ANS -- Thom Hartmann: How America Killed Its Middle Class--corrected

I'm sending this again because I forgot to include the URL of where I found it. Sorry....
Here is a good article explaining the problem with capitalism, especially the "free market fundamentalism" kind.  It's from Thom Hartmann and .   It's fairly short and easy to understand, so read it. I added my comment at the end. 
Find it here:     http://www.alternet.org/economy/thom-hartmann-how-america-killed-its-middle-class   
--Kim



ECONOMY

Thom Hartmann: How America Killed Its Middle Class

Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people.
By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet
January 27, 2015
Print
4 COMMENTS

There's nothing "normal" about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class.

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens' novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.

So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in "normal" capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.

You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed - this huge change was done in less than 35 years.

The only ways a working-class "middle class" can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval - a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century - or by heavily taxing the rich.

French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that the middle class that came about in Western Europe and the United States during the mid-twentieth was the direct result of a peculiar set of historical events.

According to Piketty, the post-World War II middle class was created by two major things: the destruction of European inherited wealth during the war and higher taxes on the rich, most of which were rationalized by the war. This brought wealth and income at the top down, and raised working people up into a middle class.

Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?

This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America's middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

Other policies, like protective tariffs and strong labor laws also help build a middle class, but progressive taxation is the most important because it is the most direct way to transfer money from the rich to the working poor, and to create a disincentive to theft or monopoly by those at the top.

History shows how important high taxes on the rich are for creating a strong middle class.

If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you'll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich - the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations - was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.

You'll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.

Even more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.

Coincidence? I think not.

Creating a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two. George H.W. Bush saw this, and correctly called it "Voodoo Economics." And we're still in the era of Reaganomics - as President Obama recently pointed out, Reagan was a successful revolutionary.

This, of course, is exactly what conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.

And, as Kirk and Buckley predicted back in the 1950s, this is exactly what happened in the 1960s and '70s when taxes on the rich were at their highest. The Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement - social movements that grew out of the wealth and rising expectations of the post-World War II era's middle class - these all terrified conservatives. Which is why ever since they took power in 1980, they've made gutting working people out of the middle class their number one goal.

We now have a choice in this country. We can either continue going down the road to oligarchy, the road we've been on since the Reagan years, or we can choose to go on the road to a more pluralistic society with working class people able to make it into the middle class. We can't have both.

And if we want to go down the road to letting working people back into the middle class, it all starts with taxing the rich.

The time is long past due for us to roll back the Reagan tax cuts.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


There is an alternative way to move money toward the working people: it is worker-owned, democratically run businesses.  In this kind of business, the huge profit that would go to a CEO in a corporation, would, instead, get shared out by all of the workers, in a scheme voted on by the workers.  The trick is to stay away from the stock market: If there are no outside stockholders who are only in it for the money and have no stake in the business itself, then there is no need to grow exponentially every year.  This demand by outside stockholders for growth in the percentage of profit, not just the profit, is what drives workers wages down.  If the business only needs to break even or make a profit, it has much more freedom to treat its workers well and to not cut corners on the product.  If the only stockholders are workers, they are also members of the community the business is in, and are less likely to want to do damage to that community.  They also have an incentive to make the business profitable because they share the profit, but not cutthroat because they are part of the community.  Everyone wins, except the fat cats.   --Kim

ANS -- Thom Hartmann: How America Killed Its Middle Class

Here is a good article explaining the problem with capitalism, especially the "free market fundamentalism" kind.  It's from Thom Hartmann and .   It's fairly short and easy to understand, so read it. I added my comment at the end. 
Find it here:    
--Kim



ECONOMY

Thom Hartmann: How America Killed Its Middle Class

Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people.
By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet
January 27, 2015
Print
4 COMMENTS

There's nothing "normal" about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class.

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens' novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.

So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in "normal" capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.

You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed - this huge change was done in less than 35 years.

The only ways a working-class "middle class" can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval - a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century - or by heavily taxing the rich.

French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that the middle class that came about in Western Europe and the United States during the mid-twentieth was the direct result of a peculiar set of historical events.

According to Piketty, the post-World War II middle class was created by two major things: the destruction of European inherited wealth during the war and higher taxes on the rich, most of which were rationalized by the war. This brought wealth and income at the top down, and raised working people up into a middle class.

Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?

This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America's middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

Other policies, like protective tariffs and strong labor laws also help build a middle class, but progressive taxation is the most important because it is the most direct way to transfer money from the rich to the working poor, and to create a disincentive to theft or monopoly by those at the top.

History shows how important high taxes on the rich are for creating a strong middle class.

If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you'll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich - the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations - was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.

You'll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.

Even more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.

Coincidence? I think not.

Creating a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two. George H.W. Bush saw this, and correctly called it "Voodoo Economics." And we're still in the era of Reaganomics - as President Obama recently pointed out, Reagan was a successful revolutionary.

This, of course, is exactly what conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.

And, as Kirk and Buckley predicted back in the 1950s, this is exactly what happened in the 1960s and '70s when taxes on the rich were at their highest. The Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement - social movements that grew out of the wealth and rising expectations of the post-World War II era's middle class - these all terrified conservatives. Which is why ever since they took power in 1980, they've made gutting working people out of the middle class their number one goal.

We now have a choice in this country. We can either continue going down the road to oligarchy, the road we've been on since the Reagan years, or we can choose to go on the road to a more pluralistic society with working class people able to make it into the middle class. We can't have both.

And if we want to go down the road to letting working people back into the middle class, it all starts with taxing the rich.

The time is long past due for us to roll back the Reagan tax cuts.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


There is an alternative way to move money toward the working people: it is worker-owned, democratically run businesses.  In this kind of business, the huge profit that would go to a CEO in a corporation, would, instead, get shared out by all of the workers, in a scheme voted on by the workers.  The trick is to stay away from the stock market: If there are no outside stockholders who are only in it for the money and have no stake in the business itself, then there is no need to grow exponentially every year.  This demand by outside stockholders for growth in the percentage of profit, not just the profit, is what drives workers wages down.  If the business only needs to break even or make a profit, it has much more freedom to treat its workers well and to not cut corners on the product.  If the only stockholders are workers, they are also members of the community the business is in, and are less likely to want to do damage to that community.  They also have an incentive to make the business profitable because they share the profit, but not cutthroat because they are part of the community.  Everyone wins, except the fat cats.   --Kim

ANS -- The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think

Here's another good article on what is really happening when someone gets addicted to drugs.  Apparently it's the drugs in 17.7% of the cases.
find it here:  http://www.alternet.org/drugs/likely-cause-addiction-has-been-discovered-and-it-not-what-you-think  
--Kim



DRUGS

The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think

The new evidence will force us to change ourselves.
By Johann Hari / The Huffington Post
January 21, 2015
Print
81 COMMENTS

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned - and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction, by our teachers, and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my book 'Chasing The Scream - The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs' to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong - and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.

I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.

I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind - what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.

If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.

One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments - ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."

But in the 1970s, a Professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was - at the same time as the Rat Park experiment - a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers , and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified: they believed a huge number of addicts were about the head home when the war ended.

But in fact, some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers - according to the same study - simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days - if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know - if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is - again - striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal - but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)

When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the most scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense - unless you take account of this new approach.

Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine - the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much high purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right - it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them - then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave hospital and try to score smack on the streets, to meet their habit.

