The Law and the Prophets

        What prevailed over Bernie Sanders in New York was not only the disconnect between his unprecedented large rallies and ineligible younger voters, but the larger disconnection between familiar political landscapes and the menace of growing inequality.  The major re-shuffling that Sanders is proposing to correct how the economic system feeds this menace steps on the priorities of the “rights” communities—Women, LGTB, Civil Rights—and the business arrangements of party politics. 

         As to the first, Sanders asserts that 3 million New York State voters could not vote for him either because they were not registered, or not registered as a Democrat. Even if true, he also ran into the deeply-rooted democratic machine in Greater New York. In 53 of 62 counties of New York state Sanders won by large margins. In the big cities the ties of familiar advocacy alliances, patronage, ethnic politics and privileged (moneyed) partnerships delivered the Clinton majority; but it is also delivers the familiar status quo:

Nearly half of the greater New York City population is impoverished, living in or near the poverty line (Huffington Post 2014).  Half the city is rent-burdened, paying far more than 30 percent of their income for rental housing (HUD).

        Elsewhere, in places like affluent Silicon Valley for example a new study shows that 43 percent of the hourly workforce have become “contingent workers.”  Seventy-seven percent work only part time and three-fourths of those earn less than $15 an hour (Working Partnerships April 2016).

        This is essentially a status quo tolerated by both political parties, which is why the Sanders’ campaign still lives, and why the Democrats have now drawn their line in the sand: Sanders must be toned down or stopped or even discredited for the very big reason that Hillary Clinton cannot win in November without the Sanders voters.

        How much would helping Hillary Clinton win translate into support for the economic policy revolution at the heart of the Sanders campaign?  Or is the profound menace of  a widening inequality gap in fact a Democratic Party status quo that has the singular advantage of lubricating the power of the incumbents?

We might call this a new version of the biblical clash between “the law and the prophets.”

Who Will Bell the Cat?

       An ironic Ukrainian proverb declares “We’re standing on the very edge, so we’re taking one step at a time.” The PBS News Hour this week looked over the edge of a real world precipice—the Alabama prison system—at a national horror story that requires many steps so far not taken. It also serves as a parable of the  national and global divisions created by inequality.

        At its Holman prison the Alabama state budget has 24,000 human beings “living” cheek by jowl in bunk beds inches above, below and next to each other. There are frequent riots—a guard and the warden were recently stabbed in the midst of trying to stop one.

       As parable this PBS  story is also a story about global inequality. OxFam reported a year ago, just before the annual Davos conference of the world’s wealthiest finance and political leaders, that by the end of 2016 the combined wealth of the richest 1 percent will overtake that of the other 99 percent of people. Oxfam’s researchers show that the richest 1 percent have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014 and

“Of the remaining 52 percent of global wealth, almost all (46 percent) is owned by the rest of the richest fifth of the world’s population. The other 80 percent share just 5.5 percent and had an average wealth of $3,851 per adult – that’s 1/700^th of the average wealth of the 1 percent.”

       In this abyss of inequality ISIS-style terrorists from the ranks of the have-nots now operate in Libya, Kenya, Somalia and across Europe. In the U.S. they may find fertile soil among the imprisoned. Untold unrest is growing among clusters of have-nots that includes tens of millions of workers with frozen wages and disappearing benefits. There are 10 million undocumented immigrants, 29 million citizens without health insurance and from Silicon Valley to New York a growing absence of affordable housing.

       There is a strange immobilization within both political parties and the candidates about this enveloping disaster. The absence of specificity about policy is striking in the face of many reality factoids. Clearly, its evolution grows from the weaknesses and absence of regulation in global capitalism; a system profoundly analyzed two years ago by political economist, Thomas Piketti, whose equation— R>G —says the rate of return on capital “r” is greater than “g” the rate of economic growth;  and this equals growing inequality.

       Who among campaigners and parties or members of congress and their candidates seems willing to bell this cat? able, that is, to speak appropriately in proportion to the disasters around us. The race for votes in New York over the next ten days will tell us something.

Fracking Above and Below

       The really interesting thing about the state of Washington’s primary last weekend was that the entire democratic congressional delegation—all eight of them--supported Hillary Clinton who proceeded to lose to Bernie Sander 72.7 to 27.1 percent.

The deeper vibrations from this suggest that “the establishment” most actively opposing the Sanders candidacy is not the big corporation, the billionaire class or the

Republicans. It’s the Democratic Party.

        At least sometimes we know the reason for earthquakes. In Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, it’s fracking.   As an aside: according to Scientific American, “Until 2008 not a single earthquake had ever been recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey from the Dallas–Fort Worth area….Since then, close to 200 have shaken the cities and their immediate suburbs.  “Statewide, Texas is experiencing a six-fold increase in earthquakes over historic levels. Oklahoma has seen a 160-fold spike in quakes….In 2014 the state’s earthquake rate surpassed California’s. [Anna Kirchner, Scientific American, March 28, 2016]

         Political earthquakes are another matter. In last Saturday’s Washington State democratic results do we understand why Sanders’ won the youth vote by margins of 80 percent?  Economist Robert Kuttner describes the ground-shattering inequality that mainstream democrats have difficulty seeing. “Yes there is an uptick in entrepreneurship, but for every young person who creates a company like Amazon, there are tens of thousands working in its warehouses.”

”most of the unreliable jobs are not on-demand gigs [like Uber and Task Rabbit]. Rather, they are other forms of lousy “contingent” work. That category includes temping, contract work, on-call workers, workers hired by staffing agencies, workers with no job security, and inferior forms of conventional employment like adjunct college professors who can make less than minimum wage, Ph.D.’s and all. (So much for the education cure.)

        Not exactly a science magazine, ”The Economist,” admits that today

...opportunity is seen as the preserve of the elite: two-thirds of Americans believe the economy is rigged in favor of vested interests. And optimism has turned to anger. Voters’ fury fuels the insurgencies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and weakens insiders like Hillary Clinton. [March 26, 2016]

         Some details one wishes Bernie Sanders and his supporters would talk more about have been described by Financial Times reporter, Virginia Houlder, who reported on  Google and Amazon strategies to defray citizens of the tax payments they should have been receiving to help run their governments. “They” are merely the latest big international companies to come under fire for adroit tax planning. “The tech group chose to pay money back to shareholders by raising $17bn of debt rather than repatriate some of the huge reserves of cash it holds overseas, which would have resulted in it writing a big cheque to the US Internal Revenue Service.”

         The move had stoked the growing concern over corporate tax planning. As a financial crisis became a fiscal crisis and then a political crisis, public anger has risen over a flawed international system that allows billions of dollars, pounds and euros of profits to go untaxed.[Vanessa Houlder, Financial times May 3, 2013]

No wonder there’s no money for education or universal health care. While more up-to-date reports in the press this week contain the good news that “a global crackdown on tax avoidance includes the big U. S Tech firms, like Linkedin and Yahoo, pharmaceuticals, insurance and asset management firms like Blackstone and Carlyle.”   

         This came, of course, not as a progressive celebration but an estimated loss warning for large corporations.  The headline about this in the San Francisco Chronicle (3/28/16) reported that the “Global tax crackdown will damage earnings.”  The underlying “frack” making the earth tremble is the OECD report that it is costing governments $240 billion in tax lost to avoidance ploys such as the booking of profits in tax havens. 

        We may not know if the democratic Congressional delegation in Washington State is leading the charge against companies using tax avoidance ploys or just warning them so they can take defensive action.  But somewhere between the energy companies’ love of fracking for oil, and corporate love of control of the American political process, more earthquakes are coming.

        The churches could begin to recite their own parts in this drama. Studying and praying about the fract-like quakes that are slaughtering the innocents around the world, and in their own neighborhoods too. Moving into a public liturgical mode.

The Media Bubble Bursts

     At about 2 A.M (EDT) March 23rd just as the cable news anchors and pundits were going to bed, they finally began to smell the leak in their bubble.   Arizona was tighter than it first appeared; Sanders’ percentage of votes cast had jumped to 40 percent and he might walk away with 31 delegates. In Utah his big margin of victory seemed to take them by surprise, at 80 percent he was winning 24 delegates. Same story in Idaho: 78 percent of the votes going to Sanders together with 17 delegates.

      When the punditocracy next got out of bed (that's today) Bernie had won more total delegates than Hillary, 72 to 62 in the combined three states of Arizona, Utah and Idaho.

       This journalistic embarrassment seems more than a fluke or a too hasty conclusion, revealing instead the stakes for media establishment ownership (a central target of Bernie Sanders’ critique).  Reporters like all the rest of the human race must keep an eye on what their paymasters want and what the big media entrepreneurs seem to prefer is predictability and good connections.  

       Therefore happily Clinton’s large victories in the south were reported as closing the deal for her. But a dangerous leak in the balloon was already in the air. Throughout early March, according to Politico, the total margin in three states between Hillary and Bernie was only 55,000  (1,585 in Missouri), (34,898 in Illinois); (18,427 in Michigan).  In the same period Sanders had won 269 delegates in spite of his big losses in the south. This seemed not to deter the dominant media narrative on cable news channels (Fox, MSNBC, CNN, PBS) where, together with the New York Times, all had become habitually dismissive of Sanders’ campaign, constantly reiterating his hopeless position and Hillary’s sure path to the nomination.  Would we be wise to understand that at least at the unconscious level the media establishment is not amused by Sanders’ constant harping about inequality and the corruption implicit in one percent controlling the 99 percent?

       The huge Sanders rallies across the Western states all this week and his growing delegate count suggest a rising Pauline-like tide aimed at the “powers and principalities of this present darkness.” After all, Paul the Apostle, was also a good Jew, like Bernie Sanders. [See Ephesians 6:12]

       Stand by for the battle of the truth-tellers and the power-holders this Saturday in Washington State, Alaska and Hawaii.  

On Not Voting your Self-Interest

        A familiar pattern is again on display Super Tuesday.  Middle and working class Americans voted either for Trump or Hillary Clinton. While both White and African-American middle class incomes have been level or worse the past twenty years, they voted for Hillary whose husband created NAFTA, moving hundreds of thousands of jobs out of the U.S.  African-Americans, led by the Civil Rights hero John Lewis, seem to be fighting the last war, ignoring Bernie Sanders mantra that you can’t reform Wall Street if you’re taking their money. With 745,000 African American men currently in prison and fifty percent Black youth unemployment one has to hope that Bernie Sanders’ economic justice and independence message could attract more African Americans. It may yet. 

        Donald Trump’s “managerial skills” cast doubt on any capacity he may have for any commitments he may have to raise all the ships. See the Taj Mahal story.

        The New York Times block-buster investigative reports this week document Mrs. Clinton’s role in Libya as Secretary of State. They appeared just before Super Tuesday (click below to access the full texts) but went largely unreported on PBS and the cable networks MSNBC and CNN.  The dynamite in the reports shows Mrs. Clinton repeating her vote for invading Iraq by urging military intervention in Libya. Channeling George Bush’s infamous aircraft carrier celebration of Iraq, “Secretary Clinton appeared at the National Defense University with Leon E. Panetta, who had recently replaced Mr. Gates as defense secretary. She hailed the intervention as a case study in “smart power.”

Mrs. Clinton had taken a triumphal tour of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and for weeks top aides had been circulating a “ticktock” that described her starring role in the events that had led to this moment. The timeline, her top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, wrote, demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s “leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish.” The memo’s language put her at the center of everything: “HRC announces … HRC directs … HRC travels … HRC engages,” it read.

Later Mrs. Clinton would be mostly a bystander as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.

 The Times series this week has this cautionary section for all to ponder;

This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The Race to the Electoral Bottom

WE HAVE DECIDED TO RESUME BLOGGING “PUBLIC  LITURGIES.”  After a long season of illness and family loss (a daughter and a wife) the growing realities of global inequality, demagoguery and rising nationalism call us to return to our prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power.

Hillary Clinton is beginning to look like the candidate who may not be electable as postmaster by next Fall. Bernie Sanders continues to stalk her as a candidate supported by Wall street money, asking her to release the transcripts of her highly paid speeches to Goldman Saks.  The landscape is changing rapidly  In Iowa and Nevada among voters between the ages of 17 and 29, Bernie Sanders won 84 percent of the vote to Hillary’s 14 percent. He also bested her 58 to 37 among voters aged 30 to 44.

Meanwhile Republicans are as one in questioning her home emails and Benghazi performance. Chris Christie’s endorsement of Trump today seems like piling-on; and Hillary is just not very exciting beyond her older middle aged women admirers.

Sanders, however, contiues to disappoint in recent appearances. In yestersay’s hour-long sympathetic MSNBC interview by Chris Matthews in froint of a mostly White University of Chicago student audience he was repeating slogans instead of articulating specific strategies. Never going near the details of his proposed tax on Wall Street speculation (Is it a “transaction” tax? Which transactions?)

Pressed again, and again by Matthews  to say just how he would turn the electoral tide to do campaign finance reform such as reversing Citizens United, he conspicuously avoided the need for a Senate majority and electoral strategies to make it happen. There may be insider democratic delicacies about this but Sanders is beginning to sound shallow instead of shrewd.

     His stump speeches iterate “When Congress sees millions of citizens rising up to demand fairness and justice it will happen” is hollow as anyone who reads history knows.  History does not support this fantasy. Millions opposed the Vietnam war; millions opposed the invasion of Iraq.  The incumbent Johnson and Bush warmakers did not fold.

     Charitably, hopefully, we might assume that Sanders’ ‘keep it simple’ message is tactical, but since it is so repetitive it sounds more and more like a man out of his depth.  Intentionally or not, he is avoiding getting into the water where it’s deep. Either he can’t swim or he is making a possibly fatal tactical maneuver.

