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.