Thinking about Paul

So I have a young friend who is quite a biblical scholar and who is extraordinarily fond of St. Paul.  About this he and I disagree, rather profoundly.

The oldest writings in the New Testament, excepting perhaps the Book of James (who was the brother of Jesus), the letters of Paul are perhaps the first gospel.  Some scholars believe that these letters were actually published and were written in highly polished Greek because they were intended for publication.  The lack of this polish is how scholars distinguish between the authentic letters of Paul and the so called Pseudoepigrapha, the letters written by others and said to be written by Paul.  These letters were written by Paul to the groups of Christians he had mentored across the Roman Empire.

Now my problem with Paul is pretty simple really.
1) Paul never met Jesus.
2) Paul never studied with Jesus.
3) Paul was not at the last supper.
4) Paul was not at the Pentecost
5) Paul never studied with James or Peter or any of the other Apostles, so far as we know.
6) Paul was in fact one of the chief persecutors of Christians during the early days of the Jerusalem church.
7) The so called vision on the road to Damascus is IMHO nothing less than an authorization tale, designed to provide for Paul the mantle of Apostle by someone putatively identified as the same author of the Gospel of Luke.  Truth to tell we do not know who wrote the Gospel of Luke, so we don't know who wrote Acts either for that matter.  The text of Acts was written approximately about AD 66-67 in memory of the recently deceased Paul.  This story exists nowhere else, there is no double attestation which would prove that it is more than an invention of the author of Acts.
8) Paul was in fact a Roman.
9) Paul was trained as a Pharisee, the very group who were the butt of many of the Parables of Jesus.
10) Paul's letters attack ministers who come among those Christians he had mentored teaching a message divergent from his own.  Scholars think these ministers teaching a divergent message had been sent from the Jerusalem Church founded by the Apostles who had actually studied with Jesus.

So, one has to ask then, just where do these teachings in Paul's letters come from?  They can't possibly represent the teachings of the Jerusalem Church which were in the direct line of Christ's own.

Paul's teachings survive mainly because he was dead when the Jerusalem Church was destroyed and his followers were spread among the diaspora Jewish community when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70.  In addition, those who created the text of the anthology we call the New Testament were followers of Paul.

I contend that if we are really going to know what Jesus the  Christ taught, we have to discard Paul.  The teachings of Paul have so eclipsed the teachings of the Jerusalem Church, his followers have worked tirelessly to suppress the teachings of the Jerusalem Church, so that if we are to see what Christ taught we have to look beyond Paul back to the beginnings of the Church.

We might begin with Phyllis Tickle's book, The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord with Reflections.

One of the Reviewers of this book writes: "We've heard them from the pulpit, scanned the red-letter words in our Bibles and quoted them in scripture memorization. But when we listen --- really listen --- to the words of Jesus, they may change us irrevocably. So says renowned religion writer Phyllis Tickle in THE WORDS OF JESUS, which offers a new way of looking and listening to familiar passages.

The book began with a simple question from a colleague who asked Tickle, "Did you ever wonder what you would really find if you took out the duplications and triplications and connective tissue of the Gospels and stripped it all down again to just His words?" The question stunned her, and she admits, "I had never wondered such a thing...I was also fascinated by the potency of the Sayings format and drawn to the intellectual game and pleasure of trying to tease out just how and why that format works so well."

The "Sayings" format is indeed unique. All of the words of Jesus from the four gospels and the first chapter of Acts are compiled and arranged into five different "books" and then organized by topic. In each book, Jesus' personality is "shaded and shaped by the particularity of either his audience --- public, private, or intimate --- or an activity --- healing." Rather than relying on a particular translation, Tickle brings her own scholarship and the texts of several translations to bear to recreate Jesus' words.

Tickle suggests that the reader begin with Book Two, Christ's words of private instruction to His followers. Here, He is "most self-revelatory and open to us." Bits and pieces of Jesus' words reach out and pull the reader in. "Be careful that you do not look down on one who seems small or unimportant and trivial...," Jesus says in one passage. In another, "Sit down in the humblest place." And, "Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour." Each saying in each "book" is grouped under a topical header.

