“Just War, War Crimes, War is a Crime, War is a Racket”

“Just War, War Crimes, War is a Crime, War is a Racket”   July 5, 2020    

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor     click here to see the video

14^th Dalia Lama – “Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous - an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.”

Winston Churchill did not say it exactly this way but the popular form of the comment he made in Parliament is this, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others.” Any democracy is inherently inefficient and wasteful and this appears to become increasingly true the bigger the democratic institution becomes.

The last denominational church I served was fairly large with several full-time staff members and many more part time staff and once a year we had to balance a budget that was just a few hundred thousand shy of a million dollars. We had a very aggressive outreach program that involved building a Habitat for Humanity house every year and supporting social services in a village in Nicaragua along with a lot of local poverty related work. 

But we also had a very large board that was populated by a number of well- intended people who watched way too much television. They would insist on adding or defending budget line items that sent money to their favorite charity. 

They didn’t necessarily love these charities enough to send their own money, but they loved them enough to gum up our budget writing process to insist that we send them money from the church. So, while I’m trying to make sure that we keep the feeding center that feeds 200 kids in Matagalpa, Nicaragua everyday open, they also felt the need to make sure that we supported the no-kill Animal Shelter where three or four hundred cats are being housed. This was one of dozens of line items of different people’s favorite causes.

There were some red-faced arguments every fall as these bureaucratic ego battles took place and at some point, I regularly offered, “give me a line item veto and I can balance the church’s budget in five minutes and put a good deal of money into savings” . . . an offer they never had the wisdom to grant to me. 

We like democracy because we all get a voice and even though we don’t get everything our way, we usually get at least a piece of what we want. But, when a lot of people get a piece of what they want, efficiency, thrift, goes out the window. I never suggested that we go ahead and euthanize the cats and anyone who says I did is a damned liar, however, my sympathy grew smaller every year for 16 years.

But during that time, I also served on the boards of several community agencies to include the United Way and Burrell Mental Health and the Community Foundation. Then I was often the minority voice as we looked a very big budgets in the tens of millions of dollars and had to make decisions about what programs got funded and which ones had to be scaled back. And, again, these things get very personal. If one board member is a recovering alcoholic, they are going to defend addiction treatment programs, tooth and nail. 

Another board member has a sibling in an assisted living housing program for people with special needs and for them, every other program is expendable. Still, mental health is generally under-funded and writing that budget was like trying to spread one jar of peanut butter over a hundred loaves of bread. But it wasn’t all well thought out.

Not to beat a dead horse but let me give you an example: 

This is a photo of a part of the main campus of Burrell where we built about $30 million worth of buildings that house most of our counseling, psychiatric, and child treatment programs. It is built on some of the most expensive land in the region, next to the Cox Hospital complex. We realized that fewer than 10% of our clients lived in this part of town and many had to take a series of bus trips to get to us to receive services.

90% of our local clients lived on the north side of town where land would have cost us about one-tenth of what this land cost. We could have put millions of dollars back into the services we delivered in mental health, been closer to our client base, and dramatically improved the property values and lowered the crime rate in a northside blighted neighborhood. And it is for observations like this that I am no longer on the board of Burrell Behavioral Health. 

I had my sacred cows in each program and could be quite difficult to get along with when I felt like politics or favoritism was having too much sway in the final writing of the budget. And when you start to talk about a really big budget, like a hospital or a university, and I was always on the sidelines of those battles, but a lot of the decisions about vendors, construction, legal services, auditing firms, these contracts were sometimes granted in the midst of kickbacks, bribes, and revolving door arrangements that would have embarrassed any third world dictator. 

I could be more specific, but I would almost certainly be sued if I actually said anything about Cox Hospitals granting multi-million dollar contracts on the basis of non-competitive bidding from members of their own board. Oops…. Sorry, not sorry. And, of course, while medical costs sky-rocket, our local hospitals make the same prime real estate decisions that Burrell made, which is a large part of why our healthcare costs are so high. 

I get my primary health care from a group of doctors that charge me $60 a month for everything. They are bright, professional, and caring people. And they lease office space downtown on the bottom floor of a parking garage surrounded by closed retail shops and empty warehouses. But my healthcare costs less than 10% of what most people in this area pay. This is not hard. It is just unpopular.

Generally speaking, the larger an institution becomes, the less efficient it is. Some of that is due simply to the complexity of scale and some of that is due to the greed that always creeps in when a lot of money is changing hands.  Just consider how our economy has changed during the current pandemic. 40 million people have filed for unemployment.

Many, if not most, small businesses will not survive this. And yet, the top billionaires in our nation have seen their wealth go up by 50% just in the past three months, exploiting the government spending and special demands of the pandemic.

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a lot of other nasty rich people whose names are not in the news as much are experiencing rapid wealth growth while tens of millions of Americans head for bankruptcy. 

That’s how our economy works though. Whenever a lot of money is being moved, the big guys step in and grab the majority of it while working class and poor people are still brushing their teeth and lacing up their boots to go to work. Now, I don’t want to go all Steve Rattner on you guys, but I have a few of charts.

This is an average municipal government budget pie chart. The big blue section is the police budget and the red section is the fire budget and this shows you what we are talking about when we talk about defunding the police. At least I am not talking about getting rid of the police force entirely but it is clear that mental health workers, social workers, the kind of people who could meaningfully respond to most of what the police are called out for, are hardly present in the budget because it is taken up, almost entirely, by the police and fire departments. 

Every mental health emergency, every public acting out of an alcoholic or drug addict, and every domestic disturbance doesn’t need two heavily armed cops to show up, and, in fact, more than a thousand times a year, that’s how someone gets shot. Save the armed cops for bank robberies and domestic terrorism but, as you have heard me say many times, if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. You don’t need an armed cop to give traffic tickets any more than we arm meter maids who give out parking tickets. Most police shootings happen in traffic stops. So, stop making traffic stops! You have their license number – just mail them a speeding ticket. That’s what they do in the United Kingdom and it not only works to avoid police shootings, no one speeds anymore because they know that they will get a ticket in the mail.

When an institution gets this big, it has so much power, the municipal government has tremendous difficulty in getting the budget cut to a more appropriate size in relation to the rest of the city’s needs. This is a problem that will not be fixed overnight and correcting it at all will require tremendous political will on the part of voters. As important as it is and as much as it is in the news, we’re not here to talk about police budgets, or mental health or hospital budgets. On this 4^th of July weekend, we are here to talk about the military budget. My previous illustrations were just to prime the pump so that it will be easier for you to accept that what I am about to tell you is entirely true.

When you go from the city budget to the national budget you see what an amazing problem this becomes.

The federal government will move over $4 trillion dollars this year but just over half of that is not really income and budget issues for politicians to manage. Social Security and Medicare are self-funding programs, so it is deceptive to look at our federal budget in this way. 

It makes a lot more sense to look at what we allegedly have discretion over. It is horrifying enough to realize that military and veterans spending accounts for nearly 70 cents of every federal dollar spent, but what you don’t see is how much is spent off the books… trillions spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were never even budgeted.

The scandal reported by the Nation in 2018 revealed that when the Department of Defense was finally pinned down to be audited, the auditing firm of Ernst and Young reported that they could not finish the audit because there were hundreds of billions of dollars unaccounted for and more than 16,000 pages of supporting documents had been destroyed. Please don’t let this slip passed you. This is not a matter of Hillary deleting thousands of personal emails about her yoga classes and her daughter’s wedding. This is the military hiding 16,000 pages of budget and acquisition documentation. The military has lost hundreds of billions of dollars that they cannot tell you where it went. 

You all know what it is like. You get a little refund check and you misplace it and you can’t get another one. You let a $10 bill slip out of your pocket while you are fishing for your keys in a dark parking lot. But this is what one billion dollars looks like . . . almost a dozen pallets stacked tightly with hundred-dollar bills six feet tall. How do you lose this, hundreds of times? The military industrial complex feeds on the bloated military budget that buys airplanes we can’t use, ships we will never need, and weapons systems designed to win wars like World War II when we will never fight wars like that again. 

