"The Abomination of Desolation standing where it ought not."
"The love of money is the root of all evil."
Saint Paul's Epistle to Timothy
Here is the entire Pauline passage as rendered in the Douay-Rheims
translation I grew up with:
And
here are two modern translations:
***
First, let's be honest.
Capitalism is the most energetic engine of production. Ever!
Nothing comes close.
The problem -- and it is an existential problem -- is that contemporary Cowboy Capitalism produces a disproportionate number of death-dealing devices and fatuous baubles whose sale requires active promotion of The Seven Deadly Sins.
Americans are loathe to acknowledge -- American "Christians" even more so -- that the degradation which inspires contemporary Capitalism is the foremost driver of national degradation - both physical degradation and metaphysical degradation.
Furthermore, in order to believe in The Golden Calf du jour, it is necessary 1.) to applaud increasingly bogus wars (Vietnam, Nicaragua and Iraq); 2.) to assert flatly that global warming does not exist and need not be heeded; 3.) to obscure the manifest mechanisms by which Cowboy Capitalism has transformed America into a nation of dumbed-down "consumer units" perennially content to suck the next seductive tieat; and 4.) to claim that American healthcare is "the best in the world," when, in fact, our entire "sickcare system" is a cheek-by-jowl collaboration between the processed food industry (designed to make us ill) and the "heroic" medical-pharmaceutical complex that bamboozles us into believing "pills and procedures" are capable of healing us so there is no need to live healthy lives in the first place.
Having stated these generalities, consider some particulars as they relate to burgeoning Medicare costs which - in the absence of evidence-based, government-coordinated universal healthcare (focused on healthy living and preventive medicine) -- will break the nation's bank.
Item:
Agribusnies takes great pains to design products whose salt, sugar and fat content hits "the bliss point."
"The bliss point" is the term used by the processed food industry to describe carefully crafted and diligently induced "taste addictions" whose purpose is to turn Americans into obese, disease-prone couch potatoes. http://www.youtube.com/channel/HCMmHXyfxxPMo
It is common knowledge that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
What we will not admit is that Cowboy Capitalism cultivates consumerist behavior that makes us chronically ill, and often deathly sick.
Conservatives rightly spotlight the importance of "personal responsibility."
However "capitalist irresponsibility" -- predicated on relentless promotion of The Seven Deadly Sins -- is central to the nation's bank-breaking healthcare costs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins
Eat a Mediterranean diet and walk two brisk miles a day.
If you undertake these disciplines, it is overwhelmingly likely you will live a long, healthy life.
But if you partake Big Brother's "Addiction Buffet," statistics say you will need a daily prescription medication for the rest of your life starting by age 45, followed by long, expensive decline into unnecessary bad health and quietly desperate death.
Remember "planned obsolescence?"
That's what Cowboy Capitalism strategizes for your body.
After The Cowboy makes you sick, he picks your pocket with his egregiously exploitive "health" care system. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-healthcare-costs-are-killng-us.html
"U.S. Diabetes Rates Soaring, C.D.C." U.S. News & World Reports
The Cowboy's "rugged individualism" also insures social isolation so that Americans spend much of their adulthood buying needless, stupid "stuff" in an attempt to fill the void where convivial society should be. (I will mention parenthetically that all the conviviality I see in America is within liberal communities whereas I see ubiquitous self-terrorization among those who believe it's their religious duty to corrode community while arming themselves to the teeth.)
Another day in Somalia.
***
"There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating."
Denis de Rougemont
***
Gringos: "Lying so long they don't know what's real."
Bruce Cockburn: "People See Through You"
Lyrics: http://www.cockburnproject.net/songs&music/psty.html
Audio File: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53JkTgdTKd0
***
***
"There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating."
Denis de Rougemont
***
Gringos: "Lying so long they don't know what's real."
Bruce Cockburn: "People See Through You"
Lyrics: http://www.cockburnproject.net/songs&music/psty.html
Audio File: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53JkTgdTKd0
***
Additional Resources:
"Don't Need No Nanny State Here"
"At Least Seven Glasses Of Red Wine Per Week" http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/02/new-england-journal-of-medicine-at.html
"Martin Luther King Jr. on capitalism's failure" http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/03/martin-luther-king-jr-capitalisms.html
Martin Luther King's greatest speech, "Why I Am Opposed To The War In Vietnam." (Listen to this entire speech and it will permenantly change your outlook.)
Hey! Are those "The Good Christians" cheering?
More Happy, Civilized Americans
(Good Christians too)
Guess which side of the political aisle.
Not that "the two sides of the aisle"
make much difference in the domain of plutocratic corporatism...
"Plutocracy Triumphant"
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