The Stumbling Block

     

        The indignity thrust upon us during the holidays is exceeded only by the price we are expected to pay for it. The vulgar commercial incentives come as reminders that what we cannot afford to buy measures our worth as human beings.  In this dim light reality is not an option. Nevertheless, the spectacular holiday conjunction of a rising U. S. economy alongside unspeakable violence in the Middle East create obscene contrasts. Monday it was violence in southern Russia; Sunday in Iraq and Syria; the day before in Beirut and Sudan. The dead and wounded are like stigmata—moral wounds—that no candle or carol removes while the victims beg to know what in the world we think we’re doing as they die of violence or starvation and we sing carols?

A practical defensive answer might be that we’re shopping our economy back to health. The other answer, the true answer, is that we’re celebrating our well-earned righteousness.  We are calling on the heroism of the Maccabees, the obeisance of three kings, the beautiful music, the mercies of Allah—all understood to be both transcendent expressions of faith and signs of our superior, if competing, cultures  in this world. That’s the real reason bombs are going off from Boston to Kiev.

The vulgarization of faith for purposes of political empowerment or as footstools for our self-righteousness is the stumbling block to religious perspectives actually intended to bend the arc of history toward justice.

It is this failure to see faith as historic purposefulness that can bring everything to ruin.  As a ferocious 2014 looms with its spreading violent moods, its fossil fuel extractions and climate changes, its growing inequality, its chronic high unemployment, its violent perils, the proper exercise of faith will be finding the courage to stop, think and do justice.   

Have a Good New Year!

Judge More Forgive Less?

   The mourning of Nelson Mandela should include remembering the awesome Truth and Reconciliation Commission he created that brought a deeply divided people through a post-Apartheid trial that was like walking on hot coals. At Mandela’s bidding forgiveness for terrible deeds under Apartheid was on offer to all segments in the conflict—provided the truth could be known and genuine regrets were expressed.  His Commission offered amnesty to wrong-doers by seeking truth through their public recollections and confessions of terrible deeds, whether committed by Afrikaner or Black communities.  Many of the petitioners seeking amnesty were not up to that test.

  

   The political problem was whether reconciliation could serve as an alternative to justice.  Coming from a religious tradition whose core was the forgiveness of sins, Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired the Commission’s work and his civic role became a trial of his religious beliefs.  Could the perspectives of faith grant priority to truth-telling and the pronouncing of judgment ?  Commission members were painfully aware of the biblical admonition that exercising such judgment brought judgment down on themselves.  As the hearings proceeded they also became aware that the biblical proscription to judge not lest you be judged could serve as a home for scoundrels.  In the end the Commission granted amnesty to only 849 persons, refusing  it to 5,392 others.*  

     

The exercise of judgment about what is true or false is an uncommon ingredient in the life of most faith communities where respectability is highly valued. However this ritual pattern of avoidance may have ricocheted into the public square. How else do we explain today’s evidence of such large scale financial frauds?  There is irrefutable evidence of dishonest interest rate manipulation in the trillion dollar global LIBOR market.  Bank fraud in the billions includes hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mortgages written by some of our neighbors that destroyed the homes and careers of other neighbors.  This is all old news by now and while the criminal convictions are mounting (nearly a hundred to date), the cultural environment continues to suggest that we take for granted the ordinary social and political practices that cut along a familiar grain not for the purpose of serving the truth but in order to keep a profitable game going.

   

What ingredient is it that leads people to look the other way?

This brings us to the consequences of today’s dangerous reality of growing inequality: the great majority of financial assets are now in the hands of the top one percent of U. S. population.  This is quickly becoming a tipping point about whether future societies will be able to offer opportunity to all their citizens. Some factions in state and federal legislatures are already clamoring to recognize inequality as the new normal.

Could it be that the foundations of Wall Street fraud are actually built in our local faith communities where granting the remission of sins has come to mean skipping judgment and its sometimes painful truths?  A common diagnosis is that guilt ridden people can be freed toward a new life by a ritual that suspends judgment in favor of a nearly infinite amount of forgiveness (“seventy times seven”).  That’s why it’s worth revisiting the painful journey of Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission where truth was one of the arbiters of judgment. 

*[See Department of Justice and Constitutional Development of the Republic of South Africa, The Truth and Reconciliation Official Website at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans/index.htm]

Sunday School Lessons

The faith community has only a few years left to demonstrate that its life and message is not about the rhetoric of good intentions, but contains critically important moral perspective applicable to the nightmarish facts accumulating on the ground beneath our feet; nightmares like the corruption of democracy through control of wealth by a few; or Drone attacks that slaughter the innocent; or the mass destruction of creation by our gluttonous fossil fuel appetites.  

Today's news features the argument that J. P. Morgan's $13 billion fine for mortgage irregularities (a polite way of saying fraud) is actually a good deal for them. They are said to still have on hand that much again. What a relief that must be, especially since the exploding growth of Wall Street profits (including J. P.'s) continue to strengthen the financial community’s capacity to simply buy the political system.  

Former mayor of Philadelphia and governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendel, is now working at the private equity firm, Element Partners, holding investments in the natural gas industry whose ambitions, The American Prospect, reports (Nov./Dec. 2013) include 100,000 fracking wells for Pennsylvania alone.  The tangled launch of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has become a window into just such corruptions, playing into the hands of the private health care industry including big pharma, the mega insurers and the health tech equipment companies.