But here's the strange thing. It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts - and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If you still believe - as I used to - that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home - to a life where she is surrounded by the people she love. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.

This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find - the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding'. A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me - you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers' Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.

But still - surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book 'The Cult of Pharmacology.'

Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism - cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.

But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of life ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture.

This has huge implications for the one hundred year old war on drugs. This massive war - which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool - is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction - if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction - then this makes no sense.

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction: for example, I went to a prison in Arizona - 'Tent City' - where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages ("The Hole") for weeks and weeks on end, to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record - guaranteeing they with be cut off ever more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world.

There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world - and so leave behind their addictions.

This isn't theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them - to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs - so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.

One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care.

The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I'll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira - the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass - and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.

This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's - only connect. But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live - constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.

The writer George Monbiot has called this "the age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander - the creator of Rat Park - told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery - how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog.

But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts.

Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention - tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction - and you may lose them all together. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever - to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't.

When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow - we should have been singing love songs to them all along.

The full story of Johann Hari's journey - told through the stories of the people he met - can be read in 'Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs', published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com

Johann Hari will be talking about his book at 7pm at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on the 29th of January, at lunchtime at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on the 30th January, and in the evening at Red Emma's in Baltimore on the 4th February.

The full references and sources for all the information cited in this article can be found in the book's extensive end-notes.

ANS SPECIAL -- It's here!!!!!

Dear Friends:  
We have been working on this invention for about 6 years, and we are ready to go to the next level.  Please pass on the information to anyone you know who is interested in alternative energy. 
We have gone live on Indiegogo!  Please click on the link and check it out -- we get credit for clicks even if you don't donate. 
The page will tell you all about it, but here's the short summary:

SunSmart -- the Next Big Step in Solar!

It's new technology --it isn't just batteries anymore:  
Solar electricity at one tenth the space,
one third the cost,
and it continues to work after dark!

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sunsmart-solar-electric-generator/x/9085943   

--Kim

ANS -- The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin

This is about the translations, interpretations, and manipulations of the Bible.  It's long but pretty interesting.  You may have seen it if you get Newsweek. 
Find it here:   http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/02/thats-not-what-bible-says-294018.html  
--Kim

The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin

BY KURT EICHENWALD / DECEMBER 23, 2014 6:54 AM EST

NEWSWEEK

•  

They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshipping at the base of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments while demanding prayer in school. They appeal to God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats. They gather in football stadiums by the thousands to pray for the country's salvation.

They are God's frauds, cafeteria Christians who pick and choose which Bible verses they heed with less care than they exercise in selecting side orders for lunch. They are joined by religious rationalizers­fundamentalists who, unable to find Scripture supporting their biases and beliefs, twist phrases and modify translations to prove they are honoring the Bible's words.

This is no longer a matter of personal or private faith. With politicians, social leaders and even some clergy invoking a book they seem to have never read and whose phrases they don't understand, America is being besieged by Biblical illiteracy. Climate change is said to be impossible because of promises God made to Noah; Mosaic law from the Old Testament directs American government; creationism should be taught in schools; helping Syrians resist chemical weapons attacks is a sign of the end times­all of these arguments have been advanced by modern evangelical politicians and their brethren, yet none of them are supported in the Scriptures as they were originally written.



The Bible is not the book many American fundamentalists and political opportunists think it is, or more precisely, what they want it to be. Their lack of knowledge about the Bible is well established. A Pew Research poll in 2010 found that evangelicals ranked only a smidgen higher than atheists in familiarity with the New Testament and Jesus's teachings. "Americans revere the Bible­but, by and large, they don't read it,'' wrote George Gallup Jr. and Jim Castelli, pollsters and researchers whose work focused on religion in the United States. The Barna Group, a Christian polling firm, found in 2012 that evangelicals accepted the attitudes and beliefs of the Pharisees­religious leaders depicted throughout the New Testament as opposing Christ and his message­more than they accepted the teachings of Jesus.

Newsweek's exploration here of the Bible's history and meaning is not intended to advance a particular theology or debate the existence of God. Rather, it is designed to shine a light on a book that has been abused by people who claim to revere it but don't read it, in the process creating misery for others. When the illiteracy of self-proclaimed Biblical literalists leads parents to banish children from their homes, when it sets neighbor against neighbor, when it engenders hate and condemnation, when it impedes science and undermines intellectual advancement, the topic has become too important for Americans to ignore, whether they are deeply devout or tepidly faithful, believers or atheists.

This examination­based in large part on the works of scores of theologians and scholars, some of which dates back centuries­is a review of the Bible's history and a recounting of its words. It is only through accepting where the Bible comes from­ and who put it together­that anyone can comprehend what history's most important book says and, just as important, what it does not say.

 

Moses carries the ten commandment tablets. KEN WELSH/DESIGNPICS.COM


Playing Telephone with the Word of God

No television preacher has ever read the Bible. Neither has any evangelical politician. Neither has the pope. Neither have I. And neither have you. At best, we've all read a bad translation­a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times.

About 400 years passed between the writing of the first Christian manuscripts and their compilation into the New Testament. (That's the same amount of time between the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and today.) The first books of the Old Testament were written 1,000 years before that. In other words, some 1,500 years passed between the day the first biblical author put stick to clay and when the books that would become the New Testament were chosen. There were no printing presses beforehand or until 1,000 years later. There were no vacuum-sealed technologies to preserve paper for centuries. Dried clay broke, papyrus and parchment crumbled away, primitive inks faded.

Back then, writings from one era could be passed to the next only by copying them by hand. While there were professional scribes whose lives were dedicated to this grueling work, they did not start copying the letters and testaments about Jesus's time until centuries after they were written. Prior to that, amateurs handled the job.

These manuscripts were originally written in Koiné, or "common" Greek, and not all of the amateur copyists spoke the language or were even fully literate. Some copied the script without understanding the words. And Koiné was written in what is known as scriptio continua­meaning no spaces between words and no punctuation. So, a sentence like weshouldgoeatmom could be interpreted as "We should go eat, Mom," or "We should go eat Mom." Sentences can have different meaning depending on where the spaces are placed. For example, godisnowhere could be "God is now here" or "God is nowhere."

None of this mattered for centuries, because Christians were certain God had guided the hand not only of the original writers but also of all those copyists. But in the past 100 years or so, tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, dating back centuries. And what biblical scholars now know is that later versions of the books differ significantly from earlier ones­in fact, even copies from the same time periods differ from each other. "There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," says Dr. Bart D. Ehrman, a groundbreaking biblical scholar and professor at the University of North Carolina who has written many books on the New Testament.


Most of those discrepancies are little more than the handwritten equivalent of a typo, but that error was then included by future scribes. There were also minor changes made by literate scribes centuries after the manuscripts were written because of what they decided were flaws in the accounts they were recopying. For example, an early version of Luke 3:16 in the New Testament said, "John answered, saying to all of them.…" The problem was that no one had asked John anything, so a fifth century scribe fixed that by changing the words to "John, knowing what they were thinking, said.…" Today, most modern English Bibles have returned to the correct, yet confusing, "John answered." Others, such as the New Life Version Bible, use other words that paper over the inconsistency.

But this discussion is about something much more important than whether some scribe in the Middle Ages decided God had not been paying attention while guiding the hand of Luke. Indeed, there are significant differences in copies that touch on far more profound issues. Scribes added whole sections of the New Testament, and removed words and sentences that contradicted emerging orthodox beliefs.

