Humiliation: The Threat Guns Can't Defend

        Without a shot fired, the proposed new regulations for guns seem felt by pro gun advocates as personal injury. In public discussions across the country one senses more than guns are at stake; as if their guns are the last redoubt in a shrunken world where the capacity to be empowered also had shrunk to Lilliputian size.

This anger at public discussions about gun control quickly rises to the level of an approaching end of times.  Extreme statements are often made—“Obama is a Tyrant”—but these seem inarticulate representatives of deeper wounds laid almost bare.  Economic wounds, for example, are hard to talk about in public because they’re born of intimate experience: the loss of a hoped for career path, loss of home equity, families broken by checkbook crises, kids that can’t get to the college of their choice. 

Other economic wounds suffer from the extreme social distance between struggling citizens and banks at the Wall Street level: banks said to be too big to fail, banks behaving in blatantly dishonest and fraudulent ways. The result is deep wounds of uncertain origin, inexplicable, and inarticulate. 

The latest example from Goldman Sachs reveals this essentially baffling social calamity; a calamity without a shot fired.  An increasingly acrid New York Times columnist, Joe Nocera, wrote two days ago  (Sunday March 10^th) about the standard fraudulent practice at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms.

“Once upon a time, in a very different age, an Internet start-up called eToys went public. The date was May 20, 1999. The offering price had been set at $20, but investors in that frenzied era were so eager for eToys shares that the stock immediately shot up to $78. It ended its first day of trading at $77 a share.”

It soon plummeted because of Goldman’s profitable maneuvers.

“Goldman would routinely under price the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of stock for a new company but give big selected institutional investors the benefits of the stock’s first day huge run-up in price.” They would buy cheap, then sell expensive. The big investors would flip the stock a day or so later (I.e. sell) and cause the price to plunge. These same big investors would then rebate a fourth or half of the big first day killing they made back to Goldman, repaying its “kindness.” 

The worst result of the scam was that if Goldman had done the deal for the new company whose interests it was supposedly representing, it would have earned $600 million for the new company. Instead, EToys closed after the crash because it was cash starved.  

Toby Lenk, the founder and former CEO of EToys, was deposed by the SEC about this experience. Nocera reports:

“After the deposition…the S.E.C. lawyers began to show him some Goldman Sachs documents. He saw that one big firm after another had been allocated shares — and had immediately flipped them, even though Goldman had promised that its clients would support the stock. That’s when I thought, We really got screwed.”

He now has 14 years’ worth of perspective. “Look at what has happened since then,” he said. “If you think eToys got screwed, what do you think happened to the country?”

“What Wall Street did to us in 1999 pales in comparison to what they did to the country in 2008,” he said.

These are real threats everyone faces today and guns won’t fix it.  We've seen intemperate anger before during the Obama years: the bitter 2009-2010 health care debates, the Presidential campaigns, the Tea Party absolutists—all have this atmosphere of people thinking of themselves as if caught at the Alamo’s “last stand.” The mood in this gun debate is both dangerous and rowdy because there is confusion over what or whom to blame for their wounds. It’s a story as remote to most of us as the Goldman Sachs story illustrates.

Besides Wall Street there is, of course, the human and social toll and loss of trust from our recent three wars.   Many Americans have fought in one or all of the failed wars In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ve returned wounded in spirit, often in body, with little to show for their sacrifice but the chaos and massive loss of life left behind.  Astonishing large numbers of them commit suicide. The public conversation easily turns less on cold facts and more on a growing sense of loss of self and life’s meaning.

This is the place where we should seek our reconciliation with the wounded because all of us are among the body count. There is a shared humiliation. A different kind of drone is at work here. It’s noiseless, dehumanizing, and in daily ways it’s destroying our ideas of democracy and liberty.   

Underground Conversations

As the day of sequester-loaded cuts arrives the consequences of global inequality receive a fresh spotlight. Millions of well-educated younger adults find themselves in the position of indentured servants, carrying six digit debt into their adult years. Over the past thirty years the real income of most U. S. citizens (adjusted for inflation) declined while only the top 5 percent gained in income and wealth. The rest of the nation remains in recession. The causes are not hard to find, ironically put this week by comedian Steven Colbert, when he reminded his viewers that the constant celebration of burgeoning wealth in Silicon Valley is built on today’s version of 19th century Chinese railroad “coolies,” virtual slave laborers then, now the Chinese low income workforce toiling for the I-gadget revolution owned by Western entrepreneurs.

So where is the rebellion against all of this?  Is there something in the Western narrative, perhaps in the Christian narrative, that removes the spine needed for resistance against unjust acts?

The Irish writer, Colm Toibin, published a novella in 2012 to be staged on Broadway later this month. The Testament of Mary, is a useful challenge to groups who feel driven underground by the dominion of war and inequality in both the U. S. and global society.

Toibin imagines Jesus as a healer and militant organizer come under growing surveillance by unidentified authorties. Toibin’s grandfather and uncle were active in the IRA, the grandfather having done hard prison time for his part in the 1916 Rising. The idea of Jesus as political liberator has been used more than once, for example in Jules Dassin’s 1970’s film, He Who Must Die. Toibin’s version of the disciples is a rough edged group whom Mary holds in little affection. They tell her Jesus is in danger, that he’s being watched by operatives whom they can point out to her lurking at the edge of the crowds while he is healing and teaching.  Mary doesn't really like the sound of Jesus’ organizing voice anymore, but with motherly concern she pleads with him several times: “You must get away from here, right now. Go! Now before it’s too late.”  Toibin’s Jesus is disdainful, he does not go and Mary reluctantly follows him to his awful execution.

In Toibin’s telling Mary lives out her years in Ephesus (there are ancient traditions to support this) but she holds to certain heretical thoughts. She thinks there was a better way, that the terrible execution of her son did not have to happen. Forced to live in hiding in a nondescript part of  Ephesus, Mary is grateful for occasional unsolicited gifts of food that appear near her doorway.  Although she fears arrest, she keeps to her distinct and heretical opinion: the salvation story could have had a better, different ending. It didn't have to happen that way.  Her son didn't have to die.

Toibin’s provocative imagination could prod today’s activists in the faith communities to ask some familiar questions again: Is there something in the dominant religious narratives of the West that generates passivity even as it invokes the authoritative?  Does the promise of eternity nullify the thirst for a just society now? Is the conversation about underground churches intended to provide a refuge from conflict or a launching pad for insurgency against injustice?  

Is the Western narrative too easily vulnerable to a disabling flaw that dilutes the energy needed for engagement with modern Pharaohs?   The sequester has the perhaps singular virtue of spelling out the terms of our further surrender: austerity and more austerity. This next step will cause  

“Some 600,000 to 775,000 low-income women and children, including very young children, who are eligible for WIC….to be turned away by the end of the fiscal year [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2/26/13]  

Lead “to 2,100 fewer food safety inspections; 4000 F.A.A. staff furloughed every day; 125,000 families put at-risk of homelessness; 70,000 children losing  head start programs,”[NY Times, February 16, 201].

Will a new occupy Wall Street movement require that we write a new story about ourselves with a different ending, one that does not conclude in either flight or tragedy?  

Dragon Food: The Preposterous Obfuscation

  

Dragon Food: The Preposterous Obfuscation

The Two-headed Dragon, Part II

In our last blog:  The two heads of this dragon kill both at home and abroad.  Here at home, crazed young men with assault weapons slaughter children and movie audiences. Overseas, suicide bombers destroy hundreds of people at a single stroke.

"Who will slay this two headed dragon and how? 

The metaphorical two-headed dragon stalking us today is the creation of a Western religious culture that could have made angels instead.  Its origins grew into a U. S. culture customarily understood to have begun with leaders like Puritan John Winthrop who saw the vast new continent as a New Jerusalem, “a city set upon a Hill.”  The trust in this exceptional gift soon permitted other exceptions: Native American removal, slave trading, railroading leading to land monopolies, mining for private ownership of precious metals. 

Later, after Darwin, came Social Darwinism—to justify cementing class and race distinctions and the “natural” way a cooperative God would confirm separating the wheat from the chaff.   People who succeeded became exemplars of this natural selection in more recent centuries. The faith communities very often adapted themselves to this comforting theology that helped the nation accept segregation, discrimination, growing inequality and the preferential option of God for the USA.    

This has made what is attractive about today’s very real, menacing, two-headed dragon:  Morally dubious decisions by the powerful can be masked as truth or patriotism; religion can be used as a love potion, a divine anesthetic that exempts people from making judgments about good and evil. Thus the Securities and Exchange Commission discussed in this week’s news media has long practiced its version of exceptionalism. Giant corporations or powerful business leaders found guilty of fraud are permitted to wink. They are permitted to simply pay a fine but admit to no wrong doing.    

So it has become common that instead of identifying dragons, instead of perceiving the demonic forces at work in our midst, faith communities can simply recite a litany of forgiveness, an insurance policy that promises anything and everyone can be forgiven. Just so are budgets for churches, synagogues and mosques raised, but much more so, a compliant and uncritical citizenry become accustomed to accept foreign wars that slay millions and drone planes that deliver sudden and summary death indiscriminately.  It is just so!

This amounts to a preposterous obfuscation—a moral hypocrisy that the disadvantaged of the world have learned to hate. Devouring the opportunities of tens of millions of unemployed Americans, our dragon’s dual heads also feed the fury of destroyed and impoverished  people around the world.

It’s not yet too late to cut off this monster’s food supply. The timidity, the irresolution of faith traditions, grows from ambivalence about their own origins in movements of resistance:  The Hebrews resisting the power of Pharaoh and the culture of idols; Muhammad resisting the tribal manipulations of polytheism that empowered them to practice the slavery of debt imposition.

Jesus--commonly portrayed as the teacher of love and forgiveness—offered  little of either to the Temple leaders or scribes and Pharisees who vied with one another for  political power.  He passed judgment on the religious-political regimes that crushed people’s spirits, that linked illness with the guilt of having broken the religious law, filling them with self-blame.  He led a resistance movement against the monsters of inequality, against the leprosy, blindness and death that were interpreted as the sufferer’s just deserts.

These days, because a new generation has been coming out of our universities and seminaries, there are reasons for hope. They are still being asked to agree not to disturb the peace, to stay in line, to not mix moral principle with politics. Often very well educated, they show signs of the capacity to resist. There is still time for them to disobey, to lead the fight to destroy the very real two-headed dragon that threatens the future.  Their moral leadership cannot come a minute too soon.

Post Inaugural Shadows: The Two-Headed Dragon, Part I

                A multitude found President Obama’s Second Inauguration on January 21st an exhilarating moment of relief from ominous shadows nearby.   Even without counting the ceaseless efforts of Republicans to block the President’s initiatives, the ground is shifting under everyone’s feet.    

It starts with the growing global disillusionment among young adults and families with children who find themselves facing a new technological economy that offers fewer jobs to support themselves or the families many cannot start because of the absence of meaningful work. 

Retired ecumenical executive, Hugh Wire who with his wife, Anne (a retired professor at San Francisco Theological Seminary), has periodically taught at colleges in China over the past decade. He sent an email over Christmas describing the growing disillusionment among young men and women passing through China’s college system.

The simple patriotism of the young people we taught 7 years ago who were first in their families to get to college (and whose families survived the cultural revolution)…has been frustrated by the lack of jobs for them related to their dreams.  Bureaucracy and the harsh realities of getting ahead in industrial cities has gotten to them.

“We could see,” he said, “that their trust in the benevolence of the community were old values that would be worn away by the radical individualism of modern, urban capitalist China.”

The NY Times confirmed this picture last week (1/25/13) with a full page devoted to career grid lock in China.  Factory jobs producing everything from shirts to I-pads are increasingly recognized as dead ends by China’s growing millions of freshly educated young people. The problem is there are few alternatives.

China’s labor force is, of course, the cheap labor that made Silicon Valley rich, and the rest of the tech world with it.  Now the picture is changing. The Economist reports (1/21) that the working-age Chinese workforce (ages 15-64) actually shrank by 3.54 million last year. The massive factories with hundreds of thousands of workers are increasingly desperate for a fresh supply of the younger workers who have become deeply disillusioned, therefore harder to find and more expensive to hire.  

A two-headed dragon is emerging in the global economy. The developed world mines the poor nations for cheap workers but both worlds face a technology boomerang.  In rich and poor nations around the world the recessionary cycles are of increasing duration and the growing gap between labor’s productivity gains and labor’s real wages pictures the shape of this two-headed dragon that is devouring youthful hopes, as the graph on the right shows. 

The new film, Zero Dark 30, is set in this rapidly growing global caste system of inequality and job shortage that is planting seedbeds of individual desperation and disillusion.  These are turning into the startling Al Qaeda raids in Algerian gas and oil fields and the suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Suddenly today’s papers tell us Afghanistan has moved to North Africa.   While Dark Zero is a dramatic reenactment of the search for and killing of Osama bin Laden—and has triggered a fresh critique of U. S. use of torture—it also demonstrates that the context for terrorism is the fierce difference between Western affluence and Central Asian under-development.

