“Income Disparity – The Lethal DisEase”
July 9,
2017 Community Christian Church of
Springfield, MO
Roger Ray,
pastor
Martin Luther King, Jr. – “As long as there is poverty in the
world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as
diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live
more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if
I just got a good checkup at Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until
you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual
or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent.”
On
Thursday of this week (July 6, 2017), while on his way to the G 20 meeting, our
president delivered what was almost immediately being called, the worst speech
in presidential history, in Poland.
It
sounded frighteningly like he was leading up to a marriage proposal for the
first several minutes but then it became clear: this wasn’t a presidential
speech. This was a commercial.
Trump
recounted the horrors of Poland’s history of invasions and occupations,
praising
the courage and the sacrifice of the Poles who stood up to the Nazis and the
Soviets to regain and maintain their independence and self-governance. After
whipping up the crowds into cheering for themselves, their courage and their
military resolve, then the sales pitch started. Trump praised the Poles for
meeting their NATO goals in defense spending and specifically for having
recently bought very expensive military hardware from the USA.
Then
he began to publicly shame the European nations, the leaders of which he would
be meeting the next day, for not loving their culture and independence as much
as the Poles and for not spending as much to defend themselves from, I don’t
know, Nazis and Soviets? Of course, military spending by anyone, anywhere,
results in increased sales of American military manufacturing.
So
it was a horrible speech for an American president to deliver but an effective
commercial for the American military industrial complex. Like so much of what
Trump does, it seemed silly on the surface but behind the curtain it is all
about the transfer of money from human services to corporate profits.
Economists
have long used the Guns v Butter graph to illustrate the
basic
issue of allocation of resources in a national budget. “Guns” represent
hardware or capital investments, like roads, bridges, national parks, and,
admittedly, nuclear weapons. “Butter” represents consumables such as
agricultural subsidies, education, food stamps, and pensions.
Trump’s
ideology makes things somewhat more literal
He
wants America and Europe to stop spending so much on education, pensions, food,
and housing and to shift that money into buying more military hardware.
But
as our war in Afghanistan has now been going on for more than 15 years, our
longest military conflict in our history, and our attempts to untangle
ourselves from a quagmire in Iraq seems to be more likely to expand into Syria
and possibly, God forbid, into Iran as well, the divergence of American
resources to the war machine is impoverishing the rest of America.
Why
does military spending grow under both Democrat and Republican administrations?
We all know that the case for war in Iraq was totally fabricated and while the
9-11 attacks may have been planned from caves and training camps in
Afghanistan, it was hardly a national effort. Why have we spent trillions of
dollars, lost thousands of soldiers and killed hundreds of thousands of
citizens in Afghanistan and Iraq? Well, forgive me if this seems too cynical
but if you follow the money
You
can quickly see that if your ultimate goal is to transfer wealth into the hands
of corporations, nothing does it faster than spending on the military. If you
spend $150,000 on the military, you create only one job but the same amount of
money would create two jobs at a hospital or a school. Europeans look at this
and think that they need to divert more money to hospitals and schools but
Donald Trump looks at this and wonders what he can do to militarize our health
care and education systems.
I
would never argue against the necessity for a sane and realistic defense of our
nation. I have locks on my doors at home but I don’t have a minefield in the
yard with missile-armed drones flying overhead. There is a rational and
reasonable level of defense spending and then there is wholesale robbery of the
majority of the population to enrich the few.
Of
course, I am not only concerned about the posture of the military industrial
complex in our economy. The laws of our nation are being molded by special
interests from Wall Street investment banks, pharmaceutical companies, health
insurance companies, and even the prison industry. I’m asking you to step back,
take a wide angle lens view at our nation and ask yourself, “what is wrong with
this picture?”
This,
I would argue, is at the heart of the problem. As our economy has grown over
the past two generations, a shockingly larger percent of the wealth has ended
up in the hands of the top 1% of wage earners in America.
As
manufacturing jobs are increasingly either exported or automated our supply of
unnecessary labor grows which pushes wages down. Class mobility was a larger
issue in the settlement of the American colonies than issues of religious
freedom. The belief was that a poor person could come to these shores and
through hard work and perseverance, become a person of considerable wealth.
That
dream has increasingly become a fairy tale as class mobility in America is
grinding to a halt. If you are born in poverty in the USA today, you have a 70%
chance of dying in poverty. Those who left Ireland, England, Germany, Italy,
Poland, and Greece to get out of a feudal economic system would be better off
going back to their nation of heritage where class mobility is now much more
likely than it is here. In fact, in countries such as Denmark, a child born
into poverty is twice as likely to grow out of poverty than is a child born in
poverty in America.
The
strong social supports afforded to citizens in socialist democracies in western
Europe make it possible to work your way out of poverty and the graduated tax
structure that places a larger tax burden on top wage earners prevents the income
disparity gap from growing to the obscene extremes we have in the USA.
Education
is the single most important factor in future earning so that countries with
tuition-free universities are obviously going to be much better off than we are
here where higher education is becoming so expensive that it unattainable for
the poor. Universal healthcare is an easy second in the reasons for greater
class mobility in western Europe, again, an obvious factor where we are doing
everything wrong while most of the developed economies of the world are pulling
out ahead of us.
There
are aspects of what is called the “Nordic” economic model that are not easy for
American’s to accept. We always seem to be afraid that someone is going to get
something for nothing. Conservative talk radio and Fox News pundits are quick
to blame our economic woes on the poor whom they describe as “takers” while
they think of themselves as the “makers” who are being robbed by the scant
social services we offer in this country.
Conservatives
reacted with visceral revulsion when President Obama and Senator Elizabeth
Warren have pointed out that even very successful business owners did not get
rich on their own. They depended on a workforce educated in public schools.
They benefited from roads, utilities, police, and fire services provided at
public expense. They participated in a regulated economic system that made
their success possible.
But
the fact that they didn’t want to hear it didn’t make it any less true. Faced
with the advancing mechanization of both agriculture and manufacturing, the
transfer of wealth to the top will continue unless we put some guardrails up
that will keep capitalism from running our nation into the ditch.
We
have more labor than we need and rather than continuing to allow fewer people
to work longer hours for less pay we really must look at how we distribute the
fruit of our growing productivity so that everyone is employed and everyone
gets a shorter work week, with more vacation time, and an earlier retirement.
Our
Protestant work ethic is admirable until it becomes lethal and right now, my
friends, it is becoming toxic. We don’t have to work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks
a year, until we are 75 years old to produce what our population needs. We can
go back to having one-income households. We can raise our own children instead
of farming them out for most of their waking childhood hours to minimum wage
strangers.
I’m
talking about creating a civilization that is worth defending. If we can’t have
a living wage, a decent retirement, access to healthcare and education, then
what exactly are we defending with our massive army, navy, and air force?
I’m
not saying that we need to chain capitalism so that no one can get rich, I’m
just saying that we have to restore sanity to our economic system.
The
six heirs of Sam Walton
Have
more accumulated wealth than the poorest 100 million Americans.
That’s
not a picture of a 100 million people…. That’s not even a thousand people….
That’s just a lot of people but still, you see my point don’t you? Sam Walton
was really good at running retail stores and maybe his family has earned and
deserves to be really rich but do they need to hoard resources that keep
millions in crushing poverty, creating hunger, disease, homelessness, and human
misery in the presence of obscene abundance?
Of
course not! And we need not allow ourselves to accept that just because the
super wealthy have created a tax structure that serves them that we all have to
just sit back and take it!
And,
of course, I am not just picking on the Walton family, though, admittedly, that
bunch is the ultimate definition of low-hanging fruit. But the larger reality
is that the most wealthy 85 people in the world, a gathering that could
comfortably be seated here in this small room, owns more than half of the
wealth of the world. If we made those 85 people simply “fabulously wealthy”
rather than “obscenely and absurdly wealthy” there would be no more poverty in
the world.
When
I was at Harvard, I indulged my mild obsession with Søren Kierkegaard over a
long weekend and traveled to Copenhagen to see what I could find of the Great
Dane. There is not much, a modest grave and a small room tucked away on the
second floor of the city museum that had his desk, a few photos and coffee
cups. But the largest display in the museum came as a real surprise to me. It
had been set up as an educational display for young Danish students to teach
them about the history of poverty when Denmark had hunger and homelessness,
when the poor were sent to live on a poor farm, before their society had
evolved to their current state, where everyone receives medical care and
education, where there is no homelessness or unemployment.
I’ll
admit, that memory crowded out my enthusiasm for Kierkegaard. I realized that
ending poverty is not just a fantasy. It is a very real possibility.
It
seems far-fetched in a country where rich politicians are constantly looking
for ways to cut Social Security, end Medicaid, and to always try to find ways
to buy more guns and less butter.
But
you know, without any shade of doubt, that it is morally wrong, spiritually
wrong, and economically disastrous to allow this income disparity to go on. You
don’t need me to convince you that we need to focus on ameliorating suffering
and poverty rather than creating more wealth at the top of the economy.
In
the midst of the riots and demonstrations of the Civil Rights movement, then
President John Kennedy very prophetically said,
“Those
who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
America simply could not continue to be America if we did not bring the racial
Apartheid of our nation to an end. But poverty was always the subtext to
America’s racial Apartheid.
There
are two Americas and there are not enough police in the world to maintain
this
picture. We not all that deeply invested in Biblical narratives around here but
sure I don’t need to remind any of you that
it
was not the gays, the poor, the liberals, or even the non-religious that Jesus
whipped out of the temple…. It was the bankers, the exploitative businesses
that were making a mockery of the sacred. I believe that there is an inevitably
revolution coming and in this time of transformation, I’m going to be on Jesus
side and I trust that you will be too.
