The Religion of the Unfettered Free Market

The illusion being sold to us by those who are trying at every turn to dismantle social security, unemployment insurance, public assistance to the poor, health care safety-nets, public education, worker-rights guarantees, regulations to protect food safety, the environment, worker safety etc….. they are trying to convince people that there is somehow an objective, invisible system in equilibrium (“the market”) that will automatically take care of everything if we would just leave it to its own automatic forces.  This illusion presumes that the bankers, the financiers, the corporate owners, are like the high priests of this sacred system, not interfering with it but only seeing that it is working without interference or interruption.  In this fantasy, when those who find themselves suffering because of this so-called ‘free market’ system begin to develop tools of collective power to assert their rights, their dignity, their interests, the high priests try to convince the rest of us that those citizens are going to ruin a good thing for us all by interfering with the supposedly otherwise ‘natural’ workings of the system.

Prices, wages, salaries, bonuses don’t automatically go up or down simply by some invisible hand over which no human being has control (or responsibility).  Corporate managers, financiers, business owners too have choices as to how they will respond to “market forces” in balance to consumer needs, consumer protections, environmental responsibility, economic justice.  People like the owner of Papa John’s or Whole Foods want us to believe for example, that because they will have to provide health insurance options to their workers, they “HAVE” to cut back hours so that they can avoid this requirement and can maintain their balance in the natural order of the market system.  NO… they have a choice… how much profit is enough for THEM, relative to how well or poorly they treat their employees.  In the Whole Foods case it is more than ironic that here we have a company that builds its corporate aura on the premise that people can and should be given options as to how they eat, what they eat, how they choose consumer products for their positive (or negative) impact on the world and on themselves--- cultivating an aura of “social responsibility” and “personal wellness,”  …until it comes to paying their employees well and making sure they can get health care.

The illusion of the “unfettered free market” is as bad as any other unexamined ideology or blind religion, being sold to people not really for their own benefit, but to protect the interests of those who are “in charge.”  

MJ EJ, Just Too Cool...

Start of the year 2014.  Visited family, and reminisced about many things with siblings.  Went through old family photos, and was struck by this one, showing my parents-- they may have been just engaged at this point, in their early 20's!  This was right after WW II (maybe just by a few weeks or months).  Trying to imagine where they were at this point in their lives-- what they thought was ahead of them, and who they were becoming.  What a way to get a little perspective on one's own life, and that of one's kids!

We Can Not Afford Social/Political Amnesia

I was a kid in the 1960's and 1970's, who grew up in Niagara Falls. The air in the city was often horrible because of the businesses (factories) along the Niagara River that spewed unregulated smoke and gasses into the air; Lake Erie was almost completely dead (this is not hyperbole--it was a dead lake filled with toxins and pollutants); then a neighborhood near the industrial area of the city (and not far from the city's drinking supply) began to discover toxins bubbling up from the ground--and "Love Canal" became a household word; the Love Canal neighborhood was boarded up, and neighbors were relocated because of the pollutants that for a generation or more were buried in an abandoned canal that was built over as a neighborhood. 

To this day, toxins from the big pollutants (unregulated "free enterprises") are still seeping through the rock strata underpinning the city, into the creeks and streams that flow into the Niagara River.  

Across the State and the country, major cities began to use the word "smog" to name the unbreathable air that was produced by the combination of factories and unregulated car exhaust from the cars that were produced by auto industries that simply chose not to improve exhaust output, though they had the technology to do so.  Businesses were putting food products on the market that contained unhealthy chemicals and "preservatives," and were using insecticides on crops that were likewise making people sick... just as the cigarette industry was pushing their product with all kinds of claims about cigarette safety....    

We can not afford a rewriting of history, or a moral amnesia, that somehow convinces people today that businesses and industries are "too regulated," and that somehow, if they were allowed to be totally unfettered enterprises, they would somehow do what is best for us all.  We have the FDA for many, hard fought reasons. We have the EPA and environmental regulations (and still not enough) for many hard-fought reasons.  We have OSHA... for many hard-fought reasons.  Today's political struggle is one that is being pushed by moneyed interests that see the opportunity of an era, to roll back so many things, not for the interest of the average American, but for the bottom-line profit of the already extremely wealthy.    
  
You still can not eat fish from Lake Ontario without worry that you are ingesting mercury and other toxins from pollution that was put into the environment by unregulated businesses decades ago!  You still must wonder about the water that surrounds you in the Great Lakes for the very same reason.  Along Lake Ontario, several major land-fills grow daily, filled with everything from the waste products of nuclear testing in the 1940's, to the potentially anthrax-contaminate desk of network news broadcaster, to the endless industrial waste that has become one of the key "imports" of one of the few big money-making businesses in the region--- a giant waste processing company.  This is not getting better, and if we follow the political agenda today that is calling for "deregulation" to somehow "fix" society and the economy, we will instead be reversing what meager gains our society made over the past half century or more in saving the eco-system in which we live from unregulated capitalism.

End-around Collective Bargaining in Democratic Connecticut?

While all eyes are on places like Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and New Jersey, as conservative politicians take bold action to attack workers' rights head-on, and in the process to try and eliminate collective bargaining, an end-around the same collective bargaining rights seems to be taking place in Democratically controlled Connecticut. Democrats control the legislature, and there is a Democratic governor, which might make you think that Hartford would be immune from the moves that are elsewhere putting unions and workers' collective rights under attack. But for some reason the Democrats seem united in handing over such rights to the demands of .... Democrats. Currently under consideration in fact is legislation that aims not to hit collective bargaining head on, but instead that seeks to accomplish the same end by effectively reclassifying many unionized workers as "managers," which will immediately remove them from unions and put the terms of their employment directly in the hands of the Governor. The Republicans must be sitting in awe that the Democrats are doing the work for them in achieving such anti workers' rights goals. And worst of all, the unions about to be affected by all of this aren't even making a sound. What's been happening in places like Wisconsin under the glare of nightly-news cameras and vehement public protest, is happening quietly and cooperatively in Connecticut with Democratic unanimity it seems. Did we fall asleep?

Oh Bishop Where Art Thou?!

In a previous blog I had reflected on the moral inconsistency in the Diocese of Providence, where the Bishop has basically excommunicated Rep. Patrick Kennedy for his politically nuanced stand on abortion (and his stance of promoting the current health care bill in Congress without actively looking to add a strict prohibition against abortion in the bill)....and where on the other hand the Diocese has moved its employees' personal retirement accounts into funds that invest in the likes of Haliburton, General Dynamics and Rockwell International (top fund producers, top war industries).

In that post I did not linger around another issue--that of the Rhode Island Roman Catholic Church's sordid and egregious history of covering up cases of pedophilia. That example of moral inconsistency is almost too obvious these days to have to note. However, in recent weeks that whole issue has pushed its way glaringly back into the category of "notable" with the occurrence of several events: The recent annual meeting of US Roman Catholic Bishops where they approved a letter that attempts to put into words the value of moral respect for family, marriage and sexuality; and the final release of an official report in Ireland on the investigation of coverup by the Church and law authorities of decades of child sexual abuse. See Full Report

First, the US Roman Catholic Bishops met in their annual gathering to address key issues facing the Church and society at large. With two endless wars raging, that sap the US of its resources for social and economic health, and perpetuate US global militarism; with health care in the US now dominated by a gouging medical industry that is bankrupting families at an alarming rate and leading to tens of thousands of deaths each year; the Bishops chose to focus once again on pelvic morality-- all about the issues relating to sexuality and its social expression. And of all things, they seem to feel they have some kind of moral authority to do so. They are going to tell us all--Catholics and non-- that abortion is an intrinsic evil, family is a product of natural law with only one ideal expression, marriage likewise has only one main (and naturally defined) purpose, that homosexuality is deviant, and eventually, that 'cohabitation' is still "living in sin" (intrinsically evil).

In the midst of their meeting, these men--who are the leaders of an institution that has bankrupted itself financially by the liability it created under decades of the cover-up of sexual abuse of children--had to bring in experts with a $2mil study to clarify for them, among other things, that pedophilia and homosexuality are not the same thing and "are not necessarily connected." These are the men who uphold the Vatican's view that young men with "deep seated homosexual tendencies" will be banned from their seminary training--in part to "solve" the pedophilia problem! ("One must in no way overlook the negative consequences that can derive from the ordination of persons with deep-seated homosexual tendencies," the Vatican has said in a previous "clarification" letter!) These are the men who believe that women are not equal to them--or at best are "separate but equal" in their (subservient) social and church roles. These are the men who have housekeepers to do their chores, allowances to pay for their food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and retirement, assistants to arrange their schedules, resources to wine and dine with the powerful of society, but who somehow can know just what it means for struggling families--single mothers, loving homosexual couples--to live morally in these times.

And did I mention... the families on both sides of the wars that this country continues to fight?

Then there is the official report from the Commission of Investigation under the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform in Dublin, IE just released. Its research tells of decades of coverup of child sexual abuse in Ireland--coverup perpetrated by the highest Church officials, aided by law enforcement, and fully known by the highest levels of the institution--the Vatican itself. If there is any inkling of hope in the whole situation it is the candid apology issued immediately after the release of this report, by the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Diarmuid Martin, who among other things noted pointedly, “The sexual abuse of a child is and always was a crime in civil law. It is and always was a crime in canon law. It is and always was grievously sinful.” This certainly begs the question, at the same time, how the abuse and its coverup could have gone on for so many decades.

The US Roman Catholic Bishops have a legacy of documents that teach about profound truths. How those written "truths" seem so hollow, coming from an institution that not only seems so out of touch with everyday people and their struggles, but that also seems so glaringly out of touch with its own moral bankruptcy. Through their actions, the Bishops as institutional officials have hidden the work of pedophiles, lined the Church up with those who make wars--or make the weapons of wars-- led the faithful to support politicians whose records on war and the death penalty are as anti-life as they could be; then they presume to say their principled stand "for life" is clear, because they can unequivocally pronounce on matters that go on in women's bodies.

And Rep. Patrick Kennedy is the one who should consider himself not worthy to be in full communion with the Church?

RI Bishop Excommunicates Catholic Politician?

The news today is a bit disheartening if true, and also a bit cloudy, about the Bishop of RI and his "instruction" to Rep. Patrick Kennedy; if the report is correct, Kennedy has been told by the bishop not to receive communion in the RI diocese. The further report, from Kennedy, is that the bishop also instructed priests in the diocese not to give communion to Kennedy. I don't hear the bishop saying the word "excommunication," but that is what this amounts to, if in fact it isn't actually official.

The previous bishop of RI played with words a few years ago when he said about another Catholic, Maryanne Sorrentino, that he didn't excommunicate her but that she excommunicated herself in her work at Planned Parenthood. So we're talking about something akin to passive-aggressive excommunication. "Hey, Patrick, just make sure you don't go to communion..." says the bishop, without telling Patrick directly that he's out.

Ironically, it was Patrick's uncle Jack, who broke the anti-catholic stigma in national politics, and was elected as the first Roman Catholic to be President of the US back in 1960. At that time JFK brought forward a national discussion---theological as well as political-- about how a Roman Catholic could in fact be an effective politician at the national level, without simply being a mouthpiece of the Vatican. The best of theologians led the Church to consider the unique challenge of politicians in this democratic republic, to apply conscience and carefully nuanced political savvy in their leadership, not just to tow a single religious line that would otherwise affirm the anti-catholic fears of the day.

The US Bishops in fact have been no strangers to political nuance, at least when it comes to the powerful in society. Of course, a few--who have been marginalized in the process-- have dared to speak truth to power when it comes to war, the death penalty, social injustice, poverty, discrimination, the US 'culture of death.' There have been no threats however of excommunication of politicians who support the war in Iraq/Afghanistan, or the death penalty. Instead, the bishops (and the RI bishop included) have reserved their moral absolutes for issues that deal with what some moral theologians have pointedly called "pelvic morality": birth control, abortion, sex outside of marriage, sex inside of marriage, homosexuality (with the glaring omission of a moral absolutist approach toward pedophhilia).

Further disheartening is the way that such moralizing has led Catholic flocks to believe (or to believe that they should believe) that in ensuing elections, for example, one is morally obliged to vote against any politician who doesn't profess clearly to be anti-abortion; this in turn has led people to believe that their "moral choice" in such elections is to vote for politicians who are anti-abortion, despite their also being responsible for starting wars of aggression (or supporting such wars), responsible for implementing the death penalty, responsible for economic and social policies that marginalize and demonize the poor and the oppressed.

The US Bishops have some wonderfully nuanced statements on justice and peace (and the "seamless garment of life") for those who care to read them. But by example, rather than by their written words, they've led people to fall silently behind wars that even the Pope himself has declared an injustice; they've led people by their (in-)actions to vote against candidates whose lives reflect profound struggle for justice and equality, and to vote instead for candidates who under the "anti-abortion" banner, have perpetrated wars and injustice (state sponsored death) with impunity.

It is ironic that 40 years after John Kennedy struggled against anti-catholic prejudice to become President of the U.S., the Bishop of Rhode Island is now apparently weighing in on the matter with a judgment--however passively given--against JFK's very nephew: you can only be a Catholic politician in the US if you simply reflect without question the 'teachings' of Rome.

Meanwhile, the Bishop is also playing right on cue: as he brings the hammer down on Rep. Kennedy, he is also lining the Church up squarely behind the monied interests of the Medical Industry, adding his tacit voice against the healthcare reform that is on the table this very day--the reform for which Patrick Kennedy and others have struggled in the name of the poor and the disadvantaged.

Fortunately, there are too many adults in Rhode Island (a very "Roman Catholic State" in name at least) with well formed and active consciences who will take the Bishop's words and attitude under consideration, and then as they should, act in good conscience. (Primacy of conscience it is called.) It is too bad, in the process that the bishop in this instance may have forgotten the principle so profoundly modeled by Pope John XXIII, to lead by persuasion and example rather than by fear.

Pro-Life?

The line that comes to mind tonight is from Ghost Busters: "I'm a little fuzzy on this good-bad thing, Egon..." You see, I am in the Diocese of Providence (geographically, right now) where in the past few days the Bishop (Tobin) has made personal comments about our Congressional Rep., Patrick Kennedy. Specifically, he called Kennedy a "disappointment to the Church," in large part because Kennedy supports health care reform that doesn't have in it an absolute ban on funding for abortion (even though health care reform itself will likely save thousands of lives a year, and maybe even prevent a number of abortions in the process; and, under current law anyway, abortions can't be funded by federal monies...) So Kennedy is a disappointment... because too he had the nerve to say that the Church was wrong in not standing up for the justice of health care reform.

Moral consistency, the Bishop seems to be saying. Either you are for life or you aren't. If you don't say you are for life (and absolutely prohibit abortions under a bill that doesn't itself call for funding abortions) you can't be 'for life.'

Turn the page for a moment... on another page, the Diocese has just let its teachers and other employees know that it is dumping TIAA CREF as the investment fund for their retirement accounts. Instead they are going to put workers' personal retirement accounts into the Ave Maria Mutual Funds accounts. Top performers of those accounts? Haliburton, General Dynamics, Rockwell.... as Don Imus often says, "You can't MAKE this stuff up!!"

Egon, I'm a little fuzzy on this good-bad thing....