PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE ECONOMIC CRISIS:

FROM OBSCURISTAN TO ABSURDISTAN

MARC BATKO

Born in 1946 in Chicago, I graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and
studied economic theory, liberation theology, alternative ecological economics, and the
social state in California and Oregon. As a freelance translator, my translation of
Dorothee Soelle’s “On Earth as in Heaven” was published by Westminster Press in 1993.
Over 800 translated articles are available on my website www.freembtranslations.net.
Baptized in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco in 1980, I am a Jewish-
Christian enamored of Jurgen Moltman’s theology of hope, a Kierkegaardian and a
Bonhoefferian. Since 1999, Portland Oregon has been my home.

Education is the great transformer, said the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith.
The truth will set us free but the truth is a process, not a cudgel. Truth must well up
within us and cannot be imposed or decreed from the outside. The event of
understanding is a fusion of horizons, said Hans Georg Gadamer, where prejudice and
misunderstanding give way to enlightenment and new life.

I wrote these essays to share the philosophical and theological wonderment which is part
of our common collective legacy. Franz Kafka said words could be an ax to crack the
frozen soul. Plato warned that people in the allegory “The Cave” could mistake image
and reality and then chase critics or the enlightened out of town. Dostoevsky said people
would surrender their freedom to the Grand Inquisitor for his promise of happiness.
Rousseau said people were born free and are everywhere in chains. In “Escape from
Freedom,” the social psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said people were susceptible to the
authoritarian temptation because of the natural fear of the new and the fear of the
unknown. He focused on the social and economic entrapments that allow neoliberal
totalitarianism to be “without an alternative.”

Philosophy’s challenge is to provoke conventional wisdom, myths and fairy-tales that

lead individually and collectively into a two-inch world with false securities and
generalized self-righteousness, drunken coachmen and a system that is allegedly not
responsible. In his poem “The Egg,” Gunter Grass said we were born in an egg and our
life project is to break the shell. As antibodies are part of our bodies, resistance is part of
our nature. “It is not he or she or them or it that you belong to,” said Bob Dylan.

In his towering 1966 work “Theology of Hope,” the Protestant theologian Jurgen
Moltmann said hope sets us apart from the rest of creation so we can go beyond
everything past and present in the power of the coming, the power of the promise. In the
19th century, the great existentialist Soren Kierkegaard said faith was a leap over seventy
thousand fathoms of water while rejecting church dogmas that led to a comfortable
Christianity and self-righteous hypocrisy. Enjoy this feast of ideas! Minds like umbrellas
work best when they are open! Unlike a chair, an idea can be shared by a whole people!

George Orwell warned that war would become a domestic necessity to distract the people
from economic contradiction and injustice. The Nobel Prize winner for economics
Joseph Stiglitz decried “weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist with
money we don’t have.” The title of this collection of essays – “From Obscuristan to
Absurdistan” – pokes fun at our surreal and instrumentalized militarism. The US war of
adventure against Iraq – with cooked intelligence and lies about Hussein’s weapons of
mass destruction – caused terrorism, ISIS and the millions of refugees from Iraq, Syria,
Yemen and Afghanistan.

In elite democracy, means and ends, public and private, part and whole and real and
imaginary are often confused. The state should represent the public interest and yet
private or special interests are in the driver’s seat through privatization, deregulation, and
liberalized markets. What is rational from a micro-economic perspective – becoming
more competitive – is often absurd from a macro- economic perspective. Mass
unemployment or normalization of precarious work occurs when all countries try to
become super-competitive. Nature, the basis of future survival, is degraded as a free
good, external or sink.

Bank crises were said to be impossible according to neoclassical theory of efficient

financial markets. The 2007/08 financial crisis ended the myth of efficient financial
markets, the myth of self-healing markets returning to balance and the myth of the
invisible hand turning self-interest into the public interest.

After 40 years of the market religion, inequality has exploded so private opulence exists
alongside scandalous public squalor. In truth, all personal and corporate success is and
was based on state investments in schools, roads, libraries, community centers, food
safety, water quality and airwaves. In truth, the $21 or $32 trillion of corporate profits
hidden in tax havens like Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Cayman Islands or Delaware cause
revenue shortfalls and social distress. Tax avoidance has become a sophisticated industry.
Public spirit and trust between the generations come with counter-measures, affordable
education, housing and health care and with ending the $118K limit on social security
taxes. Without the social contract, we become wolves to each other. How can public
spirit arise when words are manipulated and emptied by the political and economic
elites? More than magic thinking or wishful thinking is necessary for social cohesion,
sharing and future-friendly policy.

The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the
present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann). The future could be active and dynamic, not passive and
static – full of play, exuberance, paradox, scandal and surprise, exchanged roles,
community centers and free Internet books. The future like the Internet could be an open
door.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Shriveling the Financial Sector and Expanding the Public Sector

2. The Neoliberal Indoctrination

3. Three Poems for the New World

4. Dear Matriots

5. Nature as Healer and Teacher

6. Being Civilized Means Learning from History

7. The Cart in the Speculative Mud

8. Community Centers: Learning from O Canada!

9. From Obscuristan to Absurdistan

10. Shouting from the Caboose

 1. SHRIVELING THE FINANCIAL SECTOR AND EXPANDING
THE PUBLIC SECTOR

By Marc Batko

Mainstream market-radical economic theory has led to exploding inequality, cynicism

and resignation and has no answers to mass unemployment, growing precarious work,
global warming and the rights of nature. The time is right for alternative economics, for
economics that is part of life, not a steamroller crushing creativity and self-determination.

The market is not self-healing or a panacea but a necessary and helpful instrument after
political questions are answered: what kind of society do we want? How can public
necessities remain public? How can people be active participative citizens and not mere
cogs in the machine? How can nature be protected and nurtured and not trivialized as a
free good, external or sink?

Alternative economics is a vital corrective to market radicalism and neoliberalism with

unfettered deregulation, privatization and liberalization of markets. While neoliberal
mythology insists higher profits bring more jobs and greater investments, profits soar and
investments fall by the wayside. Profitable companies speculate on foreign currencies
and buy back their own stock while rewarding managers and CEOs with bonuses. As
lessons from the 2008 financial meltdown, the financial sector should be shriveled and
the public sector expanded.

The 2008 financial crisis led to the destruction of millions of jobs and the destruction of
trillions in wealth. The risk managers turned out to be risk creators. The deregulation of
the banking industry, the corruption of the rating agencies and the indifference of the
federal government enabled speculation to eclipse productive investment. All corporate
and personal achievement depends on state investment in roads, schools, hospitals, food
safety, water quality and airwaves. Changing economic priorities and policies is vital to
fair distribution and generalized security. All people should be assured a basic
unconditional income. The 26 community centers in Vancouver Canada have a
cushioning and multiplying effect. In times before Reagan, they were bursting with
counseling and surrogate classes and living proof that the future can move to generalized
security. Reduced working hours could be seen as a socioeconomic investment ensuring
long-term health and expanding

The financial sector should be shriveled and the public sector expanded. The myths of
self-healing markets, efficient financial markets, nature as a free good, external and sink,
infinite growth in a finite world, quantitative growth and the exact sciences eclipsing
qualitative growth and the human sciences (history, literature, play, language, sociology,
political science, philosophy) and private opulence next to public squalor (cf. John
Kenneth Galbraith) must call us to rethinking.