Tickle divides the other four books of Jesus' Sayings into The Words of Public Teaching, The Words of Healing Dialogue, The Words of Intimate Conversation and The Words of Post-Resurrection Encounters. The 21 Sayings under "healing" are interesting, Tickle points out, as most of them have little or nothing to do with the healing itself: "Rather, they read now as if much of the time the act of healing becomes a platform for teaching health of more than just the body." Good food for thought.

One of Tickle's passages that resonates particularly well is the idea that the brain and the heart are both organs of perceiving and being. "We must assume that there is in the human being a means of knowing other than that of the brain." Her surprise, she said, was that the Sayings of Jesus "entered prayerfully" are first heard somewhere other than the mind. "The heart, it would seem, has its own consciousness and knowledge and ways that can be experienced just as the brain's consciousness and knowledge and ways are experienced. They are just not as scientifically measurable at the moment, and may never be."

Tickle, who has worked with other sacred writings before (The Divine Hours series), has a delightful blend of humbleness and confidence in her reflections on the Sayings. As she began compiling the "words" of Jesus through the past two years, Tickle said she wrestled with new perceptions about what it is to be a Christian, as well as to be herself.

So reader be warned. If, as Tickle says, "It is the correct and proper business of followers to try to discern the meaning of God's words," then THE WORDS OF JESUS is a good place to be about our business. But readers will encounter the sayings of Jesus through this book in new ways --- and may come away changed."

--- Reviewed by Cindy Crosby

IMPERSONATING THE PERSON: CITIZEN EMBRYO

I am beginning to grow very tired of the arguments my Evangelical neighbors are making in their efforts to overturn Roe V Wade.  Now it must be very clear to anyone who listens to the blather of these good people that they imagine America to be a theocracy where biblical logic takes precedence over every other kind of logic we believe to be the basis of our Democracy.

Let us begin at the beginning of their logic.  First, they begin with the idea that the Bible is the Word of God, literally correct and inerrant.   This blather like their other blather is anchored in grotesque misunderstanding. First, this book they call the Bible (Latin for book) is an anthology of many texts written by a variety of hands, most of which belong to individuals without names, other than  those given them for convenience by the editors of the volume in the 4th century.  A good many of the letters of Paul, for instance, we know were not written by him. These pseudo-epigrapha are, to put it bluntly, forgeries accepted into the anthology by the sheer ignorance of the 4th century editors.

Secondly, the texts of this anthology were "massaged" (that is to say rewritten somewhat) by their editors during the amazing debates over the proposition of an influential priest named Arius, who asserted that The Son of God was a subordinate deity to God the Father. Their rewriting of scripture allowed them to defeat Arius and send us on our way into the amazing dogma of the Trinity, which virtually no Christian understands to this day. Mysteries are that way, it is explained to the trusting faithful.

This little trick of rewriting sacred text to win arguments is still being practiced by the anti-abortion editors in our own day.  So much for the idea of inerrancy.  But then there are so much evidence that demolishes this sacred cow of the evangelicals that they have (as a young graduate of the Truett seminary put it to me recently during a professional conference) created their own brand of "Yawbut" theology. To every exception to this inerrancy assertion a student might come up with his professors were always ready with a "Yes but" [or in the dialect of Texas, "Yawbut"] theological response.

Thirdly, the reason the Bible was created in the first place--the reason that editors sorted through all the many other Gospels held by ordinary Christians to be sacred text in the preceding 300 years--was that Constantine had begun to build for his new God Franchise [Christianity] massive new churches, and the priestly managers of these grand spaces needed something to read in the new system of public worship [liturgy] he was devising.  Of course, it is likely all Gospels and sacred texts were written for public reading in the early house churches which had sprung up across the Roman Empire of the first, second and third centuries.

