Sickness unto Death

The pitiless assignment for the mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other African American mayors over the past 50 year has been to serve as cover for the reality behind the scenes. The drill is that a minority mayor will placate the deeply disadvantaged, proving the possibility of exceptions. However, the popular understanding upon which public support for police behavior rests is the perceived reality on the ground: that the minority problem—aka the Black problem--derives from an inferior people. Like slavery, which enshrined inferiority as a moral reason for enslavement, the common understanding today supports police forces that brutalize and murder across the country. Less intentionally perhaps, it amounts to social control in the face of deepening inequality.  Yet even many deeper analyses explaning reasons for police murders in Baltimore, New York and Cleveland may miss a deeper reality: the “sickness unto death,” described by Christian theologian Soren Kierkegaard as “ultimate despair.”   

Kiekegaard’s “sickness” comes from an age that struggled to find integrity in a post-biblical 18^th and 19^th century that often replaced monarchy with personal and private rapacity. It was that unregulated personal aggrandizement that created the slaves, built the factories and now flood the few with the wealth produced by the many.  The police can be said to actually kill the losers in the service of the winners, a coterie to which they are unlikely ever to belong.  In plain English the police murders and urban upheavals will continue and may worsen because in the Silicon Valleys the Porsches, Teslas and Lamborghinis crowd the streets. The “sickness unto death” is a plague alive within our blood stream because the underlying problem of inequality of income, education, and quality jobs is worsening.

Perhaps, like Ms Rawlings-Blake, the police also deserve our pity because for generations that is what they think they see: a basically flawed uneducated class of people whose growing numbers of children born out of wedlock, captured by drugs, frequently incarcerated confirms both police prejudices and a despair that invites brutality.  

What they actually see, of course, is the enduring slave economy that built an America dependant on an endless supply of very cheap labor.  Now the despair deepens because much of the available cheap labor is no longer needed by the hi-tech, global economy.  What greater despair for us all than thousands of refugees without viable livelihoods  crowding on rafts and leaking ships to escape North African terror groups, then to drown at sea?

This is now our global situation. Not enough work, no money for stability, no future.   

Nothing short of a political revolution can adequately respond to this national and global crisis. Its beginnings may be in the presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist, expected to announce this week; or in a re-born Hillary Clinton, or a re-translated Jeb Bush.  Elections in 2016 could prove a new beginning of an end to despair by ending the growth of inequality. Kierkegaard’s spiritual language is about the self becoming true and transparently present in the eternal power of love and justice that established it. Marx’s version is that only equity can end alienation. Until this change begins we will continue to suffer the sickness unto death. 

Truth-Telling and the New Kissinger

Distant bells are tolling as AIPAC and Netanyahu’s Israel face a descent from the strange prestige won by killing Palestinians (1767 of them last summer) and blocking their right to statehood.  Israel’s worst fears are not threats from Iran—a hugely ballyhooed bogeyman—but the end of easy living through a Congress well-bribed by pro-Israel dollars pumped into local congressional districts. Now, a few weeks after Netanjahu’s triumphal address to Congress, the reality is an Israel twisting in the wind of a chaotic, internally feuding Middle East with dueling narratives between the Saudis and Iraqis and the U. S. in alliance with Netanyahu’s devil, Iran, against ISIS.  

New days dawning ahead suggest that the U. S./Iran nuclear deal must go through because it creates the possibility of rational alliances with Iran against Arab extremists.  Lies abound all around, but Israel’s familiar devil—Iran—has been replaced by numberless others: Houthis, Al Quaeda in Yemen, Boko Haran in Nigeria, Shabab  in Somalia, Muslim factional wars in Libya and Syria. It’s a long list.

The entrance of Henry Kissinger onto the stage last week is a reminder that the exercise of power is often a dark art.  Recall, please, that during  the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (perhaps before you were born, gentle reader) it was Kissinger who persuaded then President Nixon to resupply Israel’s army as it reeled from the Egyptian surprise attack. The Arab nations retaliated with their OPEC oil price rise that wrecked vast areas of both the U. S. and world economy, forcing gasoline rationing and a huge price inflation on U.S consumers. In Bangladesh the OPEC price rise meant mass starvation because people had no fuel at the inflated OPEC price.  No act of Congress or President Nixon—not even an accounting of how the pros and cons of the Kissinger recommendations might have been carefully weighed—was ever offered.  The Kissinger twist was that it both saved Israel and over the years preserved U. S. access to vast Arab oil reserves. 

We can expect more dark room power moves in coming months, but the stakes are no longer the U.S./Iran nuclear deal as one could easily suppose, but about Republican ambitions for the 2016 elections.  Oligarchic power, not oil, is today’s new fuel of choice. The decline of Israel’s influence in the U . S. in the face of these widespread and complex struggles in the Middle East is behind the softening of Senator Corker’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee bi-partisan agreement. It signaled an Israel by-passed by actually reducing the time frame for debating the pros and cons about lifting sanctions on Iran.  Look for the return of President Obama’s veto power by mid-summer.

This arrival of Henry Kissinger into the fray with a Wall Street Journal OpEd (March 5, 2015, together with another former secretary of state, George Schulz) opposes the Administration’s nuclear deal but is actually about the art of converting a portion of the traditional Jewish democrat vote into a Republican victory in 2016.  Not Iran, not saving Israel, but the opportunity to cement rule by oligarchy in the future U. S. seems to be the latest Kissinger dream.  As this profoundly immoral evil rises over us, we may once again note with regret the clear decline of faith community courage to resist Voltaire’s Panglossian version of the world. Will faith communities resist their new assignment: to paper-over the reality of our new masters and their regime of permanent inequality and chronic poverty?  Note Dean Baker's comment on your right about the looming destruction of the Affordable Care Act. Resistance will mean this kind of truth-telling.  That’s the Godly mission.     

The King Years Then and Now

        In 1968 when Martin Luther King came to Memphis three years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, his support of the Sanitation Workers’ strike signaled growing awareness of evidence that the key to racial justice would have to come from more income equality. Planning for poor people’s marches was already on the drawing boards of the NAACP and the SCLC.  Dr. King plunged into the Memphis strike to bring along his own inherently conservative church folk and local unions. The day after his assassination Coretta Scott King led 40,000 people on a silent march through Memphis streets. The Mayor finally folded, granting Sanitation Workers union recognition and wage gains, literally over Dr. King’s dead body.

        The road has been mostly down-hill since then. Fifteen years after Selma the economic heart of U. S. cities with the largest African American populations was destroyed by investment banking decisions to shift assets into the more profitable global economy.  African Americans and Latinos who had migrated North for the better factory jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago and L.A. found themselves  suddenly out of work. As U. S. Steel mills, machine tool and manufacturing industries were allowed to go without modernization, most closed forever. This began today’s repeating cycles of broken families, causing a new meandering migration. Skilled workers re-trained for jobs that did not appear; or moved their families repeatedly from one temporary job to another. Divorce often overtook them or they learned to scrape by in broken families.  The Wall Street banking system made billions from its global investments, but economic opportunities vanished for tens of millions of working people. Many of the same workers were further ravaged by more recent mortgage fraud caused by the same banks. .

         During the recent Great Recession starting in 2008, new policies to support public works and regulate control of wealth by corporate capitalism did not prevail as the TARP bailout moved forward and the Obama justice department declined  to prosecute the bankers who made millions homeless. 

         This is why President Obama’s oration last Sunday in Selma is more like a bouncing ground ball through the gap between 2^nd and 3^rd base. No one scored, no runners advanced.    

        Sadly neither the President’s hopeful oratory nor the speeches of candidates to replace him from either party reach as far as today’s growing gap between rich and poor. As democratic participation by people pre-occupied with just scraping by diminishes, the wealthiest one percent owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth.  The President has preferred to appeal to the nation’s historic values rather than jailing the bankers.  

“What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this?” the President asked: “what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

        Words without meaning seem now more abundant in the President’ rhetoric. In our last blog we wrote about the rise of fascism in the early 1900s as a consequence of the vacuum left by religion’s loss of political power and moral credibility.  When the Great Depression of 1929 followed WW I some political leaders in the U. S. and abroad began to think that democracy was too unwieldy, too subject to corruption and petty leadership fights. The answer, they thought, would have to be militarily authoritarian governance that would permit decisive decision-making, disciplining the unruly masses, and controlling even their corporations and bankers. In Europe, despairing of either faith or a reliable democracy, Italian and German fascism and Russian Stalinism emerged to replace democratic dreams. In the U.S. after 1900 a progressive movement blossomed for decades but has now faded under the impact of global corporations.

         We appear to be at the fascist-style juncture once again, with the Republicans determined to abstain from democratic negotiation and compromise while the Democrats continue unwilling to sternly regulate banking in the public interest.  People are now in the streets being shot by Police and shooting back. Such chaos calls for credible moral leadership.  It can’t begin with Mrs. Clinton’s email files. More on this next week. 

        

GODS FOR SALE

       The gods are for sale these days in case you hadn't noticed. Employable gods became available with the death of God 300 years ago after philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Reimarus, suggested that reason could replace revelation. Since then there has been little recourse to reason but the spiritual vacuum created by dying religious authority has spawned various divine inventions such as a fascination with violence. Historian Tony Judt has written that what fired the growth of fascism among young people at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was “precisely the bloody deadly aspect of war” that came to be celebrated as “the defining moment of their youth.” We see a fresher version in the film American Sniper that glorifies the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the honor conferred by lost American blood.  

In the past half century another attraction followed the Second Vatican Council with Catholics joining the Protestants in stressing God as personal. Creeping into modern liturgies is the possessive "our God," or worse, "my God." You can have a sense of ownership. Instead of Barth's "totally other" the new version of God is just like you, just a little better.

A new age of preferences, choices and special privileges has emerged about gods writ small. Such is the case with Netanyahu’s Israel.  Bibi” began his address to the U. S. Congress this week by reminding all present that “we share the common destiny of promised lands.”  This trump card, little noted by the media, was played early in his opening hand (on page one) to remind us that the god of Israel and the god of Puritan exceptionalism have the shared trait of being in our employ.  Implicitly, a state of warfare exists permanently with all those other nations that lack such a divine promise.

        There is a narcotic effect in “promised land” theology that places employable gods in the service of profound inequality and violence.  Ethics, reason, shared development resources, an end to African and Middle East poverty, global citizenship for all are goals that recede beyond the horizon.

  

        Middle East leaders know, of course, that Israel has an arsenal of an estimated 80 nuclear warheads. They also know that the rhetoric at the joint session of congress was little more  than a plank in Netanyahu’s re-election campaign.  In the U. S. the same rhetoric of godly violence provides congressional leaders with strategies for their re-election.  It creates good deals for military contractors in their district who sell weapons-related hardware to Israel (who buy it with American money granted by the Congress) and, happily, will finance their next election campaign. 

        Israel with its nuclear arsenal is profoundly equipped to annihilate all god’s enemies, including Iran.  There is this problem however.  There are other god’s for hire who command an overweening devotion from their followers who are at work with their own blood sacrifices: inspiring vast networks of suicide bombers and endless violent Jihad.  Boston-style bombers or Paris-style assassins could be coming to your own mall soon.

   

        This melancholy theology of Israel and U. S. god-given primacy takes on different shapes and forms around the world and generates many cousins: White on Black police shootings on an almost daily basis remembers the day of legitimate, legal slavery.  Sunni superiority over Shiites in Syria revives ancient authoritarianism. Documented versus undocumented neighbors revive ideas about those who are justly “called” and those left behind.

        Courtesy of Netanyahu and Congress the bad old days are back. They threaten everyone with the whirlwind born of all the gods for sale.   The antidote is a religious (or humanitarian) spirit that insists on a God who is not for sale, and whose other name is justice. 

The Very Stones Cry Out

        As photos and bios are published of the seventeen tragically killed in the twin Paris terror attacks, the missing-in-action provide the best clues to the attacker's motivation.  A few hundred “others” also murdered in the same week will have no memorial parade.  Reuters reported 35 killed and dozens wounded by a bomb outside a police college in Saana, the capital of Yemen.  Earlier the same week a bomb killed 26 at a cultural center in Ibb city.   A suicide attack in Iraq killed 23 people. A bomb exploded outside Samarra killing 8 and wounded 23. Two child suicide bombers and another bomber are said to have killed hundreds in Nigeria in the name of Boko Haram.  There will be no photos, bios or solemn marches because these dead are largely undocumented--meaning almost no one apparently is asking--and of course they are not “our” people.  

        The metaphor of stones appears in Luke’s gospel that tells of  religious leaders asking Jesus to silence the crowds as he enters Jerusalem. The crowds are celebrating his struggle against their impoverishment: by Roman rule and corrupt religious leaders. Jesus replies “If these were silent the very stones would cry out.”  Just so, these dead today, these “other” people, unacknowledged by our Western values, cry out.

        Sony Pictures and Paris satirists (now sadly dead) make clear that anyone still searching for clues to the meaning of it all must grasp that the license they claim to celebrate freedom for inappropriate satire and bad films is a marker of their (and our) superiority.  At the Golden Globe awards this week actress Tina Fey treated this superiority with appropriate irony. Feigning loyalty to Sony she reported North Korea’s bitter critique of its new film, “The Interview,” then snapped “and that wasn't the worst review it got…all of us were [forced] to pretend we wanted to see it.” 

        The very stones cry out in the videos of the senseless Staten Island police choke hold killing and the point blank shot police fired at a 12 year old in Cleveland. The police killings point to the new shape of race and class difference. It does not celebrate White, Western superiority—that idea is out of date, an expression of Ku Klux Klan liturgies and colonialist economic rationales. Instead, what we see is a settled world of permanent inequality and a picture of policing systems needed to discipline those who will never be winners. The World Bank provides clues to the new shape of things: 

• Average Middle East and African Gross National income per capita is $3,456. In France it’s $41,420. In the U. S. it’s $53,960.
• The Pew Research Center reports on the fifty years gap between median incomes in the Hispanic and Black communities compared with white incomes. Today the gap is fifty-nine percent less income for Blacks and 60% less for Hispanics.  
• Black incarceration rates are six times White rates. Latino rates three times greater.

        That’s our Orwellian world today, dead bodies and all. Any hope of changing this lies now with the faith and human rights communities and must be dedicated to lots of shouting and civic action.

Knife's Edge

 It is painfully obvious by now that slavery remains a chronic germ in the American blood stream.  All that’s happened in recent weeks has happened before with this difference: a community relations-trained  generation of law enforcement that improved on police behavior after the Civil Rights and anti war turmoil has been followed by a policing generation come of age in harshly different times. Their context includes chronic unemployment, a thirty year decline in job incomes, terror attacks, and the Middle East wars that have added new temptations for White Americans to deploy their fixations about racial superiority.  The Pew Foundation reports this week that in spite of all the gun mayhem in recent years more Americans than ever prefer gun rights to gun control.

For the first time in more than two decades....there is more support for gun rights than gun control. Currently, 52% say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns, while 46% say it is more important to control gun ownership.

This tension is surely growing from the continuing fertile post slavery racial superiority divide to which has been added a poorly understood Muslim world in turmoil.  To the “Black threat” has been added the “Muslim threat.”

The first symptom of the racial superiority disease  is its blinding effect.  The direct line of this infection that began with the power of some to enslave others is described by slavery scholars Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan. They cite a clause enacted in 1669 in the Virginia colony “that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear of prosecution. This act, “concerning… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems deeply inherited by police today.

             

            The same line of slavery’s infection runs through Abu Grebe prison, the CIA torture sites, onto U. S. streets where a Black man selling cigarettes or a 12 year old child with a toy gun can die at police hands in minutes or seconds (for your own eyes to see, courtesy of the videotape) without indictment.  Berry and Morgan tell of this trial twenty years after the end of slavery:

In 1886, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, Hal Geiger, an African-American attorney and prominent leader of the black community from Texas, was shot five times in court. The prosecuting attorney and confirmed shooter, O.D. Cannon, did not like the way Geiger spoke to him. Taking the law into his own hands, Cannon pulled out a pistol and shot Geiger, who died a month later. It took 10 minutes for a jury to acquit Cannon of this “crime.”  [The American Prospect, 12/9/14]

                

           There is better news.  A new virus-free generation is stopping the trains in Oakland.  Medical students by the hundreds, wearing their white coats, “died-in” Wednesday across the country. The West Side highway in New York City has been blocked repeatedly this week and tomorrow Washington streets will be filled with protests against unindicted police shootings of Black citizens. 

The next challenge is to create a legislative translation. Curing the slavery/racism virus requires a non-violent political revolution that in 2016 elects new leadership to Congress and the Presidency. A generation of old and new, inoculated with human rights serum, must include several policy changes: a revision of the Grand Jury process with restraints on prosecutorial freedom; passage of a more stringent version of Dodd-Frank to regulate Wall Street much more strictly so that we begin to close the middle class-wealth gap; and of course laws that reverse Citizens United that permits unbridled campaign contributions from the wealthy.  The list is much longer. Without a virus-free political translation that protects and enforces democratic practices the die-ins alone won’t change anything.

Tear Gas Meditation

        A report circulated last week that Palestinian protesters were advising protesters in Ferguson on how to protect themselves from the effects of tear gas. True or not, they hold two other severe conditions in common.  Thirty-nine percent of young adults in the Occupied Territories are unemployed according to the World Bank.   In Ferguson the Wall Street Journal reports Black youth unemployment at 31 percent.

        Ferguson and Palestinian young adults also share the reality that they both are at-risk of violent death.  Mother Jones magazine reported on four unarmed Black persons (three of them young adults) who were killed in a single month by police last summer.  Three days ago in Cleveland a Black twelve year was shot dead by the Police.  The Israeli Human Rights group, B’tselem, has posted video surveillance footage showing young unarmed Palestinians shot dead while walking in their West Bank town of Bitunya. Another video shows the Israeli military sharpshooter firing the shots at the same moment.  [You can see too: <b’tselem.org>]

        Behind the lethal gunfire and smoke is the economics of inequality translating itself as the politics of class and race.  Some of this is waged on our streets or in troubled grand jury reports, some of it in unfair labor practices.  Last week truck drivers in the ports of Los Angeles and Long  Beach, California [the two largest ports in the U.S.] struck seven companies that categorize the truckers as independent contractors, described by Rutgers Professor David Bensman as

"a ploy that relieves the companies of the responsibility of employers. They don’t have to pay payroll taxes, don’t have to contribute to unemployment or workers’ compensation funds, don’t have to respect labor and employment laws: no right to unionize, no health and safety protections, no freedom from discrimination."  

       This almost ubiquitous practice among employers of millions of American workers is a script for their impoverishment.  The good news is that major unions like the Teamsters, Change-to-Win and SEIU are finally breaking these unfair labor practices, but it’s taken seven years to do it.

       The unavoidable current reality is that growing inequality is the real background of our current social, racial and political chaos.  The “haves” feel the pressure and tighten their grip on their own advantage. The “have-nots” become more and more desperate and more vulnerable to scapegoating explanations for their plight.   The dismal facts are that a growing percentage of American jobs now pay less than a living wage.

       Even in the manufacturing sector, supposedly where the better wages are to be found, there is actually a wage decline. The National Employment Law Project reports that in 2013 the average factory worker made 7.7 percent below the median wage for all occupations. 

Even where U. S. manufacturing seems aglow—as in the auto industry renaissance of the past three years—“more than 600,000 manufacturing workers in the auto parts industry make just $9.60 per hour or less.”   If the best production jobs pay so little, the rest will pay even less.  This has the potential to put everyone at each other’s throats. Given that the top 10 percent of U. S. population now controls 70 percent of all wealth in the U. S. a rising tide of resentment is now searching in places like Ferguson and Iran for answers which cannot be found there.  

        If  we've lived anytime in the past hundred years this should fill us with dread.  An old aphorism popularized by author William L. Shirer writing about the rise of the Nazis, leaps back to mind “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it.” [originally penned by philosopher George Santayana]   Turning Muslims into generic terrorists, or attacking political leaders seeking to create just immigration reform by calling them destroyers of the Constitution, smacks of the Nazi remedies of the 1930’s and 40’s.