The Conflict in Iran and Our Own Backyard

Thursday February 29, 2012

       If the conflict with Iran does not rise to nuclear grade next week, the politics behind it will.  President Obama is expected once again to bend to the view that U. S. and Israeli interests hold all things in common. Prime Minister Netanyahu is reported to believe “there should be no space between Israel and the U. S. should Israel choose to attack Iran.” Especially true if there is—as all experts seem to believe will happen—a counter-attack by Iran and its allies.   Meanwhile all the President’s political opponents are thrilled by the possibility that the President might prove uncooperative, giving them an easy target—“Obama is anti-Israel”-- and the chance to break the Democrats’ hold on the Jewish vote.

      It is not too much to conjecture that while the war flags are being waved they also provide cover for one of Israel’s apparent largest objectives—to continue to build cities in the West Bank with the ultimate goal of pushing out the Palestinian population into Jordan and other near-by countries. The rhetoric of Israel far Right leader, Avigdor Lieberman, speaks of just such desire. His view lies closer than one might think to the mainstream of Israeli leadership.  Every Israeli administration since the 1967 war has expanded construction of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory. 

      

      The churches bear a measure of responsibility for why the U. S. stands today on the brink of another Middle East War. Christians of all stripes endlessly study the texts about the small world where Jesus walked two thousand years ago but seem deeply averse to studying and engaging what is happening in the same location now.

      Its old news but most Christians are surprised even today to learn that nearly 500,000 Israelis already live in city-size “settlements” built on Palestinian land with more construction underway.

Principal among the enforcers of the current politics is, of course, the powerful American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) which last Spring forced a joint session of Congress to hear Netanyahu, and last summer flew two-thirds of the House of Representatives to Israel for a briefing.

      The AIPAC dynamic not only pushes the President but drives the strategy of local interfaith relations among Christians and Jews. Both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, for somewhat different reasons, have been in decline for decades. It’s not just the triumph of rationalism over faith, but the loss of social status when Protestants provided a cutting edge in the Civil Rights movement and then condemned the Vietnam War (Iraq too).  Pastors, under fire when issues they champion cut contributions to the budget, are glad to receive the next Jewish community relations award for being unobstreperous about Israel and its practices. AIPAC deeply knows this and guides its local minions accordingly. The least the weakened and vulnerable Christians can do is say thank you and stick to the next food drive or home construction project.

It doesn’t have to be and should not be this way.  Faithful silence betrays the demands of history and truth. Consider for instance the proportionality of suffering in the Israel-Palestine conflict.    Most Jews know, as do some Christians and Muslims,that Israel’s border towns have been struck by rockets over the last seven year period with thirty-three Israelis killed by this rocket fire launched by Palestinians organizations. 

What most do not know is that in one three week period alone (December 27, 2008 – January 18, 2009) the Israeli War in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead) killed 1,397 Palestinians. Five Israeli soldiers died. 

      This picture of disproportionality extends over decades. In Lebanon in 2006 Twelve hundred Lebanese died and one hundred twenty-one Israelis. The Israeli prison system holds 4,387 Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinians hold 0 prisoners.

      The only way you can accept this disproportionate suffering is if you believe the Palestinians are a little sub-human and the Jews a little super-human. Is there something wrong about this picture?

       A very long string of books have been published in the past ten years that outline why Israel’s position in relation to the UN Promise to Palestinians of an independent state is wrong and untenable. From Jimmy Carter’s We Can Have Peace In the Holy Land to Mearsheimer and Walt’s analysis of The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy to dozens of books authored by Israelis themselves. Mearsheimer and Walt identify a simple goal:

Encourage a more open debate about these issues, in order to correct existing myths about the Middle East and to force groups in the lobby to defend their position in the face of well-formed opposition. In particular, Americans need to understand the real history of Israel’s founding and the true story of its subsequent conduct [p. 350]

       No such well-informed opposition yet exists.  It could still happen. That’s why faith communities could turn the nuclear direction events have taken into their faith’s finest hour by speaking truth to power, speaking out against a 40 year long occupation of the Palestinian lands by Israel.  Faith communities will bear a significant measure of responsibility if war against Iran is chosen instead of peaceful solutions.

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Unfairness: Villages not connected to a water network [edited]

Per capita daily water consumption for household and municipal use in communities connected to a central running-water network in the West Bank is some 73 liters a day. In Israel, per capita daily use is 242 liters in towns and 211 liters in local councils, more than 3.5 times greater.