Alternative Austrian, Swiss, Polish and German economists can alert us to the bankruptcy
of austerity policy and fiscal policy aiding capital at the expense of workers and the
environment. The future economic policy must be regional and decentralized. A post-
materialist economy is possible as we transition from excess to access and more to
enough. Work, health, strength, security and happiness can be redefined. The rights of
nature can be respected in a future of moderation, equality and freedom.

More and more is produced with fewer and fewer workers. Work and income have
uncoupled as people cannot survive on their earnings from work and depend on credits
and loans. Reducing working hours is a response to increased productivity and is the
only way to assure everyone of the right to meaningful work. Reducing working hours,
as Michael Schwendinger explains, is a socio-economic investment that protects long-
term health interests and gives people more time sovereignty

Peter Ulrich is a Swiss economist. The economy must be embedded in society. Society
must not be embedded in the economy. Ulrich Thielemann is a Swiss and German
economist. Profit making is not profit maximizing. Studying economics today is like
brainwashing. Tomasz Konicz is a Polish economist. The 30 year crisis is not an Obama
crisis. Wages were stagnant for 35 years. Credit was expanded. Families worked 3 or 4
jobs. Health care, education and housing became unaffordable. The US became a black
hole for the global economy.

Personal performance always depends on the work of past generations and state
interventions. Americans fall to a new feudalism with the deserving and undeserving,
fear-mongering and racism. Pragmatism or market religion often replaces vision,
principle and courage. Confusing speculation and investment makes the next crisis
inevitable. Wall Street banks spent $10 billion in campaign contribution and lobbying
ensuring corruption, weak financial deregulation and shifting private losses to public
taxpayers.

Profits soar and sovereignty is lost. The TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership) threatens democracy and the constitutional state. The Investor-State dispute
settlement mechanism elevates corporations to the status of nation states. These three
judge panels are fronts for corporate investors. 600 corporate lobbyists are discussing the
TTIP; senators and the public are denied any transparency! Philip Morris is suing
Uruguay and Australia for lost profits through health warnings. A Swedish energy
corporation Vattenfall is suing Germany for 1 billion euros for ending nuclear power too
quickly! The lessons of NAFTA were repressed: the US trade deficit soared to $180
billion and one million jobs were lost.

How perverse and shameful to ignore facts and blatant failure, to give speculators a free
pass for the 2008 crash, to shift costs to workers, the disabled, pensioners and the poor!
In post-democracy representatives do not represent the public welfare or public interests.
Do you think “public spirit” will fall from the sky without redistribution from top to
bottom? Lies are bitter fruits of the unchecked market economy normalizing corruption
and cowardice. The human future is really the welfare state where cooperation and
competition reinforce each other. The market radical or market fundamentalist are caught
in a false triumphalism and decry the welfare state as “Bolshevism.”
That globalization will benefit everyone is a deadly myth. According to the neoliberal
myth, higher profits would lead to greater investments and more jobs. In truth,
corporations used soaring profits to speculate on foreign currencies and buying back their
own stock!

The US economy amid outsourcing and financialization is kept alive through foreign
investments, social security, Medicare and suffers with false identities, the world sheriff,
the empire exploiting colonies and continents through “free investment” trade
agreements, military bases and indirect threats.

The implementation of social security insurance drastically reduced the poverty rate in
the US. The country is strengthened when fellow citizens escape poverty. Most of the
money paid in SSI benefits is immediately cycled back into circulation, further
stimulating the economy and thereby benefiting all of us. August 14 was Social Security’s
80th birthday and July 30 was Medicare’s 50th birthday.

All personal and corporate success depended on state investments in schools, roads,
hospitals, food safety, water quality and airwaves. The Schwabian housewife is a
misleading model. Debts to an individual household are different than debts to
corporations and states. Debts to corporations and states are necessary to create the
infrastructure for future economic activity.

Political will and political motivation are necessary to break with inertia, corruption and
lip service. Creating affordable housing and meaningful living wage jobs can’t be left to
the market or neoliberal theory. Profit making is different than profit-maximizing. The
neoliberal model promotes profits, not investments (Nikolaus Krowall). Private opulence
exists alongside public squalor as John Kenneth Galbraith decried in the 1960s.

Don’t hate the media; become the media. Hope is in alternative media, intercultural
learning, breaking out of the box of conformity, herd instinct and selfishness. Fear of the
unknown and fear of the future can be overcome as prejudice and illiteracy can be
overcome in the event of understanding, the fusion of horizons (cf. Hans Georg Gadamer,
Truth and Method). Fear mongering and fault finding are false securities like cheap grace
and cheap citizenship. The church (as in Nazi Germany) can become a husk of hypocrisy
and barbarism, a bastion of self-righteousness where social justice and the in-breaking
reign of God are trivialized. Our own logs of militarism and exploding inequality must be
recognized without magnifying the specks in the eyes of others.

We are called to be subjects in a future that is open and dynamic, not closed and static.
We are invited to abundant self-critical and interdependent life, not a 2-inch world of
Ponderosa and Mr. Cartwright, an insular world where nothing is learning of difference
and other cultures. where wars of aggression and adventure are normalized and where the
outside of the cup is cleaned and the inside remains filthy. “We sit here stranded and do
our best to deny it,” “the executioner’s face is always well hidden where hunger is ugly
and souls are forgotten,” “a hard rain’s going to fall” (Bob Dylan www.dylanradio.com).
 2. THE NEOLIBERAL INDOCTRINATION

Neoliberalism serves as social indoctrination. It tells the poor and weak they are
responsible for their misery. It does its utmost to prevent the true extent of social poverty
from reaching the general public. The health system despite ever greater expenditures
becomes increasingly inhuman, social work erodes, a “re-feudalization boom” rages
along with de-democratization, and investors aim at privatizing the public education
system. When the poor and weak blame themselves for social inequality (low
motivation, negative attitudes etc), the state and businesses escape their responsibility to
contribute to education, community and the infrastructure. Minds are fogged and
controlled by neoliberal media, focus on the trivial (celebrity news and sports fixation)
and psycho-techniques make resistance against this inhuman ideology largely impossible.

As low profits led to the explosion of the financial sector and financialization around
1980, the financial meltdown of 2008 led to the discrediting of neoliberalism. Homo
oeconomicus fades away as an economic theory along with market fundamentalism and
market radicalism. Market failure and state violence epitomized by Enron’s expansive
accounting method and the aggressive wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya and Syria should be lessons if the future is to be worth living.

We live at the close of the neoliberal rollback where universities became profit centers,
health care becomes a privilege not a right, where climate change and protection of labor
and the environment are ignored in trade agreements while foreign investors can sue
states for real and imaginary profits. The threat of lawsuits for lost corporate profits will
have a chilling effect on labor and environmental protection.

The people are too big to fail, not the banks. Risks and bailout costs were shifted to
taxpayers. When neoliberalism is rolled back and Orwellian distortion of language and
democracy is ended, poverty will be ended through the exercise of true democracy.
System change, not climate change is the imperative.

As capitalism grows, inequality grows. Capitalism is an inequality machine (cf. Thomas

Piketty). Corporations are sometimes more powerful than nations. In addition to buying
back their own stock, corporations store $7 trillion in tax havens and deny local, national
and international responsibility and liability. A hundred years ago, the French socialist
Jean Juares warned: “Capitalism contains crisis as rain clouds contain rain.”

PHILOSOPHY AND THE SEARCH FOR ORIENTATION: THE FUTURE

GUIDES THE PRESENT

Striving for utopia is the hope and motivation of the present. The present transcends
itself only when it includes hope and promise. The poor live in two worlds, the world of
hope and the world of misery, while the rich live in only one world where the future is
only a repetition of the present. Life and reality are not linear or self-evident but pluralist
and dependent on interpretation. True wealth is manifest in a larger consciousness of
interdependence, empathy, historical awareness and humble openness to liberation.

The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the
present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope). The penultimate draws its strength
from the ultimate (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison).

We find ourselves at the end of an epoch without clear signs of the new epoch. How can
citizens be promoted and not reduced to consumers? How can the state ensure the food,
housing and health necessities and not set corporate welfare and corporate profit above
everything? How can education emphasize critical thinking and sustainability and be
strengthened with money from a reduced pentagon and a downsized financial sector?

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMICS: REDUCING WORKING HOURS,

EXCHANGING ROLES AND COMMUNITY CENTERS

Community centers could be a third way beyond the state and the market. Vancouver
B.C. has 26 community centers, some with swimming pools that take your breath away.
The Carnegie Community Center in the poverty-stricken Downtown East Side is
subsidized by the province. There hope is restored and becomes concrete in the real
functioning mosaic of interdependence and love of life. Inexpensive meals of casseroles,
a library quickly filled to the brim, a computer room offering everyone 3 hours of daily
computer use, a basketball gym, a game room, a TV room, a theater and counseling and
class opportunities are a life-giving antidote to the non-stop consumerism and cajoling of
one-dimensional neoliberal profit worship. The community centers have a cushioning
and multiplying effect enabling both working and unemployed to feel integrated and
welcomed in the community.

Free Internet books and publishing ebooks at Smashwords.com are examples of the new
person-oriented alternative digital economics. The gate is taken away from the
gatekeepers; ebooks have a 30% share of new books today that has stabilized over the
last 3 or 4 years. People are reading on screens and not only on the printed page.
Openculture.com gives us 700 free movies (including the 1915 “Alice in Wonderland”),
700 free ebooks and 450 free audio books (including George Orwell’s “1984”). How can
anyone be “hard-nosed” with 700 free movies? Super Amigos is a free Mexican movie
from 2007 where the activist refuses anything packaged, goes up against bestial
bullfighting, homophobia and eviction of seniors.

Access could replace excess; enough could replace more. The one thing we learn from
history is that we don’t learn from history. The bomb changed everything except the way
we think (Albert Einstein). Work, strength, health, power and nature must be re-
conceptualized to avert re-feudalization, destruction of democracy and corporate
destruction of the environment. As we move into a digital knowledge-based society,
qualitative growth can replace quantitative growth. Instead of gazing at the stories of
office buildings, we could become storytellers living double vision, universal and
particular history.
Music, dance, poetry and literature deserve important places in a post-material
decommodified world. The military-industrial complex and the horror of never-ending
war must give way to multicultural interdependence, forgiveness, empathy, surprise,
mystery, play and environmental caring.

Reducing working hours, exchanging roles and community centers are vital in a post-
growth, post-fossil and post-autistic economy. Person-oriented work and investments in
labor-intensive sectors could mark our transition and end exploding inequality.

The demonized social state can be re-discovered as the future of humanity. We are
fulfilled in the other, in expanding possibilities and awareness, not in amassing things.
Lakes are more than anti-freeze and mountains are more than landfill.

The state should be the support of the majority, rescuing those who fall under the wheel
and blocking private interest from eclipsing public interest. “When the government trusts
citizens, citizens trust government,” said Justin Trudeau, the new Canadian Prime
Minister. Can we promote the welcoming spirit and not the spirit of fear in a multi-polar
world in a future that is open and dynamic, not closed and static? How can the future
become a future of generalized security? How can food, housing, health care be human
rights and not privileges? How can sharing replace hyper-individualism, narcissism, self-
righteousness and class immunization?

The state is different than a business or a household. The state can become indebted and
borrow money from the future so future generations can share the benefits of social
investment. Bernie Sanders wants to return people’s taxes in the form of infrastructure
and education rather than transfer hundreds of billions to military contractors and he
wants to regulate Wall Street and break up the big banks. Two ways the bomb changed
everything is that weapons can be de-stabilizing and security cannot be only military.

Without regulation, there would be no healthy forests or fish in the lakes. Markets are
not self-healing or panaceas but tools helpful after fundamental political questions are
answered democratically: What kind of society do we want? How can competition and
cooperation strengthen each other? How can the market, state and work be redefined?
How can nature be protected as our partner and our hope and not reduced to a free good,
external or sink?

THE NEOLIBERAL ROLLBACK AND COUNTERMEASURES

“The old gives way to the new as the snow gives way to the spring” (Rilke). “The swan
that floats and doesn’t sink represents the intransitory in the transitory” (Heidegger). “The
penultimate depends on the ultimate” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). “The cynic knows the price
of everything and the value of nothing (Oscar Wilde).
 THE NEOLIBERAL ROLLBACK CONFUSED THE GOAT WITH THE
GARDENER

The brutal epoch of the neoliberal rollback is ending. State, labor, business, and social
myths have caused re-feudalization and destruction of democracy, exploding inequality,
insecurity for labor, degradation of the environment and a depressed and cynical
populace. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Occupy and Bernie Sanders resisted these myths in
their different contexts. In the 1930s Roosevelt brought the economy from ruin to new
life by creating four million jobs in two months and building thousands of miles of roads,
bridges, schools, hospitals and community centers. Minimum wage, social security and
worker protection on the job showed the state could be caring and not only punishing.

Now is the time for counter-measures, for recognizing market failure and state
violence, for quantitative easing for the people, for reducing working hours, and
abandoning the misplaced trust in profits and corporate beneficence.

A future-friendly and environment-friendly economic policy that abandons myths is

necessary along with circulating money. Only then are persons no longer grist to be
ground up or “cost factors” to be reduced and CEOs no longer seen as beneficent “job
creators.” The social contract and our interdependence are threatened when we tear at
each other like rabid wolves and when the public interest is subordinated to the interests
of corporations.

Alternative economics emphasizes reducing working hours and investing in the

infrastructure. Education spending must be increased to ensure quality of life. Future
necessities and the right to work must not be disregarded as labor insecurity becomes
more widespread.

Social-economic regulation opposes supply-side trickle-down economics with its

social cuts and tax relief for the super-rich. The Asian, Mexican, Argentinean and the
Russian crises refute "Forever Number one." The Washington consensus is exposed as a
fraud by the latest financial crisis which results from deregulation, privatization, opening
markets and attacking unions.

Instead of expanding education and creating community centers with a multiplier

effect, trillions are squandered on wars of choice and bailouts to speculators who stylize
themselves as "investors" and "system-relevant."

The crisis is also a chance to abandon the destruction of nature and the hegemony of
financial markets and financial products. The "quiet co-op" of Wall Street and the banks
could be countered with new models replacing the rapacious business model and the
short-sighted privatization model. The state has a social nature and cannot only be a
security and power state or a trough for "achievers" and the super-rich and an "activating
- punishing" state for the unemployed.

Thirty years of supply side, trickle-down economics favored capital and speculation
and harmed labor. The role of the state, reversing inequality and creating meaningful jobs
became taboo subjects with the self-healing market. All problems were stylized as
interferences with the market. Private vices were said to produce public good. All life was
reduced, commodified or instrumentalized to economic productivity.

Herbert Marcuse ("One Dimensional Man"), Erich Fromm ("Escape from Freedom")
and John Kenneth Galbraith ("The Affluent Society") could be our mentors as we
redefine the economy, the state and future-friendly sustainability. The "Gross Happiness
Index" could replace the "Gross Domestic Product." Progress could be redefined as living
simply so others can simply live. Maximization of knowledge could replace
maximization of profit. The community centers in Vancouver B.C. could be seen as an
advance in social evolution with cushioning and multiplier effects reinvigorating public
spirit. Ignorance could be fought, not immigrants

The social state, solidarity, justice and sharing, open doors while neoliberal deregulation
and privatization lead to exploding inequality, generalized insecurity and disappearancof
public spirit. Corporations could be made taxable again since schools, roads and
policeprotection do not arise out of the blue. Dishwashers do not become millionaires.
The statehas a vital role to protect people from unemployment, old age poverty and abuse
of power.

THE ARC OF HISTORY BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE!

The arc of history bends toward justice (MLK). The welcoming tradition is also part
of American history, not only the traditions of fear and personal enrichment.
The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. The bomb
changed everything except the way we think (Albert Einstein).

Corporatist democrats seem to be 100% pragmatists and 0% idealists. Lies and

trickery darken much of American history. 7.5 million tons of bombs dropped on
Vietnam, 2.5 million tons of bombs dropped on Laos. According to Dr. Jill Stein of the
Green Party, Saudi Arabia has purchased $50 billion in armaments over the last decade
and Israel receives $8 million of military assistance every day.

The elite never make a mistake; everything is only a learning experience. Bill Clinton
said NAFTA would bring 1 million jobs to the US and instead 1 million jobs were lost,
subsidized corn was dumped on Mexico and millions of Mexicans could not survive on
their small farms. Bill Clinton removed the Glass-Steagal fire wall between commercial
and speculative banks, encouraged the creation of money out of thin air and had the gall
to write “Back to Work.” Life and death matters, economic theory and truthfulness are
secondary to financiers and cardboard politicians bent on their own enrichment. Bernie
Sanders is the only candidate who will not lead us to WWIII, who has principle,
determination, consistency, love of life and love of the future and will help end poverty
instead of ending democracy!
 The TTIP, TPP and TISA are NAFTA on steroids, corporate rule run amok, refusing to
live in a multi-polar world where labor and nature have rights, refusing self-criticism and
future-friendly economics, refusing to see market failure and state violence and the self-
destruction of profit-worship and the inanity of thinking we are “allbright.” Jean Twenge
in her book “The Narcissism Epidemic” explains that narcissism, the cult of specialness,
was thought to be the ladder of success while it really is a terrible anti-social blindness
that marginalize others and blocks discussion (www.booktv.org).

In Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, the state was caring and not punishing and
rescued those under the wheel. Minimum wage, social security and worker protection on
the job were alternative economic policies in a time of slums and strikes.

Very soon we must find some way besides jobs to distribute the wealth generated by
our increasingly automated productivity, something like a guaranteed annual income. But
to make any political changes, we have to change the way we think and talk about
economic reality. Austrian, Swiss, Polish and German economists can free us from the
“one-dimensional” worship of profit and neoliberal indoctrination. Ending poverty, not
democracy and system change, not climate change could be our revolutionary songs.

The unexamined life isn’t worth living (Socrates). Truth wells up and cannot be
imposed. Soren Kierkegaard saw truth as inwardness wounding indirectly from behind.
Self-righteousness is the grand delusion, said theologian Eberhard Juengel. Self-interest
means that our will and our perception are curved in ourselves, Martin Luther warned.
Narcissism is the unhealed epidemic where Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in
the pond and drowns (cf. Janet Twenge on www.booktv.org and Chalmers Johnson
“Nemesis”). The ego must die for the self to be born!

Let me share several more philosophical thoughts for your contemplation. By

involving and not distracting each other, we become persons of hope, subjects of history
and productive creators of a new language and a new mathematics. Hope, promise and
vision are goals that shape our today. Secondly, Jean Jacques Rousseau, another great
teacher of enlightenment, said “man was born free and is everywhere in chains.” To
expect freedom without struggle is as naïve as to expect crops without planting
(Frederick Douglas). “We can have democracy in this country or wealth concentrated in
the hands of a few, but not both.” (Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court justice)

By abandoning myths, false promises, half-truths and fables, we change assumptions,

priorities and policies and live in a future-friendly world with generalized security. By
discarding distractions and by involvement we become people of hope.
 3. THREE POEMS FOR THE NEW WORLD

May these poems help in defending the social logic against the profit logic!
As spirituality means letting go (cf. Richard Rohr, Simplicity and the Joy of Letting Go,
2003), Jesus calls us to a new language and a new mathematics, to an ethic of resistance
and solidarity and a future of openness and inclusivity.
Joy comes in the morning, not only profit maximization and endless growth!

Burnt Rubber
Instead of radical conversion,
sharing work and assets,
rewarding poets and writers,
not only speculators and con artists,
burnt rubber became a language,
a leverage and a lifestyle,
a false hope
and a false security
conferred by a false consciousness
in a culture of conformity
and mutual congratulation
where vision and utopia were lost.

