Divorcing Faith from Capitalism

        Two kinds of pathos have emerged from the slaughter of the innocents in Charleston.  Their blood documents our national failure to create a culture of hope and opportunity for millions of young adults, a failure that keeps turning disaffection into the madness of Charleston-style attacks. 

Equally poignant are the faith testimonies at Mother Emmanuel AME Church, partly overflowing with expressions of love and forgiveness that seemed more like calls for anger suppression and crowd control.  No new movement either for gun control or a program to redistribute wealth through tax reforms has emerged; no new proposals have been forthcoming to reduce income inequality in order to put more young adults into higher education and technical training. 

In the King era—constantly evoked today--the Southern Christian Leadership Conference always enunciated fresh policy proposals and organized movements to seek action. Today’s rising African Americans and Latino educated classes are rightly pursuing professional careers that would not have existed for most of them fifty years ago. They are walking through a door opened by the action-focused King era.  But there’s been a change. A new systemic global inequality has created a global population with no prospects for a positive and constructive future. The question is whether there is a common witness that can be mobilized to address this calamity? 

In his column written two days ago David Brooks writes in the NY Times about this disaffection in the U. S. as faith systems seem increasingly broken and in decline:

   

“We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.”         (NY Times 6/30/15)

Abroad, the “Isis” era has irrevocably broken the West’s centuries old cultural claim that its Christian-based faith produced its legitimate exercise of power.  A new Islamic puritanism is rising among  the African/Middle East/Asian revolutions of the desperate poor.  Domestic parallels  to this are clear as growing violence in the U. S. by estranged young adults has become a counterpoint  to chaos from Libya  to Afghanistan. 

Perhaps we can now realize that the “American” freedom that seemed so attractive to us usually depended on someone else’s servitude.  Through the practice of slavery, Native American genocide, Jim Crow sharecropping and wage laborers, capital owners have enjoyed an unregulated distribution of wealth. Their control of legislatures and courts has been the winning formula for this dominant minority in our capitalist system.  

An effective response to today’s growing inequality and the chaos it is creating means directly challenging the link between faith and the financial success of market capitalism. Today’s active entrepreneurs are too easily pulled into the notion that markets are either not a moral issue—a rampant belief these days in Silicon Valley—or that their claim of positive impacts is proof of their moral standing. 

Almost fifty years ago, in 1968, the assassination within a two month period of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy heralded an end to the Poor People’s Campaign and the Lyndon Johnson War on Poverty. It was followed in the 1970’s by a tidal wave of U .S. investment transfers that effectively ended the opportunities that had caused the great migration of African Americans in the first place to move from the deep south to job opportunities in northern industry. 

Economist Anthony Atkinson documents that as job opportunities at better wages increased from the 1920s to the 1960s inequality declined. “The top one percent owned 36 percent of the wealth in the 1920s and then declined to 24 percent in the 1950s.”  But as American investors moved their money overseas and U. S. steel mills and manufacturing began to shut down the top one percent came to own 50 percent of the wealth today. [Inequality: What Can Be Done; Harvard Press 2015]

The Confederate battle flag may come down from the state capitols but the task of Christians, other faith communities, and other people of good will in 2015 is to insist, en mass, that inequality is addressed in legislatures and enacts drastic changes in tax policies; changes that will move income from the grossly rich into the homes of ordinary Americans and to people all over the world.  A liturgy of justice for all is needed again; major social movements of the people, by the people and for the people.

This is the sixtieth issue of Public Liturgies and we intend it to be the last one.  Thanks to our followers and readers.   

Peacable Kingdom or Apocalypse?

