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.