his siege mentality, Ailes housed his newsroom in a bunker. Reporters and producers at Fox News work in a vast, windowless expanse below street level, a gloomy space lined with video-editing suites along one wall and cubicle offices along the other. In a separate facility on the same subterranean floor, Ailes created an in-house research unit – known at Fox News as the "brain room" – that requires special security clearance to gain access. "It's where the evil resides," says Cooper, who helped design its specs.

It was the election of Bush in 2000 that revealed the true power of Fox News as a political machine. According to a study of voting patterns by the University of California, Fox News shifted roughly 200,000 ballots to Bush in areas where voters had access to the network. But Ailes, ever the political operative, didn't leave the outcome to anything as dicey as the popular vote. The man he tapped to head the network's "decision desk" on election night – the consultant responsible for calling states for either Gore or Bush – was none other than John Prescott Ellis, Bush's first cousin.

In any newsroom worthy of the name, such a conflict of interest would have immediately disqualified Ellis. But for Ailes, loyalty to Bush was an asset. "We at Fox News," he would later tell a House hearing, "do not discriminate against people because of their family connections." On election day, Ellis was in constant contact with Bush himself. After midnight, when a wave of late numbers showed Bush with a narrow lead, Ellis jumped on the data to declare Bush the winner – even though Florida was still rated too close to call by the vote-tracking consortium used by all the networks. Fox News called the election for Bush at 2.16 am – a move that spurred every other network to follow suit, and led to "Bush Wins" headlines in the morning papers.

"We'll never know whether Bush won the election in Florida or not," says Dan Rather, who was anchoring the election coverage for CBS that night. "But when you reach these kinds of situations, the ability to control the narrative becomes critical."

After Bush took office, Ailes stayed in frequent touch with the new Republican president. "The senior-level editorial people believe that Roger was on the phone every day with Bush," a source close to Fox News tells me. "He gave Bush the same kind of pointers he used to give [his father] – delivery, effectiveness, political coaching." In the aftermath of 9/11, Ailes sent a back-channel memo to the president through Karl Rove, advising Bush to ramp up the war on terror. As reported by Bob Woodward, Ailes advised Bush that, "the American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible".

Fox News did its part to make sure that viewers lined up behind those harsh measures. The network plastered an American flag in the corner of the screen, dolled up one female anchor in a camouflage-print silk blouse, and featured Geraldo Rivera threatening to hunt down Osama bin Laden with a pistol. The militarism even seemed to infect the culture of Fox News. "Roger Ailes is the general," declared Bill O'Reilly. "And the general sets the tone of the army. Our army is very George Patton-esque. We charge. We roll."

Ailes likes to boast that Fox News maintains a bright, clear line between its news shows, which he touts as balanced, and primetime hosts such as O'Reilly and Hannity, who are given free rein to voice their opinions. "We police those lines very carefully," Ailes has said. But after Bush was elected, Ailes tasked John Moody, his top political lieutenant, to keep the newsroom in lockstep. Early each morning, Ailes summoned Moody into his office and provided his spin on the day's news. Moody then posted a daily memo to the staff with explicit instructions on how to slant the day's news coverage according to the agenda of those on "the second floor", as Ailes and his loyal cadre of vice-presidents are known. "There's a chain of command, and it's followed," says a former news anchor. "Roger talks to his people, and his people pass the message on down." (Ailes and Fox News declined repeated requests for an interview for this piece.)

The more profits soared at Fox News, the more Ailes expanded his power and independence. In 2005, he staged a brazen coup within the company, conspiring to depose Murdoch's son Lachlan as the anointed heir of News Corp. Ailes not only took over Lachlan's portfolio – becoming chair of Fox Television – he even claimed Lachlan's office on the eighth floor. In 2009, Ailes earned a pay package of $24m – a deal slightly larger than the one enjoyed by Murdoch himself. He brags privately that his contract also forbids Murdoch – infamous for micromanaging his newspapers – from interfering with editorial decisions at Fox News.

Many within Murdoch's family have come to viscerally hate Ailes. Murdoch's third wife, Wendi, has worked to soften her husband's politics, and his son James has persuaded him to embrace the reality of global warming – even as Ailes has led the drumbeat of climate deniers at Fox News. PR man Matthew Freud, Murdoch's son-in-law, recently told reporters: "I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to."

"Rupert is surrounded by people who regularly, if not moment to moment, tell him how horrifying and dastardly Roger is," says Wolff, Murdoch's biographer. "Wendi cannot stand Roger. Rupert's children cannot stand Roger. So around Murdoch, Roger has no supporters, except for Roger himself."

Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp pays to usher him from his $1.6m home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. Travelling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: "We come out of the building and there's an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us. We're ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox's offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive 'the package'. The package is taken in, and I'm taken on to my destination."

Ailes is certain that he's a top target of al-Qaida terrorists. Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, he keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. "What the hell!" Ailes shouted. "This guy could be bombing me!" The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. "Roger tore up the whole floor," recalls a source close to Ailes. "He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network."

Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network's viewers are old, with a median age of 65. Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, commercials for products such as Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical ("Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven't had since I started using catheters"). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38% of viewers are African-American. "Roger understands audiences," says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. "He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about." The typical viewer of Sean Hannity's show, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86%), Christian conservative (78%), Tea Party-backer (75%) with no college degree (66%), who is over 50 (65%), supports the NRA (73%), doesn't back gay rights (78%) and thinks government "does too much" (84%). "He's got a niche audience and he's programmed to it beautifully," says a former News Corp colleague. "He feeds them exactly what they want to hear."

From the time Obama began contemplating his candidacy, Fox News went all-out to convince its white viewers that he was a Marxist, a Muslim, a black nationalist and a 1960s radical. In early 2007, Ailes joked about the similarity of Obama's name to a certain terrorist's. "It is true that Barack Obama is on the move," Ailes said in a speech to news executives. "I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said: 'Why can't we catch this guy?'" References to Obama's middle name were soon being bandied about on Fox & Friends, the morning happy-talk show that Ailes uses as one of his primary vehicles to inject his venom into the media bloodstream.

The Obama era has spurred sharp changes in the character and tone of Fox News. "Obama's election has driven Fox to be more of a political campaign than it ever was before," says Burns, the network's former media critic. "Things shifted," agrees Jane Hall, who fled the network after a decade as a liberal commentator. "There seemed suddenly to be less of a need to have a range of opinion. I began to feel uncomfortable."

Most striking, Ailes hired Glenn Beck away from CNN and set him loose on the White House. During his contract negotiations, Beck recounted, Ailes confided that Fox News was dedicating itself to impeding the Obama administration. "I see this as the Alamo," Ailes declared. Leading the charge were the ragtag members of the Tea Party uprising, which Fox News propelled into a nationwide movement. In the buildup to the initial protests on 15 April 2009, the network went so far as to actually co-brand the rallies as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties."

According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Sharia law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama's citizenship. At the height of the healthcare debate, more than two-thirds of Fox News viewers were convinced Obamacare would lead to a "government takeover", provide healthcare to illegal immigrants, pay for abortions and let the government decide when to pull the plug on grandma. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland revealed that ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That's because Ailes isn't interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimisation.

"What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame," says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. "He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilises it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin's politics of resentment. He's the golden thread."

Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America's most conservative voters. Republican candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypassing the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as "matadors" who want to "tear down the social order" with their "elitist, horse-dung, socialist thinking". Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetises conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line. "I'm not in politics," Ailes recently boasted. "I'm in ratings. We're winning."

The only thing that remains to be seen is whether Ailes can have it both ways: reaching his goal of $1bn in annual profits while simultaneously dethroning Obama with one of his candidate-employees. Either way, he has put the Republican party on his payroll and forced it to remake itself around his image. Ailes is the Chairman, and the conservative movement now reports to him. "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us," said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. "Now we're discovering that we work for Fox."

SEX, MOM and GODReviews:Editorial ReviewsReviewKirkus ...

SEX, MOM and GOD Reviews:

Editorial ReviewsReview

Kirkus Reviews, 5/15/11

"The book shines in sections centered on Edith, a 'life-embracing free spirit'…A consummate memoirist, Schaeffer fills the narrative with interesting anecdotes…The sage conversation on a New York-bound bus with a distraught Asian girl is warmly resonant and a befitting conclusion to…[a] book of ruminations, memories and frustrated opinion."

Booklist, 5/15/11

"[A] startlingly honest work, which is part memoir and part religious history…Intriguing fare." Church of England Newspaper, 5/13/11

"Part memoir, part exploration of evangelical views."

PoliticusUSA.com, 5/16/11"A work that alternates from heartwarming to thought provoking to laugh out loud funny…Schaeffer brilliantly guides the reader through an exploration of the Bible's strange, intolerant, and sometimes frightening attitudes about sex, and how these Biblical teachings, through the evangelical grassroots of the Republican Party, have come to dominate the GOP stance…Schaeffer's writing style combines intelligence, warmth, humor, depth and insight…Sex, Mom, and God is hands down one of the best non-fiction books of the year."

Kirkus Reviews (website), 6/1/11

"The memoir, the third and last in Schaeffer's God trilogy, unfolds in lucid anecdotal excursions probing the chinks that later became gaping holes in the fundamentalist walls that penned him in." Internet Review of Books, 6/8/11

"A fond and sometimes hilarious look back at [Schaeffer's] mother's child-rearing methods and the effect they had on him…Schaeffer's journey demonstrates that the world could be a better place if we were all able to reassess our beliefs and values—to examine them closely and glean only those worth saving." Library Journal, 6/15/11"Well worth reading, highly entertaining, and very informative about the recent history of American evangelicalism. It will appeal to readers interested in the world today, memoir, or religion." Huffington Post, 6/13/11"Intelligent and easy to read; it transitions smoothly back and forth between story-telling and point-making prose…In his portrayal of Edith Schaeffer, Frank is able to call out the nuttiness of the religious right and to humanize conservative and Evangelical Christians in the same narrative. It is the deft work of a talented writer practicing his craft…It is a bit of wisdom our entire nation—hell, the whole world—needs to hear." RH Reality Check, 6/16/11"Part memoir, part revelation about Evangelical pathology, and part prescription for theological sanity, the book has much to recommend it." Patheos.com, 6/16/11"Offers an insider's glimpse into how fundamentalism became the dominant voice in the U.S. political area." InfoDad.com, 6/16/11

"Frequently entertaining." The Humanist, July/August 2011"[Schaeffer's] stories aren't just interesting, they're also well told…[He] serves up an intriguing combination that's part sexual memoir and part exposé of religious right extremism. It's a strange combination to be sure, but in the hands of a gifted wordsmith like Schaeffer it works." State of Formation, 6/20/11

"Part memoir, part theology, and part political commentary…An ambitious undertaking. But Sex, Mom, and God did not disappoint. Alternating between laugh-out-loud episodes and poignant reflections, Schaeffer recounts with candor the influence his mother had on both his beliefs and the beliefs of a generation of Evangelicals…His readers—believers and non-believers alike—will be challenged to reconsider their views about politics, sex, and religion." The Daily Beast, 6/24/11

"Intriguing…[Schaeffer's] privileged view of the Christian right's sexual weirdness makes his account particularly interesting, and helps explain why the aggressively pious so frequently destroy themselves with sex scandals."

Milwaukee Shepherd-Express, 7/7/11

"[Schaeffer] has grown into rueful middle age with his sense of sarcasm sharpened… Sex, Mom and God dips into the same well as Crazy for Godand draws irony and venom from its depths."

WomanAroundTown.com, 6/16/11"By turns biting, funny, and thought provoking."

Washington Post , 7/10/11"[Schaeffer's] memoirs have a way of winning a reader's friendship…Schaeffer is a good memoirist, smart and often laugh-out-loud funny…Frank seems to have been born irreverent, but his memoirs have a serious purpose, and that is to expose the insanity and the corruption of what has become a powerful and frightening force in American politics…Frank has been straightforward and entertaining in his campaign to right the political wrongs he regrets committing in the 1970s and '80s…As someone who has made redemption his work, he has, in fact, shown amazing grace." Roanoke Times, 7/10/11

"A thought-provoking analysis of the social and religious struggles that continue to define American consciousness…Schaeffer covers a lot of important territory in his book…He provides an insider's view on the ways America has become fragmented, polarized by various forms of extremism."

In These Times, August 2011"An unusual mix—part memoir, part exegesis on Bible-based belief systems, and part prescription for a more compassionate, human-centered politics for both religious and theologically skeptical people. Humor, at times of the laugh-out-loud variety, is abundant. And while readers will likely bristle at some of Schaeffer's conclusions, his wit, sass and insights make Sex, Mom, & God a valuable and entertaining look at U.S. fundamentalism." San Francisco Book Review, 7/20/11"This memoir/diatribe on organized religion is so shockingly bold and intimately revealing that it will spin your head around whiplash-quick, and cause you to double check to make sure you read the words correctly…Schaeffer comes to a jarring conclusion for fundamentalists, Roman Catholics, Jews, and Muslims alike, that if we don't set aside our dogma and start making a serious effort at getting along, we will end up destroying ourselves and everything we thought we believed in."

Product Description"A penetrating analysis of political extremism, with a moving and at times hilarious account of growing up in one of the Christian right's most influential families. Few writers command Frank Schaeffer's intimate understanding of right-wing radicalism, and even fewer are able to share their insight as entertainingly and with as much moral weight as he has in Sex, Mom, and God."—Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah "Mom was a much nicer person than her God. There are many biblical regulations about everything from beard-trimming to menstruating. Mom worked diligently to recast her personal-hygiene-obsessed God in the best light." Alternating between laugh-out-loud scenes from his childhood and acidic ruminations on the present state of an America he and his famous fundamentalist parents helped create, bestselling author Frank Schaeffer asks what the Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs and the paranoid fantasies of the "right-wing echo chamber" are really all about.

Here's a hint: sex.

The unforgettable central character in Sex, Mom, and God is the author's far-from-prudish evangelical mother, Edith, who sweetly but bizarrely provides startling juxtapositions of the religious and the sensual thoughout Schaeffer's childhood. She was, says Frank Schaeffer, "the greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox I've encountered … a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity."

Charlotte Gordon, the award-winning author of Mistress Bradstreet, calls Sex, Mom, and God "a tour de force . . . Sarah Palin, 'The Family,' Anne Hutchinson, adultery, abortion, homophobia, Uganda, Ronald Reagan, B. B. King, Billy Graham, Hugh Hefner—it's all here. This is the kind of book I did not want to end."