Last spring, in a broadly reported interview, Jimmy Carter talked about a(https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/18/jimmy-carter-us-most-warlike-nation-history-world)

Conversation he had with President Trump. Trump was worried about China’s growing economic strength and their competitiveness on world trade. The 94 year old Carter spelled it out for him: the United States is perpetually at war and China almost never is. Carter said that the US is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world” having been engaged in conflict of one kind or another for all but 16 of our 243 years of existence. China has not been engaged in any armed conflict for more than 40 years. 

While we are losing hundreds of billions on military spending that we can’t even account for, China is building airports, housing projects, wind and solar power generation, and investing in international trade. We don’t see it so much here but I can tell you that in every Caribbean and Central American country that I have visited in the past generation, the grocery store to go to is the Chinese store, and they are backed by government initiatives to spread their language, culture, and citizens around the globe in positive and helpful ways while we build aircraft carriers that will never be used and would be useless if we tried to use them…. They are all just one drone strike away from sleeping with the fishes and every nation on earth knows it and yet the USA keeps building more of them. 

It is not an accident that I am bringing this up on the 4^th of July weekend. We tend to talk about every war as a war fought for freedom and independence. We say that every soldier deployed to a battlefield is fighting to protect our freedom. And folks, wishing that it was so does not make it so. We invaded Afghanistan because there were Taliban training camps there. The whole nation wasn’t a Taliban training camp, in fact, the military targets there that had anything to do with the 9-11 attacks on the USA were few. But we invaded, occupied, and we are still there, with the Russians paying insurgents a bounty for every American soldier they kill. But 19 years later, does Afghanistan pose a threat to our freedom and independence?  Not for nearly a generation.

Dick Cheney spun up a case for invading Iraq, though they had nothing to do with 9-11, they posed no threat to us, and their military was the only counter-balance to the growing power of Iran in the region. But what that war did was increase the value of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton stock by more than 3000%. The real reason behind almost every war is not the noble stuff they sell in the media to recruit soldiers and gain support for a war, it is to enrich those who are, generally speaking, already rich. If war was such a noble enterprise, it would be illegal to profit off of it and we would spare no expense to care for our wounded veterans but, as you know, the truth of it is the exact opposite. War kills the children of the poor on both sides of the conflict, and enriches the war profiteers. 

I briefly worked as a military journalist. I have stood on the training grounds at Ft. Leonard Wood and felt the electric passion of young soldiers as they prepared for deployment. I know that they were willing to give their lives in service to their country in defense of the values we claim to hold dear. But I’m telling you, I had a very short career as a military journalist because I could see that these young women and men were being lied to. They were willing to die in defense of freedom, but they were being sent to give up arms and legs, eyes, sanity, and their very lives for cheap oil and the profits of Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Boeing, and Raytheon. 

War is a racket in which noble young soldiers are killed for ignoble profit and that men and women, is a fact. And listeners, you don’t have to write to tell me how angry you are at me for saying it, I have heard it many times. But the fact that you are angry doesn’t mean that what I am saying is not true. I’m not being unpatriotic. War profiteers are the ones who are not being patriotic, but they never seem to pay a price in the media.

As the Dalai Lama said, we allow ourselves to be brainwashed into believing that wars turn soldiers into heroes and that they make our nation safe for democracy.

It simply isn’t true. American democracy is in peril but not from the armies of Afghanistan or Iraq. Our democracy is threatened by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian meddling in our elections but that is a war our President has not only chosen not to fight but he has, in fact, encouraged Russian and Chinese meddling in our elections to hold onto an office for which he is not qualified and which he has already disgraced for more than three years. 

Here is the moral dilemma of our age:  If we cannot afford to provide health care to our sick, education to our young, a living wage to our workers, then what exactly are we spending trillions of dollars to defend? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have a Department of Defense or Homeland Security, I’m just saying that they are so big that they have dominated our nation’s budget and robbed us of the things that really would make America great if we just got our priorities in order. 

