May 16, 2012

Hallucinatory Grandeur

      The primary victim amid this week’s cascading bad economic news is not the economy but people’s faith in it.   The latest plunge by large banking houses into high risk ventures that turn calamitous seems to signal that much more is amiss than we realize.  Faith in the “market” has been badly undermined by the debacle at J. P. Morgan, where the extent of loss may rise to $4 billion according to the Financial Times.  Last Fall it was MS Global, this Spring featured Goodman Sachs misadventures, and this week it’s the best of the best (President Obama said so), J. P. Morgan, financier to the world.   

      The worldwide news about money is generally bad. Growth Indicators in China have turned strongly south. Eastern Europe is now officially in recession. Moody’s lowered twenty-six Italian banks’ credit ratings this week. Unemployment in the U. S. is now not expected to decline significantly for the rest of 2012.

      Put in another language, that’s 13 million of our friends and neighbors.  This coming Saturday 400,000 of them will be dropped from unemployment benefits.  They’ve been out too long.

A sinking feeling has spread from coast to coast and while it is clear that the people get it—they see what’s happening—but many national leaders remain true to the phantom of American exceptionalism.

   

      Last week columnist Tom Friedman told a California audience:  “I don’t want the U.  S. to be where the first moon shot took place, I want California and the U. S. to be where the greatest tech minds come from all over the world to do their own moon shoot.  When that happens, there will be plenty of jobs for the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker.”  

      That same day California’s budget deficit reported a new high of $15.5 billion—threatening entire education, health and environmental systems. Friedman’s visions of grandeur express the popular American cultural faith that drives the nation. One wonders, however, if it’s not made of the same stuff as J. P. Morgan’s faith in “complex synthetic positions using credit default swaps.”

      If it is, and it probably is, pastors and other faith community leaders need all the more to avoid passing out weekly nostrums similar to Mr. Friedman’s grandiose visions, and switch to the hard lessons told and re-told in biblical literature. The teaching there is not about American exceptionalism, but about creating just relations among the whole human family. There is plenty of evidence that that’s exactly what people seek as the pain they endure grows.    

JOBS: THE DISCONNECT

Last Friday’s job report (May 3, 1012) raised serious doubt about whether or if current strategies to put people back to work make sense. Wall Street baron, Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of PIMCO, a global investment management firm with approximately $1.77 trillion of assets under management wrote the next day in the Financial Times

“Friday’s jobs data sounds a warning that should be heard well beyond economists and market watchers.  With just 115,000 new jobs in April, the U. S. economy is not creating enough employment to make a dent in the 12.5 jobless Americans in the labour force, of which a stunning 5.1 million are long term unemployed. Moreover, the disappointing monthly number managed to fall short of analysts’ massively subdued expectation of 160,000, highlights yet again the unusual sluggishness of the labour market.”

Catherine Rampell, editor of the Economix blog At the New York Times pointed out that same day:

"the share of working-age Americans who are in the labor force, meaning they are either working or actively looking for a job, is now at its lowest level since 1981 — when far fewer women were doing paid work. The share of men taking part in the labor force fell in April to 70 percent, the lowest figure since the Labor Department began collecting these data in 1948."

The jackpot question is the disconnect between the predicament of  millions of jobless people and the answers being given—often with fanatical enthusiasm—by civic and political leaders across the country.  In Silicon Valley more than one hundred thousand are unemployed in spite of its booming tech sector.  The California Summit later this week is pushing for “smart regulation, a smart workforce, smart innovation and smart capital.”  The local NOVA Manpower agency calls its strategy “Economic and Workforce Implications in the Age of Ipads, Android Apps and the Social Web.”  The focus is on up-grading the skills of the already up-graded.  

And the one hundred thousand?  The other 3 million in California? The other nine million around the country?   In light of the new jobless data the plain fact is that without manufacturing there is nothing for fat too many people.  Creating tech assembly plants in Cleveland, Newark, Detroit, Youngstown and Silicon Valley could generate tens of thousands of jobs.  The target should be to bring 20 percent of the jobs off-shored to China back to their own country of origin, the USA.   

The Wall Street driven optimism about the next technological fix is blotting many working people out of the picture.  Commentator Edward Luce describes the Silicon Valley mania in a nut shell.  Vince Khosla—who founded Sun Microsystems—sees the Silicon Valley as the story of the world as a series of disruptive technologies that were dreamed up by the bold and brainy. “The future is not set. It belongs to those with the bravest  imagination.”  [in Time to Start Thinking, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012]

We’ve been on this asteroid before.  Back in the 1980s when  U.S. Central  banks saw larger profits could be had in Japanese, Korean and Brazilian steel-making, they pulled their investments from the great manufacturing centers in the Midwest and West and turned them into a rust belt.  Unemployed workers were told to get training and prepare themselves to work in the new service economy (where the pay was usually below a Living Wage.)  It never happened.

 U. S. companies willingly went along with this new plan for “financializing” profits instead of manufacturing products. Silicon Valley has outsourced at least 1.2 million of those kinds of jobs to China and other Asian locales.

The same dynamic is in play again. It is very clear now that high unemployment appears both chronic and permanent, and the solutions proffered are to upgrade the skills of the already upgraded.  

Paul Krugman:

   

“Consider, if you will, the current state of our nation. Despite hints of economic progress, we’re still in the midst of an immense disaster, in which unemployment and underemployment are devastating millions of American lives. And none of this need be happening! There has been no plague of locusts; we have not lost our technological know-how. Americans should be richer, not poorer, than they were five years ago. Yet economic policy across the board has become almost passive, has essentially accepted this disaster instead of trying to end it.”  [New York Times, April 29, 2012]

As this blog has noted before, we’re following a real theology here. This permanent downturn for the American people is rationalized as a function of God’s natural law!  It's the Divine Will that you should be out of work!

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LONGING AND DESIRE IN PYRAMID LAND: THE QUESTION OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FAITH COMMUNITIES

 Slave labor is supposed to have built the giant pyramids of Egypt, like those at Giza, more than 4,500 years ago.  But was it really slavery under the oppressor’s lash or was it the connection the men and women hauling the giant stones made to their own place in the scheme of salvation?  Everything pointed them to an ironic hope in this giant sarcophagus they were building:  a place where a dead Pharaoh would go, somewhere up the river Styx, and maybe somehow bring them along?  The people’s only proof was in the giant building, the tallest thing ever built in the world.

 Modern slavish devotion to symbols of power suggests similarity. The recession recovery news is not just gloomy but dangerous. The first quarter economic uptick has turned abruptly south. March unemployment increased across most of the country. European austerity programs are suddenly collapsing and the regimes that designed them are losing elections across the continent.  In the U,. S. the data projections show that even under the best of circumstances unemployment will not fall below 9 percent until after 2016.  In California it will be after 2018. [see graphs below]

There are four persons standing in line for every available job. That’s why surviving veterans of many tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan are returning home to find themselves without jobs.  Pyramid theologies will not do for this predicament now turning for the worse after three years of recession.

As bond interest rates rise large segments of global society from Greece to Bank of America may quickly become unable to afford any more borrowing.  Comparisons are being drawn between the economic disarray in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and the rise of the Nazis.  The idea of market sovereignty, historian Eric Hobsbaum observes, “is not a compliment to liberal democracy but an alternative.” It represents “a sharp decline in ‘that divinity that doth hedge not only Shakespear’s kings,’ but the public symbols of national cohesion, a fading chance for citizen loyalty to legitimate government.”

As both President Obama and the Republicans head into elections against the winds of this prolonged unemployment and sharp  public disillusionment, there are several critical questions for faith communities to take seriously. The first is their own reluctance to embrace the role of judgment; the role of critical citizenship. Prayers in faith communities these days often end with the reassurance that somehow the grace of God extends as generously to the unjust as to the just. So what we do doesn’t matter that much, right?  This kind of sentiment seems to have crept up on faith communities along with institutional anxiety about their own future.  Of course, we might ask why faith communities should have a future in current discourse if they have abandoned the moral imperative of critical judgment?

There are therefore several things to watch for.  There is confusion about whether democracy is a process of civic engagement or a competition for domination and control.   Civic and faith communities can be and should be places of discernment where  alternative ideas are weighed about just and fair social and economic policy proposals. The danger of the Weimar years was growing public despair (they too had no jobs along with worthless money ruined by the domination of the powerful nations). This growing despair deepens if democratic practice is perceived as ceremonial; if it is thought that someone else beyond democratic reach is pulling the actual levers of power.

Major protest efforts and large scale mobilizations are planned for this spring and summer. We will see them on the Left and the Right.  Non-participation in a critical examination of the issues behind these mobilizations should not be an option.  There is a deep longing for a civic faith that does not worship pyramids.  Democratic practice must be thought of as a process of discernment among neighbors.

Passover, Death, Resurrection

      Speaking of Passover Death and Resurrection—last week’s Supreme Court hearings on the Health Care Law passed by a democratically elected Congress bring to memory the teaching of theologian Paul Tillich, famous for speaking about the rise of Adolph Hitler.

      The problem in that tragic era was the failure to recognize the demonic potential in every human proposal. For example, the glorious national future that lay just ahead, promised by both Nazism and Stalinism; a marvelously simple vision intended to destroy many old enemies (Jews, Socialists, etc.) and fulfill dreams. It’s truly monstrous new direction remained invisible to many followers as well as observers until it was too late. Tillich, not one of those, saw the human condition “in terms of disruption, conflict, self-destruction, meaninglessness, and despair in all realms of life.”

    

       He taught that real grace, true revelation and newness of life could only be found through building a new and just creation for all humankind. He had many students, including Martin Luther King, Jr.

     This all seemed especially applicable at last week’s Supreme Court hearing where twenty-six Republican states brought suit to declare the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.  Paul Clement, their attorney, argued to everyone’s exhaustion that the law was dangerously coercive; its individual mandate a violation of the voluntarism and individual liberty at the heart of the Constitution.

     The self-interest of the huge private sector health care industry was actually what was at stake.   The pious advocacy for the constitution gave a patina of social concern for a common good that was seldom mentioned by Mr. Clement. The idea of a demonic that rises up in human affairs is here perfectly illustrated: 

   

JUSTICE KAGAN:   “Mr. Clement… why is a big gift from the Federal government a matter of coercion? …the Federal government is…giving you a boatload of money. There are no matching funds requirements, there are no extraneous conditions attached to it, it's just a boatload of Federal money for you to take and spend on poor people's healthcare. It doesn't sound coercive to me, I have to tell you.

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Kagan, let me —I mean, I eventually want to make a point where even if you had a stand alone program that just gave 100 percent, again 100 percent boatload, nothing but boat load — well, there would still be a problem.

JUSTICE KAGAN: ….just a stand alone program, a boatload of money, no extraneous conditions, no matching funds, is coercive?

MR. CLEMENT: It is…. And the very big condition is that the States in order to get that new money, they would have to agree not only to the new conditions but the government here is — the Congress is leveraging their entire prior participation in the program….

JUSTICE KAGAN: But, Mr. Clement — Mr. Clement, how can that possibly be. When a taxpayer pays taxes to the Federal government, the person is acting as a citizen of the United States. When a taxpayer pays taxes to New York, a person is acting as a citizen of New York. And New York could no more tell the Federal government what to do with the Federal government's money than the Federal government can tell New York what to do with the moneys that New York is collecting.

MR. CLEMENT: Right…. But we all know that in the real world…the Federal government continues to increase taxes that decreases the ability of the States to tax their own citizenry and it's a real tradeoff….

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Are you suggesting that at a certain point the States would have a claim against the Federal government raising their taxes because somehow the States will feel coerced to lower their tax rate?

MR. CLEMENT: No, Justice Sotomayor, I'm not. What I'm suggesting is that it's not simply the case that you can say, well, it's free money, so we don't even have to ask whether the program's coercive.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Now, counsel, [at] what percentage does it become coercive? Meaning, as I look at the figures…there are some states for whom the percentage of Medicaid funding to their budget is close to 40 percent, but there are others that are less than 10 percent.

