“Justifying the Inexcusable”

Dec. 9, 2018          “Justifying the Inexcusable”            Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

The late economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, said: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” 

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A decade ago, I began the habit of going out every Monday night to a local pub where an Irish band plays pretty much the exact same set of songs every week. Monday is sort of a pastor’s weekend and I found that no matter what I might be worried about, mad about, or depressed about, a couple of hours of Irish drinking songs and a couple of pints of Guinness, would at least temporarily lighten an old vicar’s heart. Over the years, different friends have joined me in this ritual so that I am never there alone. It has become an unofficial communion service for our little congregation as various members drop in to break bread, lustily sing about having been a “wild rover,” or to help raise the sails in the choruses of Irish sailing songs like, “John Kanaka.”

But, mostly, we have heard all of these songs so many times that we no longer listen, we visit with one another, make plans for the week ahead, and generally toast one another’s genius. But, I find that there is one song that never fails to demand my attention, and I will even insist that the people around me stop talking to listen respectfully if they sing The Fields of Athenry. 

The ballad tells the story of a young mother weeping as her husband is being taken away in a prison ship to Australia. His crime was having stolen corn to feed his starving family during what we Americans call the Irish Potato Famine, what the Irish call simply, “the Great Hunger.”

We know that more than a million Irish immigrated to the United States in the mid-1800’s to escape the famine. Perhaps as many as a million more died of starvation in Ireland. Millions more fled in other directions. I’ve ridden a train from Dublin to Galway and you can see that the country is still depopulated, having gone from more than 9 million before the famine to half of that in the generations that followed, never to recover. 

Potatoes were the staple food of the poor and you might wonder why, when the blight struck the potato vines, didn’t they just grow other crops? Well, they did, in fact, all during the great famine, Ireland was a major grain exporter. It is just that the grain belonged to the British, and Irish were expected to eat increasingly rare potatoes. Ships carried Irish produce to markets in England and Europe while other ships carried poor Irish farmers who had stolen grain, many off of their own farms, to feed their starving family, in chains to work camps in Australia. Many sent off on those prison ships died en route, most were never reunited with their families. 

More than 4000 ships loaded with grain left Irish ports in 1847 for England when, in that year alone, a half a million Irish died of starvation.  

Somehow, poor Irish farmers had largely accepted an economic system that locked them first into poverty and then into hunger, while they continued to labor to make distant land owners wealthy. So, when they sing Fields of Athenry, I still stop talking and I usually weep a bit for millions of lives destroyed in a truly evil economic system. And, folks, I’m not of Irish descent. My family is from England… which, in fact, makes it that much worse. (HAVE SEAN SING)

The famine lasted from 1845 to 1849 and the horrors of that time became a part of Irish self-understanding. The famine returned in 1879 but the Irish had changed in the 30 years since the great hunger. This time they revolted, refusing to be starved for British profits. That is the change in thinking that I want to talk about today. When, indeed, is enough, enough? What does it take to make the poor revolt?

It was an unguarded moment when the radical founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day, said, "The problem is our stinking rotten system, and our acceptance of it.” 

Most of us were reared to believe that Capitalism was just a part of the fabric of Christianity and Democracy. We believe that our constitution and body of laws make us free and independent but we also have this proverb that says “possession is 9/10ths of the law.” It is legal to use the police to protect private property, it is legal to lobby for a tax structure that taxes the rich at a rate much lower than the rate the poor pay taxes. It is legal to pay wages that guarantee poverty for your employees. You have to stop and think, who writes the laws? 

There are three lobbyists on Capitol Hill for every elected official there just for the pharmaceutical industry. How many lobbyists are there advocating for a living wage for the people who cook your lunch and mop your floors? You may remember a few years ago, about a dozen of us joined a local labor union to demonstrate for a living wage for employees at McDonalds. We picked a busy McDonalds in a very poor part of town and we showed up and encircled the restaurant during their morning rush. We didn’t block traffic, we didn’t impede business…. We’re were, after all, not exactly anarchists . . . we were mostly older citizens just saying that a wildly profitable business could afford to pay their help a living wage.

Within ten minutes there were eight patrol cars and a paddy wagon there to haul us all away if we kept anyone from getting their Egg McMuffin in a timely manner. I have volunteered with homeless programs in the same neighborhood where we have had to wait for hours for a single patrol car to respond to a violent outbreak among our clients. 

So, who do the police work for? What are the priorities of business, government, and most of the church? To defend the filthy, stinking economic system that creates and defends profit and poverty. 

This poster attempts to illustrate the various economic systems of the world, using cows, as they were explained to us when we were young:

In socialism, you have two cows and you are forced to give one to your neighbor. In communism, the state takes both of your cows and gives you some milk. In fascism, the state takes both of your cows and sells you some milk. But skipping to the end, the point of this illustration, in glorious capitalism, you sell one cow, buy a bull, multiply your herd, sell them, and retire on the profits. 

This sounds wonderful and, in fact, capitalism is an economic system that can reward innovation, hard work, frugality, investment, and intelligence. 

The problem is that most of us never owned a cow. Most of us just worked for the dairy industry. The United States does not have one economy. We have several. There are very few people who are actually a part of the capitalist part of our society. 

School teachers aren’t capitalists. They don’t own the school building. They don’t charge their students. They are employed by the state and paid through property taxes. 

Fire fighters are not capitalists. Our military works in a virtually communist system, our police work in a socialist system, for heaven’s sake folks, I am not a capitalist, I work for this little socialist collective called a church!

Do you know who is a capitalist? Only people who have capital, i.e., cows, to invest. Paris Hilton is a capitalist because she inherited ownership of a large hotel chain and several related businesses. She does not make money based on innovation, hard work, frugality, or intelligence. She makes money the old-fashioned way, she inherited it. All of the people who change the sheets at Hilton hotels, who mop the floors, carry the room service trays, work at the front desk and mow the lawn . . . they are not capitalists. They are labor. They are overhead. They are a cost of doing business and in unbridled capitalism, you are always looking for ways to cut costs and increase profits such that worse you treat the thousands of people who work for Hilton the more you are rewarding the capitalist at the top.

An economic system is just a means of distributing resources.

Imagine that 10 people are shipwrecked on a ten-acre tropical island full of fruit trees and readily available vegetation and sea food. So, after a bit of time, they divide up the island into one-acre plots and they each build their own home and develop their own gardening, hunting, and fishing regimen. It is an egalitarian society where they may trade goods or labor and everyone lives in a sustainable way on their island.

But one homeowner learns to ferment fruit juice, invites his neighbors over for 

drinks and a card game. His nine unsuspecting neighbors get drunk and lose their acres in a night of card games. The winner now tells the other nine that all of the island’s resources belong to him and they no longer own a home and that they either work for him at his whim or they can no longer eat from the island’s resources nor even drink the water. Clearly, even if they agreed to drink the fruit juice and play cards with the distiller, they would not long accept that unfair arrangement.

The difference is that most of us where born on that island and there was always just 10% who owned everything and the rest of us serve their wishes. In the mid nineteenth century, there were babies born in England who owned land in Ireland from birth. And there were babies born in Ireland who were born to work the fields for the English babies and both the Irish and the English grew up thinking that this was just how the world works. 

The system was so engrained that both the English and the Irish followed the rules of the system even as one became increasingly wealthy and the other slowly starved to death. At least, that’s how it worked in the first potato famine.   

People come to accept this. Folks, everyone here was taught in high school about the history of child labor in the United States. You know that the children of the poor were made to work in textile factories, sitting at looms and doing dangerous work, breathing dangerous fumes, and typically dying young or being seriously injured. We look back on that era with shame and with no small amount of confusion as to how it could have gone on for a hundred years in this largely Christian democracy. 

But I will tell you this, about 20 years ago I was leading a tour of a couple of dozen church members through Israel and Egypt. When we were nearing the step pyramid of Memphis, our tour bus stopped at an Egyptian rug factory. My church folk were led through the factory where hundreds of children, five, six, seven years old, sat at looms, weaving rugs. As they walked, they were told that without this work, these children would starve, and they would not ever receive training in a craft. Five minutes later, all of these good Christians were in the factory store, buying child labor produced rugs and proudly marching back to the bus with the belief that they were helping the children by buying the rugs. . . because if we did not exploit and enslave them, how would they eat?

This is not as hard as they are trying to make it out to be. Look:

Don’t ever drink and play cards with a pirate. That’s obvious, right? And secondly, don’t passively accept a filthy, rotten system that impoverishes the masses for the enrichment of the few. There is a way to make capitalism work, a way that rewards innovation, hard work, frugality, and intelligence but doesn’t starve anyone. And, it really isn’t that hard.

Our economic system has always been a blend of capitalism with socialism and maybe a bit of fascism. Darwin’s theory of evolution is not based on the strongest surviving, it is based on adaptability. A species is most likely to survive if they are able to adapt to changing circumstances. Every species is everyday faced with a choice between heading towards extinction or adaptation.

At this moment in history, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the expanding disparity of income in America threatens to bring our culture to the brink of extinction. The invisible hand of the market will not save us. Unbridled capitalism has one goal: profit. It has no conscience and will not correct itself to improve standards of living for the poor. 

Seeing this freight train rolling down the tracks, earlier this year, the so called “middle class tax cut” actually cut taxes on the super wealthy and shifted the tax burden more squarely on the shoulders of the middle class.

The investor class, suddenly experiencing a windfall, invested in the market, largely through stock buy backs. The market surged to new heights. What no one wanted to talk about was the fact that it was surging on the strength of borrowed money and that can never work for long. In fact, I am afraid, we are already seeing necessary corrections that will exacerbate what a horrible economic move that tax cut was. There are two issues here. There is income and there is capital. 

There are people who own the cows and their income comes from their investment. Then there are the people who milk the cows, haul the hay, muck out the barn, build the fences, and work in the slaughter house, whether those people can afford to buy a carton of milk will depend, not on the generosity of the capitalist but on the legal system set in place. With the recent tax cut, the rich were rewarded and the poor were punished, but possibly even worse, the same measure that changed the way income was taxed also removed a great deal of inheritance tax. So we were not only hurt on the income side of things but we also rigged the system so that more of the capital will flow into the hands of the already rich. 

As long as the wealthy can transfer their wealth to the next generation without at significant part of it going back into the public economic arena, then we continue to stand on the tracks waiting for the hurtling train to run us down. . . because the train is coming, and the conductor is a capitalist and he isn’t going to stop for you.

In his famous book about Capital, the French economist, Thomas Piketty says, “the durability of this system depends on the effectiveness of its apparatus of justification.” However, as you know, there is no credible justification.

That is, as long as you, the voters in western democracies, are willing to be convinced that this filthy, rotten system is the only way the world can be, then there is a fairly inevitable end. Let me give you a clue:

You are not going to like it.

The yellow vest protests in Paris this week are a united reaction to a similar tax shift in France in which a tax on the super-rich was eliminated and they made up the income by adding a fuel tax to gasoline, a tax largely paid by workers and the middle class, most of whom feel that they are already being taxed into poverty.

And I want to tell you, when I wrote the first draft of this message, because I make the English sound so horrible for exploiting the Irish, even as million of them were starving to death in a mere four year period of the first potato famine, I sent my draft to my friend John Churcher, in England, and I asked him, “Is this accurate, is this fair?”  He sadly acknowledged that it was a fair depiction of a very bad chapter in English history.

A few days later he sent me an article about this woman, Priti Sushi Patel . . . and yes, her name is Priti Sushi. She is a British politician who was born, reared and educated in England but evidently has only a sketchy awareness of British history. As England is negotiating their exit from the European Union, she suggested this week that in order to put more pressure on the EU to accept more favorable terms for the English “Brexit” that they restrict food shipments to the half of Ireland that is staying in the EU. That’s right, Priti Sushi thinks that if they plunge Ireland into hunger, it will economically help England. 

Honestly, folks, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Even if her name sounds like character in an Austin Powers movie, this is not fiction. This is just a sign of how governments act when we accept this filthy rotten economic system that creates, defends, and expands poverty. 

There was a time in human history when poverty and hunger were caused by scarcity and we were always one harsh winter or one bad growing season away from being destitute. But in the presence of modern industry, advanced agricultural sciences, medicine and banking, the only reason there is still poverty is due to greed. And that, I submit, is no longer tolerable.