The Times - Are They a-Changin?

       Right now the only predictable election result next week is the dangerous public disenchantment stretching from Texas to North Dakota.  After November 8th we are likely to find scattered all over the ground only the remains, the shards, of the Republican and Democratic parties regardless of who is elected to the White House.  That may turn out to be the good news.

        Also broken into pieces after next week may be the long era of U. S. civil religion since 1800 which people thought promised them exceptional treatment but now seems parallel to the empty promises of contemporary political leadership. The unproductive distance between party machine candidates (Hillary) and rebels (The Donald) resembles the lived experience of three-fourths of Americans who for twenty years and longer have suffered an income stagnation that nether Republican Bush nor Democrat Obama corrected. This while the public's money poured into the fifteen year Bush/Obama war which keeps expanding.  

        The massive slaughter of the innocents in the lands of that other denominated religion, Islam, contain the worst kind of news: It's well known, of course, but the ultimate irony must be grasped: that the boundaries of the Middle East and the weapons flowing into it (some from Russia also) were are all determined and made by the Christian West: the boundaries by the European powers after World War I; the weapons by the U. S. after World War II. Essentially they're all ours! The irony is the so-called Christian Western nations fashioned a kind of hell among the Islamic nations.

        It is a hard truth but in the possible collapse of politics as we've known it both believers and non-believers will find themselves reckoning with the end of what had seemed a liturgical guarantee for exceptional America, an everlasting springtime now come to winter.

       The end of Tom Hayden's life last week can remind us of the true vocation of the prophet--whether secular or sacred--who in Hayden's instance shouted out against the hundreds of thousands dying in the Vietnam war while most of the the American churches and synagogues, for patriotic reasons, backed away from what for Martin Luther King, Jr. was a similar cry against that war he could not stifle in himself.  

       A new way must be found amid the ruins to reclaim this prophetic vocation in spirit and in truth. The times are still trying to change, Bob Dylan, and maybe this time you'll be right, in honor of your Nobel Prize.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin

              For the times they are a-changin

Middle East Passion Texts

       A small similarity can be found between our tawdry presidential campaigns and the West's inability to stop the horror in the Mediterranean, Yemen and Aleppo.  Amid absurd candidate claims about Americans being "good" or "great again," lie hundreds of victims who will never be counted and have never counted:  

                     [courtesy of the NY Times 10/6/16]

       The dozens of innocent victims in this photo were either trampled to death or died of asphyxiation below decks.  "Many of these people had never seen an ocean, did not know what an ocean was" said one refugee worker.  It's a passion play without transcendent ending.  

        These mass crucifixions are happening night and day every day. The one redeeming response could be conversion to a new convergence for the common good among faith and human rights communities around the world. 

        The November election politics suggest little or no hope for such a convergence in Washington.  Under the best of circumstances the possibility of escaping polarization seems low as Trump's shocking success demonstrates.  In a Hillary Clinton victory she may face an ungovernable congress and nation.

        A new diagnostic list toward a cure for our cultures of death and for the common good would include:

(1) Radical desegregation in faith communities, especially among Christian congregations, the imaginary exceptionalism endemic among faith communities set the tone for America's segregated social structure since slavery days.  More about this in a minute. 

(2) Also needed is urgent treatment of "Silo Disease", a habit of nearly everyone that tolerates, permits, and promotes community as a gathering of their personal favorite club. Churches, labor unions, and academics with advanced degrees-among many others--are common practitioners of this in-breeding that weakens the body politic's capacity to meet unforeseen challenges of justice, like inequality.  It's  a sign of human species decline that most people live in silos that separate them from the world.  

(3) Demilitarization. The Middle East has taught us we're not strong  enough, not wise enough to drop our weapons and sue for peacemaking. More about demilitarization in the next Public Liturgies.

On Radical Desegregation:

        Racism and its conflicts in the 1950's and 60's are repeated in the 2010's conflicts and have come to seem irremediable by the comfortable classes.  Earlier remedies such as police-community relations training, inner city job training and access to jobs and housing  often fell short.  These failures have seldom been critically evaluated and are reiterated today in every city where violence breaks out.  It's actually the social stratification and inequality-the disappeared jobs-that guarantees the violence. This stratification and its segregating effect is as rigidly in place today as in the time in 1964 when Martin Luther King described Sunday morning as the most segregated hour in the country. If this does not change, the conflicts and violence are guaranteed and will remain tied to the faith-based segregated culture that has shaped the web of public sentiment since slavery days. 

Churches as the Hinge.

