The Presbyterians Foretell Obama At-Risk

The narrow defeat of divestment last week at the Presbyterian General Assembly by a 333 to 331 vote was as close as the Romney/Obama contest may be this fall, a comparison that deserves careful study. The divisions down the middle in the churches over the Middle East point to parallel fault lines in the whole nation cemented not by belief systems but by class and culture. A reenactment similar to the razor-thin presidential vote in Florida in 2000 is not impossible, but the national scene is more dire now. 

Today the nation is gripped by both large-scale and long-term unemployment. There is a growing painful inequality with millions of people on the verge of losing their homes. The national instability is an obvious invitation to opportunistic Pied Pipers.

Reasonable analytic approaches are not always good predictors of possible outcomes these days.  Eight years of Presbyterian committee study and interfaith dialogue, hundreds of trips to the Middle East, divestment conferences all over the U.  S.—none of these anticipated the solid 50 percent plus who refused to support divestment.  The complicity of Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions, and Hewlett-Packard in the destructive and often lethal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian lands did not out-weigh other considerations.  While corporate-connected business persons in the churches often have a chronic antipathy for economic boycotts, another reason grows from the tension of peoples’ positions in the spectrum of community respectability.  Pastors in many denominations consistently display their dependence on the good will of local respected religious and community leaders outside their congregations.  The circle of peer pressure can be extreme. Congregants care about how their pastors are viewed and a mayor or local rabbi can change where that wind blows.

The Israeli government seems to know this very well. Ignoring a shower of concern from religious and secular groups in England, Europe and the U. S. objecting to Israel’s Occupation and Settlement construction in the West Bank, today’s headlines (July 10^th) report that Israeli jurists have declared that scores of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank are legal. (see NY Times 7/10). 


Parallels with the coming Fall elections are real.  Even though President Obama is highly respected by liberals as a gifted and intellectually able president, he was nevertheless humiliated last Winter by a global oligarchy that pushed him to his knees—forcing him to take a hard-toned war posture toward Iran and suffer Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu addressing a joint session of Congress. 

This is an evil omen, and it’s not just about Israel. It’s about the undertow of new forms of power that can grow rapidly in the soil of economic hard times.

New oligarchs—an alliance among private sector oil monarchies, military contractors, Wall Street investors and fearful congresspersons—put the President in that position. It was striking that the Jewish community was highly represented at the Presbyterian Assembly, but Islam, the faith of the Arab peoples, the second largest religious tradition in the world was totally absent. The truth is that in many Western minds Islam is understood to be an inferior faith held by an inferior people. 

In this context the imminent danger is that while the traditional white population in the U. S. is soon to be out-numbered, before that happens an election victory for the powerfully organized affluent classes can easily change the rules. This has already begun in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and in its decision to bar the potential use of the commerce clause in badly needed legislation.  Taken a few more steps, with a few more rulings, and the undertow of a new and conservative majority can change democracy into a permanent oligarchy and demography into a new kind of cultural apartheid system.

Several object lessons applicable to the nation as a whole can be drawn from the defeat of the Presbyterian motion for divestment:  Faith communities easily persuade themselves that their role is to “stay out of it”, to be neutral, to stand in the middle. Implausibly, they imagine themselves walking in the footsteps of Jesus, the notorious challenger to authority. “God talk,” whether manipulatively intended or innocently practiced easily replaces the moral issues at stake. Giving balance to both sides has a pious ring however inauthentic it may be. That’s why the practices of manipulation and disinformation are genuinely evil and must be exposed wherever they appear.    

Last week’s news adds up to much more than the Israeli Occupation. It’s more about the cement of cultural solidarity, racial/class superiority and religious exceptionalism that puts President Obama and the rest of us at-risk. The sub-texts of this larger cultural context are the unindicted bankers who profited from mortgage swaps that ruined the lives of millions of citizens. Today, even now apparently, bankers may yet be indicted for manipulating trillions of dollars in interest rate manipulation. Or they may not, because the regulators seem to work for the bankers.

Our own risk is that we will discover too late that our options have been poured into cement buckets, Mafia-style, and the election we thought we had nailed is lost.    

[Full disclosure. The writer is a Presbyterian and attended part of the General Assemby last week.]

May 16, 2012

Hallucinatory Grandeur

      The primary victim amid this week’s cascading bad economic news is not the economy but people’s faith in it.   The latest plunge by large banking houses into high risk ventures that turn calamitous seems to signal that much more is amiss than we realize.  Faith in the “market” has been badly undermined by the debacle at J. P. Morgan, where the extent of loss may rise to $4 billion according to the Financial Times.  Last Fall it was MS Global, this Spring featured Goodman Sachs misadventures, and this week it’s the best of the best (President Obama said so), J. P. Morgan, financier to the world.   

      The worldwide news about money is generally bad. Growth Indicators in China have turned strongly south. Eastern Europe is now officially in recession. Moody’s lowered twenty-six Italian banks’ credit ratings this week. Unemployment in the U. S. is now not expected to decline significantly for the rest of 2012.

      Put in another language, that’s 13 million of our friends and neighbors.  This coming Saturday 400,000 of them will be dropped from unemployment benefits.  They’ve been out too long.

A sinking feeling has spread from coast to coast and while it is clear that the people get it—they see what’s happening—but many national leaders remain true to the phantom of American exceptionalism.

   

      Last week columnist Tom Friedman told a California audience:  “I don’t want the U.  S. to be where the first moon shot took place, I want California and the U. S. to be where the greatest tech minds come from all over the world to do their own moon shoot.  When that happens, there will be plenty of jobs for the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker.”  

      That same day California’s budget deficit reported a new high of $15.5 billion—threatening entire education, health and environmental systems. Friedman’s visions of grandeur express the popular American cultural faith that drives the nation. One wonders, however, if it’s not made of the same stuff as J. P. Morgan’s faith in “complex synthetic positions using credit default swaps.”

      If it is, and it probably is, pastors and other faith community leaders need all the more to avoid passing out weekly nostrums similar to Mr. Friedman’s grandiose visions, and switch to the hard lessons told and re-told in biblical literature. The teaching there is not about American exceptionalism, but about creating just relations among the whole human family. There is plenty of evidence that that’s exactly what people seek as the pain they endure grows.    

JOBS: THE DISCONNECT

Last Friday’s job report (May 3, 1012) raised serious doubt about whether or if current strategies to put people back to work make sense. Wall Street baron, Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of PIMCO, a global investment management firm with approximately $1.77 trillion of assets under management wrote the next day in the Financial Times

“Friday’s jobs data sounds a warning that should be heard well beyond economists and market watchers.  With just 115,000 new jobs in April, the U. S. economy is not creating enough employment to make a dent in the 12.5 jobless Americans in the labour force, of which a stunning 5.1 million are long term unemployed. Moreover, the disappointing monthly number managed to fall short of analysts’ massively subdued expectation of 160,000, highlights yet again the unusual sluggishness of the labour market.”

Catherine Rampell, editor of the Economix blog At the New York Times pointed out that same day:

"the share of working-age Americans who are in the labor force, meaning they are either working or actively looking for a job, is now at its lowest level since 1981 — when far fewer women were doing paid work. The share of men taking part in the labor force fell in April to 70 percent, the lowest figure since the Labor Department began collecting these data in 1948."

The jackpot question is the disconnect between the predicament of  millions of jobless people and the answers being given—often with fanatical enthusiasm—by civic and political leaders across the country.  In Silicon Valley more than one hundred thousand are unemployed in spite of its booming tech sector.  The California Summit later this week is pushing for “smart regulation, a smart workforce, smart innovation and smart capital.”  The local NOVA Manpower agency calls its strategy “Economic and Workforce Implications in the Age of Ipads, Android Apps and the Social Web.”  The focus is on up-grading the skills of the already up-graded.  

And the one hundred thousand?  The other 3 million in California? The other nine million around the country?   In light of the new jobless data the plain fact is that without manufacturing there is nothing for fat too many people.  Creating tech assembly plants in Cleveland, Newark, Detroit, Youngstown and Silicon Valley could generate tens of thousands of jobs.  The target should be to bring 20 percent of the jobs off-shored to China back to their own country of origin, the USA.   

The Wall Street driven optimism about the next technological fix is blotting many working people out of the picture.  Commentator Edward Luce describes the Silicon Valley mania in a nut shell.  Vince Khosla—who founded Sun Microsystems—sees the Silicon Valley as the story of the world as a series of disruptive technologies that were dreamed up by the bold and brainy. “The future is not set. It belongs to those with the bravest  imagination.”  [in Time to Start Thinking, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012]

We’ve been on this asteroid before.  Back in the 1980s when  U.S. Central  banks saw larger profits could be had in Japanese, Korean and Brazilian steel-making, they pulled their investments from the great manufacturing centers in the Midwest and West and turned them into a rust belt.  Unemployed workers were told to get training and prepare themselves to work in the new service economy (where the pay was usually below a Living Wage.)  It never happened.