Take one of the most famous tales from the New Testament, which starts in John 7:53. A group of Pharisees and others bring a woman caught committing adultery to Jesus. Under Mosaic Law­the laws of Moses handed down in the Old Testament­she must be stoned to death. The Pharisees ask Jesus whether the woman should be released or killed, hoping to force him to choose between honoring Mosaic Law and his teachings of forgiveness. Jesus replies, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.'' The group leaves, and Jesus tells the woman to sin no more.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry gives a closing address at The Response, an event at Reliant Stadium that drew roughly 30,000 people, in Houston on Aug. 6, 2011. ERIKA RICH/THE DAILY TEXAN/AP

It's a powerful story, known even by those with just a passing knowledge of the Bible. It was depicted in Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ and is often used to point out the hypocrisy of Christians who denounce what they perceive to be the sins of others. Unfortunately, John didn't write it. Scribes made it up sometime in the Middle Ages. It does not appear in any of the three other Gospels or in any of the early Greek versions of John. Even if the Gospel of John is an infallible telling of the history of Jesus's ministry, the event simply never happened. Moreover, according to Ehrman, the writing style for that story is different from the rest of John, and the section includes phrases that do not appear anywhere else in the Bible. Scholars say they are words more commonly used long after that Gospel was written.



For Pentecostal Christians, an important section of the Bible appears in the Gospel of Mark, 16:17-18. These verses say that those who believe in Jesus will speak in tongues and have extraordinary powers, such as the ability to cast out demons, heal the sick and handle snakes. Pentecostal ministers often babble incomprehensible sounds, proclaiming­based in part on these verses in Mark­that the noises they are making show that the Holy Spirit is in them. It's also a primary justification for the emergence of the Pentecostal snake-handlers.

But once again, the verses came from a creative scribe long after the Gospel of Mark was written. In fact, the earliest versions of Mark stop at 16:8. It's an awkward ending, with three women who have gone to the tomb where Jesus was laid after the Crucifixion encountering a man who tells them to let the disciples know that the resurrected Jesus will see them in Galilee. The women flee the tomb, and "neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.''

In early copies of the original Greek writings, that's it. The 12 verses that follow in modern Bibles­Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and the Disciples and then ascending to Heaven­are not there. A significant moment that would be hard to forget, one would think.

The same is true for other critical portions of the Bible, such as 1 John 5:7 ("For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one"); Luke 22:20 ("Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you"); and Luke 24:51 ("And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven"). These first appeared in manuscripts used by the translators who created the King James Bible, but are not in the Greek copies from hundreds of years earlier.

These are not the only parts of the Bible that appear to have been added much later. There are many, many more­in fact, far more than can be explored without filling up the next several issues of Newsweek.

Hands of poll workers are seen on a Bible as head precinct judge Deloris Reid-Smith reads the voters oath to poll workers before opening the polls at the Grove Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina Nov. 4, 2014. CHRIS KEANE/REUTERS


Translation Transubstantiation

Then comes the problem of accurate translation. Many words in New Testament Greek don't have clear English equivalents. Sentence structure, idioms, stylistic differences­all of these are challenges when converting versions of the New Testament books into English. And this can't be solved with a Berlitz course: Koiné is ancient Greek and not spoken anymore. This is why English translations differ, with many having been revised to reflect the views and guesses of the modern translators.

The gold standard of English Bibles is the King James Version, completed in 1611, but that was not a translation of the original Greek. Instead, a Church of England committee relied primarily on Latin manuscripts translated from Greek. According to Jason David BeDuhn, a professor of religious studies at Northern Arizona University and author of Truth in Translation, it was often very hard for the committee to find the correct English words. The committee sometimes compared Latin translations with the earlier Greek copies, found discrepancies and decided that the Latin version­the later version­was correct and the earlier Greek manuscripts were wrong.

The goal of the translators was to create a Bible that was a gorgeous work that was very accurate in its translation and clear in its meaning, but that didn't happen. "The King James Bible is a beautiful piece of English literature,'' says BeDuhn. "In terms of the other two goals, however, this translation falls short."

For subsequent English Bibles, those slightly off translations in King James were then often converted into phrases that most closely fitted the preconceptions of even more translators. In other words, religious convictions determined translation choices. For example, , a Greek word used about 60 times in the New Testament, equates to something along the lines of "to prostrate oneself" as well as "to praise God." That was translated into Latin as "adoro,'' which in the King James Bible became "worship." But those two words don't mean precisely the same thing. When the King James Bible was written, "worship" could be used to describe both exhibiting reverence for God and prostrating oneself. While not perfect, it's a decent translation.

As a result, throughout the King James Bible, people "worship" many things. A slave worships his owner, the assembled of Satan worship an angel, and Roman soldiers mocking Jesus worship him. In each of these instances, the word does not mean "praise God's glory" or anything like that; instead, it means to bow or prostrate oneself. But English Bibles adopted later­the New International Bible, the New American Standard Bible, the Living Bible and so on­dropped the word worship when it referenced anyone other than God or Jesus. And so each time appeared in the Greek manuscript regarding Jesus, in these newer Bibles he is worshipped, but when applied to someone else, the exact same word is translated as "bow" or something similar. By translating the same word different ways, these modern Bibles are adding a bit of linguistic support to the idea that the people who knew Jesus understood him to be God.

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In other words, with a little translational trickery, a fundamental tenet of Christianity­that Jesus is God­was reinforced in the Bible, even in places where it directly contradicts the rest of the verse.

David displaying the head of Goliath to the Jews, from the Old Testament, circa 1050 BC. HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY

That kind of manipulation occurs many times. In Philippians, the King James Version translates some words to designate Jesus as "being in the form of God." The Greek word for form could simply mean Jesus was in the image of God. But the publishers of some Bibles decided to insert their beliefs into translations that had nothing to do with the Greek. The Living Bible, for example, says Jesus "was God"­even though modern translators pretty much just invented the words.

Which raises a big issue for Christians: the Trinity­the belief that Jesus and God are the same and, with the Holy Spirit, are a single entity­is a fundamental, yet deeply confusing, tenet. So where does the clear declaration of God and Jesus as part of a triumvirate appear in the Greek manuscripts?

Nowhere. And in that deception lies a story of mass killings.

Birth of Christ KEN WELSH/DESIGNPICS.COM



The Sociopath Emperor

Why would God, in conveying his message to the world, speak in whispers and riddles? It seems nonsensical, but the belief that he refused to convey a clear message has led to the slaughter of many thousands of Christians by Christians. In fact, Christians are believed to have massacred more followers of Jesus than any other group or nation.

Those who believed in the Trinity butchered Christians who didn't. Groups who believed Jesus was two entities­God and man­killed those who thought Jesus was merely flesh and blood. Some felt certain God inspired Old Testament Scriptures, others were convinced they were the product of a different, evil God. Some believed the Crucifixion brought salvation to humankind, others insisted it didn't, and still others believed Jesus wasn't crucified.

Indeed, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, groups adopted radically conflicting writings about the details of his life and the meaning of his ministry, and murdered those who disagreed. For many centuries, Christianity was first a battle of books and then a battle of blood. The reason, in large part, was that there were no universally accepted manuscripts that set out what it meant to be a Christian, so most sects had their own gospels.

There was the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Simon Peter, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Barnabas. One sect of Christianity­the Gnostics­believed that the disciple Thomas was not only Jesus's twin brother but also the founder of churches across Asia. Christianity was in chaos in its early days, with some sects declaring the others heretics. And then, in the early 300s, Emperor Constantine of Rome declared he had become follower of Jesus, ended his empire's persecution of Christians and set out to reconcile the disputes among the sects. Constantine was a brutal sociopath who murdered his eldest son, decapitated his brother-in-law and killed his wife by boiling her alive, and that was after he proclaimed that he had converted from worshipping the sun god to being a Christian. Yet he also changed the course of Christian history, ultimately influencing which books made it into the New Testament.

By that point, the primary disputes centered on whether Jesus was God­the followers of a priest named Arius said no, that God created Jesus. But the Bishop of Alexander said yes, that Jesus had existed throughout all eternity. The dispute raged on in the streets of Constantinople, with everyone­shopkeepers, bakers and tradesmen­arguing about which view was right. Constantine, in a reflection of his shallow understanding of theology, was annoyed that what he considered a minor dispute was causing such turmoil, and feared that it weaken him politically. So he decided to force an agreement on the question.

Cody Walsh, 18, (left) and Eric Hoglund, 21 (center) dance and sing during the opening musical act of the non-denominational prayer and fasting event, entitled "The Response" at Reliant Stadium August 6, 2011 in Houston.BRANDON THIBODEAUX/GETTY

Constantine convened a meeting in the lakeside town of Nicaea. Invitations were sent around the world to bishops and leaders of various sects, although not all of them. The group included the educated and the illiterate, zealots and hermits. Constantine arrived wearing jewels and gold on his scarlet robe and pearls on his crown, eager to discuss the true essence of a poor carpenter who had died 300 years before.

Things that are today accepted without much thought were adopted or reinforced at Nicaea. For example, the Old Testament was clear in declaring that God rested on the seventh day, making it the Sabbath. The seventh day of the week is Saturday, the day of Jewish worship and rest. (Jesus himself invoked the holiness of the Jewish Sabbath.) The word Sunday does not appear in the Bible, either as the Sabbath or anything else. But four years before Nicaea, Constantine declared Sunday as a day of rest in honor of the sun god.

At Nicaea, rules were adopted regarding the proper positions for prayer on Sundays­standing, not kneeling; nothing was said of the Jewish Sabbath or Saturday. Many theologians and Christian historians believe that it was at this moment, to satisfy Constantine and his commitment to his empire's many sun worshippers, that the Holy Sabbath was moved by one day, contradicting the clear words of what ultimately became the Bible. And while the Bible mentioned nothing about the day of Jesus's birth, the birth of the sun god was celebrated on December 25 in Rome; Christian historians of the 12th century wrote that it was the pagan holiday that led to the designation of that date for Christmas.

The majority of the time at Nicaea was spent debating whether Jesus was a man who was the son of God, as Arius proclaimed, or God himself, as the church hierarchy maintained. The followers of Arius marshaled evidence from the letters of Paul and other Christian writings. In the Gospel of Mark, speaking of the Second Coming, Jesus said, "But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he wrote that "there is but one God, the Father…and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ." In his letter to Timothy, Paul wrote, "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

Paul's writings are consistent in his reference to God as one being and Jesus as his son. Same with the Gospel of Matthew, where Peter tells Jesus that he is the "Son of the living God" and Jesus responds that "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.'' Jesus even called out to God as his "Father" as he was dying on the cross.

But Constantine sided with those who believed Jesus was both God and man, so a statement of belief, called the Nicene Creed, was composed to proclaim that. Those who refused to sign the statement were banished. Others were slaughtered. After they had returned home and were far from Rome, some who signed the document later sent letters to Constantine saying they had only done so out of fear for their lives.

About 50 years later, in A.D. 381, the Romans held another meeting, this time in Constantinople. There, a new agreement was reached­Jesus wasn't two, he was now three­Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Nicene Creed was rewritten, and those who refused to sign the statement were banished, and another wholesale slaughter began, this time of those who rejected the Trinity, a concept that is nowhere in the original Greek manuscripts and is often contradicted by it.

To this day, congregants in Christian churches at Sunday services worldwide recite the Nicene Creed, which serves as affirmation of their belief in the Trinity. It is doubtful many of them know the words they utter are not from the Bible, and were the cause of so much bloodshed. (Some modern Christians attempt to use the Gospel of John to justify the Trinity­even though it doesn't explicitly mention it­but they are relying on bad translations of the Greek and sentences inserted by scribes.)

To understand how what we call the Bible was made, you must see how the beliefs that became part of Christian orthodoxy were pushed into it by the Holy Roman Empire. By the fifth century, the political and theological councils voted on which of the many Gospels in circulation were to make up the New Testament. With the power of Rome behind them, the practitioners of this proclaimed orthodoxy wiped out other sects and tried to destroy every copy of their Gospels and other writings.

And recall that they were already working from a fundamentally flawed document. Errors and revisions by copyists had been written in by the fifth century, and several books of the New Testament, including some attributed to Paul, are now considered forgeries perpetrated by famous figures in Christianity to bolster their theological arguments. It is small wonder, then, that there are so many contradictions in the New Testament. Some of those contradictions are trivial, but some create huge problems for evangelicals insisting they are living by the word of God.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., stage a protest outside the non-denominational prayer and fasting event, entitled "The Response" at Reliant Stadium, Aug. 6, 2011 in Houston. BRANDON THIBODEAUX/GETTY

No Three Kings?

To illustrate how even seemingly trivial contradictions can have profound consequences, let's recount the story of Christmas.

Jesus was born in a house in Bethlehem. His father, Joseph, had been planning to divorce Mary until he dreamed that she'd conceived a child through the Holy Spirit. No wise men showed up for the birth, and no brilliant star shone overhead. Joseph and his family then fled to Egypt, where they remained for years. Later, they returned to Israel, hoping to live in Judea, but that proved problematic, so they settled in a small town called Nazareth.

Not the version you are familiar with? No angel appearing to Mary? Not born in a manger? No one saying there was no room at the inn? No gold, frankincense or myrrh? Fleeing to Egypt? First living in Nazareth when Jesus was a child, not before he was born?

You may not recognize this version, but it is a story of Jesus's birth found in the Gospels. Two Gospels­Matthew and Luke­tell the story of when Jesus was born, but in quite different ways. Contradictions abound. In creating the familiar Christmas tale, Christians took a little bit of one story, mixed it with a little bit of the other and ignored all of the contradictions in the two. The version recounted above does the same; it uses parts of those stories from the two Gospels that are usually ignored. So there are two blended versions and two Gospel versions. Take your pick.

There are also deep, logical flaws here that should be apparent to anyone giving the Bible a close read. Many Christians read the Old Testament as having several prophecies that the Messiah will be a descendant of David, a towering biblical figure who was the second ruler of the Kingdom of Israel. And both Matthew and Luke offer that proof­both trace Jesus's lineage to his father Joseph and from there back to David.

Except…Joseph wasn't Jesus's father. Jesus is the son of God, remember? Moreover, the genealogies recounted in the two Gospels are different, each identifying different men as Joseph's father and grandfather. Mary, the mother of Jesus, can be the only parent with a bloodline to David, but neither Gospel makes any mention of that.

