The Mouse and the Lion

In the end, my Presbyterians produced a mouse. After years of advocacy, the close decision to divest from H-P, Motorola Solutions and Caterpillar appears to come several years too late as we watch the Middle East accelerate into a chaos that includes the potential to move closer to U. S. shores. Last week’s divestment vote was accompanied, as usual, by much hand-wringing over the damage it might cause to local Christian-Jewish relationships.  Palestinians were important too, said some commissioners, but their hearts seemed barely in it.  

The very days leading to the Presbyterian vote the Israeli army was putting on a clinic of just how they treat the Muslim-believing Palestinians: shooting dead four of them (including a 15 year-old), arresting 340, conducting 1,350 (according to the NY Times) house-to-house searches including mid-night raids, imposing curfews on whole cities. Two-thirds of those arrested were Hamas politicians or operatives. The Israelis administered collective punishment with impunity.

All this in search for three kidnapped Israeli teens, said to be inhabitants of illegal Israeli settlements, who were hitch hiking on Palestinian roads.  While there’s no justifying the kidnapping, the disproportionality of Israel’ response suggests a darker motive. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has yet to produce any evidence he claims to have of a Hamas connection to the kidnapping, is whipping up Israeli sentiments to a white hot heat as his soldiers storm into innocent Palestinian homes.  Many believe (including this writer) this is because he hopes to provoke a large scale violent reaction from the Palestinians. Something like a third Intifada would suit his purposes—and would be a hopeless action by Palestinians—and turned into a justification  for more Israeli expansion into the West Bank, ultimately accelerating the final forced exodus of the Palestinians from what many Israelis call their “promised land.” 

Divestment, if voted years ago, would have been politically apposite at a time before Israel’s Cast Lead campaign had killed 1,000 with impunity and before its large-scale settlement expansion inside East Jerusalem. More than one Presbyterian career has been enlarged and institution funded on a foundation of this tolerance for Israeli extreme measures that are pleasing to many American Jewish leaders. The treatment by Israel of Palestinians and their hope for a secure, contiguous state was seldom mentioned by many commissioners at the microphones who seemed willing to look the other way.    

Middle East events have now moved far beyond the years of Presbyterian ambivalence, but also past Mr. Netanyahu’s grasp.  The Iraq-Syria-Lebanon-Iran crisis threatens to not only completely negate the ten year U. S. invasion and military occupation of Iraq, but the growth of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nura forces is catalyzing a much wider war “reaching from the Iranian frontier to the Mediterranean coast,” as described by New Yorker reporter, Dexter Filkins.

Filkins, who has reported on Iraq since 2003, describes (New Yorker June 23, 2014)  what amounts to a horrible lion on the loose; one of terrible portent:  

“Among those fighting with ISIS and Al Nusra are hundreds of Westerners, from Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United States. At some point, the survivors will want to come home; they will be well trained and battle-hardened.”

This seems well foretold by the bombing in Boston last year by an extremist returned.  Also well exhibited is the soft Christianity commonly practiced coast to coast in the U. S.  Self-obsessed, late modern Christianity prefers to talk of love and relationships as a substitute for the burden of making judgments about what is unjust. The relative silence in local churches and at their national gatherings unwittingly appears to pave the way for a chaos now moving among us.  

After E=mc2 What's Next?

Sorry, we meant  to say r > g which means something almost as big as Einstein’s nuclear equation. The French economist, Thomas Piketty, has startled the world of economists and political leaders with an equation of seismic consequence. It expresses a new dynamic to inequality born of data showing that the return to capital (shareholders) is greater than economic growth such as standards of living and jobs. He says it is possible that during the twenty-first century the fault lines may grow from bad to worse.  

     Some sample facts drawn from current data in the U. S. include:

• Economist Paul Krugman reports a single Hedge Fund manager makes more than all kindergarten teachers  in the U. S. combined.
• The top 1 percent--own 75 percent of the Capital  and 50 percent of all income.
• The richest top 25 hedge fund managers have received more income than all the chief executives of the Standard and Poor’s 500 companies combined. 

    To catch you up In case you’ve been doing something else with your life the past month, you may have missed Piketty interviews on virtually all cable news channels and in hundreds of print media reports.  Over the past 15 years, he  and his colleagues have put together the most comprehensive data set on inequality ever assembled ;  a study of income and wealth in six countries over a two hundred year period —aided by the age of computer calculating power. 

    Using real estate tax and personal income tax records from England, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the U. S. the data shows that over the last two hundred years the average rate of return on capital has been 4-5 percent annually while the growth of productivity, jobs and standards of living, averages only 1.0 to 1.5 percent. 

T

     The Piketty study, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, refutes the long-standing belief that while capitalism follows an uneven, often un-fair growth pattern, it eventually raises all ships.

He gives us a picture of this rapids growth among the very rich in this chart.

The unfolding picture is potentially catastrophic and the illustrative figures go on and on but the question is what next?  Answers include a sharp increase in taxes on the super-rich, massive public investment and local community control and ownership of the economy.  The one exception in the 200 years of data developed by Piketty is the period of WWI and II when there was massive investment by governments in troops and weapons manufacture. That is what ended the depression of 1931-41.

So, the consensus is growing that dramatic new policy initiatives are now required to meet the rise of Oligarchy in the U. S.   It will be one of the tasks of faith communities to remind their people that economic policy-making is a moral task, as Jesus and the prophets made clear when they pointed to the power of wealth or the power of Rome in ancient times.  More on this next time. 

Religion, Democracy and Oligarchy

       In the foreground of the country’s deepening democracy crisis is the growing effort by Republican-led states to cut taxes, block Medicaid expansion and curb voter turnout. In the background is the growing concentration of wealth. In 2012 ten percent of the U. S. population earned half the country’s income; meaning the U. S. is already on the way to government by an oligarchy of the wealthy.  [Annie Lowerey, NY Times, September 10, 2013]

       

       The good news is the progressive and diverse coalitions growing rapidly in Southern states to protest this trend.  Demonstrators by the tens of thousands have filled the streets—80,000 last Summer in North Carolina—with more than a thousand people arrested for acts of civil disobedience.  New coalitions are disrupting legislative sessions that ignore the needs of low income families by blocking Medicaid expansion or limiting the number of days and hours election polls will be open. In Georgia

“There was a son of a sharecropper and an advocate for the homeless, a college student and a great-grandmother, a retired store manager and the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church”….among 39 arrested on March 17^th [NY Times March 18, 2014]

       

       While clergy are sometimes leading the protests, they comprise only part of the new coalitions that have come together to resist Republican-led strategies. More than 80 citizens were arrested in Georgia just weeks ago.  Dramatic scenes in the Georgia legislature over its refusal to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act led to acts of civil disobedience  including the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—once the home pulpit of Martin Luther King.

       

        Even while the gloves are coming off in these citizen protests against Republican policies the hour has grown late. This very day the Supreme Court struck down limits in federal law on the overall campaign contributions the biggest individual donors may make to candidates, political parties and political action committees. The “Citizen United” Supreme Court decision three years ago recognizing corporations as persons had already opened the flood gates to governance by the wealthy.  Revolving doors for staff moving from Wall Street to government and back again is pervasive. In the face of rampant corporate corruption among the big banks, a tame Securities and Exchange Commission staff has done little. Its own staff and board are composed of personnel formerly employed at giant Wall Street firms.  The hour is, indeed, growing late.

       

         While protests are growing against the Right, faith-based movements toward the Right also are growing.   New conservative church denominations are forming in the country. Often energized by gender issues, their composition is visibly an all-white community of the privileged. As many as a quarter to one-third of congregations in the traditionally liberal Presbyterian denomination may move toward this orbit this year.  

       

        A more hopeful story is unfolding with unionization efforts at the Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi. Led by a marching community coalition that includes local clergy, human rights advocates, and the UAW (demonstrating lessons the UAW learned in Chattanooga about the need for allies and shared strategic planning), with Nissan workers urged by religious leaders to vote their conscience, not listen only to the high pressure propaganda coming at them. [LA Times, March 14, 2014]

       

         The real question is whether the moral and religious roots that gave democracy life in the U. S. in the first place will find its full voice in this prophetically challenging moment. The future of democracy in America may turn on the answer to that question. 

       

          The record is mixed.  Christian churches co-habitated with slavery and segregation for hundreds of years.  Jewish congregations have maintained their loyalty to the apartheid state of Israel during its 60 year repression of Palestinian people and huge settlement expansion into Palestinian territory.  Muslim leaders often confuse their spiritual and prophetic tradition with the more familiar authoritarian rule practiced today in Syria, Egypt and many African lands.

       

         It doesn't have to be this way. There is a new, well educated younger faith-based generation of leaders coming online that may yet breathe new life into the links between faith, justice and democracy. The original Tahir Square uprising in Egypt was an expression of democratic yearning among an educated younger Muslim generation. “Jewish Voices for Peace” is a movement growing out of diverse Jewish traditions and raising its prophetic voice against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.  Christian groups once deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s are once again beginning to provide new leadership protesting the consequences of rising inequality.

      

        “The most important fact to remember,” writes Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect, “is that concentrated wealth translates into concentrated political power.”  Conscientious voices on the Left and Right should be able to see such concentration is disastrous for both democracy and their historic faith traditions.

The New Abolition Movement

In the new landmark study cited two weeks ago by blog commentator Ray Miklethun of Atlanta, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the author summarizes the worsening situation.

    

… future inequality in the United States will be driven by two forces. A growing share of national income will go to the owners of capital. Of the remaining labor income, a growing share will also go to the top executives and highly compensated stars at the pinnacle of the earnings scale.

The new study out just this week is based on monumental research never before done of annual economic data on taxes, wealth and inheritance covering 200 years of financial history in Great Britain, Germany, Sweden and the U.S. The finding is that economic growth seldom leads to more equality. It powerfully refutes the prevailing wisdom that even when capitalism sometimes produces inequality, it will naturally correct itself. Instead during most of the last two hundred years it usually increased inequality, as is happening today; creating a new kind of permanent second class citizenship of the 99 percent, a wage slavery never envisioned by Marx, who was talking about miners and factory workers. 

The NY Times expose March 9^th of hedge fund manager William A. Ackman’s star power illustrates this politics of inequality. Through incredibly vast manipulation of Congressional, Wall Street and White House officialdom and endless connections, Ackman is working furiously to make a one billion dollar bet pay-off while claiming he is serving a public good.  It’s all about the financial position he's taken, called a short, that will only pay-off if he can force the shares of a vitamin and food supplement company called Herbalife to plummet. If they do he makes billions. But not the rest of us, we whom Ackman claims he seeks to protect from Herbalife. (The Herbalife business is for others to explore.)

In Silicon Valley, where Porsches and Lamborghinis roam the streets, between 2010 and 2012 average per capita income actually decreased 5% among Blacks to $30,758 while rising among Whites by 5.6% to $62,374; among Hispanics or Latinos it went down 2% to the deplorable average of $19,049. [source: 2014 Silicon Valley Index, p. 18]. Current BLS data, January 2014, confirms this trend. That’s in Lamborghini land!

Where the rest of us live declining standards of living have become the new middle class experience over the past twenty years. A new and ghastly racism has become a 21^st century form of inequality in a class by itself. In the U. S. prison system the Public Policy Institute reports that in 2010 among adult men, African Americans were incarcerated at a rate of 5,525 per 100,000, compared to 1,146 for Latinos and 671 for non-Latino whites.

Piketty’s study demonstrates that we are encased by an inequality by race and by class.

Faith communities and human rights groups should see this as cause for a modern “Abolitionist Movement” targeting the loss of income by nearly everyone but the top one percent. The illegality practiced on Wall Street that we have seen in the massive mortgage loan frauds, the buying and selling of legislatures and Congress means Democracy is now on life support.

A first “Abolitionist” step is faith leaders and human rights advocates becoming public citizens. directly engaging legislators and government leaders. (No intermediary community organizations, please). Direct congregational and citizen action of the kind that was practiced during the King era and by the courageous first Abolitionists of the 1830s is in order. But there is generational change of a different kind underway. 

A second abolitionist step is to move immediately to localize capital investments through worker and community wealth-ownership like the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland [see blog for 3/7). Faith groups could begin to do this tomorrow. The GenX generation is at hand to lead or help with concrete practical tasks. Many larger congregations have scores of thousands of dollars in extra cash and the GenXers know where they can get more by working with community foundations and their large local corporate foundations.  Faith communities can begin to seed thriving new businesses that train local workers who reinvest their successful business profits into their own neighborhoods. This kind of locally controlled capitalism can spread coast to coast. A perfect scenario for GenXers.

While President Obama’s announcement this week that he will mandate the Department of Labor to require overtime pay for a wide range of white collar and food services workers is good, it will be resisted by the same conservative forces that are winning key votes from Florida to Tennessee. Countering steps must be taken by public citizens of the new Abolitionism.

Legislating salary caps like those at Mondragon could weaken the inequality pyramid. At the  Mondragon cooperatives in Spain 92% of the top manager pay is at 4½ times the minimum salary; larger industrial co-ops cap top managerial pay at 6 and 7 times the minimum salary. Compare this with The American Fortune 500 CEO compensation that is 410 times the average wage according to Kent State University’s Ohio Employee Ownership Center.

Third, more and more citizens can be helped through education to see that the systemic shortcomings of Capitalism must be addressed through increasingly stringent and enforced regulation. The new abolitionism will mean electing legislators loyal to their community’s citizens suffering from inequality.  Professor Piketty cautions that while it is possible to imagine public institutions and policies that would counter the traditional wisdom that the more perfect the market, the greater the equality, he is skeptical that it will be done.

Future leaders committed to social and economic justice could prove him wrong. That’s why ancient texts continue to have value, such as Jesus’ admonition that he did not come to bring peace, but the sword of righteousness. 

From Mondragon to Silicon Valley: the Move to Shared Local Wealth Production

Are worker cooperatives a plausible alternative after the victory by Republican autocrats over a proposed union and worker council at Volkswagen?  While this victory of growing national conservative strength seems intent not only to keep the cost of labor cheap but shows little concern for the shrinking standards of living of workers, a trail of stepping stones beginning in Mondragon, Spain and running to Cleveland and Silicon Valley is trying and testing the cooperative idea in highly creative ways.

The more obvious consequences of the status quo and conservative leadership can be seen in our huge prison populations, in sections of whole cities patrolled by heavily-armed special police units and, of course there’s the February jobs report. It  shows the ranks of the long-term jobless who have been out of work by 27 weeks has risen  203,000 to 3.8 million.

Since the 1950s Mondragon, in the northern Basque region of Spain, has created a federation of 110 cooperatives, 147 subsidiary companies, eight foundations and a benefit society with total assets of 35.8 billion euros developed over the past fifty years, reports Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and a founder of The Democracy Collaborative. 

Out of the ashes of cities destroyed by capital mobility such as Cleveland, Detroit and Oakland, new experiments to apply Mondragon’s example are developing through networks of green businesses organized as cooperatives that keep cash flows local by reinvesting savings and making workers stockholders who share decision-making with management. 

The most dramatic  is in Cleveland where community energies have been mobilized to create Evergreen Cooperatives consisting so far of three state of the art cooperative businesses: a commercial scale laundry, a solar panel energy company and a commercial-scale hydroponic greenhouses.  The goal is to create seven more—all located in the inner city.  The design should be applicable anywhere from the Bronx to San Jose’s east side, where gang warfare rages because, of course, there’s no work.  

This issue of Public Liturgies invites serious readers to spend time looking at each of these rather spectacular efforts by clicking below and then viewing the video at each website:

To see the 3.25 acre greenhouse function go to:

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/02/green_city_growers_cooperative.html

For the commercial laundry:

http://evergreencooperatives.com/business/evergreen-laundry/

For the Energy Solar business:

http://evergreencooperatives.com/business/evergreen-energy-solutions/

It has taken all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to organize these cooperatives—The Federal Reserve, the Cleveland Foundation, Cleveland Clinic, City Hall, Gar Alperovitz, and Mondragon.

We’ll comment further about this power array and the feasibility of both its replication and its model in our next blog.

Evil in Chattanooga

Last week’s thunderous defeat of the UAW by workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga auto plant goes to the role Protestant culture often plays in nullifying moral questions. Jung and Tillich described it as creating a state of “dreaming innocence.”  Their analysis of the nature of true evil—brought to the fore by their experience with Nazism and Sovietism—pointed to the use of religion to induce in people an imaginary innocence, blinding their ability to see evil by playing off their sense of being overwhelmed, of being powerless.

This requires mythicizing and re-writing history.  The weekly labor columnist at the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, describes how that was done in Chattanooga.

Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom (a spin-off of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform), compared the UAW’s campaign to the Union Army’s occupation of Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War and urged workers to repel it as Confederates forces had done to that Union army at the battle of Chickamauga. Clearly, this was not an argument Patterson would have made had the plant employed more than a handful of African-Americans, but Chattanooga remains one of the whiter bastions of the New South. (The website established by the Center for Worker Freedom is emblazoned with a logo reading “Liberating Labor, One Worker at a Time”—quite the slogan for a group that equated its anti-union struggle with a battle to defeat the army that actually freed Chattanooga’s slaves in 1863.)

Meyerson describes the role Walter Reuther’s UAW actually played in the emergence of social liberalism:

…no institution played a larger role in the construction of postwar American liberalism than the UAW. Under Reuther’s leadership, the union provided funds to civil rights activists who conducted the Montgomery bus boycott, paid for the buses and sound system at the 1963 March on Washington, detailed staff and dollars to the efforts to build municipal employee unions and Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, donated resources to the fledgling efforts of Students for a Democratic Society and the National Organization for Women, and helped fund the first Earth Day.

Fundamentalist Christian Evangelicalism lives off the bitter sense of belonging to an underclass, so prevalent in Appalachia and deeper south locations like Chattanooga.  It makes one cling to racial identity and the dream of innocence in a world one is unable consciously to acknowledge actually bends him to this low estate. In the virtually empty slogans of this form of Christian parlance, God both loves you, redeems you and protects you from the very agency the Gospel proclaimed to be yours. Meyers continues on the important theme of self-management and self-governance:

For all of labor’s troubles organizing in the white South, Volkswagen was the one campaign that labor thought it could win….the union had won the support of the German auto-and-steel workers union, IG Metall, which, under the terms of Germany’s “co-determination” law, controls half the seats on Volkswagen’s corporate board. Indeed, due to Volkswagen’s Nazi roots, the American authorities in postwar Germany made the company go one step further, requiring a two-thirds majority from board members for any significant policy decision—in effect, giving the union veto power over Volkswagen’s various projects. Many of the workers who opposed the very idea of a union at Chattanooga argued, rightly, that Volkswagen was a good employer that paid them well and respected their rights. They failed to realize that the company’s conduct had been largely shaped by influence that IG Metall wields over VW’s labor relations.

         How did the Levitical teaching that you are not to slander your neighbor nor profit from his loss—claimed as roots by three world faiths—compose such contradictory violations in Chattanooga?  The answer is more and more faith communities are in love with the idea of themselves, the grace of God that will always protect them and save them. Of course this means evil can run rampant and your neighbor can be slandered because even to mention it would mix politics with religion.  

Faith communities that practice in the public square can build agency and responsibility for the battle against evils like those that carried the day in Chattanooga. They can freshly study and embrace the idea of worker dignity, worker co-determination—let us even say worker ownership—because it acts out, makes real, the sovereignty of individual freedom in its indissoluble responsibility to do justice to one’s neighbors, to one’s co-workers.

Can evil grow? Yes, and its petri dish is inequality. 

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.”