Frank Schaeffer is a survivor of both polio and an evangelical/fundamentalist childhood, an acclaimed writer who overcame severe dyslexia, a home-schooled and self-taught documentary movie director, a feature film director and producer of four low budget Hollywood features Frank has described as "pretty terrible," and a best selling author of both fiction and nonfiction.

Writing in the Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize winner and novelist Jane Smiley says of Schaeffer's latest book Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway--

"Schaeffer is a good memoirist, smart and often laugh-out-loud funny. For those of us not raised in religious homes, he is like a visitor from another planet who marvels at things that we take for granted — like letting children form their own opinions… Frank seems to have been born irreverent, but his memoirs have a serious purpose, and that is to expose the insanity and the corruption of what has become a powerful and frightening force in American politics."

Frank's three semi-biographical novels about growing up in a fundamentalist mission: Portofino,Zermatt, Saving Grandma have a worldwide following and have been translated into nine languages. Frank's memoir, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back has been acclaimed widely. Joel Brown, writes in the Boston Globe (December 18, 2007) "That Crazy for God isn't just another James Frey-style memoir of personal dysfunction becomes clear with the subtitle, it's alternately hilarious and excruciating." Jeff Sharlet (a contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine) reviewed Crazy For God in The New Statesman (Oct 29 2007). He wrote: "Crazy for God is a brilliant book, a portrait of fundamentalism painted in broad strokes with streaks of nuance, the twinned coming-of-age story of Frank and the Christian right." Betty Smartt Carter writing in Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine (January/February 2008) writes-- "So now, this year, comes Crazy for God, an autobiography that's very like Portofino in its tangible beauty and humor, but with more contrition and a little less fiendish lampooning... Schaeffer describes a life that was by turns happy, difficult, idyllic, and completely nuts. Polio and dyslexia seemed like bumps on the road compared to the burden of growing up in a family that set out to save the world one intellectual at a time. If he spares anyone here, it's not himself. And we forgive him for his shortcomings, partly because he's a world-class storyteller... In other words, keep writing books, Frank. You're good at it." Frank's nonfiction also includes the NYT bestseller, Keeping Faith-A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps and AWOL-The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes From Military Service and How It Hurts Our Country. Tom Brokaw writes— "AWOL drives home, with hope and respect for our forebears, the need to address the evaporating sense of duty and service to our nation." Senator John S. McCain writes: "Frank Schaeffer has done our country a great service with the publication of AWOL." Frank has written for USA Today, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and other publications on topics ranging from his critique of American right wing fundamentalism to his experiences as a military parent and novelist and is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post website. He has been a commentator on both NPR's All Things Considered and for the NEWS HOUR with Jim Lehrer and a frequent guest on C-SPAN Book TV.

The Smirking Chimp / By Robert BeckerFirst published on...

The Smirking Chimp / By Robert Becker



First published on alternet



Tea Party Terror: An Unholy War to Gain Tyranny of the MajorityWe're in the midst of an unholy war by a minority of fanatics who take no prisoners, nor apologize for innocent victims.August 9, 2011 | LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?Join our mailing list:Sign up to stay up to date on the latest Tea Party and the Right headlines via email. TAKE ACTIONChange.org|Get Widget|Start an Online Petition �

Whether or not V.P. Biden tagged the Tea Party "terrorists," more sentient beings have dramatized their politics of crude intimidation with howls about ransom demands, hostage-taking, blackmail and extortion. The stolid NY Times' Joe Nocera condemned this "jihad against America" intent on "blowing up the country." Right, an unholy war by a minority of fanatics who take no prisoners, nor apologize for innocent victims.

We've gone way beyond states' rights on hot-button cultural fixations, even nullifying specific, objectionable "liberal" giveaways. Does not the manufactured debt fallout — nullification of government integrity — demand strong retaliation by the adults before this unholy war impales the ultimate casualty — it's the future, stupid? What defines a third world debtor nation more emphatically than obsolete infrastructure, no new growth industries or updated labor force, paltry education and research commitments, no master environmental, regulatory and/or energy planning? What distinguishes the Tea Party insurrection (and backers) from suicide bombers or unhinged shooters of House members or abortion doctors, is scope, funding, and organization — plus collusion with a radicalized GOP and the 87 rogues the rightwing shoehorned into Congress.

The first, worst casualty in this holy war — all policy contradictions aside — isn't just the truth but majority rule, the result of transforming government from gridlock to self-inflicted paralysis that kills the revenue potential that could solve any big problems. More or less, America was plodding along towards only moderate inequality when 2000 kicked off body blows against majority rule. The rightwing Bush-Cheney gang viewed majority will as a problem open to manipulation, rarely the solution or heart of America. Cheney scorned all polls.

Follow this calamitous storyline: 1) the Supreme Court wrongly trumps the 2000 Florida election when installing a minority president (in popular vote) who ends up widely hated. And why? Because 2) W. unilaterally, deceptively drags us into the Iraqi quagmire, then loses popular support when innumerable WH deceptions surface. Plus, 3) terrible wars plus terrible tax giveaways cost 3-4 trillion while shredding the budget-deficit. 4) On his own, Bush tortures innocents and abuses our civil rights — deflecting Congressional approval and in short order inviting public outrage. 5) Finally, while the middle-class gets ambushed by the criminal minority causing the Great Recession, the Supreme Court awards corporate treasuries the golden leverage only tinpot dictators inflict. Though highly unpopular, Citizens United only reflected the sabotage to the democratic spirit when the top 1% seizes 40% of assets and 25% of income.

Majority Held in Contempt

This survey only captures the high points of democratic low points, as endless wars are rejected by increasing majorities starting in '06. Not that that stops any of them in five years, in fact more get added, few with open debate or declarations. And I jumped over the Clinton Impeachment, the most high-handed act of minority arrogance in decades. And now, every time President Obama caves instead of fighting for the majority's clear agenda (quick war exits, public option-price controls-true health care reform plus Wall Street indictments), majority rule withers. Today's Tea Party's hissy fit simply finalizes the rout of democracy this decade as 20% drive the other 80% of us into double-dip recession, maybe worse. When has sustained minority rule — whether by white, male, slavery-accepting landowners in 1800, robber barons of the Gilded Age, ideological Supreme Courts, or economically-illiterate know-nothings — not produced unspeakable pain and suffering for the majority?

What makes the debt ceiling fiasco more onerous than Gingrich's 1990's political theatre — or racist '60's civil rights Senate opposition (eventually defeated), or reactionary assaults against FDR (turned back) — was its utter, needless absurdity. What was gained and how much was lost? Eventually, non-stop crusades that undermine the legitimacy of every Democratic president since LBJ — and now our credit ratings and chance to fight unemployment — torpedo Lincoln's ideal of government for and by and of the people — in short, our collective future. If Tea Party obstructionism is about 20% trumping what 60 or 80% want to do, the magnitude of permanent damage will be incalculable, making 9/11 a blip on the radar.

