What churches do

A famine on the West Bank in the first century brought difficult times for the churches.  Famine on top of persistent food shortages, double taxation, and overpopulation crippled an already precarious Palestinian economy.  Churches in the eastern Mediterranean took up collections to keep them alive.  It wasn't easy for any of them, but they did it because that's what you do when there's a need.

Children in Mpeketoni
left without fathers.

The church in Corinth was the first of several churches to give and did so eagerly, according to the history.  They asked Paul how to save up such monies. He told them to do like the Galatian churches: each person should set aside a sum every week according to their income. That way no big collections would be necessary when next Paul visited. Their surplus was small, and the week-by-week savings were how they achieved a generous gift in the end.

In Kenya just days ago, a terrorist attack on the village of Mpeketoni left 48 men dead.  They'd been asked if they were Christian and shot if they were.  Families were shattered and the town was set ablaze before security forces arrived to drive off the attackers.

The pastors in Mpeketoni asked for help, so churches in the region raised some money and sent the bishop and a truckload of food and other supplies to help out. There is much to do in the community to begin the process of recovery, of healing, but they're not alone. It's what churches do.

The Corinth church wasn't perfect. In the couple of years between Paul's letters, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, the collection effort fell by the wayside. Titus visited the church and rekindled interest in the relief fund, but after he left, it again came to a halt. Second Corinthians 8 & 9 is Paul's encouragement to the church folks to finish what they had pledged to do the previous year.  Difficult, even in the best of times, of course, so reminders and encouragement are part of the deal.

Sincere thanks come from Kenya for those who joined in the effort.
Let us know if you'd like to lend a hand.

The GAP - Part III - what he told his mother

Goldman Sachs trader is suing; his bonus of $8.25 million was five million less than he told his mother he was getting.  

Deeb Salem said in an arbitration hearing that he was expecting $13 million, down from a $15 million award for 2009 when he was paid more than the CEO, Lloyd C. Blankfein. Salem said his bonus was unfairly docked because of a written warning he received for his 2007 performance.

Salem said his group put on a large short bet against the housing market, reaping billions of dollars for Goldman Sachs and helping it weather the financial crisis better than peers. He said Blankfein told the desk to cover its bet in early 2007, forcing the group to sell almost $5 billion of positions to Harbinger Capital Partners LLC, the hedge-fund firm run by Phil Falcone that made billions betting against subprime mortgages.

In 2011, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said Salem and other Goldman Sachs traders manipulated prices of derivatives linked to subprime home loans in 2007 for their own benefit. The subcommittee’s assertions were based in part on Salem’s self-evaluation, in which he wrote “we began to encourage the squeeze with plans of getting very short again after the short squeeze caused capitulation of these shorts.”

Summary: one of the primary blood-suckers that precipitated the Great Recession and the collapse of my retirement savings by gambling, betting against the market tumble he helped create... he is complaining because he didn't make more millions personally for his performance.  This miscreant crashed the world marketplace, he and a few others like him, by gambling!  That was illegal until recently when big business and government colluded to provide yet another path for extracting wealth from the working class.  My loss was endurable, but my friends in Kenya saw the price of their food double.  The toll was and continues to be deadly.  

This particular tantrum by a Wall Streeter offers us insight into the power-player thinking that pervades the financial industry in the developed world.  

We know how it works now. We've created venues for an individual or team to manipulate the marketplace with multi-billion dollar wagers.  Win or lose, the cost is extracted from the world's working class. Functionally identical to Los Vegas gaming, it continues today, largely unregulated and unimpeded. The lower-income folks of the world pay for that play, and the GAP widens.  

If banks were countries, Goldman Sachs would be in the world's top 100 countries for wealth.  Had enough yet?




The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor.

The GAP - Part II - nice try Mr. President

Barack Obama thoughtfully opened discussion on the widening gap between rich and poor in America in 2013, intending to focus on the issue for the remainder of his presidency. In describing the “relentless decades-long trend” of a “dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility,” Obama acknowledged that his administration has not arrested two stubborn trends: widening income inequality and declining mobility, where lower-income people have a harder time finding a path to the middle class.  

“The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking enough, but the idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care or a community that views her future as their own — that should offend all of us.”

“Some of the social patterns that contribute to declining mobility, that were once attributed to the urban poor . . . it turns out now we're seeing that pop up everywhere.  Government can’t stand on the sidelines in our efforts, because government is us. It can and should reflect our deepest values and commitments.”  ~Barack Obama

The bitter truth is that poverty and income inequality have always been a political football. The reason is perhaps simple. The poor don't have an active and viable political lobby to fight for their interests.


Both democrats and republicans turned a predictable deaf ear in favor of more politically palatable subjects. House Speaker John Boehner lashed out that whatever poverty and income inequality there is can be blamed on Obama's programs.  That's nonsense, of course, just uninformed rhetoric and lacking substance; the gap has been growing for decades. With such words, the parties contend for position rather than solutions. Neither party has offered a coherent view nor a course of action; their various talking points would be laughed out of a freshman Economics 101 class.

