CHRISTIAN "FUNDAMENTALISTS,"
FREE MARKET "FUNDAMENTALISTS,"
JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR HYPOCRISY

From Noam Chomsky's Blog:

"Doctrinal Fictions" of Free Trade, Debt, and Deficits

…The US multinational establishment never favored free-trade. The economy relies very heavily on a dynamic state sector to socialize cost and risk, a radical violation of market principles. The Uruguay Round (WTO) rules crucially include extreme protectionist elements designed to guarantee monopoly-pricing power to multinationals, in radical violation of free trade theory (the excuses that are given, in terms of R&D, quickly collapse under analysis). The Reagan administration virtually doubled import restrictions, violating free-trade mechanisms far more than Europe, according the analysis of the GATT secretariat. And on, and on.

Click here for the rest.

Since nobody with any real power actually believes in "free market fundamentalism," or more simply "neoliberalism," one wonders how such a concept is used so often to justify the most Draconian of economic policy decisions. The answer is simple. Most people's eyes glaze over whenever they start hearing about economic theory; neoliberalism, on its face, sounds pretty feasible to people who don't feel like digging deeply enough to see its contradictions. Ultimately, "free market fundamentalism" ends up serving as a pseudo-intellectual justification for stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, and in this case, "poor" means everybody who isn't independently wealthy--it's pretty wild how so many people not only accept it, but love it, because "free trade" is simply "the way things are." Sheesh!

From WorkingForChange:

The moral bankruptcy of fundamentalism

But to honor conservative Christians with the title of being "Bible believing" is off the mark. They're fundamentalists all right -- market (not Christian) fundamentalists, obsessed with sexual ethics.

Given "Bible-believers'" deafening silence over a bankruptcy bill that subjects the working-poor to market discipline while doing nothing to hold unethical lending institutions accountable, and their low-key support for the permanent repeal of the estate tax, is blasphemy against the spirit embodied in the very Bible they claim as their guide.

And

So while these passages are anti-Communist insofar as private property is acknowledged by the God of the Bible, the scripture advocates for periodic, massive redistribution of wealth to even out the playing field, recognizing the human propensity to use the power wealth affords to exploit the poor, as the book of Proverbs discusses in scripture after scripture.

Click here for the rest.

Christian fundamentalists' embracing of "free market fundamentalism" is an amazing phenomenon for which I have no glib explanations. Jesus was pretty far to the left in many ways, and that's pretty clear when you read the Bible. How is it, then, that so many Christians, often covered in "What Would Jesus Do?" paraphernalia, believe exactly the opposite of what their Lord preached? This is Orwellian double-think at its most bizarre, and it's pretty creepy because, for so many people, it turns love into hate: "suffer the little children" becomes simply "make the children suffer."

Jesus!

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