The stories in the four Gospels of Jesus's death and resurrection differ as well. When brought before Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus speaks only two words and is never declared innocent. In the Gospel of John, Jesus engages in extended conversations with Pilate, who repeatedly proclaims this Jewish prisoner to be innocent and deserving of release. (The Book of John was the last to be written and came at a time when gentiles in Rome were gaining dramatically more influence over Christianity; that explains why the Romans are largely absolved from responsibility for Jesus's death and blame instead is pointed toward the Jews. That has been one of the key bases for centuries of anti-Semitism.)

And who went to anoint Jesus in his tomb? In Matthew, it was Mary and another woman named Mary, and an angel met them there. In Mark, it was Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, and a young man met them. In John, it was Mary alone; no one met her. As told in Matthew, the disciples go to Galilee after the Crucifixion and see Jesus ascend to heaven; in Acts, written by Luke, the disciples stay in Jerusalem and see Jesus ascend from there.

Some of the contradictions are conflicts between what evangelicals consider absolute and what Jesus actually said. For example, evangelicals are always talking about family values. But to Jesus, family was an impediment to reaching God. In the Gospel of Matthew, he states, "And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life."

Then there is what many fundamentalist Christians hold to be the most important of all elements of the Bible: the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world. What modern evangelicals want to believe cannot be reconciled with the Bible. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says of the Apocalypse, "This generation shall not pass, till all these things be done"­in other words, the people alive in his time would see the end of the world. Paul in 1 Corinthians is even clearer; he states, "The time is short." He then instructs other Christians, given that the end is coming, to live as if they had no wives, and, if they buy things, to treat them as if they were not their own. Some evangelicals counter these clear words by quoting 2 Peter as saying that, for God, one day is like 1,000 years.

Two problems: That does nothing to counter what either Jesus or Paul said. And even in ancient times, many Christian leaders proclaimed 2 Peter to be a forgery, an opinion almost universally shared by biblical scholars today.

None of this is meant to demean the Bible, but all of it is fact. Christians angered by these facts should be angry with the Bible, not the messenger.

God Wrestling Dragons

The next time someone tells you the biblical story of Creation is true, ask that person, "Which one?"

Few of the Christian faithful seem to know the Bible contains multiple creation stories. The first appears on Page 1, Genesis 1, so that is the version most people tend to embrace. However, it isn't hard to find the second version: It's Genesis 2, which usually starts on the same page. Genesis 1 begins with the words "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth"; Genesis 2 starts with "This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created."

Careful readers have long known that the two stories contradict each other. Genesis 1 begins with expanses of water that God separates, creating the earth between them. Genesis 2 describes a world without enough water, which is then introduced. Vegetation exists before the sun and the stars in Genesis 1; it's the other way around in Genesis 2. In Genesis 1, man is created after plants and animals; in Genesis 2, plants and animals come after man. In Genesis 1, Adam and Eve are created together; in Genesis 2, Eve is created out of Adam's rib.

This is nothing unusual for the Old Testament. In fact, even though many evangelical Christians insist that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament (including Deuteronomy, which talks about Moses having died and been buried), biblical scholars have concluded that two Jewish sects wrote many of the books. Each prepared its version of Old Testament, and the two were joined together without any attempt to reconcile the many contradictions.

These duplications are known as "doublets." "In most cases," says Richard Elliott Friedman, a biblical scholar at the University of Georgia, "one of the versions of the doublet story would refer to the deity by the divine name Yahweh, and the other version of the story would refer to the deity simply asGod." Once the different narratives appearing in the Bible were divided by the word they used to reference God, other terms and characteristics turned up repeatedly in one or the other group. "This tended to support the hypothesis that someone had taken two different old source documents, cut them up and woven them together" in the first five books of the Old Testament, Friedman says.

The doublets make reading the Old Testament the literary equivalent of a hall of mirrors. Take the Genesis story of Noah and the flood. In Genesis 6, God tells Noah to build an ark and load it with animals, and "Noah did everything just as God commanded him." Then, in Genesis 7, God again tells Noah to load the ark with animals, and "Noah did all that the Lord commanded him." Under the first set of instructions, Noah was to bring two of every kind of creature onto the ark. But the directions changed the second time, with Noah told to bring seven of every kind of clean animal and two of every kind of unclean animal.

It gets stranger. In Genesis 7:7-12, Noah and his family board the ark, and the flood begins. Then, in the very next verse, Genesis 7:13, Noah and his family board the ark again, and the flood begins a second time. The water flooded the earth for 40 days (Genesis 7:17), or 150 days (Genesis 7:24). But Noah and his family stayed on the ark for a year (Genesis 8:13).

Even well-known stories have contradictory versions. As every child knows, David killed Goliath; it's right there in 1 Samuel 17:50. But don't tell those children to read 2 Samuel 21:19 unless you want them to get really confused. There, it says in many versions of the Bible that Elhanan killed Goliath. Other Bibles, though, fixed that to make it coincide with the words in 1 Chronicles, were Elhanan killed the brother of Goliath.

These conflicting accounts are only serious matters because evangelicals insist the Old Testament is a valid means of debunking science. But as these example show, the Bible can't stop debunking itself.

In fact, the Bible has three creation models, and some experts maintain there are four. In addition to the two in Genesis, there is one referenced in the Books of Isaiah, Psalms and Job. In this version, the world is created in the aftermath of a great battle between God and what theologians say is a dragon in the waters called Rahab. And Rahab is not the only mythical creature that either coexisted with God or was created by him. God plays with a sea monster named Leviathan. Unicorns appear in the King James Bible (although that wasn't the correct translation of the mythical creature's Hebrew name). There are fiery serpents and flying serpents and cockatrices­a two-legged dragon with a rooster's head (that word was later changed to "viper" in some English-language Bibles). And in Exodus, magicians who work for the Pharaoh of Egypt are able to change staffs into snakes and water into blood. In Genesis, the "Sons of God" marry the "daughters of man" and have children; the "sons of God" are angels, as is made clear in the Books of Job and Psalms.

Evangelicals cite Genesis to challenge the science taught in classrooms, but don't like to talk about those Old Testament books with monsters and magic.

 

Workers paste a public service announcement over a billboard with an anti-homosexuality message on Bay Street in Staten Island, N.Y., on March 8, 2000. The controversial billboard, with a quotation from the Bible, was paid for by an undisclosed party and was covered over by the billboard company after complaints. CHRIS HONDROS/GETTY

Sarah Palin Is Sinning Right Now

The declaration in 1 Timothy­as recounted in the Living Bible, the New American Standard Bible, the New International Version Bible and others­could not be more clear: Those who "practice homosexuality" will not inherit the Kingdom of God. But the translation there is odd, in part because the wordhomosexual didn't even exist until more than 1,800 years after when 1 Timothy was supposed to have been written. So how did it get into the New Testament? Simple: The editors of these modern Bibles just made it up. Like so many translators and scribes before them, they had a religious conviction, something they wanted to say that wasn't stated clearly enough in the original for their tastes. And so they manipulated sentences to reinforce their convictions.

The original Bible verse in Koiné used for what has been translated as "homosexual." For the Latin Bible, it was as masculorum concubitores. The King James Version translated that as "them that defile themselves with mankind." Perhaps that means men who engage in sex with other men, perhaps not.

The next thing to check here is whether 1 Timothy was based on a forgery. And the answer to that is a resounding yes. In 1807, a German scholar named Friedrich Schleiermacher published a letter observing that 1 Timothy used arguments that clashed with other letters written by Paul. Moreover, 1 Timothy attacks false teachings, but they are not the types of teachings prevalent when Paul was writing­instead, they are more akin to the beliefs of the Gnostics, a sect that did not exist until long after Paul's death. And at times, whoever wrote this letter uses the same words as Paul but means something completely different by them. Most biblical scholars agree that Paul did not write 1 Timothy.

But suppose for a moment that 1 Timothy was written by Paul, and that "defile themselves" does refer to homosexuality. In that case, evangelical Christians and biblical literalists still have a lot of trouble on their hands. Contrary to what so many fundamentalists believe, outside of the emphasis on the Ten Commandments, sins aren't ranked. The New Testament doesn't proclaim homosexuality the most heinous of all sins. No, every sin is equal in its significance to God. In 1 Timothy, Paul, or whoever wrote it, condemns the disobedient, liars and drunks. In other words, for evangelicals who want to use this book of the Bible to condemn homosexuality, most frat boys in America are committing sins on par with being gay. But you rarely hear about parents banishing their kids for getting trashed on Saturday night.

Now let's talk about how 1 Timothy deals with women. U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican, slammed gay people as bullies last March for opposing legislation that would have allowed Arizona businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples. Well, according to the Bible, Bachmann should shut up and sit down. In fact, every female politician who insists the New Testament is the inerrant word of God needs to resign immediately or admit that she is a hypocrite.

That's because 1 Timothy is one of the most virulently anti-woman books of the New Testament, something else that sets it apart from other letters by Paul. In the King James Version, it says women must dress modestly, can't embroider their hair, can't wear pearls or gold and have to stay silent. Moreover, they can't hold any position of authority over men and aren't even allowed to be teachers­meaning, if they truly believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, women like Bachmann can't be in politics. In fact, while 1 Timothy has just one parenthetical clause that can be interpreted as being about homosexuality, it contains six verses on the shortcomings of women and the limitations on what they are allowed to do.

Many Christians point to other parts of the New Testament when denouncing homosexuality. Romans, another letter attributed to Paul, is a popular choice. In the King James Bible, it condemns men who lust in their hearts for each other, a translation that holds up pretty well when compared with the earliest Greek versions. And scholars agree that Romans is a real letter written by Paul.

700 Club co-host Pat Robertson speaks at a press conference, Feb. 3, 1998, at the CBN studio in Virginia Beach, Va., about the impending execution of Karla Faye Tucker, who was put to death later that night in Texas. BILL TIERNAM/THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT/AP

In other words, Romans is real Gospel, and what it has to say can't be questioned by those who call themselves biblical literalists. Which means televangelist Pat Robertson should prepare himself for an eternity in hell. On his television show The 700 Club, Robertson recently went on a tirade about Barack Obama and, as he is wont to do, prayed for help. "God, we need the angels! We need your help!" Robertson said. "We need to do something, to pray to be delivered from this president."

And with that, Pat Robertson sinned. Because in Romans­so often used to condemn homosexuality­there is a much longer series of verses about how the righteous are supposed to behave toward people in government authority. It shows up in Romans 13:1-2, which in the International Standard Bible says, "The existing authorities have been established by God, so that whoever resists the authorities opposes what God has established, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves."

So yes, there is one verse in Romans about homosexuality…and there are eight verses condemning those who criticize the government. In other words, all fundamentalist Christians who decry Obama have sinned as much as they believe gay people have.

It doesn't end there. In the same section of Romans that is arguably addressing homosexuality, Paul also condemns debating (all of Congress is damned?), being prideful, disobeying parents and deceiving people (yes, all of Congress is damned.) There is no bold print or underlining for the section dealing with homosexuality­Paul treats it as something as sinful as pride or debate.

The story is the same in the last New Testament verse cited by fundamentalists who scorn homosexuals. Again, it is a letter from Paul, called 1 Corinthians. The translation is good, and the experts believe it was written by him. But fundamentalists who rely on this better stay out of court­Paul condemns bringing lawsuits, at least against other Christians. Adultery, being greedy, lying­all of these are declared as sins on par with homosexuality.

Of course, there are plenty of fundamentalist Christians who have no idea where references to homosexuality are in the New Testament, much less what the surrounding verses say. And so they always fall back on Leviticus, the Old Testament book loaded with dos and don'ts. They seem to have the words memorized about it being an abomination for a man to lie with a man as he does with a woman. And every time they make that argument, they demonstrate that they know next to nothing about the New Testament.

A fundamental conflict in the New Testament­arguably the most important one in the Bible­centers on whether the Laws of Moses were supplanted by the crucifixion of Christ. The basic tension there was that Paul led a church in Antioch where he attempted to bring gentiles into Christianity by espousing a liberal interpretation of the requirements to follow the Laws of Moses­circumcision, eating kosher food and other rules spelled out in the Old Testament. Hundreds of miles away, disciples of Jesus and his brother James headed a church in Jerusalem. When they heard about the goings-on in Antioch, a debate ensued: Did gentiles have to become Jews first (like Jesus) and follow Mosaic Law before they could be accepted as Christians?

Some of the original disciples said yes, an opinion that seems to find support in words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets...." The author of Matthew made it clear that Christians must keep Mosaic Law like the most religious Jews, in order to achieve salvation. But Paul, particularly in Galatians and Romans, says a person's salvation is won by his or her faith in Christ's death and resurrection­nothing more. Those who try to follow Mosaic Law, Paul believed, risked losing salvation.

In other words, Orthodox Jews who follow Mosaic Law can use Leviticus to condemn homosexuality without being hypocrites. But fundamentalist Christians must choose: They can either follow Mosaic Law by keeping kosher, being circumcised, never wearing clothes made of two types of thread and the like. Or they can accept that finding salvation in the Resurrection of Christ means that Leviticus is off the table.

Which raises one final problem for fundamentalists eager to condemn homosexuals or anyone else: If they accept the writings of Paul and believe all people are sinners, then salvation is found in belief in Christ and the Resurrection. For everyone. There are no exceptions in the Bible for sins that evangelicals really don't like.

So apparently, God doesn't need the help of fundamentalists in determining what should be done in the afterlife with the prideful, the greedy, the debaters or even those homosexuals. Which could well be why Jesus cautioned his followers against judging others while ignoring their own sins. In fact, he had a specific word for people obsessed with the sins of others. He called them hypocrites.

 

Members of the Pentecostal Church of God, a faith healing sect, surround a woman who has "Got the Spirit" as a man holds a snake above her head in Evarts, Ky. on Aug. 22, 1944. AP

They Haven't a Prayer

In August 2011, Texas Governor Rick Perry hosted a massive prayer rally in Houston at what was then known as Reliant Stadium, where the city's pro-football team plays. Joined by 30,000 fellow Christians, Perry stepped to a podium, his face projected on a giant screen behind him. He closed his eyes, bowed his head and boomed out a long prayer asking God to make America a better place. His fellow believers stood, kneeled, cried and yelled, "Amen."

Recently, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal announced he would be holding his massive prayer rally at a sports arena in Baton Rouge. More than 100,000 evangelical pastors have been invited.

Jesus would have been horrified. At least, that's what the Bible says.

It is one of the most incomprehensible contradictions between the behavior of evangelicals and the explicit words of the Bible. Prayer shows­and there is really no other word for these­are held every week. If they are not at sports arenas with Republican presidential hopefuls, they are on Sunday morning television shows at mega-churches holding tens of thousands of the faithful. They raise their arms and sway, crying and pleading in prayer.

But Jesus specifically preached against this at the Sermon on the Mount, the longest piece of teaching by him in the New Testament. Specifically, as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus spoke of those who made large public displays of their own religiosity. In fact, performance prayer events closely mimic the depictions in early Christian texts of prayer services held by the Pharisees and Sadducees, two of the largest religious movements in Judea during Jesus's life. And throughout the Gospels, Jesus condemns these groups using heated language, with part of his anger targeted at their public prayer.

While the words in the King James Bible might be a bit confusing because it is not written in modern English, the New Revised Standard Version is a good substitute here. In it, Jesus is quoted as saying "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven."

But Jesus says much more, specifically cautioning against the kind of public performance prayer that has become all the rage among evangelicals of late. The verse in Matthew continues quoting Jesus, who says, "Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward."

Instead, Jesus says the truly righteous should pray alone and in secret, in a room with the door shut. "Your Father who sees in secret will reward you,'' Jesus is quoted as saying.

Indeed, in the dozens of discussions in the Bible about prayer, the vast majority focus on God's ability to know what a person wants. In the New Testament, it is often portrayed as a deeply personal affair, with prayers uttered in prison cells to a God who stays alongside the oppressed.

Moreover, babbling on as Rick Perry and so many like him have about faith and country and the blessings of America runs counter to everything that Jesus says about prayer in the Bible. "When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words,'' Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew. "Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him."

Because God knows what someone needs without being asked, there is no reason for long, convoluted prayers. Therefore, Jesus says in both Matthew and Luke, people who wish to pray should only say the Lord's Prayer. Of course, there is the problem that the Lord's Prayer cited in those two Gospels comes in two versions, so Christians have to choose one or the other.

It seems almost a miracle that those who effortlessly transform Paul's statement about "them that defile themselves with mankind" into "homosexual" can ignore the clear, simple words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. What's most amazing is that, unlike so many questions about the Bible, the instructions on how and where to pray are not only not contradicted; they are reinforced time and again.

The closest Jesus came to public prayer in the Bible was when he was feeding thousands with five loaves of bread and two fish. This story is recounted in each of the Gospels, and each time, Jesus is depicted as either giving thanks to God or looking to heaven and blessing the food. But he is also depicted as praying in all four Gospels, and each time, Jesus does so after heading off to be alone.

Some evangelicals have attempted to explain away this contradiction between the words of the Bible in Matthew and modern public prayer performances by saying Jesus condemned only mass prayer, when the people doing it had made that choice just to be seen. But with governors projected on giant, high-definition televisions, with thousands packed into sports stadiums weeping and waving, with thousands more doing their prayers on TV at mega-churches, it's hard to see what possible reason might exist other than to be seen. God, the Bible makes clear, didn't need anyone to drive to a football stadium so he could hear them.

Which leads to an obvious question: Why don't more Christians oppose prayer in school? If these people truly believe that the Bible is the Word of God, then their children should be taught the Lord's Prayer, brought to their rooms and allowed to pray alone.

That answer doesn't lend itself to big protests or angry calls for impeaching judges. But it does follow the instructions from the Gospels. And isn't that supposed to be the point?

Triumph of Faith, by Tiepolo Giambattista, 18th Century PHOTOSERVICE ELECTA/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/REX

Judge Not

So why study the Bible at all? Since it's loaded with contradictions and translation errors and wasn't written by witnesses and includes words added by unknown scribes to inject Church orthodoxy, should it just be abandoned?

No. This examination is not an attack on the Bible or Christianity. Instead, Christians seeking greater understanding of their religion should view it as an attempt to save the Bible from the ignorance, hatred and bias that has been heaped upon it. If Christians truly want to treat the New Testament as the foundation of the religion, they have to know it. Too many of them seem to read John Grisham novels with greater care than they apply to the book they consider to be the most important document in the world.

But the history, complexities and actual words of the Bible can't be ignored just to line it up with what people want to believe, based simply on what friends and family and ministers tell them. Nowhere in the Gospels or Acts of Epistles or Apocalypses does the New Testament say it is the inerrant word of God. It couldn't­the people who authored each section had no idea they were composing the Christian Bible, and they were long dead before what they wrote was voted by members of political and theological committees to be the New Testament.

The Bible is a very human book. It was written, assembled, copied and translated by people. That explains the flaws, the contradictions, and the theological disagreements in its pages. Once that is understood, it is possible to find out which parts of the Bible were not in the earliest Greek manuscripts, which are the bad translations, and what one book says in comparison to another, and then try to discern the message for yourself.

And embrace what modern Bible experts know to be the true sections of the New Testament. Jesus said, Don't judge. He condemned those who pointed out the faults of others while ignoring their own. And he proclaimed, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these."

That's a good place to start.
RELATED

ANS -- Naomi Klein: Only a Reverse Shock Doctrine Can Save Our Climate

Here's an interview with Naomi Klein on climate change versus Capitalism.  Read it.   I've included the comments so far.  The interview is from Bill Moyers' studio.
Find it here:  http://billmoyers.com/2014/09/16/naomi-klein-only-a-reverse-shock-doctrine-can-save-our-climate/    
--Kim


ENVIRONMENT

Naomi Klein: Only a Reverse Shock Doctrine Can Save Our Climate

September 16, 2014
by Joshua Holland

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Young girls protest in front of the Polish Ministry of Economy, where a coal industry meeting took place in Warsaw, Poland, Monday, Nov. 18, 2013. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,Naomi Klein argues that if we had taken action years ago when scientists first established that human activities were changing our climate, we might have been able to deal with the problem of global warming with only minimal disruption to our economic system. But as we approach a tipping point, and the consequences of climate change come into sharper focus, that time has passed, and we now have to acknowledge that preserving humans' habitat requires a paradigm change.

But Klein doesn't just offer us a depressing litany of the damage we've already done. She calls on us to seriously rethink the way our economy is structured to address not only climate change, but also other longstanding social problems like persistent global poverty and rising inequality.

BillMoyers.com spoke with Klein about the fundamental challenges – and opportunities – that come from dealing with a warming planet at this stage of the game. Below is a transcript of our discussion that's been edited for length and clarity.

Joshua Holland: Please briefly lay out the thesis of the book and then we can drill down into a few points.

Naomi Klein: The thesis of the book is that by responding robustly to climate change ­ in line with what scientists tell us we have to do ­ we have a once-in-a-century opportunity to solve some of the biggest and most intractable problems facing our economy. I'm talking about creating countless good jobs, rebuilding ailing infrastructure to help protect us from the heavy weather that we've already locked in, and lowering our emissions so it doesn't get markedly worse.

We also have an incredible opportunity to address our most intransigent economic problem, which is inequality within our countries, and also between our countries. We can also have safer, more livable cities and cleaner air. So there is a lot of potentially good news.

The bad news is that we can't do any of this by just changing our light bulbs or politely lobbying governments behind the scenes. We need to have a robust public debate about what values we want to have govern our society. The argument I make in the first part of the book is that the reason we've failed so spectacularly to rise to this existential crisis ­ and by failed I mean our emissions are up 61 percent since we started working on this issue in the early 1990s ­ is because the things we have to do clash fundamentally with the core ideology that has reigned in this same period, which is market fundamentalism.

This is a crisis with spectacularly bad timing because it fell in our laps at the very moment that history was being declared over and liberals around the world were exporting this market fundamentalism. They're telling us we can't regulate just when we need to regulate and that we can't invest in the public sphere just when we need to do exactly that. They say there's no such thing as society, when what we need more than anything is to come together and act collectively.

Holland: You talk about many of the ways that modern capitalism as we know it has failed a lot of people. And you're calling for this dramatic rethink of how we structure our economy. I kept thinking that this is like your book The Shock Doctrine in reverse – we have a crisis and also an opportunity. Only it's not an opportunity for a small group of us to get filthy rich but rather to advance the greater good. Was that conscious?

Klein: It's definitely conscious ­ I call it a "people shock." It's an inverse of The Shock Doctrine in the sense that what I documented in that book is how crises are systematically used by our elite to capitalize on fear and disorientation to push through policies that consolidate wealth at the top.

Here I'm arguing that we need to get smart in the midst of crisis, and the truth is that it either goes one way or the other: One of the things I learned while I was writing The Shock Doctrine is that crisis either makes us grow up fast or fall apart. And I'm saying that we can grow up really fast ­ that we can come together in this crisis. We've done it before.

We really need to receive the message that this crisis is sending, which is that our current system is failing. It's failing on multiple levels. And the solutions are not ones that will consolidate wealth, but would do the exact opposite. And those policies tend to be popular, so you don't need to engage in the sort of devious trickery that I documented in The Shock Doctrine.

Holland: I've long had a problem with the idea that our under-regulated form of capitalism, where corporations wield huge amounts of power, is the only form of capitalism we can imagine. Is it capitalism that's inherently oppositional to saving humanity, or is it what some have called "ravage capitalism?"

Klein: I agree with you that there are different forms of capitalism. This deregulated corporatism we have now is a particular strain. We've had others in the past.

Because this crisis hit us when it did ­ when this perverted strain of capitalism was so triumphant – we have not only failed to act to solve the problem, we've actively made it much worse.

That said, I don't think the solution is just reverting to a more mixed economy. As Michael Mann, the climate scientist at Penn State, said, there's a "procrastination penalty" when it comes to emissions. All this time that we've been failing to respond, emissions have been going up, and they stick around, they accumulate. Because we have waited so long, we now need to cut our emissions so deeply and rapidly that it does present a challenge to economic growth. This is why I called the book Capitalism vs. the Climate – because I do think the logic of economic growth is very much at the heart of this system. Maybe it is possible to have a form of capitalism that doesn't focus on growth, but it's really hard to pry apart the capitalism that we have from the idea of endless growth.

Holland: You don't take it easy on the big environmental groups in this book – you reject the idea that they can politely persuade powerful economic actors to do what's necessary to address this problem. But what about the argument that transitioning to a sustainable, green economy would require huge investments, lead to new technological innovations and employ lots of people? The classic green jobs argument doesn't see capitalism as being inherently incompatible with protecting the climate.

Klein: I think there's a very strong green jobs argument to be made, but a lot of these groups don't want to talk about the need to really step back and design the economy that we want. They think we can put a few incentives in place, leave it to the market, and that will get us there. But there has to be much more top-down regulation. We need to say "no" to the fossil fuel companies that want to open up all these carbon reserves.

So yes, we have to switch to the green technologies. Yes, it will create lots of jobs. I'm not disputing that. But at the same time, if we're going to get off fossil fuels by midcentury, which we need to do, we are also going to need to consume less. And that's the piece that nobody wants to talk about. These big green groups are only interested in talking about win-win solutions. Ideas that are genuinely a threat to elites like keeping fossil fuel reserves in the ground are basically off the table.

Holland: What about people who aren't elites? You're talking about a drastic rethink of our economy and our society. Do you worry that people are more fearful of that kind of change than they are of the threat of a changing climate, which is still somewhat remote for many of us?

Klein: I think the opposite is true, in that there's a huge amount of debate and discontent about our economic model right now. There's a huge appetite for addressing inequality, for a model that promises to create better jobs and different kinds of jobs and values work differently and has stronger communities. I think most of us actually know there's a problem with capitalism right now and that by shifting the focus to our economy, climate change becomes a convenient truth rather than an inconvenient truth. Because we need to fix the economy anyway, right?

Again and again we pit the economy against the environment. When the economic crisis hit Europe, all this austerity came down and not only were millions of people laid off and public services cut back, but Europeans were also told they could no longer afford their green policies anymore. So the system isn't working for workers and it isn't working for the environment. This economic system is failing us on so many levels, and it also happens to be destabilizing the systems on which all life depends.

The fact that there is so much science backing up the need for a different system should be hugely motivating ­ like a shot of adrenaline for our movement.

Holland: Throughout the book I got the sense that you, like many people, have completely given up on our institutional capacity to deal with these problems. You talk about how our elites have failed to address this. You write that slavery wasn't a crisis for American elites until abolitionism came along. You write that Apartheid wasn't a crisis for South Africa's elites until the anti-Apartheid movement turned it into a crisis. What is the equivalent here – how do we make an ecological crisis that for the moment disproportionally hurts the poorinto a crisis felt by our elites?

Klein: Every once in a while you'll hear a politician like John Kerry say that climate change is like a weapon of mass destruction, but they're certainly not on a war footing with this crisis. In fact, they're doubling down. But a grassroots movement can declare a crisis when our elites are not behaving as if they see it that way.

In that passage from the book, I'm making the point that it's not just about waiting for our politicians to say, "This is really, really serious." Social movements have the ability to lend that sense of urgency to an issue. In fact, this is how change happens. This is how change has always happened. So during the upcoming climate summit in New York there will be huge numbers of people on the street sending the message to our leaders that we believe this to be a crisis that requires a real sense of urgency.

Holland: You take us to the frontlines of this grassroots battle to push back against fossil fuel companies. We meet people all over the world who already are being impacted by global warming and are fighting back, like "Blockadia." What is "Blockadia" and what was it like researching these efforts?

Klein: "Blockadia" is a term that was first coined in the movement against the Keystone XL Pipeline in Texas. These are the people who are blocking the fossil fuel projects with their bodies and in the courts and in the streets. And we see these choke-points being developed and people are realizing, "If we block the coal ports in Washington State and Oregon, then there's no point digging it out in Montana because they're not going to be able to get the coal shipped out to China. So let's pour our energy into stopping those coal ports." And that's what people have been doing. The same is true of the pipeline fights – and not just against the Keystone Pipeline, but the Northern Gateway Pipeline and others as well. And people in Alberta are really panicked because they're landlocked ­ they don't have a way to get their tar sands oil to the sea.

The best moments for me researching the book were just hanging out with people who really love where they live. I have a chapter in the book called Love and Water and I quote an activist named Alexis Bonogofsky in Billings, Montana. She's a rancher and an environmental activist and she talks about taking on the coal companies and she says, "You know, the thing that Arch Coal doesn't understand is that it's not hate and anger that will save this place. Love will save this place." And so often when I was in this transnational space called Blockadia, I felt that this is a genuinely positive movement. It's a movement driven by people falling in love with where they live because they're faced with the prospect of losing something as fundamental as clean water or clean air.

It's really a beautiful movement, and that's counterbalanced this grim work of immersing myself in the scary science. Communities are being transformed through this resistance. And not just by saying no to these projects that they don't want, but also by building real alternatives to those projects and proving to themselves and their neighbors that another economy is both possible and desirable.

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He's the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at hollandj [at] moyersmedia [dot] com.

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