A number of colleagues have challenged my focus on the continued and seemingly bottomless taxpayer bailout of too-big-to-fail financial institutions as obsessive, even cranky. The criticisms fall into three categories: (1) they know what they’re doing-you’re not an expert; (2) why would you care how they revive the economy, as long as they get things moving again?; and (3) Shhhh-it’s Obama: don’t give ammunition to his enemies.
Here’s my answer. There is no such thing as “the economy”: there are multiple economies, multiple interests, in play. But to Washington, and to the pack journalists who feed us our daily economic news, the only economy that really matters is the Dow, the NASDQ, and the S&P 500. If you follow the business press, as I do, the only question is whether some “green shoots” in these markets are real or whether there’s more bad news to come for investors in the form of credit card defaults or corporate bad debt that has been carefully hidden from view. In the case of credit cards, it’s almost as though the fate of the card holders is a sideshow: it’s the fate of the lenders we should care about.
Our bottom line, in other words, is whether our stock portfolios and retirement accounts and home equity stakes are reviving. That’s what the journalists who feed us this stuff care about; that’s what the politicians care about; and so that is what we should care about, too.
To me, this is a way of saying to regular working people: “it’s an upper-middle-class thing: you wouldn’t understand.”
The other part of this tale of moral blindness and self-deception has to do with the fairy tales we tell ourselves about the “new economy.” Take the Waxman-Markey energy bill, which the president hails as being packed with new job creation potential. I have no doubt that significant new job opportunities will flow—eventually—from this legislation, and from the stimulus package, and from other good things the administration is doing. But the disconnect between the oh-happy-day rhetoric and the reality facing US workers now could not be more stark.
Among mainstream journalists, only Bob Herbert has been unsparing in giving us the real news of a still-collapsing job market. As Herbert reported last Saturday (“No Recovery in Sight”) we now have more than five unemployed workers for every new job opening. And as of last month the actual number of workers in crisis is not the 14 million who are officially unemployed (as if that number were acceptable), but more like 29 million people, if you count people no longer looking or working at sharply reduced hours or taking big pay and benefit cuts. That is 18 percent of the total workforce and still rising. What’s more, three-fourths of those losing work over the past year were permanently displaced, not temporarily laid off. Many had worked in construction and manufacturing: fields in which the chances of coming back are very shaky. Young workers—under age 30—have taken half the job losses since November 2007, and men account for fully 80 percent of those taking the hit.
As Herbert writes,
Young males, especially, are being clobbered at an age when, typically, they would be thinking about getting married, setting up new households, and starting families. Moreover, work habits and experience developed in one’s 20s often establish the foundation for decades of employment and earnings.
Compared to this huge tear in the social fabric, compared to this massive insult to a vital part of our national household, all the common-ground chatter in DC about strengthening American families by encouraging responsible personal behavior is really quite silly and (yes) self-indulgent. When I look around, I see significant and well-funded religious coalitions for immigration reform, for labor rights (Employee Free Choice Act), for abortion reduction, and for universal health coverage of some kind. All of that is well and good. All of these coalitions operate with the blessing and encouragement of the Obama administration.
But where is the religious coalition that looks at the big picture and confronts the administration and Congress on the core issue of growing joblessness, job downsizing, shattered dreams and no real relief from crushing personal debt still owed to tax-subsidized banks? (In this latter connection, read Peter S. Goodman’s devastating June 29 Times piece on the utter failure of Obama’s four-month-old plan to help distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure. Goodman describes the supplicants’ paperwork mysteriously disappearing, their calls to banks and mortgage servicers put on hold for hours, then dropped-basically a big “f**k you” to desperate hardworking people who were assured by Obama that they, too, would get some relief.)
Where is the religious coalition that says to the politicians, “You spent trillions in public money to prop up the zombie banks, and you are about to hand God-knows-how-much to the insurers and pharmaceutical companies feeding at the trough of health care ‘reform.’ You still give blank checks to the Pentagon and CIA for war without end in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What about the everyday people with big debts and no paychecks-what are you doing for them?”
I’ve said it before: what passes these days for a progressive religious voice is far too domesticated. In biblical terms, our religious establishment plays the same role as the court prophets of the later kings of Judah. I include myself in this criticism.
Yes, that’s harsh. But it’s not nearly as harsh as being young, out of work, and having to go begging to your family and friends for a place to stay and for food on the table.
Tags: bail-out, bailout, bible, bob herbert, common ground, obama administration, poverty
That coalition exists--it is called the Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org, and its public voice comes in Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org.
In April we bought a full page ad in the Washington Post in which we raised the prophetic critique of the President's policies, even as we affirmed our support for him, recognizing him as a supremely decent, often quite brilliant, and deeply ethical human being. It is our task to both affirm all that is good in President Obama and simultaneously to point out the ways that he has become a prisoner to the Inside-the-Beltway "non-ideological pragmatism" (the kind of thing that turns E.J. Dionne into a cheerleader of Obama)that is really just a sophisticated way of saying that he will subordinate his values to the realities that America's economic and political elites have managed to establish.
So Rev. Laarman, our task now is to build that coalition--and instead of starting from scratch, help us extend our Network of Spiritual Progressives which already has several thousand members. We are scheduling a Washington D.C. conference to "Support Obama to BE THE OBAMA YOU VOTED FOR--not the Inside the Beltway vehicle of Wall Street," and simultaneously we will be developing a positive vision of the world we actually want (because prophets sometimes become so fixated on what is wrong that they don't give enough time to articulating a vision of an alternative reality that can be built today)! That conference will be in April 2010, but I suggest that we also launch a West Coast version in Los Angeles as soon as you can help us assemble people in that part of the country who will join the effort. Are you willing?
In the meantime, please don't suggest that the only voices out there are the cheerleaders, the priests of conformity, and the false prophets. Urge people to become dues-paying members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
Our central message, a kind of guide-line that most people can understand when trying to assess public policy: America needs a New Bottom Line. The old bottom line was money and power. The New Bottom Line is this:institutions, corporations, legislation, our health care system, educational system, legal system, even personal behavior should be judged "rational" or "efficient" or "productive" not only to the extent that they maximize money or power, but ALSO to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sanity, enhance our capacity to respond to others as embodiments of the sacred, and enhance our capacity to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of all that is.
Obama needs to be convinced that he should be teaching the American public to see and evaluate policies, legislation,etc. through that new bottom line. Otherwise, what happens is that the Congress, the media and everyone else reverts to the old bottom line, and in those older terms the most creative progressive ideas get dismissed as "unrealistic." Until Obama and others recognize the emptiness of non-ideological pragmatism, embrace the Biblical mandate that is expressed through the New Bottom Line, they have no intellectual foundation upon which to base their alternative to the pro-militarist and pro-capitalist worldview that predominates in the public sphere. That's why a "coalition" is not really an alternative, because coalitions often avoid a shared ideology or intellectual foundation and just address some specific issue--unless that coalition is itself founded ona worldview. And that is what the Network of Spritual Progressives offers!!! Please help us build that alternative.
I would that we could share Rabbi Michael Lerner’s optimism. However, prophetically witnessing to the new president possibly makes sense, even though imagining that President Obama will challenge the core notions foundational to the interests of economic and political elites sounds overly ambitious. What we are doing is creating the political support to encourage progressive changes.
Imagining alternatives to the immorality of these foundations is itself a prophetic task. The Network of Spiritual Progressives is a great resource. If I had any spare change at all, I would contribute. For those or you who do have resources, this is a fine resource.
I would love that we could share Rabbi Michael Lerner’s optimism.
Regards,
Activa
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