Knife's Edge

 It is painfully obvious by now that slavery remains a chronic germ in the American blood stream.  All that’s happened in recent weeks has happened before with this difference: a community relations-trained  generation of law enforcement that improved on police behavior after the Civil Rights and anti war turmoil has been followed by a policing generation come of age in harshly different times. Their context includes chronic unemployment, a thirty year decline in job incomes, terror attacks, and the Middle East wars that have added new temptations for White Americans to deploy their fixations about racial superiority.  The Pew Foundation reports this week that in spite of all the gun mayhem in recent years more Americans than ever prefer gun rights to gun control.

For the first time in more than two decades....there is more support for gun rights than gun control. Currently, 52% say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns, while 46% say it is more important to control gun ownership.

This tension is surely growing from the continuing fertile post slavery racial superiority divide to which has been added a poorly understood Muslim world in turmoil.  To the “Black threat” has been added the “Muslim threat.”

The first symptom of the racial superiority disease  is its blinding effect.  The direct line of this infection that began with the power of some to enslave others is described by slavery scholars Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan. They cite a clause enacted in 1669 in the Virginia colony “that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear of prosecution. This act, “concerning… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems deeply inherited by police today.

             

            The same line of slavery’s infection runs through Abu Grebe prison, the CIA torture sites, onto U. S. streets where a Black man selling cigarettes or a 12 year old child with a toy gun can die at police hands in minutes or seconds (for your own eyes to see, courtesy of the videotape) without indictment.  Berry and Morgan tell of this trial twenty years after the end of slavery:

In 1886, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, Hal Geiger, an African-American attorney and prominent leader of the black community from Texas, was shot five times in court. The prosecuting attorney and confirmed shooter, O.D. Cannon, did not like the way Geiger spoke to him. Taking the law into his own hands, Cannon pulled out a pistol and shot Geiger, who died a month later. It took 10 minutes for a jury to acquit Cannon of this “crime.”  [The American Prospect, 12/9/14]

                

           There is better news.  A new virus-free generation is stopping the trains in Oakland.  Medical students by the hundreds, wearing their white coats, “died-in” Wednesday across the country. The West Side highway in New York City has been blocked repeatedly this week and tomorrow Washington streets will be filled with protests against unindicted police shootings of Black citizens. 

The next challenge is to create a legislative translation. Curing the slavery/racism virus requires a non-violent political revolution that in 2016 elects new leadership to Congress and the Presidency. A generation of old and new, inoculated with human rights serum, must include several policy changes: a revision of the Grand Jury process with restraints on prosecutorial freedom; passage of a more stringent version of Dodd-Frank to regulate Wall Street much more strictly so that we begin to close the middle class-wealth gap; and of course laws that reverse Citizens United that permits unbridled campaign contributions from the wealthy.  The list is much longer. Without a virus-free political translation that protects and enforces democratic practices the die-ins alone won’t change anything.

Tear Gas Meditation

        A report circulated last week that Palestinian protesters were advising protesters in Ferguson on how to protect themselves from the effects of tear gas. True or not, they hold two other severe conditions in common.  Thirty-nine percent of young adults in the Occupied Territories are unemployed according to the World Bank.   In Ferguson the Wall Street Journal reports Black youth unemployment at 31 percent.

        Ferguson and Palestinian young adults also share the reality that they both are at-risk of violent death.  Mother Jones magazine reported on four unarmed Black persons (three of them young adults) who were killed in a single month by police last summer.  Three days ago in Cleveland a Black twelve year was shot dead by the Police.  The Israeli Human Rights group, B’tselem, has posted video surveillance footage showing young unarmed Palestinians shot dead while walking in their West Bank town of Bitunya. Another video shows the Israeli military sharpshooter firing the shots at the same moment.  [You can see too: <b’tselem.org>]

        Behind the lethal gunfire and smoke is the economics of inequality translating itself as the politics of class and race.  Some of this is waged on our streets or in troubled grand jury reports, some of it in unfair labor practices.  Last week truck drivers in the ports of Los Angeles and Long  Beach, California [the two largest ports in the U.S.] struck seven companies that categorize the truckers as independent contractors, described by Rutgers Professor David Bensman as

"a ploy that relieves the companies of the responsibility of employers. They don’t have to pay payroll taxes, don’t have to contribute to unemployment or workers’ compensation funds, don’t have to respect labor and employment laws: no right to unionize, no health and safety protections, no freedom from discrimination."  

       This almost ubiquitous practice among employers of millions of American workers is a script for their impoverishment.  The good news is that major unions like the Teamsters, Change-to-Win and SEIU are finally breaking these unfair labor practices, but it’s taken seven years to do it.

       The unavoidable current reality is that growing inequality is the real background of our current social, racial and political chaos.  The “haves” feel the pressure and tighten their grip on their own advantage. The “have-nots” become more and more desperate and more vulnerable to scapegoating explanations for their plight.   The dismal facts are that a growing percentage of American jobs now pay less than a living wage.

       Even in the manufacturing sector, supposedly where the better wages are to be found, there is actually a wage decline. The National Employment Law Project reports that in 2013 the average factory worker made 7.7 percent below the median wage for all occupations. 

Even where U. S. manufacturing seems aglow—as in the auto industry renaissance of the past three years—“more than 600,000 manufacturing workers in the auto parts industry make just $9.60 per hour or less.”   If the best production jobs pay so little, the rest will pay even less.  This has the potential to put everyone at each other’s throats. Given that the top 10 percent of U. S. population now controls 70 percent of all wealth in the U. S. a rising tide of resentment is now searching in places like Ferguson and Iran for answers which cannot be found there.  

        If  we've lived anytime in the past hundred years this should fill us with dread.  An old aphorism popularized by author William L. Shirer writing about the rise of the Nazis, leaps back to mind “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it.” [originally penned by philosopher George Santayana]   Turning Muslims into generic terrorists, or attacking political leaders seeking to create just immigration reform by calling them destroyers of the Constitution, smacks of the Nazi remedies of the 1930’s and 40’s.  

This Week's Teaching Moment

        Now, in the fear that your own neck may be at risk, it's time to take a crash course. You can begin by making a list of the inflamed areas of the Middle East: Syria, ISIS territory in Syria and Iraq, Iraq itself, Afghanistan, Somalia; and of course the West Bank, Gaza and Israel where four rabbis were tragically murdered yesterday in Jerusalem.  Watch Israeli Prime Minister Netanuahu closely who will surprise us all if he does not go out and immediately kill more people, Palestinians that is. It's one of his favorite remedies.

        First, monitor the news in order of public perceived impressions. Count the items about dead and injured in the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper.  Do it for a few days, better for a week or so.

         Next, for the sake of everyone’s neck remind yourself of this Summer’s carnage in Gaza--that after the July-August 2014 war the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported

“2,189 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed, of whom 1,486 are believed to be civilians (513 children, 323 boys and 190 girls,70% under 12), 269 women, 557 identified as militants, and 146 of unknown status. The IDF calculates 2,127 killed claiming 55% were civilians and 45% militants. Israeli casualties consisted of 6 civilians (including 1 Thai national) and 66 soldiers, 5 of whom reportedly died from friendly fire.    

          Now read OCHA’s report for these two past summer months, just for the West Bank, not including Gaza.  It counts 39 Palestinians killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli live fire.  You can read it all at http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_the_humanitarian_monitor_2014_10_03_english.pdf

         Finally, take a look at the web site of the Israeli Human Rights organization, B’Tselem, at www.btselem.org     Click on “Updates” and read down a page’s length or so. Don’t miss this item:

Israel holding more than 470 Palestinians in administrative detention

In May 2014, B’Tselem cautioned that the number of Palestinians held by Israel in administrative detention was rising. At the end of August…there were some 473 administrative detainees – the highest number since April 2009. Administrative detention is detention without trial. The [Israeli] security establishment uses it extensively, in breach of the restrictions placed by international law. The government of Israel must release all administrative detainees or prosecute them, in accordance with due process.

Yes, you read it right, 473 Palestinians held in prison, the highest number in five years. Held without trial.

There is only one thing left to do: The U. S. government, including President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, and Congress, must redefine their corrupt alliance with Israel. The whole world is watching, but they're not waiting.  Israel itself could perish if she does not become an honest woman. The same for the USA.

Too much reading for you?  It’s your neck, and your children’s and your grandchildren’s.

Prelude to Disillusionment

      We may credit biblical literature for making magical thinking a way of life.  Whatever cannot be resolved in practical concrete terms (money, property, illness, marriage) can be moved to the magic table: a mixed realm of angels and demons that includes imagination and transcendence, delusion and hypocrisy.

       Tuesday’s election displays the magic table in one of its more demonic forms. Behind the strong vote for a Republican takeover of both congressional houses is the hope--one more time--that the world of our favorite dreams whether of wealth or a familiar peaceable kingdom will come true. 

       Illusions abound all around: Our hi-tech industry cranking out trillions of dollars of products via millions of passive workers from China to Silicon Valley; all the while the pool of the permanently unemployed grows around the world and middle class incomes remain flat over ten years. It’s all buttressed by a pantheon of angels and saints—from Moses and Muhammed to Bill Gates and Mark Zukerberg.

      

       Then there is the favorite U. S. Middle East delusion: that Israel’s massacre of 2100 Palestinians, including 500 children, is unconnected to the decline of Iraq and the rise of ISIS. Americans, passing by on the other side of the road, are asked to see no connection from Isis and Iraq’s disintegration to their forgetfulness of the vast tracts of Palestinian land stolen by Israel and now planted with 500,000 settlers.

       As illusionists, both Republicans and many Democrats leave the ominous Piketty inequality equation un-addressed. That’s the equation illustrated by Paul Krugman and others:  today a single Hedge Fund manager makes more than all kindergarten teachers in the U. S. combined. “The top ten percent of wealth holders--own 75 percent of the Capital  and 50 percent of all income.”

Economist Piketty’s equation spells out a frightening anti-democratic future. “The likely [predicted] decrease in the rate of growth of both the population and the economy,” he says, "is potentially terrifying….especially since it is occurring on a global scale.”    [see Thomas Piketty, Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century—the bombshell analysis of two hundred years of estate taxes in eight countries]

       This means that contrary to the illusionists who carried the day in Tuesday’s election, an ominous prelude to disillusionment is being written. People are already frightened into becoming gun-toters and carry in their DNA the latest racist mutations (thirty-five percent of Americans are reported to still believe Obama was born in a foreign country).  We seem ill-prepared for the world of law, negotiation and compromise that are inevitable in a more just globalized economy; unprepared for a harsh truth about the new ground where the imagination for justice must find roots.

        There is this to learn about the difference between magical thinking and an ethic of justice for all. Retrospective scribes and gospel writers usually over-wrote and distorted the engagement between a prophetic Jeremiah or Jesus as they confronted the hypocrites of their day. Harsh truth-telling has been submerged in a sentimental magical glow. Now that the elections are over who will speak truth over against falsehood? To do so goes against the latest happy tide of Republican victory. It can even  even be an act of faith right out of the prophetic tradition with the scribes' glosses removed. Otherwise glowing promises, either Republican or Democratic-style, will lead to dangerous disillusionment.  It’s already happening and yes, it's very, very dangerous. 

The Mouse and the Lion

In the end, my Presbyterians produced a mouse. After years of advocacy, the close decision to divest from H-P, Motorola Solutions and Caterpillar appears to come several years too late as we watch the Middle East accelerate into a chaos that includes the potential to move closer to U. S. shores. Last week’s divestment vote was accompanied, as usual, by much hand-wringing over the damage it might cause to local Christian-Jewish relationships.  Palestinians were important too, said some commissioners, but their hearts seemed barely in it.  

The very days leading to the Presbyterian vote the Israeli army was putting on a clinic of just how they treat the Muslim-believing Palestinians: shooting dead four of them (including a 15 year-old), arresting 340, conducting 1,350 (according to the NY Times) house-to-house searches including mid-night raids, imposing curfews on whole cities. Two-thirds of those arrested were Hamas politicians or operatives. The Israelis administered collective punishment with impunity.

All this in search for three kidnapped Israeli teens, said to be inhabitants of illegal Israeli settlements, who were hitch hiking on Palestinian roads.  While there’s no justifying the kidnapping, the disproportionality of Israel’ response suggests a darker motive. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has yet to produce any evidence he claims to have of a Hamas connection to the kidnapping, is whipping up Israeli sentiments to a white hot heat as his soldiers storm into innocent Palestinian homes.  Many believe (including this writer) this is because he hopes to provoke a large scale violent reaction from the Palestinians. Something like a third Intifada would suit his purposes—and would be a hopeless action by Palestinians—and turned into a justification  for more Israeli expansion into the West Bank, ultimately accelerating the final forced exodus of the Palestinians from what many Israelis call their “promised land.” 

Divestment, if voted years ago, would have been politically apposite at a time before Israel’s Cast Lead campaign had killed 1,000 with impunity and before its large-scale settlement expansion inside East Jerusalem. More than one Presbyterian career has been enlarged and institution funded on a foundation of this tolerance for Israeli extreme measures that are pleasing to many American Jewish leaders. The treatment by Israel of Palestinians and their hope for a secure, contiguous state was seldom mentioned by many commissioners at the microphones who seemed willing to look the other way.    

Middle East events have now moved far beyond the years of Presbyterian ambivalence, but also past Mr. Netanyahu’s grasp.  The Iraq-Syria-Lebanon-Iran crisis threatens to not only completely negate the ten year U. S. invasion and military occupation of Iraq, but the growth of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nura forces is catalyzing a much wider war “reaching from the Iranian frontier to the Mediterranean coast,” as described by New Yorker reporter, Dexter Filkins.

Filkins, who has reported on Iraq since 2003, describes (New Yorker June 23, 2014)  what amounts to a horrible lion on the loose; one of terrible portent:  

“Among those fighting with ISIS and Al Nusra are hundreds of Westerners, from Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United States. At some point, the survivors will want to come home; they will be well trained and battle-hardened.”

This seems well foretold by the bombing in Boston last year by an extremist returned.  Also well exhibited is the soft Christianity commonly practiced coast to coast in the U. S.  Self-obsessed, late modern Christianity prefers to talk of love and relationships as a substitute for the burden of making judgments about what is unjust. The relative silence in local churches and at their national gatherings unwittingly appears to pave the way for a chaos now moving among us.  

After E=mc2 What's Next?

Sorry, we meant  to say r > g which means something almost as big as Einstein’s nuclear equation. The French economist, Thomas Piketty, has startled the world of economists and political leaders with an equation of seismic consequence. It expresses a new dynamic to inequality born of data showing that the return to capital (shareholders) is greater than economic growth such as standards of living and jobs. He says it is possible that during the twenty-first century the fault lines may grow from bad to worse.  

     Some sample facts drawn from current data in the U. S. include:

• Economist Paul Krugman reports a single Hedge Fund manager makes more than all kindergarten teachers  in the U. S. combined.
• The top 1 percent--own 75 percent of the Capital  and 50 percent of all income.
• The richest top 25 hedge fund managers have received more income than all the chief executives of the Standard and Poor’s 500 companies combined. 

    To catch you up In case you’ve been doing something else with your life the past month, you may have missed Piketty interviews on virtually all cable news channels and in hundreds of print media reports.  Over the past 15 years, he  and his colleagues have put together the most comprehensive data set on inequality ever assembled ;  a study of income and wealth in six countries over a two hundred year period —aided by the age of computer calculating power. 

    Using real estate tax and personal income tax records from England, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the U. S. the data shows that over the last two hundred years the average rate of return on capital has been 4-5 percent annually while the growth of productivity, jobs and standards of living, averages only 1.0 to 1.5 percent. 

T

     The Piketty study, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, refutes the long-standing belief that while capitalism follows an uneven, often un-fair growth pattern, it eventually raises all ships.

He gives us a picture of this rapids growth among the very rich in this chart.

The unfolding picture is potentially catastrophic and the illustrative figures go on and on but the question is what next?  Answers include a sharp increase in taxes on the super-rich, massive public investment and local community control and ownership of the economy.  The one exception in the 200 years of data developed by Piketty is the period of WWI and II when there was massive investment by governments in troops and weapons manufacture. That is what ended the depression of 1931-41.

So, the consensus is growing that dramatic new policy initiatives are now required to meet the rise of Oligarchy in the U. S.   It will be one of the tasks of faith communities to remind their people that economic policy-making is a moral task, as Jesus and the prophets made clear when they pointed to the power of wealth or the power of Rome in ancient times.  More on this next time. 

Religion, Democracy and Oligarchy

       In the foreground of the country’s deepening democracy crisis is the growing effort by Republican-led states to cut taxes, block Medicaid expansion and curb voter turnout. In the background is the growing concentration of wealth. In 2012 ten percent of the U. S. population earned half the country’s income; meaning the U. S. is already on the way to government by an oligarchy of the wealthy.  [Annie Lowerey, NY Times, September 10, 2013]

       

       The good news is the progressive and diverse coalitions growing rapidly in Southern states to protest this trend.  Demonstrators by the tens of thousands have filled the streets—80,000 last Summer in North Carolina—with more than a thousand people arrested for acts of civil disobedience.  New coalitions are disrupting legislative sessions that ignore the needs of low income families by blocking Medicaid expansion or limiting the number of days and hours election polls will be open. In Georgia

“There was a son of a sharecropper and an advocate for the homeless, a college student and a great-grandmother, a retired store manager and the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church”….among 39 arrested on March 17^th [NY Times March 18, 2014]

       

       While clergy are sometimes leading the protests, they comprise only part of the new coalitions that have come together to resist Republican-led strategies. More than 80 citizens were arrested in Georgia just weeks ago.  Dramatic scenes in the Georgia legislature over its refusal to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act led to acts of civil disobedience  including the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—once the home pulpit of Martin Luther King.

       

        Even while the gloves are coming off in these citizen protests against Republican policies the hour has grown late. This very day the Supreme Court struck down limits in federal law on the overall campaign contributions the biggest individual donors may make to candidates, political parties and political action committees. The “Citizen United” Supreme Court decision three years ago recognizing corporations as persons had already opened the flood gates to governance by the wealthy.  Revolving doors for staff moving from Wall Street to government and back again is pervasive. In the face of rampant corporate corruption among the big banks, a tame Securities and Exchange Commission staff has done little. Its own staff and board are composed of personnel formerly employed at giant Wall Street firms.  The hour is, indeed, growing late.

       

         While protests are growing against the Right, faith-based movements toward the Right also are growing.   New conservative church denominations are forming in the country. Often energized by gender issues, their composition is visibly an all-white community of the privileged. As many as a quarter to one-third of congregations in the traditionally liberal Presbyterian denomination may move toward this orbit this year.  

       

        A more hopeful story is unfolding with unionization efforts at the Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi. Led by a marching community coalition that includes local clergy, human rights advocates, and the UAW (demonstrating lessons the UAW learned in Chattanooga about the need for allies and shared strategic planning), with Nissan workers urged by religious leaders to vote their conscience, not listen only to the high pressure propaganda coming at them. [LA Times, March 14, 2014]

       

         The real question is whether the moral and religious roots that gave democracy life in the U. S. in the first place will find its full voice in this prophetically challenging moment. The future of democracy in America may turn on the answer to that question. 

       

          The record is mixed.  Christian churches co-habitated with slavery and segregation for hundreds of years.  Jewish congregations have maintained their loyalty to the apartheid state of Israel during its 60 year repression of Palestinian people and huge settlement expansion into Palestinian territory.  Muslim leaders often confuse their spiritual and prophetic tradition with the more familiar authoritarian rule practiced today in Syria, Egypt and many African lands.

       

         It doesn't have to be this way. There is a new, well educated younger faith-based generation of leaders coming online that may yet breathe new life into the links between faith, justice and democracy. The original Tahir Square uprising in Egypt was an expression of democratic yearning among an educated younger Muslim generation. “Jewish Voices for Peace” is a movement growing out of diverse Jewish traditions and raising its prophetic voice against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.  Christian groups once deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s are once again beginning to provide new leadership protesting the consequences of rising inequality.

      

        “The most important fact to remember,” writes Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect, “is that concentrated wealth translates into concentrated political power.”  Conscientious voices on the Left and Right should be able to see such concentration is disastrous for both democracy and their historic faith traditions.

The New Abolition Movement

In the new landmark study cited two weeks ago by blog commentator Ray Miklethun of Atlanta, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the author summarizes the worsening situation.

    

… future inequality in the United States will be driven by two forces. A growing share of national income will go to the owners of capital. Of the remaining labor income, a growing share will also go to the top executives and highly compensated stars at the pinnacle of the earnings scale.

The new study out just this week is based on monumental research never before done of annual economic data on taxes, wealth and inheritance covering 200 years of financial history in Great Britain, Germany, Sweden and the U.S. The finding is that economic growth seldom leads to more equality. It powerfully refutes the prevailing wisdom that even when capitalism sometimes produces inequality, it will naturally correct itself. Instead during most of the last two hundred years it usually increased inequality, as is happening today; creating a new kind of permanent second class citizenship of the 99 percent, a wage slavery never envisioned by Marx, who was talking about miners and factory workers. 

The NY Times expose March 9^th of hedge fund manager William A. Ackman’s star power illustrates this politics of inequality. Through incredibly vast manipulation of Congressional, Wall Street and White House officialdom and endless connections, Ackman is working furiously to make a one billion dollar bet pay-off while claiming he is serving a public good.  It’s all about the financial position he's taken, called a short, that will only pay-off if he can force the shares of a vitamin and food supplement company called Herbalife to plummet. If they do he makes billions. But not the rest of us, we whom Ackman claims he seeks to protect from Herbalife. (The Herbalife business is for others to explore.)

In Silicon Valley, where Porsches and Lamborghinis roam the streets, between 2010 and 2012 average per capita income actually decreased 5% among Blacks to $30,758 while rising among Whites by 5.6% to $62,374; among Hispanics or Latinos it went down 2% to the deplorable average of $19,049. [source: 2014 Silicon Valley Index, p. 18]. Current BLS data, January 2014, confirms this trend. That’s in Lamborghini land!

Where the rest of us live declining standards of living have become the new middle class experience over the past twenty years. A new and ghastly racism has become a 21^st century form of inequality in a class by itself. In the U. S. prison system the Public Policy Institute reports that in 2010 among adult men, African Americans were incarcerated at a rate of 5,525 per 100,000, compared to 1,146 for Latinos and 671 for non-Latino whites.

Piketty’s study demonstrates that we are encased by an inequality by race and by class.

Faith communities and human rights groups should see this as cause for a modern “Abolitionist Movement” targeting the loss of income by nearly everyone but the top one percent. The illegality practiced on Wall Street that we have seen in the massive mortgage loan frauds, the buying and selling of legislatures and Congress means Democracy is now on life support.

A first “Abolitionist” step is faith leaders and human rights advocates becoming public citizens. directly engaging legislators and government leaders. (No intermediary community organizations, please). Direct congregational and citizen action of the kind that was practiced during the King era and by the courageous first Abolitionists of the 1830s is in order. But there is generational change of a different kind underway. 

A second abolitionist step is to move immediately to localize capital investments through worker and community wealth-ownership like the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland [see blog for 3/7). Faith groups could begin to do this tomorrow. The GenX generation is at hand to lead or help with concrete practical tasks. Many larger congregations have scores of thousands of dollars in extra cash and the GenXers know where they can get more by working with community foundations and their large local corporate foundations.  Faith communities can begin to seed thriving new businesses that train local workers who reinvest their successful business profits into their own neighborhoods. This kind of locally controlled capitalism can spread coast to coast. A perfect scenario for GenXers.

While President Obama’s announcement this week that he will mandate the Department of Labor to require overtime pay for a wide range of white collar and food services workers is good, it will be resisted by the same conservative forces that are winning key votes from Florida to Tennessee. Countering steps must be taken by public citizens of the new Abolitionism.

Legislating salary caps like those at Mondragon could weaken the inequality pyramid. At the  Mondragon cooperatives in Spain 92% of the top manager pay is at 4½ times the minimum salary; larger industrial co-ops cap top managerial pay at 6 and 7 times the minimum salary. Compare this with The American Fortune 500 CEO compensation that is 410 times the average wage according to Kent State University’s Ohio Employee Ownership Center.

Third, more and more citizens can be helped through education to see that the systemic shortcomings of Capitalism must be addressed through increasingly stringent and enforced regulation. The new abolitionism will mean electing legislators loyal to their community’s citizens suffering from inequality.  Professor Piketty cautions that while it is possible to imagine public institutions and policies that would counter the traditional wisdom that the more perfect the market, the greater the equality, he is skeptical that it will be done.

Future leaders committed to social and economic justice could prove him wrong. That’s why ancient texts continue to have value, such as Jesus’ admonition that he did not come to bring peace, but the sword of righteousness. 

From Mondragon to Silicon Valley: the Move to Shared Local Wealth Production

Are worker cooperatives a plausible alternative after the victory by Republican autocrats over a proposed union and worker council at Volkswagen?  While this victory of growing national conservative strength seems intent not only to keep the cost of labor cheap but shows little concern for the shrinking standards of living of workers, a trail of stepping stones beginning in Mondragon, Spain and running to Cleveland and Silicon Valley is trying and testing the cooperative idea in highly creative ways.

The more obvious consequences of the status quo and conservative leadership can be seen in our huge prison populations, in sections of whole cities patrolled by heavily-armed special police units and, of course there’s the February jobs report. It  shows the ranks of the long-term jobless who have been out of work by 27 weeks has risen  203,000 to 3.8 million.

Since the 1950s Mondragon, in the northern Basque region of Spain, has created a federation of 110 cooperatives, 147 subsidiary companies, eight foundations and a benefit society with total assets of 35.8 billion euros developed over the past fifty years, reports Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and a founder of The Democracy Collaborative. 

Out of the ashes of cities destroyed by capital mobility such as Cleveland, Detroit and Oakland, new experiments to apply Mondragon’s example are developing through networks of green businesses organized as cooperatives that keep cash flows local by reinvesting savings and making workers stockholders who share decision-making with management. 

The most dramatic  is in Cleveland where community energies have been mobilized to create Evergreen Cooperatives consisting so far of three state of the art cooperative businesses: a commercial scale laundry, a solar panel energy company and a commercial-scale hydroponic greenhouses.  The goal is to create seven more—all located in the inner city.  The design should be applicable anywhere from the Bronx to San Jose’s east side, where gang warfare rages because, of course, there’s no work.  

This issue of Public Liturgies invites serious readers to spend time looking at each of these rather spectacular efforts by clicking below and then viewing the video at each website:

To see the 3.25 acre greenhouse function go to:

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/02/green_city_growers_cooperative.html

For the commercial laundry:

http://evergreencooperatives.com/business/evergreen-laundry/

For the Energy Solar business:

http://evergreencooperatives.com/business/evergreen-energy-solutions/

It has taken all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to organize these cooperatives—The Federal Reserve, the Cleveland Foundation, Cleveland Clinic, City Hall, Gar Alperovitz, and Mondragon.

We’ll comment further about this power array and the feasibility of both its replication and its model in our next blog.

Evil in Chattanooga

Last week’s thunderous defeat of the UAW by workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga auto plant goes to the role Protestant culture often plays in nullifying moral questions. Jung and Tillich described it as creating a state of “dreaming innocence.”  Their analysis of the nature of true evil—brought to the fore by their experience with Nazism and Sovietism—pointed to the use of religion to induce in people an imaginary innocence, blinding their ability to see evil by playing off their sense of being overwhelmed, of being powerless.

This requires mythicizing and re-writing history.  The weekly labor columnist at the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, describes how that was done in Chattanooga.

Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom (a spin-off of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform), compared the UAW’s campaign to the Union Army’s occupation of Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War and urged workers to repel it as Confederates forces had done to that Union army at the battle of Chickamauga. Clearly, this was not an argument Patterson would have made had the plant employed more than a handful of African-Americans, but Chattanooga remains one of the whiter bastions of the New South. (The website established by the Center for Worker Freedom is emblazoned with a logo reading “Liberating Labor, One Worker at a Time”—quite the slogan for a group that equated its anti-union struggle with a battle to defeat the army that actually freed Chattanooga’s slaves in 1863.)

