Public Liturgies -- "Pray it may not be in winter"

"Pray it may not be in winter"

If social movements were like trains we would ask if the tracks are a broad enough gauge to carry the coming load as the great hinges of history seem to be swinging open before us. 

Collapse of the post world war II European consensus is suddenly possible. Watching the “Occupy” throng in Oakland march this week to block the Port of Oakland with the famously tough dock workers and truckers watching passively makes one ask if this was a dress rehearsal for what might come in the new year? 

And a huge electoral shift in the U. S. is not impossible in 2012. Think Gingrich/Condoleezza Rice as a very competitive, perhaps successful Republican ticket. The question is whether the center will hold.

“It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression,” writes Paul Krugman in his December 11^th column (NY Times)  “…Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

“On that last point, I am not being alarmist. On the political as on the economic front it’s important not to fall into the “not as bad as” trap. High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.  “Let’s talk, in particular, about what’s happening in Europe — not because all is well with America, but because the gravity of European political developments isn’t widely understood.

“First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.

“Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. And they have created immense anger, with many Europeans furious at what is perceived, fairly or unfairly (or actually a bit of both), as a heavy-handed exercise of German power.

“Nobody familiar with Europe’s history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening.

“Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

“Last month the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development documented a sharp drop in public support for democracy in the “new E.U.” countries, the nations that joined the European Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not surprisingly, the loss of faith in democracy has been greatest in the countries that suffered the deepest economic slumps.

“And in at least one nation, Hungary, democratic institutions are being undermined as we speak.

“One of Hungary’s major parties, Jobbik, is a nightmare out of the 1930s: it’s anti-Roma (Gypsy), it’s anti-Semitic, and it even had a paramilitary arm. But the immediate threat comes from Fidesz, the governing center-right party.

“Fidesz won an overwhelming Parliamentary majority last year, at least partly for economic reasons; Hungary isn’t on the euro, but it suffered severely because of large-scale borrowing in foreign currencies and also, to be frank, thanks to mismanagement and corruption on the part of the then-governing left-liberal parties. Now Fidesz, which rammed through a new Constitution last spring on a party-line vote, seems bent on establishing a permanent hold on power.

“The details are complex. Kim Lane Scheppele, who is the director of Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs program — and has been following the Hungarian situation closely — tells me that Fidesz is relying on overlapping measures to suppress opposition. A proposed election law creates gerrymandered districts designed to make it almost impossible for other parties to form a government; judicial independence has been compromised, and the courts packed with party loyalists; state-run media have been converted into party organs, and there’s a crackdown on independent media; and a proposed constitutional addendum would effectively criminalize the leading leftist party.

“Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe. And it’s a sample of what may happen much more widely if this depression continues.

“It’s not clear what can be done about Hungary’s authoritarian slide. The U.S. State Department, to its credit, has been very much on the case, but this is essentially a European matter. The European Union missed the chance to head off the power grab at the start — in part because the new Constitution was rammed through while Hungary held the Union’s rotating presidency. It will be much harder to reverse the slide now. Yet Europe’s leaders had better try, or risk losing everything they stand for.

“And they also need to rethink their failing economic policies. If they don’t, there will be more backsliding on democracy — and the breakup of the euro may be the least of their worries.”

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You may also want to read via the Foreign Policy web site Stephen M. Walt’s blog at http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/blog/2072

Walt is professor of professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and author of author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (W. W. Norton, 2005), and, with coauthor J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

Welcome to Public Liturgies, a new blog

Welcome!  I intend this new blog to be one part values reflection and one part information-provider to help move you quickly to other primary sources of data and analysis. Like all blogs you’re invited to comment, extensively if you wish, and of course you can unsubscribe. Click on my profile on this page for more information about me.

I’m after the huge gap between our stated principles (values) and our actual practice. Exhibit A is growing inequality. Today’s main trend lines remain unabated: downward pressure on incomes (wages and benefits of the 99 percent) and deepening despair caused by the recession’s huge joblessness and home foreclosure numbers. The result is a high dropout rate in civic and political participation. There is participation around self-interest, of course, but the badly needed focus on the public good suffers from the pervasive idea that “my good will be your good.”

The word “Liturgy” in this blog’s title is actually a redundancy derived from a Greek composite word, leitourgos. The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us that it originally meant “a public duty, a service to the state undertaken by a citizen—someone “who performs a public duty" whose focus is the laos, the people.  Imagine that: liturgies for the public good!

So why have few voices cried “fire” as the whole house is burning down?  Life, of course goes on but it’s clear that we’re overwhelmed by our own plight. As many of us and other millions have lost their homes, their jobs, their families, most churches have redoubled their charitable efforts but remained prophetically silent; meaning silent about justice beyond repeating the word itself in liturgies that are strong on personal (and private) consolation.