Majority Rule, the Soul of Democracy

Majority rule, and open voting (now under siege), are the only insurance against more top-down despotic control, whether military, financial, class, or oligarchic. The supremacy of majority rule precedes America and the Constitution, adjudicating what any one generation elevates to do-or-die status. Issues change, complexions change, personalities change, law and the Constitution change — but what republic survives this mortal blow? Even when the majority is wrong or mislead, or callously slow about human rights — today for gays — some absolute instrument must end debate, make decisions, and start action. Rule by majority, exactly like Churchill's view of democracy, may well be the most dreadful form of government, except for all the others.

What Tea Party insurgencies evoke for me, if sustained and widespread, are divisions we haven't seen in 150 years ago when the South seceded. What else, other than sharing history and this key value, better ties together our six very disparate regions? Today, radical Tea Party ideology disputes our core assumption — that the president and the majority (not white enough, nor religiously right) can and should rule wisely. That defines the ultimate Tea Party sabotage, way beyond the debt ceiling nonsense. Either we have majority rule or some self-appointed, minority, or "faith alone" gang rules. That's why Teavangelists are so dangerous, so inflexible in all their convictions any who disagree are condemned as treasonous, wicked, and/or foreign subversives.

Tea Party — Modern Confederacy?

Guess the percentage of defiant, white, southern, Confederates in 1861 — only 20% of all Americans. Not every one of the 5.5 million white southerners favored violent resistance, nor did all of the 22 million non-southerners adore Lincoln. What about the 3.5 million slaves? Whatever the complex causes of the Civil War, its start was anything but democratic or done by popular vote. No, an elite, plantation-slave owning gentry declared war via secessionist state houses. Lincoln wasn't about to end slavery, inflame the South, or use force to impose federal law — unless coerced.

Now guess the percentage of Tea Partiers in 2011. As polls range from 13% to 25%, let's call it no more than 20%, too. 52 House members define the Tea Party caucus and another 35 join their fun. Now guess what percentage of the total 435 members that 87 represent. Bingo, 20%.

Not to overplay the comparison, but today's batch of older, white, racially-insensitive conservatives also assert less government is automatically good, federal taxation suspect, the U. S. president's a crass, oppressive dictator — and decentralization would solve all problems. Curiously, today's insurgents want to "take back their country" (just like southern Rebels), forever waxing nostalgic about fantasy golden ages (under Reagan). Not so different from earlier delusions of pre-abolition, ante-bellum plantation golden ages where happy slaves prospered because milk and honey flowed freely.

There is, so far, one great difference: millions were killed and maimed because the Confederacy took arms against its legitimate government. The two-year old Tea Party can't yet match those casualties in its war against the majority — and against reality. But it's still young. Check out the Michael Lind linkage of "The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism," arguing "the goal, methods and passions of the Tea Party in the House are all characteristic of the radical Southern right." Good rejoinder by Democratic strategist Ed Kilgore.

Christian Terror in Norway: I Predicted Terror from the Religious Right in My New Book "Sex, Mom and God"

The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a 32-year-old man, whom they identified as a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing connections, over the bombing of a government center and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together left at least 91 people dead.

In my new book "Sex, Mom and God" I predicted just such an action. I predicted that right wing Christians will unleash terror here in America too. I predict that they will copy Islamic extremists, and may eventually even make common cause with them.

There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government in fact hatred of our country as fallen and evil because we allow women choice, gays to marry, have a social safety net, and allow immigration from other cultures and non-white races.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the killer wrote:

"Today's Protestant church is a joke," he wrote in an online post in 2009. "Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic."

It seems Anders Behring Breivik longed for a "pure" and ultra conservative religion. He was a man of religious conviction, no liberals with their jeans need apply! Liberals beware.

Norway is just a first taste of what will happen here on a larger scale.

A HISTORY of VIOLENT ACTION

There is a history to the far right, religious right extremism on the rise today, extremism so extreme that in its congressional manifestation it is risking the good faith and credit of the US in the debt calling fiasco. The Tea Party activists also want purity of doctrine.

My family was part of the far right/violent right's rise in the 1970s and 80s when we helped create the "pro-life" movement come into existence that in the end spawned the killers of abortion providers. These killers were literally doing what we'd called for.

The terror unleashed on Norway - and the terror now unleashed by the Tea Party through Congress as it holds our economy hostage to extremist "economic" theories that want to destroy our ability to function -- is the sort of white, Christian; far right terror America can expect more of.

THE "CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD"

Call this the ultimate "Tea Party" type "answer" to secularism, modernity, and above all our hated government. Call this the Christian Brotherhood. From far right congress people, to far right gun-toting terror in Norway and here at home, our own Western version of the Taliban is on the rise.

Foreigners, visitors from another planet and Americans living in a bubble of reasonable or educated people might not know this but the reality is that the debt ceiling confrontation is by, for and the result of America's evangelical Christian control of the Republican Party.

It is the ultimate expression of an alternate reality, one that has the mistrust of the US government as its bedrock "faith," second only to faith in Jesus.

To understand why an irrational self-defeating action like destroying the credit of the USA might seem like the right thing to do you have to understand two things: that the Republican Party is now the party of religious fanatics and that these fanatics -- people like Michele Bachmann -- don't want to work within our system, they want to bring it down along the lines of so-called Christian "Reconstruction." (See my book for a full account of what this is.)

In the scorched-earth era of the "health care reform debates" of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren't the evil government. The right even decided that it was "normal" for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies -- even for military operations ("contractors"), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

PRIVATE "FACTS"

The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private "facts," too.

They claimed that global warming wasn't real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate.

Worse, the government said so, too!

"Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!"

"Amtrak must make a profit!"

There is an indirect but deadly connection between the "intellectual" fig-leaf providers/leaders like my late father and periodic upheavals like the loony American Right's sometimes-violent reaction to the election of Barack Obama, killings in Norway and what the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party is about to do to us in forcing a default on our loans, and thus destroying the US economy in a way bin Laden could only have dreamed of doing.

No, your average member of some moronic gun toting Michigan militia is not reading books by my late father Francis Schaeffer where he called for the overthrow of the government because of Roe v Wade and the legalization of abortion. Nor have they heard of people like Robert George. And the killer in Norway may or may not have read my father's books.

But Michele Bachmann is reading my father's books. And she was trained in far right Reconstructionist theory at the Oral Roberts law school by one of Dad's followers.

Bachmann says she got into politics because of reading my father's work. And she is one of his extremist followers.

Non-Evangelicals with far right agendas like Robert George (I'll introduce him to you in a moment) have cashed in on the Evangelicals' like Bachmann's willingness to lend their numbers and influence to one "moral" anti-American crusade after another, or rather I should say, to one political crusade after another masquerading as moral crusades.

"RESPECTABLE" FAR RIGHT "INTELLECTUALS"

For instance, conservative Roman Catholic Princeton University Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George is an antiabortion, anti-Obama, anti-gay-rights, and anti-stem-cell-research "profamily" activist, and he has found ways to effectively carry on the far right Reconstructionist agenda while denying any formal connection to it and taking the intellectual high road.

Take George's brainchild: the "Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience."

This was published in 2009 as an anti-Obama manifesto, and many far right Evangelical leaders signed on.

The "Manhattan Declaration" reads:

"We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life

act . . . nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's."

