Press Statement Denouncing Arizona Senate Bill 1070 & Admonition To The SCOTUS To Find The Entire Law Unconstitutional

     The Clergy Campaign for Social and Economic Justice stands today with the New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC, together with other immigration advocates and religious, moral and civic leadership in response to the Supreme Court of the United States decision on the constitutionality of Arizona Senate Bill 1070. American’s throughout the country today go about the business of living their lives trying in the best way that they know how to obtain their slice of the American pie, most without considerations of how they or their ancestors from lands far away came to these shores through the processes of migration and immigration, at different times over hundreds of years. But we acknowledge, through all of our collective struggles to scratch out an existence for ourselves, and to build a better future for our families and children to engage and enjoy the American Dream in this dynamic melting pot, that we are all American’s. We must come to the education and realization that immigrants still come to America looking to live a better life, and they live among us with the desire to labour with us and to make dynamic and beneficial contributions to the glorious fabric of our union. We must also come to the education and realization that there are those in America who seek to demean and marginalize those immigrants, and who try at every turn to strip them of their human dignities, violate their persons and the human soul and spirits that burgeon with them, in an attempt to crush their hopes and dreams, and any desire to live and prosper among us. We must oppose Arizona SB1070 and any ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States to legitimize it, and all laws similar to it. We appreciate the Supreme Courts wisdom in striking down some aspects of Arizona SB1070 which pertained to the exclusive right of the Federal Government to make and enforce immigration law, but we strenuously reject on moral, human rights and constitutional grounds the Courts ruling to let stand aspects of that legislation allowing racial profiling by law enforcement.

There are four (4) major aspects of this individual state legislation that is profoundly objectionable and culturally, socially and politically immoral. 1. Requiring an officer to check the immigration status of ‘certain’ individuals in ‘certain’ local law enforcement contact situations; 2. making the failure to carry ‘alien registration’ documents a crime; 3. forbidding illegal immigrants to work; and 4. authorizing local law enforcement officers to engage in warrantless arrests. This is New York City’s “Stop, Question and Frisk” police methodology on nuclear gamma radiation. If we understand how problematic, and a violation of the human and civil rights of young black and brown people in the city of New York, the NYPD “Stop, Question and Frisk’ methodology is, it is crystal clear how devastating the Arizona SB1070 law is. NO STATE should be able to unilaterally make their own immigration legislation, usurping federal law, and immigration policy in particular, to racially profile any class of human beings in violation of their human and civil rights to promote xenophobia, and there is no way morally, politically or legally that the Supreme Court of the United States of America can sanction its practice in Arizona.

Arizona maintains no inherent or legal right simply because it is a border state to make immigration law, or to decide how federal immigration law is to be implemented and enforced. Only congress, acting through its legislative authority can make immigration law, and as it pertains to any law with similarity to Arizona SB1070, it has not done so. It remains for the Executive Branch of the United States federal government to set forth policy for the implementation of immigration policy within the framework of the existing law, and the Obama Administration has done so. We further, use our spiritual and moral voices to admonish all three (3) branches of the U.S. federal government to engage immigration legislation and policy that respects and affirms the constitutional, human and civil rights of every person in America, striking down legislation and policy that uses racial profiling as a tool to oppress and marginalize any peoples, and to pass moral and compassionate immigration law that helps illegal immigrants to obtain legal permanent residency and provides for a clear path to progressive citizenship. We stand for a progressive twenty-first Century America for all people. Arizona’s SB1070 is in clear violation of the first and fourth amendments of the Constitution of the United States, as well as federal immigration law and it is a usurpation of the Executive Branches constitutional authority to set forth policy for both the implementation of immigration law and the exercise of discretion within the framework of existing immigration law. Consequently, as a matter of constitutional law, morality and human rights and dignity that impact upon us all, we demand that the aspects of Arizona Senate Bill 1070 allowing racial profiling by law enforcement be rejected by the highest court in our land, and we stand committed in the fight to see it and all similar laws abolished.  

The Rt. Reverend Bishop Dr. Raymond H. Rufen-Blanchette

Executive Chairman

The Clergy Campaign for Social and Economic Justice

Contact: (718) 807-4780 | theclergycampaign@gmail.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/revelationplgrm

Blog: http://therevelationpilgrim.blogspot.com

Apologizing for the Sufferings of Black and Brown Peoples

In mid-January of 2012, during an organizing meeting of Occupy Faith in New York City, as we prepared for our coalition J21 Citizens United anniversary protest event, a woman participating in the meeting approached me as I facilitated the discussion and asked in the context of the ‘Occupy Movement’ if I believed that white people in America should apologize to black peoples for their suffering? The question echoed another conversation that I had back in October 2011 in Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square, with a man that has since become my friend, Chris Hedges.  The conversation centered on the observation by Mr. Hedges that there were very few black persons, or persons of color, from poor and working poor communities of New York city in Liberty Square, and the moral presence and leadership of the Black Church was conspicuously absent. He wanted to know what my take was on his observation, and if I believed that the Black Church would embrace OWS and what I believed could be done to inspire their embrace of the Occupy Movement? I contrast and answer these two fundamental questions. 