Labor, under constant attack and deeply threatened (as we all should be) by rising so-called conservatism has been focused, rightly, on the threat to working people’s collective bargaining rights.  But Labor’s perspective is strangely narrow. While the Silicon Valley lost 85,000 mostly higher paying manufacturing jobs in the past decade, little has been done to push back—something Labor is usually good at.  Moreover, the barn door has been left ajar; in fact, left wide open to more departures.  The prime example is the Silicon Valley’s brilliant high tech industry that continues to send hundreds of thousands of computer assembly jobs to Asia. If just twenty percent of those jobs were retained for stricken high unemployment communities (like the South Bay or Detroit or Cleveland)—and if steps were taken by a partnership between business, government (federal and state) to make those “living wage” jobs, then 20 to 40 thousand people would be working today; and the Asian rise in standards of living could still continue. (More about this in another blog)

We’re surrounded by daily financial scandals, embarrassing presidential debates, large scale home foreclosures, endemic joblessness and gory body counts complete with decapitations. Nuclear weapons are back on the front burner. Middle East policy continues to be mismanaged.  

Right now it’s no contest between Shakespeare’s “bare ruined choirs” and our solemn Advent candle lighting.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. [Sonnett 73]

Many American dreams have now been crushed like the vanished song. The domino effect is unavoidable.  Although a stronger jobs report came last Friday (December 1^st) the NY Times reported on the same day that hundreds of thousands of discouraged workers have left the labor force. The country still has a backlog of more than 13 million unemployed workers with an average unemployment time of 40.9 weeks.

Two days earlier, on November 29^th, Standard and Poors downgraded the credit ratings of fifteen of the largest U. S. banks. They have threatened (Dec. 4^th) to do the same to large European banks. In Germany its efforts to market bonds that would finance both debt and investment fell  short by a third, prompting major initiatives by the Federal Reserve to prop up Europe’s liquidity and credit.

                This means that companies large and small cannot get the credit they need to expand and add more jobs. Even Boeing in Seattle faces this possibility just as it is preparing to enlarge its production.

                                          Citigroup: A Case Study

On November 29^th U. S. Federal Judge Jedd Rakoff threw out the proposed settlement between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission, supposedly the policeman of financial transactions. The settlement would have allowed Citi to pay a fine of $285 million, that Judge Rakoff called “pocket change” for Citigroup. He refused to accept the usual settlement that is the SEC’s common practice and that permits corporate giants to make no admission of guilt, just pay the fine.  The SEC, clearly in bed with these corporate practices, explains it doesn’t have the resources and staff to take such cases to trial.

                “Citigroup stuffed a $1 billion mortgage fund that it said it sold to investors in 2007 with securities that it believed would fail so that it could bet against its customers and profit when values declined,” reports the NY Times last week, “falsely telling investors that an independent party was choosing the portfolio’s investments.”  

An analysis by the Times of how the SEC handles these cases of out and out fraud found 51 instances, involving 19 companies, in which the agency claimed that a company had broken fraud laws that they previously agreed never to breach.    

Worse yet, legal experts along with President Obama point out there is nothing illegal about doing business the Bank of America or Citigroup way. “it’s not illegal, said the President, but it is immoral.” Congress could make it illegal as well by changing the applicable law. 

The good news from my perspective is that many civic, government and labor leaders—including clergy and their congregations—have enormous talents including a thoughtful and dynamic relationship to this economic and policy catastrophe. They’re not deaf, dumb or blind to what is happening. The problem is that we are traduced by our own culture, nested in an early 19^th century belief in progress. In popular imagination there is thought to be a social contract that somehow binds what God is doing and what we all do to have livelihoods into a transcendent idea that it is considered morally valid. A Mephistophelian bargain has been struck. If we agree not to cry fire, we can stay in our burning home.  Breaking that belief system will be key to finding a just answer to the one percent; finding new words for fire. This is the platform of Public Liturgies.

Part of the answer lies in new initiatives, Case studies like the one above concerning Citigroup and others need to be studied in church and community groups.  California Forward and the Council of Churches of California have published a very high quality and challenging study guide pointed at the grave budget crisis of the state. Many believe that California’s budget crisis, if not positively resolved, could be the trip wire that brings down the nation.  See the right hand column for information on how to access the study guide and for web sites that address the on-going Congressional debates.

More soon.

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In the side bar

To see the California study guide” “A Free and Energetic Government:  Moving Government Back to the People” go to    http://www.calchurches.org/1-1.html

Click on study guide to open the complete study on line in downloadable PDF format.

Following the Congressional budget debate on a day-to-day basis is not as hard as it seems. Go to http://www.cbpp.org/, the web site of the Center for Budget and Policy Prioities, the gold standard of such analyses.   It’s free to enter your email address and receive almost daily critiques of both Democrat and Republican proposals.