        When  they prioritize justice religious organizations can be the hinge of change.  Every denomination  and diocese could require that each congregation integrate itself by both class and race according to its neighborhood's demographic  profile.  Any non-conforming congregation could be given a few years to change and offered resource to help it do so. Without such change they ought to lose their official denominational designation as church.  It would take several years of study, constructive cross-neighborhood development, but if it's not done the church is not the church, it's an instrument of segregation. "Every tree that does not bear good fruit, is cast into the fire."  [Matthew 7:1]

Silo Disease

 Silo Disease represents a dilution of the communal gene stream by isolating groups of people from one another. We can take it for granted that most labor unions, most community organizing forces, most faith groups and their leaders are running manifold programs of social service, education and confrontation with oppressors, but are not yet skilled at creating a larger social justice movement with many alliances and allies.  Most silo leaders and their followers know terrible things are happening all around them. Their silos have the ironic effect of trapping people by conferring on them a "silo" security that makes them blind to what is outside; and blind to their own sensibilities. The effect is to declaw them at the very moment when they feel called to action in a world tumbling like their candidates without a compass.      

                                      [Photo of Aleppo today by Yahoo.com 10/11/16]

The Year of Thinking Critically for the Common Good

       A mission transfer toward the larger common good begins with a critical evaluation of our own role in the unintended consequence of  a world at war. Everyone needs to be an outsider somewhere, with some dissimilar group. It's already happening in local areas: like the stand at Cannonball River by the Sioux and other Native Americans tribes and growing numbers of supporters who are blocking completion of the Dakota Access pipeline.Or in the PICO uprising against mass incarceration; or alliances between SEIU, Teachers unions and the Teamsters with local clergy and city governments over diesel pollution at the Ports of Newark, Oakland and Los Angele that is poisoning  the air children breathe.

       A debauched congressional process and foreign alliances based on special interests all require a new congress of the people. Not people defined in 19th century terms as a rabid mass, but people in the range from hotel workers to the PhD crowd at Stanford and Harvard.

A New Rising

         Bertold Brecht's heroine in his 1939 play, Mother Courage and Her Children, connived to keep the Thirty Years War going in the 17th century because selling food to the soldiers was the way she would survive. In the end Mother Courage loses her three children to the war. Comparisons are inviting. During the twelve year Iraq War voluntary enlistment has been a route for underemployed or jobless younger Americans to access paid work and some training for the future.  It cost 4,424 of them their lives but made lots of money for the top one percent.

        King Hussein of Jordan, a U. S. ally claims we are already engaged in WW III and Pope Francis has said as much. Evidence is not hard to find: indeterminate borders, war crimes on a growing scale every day in Aleppo with hospitals destroyed and hundreds of children slaughtered; elsewhere scores upon scores of Afghan and Iraqi civilians and soldiers are killed by terrorist attacks when they are not being killed by U. S. friendly fire. Add the fleeing refugees sometimes drowning at sea and women who survive landing in Italy but are then forced into prostitution.

        These tragic events are not being discussed at all by the presidential candidates preoccupied as they are with their personal futures.  The drowning refugees make a mockery of such politics. 

        The real possibility of a Trump presidency cannot be dismissed in spite of recent polls because it is tangibly growing from a different set of priorities that Americans barely understand; priorities with affinities to the sharp razor wire wall Hungary has spread across its Southern border to block further refugee entrance. It includes affinities with the defeat last week of Columbia's peace agreement with the FARC guerilla faction which pollsters didn't predict; and involves affinities with Brexit, Vladimir Putin, and the peril Germany's Angela Merkel faces as the nationalist Right grows across most of Europe.

         Economic stress is now so wide and deep in the U. S. that tactile connection with it has become intangible to the thriving tech and engineering castes from Silicon Valley to Mumbai.  Political writer, Thomas Frank, [Listen Liberal (2016), What's the Matter with Kansas? (2005)], points in scalding terms to what he calls the Democrats who have become"limousine liberals," live among the top 10 percent, claiming for themselves the honorific of being concerned about the bottom 90 percent.  It is their party not their candidate that blocked Bernie Sanders campaign. 

    

        Frank cites the Democratic Leadership Council which "thanks to the deeds of Bill Clinton" now knows how to reduce inequality

Fiscal discipline, global competition, flexible labor markets, transparent capital markets, deregulated business, rapid communications, and limited government interference in markets.   

       This essentially Wall Street agenda intends to drown out the reality of Mike Griffin, a union activist at Caterpillar in Decatur, Iowa-where jobs have been disappearing.  Franks tells what's really happening. "His workers, if they still work

understand that they're working two or three jobs just to get by, and a lot of them can't own anything, and they understand seeing mom and dad forced into retirement or forced out of their job, now they're working at Hardee's or McDonalds to make ends meet so they can retire in poverty. People understand that. They see that."  

       Hence the turn to Trump and to the political Right even with little evidence that Trump will serve their self-interests. 

       While the bad news is that it is possible to attend religious services in many traditions and places these days and never hear a word or a prayer about saving people from inequality or ending the horrible warfare in Syria and Iraq, there is this good news:  that perhaps helped by the prospect of dismal election outcomes a new day of radical, drastic social justice reform is tangible and dawning.   A modern rising never before seen in U. S. history is happening.  Traditionally inactive Christians,  evangelical Christians, radical Black Christians, White intellectuals, Black Lives Matter, radical Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, GLBTQ and Women's rights groups and many others are beginning to express solidarity and participate with each other along with secular groups who are organizing  new labor movements across the country; environmentalists blocking fossil fuels, and the list goes on.

Mother Courage could grow out of fashion. 

Is the Glass Actually Half Full?

       Last  Monday's horrifying airstrikes on the large relief caravan entering Aleppo show every evidence of having been launched by Syrian and Russian aircraft, according to extensive reporting  in today's September 25th New York Times.   These Middle East tragedies miniaturize the foolish political scenes in the U. S. where endorsements of Hillary Clinton by prominent  Republican newspapers  and visible disaffection of many other Republican loyalists may carry the day for her but to what end? 

        What's not clear at all is if Hillary Clinton offers a new day for Aleppo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc.  We must vote for her, but boatloads of drowning refugees and bloodied children ask the question of the relevance of our shameful politics to this horrendous theater of death and dying; as do the Charlotte and Tulsa shootings ask the dreary questions about a nation enamored for centuries with the slave-master relationship.

        Watch for Donald Trump to try to drive Hillary Clinton to the wall over the eight years of Middle East war.  Watch to see if she carries new policy proposals to fend him off.  Just as Donald Trump aligns himself with Putin when it seems useful to him in his usual strange way, as in "someone he knows knows someone else," Hillary Clinton has aligned herself with the team of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry and insistently wrapped herself in their colors. Yet their eight years of war in the Middle East and continuing loyalty to Israel and its settlement expansion in the Palestinian's West Bank may no longer guarantee her election .

          Neither Putin's reported brutalities nor the long running fiasco of Israel's settlements any longer defines the staggering complexity of U. S. foreign policy challenges around the globe.   The enormous financial benefits of both the raw materials and land ownership markets are the oceans on which the nations, the regional private-sector oligarchs (from Goldman Sachs to China), and the less powerful actors sail. It's a tide made for mega investors.

           On the other hand, in the "other world" of middle class security the comfortable life prevails, but the stirrings are hopeful.  No one appears any longer to believe that public discussion amid talk television is more than a money-making enterprise.  Growing signs of peacemaking abound: the peace accords in Columbia, the breakout from traditional politics from the Brexit rebellion and in the British Labour party, the Sanders millennial explosions--all suggest that a better and more up-to-date perspective may be coming into view as a glass half full.  The large crowds debating ferociously but peacefully on university campuses, the hundreds marching over inequality and racism, the myriad citizen action groups, the revival of strength in Labor union, and a new generation of cool-headed leaders in the churches and synagogues have become a talented and growing throng of steadier hands.  

          There are connection and engagement problems to be solved, of course. The comfort cells are, well so comfortable.  Still, remarkably impressive new organizations for peacemaking abound among the millennials, who still may not know the route to engagement with the demons of Aleppo and racism.  There's evidence they're starting to get that there is a connection from the prophets to themselves. They're starting to notice that the biblical peace and justice movements happened outside, near the bombing, at the ruins caused by racism and cheap grace.  The prophets could have used more allies, more connections. To rebuild the ruins of Aleppo may be the only route to a new day. No other way, and before it's too late.      

 

The Blood On Our Own Hands

        President Obama's ambition to create a peace process in Syria was always compromised by his administration's other priorities including trying to save Iraq from the demons unlocked by the U. S. invasion of 2003.  While irrationally supporting Israel in spite of its continued settlement expansion the U. S. has tried in vain to thread the needle between theKurdish fighters supporting the war against Isis while Premier Erdogan seeks to destroy the Kurdish independence movement on his southeastern border lands. 

        This has opened the door to a new, impressive relationship for Russia in the region. Its rising star has not only forced U. S. acceptance of its expansion in Ukraine but advanced its role as leading peacemaker when U. S. dogmatics failed to stop the slaughter in Syria.

        It's worth unpacking the symmetry between the horrible Aleppo death spiral and this downward spiral of U. S.  effectiveness in its relations with Russia. Several months ago political scientist  John Mearsheim (co-author of The Israel Lobby) concluded that the U. S. "was incapable of entering into any agreement with Russia." This institutionalized dogma was visible when retired diplomat, Nicholas Burns, last week lamented on PBS not for the hundreds of thousands dying in the Syrian conflicts but that the proposed cease fire "was finally coming down to agreeing with Putin in order to forge the agreement."  

        The dimensions of this rebuff by Russia to U. S. dominance in the Middle East has many moving parts but the result described by the Council on Foreign Relation uses a Moscow journalist writing in the English language Moscow Times to give voice to glaring instability.  Vladmir Frolov underlines the

 

"gaping lack of trust between Moscow and Washington, unruly and suspicious local proxies, unhappy outside players in Iran and in the Gulf states, a hodgepodge of legal loopholes and lack of viable enforcement mechanisms...for Moscow there is so much to love in this deal that it is surprising it took three months to negotiate."

 

        Everyone knows that the bloody roots of all this lie in the centuries old battles for oil among world hegemons, re-enacted in the recent Gulf Wars and in the struggle that continues today in the flawed U. S. preference for Israel as virtually a 51st state. 

        The domestic political lock-down behind this is one of the reasons for the deepening paralysis of political life in the U. S. with its corrupt practice of buying and selling votes to please favored factions for very narrow reasons. Two weeks ago such corrupt politics was on display when the California Assembly and Senate voted 69 to 1 and 270 to 1 respectively to block any California company from doing business in California if it boycotts or divests from U. S. companies doing business in the illegally occupied West Bank Settlements. This irrational behavior may get worse with both Clinton and Trump promising to fully support the U. S. "understanding" with Israel, no questions asked.  

        That's not all that's on lock-down. The moral incapacity to see the deepening complexity and the absurd choices that Americans keep making suggests that in faith communities where ethics and morality are supposed to be taught there is a retreat underway from understanding faithfulness as a critical appraisal of the demonic. The result may be a surprise to contemporary worshipers who could discover the blood of Aleppo is also on their own hands. It may even help open the door to possible catastrophe in the form of a Trump victory. 

The Trifecta Shift: Who Will Tell the People?

        The widely shared desperation growing from fears of a Trump victory has trapped reporters and talking heads such as Rachel Maddow and David Axelrod in a continuous loop that leaves the issues after the election largely untouched.  In the equally desperate rush for ratings most people know they are being entertained more than informed.  E. J. Dionne writes this week in the Washington Post that people  "don't expect more from their political leaders than posturing, positioning and captivating media circuses."  Which continues to make Trump's chances harder to guess than pollsters may believe. 

        Mostly untouched is how the racism habit and an economically stranded middle class open flood gates to a volatile, dangerously large audience that makes the next question not just about the November election but about what comes afterward.  The deep pathos of news as entertainment disincentivises the public  from filling sand bags against the coming storms. 

        Just over the horizon when post election days finally arrive are the nation's ineradicable mentality derived from slavery; a disabled congress; and a major shift of political power from Washington to state governments.   

        Take the example of North Carolina where its Research Triangle and great universities compete with Silicon Valley, but where the federal appellate court had to intervene in the Republican's toxic war against the Democrats with their large constituency of African American slave descendents.  Last Wednesday (8/31), the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 when asked by the Republicans to reverse an Appeals Court order that was forcing them to redraw their deeply racist voting district rules.   The Court had struck down as unconstitutional "the effort to target African Americans with almost surgical precision."  

        The Supreme Court deadlock seemed like great good fortune because it left the Appeals court order in effect requiring North Carolina to redraw its gerrymandered districts and election rules. Here's the kicker: the Court placed responsibility for redrawing those rules in the hands of 100 local county election boards all controlled by Republicans. 

        How did this happen? It turns out that three years earlier the infamous Koch brothers oligarchy had financed a Republican take-over of the state house that ultimately led to a "trifecta," i.e., control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship; which is why "trifecta" is no longer about a horse race but a measure of national political power shifting away from Washington.  As of September 2016, according to Real Clear Politics, there were 7 Democratic and 23 Republican trifectas. The GOP now controls68 out of 98 partisan state legislative chambers.

        The ironies are abundant.  The NY Times reported a week ago that In North Carolina's Lenoir County  where Democrats outnumber Republicans better than two to one, and four in 10 voters are black, the new Koch-style election plan limits early voting to a single weekend day, bans voting on Sunday (They wouldn't want to desecrate the Sabbath!) and on weekdays demands that residents, including those who are poor and without cars must make long trips to cast their ballot. "Republicans, who wrote and passed the 2013 law...deny the rules reflect anything inappropriate." 

        It's not hard to see where this leads. Republicans may have a fool for presidential candidate, but their growing control of states is the answer to their dreams: trifectas in state capitals, control of elections, and oligarchic domination of public policy by means wealth. 

        Who will tell the people? Who will fill the sandbags to resist this coming flood?  Hillary?  We shall see. In faith communities the predictable pattern will be to flee complicated issues, hand out food, and keep churches as safe sanctuaries. There is of course the Pauline alternative: "put on the whole armour of God, that you may stand against the wiles of the devil,"  (Ephesians 11 again)--the better to resist what's coming down.

Principalities and Powers

        Regardless of possible calamities with the Fall elections the two part series in the NY Times this week makes clear who’s in charge. It’s the Brookings Institute, or the American Enterprise Institute, or the Center for International Studies, etc. Two of them are building new hundred million dollar office complexes with annual budgets running over a hundred million dollars according to the Washington Post.

         "...donors like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate” all  donate to “Think Tanks” and they in return help the companies with myriad tasks like calling in university researchers without disclosing that they’re being paid for their so-called objective testimony about their next big project or blocking or altering  government regulations that threaten their profit margins.

 “On issues as varied as military sales to foreign countries, international trade, highway management systems and real estate development, think tanks have frequently become vehicles for corporate influence and branding campaigns….setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.”

        The Think Tanks hire professors from our great universities to be consultants for the projects of the nation’s largest corporations. The public and Congress is usually unaware of these compromised relations.

“This is about giant corporations who figured out that by spending, hey, a few tens of millions of dollars, if they can influence outcomes here in Washington, they can make billions of dollars,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, a frequent critic of undisclosed Wall Street donations to think tanks.”

        This helps to explain the huge pressures faced by presidents and congresspersons, including the larger failures of the Obama-led liberal democrats that neither prosecuted nor curbed the banks, did not raise taxes on the rich, did not emphasize the shrinking market for middle class workers.  Mark Shields on the PBS News Hour has repeatedly pointed out over the past six months that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy wrapped itself in Obama’s legacy, preceded by her own husband’s NAFTA legacy.  

        What’s not to hate among those left behind who lean toward Donald Trump?

         Even if Trump is forced out or resigns from the Fall elections he has given further articulation to a rising clamor in the countryside raised by left behinders, a very large segment of the population.  OpEd columnist, Roger Cohen put it succinctly

“America…whose fault lines Obama…stepped across 12 years ago, is perhaps more divided than ever….There was something about Obama’s blackness, his intellectualism, his cool distillation of problems that was intolerable to a wide swath of the white working class angered by lost jobs, lost wars, lost security and lost pride. These Americans have felt left behind. They have perceived not outreach from Obama’s White House but condescension.”  [Roger Cohen August 1 NYT]

        This is not substance but mirrors that conceal how the so-called democratic process often leaves us with a picture of what is actually small scale politics—however lethal—that conceal the principalities and powers of our age. 

        Martin Indyk is the supreme Think Tank prototype: Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, chief architect of U. S. foreign policy toward Israel, formerly  deputy research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), special assistant to President Bill Clinton as senior director of Near East and South Asian Affairs at the United States National Security Council. While at the NSC, he served as principal adviser to the President and the National Security Advisor on Arab–Israeli issues, Iraq, Iran, and South Asia. He was a senior member of Secretary of State Warren Christopher's Middle East peace team and served as the White House representative on the U.S. Israel Science and Technology Commission. Today at Brookings he directs programs such as their Global Cities Initiative. This, a Brookings senior fellow explained “must mean a marriage between JP Morgan Chase corporate interests” and “Brookings continued thought leadership.”

        JPMorgan, in a document dated a month before the agreement was signed, said the pending donation to Brookings “deepens/extends relationships with important client base among business and civic leaders both in the U.S. and abroad.”

        The lengthy two part series in this week’s NY Times should be read thoroughly and you can do that by clicking on these URLs

Part I.  Think Tank Scholar or Consultant? It Depends on the Day  http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCJTYuyKqXu41vAkMIWfA6rd&user_id=2e01af80f96bffbd607768c4547f7ab3&email_type=eta&task_id=1470863064812753&regi_id=0

Part II.  How Think Tanks Amplify Corporate America’s Influence http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCJTYuyKqXu41o8Me/5hd4gV&user_id=c4b68bb7cbdc5711a37a5ddb2eb23cf5&email_type=eta&task_id=1470862091479220&regi_id=0

You can also read the apostle Paul’s description of the situation in his letter to the Ephesians (6:12)

¹² For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness.