Jubilee Justice Network

2012-01-14T21:07:00.001-05:00

Hold Fast To The Dream

A Presentation for Two Readers and Choir

of the Life and Words, of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Stan G. Duncan

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the help and advice of Joe Bradley, Tinker Monroe, Laura Delaplain, Erma LaPierre, René LaPierre, and Beverly Latif Duncan for their work in either presenting or critiquing earlier drafts of this manuscript, and the adult choirs of the Congregational Church of South Hadley Falls and the United Church of Christ in Abington, Massachusetts for their roles in its first performances.

Introductory Notes

“Hold Fast to the Dream” was first written for a Sunday morning service of worship, perhaps taking the place of the Sermon. Later it was expanded to make it adaptable for a longer presentation of the type that might be used as an afternoon or evening event in which the music and readings comprised the entire program. For example, the Sunday of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is often the same Sunday as Martin Luther King Sunday, and would be a good occasion for a presentation such as this. The expanded portions are set off by double lines. When doing the short form, simply skip those sections. In the expanded form, add them.

A word on music. Many of the hymns suggested in “Hold Fast to the Dream” can be found in various hymnals and other collections. Most are in public domain and will be free. One fine collection that contains all of the music here is Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through its Songs, by Guy and Candie Carawan (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Corporation, 1990). However, before using music from this or any other collection in a public presentation of “Hold Fast to the Dream,” you should first contact the publishers for permission. Normally there will be little difficulty gaining permission to use their work. But, if for some reason you are unable to attain the music or apply for permission, the song, “We Shall Over Come” can be nicely substituted throughout with little loss to the overall program. In this text, both “We Shall Over Come” and a second option (which can be found in Sing For Freedom and other collections) are always given whenever a piece of music is suggested.

Note that preceding each of the readings, there is a heading which usually contains a title, date, and place of its delivery. For most of the readings, these headings are for the benefit of the readers only. The context usually introduces the reading adequately. One exception is the excerpt from the proclamation for Martin Luther King day at the end. This is not introduced in the text and will be confusing without the title given. However, the titles can also be useful if a particular reading is taken out of this presentation and used separately in another occasion as a smaller individual reading.

It should also be noted that the proclamation at the very end has troubled some people who have participated in this presentation. The president who said these words was Ronald Reagan, who frequently opposed King's work philosophically and also opposed the founding of “Martin Luther King Day,” for which these words were written. Some, therefore, have felt it hypocritical to use his words to honor Rev. King. To be sensitive to that criticism, here are three options. First, in this version we have introduced the proclamation by saying (truthfully) that these words were written, not by the president, but for him to read (by speech writer Peggy Noonan), and the name of the president is not mentioned. A second option is to simply end with the last words of King to Abernathy as he lay dying. The dramatic conclusion is a good ending by itself. Finally, if anyone in your troupe is creative, feel free to write a conclusion of your own with our blessing.

Early Years

NARRATOR:

On one very cold and very cloudy Saturday morning, January 15, 1929, just three months after the beginning of the worst economic depression in the history of the United States, Alberta Williams King and her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., gave birth to their first child.

They named him Martin, after his father, and he would grow up to make it one of the most famous names in all of American history. Little Martin Luther King Jr. would, in his lifetime, change the way people understood democracy, religion, race relations, and human relations, throughout the entire world.

Young Martin grew up in a relatively middle class home but in a very segregated Atlanta, Georgia. Though he never wanted for food or clothing, he knew that whenever he walked out of his door into white America, he would always be considered “colored,” and therefore always second class.

He could not buy a Coke or a hamburger at any of the downtown stores. He could not sit at a lunch counter. He could not drink water at the “whites only” water fountains, he could not use the “whites only” restrooms, and he could not ride on the “whites only” elevators. If he went to a theater he would have to enter from the “colored” entrance. If he rode a bus he would have to sit in the back, in the “colored” seats, and if he wanted to go swimming, golfing, or play tennis, he simply couldn’t because all of the pools, courses, or courts had “whites only” signs in front of them.

Here are some of his own reflections on what it was like to grow up in a segregated world.

KING: (“Growing Up Negro”)

[Growing up] a Negro in America is not a comfortable existence. It means being a part of the company of the bruised, the battered, the scarred, and the defeated. Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your own children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan. Being a Negro in America means listening to suburban politicians talk eloquently against open housing while arguing in the same breath that they are not racists. It means being harried by day and haunted by night by a nagging sense of nobodiness and constantly fighting to be saved from the poison of bitterness. It means the ache and anguish of living in so many situations where hopes unborn have died.^¹

CHOIR: “We Shall Overcome,” verse 1

We shall overcome,

we shall overcome,

we shall overcome some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall overcome some day.

NARRATOR: [Music over, melody only, of “We Shall Overcome”]

When he graduated from high school, he went on to Morehouse College in Atlanta, then Crozier Seminary in Pennsylvania. There he made straight “A”s and received a scholarship to go on to graduate school. He chose Boston University School of Theology, where he again made straight “A”s and received a Ph.D. in Theology.

In later years it was discovered that King copied several quotations from another dissertation into his own without citing them correctly. The act was unfortunate because it has allowed critics to unfairly smear his intelligence in spite of his obvious brilliance.

In Boston he met a young woman named Coretta Christine Scott, who was a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music. At first he was unsure about her because he’d heard that she wasn’t too religious; and she was unsure about him because she had heard that he was too short. But after they got to know one another, he grew to believe that her faith was not showy but deeper on the inside than anyone’s he ever knew. As for her concerns, he never grew any taller on the outside, but on the inside he became a giant.

And on June 18, 1953 they were married.

MONTGOMERY

NARRATOR:

Six months later, in January of 1954, King was invited to come to Montgomery, Alabama, to interview for pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, what would become his first full-time pastorate. And on April 14, he accepted the call to the church.

May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

November 17, after Martin and Coretta had arrived and begun to get settled in with their church and new home, their first child, Yolanda, was born.

And on December 1, as he was making plans for a series of sermons on the coming of the Christ Child at Christmas, a black seamstress in Montgomery, named Rosa Parks, after a long day at work, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus. She had taken the first seat in the “colored” section of the back of the bus, but the bus filled up, and by law whites could demand that any black person give up their seat at any time. And she had done so before, but today she was tired. She also thought to herself that the Supreme Court has just desegregated the public schools, so if desegregation is good enough for children, it is good enough for adults. So she refused to give up her seat. The bus driver called the police, the police came and arrested her, and the town exploded.

Montgomery was one of the most racially divided cities in the south in those days, and treatment of blacks on buses was especially terrible. Once a black blind man took too long getting on, so the driver closed the door with his leg in it and dragged him for two blocks. Another time a black man argued with the driver over the fare and the police came and shot him dead for arguing with a white man.

Blacks were wanting to riot and whites were wanting to kill blacks who were wanting to riot. So, the black community elected young father, young preacher, young seminary graduate Martin Luther King to organize them to respond to the crisis.

Over two thousand people rallied in front of a church that night to decide what they would do. The air was tense and explosive. It was a dangerous night for both blacks and whites. Rev. Martin Luther King stood up to speak to them that night and here are some of the words that he said. [music stops]

KING: (Montgomery Bus Boycott Speech)

(December 5, 1955, at the Holt St. Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama)

We are here this evening for serious business. We’re here in a general sense because first and foremost, we are American citizens, and we are determined to acquire our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning. We are here also because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.

But we are here in a specific sense because of the bus situation in Montgomery....And we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer who never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie...

But in our protests, there will be no cross burnings. No white person will be taken from his home by a hooded Negro mob and brutally murdered. There will be no threats and intimidation. We will be guided by the highest principles of law and order...the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal....If we fail to do this our protest will end up as a meaningless drama on the stage of history, and its memory will be shrouded with the ugly garments of shame. In spite of the mistreatment that we have confronted, we must not become bitter and end up by hating our white brothers. Let no people pull you down so low as to make you hate them.^²

NARRATOR:

[Music over]

So, instead of a riot, they organized a boycott of the Montgomery buses, with car pools taking people to work. Non violently they brought the city to its knees. The city took them to court arguing for segregation all the way to the Supreme Court. Finally, after over a year of attacks and threats and thousands of daily hate letters and phone calls, after his home was bombed and the police refused to investigate, and after King himself was arrested and jailed twice for speeding and had to pay hundreds of dollars in fines and had his auto insurance policy revoked, after the movement had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and bail, after all of this and more, the Supreme Court declared that segregation of public transportation facilities was unconstitutional.

CHOIR: “We Shall Overcome” verse 2.

We’ll go hand in hand,

We’ll go hand in hand, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall overcome some day.

Or: “If You Miss Me From the Back of the Bus.”

If you miss me at the back of the Bus,

and you can’t find me nowhere,

Come on up to the front of the bus,

I’ll be riding up there,

I’ll be riding up there.

Come on up to the front of the bus.

I’ll be riding up there.

SIT-INS

NARRATOR:

[Music over]

King and his movement became internationally famous after that. Together with Ralph Abernathy and others, they founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and began organizing voter registration throughout the South. At that time, less than ten percent of blacks in America were registered to vote, and in most cases in the South, they were not allowed to register.

In 1960 four black college students in Greensboro North Carolina went into a “Whites only” department store and tried to sit down at the lunch counter and be served. They were arrested, but they took it to court and a nation wide protest movement called “Sit-ins” were born.

In October of that year, Rev. King and several others joined a “sit-in” in Atlanta, Georgia and demanded to be served food just like white people. They too were arrested. Later all were freed but King, who was found to be on “parole” for a traffic violation, and he was sentenced to four months of hard labor in the Reidsville State Prison, the harshest maximum-security facility in the South.

While in prison, wearing leg irons, eating rancid food, in an unheated room, infested with bugs, Martin wrote this letter to his wife, Coretta:

[music stops]

KING: (Letter to Coretta)

(October 26, 1960, in Georgia’s maximum security prison for a traffic violation after being arrested at a sit-in in Atlanta, Georgia.)

October 26, 1960

Hello Darling,

Today I find myself a long way from you and the children...I know this whole experience is very difficult for you to adjust to, especially in your condition of pregnancy, but as I said to you yesterday this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people....

I have the faith to believe that this excessive suffering that is now coming to our family will in some little way serve to make Atlanta a better city, Georgia a better state, and America a better country.

Just how, I do not know yet, but I have faith to believe it will. If I am correct then our suffering is not in vain.

I understand that everybody—white and colored—can have visitors this coming Sunday. I hope you can find some way to come down....

Give my best regards to all the family. Please ask them not to worry about me. I will adjust to whatever comes in terms of pain. Hope to see you Sunday.

Eternally yours,

Martin^³

NARRATOR:

[Music over]

But King did not spend the four months in prison. As it happened, a young U.S. Senator and presidential candidate named John F. Kennedy personally called the judge who had sentenced him and talked him into reversing his decision. Interestingly, when he got out he held a press conference and praised Senator Kennedy for his help. The word spread, and a few days later he received hundreds of thousands of votes from black voters who had never voted in an election in their entire lives. Kennedy won that presidential election by only 110,000 votes.

CONGREGATION AND CHOIR: “Amen, Amen”

Or:

CHOIR: “We Shall Overcome” verse 3,

We are not afraid

We are not afraid, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall overcome some day.

Or:

“Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” verses 1,2.

Paul and Silas bound in Jail

Had no money for to pay their bail

Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on.

Hold on.

Keep your eyes on the prize,

Hold on.

Paul and Silas began to shout,

the jail door opened and they walked out.

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on....

BIRMINGHAM

NARRATOR:

[music over]

The reputation of Martin Luther King and the movement grew larger and larger through the early sixties. There were more sit-ins, there were more boycotts, there were more protests, all slowly tearing down the most visible excesses of the walls of oppression and discrimination in America. Through it all King began to increasingly see that the struggle was no longer just for civil rights, but that it had become a movement for human rights. For when one part of humanity is held down and repressed, then all of humanity is harmed and made less because of it.

But perhaps the turning point in his life, and the life of the movement, took place in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Birmingham was arguably the most oppressive and thoroughly segregated city in the nation in those days. It had such a long history of brutality and violence against its black citizens, that it was known by some as the “American Johannesburg.” The homes of blacks in one section of town were bombed by whites so often it got the name “Dynamite Hill.”

Birmingham was so bad that it banned a story book about friendly white and black rabbits. It also banned what they called, “nigger music” on white stations. By that they meant Ray Charles. King once said that about the only thing in town that both blacks and whites shared together were the streets and the sewer system.

The police commissioner of Birmingham was Eugene Connor, known as “Bull” Connor in the area. He was an angry, forceful racist who openly bragged about how many blacks he had beaten and killed in his lifetime. He promised that “blood would run in the streets” before Birmingham would desegregate its public facilities.

On April 3, 1963, the protest of Birmingham began, with boycotts, lunch-counter sit-ins, and daily marches, all done quietly and calmly, completely nonviolently. “Bull” Connor began arresting protesters but hundreds more came. Over the weeks the Birmingham jail had over three thousand people in it and yet more still came. King himself was one of those arrested early in the marches. Ironically he was taken to jail on April 13, Good Friday, one hundred years to the day from when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. King spent the next ten days running the campaign from in the Birmingham Jail.

While there, he had been given a newspaper in which a number of white clergy, Christian and Jewish, had written a public letter criticizing him for pushing integration too quickly. He sat down in his cell and on pieces of newspaper, rags, toilet tissue, and backs of envelopes, he wrote a public response. His response became known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and has become one of the most famous statements about non- violent civil disobedience written in this century. And here is a portion of what he said.

[music ends]

KING: (“Letter from Birmingham Jail”)

(April 16, 1963, while imprisoned in the Birmingham City Jail for protesting the segregation of eating facilities. In response to a letter in the newspaper by local Protestant and Jewish clergy who criticized him for pushing integration too quickly.)

April 16, 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in Birmingham jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.”...Since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

[You are right when you note that we are outsiders coming in to your community, but we have come to Birmingham because there is terrible injustice here and we must respond like the Apostle Paul did to the Macedonian call for help.] Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects us all indirectly....Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

[You also mentioned the demonstrations in Birmingham, which you deplored, but you did not mention the horrible conditions that made them necessary: the unsolved bombings, the killings, the whole ugly record of brutality that made Negro life here so grossly unjust. You advised us to negotiate our problems with the city fathers, something that we have frequently attempted to do, only to have them break their promises time and again.] As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.

[You told us that our protests were “untimely” and that we should trust you and “wait.” For centuries the Negro has heard “wait,” and “wait” has nearly always meant “Never.”] We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights...Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will, and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers [and sisters] smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television;...when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are)...; and your wife and mother are never given the respected title of “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.^⁴

NARRATOR:

[Music over]

Outside, “Bull” Connor seemed intent on proving that racism could be even more evil than King had described it in his letter. He had firemen turn fire hoses on the marchers, which sent columns of water crashing into children and adults, knocking them down, ripping their clothing, smashing them against the sides of buildings, sweeping them off of the streets, bloodying their bodies and throwing them into parks and alleys. Then he let loose German shepherd dogs trained to attack and bite and tear at running people. Day after day television cameras showed a shocked world the horrors, but day after day the carnage continued, and day after day the marchers continued marching for freedom.

The turning point occurred on Sunday, May 5, 1963, when three thousand children went on a prayer vigil to the Birmingham jail, where King and others were being held. When they arrived, the police threatened them and screamed at them, but all they did was kneel in prayer. Finally, one of the protesters stood up from his prayer and said to them, “We’re not turning back. We haven’t done anything wrong. All we want is our freedom....How do you feel doing these things?”

“Bull” Connor yelled at his men to turn on the hoses, but nobody moved. The children continued praying. His men were silent. He yelled again, but they dropped their hoses. One of the firemen began crying. “We can’t continue to do this,” one of them said. The children continued silently praying. Nobody spoke again, and nobody got hurt. That event was the moral turning point of the struggle. Soon after that, the businesses of Birmingham agreed to integrate.

“The Storm is Passing Over”

Or: “We Shall Overcome,” verse 4.

Our God will see us through,

Our God will see us through, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall over come some day.

Or: “Keep your Eyes on the Prize,” Verses 3, 4, 5.

The only Chain that we can stand,

is the chain of hand in hand...

Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on.

Hold on.

Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on.

The only thing that we did wrong,

was stay in the wilderness too long.

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on....

The only thing we did right,

was the day we started to fight.

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on....

WASHINGTON

NARRATOR:

[music-over]

The next few years were a whirlwind. In the space of just one year the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in Birmingham was unconstitutional. Martin Luther King was invited to have an audience with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican, and he led a successful 125,000 person “Walk for Freedom” in Detroit. He received the Nobel Prize for Peace. He was named Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year.” Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And on August 28, 1963, he took part in the largest civil rights demonstration in history, in Washington DC. At that march, King was the major speaker and gave one of the most powerful and lasting statements in his life on his philosophy and hopes and his dreams for all of America. It has come to be known as the “I have a dream speech.”

[music ends]

KING: (“I Have a Dream”)

(August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC)

...I say to you today, my friends...even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day “every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day. This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let Freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we’re free at last!”^⁵

CHOIR: “Free At Last”

Or: “I Want to be Ready”

Or: “We Shall Overcome,” verse 5.

The truth shall make us free,

The truth shall make us free, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall overcome some day.

MEMPHIS

NARRATOR:

[music over]

Over the next few years the dream of King seemed to go bad. Protesters who promoted violence seemed to be on the rise and people who promoted love and peace among all people seemed to be on the decline. Riots in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and others seemed to undermine all that he had worked for. More and more of the momentum of the early civil rights movement seemed to be slipping away.

Increasingly during this time King was growing to believe that race is only one of the issues which was at the core of America’s problems. Its violent nature and general disregard for poor people seemed to him to be the larger issues which stood over race. So for the summer of 1968 he planned to hold the biggest march on Washington ever. This time the march would not be specifically about black people or civil rights, but also about poverty. He called it the “Poor People’s Campaign.” This would be a chance, he thought, to reframe the movement in a much broader context, and to regain its moral tone and direction that had seemed to be waning in recent years.

But right in the middle of his plans for the march, he was asked to come to Memphis, Tennessee, to lend support to striking sanitation workers. Even though his schedule was brutal and he was too tired, too busy, and was growing sick with the flu, he agreed to go. By the time that he arrived, he had grown so ill he was unable to prepare a formal speech and he even tried to beg off of talking to the group at a pre-strike rally. His friend Ralph Abernathy agreed to go address the group instead, but when he got there he found two thousand people clamoring to hear Rev. King speak, not Ralph Abernathy. So he went to a phone and called King saying that if he had any energy left, could he come out to these people and at least say a few words to them. King relented. He drove to the church that night in driving rain, stumbled weakly to the podium, and without notes or manuscript or any idea of what he was about to say, he delivered one of the most stirring speeches of his life. He gave what has become known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech. These are some of the words that he said, on April 3, 1968.

[music ends]

KING: (“I’ve Been To The Mountain Top”)

(Last speech, before a rally in support of the Memphis garbage strike, April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was assassinated the following day, April 4.)

...We have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the problems that people have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival forces us to grapple with them. For years now people have been talking about war and peace. But now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world, it is nonviolence or nonexistence.

[Begin music over of “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.”]

That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.

...If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. but somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so, just as I say we aren’t going to let any dog or water hose turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

...Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.

...I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountain top. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And God’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing anyone. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.^⁶

NARRATOR:

[No music]

The next day, April 4, 1968, King and Abernathy and several others spent most of the day in their room at the Lorraine Motel planning for the big events of the next few days. He met with some of the organizers of the march, and tried to streamline events so that they would not get out of hand. He met with a group of violent black youths to see if he could talk them into laying down their clubs and rocks and working with him as non-violent marshals of the march. They refused. He met with Andrew Young, who spent most of the day in court making arrangements so that the march would be considered a legal protest. He even took time to visit with his brother AD who was visiting in town, and together they got on separate phones and called their mother.

At about 5:00, they all began to change clothes and get ready for dinner. They were going to the home of a local pastor who had invited all of them over for dinner. A few moments before six, the pastor arrived and people began to gather outside to leave. King stood at the doorway and yelled in to Abernathy, “Are you ready?” Abernathy said back, “Let me put on some after shave lotion.” King said, “Ok. I’ll be standing out here on the balcony.”

At 6:05 that evening, Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and several others were standing on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, waiting to go to dinner. The car that was to drive them pulled up. He recognized the driver as Ben Branch, the young man who was to sing for them after the dinner. He yelled down. “Ben,” he said, “Make sure you play ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ at the meeting tonight. Sing it real pretty.” Ben yelled back, “Okay, Doc, I will.”

At 6:09 they heard the sound of a shot ringing out. The sound of a .30-06 high-powered rifle. King slammed backwards against the wall of the balcony and then fell forward onto the balcony floor. Ralph Abernathy rushed out to him. Someone else found a pillow to put under his head. A secret service agent held a towel to the wound in his neck to try and stop the bleeding. Others were running up the stairs, some were running for cover, some were screaming.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

During the next few minutes Ralph held the head of his dearest, closest friend in his lap while waiting for an ambulance to arrive, and watching the life bleed out of him. He spoke to Martin several times during those minutes, but Martin could only respond with his eyes. Years later Ralph said that he heard much from those eyes that night. Martin Luther King looked at him very awake, and very alert, and with his eyes he seemed to be speaking very clearly. He was saying, “Ralph, it isn’t over. It’s only in other people’s hands now. Don’t give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up.” ...And then he died.

PROCLAMATION FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY, 1986

Written to be read by President Reagan, who opposed King and the Civil Rights era, but agreed to allow November 2, 1986, to be set as Martin Luther King Day. Because of his contentious relationship with the movement, feel free to compose your own conclusion using local allusions.

“Let all Americans continue to carry forward the banner that...fell from Dr. King’s hands. Today, all over America, libraries, hospitals, parks and thoroughfares proudly bear his name. His likeness appears on more than 100 postage stamps issued by dozens of nations around the globe. Today we honor him with speeches and monuments. But let us do more. Let all Americans of every race and creed and color work together to build in this blessed land a shining city of...justice and harmony. This is the monument Dr. King would have wanted most of all.”^⁷

“Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” verses 1,2,3.

Precious Lord, take my hand,

lead me on, let me stand,

I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;

Through the storm, through the night,

lead me on to the light:

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

When my way grows drear,

precious Lord, linger near,

when my life is almost gone,

Hear me cry, hear my call,

hold my hand, lest I fall:

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

When the shadows appear

and the night draws near,

and the day is past and gone,

At the river I stand,

guide my feet, hold my hand:

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayres, Alex. The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Meridian Books, 1993.

Carawan, Guy and Candie, eds. Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through its Songs. Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Corporation, 1990.

Garrow, David. “The Intellectual Development of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Influences and Commentaries,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, (Vol. XL, No. 4, 1986).

King, Coretta Scott, ed. The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: New Market Press, 1987.

Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Harper & Row, 1994.

1 Coretta Scott King, ed., The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: New Market Press, 1987), p. 31.

2 Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1994), pp. 70, 71; and David Garrow, “The Intellectual Development of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Influences and Commentaries,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, (Vol. XL, No. 4, 1986), p. 15.

3Alex Ayres, ed., The Wisdom of Martin Luther King (New York: Meridian Books, 1993), pp. 183, 194. Toward the end of this letter, King requested that Coretta bring him several books to read while in prison. They were deleted from the presentation because the names would be unfamiliar to most audiences. However, if your presentation group feels that your particular audience would recognize the names and be interested in knowing them, feel free to return them to the letter. The following is the deleted portion:

“Please bring the following books to me: Stride Toward Freedom, Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology Vol. 1 and 2, George Buttrick’s The Parables of Jesus, E. Stanley Jones’ Mahatma Gandhi, Horns and a Halo, a Bible, a Dictionary, and my reference dictionary called Increasing Your Word Power....”

4 Let the Trumpet Sound, pp. 223-230.

5 Words of Martin Luther King, pp. 95-97.

6 Words of Martin Luther King, pp. 93-94.

7 Wisdom of Martin Luther King, pp. 226, 227.

2011-11-26T16:57:00.002-05:00

Call to Jubilee!

Third Sunday of Advent, Year B

Joy Sunday

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126, or Luke 1:47-55;

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8; 19-28

Rev. Dr. Stan G. Duncan

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

The Good News of Deliverance

¹ The spirit of the Lord GOD[i] is upon me,

because the LORD[ii] has anointed[iii] me;

he has sent me:

to bring good news[iv] to the oppressed,[v]

to bind up[vi] the brokenhearted,[vii]

to proclaim liberty[viii] to the captives,[ix]

and release to the prisoners;[x]

² to proclaim the year of the LORD’S favor,

and the day of vengeance[xi] of our God;[xii]

to comfort all who mourn;[xiii]

³ to provide for those who mourn[xiv] in Zion—

to give them a garland[xv] instead of ashes,

the oil of gladness[xvi] instead of mourning,

the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

They will be called oaks of righteousness,[xvii]

the planting of the LORD,[xviii] to display his glory.

⁴ They shall build up the ancient ruins,

they shall raise up the former devastations;[xix]

they shall repair the ruined cities,

the devastations of many generations.

⁵ Strangers shall stand and feed your flocks,

foreigners shall till your land and dress your vines;

⁶ but you shall be called priests of the LORD,

you shall be named ministers of our God;

you shall enjoy the wealth of the nations,

and in their riches you shall glory.

⁷ Because their shame^{^[xx]} was double,^{^[xxi]}

and dishonor was proclaimed as their lot,

therefore they shall possess a double portion;

everlasting joy shall be theirs.

⁸ For I the LORD love justice,

I hate robbery and wrongdoing;[xxii]

I will faithfully give them their recompense,

and I will make an everlasting covenant[xxiii] with them.

⁹ Their descendants shall be known among the nations,

and their offspring among the peoples;

all who see them shall acknowledge

that they are a people whom the LORD has blessed.

¹⁰ I will greatly rejoice in the LORD,

my whole being shall exult in my God;

for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,

he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,

as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,

and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

¹¹ For as the earth brings forth its shoots,

and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,

so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise

to spring up before all the nations.

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

Background

saiah 61 is a critical passage in the development of Biblical theology. As we will see below, it is strongly influenced by the seminal Jubilee passage of Leviticus 25, and it is central to the self consciousness of Jesus as portrayed by Luke in the critically important sermon of Luke 4. There is also a great deal of evidence that when Jesus (or the Gospel writers) heralded the coming of the “Kingdom (or realm) of God,” it was based on the Jubilee.

The author of what we know as Third Isaiah is otherwise unknown to us. We call him by that name only because his writings are the third of the three collections of writings in the book known as Isaiah. The breakdown is generally believed to be: First Isaiah—Chapters 1-39; Second Isaiah—40-55; and Third Isaiah—56-66.

First Isaiah was written in Judah, just before it fell and its leaders were taken into captivity in Babylon. It contain numerous prophesies of coming disaster that would be the result of the crimes of the wealthy and royal families. Second Isaiah was written toward the end of that captivity and just before the fall of Babylon to Cyrus the Great of Persia (Oct 29^th 539 b.c.e.). His writings are filled with joyous anticipation of the re-establishment of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the temple. Finally, Third Isaiah wrote the generation after they were back in Judah again, when the cold reality of failed expectations took hold. His writing activity was probably between 537-521, and probably was active for only a few short years (Claus Westermann says it is possible that he was active for less than a year, but that seems unlikely). Chapters 60-62 form the nucleus of his writings. They form a literary unit.

This passage

he immediate occasion of the writing of this particular poem is an economic crisis brought about by the financial dealings of the wealthy returnees who used their status and wealth to grab more land and income from both their deported brothers and sisters and from those who had been left behind. They used their economic and class power to influence the application of tax and finance laws of the emerging nation to their advantage, causing huge increases in their own incomes, but also tremendous poverty in others. For example, they would make agricultural start-up loans during times of drought at exorbitant rates, which violated the Jubilee laws of Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15, but which was allowed because they could buy off courts and lawmakers in case anyone complained. If the poor borrower was not able to pay the entire amount in one year, the next year the unpaid portion would be rolled over into a second loan, thus doubling the interest rate. After two or three years of doubling and quadrupling the interests, the poor farmer was effectively bankrupt and had to give up his farm and often his freedom to the loaner.

Nehemiah 5:1-5 tells the story:

¹Now there was a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish kin. ²For there were those who said, “With our sons and our daughters, we are many; we must get grain, so that we may eat and stay alive.” ³There were also those who said, “We are having to pledge our fields, our vineyards, and our houses in order to get grain during the famine.” ⁴And there were those who said, “We are having to borrow money on our fields and vineyards to pay the king’s tax. ⁵Now our flesh is the same as that of our kindred; our children are the same as their children; and yet we are forcing our sons and daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have been ravished; we are powerless, and our fields and vineyards now belong to others.”

For Second Isaiah and Israel’s other theologians, the period of captivity in Babylon was God’s punishment for just this kind of oppression of the poor, and the eventual release—he believed—was God’s forgiveness.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her

that she has served her term,

that her penalty is paid,

that she has received from the Lord’s hand

double for all her sins. (Isaiah 40:2, the reading for Advent 2, Year B)

They had believed that God’s act of granting them release would bring about a spiritual change in attitude toward God and toward others. In return for their redemption through God, Israel was to become a model, a light of hope to the rest of the nations. “Nations shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn” (Isaiah 60:3). “It was said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them’” (Psalm 126:2b, the psalmic response for today).

But that great conversion did not happen. To the dismay of this anonymous prophet (and others), many of the more powerful exiles returned to Israel to begin the same kind of oppressive practices that led to the exile fifty years earlier.

Isaiah, speaking for God, characterizes them this way:

The way of peace they do not know,

and there is no justice in their paths.

Their roads they have made crooked;

no one who walks in them knows peace.

(Isaiah 59:8)

In the first section of today’s reading, the prophet envisions himself as receiving an “anointing”[xxiv] from the Spirit of God to go to those who are poor and oppressed and to bring them “good news”[xxv] of the establishment of the “year of God’s favor.” He is going to all of those who were pushed to the sidelines and passed by in the euphoria over the booming economy. The “good news” he brings is that the city of Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Babylonian army, will be rebuilt:

They shall build up the ancient ruins,

they shall raise up the former devastations;

they shall repair the ruined cities,

the devastations of former generations. (61:4)

But what is most startling is that the “they” of this passage—the ones who will be doing the rebuilding (and receiving the glory)—will not be the prophet nor even God, but instead this particularly abused group within the larger Israelite community: the oppressed, the broken hearted, the captives, the prisoners and the mourners. “The spirit...is upon me...to bring good news to the oppressed....and They shall build up the ancient ruins....” (vv. 1a, 4a emphasis added). Those who have been pushed to the margins will become the center in the newly created society.

A Few Words On Terminology:

n the prophet’s list of recipients of the good news, the word the nrsv translates as “oppressed” (Hebrew, anau) has two meanings. One is “weak” or “powerless,” and the other is “poor” or “economically oppressed,” and it is rendered both ways in the Hebrew Scriptures. In ancient Israel, the vast majority of the population was poor. Whenever they are described as such, it is almost always to make the point that their poverty is not caused by fate or vocation, but by an abuse of power. Poverty that requires mention is poverty caused by economic oppression. Therefore, this word has a clear political tone to it. The kjv translates it “meek” which gets at the powerlessness, but doesn’t indicate its cause. The nrsv has “oppressed,” which gets at the political tone, but not the poverty. The rsv includes both, with “afflicted” which implies that the powerlessness came from others in power, and then adds “poor” in a footnote.

“Liberty to the captives” is also politically charged. In this context it refers not to criminal prisoners (and probably not political prisoners, because they had not been back from Babylonia long enough to acquire any), but to poor people who have been enslaved for their inability to make payments on usurious debts. The phrase “proclaim liberty” (Hebrew: dêror) is a technical term from the Leviticus Jubilee provisions for the cancellation of debts, return of slaves and property stolen or acquired immorally by the rich (there was seldom a "moral" acquiring of property in those days), and a return to the world as God intended in the original creation.

You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land.

And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. (Lev. 25:8-10; cf. Jer. 34:8, 15, 17)

Also, most scholars believe that the phrases, “year of the Lord’s favor,” and “the day of vengeance” (better, “rescue”)[xxvi] also refer to the biblical Jubilee. They point to an age to come when Yahweh’s original intention for the world would be realized. The ancient and equitable system of communal land and property ownership would be re-instated (cf. Jer. 34:8, 15, 17). The poor would finally get their economic rights and powers within the larger community and God’s peace would once again prevail.

However, the political/economic/religious powers never allowed an authentic enactment of the laws of Jubilee. In their view, the “world as God intended,” could never be allowed to get in the way of profits. Therefore prophets like Third Isaiah increasingly began to sprinkle their oracles with phrases that got at the sense of the Jubilee without actually using the dangerous and politically charged word. (Perhaps we could also say with Reinhold Niebuhr that just because a cause is difficult, it doesn’t mean that it is something unworthy of giving our lives to.)

The upshot of all of this is that the mission for which the prophet has been anointed is to bring the “good news” to the oppressed and broken hearted that a new age of Jubilee is coming, and that they will be the ones who will rebuild the new society which embodies it. They will be comforted, given the oil of gladness and mantles of praise and will be called oaks of righteousness. And they will also be the ones to recover the lost glory of Jerusalem. This is a dramatic reversal of fortune for those who returned to Israel expecting to be treated like royalty.

Verses 5-7 continue to shower accolades upon the restored outcasts of v. 1, though the lectionary reading skips them going on to vss. 8-9, where God begins to speak. However, there are (at least) two things about these two verses which might be of help to preaching. First, in v. 6 the prophet announces that "you shall be called priests of the LORD, you shall be named ministers of our God." You will be different from the other stratified and hierarchical nations. You shall all be equal in your access to God. The promise of the covenant given to Moses on Mt. Sinai that "you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation" is about to become true.

Second, in v. 7, the prophet notes that because their shame was double, now their portion of everlasting joy will be double. This is a direct contrast to the phrase used in last week's lection that their agony in Babylonia was double their sins. You have suffered twice as much as you should have, therefore your redemption or rescue will be twice as sweet. The New English Translation notes interprets this to mean they each will receive twice their original portion of land, though that cannot be determined for certain from the text itself.

In vv. 8-9 (where the lectionary returns to the text) the prophet says that God loves justice and hates wrongdoing, and will pay them for all of their years of unrewarded labor. This will be an amazing extension of the covenant which will be so grand that “their descendants shall be know among the nations”! These people, poor and despised by the powers that be, have become the special chosen ones of God, the light to the nations which was envisioned originally for the nation itself. This is a radical reorientation of society’s values and hierarchy. Only a God of the poor and oppressed would think of such a thing. And only justice made flesh in the poor and oppressed can make it real.

In vs. 10-11, the prophet closes the passage by bursting into song, celebrating what God is doing through him. With his role as the anointed one to bring this news to the poor, his very clothes and robe become righteousness and garlands, which are as glorious as the clothes and jewelry worn by a bride and groom on their wedding day. With his message (and the people’s response) as sure as seeds grow in a garden, God’s plan for righteousness and praise will shine forth before all the nations.

This is an excellent Advent passage, because it offers authentic hope for those broken and excluded from proper society, and it is mixed with personal responsibility: if the prophet does not “bring” the good news, it won’t get shared, and if the renewed people do not claim their new role, it won’t get taken. It is with promise, expectation, and personal responsibility that we as Christians wait for the claims of the coming (and coming again) of the Anointed One.

[i] “Lord GOD,” 'Adonai Yahweh. Jews display reverence for the name "Yahweh" by substituting the proper title “Lord” or Adonai. English translations follow that convention, but in this passage Adonai actually precedes Yahweh, which unless avoided creates in English, "Lord LORD." Could be read as “Lord Yahweh.” Note that the use of small caps generally alerts the reader that the underlying word is "Yahweh." In this case that is applied to the substitute word, "GOD." In 1b, Yahweh occurs again and convention is restored using "LORD."

[ii] “Lord,” Yahweh h'/hy.

[iii] “Anoint” (mashiach, çLÛîÈ). To rub with oil. To consecrate or send. Related to noun, Messiah, the “anointed one,” the sent one. Related to the Greek, ÷ñßù , chrioô , from which "Christ" and "Christen" are derived. Compare with the christening (anointing) when one begins a new life in a faith community or the christening of a ship when it is sent off on its first journey. Here "anoint" and "send" are parallel with each other.

[iv] “Good news” bâśar, øNÛa˜. To bear or bring news, especially good news (or "tidings"). To announce, preach, tell. The term “Good News” (“good tidings”) is found also in 40:9 (the Hebrew scripture reading for the second Sunday of Advent, year B), 52:7, but only here does it refer to the poor, and only here is it the speaker (the prophet) who brings it. Bringing Good News is usually the task of a runner for a king or dignitary, proclaiming the arrival of the dignitary. Also, importantly, in its biblical usage, it is usually “proclamation of an event which has already come about.” Here the prophet’s words themselves will bring about liberty to the captives (etc.) This is a critical distinction. (Old Testament Library: Isaiah 40-66, Klaus Westermann (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), p. 366).

[v] “Oppressed,” anaw. The kjv has "afflicted." The lxx has "poor." The term could refer to both (poor in circumstances and poor in spirit), and the term was often used with the meaning of "meek" and "pious."

[vi] "Bind up" (Lá—ç˜, chaòbash). To wrap tightly, but also to heal. Cf. Psa. 147:3)

[vii] “Brokenhearted;” From Shabar, r;b'v break, destroy, break in pieces, break down, hurt, torn, crush.

[viii] “Liberty,” r/r.D derôr, from a root of "to move rapidly." This is understood by many commentators to not refer to Israel in the exile, but to debt prisoners. See Isaiah 58:6, “Loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, let the oppressed go free….”

[ix] “Liberty to the captives”; “does not mean the exiles (who have already been liberated by this time), but, as in 58:6, people put in prison for debts and the like” (Westermann, p. 366).

[x] “[Release to the] Prisoners” (pêqach-qowach; j/qAj;q.P, ). Opening (of eyes), wide. Can also be translated as “light.” The lxx has "blind," which is the translation cited in Luke's "recovery of sight to the blind" (Luke 4:18).

[xi] “Day of vengeance” (cf. also, Isa. 34:8; 63:4; Jer. 46:10; and “day of Yahweh”: Isa. 2:12; 13:6; Joel 2:1ff.). Interpreters Bible (p.710) says the translation of the Hebrew í÷®ðˆ, naòqaòm than as “vengeance” is "dubious" and prefers "requital." Chris Haslem prefers “rescue.” (http://www.montreal.anglican.org/comments). It follows a Ugaritic root which means to avenge, but also “rescue” or "requite." Perhaps in rescuing, God offers vindication. The key, in Westermann's words is that the word doesn’t have the “sense of God’s taking vengeance on Israel’s foes....the word is to be taken in the sense of ‘for’ and not ‘against’ restoration; as it is also true of the original meaning of ‘revenge’ the days before Israel became a state: ‘the restoration of wholeness’” (Westermann, p. 367. Cf. J. Morgenstern, “Jubilee, Year of,” Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 2 (Nashville: Abington, 1962), p. 1002. Note that the line is missing in Jesus' reading of this text.

[xii] Note the equal status of “year” and “day,” indicating that no particular event or time is in mind, but what is envisioned is a new era. The Jubilee has become unhooked from a specific fifty-year event, and has become a vision of what will be in God’s time. (Westermann, p. 367).

[xiii] “Comfort to all who mourn,” 2^nd Isaiah particularized the mourners, as in 40:1. 3^rdIsaiah generalizes them, universalizes them. This difference is common between the two writers.

[xiv] "To provide for those who mourn." "The line may be a marginal variant. It disturbs the meter," (IB, p. 711). Note that it could be referring to those who are mourning in Israel or to those who mourn for Israel.

[xv] "Garland" (øàÅtÀ, p^eeòr). From the same root as øTtÈ, paòar; to "gleam" or "embellish"; "beautify" or "glorify." A symbol for joy or festivity.

[xvi] “Oil of gladness” (ïNNÜ, sñaòsñoòn ). Cheerfulness; specifically welcome. The kjv and New English Translation have “Oil of Joy.”

[xvii] “Oak of righteousness”: See 44:14 for becoming like an oak as a symbol for spiritual strengthening.

[xviii] “The planting of the Lord”: For this image, see also 60:21 and Jeremiah 17:8.

[xix] “They shall raise up the former devastations”; NET has, “and the formerly desolate places they will raise up.”

[xx] “Their shame,” Heb: Your shame.

[xxi] “Double," "double portion,” a reward to replace the double punishment that was their time in Babylonia. See 40:2. The NET understands "portion" to refer to land they received when they returned to Israel.

[xxii] “Wrongdoing” (äìÈòÊ, €oòlaòh). Feminine active participle of the verb, €aòlaòh, “to ascend.” A step (as in ascending). Used usually in reference to a holocaust (as going up in smoke), and therefore to “burnt offering.” The kjv translates this phrase (with some justification) “I hate robbery for burnt offering,” as does the nrsv note.

[xxiii] “Everlasting covenant.” In Genesis 9:16, God tells Noah that the rainbow is a reminder of the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures. In Genesis 17:7, God makes such a covenant with Abraham and his offspring. In Genesis 17:19, God promises a covenant with Isaac and his progeny. David. In his death speech (2 Samuel 23:5) recalls the everlasting covenant God made with him when he wished to build a temple (2 Samuel 7:13, 16, 24-26, 29). See also 54:9-10; 55:3; 59:21; Jeremiah 32:40; 50:5; Psalm 105:10.

[xxiv] mashach, from which we get the term “messiah” [Hebrew: meshiach], cf. 1 Sam 10:1. See on note c above.

[xxv] bäsar, Note the word's use also in last week's Advent 2 Year B reading, Isaiah 40:9.

[xxvi] í÷®ðˆ, naòqaòm “requital,” or “rescue” are better than “Vengeance.” It follows a Ugaritic root which means to avenge someone, in the sense of rescuing them. See above on note l, "Day of vengeance."

2011-11-01T17:27:00.007-04:00

The Talents and the “One Percent”

Proper 28, Year A

Matthew 25:14-30

ost of what we would think of today as commercial trade or “investing” in first century Palestine was done by the wealthy one percent—meaning the royalty the and the priests (who took in and spent investments held in the temple, and then traded with them for foreign goods and currency).

There were two common ways that one with sufficient capital could make a profit from investing.The first was by lending to those involved in the currency exchange business in the Temple. When Jews or others came to Jerusalem from other parts of the world, they needed to change their international currency into the local Jewish currency, and the exchange tables served this purpose. International Jews in particular (and there were many) needed to make a sacrifice in the Temple, but typically only carried Roman currency, with the Emperor’s picture on it, so they exchanged it for local currency, which did not. A wealthy person’s investment in this, from fees, skimming, and exaggerating the exchange rate, could be very high.

The second form of investment was in mortgage loans or bridge loans to small farmer families struggling to stay afloat in the declining first century Palestinian economy. Most loans made huge returns on their investment because interest rates were so astronomically high by today’s standards—anywhere between twenty-five to fifty percent. (It’s worth noting in this regard that one of the causes of the “lost decade” of the 1980s, for poor and developing countries of the global south, was that the interest charged by banks in the “First World” on loans to countries in the “Third World” rose sometimes to as high as twenty-seven percent.) The purpose for loans then, was primarily for the purpose of getting borrowers in over their heads and then being foreclosed on and losing their property. They would then either become tenants on what had been their own property, homeless, or join the ranks of the growing number of bandits or revolutionary militias.

Much of the income from these loans was deposited in the Temple to keep the rich from having to pay a Roman tax on it, and to allow them to claim they didn’t have any money on hand when the Sabbath and Jubilee-debt-cancellation years rolled around (a law called the “Prosbul” allowed them put their money in the Temple just before the seventh year, to claim they no longer could afford to cancel the debt). And then that money was often invested elsewhere by the priests who were the financial overseers of the bank’s holdings. There are ancient inscriptions that show Priests investing in trade and commodities using this “tax-sheltered” money drawn from mortgages taken out by poor families in rural Palestine. That’s probably one of the reasons why Jesus decided to occupy the Temple and set up a temporary boycott of currency trading there as his first official act in Jerusalem. And it is clearly the reason why—when the revolution finally came—the angry 99 percenters stormed the temple and burned the mortgage papers that had been held there.

It was also common, as this parable indicates, for wealthy lenders to assign the dirty tasks of originating the loans, collecting on them, and then repossessing the properties, to their servants. It was considered dishonorable for nobility to expand their wealth, and since servants were a class without honor, they were given the job. That gave the lenders the ability to deny any knowledge of wrong-doing if an evicted family’s misery became too public.^{^[1]} The story of the widow and the unjust judge is similar to this (Luke Luke 18:1-8, Proper 24 C).

It’s also important to add here that the servants who were entrusted with inflicting this pain on people didn’t do it for monetary gain (because they weren’t paid anything), but instead they did it for the power and prestige they received for successfully managing the company. As the parable says, if they were successful in little, they would be given power and responsibility over much. The lead character in the parable of the Dishonest Steward plays a similar role. Also reflected here is that interest rates were often as high as fifty percent, so it would not be at all unlikely for a steward of a powerful finance family to double or even triple an investment.

In this story, servants one and two clearly went along with this insidious system and were rewarded handily for their efforts. The first put his money into trading (ergázomai, probably in commodities because they were the most frequently traded at the time), and the second in interest-bearing investments (kerdainō, like the loans and currency-trading mentioned above), but both made a healthy profit.

But the third person (often the hero in three-part tales), following the Torah that forbade lending money at interest (Exodus 22.20-30), believed that the system was corrupt, that the leader was evil, that money should not be used as a weapon against homes and farms and families, and he refused to participate. He accused the wealthy one percenter of being a “Sklēros,” someone who is violent, rough, offensive, and thoroughly intolerable. He accuses him of doing nothing on his own to gain his wealth: he doesn’t plant, he doesn’t distribute (diaskorpízō) his wealth, but just by collecting interest on it from the misery of people who were sucked into the downwardly spiraling system.

So he denounces the crime, buries the money, and in the end he gets crucified for his actions. It is telling that he put the money in the ground, which is ultimately owned by God (Leviticus 25:23-28), and it is also where Judas hid his “blood money” when he realized that it had just caused his friend’s death.

So, what are the preaching themes and possibilities in this story? There are two traditional readings of this story. The first is that the (evil, greedy, wicked) Master is Jesus, who left us for a while and will come again at the end of time for an ominous reckoning of how we have used or misused our “talents” (mis-interpreted as skills and gifts). That’s an odd role for Jesus, but it seems to have survived thousands of years of puzzled looks during children’s sermons. A second traditional reading is that God is the (evil, greedy, wicked) Master who does the judging, and who is just as nasty in the end. Making God the “heavy” somehow doesn’t feel any better than making it Jesus, but there you have it. The way that my pastors as a child got around this was to ignore that the third servant got tossed into outer darkness, and gave heroic examples of the non-squandering of our “talents.”

Perhaps, instead, this is not an allegory. Perhaps Jesus was simply saying that if you stand up and denounce an immoral, evil, system, you may have to pay for it. Perhaps Jesus was saying that sometimes—like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace (Daniel 1–3)—the right thing to do is to offer up your life as a bulwark against injustice, even if it means losing that life.

Perhaps the message of the story is simply that the story is true, and that if you don’t like it, what are you going to do about it?

Notes and comments on this post:

[in response to someone who said that the storming of the temple was Jesus’ way of rejecting the entire corrupt system.]

Janet,

That’s sort of true and sort of not true. It is probably true that the incident as written reflects Jesus personal desire to reject the entire corrupt system, but to be fair historically, only a shrinking number of NT scholars today believe the story actually happened. It may reflect his passions but probably not his deeds.

Most, I think, believe the story was created by his followers some years after he died as a way of fleshing out his occasional statements of distaste for the Temple. But it’s hard to see how it could actually have happened. There were as many as two to three hundred thousand people in and tightly packed around the temple that day, because of the festival, and each of the money changers had armed body guards standing next to them. The odds of his breaking through the crowds and overturning all of the dozens and dozens of tables are not large. And assuming he could have gotten two or three tables turned over, the hired heat would have ushered Jesus into a premature crucifixion with Roman swords purchased with the proceeds of the tables. And assuming he could overpower all of the changers and all of the guards and all of the people fighting in their defense, the crowds were so dense that it’s unlikely that the rest of the people, only twenty to thirty feet away, would even notice. The idea of his driving out hundreds of thousands of people, many armed and powerful, is difficult to imagine, that is short of a major miracle, and none of the Gospels hint that there was one.

I’m just sayin’...

Stan

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Interesting observations Stan.

On the other hand . . .Borg and Crossan certainly imply in their book The Last Week that they regard this as an actual incident. (How ironic is it that I’m the one quoting Jesus Seminar scholars on this list?) Anyway, they seem to consider it an act of civil disobedience, an act of protest that they compare to someone breaking into a recruiting office and pouring blood on the draft card files. They say that that action wouldn’t bring an abrupt halt to the Pentagon. It’s just an act that makes a statement of protest. They don’t say this, but someone else might argue that Jesus did overturn some money changers tables, did upset some dove-sellers and prevent some in the immediate area from carrying stuff through the temple, but that the gospel accounts are exaggerations of the scale of his protest.

What I find very interesting in Mark’s account is the detail that on Sunday afternoon/evening, Jesus went into the temple and looked around and didn’t do anything. That is consistent with the idea that his action was a planned demonstration, not done on impulse. He went in on Sunday afternoon to reconnoiter for Monday’s action.

Kathy

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Presuming that we follow this line, that the third servant was actually standing up to the “powers” of his world, what do we do with the line where he says, “And I was afraid, and I buried the money”?

Carolyn

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About his “fear” I’m not certain, but he could have been simply stating his fear of the harsh ruler, but deciding to stand up to him anyway. Without doing violence to the Greek, the verse could just as easily be translated something like “Even though I was afraid of you, I still went and hid your money.”

On the burying of the money, there are a number of possibilities. The most likely, as I said below, was that according to Leviticus, the land belonged to God and the third servant returned the money to the land, that is, to God. Another possibility, from the Inter-Varsity Bible Background Commentary, is that burying the money was considered the moral way to handle ill-gotten gains. People in the first century believed in “limited goods,” meaning there was only a set amount of things in the universe, so if you made interest on something you did it by cheating or stealing or oppressing someone to get it. The “moral” thing, then, would have been to bury it or hide it (as in Luke’s version of the story). By taking the money out of the economy, he was in effect protecting those who would have been harmed by the money. According to Malina and Rohrbaugh’s Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, Rabbinic law taught that burying money to preserve it was considered the honorable thing to do and was the safest way to care for somebody else’s money.^{^[2]} Possibly, then, we could say that he was the only moral person in the group. And he was the one who was punished for being moral.

Incidentally, this is just one of many interpretations of the parable that do not follow the standard, “use your ‘talents’ that God has given you” line. David Harrington (Sacra Pagina: The Gospel of Matthew) believes that Matthew intended it as a rebuke of elements within the church who were resistant to change and wanted to do things the old way and wanted to give up and return to the old pre-Jesus days. Those who trace it back to Jesus recognize something similar, but believe Jesus was targeting people within Judaism who resisted working hard to bring in the new Realm of God. Both of those are possible, but different from my interpretation. The fact that with this interpretation the parable recommends the same trade and investment policies that impoverished much of Galilee makes preaching it this way a bit difficult for me, but it is not impossible and I will probably reference it in my sermon tomorrow.

Stan

Textual notes on Matthew 25:14-30

The Parable of the Talents

(Lk 19:11–27)

¹⁴“For it is as if^{^[3]} a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves^{^[4]} and entrusted^{^[5]} his property^{^[6]} to them; ¹⁵to one he gave five talents,^{^[7]} to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability.^{^[8]} Then he went away.^{^[9]} ¹⁶The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded^{^[10]} with them, and made five more talents.

¹⁷In the same way, the one who had the two talents made^{^[11]} two more talents.^{^[12]}

¹⁸But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

¹⁹After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them.

²⁰Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing^{^[13]} five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’

²¹His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things,^{^[14]} I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’^{^[15]}

²²And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.’

²³His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’

²⁴Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man,^{^[16]} reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; ²⁵so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’

²⁶But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? ²⁷Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. ²⁸So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. ²⁹For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. ³⁰As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

[1] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), p. 149.

[2] Jeremias (Parables, p. 61) says that buying money was the best hedge against theft. That meant that you were free from liability for it. On the other hand, just hiding it (as with Luke) made you still responsible for it in case something happened.

[3] “For it is as if…” (JWsper gar) What is the it in the sentence? “It is as though a man….” This doesn’t fit well as an introduction. The use of gar gives the sense that this is a continuation of the previous teaching, as in, “that about which I was referring before, is as if…” But it doesn’t quite read as though that is the case. John Nolland (The New International Greek Testament Commentary: The Gospel of Matthew [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005], p. 1014) believes that this introductory phrase was intended for the previous parable about the bridesmaids. David Harrington (Sacra Pagina: The Gospel of Matthew: Vol. 1 [Collegeville, Minn: The Liturgical Press, 1991], p. 352) suggests that Matthew intended the introduction to the chapter (“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this...”) to encompass both the parable of the maidens and this parable. That is, of course, assuming that Jesus intended this parable to be about the Kingdom/realm, which both (and others) also believe, but that is not totally clear to me that that is the case.

[4] “Slaves” (doúlos; gen. doúlou, masc. noun.). Historically translated “servant,” and more recently “slave,” is actually somewhere in the middle. Not the beaten down image we have of slaves, but not free to find employment elsewhere either. “Generally one serving, bound to serve, in bondage” (Complete Word Study Dictionary)

[5] “Entrusted” (παραδίδωμι, paradidomi, vb.,aor.) “‘Entrusted’ - give, deliver to. May be stretched to ‘entrust’ although this is reading into the parable. ‘Put them in charge of.”’ TEV” (Pumpkin). “To hand over to or to convey something to someone, particularly a right or an authority—‘to give over, to hand over.’ ὅτι ἐμοὶ παραδέδοται καὶ ᾧ ἐὰν θέλω δίδωμι αὐτήν ‘because this has been handed over to me and I give it to whomever I wish’ Lk 4:6” (Louw-Nida).

[6] “Property” (ὑπάρχοντα, hupárchonta; pres. part. neut. pl. of hupárchō, ὑπάρχω [to exist]). Property, but more generally, “Things which constitute someone’s possessions, goods.” Translating it here as “property” leads one to think in terms of land or buildings, while in the parable it means it as something of value that can be traded or invested, “Talents.” Noland suggests “something like ‘[business] capital’” (John Nolland, The New International Greek Testament Commentary: The Gospel of Matthew [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005], p. 1014).

[7] “Talents” (talanton, τάλαντον, noun neuter from tláō [n.f.]). To bear, "talent," a weight, a unit of measurement. Five thousand gold coins", TEV. In New Testament times a talent was a unit of exchange which varied in its value. The word can be used of money or silver or a weight of between 26 and 36 kilos of copper, silver or gold. So, it is a variable amount of money. We tend to think of a talent as a skill, but we draw this notion from the parable, not the meaning at the time."

[8] “His (own) ability” (ἰδίαν δύναμιν, idian dunamin). “Lit., his own or peculiar capacity for business. For some reason, idian, “own,” is seldom translated. The KJV has “His several ability.”

[9] The NRSV leaves out εὐθέως, immediately.

[10] “Traded” (ἐργάζομαι, ergázomai; imperf. ). “To trade, to make gains by trading, ‘do business’” (Thayer). Nolland suggests, “He worked with them (the talents)” meaning he actually put in some effort. “The slave and not just the money is on the job” (p. 1015).

[11] “Made” κερδαίνω, kerdainō, vb.). To make or gain or earn by way of interest. To increase wealth by investments usually in land. Notice that both the five and ten talent people made money through interest. But the first did it through trading in goods and the second just made it, presumably by collecting interest off of investments.

[12] “Though the second slave has less capital to work with, he makes the same percentage gain” (Nolland, p. 1015).

[13] “Came forward, bringing…” It has the sense of being a ceremonial presentation. Luke’s version says “your “Minas have earned ten minas.” Matt here says, “I have made five more talents.” Real pride in his work.

[14] See above on the value of a Talent. Only an extremely rich person could call this amount “little”

[15] “Enter into the joy of your master” (tēn charin tou kuriou sou). “The word chara or joy may refer to the feast on the master’s return. So also in Matt. 25:23” (Archibald Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament).

[16] “Harsh” (sklērós, σκληρός, adj., nom., masc.). A Harsh , stern, and unyielding person. Luke’s version of this parable has austere (austerōs), someone who might be inclined to impose an “austerity program” on indebted property owners. “Pertaining to being hard and demanding in one’s behavior—‘hard, severe, demanding.’ ἔγνων σε ὅτι σκληρὸς εἶ ἄνθρωπος, θερίζων ὅπου οὐκ ἔσπειρας. (Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament : Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd edition. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1989), 1:756.). “to harden, dry up. Dried up, dry, hard, stiff; of the voice or sounds as hoarse or harsh; of things as hard, tough, not soft. In the pl., tá sklērá, the hard things, stands in contrast to tá malaká, the soft things, or with a neg. connotation, the effeminate (1Co_6:9). Also from skéllō (n.f.): skoliós, crooked, warped. (The Complete Word Study Dictionary, (AMG International, Inc.: Chattanooga, TN: 1992, Rev. ed., 1993).

Would Jesus Join the "Occupy Wall Street" Movement?

2011-10-15T22:59:00.002-04:00

by John B. Cobb, Jr.

The Answer is Yes

To this question there is a simple answer: Yes. By that I mean that this is the kind of thing that Jesus in fact did. He drove the money changers out of the temple. He proclaimed the nearness of the basileia theou, which was the other world that is possible, the world organized for the benefit of the 99% (and even, in ways they don't want, of the 1% as well).

The basiliea theou was a counter-culture based on just the values that were rejected by the political, economic, and religious establishments of his day. I call it the "divine commonwealth." Jesus was killed for his in-your-face rejection of the political authorities, but these had the support of the religious authorities as well. So, if we project the character and commitments of Jesus into the contemporary world, we can expect that he would be occupying Wall Street.

The question is then why so many of those who want to be his followers, people like me, are not there. We have good excuses. Consider mine. I am the chief caregiver to my wife. I am committed to helping finish preparations for several conferences. It seems that fulfilling my commitments to others is more important than simply being another body on Wall Street or in Los Angeles.

But Jesus did not deal generously with excuses. When the rich young ruler was unwilling to sell all that he had and give it to the poor, Jesus did not have a discussion with him of why he needed to keep part of his money to take care of his family. When he told the parable of the banquet, he noted that many declined to come because they had family, professional, and business responsibilities. Clearly in his view they made the wrong choice.

From Greed to Justice

Even so, I am not sure that I would be a better disciple if I abandoned by wife and my commitments. Jesus also called on us to be "wise as serpents." Perhaps it is just rationalization, but I like to think that the basic choice for which Jesus calls so unequivocally is between putting first success in the dominant society (today, the American Empire and the world of consumerism), or putting first the divine commonwealth. I like to think that Jesus saw the reasons for not following him or coming to the banquet, the reasons he rejected, as favoring the status quo, the Empire, rather than the counter-culture he affirmed.

If we put first the divine commonwealth and live from its values, then we should use our critical abilities to decide how best to serve it. I persuade myself that implementing conferences that show how the Empire is destroying the world is a greater contribution to the realization of the divine commonwealth (in my particular circumstances) than participating in demonstrations, valuable as that is.

But that some of us may have good reasons for not physically joining the demonstrators in no way denies that Jesus can be found there among them. Those who are there, whether they know it or not, are part of the Jesus movement. The prophets of Israel initiated ethical critique of the powers that be in the name of God's justice. It is primarily through Jesus that this critique has become part of Western history. Those who engage in nonviolent protest against the powers and principalities of this world may or may not acknowledge the leadership of Jesus. That is not the test of discipleship. It is those who do the will of God, and not those who use the proper language, whom Jesus lauds.

When so clear an opportunity to follow Jesus presents itself as we have today, it is those of us who do not join in occupying Wall Street or Los Angeles who need to examine our consciences and our decisions. Are our reasons expressing the wisdom Jesus commends or the power of the Empire over us?

Is That all You Got?

2011-08-14T16:00:00.000-04:00

In this Sunday’s New York Times[1] there was an article by Binyamin Appelbaum and Helen Cooper, which discussed the two major debate streams in the Obama White House.

On the one hand, it said, there were people like David Plouffe and William Daley, who want him to hover close to the center and do things that will get through the radical right wing fringe groups that seem to have taken over Congress. Things like patent reform for inventors and free trade agreements with Panama which might, maybe, eventually help the children or grand children of workers in the US who have been put out of work by free trade agreements with Panama. Workers are aghast at them, but big-business and the people whose re-elections they pay for like them a lot. AND they might have a chance at passing a Republican filibuster.

On the other hand, there are people like Gene Sperling, Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, who argues for what he calls BIG ideas like tax cuts for businesses that hire new workers. Now, tax cuts for businesses that hire people is not a bad idea (according to studies, they are the only tax cut that helps during a recession)

But the BIG question, it seems to me is: is this all you’ve got? Is it really the case that with the worst jobs recession in seventy years, and a possible future of decades of economic malaise and personal misery, is it really, really true that the only two options the President of the United States is considering are between doing nothing and doing almost nothing? We have 9.2 percent unemployment and 4.6 million homes that are near foreclosure. Is this all we are being offered? More tax cuts are considered a BIG idea? Is it a paucity of brains or of concern that causes this kind of vapid boring thinking? As Arianna Huffington notes in her recent book, Third World America, “Does anyone believe that the sense of urgency coming out of Washington (and here, I’d add the Obama White house) wouldn’t be wildly different if the unemployment rate for the top 10 percent of income earners was 31 percent?...Of course not---the sense of national emergency would b so great you’d hear air-raid sirens howling.”[2]

[1] “White House Debates Fight on Economy,” Binyamin Appelbaum and Helene Cooper (New York Times, August 13, 2011), p. A1.

[2] Arianna Huffington, third World America: How our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), p. 13.

2011-08-11T22:34:00.001-04:00

Who owns America? Hint: It's not China

By Tom Mucha, Global Post

Truth is elusive. But it's a good thing we have math.

Our friends at Business Insider know this, and put those two principles to work today in this excellent and highly informative little slideshow, made even more timely by the ongoing talks in Washington, D.C. aimed at staving off a U.S. debt default.

Here's the big idea:

Many people — politicians and pundits alike — prattle on that China and, to a lesser extent Japan, own most of America's $14.3 trillion in government debt.

But there's one little problem with that conventional wisdom: it's just not true. While the Chinese, Japanese and plenty of other foreigners own substantial amounts, it's really Americans who hold most of America's debt.
Here's a quick and fascinating breakdown by total amount held and percentage of total U.S. debt, according to Business Insider:

Hong Kong: $121.9 billion (0.9 percent)
Caribbean banking centers: $148.3 (1 percent)
Taiwan: $153.4 billion (1.1 percent)
Brazil: $211.4 billion (1.5 percent)
Oil exporting countries: $229.8 billion (1.6 percent)
Mutual funds: $300.5 billion (2 percent)
Commercial banks: $301.8 billion (2.1 percent)
State, local and federal retirement funds: $320.9 billion (2.2 percent)
Money market mutual funds: $337.7 billion (2.4 percent)
United Kingdom: $346.5 billion (2.4 percent)
Private pension funds: $504.7 billion (3.5 percent)
State and local governments: $506.1 billion (3.5 percent)
Japan: $912.4 billion (6.4 percent)
U.S. households: $959.4 billion (6.6 percent)
China: $1.16 trillion (8 percent)
The U.S. Treasury: $1.63 trillion (11.3 percent)
Social Security trust fund: $2.67 trillion (19 percent)

So America owes foreigners about $4.5 trillion in debt. But America owes America $9.8 trillion.

For a smart take on how President Obama and House Republicans should end gridlock over debt and deficits, see our new GlobalPost series The Negotiator, which features Wharton's negotiation guru Stuart Diamond.

And to bone up on China's debt — another potentially big global economic headache — check out this interview with brainy-yet-coherent Northwestern University economist Victor Shih, who spoke with GlobalPost's David Case.

2011-08-03T22:00:00.009-04:00

How Much Harm Will it Do?

Stan Duncan

Now that we have raised the debt ceiling (or paid off the hostage-takers, depending on your point of view) it might be a good time to review how much damage the deal will do to the economy, to the recovery, and to ordinary people trying to hold down jobs.

Before I try to total that up, here is a brief overview of how we got here. You can skip down if you already know all of this.

Where did it come from?
Our US debt itself (the fact that we have borrowed money) has been around for a long time, but the deficit (the fact that we spend more than we make) was pretty much eradicated during the Clinton years. When president Clinton left office we had a surplus of about $412 billion and we were on track for eventually paying down the total debt itself (which was about $8 trillion). When President George Bush left office eight years later, the entire surplus was gone. The deficit had grown to over $500 billion, and the debt was around $14 trillion.

Liberals and conservatives argue over how much influence President Clinton or the high tech explosion had to do with that, but the fact remains that we had a surplus during his administration. He raised taxes and social spending and unemployment went down. And when people are employed they pay taxes. Remember that part: when people are employed, their taxes pull down the deficit.

President Bush had two unfunded wars, three unfunded tax cuts (one in the spring of 2008 that no one talks about), an unfunded prescription drug program, and a recession. The unfunded programs and tax cuts were like paying money out and the recession kept money from coming in (actually the recession did both: tax revenue went down and expenditures for unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc. went up).

At the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 both the Bush and Obama administrations spent hundreds of billions in stimulus to help stave off an economic meltdown. However, a good amount of President Bush’s spending was in loans to Wall Street, which have been paid back, and much of Obama’s was for jobs, which came back in terms of workers paying taxes, so in the long run neither of their programs impacted the deficit in the way that the wars, tax cuts, the drug program and recession did. Economists differ on how much all of these things drove up the deficit (see my previous post on that), but by any estimate except Rush Limbaugh’s, when President Obama took office the US deficit had soared upwards by trillions of dollars.

To be fair, this description of the origin of the deficit comes mainly from economists and observers from the right, left and center. There is an alternative view from people like Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), who argues that the deficit is the result of the “out of control spending” of unnamed members of Congress (apparently Democrats) between 2000 and 2008, and the “Job-killing tax increases” that President Obama might be pushing on us one of these days. Even though evidence for this view is difficult to come by, it seems to be the predominant opinion held by the media, the White House, and both houses of Congress.

So, where are we now?

At the beginning of 2011, the Republican leadership in Congress announced that they had kidnapped the debt ceiling and would not let it go free until they had been paid an astronomical ransom in cuts in social spending. And if the Obama administration did not agree to their demands, they would blow up the economy by refusing to allow the federal government to borrow money. That act would throw our tepid recovery back into a deeper recession, families and jobs would be ruined for decades, and our future as a global economic player would be in jeopardy. They didn’t really want to do it, they said, but they had no choice because otherwise somewhere a few decades from now there might come a time when someone might get hurt if they didn’t do it. (They didn’t put it in quite those terms, but you get the idea.)

It is a form of what I call “Economic Apocalypticism,” the belief that we need to cause a catastrophic human apocalypse right now, with pain, suffering, and hunger, in order to create a pure capitalist order generations from now for our grand children. As examples of this, look at the draconian cuts in social spending imposed on poor and developing countries in the 1980s by the IMF and the resulting rises in poverty, homelessness, and illiteracy. It is sometimes referred to as “Shock Treatment” by economists like Jeffrey Sachs and others. It means: cause agony and death for hundreds of thousands of innocent people right now on the gamble that their grandchildren might be able to claw their way back into a middle class life years from now. The theory was common currency in the economic development circles of two decades ago and is apparently also behind the death threats of Congressional Republicans today.

The Democrats and the Obama administration inexplicably believed that the Republicans were not bluffing in their threats to destroy the economy, and moved into protracted hostage negotiations over how much to give up to keep them from killing the planet. Then, according to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Congress agreed to ninety-percent of their demands, with an additional promise that a bi-partisan panel will be set up to decide how much more will be given to them later.

So, what is the damage?

Let’s begin by acknowledging that cuts in social spending will hurt the economy and drive up the deficit. We often hear that it will, of course, also cut the deficit, but not by as much as you think because the people you fire will no longer pay income or sales taxes. Firing people can lower the deficit, but it also to some degree increases it—that in addition to causing fear and pain to millions of innocent families. Cutting social spending in the middle of the worse job losses in seventy years is much like bleeding hemophiliacs to see if it will help them get well. It wasn’t successful in the 1200s, and it probably will not work today.

How much damage will it do? First, the debt reduction plan will cut $3 trillion from Federal spending over 10 years. That comes out to about $300 billion in spending reductions per year. The higher amounts of that, however, are set to be cut in future years so that people won’t feel as much of it before the elections, so for our present numbers let’s assume that only $100 billion will be cut next year.

So, deduct that $100 billion from our annual spending, which is presently around $3.5 trillion, and it will shrink the GDP by about 3%. (The math is 100/3,500.) That, by the way, is probably a bit low because it doesn’t take into account the “Multiplier effect.” Every time a dollar changes in hands there is a value added to it, which adds to the GDP. Direct Government expenditures can increase the GDP by anywhere from 1.20% to 1.75% (tax cuts, on the other hand, are usually a loss). So, the overall loss to the economy is probably larger than my simple equation.

According to a rule of thumb called “Okun's law,” if the GDP is depressed by 3%, then the unemployment rate should go up by about half that, or 1.5%. That is of course, assuming that only jobs will be cut and not waste, so to be fair, let’s assuming that in this first year we will only drive up unemployment by 1%.

Right now unemployment in America is 9.2%. Add another one percent to that and we get 10.2%. What this means is that the number of jobs lost by this act then, comes out to be about 1.5 million jobs next year. And that’s just at the start. More government-caused job losses are to come. Each year they will get larger; each year we will depress the GDP further and hurt families deeper.

Already cut backs in jobs and benefits on state and local levels are one of the major contributing factors in our high unemployment and low tax revenue and the first line of hurt will be state and local governments. One out of every three dollars of state spending comes from the federal government — $478 billion alone in 2010. That will definitely be cut. In the first half of 2011 almost all of the job gains in the private sector were lost again by firings in the public sector. From August 2008 to the present, over 577,000 jobs have been lost to government belt-tightening.

Some of the biggest items that are to be cut in the bill are spending on education and Medicaid for the poor That won't hurt many in Congress, who are generally richer than "average" Americans and prefer private schools for their children, but for the rest of us, it could be one more step in our national decline. Note that nearly every state government has already set its budget for the next two years assuming a certain amount of federal dollars to come in. With this bill, all of those programs will have to be cut back. Local governments will probably try to raise property taxes to raise revenue, but that would be one more drag on the housing market that’s already dragging the bottom. Many local municipalities are already filing for bankruptcy and that will accelerate depending on how fast Washington’s cuts begin impacting them.

As long as we believe that the pain and fear of our recession is not related to Wall Street gambling, Mortgage loan scandals etc., but out-of-control spending by God knows who in our pasts, and that the only way out of it is through cuts in taxes for the wealth and benefits for the poor, and that the only way to find God’s final realm for the next generation is by balancing our checkbook on the backs of the poor, the sick, the elderly and the very young, then we will continue to decline into what looks from this side as an abyss of madness and evil…but that’s just my opinion.

The Tea Party’s War on America

2011-08-02T06:19:00.001-04:00

New York Times

Op-Ed Columnist

By JOE NOCERA

August 1, 2011

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

Joe Nocera

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. After this latest agreement was finally struck on Sunday night — amounting to a near-complete capitulation by Obama — Tea Party members went on Fox News to complain that it only called for $2.4 trillion in cuts, instead of $4 trillion. It was head-spinning.

All day Monday, the blogosphere and the talk shows mused about which party would come out ahead politically. Honestly, who cares? What ought to matter is not how these spending cuts will affect our politicians, but how they’ll affect the country. And I’m not even talking about the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class. I am talking about their effect on America’s still-ailing economy.

America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved. What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending. Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.

One thing Roosevelt did right during the Depression was legislate into being a social safety net to soften the blows that a free-market economy can mete out in tough times. During this recession, it’s as if the government is going out of its way to make sure the blows are even more severe than they have to be. The debt-ceiling debate reflects a harsher, less empathetic America. It’s sad to see.

My own view is that Obama should have played the 14th Amendment card, using its language about “the validity of the public debt” to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling. Yes, he would have infuriated the Republicans, but so what? They already view him as the Antichrist. Legal scholars believe that Congress would not have been able to sue to overturn his decision. Inexplicably, he chose instead a course of action that maximized the leverage of the Republican extremists.

Assuming the Senate passes the bill on Tuesday, the debt ceiling will be a nonissue until after the next election. But the debilitating deficit battles are by no means over. Thanks to this deal, a newly formed supercommittee of Congress is supposed to target another $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in cuts by late November. If those cuts don’t become law by Dec. 23, automatic across-the-board cuts will be imposed, including deep reductions in defense spending.

As has been explained ad nauseam, the threat of defense cuts is supposed to give the Republicans an incentive to play fair with the Democrats in the negotiations. But with our soldiers still fighting in Afghanistan, which side is going to blink if the proposed cuts threaten to damage national security? Just as they did with the much-loathed bank bailout, which most Republicans spurned even though financial calamity loomed, the Democrats will do the responsible thing. Apparently, that’s their problem.

For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 2, 2011, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: The Tea Party’s War On America.

Deficit 101

2011-07-30T09:25:00.002-04:00

With Congress tangled in a fight to the death over how many lives we need to destroy in order to save us from a budget crisis we might encounter ten to fifteen years from now, I thought I’d put down some thoughts on the deficit and where it came from.

Before beginning, it’s probably helpful to start by saying that the deficit itself has only been around for a short while. At the end of President Clinton’s term of office, we had a surplus of $236 billion.[1] All of that changed with the Bush Administration, but contrary to what a lot of liberals like to think, he is not the sole cause of the recession.

In the very short term, the biggest contributor to the short fall in revenue is the recession. People lost jobs, businesses collapsed, and federal revenue went from 18.5% of GDP in 2007 to 14.8% in 2010.[2]

At the same time, spending went up. When people are unemployed, we pay out much more on unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, social security (people in their 60s throw in the towel and retire early) and so on.

Add to that the Recovery act under Obama and the TARP under Bush (much of which, however, was later paid back) and Federal outlays grew from 19% of the GDP in 2007 to 24% in 2010.[3]

Finally, add to all of that the fact that state and local governments have been firing people at a breakneck pace, driving up unemployment and driving down revenue from taxes. It is estimated that since 2008, as many as 500,000 people have been fired by state and local governments and cut salaries of even more, as a way to help balance their budgets, which is somewhat like bleeding a hemophiliac to see if it will make him get well. The problem in a recession is that a cycle has ended or a bubble has burst and people either have less money to spend or they grow concerned about spending it and the economy grinds down. The way to fix that is to put a lot of money back into the system which adds incomes to some and confidence to others until the machinery begins to run on its own. In this recession, following a small burst of crisis aversion money at the very beginning, our plan instead is to fire even more people and cut even more programs which will make the economic down turn even worse. When the when the housing bubble burst, we lost $4.2 trillion in real estate values. (Yes, that was inflated values, but people trusted it, borrowed against it and based their lives on it, so its loss is a real loss). When you add to that equities, businesses, and other forms of wealth, altogether the US lost around $12.2 trillion since its peak in 2007.[4] So, it’s easy to see how the $300 billion in the TARP program under president Bush (mainly to bail out Wall Street Banks and little for the real economy), and the stimulus package of $789 under President Obama (two-thirds of which were tax cuts to win Republican support and reimbursements to counteract state and local government cutbacks) were only a tiny fraction of what was needed to right the struggling economy.

Other, medium term causes:

Some of of the recession is attributable to the anti-regulation policies of the Bush Administration (a trend which began in the latter Clinton years), some of it is blindness of the Federal Reserve (keeping interest rates too low and allowing the housing bubble to get out of hand) and some of it is the greed and sin of mortgage originators and wall Street gamblers. So, there’s plenty of sin to go around for all of us.

The spikes in the deficit which are most attributed to policies of President Bush are three:

The cost of two unfunded wars.

The Bush Administration said that it would cost between $50-60 billion. Soon after the war began, official government estimates revised it upwards to $1 trillion. Many economists, most notably Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz,[5] now put the number at over $3 trillion, and say that it will continue to grow for decades. They include not just the fighting itself, but such things as disability payments to wounded veterans and the interest paid on the loans we took out to pay for the wars. More recently, the very well respected Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University[6] brought together 20 scholars from many fields to bring out the most precise number yet on the costs and they put it at present to be just over $4 trillion, with the additions of interest and health care that Bilmes and Stiglitz included, which are estimated to be just over $250 billion per decade for the next forty years.[7]

The costs of the two major unfunded tax cuts

The Treasury Dept has estimated that costs of making the tax cuts permanent for everyone is $3.7 trillion over 10 years.[8]

The center on Budget ande Policy Priorities says the tax cuts will create almost $7 trillion in deficits from 2009 through 2019, including the associated cost of servicing the debt.[9]

The cost of unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug plan.

The Bush administration won support in Congress for his plan in a very tight vote by claiming that it would only cost $400 billion over ten years. After it passed they recalculated and discovered that they were off by about $800 billion but instead would be closer to $1.2 trillion. Since then projections are as high as $2 trillion.

Many progressives supported this, because there’s nothing wrong with increasing healthcare. But the question why there were no provisions to pay for it, and why the Bush administration blocked the administrators from using free market forces to “jawbone” down prices from the drug manufacturers. It could have been a golden opportunity to start lowering health care costs, but the legislation prevents itself us from doing that.

Speaking of health care…

In the Long term, Health Care is going to be the biggest driver of the deficit.

The costs are rapid and dramatic and will soon be unsustainable. There were a number of provisions in the Affordable Health Care Act that would have slowed its rise, but they were blocked, mainly by members of Congress who receive major campaign contributions from the health care industry (I’m not accusing them of anything, I’m just saying…)

If our health care costs were rising at the rate of the other wealthy countries of the world, we would not be having a long-term problem with health care.[10] (But, then, if we took advice from the rest of the world it would be an attack on the myth of American exceptionalism and it would mean becoming commie socialists and taking care of our own people and we could never live with such a thing.) Social Security, by the way, while slowly running out of money, is not a major driver of our growing debt. Its total shortfall is projected to be 0.7% of total GDP of the next 75 years. That will actually have a very small impact on the budget compared to the recession and tax cuts, which will, over the next decade, consume 1.5% and 2.6% of GDP respectively.[11]

[1] You can download an Excel chart of that by going here: www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

[2] http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/01-26-Outlook.pdf

[3] Ibid.

[4] http://www.mybudget360.com/the-balance-sheet-recession-42-trillion-lost-in-residential-real-estate-value-yet-mortgage-debt-down-by-140-billion/

[5] Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, “The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond” (The Washington Post, Sunday, September 5, 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html

[6] See “Costs of War” (http://costsofwar.org).

[7] Caring for US veterans, “Costs of War” http://costsofwar.org/article/caring-us-veterans.

[8] “Bush tax cuts: What you need to know,” http://money.cnn.com/2010/09/15/news/economy/bush_tax_cuts_faqs/index.htm

[9] Kathy Ruffing and James R. Horney, “Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers,” June 28, 2010 (www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3036#_ftnref6)

[10] http://www.oecd.org/document/30/0,3746,en_2649_34631_12968734_1_1_1_1,00.html

[11] http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/01-26-Outlook.pdf

Home Prices Fell Through The Floor. Mortgage Debt Didn't.

2011-06-14T06:06:00.000-04:00

From NPR's Planet Money Blog

by Jacob Goldstein
In the past few years, home prices have fallen back to where they were before the bubble. But mortgage debt still has a long way to go.

Enlarge Calculated Risk

Bringing debt levels back down — what economists call de-leveraging — is a long, painful process. It's a key part of the bust in the boom-and-bust cycle, and it's often characterized by slow economic growth and high unemployment.
One recent study found that the de-leveraging process typically takes as long as the credit boom that preceded it. That study found that the recent credit boom lasted for about a decade, and ended in 2007.
So if the pattern holds true this time — and that graph above suggests it might — we will be in for several more years of de-leveraging.
The CalculatedRisk graph above is based on data from the Fed's latest Flow of Funds report, which came out today.

The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic

2011-05-18T08:49:00.000-04:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516/

Posted on May 16, 2011

By Chris Hedges

The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be sacrificed on the altar of power.
Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.

“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there.

“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”

* * * *

“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council].”

* * * *

“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.

“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”

Don't Hold a Bake Sale

2011-05-06T08:19:00.001-04:00

Recently, researchers Sanjai Bhagat and Brian Bolton studied the stock holdings and sales of the 14 CEOs who headed the 14 US financial institutions that received TARP funding to survive. The list included the losers after the 2008 meltdown (like Lehmann bros.) and winners (like Goldman Sachs).

All of them owned stock in their own financial institution and all of them traded their stock as individuals. Cumulatively, in 2000, the 14 CEOs held $6.8 billion of their own institution’s stock (about $485 per CEO) and from 2000 to 2008, their wealth from trades grew to $1.8 billion each.

When the crash came, they had paper losses of $2.0 billion in the crash, but their personal wealth had collectively grown by $649 million and they still had $939 million in net stock holdings. Even with all of their losses, they came out of the disaster with a profit of $46 million per CEO with another $67 million in their stock portfolio.

(And this is unrelated to their official compensation which averaged about $890 million per person, per year.)

Meanwhile, among the recipients of their greedy, immoral, and frequently illegal behavior, millions lost their jobs, millions more lost their homes, tens of millions were thrown into poverty, and even more kept their jobs but had severe declines in income. And not one CEO is in jail.

For more on executive pay, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-martin/post_2008_b_857945.html

2011-04-29T21:24:00.000-04:00

Some Kind of Deficit

Thomas Massaro, S.J.

APRIL 18, 2011

My friends are tired of hearing me bemoan how seldom public discourse ever gets around to addressing substantive issues of justice, such as the shape of public finance and budgeting. So I suppose I ought to be rejoicing that our nation is conducting serious high-level debates about economic priorities: fierce budget battles in Washington; statehouse rallies in Wisconsin in support of beleaguered public-sector unions; deficit hawks wielding the budget axe with a vengeance; Congressional wrangling on debt ceiling extensions.

Sure, I am glad that such matters at least occasionally eclipse celebrity scandals and have maintained a place on the front page alongside the recent crises in Japan and Libya. If I harbor disappointment, it is because so many of our political leaders are getting it all wrong and are endorsing the wrong priorities entirely.

The shape of the current budget debates changes from minute to minute, and there is no way to predict the eventual outcome. Will we avert a government shutdown, or will the reckless game of “chicken” prevent sensible bipartisan compromise? But beyond the ebb and flow of events, a key challenge is to stay in touch with the bedrock ethical principles that should guide any process of social deliberation. Spiritual writers use the phrase id quod volo (“that which I desire”) to capture this task of discerning proper and heartfelt goals. I deeply desire to live in a country that:

Does not abandon its poor to starvation, homelessness and destitution. Deficit hawks always seem to circle above the prey of anti-poverty programs, especially those with shadowy names like community services block grants. But the more you know about the crucial assistance they provide to struggling people and neighborhoods, the more eager you will be to exempt these particular heads from the chopping block. Investments in community health centers, job training and early childhood development for disadvantaged groups, through programs like Head Start, will surely in the long run save money for government at all levels. Current proposals to cut them sharply amount to eating our seed corn. Whether we argue from outcomes or from ethics, it is easy to agree with a line from a recent letter from the U.S. bishops’ conference to the Senate: “In a time of economic crisis, poor and vulnerable people are in greater need of assistance, not less.”
Protects the rights of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Several cash-strapped states are seeking to limit the influence of public-sector unions. Even some Catholic voices, like the Rev. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute, are piling on against the unions, demonizing them as impediments to prosperity and justice. To his great credit, Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee stepped up to defend the constant tradition of church support for organized labor, writing: “Hard times do not nullify the moral obligation each of us has to respect the legitimate rights of workers.” Scapegoating and demonizing organized labor is a sure sign that the drift of public deliberation is turning away from authentic social justice.
Maintains a commitment to the least privileged around the world. The slash-and-burn approach to budget-cutting has targeted the already modest funding the United States provides to assist programs crucial for development. Foreign aid makes possible life-saving public health and social service outreach to some of the poorest people on earth. Cut-ting humanitarian aid and international pover-ty-focused development assistance would seriously undermine our nation’s leadership position in the world community. Fighting epidemics and helping people grow subsistence crops are not optional expenditures for a responsible nation, no matter how badly it needs to pinch pennies.

Each of us could compile a much longer list of deep desires, but these three priorities will always be near the top of my list.

Sure, deficits are serious concerns, but the current budget process is heading in a direction that is ethically and practically indefensible. Leaders from both parties appear not to be acting on consistent principles and seem unaware of the real human costs they are imposing through austerity plans. When politicians hide behind the mantra, “We are broke,” I am often tempted to think, “Morally bankrupt may be more like it.”

Jon Stweart on Provisions in the "First Responders" Bill

2011-04-28T21:15:00.000-04:00

I don't usually pass on videos, but this one struck me as unusually funny and biting at the same time. It's Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," commenting on the amazingly absurd provision in the long-awaited "First Responder" bill that helps Fire Fighters and others who were made ill by working long hours in the rubble of the World Trade Center following 9/11. Even though he is funny about it, he can barely contain his rage over the evil, inhumane, and just stupid provision.

The scene is in two parts below.

Enjoy (more or less),

Stan

Part one:

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Part two:

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

2011-04-21T08:47:00.001-04:00

Warning! Inequality May Be Hazardous to Your Growth

There is little question that growing income inequality is dangerous for democracy. Money as a form of "Freedom of Speech" is now firmly a part of American law and its impact on swaying elections and passing bills is increasingly clear. However, it seems that the gap could also be bad for a country's economy. The more money that gets sucked out of the economy and into the accounts of the wealthiest classes, the smaller are the resources the country has with which to sustain growth times and bounce back in recessions.

In a recent note on the IMF Blog, shares research they did on the relationship between income and economic stability and found that countries that have a declining income gap (like Brazil) have longer booms and shorter busts. And countries with a widening income gap (like the US) are just the opposite: longer busts and shorter booms. Our experience in the recent sluggish recovery from the 2001 recession and non-recovery from the 2008 recession seem to support their research.

Here is an excerpt from the article, "Warning! Inequality May Be Hazardous to Your Growth," (Note that bold faced print was in the original.)

Some time ago, we became interested in long periods of high growth (“growth spells”) and what keeps them going. The initial thought was that sometimes crises happen when a “growth spell” comes to an end, as perhaps occurred with Japan in the 1990s.

We approached the problem as a medical researcher might think of life expectancy, looking at age, weight, gender, smoking habits, etc. We do something similar, looking for what might bring long “growth spells” to an end by focusing on factors like political institutions, health and education, macroeconomic instability, debt, trade openness, and so on.

Somewhat to our surprise, income inequality stood out in our analysis as a key driver of the duration of “growth spells”.

We found that high “growth spells” were much more likely to end in countries with less equal income distributions. The effect is large.

For example, we estimate that closing, say, half the inequality gap between Latin America and emerging Asia would more than double the expected duration of a “growth spell”. Inequality seemed to make a big difference almost no matter what other variables were in the model or exactly how we defined a “growth spell”.

Inequality is of course not the only thing that matters but, from our analysis, it clearly belongs in the “pantheon” of well-established growth factors such as the quality of political institutions or trade openness.

While income distribution within a given country is pretty stable most of the time, it sometimes moves a lot. In addition to the United States in recent decades, we’ve also seen changes in China and many other countries. Brazil reduced inequality significantly from the early 1990s through a focused set of transfer programs that have become a model for many around the world.

A reduction of the magnitude achieved by Brazil could—albeit with uncertainty about the precise effect—increase the expected length of a typical “growth spell” by about 50 percent.

The upshot? It is a big mistake to separate analyses of growth and income distribution. A rising tide is still critical to lifting all boats. The implication of our analysis is that helping to raise the lowest boats may actually help to keep the tide rising!

2011-04-20T08:36:00.000-04:00

The “Hire Abroad, Fire at Home” Strategy

There was a very interesting article in The Wall Street Journal this morning by David Wessel. I hope it gets commented on by politicians and the mainstream press (including Wessel’s own paper).

It has to do with the employment strategy of the major employing corporations in America.

According to data from the US Commerce Department during the 2000s, multi-national corporations based in the US cut their domestic work force by 2.9 million while expanding it overseas by nearly as much at 2.4 million. The irony of that, of course, is that the 2000s were touted as an era of low taxes, low regulations, with an abundance of incentives to help corporations grow and make money for the rest of us. They did grow, but just didn’t make any money for the rest of us. Income and jobs stagnated during that time for the vast majority of Americans. The recovery from the 2001 recession was one of the most sluggish on record, and of course any minimal gains we received were wiped out in 2008.

This is interesting because by comparison, the nineties are now being ridiculed and dismissed by many on the right as a high tax, high regulation era that stifled growth and discouraged corporate profits. But, again according to the US Commerce Department’s numbers, in those years the multi-nationals created 4.4 million jobs in the US and 2.7 million elsewhere. They created almost twice as many domestic jobs as international jobs. Altogether, they employed 21.1 million here and 10.3 abroad. Not bad for a country led by a godless, commie, socialist, philandering, murderous tax and spend liberal.

Click here to go to the article in the Journal.

And click here for a summary of it at the Business Insider.

Woe to You, Legislators!

2011-04-15T11:24:00.000-04:00

Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: A Guide for Economic and Moral Recovery, and CEO of Sojourners. He blogs at www.godspolitics.com. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.

It is reported that Congressman Paul Ryan makes every member of his staff read philosopher Ayn Rand, the shameless promoter of the gospel of aggressive self-interest. This makes sense to me as I read Congressman Ryan's new budget proposal. I wish he had his staff reading the Bible instead.

While widely lauded by conservatives, Congressman Ryan's budget isn't really about deficit reduction. It's about choices -- choices that will determine what kind of a country we become. And Paul Ryan has made the choice to hurt people who don't have the political clout to defend themselves. Two-thirds of the long-term budget cuts that Ryan proposed are directed at modest and low-income people, as well as the poorest of the poor at home and abroad. At the same time, he proposed tax cuts up to 30 percent for some of our country's wealthiest corporations. Let me say that again: Two-thirds of the cuts come at the expense of already struggling people and families, while corporations posting record profits get tax breaks. In short, the most vulnerable members of society are being attacked by Ryan and his supporters. This makes them bullies.
In dramatic contrast, Ryan has chosen to help the people who need help the least. Wealthy individuals and companies reap a windfall of benefits in Ryan's plan -- with tax cuts and breaks, continued subsidies and loopholes for every powerful special interest, and increased corporate welfare payments from the government. Congressman Ryan and his supporters have carefully and faithfully rewarded the rich people who make their campaign contributions, and, in most cases, have also rewarded themselves as rich people. This makes them corrupt.

And, as self-professed budget hawks, they have completely ignored the most consistently egregious, wasteful, and morally compromised area of the whole federal budget -- our endless and unaccountable military spending. Paul Ryan and the Republicans would cut nothing from the Pentagon profligacy. This makes them hypocrites.

You may think that my language sounds too strong: "bullies", "corrupt", "hypocrites." But listen to the prophet Isaiah:

Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims -- laws that make misery for the poor, that rob my destitute people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children. What will you have to say on Judgment Day, when Doomsday arrives out of the blue? Who will you get to help you? What good will your money do you? (Isaiah 10:1-3, The Message)

Ryan's budget seems to follow, almost line by line, the "oppressive statues" Isaiah rails against. Ryan's budget slashes health care for the poor and elderly by gutting Medicaid and undermining Medicare, and cuts funding for food stamps, early childhood development programs, low-income housing assistance, and educational programs for students.

Cuts of this magnitude for people of modest and low-incomes will result in a direct increase of poverty and misery in America. Furthermore, poverty-focused international assistance proven to save lives is under continued attack. As Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said, not all cuts are equal because some will lead to "a fever and a small coffin."

Simply put, the Ryan budget is a bonanza for the rich and devastation for the poor, and it will never be accepted by the religious community. And I don't believe Ryan's budget expresses the values of the American people. I just don't believe it. (You can click here if it doesn't represent your values.)
Of course, many Americans, including in the faith community, believe that rising deficits are immoral and a threat to our future. But how you reduce a deficit is also a moral issue, and to do so by further impoverishing the poor in order to add more wealth to the wealthy is not an acceptable political or moral strategy.
Ayn Rand said, "Money is the barometer of a society's virtue," and she made no apology for not liking the teachings of Jesus. But for those of us who do aim to live out the teachings of Jesus, the Paul Ryan budget is a moral non-starter.

Yesterday, as President Obama offered his budget, he both failed and succeeded. What Obama failed to say was that we are currently wasting lives and billions of dollars in Afghanistan on a strategy that fails to make us any safer. Today, I am joining with some fiscal conservatives and Republican members of Congress at a "ReThink Afghanistan" press conference. We don't agree on a lot of other budget issues, but we are united in our belief that we are wasting lives and money with misguided strategy in Afghanistan. For those who truly care about the deficit, I believe this is the first place we should start cutting.

The president succeeded yesterday by making this important statement: "In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That's who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that's paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That's not right. And it's not going to happen as long as I'm president."

This last line was the clearest message we've heard for some time from the White House. It's a message President Obama will have to repeat over and over again in the months ahead against all the pressures to compromise. Presidents sometimes have to draw some clear lines in the sand, and the time for this president to do that is now.

2011-03-08T15:32:00.000-05:00

At IMF, the hunt for a new consensus

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 7, 2011; 10:43 PM

It was a fitting eulogy for the economic orthodoxy that once governed the world, given by one of the men who helped develop it.

