“And wage slaves, obey your corporate masters with fear and respect, giving up your right to organize and negotiate. Submit yourselves to them not only to move up on the ladder of meritocracy, but obey the laws of Big Business just as you were loving god.
And corporate overlords, be mindful to undermine any call for economic justice, and remain diligent in firing black people first, and hiring them last.”– A modern day CEO’s reading of Ephesians 6:6-9
Yesterday, Mitchell suggested A Practical Program of Disenfranchisement: A 10 Step Plan to Save American Democracy By Dismantling it.
Among the people who should not be allowed to vote, for Mitchell: “Government employees”; “Those who do not pay taxes. If you do not pay taxes, or if your unemployment benefits or government aid or earned payincome credit or other need-based government aid outweigh the amount of taxes you pay, you have no right to have access to government violence against those who do pay taxes”; and most importantly, “People with children in public schools. People with children in the public schools have chosen not to take personal responsibility for the education of their own children, and instead have handed them over to the care of the taxpayer, at a cost of $10,000 per child”
I say that Mitchell did not go far enough; I would like to include an additional 10:
1. People who receive Social Security, Medicare or Medicare/ Obviously, these people are the bane our existence, and God Himself disapproves of all public resources for helping the poor.
2. People who send their children to private and charter schools, which depend upon subsidies, city-wide lotteries, and tax breaks for their schools. The free market should be free. This government interference is uncalled for, and breaks all of God’s laws.
3. Any employee of a bank that received money from the federal government bailouts. Don’t really have to explain that one.
4. Farmers in Minnesota and Iowa who have their crops subsidized by the federal government. This is a form of socialism and should be repealed.
5. The millions of students who owe the federal government (no longer private banks) a gross amount of their income in student loans. If you can’t afford to go to college, do not go! And dismantle the Department of Education. Enough is enough.
6. All prison employees who work with death row on the federal level.
7. All citizens of the United States who currently do not live in a border state. You don’t know what it’s like to deal with immigration politics and populations, so you shouldn’t have a vote in the matter.
8. Big time millionaires like Jerry Jones who raise a city’s taxes just so they can have a private enterprise like a football stadium on the backs of the poor.
9. NBA Commissioner David Stern.
10. The biggest recipients of government welfare: our nation’s veterans and soldiers. Let’s get rid of all of those G.I. Bills, return to the military draft, and pay our Armed Forces minimum wage, which there wouldn’t be any since all minimum wage laws would be stripped from our law books. No health benefits, no free college education. Just a pay check, and our love.
Knew I could count on you for a fiery response to this one, though I’ve got no idea how my idealistic and taxpayer-respecting plan would guarantee corporate overlordship. If the concern is corporate overlordship, then don’t allow corporations to participate in the public bribing of officials by means of campaign donations, don’t let government hand-out as many wasteful and massive contracts to private companies, and strip away the endless red tape that favors massive corporations over smaller start-ups. That’s the real way to deal with corporatism. Thinking that our wide franchise is somehow keeping corporations at bay is a pipe dream.
I could probably get behind the second half of #2. I could definitely get behind 3, 4, 5, and especially #8. I am furious that city money is spent on building massive entertainment venues on the backs of people during an economic downturn. (I’d feel the same way in an upturn, but I’d just be annoyed instead of furious.) I don’t know a thing about #9, and I’ve got mixed feelings about #1 and #10.
As for number #6, I wouldn’t want to strip the franchise from employees so much as from the fat cats of the prison-industrial complex who make their money on the miserable family-destroying for-profit prisons. Similarly, I’d be perfectly fine stripping the franchise from the people getting rich by producing weapons and winning lucrative contracts for wars that other people die in.
Finally, since you’re so confident that your reading of Ephesians 6:6-9 is superior to that of some imaginary CEO’s, why not share with us how you read it? Or is this one more part of the Bible that you don’t read anymore since the time you “rejected linear logic” and “white Calvinist interpretations” of the Bible? My suspicion is that your real beef is with Ephesians 6:6-9 itself, not with some alleged misinterpretation of it.
“My suspicion is that your real beef is with Ephesians 6:6-9 itself, not with some alleged misinterpretation of it.”
Hahahahahhahaha
You couldn’t be farther from the truth.
You are right in that I reject Calvinist interpretation of Ephesians 6, like almost every other passage, they get incredibly wrong. For the record, I actually prefer the Yoderian/anabaptist interpretation of the “pro-slavery” passages, a promotion of non-resistant love.
Rod,
This is an incredible response to Mitchell’s ill-informed and, frankly, anti-American disenfranchisement program.
First, felons and prisoners can’t vote. Most, if not all states, strip felons of their voting rights once convicted. That essentially takes care of his first 3 points.
On Government employees, I’m glad he’s admitted he doesn’t want soldiers, sailors, or any other member of the Armed Services to vote. That takes chutzpah to say that, regardless of how you and I feel about military action, those that choose to risk their lives for their country don’t get to participate in the running of that country.
On public education, I’m sure it would distress Mr. Powell to know that the founders were firm believers in public education and that it was essential to a functioning republic. Perhaps that’s why Mr. Jefferson, on his grave marker at Monticello, has no mention of his time as President, but mentions his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and founder of the University of Virginia.
#facepalm
Dearest Christian,
You’re only partially right about felons and prisoners. Though there are some states which have regulated their voting in a variety of different ways, there are still both felons and prisoners voting in these United States.
When it comes to members of the armed forces, I regret to say that I do not have the chutzpah you think I have. I was thinking in particular of regular civilian government employees when I wrote “government employees.” I’m honestly not sure whether our country is better off with military members voting. If I gave the impression that I wanted to take away the franchise from them, that was an accident on my part. It seems cruel, especially if we reinstate the draft, to send people off to die without giving them any say in the matter.
Finally, it is awfully vague to simply say that “the founders were firm believers in public education.” I would very much enjoy seeing you attempt to prove that even one quarter of the signers of the Constitution (10 of 40) or one quarter of the signers of the Declaration of Independence (14 of 56) expressed a firm belief in the idea that the government ought to ensure that all children have free and compulsory education paid for by the government. You probably won’t attempt doing any such thing, however, because it’s far easier to speak lazily of “the founders” without naming names, which would be disastrous to your case.
Of course, even if it could be proved that every founding father prayed daily for a free and compulsory educational system, neither that fact nor being labelled “anti-American” would frighten me into letting others do my thinking for me.
By… [selecting] the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated.
–Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree. – TJ
One founder down (at least for state-subsidized schooling) . . . 39 to go!
Try Benjamin Rush and Madison.
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I’ll give you Benjamin Rush, who, in his desire to stamp all the ethnic out of recent immigrants, desired to take their children and “render the mass of people more homogenous” and cooperative toward the government. That Rush thought the education of children was beneficial to a functional Republic is true; whether Rush wanted a diverse or free Republic is much more open to question. The public school system Rush imagined was also to be based on “RELIGION” — his caps, not mine. He would be most disappointed with today’s toleration toward multiculturalism, bilingualism, and especially non-religious instruction in our schools. Rush is typical of all the major proponents of public schooling in his desire to use it to homogenize society and suppress undesirable social traits. After all, to the extent that government controls the minds of children, the messiness of democracy is lessened.
Jefferson, for all the talk about his being a proponent of public schooling, had a vision for something quite different than today’s schooling. His vision for schooling was of schooling as voluntary, with students entitled to three years of instruction. That was his vision of what mass education meant. The poor “youths of genius” he spoke of in the quote you cited were the very smartest of the poor, who he proposed be given an extra fourth and fifth year of education in Greek and Latin. And then of those he wanted only half to be allowed to go on to three years of science education. Jefferson’s vision of public education would generally end at the third grade, stretching on to the fourth through fifth grade occasionally and sometimes with the brightest and best to the end of the eighth grade. He was quite opposed to what we today call public schooling, because (1) it is compulsory, (2) it is not sufficiently selective, and (3) it does not teach Greek and Latin. To count him as a supporter of public schooling in the modern sense is quite a stretch.
But for the sake of argument I’ll give you that 2 of 40 signers supported publicly funded education of a very different sort than today, though that is hardly worthy of being called “the founders” by Christian, whose research assistant you seem to have become. As to James Madison, I’d need to see the exact words you think indicate his support of free and compulsory public schooling.
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