Occupy This, Today

The Missing Religious Principle in Our Budget Debates

This was originally posted by Jim Wallis on the Huffington Post on June 7, 2012. The photo was added by this editor.

Both Republicans and Democrats have a religion problem and it has nothing to do with same-sex marriage, abortion or religious liberty. Rather it is budgets, deficits, and debt ceiling deadlines that are their serious stumbling blocks.

That's right, in a city deeply divided between the political right and left, there is a growing consensus from religious leaders about getting our fiscal house in order and protecting low-income people at the same time. Together, many of us are saying that there is a fundamental religious principle missing in most of our political infighting: the protection of the ones about whom our scriptures say God is so concerned.

Indeed, the phrase "a budget is a moral document" originated in the faith community, and has entered the debate. But those always in most jeopardy during Washington's debates and decisions are precisely the persons the Bible instructs us clearly to protect and care for --  the poorest and most vulnerable. They have virtually none of the lobbyists that all the other players do in these hugely important discussions about how public resources will be allocated.

For us, this is definitely not a partisan issue, but a spiritual and biblical one that resides at the very heart of our faith. It is the singular issue which has brought together the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Salvation Army and the leaders of church denominations, congregations and faith-based organizations across the nation.

Here is the missing principle still absent in our current debate:

We must agree not to reduce deficits in ways that further increase poverty and economic inequality by placing the heaviest burdens on those who are already suffering the most.
 
Religious leaders do believe that massive deficits are moral issues, and that we must not saddle future generations with crippling debt. But we believe that how we resolve deficits also is a moral issue. And our society must not take more from those who already have so much less that the rest of us.

We understand the politics of this debate. We know that Republicans will resist reforming the private sector, because that is where their core constituencies and money lie. We understand that Democrats will resist reforming the public sector because that is where their key constituencies and money are.

We also understand that neither party wants to risk actually examining bloated Pentagon spending out of political fears that they might appear unconcerned about national defense or our military personnel. During elections, both Republicans and Democrats are almost entirely focused on middle-class voters and wealthy donors who all have special interests in the outcome of how government financing is determined.

And then there are the pollsters who tell both parties that talking about "poor people" and "poverty" will not be popular.

But we must agree with what a Catholic bishop told President Obama in a meeting we religious leaders had with him in the White House last year as the August debt crisis deal was being decided:

Mr. President, our scriptural mandate from Jesus does not say 'As you have done to the middle class, you have done to me.' It rather says, 'As you have done to the least of these you have done to me.'

We have no choice as to what our position will be in these upcoming debates. We are telling the leaders and legislators of both parties that they must form "a circle of protection" around the most effective and vital programs that help the lowest-income American families survive in such difficult economic times. With one clear voice we also are telling lawmakers that the global efforts, which literally mean life and death to the poorest around the world who are assailed by preventable hunger and diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, must be protected.

Some cuts kill. Others will destroy the small opportunities families have to lift themselves out of poverty.

We will be telling our legislators, for example, that if they really decide to take all of the proposed $36 billion in agricultural cuts from proven and successful nutritional "food stamp" programs that go mostly to families with children, while taking nothing from the rice, corn and sugar subsidies to rich agribusiness -- they should expect to hear voices like Old Testament prophets standing outside their halls.

Or when they plan to cut poor children's health care or the chance for students from poor families to go to college for the first time, but block any increased revenue from the wealthiest and keep corporate welfare checks flowing -- they should anticipate having to listen for the faith community's different priorities.

And if they cut "Meals on Wheels" feeding programs to our most vulnerable senior citizens, but keep paying for the wheels on outdated and useless weapons systems, they should expect to hear some words from the Scriptures.

How faith community leaders protected low-income entitlements in the sequestered automatic cuts agreed to in the August  2011 debt ceiling deal is an untold story in much of the media; and we will ask for those protections again.

Both Republicans and Democrats could agree to the principle of protecting the most vulnerable people -- as many budget-cutting processes have in the past -- and the Simpson-Bowles recommendations do even now. Then the parties could have their private-public sector debates and reach the compromises necessary to find fiscal integrity. But both party's church leaders and pastors will be telling them to defend the ones for whom God commands us to give special care.

Everything else may be on the table, but the fate of the poor and vulnerable should not be.

Occupy This, Today

The Trouble with Twoness and the Imperative of Oneness

This opinion piece by Winslow Myers was published on Friday, June 22, 2012 by Common Dreams.

Nature within her inmost self divides
To trouble men with having to take sides.

—Robert Frost

The single most powerful idea that needs to be seeded into world culture as rapidly as possible is that we are one interdependent whole on this planet. Difficult as the implications may be for us to grasp, it will have only a salutary effect upon world politics, economics, cultural diversity, and religious practice.

Going further, it could be asserted that the internalization in the human mind and heart of this idea is the way evolution itself will manifest itself at this unfolding moment of history.

For relief from such headache-inducing abstractions, I often walk a path that takes me along a tidal river to a midden, a cliff-high mound of oyster shells left from the summer gatherings of indigenous Americans over millennia. The midden slopes to a beach where horseshoe crabs forage along the sandy shallows—a species so resilient that it has sustained itself unchanged for 445 million years.

The process that has allowed horseshoe crabs to flourish for so long has operated instinctually, on “automatic,” in a roller coaster ride up into breathtaking diversity and down into five vertiginous moments of mass extinction, as life-forms jostled for their place in the ecosystem. Those forms that adapted survived. Those that did not disappeared, leaving only their fossil remains. Scientists tell us we are into a sixth dizzying plunge as thousands of species go extinct around us. Natural selection continues to operate at full throttle.

Meanwhile an “unnatural” factor, human consciousness, entered the scene. In what has been only an instant of evolutionary time, it became dominant—rather, it has assumed dominance over the system while in reality remaining totally subject to the system’s every law and principle. The “other” in the twoness of self and other is not only the perceived enemy or opposing viewpoint. The other is also the natural world that until now we have perceived as an infinite resource subject to our command and exploitation, rather than as the ground of our own sustained vitality. We can be no healthier than it.

If the Chinese continue to operate their coal-fired power plants, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the world, the military-economic competition between China and the United States will become at best irrelevant and at worst a potential disaster. If the United States continues to use up a third of all global resources, it will matter little whether Iran produces a nuclear weapon or not.

These ecological realities behind our conflicts rarely surface in political campaigns because we are entranced by obsolete competitive metaphors: our politics are not the civil contribution of workable ideas based in interdependency. Instead they are a Superbowl contest.

Superbowl twoness is the obsolete thought-paradigm that informs everything we do. We compete from birth to death. We compare ourselves endlessly with others. We envy those who are wealthier or better looking or apparently happier, and look down upon those less fortunate than ourselves with a distancing pity or contempt. In a thousand daily ways, we take sides. Especially in the United States our politics, our legislatures and courts, executive leaders, and mass-media discourse are dominated by polarized allegiance to conservative or progressive opinion.

The great next step of the evolutionary process is from twoness to oneness, not as a New Age bromide but as an evolutionary necessity. 

A Republican president and vice-president administer a torture program of global reach, a program that would subject them to potential criminal trial by Nuremburg standards, but they have enough support among both Republicans and Democrats—given our fear of the terrorist “other”—to receive a pass. A Democratic president supervises a drone program that violates the sovereignty of other nations and kills innocents at his personal command, also a program that could arguably subject him to potential criminal trial by Nuremburg standards. But he too enjoys enough support to receive a pass. We citizens whose collective will our leaders are sworn to enact continue in our moral ambivalence—our troubled twoness. Instead of the practical imperative of the Golden Rule, that bow toward the truth of interdependence found in all the major world religions, we live by the half-truth of “you’re either with us or against us.”

At the fateful moment in October 1962 when superpower competition, in the form of the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought the planet as close as it has been to thermonuclear annihilation, who was the enemy? Who was the “other”? Was it not war itself? Was it not ignorance itself? Why is this not equally true in every competitive confrontation from the international to the intimately personal?

We humans emerged from a uni-verse. This is the single context out of which came all our religions, all our cultural and ethnic diversity, our constantly calibrated sense of twoness. The great next step of the evolutionary process is from twoness to oneness, not as a New Age bromide but as an evolutionary necessity. This step can only take place in the way individual humans feel and think, as we, we upon whose decisions rests the fate of all life-forms on the planet, mature into willingness to look into how we can contribute to the health of the whole system.

Frost’s couplet distills the depth to which competition is structured into evolution. But we are awakening to the fundamental unity behind our twoness. As a Peace Corps volunteer once said, “The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.” Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Sunnis, Iranians, Jews, fans of Limbaugh, fans of Maddow, horseshoe crabs—we’re all in this together.

Occupy Farmers Market This Saturday!

 

Occupy Brookings invites all Brookings-area residents to shop at the Brookings Farmers Market this coming Saturday, June 30, as a kick-off to a national “Shop Small Business Week.”

The Brookings Farmers Market is open from 8 am to noon in the City Plaza parking lot, at the corner of Sixth Street and Third Avenue. It offers a variety of locally grown vegetables, strawberries, beef, lamb, poultry, honey and locally made breads and pies. Most of the produce is grown without the use of chemical additives.

America United has declared July 1-7 as “Shop Small Business Week.” Shopping at locally owned businesses and supporting local farmers supports our local economy. Local business owners, including farmers, employ local people and pay local taxes, encouraging local prosperity. By contrast, shopping at large chain stores primarily benefits corporations and executives with no stake in the local community.

Occupy Brookings will have information available at the Farmers Market about South Dakota’s Local Foods Directory, local food coops, locally-owned energy, and an important upcoming effort called “Fast for the Earth”, which will launch August 1.

The Brookings Farmers Market is open every Saturday from 8 am–noon and every Wednesday from 4-6 pm at the City Plaza parking lot. Buy local!

Occupy This, Today

"This Is Climate Change" Photo Series Showing Dramatic Effects of Global Warming

Originally posted on The Huffington Post on June 21, 2012

Climate change is one of the hottest issues of our time, and nothing helps tell the story like photos.

The Del Mar Global Trust, a private charitable foundation with a focus on environmental issues, has started a website called "This Is Climate Change" as part of an awareness-raising initiative.

Its focal point is a series of powerful then-and-now photos that documents arctic and antarctic ice melting, mountain pine beetle infestation, and glacial retreat.

Glacial retreat is one of the most directly observable effects of climate change, and the steep retreat of glaciers in Glacier National Park is an example often cited by researchers.

On the This Is Climate Change website, the trouble with the park's glaciers is quantitatively explained:

"About 150 glaciers were observed in Glacier National Park, Montana in 1850, and about the same number in 1910 when the park was established. A survey of the park in 2010 revealed only 25 glaciers."

But dramatic as it may be, glacial retreat is just one of many aspects of global climate change. Climate change can lead to increased spread of diseases, extreme weather, and can even impact the behavior of animals.

Click here to view the photos of Glacier Retreat. When you're redirected to the page with the photos, scroll down to view the slideshow, preferably full screen.

Low-Wage Nation: Poverty and Inequality Are Threatening Our Democracy

This piece by Peter Edelman was published on Tuesday, June 19, 2012 by OtherWords.

(palmspringsdude/Flickr)

With its catchy "We are the 99 Percent" slogan, the Occupy movement focused millions of Americans on our nation's chronic inequality. As that movement regains momentum, it must pay more attention to the whole 99 percent.

We certainly should worry about how the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans isn't paying its fair share of the cost of running the country. But we should be just as worried about how people at the other end are doing.

It's not just about the continuing wave of foreclosures. Millions of people are stuck in low-wage jobs that don't pay enough to make ends meet. And millions more live on incomes so low that it's hard to imagine how they survive.

Low-wage work is a pandemic. A third of our population ekes by on less than $36,000 for a family of three. That's 103 million people living on less than twice the poverty line, but most of them technically aren't poor or don't consider themselves poor. Yet they struggle every month to make ends meet and are one medical emergency or protracted illness away from bankruptcy.

Why so much low-wage work? Because over the past 40 years, well-paying industrial jobs disappeared, unions lost much of their clout, the minimum wage stagnated, and the field of competition in many areas became globalized.

The result: half of U.S. jobs now pay $34,000 or less a year. A quarter of U.S. jobs pay less than $22,000, the poverty line for a family of four. And the wages for those jobs have been stuck for four decades. Today, they pay only 7 percent more than they did in 1973.

Most families cope by having both parents work, but the rising number of single moms means that millions of households have just one possible worker. It's no wonder that 42 percent of single-mother families with children under 18 are poor.

Meanwhile, our safety net is in tatters at a time when 20.5 million people have incomes that amount to less than $9,500 a year. That's half the poverty line, which is currently pegged at $19,090 for a family of three. This number grew by almost 8 million between 2000 and 2010. Why? Cash assistance for the mothers and children who need it in many states has been scratched.

Many politicians still crow about the supposed "success" of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the threadbare national welfare program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children during the Clinton administration.

At last count, Wyoming has a total of 617 people enrolled in its TANF program. The kids it covers comprise just 4 percent of the children in the state's poor families. Twenty-five states now provide less than 20 percent of their poor children with this kind of support.

Nationwide, the percentage of kids covered by these benefits has declined to 27 percent from 68 percent before President Bill Clinton and the GOP-controlled Congress "reformed" the welfare system. As a result, we have 6 million people whose only income is from food stamps. Food stamps provide an income of a third of the poverty line — about $6,000 for a family of three. This is the most urgent problem we face.

Rep. Paul Ryan and his House Republican colleagues want to make matters worse. They're touting a budget that would slash virtually every program that helps low-income people. Their rationale: we're helping too much.

But the House Republicans evidently think we're not helping the rich enough — their budget proposes massive new tax cuts for the wealthy. Robin Hood would turn over in this grave.

Seeing that work produces a decent income and that our people are prepared for the jobs of the future is cost-effective and will benefit corporate bottom lines. But there's an even more fundamental reason to act. The concentration of power and wealth at the top and the sense of political exclusion and impossibility at the bottom threaten a new order that's antithetical to the animating ideals of our country. Poverty and inequality are threatening our democracy.

Occupy This, Today

Supreme Court Extends Power of Corporations to Buy Elections

This piece by John Nichols was published on Monday, June 25, 2012 by The Nation.

The U.S. Supreme Court may still retain some familiarity with the Constitution when it comes to deciding the nuances of cases involving immigration policy and lifetime incarceration. But when it comes to handing off control of American democracy to corporations, the court continue to reject the intents of the founders and more than a century of case law to assure that CEOs are in charge.

Make no mistake, this is not a "free speech" or "freedom of association" stance by the court's Republican majority. That majority is narrowing the range of debate. It is picking winners. To turn a phrase from the old union song, this court majority has decided which side it is on.

The same court that in January, 2010, ruled with the Citizens United decision that corporations can spend freely in federal elections -- enjoying the same avenues of expression as human beings -- on Monday ruled that states no longer have the ability to guard against what historically has been seen as political corruption and the buying of elections.

The court's 5-4 decision in the Montana case of American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock significantly expands the scope and reach of the Citizens United ruling by striking down state limits on corporate spending in state and local elections.  "The question presented in this case is whether the holding of Citizens United applies to the Montana state law,” the majority wrote. “There can be no serious doubt that it does.”

Translation: If Exxon Mobil wants to spend $10 million to support a favored candidate in a state legislative or city council race that might decide whether the corporation is regulated, or whether it gets new drilling rights, it can. But why stop at $10 million? If it costs $100 million to shout down the opposition, the court says that is fine. If if costs $1 billion, that's fine, too.

And what of the opposition. Can groups that represent the public interest push back? Can labor unions take a stand in favor of taxing corporations like Exxon Mobil?

If it costs $100 million to shout down the opposition, the court says that is fine. If if costs $1 billion, that's fine, too.

Not with the same freedom or flexibility that they had from the 1930s until this year. Last Thursday, the court erected elaborate new barriers to participation in elections by public-sector unions -- requiring that they get affirmative approval from members before making special dues assessments to fund campaigns countering corporations.

How might it work? If Wal-Mart wanted to support candidates who promised to eliminate all taxes for Wal-Mart, the corporation could spend unlimited amounts of money. It would not need to gain stockholder approval. It can just go for it.

But if AFSCME wants to counter Wal-Mart argument, saying that eliminating taxes on out-of-state retailers will save consumers very little but will ultimate undermine funding for schools and public services, the union will have to go through the laborious process of gaining permission from tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of members. And, even then, it will face additional reporting and structural barriers imposed by the court.

Campaign finance reformers had held out some hope that states might be able to apply some restrictions on corporate spending, as Montana did with its one-hundred year old law barring direct corporate contributions to political parties and candidates. That law, developed to control against the outright buying of elections by "copper kings" and "robber barons," was repeatedly upheld. Until now.

Now, says Marc Elias, one of the nation's top experts in election law,“To the extent that there was any doubt from the original Citizens United decision broadly applies to state and local laws, that doubt is now gone,” said Marc Elias, a Democratic campaign lawyer. “To whatever extent that door was open a crack, that door is now closed.”

There may still be a few legislative avenues left for countering the "money power" of the new "copper kings" and "robber barons." But they are rapidly being closed off by a partisan high court majority.

That's why U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has emerged as a leading proponent of moves to amend the U.S. Constitution to restore the rule of law in elections, says: “The U.S. Supreme Court’s absurd 5-4 ruling two years ago in Citizens United was a major blow to American democratic traditions. Sadly, despite all of the evidence that Americans see every day, the court continues to believe that its decision makes sense."

When billionaires can "spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy this election for candidates who support the super-wealthy," argues Sanders, "this is not democracy. This is plutocracy. And that is why we must overturn Citizens United if we are serious about maintaining the foundations of American democracy.

Sanders says he will step up his efforts to enact a  constitutional amendment to overturn not just the Citizens United ruling but the democratically disastrous rulings that extend from it.

“In his famous speech at Gettysburg during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln talked about America as a country ‘of the people, by the people and for the people.’ Today, as a result of the Supreme Court’s refusal to reconsider its decision in Citizens United, we are rapidly moving toward a nation of the super-rich, by the super-rich and for the super-rich," explains Sanders. "That is not what America is supposed to be about. This Supreme Court decision must be overturned.”

Did You Know...?

The Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies than Social Welfare Programs. Yep, That's Right.

In 2006 about $59 billion was spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion was spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance. If you want to look at all the details, click here.

Occupy This, Today

Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie

Here's a piece of recommended reading. The entire article by Henry A. Giroux is too long to repost here, so if after reading this brief excerpt you'd like to read further, click here. The article originally appeared on June 19, 2012, at Truthout.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous

than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

 —Martin Luther King Jr. 

The American public is suffering from an education deficit. By this I mean it exhibits a growing inability to think critically, question authority, be reflective, weigh evidence, discriminate between reasoned arguments and opinions, listen across differences and engage the mutually informing relationship between private problems and broader public issues. This growing political and cultural illiteracy is not merely a problem of the individual, one that points to simple ignorance. It is a collective and social problem that goes to the heart of the increasing attack on democratic public spheres and supportive public institutions that promote analytical capacities, thoughtful exchange and a willingness to view knowledge as a resource for informed modes of individual and social agency. One of the major consequences of the current education deficit and the pervasive culture of illiteracy that sustains it is what I call the ideology of the big lie—which propagates the myth that the free-market system is the only mechanism to ensure human freedom and safeguard democracy....

Occupy This, Today

The Most Anti-Environment Congress in History: Here's the Record

This article by Richard Schiffman was published on Wednesday, June 20, 2012 by Common Dreams. 

Global temperatures are rising, violent weather is increasing, chemicals in the air, food supply and water have led to soaring rates of allergies, asthma, certain cancers, hormone disruption, male infertility. Forest lands are vanishing at unprecedented rates, vast dead zones are spreading in the world’s oceans, we are running out of non-renewable fossil fuels. Everyone knows that we are facing an unprecedented environmental crisis-- right?

Wrong. This news seems never to have gotten to America’s Republican legislators. In the face of these huge and escalating threats, the GOP majority over the last year has voted no fewer than 247 times (nearly once a day for every day the House was in session) to weaken environmental protections that have been in place for decades and to defeat needed legislation.

This according to a report released on Monday by Representatives Henry Waxman, a member the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and Edward Markey a member of the Committee on Natural Resources. They have called the 112th Congress the most anti-environment ever. Here is how Waxman and Markey break down this dismal record.

•77 votes to undermine Clean Air Act protections, including votes to repeal the health- based standards that are the heart of the Clean Air Act and to block EPA regulation of toxic mercury and other harmful emissions from power plants, incinerators, industrial boilers, cement plants, and mining operations.

"...the GOP majority over the last year has voted no fewer than 247 times (nearly once a day for every day the House was in session) to weaken environmental protections that have been in place for decades and to defeat needed legislation."

•39 votes to weaken protection of public lands and wildlife, including votes to halt reviews of public lands for possible wilderness designations and to remove protections for salmon, wolves, sea turtles, and other species.

•37 votes to block action to address climate change, including votes to overturn EPA’s scientific findings that climate change endangers human health and welfare; to block EPA from regulating carbon pollution from power plants, oil refineries, and vehicles; to prevent the United States from participating in international climate negotiations; and even to cut funding for basic climate science.

•31 votes to undermine Clean Water Act protections, including votes to strip EPA of authority to set water quality standards and enforce limits on industrial discharges; to repeal the EPA’s authority to stop mountaintop removal mining disposal; and to block EPA from protecting headwaters and wetlands that flow into navigable waters.

And House Republicans have not been content merely to shoot down vital new environmental legislation. They have pushed through laws that tie the hands of government agencies making "the issuance of new regulations more difficult, if not impossible." Three bills were passed with unanimous Republican support that require federal regulatory agencies to:

"Use time-consuming quasi-judicial procedures to issue major rules, add more than 60 new requirements to agency rulemaking, prevent new rules from going into effect unless approved by both the House and Senate, and subject the rules to new judicial challenges, such as lawsuits contesting the agency’s cost-benefit analysis."

Why are these conservative politicians so anxious to gut environmental laws and cripple US regulators? That's easy-- just follow the money. The people who gained the most from these votes, according to Markey and Waxman, were, you guessed it, the oil and gas industry. They report that in little over a year the House has voted 109 times for policies that would advance the interests of the oil and gas industry at the expense of the environment, public health, and the taxpayer.

So nobody will be surprised to learn that Republicans were far and away the largest recipients of oil and gas industry largesse in recent elections. House Republicans received more than four times the campaign contributions as Democrats ($38 million as opposed to $9 million) from these corporations, according to data published by the Center for Responsive Politics. The coal industry too contributed over 8 million dollars last year-- their highest level on record-- 85 percent of it going to House Republicans.

What can we expect in the future as cash from Big Energy continues to pour in to corrupt our legislative process?

“These votes are just a preview of coming attractions if the fossil fuel industries get their way and place more Republicans in Congress and the White House,” Markey stated in a press release. “With that kind of cast, anti-environmental blockbusters will be the norm, sending more mercury into our kids, more air pollution into our lungs, and more carbon pollution into our atmosphere.”

Occupy This, Today

Major Oil Spills in Alberta Prompt Questions and Concerns About Keystone XL

The following article by Matt Kasper was published on Climate Progress on June 22, 2012.

 

 

The 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline proposed by TransCanada

would run from Alberta down to Houston, Texas,

and move 435,000 barrels of heavy crude oil per day.

 

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline running from Alberta’s tar sands south to Nebraska and Texas continues to stay in the public eye. Mitt Romney gave it center stage in acampaign ad released today, and the House Republicans attempted to attach it to a drilling bill that passed yesterday.

 

But this week it was reported that over the past few months, a million liters (quarter million gallons) of oil from several pipelines have spilled in Alberta. Canada’s The Star reported on Wednesday that cleanup crews are working to prevent contamination from the three major oil spills:

The latest spill occurred earlier this week in northeastern Alberta near the town of Elk Point, where Enbridge confirmed a spill of about 230,000 liters through its pumping station on the Athabasca pipeline.  The biggest incident was earlier this month near Red Deer and Sundre in central Alberta, where 475,000 liters of oil from Plains Midstream Canada leaked, some of it spilling into the Red Deer River.

This is not the first time the Canadian tar sands giant, Enbridge, has been involved with an oil spill. In July 2010 one of its pipelines ruptured in Marshall, Michigan and spilled an estimated 819,000 gallons.

 

Even proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline see these incidences as worrisome, and confidence in the tar sands extraction and transportation throughout Canada has clearly been shaken.  For example, Doug Bloom of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association and president of Spectra Energy said:

Any spill right now is going to be bad timing. There’s such a focus now with Gateway and with Keystone XL and other projects going through regulatory review. Any time there’s any kind of an incident no matter how large or how small, it’s going to be prominent.

The 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline proposed by TransCanada would run from Alberta down to Houston, Texas and move 435,000 barrels of heavy crude oil per day.  Environmentalists and residents near the proposed pipeline fear that that it could leak in critical areas such as Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer.

TransCanada’s own analysis shows that the Keystone XL pipeline would have 11 “significant spills”over its 50-year lifecycle, while an independent study estimated that there could be as many as 91 spills. The first leg of the Keystone  pipeline even suffered 12 spills in 2010 – a record for a pipeline’s first year in operation.

Although not always reported in the media, oil spills from pipelines, wells, and infrastructure happen so frequently that at this point they are just part of doing business for oil companies.  For example, a report from USA Today found an average of 22 large spills offshore every year between 2005 and 2009.

And yet, the spill has not deterred proponents of the pipeline.  In fact, Canadian Premier Alison Redford has called for an investigation into the spills, while still trying to get Keystone XL built over the Canadian-American border.

God, Money, and Planet Earth

This article by Robert C. Koehler was first published on Thursday, June 21, 2012 by Common Dreams. 

Earth hovers on the brink of ecological catastrophe — actually, 20 years closer to the brink than it was at the first global climate summit, in 1992.

“Deserts continue to expand. The loss of plant and animal species has accelerated . . . . And greenhouse gases have continued to build up in the atmosphere,” the Los Angeles Times explains. No matter that, 20 years ago, most nations of the world “signed off on a long list of goals and agreements” designed to ensure a different future. Nothing came of it.

And my sense is that no one expects the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, a.k.a.  Rio+20, which begins this week, with representatives from 190 countries attending, to make any difference in our disastrous drift ever more deeply into unsustainability...because nothing can make a difference. We’re stuck, apparently, in a system that won’t be constrained by international goals and agreements, which are already compromises to that system. No matter that this is a life-devouring system that serves the interests of the very few — and at best serves them temporarily. No matter that more and more people see the insanity of this system. There seems to be no escape from it.

That is to say, there’s no escape from the demands and requirements of money, the pursuit of which tramples whatever we might hold sacred, such as the future.

“These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed,” George Monbiot wrote recently in The Guardian/UK. “Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires. The past 20 years have been a billionaires’ banquet.”

"What if we backed our money with something we actually valued, such as a healthy ecosystem, equitable distribution of wealth and a restored human commons?" 

I add my voice to this frustration in order to raise a single question: What if the problem is deeper than greed, or the evil rich? Seldom does the analysis get beyond the concept of greed, whether corporate or individual. Instead, an obvious solution is advanced: Get the greedy ones out of power. And there the analysis tends to stop, because the path to doing so quickly gets incredibly vague.

Whatever the divide between the 1 percent, or the .0001 percent, and the rest of us, there’s enough general prosperity in the system to implicate almost everyone in the habitual consumption of corporate products, tying our self-interest to systematic environmental destruction. Half the population is in denial that this is happening and the other half feels mostly powerless despair. And even when we think we’ve won the election, the victors turn out to be beholden to the same hidden interests. The system continues unabated.

What generally remains unquestioned is the nature of money itself.

In his book Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein point out that our notion of spirit “is that of something separate and nonworldly, that yet can miraculously intervene in material affairs, and that even animates and directs them in some mysterious way."

“It is hugely ironic and hugely significant,” he continues, “that the one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money. It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an ‘invisible hand’ that, it is said, makes the world go ’round.”

Or, if it so chooses, money can decide to make the world uninhabitable. It works in mysterious ways....

Eisenstein’s book is one of the few analyses I know of that attempts to explain money in terms larger than its own. I recommend it highly, and offer a brief synthesis of his analysis in an attempt to put Rio+20 into a context larger than “why bother?”

The destructive nature of our current monetary system, according to Eisenstein, is due to that which backs it, rendering helpless everyone who deals with money, because what backs it becomes what we are, in essence, forced to worship. If gold backs money, people worship gold. But some time ago, our monetary system evolved beyond the backing of material substances. Money, now an electronic notation on a computer screen, is backed by none other than growth itself — by the creation of more money.

“Created as interest-bearing debt, (money’s) sustained value depends on the endless expansion of the realm of goods and services,” Eisenstein writes. “Whatever backs money becomes sacred: accordingly, growth has occupied a sacred status for many centuries.”

And this is the problem. It’s not the greed of the powerful, however ferocious and consuming that might be, but the nature of money itself, our tacit and unconscious agreement on value, that has turned the system into a mechanism of unlimited growth. Thus David Korten, writing in YES! Magazine, describes the essential Rio+20 debate as “a foundational choice between two divergent paths to the human future”: the Money Path or the Life Path.

This may be an impossible choice. But what if this were not the choice we needed to make?

Eisenstein writes: “Today, for the first time, we have the opportunity to infuse some consciousness into our choice of money. It is time to ask ourselves what collective story we wish to enact upon this earth, and to choose a money system aligned with that story.”

That is to say, what if we backed our money with something we actually valued, such as a healthy ecosystem, equitable distribution of wealth and a restored human commons?

This may be the beginning of the conversation that will save the world.

Occupy This, Today

Occupy Will Be Back

This article by Chris Hedges was published at NationofChange.


In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protest—and there will be one—will be labeled as “unexpected,” a “shock” and a “surprise.” The television pundits and talking heads, the columnists and academics who declare the movement dead are as out of touch with reality now as they were on Sept. 17 when New York City’s Zuccotti Park was occupied. Nothing this movement does will ever be seen by them as a success. Nothing it does will ever be good enough. Nothing, short of its dissolution and the funneling of its energy back into the political system, will be considered beneficial.

Those who have the largest megaphones in our corporate state serve the very systems of power we are seeking to topple. They encourage us, whether on Fox or MSNBC, to debate inanities, trivia, gossip or the personal narratives of candidates. They seek to channel legitimate outrage and direct it into the black hole of corporate politics. They spin these silly, useless stories from the “left” or the “right” while ignoring the egregious assault by corporate power on the citizenry, an assault enabled by the Democrats and the Republicans. Don’t waste time watching or listening. They exist to confuse and demoralize you.

The engine of all protest movements rests, finally, not in the hands of the protesters but the ruling class. If the ruling class responds rationally to the grievances and injustices that drive people into the streets, as it did during the New Deal, if it institutes jobs programs for the poor and the young, a prolongation of unemployment benefits (which hundreds of thousands of Americans have just lost), improved Medicare for all, infrastructure projects, a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions, and a forgiveness of student debt, then a mass movement can be diluted. Under a rational ruling class, one that responds to the demands of the citizenry, the energy in the street can be channeled back into the mainstream. But once the system calcifies as a servant of the interests of the corporate elites, as has happened in the United States, formal political power thwarts justice rather than advances it.

Our dying corporate class, corrupt, engorged on obscene profits and indifferent to human suffering, is the guarantee that the mass movement will expand and flourish. No one knows when. No one knows how. The future movement may not resemble Occupy. It may not even bear the name Occupy. But it will come. I have seen this before. And we should use this time to prepare, to educate ourselves about the best ways to fight back, to learn from our mistakes, as many Occupiers are doing in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and other cities. There are dark and turbulent days ahead. There are powerful and frightening forces of hate, backed by corporate money, that will seek to hijack public rage and frustration to create a culture of fear. It is not certain we will win. But it is certain this is not over.

“We had a very powerful first six months,” Kevin Zeese, one of the original organizers of the Occupy encampment in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., said when I reached him by phone. “We impacted the debate. We impacted policy. We showed people they are not alone. We exposed the unfair economy and our dysfunctional government. We showed people they could have an impact. We showed people they could have power. We let the genie out of the bottle. No one will put it back in.”

The physical eradication of the encampments and efforts by the corporate state to disrupt the movement through surveillance, entrapment, intimidation and infiltration have knocked many off balance. That was the intent. But there continue to be important pockets of resistance. These enclaves will provide fertile ground and direction once mass protests return. It is imperative that, no matter how dispirited we may become, we resist being lured into the dead game of electoral politics.

“The recent election in Wisconsin shows why Occupy should stay out of the elections,” Zeese said. “Many of the people who organized the Wisconsin occupation of the Capitol building became involved in the recall. First, they spent a lot of time and money collecting more than 1 million signatures. Second, they got involved in the primary where the Democrats picked someone who was not very supportive of union rights and who lost to [Gov. Scott] Walker just a couple of years ago. Third, the general election effort was corrupted by billionaire dollars. They lost. Occupy got involved in politics. What did they get? What would they have gotten if they won? They would have gotten a weak, corporate Democrat who in a couple of years would be hated. That would have undermined their credibility and demobilized their movement. Now, they have to restart their resistance movement.

“Would it not have been better if those who organized the occupation of the Capitol continued to organize an independent, mass resistance movement?” Zeese asked. “They already had strong organization in Madison, and in Dane County as well as nearby counties. They could have developed a Montreal-like movement of mass protest that stopped the function of government and built people power. Every time Walker pushed something extreme they could have been out in the streets and in the Legislature disrupting it. They could have organized general and targeted strikes. They would have built their strength. And by the time Walker faced re-election he would have been easily defeated.

“Elections are something that Occupy needs to continue to avoid,” Zeese said. “The Obama-Romney debate is not a discussion of the concerns of the American people. Obama sometimes uses Occupy language, but he puts forth virtually no job creation, nothing to end the wealth divide and no real tax reform. On tax reform, the Buffett rule—that the secretary should pay the same tax rate as the boss—is totally insufficient. We should be debating whether to go back to the Eisenhower tax rates of 91 percent, the Nixon tax rate of 70 percent or the Reagan tax rate of 50 percent for the top income earners—not whether secretaries and CEOs should be taxed at the same rate!”

The Occupy movement is not finally about occupying. It is, as Zeese points out, about shifting power from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. It is a tactic. And tactics evolve and change. The freedom rides, the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, the marches in Birmingham and the Montgomery bus boycott were tactics used in the civil rights movement. And just as the civil rights movement often borrowed tactics used by the old Communist Party, which long fought segregation in the South, the Occupy movement, as Zeese points out, draws on earlier protests against global trade agreements and the worldwide protests over the invasion of Iraq. Each was, like the Occupy movement, a global response. And this is a global movement.

We live in a period of history the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul calls an interregnum, a period when we are enveloped in what he calls “a vacuum of economic thought,” a period when the reigning ideology, although it no longer corresponds to reality, has yet to be replaced with ideas that respond to the crisis engendered by the collapse of globalization. And the formulation of ideas, which are always at first the purview of a small, marginalized minority, is one of the fundamental tasks of the movement. It is as important to think about how we will live and to begin to reconfigure our lives as it is to resist.

Occupy has organized some significant actions, including the May Day protests, the NATO protest in Chicago, an Occupy G8 summit and G-8 protests in Thurmont and Frederick, Md. There are a number of ongoing actions—Occupy Our Homes, Occupy Faith, Occupy the Criminal Justice System, Occupy University, the Occupy Caravan—that protect the embers of revolt. Last week when Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, testified before a U.S. Senate committee, he was confronted by Occupy protesters, including Deborah Harris, who lost her home in a JPMorgan foreclosure. But you will hear little if anything about these actions on cable television or in The Washington Post. Such acts of resistance get covered almost entirely in the alternative media, such as The Occupied Wall Street Journal and the Occupy Page of The Real News.

“Our job is to build pockets of resistance so that when the flash point arrives, people will have a place to go,” Zeese said. “Our job is to stand for transformation, shifting power from concentrated wealth to the people. As long as we keep annunciating and fighting for this, whether we are talking about health care, finance, empire, housing, we will succeed.

“We will only accomplish this by becoming a mass movement,” he said. “It will not work if we become a fringe movement. Mass movements have to be diverse. If you build a movement around one ethnic group, or one class group, it is easier for the power structure and the police to figure out what we will do next. With diversity you get creativity of tactics. And creativity of tactics is critical to our success. With diversity you bring to the movement different histories, different ideas, different identities, different experiences and different forms of nonviolent tactics.

“The object is to shift people from the power structure to our side, whether it is media, business, youth, labor or police,” he went on. “We must break the enforcement structure. In the book ‘Why Civil Resistance Works,’ a review of resistance efforts over the last 100 years, breaking the enforcement structure, which almost always comes through nonviolent civil disobedience, increases your chances of success by 60 percent. We need to divide the police. This is critical. And only a mass movement that is nonviolent and diverse, that draws on all segments of society, has any hope of achieving this. If we can build that, we can win.”

Occupy This, Today

Occupy This, Today

We've Been Brainwashed

This article by Joseph E. Stiglitz was published on Salon.com on June 14, 2012. It was adapted from the new book The Price of Inequality.

 

How, in a democracy supposedly based on one person one vote, could the 1 percent have been so victorious in shaping policies in its interests? It is part of a process of disempowerment, disillusionment, and disenfranchisement that produces low voter turnout, a system in which electoral success requires heavy investments, and in which those with money have made political investments that have reaped large rewards — often greater than the returns they have reaped on their other investments.

There is another way for moneyed interests to get what they want out of government: convince the 99 percent that they have shared interests. This strategy requires an impressive sleight of hand; in many respects the interests of the 1 percent and the 99 percent differ markedly.

The fact that the 1 percent has so successfully shaped public perception testifies to the malleability of beliefs. When others engage in it, we call it “brainwashing” and “propaganda.” We look askance at these attempts to shape public views, because they are often seen as unbalanced and manipulative, without realizing that there is something akin going on in democracies, too. What is different today is that we have far greater understanding of how to shape perceptions and beliefs — thanks to the advances in research in the social sciences.

It is clear that many, if not most, Americans possess a limited understanding of the nature of the inequality in our society: They believe that there is less inequality than there is, they underestimate its adverse economic effects, they underestimate the ability of government to do anything about it, and they overestimate the costs of taking action. They even fail to understand what the government is doing — many who value highly government programs like Medicare don’t realize that they are in the public sector.

In a recent study respondents on average thought that the top fifth of the population had just short of 60 percent of the wealth, when in truth that group holds approximately 85 percent of the wealth. (Interestingly, respondents described an ideal wealth distribution as one in which the top 20 percent hold just over 30 percent of the wealth. Americans recognize that some inequality is inevitable, and perhaps even desirable if one is to provide incentives; but the level of inequality in American society is well beyond that level.)

Not only do Americans misperceive the level of inequality; they underestimate the changes that have been going on. Only 42 percent of Americans believe that inequality has increased in the past ten years, when in fact the increase has been tectonic. Misperceptions are evident, too, in views about social mobility. Several studies have confirmed that perceptions of social mobility are overly optimistic.

Americans are not alone in their misperceptions of the degree of inequality. Looking across countries, it appears that there is an inverse correlation between trends in inequality and perceptions of inequality and fairness. One suggested explanation is that when inequality is as large as it is in the United States, it becomes less noticeable—perhaps because people with different incomes and wealth don’t even mix.

These mistaken beliefs, whatever their origins, are having an important effect on politics and economic policy.

Perceptions have always shaped reality, and understanding how beliefs evolve has been a central focus of intellectual history. Much as those in power might like to shape beliefs, and much as they do shape beliefs, they do not have full control: ideas have a life of their own, and changes in the world—in our economy and technology—impact ideas (just as ideas have an enormous effect in shaping our economy). What is different today is that the 1 percent now has more knowledge about how to shape preferences and beliefs in ways that enable the wealthy to better advance their cause, and more tools and more resources to do so.

Beliefs and perceptions, whether they are grounded in reality or not, affect behavior. If people see the “Marlboro man” as the type of person they aspire to be, they may choose that cigarette over others. If individuals overestimate some risk, they may take excessive precautions.

But important as perceptions and beliefs are in shaping individual behavior, they are even more important in shaping collective behavior, including political decisions affecting economics. Economists have long recognized the influence of ideas in shaping policies. As Keynes famously put it,

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Social sciences like economics differ from the hard sciences in that beliefs affect reality: beliefs about how atoms behave don’t affect how atoms actually behave, but beliefs about how the economic system functions affect how it actually functions. George Soros, the great financier, has referred to this phenomenon as reflexivity, and his understanding of it may have contributed to his success. Keynes, who was famous not just as a great economist but also as a great investor, described markets as a beauty contest where the winner is the one who assessed correctly what the other judges would judge to be the most beautiful.

Markets can sometimes create their own reality. If there is widespread belief that markets are efficient and that government regulations only interfere with efficiency, then it is more likely that government will strip away regulations, and this will affect how markets actually behave. In the most recent crisis what followed from deregulation was far from efficient, but even here a battle of interpretation rages. Members of the Right tried to blame the seeming market failures on government; in their mind the government effort to push people with low incomes into homeownership was the source of the problem. Widespread as this belief has become in conservative circles, virtually all serious attempts to evaluate the evidence have concluded that there is little merit in this view. But the little merit that it had was enough to convince those who believed that markets could do no evil and governments could do no good that their views were valid, another example of “confirmatory bias.”

If individuals believe that they are being treated unfairly by their employer, they are more likely to shirk on the job. If individuals from some minority are paid lower wages than other equally qualified individuals, they will and should feel that they are being treated unfairly—but the lower productivity that results can, and likely will, lead employers to pay lower wages. There can be a “discriminatory equilibrium.”

Even perceptions of race, caste, and gender identities can have significant effects on productivity. In a brilliant set of experiments in India, low- and high-caste children were asked to solve puzzles, with monetary rewards for success. When they were asked to do so anonymously, there was no caste difference in performance. But when the low caste and high caste were in a mixed group where the low-caste individuals were known to be low caste (they knew it, and they knew that others knew it), low-caste performance was much lower than that of the high caste. The experiment highlighted the importance of social perceptions: low-caste individuals somehow absorbed into their own reality the belief that lower-caste individuals were inferior—but only so in the presence of those who held that belief.

Fairness, like beauty, is at least partly in the eyes of the beholder, and those at the top want to be sure that the inequality in the United States today is framed in ways that make it seem fair, or at least acceptable. If it is perceived to be unfair, not only may that hurt productivity in the workplace but it might lead to legislation that would attempt to temper it.

In the battle over public policy, whatever the realpolitik of special interests, public discourse focuses on efficiency and fairness. In my years in government, I never heard an industry supplicant looking for a subsidy ask for it simply because it would enrich his coffers. Instead, the supplicants expressed their requests in the language of fairness—and the benefits that would be conferred on others (more jobs, high tax payments).

The same goes for the policies that have shaped the growing inequality in the United States—both those that have contributed to the inequality in market incomes and those that have weakened the role of government in bringing down the level of inequality. The battle about “framing” first centers on how we see the level of inequality—how large is it, what are its causes, how can it be justified?
Corporate CEOs, especially those in the financial sector, have thus tried to persuade others (and themselves) that high pay can be justified as a result of an individual’s larger contribution to society, and that it is necessary to motivate him to continue making those contributions. That is why it is called incentive pay. But the crisis showed to everyone what economic research had long revealed—the argument was a sham. What was called incentive pay was anything but that: pay was high when performance was high, but pay was still high when performance was low. Only the name changed. When performance was low, the name changed to “retention pay.”

If the problems of those at the bottom are mainly of their own making and if those collecting welfare checks were really living high on the rest of society (as the “welfare deadbeats” and “welfare queen” campaign in the 1980s and 1990s suggested), then there is little compunction in not providing assistance to them. If those at the top receive high incomes because they have contributed so much to our society—in fact, their pay is but a fraction of their social contribution—then their pay seems justified, especially if their contributions were the result of hard work rather than just luck. Other ideas (the importance of incentives and incentive pay) suggest that there would be a high price to reducing inequality. Still others (trickle-down economics) suggest that high inequality is not really that bad, since all are better off than they would be in a world without such a high level of inequality.

On the other side of this battle are countering beliefs: fundamental beliefs in the value of equality, and analyses such as those presented in earlier chapters that find that the high level of inequality in the United States today increases instability, reduces productivity, and undermines democracy, and that much of it arises in ways that are unrelated to social contributions, that it comes, rather, from the ability to exercise market power—the ability to exploit consumers through monopoly power or to exploit poor and uneducated borrowers through practices that, if not illegal, ought to be.

The intellectual battle is often fought over particular policies, such as whether taxes should be raised on capital gains. But behind these disputes lies this bigger battle over perceptions and over big ideas—like the role of the market, the state, and civil society. This is not just a philosophical debate but a battle over shaping perceptions about the competencies of these different institutions. Those who don’t want the state to stop the rent seeking from which they benefit so much, and don’t want it to engage in redistribution or to increase economic opportunity and mobility, emphasize the state’s failings. (Remarkably, this is true even when they are in office and could and should do something to correct any problem of which they are aware.) They emphasize that the state interferes with the workings of the markets. At the same time that they exaggerate the failures of government, they exaggerate the strengths of markets. Most importantly for our purposes, they strive to make sure that these perceptions become part of the common perspective, that money spent by private individuals (presumably, even on gambling) is better spent than money entrusted to the government, and that any government attempts to correct market failures—such as the proclivity of firms to pollute excessively—cause more harm than good.

This big battle is crucial for understanding the evolution of inequality in America. The success of the Right in this battle during the past thirty years has shaped our government. We haven’t achieved the minimalist state that libertarians advocate. What we’ve achieved is a state too constrained to provide the public goods—investments in infrastructure, technology, and education—that would make for a vibrant economy and too weak to engage in the redistribution that is needed to create a fair society. But we have a state that is still large enough and distorted enough that it can provide a bounty of gifts to the wealthy. The advocates of a small state in the financial sector were happy that the government had the money to rescue them in 2008—and bailouts have in fact been part of capitalism for centuries.

These political battles, in turn, rest on broader ideas about human rights, human nature, and the meaning of democracy and equality. Debates and perspectives on these issues have taken a different course in the United States in recent years than in much of the rest of the world, especially in other advanced industrial countries. Two controversies—the death penalty (which is anathema in Europe) and the right to access to medicine (which in most countries is taken as a basic human right)—are emblematic of these differences. It may be difficult to ascertain the role the greater economic and social divides in our society has played in creating these differences in beliefs; but what is clear is that if American values and perceptions are seen to be out of line with those in the rest of the world, our global influence will be diminished.

Is Democracy for Sale?

The following piece is by the Rev. Dr. David Hansen, former pastor of the Brookings United Church of Christ, now the organizer of Interfaith Worker Justice-Kansas, based in Wichita. He presented these remarks on a recent panel discussing the question "Is Democracy for Sale?" Each panelist was asked to comment on the U. S. Supreme Court's "Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission" decision and its implications for the future of democracy.

As you may know, the Citizens United case evolved from an action by the FEC banning a political ad targeting Hillary Clinton, then running for office. The FEC ruling was based on a law forbidding the airing of political ads a certain number of days before an election. The Citizens United group claimed the FEC ruling violated their freedom of speech. The Court found in favor of Citizens United and, going beyond the limits of the case, it also ruled that money is political speech. Moreover, the majority of the Court concluded that the identify of the donor(s) does not matter. Nobody needs to know who is giving the money. The source is unimportant. The donor can remain anonymous. President Barack Obama famously criticized this ruling in his State of the Union, and Justice Samuel Alito, with equal renown and in an unprecedented act, interrupted the President to register his dissent.

 

I believe that many, perhaps even all, of our most perplexing and vexing problems begin in the realm of the spirit. When our spiritual center gets off-center and our core values become confused, problems are sure to follow. Because I believe that this is the case, I also believe that we cannot solve many of our problems without examining the underlying spiritual issues and finding ways to get our center re-centered and our values restored.

The idea that money is political speech is not a self-evident truth. It is based on certain assumptions and embodies certain values. If we are going to challenge this decision we need to know how it is justified and why this justification is wrong. Then we can propose an alternative. So I want to do three things this evening: 1) examine the justification for the idea that money is political speech, 2) show why I believe this idea is wrong, and 3) propose an alternative.

Let's begin at the beginning. The Bible is my tradition, so I speak from this tradition. I recognize that other faith traditions have their own sacred texts and I mean no disrespect. This is my tradition. The Bible describes the Promised Land as a land flowing with milk and honey. The prophet Micah foretells of a day when nations will study war no more and each one of us will sit beneath our own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. We want to do more than merely survive. We want to live well. This is true for everyone, and it has always been so.

From the days of Abraham and Sarah, Western tradition has taught us that a good society, a society in which people can live a good life, rests on a moral foundation. The most basic moral code involves self-regard and other-regard. "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or as my mother taught me, "Let kindness be your guide." For thousands of years people believed that a good society rests on this moral foundation.

Then in the middle of the 1600s everything suddenly changed. The old world was turned upside down and inside out as a result of the English Civil War. The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who is recognized as the founder of Modern Political Theory, lived through this war. When the war ended, he concluded that life in a state of nature is "mean, brutish, nasty and short." He said that people are motivated by what he called their Appetites (desires) and their Aversions (fears). He went on to say that our greatest fear is to die a violent, degrading, meaningless and humiliating death. What we want, what we desire, he said, is to be able to satisfy all our appetites.

Hobbes gave us a new vision of society. His was a society ruled by competition rather than cooperation. And he separated ethics and economics, or perhaps it would be better to say he reduced ethics to self-interest. In his world, what is ethical is what satisfies my desires. My self-interest is defined by my appetites and my goal is to do what it takes to satisfy them. What is good and right for me is now defined by what I want. Life is an endless competition between people trying to satisfy their appetites.

The idea of a society governed by the self-interest of individuals eventually leads to the development of a market economy and to the idea of progress. The idea of economic progress did not exist in any meaningful way before the rise of the market economy. One economist famously called this churning of society, this push for progress, this life of endless competition, the process of "Creative Destruction." Out with the old and in with the new. Some call it progress and others call it planned obsolescence. In truth it is both.

Now fast forward to 1987 and Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street. As we all remember, the main character in that movie famously declares "Greed is good!" The reason that greed is good is because it allows me to satisfy my appetite. It is a totally Hobbesean world. This is not the goodness of creation. This is the goodness of endless consumption.

We do not have to leave the set of the movie to conclude that money is the measure of success. Successful people are those who have the most money. They have earned it. They are able to satisfy their hungers. Making money validates the system and confirms the worth of those who have it. In the world of Thomas Hobbes, successful people satisfy their appetites; unsuccessful people are left to cope with their fears.

Now we come to the Citizens United decision and to the personification of money. Money is the measure of value. Those who have it, have value. Those who have it are literally worth more. People who do not have money are literally worth-less. It is not only that money measures the value of other things; money is now the embodiment of value. Money is good. Money is political speech.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a 90-page dissent in the Citizens United case. His dissent had two parts, as I understand it. In part one, he said that the First Amendment does not guarantee the right of political free speech. He said that it prevents the suppression of political speech based on the identity of the speaker. That is a very different interpretation. The majority of the Court said, without explanation, that the identity of the speaker does not matter. It is unimportant. This interpretation is the personification of money and the subordination or suppression of the person--the human being. Justice Stephens argued that if there is no way to identify the speaker, then there can be no accountability. Nobody is responsible. All we are left with is a society governed by the appetites of those anonymous people who have money and can speak. Even Hobbes knew that this is a receipt for a culture of despair. Such a society cannot survive; at least not democratically.

What, then, shall we do? I think we need to change the story. I think we need to reconnect ethics and economics. We need to leave the world of Thomas Hobbes and return to the world of Micah, who calls us to seek justice, love mercy and walk with kindness. Let me elaborate briefly.

Justice is found in the law. The law serves three functions: to teach us what is right, to restrain us when we are temped to do wrong, and to punish those who violate the social norms. To seek justice means that in the eyes of the law everyone is the same. Equality is the first principle of justice. Due process is the second principle. Everyone is equal and everyone is entitled to the same treatment; the same standard applies to all. Some people are not favored over others. Without equality and due process, there can be no justice.

Mercy, in this context, means that the goal of justice is the restoration of the community. The aim of justice is the healing of the community; restoring the community to health. Restorative justice is another name for mercy.

Kindness in this context means lifting up the bottom line. The measure of a successful economy is not the wealth of a few but the health of the whole. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbor as yourself. Let kindness be your guide.

We need a new creation. Not the world of Thomas Hobbes but the world of Micah. We need a society that values justice, mercy and kindness. We need an economy that is in the service of life.  

Occupy This, Today

Teachers Taking Petitions to Pierre

The following news from Cory Heidelberger on The Madville Times, June 19, 2012.


Update 11:31 CDT: SDEA says they just handed Secretary Gant 30,000 signatures!

Members of the South Dakota Education Association are delivering their HB 1234 referendum petitions to Pierre today with great Twitter fanfare. SDEA clearly feels good about their signature count.

Occupy This, Today

Report from OB Assembly, 6/16/2012

This report from the Occupy Brookings Assembly of June 16, 2012, was submitted by Richard Seese and edited slightly for a web audience.

1. Discussed frustrations concerning apathy exhibited by area residents on doing anything to improve their lives or the lives of others. It was decided that "education" on the issues and outreach/co-operation with other organizations sharing our aims and goals would be a good action. Also promoting worldwide visibility, and focus on issues via the media would help educate people. It was also suggested that a reconciliation council be formed to reconcile differences between people and promote unity.

2. Carl Kline asks people to join the Fast for the Earth supporting the indigenous Native Americans' (US and Canada) protest of Tar Sands Oil Extraction and the XL Pipeline, August 1-8. You can learn more and sign up for the Fast here. Also see the Facebook page. People from other nations are joining the fast and are meditating on world change concerning many issues (not just the Tar Sands) at that time. You are invited to become part of the worldwide fast/protest.

3. July 1-8 is "Support small/local business week". While it is agreed we should do something, it is felt that another "cash mob" would not be as effective as other actions. New ideas and a day that people agree to for the action will be voiced/discussed via input in e-mailings to the group. We have less than 2 weeks to formulate an action and implement it. Immediate input is desired.

4. Reminder that the cash mob action at the Farmers Market will be Saturday June 30, 2012, from 8:00 a.m. until noon. We need volunteers to make posters and handouts for the event. We urge as many OB Members as possible to attend and wear your "Occupy Brookings" buttons, identify ourselves as being from OB and as being the 99%. Need outgoing people to engage others in conversation, make them aware of our organization and invite them to meetings.

5. Discussed Racism as a growing concern, it appears that many people, even progressive ones, have some degree of racism (or underlying prejudice about differing religions, lifestyles, political affiliations, on down to what type of car you drive or where you went to school). We all need to work on abolishing these culturally deep rooted feelings of prejudice/racism from our lives and accept others as they are.

6. It was brought up that our first meetings had around 30 people and that attendance has been slowly dwindling ever since the second meeting. We need some actions to make people aware of our presence and get more people involved in our efforts to help make a better world for all. People prefer to belong to an organization that doesn't just discuss what is wrong but shows action by doing something about it. The weather is nice. Let's hit the streets and do something to make people aware we exist. Ideas as to what that can be are welcome.