It’s a cheerier footnote that film maker Spike Lee (“Do the Right Thing”) and The Atlantic writer Ta Nihisi Coates have endorsed Bernie.

     Hillary, on the other hand seems by now completely exposed as the establishment Democratic candidate. She and Bill have taken tons of Wall Street money and it will take a nuclear attack to get those Goldman Saks speech transcripts released. 

Meanwhile the Republican circus sounds worse than Hitlerian propaganda. Nearly always bombastic rather than factual, Rubio, Cruz and Trump use slogans and right wing mantras intended to please their following of angry, largely disenfranchised White evangelical and hardline conservative voters—many of them people left out of the often inherently unjust American opportunity system; ironically they are the very neglected people Sanders and maybe Clinton are talking about.

     There’s something else:  Eight of the eleven Super Tuesday states have their roots in the practice of slavery. This underlying culture has clearly shaped the anti-Obama obstruction of the Republicans in and outside Congress who now draw on the same slavery roots to run their election season circus.

   

Divorcing Faith from Capitalism

        Two kinds of pathos have emerged from the slaughter of the innocents in Charleston.  Their blood documents our national failure to create a culture of hope and opportunity for millions of young adults, a failure that keeps turning disaffection into the madness of Charleston-style attacks. 

Equally poignant are the faith testimonies at Mother Emmanuel AME Church, partly overflowing with expressions of love and forgiveness that seemed more like calls for anger suppression and crowd control.  No new movement either for gun control or a program to redistribute wealth through tax reforms has emerged; no new proposals have been forthcoming to reduce income inequality in order to put more young adults into higher education and technical training. 

In the King era—constantly evoked today--the Southern Christian Leadership Conference always enunciated fresh policy proposals and organized movements to seek action. Today’s rising African Americans and Latino educated classes are rightly pursuing professional careers that would not have existed for most of them fifty years ago. They are walking through a door opened by the action-focused King era.  But there’s been a change. A new systemic global inequality has created a global population with no prospects for a positive and constructive future. The question is whether there is a common witness that can be mobilized to address this calamity? 

In his column written two days ago David Brooks writes in the NY Times about this disaffection in the U. S. as faith systems seem increasingly broken and in decline:

   

“We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.”         (NY Times 6/30/15)

Abroad, the “Isis” era has irrevocably broken the West’s centuries old cultural claim that its Christian-based faith produced its legitimate exercise of power.  A new Islamic puritanism is rising among  the African/Middle East/Asian revolutions of the desperate poor.  Domestic parallels  to this are clear as growing violence in the U. S. by estranged young adults has become a counterpoint  to chaos from Libya  to Afghanistan. 

Perhaps we can now realize that the “American” freedom that seemed so attractive to us usually depended on someone else’s servitude.  Through the practice of slavery, Native American genocide, Jim Crow sharecropping and wage laborers, capital owners have enjoyed an unregulated distribution of wealth. Their control of legislatures and courts has been the winning formula for this dominant minority in our capitalist system.  

An effective response to today’s growing inequality and the chaos it is creating means directly challenging the link between faith and the financial success of market capitalism. Today’s active entrepreneurs are too easily pulled into the notion that markets are either not a moral issue—a rampant belief these days in Silicon Valley—or that their claim of positive impacts is proof of their moral standing. 

Almost fifty years ago, in 1968, the assassination within a two month period of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy heralded an end to the Poor People’s Campaign and the Lyndon Johnson War on Poverty. It was followed in the 1970’s by a tidal wave of U .S. investment transfers that effectively ended the opportunities that had caused the great migration of African Americans in the first place to move from the deep south to job opportunities in northern industry. 

Economist Anthony Atkinson documents that as job opportunities at better wages increased from the 1920s to the 1960s inequality declined. “The top one percent owned 36 percent of the wealth in the 1920s and then declined to 24 percent in the 1950s.”  But as American investors moved their money overseas and U. S. steel mills and manufacturing began to shut down the top one percent came to own 50 percent of the wealth today. [Inequality: What Can Be Done; Harvard Press 2015]

The Confederate battle flag may come down from the state capitols but the task of Christians, other faith communities, and other people of good will in 2015 is to insist, en mass, that inequality is addressed in legislatures and enacts drastic changes in tax policies; changes that will move income from the grossly rich into the homes of ordinary Americans and to people all over the world.  A liturgy of justice for all is needed again; major social movements of the people, by the people and for the people.

This is the sixtieth issue of Public Liturgies and we intend it to be the last one.  Thanks to our followers and readers.