Language and community

are in permanent crisis
amid repressing and fading out
everything unpleasant.
Was speed glorified by the media
so present, past and future dissolve
as means are confused with ends
and the part mistaken for the whole?

A world of interdependence
can be envisioned
where stories of liberation
eclipse the stories of office buildings,
where the market isn’t the omnipotent ruler
reducing life to a shopping mall
but a means
fostering human development..
Change of consciousness
from auto-dependence in the car-tastrophe
is still
in its infancy.

Intoxicated with itself,

the triumphalist culture is threatened with solipsism
as vanity and narcissism
threatened Narcissus gazing at his reflection..
There is power in our question,
our proclamation and our vision!
Are human rights the same as market rights?
Do we ever learn from other cultures?

Do we obliterate the memory of other people?

Is growth endless and undifferentiated?
Can market progress threaten human progress?
Can Wall Street overshadow Main Street?
The rich one can lose all things without sorrow.
Buddhist enlightenment like Jesus’ parables can change reality.
True wealth is receiving and sharing
reconfiguring the plutonium economy of nonstop consumerism
where future generations refuse the celebration of burnt rubber.

The Seven Myths

The great myth

that individual selfishness
becomes public good
reflects
the displacement of public ethics
by personal morality.

The myths of the self-healing market,

the ever-larger cake
and lifting oneself by one’s bootstraps
are economic and psychological
like the myths of corporate beneficence,
trickle down prosperity and nature as an external.
Who would have thought
that Reagonomics would be
such an insurmountable virus?
A lie can travel half way around the world
before truth gets her boots on! (Mark Twain)
Myths and prejudices block the way to understanding.

Economism sets profit and property above human life,

degrades labor into a cost factor,
and commodifies all life..
The anthropology of self-interest
has its counterpart
in the anthropology of receptivity.

We are social beings bound to one another

like the waves of the sea.
We are dependent and changed
by our context and environment,
not atomized nomads
without connection, history, passion and hope.

The truth will set us free

but the truth is a process
where life is an unfolding fragment
relational and conditional
calling us to engagement
not self-righteousness or solipsism.

As the end is present in the beginning,

the tree in the seed,
our fragmentary lives ought to be
dialogical and international
where we are questions and answers
to one another exploding the myths.
Historical Consciousness and Utopias

Historical consciousness and utopias

do not become discredited
when little Bart
comes home all muddy and twisted.
America corrupted by wealth
where full employment only occurs through wars
is the pioneer of speculation
and misfortune.

Capitalism and the last superpower are above the law.

Where our footprint is too great and wasted energy is challenged,
we use the Creole trick
and stylize ourselves as victims, not culprits.
Only repression artists could redefine
non-stop consumerism and limitless nature
as economic laws.
People on the fifth floor congratulate people on the fifth floor.

Rightwing propaganda threatens!

Idolizing the nation or the belt-buckle,
the rightwing scapegoat the weak,
the immigrants who enrich the materialist North.
Triumphant America becomes a buffoon
when prosperity is based on weapons exports,
redistribution upwards
and exploitation of the global South.

The future should be anticipated and protected in the present,

not extrapolated from the present.
Let us reclaim life and the future
and not become buffoons of the mega-machine!
 4. DEAR MATRIOTS

I was overcome by Jurgen Moltmann’s idea that hope sets us apart from all creation in
that we can go beyond everything present and past in the power of the coming, the power
of the promise (cf. “Theology of Hope”)

Born in 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, I attended Northwestern University and graduated from
the University of Wisconsin. After completing one year at Rutgers School of Law, I
moved from Newark to San Francisco and worked as a desk clerk in a small hotel in
Berkeley from 1980 to 1999. In 1999 I moved to Portland, Oregon and have been an
active contributor to http://portland.indymedia.org.

Baptized in St. Marks Lutheran Church in San Francisco, I am a Jewish Christian who
finds prophetic liberation Christianity as the completion not denial of Judaism. I think of
myself as a Kierkegaardian and Bonhoefferian enamored of the wonders of
contemplation. Life is full of super nova explosions where stars remain invisible until
they find their partner star. Life is full of play, exuberance, and mystery and the future
could be full of community centers, free Internet books and soft power.

Dear Matriots, seekers for an alternative economics and an alternative spirituality,

In Kaspar Hauser by Jacob Wassermann, a town was afflicted by drought, the wells were
dry and people became angry and violent until a little boy played so beautifully on his
flute that water rose in the wells again. Kaspar Hauser is a cultural symbol of our
refractory and resistant nature, our questioning and yearning for authenticity., our utopian
and future-oriented restlessness. “The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser” by Werner Herzog is
available as a foreign film/DVD from www.modernrock.com. My other fictional model is
Oscar from Gunter Grass’ “The Tin Drum.’ As a protest against the Nazi enslavement and
genocide, Oscar refuses to grow up and lives out his life in resistance and solidarity.

The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas said that instrumental rationality threatens to
colonize all life, relationships and dialogue. Professors lament that they are often only
asked whether the question will be on the test and whether it will put money in our
pockets.
The future must be open and dynamic, welcoming and dynamic, self-critical and
intercultural. The future must be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated
from the present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope). The Zapatista vision of one
world where many worlds fit and where everyone has a place could free us from fatalism,
cynicism and one-dimensionality, the bitter fruits of vulgar materialism (cf. Ernst Bloch)
and the self-healing market.

A Chinese friend Yu Xia designed a web site for me that now offers 800 translated
articles on anti-militarism, economic ethics, political theory, the Jewish-Christian
dialogue and liberation theology, http://www.freembtranslations.net..

Jesus calls us to the creation of a new language and a new mathematics, to be salt, leaven
and light. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s perspective, one act of obedience can be more
valuable than a hundred sermons. Costly grace to Bonhoeffer and the eternal moment or
kairos moment for Kierkegaard is crucial in following the God who as eternal everlasting
love calls us to sacrifice, renunciation and abandonment of material cares. Faith is
personal but not private and is more interruption than custom. In the words of Soren
Kierkegaard, faith is a leap across seventy thousand fathoms of water.

Unlike a chair, an idea can be shared by a whole people. The time is right for alternative
economics, reduced working hours, redefining work, security, health and happiness,
person-oriented work, labor-intensive investment (not capital-intensive investments) and
soft power. The only way to solve the three crises of mass unemployment, environment
destruction and trade imbalance is to move from quantitative to qualitative growth (cf.
Hans-Christoph Binswanger).

Access could replace excess as enough could replace more. Possessions possess us more
than we possess them. The car is more than a metal box but is a whole way of thinking
encouraging domination, narcissism, solipsism and self-righteousness. Consumerism
goes through the roof, not population. We have enough for everyone's need, not for
everyone's greed (cf. Gandhi). Utopia, the place of no-place, is more a goal and objective
than a concrete reality. Economics changes with the times. Once savings was the elixir
and then spending became the elixir.