"The policeman who climbed on the hood of a car last month in Cleveland and fired 49 shots through the windshield at an unarmed couple has been found not guilty on two counts of voluntary manslaughter. Last week. Judge John P O’Donnell said prosecutors failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the bullets fired were the cause of death of Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell. USA Today May 20, 2015

   

Would this common realm of purchased judges and corrupt city government be different if it offered people a decent and fair world for their lives? Could we expect that this daily havoc, riven as it is by racial and religious resentment and growing inequality, might turn out differently if it offered people everywhere a set of  different expectations? In the face of the prevailing madness a new threshold for change is beginning to open and brave hearts, young and old, mid-life adults all  need to walk toward it. Below is a summary of new policies as well as the hypocrisies that challenge it. 

These serious steps on a path forward grow from a global context and international perspectives. Economic policy experts including Thomas Piketty (France), Anthony Atkinson (England), Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner (USA)—joined by many others--are laying out major suggestions for a radically different social and economic antidote to the rising tide of violence in the U. S. and around the world. These "peacable kingdom" stepping stones include:

• A Rising Real Wage for all
• Guaranteed Public Sector Jobs for the unemployed at a living wage
• Debt free college
• Universal Family Benefits
• A Pension for all
• Inheritance for all
• Asset Development for all, including property ownership
• Transferring stock market wealth to the citizenry
• Progressive Taxation especially on wealth
• Capital endowments for each new young adult financed from estate taxes.      

Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School helps launch the new agenda for a Peacable  Kingdom with historical perspective.

“The postwar boom [fifty years ago] was a time of broadly shared prosperity, when working- and middle-class people not only enjoyed steadily increasing incomes but were also able to accumulate lifetime wealth. The measures that made possible this wealth-broadening included expansion of home ownership under a reliable, well-governed system of mortgage finance; the development of a retirement system, with Social Security complemented by private pensions; debt-free higher education; and rising real wages. Each of these instruments interacted with the others.”

"Today, these mechanisms have all gone into reverse. Meanwhile, the capacity of the already-rich, the parentally endowed, and the well-situated to accumulate financial wealth has only intensified. Wealth inequality gets less attention than income inequality, but it is every bit as important. And the two are related. Wealth helps generate income and the capacity to earn income. Decent income increases the capacity to save and to amass wealth. As public systems for wealth-broadening collapse, private wealth within families provides asset endowments to the young and positions the next generation to become upper-income earners like their parents.

British economist, Anthony Atkinson, as cited by French economist, Thomas Piketty (New York Review of Books, June 25, 2015) calls for

"Universal family benefits financed by a return to progressive taxation, guaranteed public-sector jobs at a minimum wage for the unemployed, democratization of access to property ownership via an innovative national savings system, with guaranteed returns for the depositors.

"Atkinson, writing in the context of British policy issues proposes establishing an “inheritance for all” program. “This would take the form of a capital endowment assigned to each young citizen as he or she reached adulthood, at the age of eighteen. All such endowments would be financed by estate taxes and a more progressive tax structure. In concrete terms, Atkinson estimates that, with current revenue from the British estate tax, it would be possible to finance a capital endowment of slightly more than £5,000 for each young adult. He calls for a far-reaching reform of the system of inheritance taxation, and especially for greater progressivity with regard to the larger estates. (He proposes an upper rate of 65 percent, as with the income tax.) These reforms would make it possible to finance a capital endowment on the order of £10,000 per young adult." 
Much of this has application in somewhat different language or terms in the U. S.

Current very negative social trends illustrate why the election season must grow into a season of non-violent political reform; non-violent but nevertheless, reforms that are revolutionary. From the Federal Reserve and economist Paul Krugman we learn that:

* For the most affluent 10 percent of American families, average incomes rose by 10 percent from 2010 to 2013. For the rest of the population, average incomes were flat or falling.

* The least affluent families had the largest declines. Average incomes dropped by 8 percent for the bottom 20 percent of families

* The top 3 percent of families hold 44.8 percent of wealth in 1989, then 51.8 percent in 2007 and 54.4 percent in 2013.

* 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

        Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich summarizes our current context: “The key to understanding the rise in inequality isn’t technology or globalization. It’s the power of the moneyed interests to shape the underlying rules of the market.”    USA Today on May 20th reported that although the Obama Administration postures in the direction of a clamp–down on market rules, actual enforcement by the Securities and Exchange Commission casts this in doubt:

         “Outlining what she termed a "brazen display of collusion," the new U.S. Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, charged that traders in the nearly unregulated $5.3-trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market colluded in rigging foreign exchange prices of U.S. dollars and euros from Dec. 2007 to Jan. 2013. Five major banks: Citicorp(C), JPMorgan Chase(JPM), London-based Barclays(BCS) and Royal Bank of Scotland(RBS) agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay more than $5.5 billion in collective penalties to settle charges that their traders routinely manipulated the world's foreign-exchange market for their own profit.”

      

           "Yet no bank official was required personally to admit personal guilt nor were any charged; just their companies.  Banking experts predict the settlements are not expected to have a material impact on banking financial operations. Lynch even confessed, so to speak, that the banks are "working with their regulators" to obtain any waivers that might be required to continue normal operations.                                                                                    

               This is the agenda that must be pursued over the coming election months and should become the subject of study and discussion among community organizations, public interest groups and faith groups.  It's the path to a more peacable kingdom.

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Sickness unto Death

The pitiless assignment for the mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other African American mayors over the past 50 year has been to serve as cover for the reality behind the scenes. The drill is that a minority mayor will placate the deeply disadvantaged, proving the possibility of exceptions. However, the popular understanding upon which public support for police behavior rests is the perceived reality on the ground: that the minority problem—aka the Black problem--derives from an inferior people. Like slavery, which enshrined inferiority as a moral reason for enslavement, the common understanding today supports police forces that brutalize and murder across the country. Less intentionally perhaps, it amounts to social control in the face of deepening inequality.  Yet even many deeper analyses explaning reasons for police murders in Baltimore, New York and Cleveland may miss a deeper reality: the “sickness unto death,” described by Christian theologian Soren Kierkegaard as “ultimate despair.”   

Kiekegaard’s “sickness” comes from an age that struggled to find integrity in a post-biblical 18^th and 19^th century that often replaced monarchy with personal and private rapacity. It was that unregulated personal aggrandizement that created the slaves, built the factories and now flood the few with the wealth produced by the many.  The police can be said to actually kill the losers in the service of the winners, a coterie to which they are unlikely ever to belong.  In plain English the police murders and urban upheavals will continue and may worsen because in the Silicon Valleys the Porsches, Teslas and Lamborghinis crowd the streets. The “sickness unto death” is a plague alive within our blood stream because the underlying problem of inequality of income, education, and quality jobs is worsening.

Perhaps, like Ms Rawlings-Blake, the police also deserve our pity because for generations that is what they think they see: a basically flawed uneducated class of people whose growing numbers of children born out of wedlock, captured by drugs, frequently incarcerated confirms both police prejudices and a despair that invites brutality.  

What they actually see, of course, is the enduring slave economy that built an America dependant on an endless supply of very cheap labor.  Now the despair deepens because much of the available cheap labor is no longer needed by the hi-tech, global economy.  What greater despair for us all than thousands of refugees without viable livelihoods  crowding on rafts and leaking ships to escape North African terror groups, then to drown at sea?

This is now our global situation. Not enough work, no money for stability, no future.   

Nothing short of a political revolution can adequately respond to this national and global crisis. Its beginnings may be in the presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist, expected to announce this week; or in a re-born Hillary Clinton, or a re-translated Jeb Bush.  Elections in 2016 could prove a new beginning of an end to despair by ending the growth of inequality. Kierkegaard’s spiritual language is about the self becoming true and transparently present in the eternal power of love and justice that established it. Marx’s version is that only equity can end alienation. Until this change begins we will continue to suffer the sickness unto death. 

