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DIR Return to: Theology, Anthropology & Archaeology
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#Post#: 20485--------------------------------------------------
Cultural Marxism and the Decline of the West - ROBERT SEPEHR
DIR By: patrick jane
Date: November 14, 2020, 9:46 am
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Cultural Marxism and the Decline of the West - ROBERT SEPEHR
11 minutes
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10ccBnwxyDA
Yuri Bezmenov was a Soviet journalist and a former KGB informant
who defected to the West. After being assigned to a station in
India, Bezmenov eventually grew to resent the KGB-sanctioned
oppression of intellectuals who dissented from Moscow's Marxist
policies. He is best remembered for his anti-Communist lectures
and books from the 1980's, which when looking back at this
interview, has played out just as he described right before our
eyes.
#Post#: 20902--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cultural Marxism and the Decline of the West - ROBERT SEPEHR
DIR By: patrick jane
Date: November 22, 2020, 12:02 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y68pEknYyCM&list=WL&index=58&t=11s
#Post#: 21168--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cultural Marxism and the Decline of the West - ROBERT SEPEHR
DIR By: patrick jane
Date: November 27, 2020, 8:48 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkwWp-53Zxg
#Post#: 24363--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cultural Marxism and the Decline of the West - ROBERT SEPEHR
DIR By: patrick jane
Date: January 30, 2021, 11:22 pm
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[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/121834.jpg?w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/january-web-only/wall-street-gamestop-parable-what-if-we-are-all-1-percent.html
In the GameStop Frenzy, What If We’re All the 1 Percent?
Jesus’ economic justice doesn’t mean beating the rich at their
own game.
Everybody loves a David and Goliath story. In recent days,
millions of aspiring Davids took on one of society’s least
favorite Goliaths: Wall Street.
It all started with a Reddit page called WallStreetBets. Many of
the 3 million amateur investors involved in the chat room
decided to come together to coordinate the purchase of stocks in
a handful of companies. By doing so, they generated a massive
increase in the value of those companies’ stock. GameStop’s
market value, for instance, went from $2 billion to $24 billion
in just a few days. While this created an enormous profit margin
for individual investors, it also nearly bankrupted a hedge fund
that had bet against GameStop by short selling their shares.
By all accounts, many folks involved celebrated both outcomes.
“You stand for everything that I hated during [the financial
crisis],” one user wrote in an open letter to the hedge funds.
“You are a firm who makes money off of exploiting a company and
manipulating markets and media to your advantage.” One
evangelical pastor even drew on Jesus’ parable about the rich
fool (Luke 12:13–21) who used his profits to build a bigger barn
to describe what was happening. “Since 2008, it feels like Wall
Street has had an overabundant harvest, financed by public
money, and rather than share the billions with the less
fortunate, they’ve built bigger and bigger barns for
themselves.”
I certainly see what he means, especially when we consider the
likely economic realities behind the parable. When the rich man
tears down his barns to build bigger ones, he probably isn’t
creating an enormous rainy-day savings fund. He’s more likely
opening the first-century equivalent of a one-man hedge fund.
But focusing on the way the parable puts financial Goliaths in
the crosshairs may cause us to miss another group targeted by
Jesus’ strange story: us.
While the vast majority of farmers in Jesus’ day would have been
engaged in some form of subsistence agriculture, large
landowners were increasingly profiting off grain speculation.
Those who had enough of an agricultural surplus could afford to
keep their grain off the market while prices were low. Then,
when grain was scarce and people were hungry, they could sell
their surplus at a massive profit. Such speculation wreaked
havoc on the local economy while allowing the opportunist to
profit both financially and socially from the chaos he helped
create.
Against this background, Jesus condemns at least two aspects of
the rich man’s greed. Not only does the rich man fail to share
from his abundance, but he apparently plans to use the economic
power his abundance affords him to gain further riches for
himself at the expense of his neighbors.
Jesus’ parable offers a warning to those who made ludicrous
profits while creating a crisis that devastated the global
economy. It’s hard to imagine that the Jesus who characterized a
first-century agro-entrepreneur as a malicious fool would
overlook the way bank CEOs claimed multimillion-dollar Wall
Street bonuses while Main Street burned. Surely the Jesus who
sniffed out the money-loving Pharisees’ hypocrisy (Luke 12:1)
would have something to say about modern-day financial market
manipulation.
But notice why Jesus tells the parable in the first place. A man
from the crowd asks Jesus to help him get a share of his
inheritance. While we don’t know anything certain about this
man’s economic status, we do know that the vast majority of
Jesus’ audience faced brutal poverty, the likes of which hardly
any American can imagine. Carol Wilson argues that a quarter of
the population of Palestine in Jesus’ day was so destitute they
were “slowly starving to death,” while another 30 percent
hovered “precariously near the edge of subsistence.” Only an
elite 3 percent of the population was secure against economic
poverty. It’s likely, then, that the man asking for help with
his inheritance faced serious economic hardship. It’s certain
that most of Jesus’ audience did.