The evidence is that the practice of religiously expressed or nobly articulated exhortation actually erect a comfort zone behind which people can hide as ancient peoples once did, cowering behind their city’s walls as an enemy advanced upon them.  But what if the “Trojan Horse” is already inside the gate as seems the case today?

Religious language requires concrete ethical articulation. There are beginning to be important examples of this: in the Shale rebellion in Pennsylvania and the Moral Mondays Movement that started in North Carolina and is now appearing elsewhere across the country. Faith groups are often leading or facilitating and participating in these movements. This movement to resist or to occupy is the leasding edge of what must become a new non-violent revolution 

There is a seductively strong connection between good intentions and the sentiments of religious language when application proportionate to the scale of the problems around us is missing.  Consider the Congressional hearings in recent weeks that cross-examined NSA officials about the secretive role it played through gross internet invasions of privacy from Angela Merkel down to everyone else.  The same hearings made clear the existence of para-governments resident in both federal and corporate agencies that are able either to secretly serve elected officials or undermine them. 

Sunday School lessons today must acquire that scale to he heard and respected by the powerful. Consider Floyd Norris’ discussion below of pervasive bank fraud in setting interest rates.  (Norris is Chief Financial columnist of the NY Times; October 31, 1913).  Excerpts:

LIBOR— the London interbank offered rate — is supposed to represent the costs that each bank would face if it received an unsecured deposit from another bank. Each day, banks report Libor rates for maturities ranging from overnight to 12 months, in numerous currencies. The announced Libor rates are based on averages of bank submissions. In Europe, there is a similar Euribor. Banks cheated on both.  

“Don’t worry mate — there’s bigger crooks in the market than us guys!” wrote an official of Rabobank, the large Dutch lender, after he agreed to a request from one of the bank’s traders in 2007 to submit a phony rate for Libor rates in yen.

          Even without fraud, Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said in a recent speech at Harvard, that Libor rates “are basically more akin to fiction than fact.”  “In the U.S.,” Mr. Gensler said in his speech, “Libor is the reference rate for 70 percent of the futures market and more than half of the swaps market. It is the reference rate for more than $10 trillion in loans.”

           

The danger signals require a new vocation of deeper reflection and action. A first step in the case of faith communities is to modify their saturation in the study of scriptural texts so that texts serve as a light shining on contemporary issues, no generalities or abstractions please; a new process should turn Sunday School into critical thinking seminars for young and old.  Religious language is not the same thing as ethical thinking about the search for the fairest tax policy, the wisest environmental regulations or the best health care policy. Progressively inclined folks active in churches, mosques and synagogues —and all others who link love and justice together—can easily feel overwhelmed by this predicament. 

  

By creating a “think tank” process inside weekly congregational life, the weekend Sabbath lessons can become critical thinking exercises.   Every region in the country has university-level faculty who could help resource a new wave of think tanks, a bit like the old travelling Chautauqua’s that brought learning to remote local communities a hundred years ago. Let the new lessons begin. 

Modern Theology

       On the same day Apple released its new super I-Pads this week it was given a free pass for its practice of outsourcing millions of jobs.  None other than California’s  Democrat  Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsome (former mayor of San Francisco) proclaimed on his website that the new California Economic Agenda does not intend “to recreate the past and restore the jobs lost to global competition.” [http://www.ltg.ca.gov/s_aneconomicandcompetitivnessagenda.html[

         

        In a magisterial article also out this week, Harvard’s professor of political economy, Benjamin M. Friedman, laments the growing jobs gap but utters not a single word about deterring or correcting Silicon Valley’s massive export of jobs to China. [see “Brave New Capitalists’ Paradise: The Jobs,” The New York Review of Books, 11/7/20013] 

      

        Inevitability is the theme here; meaning corporate success and its consequence are in the same category as an act of god, like lightening or hurricanes.  It’s an inexact analogy since there always are alternatives to corporate lightening, but obeisance is the thing.  When decisions were made in the private sector fifty years ago that would doom Detroit, Cleveland and swaths of cities like Chicago and Los Angeles as U. S. capitalists decided they could make more money in overseas manufacturing, it was the worshipful obedience to such decisions that closed the deal and destroyed whole cities.  Memories are soon lost, as in the old quip about the difference between de jure and de facto segregation: de facto meant nobody did it. It was just modern theology at work.

       

       This adds up to the huge importance of the current prosecutions of corporate fraud and setting in place tough regulations under the Dodd-Frank law.  The dramatis persona embodies a great sameness.  Big money can make you look the other way, especially if it’s the gods at work. 

       

        Such dollars without sense show parallel dramas. Over the last fifty years it’s possible to watch a whole generation of glittering universities rise and brilliant scholars write their juried journal articles but still discover that the high school dropout rate in many urban school districts hovers around 40 to 50 percent today, just as it did in 1963.  Articles written back then always mentioned the family environment of low income people whose limited vocabulary limits their children’s.  Articles written today repeat the observation.  Fifty years of familiar stories about kids getting on drugs, committing crimes, heading to prison. It was also fifty years without decent incomes for millions of families, who if they had time and money to grow their vocabularies they could have advanced themselves.

        This week’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports unemployment offers a continuing picture of the deepening disaster for millions of our sisters and brothers:  “Despite 43 months of private-sector job growth, there were still 1.8 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 1.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls in September than when the recession began in December 2007.”       

       

        The Times' Catherine Rampell writes that “the labor market lost, rather than gained, momentum over the summer, leaving us with less than a desirable cushion just as the government was shuttered in response to political shenanigans,” citing Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial about the new data from the BLS.  [NY Times 10/22]  Even before the recent shutdown the federal government had the lowest number of civilian employees on its payrolls since 1966, according to their delayed September jobs report.”    The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington reported:

*  The Labor Department’s most comprehensive alternative unemployment rate measure — which includes people who want to work but are discouraged from looking is still 4.8 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession.  By that measure, over 21 million 

people are unemployed or underemployed….

* ….there were still 1.8 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 1.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls in September than when the recession began in December 2007. 

 * Nearly two-fifths (36.9 percent) of the 11.3 million people who are unemployed — 4.1 million people — have been looking for work for 27 weeks or longer.  These long-term unemployed represent 2.7 percent of the labor force.  Before this recession, the previous highs for these statistics over the past six decades were 26.0 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in June 1983.  [Oct 22 CBPP web]

         This is huge and very bad news. Or is it just the gods disposing?

              

                          

The Rising

Fresh evidence that religious language can be murdered in broad daylight came Wednesday morning when the Republican Caucus sang “Amazing Grace,” a hymn sung when the British Parliament ended the Atlantic slave trade. While the Tea Party crash this week has dressed itself in garments of martyrdom, mainstream Republicans continue to see nothing wrong with gerrymandering congressional districts and creating voter registration barriers—all designed to block access of Blacks, Latinos and other low income people across the country to their voting rights.

As this strange second Civil War continues people continue to use religious ideas to support the “truths” they prefer:  In the past, Africans were said to be biologically inferior and therefore slavery was a divinely inspired kindness to them. Capitalists, lucky enough to accumulate vast wealth used  it to polish an image as icons of divine blessing.

While almost no one really believes such stuff any longer, the irresistible temptation to use faith language to lay claims to truth helps conceal the huge power play unfolding as “the owners” not "the believers," take charge. They're the owners of the Shale oil system and its pipe and shipping lines; the corporate powers that own our politicians; the financiers who hold your mortgage and credit debt. 

The profound reason to hope the faith community will help is because its origins lie in the battle against just such demonic powers—by definition powers that claim to be doing everything for your own good. The modern gods no longer want your virgin daughter sacrificed on their altar, they want you to learn to submit to their inequality regime, to accept without resistance your extended family’s worsening and unequal status today. 

A first step toward resistance will require people of faith to abandon their neutrality. This means de-schooling ancient pastoral fantasies long nurtured in monasteries and seminaries (and at a great remove from a Moses struggling against Pharaoh, or a Jesus leading the common peasants into Jerusalem) people of faith, must practice a non-violent form of love that insists on justice. 

Such a faith is already blowing fresh winds in North Carolina. A huge start toward a non-violent and instructive social justice movement is underway there. A reaction to the Republican’s ruthless blockade of voting rights has led faith leader’s and many others to abandon the neutral center. 

Many thousands are marching on Moral Mondays in North Carolina cities inspired by faith leaders like Rev. William Barbour, an NAACP president and Disciples of Christ Pastor. The large coalition growing there is practicing coalition-building across disparate lines by focusing on the perceived injustices they face. Black and White people of faith have locked arms with LGBT advocates, labor unions, environmentalists, women’s rights leaders, intellectuals from the universities and many others, some of them people Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have called “the Saints without God.”  Not only do they share a commitment to the common good, but hundreds of them have been arrested while engaging in acts of civil disobedience, going to jail for their faith whether holy or secular.

A new spirit is blowing in this wind as people discover that when they embrace both love and justice many people can come together. This is "a rising" that needs to spread. 

The Potential for Democratic Collapse: Can Faith Communities Make a Difference?

   

With the Polar ice pack melting, unusually severe storms increasing and a dysfunctional American democracy, it’s a good time to ask a lot of questions about faith and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of Capitalism.  A prime example is the increasingly powerful interests at play in the fossil fuels empire that are releasing both floods of shale drilling and a growing corruption and political recklessness that could sink American democracy.      

As inequality grows such forces are compelling economically vulnerable people to sell partial land rights for fracking and shale drilling.   They are becoming increasingly helpless today and this is a condition that should invite the liberating and prophetic power of the faith traditions. But is that real any longer?  

Compare the last hundred years of faith community activism with today’s faith-based localism.  The “social gospel” in the early 1900s gripped faith-based consciences over terrible factory and mining working conditions, including exploitation of women and child labor.  A Federal Council of Churches was convened with thousands of faith leaders at its founding assembly in 1908. They adopted  an historic fourteen point ethically-based Social Creed that helped propel a progressive movement whose reforms under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson changed the whole landscape of public health protections and worker rights.

 After WW II faith communities gathered in Amsterdam to form a World Council of Churches to rethink and begin to reconstruct a post-Hitler world. Their mission was two-fold: theological in the wake of Nazism’s failed “religious” rationales and the Allies failure to advocate against the Holocaust; and humanitarian as they supported creation of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and relocate millions of displaced persons to new secure beginnings.

Again, in the 1950s U. S. faith groups (tardily but finally) created ecumenical agencies and interfaith coalitions for civil rights inspired by many prophetic figures of the times, including Martin Luther King, Jr.  Creating ecumenical agencies for racial justice a National Council of Churches and a national office of religion and race furthered the Civil Rights Movement in local communities where local congregations felt too threatened to raise their voices.  These faith communities played a key role in passage of the Civil Rights act of 1954.

This is no longer real, nearly all lapsed today in favor of a “localism” intended to encourage individual participation rates while avoiding the public square controversies of the civil rights days that broke up many local congregations. 

It’s not an organizational or tactical question any longer. What’s at stake is the power of religious language itself, the power of a mythic moral vision about an exodus to freedom from slavery, about dry bones coming alive, about god born in poverty, about a city with waters of life flowing through it, about everlasting life. Theologian Paul Tillich taught that the symbol (for example, of faith) participated in the reality which it represents.  

What’s at stake as democracy hurtles toward the cliff’s edge is whether the symbolic language of faith is real anymore.  Today, it’s in the hands and voices of the people of faith to answer that question.  More  soon about faith-based roles in the public square. 

Moral Compass in the Heart of Darkness

The Syrian refugee catastrophe has become a metaphor for the devil himself, so obviously born of the confabulations of the rich nations. Their dearest interests, not the Syrian people's, is the keystone to the nightmare. Syria has become a twenty-first century version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel about the African ivory trade written in 1898.  In a land awash with American, Israeli, Russian and Iranian agents (to name a few)—the current version of Conrad’s novel is re-enacted in corporate and global struggles over food, oil, and control of the tech universe. 

This dystopia of rich and poor struggling in Africa and the Middle East now clearly extends to the struggles over growing inequality in the U. S. and Europe.  Both last week’s solo terror attack in Washington and the assault on the huge shopping mall in Nairobi lap at the shore of American imagination, which is why the FBI has been sent scurrying in all directions to learn where it might happen next.  

Amid such moral confusion it may be helpful to take recourse to John Milton, the 17^th century Puritan poet, who worked as a pamphleteer and civil servant during the first English Revolution.  An eloquent advocate of free speech, Yale’s Professor John Roberts tell us he invented “the very language of insubordination, creating an entire vocabulary of resistance, protest and revolution.”  This was because he wanted the biblical Word about righteousness and justice to become incarnate in the revolution’s new social and political institutions.

 There was not quite that intention with the American Revolution though we Americans have thought it so. The emerging USA pursued a different incarnation: to make all men free to pursue their own interests; and as it turned out on a vastly rich continent, men used slavery, Native American removal and financial manipulation to make themselves rich if they could. Because some could, later they enshrined their success and wealth as the customary measures of a divine American way. It was, in fact, an incarnation of themselves. 

Karl Barth, the famous 20^th century theologian, pointed out how this 18^th century formula worked.  In effect, God was given an honorary box seat—at the top of the grandstand—but men were given the central place on the field of play. His most terrifying example was the 19th century Dutch colonial empire which he described as a place of wealth and skulls, the skulls of the slave trade.

There was something about the Puritans like Milton, and the earliest Christians including Augustine, that understood this human propensity to self-elevation.  Anyone who reads about the despoiling of Syria can understand the ancient Christian sense of being caught in sin.

Ironically, the community seldom heard from in public life today is the faith community, composed more than any time in recent decades of highly educated and trained clergy and lay leaders, many of them women, and from a younger generation.  They could exercise a public and transformative role identifying saints, sinners and devils.   More about this in the next Public Liturgies blog.

The Vanishing Common Good

Sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville revealed an Achilles heel in American democracy in 1835 when he described an early America whose democratic practice operated apart from politics in the public square. He observed a vast hive of thousands of lodges, fraternal organizations, clubs and churches that operated alongside the realm of government and political life, each pursuing the particular interests of its members, offering them the ceremonies of democracy without the civic rough and tumble where leaders and legislatures were elected and laws shaped.     

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all dispositions formed all kinds of associations, religious, moral, serious, futile….hospitals, prisons, schools….pursuing in common the object of their desires.” They shared the perhaps unintended pattern of functioning largely below the radar of political public life. The common understanding of faith communities in this new democracy—separation of church and state—undergirded the same pattern as did the new sciences of the age that also were above politics. Then (as now) clergy were called to their pulpits on the pledge to do no politics in the churches.  

Thus organized the effect has been to take a lot of what was called citizenship out of the government-related democratic process, creating a passivity in the public square and silencing the prophetic voice of most churches.  Good citizens were expected to keep the peace.

This may help explain why the outrageous injustice documented in the New Pew Research Center report of huge inequalities in the nation has so far avoided creating an uprising, an American Spring.  The Report shows the U. S. wealth gap is now running $3,173,896 for the median income of the top 7 percent of U. S. population but down to $133,817 for the bottom 93 percent. Between 2009 and 2011 the top group gained 27 percent in income while the bottom 93 percent lost 4 percent.

Our scandalous Inequality has grown in part from the hierarchical structure and theological conventions of industrial capitalism. Ever since the large U. S. central banks began shifting investments overseas destroying the economic foundation of manufacturing centers like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Youngstown it has been largely with only a whimper of resistance.  It was accepted as the operation of a divinely instituted natural law at work in older industries. There was deep suffering, but no rebellion.    

There have been historic exceptions to our national history of passivity: the Farmer’s rebellion of the 1880s; Populism that led in the 1910s to the industrial reforms of the Progressive movement; the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s. In each case leaders pursued a democratic practice with teeth in it. They changed the laws through their challenges not at the lodge meeting but in the public square.

There is a rebellion afoot today and it has teeth. It’s among conservative forces like the Tea Party. Championing a new spirit of individualism, this rebellion seeks to separate winners from losers, to form an organic social and racial Darwinism that will bless the survival of the most deserving among us, as they define them.  State after state is abandoning fair voter rights laws, blocking universal health care, balking at immigration reform, and repealing gun control restraints.   As corporate money pours into this rebellion from wealthy conservative sources, the trend threatens to pull the country apart more rapidly than we may imagine.  

We’ll analyze the sources of this disintegration next week, pointing to the strengths that should unite us.

The Obama Presidency Verges on Disaster

 Even if President Obama wins begrudging approval this week from either Congress or his lawyers for his desire to attack Syria, he risks a possible disastrous loss of influence at home and abroad for the balance of his second term.  In fact, that is already happening. While the President asserts the necessity to act if the international agreements against the use of poison gas have been violated by the Syrian government, the real reasons for his compulsions seem both political and emotional and are perhaps more transparent in the actions of his Secretary of State, John Kerry.  

  

Kerry’s passions this past summer run from the so-called peace talks he is conducting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to his near fanatical call for an attack on Syria. Both are perfect examples of truth defined by righteous umbrage.  Kerry has proved willing to give away the store by suggesting that the problem of continued Israeli settlement expansion and the permanence of Israel’s already large settlements located inside the Palestinian territory be set aside so the basis of a peace agreement can be reached without such distractions.  Just this past weekend he turned to the European Union asking them to drop their restrictions banning financing and cooperating with institutions within the Israeli settlement areas in order “to demonstrate to the Israelis that taking the risk of moving toward peace is worthwhile.” [NY Times 9/9/13) 

Not only does this bizarre strategy speak volumes about the blind loyalty of the Secretary of State to Israel and its American lobby, AIPAC—it is also a window into a similar bondage of President Obama.  Even as the President seems compelled to an action that loses him the already thin respect of the Muslim/Arab world, confidence in him among Democrats appears to be seriously eroded.  This can mean doom for his domestic initiatives. Democrats, made politically vulnerable by Obama’s sudden weakness, can be expected to low ball their policy objectives.    

Equally important, this growing weakness threatens the ambitions of the liberal and progressive communities for a non-violent movement to transform banking, finance and corporate control of American democracy.   

This abrupt political climate change, if it occurs, does offer us an important teaching moment.  It’s an opportunity  to reflect about the compromises of the modern period that confuse moral principle with power;  a chance to ponder the declining role of the religious community as it often surrenders its prophetic truth-telling role for the comfort of good music and soft preaching; a chance to exegete “Holocaust Guilt,” when someone else’s self-interest defines our own civic disengagement.  On our way to a non-violent American spring we’ll treat these three issues in our next three issues of Public Liturgies—coming each remaining week in September.            

Prelude to an American Spring: Regulating the Banks

        It’s been forty years since the 1973 oil price shocks transformed the formula of labor costs that have become today’s era of low union membership and growing inequality.  The price shocks back then were caused by Arab reaction to the U. S. re-supply of Israel in its 1973 war with Egypt.  There have been virtually unending consequences. OPEC, in response, raised the posted price of crude by 70% and placed an embargo on exports to the U.S. and other nations allied with Israel.  Although prices soon stabilized, the oil crisis had a profound impact on the international system.

It’s a suitable labor Day history lesson new generations should know about. At the beginning of the boycott with the price of oil quadrupled, gas rationing occurred in the U. S. and Europe, the Great Lakes greenhouse industry collapsed almost overnight, a deep recession set in that included a 45 percent decline in stock prices.  

The center of this drama is how the OPEC boycott created new incentives for investment capital to search for global investments whose lower labor costs would balance the rise in energy costs. The Central banks in the U. S. abandoned their long time customers—U. S. manufacturers—and moved toward overseas investment. The effect was to make money not things, to financialize their capital, shifting not just to overseas investment but to a seemingly infinite variety of financial instruments such as today’s synthetic securities: Credit Default Swaps, Derivative Securities and the rest.

Back then, 1973 to 1983--within ten years time—most of the vast steel and machine tool industries in the U. S. closed down. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland, LA and Baltimore went into death spirals.   

That’s why Labor Day 2013 is almost universalized. As previously noted here, the Pew Research Center last April reported that in dollar terms in the past six years the mean wealth of the richest 8 million households rose $697,651 while the mean wealth of 111 million less affluent households fell $133,817 .

That’s why on this Labor Day 2013 the banks are the biggest winners in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession.  In his new book, Debtors Prison, Robert Kuttner describes the rise of a federal reserve banking system created by investment banks like J. P. Morgan and Goldman Saks for the J. P. Morgans and Goldman Saks. When, during the Depression years the Glass-Steagall Act separated the speculative part of the economy from the real part (e.g. making steel), its repeal in 1999 had catastrophic consequences, opening the flood gates of the big banks’ speculative investment and leading to the crash of 2008 and the loss of the homes of millions upon millions of Americans.

    

           Kuttner believes the supposed antidote—passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—is destined to fail because the same banks that ruined the country are still in the driver’s seat, richer than ever, working with all their huge financial lobbying power to water down the rules to be implemented by Dodd-Frank, which has turned out—due to pressures from the banking lobby—to not have enough teeth to succeed. 

          Changing that will require a non-violent American Spring that will need several years to be successful.  Measures of moral reform and determination must be mobilized that only a large scale democratic movement can create. Faith groups and democracy groups, Labor unions and progressive research centers at our universities need to join together to make that happen.

Will THERE BE AN AMERICAN SPRING?

Josh Whedon’s film "Much Ado About Nothing” shown in theaters this summer offered Shakespeare’s sparkling language in the transparent light of  black and white camera work, portraying  the characters in both modern dress and masquerades that conceal reality from them, offering the compensation of also concealing their personal desires and motives. 

There’s a lot of that these days.  Abandoning prophetic warnings about injustice, faith communities are offering “Christianity Lite,” a personal fulfillment theology of praise music, personal anecdote and success story. One senses an unease about this. Singing praise hymns delivers a fanciful sense of a holiday illusion distracting people until the bills come in. The masquerades may not be working because people sense deeply ominous changes are afoot. 

After eleven years of war without meaningful victory, what Americans see today are drone air strikes killing dozens of children, American-sponsored torture, suicide bombers emulated by the Boston marathon perpetrators.  A long list includes Trayvon Martin and the stand-your-own-ground laws, the anniversary of the March on Washington observed amid growing evidence of race-based inequalities--and now more war imminent in Syria.

Americans stand on a knife’s edge sharpened by a faltering domestic economy (unemployment increased last month) and deluged by a hostile Russian, Arab and Iranian world.  The question is whether despair will become surrender or give birth to resistance, to an American Spring.  Can that Spring be pursued with a non-violence that surrenders nothing to determination?  Will faith communities feed that moral resolve or sing soft hymns?

In the U. S. South, The Tea Party movement continues to resonate among evangelicals and political opportunists as another “white hope” based on masquerades of so-called  democracy and devotion to the Constitution.  But the inequality gaps loom everywhere. According to the Manpower Development Corporation:

•           Median household income decreased in several Southern states: Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. However, only Florida and Louisiana had larger decreases in income than from 2009 to 2010.    

•        The poverty rate increased in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina and Texas, with no significant change in the other Southern states. Only Louisiana had a worse increase than 2009 to 2010.

              A personal walk on New York City's High Line last week (an urban park built on an abandoned overhead rail line) found virtually no people of color strolling among the plantings. At a Coney Island baseball game only a few people of color were present.  At a Broadway theater the same week, just a few more.  In a city of 2 million African Americans, racial separation and economic inequality is on the up-tick, ironically counterpointed with digital hand-helds everywhere.

  The Trayvon Martin case is a relative of this digital world.  Yes, the case is about race in America and its role in national electoral politics.  Yes, it’s about the bias toward potential injustice imposed by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws.  Less obvious, is the camouflage it provides for the reality of today’s permanently isolated and jobless underclass.   

   Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 novel, The Road, is set in the aftermath of a vast nuclear disaster. He foretells a starving and cannibalizing world where roaming gangs hunt down others to feed off their bodies.  Note, please, that Mark Zimmerman’s role on a February evening last winter was to hunt for the Trayvon Martins.

  

    In the next issue of Public Liturgies the discussion will be about policies necessary to build a non-violent American Spring.

[A personal note: after a moderate illness and some Summer reflection Public Liturgies is back for the foreseeable future]

Trip Wires and Silicon Answers

Estimates suggest the number of suicide bombers in the Middle East and Africa is nearing one thousand per year, killing and maiming other tens of thousands.  The flash points behind this are mostly illegible to our Western eyes.  As the new World Trade Center Tower and Memorial nears completion in New York City—remembering the inestimable worth of 3,000 human lives lost on 9/11—no memorial rises for the tens of thousands of inestimable human lives lost during the past decade’s Middle East and African wars; wars in which the U. S. has been either directly or indirectly involved.  

The suicide bombers can be seen as a response to the missing memorials. The bombers are making a statement about their own life’s meaning, drained of opportunity, ennobled by their self-willed death that ends all future meaning and concludes all future social relations.

Note that the young Boston bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, drifted for days in anomie after their awful act. They appear to have had no future plans. The meaning of their act—like the acts of suicide bombers—lay in its potentially conclusive devotion.  The Tsarnaevs are reported to have resented that their own culture’s traditions were usually identified as despised and inferior, invidiously compared with U. S. traditions—where they found no place for themselves—composed of noble moral superiority; a superiority they could have heard reiterated in countless political speeches, usually dressed with religious sanctimony.  

Our Western minds never want for self-regard but this easily becomes a trip wire exposing a moral arrogance blind to the sight of a vastly unjust world, one plausibly filled with many more Tsarnaevs.  

This was documented days after the Boston bombers’ apprehension when the national news focus changed ineluctably revealing a second trip wire as Bloomberg News reported that half of New Yorkers are now poor or near-poor.  Two days later the Pew Research Center reported the net worth of 93 percent of U. S. households had declined 4% during the Recession years 2009 to 2011 while the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose 28%.   In dollar terms the mean wealth of the richest 8 million households rose $697,651 while the mean wealth of 111 million less affluent households fell $133,817.  

Across the Atlantic, prolonged Euro Zone unemployment ticked up May 1st to 12.1 percent.  Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union situated in Luxembourg, reports this is the highest unemployment in Europe since it began keeping records in 1995: 26.5 million are now unemployed in Europe including 5.7 million young people. [NY Times, May 1, 2013]

Current global conditions can be understood to guarantee a continuing supply of suicidal acts born among millions of people with no clear path to the future. Apparently invisible to many leaders in government and business today, the rising tide of violence is growing as the inequality gap grows. Suicide bombing is now a significant portion of the deaths in the ongoing global violence: approximately 3,043 deaths in the Middle East per month since January 2013 [CNN].    During this April alone in Iraq 322 people died, Afghanistan 323, Pakistan 89. 

With 11.7 million in the U. S. remaining unemployed, many for more than a year (BLS May 3, 2013) 4.4 million workers have been unemployed for at least six months not including people who have given up looking for work. Then there is the other dark side: the burgeoning U. S. prison population. The Population Reference Bureau (August 2012) reports:

Since 2002, the United States has had the highest incarceration rate in the world….the natural rate of incarceration for countries comparable to the United States tends to stay around 100 prisoners per 100,000 population. The U.S. rate is 500 prisoners per 100,000 residents, or about 1.6 million prisoners in 2010, according to the latest available data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

A growing domestic and global alienation from Western idealism is clearly visible in the growing tide of violence:  in the U. S. we see school massacres, murdered police and public officials, counter-pointed by a daily family death toll by gunfire.  In Pakistan twenty more died in a bombing in Pakistan as this was being written. (5/6/13)

We can be forgiven for believing that worse lies ahead.

 On the other hand powerful minds in Silicon Valley believe this does not have to be so. The Valley’s Kool Aid diet (the one that shipped millions of jobs out of the U.S) creates a steady drum beat of harmony between wealth and moral principle. Valley entrepreneurs Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have written a new book. The New Digital Age, that advances a parallel universe cut from biblical metaphors.  Technology will change all things, make all things new.  Schmidt, the executive chairman (and former chief executive) of Google, and Cohen, a foreign-relations expert and director of Google Ideas claim their book is meant to explore the ways technology and diplomacy can intersect.

There is a canyon dividing people who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world’s toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge.…[but] a new accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed public… will be able to tell the difference….The consequence of having more citizens informed and connected is that they’ll be as critical and discerning about rebels as they are about the government.”

The Tech icons claim that to confront terrorism “a new accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed [global] public will be able to tell the difference.  [the citations and this account are in The N Y Times 4/25/13].

The writers’ theory may enlarge their already ample fortunes but will its saving power reach the jobless, the disenchanted and the potential bombers whose wires have already been tripped?

    

Humiliation: The Threat Guns Can't Defend

        Without a shot fired, the proposed new regulations for guns seem felt by pro gun advocates as personal injury. In public discussions across the country one senses more than guns are at stake; as if their guns are the last redoubt in a shrunken world where the capacity to be empowered also had shrunk to Lilliputian size.

This anger at public discussions about gun control quickly rises to the level of an approaching end of times.  Extreme statements are often made—“Obama is a Tyrant”—but these seem inarticulate representatives of deeper wounds laid almost bare.  Economic wounds, for example, are hard to talk about in public because they’re born of intimate experience: the loss of a hoped for career path, loss of home equity, families broken by checkbook crises, kids that can’t get to the college of their choice. 

Other economic wounds suffer from the extreme social distance between struggling citizens and banks at the Wall Street level: banks said to be too big to fail, banks behaving in blatantly dishonest and fraudulent ways. The result is deep wounds of uncertain origin, inexplicable, and inarticulate. 

The latest example from Goldman Sachs reveals this essentially baffling social calamity; a calamity without a shot fired.  An increasingly acrid New York Times columnist, Joe Nocera, wrote two days ago  (Sunday March 10^th) about the standard fraudulent practice at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms.

“Once upon a time, in a very different age, an Internet start-up called eToys went public. The date was May 20, 1999. The offering price had been set at $20, but investors in that frenzied era were so eager for eToys shares that the stock immediately shot up to $78. It ended its first day of trading at $77 a share.”

It soon plummeted because of Goldman’s profitable maneuvers.

“Goldman would routinely under price the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of stock for a new company but give big selected institutional investors the benefits of the stock’s first day huge run-up in price.” They would buy cheap, then sell expensive. The big investors would flip the stock a day or so later (I.e. sell) and cause the price to plunge. These same big investors would then rebate a fourth or half of the big first day killing they made back to Goldman, repaying its “kindness.” 

The worst result of the scam was that if Goldman had done the deal for the new company whose interests it was supposedly representing, it would have earned $600 million for the new company. Instead, EToys closed after the crash because it was cash starved.  

Toby Lenk, the founder and former CEO of EToys, was deposed by the SEC about this experience. Nocera reports:

“After the deposition…the S.E.C. lawyers began to show him some Goldman Sachs documents. He saw that one big firm after another had been allocated shares — and had immediately flipped them, even though Goldman had promised that its clients would support the stock. That’s when I thought, We really got screwed.”

He now has 14 years’ worth of perspective. “Look at what has happened since then,” he said. “If you think eToys got screwed, what do you think happened to the country?”

“What Wall Street did to us in 1999 pales in comparison to what they did to the country in 2008,” he said.

These are real threats everyone faces today and guns won’t fix it.  We've seen intemperate anger before during the Obama years: the bitter 2009-2010 health care debates, the Presidential campaigns, the Tea Party absolutists—all have this atmosphere of people thinking of themselves as if caught at the Alamo’s “last stand.” The mood in this gun debate is both dangerous and rowdy because there is confusion over what or whom to blame for their wounds. It’s a story as remote to most of us as the Goldman Sachs story illustrates.

Besides Wall Street there is, of course, the human and social toll and loss of trust from our recent three wars.   Many Americans have fought in one or all of the failed wars In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ve returned wounded in spirit, often in body, with little to show for their sacrifice but the chaos and massive loss of life left behind.  Astonishing large numbers of them commit suicide. The public conversation easily turns less on cold facts and more on a growing sense of loss of self and life’s meaning.

This is the place where we should seek our reconciliation with the wounded because all of us are among the body count. There is a shared humiliation. A different kind of drone is at work here. It’s noiseless, dehumanizing, and in daily ways it’s destroying our ideas of democracy and liberty.   

Underground Conversations

As the day of sequester-loaded cuts arrives the consequences of global inequality receive a fresh spotlight. Millions of well-educated younger adults find themselves in the position of indentured servants, carrying six digit debt into their adult years. Over the past thirty years the real income of most U. S. citizens (adjusted for inflation) declined while only the top 5 percent gained in income and wealth. The rest of the nation remains in recession. The causes are not hard to find, ironically put this week by comedian Steven Colbert, when he reminded his viewers that the constant celebration of burgeoning wealth in Silicon Valley is built on today’s version of 19th century Chinese railroad “coolies,” virtual slave laborers then, now the Chinese low income workforce toiling for the I-gadget revolution owned by Western entrepreneurs.

So where is the rebellion against all of this?  Is there something in the Western narrative, perhaps in the Christian narrative, that removes the spine needed for resistance against unjust acts?

The Irish writer, Colm Toibin, published a novella in 2012 to be staged on Broadway later this month. The Testament of Mary, is a useful challenge to groups who feel driven underground by the dominion of war and inequality in both the U. S. and global society.

Toibin imagines Jesus as a healer and militant organizer come under growing surveillance by unidentified authorties. Toibin’s grandfather and uncle were active in the IRA, the grandfather having done hard prison time for his part in the 1916 Rising. The idea of Jesus as political liberator has been used more than once, for example in Jules Dassin’s 1970’s film, He Who Must Die. Toibin’s version of the disciples is a rough edged group whom Mary holds in little affection. They tell her Jesus is in danger, that he’s being watched by operatives whom they can point out to her lurking at the edge of the crowds while he is healing and teaching.  Mary doesn't really like the sound of Jesus’ organizing voice anymore, but with motherly concern she pleads with him several times: “You must get away from here, right now. Go! Now before it’s too late.”  Toibin’s Jesus is disdainful, he does not go and Mary reluctantly follows him to his awful execution.

In Toibin’s telling Mary lives out her years in Ephesus (there are ancient traditions to support this) but she holds to certain heretical thoughts. She thinks there was a better way, that the terrible execution of her son did not have to happen. Forced to live in hiding in a nondescript part of  Ephesus, Mary is grateful for occasional unsolicited gifts of food that appear near her doorway.  Although she fears arrest, she keeps to her distinct and heretical opinion: the salvation story could have had a better, different ending. It didn't have to happen that way.  Her son didn't have to die.

Toibin’s provocative imagination could prod today’s activists in the faith communities to ask some familiar questions again: Is there something in the dominant religious narratives of the West that generates passivity even as it invokes the authoritative?  Does the promise of eternity nullify the thirst for a just society now? Is the conversation about underground churches intended to provide a refuge from conflict or a launching pad for insurgency against injustice?  

Is the Western narrative too easily vulnerable to a disabling flaw that dilutes the energy needed for engagement with modern Pharaohs?   The sequester has the perhaps singular virtue of spelling out the terms of our further surrender: austerity and more austerity. This next step will cause  

“Some 600,000 to 775,000 low-income women and children, including very young children, who are eligible for WIC….to be turned away by the end of the fiscal year [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2/26/13]  

Lead “to 2,100 fewer food safety inspections; 4000 F.A.A. staff furloughed every day; 125,000 families put at-risk of homelessness; 70,000 children losing  head start programs,”[NY Times, February 16, 201].

Will a new occupy Wall Street movement require that we write a new story about ourselves with a different ending, one that does not conclude in either flight or tragedy?