Truth-Telling and the New Kissinger

Distant bells are tolling as AIPAC and Netanyahu’s Israel face a descent from the strange prestige won by killing Palestinians (1767 of them last summer) and blocking their right to statehood.  Israel’s worst fears are not threats from Iran—a hugely ballyhooed bogeyman—but the end of easy living through a Congress well-bribed by pro-Israel dollars pumped into local congressional districts. Now, a few weeks after Netanjahu’s triumphal address to Congress, the reality is an Israel twisting in the wind of a chaotic, internally feuding Middle East with dueling narratives between the Saudis and Iraqis and the U. S. in alliance with Netanyahu’s devil, Iran, against ISIS.  

New days dawning ahead suggest that the U. S./Iran nuclear deal must go through because it creates the possibility of rational alliances with Iran against Arab extremists.  Lies abound all around, but Israel’s familiar devil—Iran—has been replaced by numberless others: Houthis, Al Quaeda in Yemen, Boko Haran in Nigeria, Shabab  in Somalia, Muslim factional wars in Libya and Syria. It’s a long list.

The entrance of Henry Kissinger onto the stage last week is a reminder that the exercise of power is often a dark art.  Recall, please, that during  the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (perhaps before you were born, gentle reader) it was Kissinger who persuaded then President Nixon to resupply Israel’s army as it reeled from the Egyptian surprise attack. The Arab nations retaliated with their OPEC oil price rise that wrecked vast areas of both the U. S. and world economy, forcing gasoline rationing and a huge price inflation on U.S consumers. In Bangladesh the OPEC price rise meant mass starvation because people had no fuel at the inflated OPEC price.  No act of Congress or President Nixon—not even an accounting of how the pros and cons of the Kissinger recommendations might have been carefully weighed—was ever offered.  The Kissinger twist was that it both saved Israel and over the years preserved U. S. access to vast Arab oil reserves. 

We can expect more dark room power moves in coming months, but the stakes are no longer the U.S./Iran nuclear deal as one could easily suppose, but about Republican ambitions for the 2016 elections.  Oligarchic power, not oil, is today’s new fuel of choice. The decline of Israel’s influence in the U . S. in the face of these widespread and complex struggles in the Middle East is behind the softening of Senator Corker’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee bi-partisan agreement. It signaled an Israel by-passed by actually reducing the time frame for debating the pros and cons about lifting sanctions on Iran.  Look for the return of President Obama’s veto power by mid-summer.

This arrival of Henry Kissinger into the fray with a Wall Street Journal OpEd (March 5, 2015, together with another former secretary of state, George Schulz) opposes the Administration’s nuclear deal but is actually about the art of converting a portion of the traditional Jewish democrat vote into a Republican victory in 2016.  Not Iran, not saving Israel, but the opportunity to cement rule by oligarchy in the future U. S. seems to be the latest Kissinger dream.  As this profoundly immoral evil rises over us, we may once again note with regret the clear decline of faith community courage to resist Voltaire’s Panglossian version of the world. Will faith communities resist their new assignment: to paper-over the reality of our new masters and their regime of permanent inequality and chronic poverty?  Note Dean Baker's comment on your right about the looming destruction of the Affordable Care Act. Resistance will mean this kind of truth-telling.  That’s the Godly mission.     

The King Years Then and Now

        In 1968 when Martin Luther King came to Memphis three years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, his support of the Sanitation Workers’ strike signaled growing awareness of evidence that the key to racial justice would have to come from more income equality. Planning for poor people’s marches was already on the drawing boards of the NAACP and the SCLC.  Dr. King plunged into the Memphis strike to bring along his own inherently conservative church folk and local unions. The day after his assassination Coretta Scott King led 40,000 people on a silent march through Memphis streets. The Mayor finally folded, granting Sanitation Workers union recognition and wage gains, literally over Dr. King’s dead body.