At the Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that ended this past Sunday, the Global Agenda Council on Values describes the profile of this dragon

At the end of the 19th Century, the ratio of the richest 20% in the world to the poorest 20% was approximately 7:1.  At the end of the 20th Century, it was 75:1.  80% of the real increase in wealth in the USA between 1980 and 2005 went to only 1% of the population. Now in the USA, the richest 400 people have as much wealth as the poorest 155 million people.

An Oxfam Media Briefing in advance of the Davos meeting noted that “The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012—enough to end world poverty four times over.” 

The U. S. version of the Central Asian and young Chinese’ disillusionment is the growth of mindless acts of violence, such as Newtown, and our growing suicide rate.  In the U. S. military during and after their service in Iraq and Afghanistan suicide rates are greater than the combat casualties. At mid-year in 2012 it was one per day in the combat zones. [More recent data has not been released]

Veterans returning from the wars discover there are few civilian jobs available for them. Many had enlisted in the first place because other job alternatives did not exist. According to the Veterans Administration, suicide rates among all veterans of all ages is a staggering eighteen per day.

While Zero Dark 30 has revived a much-needed critique of torture, it is the difference it displays between the world of the western powers and the Middle Asian world of underdevelopment that screams even more loudly at us.  The tragic events of 9/11 have become the rich man’s sorrow:

Al Qaeda spent roughly half a million dollars to destroy the World Trade Center and cripple the Pentagon. What has been the cost to the United States? In a survey of estimates by The New York Times, the answer is $3.3 trillion, or about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks…this total equals one-fifth of the current national debt. (All figures are shown in today’s dollars.) [NY Times, 9/11/11]

The two heads of this dragon kill both at home and abroad.  Here at home, crazed young men with assault weapons slaughter children. Overseas, suicide bombers destroy hundreds of people at a single stroke.

Who will slay this two headed dragon and how?  Part Two of this blog will pursue this question further next week.

Theology and the Jobs Crisis

          Reports last week of Apple’s decision to invest one hundred million dollars to begin some manufacturing in the U. S. seems like a lot.  It's pocket change at Apple whose total sales last year topped 128 billion. This means the promised investment comes to something like .0018 of 1 percent.  The purpose looks more like public relations.  CEO Tim Cook, who set-up Apple’s Asian supply chain in the first place, told NBC that it’s not the skills people have in China but the education network that trains them.  “The education system stopped producing them [back here].”  Certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one since the community colleges in the USA cannot train people to do jobs that have been moved 3000 miles away.   

News reports begrudged this skimpy investment in U. S. manufacturing but still treated it affectionately: “One Small Step Home for Apple and One Giant Leap for Mac-kind” said the Financial Times headline.  The Apple tech inventions are of course dazzling, but their bright sun  blinds our capacity to see the whole picture.

For example, last Friday’s jobs report (on Pearl Harbor Day) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was headlined as a decline in unemployment—all of 0.2 percent. The truth of the matter, as the BLS noted, is that the small decline was only because the labor force is shrinking under the weight of discouraged and part time workers. Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital remarked last Friday, that at the current pace of job creation, the unemployment rate would only gradually decline to 7.1 percent by December 2013. (as quoted in the FT)

While that’s a whole year from now, the NY Times on Friday was even more vividly realistic:

Factoring in people seeking work, as well as those who want jobs but have stopped looking and those forced to take part-time jobs because full-time employment was not available, the broad unemployment gauge dipped to 14.4 percent in November from 14.6 percent in October.    

Public attitudes, especially media attitudes toward the US unemployment problem have the same unrealism that was the order of the day in the Romney campaign.  If Romney’s brain trust simply could not make the connection from the all-white faces in their crowds to the reality of U. S. diversity, the analogy here is that we often don’t connect sagging standards of living under conditions of long term unemployment to a more dismal future now rapidly approaching.  

The problem is theological.  We are as beguiled by electronic wizardry as any ancient Greek crowd bowing before a giant statue of Athena or Canaanites praying at the altar for virgin sacrifice.

The Federal Reserve has now acted with some desperation (Wednesday, December 12th) to hold interest rates at zero until probably 2015 when they hope unemployment will have declined to 6.5 percent.   The theological trick lies in the beguilement provided by technological glitter, but there is always the devil to pay.

The same day media reports indicated that the nation has suffered the biggest trade deficit (meaning a decline in trade) in nearly four years. This devil is getting its due: weakening consumer demand, in spite of the recent Black Friday hullabaloo, make it clear that the big downturn many economists have predicted for next year may be near to happening. The jobless crisis simply comes to mean that consumers don’t have enough money to buy the gadgets, to say nothing of essentials like food and medicine.  

The trend is rapidly becoming gloomier. The recent hard fought electoral battle between conservatives who have and many others who have not may turn out to be only prologue when the New Year dawns, fiscal cliff or not.

Will  Faith Communities Respond to the Scandal of Inequality?

“The median income of Santa Clara County families [Silicon Valley] fell by 3.2 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars last year -- more than twice the national decline -- to its lowest point in more than 11 years, according to U.S. Census figures.”

“…census data confirm widening income inequality in Silicon Valley traceable to a decline in the well-being of poor and middle-class families.                                                                              

                                                                                   “Life In The Valley Economy—Saving the Middle Class   

                                                                                     Lessons from Silicon Valley 2012” 

                                                                                      Working Partnerships USA, October 2012

In 1919, following the end of the First World War, the renowned Sociologist Max Weber said in a lecture on Politics as a Profession that a nation-state’s power lies in its “capacity to lay claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence.”  

The new Steven Spielberg-Tony Kushner film, “Lincoln,” shows this profession at work, and makes it clear that during that era it was the power of the state, the government, that permitted inequality both racial and economic.

The operative idea here is legitimacy. “Lincoln” reminds us that in the struggle over slavery, the United States asserted its violent power to enforce and legitimate the enslavement of four million African-Americans.  As later history shows the U. S. then let this power be used to enforce and legitimate inaction after adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. During that period the state either tolerated or enforced  a hundred year reign of terror over Black people, permitting wide-spread mob violence, the lynching of Black people for entertainment, the denial of their right to vote, and a rigid coast-to-coast but often unwritten code of racial segregation.     

Just so and very similarly, the state today tolerates, enforces and subsidizes the prevailing policies of an economy that continues to unevenly reward its workers, keeping millions bent over in stoop labor or at hard labor in labor intensive shipping warehouses while suffering a bottom tier pay scale that offers them little future.  

A N Y Times series running this week reviewed the history of tax abatements given by local governments in the U. S. that divert resources away from public needs while improving the bottom lines of corporations.  Local, regional and federal governments invest as much as $80 billion a year in subsidies to these corporations, thereby draining resources away from creating better schools, quality housing, and better health care for all citizens.

The Times identified 48 companies that have received more than $100 million in state grants just since 2007. Some 5,000 other companies received more than $1 million in recent years.

All of this rests on the same ideas that were rife in the age of Lincoln and present still today in public discourse:  the inherent righteousness of success, dominance and survival of the fittest, notions of genetic inferiority, rigid divisions of labor that condemn many groups, not only Latinos but many others, to backbreaking labor with little or no access to a viable future for their children. This was state policy and its state policy today. 

In the super-affluent Silicon Valley—a place thought by many people to be the new center of the universe—a report by the organized labor consortium, Working Partnerships, quoted in the text box above, documents the accelerating income decline of the middle and lower class communities in the Valley while life soars for the upper twenty percent.

The hardest bridge for faith communities is the crossing from the comfortable metaphorical riverside of intensely personal liturgies, a place where judgment is suspended and acts of contrition, thanksgiving, and redemption are celebrated----over to the other side of the river where judgment and risk-taking may be required; a place where people, their religious leaders and others accept vulnerability and the challenge of social reform as a vocation.

The truth of growing inequality may bring the global economic community to its knees one more time in 2013 because, for example, in the report cited in this blog last week from the  Pulling Apart

In California …

the incomes of the richest twenty percent of households were 9.5 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest households in the late 2000s; and

the incomes of the richest five percent of households were 16.2 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest fifth in that same period.

In New York…

the incomes of the richest twenty percent of households were 9.2 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest households in the late 2000s; and

the incomes of the richest five percent of households were 15.6 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest fifth in that same period.

In Iowa…

the incomes of the richest twenty percent of households were 5.6 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest households in the late 2000s; and

the incomes of the richest five percent of households were 8.7 times bigger than the incomes of the poorest fifth in that same period.

In Lincoln’s era many clergy and laity resisted such civic obscenities and put on the garments of radical abolitionists. Their choice of a vocation as “public intellectuals” is a rarity in our own age, and that is why the times are so dangerous:  public debate in our civil society is mostly severed from its roots in the “city set upon a hill.”  The faith community is mostly camped on the safe side of the river, where they can be soothed by the rites of private faith.

 So far, this means the dominance and control of a government ruled by the wealth of a few.   In the age of Lincoln there is a long list of familiar names of those who chose not to remain safe, but instead struggled to shape the power of the state to support justice:  the martyred Presbyterian clergyman and newspaper publisher, Elijah P. Lovejoy, Revivalist and college President (Oberlin) Charles Finney, the freedman Frederick Douglas, the feminist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Many others joined in or were led: William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, William Ellery Channing, poet John Greenleaf Whittier, etc. The list goes on.

These all pushed and hounded Lincoln who partly for reasons of his own cautious temperament and because he, probably correctly, believed he could not be elected if he embraced the radical abolitionsts, did finally share their vision and achieve their ultimate dream: first the Emancipation Proclamation and two years later  the Thirteenth Amendment. 

Had it not been for the radical clergy of that era, had it not been for the radical clergy in both Black and White congregations during the Civil Rights era of Martin Luther King, Jr., had it not been for the likes of Bishop Tutu in South Africa ----had it not been for this multitude of voices the freedom movement of both centuries would not, could not, have occurred.

Are such leaders among us today in the churches, temples and synagogues? Will they cry out in their own time against the new and crippling scandal of growing inequality?  Time will tell.

Breaking the Gag Rule

President Obama’s important electoral victory grew from a younger generation of voters that is at once more diverse, but also profoundly at-risk.

            The new report released last week by the Washington-based think tanks, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Economic Policy Institute, documents their predicament.  If they were part of the middle fifth of U. S. households, their incomes grew only 1.2 percent in the past fifteen years (after adjusting for inflation). Of course many in the Obama majority are only honorary members of that middle class with virtually no income gains for decades. The report, entitled Pulling Apart, finds that

Nationally, over the last thirty years the richest fifth of households enjoyed larger average income gains in dollar terms each year ($2,550, after adjusting for inflation) than the poorest fifth experienced during the entire three decades ($1,330).    

This means that much of the “hope” they created in electing President Obama for a second term is now living on fumes.

             The picture of gross injustice for these moderate income families is beyond scandalous. Pulling Apart examined the eleven largest states in the nation and found that   

the average income of the top 5 percent rose between the late 1970s and mid-2000s by more than $100,000….By contrast, the largest increase in average income for the bottom fifth of households in these states was only $5,620.  In New York...average incomes grew by $194,000 among the top 5 percent of households but by less than $250 among the bottom fifth of households.

In these 11 large states, the incomes of the top 5 percent of households increased by 85 percent to 162 percent between the late 1970s and mid-2000s. By contrast, incomes of the bottom fifth of households didn’t grow by more than 27 percent in any of these states, and in one state —Michigan – they actually fell.

These morally outrageous social policies have destroyed the prospects of whole generations of middle and lower income families, placing the deepening crisis of income inequality on the same burner where slavery, early 20^th century industrial tyranny, and racial segregation were confronted by civil war, Social Gospel reformers such as Walter Rauschenbusch and the Martin Luther King, Jr. voting rights movements.

This also helps explain why, at a  recent lecture in San Jose by the renowned biblical scholar, Walter Bruggeman, a young pastor rose to ask about the contemporary consequences of the biblical texts about prophetic justice Bruggeman had been discussing. She put her question sharply: 

            “So, does this mean,” she asked, “that we will have to be shot?”  Her question tests who will answer the call to a heightened level of non violent protest in both the churches and among the Obama followers.

Vividly aware of the need to resist the outrageous inequities now set in concrete in the daily lives of most citizens, the questioning pastor at the Bruggeman lecture appeared to realize that confronting growing inequality in the United States will require overcoming the gag rule in both the quietest middle class and in the churches where disturbing the peace can mean the end of pastoral careers.

This recalls John Quincy Adams, who as a member of the House of Representatives following his brief presidency offered a resolution every year for sixteen years to abolish the notorious Gag Rule that prevented any anti-slavery petition from being brought forward until, finally, he succeeded and new sentiments accumulated that would lead to emancipation.

The Obama majority does not have sixteen years. The question is whether their great electoral victory will strengthen them to break the cultural gag rule that expects people to accept their place in an increasingly stratified society. Will Obama’s majority risk public disapproval and organize non-violent movements to resist growing inequality? Will the churches tell them why it’s meet and right so to do?