The Scandal In Silicon Valley: Giving Fire To The World

Nathan the prophet came to David.  “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb….It drank from his cup and was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep…he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it…. David burned with anger… and said to Nathan, “the man who did this must die!” Nathan said “You are the man.”

So it is also with the great Achilles—Silicon Valley’s fabulously successful tech corporations—that are increasingly exposed for their vulnerable heel—the export of hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas, and the often terrible working condition in their supply chain plants.

The Second Samuel story of King David’s adultery with Bathsheba is to illustrate the moral magnitude of what can be called the scandal of Silicon Valley’s export of jobs.  If some of these jobs are returned to the U.S. they would play a big role in bringing the Bay area and other U. S. communities out of their recession--and maybe they still can. 

President Obama called for this kind of change in his State of the Union message, but it will require orders of magnitude in presidential leadership this President has so far not shown. It will mean simulating or creating a jobs and factory relocation “Czar” endowed with miracle-working powers to impel tech corporations such as Apple to create scaled-up manufacturing systems in U. S. communities. Here in the U. S. such plants could manufacture and assemble products like I-Pads and the I-Phone4’s.  

Silicon Valley tech leaders are not motivated intuitively or ideologically by their own experience to want to develop domestic working class factories for their products.  They are mesmerized and motivated to invent the next stupendously intricate nano device that will make billions in dollars roll down like a mighty stream. Ideologically they are simply loyal to their own experience shaped in the tech booms of the last 20 years. They argue that the billions of dollars they generate create job growth.

Yet in moral terms one greater task is asked of this Achilles—to bring the jobs back to the U.S. This is no idle matter. While the quiet, soft days of January’s economic improvements have shown a few flowerings, unless jobs reappear on a grand scale in both the US and Europe the glowering crisis of the global economy threatens a global second recession and the dystopian collapse predicted at the Davos Forum this week (see blog dated blank).

It’s not too much to say that the President’s freshly announced discourse with the corporate masters of private corporations may be the last chance for a stable and democratically structured U. S. economy and maybe the last chance for democratization in the global community.  

The President needs a fast learning curve and a re-framing of his own mediator thought style to work this miracle. His intuitions, often wonderful, have outstripped his experience with the history of industrial relations in the U. S.  For the first years of his Presidency he has mostly ignored the urging of social and economic experts to quickly re-launch the WPA and similar public works projects.  Barney Franks is probably right with his weekend remark in the NY Times magazine that some of his friends on the Left “read into [Obama] more than was actually there.”

Last Spring an OpEd about “Steve Jobs’ Doughnut Hole” was sent by this writer to the NY Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Silicon Valley Leadership Council and the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council. The analogy was to the empty middle of Jobs’ plan for a Pentagon-size circular headquarters. The essay grew from personal familiarity as a clergyman in cities like Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh where a quarter century and more ago the interfaith community had worked to oppose the destruction of their local workforces through corporate disinvestment; a disinvestment that in a few year’s time reduced the huge mid-west steel mills and metal-working factories to rust, ruining the lives of millions of skilled workers.  It was all done in the name of a supposed natural economic law; a god that required the sacrifice of entire manufacturing cities and their workforces.

My essay was ignored but new alarm bells have begun ringing in recent weeks.  Reuters and CNN carried stories of the consequences of current jobs exports. Jon Stewart did an extended interview about the question, and then beginning Sunday last two big, big stories have twice begun on the N Y Times’ front page with two columns above the fold and continued over four full pages with twenty columns in its main news sections.   

The Times documents (at last) both the happy and grim sides of the Apple journey.  While Apple does employ 43,000 within the U. S. and has drawn everyone’s admiration as it revolutionized a global universe of information and communication in dazzling ways, it also has contracted 200,000 jobs offshore.  Through companies such as Foxconn—owned in Taiwan, with giant plants in China, Germany and many other countries—Apple products invented here in the U. S. are manufactured over there. Working conditions in these plants are well-documented as often both terrible and frequently the cause of high numbers of suicides and deaths from industrial explosions. Workers often work 60 to 72 hour shifts in hazardous and unhealthy conditions, it seems plain that what really drives this is our own hunger for glittering devices and the breakneck production whose costs are constantly under downward pressure to the last penny.