In case you've never heard of George, he's been a one-man "brain trust" for the Religious Right, Glenn Beck, and the Far Right of the Republican Party as well as for the ultraconservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church. Here's how the New York Times introduced him to its readers:

"[Robert George] has parlayed a 13th-century Catholic philosophy [the natural law theory] into real political influence. Glenn Beck, the Fox News talker and a big George fan, likes to introduce him as "one of the biggest brains in America," or, on one broadcast, "Superman of the Earth." Karl Rove told me he considers George a rising star on the right and a leading voice in persuading President George W. Bush to restrict embryonic stem-cell research. . . . Newt Gingrich called him "an important and growing influence" on the conservative movement, especially on matters like abortion and marriage. "If there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy," the conservative Catholic journal Crisis concluded a few years ago, "its leaders probably meet in George's kitchen.""

GOVERNMENT IS THE ENEMY

It's a question of legitimacy and illegitimacy.

What the Religious Right, including the Religious Right's Roman Catholic and Protestant enablers, did was contribute to a climate in which the very legitimacy of our government--is questioned as part of religious faith itself.

The "Manhattan Declaration" called laws with which its signers disagreed "edicts," thereby conjuring up images of dictators handing down oppressive rules, rather than legitimately elected democratic bodies passing legislation. In other words, when the Right lost in the democratic process, "other means" to undermine the law were encouraged. This is the language of revolution, not democracy.

The Far Right intellectual enablers began by questioning abortion rights, gay rights, school prayer rulings, and so forth. What they ended up doing was to help foster a climate in which--in the eyes of a dangerous and growing (mostly white lower class undereducated gun-toting) minority--the very legitimacy of the U.S. government was called into question, sometimes in paranoid generalities, but often with ridiculous specificity: for instance, in the persistent lie that President Obama was not a citizen or was a Muslim or that the Federal Reserve and/or United Nations were somehow involved in a plot to "take away our freedoms" or that sensible gun control equaled "tyranny."

TERROR FOR CHRIST

It was in the context of delegitimizing our government that actions by domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh became thinkable. In 1993 McVeigh told a reporter, "The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control."

Change a word or two and his words could have been lifted from my father's 1981 book A

Christian Manifesto, or for that matter a few decades later, from statements by the so-called Tea Party or those by Michele Bachmann, or Robert George or his follower Glenn Beck.

In my father's book he called for the overthrow of the US government unless non-violent ways were found to overturn Roe v Wade. He compared America to Nazi Germany.

Note the ominous rhetorical shadow Dad's book cast over a benighted and divided American future, a future that produced the climate of hate that eventually spawned the murder of abortion providers such as Dr. George Tiller in Wichita in 2009 and the threat of destroying America's credit in an effort to literally defund the USA.

Here's a bit from Manifesto on how the government was "taking away" our country and turning it over to Liberals, codenamed by Dad as "this total humanistic way of thinking":

"The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population..."

And this:

"Simply put, the Declaration of Independence states that the people, if they find that their basic rights are being systematically attacked by the state, have a duty to try and change that government, and if they cannot do so, to abolish it."

Then this:

"There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate. . . . A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion. . . . It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates its authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation."

In other words, Dad's followers were told that (1) force is a legitimate weapon to use against an evil government; (2) America was like Hitler's Germany--because of legal abortion and of the forcing of "Humanism" on the population--and thus intrinsically evil; and (3) whatever would have been the "appropriate response" to stop Hitler was now appropriate to do here in America to stop our government, which Dad had just branded a "counterfeit state."

EXTREMISM IS NEXT TO GODLINESS

To understand the extremism coming from the right, the fact that there are members of Congress who seem to be genuinely mentally unhinged leading the charge on the debt ceiling, you need to understand that this hatred of all things government has theological roots that have nothing to do with facts.

Theology is -- by nature -- not about reason but about faith. If God's will is to be served then so be it if America is plunged into chaos! This debt ceiling fiasco is just another chapter in the "culture" wars.

The extreme language of Evangelical/"pro-life" rebellion has now been repackaged in the debt ceiling showdown. It is the language of religion pitted against facts.

And the anti-government charge is being led by people who are either true believers, thus unable to reason, or people catering to the true believers so that they can remain in the good books of the Tea Party, which is nothing more than the Evangelical far right repackaged and renamed.

Some people took the next step. The night of December 14, 2008, Bruce Turnidge was in handcuffs and sitting next to an FBI agent in Turnidge's farmhouse in Oregon. He was ranting about the "need" for militias and cursing the election of an African American president. Hours earlier, his son, Joshua, had been arrested for allegedly causing a fatal bomb explosion.

"Bruce started talking about the Second Amendment and citizens' rights to carry firearms," said George Chamberlin, the FBI agent. "Bruce talked at length that the government should fear the people and that the people should not fear the government."

In February 2010, a little more than a year after Obama's inauguration, Joseph Stack, a fifty-three-year-old software engineer, piloted a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, and killed one man and injured several others.

Before killing himself, Stack posted an online suicide note railing against the federal government and expressing grievances similar to those Dad had enumerated.

A Facebook group celebrating Stack had thousands of members sign on almost instantly after he was "martyred for our freedoms," as one contributor called it. The site featured the Gadsden flag (the flag with the logo "Don't Tread On Me") and these words: "Finally an American man took a stand against our tyrannical government that no longer follows the constitution and turned its back on its founding fathers and the beliefs this country was founded on."

In March 2010 the so-called Hutaree Militia, a right-wing, biblically inspired fundamentalist group, was alleged to have hatched a plot to kill police officers. Members of this outfit had planned attacks on police officers as a way of acting out their hatred for the government as well as a way to launch the civil chaos "predicted" in so-called End Times biblical prophecies. The day the plotters were arrested, I checked their online homepage. Here's what I found as their mission statement (misspellings in the original post, which has since been taken down, as has the site):

"As Christians we all are a part of the Souls of the Body of Christ, the one true church of Christ. . . . This is the belief of the Hutaree soldier, as should the belief of all followers in Christ be."

THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE DRIVES THE RIGHT TO INSANITY

Following the election of our first black president, the "politics" of the Evangelical, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Mormon Far Right was not the politics of a loyal opposition, but rather the instigation of revolution, which was first and best expressed by Rush Limbaugh when even before President Obama took office he said, "I hope Obama fails."

To the old-fashioned conservative mantra "Big government doesn't work," the newly radicalized Evangelicals (and their Roman Catholic and Mormon cobelligerents) added "The U.S. government is evil!"

And the very same community--Protestant American Evangelicals--who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere "run by the government."

As they opened new institutions (proudly outside the mainstream), the Jesus Victims doing this "reclaiming" cast themselves in the role of persecuted exiles.

What they never admitted was that they were self-banished from mainstream institutions, not only because the Evangelicals' political views on social issues conflicted with most people's views, but also because Evangelicals (and other conservative religionists) found themselves holding the short end of the intellectual stick.

And yet having "dropped out" (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding "moral" and "family" matters the society they'd renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

CHRISTIAN JIHAD

Another Far Right Roman Catholic ideologue (and also an academic) even wrote a book calling on Christians, Jews, and Muslims to join together in a jihad against the secular West. In Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War a former friend of mine, Peter Kreeft (a professor of philosophy at Boston College), called for "ecumenical jihad."

I met with Kreeft several times in my home in the 1980s and early 1990s while he was developing his "jihadist" ideas.

