Silence is Acquiescence

In Studs Terkel's last book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, he's once again collected many moving first person accounts from a wide range of people. They are all moving reflections well worth sitting with should you get a chance.




I was particularly taken the other morning by the words of Rabbi Robert Marx.

        Silence is not inaction. It is doing something: silence is acquiescence. When you acquiesce to injustice, you are contributing to it. The hardest thing in the world is to help people find the courage. In that process, finding it yourself is not always an easy task. You have to say that I'm willing to be inconvenienced, I'm willing to march in that parade, I'm willing to sign that petition. I am willing to go down to a prison and visit somebody who has been wrongfully imprisoned. I am willing to have rocks thrown at me, as has happened.(p.135)

I recognize my own silence on many issues. My own fears arise of receiving, not rocks, but vitriol, from those who don't see the world the way my experience has painted it. One of those current issues for which I have been too quiet is the realization that Black Lives Matter. Of course, I understand that intellectually. But the recent media coverage of almost daily examples of injustice and violence perpetrated on citizens, whose skin color makes them a target for abuse at so many levels has me distraught. I certainly can't walk in the shoes of a person of color. But my empathy and recognition of injustice should have brought me out of my chair much sooner. The abuses are endemic and ongoing.

It seems to me now, that we folks who have benefited from the privilege of whiteness in this society must not be silent anymore. I understand better now the reason why Cascade Engineering has made a concerted effort to be an anti-racist company, without being forced by some new law to do so. I see why colleagues in our local peace community have come to focus increasingly on domestic peace and injustice issues, after so many years of looking overseas for human rights, demilitarization, and refugee safety.

It is not an 'either/or' choice, but rather a 'both/and' one. I suspect the creator of the poster below has made this more clear than I could.

Marian Wright Edelman, long time leader of the Children Defense Fund  makes the case as for ending our silence as good as anyone in her message Friday .
 


10 Rules to Help Black Boys and Girls Get Home Safely

Possibilities - Wholeness is Emergent

I am not the swiftest thinker but seems like an unusual series of things have come into my sight in the past week that might spell the emergence of wholeness of thinking to a degree rarely visible in our culture. Let me share five of those!

I just finished reading this morning this piece by Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder and publisher of Tikkun, a thoughtful journal of our times.
In this deeply resonant piece entitled, "Yearning for a World of Love and Justice" Lerner, co-founder of the Network for Spiritual Progressives, lays out a ten point new Spiritual Covenant.

1. We will create a society that promotes rather than undermines loving and caring relationships and families.

2. We will take personal responsibility for ethical behavior.

3. We will build social responsibility into the normal operations of our economic and political life.

4. We will reshape our education system so that it teaches values of love, caring, generosity, intellectual curiosity, tolerance, nonviolence, gratitude, wonder, democratic participation, and environmental responsibility.

5. We will seek a transformation of our entire health care system not only providing free universal health care in our own country and around the world, but also creating a system that addresses the spiritual, psychological, and physical dimensions of human beings and the impact of social and environmental influences on their well-being.

6. We will be stewards of the environment and reshape the global economy in sustainable ways.

7. We will address our desire for “homeland security” through a strategy of nonviolence, generosity, genuine caring, and respect for the well-being of others.

8. We support a strong separation of church, state, and science.

9. We will rebuild our economy to provide economic security, fundamental equality, and meaningful work that contribute to some higher good beyond maximizing money or power.

10. We seek to protect individuals from coercive powers of the government and the marketplace, while affirming our interdependence.

The wholeness of this approach as laid out more fully in the lengthy article resonated with me, especially the concept of the necessity for doing inner and outer work simultaneously.

Also recently, Gar Alperovitz and James Gustave Speth laid out what they are calling the Next System Project

which 


 is an ambitious multi-year initiative aimed at thinking boldly about what is required to deal with the systemic challenges the United States faces now and in coming decades. Responding to real hunger for a new way forward, and building on innovative thinking and practical experience with new economic institutions and approaches being developed in communities across the country and around the world, the goal is to put the central idea of system change, and that there can be a “next system,” on the map.

Working with a broad group of researchers, theorists and activists, we seek to launch a national debate on the nature of “the next system” using the best research, understanding and strategic thinking, on the one hand, and on-the-ground organizing and development experience, on the other, to refine and publicize comprehensive alternative political-economic system models that are different in fundamental ways from the failed systems of the past and capable of delivering superior social, economic and ecological outcomes.

By defining issues systemically, we believe we can begin to move the political conversation beyond current limits with the aim of catalyzing a substantive debate about the need for a radically different system and how we might go about its construction. Despite the scale of the difficulties, a cautious and paradoxical optimism is warranted. There are real alternatives. Arising from the unforgiving logic of dead ends, the steadily building array of promising new proposals and alternative institutions and experiments, together with an explosion of ideas and new activism, offer a powerful basis for hope.

Again, the vision is a connected one based upon a wholeness and an appreciation and respect for relationships - human-to-human, as well as human-nature ones. A detailed report is available at their website along with a short video overview.

If this isn't enough one can look at the quickly emergent movement referred to as the SSE - Social and Solidarity Economy. A new book I pulled from the new book shelf on Wednesday gives a sense of the pulse of this global movement which I've been somewhat aware of for about 18 months, but which is quickly engaging both academics and practitioners around the world seeking to reconsider the relationships between our economic and social systems

  The work is edited by the veteran development leader, Peter Utting, who was former Deputy Director and now Senior Research Associate with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. 

 

The eighteen chapters analyze the possibilities and challenges of creating an economy that is socially strong and as is being invented in places around the world. It gives a glimmer of the grassroots explosion of possibilities that is hidden from mass media and those who rely solely on it for their understanding of the world..

Then we have Pope Francis' 184 page Encyclical Letter on Care for Our Common Home which admittedly since it was just released I have yet to read  but from what is being reported, except by climate change deniers, it is a holistic consideration of how to move forward on many fronts at the same time.

That I have bumped into these four major pieces of deep systemic thinking within a week is either a total fluke, or there is arising amongst us a set of possibilities. Not probabilities, not certainties, but genuine possibilities if we were to imagine a better world and then begin to SERIOUSLY join together to create it. Wouldn't that be a great legacy to leave the children and grandchildren!

I find it also in the unusual campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who says it is less important that he wins the presidency than the awakening of citizens to their possibility, if not responsibility, that a better world is possible. 

     "This is not about Bernie Sanders," the candidate said to the room filled beyond capacity. "You can have the best president in the history of the world but that person will not be able to address the problems that we face unless there is a mass movement, a political revolution in this country. Right now the only pieces of legislation that get to the floor of the House and Senate are sanctioned by big money, Wall Street, the pharmaceutical companies. The only way we win and transform America is when millions of people stand up as you’re doing today and say. 'Enough is enough.

     

The word solidarity keeps rising in my head as I read all these things. In the Catholic culture, the word might be communion. They each are embedded in relationships. It goes back to the first point in Lerner's Spiritual Covenant:

 1. We will create a society that promotes rather than undermines loving and caring relationships and families.

 

I can feel the pulse throbbing in all this. Can anyone else? And will we throw ourselves into shaping the future together.

Film at 11:00.

Put a Lid On It

A good friend and former colleague, Dr. Frank Fear, recently blogged at The Sports Column about the funding of higher education sports programs, where the subsidies are, to put it kindly, crazy.

Subsidies are the Name of the Game in D-1 College Sports

by Frank Fear June 7, 2015


His analysis shows how important big dollars are to run the big time collegiate sports system, whether subsidized by university budgets, alumni, or fans..