Meyerson describes the role Walter Reuther’s UAW actually played in the emergence of social liberalism:

…no institution played a larger role in the construction of postwar American liberalism than the UAW. Under Reuther’s leadership, the union provided funds to civil rights activists who conducted the Montgomery bus boycott, paid for the buses and sound system at the 1963 March on Washington, detailed staff and dollars to the efforts to build municipal employee unions and Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, donated resources to the fledgling efforts of Students for a Democratic Society and the National Organization for Women, and helped fund the first Earth Day.

Fundamentalist Christian Evangelicalism lives off the bitter sense of belonging to an underclass, so prevalent in Appalachia and deeper south locations like Chattanooga.  It makes one cling to racial identity and the dream of innocence in a world one is unable consciously to acknowledge actually bends him to this low estate. In the virtually empty slogans of this form of Christian parlance, God both loves you, redeems you and protects you from the very agency the Gospel proclaimed to be yours. Meyers continues on the important theme of self-management and self-governance:

For all of labor’s troubles organizing in the white South, Volkswagen was the one campaign that labor thought it could win….the union had won the support of the German auto-and-steel workers union, IG Metall, which, under the terms of Germany’s “co-determination” law, controls half the seats on Volkswagen’s corporate board. Indeed, due to Volkswagen’s Nazi roots, the American authorities in postwar Germany made the company go one step further, requiring a two-thirds majority from board members for any significant policy decision—in effect, giving the union veto power over Volkswagen’s various projects. Many of the workers who opposed the very idea of a union at Chattanooga argued, rightly, that Volkswagen was a good employer that paid them well and respected their rights. They failed to realize that the company’s conduct had been largely shaped by influence that IG Metall wields over VW’s labor relations.

         How did the Levitical teaching that you are not to slander your neighbor nor profit from his loss—claimed as roots by three world faiths—compose such contradictory violations in Chattanooga?  The answer is more and more faith communities are in love with the idea of themselves, the grace of God that will always protect them and save them. Of course this means evil can run rampant and your neighbor can be slandered because even to mention it would mix politics with religion.  

Faith communities that practice in the public square can build agency and responsibility for the battle against evils like those that carried the day in Chattanooga. They can freshly study and embrace the idea of worker dignity, worker co-determination—let us even say worker ownership—because it acts out, makes real, the sovereignty of individual freedom in its indissoluble responsibility to do justice to one’s neighbors, to one’s co-workers.

Can evil grow? Yes, and its petri dish is inequality. 

After Fifty Years More Questions About Capitalism

Last Saturday (February 8^th) a diverse coalition took their “Moral Monday” movement to the state capital in Raleigh, North Carolina. Grown to 30,000 from nearly a year of demonstrations involving the arrest of 900 North Carolinians, they protested  Republican actions that include refusal to expand Medicaid, imposing new photo ID voting requirements, and re-drawing district boundaries.

The North Carolinians marched to the familiar cadences of the faith-based civil rights protest era fifty years ago, but while the beat goes on Jericho’s walls remain.  [click on the URL in the right hand column to view the rally]

An awareness is growing on more and more people that it’s not the Republicans behind Jericho’s walls but our capitalist loyalties  that hold inequality in place.  Notice the “our.” From California Democratic leaders like Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsome—who gave Silicon Valley a free pass for exporting millions of jobs—to Kansas Tea Partiers, the heart of the American dream is to solve problems the capitalist way: by growing the economy instead of more fairly distributing it.  President Obama is expected to genuflect every day in this direction. 

Stale as accusations about capitalism may sound, on-going struggles coast-to-coast are freshly encoded with the search for policies that will bend our system to serve the basic dignity and needs of all people. The battle to raise the minimum wage, the battle to enforce the Volker rules in Dodd-Frank, the prosecutions of Wall Street fraud, and of course Bill Moyer’s broadcasts  are part of this rising tide.      

Old ideas like worker control or community ownership are coming back. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, workers at the Volkwagen plant are deciding this week whether to join the U.A.W. and  management is not opposing this for the interesting reason that it wants to see the plant adopt its successful German model of works councils and self-management. The company needs a UAW win in order to do this. According to the NY Times, Frank Fischer, Volkswagen local chief executive and chairman says

“worker councils” are a business model that helped to make Volkswagen the second-largest car company in the world. Our plant in Chattanooga has the opportunity to create a uniquely American works council, in which the company would be able to work cooperatively with our employees and ultimately their union representatives, if the employees decide they wish to be represented by a union.”

The Republicans are not only opposing this, but bringing in none other than Grover Norquist and his Washington-based lobbying  group,“Americans for Tax Reform.” In Tennessee Norquist has created a Center for Worker Freedom who’ve put up 13 billboards in Chattanooga, some calling the U.A.W. “United Obama Workers” and saying, “The UAW spends millions to elect liberal politicians.” Another billboard says, “Detroit: Brought to you by the U.A.W.,” and shows a photo of a Packard plant that was shuttered there 55 years ago.

Enjoining the battle may define what it means to be faithful.  But it may also mean developing the intellectual habit of courageous and critical thinking.  Some battles may be about dividing the spoils not helping the poor. In Memphis, where Dr. King was assassinated marching for sanitation workers’ low wages, the Kellogg company has locked out its workers in the hope of introducing a two tier wage system.  The union says Kellogg is asking for the right to employ up to 100 percent of the Memphis factory’s work force as temps or casuals — a lower tier that would earn around $22 an hour. The locked-out workers fear that if Kellogg wins the right to use as many casuals as it likes — the current contractual limit is 30 percent — then the company would somehow find a way to push out the longer-term workers, perhaps by preferring the casuals in assigning work schedules. [NY Times 2/11]

As usual, knowledge of these struggles is not widely distributed, but some of the groups that can provide a cure for this are the social justice units of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim faith groups. In an internet age they have the capacity to provide thousands of study groups in local congregations with briefing and study materials, which could be entitled, “Why you and your children are getting poorer.”  

The Year of Living Dangerously: Renewing the King Vision

            Annual observances of MLK’s birthday can become impediments to historical memory where critical thinking is required. Only three years after his “I have a dream” speech, Dr. King and the civil rights movement stalled at the point where it encountered the toxic mixture of economic and class-based segregation and limited opportunities in northern cities like Chicago, Boston and Cleveland.

What they found in these highly segregated cities is a familiar story today: insufficient work and opportunity, hard-bitten wage earners fighting and clawing for foot holds on security for themselves and their families. They lived in those days in a world of union solidarity (or exclusion) that was a combination of standoff by dynamite, mounted police and the corruptions of political patronage. Today they work at jobs that do not pay enough to support a family.

In 1964 what had seemed a matter of moral courage and persuasion in the South had become  more like an encounter with the four horsemen of the apocalypse by 1967.  In Dr. King’s last months he and his movement partners found themselves deciding whether to march against the monstrous realities of the Vietnam War or launch a domestic war on poverty. It would be hell either way. King was still dreaming but the familiar ground had changed under his feet.  Moral appeal in northern cities had few ears for the hearing of it.  

This was a different kind of theological problem.  Abruptly King’s vision, his transcendent call, had become a dream of integration into a world that did not really exist.  The main elements of the toxic mix he encountered are still our current reality fifty years later, only much more dangerous.  Today it connects to Syria, Egypt, Central Africa, Afghanistan and all the rest. Growing global inequality is making 2014 the year of living dangerously. Those apocalyptic horsemen are riding hard (traditionally conquest, war, famine and death).

Faith communities have a call, if they can hear it, to renew Dr. King’s drive to create an alternative imagination. The problem is that most faith communities have become comfort zones. They can be heard on any given day praying for themselves, their babies, their growing kids, their elderly parents, but not for the forty people killed yesterday in a raid by Boko Haram on Kawuri in Nigeria. And they study not; perpetual bible study, maybe, but usually not a political or sociological analysis of the problems to which their biblical studies may direct them. Such as these:

“ General Electric’s decision to open its first new assembly line in 55 years in Louisville, Ky [will offer jobs] at just over $13.50 an hour. That’s less than $30,000 a year

“Volkswagen…. is bringing around 2,000 fresh auto jobs to America [with a] beginning wage for assembly line workers of  $14.50 per hour, about half of what traditional, unionized workers employed by General Motors or Ford received.

“[These Volkswagen jobs will] cost Volkswagen $27 per hour…..in Germany, the average autoworker earns $67 per hour.

“In effect….Volkswagen has moved production from a high-wage country (Germany) to a low-wage country (the United States).”

                                                  [Wall Street analyst Steve Ratner, N. Y. Times 1/26/14]     

Martin Luther King, Jr. did go symbolically to Kawuri, only its name was Memphis. If his dream is to live on it must be given new configurations if peace doves are to fly in Chicago or Kawuri.   Not to follow the path of the King dream is to stay comfortable. That’s why this is the year of living dangerously.  We must go to Kawuri. There’s little time left to pack.

Hitting the Right's Pitch

        It was many years, centuries in fact, before the Visigoths overwhelmed Rome.  First they became insiders fighting barbarian competitors alongside Roman troops on the northern frontier. Perceiving the growing weakness in the Empire, the Visigoths gradually congealed, overwhelming, looting and destroying whole Roman cities.   

        Detroit is not Rome, but a look at it makes one ask when it was that the Nazis or some other enemy swept  in with their bombers?  Much of the city is utterly destroyed from neighborhood streets to elegant train stations . It’s the same story in many other cities.   The enemy air raids on Detroit, Youngstown, Cleveland came, of course, from a capitalism that can be called “classic” only because it went on its way unchallenged. 

     

         Is it happening now? 

         

         The Financial Times (1/14/14) headlines “A productivity crisis is stalking the global economy as most countries last year failed to improve their overall efficiency for the first time in decades.”  That’s econo-speak for too many people could not go back to work. In between the lines it means that the true goal of efficiency is to reduce labor costs, by finding a way workers will double their productivity so no one will notice the bread lines.  

Last Friday’s monthly Jobs Report from the Department of Labor (DOL) shouts the same tragic story.  There are 1.2 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 638,000 thousand fewer jobs on private payrolls in December than when the recession began in December 2007,” While Census Bureau data says the nation grew by another 11 million people. More people, fewer and fewer jobs.

         

            Chad Stone, Chief Economist at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities(on 1/10/14):

 “The share of the population with a job, which plummeted in the recession from 62.7 percent in December 2007 to levels last seen in the mid-1980s and has remained below 60 percent since early 2009, was 58.6 percent.'

                

          The real danger now comes not from metaphorical air raids but from a Right wing take-over built on the ruins of millions of people’s empty pocketbooks and lost homes—thanks to the Great Recession—and from a revival or racial scapegoating.  

          With the Obama mystique severely damaged by the gross mishandling of its own Affordable Health Care Act,  we find at least thirteen states in play for possible Republican senate victories; this on top of thirty-six state governorships all in Republican hands now.  It’s not paranoia to imagine a worst case scenario in which the prejudices of wounded people come to be exploited and then used to dominate national attitudes amid even more tightening economic conditions.  Models for radical conservative takeovers of government are ready at hand in Wisconsin and North Carolina, ready for the copying.  

        Bill Moyer’s Report describes it this way in North Carolina:

“Now…Republicans hold the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature and they are steering North Carolina far to the right: slashing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, providing vouchers to private schools, cutting unemployment benefits, refusing to expand Medicaid and rolling back electoral reforms, including voting rights.'

         The American Prospect writers, Kriss Kromm and Sue Sturgis describe the new policy strategy on the Right:

“…photo ID at the polls, slash the number of early-voting days, eliminate same-day registration during early voting, and delay by five years the time it takes for former felons to regain their voting rights…. ban parents from claiming their college children as dependents on their state taxes if those children vote on campus (as most students do)….[prohibit] the “mentally incompetent” from voting. “

         William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, writes in Politico describing his version of good news in 2014:

“an Obamacare-inspired Republican wave…that will not only sweep out red-state Democrats, but will also produce a gaggle of Republicans coming to the Senate to represent states Obama carried, including New Hampshire, Iowa, Michigan … and Virginia."

        Then there is Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, who shows another Right wing plank: successfully pushing his campaign to deprive public workers of collective bargaining rights and increase their share of payments for pensions and health care. He’s winning against Union-driven recall efforts.

        After the Fall months of good cheer about the recovering economy the December unemployment report demonstrates the nation has been drinking too much of the cool aide stuff.  Economist Stone continues: 

“December’s job growth (even with the revisions to earlier months) was well below the sustained job growth of 200,000 to 300,000 a month that would mark a robust jobs recovery…The unemployment rate was 6.7 percent in December, and 10.4 million people were unemployed….  The unemployment rate was 5.9 percent for whites (1.5 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession), 11.9 percent for African Americans (2.9 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession), and 8.3 percent for Hispanics or Latinos (2.0 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession)."

          Faith communities have missed many a pitch over the last several hundred years: remaining silent during the era of slavery; remaining silent (mostly) during the Jim Crow period; missing the call to support anti-war movements against the slaughter of several wars.  Since the time of Caesar Chavez and the massacres of Central America they've done better, especially in advocacy for refugees.  Now they need to hit the Right wing's ball that is polarizing government and deepening the growing open wound of inequality. 

The Sharon Syndrome

Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace talks have much in common with Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of Israel.  The wheezing peace talks roughly parallel Sharon’s last breaths, reported to be imminent.    Both have been kept alive artificially and both have actually been dead for years. Sharon became the author of Israel’s settlement movement while he was Housing Minister, a post he was forced into after he was held responsible as Israel’s General for the slaughter of Palestinians in the refugee camps at Shabra and Shatila in 1982.  His will still prevails.

           The familiar peace formula sponsored for years by the U. S. always asks the Palestinians to again compromise a little more over their borders in order to accept most of Israel’s settlement growth, now somewhere near 450,000 and counting. This is a familiar bad joke in the Middle East.  Every Israeli prime minister since Ben Gurion has approved new settlement construction.   

Heaping insult on injury in this very first week of 2014 the Israelis are insisting on protecting their security by requiring an agreement to its felt need to occupy a wide zone along the banks of the Jordan River from Jericho to the Galilee.  This is a low point  in dark humor since the Israelis for decades have occupied that western side of the Jordan with hundreds of thousands of acres of date palm plantations.

While many of the violent fires raging in the Middle East from Southern Sudan to Pakistan cannot be laid at the feet of Israel and its U. S. partner, the sheer hypocrisy, the affectation of moral legitimacy, of the U. S. posturing as honest peace broker, is like gasoline poured on the fires of abject poverty, illiteracy, and inequality and is feeding the growth of terrorism across North Africa all the way to Pakistan.  The fires are growing worse every day.

Behind these fires is a Britannica of theological material.  A guilt-ridden compact tied to the origins of the Holocaust has existed between Christians and Jews since WW II and has led both to a fresh purchase on Western triumphalism. The franchise lives on today in the form of a global imperialism of the wealthy in a framework of growing inequality. 

Generations of modern Christians and their denominations have no experience at all with the historic dogmas on which Anti-Semitism was based, but dutifully and periodically confess a symbolic complicity with the Holocaust. The result pulls the teeth on constructive criticism and dialogue and amounts to reality denial as generations of modern Jews continue to suffer from Holocaust fear in much the same way that pharmaceuticals advertise their cancer medications. It could happen to you.

These are theological chains that imprison everyone with their specious versions of history.  Jews adhere to an Israeli secular theology that uses biblical narratives about the land with little historical validity or meaning, preening for political support from their extreme Orthodox factions.   Christians, terrified of possible conviction for an anti-Semitism that is entirely foreign to them, support an Israeli right to land that takes priority over the Palestinians and Arab peoples in general.  Both faiths then buy into a compact that holds them to be both exceptional and morally superior to those around them.  It’s a compact that drives the U. S. Congress and Israel’s worst angels to guarantee fresh supplies of gasoline for the terrorist fires.

There is an alternative.   Here are great world religious traditions that could stand for something so drastically different—they could even stand together—and cut the tangled chains that imprison their better angels.   Christians, with their transcendent symbols of God without tribal allegiance who is aligned with the poor and outcast; the Jews with their high moral tradition of ethics rooted in righteousness, justice and equity. Islam, linked with Jews and Christians as people of the same book but with their own tradition expressed in capacious Mosques into which the most humble camel herder may come as one of God’s own.  (It is worth noting that the Christian-convened Councils of Nicaea included no camel herders.)

Advocacy for universal human dignity and equality, justice for all, genuine political righteousness, a just economic life—all are common themes among most world religions.  Such advocacy makes good New Year resolutions, and in case you’re interested they could be seen as a fresh epiphany.