Elizabeth Warren and Goliath

By Jim Wallis

I had a most instructive conversation this week with Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard economist who is also the Chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel. Warren has a way of cutting through the jargon and confusion of many economists and of this economic crisis — right to the moral core of the issues at stake. I knew her for her keen insights, but I didn’t know she was from, as she puts it, a “mixed marriage from Oklahoma” — Baptist and Methodist — and that she is a former Methodist Sunday school teacher. In the interview I did with her for Sojourners, her moral and even theological comments were as impressive as her economic analysis of our present crisis. She said the battle for financial regulatory reform is like the battle between David and Goliath.
Warren’s narrative of the U.S. economy, and the banking industry in particular, was very clarifying. For most of U.S. history, our country went through repeated periods of boom and bust, with all the consequences of those cycles. But after the Great Depression, a number of new financial regulations — rules for the road — were put into place that were designed to protect average Americans in particular from the continued abuses of the big banks and the often terrible results in bad times for ordinary people. Two important examples were the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) to protect people’s savings and the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 to prevent banks from speculating with depositors’ money. And the new rules worked for several decades, creating both prosperity and security for many American families and an emerging middle class. But starting in 1980, the rules were first watered down and gradually removed, and banks were free again to engage in both the abusive and very risky speculative behavior that helped to bring on the Great Depression, and resulted again in the current Great Recession.

She explained how credit card and mortgage application forms used to be only a page or two and were both clear and understandable to the average person — even allowing people to easily compare and contrast the deals offered. But now, as all of us know, these forms have expanded to 30 pages or more with lots of complications, hard to comprehend provisions, and “fine print” that cleverly hides a long list or traps, tricks, and a myriad of both exploitive arrangements and outright abuses that greatly benefit banks at the expense of borrowers and card holders. In clear moral terms, Warren described the current behavior of our biggest banks as deliberately deceiving, entrapping, and cheating unsuspecting customers into very precarious and ultimately disastrous financial positions. And with no more rules of the road, the banks were leading their customers into the financial ditch. An economic crisis has been the result with massive suffering and pain for millions of Americans.

We are now living in a “lawless” economic environment, according to Warren, where our biggest banks have become our most dangerous predators — and with no protections for the rest of us against the “law of the jungle,” as she puts it. The consequences for our economy, our culture, our families, and even our souls have been disastrous. This is not the way we should want to live, Warren says, and it is creating a world which we should not want our children to grow up in. She makes the urgent case for reform with the compelling analysis of a top economist, the family values of a grandmother, and the moral arguments of a person of faith. The sins of the financial world have become both a moral, and even religious, issue from the perspective of the Methodist tradition “which still shapes me.”

Warren is the “mother” of the idea for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA),which is in the current financial reform bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, and is now slowly making its way through the U.S. Senate. But the big banks are aggressively fighting back, trying to prevent their own regulation only one year after the financial meltdown for which they were in large part responsible. There seems to be no remorse, let alone repentance, from the big banks — only record new profits enabled by their taxpayer-funded bailouts, and enormous bonuses to the executives who made the very decisions that brought the economic system down on the heads and hearts of so many Americans. The biggest banks in America are giving shame a bad name.

Why are new rules, regulations, and protections necessary? Because of the human condition, the realities of human nature, and a biblically orthodox understanding of human sinfulness. Yes, the reasons we need the protections offered by a Consumer Financial Protection Agency are as theological as economic. And it is amazing to me how many of those who oppose any regulation of Wall Street also claim to be religious conservatives. They subscribe to what I label in my new book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street — A Moral Compass for the New Economy, “the myth of the sinless market.” I am a conservative Christian too, conservative enough to have a healthy appreciation for human sins, human failings, and fallen-ness, and after witnessing the behavior of America’s biggest banks during this economic crisis, an old theological term called human depravity. It is simply bad theology to trust large corporations not to pollute our waters, poison our air, or cheat their unsuspecting customers. They have to be prevented from doing so for the sake of the common good. Good financial and economic rules reflect, not only good economics, but also good theology. And the free market fundamentalism of Wall Street’s defenders is, among other things, bad theology.

But as Elizabeth Warren, a good Methodist, warns, the banks are trying everything they can think of to kill financial reform. And we must not let them do that. In the name of a fairer economy, of family values, of moral values, and of sound biblical theology, the faith community must now make itself heard on the urgent issue of financial regulatory reform. We must hold our biggest banks accountable to the common good. So let our Senators not just hear from the bankers, but now also from pastors who see what such abusive banking behavior has done to their families and parishioners, to devastated communities with shuttered houses, to the prison of debt that more Americans find themselves in. People of faith across the land must now tell their elected representatives that we will be “watching and praying” to see what they will do about necessary financial reform. We don’t have the money in our financial coffers that the banks do to finance their political campaigns, but we do have our voice and our votes which will be turned against them if they vote against the best interests of our people and for the greed of the bankers. Jesus said it well — choose this day who you will serve, God or Mammon (Money). Let’s now put that choice to our Senators, who need to hear from us this next week while they are in their district offices during the Presidents’ Day recess. Critical decisions are being made for or against critical financial reform right now.

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be careful.
Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952.

As evidence of the unfettered power of corporations in the political process in this country, I present to you an essay by Norman Solomon. It appeared on the website Truthout on February 2, 2010. A memorable line in the essay is this one: “We had to destroy our country in order to save it.” That line is from the Vietnam War era, when claims were made to that effect. This year’s “defense” budget is larger than last year’s and approaches the cost of the bailout at $744 billion dollars. That is $2 billion dollars a day, my friends. Is it any wonder why we can’t have decent health care for our citizens when we are bleeding treasure to kill “terrorists”? Just who is the terrorist, here, anyway? I think our own government, controlled by these same corporations, is the terrorist – for fear mongering us into meekly approving the transfer of our wealth to the multinational “defense” corporations to “defend” our country. In a speech linked to later in this post, Martin Luther King said much the same thing, in his Riverside Church speech on April 4, 1967. In that speech, he said that I “could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

Don’t Call It a “Defense” Budget

This isn’t “defense.”

The new budget from the White House will push US military spending well above $2 billion a day.

Foreclosing the future of our country should not be confused with defending it.

“Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors,” The New York Times reported February 2.

It isn’t defense to preclude new domestic initiatives for a country that desperately needs them: for health care, jobs, green technologies, carbon reduction, housing, education, nutrition, mass transit …

“When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer,” Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out. “We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don’t even get good oleo. These are facts of life.”

At least Lyndon Johnson had a “war on poverty.” For a while, anyway, until his war on Vietnam destroyed it.

Since then, waving the white flag at widespread poverty – usually by leaving it unmentioned – has been a political fact of life in Washington.

Oratory can be nice, but budget numbers tell us where an administration is headed. In 2010, this one is marching up a steep military escalator, under the banner of “defense.”

Legitimate defense would cost a mere fraction of this budget.

By autumn, the Pentagon is scheduled to have a total of 100,000 uniformed US troops – and a comparable number of private contract employees – in Afghanistan, where the main beneficiaries are the recruiters for Afghan insurgent forces and the profiteers growing even richer under the wing of Karzai-government corruption.

After three decades of frequent carnage and extreme poverty in Afghanistan, a new influx of lethal violence is arriving via the Defense Department. That’s the cosmetically named agency in charge of sending US soldiers to endure and inflict unspeakable horrors.

New waves of veterans will return home to struggle with grievous physical and emotional injuries. Without a fundamental change in the nation’s direction, they’ll be trying to resume their lives in a society ravaged by budget priorities that treat huge military spending as sacrosanct.

“At $744 billion, the military budget – including military programs outside the Pentagon, such as the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons management – is a budget of add-ons rather than choices,” said Miriam Pemberton at the Institute for Policy Studies. “And it makes the imbalance between spending on military vs. non-military security tools worse.”

Of course, the corporate profits for military contractors are humongous.

The Executive Director of the National Priorities Project, Jo Comerford, offered this context: “The Obama administration has handed us the largest Pentagon budget since World War II, not including the $160 billion in war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The word “defense” is inherently self-justifying. But it begs the question: Just what is being defended?

For the United States, an epitaph on the horizon says: “We had to destroy our country in order to defend it.”

As new sequences of political horrors unfold, maybe it’s a bit too easy for writers and readers of the progressive blogosphere to remain within the politics of online denunciation. Cogent analysis and articulated outrage are necessary but insufficient. The unmet challenge is to organize widely, consistently and effectively – against the warfare state – on behalf of humanistic priorities.

In the process, let’s be clear. This is not a defense budget. This is a death budget.

So what was my opinion of the address? Not that anyone is paying attention to my ideas, but I think the State of the Union is pretty sorry and Obama didn’t do much more than issue rhetorical platitudes. The only bright spot in the speech for me was when he criticized the Supreme Court for its recent ruling that corporations have the right of free speech. I particularly didn’t like the part where he said he was going to freeze discretionary spending starting in 2011, but said absolutely nothing about the out-of-control military spending in this country.

I’m becoming interested in the idea of hubris and nemesis and in that spirit, I’m offering an essay by Eli Zaretsky, who was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1960 and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1978. His books include, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life and Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. He has been a professor of history at Eugene Lang College, part of the New School in New York City, since 1999.

A storm has been building in this country since Bush took office in 2001. Today, we are more indebted, have fewer civil liberties, and are more unhappy than ever. Partisan bickering and finger-pointing are rife and no solutions to our troubles appear to be at hand. Mr. Zaretsky has identified some points to watch. As you read his points, keep in mind that Adolf Hitler’s rise to power did not involve any violence at all. He was elected to office and consolidated his power through legal means. I don’t know how nemesis is going to manifest itself in this country, but the scenario that Mr. Zaretsky outlines could be one possiblity. If you would like to learn more about what he is writing about, I can’t suggest a better source than Dave Neiwert’s blog.

Personally, since I am interested in social justice, I am praying for the opposite of the trend identified by Mr. Zaretsky. But I fear that the followers of Palin, Beck, Robertson, and Limbaugh have the upper hand in what passes for political discourse in this country. If the economy does not improve markedly soon (and I see little possibility that it will do so), it is entirely possible that we will soon be living in a country with startling parallels to Germany in the 1930s.

This essay, by Eli Zaretsky, appeared on the Tikkun Daily Blog on January 23, 2010.

Proto-Fascist Elements in America Today

If I were Barack Obama, I would be frightened right now, not so much because of the likelihood that there would be serious Democratic losses in the 2010 election, or even a strong challenge to my re-election in 2012. No, I would be frightened because I would feel that I was in danger of losing control of my party, of my authority in government generally, and of the respect I had among the American people. I would feel — if I had my pulse on the nation — that the country was in an unstable and volatile situation and that things could go pretty haywire pretty fast, and I wouldn’t be sure if I could control them. I would be frightened that I had taken on a job that was beyond my capacities, if I were Barack Obama.

The fact is that there are proto-fascist elements in America today, and I don’t mean the Tea-Party group or any easy, rightwing target per se. I say “proto” fascist because I don’t want to be alarmist, and because I don’t want to use the term “fascist” as a meaningless insult. There are, however, situations when proto-fascist or extra-legal authoritarian elements do seem to surface, and this is one of them. In what follows, I want to cursorily list a few of these elements and then say a word about what has brought about the present situation.

1. The anti-Congress mood: One of the most marked aspects of societies that move in authoritarian directions is contempt for Congress or Parliament. Although a certain amount of this contempt is typical and normal in a democracy, the present situation is extreme. Furthermore, it is not hard to see the reason for it. The blatant service of both parties to special interests, not just in the health care episode, but in TARP is unprecedented. The idea that Congress would spend a year working on health care, come up with the kind of bill that it did, and then not even pass it is amazing. The idea that it would abet the President in handing the country’s checkbook to the leading banks, without getting anything in return, is even more amazing.

2. Contempt for the President: For quite a while now, it has been clear that the President has very little real support in the country. His polling among African-Americans remains high, and a certain type of wonkish liberal supports him, as do such figures as David Brooks and Ross Douthat, who use their “admiration” for his supposed “thoughtfulness” as spin for their rightwing agenda. However, from the moment he took office he lost the support of the rest of his base, the antiwar folks, the “Left,” however defined, young idealists and the like, even though, understandably, they were reluctant to criticize the first black President. The truth is, however, that he is a weak President, unable to connect emotionally to the ordinary workingman or woman, and this makes for further instability.

3. The Supreme Court is in the hands of a fanatic group of five, with a passionate and unstoppable agenda. The decision on corporate campaign financing is only one example. It is not merely the content of the decision, it is even more the legal opportunism, the drive to turn a small sliver of opportunity into a big, epoch-making decision, the refusal to honor or even really consider precedent, etc. all of which threatens the idea of a nation under law. We already saw the Supreme Court behave in an extra-legal way in installing Bush in the 2000 election. Once again, one of the core elements of stability in any modern democracy, namely the courts, leads in the direction of instability.

4. Scapegoating of the Left: One of the strongest bases of a stable democracy is a responsible Left committed to liberal principles and democratic means, but attempting to articulate and bring into politics the interests of the weakest and most deprived members of the society. Contrariwise, one of the elements making for instability is the scapegoating of the Left, their marginalization from the national consensus. In the US, of course, this marginalization dates back to the seventies and eighties, and led to the transformation of the Democratic Party, which many hoped Obama would reverse, but which he deepened. The new factor, however, is the revival of a Left sentiment and a Left consciousness. Watch for liberals blaming the Left for the defeats of Obama, as one of the main signals that the country is on a dangerous path.

5. National Decline: One of the main causes of authoritarian and extra-legal political developments is a country in decline, or trying to reverse some apparently unfair international developments. The United States today is in danger of developing this kind of “decline” mentality. Even when it was far stronger (relatively) than it is today, it operated as a bully, regularly lying to the American people, and using force to get its will without regard for justice, or the “decent opinion of mankind,” as it used to be called. One of the things that made Obama attractive was the idea that he recognized this, and that he would help lead an orderly retreat, which is what the U.S. needs. But that, however, requires that he be strong. He is now far too weak to do that and, besides, we have seen in his Afghanistan decision that even when his Presidency seemed solid he was going to defer to the established powers, like the Pentagon.

6. The Corporate Elites: The US today has the greediest and least public-minded capitalist class of any country in the world. Yes, there might be exceptions that we could argue about such as the oligarchs in Russia in the nineties, or the comprador classes in various stages of Latin American history. Nonetheless, the fact remains, basically, as I stated it. Most Americans, I am sure, would be shocked to learn that in European countries, both Western and Eastern, in China, India and Brazil, and even in Russia, there are relationships and norms that more or less govern the behavior of capitalist corporations. Only in the United States, are greed, grasping, and exploitation celebrated and so-called “class struggle” or “Populism” mocked. Once again, a key element making for stability, a capitalist class that has a sense of responsibility for the national interest is missing, leading to further instability.

In raising these considerations, I am not predicting which way the country will go. I have no idea which way it will go. I do think, however, that some awareness of the dangers that face us is salutary.

Finally, I want to raise a last question: could it have been different? Of course, it could have. The United States has an extraordinary history of progressive reform and change and the 2008 election was potentially a transformative moment, as the election of the first African-American President seemed to suggest it would be. For reasons that remain unfathomable to me, Obama moved in a wholly different direction, and with every step he took he became weaker, and the enemies of a stable democracy became stronger. As to the future, we shall see.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, whose essays I have posted before, had some wonderful thoughts on this election and I am posting them here, for your consideration.

We Tried to Warn Obama…But He Wouldn’t Listen

By Rabbi Michael Lerner January 19, 2010

The defeat of the Democrats’ choice to succeed Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate is being treated as though there is a decided shift of mass opinion to the Right in the U.S. But it is the Obama Administration, not the people who supported him in 2008, which moved to the Right–in the name of being pragmatists or realists– in the process emptying their own agenda in regard to health care, environment, human rights, social and economic justice, and global peace of the critical elements that made those programs sound hopeful, and leaving many of their supporters feeling confused, disillusioned, and unable to rally around the politics that seemed so very far from “the change you can believe in” that we had been promised.

Thousands of us saw this coming, and tried to warn Obama, but he wouldn’t listen.

On April 29, 2009, Tikkun and our education arm the Network of Spiritual Progressives bought the entire back page of a special supplement published in the Washington Post on the occasion of the 100th day of Obama’s presidency. We warned him that his presidency was in grave danger. Our point was simple and direct: “Your success depends on helping people believe that they can count on each other, that they are not alone in a ruthless world in which people are out for themselves, and there is a possibility of building a society based on kindness, generosity, and caring for each other. Unless your programs actually allow people to feel in their own lives that they are part of a movement to build a new society based on love and generosity of spirit, they will soon fall back into the older paranoid view – that we are all competing with each other and have to look out first for number one. And that will likely lead them right back into the hands of the most conservative forces in this society. It’s that simple, President Obama: if your policies do not give people a personal experience of caring and generosity, people will quickly succumb to the fearmongers who compete in the media over who can make people most afraid, most cynical, and most angry. ”

Our ad went on to tell President Obama that his supporters were beginning to feel unhappy because they could not explain to themselves and to others:

*Why you are bailing out the bankers and the Wall Street crowd rather than prioritizing the needs of people who have lost their jobs and homes.

*Why you are not backing single payer (Medicare for Everyone) health reform but are instead preserving the interests of the health care profiteers and insurance companies that make our health care system so costly.

*Why you are escalating the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, when you must know that these are no win situations, and when you have even agreed with Rabbi Michael Lerner that the best way to achieve “homeland security” is not by attempting to dominate others around the world in an insane “war on terrorism,” but instead by a Strategy of Generosity manifested in the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ proposal for a Global Marshal Plan introduced into the Congress by Congressman Keith Ellison.

*Why you have failed to bring into your Administration more leaders of the peace, social justice, labor and environmental movements that gave you the critical support you needed to win the Democratic nomination for President.

Our conclusion: “If the people who made your presidency possible stop feeling excited about your present direction, the populist energies that could be mobilized for fundamental change will instead be mobilized by the Right for reactionary goals, and you may find yourself without the base of support you need even for your scaled down goals.” And now our worst fears and prophetic predictions are coming true. [If you were one of the many members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives or subscribers to Tikkun who donated to make the ad we published possible, I want to thank you for your ability to see what was ahead--and your willingness to back your wisdom with the money we needed to publish that ad!]

But what could he have really done, many ask, given the way corporate interests seemed to have bought their way into power not only in the Republican party, but among Blue Dog Democrats in the House and Senate?

It’s true that if Obama had fought for the kind of change he led his followers to believe would be possible, he might have lost. But winning legislative battles is not the highest goal, as FDR and Reagan, the two most influential 20th century presidents, learned. The most important thing a president can do is develop a worldview and convince the American public of that. Obama could have spoken the truth, told what he saw happening in Washington rather than trying to be a clever inside manipulator-a game that he was destined to lose. Any legislative victory won by compromising away the heart of what you are fighting for isn’t worth much, and in any event, even good legislation can quickly be dismantled by the next president if you haven’t won over the minds and hearts of the American people–and to do that you need to speak the truth and tell people what we are up against in the system of global capital and its ethos of materialism, selfisness, and looking-out-for-number-one, and what it would take to dismantle it and replace that system with a more humane and caring, environmentally sane and ethically and spiritually coherent society. And Obama could have constantly reminded his supporters that the 2008 election had shown that their yearning for a world of peace and justice, of love and caring and community and real solidarity and democracy, were not the private dreams of an isolated minority but the real needs of the American majority. By making us visible to each other, he could have empowered people to fight for programs that manifested their highest values (if and only if his programs did in fact manifest those values, which unfortunately they often did not).

Now it’s up to us, the tens of millions of Americans who really showed in 2008 the powerful commitment we have to building a world of love, kindness, generosity, environmental sanity and caring for others. We have to reconstitute that movement without Obama’s help, before the disillusionment with Obama’s compromises leads to the resurgence of the Right’s policies, the surge of a know-nothing Tea Party movement, and the retreat into despair and self-imposed powerlessness by all those who are questioning whether there’s any real possibility of replacing corporate power, materialism and selfishness with a more ethically and spiritually grounded community of caring.

Please don’t let your disappointment at Obama lead you or your friends into political passivity…because the alternative if you do that is Sarah Palin and The Tea Party extremists and the haters and fundamentalists, all of whom are now momentarily dressing themselves in the language of populism, but all of whom will actually only give even more power to the elites of wealth and power.

That’s why it is so important for you to become part of our efforts to reconstitute the movement of hope–and we can do that with your help. We need your ideas and involvement–and so we’ve created two conferences, a one day event on the Monday of President’s Day weekend, February 15, at the McLaren Hall on the campus of the University of San Francisco on Fulton St. near Clayton; and a longer event June 11-14 at the Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. The conferences are co-sponsored by The Nation Magazine, Yes Magazine, Democracy Now, Op-ed News, Peace Action, 350.org, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and speakers will include Chris Hedges, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Congressman Keith Ellison, Riane Eisler, Rev. Brian McLaren, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, Peter Gabel, Rev. James Winkler, Rev. Conrad Braaten, Robert Thurman, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Rev. Gralan Hagler, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Jonathan Granoff, Marianne Williamson, Paul Wapner, John Dear SJ, John Nichols, Svi Shapiro, Bob McChesney, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and many more.

Please register for one of these conferences now. To plan effectively, we need to know very soon if you’ll be coming! If you cannot come, please donate to make it possible for us to afford to create these events. The amount we are charging will not even come close to covering our expenses. Donate on-line or by sending a check to Tikkun, 2342 Shattuck Ave,#1200, Berkeley, Ca. 94704.

Please help us spread the word–and let us know if you and your friends, colleagues, community members, would like to help us organize a “Support Obama to BE the Obama Americans Thought they were Voting For” conference in your area of the country. Please read the information at our website–this is not about trashing Obama, but about reconstituting the movement that made his presidency happen, and then moving together to bring about the changes that tens of millions of Americans and billions of people around the world desperately need to have happen.

“It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State’s chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the nation. No one will deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces. If the State’s chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with coordinating and developing the powers and techniques which make for destruction. And this means not only the actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at home as well. For the very existence of a State in a system of States means that the nation lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and the calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of the productive and life-enhancing processes of the national life.”

Slideshow by Michael P. Flaherty

A Morning Song (For the First Day of Spring)

by Elizabeth Farjeon

Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the word

Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dewfall, on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new day

Economic Recovery 1 and 2

For many people, economic recovery means “getting back to where we were a few months or years ago.” That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life.

I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery … drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life – a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life … unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.

Similarly, I’d like to suggest whenever we hear the word “recovery,” we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high, but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions, including the following:

1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance. They give us speed … quick energy … serving as a kind of cultural amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.

2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons are one of the most addictive substances possible. They give us a feeling of well-being and security, removing our feeling of fear and anxiety, much like a barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow – lazy and slow in the much more important work of relationship-building, justice, and peace-making, lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more and more weapons, we aren’t safer … especially when increasing numbers of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.

3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes, dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives, Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants, and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high – crack for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and missing things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.

4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used, and then thrown away into a landfill … that economy “succeeds” by turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That’s not success. We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a regenerative economy. I believe that in God’s world, if billions can be made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.

5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the President’s town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his pocket … but wouldn’t you agree that being a good neighbor has a value that can’t be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line – financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.

6. Our addiction to easy answers. “Government is the problem.” “Just throw money at the problem.” We can’t afford our addiction to these kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring wisdom.

So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long. That’s my hope and prayer. (For more on this, see my book Everything Must Change.)