Kreeft's was not a plea for blowing people up, and his book was published pre-9/11.

His book was based on the fact that many believers in Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, and Islam (at least in their fundamentalist forms) rejected the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Homosexuality is out, sex education is evil, and so on. Kreeft called on all believers to unite to overthrow "secularism" in the same anti-secular spirit that Robert George channeled a few years later when trying to undermine the Obama administration through his brainchild, the "Manhattan Declaration."

Kreeft called for an "alliance" of fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims to prosecute a culture war against what he viewed as the Western cultural elite. Ecumenical Jihad was dedicated to Richard John Neuhaus, the late Roman Catholic convert priest, and to Charles Colson (who later teamed up with George to author the "Manhattan Declaration").

The groups Kreeft, Colson, and Neuhaus had in mind to "bring together" in an ecumenical jihad were alienated Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Roman Catholics, to which Kreeft added Muslims (not that any actually signed on to his program as far as I know). These groups did not share each other's theology, but they had a deeper link: anger at the "victimhood" imposed on them by modernity.

Kreeft and Neuhaus were calling abortion murder. Thus, the logic of their argument was that of my father's, too: The U.S. government was enabling murder and was thus disparaged as a "regime," even a "counterfeit state," that needed to be overthrown.

A WILLINGNESS TO DESTROY AMERICA IN ORDER TO "SAVE" IT

George and Colson and the others who wrote and then signed the "Manhattan Declaration" (like Kreeft before them) also called for fundamentalists to unite if need be for civil disobedience to stop the U.S. government from passing laws that did not comply with their religious "values" and/or to undermine those laws if they were enacted.

So if the U.S. government legalized gay marriage and thus "compelled" all Americans (including church groups) to recognize gay men and women's civil rights, the government need no longer be obeyed when those laws affected religious people who disagreed with them. The "Manhattan Declaration" called believers to "not comply." And just as Neuhaus dismissed the U.S. government as a "regime"--and my father did the same when saying the government was a "counterfeit state"--George and his co - signers also used dismissive and demeaning language about the U.S. government.

In a country awash in weapons and wallowing in the rhetoric of rebellion against an "evil" government, sporadic outbursts of murder tinged with political overtones seem as inevitable as they seem horribly "normal."

It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to foresee a day when a "secessionist" group and/or members of some "militia"--let alone one lone individual--will use their U.S. passports, white skins, and solid- citizen standing as a cover for importing a weapon of mass destruction to "liberate" the rest of us from our federal government's "tyranny" and/or to "punish" some city like New York, known as the U.S. "abortion capital" or San Francisco as the place that "those gays have taken over." And the possibility of an assassination in the same vein is a never-ending threat.

What we fear most from Islamist terrorists will be unleashed here as it was in Norway.

Terror is on the way on the way from our very own Christian and/or Libertarian "Tea Party" type activists inspired by right wing "Christian" intellectuals and political leaders like Bachmann who - after the killing starts -- will then disown them and express horror at their actions, actions that are in fact the logical extension of the anti-government rhetoric spewing from Congress and the religious right.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.

Only Bad People Will Work With Murdoch Now (That We Know What We Know)

Here's what you may not know about Rupert Murdoch: he's one of the leading religion publishers in the world.

Here's what you do know: The top executive in Murdoch's UK power base, Rebekah Brooks is under arrest. The top UK police officer -- Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson -- has just announced his resignation given the corruption of the police by Murdoch company officials. Rupert Murdoch could be arrested too, as could his son.

Murdoch-owned companies have intercepted the voicemail messages of murder victim Milly Dowler, hacked into the phones of the parents of one of murder victims, listened in to the mobile phones of the families of the 7/7 London bombings, hacked phones of servicemen killed in Afghanistan. They have conspired to corrupt the top ranks of the UK police. They have allegedly hacked the phones of 9/11 victims.

Here's what we also know: Without the "Tea Party" there wouldn't be far right ideologues in Congress like Michele Bachmann empowered to play Russian roulette with America's future over the debt ceiling. And without Fox News and the Wall Street Journal there would have been no Tea Party, let alone Republicans "successfully" obstructing the President at every turn.

Who is the sole source of this combination of paparazzi hell tabloid amorality gone wild, sleaze and decadence along with breeding the most extreme right wing politics America's ever known since the days of radio host and fascist sympathizer Fr. Coughlin?

Where do all these downward paths meet: In the person and career of Rupert Murdoch.

And now the Murdoch scandal has spread from the just closed News of the World to the Sun and the Sunday Times of London. So it is not about "one bad apple" but about Murdoch's company's methods across the board, as extensive coverage in the Guardian has proved.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown suffered from years of criminal intrusion by the Murdoch team, including pilfering medical records of his child. His infant son's medical records were obtained by the Sun. And Brown's tax returns were hacked. Murdoch companies corrupted the police, bribed them into handing over information on their targets, including the prime minister and the queen.

So why are religious moralizers writing about high-minded ethical themes still prepared to enrich Murdoch as they are doing?

Murdoch is one of America's biggest publishers of religious books, including the 33-million seller Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. Murdoch is also publisher of Rob Bell's Love Wins. And he also publishes Deepak Chopra and even Desmond Tutu!

Do these religious authors -- and many more besides -- writing about ethics, love and moral rectitude wear gloves when they cash their royalty checks?

Murdoch bought into the billion-dollar American religion market. He bought the venerable evangelical Zondervan publishing house. He bought the religion web site Beliefnet. And he owns HarperOne that publishes Chopra and Tutu.

Back in the day when I was an evangelical author/activist - I've long since fled that world -- and working with my father Francis Schaeffer who was a founder of the religious right, I knew the founding Zondervan family. They were a clan of strict Bible-believing Calvinists who'd have bathed for a week in the Jordan River to purify themselves if they'd ever even brushed up against Murdoch and his minions, let alone stumbled on the ubiquitous nude centerfolds Murdoch puts in his "newspapers." Later generations sold out in the religion version of the family that sold the once respected Wall Street Journal into Murdoch bondage.

My question is this: What religious author - conservative or liberal -- would knowingly work to enrich Murdoch now? He is the epitome of everything that religion says its against: lies, greed, criminality, and sheer exploitation of the defenseless. He is the Fox News hate facilitator who gave us Glenn Beck.

Okay, they deserve a second chance.

Mea Culpa!

I published two books with HarperCollins some years ago soon after Murdoch had taken over. I had a deal with the Smithsonian that was tied into HarperCollins for distribution, then the Smithsonian backed out but my books stayed at Harpers. After they were published I thought about - and regretted -- helping Murdoch in however small a way. I've never published with them again.

I only have one excuse, I didn't know much about Murdoch then. But who would willingly publish anything with any Murdoch paper, magazine or book publisher now, knowing what we all know?

Non-religion authors like Jeff Jarvis have pulled books from HarperCollins because it's owned by Murdoch as he writes in the Huffington Post : "[my] next book, Public Parts, was to be published, like my last one, by News Corp.'s HarperCollins. But I pulled the book because in it, I am very critical of the parent company for being so closed. It's now being published by Simon and Schuster."

Post UK meltdown, post Fox News leading the charge on facilitating the potential destroyers of the US economy, all because they want to take down the first black American president, will Tutu, Bell, Chopra et al - big time authors with a choice of publishers -- still publish yet more books with HarperOne, and/or with Zondervan?

Will liberals in Hollywood still underwrite Murdoch with their lives and continue to work for Fox TV and Fox Films? They used to boycott working in the old apartheid South Africa with the cry, "We won't play Sun City!" (an entertainment complex that tried to book big American entertainers).

Now the Hollywood "liberals" like James Cameron's movies underwrite this right wing zealot, pouring Fox News lies into every home in the world. The message of Cameron's film Avatar was all about the environment, and anti-war, a sensitivity that Fox News has done its best to destroy with their anti-belief-in-global-warming lies, not to mention making the Bush war in Iraq possible by backing the Bush lies. Making Avatar with and for Murdoch was as appropriate as publishing the Diaries of Anne Frank with a company controlled by the Arian Nation.

Next time you read Chopra, Bell and Tutu or re watch Avatar, remember this: there is a direct line from these spiritual enlightened works to Rupert Murdoch's bank accounts and to the pay checks Fox News and Wall Street Journal "reporters" will draw next week.

It's time to hold Murdoch's collaborator's feet to the fire no matter what their progressive or religious credentials are, especially the famous authors who can publish anywhere. Without writers willing to contribute to Murdoch's publishing/entertainment empire, there'd be no empire and no Fox News and Wall Street Journal, perverting American politics and rooting for the destruction of the US economy all to please the lunatic far right/religious right fringe that's taken over the Republican Party.

We can't boycott every dubious corporation on earth. But with Murdoch a line's been crossed.

I know it's not considered polite to be judgmental but I'll say it: to work for any part of Murdoch's empire, let alone to publish religious books with him, or to make spiritually sensitive films for him strips the author (or film maker) of moral authority and it should strip that person of his or her readers and viewers too.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His most recent book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus).

Roots of the Republican Anti-Government Reflex and the Debt Ceiling Crisis

Foreigners, visitors from another planet and Americans living in a bubble of reasonable or educated people might not know this but the reality is that the debt ceiling confrontation is by, for and the result of America's evangelical Christian control of the Republican Party. It is the ultimate expression of an alternate reality, one that has the mistrust of the US government as its bedrock "faith," second only to faith in Jesus.
To understand why an irrational self-defeating action like destroying the credit of the USA might seem like the right thing to do you have to understand two things: that the Republican Party is now the party of religious fanatics and that these fanatics -- people like Michele Bachmann -- don't want to work within our system, they want to bring it down.
In the scorched-earth era of the "health care reform debates" of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren't the evil government. The right even decided that it was "normal" for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies -- even for military operations ("contractors"), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.
The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private "facts," too.
They claimed that global warming wasn't real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too
"Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!"
"Amtrak must make a profit!"
Even the word "infrastructure" lost its respectability when government had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges, and trains. In denial of the West's civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, Evangelicals (and the rest of the Right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God's creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals.
It only remained for a far right Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to rule in 2010 that unlimited corporate money could pour into political campaigns -- anonymously -- in a way that clearly favored corporate America and the super wealthy, who were now the only entities served by the Republican Party.

Where does this all come from?
The 1970s Evangelical antiabortion movement that my father Francis Schaeffer, C. Everett Koop, and I helped create seduced the Republican Party. By the early 1980s the Republicans were laboring under the weight of a single-issue religious test for heresy: abortion. Abortion was "murder" and since the US government "allowed abortion" it was no longer seen as legitimate by the anti-abortion activists.
I was there -- and/or Dad was -- participating in various meetings with Congressman Jack Kemp, Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush, Sr., when the unholy marriage between the Republican Party and the Evangelical "pro-life" community was gradually consummated. Dad and I -- as did many other Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell -- met one on one or in groups with key members of the Republican leadership quite regularly to develop a "pro-life strategy" for rolling back Roe v. Wade.
And that strategy was simple: Republican leaders would affirm their antiabortion commitment to Evangelicals, and in turn we'd vote for them -- by the tens of millions. Once Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, "we" would reverse Roe, through a constitutional amendment and/or through the appointment of antiabortion judges to the Supreme Court or, if need be, through civil disobedience and even violence, though this was only hinted at -- at first.
When Evangelical and Republican leaders sat together, we discussed "the issue," but we would soon move on to the practical particulars, such as "Will blue-collar Catholic voters join us now?" (They did.) Soon Evangelical leaders were helping political leaders to send their message to the "pro-life community" that they -- the Republican leaders -- were on board.
For instance, I organized the 1984 publication of President Ronald Reagan's antiabortion book with Evangelical Bible publisher Thomas Nelson. Reagan's book had first appeared as an essay in the Human Life Review (Spring 1983). I was friends with Human Life Review founder and editor: the brilliant Roman Catholic antiabortion crusader Jim McFadden. He and I cooked up the presidential project over the phone.
The president's book expressed his antiabortion "views" as ghostwritten by McFadden in order to cement the Reagan "deal" with the antiabortion movement. We called the book Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation. I suggested to Reagan's people that two Schaeffer family friends -- C. Everett Koop and Malcolm Muggeridge (a famous British writer/social critic and convert from Far Left politics to rabid Far Right Roman Catholicism with whom my father once led a huge "pro-life" demonstration in Hyde Park, London) -- provide us with afterwords to "bulk out" an otherwise too brief book, which they did within a week or two after I called them.
Once they were "on board," Republican leaders like Senator Jesse Helms and Congressmen Jack Kemp and Henry Hyde (to name but three whom I met with often, in Jack's case in his home, where I stayed as a guest) worked closely with my father and me, and we (along with a lot of other religious leaders) began to deliver large blocs of voters. We even managed "our" voters for the Republican Party by incessantly reminding our followers of "the issue" through newsletters, TV, and radio broadcasts.

Fast-forward thirty years to the early twenty-first century:
The messengers, leaders, and day-to-day "issues" changed, but the volume and tone of the anti-government "debate" and the anger in reaction to the Obama presidency originated with the antiabortion movement. To understand where that anger came from and who first gave voice to it, consider a few prescient passages from my father's immensely influential book (influential within the Evangelical ghetto, that is) A Christian Manifesto, which was published in 1981.
As you read these excerpts, bear in mind what would take place in the health care "debates" over what came to be disparaged as "Obamacare" thirty years or so after my father's book was read by hundreds of thousands of Evangelicals. Anti-health-care-reform rhetoric -- "Death Panels!" "Government Takeover!" "Obama is Hitler!" -- that the Far Right spewed in the policy debates of 2009 and beyond seemed to be ripped from the pages of Dad's and my writings.
Note the ominous rhetorical shadow Dad's book cast over a benighted and divided American future, a future that produced the climate of hate that eventually spawned the murder of abortion providers such as Dr. George Tiller in Wichita in 2009 and the threat of destroying America's credit in an effort to literally defund the USA.
Here's a bit from Manifesto on how the government was "taking away" our country and turning it over to Liberals, codenamed by Dad as "this total humanistic way of thinking":
"The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population.*
And this:
"Simply put, the Declaration of Independence states that the people, if they find that their basic rights are being systematically attacked by the state, have a duty to try and change that government, and if they cannot do so, to abolish it."
Then this:
"There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate. . . . A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion. . . . It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates its authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation."
In other words, Dad's followers were told that (1) force is a legitimate weapon to use against an evil government; (2) America was like Hitler's Germany--because of legal abortion and of the forcing of "Humanism" on the population--and thus intrinsically evil; and (3) whatever would have been the "appropriate response" to stop Hitler was now appropriate to do here in America to stop our government, which Dad had just branded a "counterfeit state."
Dad's books sailed under the radar of the major media. But his work, and the work of other anti-American religious right leaders shaped a generation.
For instance Michele Bachmann credits reading my father's books as to what inspired her to enter politics as a means to "serve the Lord."