If we acknowledge a true examination of the Civil War in these United States, and the quest for freedom for African peoples, it must be stated that what was most objectionable to the Southern slave holding aristocracy and the gentrified business class of the North about the ‘Abolitionist Movement’ and the abolition of slavery was the immediate economic consequences of the loss of the cheap and free labor.  We can talk all day and all night for weeks about race, and how the elite political and economic classes of America in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century’s saw the black man as less than human, three fifths of a man, and intellectually and spiritually inferior to their white counterparts; the narrative was a lie straight from the pit of the lowest Hell, and a cover for one bold and simple truth, that there was an economic reality to slavery, and by eliminating slavery there would be serious and demonstrable negative consequences on the Southern economy, and on the morally bankrupt social classes that obtained their wealth and benefit from it. Slavery and America’s Civil War was about money. During ‘American Reconstruction’, both free blacks and white America had to breech a conspicuous reality, how am I going to eat? Pronouncements of freedom were of little value if you couldn’t feed yourself, or your family.  Freedom is the ability to exercise choices and options; without choice and options a man is not free.  Blacks had no real political or economic options or power that could result in effectual social change, and without any real money to speak of they could not buy land so that they could compete with white farmers.  The flight of blacks to the North didn’t produce an abundance of jobs, especially if they were marginally literate, or completely illiterate, and they were greeted with hostility by other working class, working poor whites because now they were competing for their mediocre, low wage jobs.  

Discrimination against blacks in the North and ‘Jim Crow’ in the South was rooted in economic supremacy and the raw political power required to maintain it.  The advent of the Twentieth Century and industrialization in America provided some relief to the working poor in the form of jobs, but blacks still had to compete for those jobs, they still had to play catch up, and to fight to obtain an education so that they could compete, and were met with violence at every turn when they tried to compete.  When we observe the history of the Twentieth Century and the fight for equality, equal justice under the law, and the Civil Right’s movement of the 50’s and 60’s, it is important to note that the Civil Right’s movement began long before Martin Luther King, Jr.; long before Rosa Parks refused to tender her seat and the Montgomery bus boycott; but it began when small groups of black people, locally in neighborhoods and communities in states throughout the South decided that they were gonna fight for their businesses and churches that were being fire bombed, that they were going to take responsibility to protect their women and children, that they would build their own communities and protect each others homes, that they would take responsibility to educate their own children as best they could, and that they would organize for political power in the fight for the right to vote.

It is clear, that the true movement that was the Civil Right’s movement of which we all speak so eloquently of today was not simply about race, but is was about economic and political power, equality and fairness that would be the foundation for social equity and social justice in American civil society. This was the human, moral and social imperative of obtaining economic equality and fairness for blacks, and for all disenfranchised peoples of America, which is why Martin King and the SCLC began to transition to a more comprehensive ‘Poor Peoples Campaign’ in coalition with other progressive groups in America to address the core issues of economic justice and housing for the poor in America.  It is the reason that Dr. King went to Memphis, Tennessee in 1968 to campaign and advocate on behalf of striking sanitation workers, and I believe personally that it is the reason that he was assassinated on April 4, 1968. 

In the aftermath of Dr. King’s death, although the Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to move forward with the ‘Poor People’s Campaign’ there was a dramatic void in the absence of the charismatic leadership and moral weight Dr. King brought to the calculus, and right wing political and economic strategists engaged their own campaigns to polarize an already deeply divided country, to bring to halt any gains that Blacks believed that they had made with Brown v. Board of Education and School Desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The ‘Southern Strategy’ exploited Southern resentment for having been made a moral spectacle and national pariah in the painful 1960s, establishing the false narrative of the Federal government seizing social, judicial, political and economic power over the Southern states, diminishing ‘States’ rights’, and allowing the inferior Blacks to rule over them, which fueled and allowed the Southern Dixiecrat political movement to come into full bloom taking dynamic root in Barry Goldwater, and culminating in the election of Richard M. Nixon to the presidency in 1968.  It was the catalyst for the realignment of the former solid Democrat Southern states to the Republican party, at the expense of driving 90% of black voters to the Democratic party, which was a major feature of the Southern strategy because it caused Southern whites  to migrate in droves to the Republican party.  Kevin Phillips, a political strategist to Richard M. Nixon stated in a New York Times article in 1970 that: “From now on the Republicans will never get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote, and they don’t need more than that, but Republicans would be short sighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe Whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.  That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with local Democrats.”

“All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”

  

Not only did ‘Right Wing’ social engineering and extremism seek to occupy and dominate political and economic life in America in the 1970s, they as well sought to occupy and co-opt the American religious experience and morality as a means to manipulate the culture and the sociopolitical narrative, as they had done during slavery.  America was without sin in their narrative.  America was the country of God with God given liberty and republican ideals, and God built it, [American Exceptionalism] which exonerated America and them by extension; for slavery, the Civil War, lynchings, and Jim Crow, and in fact, as it is slanderously reported by the ‘right wing conservatives’ of today, slavery may not have ever happened at all, so they owe no apologies to Black peoples. Right wing extremists and extremism have polarized America along the lines of race, faith, creed, sexuality, poverty, wealth, finance and economics, family, and values; not evangelizing and sharing the all inclusive power and redemptive love of God, but demonizing American’s of different faith traditions and experience, promoting jingoism, racial bias, intolerance and xenophobia for social, political and economic benefit, and they have embedded their false social narrative deep within the psychological fabric of the country. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

 

This is not to say that there have not been gains for blacks and peoples of color in America.  Of course, there have been, but the most prolific gains experienced are for the most part individual, and all boats must float for America to live up to the high calling of it’s founding creed. Today, the same spiritual forces of greed, moral turpitude and moral corruption engage the same high crimes and misdemeanor’s that took America down the path of slavery, civil war, and the fight for civil and human rights and liberties. It lifts again it’s demonic head, unapologetic, and without shame for its conspicuous wealth and ostentation, taking the homes of the working poor and middle class American families through illegal foreclosure practice despite not having original mortgage documentation. This demon takes taxpayer funded bailouts to keep its corrupt criminal enterprises afloat as it continues to reap exorbitant executive bonuses.  The demon declares that corporations are persons, placing profits over people and the human need for which the corporation was created to satisfy to begin with, denying and diminishing the spirit and humanity that sustains all human beings, and has lured to the dark side, bought and corrupted the very politicians that we have elected to represent our profound human interests in our government.  This fundamental ‘spirit of evil’ was never truly about race, but it was always about exploiting the diversity of the human experience to breed division and hatred so that a select wicked few could reap the gains.  This was never just a struggle in and for Black America, although Black America featured prominently in the story. The struggle was always against depravity and poverty in the American experience, always against the strong taking advantage of the weakest and least among us. Not just Black America, not just Hispanic, or Asian America, or Arab and Muslim American’s, not just against immigrants and demonizing immigration, or against civil service worker’s in states and municipalities across America, not just against unions and union worker’s across the United States, but today the full frontal assault on the collective bargaining process and the right to unionize in its entirety, the fundamental core of what paved the way for immigrants to America and the working poor to become the middle-class America that we have come to know and understand of the last 70 years. 

In the Soviet Union capitalism triumphed over communism, in America capitalism has triumphed over democracy. Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force. Not just Black America, we are all under assault by ‘Right Wing’ extremists and extremism, extolling the virtues of the capitalist free market, touting in their bogus, unholy rhetoric words and phrases that are as American as hot dogs and apple pie.  Words like freedom, free enterprise, success, faith and family, free and unfettered markets, life, liberty and the pursuit of their happiness, caring more for the unborn than for children living in poverty and for those that are now occupying the earth. They have been allowed to escape with the abundant fruits of their crimes because we as civil society did not protect the least among us, because they did not look like us, because poverty, suffering and societal alienation was sui generis to the Black experience. As a consequence, we are all, without respect to race, color, creed, or religious faith perspective, now subject to the very same heinous socioeconomic assault suffered by black and brown peoples for the last 40 years, threatening the very core of our collective civil and human existence, and the vast majority of American’s do not even understand how it has come to pass.

It must be acknowledged that a lie is a lie by any moral, or intellectual measure, or any slogan that a person might use to mask its nefarious purpose. But America ignored the lies and many American’s have chosen to believe them, and by so doing America has condemned itself. Now within the Occupy Movement, educated youth, progressives, and the intellectual class seek to extricate itself from the socioeconomic, political and moral abyss within which America now finds itself. It’s half time in America. However, for America to extricate itself from this abyss, America must now extricate the demons that are within us as a people. We must call the devil by his name, acknowledge our gross sins as a nation and embrace one another, engaging in one bond of dynamic repentance and brotherhood forged with the spirit of our collective humanity that cannot be broken.  Further, it is critical that we understand that we cannot ignore our base, and, it is required that we define that base.  The progressive base is not the liberal white establishment in the Northeast, or the Northwest frontier states. The progressive base is not the urban inner city, or the African-American demographic of the United States. The progressive base is the Diaspora of the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, the working poor and the working people of the world whom have made America their home, and who have forged the American middle-class.  Our base is the 99%.  Out of many, one people.   Not the Black experience, not the White experience, not the Christian, or the Jewish, or the Muslim, or the Hindu, or the Buddhist experience.  No more the politics of division that have fractured civil society and has caused us to see ourselves as different and not as beautiful and diverse pieces of the magnificent human mosaic that is America.  We have a moral and faith imperative in this new potentially perfect Occupy Movement to bring this spiritual psychology to the mainstream of American thought and reality.  Activism is evangelism if the activism is righteous, lifts up the human dignity of all peoples, embraces the poor and the working poor, blesses the family, and helps us to recognize our best self in civil society and as humanity before God.

So White American’s do not have to apologize to Black American’s, because as in the time of American Reconstruction, an apology doesn’t put food on the table, a roof over the head of Black American’s, shoes on their feet, or clothing on their backs, and it will not remedy the century’s of slavery, or the social, political and economic injustice of the last 150 years. What White American’s can do is recognize the evils that have brought America, as a whole, to this present abyss, call it evil, shun and disavow it, and link arm in arm with Black American’s, and with brown American’s, and American’s of every ethnic origin, race, color, creed, religion and sexual orientation, because we are all Americans, and fight with us for a standard of social, political and economic egalitarianism that is sustainable and allows all American’s and their family’s to prosper equitably. Real equality in America.

White American’s can link arm in arm with all American’s to demand and fight for the repeal of Citizens United, and fight together to end, once and for all, the influence of corporate dollars in public elections. Link arm in arm to fight against the illegal foreclosures that have taken millions of homes across America, and that threaten millions of homeowner’s presently and their dreams of a bright and stable future for their families. Let us stand as one people, the 99 percent, to force corporations to place the needs of people first, and to serve the interests of the people that corporations were created to serve to begin with. Fight the righteous and moral fight with us, so that discrimination in the workplace based on age, skin color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or for any reason, becomes a relic of the history books. Fight with us to insure a fair and living wage in America for all American’s, to end homelessness because we as civil society can, and to establish an immigration policy that’s compassionate, fair, just and equitable, and that affords all peoples the opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Fight with us against the establishment of the police state, and for a viable and dynamic model of community policing that respects the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the Constitutional rights of every person, and that places the needs of the citizenry and civil liberties above the criminal justice machine and the greed, immorality and inhumanity of the prison industrial complex. 

Fight with us to end the NYPD policy of ‘Stop, Question and Frisk’ in the city of New York, as it violates the civil and human rights of young black and brown peoples predominantly on the street. Fight with us to end islamophobia, and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslims. Fight with us to destroy the prison industrial complex, and to drastically reform the criminal justice system that has more young black men behind bars today than have ever been enslaved in America during 400 years of slavery. Fight with us to secure a dynamic primary and secondary school educational system in America for all children so that going to college is not just a dream, but a real and viable option for all those who aspire to it, and so that our children can experience a prosperous and innovative future. Dream with us, about a better, more successful tomorrow for all peoples, and put your hand to the plow with us to help us to build it today. This is the new ‘Liberation Theology’ that will bring the Black Church in America, and peoples of faith and good will of every stripe and from every corner to the Occupy Movement, because it is by extension the continuation of the Civil Rights movement.

This present Occupy Movement can be among the greatest movements for social, political and economic justice and effective change that the World has ever seen.  The actions of the movement, if it is to be a true movement, must be righteous, moral and must be a tool for real and effective change in the neighborhoods and communities of the disenfranchised and disaffected, and it must further partner and coalition honestly with the true organic leadership of those communities. The people do not need a hero, they must discover that their hero and deliverance is within themselves. Let us here acknowledge that the Civil Right’s movement gone past is not yet complete, and the quest for civil liberties in America, attaining dignity for all humanity is far from over, and it must be our spiritual, human, moral and intellectual obligation to complete it.   

The Clergy Campaign for Social and Economic Justice Supports the ‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ Movement

These are the first principles of The Clergy Campaign for Social and Economic Justice’s support of the ‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ Movement and the basis of our progressive action campaign against the Wal-Mart Corporation as a matter of social and economic justice.