 U. S. companies willingly went along with this new plan for “financializing” profits instead of manufacturing products. Silicon Valley has outsourced at least 1.2 million of those kinds of jobs to China and other Asian locales.

The same dynamic is in play again. It is very clear now that high unemployment appears both chronic and permanent, and the solutions proffered are to upgrade the skills of the already upgraded.  

Paul Krugman:

   

“Consider, if you will, the current state of our nation. Despite hints of economic progress, we’re still in the midst of an immense disaster, in which unemployment and underemployment are devastating millions of American lives. And none of this need be happening! There has been no plague of locusts; we have not lost our technological know-how. Americans should be richer, not poorer, than they were five years ago. Yet economic policy across the board has become almost passive, has essentially accepted this disaster instead of trying to end it.”  [New York Times, April 29, 2012]

As this blog has noted before, we’re following a real theology here. This permanent downturn for the American people is rationalized as a function of God’s natural law!  It's the Divine Will that you should be out of work!

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LONGING AND DESIRE IN PYRAMID LAND: THE QUESTION OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FAITH COMMUNITIES

 Slave labor is supposed to have built the giant pyramids of Egypt, like those at Giza, more than 4,500 years ago.  But was it really slavery under the oppressor’s lash or was it the connection the men and women hauling the giant stones made to their own place in the scheme of salvation?  Everything pointed them to an ironic hope in this giant sarcophagus they were building:  a place where a dead Pharaoh would go, somewhere up the river Styx, and maybe somehow bring them along?  The people’s only proof was in the giant building, the tallest thing ever built in the world.

 Modern slavish devotion to symbols of power suggests similarity. The recession recovery news is not just gloomy but dangerous. The first quarter economic uptick has turned abruptly south. March unemployment increased across most of the country. European austerity programs are suddenly collapsing and the regimes that designed them are losing elections across the continent.  In the U,. S. the data projections show that even under the best of circumstances unemployment will not fall below 9 percent until after 2016.  In California it will be after 2018. [see graphs below]

There are four persons standing in line for every available job. That’s why surviving veterans of many tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan are returning home to find themselves without jobs.  Pyramid theologies will not do for this predicament now turning for the worse after three years of recession.

As bond interest rates rise large segments of global society from Greece to Bank of America may quickly become unable to afford any more borrowing.  Comparisons are being drawn between the economic disarray in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and the rise of the Nazis.  The idea of market sovereignty, historian Eric Hobsbaum observes, “is not a compliment to liberal democracy but an alternative.” It represents “a sharp decline in ‘that divinity that doth hedge not only Shakespear’s kings,’ but the public symbols of national cohesion, a fading chance for citizen loyalty to legitimate government.”

As both President Obama and the Republicans head into elections against the winds of this prolonged unemployment and sharp  public disillusionment, there are several critical questions for faith communities to take seriously. The first is their own reluctance to embrace the role of judgment; the role of critical citizenship. Prayers in faith communities these days often end with the reassurance that somehow the grace of God extends as generously to the unjust as to the just. So what we do doesn’t matter that much, right?  This kind of sentiment seems to have crept up on faith communities along with institutional anxiety about their own future.  Of course, we might ask why faith communities should have a future in current discourse if they have abandoned the moral imperative of critical judgment?

There are therefore several things to watch for.  There is confusion about whether democracy is a process of civic engagement or a competition for domination and control.   Civic and faith communities can be and should be places of discernment where  alternative ideas are weighed about just and fair social and economic policy proposals. The danger of the Weimar years was growing public despair (they too had no jobs along with worthless money ruined by the domination of the powerful nations). This growing despair deepens if democratic practice is perceived as ceremonial; if it is thought that someone else beyond democratic reach is pulling the actual levers of power.

Major protest efforts and large scale mobilizations are planned for this spring and summer. We will see them on the Left and the Right.  Non-participation in a critical examination of the issues behind these mobilizations should not be an option.  There is a deep longing for a civic faith that does not worship pyramids.  Democratic practice must be thought of as a process of discernment among neighbors.

Passover, Death, Resurrection

      Speaking of Passover Death and Resurrection—last week’s Supreme Court hearings on the Health Care Law passed by a democratically elected Congress bring to memory the teaching of theologian Paul Tillich, famous for speaking about the rise of Adolph Hitler.

      The problem in that tragic era was the failure to recognize the demonic potential in every human proposal. For example, the glorious national future that lay just ahead, promised by both Nazism and Stalinism; a marvelously simple vision intended to destroy many old enemies (Jews, Socialists, etc.) and fulfill dreams. It’s truly monstrous new direction remained invisible to many followers as well as observers until it was too late. Tillich, not one of those, saw the human condition “in terms of disruption, conflict, self-destruction, meaninglessness, and despair in all realms of life.”

    

       He taught that real grace, true revelation and newness of life could only be found through building a new and just creation for all humankind. He had many students, including Martin Luther King, Jr.

     This all seemed especially applicable at last week’s Supreme Court hearing where twenty-six Republican states brought suit to declare the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.  Paul Clement, their attorney, argued to everyone’s exhaustion that the law was dangerously coercive; its individual mandate a violation of the voluntarism and individual liberty at the heart of the Constitution.

     The self-interest of the huge private sector health care industry was actually what was at stake.   The pious advocacy for the constitution gave a patina of social concern for a common good that was seldom mentioned by Mr. Clement. The idea of a demonic that rises up in human affairs is here perfectly illustrated: 

   

JUSTICE KAGAN:   “Mr. Clement… why is a big gift from the Federal government a matter of coercion? …the Federal government is…giving you a boatload of money. There are no matching funds requirements, there are no extraneous conditions attached to it, it's just a boatload of Federal money for you to take and spend on poor people's healthcare. It doesn't sound coercive to me, I have to tell you.

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Kagan, let me —I mean, I eventually want to make a point where even if you had a stand alone program that just gave 100 percent, again 100 percent boatload, nothing but boat load — well, there would still be a problem.

JUSTICE KAGAN: ….just a stand alone program, a boatload of money, no extraneous conditions, no matching funds, is coercive?

MR. CLEMENT: It is…. And the very big condition is that the States in order to get that new money, they would have to agree not only to the new conditions but the government here is — the Congress is leveraging their entire prior participation in the program….

JUSTICE KAGAN: But, Mr. Clement — Mr. Clement, how can that possibly be. When a taxpayer pays taxes to the Federal government, the person is acting as a citizen of the United States. When a taxpayer pays taxes to New York, a person is acting as a citizen of New York. And New York could no more tell the Federal government what to do with the Federal government's money than the Federal government can tell New York what to do with the moneys that New York is collecting.

MR. CLEMENT: Right…. But we all know that in the real world…the Federal government continues to increase taxes that decreases the ability of the States to tax their own citizenry and it's a real tradeoff….

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Are you suggesting that at a certain point the States would have a claim against the Federal government raising their taxes because somehow the States will feel coerced to lower their tax rate?

MR. CLEMENT: No, Justice Sotomayor, I'm not. What I'm suggesting is that it's not simply the case that you can say, well, it's free money, so we don't even have to ask whether the program's coercive.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Now, counsel, [at] what percentage does it become coercive? Meaning, as I look at the figures…there are some states for whom the percentage of Medicaid funding to their budget is close to 40 percent, but there are others that are less than 10 percent.

....And you say, across the board this is coercive because no state, even at 10 percent, can give it up. What's the percentage of big gift that the federal government can give? Because what you're saying to me is, for a bankrupt state, there's no gift the federal government could give them ever, because it can only give them money without conditions….No matter how poorly the state is run, no matter how much the federal government doesn't want to subsidize abortions or doesn't want to subsidize some other state obligation, the federal government can't give them 100 percent of their needs.

MR. CLEMENT: [in his closing summary] It's really hard to understand tying the preexisting participation in the program as anything other than coercive. The Solicitor General makes a lot of the fact that there are optional benefits under this program. Well, guess what? After the Medicaid expansion there will be a lot less opportunity for the States to exercise those options, because one of the things that the expansion does — precisely because the expansion is designed to convert Medicaid into a program that satisfies the requirement of the minimum essential cover of the individual mandate, things that used to be voluntary will no longer be voluntary….

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Mr. Clement, may I ask one question about the bottom line in this case? It sounds to me like everything you said would be to the effect of, if Congress continued to do things on a voluntary basis, so we are getting these new eligibles, and say States, you can have it or not, you can preserve the program as it existed before, you can opt into this.

But you are not asking the Court as relief to say, well, that's how we cure the constitutional infirmity; we say this has to be on a voluntary basis. Instead, you are arguing that this whole Medicaid addition, that the whole expansion has to be nullified; and moreover, the entire health care act. Instead of having the easy repair, you say that if we accept your position, everything falls.

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Ginsburg, if we can start with the common ground that there is a need for repair because there is a coercion doctrine and this statute is coercion, then we are into the question of remedy. And we do think, we do take the position that you describe in the remedy, but we would be certainly happy if we got something here, and we got a recognition that the coercion doctrine exists; this is coercive; and we get the remedy that you suggest in the alternative.

     Theologian Paul Tillich’s students began to realize decades ago that “to caste out demons you had to call them by name.”  

LENTEN ETHICS

Anyone willing to look can see that ethical criteria for honest, clean, and trustworthy financial practices have spiraled downward to oblivion in the U.S.  The Goldman Sachs scandals are opening new depths of cognitive dissonance measured against ethical standards; the same with the banking industry, disgraced by robo-signing and sheer greed. 

The question is whether people of both faith and secular humanist traditions have the will to unearth and reconstruct a moral vision of justice and shared decision-making.  The moral vision is there in Christian, Islamic and Jewish roots as well as in egalitarian writings of the Enlightenment. The grand scale corruption of today’s common practice is both an intellectual and political problem.  The rationalizations that enshrine wealth as moral success beg for deconstruction; as does the so-called democratic practice of self-interested factionalism.  U. S. political practice keeps defeating itself by separating process from goals, turning the process itself into the supposed desired end; easy to do if you make millions doing it.       

As example, Goldman is making headlines almost every day. Last Saturday (3/14) the NY Times reported that federal prosecutors “have recordings of a Goldman Sachs executive leaking confidential information” about technology stocks to financial mogul, Raj Rajaratnam, now serving a twelve year sentence in federal prison for financial fraud.  Two other Goldman executives are reported under investigation for their roles  in a vast insider trading network. 

Of course it’s not surprising that a strong defense is being mounted on behalf of Goldman Sachs, exposed in last week’s blog for its “shameless” double-dealing in the proposed giant El Paso/Kinder Morgan merger. (Where Goldman persuaded El Paso to sell itself for far less than it was worth.)  Loyalty to profits count. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made a special visit last week to offer condolences to Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein as he endured this new avalanche of criticism. It had grown even larger because of the spectacular resignation last Monday  (3/12) by one of Goldman’s own executives, Greg Smith. In a Times Op Ed Smith itemized Goldman’s toxic and destructive culture: clients are called Muppets, he said.  A “vampire squid culture” urges employees to “rip-off clients,” and “ rip out eyeballs.”    

 Mayor Bloomberg called the criticism worse than “ridiculous.”  But the fact is that Goldman is “a key contributor” to the Mayor’s wealth. NY Times Reporter Michael Grynbaum observed  that Goldman “leases thousands of Bloomberg terminals, sending tens of millions of dollars a year to the mayor’s private company [Bloomberg News].”

These seem like misdemeanors compared to the Wall Street Journal’s report of continuing corruption in the banking industry where a decimal point can destroy the lives of thousands of moderate income or unemployed families. Last Thursday the Journal reported on new research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland discovering that banks are ”systematically overvaluing foreclosure homes.” This makes it too difficult for under water homeowners to negotiate a loan modification, enabling banks to evict people sooner.  Nice! “The higher the lender thinks that the value of a home is, the less likely they are to offer a modification” that would enable families to remain in their homes.

Meanwhile the struggle to improve financial regulation is being fiercely resisted with big money lobbying from the same Wall Street industry. It has dug in its heels to water down the final stages of rule-setting for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. 

This Sunday, in the Christian world, cognitive dissonance will be the order of the day as thousands of churches hear the Lenten lectionary reading from Jeremiah—“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”   And from the Psalmist, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right^* spirit within me.”  

When and if the people connect the dots, we’ll know that when we act.  Everything now hangs on whether we can grasp that the dreams, the language, the rhetoric no longer describe either our broken world or where we need to go. Will we articulate new visions for ancient values?     

Public Liturgies: Wall Street Theology

March 12, 2012

WALL STREET THEOLOGY

     Some readers are asking about God in relation to these blogs.  One way to begin that conversation is by listening to a Wall Street version of God talk.  In 2009, in the teeth of the Great Recession, the CEO of Goldman Sachs announced “I’m doing God’s work” on the caption page of a report to shareholders. Lloyd Blankfein said he helps companies raise capital which creates wealth “that allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth.”  

     The inner mechanisms of this theology are illuminated by the February 29^th ruling by Chancellor Leo E. Strine, J. of Delaware’s Court of Chancery. A brief summary of Chancellor Strine’s 33 page ruling goes like   this:

In Scene One the big energy company, Kinder Morgan, wants to buy the giant oil production and pipeline company El Paso for $21.1 billion.  Behind the scenery Goldman Sachs, hired as an advisor on the deal, turns out to own a $4 billion dollar stake in Kinder. Working on both sides of the street, Goldman also takes an undisclosed $20 million fee from El Paso to advise them at what price it should sell itself to Kinder Morgan.

Scene Two: Douglas Foshe, CEO of this big energy company, El Paso, doesn’t tell his own board that after the merger he hopes to buy the production part [read oil production] of El Paso and he works behind the scenery to persuade Kinder Morgan to offer it to him at a low price.

Scene Three: “In other words,” says Chancellor Strine in his court order, “when El Paso’s CEO was supposed to be getting the maximum price from Kinder Morgan, he actually had an interest in not doing that.”

Scene Four: The Chancellor continues: “This undisclosed conflict of interest compounded the reality “that the Board and management of El Paso relied in part on advice given by a financial advisor, Goldman Sachs & Co., which [also] owned 19% of Kinder Morgan (a $4 billion investment) and controlled two Kinder Morgan board seats.” 

Scene Five: “Although Goldman’s conflict was known,” continues the Chancellor, “When a second investment bank was brought in [Morgan Stanley] to address Goldman’s economic incentive for a deal with, and on terms that favored, Kinder Morgan, Goldman continued to intervene and advise El Paso on strategic alternatives, and with its friends in El Paso management, was able to achieve a remarkable feat: giving the new investment  bank an incentive to favor the Merger by making sure that this bank only got paid if El Paso adopted the strategic option of selling to Kinder Morgan.” [emphasis added]

Scene Six: “In other words,” explains the judge-Chancellor, “the conflict-cleansing bank only got paid if the option Goldman’s financial incentives gave it a reason to prefer was the one chosen. On top of this, the lead Goldman banker advising El Paso did not disclose that he personally owned approximately $340,000 of stock in Kinder Morgan.”

     In a very telling comment by the NY Times business columnist, Andrew Ross Sorokin, he underlines that

“What’s even more surprising about Goldman’s role working for El Paso is that it came just six months after the firm issued a new set of guidelines by its “business standards committee.” The firm had just agreed to a $550 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations that it knowingly sold its clients financial instruments meant to fail. In the guidelines, the firm pledged that its most important principle is that “our clients’ interests always come first.”  [Sorokin is a major source for this blog, in the Times of March 2^nd]

     In this context the question of theology and Blankfein’s God talk is of course quite frivolous and beside the point, which is the profound ethical violations, including fraud and victimization in the billions of dollars; including the sweetheart relationships between business and government regulatory agencies; including the absence of  relative absence of serious penalties and serious reforms in banking where their destructive impacts has registered at the top of the moral richter scale destroying the lives of millions of people in the U.S. and around the world.

     It goes beyond even that.  Money and materialism have guided leaders in both secular and religious life to tolerate destruction even when it is clearly predicted. We knew it was possible for nuclear power plants to melt down as in Japan and Chernobyl but we’ve built them anyway. We knew it was impossible to abandon manufacturing without destroying the social and economic fabric of whole cities and  regions, but the political will, the moral resistance—some would say the voice of God—was not spoken.

     

     The kind of regulation and needed social policy to protect all the people, lies in a direction condemned daily in the political campaigns. That direction is toward a re-engagement with social management for the common good, sometimes known as socialism.

     Lloyd Blankfein and his class of one-percenters are not phony believers. He may have stumbled badly in this case but his is the deeply-held belief shared by many in his dominant class. It has suffused the acquisitive, greedy human self with ideal outcomes. Their view is that fierce competitiveness in the marketplace, triumph and wealth is the formula of their own righteousness, and therefore it seems God cannot be far away.

     The first question to Wall Street is: are the outcomes ideal? What is fair about the global banking frauds uncovered in recent years but rarely prosecuted? Where is the fairness for millions in the U. S. who have become homeless and unemployed?

     The second question is for the ninety-nine percenters, at least half of them (to judge by polling results)  suffused by the same belief system. They’re Tea Partyers, conservative democrats, active Republicans, and they’re often loyal to the Blanlkfeinian dream that righteousness and wealth are members of the same family.

     Challenging the popular dreams of imagined virtue and its self-serving outcomes is the first step toward the often missing God talk which can really exist only when justice and caring among people—not money—is the subject.