Republican Apocalypse Now
To understand the extremism coming from the right, the fact that there are members of Congress who seem to be genuinely mentally unhinged leading the charge on the debt ceiling, you need to understand that this hatred of all things government has theological roots that have nothing to do with facts.
Theology is -- by nature -- not about reason but about faith. If God's will is to be served then so be it if America is plunged into chaos! This debt ceiling fiasco is just another chapter in the "culture" wars.
The extreme language of Evangelical/"pro-life" rebellion has now been repackaged in the debt ceiling showdown. It is the language of religion pitted against facts.
And the anti-government charge is being led by people who are either true believers, thus unable to reason, or people catering to the true believers so that they can remain in the good books of the Tea Party, which is nothing more than the Evangelical far right repackaged and renamed.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.

Orwell and Me

From the Roanoke Times

« Review: "Capital of the World" | Review: "Fire and Rain" »

2011.07.11Review: "Sex, Mom & God"

SEX, MOM, & GOD: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics — and How I learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway
By Frank Schaeffer. Da Capo Press. 298 pages. $26

Reviewed by Lawrence Wayne Markert
LAWRENCE WAYNE MARKERT is an English professor at Hollins University.

"Sex, Mom, & God," the new memoir from Frank Schaeffer, author of "Crazy for God," reads similarly to George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia."
Orwell's book describes his growing disillusionment as he fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Schaeffer was raised as a "soldier" for the religious right, fighting various culture wars in the United States through the 1980s.

He, like Orwell, became disillusioned with the extremism he encountered. Schaeffer fled the evangelical scene in the early 1990s. He, too, learned that extremism exists on both sides of the battle lines. He now has created a thought-provoking analysis of the social and religious struggles that continue to define American consciousness.

Schaeffer's book, as the title and subtitle suggest, provides an informed ramble through a mix of personal experiences, social history and cultural critiques.
The personal experiences center on the formative relationship with his mother, Edith Schaeffer, who proved to him through her behavior rather than ideology that life is defined by paradox rather than certainty.

The opening sentences may startle some, but they are the beginning of Schaeffer's remarkably honest account of the importance of his mother's life to his own: "My biblically inspired sex education took a quantum leap in 1960. When I was 8 years old, my mother handed me her diaphragm."

Like Orwell's, Schaeffer's book proves to be less a memoir and more of a polemic. The personal experiences serve as a catalyst for analyzing broader social issues. Anyone who has seen Schaeffer interviewed on television or read some of his more recent writings knows that he is resolute, even evangelical, about his new perspectives and his exodus from his fundamentalist past: "I regret every moment I spent selling myths to the deluded, or should I say that I regret selling myths to myself and then passing them on to people as deluded as I was."

His goal is not to discredit Christianity — he and his wife are members of the Greek Orthodox Church now — but rather to gain balance, perspective.

Schaeffer covers a lot of important territory in his book, beginning with his early Bible instruction and what he calls "The God-of-the Bible," a handle he uses "to differentiate between whatever actual deity might be out there and the biblical version and caricature of that Person, Force, or Persons," to America's Puritan tradition and the concept of American exceptionalism, and to the "unholy" alliance between the Christian right and the Republican Party.

There is a long and insightful chapter on the pro-life/pro-choice debate, and at various points he deals insightfully with the fear of the "other," those who are not like us, as central to objections to the Obama presidency.

Although his tone at times seems polemical — he loves exclamation and the exclamation point — Schaeffer's purpose is to encourage us all to establish common ground. He provides an insider's view on the ways America has become fragmented, polarized by various forms of extremism. He states, in fact, that "what we fear most from Islamist terrorist could also be unleashed on us by our very own Christian and/or Libertarian activists."

He now realizes, as his mother taught him, that the acceptance of paradox rather than the insistence on certainty is the starting and ending point of human existence. Again like Orwell, he has embraced the meaning he finds in the everyday aspects of life.

The Swine Company that Runs Fox News Exposed

Here's an op-ed from the Guardian newspaper about the folks that run Fox News, made Palin, destroyed Obama's chance to govern and on and on....


After the Gordon Brown revelation, can this scandal get any worse?

With revelations that Gordon Brown's children were targeted, the News International scandal is spiralling out of Murdoch's control

reddit thisComments (519) Roy Greensladeguardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011 18.51 BSTArticle historyGordon Brown with his wife Sarah and new baby boy James Fraser Brown in July 2006. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA

Another day, another shock. The Gordon Brown revelations are truly shocking. But I've written that before. There is so much that generates this response. Our language of shock fails us at every turn.

The muck has spread from the News of the World (deceased) to The Sun and the Sunday Times. And it includes a centre-stage role for News International's chief executive Rebekah Brooks.

But the discovery that Brown suffered from the dark arts over his children puts the spotlight back on a publisher that staggers from crisis to crisis without any apparent strategy to cope.

In fact, its public relations seems disastrous, and 80-year-old Murdoch – who has conducted himself in public so carefully in the past – now seems to have lost the plot.

Did he think it wise to have his arm about Brooks as they both smiled for the cameras within a day of 200 employees being dismissed?

Did he believe that trying to manage the news with injudicious leaks was a clever manoeuvre in the face of such a welter of negative information emerging about the company on an hourly basis?

Did he care at all about the years of deceit that have been the hallmark of News International's handling of a terrible catalogue of unethical (and illegal) behaviour?

The man is losing touch and if he isn't careful, he will lose his company.

Shareholders in the States were already aghast at the previous exposures of wrongdoing by NoW journalists. That started the share price slippage.

Now there is even more reason for News Corp's investors to take flight. Can they get out before the price collapses still further?

Consider once more the heinous nature of News International's eavesdroppers: intercepting the voicemail messages of murder victim Milly Dowler; hacking into the phones of the parents of one of the Soham murder victims; listening in to the mobile phones of the families of 7/7 victims and of servicemen killed in Afghanistan.

No one was safe from the journalists and investigators of Wapping. Not even the country's prime minister.

Brown has now revealed that his infant son's medical records were obtained by the Sun. And the paper went on to publish a story about the child's serious illness.

Brown's tax affairs were the subject of computer hacking. Lawyers were fooled into handing over details from the files.

The sheer scale of the assault on Brown's privacy is mind-boggling.

There are all sorts of related questions too, about failures of security – and, once more, about Scotland Yard's failings.

Scandal follows scandal. There are no words to describe just how big it is, with political, policing and media involvement.

Is our current prime minister, David Cameron, able to cope? I don't think so, because he is compromised too. But he had better act correctly from now on or the country will make him pay.

As for Murdoch, he is in a firestorm, caught in the kind of media feeding frenzy that his own papers have so often orchestrated. It is difficult not to delight in his embarrassment.