Government is us, as Obama says.  And it does in fact reflect our collective values and commitments.

In the U.S., the southern states in particular have been bludgeoned by economic policy, economic decline, and an increase in the number of folks living in poverty. North Carolina and a handful of other Southern U.S. states saw the biggest increases in the number of people living in what are known as "poverty areas" between 2000 and 2010, according to a new Census Bureau report.

Today, 25.7 percent of all Americans live in such areas, up from 18.1 percent in 2000, according to the report. Having a quarter of the nation living this way is a problem: Poverty areas are typically marked by "higher crime rates, poor housing conditions, and fewer job opportunities," the report points out.

See The GAP - Part I for additional information.  In the U.S., the gap is growing faster than in other developed countries.

See Class and the absence thereof for a look at underlying cultural issues.

The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor.

Furious Freedom

Freedom is uncommon.

It's worth remembering on this Independence Day...

However inalienable and proper freedom might be, oppression, bondage, and involuntary servitude persist today more so than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade.

The freedom to choose what you say and believe, where you go to live and work, to pursue knowledge, where you choose to call home and whom you will serve ... these are uncommon today. Uncommon, as in not available to most people.  Today.

Freedom's story is about more than taxes on tea or people in chains. 

Our American Revolution included twenty years of political upheaval and eight years of bloody war that ended in 1783, but there was more.

The French Revolution followed in the same decade, and the western world was born.  Personal freedom and inalienable rights were recognized in 1791 by the first amendments to our constitution, but it was well into the next century before such rights began to emerge for blacks, even later for women, and another century before segregation began to rot away.  There's more.

Humanity and the world were explosively changed by the freedom these few in the New World had won, but they and their predecessors had been fighting for such freedom since the Bronze Age.  It is a perpetual fire that has burned in every heart since the beginning.

At the other end of the spectrum from freedom is enslavement, perhaps.  Slavery is broad-reaching and not confined to the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the new world.  Slavery existed thousands of years before in ancient China, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, India, Rome, Greece, Europe, the Americas, and Africa.

Slavery in antiquity may have begun simply.  From year to year, there might be a good harvest, a successful season, or a dry spell lasting years; success wasn't guaranteed.  A family or a community might have plenty for generations or be driven out when the rains failed or the nearby forests were exhausted.  Having lost their livelihood, they might offer themselves as laborers in a more fruitful region to those who had good land for crops or nets for fishing.  Problems arose when those who 'had' took advantage of those who 'had not', and varying degrees of indenture and servitude were imposed.  In distress, a family might sell a child in hopes of saving the child and themselves as well.  A successful herdsman might offer a cow or two for a pretty wife.  Or servant.  Slavery by class, by birth, by conquest, by desperate choice ...

Beyond self-indenture, we find capture and forced service. Forced enslavement has a long history and persists today as human trafficking.

Only recently having returned to worldwide public attention, the slave trade affects perhaps millions.  There are 10,000+ per year that we know about. Actual (undetected) numbers will be much higher.

Children are still being bought and sold. Women and girls make up about 70% of trafficking victims.  

To continue bringing the issue forward, take a look at indentured servitude.

Indentured service was a labor system, most common in the 18th century British colonies, where young folks would sell themselves for a period of years as laborers.  They began by first selling themselves to a European sea captain who transported them and in turn sold their indenture to employers in the colonies who needed labor.

Indenture was a way for the poor youth of Britain and Germany to try for a new life in the New World.  Their plan was to work for a period of years and then be released.

During the late 17th and early 18th centuries poor children from England and France were kidnapped and sold into indentured labor in the Caribbean for a minimum of five years, but most times their contracts were bought and sold repeatedly and some laborers never attained their freedom.

Our modern version has several elements, particularly since the industrial age began.

Indebtedness is a bondage, encouraged and enforced by western culture.  Particularly for students, the legally enforced obligation of debt confines the individual to a narrow path of employment and availability in the workforce, usually for decades.  (Student debt tops $1.2 trillion, more than all credit card and auto loans combined.)  When you're dealing with millions of workers, the averages play out pretty impressively for the finance industry and the wealthy.

Wages were tied to productivity for 25 years following WWII.  In college economics, we
were taught that the two were tied by economic law, and that if they deviated, marketplace
response would force them back together.  They couldn't separate.  All that ended by the 70's
when corporations began to extract wealth specifically for the benefit of the few.  Executive
wages increased radically while labor pay rates stalled for the next half-century.  The financial
industry was turned loose to continue the wealth extraction.  Deregulation made the theft legal,
and Wall Street has extracted trillions from the economy's productivity without a penny going
 to the workers who provide it all.

Minimum wage traps unskilled workers in poor working conditions and inadequate support for a healthy life.  At first, after the plague in Europe had decimated the population and labor was in short supply, maximum wages were set to control costs for the benefit of the wealthy.  Later minimum wages were set to provide a 'living wage'.  If the U.S. minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity, it would be more than double the current rate.

Poverty, we know, is not something anyone chooses; it's done to you.

The big players these days are the 0.01% richest folks.  Economic warfare, rather poorly disguised in the west as free market capitalism, has formalized the process by which the super-rich advance at the expense of the indentured many.  The war is now global as financial institutions extract the wealth of developing nations.  Governments serve the wealthy and the gap widens.

Freedom is not the power to rise on the backs of others.
Freedom is not the chance to get ahead and leave others behind.
The full declaration is a world-changer.

"THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS UPON ME, BECAUSE HE ANOINTED ME TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. HE HAS SENT ME TO PROCLAIM RELEASE TO THE CAPTIVES, AND RECOVERY OF SIGHT TO THE BLIND, TO SET FREE THOSE WHO ARE OPPRESSED, TO PROCLAIM THE FAVORABLE YEAR OF THE LORD." 

The triumph of freedom is not a war's victory of one people or ideology over another ... that which we have isn't real freedom.  It's just a taste, and there's more to come.

The Myth of the Corporate Soul

Corporations are people, or at least the legal equivalent thereof.  The world changed on January 21, 2010.   With little fanfare, corporations became people.  On that date the Supreme Court of the United States decided that corporations, be they American or foreign, are afforded the same rights as a single individual when it comes to contributing money to a political cause or candidate.  The same applies to corporations speaking their mind through lobbyists.  

There are many discussions that might follow, but a perhaps interesting inquiry considers the moral and ethical choices a 'corporation' might make.  Does a corporation have a guiding conscience?  Is there a 'knowing what's right' apart from any other criteria that constrains the decision-making process and guides the whole of the organization?

Of course not.  Despite the legal word-play, corporations are not people.  

Corporate governance is primarily a matter of state law. There are thousands of businesses incorporated in Delaware simply because laws there are more lenient regarding the obligations that directors have to shareholders.

Within that constraint of law (or not), the business model governs the corporation, and the goal is profit.

Examples of corporations taking advantage of laborers and consumers are many. Enron bragged of how they cheated grandmothers who depended on them for electricity in California and cheated their own employees by recommending they buy more stock in their pension funds as company executives were selling. Tyco's top officers used millions of investor dollars for their own personal expenses. American Airlines' former chairman secretly took huge pay increases while negotiating pay cuts for the company's pilots, flight attendants and mechanics.   ~The Global Policy Forum

Wall Street and the banking industry have illustrated the consciencelessness of the corporation. Lacking an ethical governance and oversight, the corporation is just a hungry animal in violent competition for its food.

A mild surprise in the inquiry:  it isn't just the corporations; investors behave much the same way.

"When we looked at the investors, we ran a series of very interesting studies on how people would invest in pension funds. We literally gave them pension fund opportunities where there were social issues embedded in the portfolios they could invest in. What we found is they underinvested in social investment funds, even when it was quite irrational for them to do so – they seemed to discount those funds relative to funds that didn’t have these components.

When we queried people and we asked them, “Well, why are you doing this?” they were fundamentally looking not at the current returns, but basically believing that ultimately they would be forced to make sacrifices in their dividends and the payouts they would receive in the future ...."  Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail

There are people of genuine conscience.  Our difficulties arise as we attempt to regulate such things as morality in the business realm.  Those with Hobby Lobby went to court on the issue of abortifacient contraceptives.  It's a valid point that they could not in good conscience support or endorse or provide the means of abortion.  But those are people speaking on how they choose to live and do business. A corporation itself has no thoughts on the subject.

The narrow focus on the contraceptive question is unfortunate.  The issues of conscience in business go far beyond.  Questions of fair labor practices and wages, ethical suppliers and manufacturers, and even to the utility of offered products compared to pointless luxury.  Can government regulation resolve these?  Perhaps not.

Our well-intended efforts to legislate morality in the business world must walk a narrow line.  On one side, it's free enterprise; on the other it's government oppression.  Elements of socialism hover in the wings.  Ideas?  What's the underlying problem?

Independence Day

"This is the only country where you can come with just $100 in your pocket and get a PhD in nuclear engineering," she said with a great smile as she prepared for her citizenship ceremony.

"When a boy is born," an Asian mother tells us, "there is celebration. But when a girl is born, nothing."

"When I was a child," a young lady tells us, "all my dreams were taken from me just because I was a girl born in Iran."

"I saw a fellow walking his dog, and the dog had socks on his feet," one fellow remembers.  "Why, I asked."
   "Because the pavement is hot."
"I was amazed, people here care about such things, even a dog's feelings.  Humans are not treated like that in Iraq.  People in Iraq would wish be an animal in America."

Each of these folks were interviewed on the day they became U.S. citizens.  They, and a million more every year, come to America, hoping for a chance to be free.  And not to America alone, for there are many countries who share the vision.

Tahrir Square during the Cairo Revolution

So much is discoverable in the realm of human rights, the inalienable rights which many of us perhaps take for granted.  The stories of escape to freedom are almost endless, and all are deeply moving.  It helps our perspective to remember.

"The great struggle is not for power and dominance, but for the precious life and freedom of each and every individual."  

Happy 4th of July!