Symptoms, Not Causes

Last week I spent three days in Washington, DC with 700 or so strong, outspoken women and a handful of men courageous enough to join the League of Women Voters. We were wrestling with issues of democracy: 

• Roll-back of voting rights in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act
• Vast infusions of undisclosed donations that followed the Supreme Court Citizen’s United decision declaring corporations are people.
• Erosion of public trust in the structures and systems of government.

We’ve heard the stories in the news: five hour waits to vote in poor communities in Arizona. 

Illegal purges of voter rolls in states like Georgia and Ohio.  

The speakers I heard brought the headlines alive with context and stories and troubling insight into underlying issues. 

Amanda Taub spoke on the rise of American authoritarianism, describing the way rapid social change can become an occasion for whole groups of people to look for scapegoats to blame. Powerful, punitive leaders can stir anxiety into fear and sweep laws aside with a promise of protection from encroaching others who bring unwanted social change.  

Jennifer Lawless focused on the dangerous dismantling of trust in public institutions and the undermined legitimacy of those institutions when the majority withdraws from engagement. 

Arturo Vargas, of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, spoke, in tears, of the obstacles put in the way of a growing Latino population. He insisted that his people care deeply about their communities, yet find it difficult to translate that concern into civic engagement when so much is done to ensure their votes don’t count.

Kristen Clarke, President of the National Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Christine Chen, of the Asian Pacific Islander American Vote, described new forms of voter suppression and ongoing barriers to full inclusion of minority voters. 

Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot, gave a masterful overview of the struggle that shaped the Voting Rights Act of 1963 and continues to play out in polling places and courthouses across the country.  As he said with passion: "It is fundamentally immoral to try to win elections by stopping people from voting.” 

The primary focus of the convention was democracy, voting rights, the forces undermining the ability to reach good solutions that serve the common good. But we also spent time looking at some of the fallout of our political dysfunction, acknowledging that every political decision has real-life human outcomes. 

My friend, Jennifer Levy-Tatum, presented insights from our year-long criminal justice study, demonstrating in tragic detail that little shifts in sentencing legislation can throw thousands of families in to poverty and ruin more lives than anyone imagined. Speaking to a room packed with men and women from other states she shared just a little of what we’ve learned, about county jails packed with people waiting trial for months. Defense lawyers with schedules so tight they meet clients just before a trial begins. Mentally ill men and women kept in solitary confinement rather than receive appropriate treatment. Pregnant women giving birth in shackles. Millions of tax dollars invested in building new prisons rather than putting money into teachers and schools to give poor communities a better path to the future. 

In the news between our meetings, like the rumble of thunder, we heard ongoing coverage of the Orlando shooting. 

In the days since, disruption on Capital Hill has captured the news, with civil rights hero John Lewis and others pleading for the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, to allow a vote on gun safety bills. 

 

The temptation to place blame runs high.

For some, President Obama is the cause of all our current woes.

Others point to the Republican Party.

Immigrants.  

Muslims.

Hillary and Bill Clinton. 

But what if people are symptoms, not causes? 

Donald Trump didn’t undermine our ability to weigh facts and fiction. That started long ago, with philosophical relativism, deconstructionist theory, the post-modern dismissal of objective reality and absolute truth.  A culture that still believed firmly in objective truth would have little patience with Trump’s obvious lies. 

Gays haven’t destroyed our families. That honor goes to a dizzying stew that could include slavery, pornography, birth control, growth of women’s rights and opportunities, loss of job security, oppressive work hours, addiction, abuse, a “me-first” philosophy endemic to our current culture.

Governmental dysfunction wasn’t invented by Paul Ryan or his fellow GOP representatives, or by President Barack Obama. It’s been built into the system, with steady intent, over long decades of determined self-interest by leaders from both sides eager to bolster their own standing. 

Hate, fear, suspicion, prejudice? We can’t pin those on any one group, religion, race. They’re our constant companions, held in check by compassion and self-control, or fanned into destructive fire by careless speech and lazy patterns of thought.

As Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus,  

we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in heavenly places. 

 What are principalities and powers? 

Are they spiritual forces? 

Oppressive systems? 

Embedded patterns of action and thought that hold whole continents captive? 

Scholars and theologians have written reams on the question. Walter Wink alone wrote five books on the topic: Naming the Powers (1984), Unmasking the Powers (1996), Engaging the Powers (1992), When the Powers Fall (1998), and The Powers that Be (1999). All address the disordered worldview that puts trust in violence rather than love and prioritizes wealth over justice.

There is much to learn about what it means to wrestle with principalities and powers,  but the meaning of the first part of Paul’s observation seems very clear. We aren’t doing battle with mere humans. Individuals aren’t the cause of our deep dilemmas.

Omar Mateen, the man who opened fire in the nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people and injuring 53 others, was certainly the immediate cause of death and injury.

Yet he himself was and is a symptom of complex forces: misguided notions about race, religion and power, conflicting ideas about gender and belonging, a cultural love-affair with weapons and violence.  He’s not the first American man to turn his inner agitation outward in an explosion of deadly power. Just the latest and most visible.

It’s always easiest to scapegoat.

And always dangerously wrong.

Any real solution to our current morass will involve attention to causes, courageous engagement, selfless service, a renewed willingness to seek and speak the truth, great wisdom and compassion. 

No one person, no one party can make that happen. 

Power.Money.Justice.Love?

In 1960 Martin Luther King, describing his own spiritual and intellectual journey, wrote: "The gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well being. Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial." (Pilgrimage to Non-Violence)

My intent in this blog has been to wrestle with the realities of faithful living in the widest sense possible: what does it mean to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? What does it mean to do the things Jesus did, to live as his friend, to abide in him in this culture where I find myself? What does it mean to care about the people God has put in my life, but also to care about the systems that hold them captive? What are the fragments of beauty and light and joy I can point to as signposts of the kingdom of grace I see off in the distance?

The Story of Citizens United v FEC

Some weeks I find this a pleasant task. Some weeks it’s more of a brain puzzle. This week I’ve been unhappily mulling over the upcoming anniversary of the Supreme Court decision affirming “corporate personhood” and the idea that free speech implies unlimited corporate expenditure in elections. I never studied economics, am not really interested in the flow of money, would rather spend the morning birdwatching, or taking a young friend or two to the nearest library. But if our current economic system strangles and cripples people struggling toward freedom, am I responsible to care? If good people believe - as many I know do - that democracy is dead, or dying, do I need to understand what it is they're saying? 

I have a foreboding sense that we are at a crossroads. I fear that unless more of us, people who love the earth, who long for justice, who believe in compassion, unless more of us take the time to understand our current economic and political conditions, we will make the wrong turn and find there’s no way back. Some I know say we've already made that turn. I"m hoping they're wrong.

Last October I began attending a local Occupy group. Occupy Phoenixville has never had an encampment, rally or demonstration. We haven’t even made any homemade signs. Our first move was to promote Occupy the Polls – with a website offering voter information and encouragement to engage. Since then we’ve done some work about billboards, helping Phoenixville oppose a corporation trying to force large digital billboards on a community that doesn't want them. And now we’re working with Films for Action to use documentaries to promote conversation about issues like corporate personhood. Our first film. The Corporation, will be screened this Saturday, January 21, the anniversary of the Citizens United decision.

As I said, I’m not an economist. And while I studied and taught American lit for years, I confess, I never read Ayn Rand. Is capitalism moral? Evil? Neither? Are free markets the answer to all our troubles, or the cause? Are corporations our friends, benevolent job-creators, the source of our prosperity, or are they evil empires, intent on ruling the world, oblivious to the pain they leave in their wake?

We tend to talk in absolutes: all capitalism is good, or all corporations are bad. The truth is obviously somewhere in between. I fear that unless we spend some time sorting out the good from the bad, the helpful from the harmful, we’ll be more and more overrun by the freight train currently in place: runaway corporatism, an economic system run by a handful of multinational corporations who hide their profits in offshore banks, shift jobs from place to place in search of the lowest wage, and control the political arena with huge invisible contributions, slick attack ads, revolving door lobbyists, and regulatory agendas promoted far from public scrutiny.

Well yes, I do have some opinions. I’ve been doing some reading, and what I read alarms me.

Here’s a sampling: 

Thomas Jefferson:  "Yes, we did produce a near perfect Republic. But will they keep it... I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."  "The end of democracy, and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations."

 Andrew Jackson: "Unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations."

Abraham Lincoln: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."

 Franklin D. Roosevelt: "The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. "

 Justice Louis D. Brandeis: "We can have a democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." 

From Citizens United v. FEC

In the 1990s, management guru Peter Drucker worried that "The largest 100 corporations hold 25 percent of the worldwide productive assets, which in turn control 75 percent of international trade and 98 percent of all foreign direct investment. The multinational corporation...puts the economic decision beyond the effective reach of the political process and its decision-makers, national governments." 


Consider: of the largest 100 economies in 2010, more than half were corporations, not countries. One quarter of those corporations are invested heavily in fossil fuel, with a total income that would put the fossil fuel industry somewhere in the top 10 nations.

The Citizens United decision opened the door to increased money from fossil fuel industries in our political process. An industry publication asks “Is the Oil and Gas Industry Trying to Buy a Keystone XL Decision from Congress?” The answer is an obvious yes.   

Equally obvious is the way the shale gas industry has taken control of the energy equation here in Pennsylvania. After giving millions to the governor-elect and others in the last election, shale gas influence has overseen the deregulation of the industry while ensuring steep cuts to effective promotion of sustainable energy sources.

Broke: The Story of Stuff Project

According to a recent report by the International Energy Agency, in 2009, “Fossil-fuel consumers worldwide received about six times more government subsidies than were given to the renewable-energy industry. State spending to cut retail prices of gasoline, coal and natural gas rose 36 percent to $409 billion as global energy costs increased. . .  Aid for biofuels, wind power and solar energy, rose 10 percent to $66 billion. While fossil fuels meet about 80 percent of world energy demand, its subsidies are creating market distortions that encourage wasteful consumption." 

Sustainable energy, care of creation, fair wages, healthy food . . . the more I read, the more connected I realize these are. And somewhere at the heart of them all is the issue of values, value, and economic policy: are corporations people? Is unrestrained capitalism the best way to get where we say we want to go?

from Citizens United v. FEC

This will be a big conversation in the year ahead, and an important one. The world we pass on to our children, and their children, will depend in large part on how many of us choose to engage, and how.

To continue the conversation, you might want to watch the two short videos (linked through the Citizens United and Broke graphics) that explain some of the issues at stake. Yes, both videos are oversimplifications, but any discussion short of a several volume work will simplify these complex, often-confusing questions.

Come join us for our screening of The Corporation (followed by some roundtable conversations). Or watch it free online.

A more sustained, long-term discussion about economics, public policy, and sustainable alternatives is  taking place at The New Economics Institute. Change is possible, but only if we pay attention and become informed voters and consumers, demonstrating our love by attentive concern to the challenging issues of justice and power. 

I'd love to hear what you think on this. Your comments and questions, as always, are welcome.