Labor Day’s Inequality Flood and the Roots of Authoritarianism

         The question for faith communities on Labor Day 2017 is whether they can own their share of responsibility for today’s unanswered inequality and rising authoritarianism. Flooded Houston, the epi-center of a fossil fuels empire that created enormous wealth by turning land into unlimited concrete for profitable development is now the scene of immeasurable human catastrophe. As with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans the disaster scenes in Houston pulls back the curtain on a city whose people live only on the margin of the empire of oil.

        Houston ranks as the 15th most unequal city among the nation's 50 largest according to the Brookings Institute. On April 7^th 2016 the Houston Chronicle reported

“The richest 5 percent of households here earn nearly 12 times more than the poorest 20 percent. About 156,000 of the city's households have an income under $18,759.

     

       The current state of public policy about this income inequality in the U. S. persistently avoids such realities.  State government in Missouri is cutting back minimum wage increases approved by St. Louis city voters. New Trump tax policies announced four days ahead of Labor Day prescribe “reforms” that primarily help the rich and add to the national debt.  The real “wall” supported by big money players is their strategic investment in primary elections that look toward the mid-terms of 2018. Their clear purpose seems not about  improving wages and working conditions but how to extend the warp of the economy in favor of their peers at the top of the income pyramid. The top 1 to 5 percent.

       A positive alternative strategy from faith communities concerned with the common good will require unprecedented commitment to new interfaith formations and theologically meaningful alliances with secular organizations who share a high moral purpose to meet the needs of the common good.  Bonhoeffer's "saints without god."

      

       How religion—so popular in America—and  endemic inequality have come to share the same boat is not a pretty story and begins with the slave economy that built the first several hundred years of the very Christian Americas; a continent whose conquerors were  comfortable with the normative belief  that human nature was a biologically determined hierarchy. 

      

       Even at the founding of the U. S., although the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton detested slavery he still believed human nature was a natural class hierarchy and fitted it to his vision for the nation.  Correcting the picture portrayed in the musical, “Hamilton,” Cornell  political historians Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick describe a Hamilton who loathed “the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which he lived…[he]clearly envisioned the greatness of a future empire enabled by drastic inequalities of wealth and power.” (NY Times 6/20/16)

       While the new Constitution (designed mostly by slave owners) was less extreme, there was a dominant belief in an elitism of “nature” that was held almost universally until after the mid 20th century  and was applied in the Protestant imprint on U. S. culture that made second class citizens of millions of Catholic and Jewish workers brought to America to work for the biologically superior first class white, Protestant owners of the thriving steel mills, factories and mines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Such superiority of religious identity made for 90 hour work weeks, child labor, and 12 hour days in sweat shops employing immigrant women legitimate expressions of the Christian righteousness of owners of wealth and power.  

      

       It’s doubtful if any of today’s Silicon Valley-style masters of the universe hold such ideological views of human nature but their instinctive decisions suggest they remain children born of the same mold.  The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality In the U. S. reports that in 2016 the U. S. top one percent own 41.8 percent of the wealth.   

       The pre-eminent economists and political science researchers—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman   reported that at the close of 2016 the bottom half of the country had been shut out from income growth for the last 40 years.

·                     The average pretax earnings of an American in the bottom 50 percent by income was $16,197 in 2014, a nearly invisible 2.6 percent gain over 40 years. Over the same period, the top 10 percent of Americans saw their pretax incomes grow by 231 percent.     

        Three consequences of this staggering inequality shape Labor Day 2017 realities and underlie the nation’s current vulnerability to bizarre expressions of power that underlie the Constitutional crisis that could occur if the President, any President, manages  to suspend the power of courts by exercising the power to pardon those whom a court has judged guilty.

      

        Such chaotic consequences  are all in the category of cause and effect and flow from the consequence of millions of manufacturing jobs and new economy high tech jobs exported to off-shore locations like China and South Korea over the past 40 years; with the further consequence of placing  downward pressure on U. S. workers’ wages and benefits; leading in turn to an explosion of contingent work (contract) jobs that offer almost no benefits like a pension, health insurance or guaranteed job protection and security.  

          Forbes Magazine estimates forty percent of today’s workforce are independent contract workers. This third consequence has now mutated through career ranges that run from truck and Uber drivers to programmers and highly skilled technicians. 