....And you say, across the board this is coercive because no state, even at 10 percent, can give it up. What's the percentage of big gift that the federal government can give? Because what you're saying to me is, for a bankrupt state, there's no gift the federal government could give them ever, because it can only give them money without conditions….No matter how poorly the state is run, no matter how much the federal government doesn't want to subsidize abortions or doesn't want to subsidize some other state obligation, the federal government can't give them 100 percent of their needs.

MR. CLEMENT: [in his closing summary] It's really hard to understand tying the preexisting participation in the program as anything other than coercive. The Solicitor General makes a lot of the fact that there are optional benefits under this program. Well, guess what? After the Medicaid expansion there will be a lot less opportunity for the States to exercise those options, because one of the things that the expansion does — precisely because the expansion is designed to convert Medicaid into a program that satisfies the requirement of the minimum essential cover of the individual mandate, things that used to be voluntary will no longer be voluntary….

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Mr. Clement, may I ask one question about the bottom line in this case? It sounds to me like everything you said would be to the effect of, if Congress continued to do things on a voluntary basis, so we are getting these new eligibles, and say States, you can have it or not, you can preserve the program as it existed before, you can opt into this.

But you are not asking the Court as relief to say, well, that's how we cure the constitutional infirmity; we say this has to be on a voluntary basis. Instead, you are arguing that this whole Medicaid addition, that the whole expansion has to be nullified; and moreover, the entire health care act. Instead of having the easy repair, you say that if we accept your position, everything falls.

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Ginsburg, if we can start with the common ground that there is a need for repair because there is a coercion doctrine and this statute is coercion, then we are into the question of remedy. And we do think, we do take the position that you describe in the remedy, but we would be certainly happy if we got something here, and we got a recognition that the coercion doctrine exists; this is coercive; and we get the remedy that you suggest in the alternative.

     Theologian Paul Tillich’s students began to realize decades ago that “to caste out demons you had to call them by name.”  

LENTEN ETHICS

Anyone willing to look can see that ethical criteria for honest, clean, and trustworthy financial practices have spiraled downward to oblivion in the U.S.  The Goldman Sachs scandals are opening new depths of cognitive dissonance measured against ethical standards; the same with the banking industry, disgraced by robo-signing and sheer greed. 

The question is whether people of both faith and secular humanist traditions have the will to unearth and reconstruct a moral vision of justice and shared decision-making.  The moral vision is there in Christian, Islamic and Jewish roots as well as in egalitarian writings of the Enlightenment. The grand scale corruption of today’s common practice is both an intellectual and political problem.  The rationalizations that enshrine wealth as moral success beg for deconstruction; as does the so-called democratic practice of self-interested factionalism.  U. S. political practice keeps defeating itself by separating process from goals, turning the process itself into the supposed desired end; easy to do if you make millions doing it.       

As example, Goldman is making headlines almost every day. Last Saturday (3/14) the NY Times reported that federal prosecutors “have recordings of a Goldman Sachs executive leaking confidential information” about technology stocks to financial mogul, Raj Rajaratnam, now serving a twelve year sentence in federal prison for financial fraud.  Two other Goldman executives are reported under investigation for their roles  in a vast insider trading network. 

Of course it’s not surprising that a strong defense is being mounted on behalf of Goldman Sachs, exposed in last week’s blog for its “shameless” double-dealing in the proposed giant El Paso/Kinder Morgan merger. (Where Goldman persuaded El Paso to sell itself for far less than it was worth.)  Loyalty to profits count. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made a special visit last week to offer condolences to Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein as he endured this new avalanche of criticism. It had grown even larger because of the spectacular resignation last Monday  (3/12) by one of Goldman’s own executives, Greg Smith. In a Times Op Ed Smith itemized Goldman’s toxic and destructive culture: clients are called Muppets, he said.  A “vampire squid culture” urges employees to “rip-off clients,” and “ rip out eyeballs.”    

