After Fifty Years More Questions About Capitalism

Last Saturday (February 8^th) a diverse coalition took their “Moral Monday” movement to the state capital in Raleigh, North Carolina. Grown to 30,000 from nearly a year of demonstrations involving the arrest of 900 North Carolinians, they protested  Republican actions that include refusal to expand Medicaid, imposing new photo ID voting requirements, and re-drawing district boundaries.

The North Carolinians marched to the familiar cadences of the faith-based civil rights protest era fifty years ago, but while the beat goes on Jericho’s walls remain.  [click on the URL in the right hand column to view the rally]

An awareness is growing on more and more people that it’s not the Republicans behind Jericho’s walls but our capitalist loyalties  that hold inequality in place.  Notice the “our.” From California Democratic leaders like Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsome—who gave Silicon Valley a free pass for exporting millions of jobs—to Kansas Tea Partiers, the heart of the American dream is to solve problems the capitalist way: by growing the economy instead of more fairly distributing it.  President Obama is expected to genuflect every day in this direction. 

Stale as accusations about capitalism may sound, on-going struggles coast-to-coast are freshly encoded with the search for policies that will bend our system to serve the basic dignity and needs of all people. The battle to raise the minimum wage, the battle to enforce the Volker rules in Dodd-Frank, the prosecutions of Wall Street fraud, and of course Bill Moyer’s broadcasts  are part of this rising tide.      

Old ideas like worker control or community ownership are coming back. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, workers at the Volkwagen plant are deciding this week whether to join the U.A.W. and  management is not opposing this for the interesting reason that it wants to see the plant adopt its successful German model of works councils and self-management. The company needs a UAW win in order to do this. According to the NY Times, Frank Fischer, Volkswagen local chief executive and chairman says

“worker councils” are a business model that helped to make Volkswagen the second-largest car company in the world. Our plant in Chattanooga has the opportunity to create a uniquely American works council, in which the company would be able to work cooperatively with our employees and ultimately their union representatives, if the employees decide they wish to be represented by a union.”

The Republicans are not only opposing this, but bringing in none other than Grover Norquist and his Washington-based lobbying  group,“Americans for Tax Reform.” In Tennessee Norquist has created a Center for Worker Freedom who’ve put up 13 billboards in Chattanooga, some calling the U.A.W. “United Obama Workers” and saying, “The UAW spends millions to elect liberal politicians.” Another billboard says, “Detroit: Brought to you by the U.A.W.,” and shows a photo of a Packard plant that was shuttered there 55 years ago.

Enjoining the battle may define what it means to be faithful.  But it may also mean developing the intellectual habit of courageous and critical thinking.  Some battles may be about dividing the spoils not helping the poor. In Memphis, where Dr. King was assassinated marching for sanitation workers’ low wages, the Kellogg company has locked out its workers in the hope of introducing a two tier wage system.  The union says Kellogg is asking for the right to employ up to 100 percent of the Memphis factory’s work force as temps or casuals — a lower tier that would earn around $22 an hour. The locked-out workers fear that if Kellogg wins the right to use as many casuals as it likes — the current contractual limit is 30 percent — then the company would somehow find a way to push out the longer-term workers, perhaps by preferring the casuals in assigning work schedules. [NY Times 2/11]

As usual, knowledge of these struggles is not widely distributed, but some of the groups that can provide a cure for this are the social justice units of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim faith groups. In an internet age they have the capacity to provide thousands of study groups in local congregations with briefing and study materials, which could be entitled, “Why you and your children are getting poorer.”  

The Year of Living Dangerously: Renewing the King Vision

            Annual observances of MLK’s birthday can become impediments to historical memory where critical thinking is required. Only three years after his “I have a dream” speech, Dr. King and the civil rights movement stalled at the point where it encountered the toxic mixture of economic and class-based segregation and limited opportunities in northern cities like Chicago, Boston and Cleveland.

What they found in these highly segregated cities is a familiar story today: insufficient work and opportunity, hard-bitten wage earners fighting and clawing for foot holds on security for themselves and their families. They lived in those days in a world of union solidarity (or exclusion) that was a combination of standoff by dynamite, mounted police and the corruptions of political patronage. Today they work at jobs that do not pay enough to support a family.

In 1964 what had seemed a matter of moral courage and persuasion in the South had become  more like an encounter with the four horsemen of the apocalypse by 1967.  In Dr. King’s last months he and his movement partners found themselves deciding whether to march against the monstrous realities of the Vietnam War or launch a domestic war on poverty. It would be hell either way. King was still dreaming but the familiar ground had changed under his feet.  Moral appeal in northern cities had few ears for the hearing of it.  

This was a different kind of theological problem.  Abruptly King’s vision, his transcendent call, had become a dream of integration into a world that did not really exist.  The main elements of the toxic mix he encountered are still our current reality fifty years later, only much more dangerous.  Today it connects to Syria, Egypt, Central Africa, Afghanistan and all the rest. Growing global inequality is making 2014 the year of living dangerously. Those apocalyptic horsemen are riding hard (traditionally conquest, war, famine and death).

Faith communities have a call, if they can hear it, to renew Dr. King’s drive to create an alternative imagination. The problem is that most faith communities have become comfort zones. They can be heard on any given day praying for themselves, their babies, their growing kids, their elderly parents, but not for the forty people killed yesterday in a raid by Boko Haram on Kawuri in Nigeria. And they study not; perpetual bible study, maybe, but usually not a political or sociological analysis of the problems to which their biblical studies may direct them. Such as these:

“ General Electric’s decision to open its first new assembly line in 55 years in Louisville, Ky [will offer jobs] at just over $13.50 an hour. That’s less than $30,000 a year

“Volkswagen…. is bringing around 2,000 fresh auto jobs to America [with a] beginning wage for assembly line workers of  $14.50 per hour, about half of what traditional, unionized workers employed by General Motors or Ford received.

“[These Volkswagen jobs will] cost Volkswagen $27 per hour…..in Germany, the average autoworker earns $67 per hour.

“In effect….Volkswagen has moved production from a high-wage country (Germany) to a low-wage country (the United States).”

                                                  [Wall Street analyst Steve Ratner, N. Y. Times 1/26/14]     

Martin Luther King, Jr. did go symbolically to Kawuri, only its name was Memphis. If his dream is to live on it must be given new configurations if peace doves are to fly in Chicago or Kawuri.   Not to follow the path of the King dream is to stay comfortable. That’s why this is the year of living dangerously.  We must go to Kawuri. There’s little time left to pack.

Hitting the Right's Pitch

        It was many years, centuries in fact, before the Visigoths overwhelmed Rome.  First they became insiders fighting barbarian competitors alongside Roman troops on the northern frontier. Perceiving the growing weakness in the Empire, the Visigoths gradually congealed, overwhelming, looting and destroying whole Roman cities.   

        Detroit is not Rome, but a look at it makes one ask when it was that the Nazis or some other enemy swept  in with their bombers?  Much of the city is utterly destroyed from neighborhood streets to elegant train stations . It’s the same story in many other cities.   The enemy air raids on Detroit, Youngstown, Cleveland came, of course, from a capitalism that can be called “classic” only because it went on its way unchallenged. 

     

         Is it happening now? 

         

         The Financial Times (1/14/14) headlines “A productivity crisis is stalking the global economy as most countries last year failed to improve their overall efficiency for the first time in decades.”  That’s econo-speak for too many people could not go back to work. In between the lines it means that the true goal of efficiency is to reduce labor costs, by finding a way workers will double their productivity so no one will notice the bread lines.  

Last Friday’s monthly Jobs Report from the Department of Labor (DOL) shouts the same tragic story.  There are 1.2 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 638,000 thousand fewer jobs on private payrolls in December than when the recession began in December 2007,” While Census Bureau data says the nation grew by another 11 million people. More people, fewer and fewer jobs.

         

            Chad Stone, Chief Economist at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities(on 1/10/14):

 “The share of the population with a job, which plummeted in the recession from 62.7 percent in December 2007 to levels last seen in the mid-1980s and has remained below 60 percent since early 2009, was 58.6 percent.'

                

          The real danger now comes not from metaphorical air raids but from a Right wing take-over built on the ruins of millions of people’s empty pocketbooks and lost homes—thanks to the Great Recession—and from a revival or racial scapegoating.  

          With the Obama mystique severely damaged by the gross mishandling of its own Affordable Health Care Act,  we find at least thirteen states in play for possible Republican senate victories; this on top of thirty-six state governorships all in Republican hands now.  It’s not paranoia to imagine a worst case scenario in which the prejudices of wounded people come to be exploited and then used to dominate national attitudes amid even more tightening economic conditions.  Models for radical conservative takeovers of government are ready at hand in Wisconsin and North Carolina, ready for the copying.  

        Bill Moyer’s Report describes it this way in North Carolina:

“Now…Republicans hold the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature and they are steering North Carolina far to the right: slashing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, providing vouchers to private schools, cutting unemployment benefits, refusing to expand Medicaid and rolling back electoral reforms, including voting rights.'

         The American Prospect writers, Kriss Kromm and Sue Sturgis describe the new policy strategy on the Right:

“…photo ID at the polls, slash the number of early-voting days, eliminate same-day registration during early voting, and delay by five years the time it takes for former felons to regain their voting rights…. ban parents from claiming their college children as dependents on their state taxes if those children vote on campus (as most students do)….[prohibit] the “mentally incompetent” from voting. “

         William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, writes in Politico describing his version of good news in 2014:

“an Obamacare-inspired Republican wave…that will not only sweep out red-state Democrats, but will also produce a gaggle of Republicans coming to the Senate to represent states Obama carried, including New Hampshire, Iowa, Michigan … and Virginia."

        Then there is Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, who shows another Right wing plank: successfully pushing his campaign to deprive public workers of collective bargaining rights and increase their share of payments for pensions and health care. He’s winning against Union-driven recall efforts.

        After the Fall months of good cheer about the recovering economy the December unemployment report demonstrates the nation has been drinking too much of the cool aide stuff.  Economist Stone continues: 

“December’s job growth (even with the revisions to earlier months) was well below the sustained job growth of 200,000 to 300,000 a month that would mark a robust jobs recovery…The unemployment rate was 6.7 percent in December, and 10.4 million people were unemployed….  The unemployment rate was 5.9 percent for whites (1.5 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession), 11.9 percent for African Americans (2.9 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession), and 8.3 percent for Hispanics or Latinos (2.0 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession)."

          Faith communities have missed many a pitch over the last several hundred years: remaining silent during the era of slavery; remaining silent (mostly) during the Jim Crow period; missing the call to support anti-war movements against the slaughter of several wars.  Since the time of Caesar Chavez and the massacres of Central America they've done better, especially in advocacy for refugees.  Now they need to hit the Right wing's ball that is polarizing government and deepening the growing open wound of inequality. 

The Sharon Syndrome

Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace talks have much in common with Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of Israel.  The wheezing peace talks roughly parallel Sharon’s last breaths, reported to be imminent.    Both have been kept alive artificially and both have actually been dead for years. Sharon became the author of Israel’s settlement movement while he was Housing Minister, a post he was forced into after he was held responsible as Israel’s General for the slaughter of Palestinians in the refugee camps at Shabra and Shatila in 1982.  His will still prevails.

           The familiar peace formula sponsored for years by the U. S. always asks the Palestinians to again compromise a little more over their borders in order to accept most of Israel’s settlement growth, now somewhere near 450,000 and counting. This is a familiar bad joke in the Middle East.  Every Israeli prime minister since Ben Gurion has approved new settlement construction.   

Heaping insult on injury in this very first week of 2014 the Israelis are insisting on protecting their security by requiring an agreement to its felt need to occupy a wide zone along the banks of the Jordan River from Jericho to the Galilee.  This is a low point  in dark humor since the Israelis for decades have occupied that western side of the Jordan with hundreds of thousands of acres of date palm plantations.

While many of the violent fires raging in the Middle East from Southern Sudan to Pakistan cannot be laid at the feet of Israel and its U. S. partner, the sheer hypocrisy, the affectation of moral legitimacy, of the U. S. posturing as honest peace broker, is like gasoline poured on the fires of abject poverty, illiteracy, and inequality and is feeding the growth of terrorism across North Africa all the way to Pakistan.  The fires are growing worse every day.

Behind these fires is a Britannica of theological material.  A guilt-ridden compact tied to the origins of the Holocaust has existed between Christians and Jews since WW II and has led both to a fresh purchase on Western triumphalism. The franchise lives on today in the form of a global imperialism of the wealthy in a framework of growing inequality. 

Generations of modern Christians and their denominations have no experience at all with the historic dogmas on which Anti-Semitism was based, but dutifully and periodically confess a symbolic complicity with the Holocaust. The result pulls the teeth on constructive criticism and dialogue and amounts to reality denial as generations of modern Jews continue to suffer from Holocaust fear in much the same way that pharmaceuticals advertise their cancer medications. It could happen to you.

These are theological chains that imprison everyone with their specious versions of history.  Jews adhere to an Israeli secular theology that uses biblical narratives about the land with little historical validity or meaning, preening for political support from their extreme Orthodox factions.   Christians, terrified of possible conviction for an anti-Semitism that is entirely foreign to them, support an Israeli right to land that takes priority over the Palestinians and Arab peoples in general.  Both faiths then buy into a compact that holds them to be both exceptional and morally superior to those around them.  It’s a compact that drives the U. S. Congress and Israel’s worst angels to guarantee fresh supplies of gasoline for the terrorist fires.

There is an alternative.   Here are great world religious traditions that could stand for something so drastically different—they could even stand together—and cut the tangled chains that imprison their better angels.   Christians, with their transcendent symbols of God without tribal allegiance who is aligned with the poor and outcast; the Jews with their high moral tradition of ethics rooted in righteousness, justice and equity. Islam, linked with Jews and Christians as people of the same book but with their own tradition expressed in capacious Mosques into which the most humble camel herder may come as one of God’s own.  (It is worth noting that the Christian-convened Councils of Nicaea included no camel herders.)

Advocacy for universal human dignity and equality, justice for all, genuine political righteousness, a just economic life—all are common themes among most world religions.  Such advocacy makes good New Year resolutions, and in case you’re interested they could be seen as a fresh epiphany.    

The Stumbling Block

     

        The indignity thrust upon us during the holidays is exceeded only by the price we are expected to pay for it. The vulgar commercial incentives come as reminders that what we cannot afford to buy measures our worth as human beings.  In this dim light reality is not an option. Nevertheless, the spectacular holiday conjunction of a rising U. S. economy alongside unspeakable violence in the Middle East create obscene contrasts. Monday it was violence in southern Russia; Sunday in Iraq and Syria; the day before in Beirut and Sudan. The dead and wounded are like stigmata—moral wounds—that no candle or carol removes while the victims beg to know what in the world we think we’re doing as they die of violence or starvation and we sing carols?

A practical defensive answer might be that we’re shopping our economy back to health. The other answer, the true answer, is that we’re celebrating our well-earned righteousness.  We are calling on the heroism of the Maccabees, the obeisance of three kings, the beautiful music, the mercies of Allah—all understood to be both transcendent expressions of faith and signs of our superior, if competing, cultures  in this world. That’s the real reason bombs are going off from Boston to Kiev.

The vulgarization of faith for purposes of political empowerment or as footstools for our self-righteousness is the stumbling block to religious perspectives actually intended to bend the arc of history toward justice.

It is this failure to see faith as historic purposefulness that can bring everything to ruin.  As a ferocious 2014 looms with its spreading violent moods, its fossil fuel extractions and climate changes, its growing inequality, its chronic high unemployment, its violent perils, the proper exercise of faith will be finding the courage to stop, think and do justice.   

Have a Good New Year!

Judge More Forgive Less?

   The mourning of Nelson Mandela should include remembering the awesome Truth and Reconciliation Commission he created that brought a deeply divided people through a post-Apartheid trial that was like walking on hot coals. At Mandela’s bidding forgiveness for terrible deeds under Apartheid was on offer to all segments in the conflict—provided the truth could be known and genuine regrets were expressed.  His Commission offered amnesty to wrong-doers by seeking truth through their public recollections and confessions of terrible deeds, whether committed by Afrikaner or Black communities.  Many of the petitioners seeking amnesty were not up to that test.

  

   The political problem was whether reconciliation could serve as an alternative to justice.  Coming from a religious tradition whose core was the forgiveness of sins, Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired the Commission’s work and his civic role became a trial of his religious beliefs.  Could the perspectives of faith grant priority to truth-telling and the pronouncing of judgment ?  Commission members were painfully aware of the biblical admonition that exercising such judgment brought judgment down on themselves.  As the hearings proceeded they also became aware that the biblical proscription to judge not lest you be judged could serve as a home for scoundrels.  In the end the Commission granted amnesty to only 849 persons, refusing  it to 5,392 others.*  

     

The exercise of judgment about what is true or false is an uncommon ingredient in the life of most faith communities where respectability is highly valued. However this ritual pattern of avoidance may have ricocheted into the public square. How else do we explain today’s evidence of such large scale financial frauds?  There is irrefutable evidence of dishonest interest rate manipulation in the trillion dollar global LIBOR market.  Bank fraud in the billions includes hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mortgages written by some of our neighbors that destroyed the homes and careers of other neighbors.  This is all old news by now and while the criminal convictions are mounting (nearly a hundred to date), the cultural environment continues to suggest that we take for granted the ordinary social and political practices that cut along a familiar grain not for the purpose of serving the truth but in order to keep a profitable game going.

   

What ingredient is it that leads people to look the other way?

This brings us to the consequences of today’s dangerous reality of growing inequality: the great majority of financial assets are now in the hands of the top one percent of U. S. population.  This is quickly becoming a tipping point about whether future societies will be able to offer opportunity to all their citizens. Some factions in state and federal legislatures are already clamoring to recognize inequality as the new normal.

Could it be that the foundations of Wall Street fraud are actually built in our local faith communities where granting the remission of sins has come to mean skipping judgment and its sometimes painful truths?  A common diagnosis is that guilt ridden people can be freed toward a new life by a ritual that suspends judgment in favor of a nearly infinite amount of forgiveness (“seventy times seven”).  That’s why it’s worth revisiting the painful journey of Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission where truth was one of the arbiters of judgment. 

*[See Department of Justice and Constitutional Development of the Republic of South Africa, The Truth and Reconciliation Official Website at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans/index.htm]

Sunday School Lessons

The faith community has only a few years left to demonstrate that its life and message is not about the rhetoric of good intentions, but contains critically important moral perspective applicable to the nightmarish facts accumulating on the ground beneath our feet; nightmares like the corruption of democracy through control of wealth by a few; or Drone attacks that slaughter the innocent; or the mass destruction of creation by our gluttonous fossil fuel appetites.  

Today's news features the argument that J. P. Morgan's $13 billion fine for mortgage irregularities (a polite way of saying fraud) is actually a good deal for them. They are said to still have on hand that much again. What a relief that must be, especially since the exploding growth of Wall Street profits (including J. P.'s) continue to strengthen the financial community’s capacity to simply buy the political system.  

Former mayor of Philadelphia and governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendel, is now working at the private equity firm, Element Partners, holding investments in the natural gas industry whose ambitions, The American Prospect, reports (Nov./Dec. 2013) include 100,000 fracking wells for Pennsylvania alone.  The tangled launch of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has become a window into just such corruptions, playing into the hands of the private health care industry including big pharma, the mega insurers and the health tech equipment companies.

The evidence is that the practice of religiously expressed or nobly articulated exhortation actually erect a comfort zone behind which people can hide as ancient peoples once did, cowering behind their city’s walls as an enemy advanced upon them.  But what if the “Trojan Horse” is already inside the gate as seems the case today?

Religious language requires concrete ethical articulation. There are beginning to be important examples of this: in the Shale rebellion in Pennsylvania and the Moral Mondays Movement that started in North Carolina and is now appearing elsewhere across the country. Faith groups are often leading or facilitating and participating in these movements. This movement to resist or to occupy is the leasding edge of what must become a new non-violent revolution 

There is a seductively strong connection between good intentions and the sentiments of religious language when application proportionate to the scale of the problems around us is missing.  Consider the Congressional hearings in recent weeks that cross-examined NSA officials about the secretive role it played through gross internet invasions of privacy from Angela Merkel down to everyone else.  The same hearings made clear the existence of para-governments resident in both federal and corporate agencies that are able either to secretly serve elected officials or undermine them. 

Sunday School lessons today must acquire that scale to he heard and respected by the powerful. Consider Floyd Norris’ discussion below of pervasive bank fraud in setting interest rates.  (Norris is Chief Financial columnist of the NY Times; October 31, 1913).  Excerpts:

LIBOR— the London interbank offered rate — is supposed to represent the costs that each bank would face if it received an unsecured deposit from another bank. Each day, banks report Libor rates for maturities ranging from overnight to 12 months, in numerous currencies. The announced Libor rates are based on averages of bank submissions. In Europe, there is a similar Euribor. Banks cheated on both.  

“Don’t worry mate — there’s bigger crooks in the market than us guys!” wrote an official of Rabobank, the large Dutch lender, after he agreed to a request from one of the bank’s traders in 2007 to submit a phony rate for Libor rates in yen.

          Even without fraud, Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said in a recent speech at Harvard, that Libor rates “are basically more akin to fiction than fact.”  “In the U.S.,” Mr. Gensler said in his speech, “Libor is the reference rate for 70 percent of the futures market and more than half of the swaps market. It is the reference rate for more than $10 trillion in loans.”

           

The danger signals require a new vocation of deeper reflection and action. A first step in the case of faith communities is to modify their saturation in the study of scriptural texts so that texts serve as a light shining on contemporary issues, no generalities or abstractions please; a new process should turn Sunday School into critical thinking seminars for young and old.  Religious language is not the same thing as ethical thinking about the search for the fairest tax policy, the wisest environmental regulations or the best health care policy. Progressively inclined folks active in churches, mosques and synagogues —and all others who link love and justice together—can easily feel overwhelmed by this predicament. 

  

By creating a “think tank” process inside weekly congregational life, the weekend Sabbath lessons can become critical thinking exercises.   Every region in the country has university-level faculty who could help resource a new wave of think tanks, a bit like the old travelling Chautauqua’s that brought learning to remote local communities a hundred years ago. Let the new lessons begin.