We Are All Refugees

       A Brexit omen hangs over the coming U. S. Fall elections but in a foreign language whose key few seem to know.  Gone is the progressive Sanders momentum; gone the dominant Democratic party; gone a coherent Republican opponent.

       The latest Quinnipiac Poll today (6/29/16) is verification of the approaching danger, showing Clinton and Trump deadlocked, even after a week of bizarre Trump pronouncements (Waterboarding?).  This may not be a surprise to everyone, but aside from Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats seem to be winning very few new friends.  Trump on the other hand is gathering-in the sheaves and seems already to have a solid Brexit-style support community. Like the “leave” majority in Britain, a growing dangerous number of U. S. voters have stopped listening to the professional political leadership and media pundits. They’ve stopped caring about the Marquis of Queensbury rules of combat.  The Brexit majority has much in common with Donald Trump’s supporters. 

        This emerging landscape created by the 52% to 48% vote in Britain to leave the European Union reflects a British population that is refugee averse, increasingly caught in the stagnation of declining income prospects, fearful of terrorism within and without.  The truth in plain terms is that the anti-refugee movement in Britain and the United States is fired by the dawning realization that they themselves have become refugees in a world of obscene inequality. Brexit is the name of the new god,

        It is both sign and graven image: a sign of possible disaster approaching and a bit like an economic futures contracts—you might win but you’ll have to take large risks, and the Brexit God is making no promises; but then neither have Cameron or Clinton.

       A case of very bad mythical theology has created this 1 percent God who reigns over the trampled majority who only lately have stopped believing in the respectability of the 1 percent.  Assistant New York Times business editor, Gretchen Morgensen, describes a now familiar example of acceptable fraud in U. S. banking, giving the particulars of just one case. Writing last Sunday, June 26^th—she describes how Angelo Mozillo, former CEO of Countrywide Mortgage, had over-charged 600,000 of its customers and was at the center of the 2008 mortgage crisis meltdown.   She asked

“What about thousands of loans with exploding interest rates made to unsophisticated borrowers who had no ability to repay them? The abusive foreclosure practices that increased the burden on struggling people? The shattered lives?”

        The answer of the Obama administration? Mr Mozillo was told last week by the Justice Department  “that he was no longer under investigation in connection with civil mortgage fraud.”

        While the Brexit vote is an omen of rebellion the question is whether it can do more than replicate the unjust system that has prompted it.  Can high principles of justice, equity and fairness be adopted by this emerging revolution, or will it be consumed by a desperate search by the disenfranchised for another idol made of clay to be worshiped until it too collapses?

For the time being we are all refugees in a strange land.

Roosevelt's Ghost

       It’s worth betting real money that the Trump candidacy may blow up before or at the Republican convention.  If it does his replacement would probably be Governor John Kasich of Ohio—a prominent participant in the Primary contests with the mojo to defeat Hillary Clinton.  Absent a rejected Trump remaining in the race, a Kasich-like nominee would face the Democratic leadership with the possibility of seeing Hillary Clinton not only lose the election but lose her anticipated momentum to maintain and enlarge Democratic control of the Senate. This is why the Sanders candidacy remains in play.

       Both the Democrats and the liberal news media have had trouble moving from opportunistic day-to-day political coverage to the badly needed deeper probe into growing inequality in both the American and global community.  Sanders’  progressive policy proposals stand out because the ghost of the FDR New Deal version of the Democratic party—a party aligned by Roosevelt with working class and middle class folks—haunts today’s Democrats.  Thomas Franks, author of “What Happened to Kansas” and a new book, “Listen Liberal,” asserts that the FDR version of the Democratic Party has become the Bill and Hillary Clinton party of the top ten percent with deep commitments to the new class of technocrats, professionals, Wall Street wizards and Silicon Valley CEOs.  

       These are the CEOs who shipped millions of jobs to China to make their unprecedented fortunes.  It was a shift that left a third of Silicon Valley, South Chicago and the South Bronx with an irremediable jobless population. It’s terrible for the permanently jobless or underemployed, but working and middle class folks are almost equally stricken--the ones who teach in your local school or work on the fire department—but can’t afford a house to live in-town.  

        Lest a line form to cast the first stone, this class line can be found from Asia to your local church or synagogue.  Virtually every church in the United States (there are notable exceptions) holds services for their middle class congregants just a few miles from the bullet-infested narcotic-laden streets of their city, or from the migrants bent-over in the fields to pick their strawberries. Everyone can see that the political tempest is growing more violent from Afghanistan to the assassination of labour party MP Jo Cox in England to the Orlando madman equipped by Congress with an AR-15 automatic rifle.

        At the bottom of the Mid-East crisis is the vast inequality that creates unspeakable wars and that has so far killed 400,000 people in the Syrian conflict.

“the International Organization for Migration said that thousands of migrants had died trying to cross seas and deserts…. Along one of the busiest sea routes to Europe, a third of the dead were children.” 

       This global humanitarian and economic inequality crisis shattering communities world-wide is the real issue but it’s not clear that today’s Democratic party wants to face that storm.   While Bernie Sanders’ stance about economic injustice can belong to Hillary as well, she is very unlikely to win without a partnership with him.  Roosevelt’s ghost this week made it plain that this will be a hard sell. Sanders will be in Philadelphia with 1,900 delegates!  

Unable to Mourn the Other

    Two thousand refugees drowned in the Mediterranean last week; briefly noted, easily forgotten. Their deaths are hardly mentioned if at all by candidates and the silence of faith leaders speaks volumes. Apparently these are “the others.”

        David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee, provides context: two different desperate refugee streams are fleeing violence: one stream from Syria, Lebanon and Iraq trying to cross to Greece. Another fleeing from countries like Egypt, Somalia, Libya and Ethiopia on a longer journey trying to reach Sicily. Refugees who survive the sea passage say they did not understand in advance the terrible danger of turbulent seas, their flimsy inflated raft, and possible death.  But they say “If we don’t go we will die here.”  An interfaith fellowship of dieing?

There’s a profound analogy here to rich nation failures to see the mortal danger of letting growing domestic and global inequality go unaddressed. The dots can be connected from inequality to desperate acts and more warfare. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports income inequality now is at its highest level in half a century

“The average income of the richest 10% of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10% across the OECD, up from seven times 25 years ago.”

        Perhaps the end of the long Primary Elections season will make it possible for people to see what is really at stake in their political decisions including, the refugees experts tell us, those  who may die in coming weeks.

        It is a colossal disaster and there is such silence in the faith communities, to say nothing of the candidates. It suggests that the inability to stop and mourn is the real death knell of civilization because it is the end of a moral common thread.  Consumed by self-absorption, the policy debates fail if “the others” can be so easily dis-remembered.    Not even a Bach chorale can express the sorrow of boatloads of hundreds of drowning children, men and women because they are “the others.” The Christian tradition Bach expressed easily lapses into a liturgy that helps people mourn for Jesus and themselves, but not for “the others.” The dangerous quicksand of Jewish tribalism likewise subjects “others” to subsidiarity to a chosen people. 

       Of course we will not mourn unless the others become our brothers and sisters, our children.  The ancient texts require a new song, a new chorale, that defines an inclusive and whole global family in moral terms, that compels action and elects governments that will enact it.