 Mayor Bloomberg called the criticism worse than “ridiculous.”  But the fact is that Goldman is “a key contributor” to the Mayor’s wealth. NY Times Reporter Michael Grynbaum observed  that Goldman “leases thousands of Bloomberg terminals, sending tens of millions of dollars a year to the mayor’s private company [Bloomberg News].”

These seem like misdemeanors compared to the Wall Street Journal’s report of continuing corruption in the banking industry where a decimal point can destroy the lives of thousands of moderate income or unemployed families. Last Thursday the Journal reported on new research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland discovering that banks are ”systematically overvaluing foreclosure homes.” This makes it too difficult for under water homeowners to negotiate a loan modification, enabling banks to evict people sooner.  Nice! “The higher the lender thinks that the value of a home is, the less likely they are to offer a modification” that would enable families to remain in their homes.

Meanwhile the struggle to improve financial regulation is being fiercely resisted with big money lobbying from the same Wall Street industry. It has dug in its heels to water down the final stages of rule-setting for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. 

This Sunday, in the Christian world, cognitive dissonance will be the order of the day as thousands of churches hear the Lenten lectionary reading from Jeremiah—“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”   And from the Psalmist, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right^* spirit within me.”  

When and if the people connect the dots, we’ll know that when we act.  Everything now hangs on whether we can grasp that the dreams, the language, the rhetoric no longer describe either our broken world or where we need to go. Will we articulate new visions for ancient values?     

Public Liturgies: Wall Street Theology

March 12, 2012

WALL STREET THEOLOGY

     Some readers are asking about God in relation to these blogs.  One way to begin that conversation is by listening to a Wall Street version of God talk.  In 2009, in the teeth of the Great Recession, the CEO of Goldman Sachs announced “I’m doing God’s work” on the caption page of a report to shareholders. Lloyd Blankfein said he helps companies raise capital which creates wealth “that allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth.”  

     The inner mechanisms of this theology are illuminated by the February 29^th ruling by Chancellor Leo E. Strine, J. of Delaware’s Court of Chancery. A brief summary of Chancellor Strine’s 33 page ruling goes like   this:

In Scene One the big energy company, Kinder Morgan, wants to buy the giant oil production and pipeline company El Paso for $21.1 billion.  Behind the scenery Goldman Sachs, hired as an advisor on the deal, turns out to own a $4 billion dollar stake in Kinder. Working on both sides of the street, Goldman also takes an undisclosed $20 million fee from El Paso to advise them at what price it should sell itself to Kinder Morgan.

Scene Two: Douglas Foshe, CEO of this big energy company, El Paso, doesn’t tell his own board that after the merger he hopes to buy the production part [read oil production] of El Paso and he works behind the scenery to persuade Kinder Morgan to offer it to him at a low price.

Scene Three: “In other words,” says Chancellor Strine in his court order, “when El Paso’s CEO was supposed to be getting the maximum price from Kinder Morgan, he actually had an interest in not doing that.”

Scene Four: The Chancellor continues: “This undisclosed conflict of interest compounded the reality “that the Board and management of El Paso relied in part on advice given by a financial advisor, Goldman Sachs & Co., which [also] owned 19% of Kinder Morgan (a $4 billion investment) and controlled two Kinder Morgan board seats.” 

Scene Five: “Although Goldman’s conflict was known,” continues the Chancellor, “When a second investment bank was brought in [Morgan Stanley] to address Goldman’s economic incentive for a deal with, and on terms that favored, Kinder Morgan, Goldman continued to intervene and advise El Paso on strategic alternatives, and with its friends in El Paso management, was able to achieve a remarkable feat: giving the new investment  bank an incentive to favor the Merger by making sure that this bank only got paid if El Paso adopted the strategic option of selling to Kinder Morgan.” [emphasis added]

Scene Six: “In other words,” explains the judge-Chancellor, “the conflict-cleansing bank only got paid if the option Goldman’s financial incentives gave it a reason to prefer was the one chosen. On top of this, the lead Goldman banker advising El Paso did not disclose that he personally owned approximately $340,000 of stock in Kinder Morgan.”

     In a very telling comment by the NY Times business columnist, Andrew Ross Sorokin, he underlines that

“What’s even more surprising about Goldman’s role working for El Paso is that it came just six months after the firm issued a new set of guidelines by its “business standards committee.” The firm had just agreed to a $550 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations that it knowingly sold its clients financial instruments meant to fail. In the guidelines, the firm pledged that its most important principle is that “our clients’ interests always come first.”  [Sorokin is a major source for this blog, in the Times of March 2^nd]

     In this context the question of theology and Blankfein’s God talk is of course quite frivolous and beside the point, which is the profound ethical violations, including fraud and victimization in the billions of dollars; including the sweetheart relationships between business and government regulatory agencies; including the absence of  relative absence of serious penalties and serious reforms in banking where their destructive impacts has registered at the top of the moral richter scale destroying the lives of millions of people in the U.S. and around the world.

     It goes beyond even that.  Money and materialism have guided leaders in both secular and religious life to tolerate destruction even when it is clearly predicted. We knew it was possible for nuclear power plants to melt down as in Japan and Chernobyl but we’ve built them anyway. We knew it was impossible to abandon manufacturing without destroying the social and economic fabric of whole cities and  regions, but the political will, the moral resistance—some would say the voice of God—was not spoken.

     

     The kind of regulation and needed social policy to protect all the people, lies in a direction condemned daily in the political campaigns. That direction is toward a re-engagement with social management for the common good, sometimes known as socialism.

     Lloyd Blankfein and his class of one-percenters are not phony believers. He may have stumbled badly in this case but his is the deeply-held belief shared by many in his dominant class. It has suffused the acquisitive, greedy human self with ideal outcomes. Their view is that fierce competitiveness in the marketplace, triumph and wealth is the formula of their own righteousness, and therefore it seems God cannot be far away.

     The first question to Wall Street is: are the outcomes ideal? What is fair about the global banking frauds uncovered in recent years but rarely prosecuted? Where is the fairness for millions in the U. S. who have become homeless and unemployed?

     The second question is for the ninety-nine percenters, at least half of them (to judge by polling results)  suffused by the same belief system. They’re Tea Partyers, conservative democrats, active Republicans, and they’re often loyal to the Blanlkfeinian dream that righteousness and wealth are members of the same family.

     Challenging the popular dreams of imagined virtue and its self-serving outcomes is the first step toward the often missing God talk which can really exist only when justice and caring among people—not money—is the subject.

The Conflict in Iran and Our Own Backyard

Thursday February 29, 2012

       If the conflict with Iran does not rise to nuclear grade next week, the politics behind it will.  President Obama is expected once again to bend to the view that U. S. and Israeli interests hold all things in common. Prime Minister Netanyahu is reported to believe “there should be no space between Israel and the U. S. should Israel choose to attack Iran.” Especially true if there is—as all experts seem to believe will happen—a counter-attack by Iran and its allies.   Meanwhile all the President’s political opponents are thrilled by the possibility that the President might prove uncooperative, giving them an easy target—“Obama is anti-Israel”-- and the chance to break the Democrats’ hold on the Jewish vote.

      It is not too much to conjecture that while the war flags are being waved they also provide cover for one of Israel’s apparent largest objectives—to continue to build cities in the West Bank with the ultimate goal of pushing out the Palestinian population into Jordan and other near-by countries. The rhetoric of Israel far Right leader, Avigdor Lieberman, speaks of just such desire. His view lies closer than one might think to the mainstream of Israeli leadership.  Every Israeli administration since the 1967 war has expanded construction of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory. 

      

      The churches bear a measure of responsibility for why the U. S. stands today on the brink of another Middle East War. Christians of all stripes endlessly study the texts about the small world where Jesus walked two thousand years ago but seem deeply averse to studying and engaging what is happening in the same location now.

      Its old news but most Christians are surprised even today to learn that nearly 500,000 Israelis already live in city-size “settlements” built on Palestinian land with more construction underway.

Principal among the enforcers of the current politics is, of course, the powerful American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) which last Spring forced a joint session of Congress to hear Netanyahu, and last summer flew two-thirds of the House of Representatives to Israel for a briefing.

      The AIPAC dynamic not only pushes the President but drives the strategy of local interfaith relations among Christians and Jews. Both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, for somewhat different reasons, have been in decline for decades. It’s not just the triumph of rationalism over faith, but the loss of social status when Protestants provided a cutting edge in the Civil Rights movement and then condemned the Vietnam War (Iraq too).  Pastors, under fire when issues they champion cut contributions to the budget, are glad to receive the next Jewish community relations award for being unobstreperous about Israel and its practices. AIPAC deeply knows this and guides its local minions accordingly. The least the weakened and vulnerable Christians can do is say thank you and stick to the next food drive or home construction project.

It doesn’t have to be and should not be this way.  Faithful silence betrays the demands of history and truth. Consider for instance the proportionality of suffering in the Israel-Palestine conflict.    Most Jews know, as do some Christians and Muslims,that Israel’s border towns have been struck by rockets over the last seven year period with thirty-three Israelis killed by this rocket fire launched by Palestinians organizations. 

What most do not know is that in one three week period alone (December 27, 2008 – January 18, 2009) the Israeli War in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead) killed 1,397 Palestinians. Five Israeli soldiers died. 

      This picture of disproportionality extends over decades. In Lebanon in 2006 Twelve hundred Lebanese died and one hundred twenty-one Israelis. The Israeli prison system holds 4,387 Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinians hold 0 prisoners.

      The only way you can accept this disproportionate suffering is if you believe the Palestinians are a little sub-human and the Jews a little super-human. Is there something wrong about this picture?

       A very long string of books have been published in the past ten years that outline why Israel’s position in relation to the UN Promise to Palestinians of an independent state is wrong and untenable. From Jimmy Carter’s We Can Have Peace In the Holy Land to Mearsheimer and Walt’s analysis of The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy to dozens of books authored by Israelis themselves. Mearsheimer and Walt identify a simple goal:

Encourage a more open debate about these issues, in order to correct existing myths about the Middle East and to force groups in the lobby to defend their position in the face of well-formed opposition. In particular, Americans need to understand the real history of Israel’s founding and the true story of its subsequent conduct [p. 350]

       No such well-informed opposition yet exists.  It could still happen. That’s why faith communities could turn the nuclear direction events have taken into their faith’s finest hour by speaking truth to power, speaking out against a 40 year long occupation of the Palestinian lands by Israel.  Faith communities will bear a significant measure of responsibility if war against Iran is chosen instead of peaceful solutions.

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Unfairness: Villages not connected to a water network [edited]

Per capita daily water consumption for household and municipal use in communities connected to a central running-water network in the West Bank is some 73 liters a day. In Israel, per capita daily use is 242 liters in towns and 211 liters in local councils, more than 3.5 times greater.

The principal reason for the water shortage in the West Bank is the unfair distribution of the water resources shared by Israel and the Palestinians. One of these resources is the Mountain Aquifer which is composed of a few reservoirs of groundwater that lie on both sides of the Green Line. Although this aquifer is the sole water source for residents of the West Bank, Israel uses eighty percent of it, leaving only the remaining twenty percent for the Palestinians. Israel refuses to alter this distribution…

The water shortage is especially hard on residents of Palestinian villages that are not connected to a water network. According to data from 2008, some 191,238 Palestinians live in 134 villages without a running-water network. There are an additional 190,000 Palestinians who live in communities in which the water system is very limited. In the winter and fall, these residents collect rainfall in pits next to their homes and use the water for all their needs. In the spring and summer months, when the water in the pits runs out, the residents rely on water from nearby springs and on water they purchase from owners of private water-tankers.

There are also hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who live in communities with a central running-water network that supplies water irregularly in limited amounts and does not reach everyone in the community. For this reason, some Palestinian authorities supply water in the summer months on a rotation basis: each neighborhood receives water once every few days, for one day or several hours at a time. To supplement the water supplied, these residents have to buy water brought to them in privately owned water-tankers.                                          [B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights]