Theology and the Jobs Crisis

          Reports last week of Apple’s decision to invest one hundred million dollars to begin some manufacturing in the U. S. seems like a lot.  It's pocket change at Apple whose total sales last year topped 128 billion. This means the promised investment comes to something like .0018 of 1 percent.  The purpose looks more like public relations.  CEO Tim Cook, who set-up Apple’s Asian supply chain in the first place, told NBC that it’s not the skills people have in China but the education network that trains them.  “The education system stopped producing them [back here].”  Certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one since the community colleges in the USA cannot train people to do jobs that have been moved 3000 miles away.   

News reports begrudged this skimpy investment in U. S. manufacturing but still treated it affectionately: “One Small Step Home for Apple and One Giant Leap for Mac-kind” said the Financial Times headline.  The Apple tech inventions are of course dazzling, but their bright sun  blinds our capacity to see the whole picture.

For example, last Friday’s jobs report (on Pearl Harbor Day) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was headlined as a decline in unemployment—all of 0.2 percent. The truth of the matter, as the BLS noted, is that the small decline was only because the labor force is shrinking under the weight of discouraged and part time workers. Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital remarked last Friday, that at the current pace of job creation, the unemployment rate would only gradually decline to 7.1 percent by December 2013. (as quoted in the FT)

While that’s a whole year from now, the NY Times on Friday was even more vividly realistic:

Factoring in people seeking work, as well as those who want jobs but have stopped looking and those forced to take part-time jobs because full-time employment was not available, the broad unemployment gauge dipped to 14.4 percent in November from 14.6 percent in October.    

Public attitudes, especially media attitudes toward the US unemployment problem have the same unrealism that was the order of the day in the Romney campaign.  If Romney’s brain trust simply could not make the connection from the all-white faces in their crowds to the reality of U. S. diversity, the analogy here is that we often don’t connect sagging standards of living under conditions of long term unemployment to a more dismal future now rapidly approaching.  

The problem is theological.  We are as beguiled by electronic wizardry as any ancient Greek crowd bowing before a giant statue of Athena or Canaanites praying at the altar for virgin sacrifice.

The Federal Reserve has now acted with some desperation (Wednesday, December 12th) to hold interest rates at zero until probably 2015 when they hope unemployment will have declined to 6.5 percent.   The theological trick lies in the beguilement provided by technological glitter, but there is always the devil to pay.

The same day media reports indicated that the nation has suffered the biggest trade deficit (meaning a decline in trade) in nearly four years. This devil is getting its due: weakening consumer demand, in spite of the recent Black Friday hullabaloo, make it clear that the big downturn many economists have predicted for next year may be near to happening. The jobless crisis simply comes to mean that consumers don’t have enough money to buy the gadgets, to say nothing of essentials like food and medicine.  

The trend is rapidly becoming gloomier. The recent hard fought electoral battle between conservatives who have and many others who have not may turn out to be only prologue when the New Year dawns, fiscal cliff or not.

Will  Faith Communities Respond to the Scandal of Inequality?

“The median income of Santa Clara County families [Silicon Valley] fell by 3.2 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars last year -- more than twice the national decline -- to its lowest point in more than 11 years, according to U.S. Census figures.”

“…census data confirm widening income inequality in Silicon Valley traceable to a decline in the well-being of poor and middle-class families.                                                                              

                                                                                   “Life In The Valley Economy—Saving the Middle Class   

                                                                                     Lessons from Silicon Valley 2012” 

                                                                                      Working Partnerships USA, October 2012

In 1919, following the end of the First World War, the renowned Sociologist Max Weber said in a lecture on Politics as a Profession that a nation-state’s power lies in its “capacity to lay claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence.”  

The new Steven Spielberg-Tony Kushner film, “Lincoln,” shows this profession at work, and makes it clear that during that era it was the power of the state, the government, that permitted inequality both racial and economic.

The operative idea here is legitimacy. “Lincoln” reminds us that in the struggle over slavery, the United States asserted its violent power to enforce and legitimate the enslavement of four million African-Americans.  As later history shows the U. S. then let this power be used to enforce and legitimate inaction after adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. During that period the state either tolerated or enforced  a hundred year reign of terror over Black people, permitting wide-spread mob violence, the lynching of Black people for entertainment, the denial of their right to vote, and a rigid coast-to-coast but often unwritten code of racial segregation.     

Just so and very similarly, the state today tolerates, enforces and subsidizes the prevailing policies of an economy that continues to unevenly reward its workers, keeping millions bent over in stoop labor or at hard labor in labor intensive shipping warehouses while suffering a bottom tier pay scale that offers them little future.  

A N Y Times series running this week reviewed the history of tax abatements given by local governments in the U. S. that divert resources away from public needs while improving the bottom lines of corporations.  Local, regional and federal governments invest as much as $80 billion a year in subsidies to these corporations, thereby draining resources away from creating better schools, quality housing, and better health care for all citizens.

The Times identified 48 companies that have received more than $100 million in state grants just since 2007. Some 5,000 other companies received more than $1 million in recent years.

All of this rests on the same ideas that were rife in the age of Lincoln and present still today in public discourse:  the inherent righteousness of success, dominance and survival of the fittest, notions of genetic inferiority, rigid divisions of labor that condemn many groups, not only Latinos but many others, to backbreaking labor with little or no access to a viable future for their children. This was state policy and its state policy today. 

In the super-affluent Silicon Valley—a place thought by many people to be the new center of the universe—a report by the organized labor consortium, Working Partnerships, quoted in the text box above, documents the accelerating income decline of the middle and lower class communities in the Valley while life soars for the upper twenty percent.

The hardest bridge for faith communities is the crossing from the comfortable metaphorical riverside of intensely personal liturgies, a place where judgment is suspended and acts of contrition, thanksgiving, and redemption are celebrated----over to the other side of the river where judgment and risk-taking may be required; a place where people, their religious leaders and others accept vulnerability and the challenge of social reform as a vocation.

The truth of growing inequality may bring the global economic community to its knees one more time in 2013 because, for example, in the report cited in this blog last week from the  Pulling Apart

In California …

the incomes of the richest twenty percent of households were 9.5 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest households in the late 2000s; and

the incomes of the richest five percent of households were 16.2 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest fifth in that same period.

In New York…

the incomes of the richest twenty percent of households were 9.2 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest households in the late 2000s; and

the incomes of the richest five percent of households were 15.6 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest fifth in that same period.

In Iowa…

the incomes of the richest twenty percent of households were 5.6 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest households in the late 2000s; and

the incomes of the richest five percent of households were 8.7 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest fifth in that same period.

In Lincoln’s era many clergy and laity resisted such civic obscenities and put on the garments of radical abolitionists. Their choice of a vocation as “public intellectuals” is a rarity in our own age, and that is why the times are so dangerous:  public debate in our civil society is mostly severed from its roots in the “city set upon a hill.”  The faith community is mostly camped on the safe side of the river, where they can be soothed by the rites of private faith.

 So far, this means the dominance and control of a government ruled by the wealth of a few.   In the age of Lincoln there is a long list of familiar names of those who chose not to remain safe, but instead struggled to shape the power of the state to support justice:  the martyred Presbyterian clergyman and newspaper publisher, Elijah P. Lovejoy, Revivalist and college President (Oberlin) Charles Finney, the freedman Frederick Douglas, the feminist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Many others joined in or were led: William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, William Ellery Channing, poet John Greenleaf Whittier, etc. The list goes on.

These all pushed and hounded Lincoln who partly for reasons of his own cautious temperament and because he, probably correctly, believed he could not be elected if he embraced the radical abolitionsts, did finally share their vision and achieve their ultimate dream: first the Emancipation Proclamation and two years later  the Thirteenth Amendment. 

Had it not been for the radical clergy of that era, had it not been for the radical clergy in both Black and White congregations during the Civil Rights era of Martin Luther King, Jr., had it not been for the likes of Bishop Tutu in South Africa ----had it not been for this multitude of voices the freedom movement of both centuries would not, could not, have occurred.

Are such leaders among us today in the churches, temples and synagogues? Will they cry out in their own time against the new and crippling scandal of growing inequality?  Time will tell.