      

          The net effect is that the gains of a century of struggle for equity for miners and factory workers have now been put into reverse gear, bringing us to a moment when only one in ten workers belong to unions compared with 30 percent of the labor force unionized forty years ago.  Worse are anecdotal reports that the pressure on today’s contingent private contractors is pushing many of them back to the 90 hour work weeks of the 1890’s and 1900’s.

      This tragic system of racism and religious-based classism handicaps the potential today of people of faith to join together to counter the rise of authoritarians. Racism forced Black churches to exist separately. The ownership and managerial classes that built the tall steeple Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational edifices locked denominations into a sociology of segregation and inequality visible in the suburbs of most American towns and cities.  

        The fateful pattern of church-based class division developed from the same inequality that now divides Houston and the rest of the U. S.  People then and now who worked mostly with their hands and backs could not be comfortable in churches where their bosses were sitting. It was reciprocated by the managers of the dominating class.  Workers attended “other” churches: Baptist, Church of God, Adventists.  Catholics and Jews lived a world apart in liturgies and traditions foreign to and unknown to the wealthier Protestant world.   In other words, religion in America in spite of all the good it does symbolizes the racism and classism that is the basic shape of American life and underlies today’s rising threat of authoritarianism.

      There are better angels in this history.  The 19th Century glory of the churches (before they were cemented into their respective sociological strata) was their battle against slavery through the Abolitionist Movement. The 20th Century glory of the churches was the Social Gospel preached against the outrages of capitalism that exploited women and children and created vast urban slums filled with sweat shops.  Christian and Jewish socialist movements were an early twentieth century glory in the U. S. advocating for workers to form worker circles and partnerships that grew to become unions.   

       It still required decades for church leaders like Walter Rauschenbusch to convince at least some Protestant groups that the teachings of Jesus and socialism had many values in common. The two Roosevelts played respective roles in the first forty years of this Progressive Movement that reflected a coalition between religion and secular humanitarians such as Jane Addams at Chicago’s Hull house.  This reform era created major workplace and public health reforms (Theodore) and supporting the lawful right of unionization (FDR).

      

       The tragedies of the 20th Century interrupted this momentum. The Soviet Communist Revolution put the Capitalist era on high alert and gave corporate owners an excuse to resist collective organizing and limit the power of unions to organize.  WW II became a cauldron from which the shape of today’s global-wide inequality grew. The deep wound that now exists among an abandoned workforce makes them vulnerable to the pied pipers of the Trump era and the winners in the digital economy.  

      

        There is good news! A new glory is on the rise this Labor Day in the form of Moral Monday movements, growing Industrial Areas Foundation organizations, PICO National Networks and other non-denominational movements for justice that are being born in the empty public space created by too many insular traditional churches and synagogues that exist as fortress silos amid a secular word they seem inclined to avoid.  And the younger generations care little about the segregated life of congregations, They’ve moved on and mostly outside organized religious life.

       

         In the coming weeks many chickens will be coming home to roost beginning with the incalculable and unanticipated costs of the Houston inundation. The Congressional budget wars immediately ahead will become struggles between the haves and have less with the have nots pushed to the back of economic priorities.    The new interfaith religion of community unity without racism and committed to equity for all will be severely tested as will the Saunders-style spirit of progressive policy reform. 

      

        Labor Day 2017 means everyone a teacher, everyone an organizer, all hands on deck! What we do, not what we say, will define belief.

Labor Day and the Roots of Authoritarianism

The question for faith communities on Labor Day 2017 is whether they can own their share of responsibility for the unanswered inequality and rising authoritarianism in the U. S.  Becoming part of the answer could mean a metamorphosis beyond reach in the same sense that halting the rise of autocracy could be beyond reach.  A positive answer surely means unprecedented commitment to new interfaith formations and theologically meaningful alliance with the communities and organizations of high moral and ethical purpose.   Bonhoeffer’s “saints without god.”

How religion and inequality share the same boat is not a pretty story. A slave economy built the first several hundred years of the very religious Americas that was comfortable with the normative belief  that human nature was a biologically determined hierarchy.  At the founding of the U. S. although the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton destested slavery he still believed human nature was a natural class hierarchy and fitted it to his vision for the nation.  Correcting the picture portrayed in the musical, “Hamilton,” Cornell  political historians Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick describe a Hamilton who loathed “the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which he lived….No founder of this country more clearly envisioned the greatness of a future empire enabled by drastic inequalities of wealth and power.” (NY Times 6/20/16)

While the new Constitution (designed mostly by slave owners) was less extreme, more important was a belief in an elitism of “nature” that was held almost universally until after the mid 20^th century  and was applied in the Protestant imprint on U. S. culture that made second class citizens of millions of Catholic and Jewish workers brought to America to work for the biologically superior first class white, Protestant owners of the thriving steel mills, factories and mines of the late 19^th and early 20th centuries.  Such superiority of religious identity made 90 hour work weeks, child labor and sweat shops employing poor women legitimate expressions of the Christian righteousness of owners of wealth and power.  

It’s doubtful if any of today’s Silicon Valley-style masters of the universe hold such ideological views of human nature but their instinctive decisions suggest they remain children born of the same mold.  The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality In the U. S. reports that in 2016 the U. S. top one percent own 41.8 percent of the wealth.   The pre-eminent economists and political science researchers—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman   reported that at the close of 2016 the bottom half of the country had been shut out from income growth for the last 40 years.

The average pretax earnings of an American in the bottom 50 percent by income was $16,197 in 2014, a nearly invisible 2.6 percent gain over 40 years. Over the same period, the top 10 percent of Americans saw their pretax incomes grow by 231 percent.

Three consequences of this staggering inequality shape Labor Day 2017 realities and underlie the nation’s current vulnerability to bizarre expressions of power that underlie the Constitutional crisis that could occur if the President, any President, manages  to suspend the power of courts by exercising the power to pardon those whom a court has judged guilty.

Such chaotic consequences  are all in the category of cause and effect and flow from the consequence of millions of manufacturing jobs and new economy high tech jobs exported to off-shore locations like China and South Korea over the past 40 years; with the further consequence of placing  downward pressure on U. S. workers’ wages and benefits, leading in turn to an explosion of contingent work (contract) jobs that offer almost no benefits like a pension, health insurance or guaranteed job protection and security.  Forbes Magazine estimates forty percent of today’s workforce are independent contract workers. This third consequence has now mutated through career ranges that run from truck and Uber drivers to programmers and highly skilled technicians. 

The net effect is that the gains of a century of struggle for equity for miners and factory workers have now been put into reverse gear, bringing us to a moment when only one in ten workers belong to unions compared with 30 percent of the labor force unionized forty years ago.  Worse are anecdotal reports that the pressure on today’s contingent private contractors is pushing many of them back to the 90 hour work weeks of the 1890’s and 1900’s.

This tragic system of racism and religious-based  classism handicaps the potential of people of faith to join together to counter the rise of the Trump era authoritarians. Racism forced Black churches to form separately. The ownership and managerial classes that built the tall steeple Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational edifices have locked denominations into a sociology in which they represent a normative segregation and inequality visible in the suburbs of most American towns and cities.  The pattern grew from people who worked mostly with their hands and backs feeling uncomfortable in churches where their bosses worshipped. Workers attended “other” churches: Baptist, Church of God, Adventists.  Catholics and Jews lived a world apart in liturgies and traditions foreign to and unknown to the wealthier Protestant world.   In other words, religion in America in spite of all the good it does symbolizes the racism and classism that is the basic shape of American life and underlies today’s rising threat of authoritarianism.

There are better angels in this history.  The 19^th Century glory of the churches (before they were cemented into their respective sociological strata) was their battle against slavery through the Abolitionist Movement. The 20^th Century glory of the churches was the Social Gospel preached against the outrages of capitalism that exploited women and children and created vast urban slums filled with sweat shops.  Christian and Jewish socialist movements were an early twentieth century glory in the U. S. advocating for workers to form worker circles and partnerships that grew to become unions.   It still required decades for church leaders like Walter Rauschenbush to convince at least some Protestant groups that the teachings of Jesus and socialism had many values in common. The two Roosevelts played respective roles in the first forty years, creating major workplace and public health reforms (Theodore) and supporting the lawful right of unionization (FDR).

The tragedies of the 20^th Century led to a failure of further development toward an equitable world.  The Soviet Communist Revolution gave corporate owners an excuse to resist collective organizing and WW II became a cauldron from which the shape of today’s inglorious inequality grew. The deep wound that now exists among an abandoned workforce makes them vulnerable to the pied pipers of the Trump era and the winners in the digital economy.  

There is good news! A new glory is on the rise this Labor Day in the form of Moral Monday movements, growing Industrial Areas Foundation organizations, PICO National Networks and other non-denominational movements for justice that are being born in the empty public space created by too many insular traditional churches and synagogues that exist as fortress silos amid a secular word they seem inclined to avoid.  

  In the coming weeks many chickens will be coming home to roost beginning with the incalculable and unanticipated costs of the Houston inundation. The Congressional budget wars immediately ahead will become struggles between the haves and have less with the have nots pushed to the back of economic priorities.    Because the resources are not evenly divided and the stakes so high, the new interfaith religion of community unity without racism and committed to equity for all will be severely tested as will be the Saunders-style spirit of progressive policy reform. 

Labor Day 2017 means everyone a teacher, everyone an organizer, all hands on deck! What we do, not what we say, will define belief. 

The Twilight of the Gods

        While it's not yet known whether the President's large body of critics will finally run him to ground the other question is how the Republican leadership will make their stand on tax reform, the budget and Affordable Health Care Act amendments after the Labor Day recess.  In spite of the outpouring of rage over the President's behavior over racism in Charlottesville he is not without many allies who are content to see the status quo of missing infrastructure jobs programs and anemic education funding continue--under cover of "traditional," racist values.  

        

         The clearly uncertain future for the nation and its stability will need more than the current emphasis by progressive young people on righteous resistance. After stalwart resistance, what's the strategy on single-payer, housing for moderate and low income families in the big cities and what about international partnerships for peace, justice and the environment?       

        Famous community organizer, Saul Alinsky, used to begin speeches to faith leaders by sharing his wonderment at just how they folded up those wings on their backs to be able to lie down to sleep.  He was calling for more than vestments of good intentions.  In this summer of popular defenestration of old idols like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee the larger challenge comes from whether we even recognize the monuments not made of marble or bronze but who claim to be our fulfillment.  There is among the Silicon Valley gargantuan corporations more than a little resemblance between themselves and that old Canaanite god of biblical reference: both claim to exist for your own good!

       With progressive community organizations sponsoring programs they describe as training  for "righteous resistance" at least one lesson of history is how the good is defined, by whom and for what purpose.  Critical thinking will be required to answer that question. It's always complicated.

    

        Here's a little known example drawn from Stephen Kinzer's book: The Brothers: John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles and their secret world war," [Henry Holt, 2013]...described by John Le Carre as "an essential allegory for our own times":

        The Cold War now in the process of re-start was born not after WW II but before it when Wall Street firms like Sullivan and Cromwell (S & C) put the financing packages together that enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler, first by freeing it from its WW I debt burden and by issuing in 1935 the bonds to re-finance the German steel, and weapons manufacturing titan, Krupp; and further enabling a chemical and rare metals cartel that included I. G. Farben, subsequent producer of the Zyklon B gas used in the Nazi death camps to exterminate millions. 

       Later to be Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles was managing partner at S & C in those pre-war years and was a defender and advocate for Adolf Hitler. He saw Hitler and the Nazis as a bulwark against Bolshevism. The Germans with their great achievements in language, science, theology and the arts were kinfolk.  Dulles was fixated on communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular as enemies of Christianity. He never saw any difference between making money at S & C and the high purpose of Christianity.

        After the Second World War Dulles and the Allied High Command saw to it that the Nazi war record of hundreds of German scientists were wiped clean--even Werner von Braun's, who created the Nazi V-I and V-II  rockets that reigned down on London, was put to work creating the U. S. space program.  Dulles advocated for a global civilized society and interacted  in World Council of Churches meetings attended by  Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and others. But after the war he gradually developed a Devil theory of theology at about the same time that he became Dwight Eisenhower' Secretary of State.  In that role he led and enabled others such as George Kennan to launch and define a Cold War that sponsored the overthrow of democratically  elected governments such as Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, and others.  It was this definition of evil that was championed by many (not all) faith leaders and led sequentially to millions of deaths in the long fight against the devil, the Soviet Union and China, in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

                

        The moral of this history is that the youthful advocates of dramatic change in the current direction of the Trump White House toward an era of righteousness face the necessity for critical evaluation of complex initiative and promises; challenging every step of the way how the promises of the rich and powerful affect the common good; identifying and critiquing the interplay of their own self-interest. Constantly making sure they've not been captured by a new attractive idol