I love my country, but my government is a disgrace. I respect our service women and men, but I despise the people who have sent them into battle to profit from their sacrifices. I want to be able to stand at attention for our flag, but first America is going to have to get its head straight about what it is that we really stand for.

I will close with a bit of trivia that may be news to many of you. We all know that our grand Statue of Liberty was a gift to America from France. But it was not a gift given to us at the end of our War for Independence at the end of the 18^th century. It was not given to us until the end of the 19^thcentury and it was given to honor the fact that America had finally freed its slaves. The whole association with immigration and famous poem on the base of the statue came later. The French gave us this great monument to liberty because we had finally done the right and moral thing in giving liberty to African slaves. 

This is not a difficult thing. If you want to be honored and respected, do something that is honorable and respectable. Cut the military budget and give workers a raise to a living wage. Make higher education available to the children of the rich and the poor. Give healthcare to the sick, housing to the homeless, jobs to the unemployed, and for God’s sake, pay reparations to the decedents of those freed slaves for which lady liberty holds high her torch of freedom. Oh, and not that I watch football, but give Colin Kaepernick a job in the NFL, and tear down some statue of Robert E. Lee and put up a statue of Fredrick Douglas, or even Colin Kaepernick for that matter…. Celebrate some history that is worth preserving . . . or create some history that would be worth remembering. 

It may be a symbolic gesture to take Indian murdering Andrew Jackson off of the $20 bill and put Harriet Tubman’s face on our currency, but you can’t say that it is just symbolic, or we would have done it already. There is a reason why Trump is delaying that change and the reason is we have a racist in the White House. Come on America, you are better than this. Give me something to celebrate on Independence Day. 

I have a great deal more that I want to say on this topic but I know that I have already taxed your patience and frayed your nerves and so I will end with what I think was the greatest line from all of the 9 episodes of the fictional Star Wars movies: When Luke Skywalker crash lands on the jungle planet of Tatooine, he meets a tiny alien and he tells him that he is looking for a great warrior. 

The strange looking creature was Yoda, whom Luke came to find, but Yoda is quick to correct him saying, "Wars not make one great." I want to be proud of a great America, but America is not now great. I can’t vouch for whether or not it ever was, but I know that right now it is not and that there is no war that will ever make it great again. 

The ball is in your court America. If you want to reclaim your honor, do something honorable. If you want to be respected, do the things that would make you respectable. End your ceaseless wars. Find a solution to racism. Bring an end to ignorance and poverty, and for God’s sake, elect national leaders that you don’t have to constantly apologize for. Nobody is perfect but then, nobody I can think of is as imperfect as our current president. Do better America. Be better. Earn our respect and you will have it. I am a son of the South. I am a natural born patriot. All you have to do to win me back is stop embarrassing yourself and start to do the right thing.

“Thievery from the Top Down”   click here to see the video                                                 David Ketchum 

June 28, 2020 

 

Indiana Jones is perhaps an unexpected starting place for a reflection like this, so bear with me. I confess to loving the movies as a child – the music remains incredible, and who can resist a little bit of Harrison Ford’s charisma, 

 not to mention the memes about punching Nazis? I wish that was the whole of it, but we also get a glimpse of a worldview that has shaped and ruled the world for hundreds of years. And while I would love to ruminate on one of Indiana’s more adorable catch-phrases (“Why’d it have to be snakes?”), the one that really applies here is: “It belongs in a museum.” 

In Indiana Jones’ case, it is easy to root for the least terrible White guy. I mean, Indiana really just wants to protect priceless artifacts from the Nazis, private collectors, and evil cultists. All of the movies’ bad guys have motives that are obviously repugnant; they set a pretty low bar. And then we have Indiana Jones, who doesn’t even want to profit off of the looting of cultural and historic relics; he just wants to preserve them. What could be wrong with that? But when I watch these kinds of films now, what stands out to me is 1) how invisible non-European cultures and people are, and 2) how ubiquitous the assumption that White people have a legitimate claim to own and preserve what belongs to others, and to accumulate profit and power at the expense of others, really is. It’s so ingrained that it hides in plain sight. 