But when the new God franchise was created by Constantine he had to--in the tradition of every good empire--standardize the text. Standardization is after all the hallmark of a good empire, weights and measures being the first Standard to be put in place.  So what was sacred and what was not sacred, what was acceptable and what was not, had to pass muster of Constantine's appointed editors and compilers.  This bible-is-the-Living-word-of-God meme is nothing more than an authorization trope designed to empower the clergy of the new God franchise. And thus we invented the Canon and cast into the outer darkness all competing texts making every effort to obliterate them and all who clung to them.

So since America is not a theocracy run by empowered Clergy, we can dispense with these Bible based arguments.  They convince no one but evangelicals of the inerrancy tribe.  What then can we agree on?
I suppose it is fair for us to agree that biological life begins when the sperm hits the ova.  It is equally fair to think that this biological life is human.  It is equally fair to think that this human life should be accorded respect once it achieves viability which medical science is pushing back further and further into the weeks after fertilization. Currently, most agree that viability occurs at seven months or 28 weeks.  Up until then Roe V Wade permits the mother to terminate the pregnancy if she chooses. Viability has occurred at 21 weeks, but the chances of survival are very challenged at 21.

So what is the status of the fetus prior to 21-28 weeks?  Our bibliocists demand that we give the conceptus all the legal rights of a Citizen from the moment of conception.  They are working over time to conceal their biblical imperatives so they will have weight in a court of law, where these decisions will be made.  Currently, the best of their arguments resides in the Potentiality argument that argues that since the embryo is potentially a Citizen it should have all the rights of a Citizen. "Best" does not necessarily mean convincing, I hasten to say.

The problem with all these arguments, of course, is that our ancestors who wrote the books of the bible were dyed-in-the-wool misogynists.  In the days of our Bedouin Hebrew ancestors, women were property with few rights.  This misogyny persists for nearly two millennial so that it has only been in the last century when women threw off the shackles of patriarchy and demanded an equal share of respect, legal rights and liberty such as Citizens have the right to expect.  So our evangelical friends argue from texts that deny the importance of woman from the outset.  These arguments are irrelevant in modern context where women have long been accorded equal rights.  Even as we speak, however, many legislators drawn from the evangelical camp struggle to strip women of these hard won rights and long to return them to the status of chattel property.  Such is the intent and purpose of these Personhood arguments, in my opinion.

Surprisingly, we have learned more about gestation since Roe V Wade than we knew in the preceding 7,000 years.  It is nearly miraculous how much we now know about the process of gestation and in particular embryogenesis. Not withstanding this avalanche of new technical information, our evangelical friends retroject this information back into our early history assuming the authors of books like the proverbs knew what fertilization was.  One notable authority on personhood even demanded that we interpret the line in Proverbs that says "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you" meant that God knew us at the point of fertilization.

Now fertilization is a microscopic event and we had no microscopes until 1590. It is impossible for these ancients to have imagined such a process.  Secondly we did not know that a woman even had an ova until 1827.  So the idea that the ancients could have imagined that God knew us when sperm and ova collided is patiently absurd. It is the very epitome of the logical error retrojection. But then if you don't believe in Critical Thinking as evangelicals mostly do not often militantly so, they could hardly protect their logic from such fallacies.

So if we begin with the idea that all women--poor, middle class and wealthy--are Citizens fully equal to men who have the right to control their own bodies, we cannot begin to accept that the State has any right to curtail their rights to control the most intimate process of her anatomy.  The ludicrous demands of our evangelical friends to demand the state reach out and seize control of a woman's uterus and its inhabitants flies directly in the face of the conservative  quest for smaller and less intrusive government possessed of fewer regulations.

This kind of governmental regulation always fails, witness the effects of such regulation in the matters of access to alcohol, marijuana, all schedule one drugs, immigration and even voting rights.

And truth to tell, they are not mounting an argument aimed at the upper classes.  Their arguments and legislation are aimed directly at poor women as witness their attack on Planned Parenthood which has been a major source of health care for poor women.

