Moral Compass in the Heart of Darkness

The Syrian refugee catastrophe has become a metaphor for the devil himself, so obviously born of the confabulations of the rich nations. Their dearest interests, not the Syrian people's, is the keystone to the nightmare. Syria has become a twenty-first century version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel about the African ivory trade written in 1898.  In a land awash with American, Israeli, Russian and Iranian agents (to name a few)—the current version of Conrad’s novel is re-enacted in corporate and global struggles over food, oil, and control of the tech universe. 

This dystopia of rich and poor struggling in Africa and the Middle East now clearly extends to the struggles over growing inequality in the U. S. and Europe.  Both last week’s solo terror attack in Washington and the assault on the huge shopping mall in Nairobi lap at the shore of American imagination, which is why the FBI has been sent scurrying in all directions to learn where it might happen next.  

Amid such moral confusion it may be helpful to take recourse to John Milton, the 17^th century Puritan poet, who worked as a pamphleteer and civil servant during the first English Revolution.  An eloquent advocate of free speech, Yale’s Professor John Roberts tell us he invented “the very language of insubordination, creating an entire vocabulary of resistance, protest and revolution.”  This was because he wanted the biblical Word about righteousness and justice to become incarnate in the revolution’s new social and political institutions.

 There was not quite that intention with the American Revolution though we Americans have thought it so. The emerging USA pursued a different incarnation: to make all men free to pursue their own interests; and as it turned out on a vastly rich continent, men used slavery, Native American removal and financial manipulation to make themselves rich if they could. Because some could, later they enshrined their success and wealth as the customary measures of a divine American way. It was, in fact, an incarnation of themselves. 

Karl Barth, the famous 20^th century theologian, pointed out how this 18^th century formula worked.  In effect, God was given an honorary box seat—at the top of the grandstand—but men were given the central place on the field of play. His most terrifying example was the 19th century Dutch colonial empire which he described as a place of wealth and skulls, the skulls of the slave trade.

There was something about the Puritans like Milton, and the earliest Christians including Augustine, that understood this human propensity to self-elevation.  Anyone who reads about the despoiling of Syria can understand the ancient Christian sense of being caught in sin.

Ironically, the community seldom heard from in public life today is the faith community, composed more than any time in recent decades of highly educated and trained clergy and lay leaders, many of them women, and from a younger generation.  They could exercise a public and transformative role identifying saints, sinners and devils.   More about this in the next Public Liturgies blog.

The Vanishing Common Good

Sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville revealed an Achilles heel in American democracy in 1835 when he described an early America whose democratic practice operated apart from politics in the public square. He observed a vast hive of thousands of lodges, fraternal organizations, clubs and churches that operated alongside the realm of government and political life, each pursuing the particular interests of its members, offering them the ceremonies of democracy without the civic rough and tumble where leaders and legislatures were elected and laws shaped.     

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all dispositions formed all kinds of associations, religious, moral, serious, futile….hospitals, prisons, schools….pursuing in common the object of their desires.” They shared the perhaps unintended pattern of functioning largely below the radar of political public life. The common understanding of faith communities in this new democracy—separation of church and state—undergirded the same pattern as did the new sciences of the age that also were above politics. Then (as now) clergy were called to their pulpits on the pledge to do no politics in the churches.  

Thus organized the effect has been to take a lot of what was called citizenship out of the government-related democratic process, creating a passivity in the public square and silencing the prophetic voice of most churches.  Good citizens were expected to keep the peace.

This may help explain why the outrageous injustice documented in the New Pew Research Center report of huge inequalities in the nation has so far avoided creating an uprising, an American Spring.  The Report shows the U. S. wealth gap is now running $3,173,896 for the median income of the top 7 percent of U. S. population but down to $133,817 for the bottom 93 percent. Between 2009 and 2011 the top group gained 27 percent in income while the bottom 93 percent lost 4 percent.

Our scandalous Inequality has grown in part from the hierarchical structure and theological conventions of industrial capitalism. Ever since the large U. S. central banks began shifting investments overseas destroying the economic foundation of manufacturing centers like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Youngstown it has been largely with only a whimper of resistance.  It was accepted as the operation of a divinely instituted natural law at work in older industries. There was deep suffering, but no rebellion.    

There have been historic exceptions to our national history of passivity: the Farmer’s rebellion of the 1880s; Populism that led in the 1910s to the industrial reforms of the Progressive movement; the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s. In each case leaders pursued a democratic practice with teeth in it. They changed the laws through their challenges not at the lodge meeting but in the public square.

There is a rebellion afoot today and it has teeth. It’s among conservative forces like the Tea Party. Championing a new spirit of individualism, this rebellion seeks to separate winners from losers, to form an organic social and racial Darwinism that will bless the survival of the most deserving among us, as they define them.  State after state is abandoning fair voter rights laws, blocking universal health care, balking at immigration reform, and repealing gun control restraints.   As corporate money pours into this rebellion from wealthy conservative sources, the trend threatens to pull the country apart more rapidly than we may imagine.  

We’ll analyze the sources of this disintegration next week, pointing to the strengths that should unite us.

The Obama Presidency Verges on Disaster

 Even if President Obama wins begrudging approval this week from either Congress or his lawyers for his desire to attack Syria, he risks a possible disastrous loss of influence at home and abroad for the balance of his second term.  In fact, that is already happening. While the President asserts the necessity to act if the international agreements against the use of poison gas have been violated by the Syrian government, the real reasons for his compulsions seem both political and emotional and are perhaps more transparent in the actions of his Secretary of State, John Kerry.  

  

Kerry’s passions this past summer run from the so-called peace talks he is conducting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to his near fanatical call for an attack on Syria. Both are perfect examples of truth defined by righteous umbrage.  Kerry has proved willing to give away the store by suggesting that the problem of continued Israeli settlement expansion and the permanence of Israel’s already large settlements located inside the Palestinian territory be set aside so the basis of a peace agreement can be reached without such distractions.  Just this past weekend he turned to the European Union asking them to drop their restrictions banning financing and cooperating with institutions within the Israeli settlement areas in order “to demonstrate to the Israelis that taking the risk of moving toward peace is worthwhile.” [NY Times 9/9/13) 

Not only does this bizarre strategy speak volumes about the blind loyalty of the Secretary of State to Israel and its American lobby, AIPAC—it is also a window into a similar bondage of President Obama.  Even as the President seems compelled to an action that loses him the already thin respect of the Muslim/Arab world, confidence in him among Democrats appears to be seriously eroded.  This can mean doom for his domestic initiatives. Democrats, made politically vulnerable by Obama’s sudden weakness, can be expected to low ball their policy objectives.    

Equally important, this growing weakness threatens the ambitions of the liberal and progressive communities for a non-violent movement to transform banking, finance and corporate control of American democracy.   

This abrupt political climate change, if it occurs, does offer us an important teaching moment.  It’s an opportunity  to reflect about the compromises of the modern period that confuse moral principle with power;  a chance to ponder the declining role of the religious community as it often surrenders its prophetic truth-telling role for the comfort of good music and soft preaching; a chance to exegete “Holocaust Guilt,” when someone else’s self-interest defines our own civic disengagement.  On our way to a non-violent American spring we’ll treat these three issues in our next three issues of Public Liturgies—coming each remaining week in September.            

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.