States are different than Schwabian housewives. They can become indebted and invest
and safeguard their future. What is rational from a microeconomic perspective can be
destructive from a macroeconomic perspective. Increasing competitiveness is sensible for
an individual corporation or businessperson but may be disastrous if all countries reduce
their workforces. Wages are both costs and demand or purchasing power. Neoliberal
myths and assumptions give unbounded freedom to capital while demeaning labor as
only an inevitable cost. The articles "Learning from History," "Community Centers in O
Canada," "Nature as Healer and Teacher," "Cinderella's Sisters and King Midas" and
"Shouting from the Caboose" are invitations to ecological, sustainable, respectful and
future-oriented change.
"We must be wounded to be healed," Dorothee Soelle said. Have we been sufficiently
wounded by materialism, imperial hubris, the financial crisis, deregulation,
commodification, instrumental rationality, suburbanization and the work religion? In
"Surveying Utopia," the emeritus professor Elmar Altvater shares the Polish proverb:
“You can make fish soup out of an aquarium but you can't make an aquarium out of fish
soup.” The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated
from the present. The future could be full of community centers, free Internet books and
soft power if we become active subjects and not passive objects, enthralled in the present
and future like children. Music, books and questions make our lives rich and independent
of the trickle-down market jingle.

5. NATURE AS HEALER AND TEACHER

Nature is a healer and teacher, a wounded healer and scorned teacher, a majestic fountain
of awe, wonder and inspiration. This essay focuses on the misuse and commodification of
nature and calls us to new consciousness and new priorities. Nature, the foundation of
economics, cries in pain because she is reduced to a free good, external or sink by a one-
dimensional economism.

In “One Family”, the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff insists that survival
as a species will be easier than survival as a family. This essay seeks to encourage a
change of consciousness, a respect for diversity, a commitment to humility and a love for
life.

The economy is part of a larger reality or oikos. May we break from the myths of the total
absolute market, nature as an external or free good and life as social Darwinism. Living
the truths of interdependence means reducing working hours. In a healed balanced
perspective urged by Christianity, Buddhism and the Simpsons, the economy is one
element of life with especial responsibility to future generations. Without this healed
balanced perspective, cultures and the future are sacrificed to the Washington Consensus
of liberalization, deregulation and privatization. Without a change of consciousness and
priorities, the economy becomes a steamroller with a self-dynamic where nature, women
and the third world fall by the wayside.

Human life ought to be dialogical, people relating to one another as question and answer.
Gandhi declared that everyone has a wild card in him or herself; only spiritual discipline
is necessary for transformation. The truth will set us free but the truth is a process, not a
cudgel, a process that can be vitiated by the love of money or the love of power. Life in
interdependence with God, contemporaries and nature is life in humility and teachability.

Technology isn’t neutral like an eggbeater but a worldview that envelops. The weaver
becomes the web and the machinist the machine (Langdon Winner, MIT). Economic
ideology and anthropocentrism have allowed nature to be reduced to a free good, an
external and a sink, not counted in economic calculations. The Washington Consensus,
the ideology of the total absolute market, is at the root of increasing world inequality and
environmental destruction. When profit is made supreme and investors and financiers
eclipse workers and consumers, the world is reduced to commodities and merchandise.

Lakes are more than anti-freeze and mountains are more than landfill, First Nations
people warn us. Being is greater than having. Hearkening back to an ancient Buddhist
saying, a rich one is one who can lose all he has without sorrow.

The malaise of the North could be the harbinger of another world. Overproduction and
commodification could be replaced by sharing and sustainability. As crisis and
opportunity are represented by the same Chinese letter, people of the North must see their
wealth as a gift despoiled by greed and megalomania. Without this new sense of
contingency, criticism and intercultural and intergenerational trust become ephemeral.

As love exists in three forms, Eros, Philatio and Agape, the future is described by three
German words, Zukunft, Futurum and Adventus. Will the future be marked by
sustainability or ruination? Can we see nature as the foundation of future economics? Can
we view the economy as part of a greater reality or oikos?

Hope like the immigrant is often unwelcome, calling us to new priorities and paradigms.
Nature has rights in herself as children have rights in themselves. Nature comes to us as a
healer and teacher, a majestic source of awe and inspiration, a balm designed to bless the
poor and the rich as the sun rises on the good and the unjust. Listening to nature can
enable us to understand faith as the balancing act of life, the tightrope walk between
privacy and community, between individual realization and social development.

Ends and means are confused as part and whole are often confused. Forgetful of nature
and of our spiritual core, the economy often becomes a steamroller driven only by profit
and short-term constraints. Instead of being one aspect, economism and instrumental
rationality colonize all life. All dialogue and relationships become reduced to
materialism. The German philosopher Ernst Bloch inveighed against vulgar materialism
where all life is reduced to sky atoms, cloud atoms etc.

Nature calls us to unsurpassable majesty, to the wonder and inscrutability of life and to
contemplative life. The simplistic reductionism that denies the complexity and
uncertainty of life makes us slaves of the routine and conventional perception, accepting
as real only what is calculable and known. Mystery, spiritual nexus, wonder and vision
are only troublesome intrusions to the hyper-pragmatic mindset. The farmer rose and
slept without knowing how the seed grew, Jesus said (Matthew 13). Can we rediscover
our humility and interconnectedness and learn from different spiritual traditions? Perhaps
riches are like thorns, a temptation to be overcome on our way to wholeness.

In a complex and uncertain world, we are lured by linear and quantitative interpretations
of the world and by simplistic and xenophobic solutions, e.g. might makes right.
Rightwing extremism seems naturalized in the America of G.W. Bush. The middle has
moved to the right. Communities and continents seem mired in disillusionment and
resignation. Private interests and power elites make mockery of sustainability and
democracy.

Kairos time, the time of decision, differs from everyday time. The Old Testament
prophets and the different resistance traditions tried to warn against the delusions of self-
interest and the idolatry of power and riches. These voices are often continuously
marginalized and disparaged as naïve and habitual disgruntlement. Nature strikes back,
Eberhard Stammler wrote in Evangelische Kommentare. The overflowing of the Rhine
and the earthquake in Japan are cries of wounded nature.

Being sustainable means using only what is necessary and not taking possibilities of life
from future generations. Can we learn from First Nations people and plan for seven
generations? Can we live in double vision as people of universal and particular history?
Can we rediscover life as active and contemplative, ready to trade our sport-utility
vehicles promoted as “lifestyle” for laptop computers?