It should be obvious to any reasonable individual that what we have here is nothing less than an effort to deny women equality under the law.  Men want to return to a day when women did not compete with them in the Job Market, could not control their own money, and control their fertility.  They would like to dismantle the divorce laws, and Title IX which gives women equal access to the sports fields and programs.  They dislike women serving in the military let alone in combat. And so on and on in their not so subtle misogamy.

Those of us who really love women, and respect them to the degree that we want our wives and daughters to be equal before the law in every way a man is should be very alert to the real thrust of this personhood argument.  It is nothing less than misogyny concealed.

If these good Christian folk really loved the fetus as they say they do, wouldn't they:

1) Provide sex education of a real and meaningful sort so both women and men know how their reproductive organs work, how STDs are contracted, and how they should think about their health when they are trying to bring a child into the world?

2) Provide prenatal care to poor women who can't afford it?

3) Provide legal protection for women who have been raped and to treat rape as the heinous crime it is in ALL cases.

4) Defend a woman's constitutional rights to control her own body as vigorously as they defend their second amendment rights.

5) Provide health care to poor women so they can receive adequate care during difficult deliveries of their infants.

6) Provide health care to poor women in the difficult months after a birth so their children might not become a statistic on the mortality roles of infant death.

7) Provide preschoolers with Head Start funding so they will be ready for school

8) Provide children with a good education so poor women have some hope that their children really do have access to the American Dream.

9) Stop incarcerating the husbands and men folk of poor women through draconian drug laws and mandatory sentencing which have resulted in the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized  nation. Raising children requires a father in the home just as much as a mother.

10) Stop the massive legislative efforts both in State legislatures and Congress during the last four years to restrict a woman's ability to control her own body and the attendant media which demeans poor women as welfare queens and murders of unborn children.

11) Work to improve job prospects for the poor and middle classes. The conservative blockage of all of Obama's efforts to create jobs especially through much needed rebuilding of our infrastructure has ironically been the motivation of many families to curtail building their families through all methods of contraception and early term abortion.

12) Work to make marriage a viable institution for all segments of society.  Currently half  of all infants are born out of wedlock, and half of all marriages end in divorce.

How are we to encourage pregnant poor women to want to take their pregnancies to term if we continually leave them bereft of hope that there will be equality of opportunity for themselves and their children.

The Fetus Fetish

Fetus, fetus, fetus, who love this fetus anyway?  I begin to be really irritated by the fetish certain sectors of the political spectrum have for this entity called the fetus.  I have even begun to suspect that this fetish has nothing at all to do with fetal life and everything to do with controlling the reproductive life of women.  I have even begun to suspect that all this legislative hand wringing over these little precious tongues of flesh don't love the poor, don't love poor women, I even suspect they don't love women at all.  I am almost positive that these male legislators have no love for pregnant women of any stripe.  I know for sure they do not love fetuses at all. 

 If we really wanted to protect the fetus wouldn't we want to ensure that the mother entity was delighted to be pregnant?  Wouldn't we want to be sure that the mother entity was well informed about what pregnancy meant, how pregnancy happened, how she could stay pregnant and how she could deliver a healthy infant?  Wouldn't we want to give that mother entity the feeling that we respected her, loved her and encouraged her to be the best mother she could be?

Yet what do we do? Nothing of the sort. 

We humiliate them, embarrass them and go out of our way to wage war on their demographic.   

We threaten to poke an unltrasound wand up their koochies, a required procedure which the state also requires they pay for.  

We humiliate them by allowing pharmacists to deny women access to contraceptives if the pharmacist claims such a sale would offend his religious views: not withstanding that women use contraceptives for far more than just preventing pregnancies.  

Their most private and intimate biological process are suddenly the stuff of debate and argument by men who obviously have not even the most minimal understanding of how the lady parts work.  

Supposedly educated and supposedly happily married men energetically propose an entire taxonomy of rape including illegitimate rape and legitimate rape, as if it weren't a horrific crime but a kind of inter-mural sport they long to be spectators of.

Then the House of Representatives refuses to pass the Violence against Women Act, as why would they when they seemingly enjoy discussing rape, imagining rape and its consequences.

Then 30 States have laws on the books that allow rapists to have parental rights for the child of their forcible rape.   I can tell you that if a rapist were to show up on my door wanting to have his parental rights with my grandchild he forced my daughter to have in a violent and ruthless sexual attack, there would be one very dead former rapist "burglar" in my house.  Or there would finally be a good use for "Stand Your Ground" Laws.

And then there is the State of Utah which reached into the bottom of the humiliation barrel and recently criminalized miscarriage. Not abortion mind you, they criminalized that event that most women are completely devastated by.  Way to go Mormons!

So it is pretty clear to me, that these fetus fetishists are liars, hypocrites and knownothing spiritual raopists.  They don't care about women, they don't care about fetuses, and the particularly don't want to honor women in that most challenging moment in their life when they accept responsibility for another life growing under their growing breasts.

The Wobble God Hypothesis--a personal caveat to How Not to Talk of God

One thing I do not understand about such discussions as these—and it is probably such a silly question that it does not deserve an answer—is why are we so focused on the generic God. Used to be that the God had a name: Kali, Shiva, Dionysius, Apollo, Zeus, Hera, Isis, Orisis, Set, Amon Ra, Thor, Loki, and so on and on. In the history of ideas there must have come a time when this generic God rose up and replaced these others.

I have three thoughts about this: One is that we forgot the name of God—supposedly—so we have to call him by the Generic. Two is that the name of God is so sacred that we dare not use the name, if we knew it.

I have heard, however, of a third explanation. That is that all these named Gods were associated with stellar phenomena so that constellations were named for them and so forth. These constellations and the dominance of the God associated with each of them shifted about once each 2,000 years. So we had an age dominated by the Apis sacred bull God associated with the constellation Taurus, an age dominated by the Ram God Osirus associated with Aries, an age dominated by the constellation Pisces which accounts for the fish imagery in Christianity, which has just come to an end to be replaced with the so called "Age of Aquarius."


When it was realized that there was a grand precession of the constellations ancient astronomers realized that this implied the existence of a super God who ruled over the others and placed them among the stars. Some think that the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV in response to this insight overthrew Egypt’s ancient religion and created the solar religion of the Aten and created a whole new capital on the west bank of the Nile called Armarna to be the center for this new religion and renamed himself Akhenaten. From this new monotheistic religion many believe the Abrahamic religions rose.


Now astronomers realize that this grand precession of constellations is the result of a wobble in the earth’s axis which creates the way the constellations can be seen. Consequently, we might call this idea of a super God beyond all the ancient constellation Gods, the Wobble God hypothesis. The problem with the wobble God is that it did not have the personal accessibility apparent in the older gods such as Osirus and Isis and Amun Ra. That is the ancients could look up into the heavens and see the constellations, but they could not see the wobble, all they knew was that something or someone very powerful was causing the constellations to drift across the heavens in a 2,000 year precession, something that was literally beyond their comprehension.


Because they had no language to describe it, or conceptual ground to explain it, the Wobble God became the unknowable one, our generic God. Because it is much harder to have a personal relationship with a God created by a wobble they could not understand at the time, as soon as Akhenaten died, the Egyptians quickly returned to the worship of the older gods they could visually comprehend. Moreover, the 2,000 year change of the precession was far beyond their brief life times and hence impossible for them to comprehend the timescale involved in the recognition of this new super god. For hundreds of years as these different religions came into contact with each other, they recognized that each was an expression of these constellational divinities, so that they recognized Zeus as Osirus, Apollo as Ra and so forth. It was only the descendents of the Armarna experiment, as Jan Assman calls it in his book Moses the Egyptian, who persisted in worshiping the Wobble God rejecting all other constellation Gods as inferior to it.


What we are left with then is the Abrahamic religions who all reject the constellation Gods in favor of the unknowable force which set them in the heavens in the first place. And so we have the generic god who is without a name because its existence is literally beyond the ancient’s ability to comprehend as they had no knowledge of the spherical earth or its wobble which caused their view of the constellations to shift in a 26,000 year precession. This is similar to the enormity of the billions of years inherent in the geological concept of Deep time, which makes evolution so hard for those of us granted only three score and ten in our life cycles to comprehend that many reject it out right in favor of a much more familiar creation story from Genesis.

An assault on the rights of the individual and freedom of conscience

In an Editorial published today (3/29/09) in the Washington Times, “The U.N. tackles religion” the editors argue that the Organization of the Islamic Conferences is making an effort to insinuate Shariah Law into the United Nations Human Rights Council’s approach to religion world-wide. This is a chilling “assault on the rights of the individual and freedom of conscience” under the guise of combating defamation of religion. That is to say combating the defamation of Islam. There is no effort to combat the defamation of Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism or Christianity by Islamic voices, or for that matter by the Koran which apparently is filled with excoriations of every other religion. But then it must be ok for Islamists to revile non-believers.

What is wrong with this picture? If our Islamic friends would like to prevent what they feel is defamation within their own nations, that certainly is their right. But the effort to isolate the word “defamation” as if it were to apply only to Islam is an aggressive violation of what the freedom of religion should mean. Will our Islamic friends refrain from defaming Israel and Judaism? Will they refrain from defaming India and Hinduism? Will they refrain from defaming unbeliever’s generally? Is that even a possibility? Or would they see such a refusal to defame the unbeliever as a basic assault on Islam?

What we have here seems to be an unbelievable intrusion into the rights of member States to manage their own freedoms. Is this what we are to expect from Islamic states? Do they not understand that the United Nations is not a World Government and that membership in it is optional? Perhaps what we have here is a direct assault on the very existence of the United Nations as an effective community for diplomacy and free discussion. Perhaps this is a lesson to us all about the true nature of Islam as a religion that seeks only world domination and the elimination of all other faiths.

Where are the moderate voices in Islam? Where are those among the Islamic believers who recognize the rights of others to believe as they wish? Perhaps what we have here is yet another lesson about how there is no tolerance to be found in Islam, only a sham pretence of tolerance while it continues to be the fastest growing religion in America.
Let us hope that calmer more moderate voices are able to bring reason to the deliberations of the United Nations Human Rights Council in this matter.

Reefer Madness Revisited

When are we ever going to get it? The laws that include Marijauna as a class A drug right up there with heroin, LSD, magic mushrooms, methadone, morphine, opium, pethidine and penylcyclidine were originated by an effort of Henry Anslinger to promote marijuana as the drug of ax murderers. He is the guy who engineered the film “Reefer Madness” in order to promote the idea that America needed a second armed police force to deal with such drugs. The hysteria he generated gave us the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF). The marijuana he attacked in the 30’s was a minor herb compared to the hybridized and genetically manipulated monster we have among us today. We must take responsibility for creating this monster. Just as we must take responsibility for the enormity of the market we create when we make it illegal. Nothing makes a product more successful than making it illegal. We must admit we have done this to ourselves. We are the monstrous society that has created this monster—and others too wonderful for inclusion here.

The question is what to do? Do we continue to incarcerate one in thirty Americans, prop up the incredible for profit prison system in the United States? Or do we try to find someway out of our self imposed lunacy. The question that was asked of Obama Open for Questions forum yesterday: “With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals?" was bizarre on two fronts. First, it was amazing that he answered such a question: Bush an his cronies would never have tolerated such an impertinence, especially when the V.P. had invested so much money in for profit prisons. Secondly it was amazing that Americans seem so energized by the problem and so needy that they want to hear this president consider decriminalizing marijuana.

One has to wonder what would happen were the United States to suddenly abandon this prohibition. Could things be any worse than they are as we speak? It would certainly remove the income from one of the biggest narcotics gang enterprises in America. And it certainly might generate considerable cash for the tax revenue.

Did you know that the United States Government has the medical use of marijuana? After years of denying that there is any medical value in Marijuana, they have been issued Patent 6630507 titled “ Cannaboids as antioxidants and neruoprotecatants.” The patent claims that “Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia" [].

Someone somewhere is not telling the truth to the American people. Duh, I wonder who that might be.

Now the Obama administration has eased up on the Federal Government’s attack on medical marijuana so that there will be no more raids on the distribution of medical marijuana in states were that is allowed. A good first step, perhaps. But what is needed is a thorough review of the problem and a rapid move to decriminalizing the drug.

But in the midst of the rapid mobilization of our resources to save the economy from the Republican inspired wreckage this is one fight we do not need to wage right now. I agree with Obama that now is not the time, but the time must and should come soon. Like so many other traumas inflicted upon us by our Republican jackbooted friends, this is one that has to be solved and soon.

The Wall Street Terrorists are back at it.

NOW JUST A DAMN MINUTE. We have seen how we got here: ten years of $5 billion spent on campaign donations paid out by Wall Street Banker-terrorists to key players in Congress and on lobbyists to make sure the pols do what is expected of them. These are not drive by shootings. These are not IUD’s that explode underneath HumVees. These are not even suicide bombers who send shrapnel mixed with their own blood and flesh jetting into Americans.

Nope. Modern Wall Street Terrorists do not do things quite so noisily. Terrorists usually love publicity. The old style Terrorists want the reporters on site, the cameras rolling, the first responders rushing with sirens blaring to the carnage. They play to the nightly news casts and want to spread fear among the opposition.

Not these new Wall Street Terrorists. They want to quietly move in with their money to corrupt politicians who might otherwise represent their constituents as they vote. They want to seduce these always-money-hungry pols with the soothing hypnotic siren songs: “you alone can save the economy. Let us show you how to preserve the ship of state.”

These narcissistic pols who have cut their teeth on campaign publicity know just how expensive attack ads are, just how costly it is to hire the young guns needed to put down the competition. The Wall Street Terrorists know just how to coax these ripe-for-the-picking week-kneed congressional opportunists into doing their bidding. They know just how desperate and leaderless and vulnerable the Republican pols are especially.

And in ordinary conditions these kinds of goings on are probably standard operation procedures in our corrupt congress. But not now. Now these Wall Street Terrorists have their coffers stuffed to over flowing with Tax-payer money. OUR MONEY.

These criminals do not even have the good sense to realize that things have changed. It is no longer standard operating procedure to corrupt the United States Congress with campaign contributions because they have no right to use OUR MONEY to poison the process of recovery.

Was it not bad enough that they wrecked our economy with these world wrecking unethical financial instruments enabled by the deregulation they bought and paid for in the late ‘90s? Was it not bad enough that they fixed the system to permit them such enormous wealth with bizarre arcane financial instruments which have now stolen the money from our 401K’s? Are we now to be stuck with the tab for corrupting the congress a second time?

What is wrong with this picture? Do we have to march on Washington to demand these Wall Street Terrorists be confined to ethical banking practices? Do we have to sharpen our pitchforks and light up our torches to get these terrorists’ criminal influences out of the governmental processes? The American Taxpayers own a controlling position in AIG, and yet unimaginably, infuriatingly these arrogant AIG executives continue to think they pretend they can continue to operate as they used to because they imagine they belong to the super class of oligarchs who own the system.

Someone needs to disillusion them, to remind them who owns them, and to demand that they keep their polluting influence out of the decision making processes trying to get us out of the wreckage they have left us.

We should purge these Terrorist-Bankers from the executive offices of AIG and other companies who are afloat only because they are stuffed to the gills with OUR MONEY. We should replace them with people who know they work for US.

FIRE THE TERRORISTS-BANKERS NOW! Send them packing to their colossal mansions or their giga-yachts. Better yet rendition their fat buttox to a Turkish prison for some well earned solitude