1. Politicians and governments rule by consent of the governed.
2. Corporations are not people. We are the people. A person is a spirit (with a personality and character, feelings, hopes, dreams, desires and aspirations for the best possible life for him or herself, family and community), possessing a living soul (conscious, cognitively intelligent, and alive), occupying a mortal body. Corporations are creations of people. Corporations exist to engage business interests and activities that serve the needs of people, profitably. The needs and the civil and human rights of the people supersede the interests of corporations and business morally, socio-politically, socio-economically, and as a fundamental construct of civil society. This is the social contract between business and civil society.
3. ‘Corporate Social Policy’ should at all times reflect this fundamental tenant of civil society, and corporations must not and may not violate this social contract on pain of action against it by the people and dissolution.
4. Politicians and Government (local, state and federal) should and must at all times serve the interests of the people that they were elected to represent, as a matter of socio-political obligation by advocating for and defending this social contract, recognizing fundamentally the needs of the people as superior to and having priority over the needs of corporations and business. The people have a voice independently and collectively, and they alone determine what their needs are. Politicians and Government are agents of the people and serve at the pleasure of the people on pain of disenfranchisement.
5. The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Movement (OWS) is a movement of the people to redress our system of capitalism which places the self-interests of corporations and business over the needs and the civil and human rights of the people, and Politicians and Government held captive by corrupt financial influence against the best interest of the people that they represent. We endorse and support the OWS Movement and the rights of the people to seek public redress through the creation of this public square (Zuccotti Park) re-named LIBERTY PLAZA. We recognize and respect their peaceful protest and their sacrifice on behalf of all of civil society and our country.
6. Wal-Mart among the world’s largest and most profitable corporations, and the largest retailer in the world, is among the most egregious offenders of this social contract with the people, duping the public with its low price business model and corporate marketing, but the profits obtained from this virulent business model accrue against the interest of the very consumers who flock to Wal-Mart retail stores because they desperately desire to make ends meet in these harsh economic hard times.
7. Wal-Mart employs a vast number of the working poor in its retail empire, paying poverty wages that keep their employees below, at, or barely above the 2011 HHS Poverty Guidelines. A jaw dropping number of Wal-Mart employees receive public assistance to supplement their meager paychecks. Wal-Mart fights unionization, as well as their own employees who join together in solidarity to improve wages and work conditions for themselves and their colleagues. Wal-Mart regularly engages in tactics that serve to break efforts to unionize and provide benefits for their ‘associates’ including limiting weekly work hours to under 24 hours keeping their ‘associates’ on a tight leash and literally hungry to work.
8. Instead of hiring a solid core skilled workforce, Wal-Mart employs huge numbers of people from the communities where they establish Wal-Mart retail stores, paying these individuals, they call ‘associates’ poverty wages, giving them low hours so they do not qualify for benefits, and when they do qualify for benefits the ‘associates’ pay a significant portion of their poverty wages to maintain health insurance. New York Times, October 21, 2011, ‘Wal-Mart Cuts Some Health Care Benefits’. Wal-Mart employs over 2.1 million people in the United States.
9. There are those that will advocate for Wal-Mart’s entry into the NYC market (Mayor Michael Bloomberg) citing the need to create jobs in a climate of high unemployment in the country generally and in New York city in particular, but the question remains ‘Wal-Mart Jobs at What Cost to New York City?’

1. Wal-Mart will not pay its employees a ‘living wage’ that keeps them squarely in the middle class and out of poverty, perpetuating a permanent underclass that not only cannot make ends meet, but who then simultaneously while drawing a Wal-Mart poverty wage paycheck require public assistance to remain a healthy component of our social fabric.
2. In spite of earning well over $1 Trillion over the last three (3) years Wal-Mart is still crying poverty, not only refusing to pay their employees a ‘living wage’, but simultaneously refusing to give their associates benefits, making them pay a significant portion of their meager poverty wages to purchase health insurance coverage. They have now increased the amount that an ‘associate’ must pay to maintain health insurance coverage which will force vast numbers to drop their employer provided health insurance ending up at the door steps of our public health system costing the city, the State of New York, and the middle class billions of dollars. New York Times, October 21, 2011, ‘Wal-Mart Cuts Some Health Care Benefits’.
3. Wal-Mart will say that to raise wages for its employees would mean higher prices for its customers. But Wal-Mart’s customers already pay an astronomically high social and economic price in the communities where Wal-Mart maintains its over 5,000 U.S. retail locations. Wal-Mart with its brute buying power, purchasing goods from low wage sweat shops in China and other developing countries around the world, under cuts healthy local business establishment driving many of these local businesses out of business, forcing Mom & Pop entrepreneurs, which are the backbone of our nations local economies, into economic chaos and distress because they simply cannot compete. Wal-Mart is anti-competitive in the local economy and neither do they re-invest revenue harvested from local economies back into the local economies from whence it gleaned its wealth.
4. Think about it. Goods that were once made in America by American workers earning good and fair wages, are now being manufactured in low-wage, high output, China sweat shops, at the expense of China’s human capital, costing Americans millions of good jobs. Wal-Mart buys these goods and sells them back to those same, now desperate Americans, at dramatically low prices, under cutting local businesses in local economies destroying more American jobs and local American homes and communities in the process. Wal-Mart’s business model is anti-American and a cancer on civil society.
5. Wal-Mart does not invest in small businesses serving the local economies in which they have their retail stores. They do not extend major contracts to provide goods and services to its retail establishments to local businesses that exist in and serve the local communities where they have Wal-Mart retail stores.
6. Consequently, Wal-Mart is a corporate parasite and pariah on the backs of the middle class and working class America, providing a short-term fix in the form of low prices, and at the same time sucking the blood out of the socio-economic life of America in general and the local community in particular.
7. Does the city of New York need to subsidize Wal-Mart, a Trillion dollar mega-corporation?
8. Wal-Mart has never kept its promises to the communities in the large urban cities where they have fought the community to establish new Wal-Mart retail locations. NEVER. Why? Because it violates Wal-Mart’s virulent business model.