It is this primarily poor audience that Jesus warns about the
need to “guard themselves against all kinds of greed.” Jesus’
anti-greed parable wasn’t only a warning for the super-rich. It
was also a warning about the kind of financial insatiability
that Jesus believed even the poor could get caught up in.
As best I can tell, the WallStreetBets folks got involved
because they wanted to make money quickly. One of the most
popular trading platforms, Robinhood, advertised their services
as allowing “people like us” to trade “just like the big guys.”
So while these investors’ actions put the squeeze on a hedge
fund, their market manipulation also sought to create quick,
substantial profits for themselves.
I’m not sure that’s all necessarily sinful. But when we wield
the parable of the rich fool as a weapon against the super-rich,
we risk missing the way Jesus offered it as a challenge to folks
like us.
The danger here is much bigger than this week’s stock market
story. The danger is that in the face of a deeply dysfunctional
economic system and corruption by the super-rich, middle-class
American Christians forget that in global and historical terms,
we are the 1 percent.
Every single investor in GameStop lives a life of unimaginable
comfort and wealth compared to the vast majority of those Jesus
warned about their greed. Most of us are richer than the
fictitious rich fool in terms of life expectancy, health, and
luxury items. Economically speaking, compared to the typical
first-century Jesus-follower, we are kings and pharaohs living
lives of unimaginable security and ease. Yet middle-class
Christians consistently read Jesus’ warning about the wealthy as
applying to somebody else. We, the richest people who have ever
lived, read ourselves in the role of the peasant and find
somebody further up the economic ladder to play the part of the
fool.
We all do this. We talk about being “poor college students”
while attending schools that cost enough to feed entire villages
in the global south. Pastors and professors like me regularly
remind people “we sure don’t do it for the money,” even though
the money gives us some of the highest standards of living
experienced in human history.
As that Robinhood advertisement makes clear, we often criticize
the large-scale behavior of the “big guys” while imitating it in
our own economic practices. For years, Christian economist Bob
Goudzwaard has warned about the ways that financial markets have
gotten out of hand, with devastating effects on the “real
economy” at home and abroad. While I wouldn’t claim that all
hedge funds are intrinsically immoral, aspects of our
contemporary financial markets, like aspects of the grain market
in Jesus’ day, demand prophetic confrontation.
But we shouldn’t confuse fighting for a better seat at the
blackjack table with confronting an economy addicted to
gambling. That’s especially true when either gambler’s loss can
wreak havoc on the lives of others. After all, it’s not just
Wall Street financiers who invest in hedge funds; pension funds,
like the ones that fund the retirements of school teachers and
firefighters, do too. We ignore the ways we are the rich fools
at our own moral and spiritual peril and at our neighbors’
expense.
Jesus doesn’t tell his flock to beat the rich fool at his own
game. He invites them to live an economic life free from greed
or fear, storing up treasure in heaven by giving generously to
the poor (Luke 12:33).
Such kingdom investments include charity to the destitute, but,
as Brian Fikkert, Robby Holt, and I argue in Practicing the
King’s Economy, it also includes orienting the whole of one’s
economic life toward love of God and love of neighbor.
If we want to invest in Jesus’ kingdom, I suspect there are
better ways than squeezing hedge funds. We could invest in black
and brown business with the help of lending platforms like
WeFunder and Kiva. We could invest our money and social
connections in organizations that help the economically poor
build wealth through education or homeownership. We could
creatively protest some of the dysfunctions of our economic
system while remembering that Jesus’ parable is a warning for us
as much as it is for financial professionals.
Michael J. Rhodes is an Old Testament lecturer at Carey Baptist
College and co-author of Practicing the King’s Economy: Honoring
Jesus in How We Work, Earn, Spend, Save, and Give.
Speaking Out is Christianity Today’s guest opinion column and
(unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion
of the publication.
#Post#: 32120--------------------------------------------------
Re: Cultural Marxism and the Decline of the West - ROBERT SEPEHR
DIR By: patrick jane
Date: June 21, 2021, 4:28 pm
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Secret societies, Jesuitism and Leninism By Rudolf Steiner
"Stuttgart 13 June 1920"
"Powers of decline in present-day civilization. Secret
societies, Jesuitism and Leninism: three initiation
streams in the present day. Religious confessions opposing
spiritual science. Their denial of pre-existence
and dogma of eternal hell. Professor Traub's smear campaign.
Opposition from Roman Catholic Press in Switzerland."
(Titles of individual videos in general not titles given by
Rudolf Steiner)
----------
All rights reserved. Rudolf Steiner Press in association with
Rudolf Steiner Audio.
43 minutes
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9jxfeJwEk4
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