"Before the crisis, we had converged on a beautiful construction" to explain how markets could protect themselves from harm, said Olivier Blanchard, an economics counselor at the International Monetary Fund.

"But beauty is not synonymous with truth."

That beautiful construction held that central banks need only control inflation and that markets would virtually govern themselves with a light touch from government. It largely blinded mainstream economists from foreseeing the ugly depths of the 2008 downturn. Blanchard himself, upon assuming his IMF position in September 2008, projected there would be "limited cost in terms of real [economic] activity."

Now the list of discredited theories is lengthy.

The efficient-market hypothesis, which argued that smart investors would be on their own guard against undue risk, lost face during the subprime mortgage crisis. Mainstream central bank policy is being tested in the recovery. The ability of developed economies to sustain low unemployment is in doubt. A globalized world, it turns out, linked companies and economies together in ways not fully understood.

What's less certain - and the focus of Blanchard and a panel of top world economists who gathered at the IMF this week - is whether a new consensus can be salvaged out of the ashes of the old.

It is no mere academic debate. World governments are being asked to cooperate on economic policy at a level never seen before. Some of the ideas being discussed could affect everything from long-run unemployment rates in the United States to the extent of welfare benefits in Europe or the availability and cost of home mortgage loans.

Global bank regulators are talking of rules to limit asset bubbles - possibly making it more difficult for home values in the United States to recover their previous levels. They are developing lists of large institutions that need more regulation - a potential constraint on the financial industry as a whole. In Europe, some are pushing for a kind of shared sovereignty that would limit a country's ability to make its own decisions on government spending.

The economists driving the policy discussion, however, say they are far from developing a new playbook.
"We realize that many of the things we thought with certainty we cannot anymore," said Kemal Dervis, head of the global economics program at the Brookings Institution and a longtime World Bank and Turkish government official. "But from there to an overall consensus on how monetary and fiscal and growth policies are linked - we are very far off."

Some underlying principles are emerging, largely surrounding the need for government and central banks to be more interventionist.

The IMF, for example, has typically discouraged countries from imposing restrictions on the flow of capital, arguing that global markets work best when investment is free to move.

That view is now changing amid broad acknowledgment that countries in the developing world performed well during a crisis that originated in the United States. The IMF is developing guidelines for those economies to use "capital controls" as a way to buffer themselves from the damaging impact that large, rapid movements of money can have on prices, currency values and other aspects of the economy.

It is just one way that what Guillermo Ortiz, Mexico's central bank governor, referred to as the "Anglo-Saxon concept" of economic policy needs to be adapted to a more diverse and globalized world.

"We really believed that the people of the developed world managing the world economy knew what they were doing," Ortiz said.

There was also a general sense that central banks such as the Federal Reserve need to take a more activist approach - concerning themselves not just with inflation, unemployment and interest rates, but with broader efforts at keeping the economy and financial system stable.

That, and some of the other ideas under discussion, may prove politically difficult to enact, something that the economists in the two-day meeting acknowledged. University of California at Berkeley economist David Romer, among others, noted that U.S. politicians were not leveling with citizens about issues such as the long-run need to curb public debt or about the amount of economic stimulus that might be needed to meaningfully bring down unemployment in the short run.

Neither, said Columbia University professor and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, is there any guarantee that the old orthodoxy won't resurface.

While there is "broad understanding" about the need for more regulation and more government and central bank oversight, "the big issue is whether policy will go back to the way it was but with a bit more rhetorical flourish," he said. Stiglitz added that anyone with faith in regulatory efforts to date, including the recently enacted Dodd-Frank legislation, "has to be on another planet."

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2011-02-06T22:44:00.005-05:00

NEW RESOURCES TO HELP YOU LEARN ABOUT AND HELP PROMOTE:

"From Spirituality to Activism"
(Without Choosing One Over the Other)

8:00-4:00

March 19, 2011

Christ Congregational Church, UCC, Brockton

$10.00, which includes lunch, payable either in advance or at the door.

(Click here for directions)

An important conference designed to ask "what does our spiritual heritage call us to do in a broken and damaged world?" And "how you and your church can become an activist in ministry and action in that world?"

Keynote Speaker: Rev. Dr. James Forbes

Pastor Emeritus Riverside Church, NYC; director of Healing of the Nations Foundation.

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Mary Luti

Dean of Chapel and Professor of Preaching and Worship at Andover Newton Theological School

Music: Earth Harmony

South Shore Gospel, Bluegrass, Traditional, and Folk group

The Workshops:

Morning:

"Homelessness and Your Church," Tom Washington, Executive Director, Mainspring House, Brockton.

"Faith-Based Political Advocacy for Hungry People," Flavia DeSouza, Northeast Organizer for Bread for the World.

"Seafarers Friend," Rev. J. Loring Carpenter, Executive Director.

"Guiding Your Church Through 'Opening and Affirming' Without Getting Your Pastor Fired," Rev. Fran Bogle, Just Peace Coordinator, Just Peace Players.

Afternoon:

"'Let your fingers do the walking!' Hand-held finger labyrinths as tools for focus, meditation, prayer," Helen Rowe Blake.

"How to do Mission When You Don't Have Any Money," Rev. Peter Wells, MACUCC, Associate Conference Minister and coordinator of Conference Mission & Justice programs.

"How Faith Communities can Work for Immigrant Rights," Alex Kern, Chaplain, Brandeis University, and executive director of Boston Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries.

"Advocacy for Fair Trade Over Free Trade in the Developing World," Neeka Stanley, Jubilee Massachusetts.

"Planet At Risk: The Hidden Casualties of Wars and Militarism," Beth Adams, MACUCC Eco Ministries, NE Regional UCC Environmental Justice, and long-time faith-based environmental, human rights, and peace and justice activist.

More Resources and Information

How do I sign up?

Click here

to ask more questions and find more information. An email will open up to Ms. Ruth Poole, conference registrar.

Click here

to download a registration form. You can either (a) print it out, fill it out by hand, and mail it in to the address included on it, or (b) fill it out on your word processor and send it back as an attachment to the email address included on it.

Click here

to forward this notice to someone else you know who would love to come.

How Do I Publicize this Event?

Click here

for a down-loadable flier about the conference. Post it in your church. Give it to your missions or justice committees, or to those people in your church committed personally to spirituality and activism. Invite them all.

Click here

to download a pdf file bulletin insert for 8.5x11-sized orders of service

Click here

to download a pdf file bulletin insert for 8.5x14-sized orders of service

Click here

for a fully formatted version of this announcement with photos, that you can forward to your friends.

What more can we do to help?

Click here

For a "Best Practices for Doing Mission and Justice" form your mission or justice committee can fill out to tell us what you are doing for spirituality and activism in your church and community. Mail it in with your registration or bring it with you, but fill it out so that we can learn from you. Teach us. Inspire us. We'll share it with others. You'll be famous.

Click here

if you would like to make an financial contribution to help with the costs of this conference. It is larger than our normal annual budget and your help will be greatly appreciated (when you click, an email to Stan Duncan will pop up, and you can ask how you can help).

Unemployment Does Not Equal Poverty

2011-02-05T09:04:00.000-05:00

In this article David Leonhardt looks at the Gallup study of global unemployment and makes the point that a country can have vast poverty an yet still have low unemployment. It is a point that people of faith and conscience have been making for years, yet he seems to believe that it is surprising news (or at least he believes that his readers would view it as surprising).

In America we have often said that watching unemployment numbers so closely (as the media tends to do) misses the depths of what is happening to America as a whole. Our national income has been stagnating or declining for decades, even during times when our employment was high. That is because people are losing high paying jobs and finding low or modest paying jobs. When you leave a $30 an hour factory job and take a $15 an hour Wal-Mart job, you are still employed, but you are more poor. Every now and then the media pundits will note that, but then they quickly move on to jobless claims trench that they are more interested in and more familiar with. What they (and we) should be saying is that we have near ten percent unemployment and near twenty-five percent poverty. But we don't.

But here are Leonhardt's comments on the global picture, in which he comes reasonably close to making that point.

__________________________________________________
Unemployment Does Not Equal Poverty
By David Leonhardt
January 19, 2011

Perhaps the most surprising part of the new Gallup study of unemployment around the world is that poorer countries don’t tend to have higher jobless rates. After surveying workers in 129 countries, Gallup concludes that “there is no significant relationship between unemployment rates and GDP per capita.” The relevant chart, which shows basically no pattern:

So what makes poor countries poor? In part, they have too many part-time jobs and too many people working for themselves (in either case, making meager amounts of money).
Here’s the Gallup’s chart comparing per-capita gross domestic product and underemployment, a category that includes part-time workers who want to be working full time:

You’ll notice many more countries in the upper-left corner of the chart (rich countries, with little underemployment) and the lower-right corner (poor countries, with lots of underemployment) than in the other two corners.
The relationship between poverty and what Gallup calls “employed full time for an employer” is even stronger:

And that same relationship in map form:

The United States is the richest large country in the world, and it has a relatively small share of people who work for themselves or who work part-time against their wishes. Surprisingly, though, Gallup found that straight-up unemployment was higher in the United States than in Sri Lanka, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Niger, Bolivia, Vietnam, Chad, Belarus or China.

Debt, Spending, and Taxes, One More Time

2011-01-30T16:07:00.002-05:00

A few thoughts and observations on two charts on debt and deficits since the mid forties to the present.

Follow mainly the red line, which is public debt. Media pundits often comment on the entire debt (the black line) which is not relevant because it is out of government policy control. Fa more important is the record of fiscal responsibility of the Federal Government.

Notice first that our national indebtedness was casually declining for decades after the stimulus spending of WWII, but rose dramatically during the glory years of "reigning in spending" with Reagan and Bush I. It tapers off and eventually declines during the evil, radical, socialist, big spending, big taxing years of Bill Clinton, but then it goes up and up and off the charts during the fiscally responsible, spending cutting, tax-freedom-loving years of Bush II. Finally, with a combination of the loss of tax revenue from joblessness and increases in stimulus spending that began in the last months of the Bush administration, it continued to rise through the horrible, evil, socialist, tax-loving years of the Obama Administraton.

My characterizations were humorous to make a point. The Tea Partiers and their Fox/Talkshow/Republican allies seem to be blaming the Democrats for our debt and in reality it has generally gone down with Democrats and up with Republicans. It went up most during the Bush administration with the income losses of three tax cuts, two wars, a drug treatment program, a huge expansion of government, and the Wall Street Bailout, with no countering plans for paying anything back.

To be fair to Mr. Bush, his debt began during the 2001 recession when people lost their jobs and their ability to pay taxes. That recession was caused by a tech bubble explosion and not government action (though he was known to blame it on Bill Clinton's policies). But all of the rest of the trillions in debt that we acquired during his time in office should be laid at his doorstep.

The Clinton Administration handled the debt with a combination of tax increases and budget cuts. Both were painful, but both were responsible and ultimately (though I did not agree with all of the cuts at the time) they brought us closer to a balanced budget and gave the Bush/Cheney administration the healthiest balance sheet we'd seen in years.

With some qualifications, I would support the same right now, except that I would argue for postponing the spending cuts until the economy is more stable. Right now large budget cuts of the kind that Obama is proposing and even larger that the irresponsible Republicans are proposing, would damage the recovery and keep us deep in pain until the next election (hmmm, which may well be the Republican plan).

Budget baloney: Social Security isn't to blame for deficit

2011-01-29T15:48:00.001-05:00

Social Security won't be a problem for another 26 years, and even then, the problem can be solved.

By Robert Reich, Guest blogger / February 18, 2011

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican presidential hopeful, says in order to “save” Social Security the retirement age should be raised. The media are congratulating him for his putative “courage.” Deficit hawks are proclaiming Social Security one of the big entitlements that has to be cut in order to reduce the budget deficit.

This is all baloney.

In a former life I was a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. So let me set the record straight.

Social Security isn’t responsible for the federal deficit. Just the opposite. Until last year Social Security took in more payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits. It lent the surpluses to the rest of the government.

Now that Social Security has started to pay out more than it takes in, Social Security can simply collect what the rest of the government owes it. This will keep it fully solvent for the next 26 years.

But why should there even be a problem 26 years from now? Back in 1983, Alan Greenspan’s Social Security commission was supposed to have fixed the system for good – by gradually increasing payroll taxes and raising the retirement age. (Early boomers like me can start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 will have to wait until they’re 67.)

Greenspan’s commission must have failed to predict something. But what? It fairly accurately predicted how quickly the boomers would age. It had a pretty good idea of how fast the US economy would grow. While it underestimated how many immigrants would be coming into the United States, that’s no problem. To the contrary, most new immigrants are young and their payroll-tax contributions will far exceed what they draw from Social Security for decades.

So what did Greenspan’s commission fail to see coming?

Inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain ceiling. (That ceiling is now $106,800.) The ceiling rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

Back in 1983, the ceiling was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of all wages covered by Social Security. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Commission assumed that, as the ceiling rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.

Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 84 percent of total income.

It went from 90 percent to 84 percent because a larger and larger portion of total income has gone to the top. In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent.

If we want to go back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax would need to be raised to $180,000.

Presto. Social Security’s long-term (beyond 26 years from now) problem would be solved.

So there’s no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical response to the increasing concentration of income at the top is simply to raise the ceiling.

Not incidentally, several months ago the White House considered proposing that the ceiling be lifted to $180,000. Somehow, though, that proposal didn’t make it into the President’s budget.

Robert is chancellor's professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Clinton. He has written 13 books, including 'The Work of Nations,' 'Locked in the Cabinet,' and his most recent book, 'Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future.' The original of this post can be found at

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Robert-Reich-s-Blog/2011/0218/Budget-baloney-Social-Security-isn-t-to-blame-for-deficit