1. Wal-Mart has spent over $12.3 Million nationally since 2002, and $1.8 Million in New York State in lobbying and political advertising in 2011 alone (the Center for Political Accountability), increasing its spending of corporate profits derived from the backs of regular hardworking Americans, the 99 percent, to influence Politicians and Government, placing more Wal-Mart retail establishments in local communities continuing the nefarious cycle of destroying American jobs, decimating local economies, and replacing good jobs with poverty wage employment as ‘associates’ in Wal-Mart stores, increasing the burden on entitlement programs.
2. New York and America, has to make the decision today to eradicate the cancer that is the Wal-Mart business model, and others like it, if we are to recover from America’s current economic crisis.
3. Business does not exist for the sole purpose of making profits. Business exists to provide goods and services that serve the best interest of the people of civil society who comprise the marketplace, and to do so profitably and morally. Businesses that exist for the sole purpose of making money at the expense of civil society, and not to offer the best products and services to the people in fair competition with other businesses in the marketplace are socio-economic pariahs that must be rooted out of civil society because they violate the vital social contract that fundamentally recognizes the interests and needs of the people over the greed that corrupts men’s souls and destroys the very fabric of civil society. For this reason Wal-Mart is corporate public enemy number one.

America in ‘Sackcloth and Ashes’?

 

 

The LORD bless you. I have not updated THE REVELATION PILGRIM blog in two months. Since I last posted the United States of America inaugurated a new president in the person of Barack Hussein Obama. The country has spiraled deeper into the current recession with unemployment deepening. Credit is almost impossible to obtain on both the corporate business and individual levels, and millions of homes across the nation are in foreclosure, or are about to enter foreclosure. Well known establishment companies are going out of business, or have been determined to be insolvent, our stock markets continue a vehement decline, our nation’s and the worlds banking system is in shambles, and our people continue to worry about both their families present and their families futures. Some commentators proffer that America could be entering into a new economic depression to rival the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930’s. The world may in fact be entering into the most economically and socially challenging times that has ever been encountered in the post-modern age.

For all that our country is currently suffering the people of this very great nation continue to live their lives without undertaking a fundamental reassessment of first who they are as individuals, and secondly who we are as a people. We continue without a re-examination of our personal reason for being, our personal value and our values, as well as the value of our personal contribution to the life that we live together in America and in the world that we share.  Most preachers when they discuss the Old Testament Book of Jonah dialogue about the prophet being swallowed up by a fish for three days and three nights as a metaphor for the Lord Jesus Christ being in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights after His crucifixion and his redemptive resurrection, and Jonah himself being a type of Christ.  These observations are truth. However, the prophet’s holy mission gives the reader appropriate context and is as well of note. Jonah was sent to preach to the people of Nineveh, that great ancient trade city near the city of Mosul in present day Iraq, warning that they should repent of their sinful ways. The Word of God puts forward that their lives of idolatry, great excess and wickedness had come up before the LORD God and He had divinely purposed in His heart to destroy that great city if they did not repent of those sinful ways. Jonah fled from that mission because although Jonah was a righteous man before God he was as well a bit self-righteous. He presupposed that God was too lenient with the people of Nineveh and Jonah believed that the peoples of ancient Nineveh did not deserve God’s loving kindness and great mercy. He didn’t feel that Nineveh deserved a second chance. He believed that because of the magnitude of their sins they deserved to face God’s judgment and to be destroyed. He chose not to obey the will and purpose of God which was the context of his mission, as though he (Jonah) knew better than God what was the appropriate remedy for the situation, simply because he desired to see the city and its people consumed in the condemnation and righteous fury of God. It is with this mind that Jonah fled from his assigned task. However, once the Lord had set Jonah straight he was commissioned again to preach to the peoples of Nineveh and to warn them of their impending destruction unless they turned from their sin sick ways and repent.

In the Book of Jonah, chapter three, we find that as a result of Jonah’s preaching throughout Nineveh that the people believed the Word of God and repented, proclaiming a fast and putting on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them.  Jonah 3v.5-10. The king as well, hearing Jonah’s holy warning, arose from his throne removing his robe, put on sackcloth and sat in ashes crying unto God for mercy and decreed that all should repent of their evil ways and cry unto God seeking mercy.

Here is the question. Will America, that shining city on a hill, as a nation, as a people, collectively or as individuals, stop to re-examine the world that we have created for ourselves, how we live life daily, moment by moment, and repent? I ask the question already knowing the answer. America is far too rich, far too spoiled, and far too arrogant to repent. The deceitfulness of riches, mammon worship and the pursuit of a happiness that is selfish and self serving and is nothing like holiness or the will of God rules the American psyche. God, if there is one, and His opinion, whatever it may be, is really none of our business. We go to church on Sundays, sometimes, or when there’s a special holiday; we try to eat our vegetables; we try not to cuss, or at least not too much; we say grace before dinner, when we remember, okay at Thanksgiving; we love our families, as long as we get to do it our way and our families don’t want too much, or loving doesn’t become inconvenient; and we are all around good people. If God, if there is one, has a problem with how we live our lives, with our relationships, with how we spend our time, with how we spend our money, with what we do when no one else is watching, or with what we really think and feel, then it’s really His problem.

Imagine our children, if after we’ve invested ourselves and all of our substance providing for and educating them, when they turned eighteen years of age were to tell us to go to hell and not to come back. Imagine again, the shoes on our feet, created by man with distinctive form, function, design and for the purpose of protecting our feet and to provide us with comfort, and to even make us appear stylish, en mass, suddenly rose up and decided that they didn’t want to be shoes any longer. We could no longer walk in them. All shoes purposed in themselves that they wanted to be and were in fact forks and spoons and we could only eat with them not wear them as protective coverings for our feet. We are imagining that they, our shoes, have a mind of their own and the ability to reason and make choices. Where would such a rebellion place mankind? Imagine your life without shoes. Imagine your life with your shoe in your mouth. It all sounds rather ridiculous and a waste of time to even contemplate such a scenario until we consider that we are, each of us the divine creation of God. Created by God for a divine purpose each of us different in our own unique way and no two persons exactly alike. We are much more than shoes, we do have a mind of our own and we do have the ability to reason and make our own choices, even the choice not to believe in the very God who created us to live this life at this appointed time in human history to begin with. We are not patent leather, soles and heels, but we are created with definitive purpose and much like the relationship between parent and child God has invested himself in us and America, as a nation, as a people, collectively and individually, and as we have come of age we have told our creator to go to hell and to stay there.

In Jonah 3v.10 we find that ‘God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that He had said that He would do unto them and He did it not’. There have been many throughout time who have read that passage of scripture and have said if God didn’t destroy them who’s to say that he really had the power and ability to do it, or they doubt that God said it at all, or peradventure Jonah was crazy, or the story was a lie, or perhaps there is no God at all and the whole idea and discussion is ridiculous. But let us consider the Old Testament Book of Nahum, written in Palestine circa 786 B.C., almost one hundred years after Jonah to the same people of Nineveh. This time there is no warning, no opportunity for repentance, mercy has gone and judgment has come. Nineveh was destroyed and brought to dust by the Medes and the Babylonians because not very long after the people repented from their evil ways in sackcloth and ashes in response to Jonah, they perceived that the danger of consequences for their sinful lives before God had altogether passed and they reverted to their former ways and that more grievously. God permitted them to be destroyed by their adversaries because of their own pride, arrogance and wickedness. In the context of Nineveh, God used the Medes and the Babylonians to execute His judgment. A seemingly educated and astute mankind says that the destruction of the great city of Nineveh had nothing at all to do with God, these things transpired in the normal course of human events. If it were the judgment of God, why could He not destroy the city Himself. It is instructive that we understand that God uses other nations and peoples, righteous or no, to execute His judgment. In the Old Testament Book of Daniel, Daniel 4v.25-37, as the prophet Daniel addressed the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar concerning a prophetic dream that he had experienced and giving the interpretation thereof he says to Nebuchadnezzar, ’till though know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will’. We need to understand this truth today. God rules in our lives and our world whether or not we understand it, or like it. God is both able to execute judgment Himself and to raise up a people to execute His judgment for Him. In these last days the Word of God reveals that it will be God Himself that comes to execute His divine judgment because it meets His divine will and purpose to do so.

The LORD God, has extended His grace and His mercy to America over and over again. He has brought us back from the brink of annihilation countless times and has delivered us from our adversaries and awesome peril. At the same time He has allowed us to prosper and to gain great wealth and we have become drunk with self-righteous pride and vanity. We oppress our own poor and the poor of the world and in the presence of great suffering we can only think of ourselves, our wallets and pocket books, our own comfort and our next meal. Beyond the sin of pride and greed, America is beyond wanton and immoral, we have even left off worshipping idols and money with a great number now worshipping themselves. In trouble, we look to our new president for change, hope and salvation, resting on his every word, ignoring the fact that the hope of the whole world died on a cross at Calvary, shedding His blood for our sins and rose again with all power in His hands, and that He (JESUS) is salvation. 

In the context of all of human history, perhaps mercy has now gone and judgment has come. 

The Revelation Pilgrim

Understanding Our Humanity's Collective 

Need for Prayer

It should be remembered that prayer is, in its most simplistic understanding, meaningful conversation with God. It should also be clearly understood that it is God Himself that is doing the listening. If every human being on earth today and every human being that ever lived on earth were to pray all at once, the LORD God would still be able to hear your prayer, uniquely, distinctly, personally with understanding which transcends all human comprehension. In His omnipresence and omniscience He is able to know and engage all who chose to engage Him in the spiritual dialogue that is prayer.