The principal reason for the water shortage in the West Bank is the unfair distribution of the water resources shared by Israel and the Palestinians. One of these resources is the Mountain Aquifer which is composed of a few reservoirs of groundwater that lie on both sides of the Green Line. Although this aquifer is the sole water source for residents of the West Bank, Israel uses eighty percent of it, leaving only the remaining twenty percent for the Palestinians. Israel refuses to alter this distribution…

The water shortage is especially hard on residents of Palestinian villages that are not connected to a water network. According to data from 2008, some 191,238 Palestinians live in 134 villages without a running-water network. There are an additional 190,000 Palestinians who live in communities in which the water system is very limited. In the winter and fall, these residents collect rainfall in pits next to their homes and use the water for all their needs. In the spring and summer months, when the water in the pits runs out, the residents rely on water from nearby springs and on water they purchase from owners of private water-tankers.

There are also hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who live in communities with a central running-water network that supplies water irregularly in limited amounts and does not reach everyone in the community. For this reason, some Palestinian authorities supply water in the summer months on a rotation basis: each neighborhood receives water once every few days, for one day or several hours at a time. To supplement the water supplied, these residents have to buy water brought to them in privately owned water-tankers.                                          [B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights]

Correction to Feb. 21st Truth Force Blog

An early draft of my February 21st Blog title Truth Force contained an error that accidentally was not corrected. It concerns Kurt Weil, composer with Maxwll Anderson of the musical drama Lost in the Stars.  Kurt Weill was never a member of the Communist Party. I regret the error.

TRUTH POWER—CAN WE FIND ITS LANGUAGE AGAIN?

TRUTH POWER—CAN WE FIND ITS LANGUAGE AGAIN?

When language is distorted by misuse as propaganda, false advertising, social manipulation, fraudulent information,  the consequences are not only that it can leave us speechless, but the words themselves can become irretrievable, their original meaning lost.  The purpose of the supposed good news about economic recovery this month is to build enthusiasm without providing a realistic assessment.  For that realistic perspective read Noriel Roubini in Slate who describes the Eurozone  in deep recession, the Chinese economy  weakening, and the U. S. economy tightening later this year. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/project_syndicate/2012/02/austerity_china_the_housing_market_and_the_middle_east_four_reasons_to_stay_gloomy_about_the_economy_.html   

This year is the 400^th anniversary of the translation of the Greek, Latin and Hebrew scriptures into a vernacular English that became the King James Bible.  The KJ’s voice gave new language to the voices of Shakespeare, Milton, the Puritans, Jefferson, Melville and virtually all Western writers.  William Tyndale did much of the heavy lifting and told Pope Alexander VI, “I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, will know more of the scriptures than thou dost.” Opposed by prominent voices including Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas Moore, Tyndale—after the penal fashion of the times—was strangled, impaled and burned on a stake in 1636.  The language he used in the KJ had what Gandhi called Satyagraha, “Truth Power.”  Harold Bloom calls it “cognitive music.” Such Truth Power is badly needed in our present era of the ninety-nine and the one percent.  

Today these texts (including drastically worse modern translations) appear to ricochet off the walls of most churches as many congregations grow grayer.  There is only modest evidence that churches have the Tyndalian will to speak words of truth to the unjust use of power.  Prayers yes, but mostly self-concern predominates. Yet, ironically, the churches nested at the heart of American culture could make the difference in this age of financial hierarchies.  There’s precedent for Truth Power in recent history, but it means really getting to work on it.  It means building a big movement to reinstate truth.  Here’s one blue print we could all learn from.

In 1952 a small group met at Union Theological Seminary in New York to organize “Americans for South African Resistance.”  The need was to support the emerging South African Campaign to Defy Unjust Laws just launched by the African National Conference (ANC).  The same year the seminary created a teaching fellowship with cross-pollination potential appointing a South African regional ANC leader, Methodist pastor Z. K. Matthews, who was working closely with Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu. 

The New York executive committee  included early civil rights and labor leaders:  Methodist George Hauser (director of CORE at that time), Socialist Norman Thomas (a former Presbyterian minister), Bayard Rustin (strategic advisor to MLK, Jr.),  A. Philip Randolph (President of the Sleeping Car Porters Union--the first African American union to win major concession from a white dominated corporation),  Roger Baldwin (founder of the ACLU) and Conrad Lynn, a Black civil rights lawyer and Left activist

Others joined in:   A. J. Muste, (Congregationalist pastor and founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation), NYC Unitarian Pastor, Donald Harrington, Unitarian and socialist, Homer Jack. 

Their activist records were a mix of human rights motifs and socialist ideas; most were pro-labor advocates who helped faith communities become supporters of labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and John L. Lewis. Forty years had passed since Mohandas Gandhi led the first rebellion in South Africa  against the notorious passbook laws.  In their desperation against apartheid, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo moved away from non-violence toward guerilla warfare, subsequently receiving life prison sentences that lasted 27 years. 

In the still totally segregated U. S., civil rights for Blacks was an uphill struggle to say nothing of the struggle in  South Africa.  Nevertheless the waves from this small and diverse band spread far and wide. The composer Kurt Weill (a committed Communist party member) joined with playwright Maxwell Anderson to produce a heartbreaking Broadway musical drama, Lost in the Stars, based on Alan Paton’s equally heartrending South African novel, Cry the Beloved Country.     

Bayard Rustin became the chief strategist for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Philip Randolph chaired the planning that led to the 1964 March on Washington. George Hauser became a liaison with many decolonizing African nations.

 And Gandhi achieved the liberation of India from the British Empire. Philip Glass wrote an opera, Satyagraha, about Gandhi’s Truth Power.

In the latter 20^th century ecumenical leaders such as Tim Smith at the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) documented U. S. corporate complicity actively doing business with the South African Apartheid regime. Paul Stagg, an American Baptist minister and executive director of the New Jersey Council of Churches used ICCR’s analysis of corporate America’s apartheid connection to persuade Governor Tom Kane to divest New Jersey’s large portfolio from such companies—a groundbreaking act.  Nationwide, divestment movements among the churches brought events to flood tide:   by 1990 Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress imprisoned leaders would be released and in 1992 Mandela would be elected President of the new South Africa.  

One recent evening a group of “Occupiers” gathered outside Lincoln Center to harass all the rich one percenters coming out of the opera house after a Satyagraha performance. Philip Glass, the opera’s composer crossed the picket line to join the Occupiers and using their human microphone method said

“When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again”  [as quoted by Alex Ross in The New Yorker, Feb. 13 and 20 edition, 2012]

It’s time for a Truth Power national movement again.

(This Blog has drawn on The New Yorker, Feb. 13 & 20 2012; on the essay “The Book From Which Our Literature Springs” by Robert Pogue Harrison in The New York Review of Books, Feb 9, 2012 and on the book by George Hauser, No One Can Stop the Rain, 1989, Pilgrim Press  

                                                                                                              

The Words Count

Monday, February 13, 2012

THE WORDS COUNT

As the clothing of Athens policemen burst into flames on our television sets and pitched street fighting grows in the European region, many in the U. S. clearly view this as if from Mars.  U. S. perspectives depend on the linguistics of soothing slogans even when bewilderment is the order of the day.  As people discover that the number of school days (or weeks) for their children, their community libraries, their health and safety forces, their own pay levels and pensions (if they have one) all are on the chopping block, they don't need a language of nostalgia but a language that empowers their own engagement with the powers that can lead to their own destruction.  

The term "social justice," for example, is increasingly used by progressives but remains a classic linguistic problem--illegible and largely unknown in the modern lexicon. Justice more likely means you get what you deserve. Social justice is more easily associated with the prison system where others get what they deserve.  

It’s not going to be easy. I audited a recent presentation to supposedly liberal clergy on growing inequality; the power points appeared to fall on unpracticed ears and appeared not comfortably relevant to their line of work.   The pastors’ available framing device (linguist George Lakoff’s term} seemed tuned to familiar metaphors of hope, not engagement.  It is one thing to demand that a mayor make a different decision, but quite another to demand that you begin to reshape your mission by learning a new vocabulary that can engage the fires that are now burning closer.  The same struggle was visible at a presentation to community leaders about revenues and taxation where the harsh realities did not seem to move past the puzzlement stage. “Maybe we’ll deal with this only when we finally hit bottom,” said one participant. The truth is the bottom is near at hand.  

The vague civic theology used by publicists, news media, high tech investors, and most churches, supposedly guards us against that bottom but is based on nostrums that invoke hope but not comprehension.  This is nothing less than a neural challenge say linguists like Lakoff and Noam Chomsky who demonstrate that repeating the same alleged truth endlessly embeds it as truth in the neural operation of our brains.  The capacity to understand and teach others about the fraud of inequality and possible further tragic economic decline depends on writing new stories about ourselves and new terms for their expression.  Surrounded by the reinforcement of old frameworks that amount to programmed passivity, such frames are hard wired into our brains when a practical transformative strategy is needed.  

New strategies require new language that services the truth;  strategies such as training programs for jobs indefensibly shipped overseas, 21^st century versions of a Civilian Conservation Corps that can turn disadvantaged workers into computer engineers; and a new WPA that puts enormously gifted people back to productive work.  Nothing less will do.

Becoming programmatic and active in our advocacy for justice for all will help in the linguistic battle where we are alternately assaulted by the old language of Catholic Bishops opposing contraceptives used by 98 percent of their parishioners; or by the preposterous claim of an Israeli government and its U. S. supporters that they’re serious about a two state solution while building more and more city-size Israeli settlements inside the Palestinian lands.  

           While many faith leaders show signs of resistance to a vacuous theology of hope intended to make engagement unnecessary, the sheer illegibility of goals such as social justice is what’s burning the pants off police forces around the world. If the old words have been made into the flesh of lies, it’s our task to breathe life into new words that are both legible and true.

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.