        The road has been mostly down-hill since then. Fifteen years after Selma the economic heart of U. S. cities with the largest African American populations was destroyed by investment banking decisions to shift assets into the more profitable global economy.  African Americans and Latinos who had migrated North for the better factory jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago and L.A. found themselves  suddenly out of work. As U. S. Steel mills, machine tool and manufacturing industries were allowed to go without modernization, most closed forever. This began today’s repeating cycles of broken families, causing a new meandering migration. Skilled workers re-trained for jobs that did not appear; or moved their families repeatedly from one temporary job to another. Divorce often overtook them or they learned to scrape by in broken families.  The Wall Street banking system made billions from its global investments, but economic opportunities vanished for tens of millions of working people. Many of the same workers were further ravaged by more recent mortgage fraud caused by the same banks. .

         During the recent Great Recession starting in 2008, new policies to support public works and regulate control of wealth by corporate capitalism did not prevail as the TARP bailout moved forward and the Obama justice department declined  to prosecute the bankers who made millions homeless. 

         This is why President Obama’s oration last Sunday in Selma is more like a bouncing ground ball through the gap between 2^nd and 3^rd base. No one scored, no runners advanced.    

        Sadly neither the President’s hopeful oratory nor the speeches of candidates to replace him from either party reach as far as today’s growing gap between rich and poor. As democratic participation by people pre-occupied with just scraping by diminishes, the wealthiest one percent owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth.  The President has preferred to appeal to the nation’s historic values rather than jailing the bankers.  

“What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this?” the President asked: “what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

        Words without meaning seem now more abundant in the President’ rhetoric. In our last blog we wrote about the rise of fascism in the early 1900s as a consequence of the vacuum left by religion’s loss of political power and moral credibility.  When the Great Depression of 1929 followed WW I some political leaders in the U. S. and abroad began to think that democracy was too unwieldy, too subject to corruption and petty leadership fights. The answer, they thought, would have to be militarily authoritarian governance that would permit decisive decision-making, disciplining the unruly masses, and controlling even their corporations and bankers. In Europe, despairing of either faith or a reliable democracy, Italian and German fascism and Russian Stalinism emerged to replace democratic dreams. In the U.S. after 1900 a progressive movement blossomed for decades but has now faded under the impact of global corporations.

         We appear to be at the fascist-style juncture once again, with the Republicans determined to abstain from democratic negotiation and compromise while the Democrats continue unwilling to sternly regulate banking in the public interest.  People are now in the streets being shot by Police and shooting back. Such chaos calls for credible moral leadership.  It can’t begin with Mrs. Clinton’s email files. More on this next week. 

        

GODS FOR SALE

       The gods are for sale these days in case you hadn't noticed. Employable gods became available with the death of God 300 years ago after philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Reimarus, suggested that reason could replace revelation. Since then there has been little recourse to reason but the spiritual vacuum created by dying religious authority has spawned various divine inventions such as a fascination with violence. Historian Tony Judt has written that what fired the growth of fascism among young people at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was “precisely the bloody deadly aspect of war” that came to be celebrated as “the defining moment of their youth.” We see a fresher version in the film American Sniper that glorifies the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the honor conferred by lost American blood.  

In the past half century another attraction followed the Second Vatican Council with Catholics joining the Protestants in stressing God as personal. Creeping into modern liturgies is the possessive "our God," or worse, "my God." You can have a sense of ownership. Instead of Barth's "totally other" the new version of God is just like you, just a little better.

A new age of preferences, choices and special privileges has emerged about gods writ small. Such is the case with Netanyahu’s Israel.  Bibi” began his address to the U. S. Congress this week by reminding all present that “we share the common destiny of promised lands.”  This trump card, little noted by the media, was played early in his opening hand (on page one) to remind us that the god of Israel and the god of Puritan exceptionalism have the shared trait of being in our employ.  Implicitly, a state of warfare exists permanently with all those other nations that lack such a divine promise.

        There is a narcotic effect in “promised land” theology that places employable gods in the service of profound inequality and violence.  Ethics, reason, shared development resources, an end to African and Middle East poverty, global citizenship for all are goals that recede beyond the horizon.

  

        Middle East leaders know, of course, that Israel has an arsenal of an estimated 80 nuclear warheads. They also know that the rhetoric at the joint session of congress was little more  than a plank in Netanyahu’s re-election campaign.  In the U. S. the same rhetoric of godly violence provides congressional leaders with strategies for their re-election.  It creates good deals for military contractors in their district who sell weapons-related hardware to Israel (who buy it with American money granted by the Congress) and, happily, will finance their next election campaign. 

        Israel with its nuclear arsenal is profoundly equipped to annihilate all god’s enemies, including Iran.  There is this problem however.  There are other god’s for hire who command an overweening devotion from their followers who are at work with their own blood sacrifices: inspiring vast networks of suicide bombers and endless violent Jihad.  Boston-style bombers or Paris-style assassins could be coming to your own mall soon.

   

        This melancholy theology of Israel and U. S. god-given primacy takes on different shapes and forms around the world and generates many cousins: White on Black police shootings on an almost daily basis remembers the day of legitimate, legal slavery.  Sunni superiority over Shiites in Syria revives ancient authoritarianism. Documented versus undocumented neighbors revive ideas about those who are justly “called” and those left behind.

        Courtesy of Netanyahu and Congress the bad old days are back. They threaten everyone with the whirlwind born of all the gods for sale.   The antidote is a religious (or humanitarian) spirit that insists on a God who is not for sale, and whose other name is justice. 

The Very Stones Cry Out

        As photos and bios are published of the seventeen tragically killed in the twin Paris terror attacks, the missing-in-action provide the best clues to the attacker's motivation.  A few hundred “others” also murdered in the same week will have no memorial parade.  Reuters reported 35 killed and dozens wounded by a bomb outside a police college in Saana, the capital of Yemen.  Earlier the same week a bomb killed 26 at a cultural center in Ibb city.   A suicide attack in Iraq killed 23 people. A bomb exploded outside Samarra killing 8 and wounded 23. Two child suicide bombers and another bomber are said to have killed hundreds in Nigeria in the name of Boko Haram.  There will be no photos, bios or solemn marches because these dead are largely undocumented--meaning almost no one apparently is asking--and of course they are not “our” people.  

        The metaphor of stones appears in Luke’s gospel that tells of  religious leaders asking Jesus to silence the crowds as he enters Jerusalem. The crowds are celebrating his struggle against their impoverishment: by Roman rule and corrupt religious leaders. Jesus replies “If these were silent the very stones would cry out.”  Just so, these dead today, these “other” people, unacknowledged by our Western values, cry out.

        Sony Pictures and Paris satirists (now sadly dead) make clear that anyone still searching for clues to the meaning of it all must grasp that the license they claim to celebrate freedom for inappropriate satire and bad films is a marker of their (and our) superiority.  At the Golden Globe awards this week actress Tina Fey treated this superiority with appropriate irony. Feigning loyalty to Sony she reported North Korea’s bitter critique of its new film, “The Interview,” then snapped “and that wasn't the worst review it got…all of us were [forced] to pretend we wanted to see it.” 

        The very stones cry out in the videos of the senseless Staten Island police choke hold killing and the point blank shot police fired at a 12 year old in Cleveland. The police killings point to the new shape of race and class difference. It does not celebrate White, Western superiority—that idea is out of date, an expression of Ku Klux Klan liturgies and colonialist economic rationales. Instead, what we see is a settled world of permanent inequality and a picture of policing systems needed to discipline those who will never be winners. The World Bank provides clues to the new shape of things: 

• Average Middle East and African Gross National income per capita is $3,456. In France it’s $41,420. In the U. S. it’s $53,960.
• The Pew Research Center reports on the fifty years gap between median incomes in the Hispanic and Black communities compared with white incomes. Today the gap is fifty-nine percent less income for Blacks and 60% less for Hispanics.  
• Black incarceration rates are six times White rates. Latino rates three times greater.

        That’s our Orwellian world today, dead bodies and all. Any hope of changing this lies now with the faith and human rights communities and must be dedicated to lots of shouting and civic action.