Ritual prayer profits little if it profits at all. Apart from the prayers of adoration, praise and worship expressing personal devotion and gratitude toward God, ritual prayer is not even truly prayer. It is tantamount to a one way rant throwing something up on a perceived heavenly wall looking to see what will stick so we can get what we want, which on its face is not particularly reverential. There is no conversation in ritual prayer, simply empty words in one direction more often than not seeking favor, or preferential benevolent action and/or miracles from the LORD. There is no, or little acknowledgement of the human condition and position before the LORD, no humility, no repentance, or self examination seeking direction and correction in one's life. Most persons as they engage what they believe to be prayer place all their begs in one asket, continually begging and asking God for one thing or another never yielding to the voice of God which always speaks to the human spirit and never coming to the knowledge of the truth. God, the LORD Jesus Christ, is truth Himself and He seeks persons to worship and pray to Him in Spirit and in truth. He desires to talk with us.

Today in my early morning prayer and devotion, I opened up the Word of God to the book of the Old Testament prophet Micah, chapter seven. 

"Woe is me! for I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits, as the grapegleanings of the vintage: there is no cluster to eat: my soul desired the firstripe fruit. The good man is perished out of the earth: and there is none upright among men: they all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man his brother with a net. That they may do evil with both hands earnestly, the prince asketh, and the judge asketh for a reward; and the great man, he uttereth his mischievous desire: so they wrap it up. The best of them is as a brier: the most upright is sharperthan a thorn hedge: the day of thy watchmen and thy visitation cometh; now shall be their perplexity.  Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide: keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom. For the son dishonoureth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter in law against her mother in law; a man's enemies are the men of his own house.  Therefore I will look unto the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation: my God will hear me. Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me. I will bear the indignation of the LORD, because I have sinned against him, until he plead my cause, and execute judgment for me: he will bring me forth to the light, and I shall behold his righteousness." Micah 7v.1-9

This scripture speaks to the lamentation and anguish in the heart of the prophet desiring truth, honesty, integrity and goodness within the heart of men and finding none, and to the contrary he finds the heart of men to be deceitful and desperately wicked, seeking blood and desirous to do evil with both hands earnestly. Even within hearts of the best of men wickedness pervades. Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit he prophecies to trust not in a friend, place no confidence in a guide and to keep the doors of your mouth closed from even the woman that lies in your bosom. Micah is not telling us to be anti-social, he's telling us that our trust and the deepest yearnings of our hearts should be in and shared with God. 

I know of no person that would agree with Micah's assessment of the condition of the human heart, particularly in our modern day civil society. But I will tell you that the prophet was absolutely correct. The greater our human progress and achievement the deeper we sink into the abyss of human depravity, and our moral sensibilities and shallow human kindnesses veil what we truly feel and the truest expressions of our human character. However, Micah's indictment was not simply an aspersion towards the rest of humanity while he stood alone as perfect. He, as I do myself, acknowledges his guilt and sin before God and willingly accepts the LORD's indignation because he has ultimately sinned against God having sinned against others. If we are honest with ourselves and with God we will acknowledge that most of the problems and suffering in our lives have to do with our own life choices and its consequences. I thank God that He is not this awful god of wrath waiting to beat me up, but just like in any good relationship if we humbly confess our faults and turn from our errors their is forgiveness, grace and mercy and the relationship grows and bares great fruit. It's what we tell our children, but it means nothing to us in our daily lives and we wonder why we have such great problems with adolescent behavior.

The LORD is speaking through the prophet, telling us that there is a day of reckoning to come for our world whether we want to accept it, believe it to be false, or simply conclude that the Bible and all of its books are simply the rants and ravings of a series of religious fanatics and/or their crazy god. God is speaking to us everyday in our world and we are simply not listening. Because we do not want or care to listen, its an interruption in our carefree, selfish lives and we are not interested. Human beings believe that if we ignore what is right in front of us the inconvenient truth will simply go away. 

God has given us a spiritual voice box, an audible voice within us called the human conscience. Most of us ignore it, but through our conscience God has given us the tools to defeat evil and embrace the good in our life and our world. But we shun the inner voice and embrace the evil, paying lip service to what we know to be good and right in our life and the world, and look with amazement and horror at all of the destruction, suffering and pain around us. Some of us even have the nerve to blame, and even curse God because of it. Choices and consequences.

Humanity needs prayer. We need to pray, NOW. We need to pray to a God that is listening and who can do something about the hurricane in our lives. We chose ritual and ineffectual prayer and religion because in it we can absolve ourselves of guilt, we don't need to embrace self examination, or confess errors in our human walk to a holy, righteous, but loving God. Just bless me and do miracle type stuff in my life. Just make it all good and I'll see you in church on Sunday, for an hour, maybe, if i don't have a hang over, or if I don't get caught up in something else more important. 

Tell me, what would you characterize to be a meaningful relationship with God?

The Revelation Pilgrim