August
28, 2016 Community Christian Church of
Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor “You Say You Want A
Revolution?”
David
Brooks, NYT op-ed: In 18th-century America, colonial society and
Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial;
the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe
noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many
whites were defecting to live in the Native American one.
This struck them as strange. Colonial society was
richer and more advanced. And yet people were voting with their feet the other
way.
The colonials occasionally tried to welcome
Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to
stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an
Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated
to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble
with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”
During the wars with the Indians, many European
settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they
had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when
they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers.
In a move that only a social pariah like Martin Shkreli could love, and, in fact, Martin Shkreli
has publicly defended the decision of pharmaceutical
giant Mylan to increase the cost of EpiPen, a life saving medication used by
people who have lethal allergies, by 600%. It cost them $4 to make each dose,
they have been selling it for $100, a remarkable markup in and of itself, and
now they changed it to $600.
This has been in the news because
it is one of the worst cases of capitalism run amok in our ill-advised marriage
of healthcare with the profit motive. The government gives taxpayer funded
grants to researchers to develop a drug that will benefit our citizens. But the
government doesn’t hold the patent on work product of the researchers….
Something is already wrong with that.
Then the developer is allowed to
sell the patent to a for-profit pharmaceutical company.
That company does not exist to
make sick people well, to treat illnesses or to spread happiness. The
Pharmaceutical company exists to make money. Period. In a capitalist system
then, they are motivated to make all of the money they possibly can. So they
will price their product, not based on what it costs to make, ship, sell,
store… but solely on the price the market will bear. That is why some drugs
cost five, or ten, or a hundred times as much in the USA as they do in other
countries. The system is rigged to avoid competition. They can exploit people
who will die without this particular medication.
When capitalism is applied to an
automobile, or a brand of shoes, you can always choose to buy a less expensive
car, or even a used pair of shoes at a thrift store. I kid who will die in
seconds from a bee sting, has to have an EpiPen. And it costs $600. In the face
of public outrage, Mylan Pharmaceuticals agreed, not to lower the price, but to
offer a 50% discount to those who cannot afford the drug at this 1500% markup
price.
Clearly, this was just a smoke
screen to make it look like they were doing something decent when they absolutely
are not. And, as the plot thickens, the CEO of Mylan paid herself a
multi-million dollar bonus for coming up with the brilliant plan to pick the
pockets of the vulnerable, and the icing on the cake is that she, Heather
Bresch, is the daughter of West Virginia’s Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin. Oh,
and one more thing, they are moving their corporate offices off shore to avoid
paying taxes on their outrageous profits….. to make America great again?
She is defending herself saying
that the problem is our health care system…. And it is…. The problem is that we
have a health care system that is run by moral midgets like her.
It is not because of evil
Republicans; in this case they are evil Democrats. It is not at partisan sin,
it is, I believe, a cultural blindness… which makes it the business of the
church. Capitalism is so interwoven into our psyche, that it is very nearly
removed from moral deliberation. Because capitalism has no morality, it should
have nothing at all to do with managing healthcare. Folks, what can be more
obvious than to say that it is immoral to make a profit off of people being
sick? Plain and simple…. I am convinced that there is no such thing as hell but
that doesn’t meant that there should be one!
I don’t want to sound judgmental,
but there should be a very hot place of eternal torment for people who take
advantage of people because they are sick…. Ok, that’s really judgmental…. But
I am going to stand by it anyway.
Capitalism is an economic system that produces a
lot of incentive for both invention and productivity, but it can also mask
immorality and unbridled greed… even at the points where it clearly produces
evil results, it is so baked into our thinking, that we have difficulty in
saying when we are rewarding invention and productivity, and when we are just
allowing the super-wealthy to exploit everyone else.
Now that I have clearly exposed a moral failing
on the Democratic side of the fence, I will claim the right to speak to one of
my favorite sermon illustrations, the Republican nominee for President, Donald
Trump.
When Donald began his bid for the office of the
President, he promised that he would self-fund his campaign. It was easy to
claim when he and the rest of the world thought that he had absolutely no
chance of ever winning the nomination… most of us couldn’t dream of him lasting
through the Iowa caucuses. His success has surprised not only liberals and
conservatives alike, it has surprised Donald Trump.
Now that things are getting real, the whole ruse
of self-funding has been thrown into the trash and he is now begging for
political donations from the very donors he swore he would never take money
from because that money always comes with strings attached.
But the old “pay to play” system, with all of
its “government for sale” implications has not stopped the ultimate con-man
from finding a way to make a profit off of the system. When Trump was self funding his campaign he
paid $35,000 a month for his campaign offices in Trump Tower. Now that his
campaign is funded by donors, he is charging his campaign $170,000 a month…. A
five fold increase.
Why is he doing this? Because he can? Is he being rewarded for
invention or productivity? No. The system is simply protecting him while he
steals money from donors. This is capitalism turned malignant…. It has more to
do with cannibalism than it does profit-motive.
And yet, his campaign is being billed as a
“populist” movement. The working poor champion him because, they believe, he is
on their side.
In a recent campaign speech, he talked about
some of his specific economic policies to help the downtrodden middleclass. He
talked about the rank unfairness of the estate tax, what he called the “death
tax.” The crowd roared. Of course, the crowd generally doesn’t know that you
have to have an estate worth more than $5 million before they pay any estate
taxes. Virtually no one in his audience has the slightest chance of ever paying
any estate taxes.
In the same speech, he promised to help working
families by allowing them to fully deduct their child-care expenses on their
tax return. Again, the crowd cheered. But a tax deduction only helps families
who make enough money to itemize on their tax return which is fewer than a
third of families. Again, it helps the wealth, giving the richest Americans a
subsidy paid for by the poor who are cheering the decision.
But again, it is a baked into the bread
mentality. Trump doesn’t want to pay estate taxes and so he rails against them
and his unreflective audience cheers… the equivalent of “long live the king.”
The rich view the middle class and the working poor as being the moral
equivalent of fire wood…. A commodity to be used up for their own comfort, and
folks, the rich almost always feel a little chilly.
A capitalist makes money through investment of
capital. If you earn a salary, you are not a capitalist. You may support
capitalism ideologically, but you are not a capitalist, you are an employee.
And if you are employed by the government, you are a part of the socialist
economy. Public school teachers are not capitalists, they are paid through a
socialist system.
Members of the army, the navy, the air force,
the marines, are not capitalists. They are paid through the socialist part of
our economy. Veterans benefits are socialist. Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, Federal Flood Insurance, SSI disability, are all socialist. Our
society’s heroes, firemen, police, the CIA, the FBI, secret agents, the NSA,
the TSA, and the EPA…. All socialist.
So who is a capitalist? Well, one example that
comes to mind is Paris Hilton. She lives off of the return on her inherited
wealth. That may be an intentionally prejudicing choice… Warren Buffet is a
capitalist, Donald Trump is a capitalist, but I am not and unless I win the
lottery or you people start paying me a whole lot more than you have up until
now, I’m not going to be one.
The talk about a revolution that was a part of
the Bernie Sanders campaign was not the same as a Trump campaign to convince
the poor to vote for the special privileges afforded to the rich. The revolution is not, of course, about
Bernie Sanders. The revolution we need is a moral awakening that allows us to
see plainly how capitalism without any social moral filters is inherently evil.
I loved the recent David Brooks column in the
New York Times in which he remarked on how shocked that Ben Franklin was to
notice that any number of white European settlers were abandoning the business
centered settlements on the coast to join the community centered Indian tribes
and that the Indians appeared to have no interest in leaving their tribes to
come and become capitalists.
In their tribes, everyone was expected to work
for the common good. They were almost never separated from their children by
work obligations. They were together and shared food and resources equally.
Franklin, as smart as he was, was still a slave owning, successful businessman
who just couldn’t understand why anyone could find a moral rational more
powerful than greed.
The revolution comes when we will no longer
accept the assumptions the profit is superior to people, and that those who own
capital have a right to exploit those who provide labor. Our nation is out of
balance and a correction will come, either at the ballot box or in the streets.
As John Kennedy, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent
revolution inevitable. That’s not a threat, that’s just a fact…. And you know
me, I’m always on the side of facts.
Let me conclude with a quote from Arundhati Roy, the Indian writer and activist:
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay
siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art,
our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer
relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are
different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what
they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their
weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more
than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a
quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