The growing cost of higher education and the escalating student debt have nudged the pundits to call for more tax support for higher education, more online courses, and even the end of tenure as Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor is trying to engineer in the University of Wisconsin system. Seems like job security even for those who invest in a good education is now in question. As Prof. Michael Schwalbe recently notes in his otherwise pessimistic review of the professorship, being a professor is a great job.

     "being a professor is still a great job—it affords status, decent pay, autonomy, control over one’s work, and a measure of democratic control over one’s workplace."

So let's put all these forces in perspective - costs climb, debt rises and so does inequality. Could there be at least a partial simple repair? How about a having a serious discussion of what is decent/sufficient pay and the what is indecent - either too little or too much? While we might begin by talking about a minimum wage or a livable wage, how about starting from somewhere closer to the middle. 

The U.S. Median (not the average) household income (50% of households make more, and 50% make less) is approximately $50,000 [$51,939 from latest government figures] before taxes. So let's start there. That's roughly $1,000 a week or $25/hr for a 40 hour work week. While a family may have shelter, food, and clothing covered with that level of income, they won't be taking distant vacations, eating at fine restaurants or attending many concerts on that income. But it sure beats the federal poverty level - by a factor of two.

The US Poverty level as of January 2015 is listed below:

2015 POVERTY GUIDELINES FOR THE 48 CONTIGUOUS STATES
AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Persons in family/household	Poverty guideline
For families/households with more than 8 persons, add $4,160 for each additional person.
1	$11,770
2	15,930
3	20,090
4	24,250
5	28,410
6	32,570
7	36,730
8	40,890

A family of four that makes essentially less than half the median household income is determined to be in poverty. Notice that while the incomes of the 1 percent have increased 120 percent between 1979 and 2006 the income for the bottom 20 percent fell 4 percent and the middle class made a modest 15 percent gain. (Scott Myers-Lipton, Ending Extreme Inequality: An Economic Bill of Rights to Eliminate Poverty, 2015

 
So here's an example that has been tested successfully over time - Mondragon. The uber successful family of cooperatives in Spain has a six times rule. The nearly 75,000 employee-owners of the tenth largest business in Spain share the profits more equally. See the recent interview with Mondragon president Josu Ugarte in the recent issue of Too Much for more on how that system works.





 If  we employed this ratio at my former institution, the top pay based upon lowest paid full-time employee would be about $140,000 or three times the median HOUSEHOLD income. Most of us should be able to live a pretty decent life on that income, even better if we're married to a partner who is bringing in additional income - heck, it's nearly three times the median income. Certainly, those choosing to work in public university should not be expecting to get rich, again in Schwalbe's vision they are able to enjoy the perks of "status, autonomy, and control over one's work."

Of course, MSU's president earns more than $140,000 - 5 times more, $750,000, or approximately 30 times the lowest paid MSU employee. Her salary, while surely well above the median isn't the highest in the land and the value to the institution of paying college presidents higher salaries, as noted in a recent New York Times article is at least debatable. But that salary is a mere pittance compared to MSU basketball and football coaches - Tom Izzo ($4,000,000 or 135 times more) and Mark Dantonio ($3,600,000 or 125 times more than the lowest paid employee - not the players, of course). Beyond these sky high salaries are many, perhaps hundreds of other university employees -mainly some administrators and faculty  who earn more than six times the lowest paid employee at MSU.

I don't suspect that the ratios change all that much at the larger schools with big sports programs where the coaches make more than anyone else.See the interesting graphic below!



 
A thoughtful review of addressing this inequality via increasing either the minimum wage or establishing wage ratios, like Mondragon's  is available here.  Among some of its key points are:

• Maximum Ratio was pioneered by Ben & Jerry's whose company policy said no employee may earn more than 7 times another. In most European companies the accepted ratio is about 25, but in the United States the accepted ratio for large corporations has increased to about 500, up from 100 in the 1980s. 
• Maximum ratio could be easily implemented by making corporate tax rate equal to the ratio between the highest compensated and lowest compensated within that company. It could also be enforced with a penalty tax equal to all the wages in the company that are greater than 20 times the wages of the workers. 
•  Maximum Ratio, once started, operates independently of political forces. A political party can't force the wages artificially low, or high. When things are good employers will raise their worker wages in order to raise their own. 
• Maximum ratio states to the employer, "If you can afford to raise the owners salary then you can afford to raise the workers salary." This approach is highly responsive to economic forces. For the managers to get a raise the workers should get a raise also. Implementing maximum ratio gives the employer realizing huge profits three choices, [1] pay your workers a better wage, [2] reinvest your profits in the company (promote the viability of your company or create new jobs), [3] pay an increased amount in taxes to support the system. (from http://conceptualmath.org/philo/minwage.htmlhttp://conceptualmath.org/philo/minwage.html)

With the accumulation of more and more wealth into the hands of the few comes a more fearful reality, increasing the power that comes with it. Power to resist change, power to open doors, to make connections, power to lobby for what one wants to maintain or power to increase their wealth and power even more. Changing the rules to benefit the larger portion of society becomes more and more difficult, as the system rigs the game for those with wealth/power. We see this in extreme cases of Donald and Edward Koch, George Soros, and others who shape elections, shift markets, and gain more and more power and wealth because of the use of their great wealth.

Establishing wage ratios won't solve the whole income inequality problem, especially  global inequality. But it will apply a necessary brake on a runaway train. Other policies could be built on it. For example:

• Restrict contracts to enterprises paying more than six times ratio to executives. 
• Restrict grants to Non profits if their wage ratio exceeds 4:1 
• Rescind tax deductible status for Nonprofits  if they pay more than twice median household income - individual profit beyond that profit becomes private to the individual beyond that 
• Wage ratios should be made public so investors and consumers can make decisions about supporting the the institution and whether too much money is going to too few people
• No employee of a public institution or tax deductible nonprofit can make more than half of the President of the United States - currently $400,000 a year.

Making these changes would lower costs, decrease debt and/or increase the buying power for those now working in poverty. Let's quit picking on the folks trying to scape by.
 

Strange Alignments - Trade and Democracy

As the battle for fast track status for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) continues watching the alignments for either side form has been curious at least. President Obama and generally progressive Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) have been bullish on the pact, as of of course has been conservative stalwarts like Sen. Orin Hatch (R-UT) and Sen. Mitch McConnel (R-KY). Obama claims that if we don't pull this off soon (thus fast-track) will lose a big opportunity to control trade relations with China. 

Critics like Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) are claiming that not only is the deal secretive from the public, as the Intercept reported recently,

        " So who can read the text of the TPP? Not you, it’s classified. Even members of Congress can only look at it one section at a time in the Capitol’s basement, without most of their staff or the ability to keep notes. But there’s an exception: if you’re part of one of 28 U.S. government-appointed trade advisory committees providing advice to the U.S. negotiators. The committees with the most access to what’s going on in the negotiations are 16 “Industry Trade Advisory Committees,” whose members include AT&T, General Electric, Apple, Dow Chemical, Nike, Walmart and the American Petroleum Institute. "

But critics argue the agreement will likely empower global corporate behemoths to override local (national) policies. Wyden and Obama deny this, and suggest that pending legislation for fast track has safeguards and enforcement and a window of 90 days where citizens can read and debate the final agreement before Congress votes it up or down. Wyden clearly sees the TPP, if done right, as an economic boon for his home state of Oregon. East coasters like Warren and Sanders constituents won't see the same benefits as Wyden's. But are Wyden's and Obama's faith in global trade regimes misplaced?

Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks so.

     " The real intent of these provisions is to impede health, environmental, safety, and, yes, even financial regulations meant to protect America’s own economy and citizens. Companies can sue governments for full compensation for any reduction in their future expected profits resulting from regulatory changes."

 And so do groups as diverse as Public Citizen, Doctors Without Borders and the Electronic Frontier Foundaton....


A study just released this week by The Guardian of financial contributions to the Senate between January and April of this year shares some interesting findings.

     "Fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments, was only possible after lots of corporate money exchanged hands with senators. The US Senate passed Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) – the fast-tracking bill – by a 65-33 margin on 14 May. Last Thursday, the Senate voted 62-38 to bring the debate on TPA to a close. Those impressive majorities follow months of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by the world’s most well-heeled multinational corporations with just a handful of holdouts. 

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate."

While it might be hard to prove a quid pro quo with these donations, what they do show is that the increasing inequality and the power of the 1% to shape policy. They have access via cash contributions and invitations to participate in trade advisory committees that typical citizens do not enjoy. One of the findings in The Guardian study stands out as representative of that power.

• In just 24 hours, Wyden and five of those Democratic holdouts – Michael Bennet of Colorado, Dianne Feinstein of California, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Patty Murray of Washington, and Bill Nelson of Florida – caved and voted for fast-track.
• Bennet, Murray, and Wyden – all running for re-election in 2016 – received $105,900 between the three of them. Bennet, who comes from the more purple state of Colorado, got $53,700 in corporate campaign donations between January and March 2015, according to Channing’s research.

 The only antidote to the hijacking of our democracy is for citizens to use their voice and and their vote. The proposed rush to get this deal done has its own unpleasant odor to it. Wyden and other supporters of this deal look to see the US profit from such agreements.  But with the rules rigged, there will be losers, and something tells me it will be the 99%.

Running into Roosevelt

On my weekly visit to the MSU Libraries new book shelf, I've been running into books that in some way or another bring up Franklin Roosevelt and his presidency. One of my more recent finds is Professor Scott Myers-Lipton's Ending Extreme Inequality: An Economic Bill of Rights to Eliminate Poverty (Paradigm Publishers, 2015).
Myers-Lipton looks at the proposed Bill of Rights put forth by Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address and builds the chapters around the six rights:

• The Right to a Job
• The Right to a Living Wage
• The Right to a Decent Home
• The Right to a Good Education
• The Right to Adequate Medical Care
• The Right to Adequate Protection from Economic Fears of Old Age, Accident and Unemployment

As Myers-Lipton reviews each of these rights he updates us on the current economic status in employment, wages, housing, etc. In each section he reviews the history, earlier attempts to address the issue, and some currently proposed solutions. He is not an armchair scholar nor a pessimist. But that doesn't make him an optimist either. He has helped raise the minimum wage in San Jose where he teaches from $8 to $10 an hour and founded the Gulf Coast Civic Works Campaign, an initiative to develop 100,000 prevailing wage jobs for local and displaced workers after Hurricane Katrina.

In his short two page epilogue, he makes a compelling argument for using the Economic Bill of Rights as a framework for ending extreme inequality.

The United States takes pride in being a democratic nation and the leader of the free world. However, I argue that if the United States is to continue on the path of becoming "a more perfect union," it must now turn its attention to implementing the constitutional commitments first set out by President Roosevelt seventy years ago in his 1944 State of the Union address. Otherwise, the United States is destined for plutocracy, where the top 1 percent of income earners controls the vast economic wealth and political power, and the 99 percent are left with economic scraps and little political power. For as Louis Brandeis, a former Supreme Court justice, postulated, "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."(p.135)

In addressing the question that many pundits and critics would lob at him, how will the nation pay for it, especially with a  projected deficit of $492 billion in 2014 and a deficit of $17 trillion he responds.

It is my belief that once people begin to organize around the implementation of an Economic Bill of Rights, and begin to educate and convince the majority of the US population that this is a necessary step in the country's development, the nation will find the money. And we will find it because we will develop a sound tax policy that has shared responsibility, where corporations and the economic elite pay their share of taxes. Just sixty years ago, corporations paid over 30 percent of all federal taxes, and the 1 percent had a top marginal tax rate of 90 percent and an effective tax rate of 60 percent. Today corporations pay 9 percent of all taxes, and the top 1 percent now has a marginal tax rate of 39.6 percent (up from 35 percent from 2012) When there is more shared responsibility, our nation's deficit will be decreased, and the pundits will not be able to claim that the nation cannot afford an Economic Bill of Rights. (p.136)

I wish our Michigan Legislature and the governor would read this book as they have been assaulting the low income citizens while relieving the business and economic elite of responsibility. They have recently passed legislation outlawing prevailing wage contracts by cities/and counties in the state. They are proposing total elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit that benefits the working poor stuck at minimum wage. And they have all but eliminated business taxes in recent years. No wonder they can't repair the roads, funds the schools, or help those struggling to house, feed, and care for their families.Their playbook is destroying our communities and creating ever greater gaps between the poor, the middle class and the elite.

Which brings me to another tome I stumbled upon and finished recently. The Unsustainable Presidency: Clinton, Bush Obama and Beyond (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014) Political science faculty members William Grover and Jospeh Peschek review the role of recent presidencies in the context of dominant theories of the presidency within political science.
 

What they argue is fascinating. Their concluding chapter begins with an interesting hypothesis:


     "If Senator Bernie Sanders(I-VT) were elected president in 2016, "what do you think that would do?"

As they demonstrate in the review of recent presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, the presidency is captured by forces of power, that regardless of political rhetoric or party, is constrained within narrow bounds of acceptable actions. While they demonstrate how this works across recent presidencies, their take on a president sanders election is most compelling.

On the morning after his election they note, "The most predictable immediate impact of a Sanders victory would be the sharp decline of global financial markets, as investors registered their displeasure, possibly panic, at the "reckless" decision rendered by US voters.... FOX News would be apoplectic with visions of impending "communism", even terrorism leaping out of every news report.... The one economic bright spot would be a spike in sales of Sanders book The Speech, the full account of his historic December 10, 2010 senate filibuster, where for more than eight and one half hours he spoke against the agreement between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans that extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, lowered estate taxes for the  superrich, and diverted revenue from the Social Security through a payroll tax holiday."(pp.141-2).

Grover and Peschek go on to describe in more detail how the powers that be would completely hamstring the Sanders presidency as they have Clinton, Bush, and Obama before him. Unlike Professor Myers-Lipton they seem more pessimistic.

"In short, we live in a catastrophic world. And unless a president -- emboldened by a long term social movement and acting in concert with other world leaders __ is willing to challenge the interests of corporate power and financial capital that underlie our political economy, the office of the presidency will remain wedded to outmoded and destructive definitions of economic growth and national security. And theories of the presidency within Political Science will remain as intellectually imprisoned as Lindblom warned they were at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution. Neustadt once referred to Eisenhower as a sort of "Roosevelt in reverse," discounting the possibility that public expectations for the president could ever be lowered save for very limited periods of time. Reagan also was characterized the same way, for mobilizing the powers of the office in the pursuit of conservative purposes. But for the American presidency to be really sustainable -- for it to survive as anything more than a Kabuki drama off spectacle and self-defeating partisan ends -- we need not a "Roosevelt in reveres." Rather, we are in dire need of a Roosevelt reconfigured, a Roosevelt redefined. Absent that type of transformational leadership, the American presidency is likely to remain our Catastrophe-in-Chief -- an unsustainable catastrophe of an office, situated in a catastrophic world. " (p.154)

Which is why Myers-Lipton's recipe is all the more compelling. But given Peschek's and Grover's keen analysis of the presidency those Bernie Sanders for President fans will need to more than get him elected. 


They will need to build a movement that pushes him and the other elected representatives to act on behalf of ensuring an economic bill of rights becomes the practice, not simply an idea.