Sidebar: Damned as Dives

Another brilliant piece this MLK Holiday from Lee Papa, a.k.a. The Rude Pundit:

Here's something relevant to our current debate over whether or not it's okay to raise the marginal income tax rate on millionaires by 4%. It's from the sermon "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on March 31, 1968, after King had finished discussing racial injustice:

"We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia."

King then described a trip that he and his wife took to India, coming to the conclusion that "maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding."

He continued, "Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.

"I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman County, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money. The federal government hadn’t funded them, but they were trying to carry on. They raised a little money here and there; trying to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little something.

"And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they unemployed, they didn’t get any kind of income—no old-age pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, 'How do you live?' And they say, 'Well, we go around, go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that’s about it.'

"And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, 'The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair.' She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, 'How much do you pay for this apartment?' She said, 'A hundred and twenty-five dollars.' I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, 'It isn’t worth sixty dollars.' Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

"Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, 'Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives.'

"There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

"Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

"And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world — and nothing’s wrong with that — this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will."

That this sermon could be delivered today, 44 years later, with some adjustments for inflation and with "billionaire" in there, speaks to a shame that should scar us as deeply as any mark of Cain. That it doesn't and that we speak of helping the poor with the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich as "wealth redistribution," as if that's wrong and evil, demonstrates that we are, indeed, damned as Dives.

Tchotchkes: Christmas Gift List Suggestion

Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray

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Buy a whole case!

D-Bag of Liberty

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Word Hack

Ar[e] you an armed, law enforcement officer -- with a helmet, face shield and body armor?

Do you feel "threatened" when "surrounded" by a group of seated, peaceful protestors?

Do you think a badge and a gun gives you the right to lift up your leg and pee on the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States?

Why merely step over those peaceful, seated students when you can spray the crap out of them with a Defense Technology 58695 MK-9 Stream pepper spray blaster?

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One positive outcome, I did receive a paid vacation for my efforts.

“100yrsold”

I was told that this product was essentially a food item used to spice food. This pepper spray, instead, ruined the first meal I used it on due to being approximately 1,000 times hotter than the jalapenos I normally use. For the first time ever I think Fox News may have lied to me.

“Hookertime”

Lil White Lies: I Dream of Gini

Lawyers’ Rules of Thumb(i.e., how my conservative counterpart works his blog):
If you can’t use the law (i.e., argue fallacies), use the facts
If you don’t have facts, use the law (i.e., argue fallacies)
If you have neither law (fallacies) nor the facts, pound on the table and create a distraction.

Here we have another sublimely bloviating multiple-infected specimen of misrepresenting the source along with the underlying argument of a PolitiFact (PF) ruling. My conservative counterpart takes aim at a statement made by ex-Florida-congressman Alan Grayson on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show that there are “are only five countries in the entire planet that are more unequal than the United States in the distribution of our wealth.”

The first part of Bryan White’s argument is that PolitiFact’s Lou Jacobson (who else!) incorrectly attributed where Grayson said he got his information: a link provided in Wikipedia to a “peer-reviewed” paper published in The Economic Journal in 2010. He explains:

If the PolitiFact team had paid closer attention, they would have noticed that the numbers on which Grayson relies were not published in any peer-reviewed journal. The numbers Grayson used ultimately came from an appendix (Excel file) to a working paper that preceded the version published in The Economic Journal.

PolitiFact reports falsely in claiming that PolitiFact sourced its numbers to the linked "a peer-reviewed paper." Sift through the linked work from now until doomsday and you won't find "Namibia" mentioned at all nor any comprehensive list of Gini coefficients (identified by PolitiFact as the primary statistic used to identify inequality) for all the nations of the earth.

But if one reads the paper (paid closer attention!), one would find 25 countries listed,with the identical Gini Coefficients from the “unpublished” Appendix VI, in Table 7 on page 246 . The writers describe how they chose these 25 countries: “Note. Countries are listed according to the number of members of the global top wealth decile.” In other words, the writers made this the criteria for selecting countries from Appendix VI. In fact, Table 7 has the U.S. as Numero Uno in wealth disparity, as the four countries which exceed it are not there, although one of them, Switzerland, is mentioned on the previous page: “…Switzerland, whose distribution is based on hard data with good detail in the upper tail, has a Gini coefficient of 0.803 (Davies et al., 2009, Appendix VI) The US and Switzerland have Gini coefficients close to the global wealth Gini of 0.802.” And right there is the cross reference to “Davies et al., Appendix VI” which is cited frequently throughout the paper. James Davies is the first “academic” listed as the writer of the paper.

So, if Appendix VI wasn't published, what becomes of this? Does that make it incorrect?

If one looks at the working papers cited/linked in a bottom reference at Wikipedia, one can see it reads like the paper submitted to The Economic Journal. In other words, it’s virtually certain that Appendix VI served as the data source for Table 7. Actually, it WAS published, although not in The Economic Journal: it was at the NBER, National Bureau of Economic Research. I suppose only the reference was required for the table instead of appending it to what was published in The Economic Journal; but for all intents and purposes it was the foundation of the paper’s Table 7 and was the sole reliance for the Gini data presented . You can say it was partially published, but it can’t be said, as Bryan’s trying to claim, that it wasn’t published at all.