Prelude to an American Spring: Regulating the Banks

        It’s been forty years since the 1973 oil price shocks transformed the formula of labor costs that have become today’s era of low union membership and growing inequality.  The price shocks back then were caused by Arab reaction to the U. S. re-supply of Israel in its 1973 war with Egypt.  There have been virtually unending consequences. OPEC, in response, raised the posted price of crude by 70% and placed an embargo on exports to the U.S. and other nations allied with Israel.  Although prices soon stabilized, the oil crisis had a profound impact on the international system.

It’s a suitable labor Day history lesson new generations should know about. At the beginning of the boycott with the price of oil quadrupled, gas rationing occurred in the U. S. and Europe, the Great Lakes greenhouse industry collapsed almost overnight, a deep recession set in that included a 45 percent decline in stock prices.  

The center of this drama is how the OPEC boycott created new incentives for investment capital to search for global investments whose lower labor costs would balance the rise in energy costs. The Central banks in the U. S. abandoned their long time customers—U. S. manufacturers—and moved toward overseas investment. The effect was to make money not things, to financialize their capital, shifting not just to overseas investment but to a seemingly infinite variety of financial instruments such as today’s synthetic securities: Credit Default Swaps, Derivative Securities and the rest.

Back then, 1973 to 1983--within ten years time—most of the vast steel and machine tool industries in the U. S. closed down. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland, LA and Baltimore went into death spirals.   

That’s why Labor Day 2013 is almost universalized. As previously noted here, the Pew Research Center last April reported that in dollar terms in the past six years the mean wealth of the richest 8 million households rose $697,651 while the mean wealth of 111 million less affluent households fell $133,817 .

That’s why on this Labor Day 2013 the banks are the biggest winners in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession.  In his new book, Debtors Prison, Robert Kuttner describes the rise of a federal reserve banking system created by investment banks like J. P. Morgan and Goldman Saks for the J. P. Morgans and Goldman Saks. When, during the Depression years the Glass-Steagall Act separated the speculative part of the economy from the real part (e.g. making steel), its repeal in 1999 had catastrophic consequences, opening the flood gates of the big banks’ speculative investment and leading to the crash of 2008 and the loss of the homes of millions upon millions of Americans.

    

           Kuttner believes the supposed antidote—passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—is destined to fail because the same banks that ruined the country are still in the driver’s seat, richer than ever, working with all their huge financial lobbying power to water down the rules to be implemented by Dodd-Frank, which has turned out—due to pressures from the banking lobby—to not have enough teeth to succeed. 

          Changing that will require a non-violent American Spring that will need several years to be successful.  Measures of moral reform and determination must be mobilized that only a large scale democratic movement can create. Faith groups and democracy groups, Labor unions and progressive research centers at our universities need to join together to make that happen.

Will THERE BE AN AMERICAN SPRING?

Josh Whedon’s film "Much Ado About Nothing” shown in theaters this summer offered Shakespeare’s sparkling language in the transparent light of  black and white camera work, portraying  the characters in both modern dress and masquerades that conceal reality from them, offering the compensation of also concealing their personal desires and motives. 

There’s a lot of that these days.  Abandoning prophetic warnings about injustice, faith communities are offering “Christianity Lite,” a personal fulfillment theology of praise music, personal anecdote and success story. One senses an unease about this. Singing praise hymns delivers a fanciful sense of a holiday illusion distracting people until the bills come in. The masquerades may not be working because people sense deeply ominous changes are afoot. 

After eleven years of war without meaningful victory, what Americans see today are drone air strikes killing dozens of children, American-sponsored torture, suicide bombers emulated by the Boston marathon perpetrators.  A long list includes Trayvon Martin and the stand-your-own-ground laws, the anniversary of the March on Washington observed amid growing evidence of race-based inequalities--and now more war imminent in Syria.

Americans stand on a knife’s edge sharpened by a faltering domestic economy (unemployment increased last month) and deluged by a hostile Russian, Arab and Iranian world.  The question is whether despair will become surrender or give birth to resistance, to an American Spring.  Can that Spring be pursued with a non-violence that surrenders nothing to determination?  Will faith communities feed that moral resolve or sing soft hymns?

In the U. S. South, The Tea Party movement continues to resonate among evangelicals and political opportunists as another “white hope” based on masquerades of so-called  democracy and devotion to the Constitution.  But the inequality gaps loom everywhere. According to the Manpower Development Corporation:

•           Median household income decreased in several Southern states: Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. However, only Florida and Louisiana had larger decreases in income than from 2009 to 2010.    

•        The poverty rate increased in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina and Texas, with no significant change in the other Southern states. Only Louisiana had a worse increase than 2009 to 2010.

              A personal walk on New York City's High Line last week (an urban park built on an abandoned overhead rail line) found virtually no people of color strolling among the plantings. At a Coney Island baseball game only a few people of color were present.  At a Broadway theater the same week, just a few more.  In a city of 2 million African Americans, racial separation and economic inequality is on the up-tick, ironically counterpointed with digital hand-helds everywhere.

  The Trayvon Martin case is a relative of this digital world.  Yes, the case is about race in America and its role in national electoral politics.  Yes, it’s about the bias toward potential injustice imposed by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws.  Less obvious, is the camouflage it provides for the reality of today’s permanently isolated and jobless underclass.   

   Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 novel, The Road, is set in the aftermath of a vast nuclear disaster. He foretells a starving and cannibalizing world where roaming gangs hunt down others to feed off their bodies.  Note, please, that Mark Zimmerman’s role on a February evening last winter was to hunt for the Trayvon Martins.

  

    In the next issue of Public Liturgies the discussion will be about policies necessary to build a non-violent American Spring.

[A personal note: after a moderate illness and some Summer reflection Public Liturgies is back for the foreseeable future]

Trip Wires and Silicon Answers

Estimates suggest the number of suicide bombers in the Middle East and Africa is nearing one thousand per year, killing and maiming other tens of thousands.  The flash points behind this are mostly illegible to our Western eyes.  As the new World Trade Center Tower and Memorial nears completion in New York City—remembering the inestimable worth of 3,000 human lives lost on 9/11—no memorial rises for the tens of thousands of inestimable human lives lost during the past decade’s Middle East and African wars; wars in which the U. S. has been either directly or indirectly involved.  

The suicide bombers can be seen as a response to the missing memorials. The bombers are making a statement about their own life’s meaning, drained of opportunity, ennobled by their self-willed death that ends all future meaning and concludes all future social relations.

Note that the young Boston bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, drifted for days in anomie after their awful act. They appear to have had no future plans. The meaning of their act—like the acts of suicide bombers—lay in its potentially conclusive devotion.  The Tsarnaevs are reported to have resented that their own culture’s traditions were usually identified as despised and inferior, invidiously compared with U. S. traditions—where they found no place for themselves—composed of noble moral superiority; a superiority they could have heard reiterated in countless political speeches, usually dressed with religious sanctimony.  

Our Western minds never want for self-regard but this easily becomes a trip wire exposing a moral arrogance blind to the sight of a vastly unjust world, one plausibly filled with many more Tsarnaevs.  

This was documented days after the Boston bombers’ apprehension when the national news focus changed ineluctably revealing a second trip wire as Bloomberg News reported that half of New Yorkers are now poor or near-poor.  Two days later the Pew Research Center reported the net worth of 93 percent of U. S. households had declined 4% during the Recession years 2009 to 2011 while the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose 28%.   In dollar terms the mean wealth of the richest 8 million households rose $697,651 while the mean wealth of 111 million less affluent households fell $133,817.  

Across the Atlantic, prolonged Euro Zone unemployment ticked up May 1st to 12.1 percent.  Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union situated in Luxembourg, reports this is the highest unemployment in Europe since it began keeping records in 1995: 26.5 million are now unemployed in Europe including 5.7 million young people. [NY Times, May 1, 2013]

Current global conditions can be understood to guarantee a continuing supply of suicidal acts born among millions of people with no clear path to the future. Apparently invisible to many leaders in government and business today, the rising tide of violence is growing as the inequality gap grows. Suicide bombing is now a significant portion of the deaths in the ongoing global violence: approximately 3,043 deaths in the Middle East per month since January 2013 [CNN].    During this April alone in Iraq 322 people died, Afghanistan 323, Pakistan 89. 

With 11.7 million in the U. S. remaining unemployed, many for more than a year (BLS May 3, 2013) 4.4 million workers have been unemployed for at least six months not including people who have given up looking for work. Then there is the other dark side: the burgeoning U. S. prison population. The Population Reference Bureau (August 2012) reports:

Since 2002, the United States has had the highest incarceration rate in the world….the natural rate of incarceration for countries comparable to the United States tends to stay around 100 prisoners per 100,000 population. The U.S. rate is 500 prisoners per 100,000 residents, or about 1.6 million prisoners in 2010, according to the latest available data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

A growing domestic and global alienation from Western idealism is clearly visible in the growing tide of violence:  in the U. S. we see school massacres, murdered police and public officials, counter-pointed by a daily family death toll by gunfire.  In Pakistan twenty more died in a bombing in Pakistan as this was being written. (5/6/13)

We can be forgiven for believing that worse lies ahead.

 On the other hand powerful minds in Silicon Valley believe this does not have to be so. The Valley’s Kool Aid diet (the one that shipped millions of jobs out of the U.S) creates a steady drum beat of harmony between wealth and moral principle. Valley entrepreneurs Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have written a new book. The New Digital Age, that advances a parallel universe cut from biblical metaphors.  Technology will change all things, make all things new.  Schmidt, the executive chairman (and former chief executive) of Google, and Cohen, a foreign-relations expert and director of Google Ideas claim their book is meant to explore the ways technology and diplomacy can intersect.

There is a canyon dividing people who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world’s toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge.…[but] a new accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed public… will be able to tell the difference….The consequence of having more citizens informed and connected is that they’ll be as critical and discerning about rebels as they are about the government.”

The Tech icons claim that to confront terrorism “a new accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed [global] public will be able to tell the difference.  [the citations and this account are in The N Y Times 4/25/13].

The writers’ theory may enlarge their already ample fortunes but will its saving power reach the jobless, the disenchanted and the potential bombers whose wires have already been tripped?

    

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.