It’s startling to recognize that the descendants of the folks who produced those priceless artifacts exist now only as backdrops. They make up the crowds that become Indiana’s audience for some wise crack or audacious feat. They are the laborers who toil under some hot sun, carrying luggage or excavating sites. They are helpless victims and the grateful recipients of Indiana’s help. Generally speaking, they aren’t viewed as the experts of their own culture and history. Generally speaking, there is not any consideration given as to why their communities have been reduced to being, usually at best, the servants of foreigners. If we’re asked to notice them at all, it’s usually to watch them suffer a violent death. And their deaths aren’t meaningful, because their lives are not really part of the story. Their deaths mainly serve to provide a sense of gravity to the stakes at hand and to draw attention to the risks the (White) heroes are taking on their noble quest.  

Perhaps you’ve already guessed where this is going, and why Indiana Jones is relevant to the nightly news. History has a lot to tell us, and movies can remind us, about why racism is so intractable in our society and culture. Historical traumas span across centuries and generations, but the history of colonial expansion is often taught and told like an Indiana Jones movie, with the Europeans in the spotlight. White heroics absolve the White conscience, because these versions of the stories inevitably demonstrate that the colonizers really just had the best interests of the colonized in mind. In these stories, colonization is not ruthless exploitation; it is economic development. It is not military occupation and state-sanctioned violence; it is benevolent order. And it is not looting; it is historical preservation. After all, “it belongs in a museum” – a museum most likely financed and run by wealthy, powerful, and White people, to be consumed by mainly White people.  

The United States began as a colony, and we typically get the Indiana Jones treatment of that history. But there are at least two versions of the story. The popular story focuses on the aspirations and ideals of freedom and democracy, and of heroic sacrifice to cast off the yoke of tyranny. For the colonizers, the so-called New World was an experience that represented religious and political freedom, the hard work and wonder of exploration, and the risks and rewards of opening up economic markets. But notice who is left out of that assessment. Who is it that is made invisible by this narrative, like the masses of commoners who crowd the market while everyone is really watching Indiana Jones? Because there is another story here. For the colonized, the arrival of European explorers brought with it the experience of brutal genocides, cruel enslavement and forced labor, displacement, disease, endless war, and death. And that story has not yet come to an end.  

In my experience of life in the United States, the focus on lofty aspirations and ideals often obscures and diminishes the brutality suffered by those who paid the price of colonization. And because people, especially people with relative privilege and power, such as White people, are socialized to identify with those heroic aspirations, even talking about the brutality can be perceived as a threat to them and their way of life. Because the aspirations are worth defending, they become defensive. This is terribly tragic and ironic, because they make people who are denouncing injustice into enemies, instead of understanding that injustice itself is the obstacle to their aspirations.  

We can look at policing in the United States through this lens. And perhaps I should pause to note that we can and should look at all of our institutions through this lens. Policing is not unique in this regard; all of our institutions have been influenced by these competing stories. In the case of policing, the popular narrative is that policing is about protecting innocent people. It is about sacrifices that law enforcement officers make in order to create safe communities. They are public servants who are willing to risk their lives so that our lives are not at risk. This is ideal version of policing inspires a lot of people to become police officers in an effort to help their communities, and it inspires a lot of communities to glorify law enforcement officers. This is the story that (White) culture tells and re-tells, and these law enforcement officers are the so-called good apples that shouldn’t be tossed out when we discover a Derek Chauvin in their midst.  

But who and what is made invisible by this version of the story? In the United States, the history of policing is a complicated tale that often boils down to protecting property and controlling labor. In the North, labor movements threatened the power and profit of the rich, and policing developed out of attempts to break strikes, destroy unions, and control labor. Dr. Gary Potter has described the relationship of police with labor in “two distinct forms” - “forced dispersal of demonstrating workers, usually through the use of extreme violence” and “public order” arrests, where labor movements were deprived of their power through the arrests of supporters “for trivial public order offenses”. Often, “police made use of ambiguous vagrancy laws … to arrest both union organized and unemployed workers.” (https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-history-of-policing-in-us.pdf  )  

Further, race and property have been intimately connected throughout U.S. history. For example, White people were authorized to capture Black people who were suspected to be escaped slaves, and, over time, slave patrols and Night Watches would become the predecessors of police in the South. These dynamics can be traced through time in their connection to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and mass incarceration, and can also be seen in the establishment of police forces to control Indigenous populations.  

This was the case just up the interstate in St. Louis, Missouri. Terrell Carter described this process in Police on a Pedestal: Responsible Policing in a Culture of Worship. When white settlers moved to the territory, “they lived in fear of attack from Native Americans who did not want their land or resources unjustly taken from them.” So they formed a group that would eventually become the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, but which was, in part, explicitly created “to protect white settlers from the retaliatory actions of Native Americans who previously occupied the land.” (http://www.stlamerican.com/entertainment/living_it/in-latest-book-former-st-louis-cop-writes-how-problems-with-cops-starts-with-the/article_fc1c0ff6-a30c-11e9-b241-971e810fe3dd.html  ) 

 

Carter went on to say that:  

“After slavery ended, whites, especially those in the South, were not happy that African Americans had been granted their freedom. They could not imagine a world where African Americans were considered equal to them and living under their own direction … . So, after the Civil War and into Reconstruction, whites started militia groups whose primary purposes were to hunt down freedmen and runaway slaves and return them back to their former slaveowners or sell them to corporations where they would be forced into back-breaking physical labor. Many of these militia groups served as the predecessors to our modern police departments.” (ibid) 

Knowing the history of policing can help us understand how it has evolved, adapting over time, and we can trace that history through convict leasing to mass incarceration. Indeed, today’s Prison Industrial Complex is a massive tangle of institutions and stakeholders, including private corporations that rake in the billions of dollars that come from building new prisons, staffing those prisons, and filling up beds. As the Prison Policy Initiative points out, this requires: public and private employees, health care, construction, interest payments, food, and utilities. It also requires: judicial and legal costs, civil asset forfeiture, bail fees, and a host of commissary and communications costs. The Initiative has documented that mass incarceration by itself is, at a minimum, a $182 billion a year industry.  

And it especially preys upon the very, especially women and people of color. (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html ) 

But there is more at stake than that $182 billion. Our socioeconomic and political systems have also evolved to facilitate and protect the process of accumulating power and wealth. Throughout our history, and including today, exploitation of human lives in order to amass wealth has been legally protected, and the wealthy have called upon the police to enforce those laws. These laws are not in the interest of our personal or social well-being. We know that inequality is dangerous and harmful; we have the historical record, the psychosocial data, and the personal experience to back that up. (https://www.welcomingpath.com/2019/07/Equality-Also-Means-Economic-Equality.html  ) But inequality and injustice is legal, and it is afforded the protection of the law.  

It is crucial that we remember this economic context, the profit motive, when we talk about racial justice and ending police brutality. Now that public interest and support of  #BlackLivesMatter and racial justice issues are growing again, many corporations are beginning to tentatively do the same. A recent example was Amazon.com, which posted a banner on social media and on their main website that expressed “Black lives matter: Amazon stands in solidarity with the Black community.” Jeff Bezos even went out of his way to defend this support when the company received the predictable onslaught of racist tirades and criticisms. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/06/08/jeff-bezos-shares-angry-emails-over-support-black-lives-matter/5317310002/  ) So let me say, first of all, thank you for that. I don’t want to dismiss the importance of these kinds of gestures in normalizing support of racial justice.  

But, second of all, we can’t ignore the fact that Amazon.com cannot sincerely support #BlackLivesMatter while exploiting Black workers. Amazon’s warehouse conditions, for example, are notoriously terrible (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-workers-protest-unsafe-grueling-conditions-warehouse  ), and an “AP analysis found that more than 60% of warehouse and delivery workers in most cities are people of color,” while only “about 8% of its managers in the U.S. are black, compared to nearly the 60% of managers who are white.” (https://komonews.com/news/local/empty-words-companies-touting-black-lives-matter-accused-of ) A global pandemic and a resurgent movement to demand racial justice could have been an opportunity to address those disparities and redistribute wealth. Instead, Jeff Bezos has continued to accumulate wealth and power beyond belief. In an analysis of 2020’s first quarter,  

“The company’s earnings increased by $33 million every hour of the first quarter, even as its warehouses suffered coronavirus outbreaks and workers walked out over unsafe conditions. Bezos, the world’s richest man, has accumulated an additional $25 billion since the beginning of this year, putting him on track to become the first-ever trillionaire.” (https://inthesetimes.com/article/22539/covid-19-profiteers-are-making-a-killing  ) 

I hope the point is clear. Putting up a banner on a website is free. And, in light of the pandemic profiteering of Jeff Bezos, it is hard not to see it as anything but a publicity stunt. But Amazon.com isn’t the only corporation profiting in this way. A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies revealed that: 

• “Between January 1, 2020 and April 10, 2020, 34 of the nation’s wealthiest 170 billionaires saw their wealth increase by tens of millions of dollars. Eight have seen their net worth surge by over $1 billion.  
• “… Between March 18 and April 10, 2020, over 22 million people lost their jobs as the unemployment rate surged toward 15 percent. Over the same three weeks, U.S. billionaire wealth increased by $282 billion, an almost 10 percent gain.” 

And this isn’t a new trend:  

• “Billionaire wealth rebounded quickly after the 2008 financial crisis. Between 2010 and 2020, U.S. billionaire wealth increased 80.6 percent, more than five times the median wealth increase for U.S. households. 

• Between 1990 and 2020, U.S. billionaire wealth soared 1,130 percent — an increase more than 200 times greater than the 5.37 percent growth of U.S. median wealth. 
• Measured as a percentage of their wealth, the tax obligations of America’s billionaires decreased 79 percent between 1980 and 2018.” (https://ips-dc.org/billionaire-bonanza-2020/  ) 

This is the system that the laws are designed, and that the police have vowed, to protect. It is 100% legal to make billions of dollars during a pandemic, during which the moral bankruptcy and fundamental racism of this economic system has been on full display. Billionaires, in the midst of a pandemic, have been literally making a killing, sucking up wealth while real live human beings suffer and die.  

Again, this is the system that the laws are designed, and that the police have vowed, to protect. It is considered good business to siphon off billions of dollars that could be invested into creating and maintaining the medical and social infrastructure that saves lives during, for example, a pandemic. It is legal, but it is also cruel and immoral. And it is also racist. 

But wait, there’s more! Generally speaking, the very wealthy and their corporations support the system of policing that has produced the very police brutality that is being protested. It’s well established that police departments receive a disproportionate amount of local funding, usually in the range of 20-45% of municipal budgets. (https://populardemocracy.org/news-and-publications/congress-must-divest-billion-dollar-police-budget-and-invest-public-education ) But our ever increasingly militarized and high-tech police departments demand even more.  This is where police foundations come in to play.  

Those municipal budgets are public documents that can be reviewed and criticized by elected officials and engaged community members. Police foundations usually operate without this kind of oversight. Since public money is not being spent, donations, such as specialized equipment, are made directly to police departments. Armstrong and Seidman have given some poignant examples -  

“The Houston Police Foundation has an entire page on its website showcasing the equipment it purchased for the police department, including SWAT equipment, LRAD sound equipment, and dogs for the K-9 unit. The Philadelphia Police Foundation purchased long guns, drones, and ballistic helmets. The Atlanta Police Foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of over 12,000 cameras. / In Los Angeles, the police used foundation funding to purchase controversial surveillance software from Palantir. If the LAPD purchased this technology through its public budget, it would have been required to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council. By having the foundation purchase it for them, the LAPD was able to bypass that oversight.” (https://news.littlesis.org/2020/06/18/corporate-backers-of-the-blue-how-corporations-bankroll-u-s-police-foundations/  ) 

They go on to say that:   

“these foundations provide a public-private structure wherein the corporate elite can overtly support police departments through direct donations, sponsorships, special programs, and by serving as directors on foundations’ boards. The ongoing protests have emphasized that police exist to enforce a racist social order that protects corporations, capital, and buildings rather than black and brown lives. Police foundations are a key space for orchestrating, normalizing, and celebrating the collaboration between corporate power and the police.” (ibid) 

This needs to be emphasized. These wealthy, powerful corporations are willing to spend millions and millions of dollars each year to increase very dangerous and disturbing trends, such as the militarization of police forces and the ever-expanding invasion of privacy through surveillance and big data. What these wealthy, powerful corporations are NOT willing to do is pay fair wages, offer just benefits, and redistribute wealth in an equitable and sustainable way. The wealthy benefit from a set of systems that requires that most human beings experience some level of exploitation, and that has, historically and presently, ruthlessly and systematically exploited Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. The wealthy and their corporations have an economic and political interest in defending these systems, and they go out of their way to pour money into police foundations that avoid public accountability and the promotion of the common good.  

In the end, this is an essential reason why police brutality is tolerated so willingly, defended so passionately, and even protected as a right. Policing connects with our nation’s deep and problematic history of oppression, especially as it is related to race and wealth. Its roots are in the attempt of those in power to defend land that had been stolen from native peoples and labor stolen through exploitation, including slavery in the South and sweat shops in the North. Economic systems have played a crucial role in producing a version of policing that protects the power and wealth that was and is accumulated through exploitation and injustice. As Dr. Cooper put it,  

 

“From the beginning American policing has been intimately tied not to the problem of crime, but to exigencies and demands of the American political economy. From the anti-immigrant bashing of early police forces, to the strike breaking of the later 1800s, to the massive corruption of the early 20th century, through professionalism, Taylorization and now attempts at amelioration through community policing, the role of the police in the United States has been defined by economics and politics, not crime or crime control. As we look to the 21st century, it now appears likely that a new emphasis on science and technology, particularly related to citizen surveillance; a new wave of militarization reflected in the spread of SWAT teams and other paramilitary squads; and a new emphasis on community pacification through community policing, are all destined to replay the failures of history as the policies of the future.” (https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-history-of-policing-in-us.pdf  ) 

So: as long as White wealth matters more than Black lives, there will be financial motivation to tolerate, protect, and even promote police brutality.  I feel like I should say that again: as long as White wealth matters more than Black lives, there will be financial motivation to tolerate, protect, and even promote police brutality. 

There is much more to be said, but we’ll pause the conversation on this point. Our wisdom lesson was a joyful, beautiful vision of what life could be like. None of those aspirations are unattainable, and most would not be very difficult to bring into reality. Yet we struggle. Our unjust systems and cultures are the obstacles to that vision. White supremacy stands in the way, in all its forms, including within our White-centered capitalist economic system. The title for my sermon comes from an article by William C. Anderson called “Forget ‘Looting.’ Capitalism Is the Real Robbery.” He wrote that  -  

“In a nation that has never gotten past the civil war it fought over a wealthy class not giving up slavery profits, defending the wealthy is a tradition. The same people who created and currently benefit from the current crisis are intentionally mismanaging plenty of other parts of our existence. … The robbery we should concern ourselves with is the theft perpetrated by a system that creates desperation where people in need have to go and take for themselves what should be a guaranteed right. Capitalism encourages thievery from the top down.”  (https://truthout.org/articles/forget-looting-capitalism-is-the-real-robbery/   ) 

We don’t have any excuses. We have a vision of how life could be, and we understand how harmful the present systems actually are. In the case of economics, thievery from the top down doesn’t work, and will never work, if what we are working for is a just, compassionate, wise society. Let’s demand better. That means we have to be willing to dismantle and divest in economic injustice. We have to ask ourselves if #BlackLivesMatter more than the financial perks and profits that we access, especially if we are White. Because, if we are to reach a sustainable and life-giving future, we have to make sure these oppressive systems come to an end. They don’t belong in the future; we must dismantle them. But they should not be forgotten; we want to remember and continue to learn how to grow into justice and love. So maybe Indiana Jones can help us here after all. Let’s lay these oppressive systems to rest, because they belong in the past. They belong in a museum.