Many media sources report that Silicon Valley tech giants (e.g., Dell, H-P, Sony) have together contracted more than 1.2 million manufacture and assembly jobs away from the U. S. where unemployment as of the last count by Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in December now numbers about 13 million. The number is much larger because the millions of workers trapped in long term unemployment are not counted and number additional millions.  

Lost along with these jobs is what experts call “the multiplier effect” – for every tech industry job there are additional jobs required in parts design and manufacture, marketing, sales and transportation. Just as dazzling as its devices and software, is the extraordinary chain of assembly and supply that include myriad networks of parts suppliers, engineering and manufacture. 

Understandably, the growing complaint that Silicon Valley has betrayed its own country is as welcome as Bubonic Plague, But other kinds of virtuosity are now required of this industry.  

If just twenty percent of those exported jobs, say 200,000, were brought back to the U. S. the economies of half a dozen cities stricken with long term unemployment—like Atlanta, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago and Youngstown—could be revived or given a huge lift.

There is always some moral ambiguity in these pictures. Shifting steelmaking to Korea and Brazil in the 1970s and 80s helped raise the local standard of living. The growing global economy has lifted millions of Chinese out of rural poverty, opened up a maze of educational opportunities, and created the largest migration of peasants in history as they moved from meager farms to higher levels of skill, pay and opportunity in China’s burgeoning new cities. This is to be celebrated in the name of our common humanity.  But if its consequence destroys cities like Detroit and Cleveland or creates a hole in Silicon Valley where eighty-five thousand unemployed people languish, then it’s not too soon to ask some questions and challenge prevailing practices that keep sacrificing American workers to expedient corporate strategies.

The extent of the Times’ coverage is a measure of how urgent returning jobs to the U. S. has become. Late, very late, in its awakening the media and the President appear to now realize that this issue may become the whole ball game. What has been an unbelievable bonanza for profits now requires the Achilles-like tech industry to turn on a dime and address not the next profitable opportunity but a looming disaster born of the too easy global option to off-shore nearly everything.

On the defensive, an Apple executive quoted in the Times claimed “We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries. We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.”   The late Steve Jobs bluntly told President Obama at a Silicon dinner a year ago: “Those jobs are not coming back.”   The Times’ weekend piece came close to prophesying that moving jobs back may be impossible.  It cites many sources that say the size, flexibility and lifestyles of young Chinese workers could not be matched in the U.S.  Also missing here in the U. S. workforce are the new engineering skills found in the young Chinese workforce.  A former Apple executive asked “what U. S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?—referring to Foxconn City where 230,000 employees in Shenzhen live and work. 

Here are two answers from this blog corner: in the depression of the 1930’s young American workers did live in dorms built by the government and through the Civilian Conservation Corps built much of the state and national parks system.  The people jobs exporters claim are not available are actually right here in our own regions. In Ohio there are 469,000 people unemployed. 174,000 in Georgia. Over 2 million in California.  In Michigan 431,000. [BLS December 2011].  And there is a big community college system in place where engineers can be trained. In a column this week, David Brooks called for linking policy strategies, creating relevant training and streamlining regulations.

The hard driving Silicon Valley executives do work hard and often achieve much.  But they have public responsibilities regardless of their private preoccupations and occupations. What we must teach them is to re-tool themselves with a social justice vision dedicated to overcoming growing inequality as a new priority framework for their lives. They’re often sitting out there in the Pews Friday mornings, evenings, and on Sunday mornings. It’s too easy for them to leave and continue talking only with themselves.  Community clergy, civic and labor leaders need to insist on a conversation, and more than one.

Conversation can help everyone become more thoughtful. At the famous tech moguls dinner with President Obama last February, Steve Jobs, whom everyone knew was in failing health, finally conceded: It might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.

The whole ball game is at stake in having serious community conversation—masters of the universe and the rank and file citizens together. It is not enough to hold open meetings while keeping real conversation private.

Aeschylus’ wrote a play about Prometheus, bound to a rock by Zeus as punishment for having given fire to the world.  Tech leaders in Silicon Valley are virtually consumed in this fire, its demanding engineering requirements, its almost unimaginable entrepreneurial opportunities. The next spark, however carries the danger that it so disarranges our democratic worlds that all is lost just as Zeus and better known Gods feared.

Scenario for a Perfect Storm

January 19, 2012

            Yesterday, January 18^th,  the World Bank cut its global growth forecast by the most in three years, saying that a recession in the euro region threatens to exacerbate a slowdown in emerging markets such as India and Mexico.

A graphic U. S. map also published this week by the Conference of Mayors shows estimates of how long it will be before the number of lost jobs return to pre-recession levels: in Los Angeles not until 2018; in Chicago 2015, San Jose and New York by 2014.  That is, if all goes well.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/18/us/when-different-parts-of-the-country-may-recover.html?ref=us

            The World Bank report notes that a decline in both the U. S. and Europe and weaker growth in developing countries raises the risk that the two developments will reinforce one another….China, the world’s second-biggest economy, reported today that foreign direct investment declined in December by the most since July 2009, underscoring the World Bank’s warning that developing economies should “prepare for the worst.” Home prices fell in 52 of 70 cities in December from November, statistics bureau data showed.

As candidates Gingrich and Santorum took recourse to unconcealed race-baiting—[Black] President Obama is depicted as the greatest issuer of food stamps in history. All those babies born of [Black] single moms are costing taxpayers money, says Santorum—the producer of the map graphic, HIS Global predicted the many risks that lie ahead:

The first is the possibility of a financial meltdown in the Eurozone, with some countries exiting, or a messy default by one or more of the large Eurozone countries, especially Italy or Spain. Such a “Lehman moment” for Europe would likely push the global economy into recession. The second big risk is a sharp slowdown in China’s growth [from 8% down  to 5%) triggered by a bursting of its real estate bubble.

A new Bureau of Labor Statistic graph also published today shows a dis-correlation between manufacturing and manufacturing job growth.  [Sorry, unable to paste the chart]

Debate rhetoric in the primary campaign ominously catches a public mood shared by many people deeply injured by economic adversity and as a result are deeply vulnerable.  While no serious job proposals have been offered, candidate Santorum almost leaped over the podium with his jobs solution. He quoted a 2009 Brookings Institute study showing you can avoid poverty by doing just three things:  work, graduate from high school, and get married before you have children.  The Brookings authors, Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskin, predict this will keep all but 2 percent out of poverty and they will have incomes 77 percent higher than the national average.

Such shallow answers set the stage for an unprecedented perfect storm:  continuing years of high unemployment redefine joblessness as a personal moral failure for everyone not working.  Those “other” people—Blacks and immigrants— are receiving help they don’t deserve because, it’s alleged , they didn’t earn it. Since the government enforces all of this, it has become your enemy.  Your family’s suffering and despair is not decreasing, it’s growing, and you’re ready to follow a leader who will offer simple answers.

A current very hard film, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” playing these days in only a few theaters, shows the sheer madness and brutality fermented 20 years ago in Bosnia when the failure to establish functional democratic institutions was added to ancient prejudices, religious dogmatism and political ambition. 

Historian Tony Judt, in Postwar, described a period in Yugoslavia ten years after World War II that put in place the murderous model of ethnic cleansing depicted in Blood and Honey:

“For hours both armies clambered up rocky ravines to escape annihilation or to destroy a little group of their countrymen, often neighbors, on some jutting peak six thousand feet high, in a bleeding, starving captive land.”

In Bosnia five years later the same failure to create working democratic institutions repeated the same nightmare.  In 1995 morning television in the U. S. showed thousands of people trapped at 7,000 feet on winding mountain roads where they fled with their families desperately trying to escape annihilation.

                Maybe such nightmares will never happen here in the U. S., but a dangerous storm, perhaps a perfect storm, is brewing in 2012. It’s beginning to mix our stalled democratic processes with ancient habits of slavery, racism, and chronic income inequality. Given some politicians on both sides of the aisle who offer little resistance to simple solutions, the storm this year could lead to depths we’ve never imagined, opening up roads we’ve never before had to walk. 

The Prevailing Ethic of the King Days

The Prevailing Ethic of the King Days

In last week’s blog we wondered (in so many words) if the new political danger was that voters, candidates, and their supportive communities (churches, synagogues, mosques, temples) had surrendered to a deliberate preference for blindness.  No one can have missed the chronic aversion to a reality-based problem statement  by the candidates now working South Carolina.  “Don’t let Obama turn America into a European-style entitlement society;”   “Learn to prefer a paycheck to food stamps;”  “Restore capitalist principles – competition and creative destruction – to our financial sector.”

Not to be left out, one national church journal came out for blindness, instructing its editors last week to publish only positive letters from readers about Israel/Palestine. Sure.

Even with eyes closed the negative news hasn’t gone away.  Post holiday optimism about December retail sales were dashed by Commerce Department reports (1/12/12) that retail sales were  down in December, reaching the weakest pace in seven months; and  jobless claims rose sharply—with unemployment claims reaching 399,000, the highest in six weeks.

 The mindless discourse of the candidates tooling through South Carolina suggests at the least a practiced disrespect for the voters. Like British soldiers at the Somme, citizens often are fodder for other people’s ambitions.

The Global Economic Forum—itself not without such ambitions—in advance of its January 25^th meetings in Davos, Switzerland has reported growing evidence of a “Dystopia,” a term (the opposite of utopia) describing a world descending into a chaos that will be “full of hardship and devoid of hope. A world

where a large youth population contends with chronic, high levels of unemployment, while concurrently, the largest population of retirees in history becomes dependent upon already heavily indebted governments. Both young and old could face an income gap, as well as a skills gap so wide as to threaten social and political stability.

Yes, truly, and you can study the evidence in their sophisticated interactive graphs at http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2012/#ol=data-explorer

All these fantasies, visions and premonitions reflect an eerie similarity. Instead of a focus on a hugely unbalanced global economy and its affected people, one quickly develops the impression that political rhetoric, theological sophistry, and Davos summit conferences may really be for the preservation of the one percent.

As for the rest of us, we would do well on this anniversary weekend to remember the prevailing ethic in the days of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the days of SCLC, SNCC and CORE. There was an old saw then that compared southern de jure racial segregation to de facto segregation in northern U. S. cities. Pundits found the answer: the Negro is segregated but nobody did it.”

That’s still the prevailing ethic.  Consequences, which often are compared to a natural law, must be kept carefully separate from their real causes.



The Dangerous Ground of American Popular Theology

Candidate Rick Santorum’s fulsome language of faith as he left Iowa to begin his week in New Hampshire was mocked by Jon Stewart the next evening, who caricatured a fickle and arbitrary god who plays favorites: blessing one way here, another way there. This lifts the curtain on the dangerous ground of American popular theology.

Outside the candidates’ walled chambers is a nation where the top 20 percent of the American populace holds roughly 93 percent of the country's financial wealth and the bottom 4o percent controls just 1 percent. A Pew study last summer reported that the median wealth of Hispanics had declined 66 percent. Asian immigrants’ wealth declined 54 percent, and African-Americans’ wealth is down 53 percent   White decline during the same recession period is down only 16 percent. 

Santorum’s resonance cannot be missed. It connects not only with the apparently monolithic audience he attracts, but also with the popular religion Jon Stewart mocks.  On the campaign trail common parlance begins on the theme of restoring America to its “greatest” standing in the world and ends with the encomium “May God bless America.”

Just how serious and dangerous this is grows from a “candidate religion” that very closely mirrors every day religious practice in many U. S. congregations. As long as candidates and others remain in closed chambers that separate them from real world diversity and economic complications, this brand of religion amounts to easy grace. In many Christian congregations where social and economic particulars are considered off-limits, the liturgical answer invokes a loving God who in the end will forgive you everything.

This blinds people’s moral capacity to look at facts and respond with outrage and action. Facts like the enormous fraud conducted by the financial industry; facts like the current unemployment levels, ruinous home foreclosures (ruinous to both people and whole communities) and the continued shipment overseas of jobs created in the U S.  We’re not talking economic necessity here, we’re talking economic betrayal. And the political danger in this election year is that both the people and the candidates may prefer blindness to a fierce struggle for justice.

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Growing Political Power From Money

Excerpted from "Tocqueville for Toffs" by Robert Kuttner (The American Prospect, January/February 2012)  

On any given day in Washington, D.C., the city’s hotels teem with civic activity. Trade associations, lobbies, corporations seeking government contracts, lawyers looking to influence agency rules—all form a beehive of action. At last count, there were 12,200 registered lobbyists in Washington, according to opensecrets.org, and that doesn’t include the many thousands of corporate attorneys who are technically not lobbyists. Of the top-spending trade associations or issue organizations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce leads the list with a budget of more than $46 million. Only one quasi-liberal group, the AARP, is even in the top 20. This is the vision of Alexis de Tocqueville made flesh, with one notable difference: Nearly everyone in this associational paradise speaks for the top 1 percent or 2 percent of the income distribution.

Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, famously identified “the art of association” as an essential complement to American constitutional democracy. The franchise was only the beginning of an effective republic. Political associations, to Tocqueville, were “great free schools” of democracy. They breathed civic life into formally democratic institutions of government. To engage with public issues, people did so more effectively in groups, not as isolated individuals. “Americans of all ages, all stations of life … are forever forming associations,” he wrote admiringly.

But something has changed dramatically since Tocqueville wrote those words in 1840. [to read the entire article click on “All stations of life” no longer applies. Civic and political association and the organized exercise of influence have increased for the elite and have all but collapsed for the bottom half, even for the bottom three-quarters.

Thus, while inequalities of campaign finance have gotten most of the attention and indignation of reformers, participatory inequality is just as important. Perhaps it is even more important, since the most promising antidote to the narrow, concentrated power of wealth is the broad power of organized people. When non-rich people are disorganized, disconnected from practical politics, or overwhelmed by the networking power of elites, money rules.  {To continue reading this very important analysis click on http://prospect.org/article/tocqueville-toffs ]

Public Liturgies -- "Pray it may not be in winter"

"Pray it may not be in winter"

If social movements were like trains we would ask if the tracks are a broad enough gauge to carry the coming load as the great hinges of history seem to be swinging open before us. 

Collapse of the post world war II European consensus is suddenly possible. Watching the “Occupy” throng in Oakland march this week to block the Port of Oakland with the famously tough dock workers and truckers watching passively makes one ask if this was a dress rehearsal for what might come in the new year? 

And a huge electoral shift in the U. S. is not impossible in 2012. Think Gingrich/Condoleezza Rice as a very competitive, perhaps successful Republican ticket. The question is whether the center will hold.

“It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression,” writes Paul Krugman in his December 11^th column (NY Times)  “…Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

“On that last point, I am not being alarmist. On the political as on the economic front it’s important not to fall into the “not as bad as” trap. High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.  “Let’s talk, in particular, about what’s happening in Europe — not because all is well with America, but because the gravity of European political developments isn’t widely understood.

“First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.

“Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. And they have created immense anger, with many Europeans furious at what is perceived, fairly or unfairly (or actually a bit of both), as a heavy-handed exercise of German power.

“Nobody familiar with Europe’s history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening.

“Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

“Last month the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development documented a sharp drop in public support for democracy in the “new E.U.” countries, the nations that joined the European Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not surprisingly, the loss of faith in democracy has been greatest in the countries that suffered the deepest economic slumps.

“And in at least one nation, Hungary, democratic institutions are being undermined as we speak.

“One of Hungary’s major parties, Jobbik, is a nightmare out of the 1930s: it’s anti-Roma (Gypsy), it’s anti-Semitic, and it even had a paramilitary arm. But the immediate threat comes from Fidesz, the governing center-right party.

“Fidesz won an overwhelming Parliamentary majority last year, at least partly for economic reasons; Hungary isn’t on the euro, but it suffered severely because of large-scale borrowing in foreign currencies and also, to be frank, thanks to mismanagement and corruption on the part of the then-governing left-liberal parties. Now Fidesz, which rammed through a new Constitution last spring on a party-line vote, seems bent on establishing a permanent hold on power.

“The details are complex. Kim Lane Scheppele, who is the director of Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs program — and has been following the Hungarian situation closely — tells me that Fidesz is relying on overlapping measures to suppress opposition. A proposed election law creates gerrymandered districts designed to make it almost impossible for other parties to form a government; judicial independence has been compromised, and the courts packed with party loyalists; state-run media have been converted into party organs, and there’s a crackdown on independent media; and a proposed constitutional addendum would effectively criminalize the leading leftist party.

“Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe. And it’s a sample of what may happen much more widely if this depression continues.

“It’s not clear what can be done about Hungary’s authoritarian slide. The U.S. State Department, to its credit, has been very much on the case, but this is essentially a European matter. The European Union missed the chance to head off the power grab at the start — in part because the new Constitution was rammed through while Hungary held the Union’s rotating presidency. It will be much harder to reverse the slide now. Yet Europe’s leaders had better try, or risk losing everything they stand for.

“And they also need to rethink their failing economic policies. If they don’t, there will be more backsliding on democracy — and the breakup of the euro may be the least of their worries.”

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You may also want to read via the Foreign Policy web site Stephen M. Walt’s blog at http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/blog/2072

Walt is professor of professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and author of author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (W. W. Norton, 2005), and, with coauthor J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

Welcome to Public Liturgies, a new blog

Welcome!  I intend this new blog to be one part values reflection and one part information-provider to help move you quickly to other primary sources of data and analysis. Like all blogs you’re invited to comment, extensively if you wish, and of course you can unsubscribe. Click on my profile on this page for more information about me.

I’m after the huge gap between our stated principles (values) and our actual practice. Exhibit A is growing inequality. Today’s main trend lines remain unabated: downward pressure on incomes (wages and benefits of the 99 percent) and deepening despair caused by the recession’s huge joblessness and home foreclosure numbers. The result is a high dropout rate in civic and political participation. There is participation around self-interest, of course, but the badly needed focus on the public good suffers from the pervasive idea that “my good will be your good.”

The word “Liturgy” in this blog’s title is actually a redundancy derived from a Greek composite word, leitourgos. The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us that it originally meant “a public duty, a service to the state undertaken by a citizen—someone “who performs a public duty" whose focus is the laos, the people.  Imagine that: liturgies for the public good!

So why have few voices cried “fire” as the whole house is burning down?  Life, of course goes on but it’s clear that we’re overwhelmed by our own plight. As many of us and other millions have lost their homes, their jobs, their families, most churches have redoubled their charitable efforts but remained prophetically silent; meaning silent about justice beyond repeating the word itself in liturgies that are strong on personal (and private) consolation.

Labor, under constant attack and deeply threatened (as we all should be) by rising so-called conservatism has been focused, rightly, on the threat to working people’s collective bargaining rights.  But Labor’s perspective is strangely narrow. While the Silicon Valley lost 85,000 mostly higher paying manufacturing jobs in the past decade, little has been done to push back—something Labor is usually good at.  Moreover, the barn door has been left ajar; in fact, left wide open to more departures.  The prime example is the Silicon Valley’s brilliant high tech industry that continues to send hundreds of thousands of computer assembly jobs to Asia. If just twenty percent of those jobs were retained for stricken high unemployment communities (like the South Bay or Detroit or Cleveland)—and if steps were taken by a partnership between business, government (federal and state) to make those “living wage” jobs, then 20 to 40 thousand people would be working today; and the Asian rise in standards of living could still continue. (More about this in another blog)

We’re surrounded by daily financial scandals, embarrassing presidential debates, large scale home foreclosures, endemic joblessness and gory body counts complete with decapitations. Nuclear weapons are back on the front burner. Middle East policy continues to be mismanaged.  

Right now it’s no contest between Shakespeare’s “bare ruined choirs” and our solemn Advent candle lighting.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. [Sonnett 73]

Many American dreams have now been crushed like the vanished song. The domino effect is unavoidable.  Although a stronger jobs report came last Friday (December 1^st) the NY Times reported on the same day that hundreds of thousands of discouraged workers have left the labor force. The country still has a backlog of more than 13 million unemployed workers with an average unemployment time of 40.9 weeks.

Two days earlier, on November 29^th, Standard and Poors downgraded the credit ratings of fifteen of the largest U. S. banks. They have threatened (Dec. 4^th) to do the same to large European banks. In Germany its efforts to market bonds that would finance both debt and investment fell  short by a third, prompting major initiatives by the Federal Reserve to prop up Europe’s liquidity and credit.

                This means that companies large and small cannot get the credit they need to expand and add more jobs. Even Boeing in Seattle faces this possibility just as it is preparing to enlarge its production.

                                          Citigroup: A Case Study

On November 29^th U. S. Federal Judge Jedd Rakoff threw out the proposed settlement between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission, supposedly the policeman of financial transactions. The settlement would have allowed Citi to pay a fine of $285 million, that Judge Rakoff called “pocket change” for Citigroup. He refused to accept the usual settlement that is the SEC’s common practice and that permits corporate giants to make no admission of guilt, just pay the fine.  The SEC, clearly in bed with these corporate practices, explains it doesn’t have the resources and staff to take such cases to trial.

                “Citigroup stuffed a $1 billion mortgage fund that it said it sold to investors in 2007 with securities that it believed would fail so that it could bet against its customers and profit when values declined,” reports the NY Times last week, “falsely telling investors that an independent party was choosing the portfolio’s investments.”  

An analysis by the Times of how the SEC handles these cases of out and out fraud found 51 instances, involving 19 companies, in which the agency claimed that a company had broken fraud laws that they previously agreed never to breach.    

Worse yet, legal experts along with President Obama point out there is nothing illegal about doing business the Bank of America or Citigroup way. “it’s not illegal, said the President, but it is immoral.” Congress could make it illegal as well by changing the applicable law. 

The good news from my perspective is that many civic, government and labor leaders—including clergy and their congregations—have enormous talents including a thoughtful and dynamic relationship to this economic and policy catastrophe. They’re not deaf, dumb or blind to what is happening. The problem is that we are traduced by our own culture, nested in an early 19^th century belief in progress. In popular imagination there is thought to be a social contract that somehow binds what God is doing and what we all do to have livelihoods into a transcendent idea that it is considered morally valid. A Mephistophelian bargain has been struck. If we agree not to cry fire, we can stay in our burning home.  Breaking that belief system will be key to finding a just answer to the one percent; finding new words for fire. This is the platform of Public Liturgies.

Part of the answer lies in new initiatives, Case studies like the one above concerning Citigroup and others need to be studied in church and community groups.  California Forward and the Council of Churches of California have published a very high quality and challenging study guide pointed at the grave budget crisis of the state. Many believe that California’s budget crisis, if not positively resolved, could be the trip wire that brings down the nation.  See the right hand column for information on how to access the study guide and for web sites that address the on-going Congressional debates.

More soon.

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In the side bar

To see the California study guide” “A Free and Energetic Government:  Moving Government Back to the People” go to    http://www.calchurches.org/1-1.html

Click on study guide to open the complete study on line in downloadable PDF format.

Following the Congressional budget debate on a day-to-day basis is not as hard as it seems. Go to http://www.cbpp.org/, the web site of the Center for Budget and Policy Prioities, the gold standard of such analyses.   It’s free to enter your email address and receive almost daily critiques of both Democrat and Republican proposals.