The future of access, not excess, is a future of boundless growth. Materialism pretends to
be absolute. Gold is stylized as the quintessence that changes all life, opens all doors, and
cures all relationships. Hans Christoph Binswanger, an emeritus economics professor at
the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland discusses the economic pressure of growth in
his book “Money and Magic”. Why did fishermen long content with providing for their
families suddenly become obsessed with profit and mammoth output? The turning point
came with the purchase of a boat. Can we become passionate about sustainable
economics and subsistence economics? Nature will then be the treasure of life and the
foundation of economics. KFC cannot bring us together; only a re-visioning of nature as
healer and teacher can make our spirits strong and resilient. When the destruction of
nature is included in prices and not arrogantly dismissed as an external or free good, we
will turn from the temptations of excess and be stewards and partners of living, wounded
and resplendent nature.

There is power in our vision, our proclamation, our decision and our passion. In a culture
of nonstop consumerism, people become strangers to their gifts and powers. Cities that
become gridlock reduce the value of the car. The ladder of success, corporate beneficence
and the right of the stronger are slowly discredited as pillars of social Darwinism.
Another world is possible where money and power do not disfigure communities and the
future.

In the Jewish feast of Passover, families eat bitter herbs to remind them of their ancestors’
painful slavery in Egypt. A place is prepared for the prophet Elijah. Can we make a place
for nature, the disparaged and reviled foundation of life?

Nature, women and the third world have been disfigured. Global warming, deforestation,
over-fishing and genetic engineering are consequences of misguided economic theories
and mythologies. The gross domestic product is gross when traffic accidents, cancer
suffering and nuclear weapons are only positive inputs. Adbusters magazine from
Vancouver, Canada has insisted that economists must learn to subtract
( http://www.adbusters,org). Rethinking Progress, a San Francisco based think tank on
alternative economics offers help in leaving the mirage of unlimited quantitative growth.

As Horst-Eberhard Richter said, we live in a world of mutuality and no individual or

nation can steal away without damaging nature. Denial of common guilt is part of the
American tradition. St. Paul described our interdependence in unforgettable words: Can
the eye say to the hand, I have no need of you? Why are you constantly fighting? Do you
not have one Father? Jesus asked the refractory Jews.

The center cannot hold, William Butler Yeats warned. Everyone pursuing self-interest
doesn’t bring the common good. The “invisible hand” of the market favors those with
better starting conditions and makes health care, housing and water into privileges rather
than rights.
Creating a social net is the prerequisite for reducing working hours or sharing work.
Since we clearly lack the capacity to create meaningful work, sharing work becomes an
imperative if the right to work should be upheld. Evaluating technology as to nature-
friendliness and employment-friendliness is vital in a world of limits and short-term
fixation. New priorities displacing profit worship and quantitative growth are necessary,
not blaming the victim, selling the silverware, helping those already enriched or cutting
down the branch on which we sit.

In an essay “Cooperation not Violence”, the theologian Gottfried Orth explains that
cooperation is our true human nature. As carrots and onions thrive together, people in all
their diversity and brokenness can cooperate. Out of the cacophony can come a
symphony, Martin Luther King proclaimed.

Can we live as broken branches and as bearers of hope? Can we welcome criticism and
peaceableness as parts of our being? Can we see the poverty of the global South as the
concomitant to the wealth of the North? Can we remove the log of wastefulness and
excess from our own eye before removing the speck from our brother’s eye? Can we
repudiate life without criticism as arrogance and hubris?

Development can and must be defined differently. As life isn’t linear and self-evident,
development is more than a fast-food restaurant on every corner. Being civilized means
learning from the past, correcting our errors and beginning again. The North like the
Prodigal Son wasted its inheritance in speculative shareholder capitalism. The
normalization of war and the militarization of foreign policy are the bitter fruits of
megalomania and imperial ambition. Kyrie Elieson! Under the guise of September 11, the
Bush administration fell to the Orwellian perversion of calling attack defense and
destroying two countries without any evidence of their complicity.

Knowledge is power. The deception that ignorance is strength; the Washington consensus
that deregulation, liberalization and privatization would lift all boats has proven to be a
chimera or anachronism. Exploding inequality, ruined state finances, corporate welfare
and corporate tax evasion are the consequences of market radicalism or market
fundamentalism.
Nature falls by the wayside. According to the mythology, increased profits would lead to
increased investment and increased jobs. According to reality, helping those who don’t
need help, refusing to mend our own pockets and destroying nature, women and the third
world are pathological consequences of our pride and impenitence.

Come to the waters of plurality, humility and inoffensiveness! Can the rich see
themselves as needy of vision and compassion? Can the poor see themselves as rich in
faith and guardians of repressed marginalized voices? When the destruction of nature is
included in prices and not arrogantly dismissed as an external or free good, we will turn
from the temptations of excess and be stewards and partners of nature. The friendly
beneficent face of nature will dawn again when we live as open, welcoming and
changeable creatures.

6. BEING CIVILIZED MEANS LEARNING FROM HISTORY

The hope is learning from others, seeing life as ambivalent and dialectical, facing and not
fading out the expansion of the financial sector and speculation and abandoning the
myths of the “bubble and credit prosperity” where banks become too big to fail and too
big to control. “Forever number one” has also become a black hole for the global
economy as Bank of America turned out to be bad-for-America. Investment is not
speculation. The Wall St banks spent $4 billion over the last 10 years in lobbyists and
campaign contribution and successfully diluted financial regulations like the Dodd-Frank
law. The state has become the “errand boy” for the banks (Bill Moyers). The time is right
for alternative economics, reducing working hours and reconsidering state and market
and the social nature of the state.

The child can always be astonished. To the child, the spinning top or as squirrel can be as
fascinating as a sunrise or a sunset. Adults often fall into resignation and nihilism after
they reduce life to personal success or vulgar materialism. Fear of the new and fear of the
unknown can have paralyzing effects as Erich Fromm explained in “Escape from
Freedom.” The whole German society fell into a worship of Hitler and the horror of
militarism and scapegoating and demonizing Jews and minorities for 12 years. Restoring
the pure German society, idolizing the right of the stronger and blaming the weak led to
concentration camps and 50 million deaths in Europe in the horrific World War Two.

Cicero said: Whoever refuses to learn from history remains a child forever. In 2017,
America is an empire in decline where 95% of the economic gain in the past decade went
to the top 1%. According to a 2016 Oxfam study, the richest 8 persons in the world have
more wealth than 90% of the world’s population. A power elite dominates in politics and
the media and people feel generally powerless and handed over to profit shifting, tax
evasion, tax competition, tax havens and revenue shortfalls. Education, health care and
housing should be human rights and yet become unaffordable privileges. The state
should represent the public interest and yet special or private interests are often in the
driver’s seat with deregulation, privatization, liberalized markets, and speculation.
In Chinese, crisis and chance are represented by the same letter. Hope sets us apart from
the rest of creation since we can go beyond everything past and present in the power of
the coming, said the theologian Jurgen Moltmann. Faith is like a leap across 70,000
fathoms of water said Soren Kierkegaard. Faith is the death of the ego and the
celebration of the infinite selfless God who created out of nothing and describes his reign
in the parable of the mustard seed, the smallest seed that grows into the mightiest tree.

What is rational in microeconomics – like competitiveness – can be irrational in micro-

economics where countries try to be super-competitive and end up in mass
unemployment, 27 million unemployed in Europe and 22 million in the US. Can we find
the courage to live in hope, anticipation and promise, to see the future amid the changing
and shipwrecked present and to resist selfishness, the herd instinct and conformism?

7. THE CART IN THE SPECULATIVE MUD

Liberalizing markets leads to instability, not growth. Developing and threshold countries
suffer grievously through US speculation. The New Year is a time to abandon the myths
of American exceptionalism and corporate beneficence and welcome justice and
economic alternatives.
New Paradigms for the New Year

For hundreds of years the US was a source of hope and inspiration for the world, the city
set on a hill, the dream of equal opportunity. With the Vietnam War and the Iraq war, the
world has come to fear America as unbridled megalomania, a forked tongue power that
feigns concern for human rights while enforcing its economic interests. Unwilling to see
the log or the militarism in its own eye, the US rails against the speck in the eyes of the
developing world and redefines solidarity as compliance with its multinational
corporations. Once allies were respected and lip service was offered to self-determination.
Now vassals are sought and countries expected to surrender their resources for the profit
needs of beneficent corporations.

Liberalization of markets has brought instability, not growth. The Asian crisis followed by
the financial crises in Mexico, Russia, Turkey, Brazil and Argentina left behind grievous
wounds. The Washington Consensus, privatization, deregulation and opening markets to
American finance capital, is discredited. At last a post-Washington Consensus is forming
(cf. Jorg Goldberg, "The Cure is the Sickness”). In Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, the
Grand Inquisitor promised happiness in exchange for freedom. The South is refusing that
hoax and demanding its own freedom in forging alternative economic policy. Countries no
longer need the dollar to buy oil. Whether the US accepts this new reality and sees the
self-destruction in its myopic quest for power and wealth will decide over the future of the
planet.
The forced resignation of Cheney would help restore the dollar's stability and the world's
respect for the US. Would you lend money to a pyromaniac or a gun-crazed
megalomaniac? Blowback and the isolation and fear of the US are defense mechanisms of
the world intent on survival and safeguarding law and language. Another analogy would
be removing the fly from the soup after the guests complain or throwing out the rotten
rancid milk after the rule of law has been spoilt.

Intimidation, might makes right and double standards are false securities like building
your house on the hand (cf. Matthew 7). The world should be tilled and preserved and
isn't just putty for creating more money out of money and more international fear and
loathing out of initial advantage!

The threat of war, war-mongering, violates international law (cf. UN Charter) like stealing
the resources of another country. The right of self-determination and reparations are
foundations of international law as liberating the world from the scourge of war was the
foundation for the United Nations and the UN Charter. The fifty million who died in
World War II united the world in outlawing war.
Interdependence should replace jingoism, ethnocentrism and the cult of the soldier.
Nonviolence is stronger than violence as the pen is mightier than the sword. The
penultimate should be restrained by the ultimate as short-term necessities should be
relativized by the long-term love for life and respect for the planet. Hope and true
patriotism (cf. Bonhoeffer, Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison) require tough love,
sacrifice and engagement, and may not become justifications for lawlessness and greed
for power and wealth.

How do you proclaim costly grace in a culture accustomed to cheap grace and new
financial products? How can alternative sustainable economics be heard when criticizing
the dominant economic myths, the self-healing market, beneficent corporations and nature
as a free good, external or sink, is anathema? Infinite growth is impossible in a finite
world. We were told: increased profits would bring higher wages and more jobs. Instead
soaring profits brought exploding inequality, destruction of the earth, unbridled
speculation on currency markets and the working poor. Private affluence stands opposite
public squalor. The average CEO earns $10.4 billion, 640 times the worker's pay. Some
CEOs earn more in ten minutes than their workers earn in an entire year and yet those
CEOs are given tax gifts and tax subsidies.

"Words mean what I say they mean," Humpty Dumpty said to Alice. Can the US discover
interdependence, humility and self-criticism, mend its own pockets and focus on
systemic/structural evil instead of scapegoating the weak and confusing its own interests
with the interests of the world? The abuse of power in the US, cooking intelligence and
exaggerating threats, has inevitable consequences in the mockery and isolation of the US.
King Midas must have known that he would die of hunger after the entire world was
transformed into gold. The economic and political elites of the US must have known that
future peace necessitates partnership and sharing and that the most fearsome military
power will not be able to force countries to hold onto an increasingly worthless dollar.
Jesus calls us to new life, to create a new language and a new mathematics, to encourage
alternative perspectives and treasure the present in its interplay with the past and the
future. We could be internationalistas, zealots for justice with a passion for reconciliation
amid social, economic and cultural disconnection. The hope is that we become subjects
enthralled with the wonder of life and with spiritual, moral, intellectual and creative
growth. In the words of the Zapatistas of Mexico, the hope is one world where many
worlds fit, where everyone has a place and where both cooperation and competition
thrive.

As the New Year begins, may we see ourselves as part of a larger world and the economy
part of the oikos. Politics must have precedence so the economy serves public interests.
May we mend our own pockets and discover our gifts and powers repressed in
economism. May we overcome the anti-social offensive with its anti-labor bias, its hire
and fire, winner take all and right of the stronger. May we overcome the crisis of the
welfare state, the crisis in the heads of the economic and political elites.

Hope comes from below, from the marginalized and excluded, from the grassroots. May
community centers open up in every neighborhood. These centers could be oases of
counseling and activity, of reclaiming and rediscovering our interconnectedness. The
multiplier effects would be positive and breathtaking (cf. the 26 community centers in
Vancouver, British Columbia), very different from the negative effects of the Washington
Consensus and opening markets to hot money.

How many reasons did the chicken need to cross the road? May the US join the world in
living an ethic of resistance and solidarity where human interests finally counter and
contain profit interests and life and the future are more than newly packaged financial
products!
 8. COMMUNITY CENTERS: LEARNING FROM O CANADA

The mosaic works in Vancouver, B.C. The 26 community centers provide a buffer and
cushion from the brutal and commodifying market. In happier days before Reagan and
market fundamentalism, the Carnegie Community Center was bursting with activity,
counseling, classes and small groups.

Community centers in every neighborhood of Vancouver B.C. make the city livable,
friendly and inclusive. The Carnegie Community Center in the poorest part of Vancouver
recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. A new patio allows breath-taking views of the
mountains. Breakfast and lunch are $1.50 and dinners are $2.10 or $3.50. For a dollar a
year, anyone can use the computers three hours a day since the day is divided in three
segments. