"This one, big, shameful bill reveals the truth: We are ruled by the wealthy few. This is the slow funeral of the moral foundations of the republic — compassion, justice, decency — sacrificed at the altar of plutocracy. The angels have been driven out."

~ National Catholic Reporter

#Trump #BigBeautifulBill #EconomicElites #TaxCuts #SuperRich #democracy #morality
/2

https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/editorial-trumps-bill-set-be-signed-july-4th-shows-democracy-decay

I grew up in a Christian family, specifically a Lutheran family, so my ideas of "right and wrong" and "good and evil" were shaped by Christianity in the Lutheran tradition, which like many other religions can more or less be summed up via the so-called Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." cf: Matthew 25

Imagine my surprise to find out that not all "Christians" are Christian.

Even the Wiccan Rede gets this right: "An' ye harm none, do as thou wilt."

Wester writes,

"Because of its overall effects on those who are most in need, passing this budget would be a moral failure for American society as a whole. Unless the church opposes it in the clearest possible terms, we will squander the credibility of our witness to the Gospel and Christ’s command to care for the 'least of these.'”

#Trump #BigBeautifulBill #morality #JohnWester #cruelty
/2

@adwright

This is worth another bump.

@bartlomiejnestvarno The monopolisation of information sharing is so embedded that any alternative no longer seems to exist.

With no alternative I'm stuck in a moral / ethical dilemma.

Do I forgo my principles and use the monopoly?

Or do I sacrifice my income and cripple my ability to find clients?

At the moment I'm sticking with the latter. I choose to believe I can find a way, even though I may well be deluded!

Beinart concludes his commentary, which is a response to Dan Senor's recent speech re: the state of word Jewry, by saying that the US Jewish "estabishment" is in "profound moral" because the American Jewish establishment ... basically takes no responsibility for the moral crisis that exists either vis-a-vis Palestinians or within the United States itself."

#Jews #Trump #morality #Israel #Gaza #Palestinians #genocide
/5

"We are in a moment in which Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both in different ways said that they think Israel is committing genocide. I think a growing larger and larger consensus of people who study genocide, including people like Omer Bartab, the renowned Holocaust historian, have said this is genocide."

#Jews #Trump #morality #Israel #Gaza #Palestinians #genocide
/4

"It's an extraordinary moral abdication ... to think about the state of Jews in the world today and not to think about how we are impacted and what our moral responsibilities are in the face of the gravest threat to American liberal democracy, perhaps since the Civil War."

~ Peter Beinart

#Jews #Trump #morality #Israel #Gaza #Palestinians #genocide
/3

https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/the-moral-abdication-of-the-american

"A country that could re-elect him in the face of all he had already done and all he was threatening to do has shown a moral fickleness that ought to concern us moving forward. Trump is unpopular once more, and many of his policies don’t command broad support from the public, but I contend that he and his policies are not unpopular enough."

#Trump #authoritarianism #morality #fascism #immigrants
/5

"A country where such an administration and such behavior is only a little underwater is a deeply broken one. A country where over 40 percent of respondents could call what’s happening [to immigrants] 'exciting' is one where the animal instincts that undergird fascist politics are at the gates."

#Trump #authoritarianism #morality #fascism #immigrants
/4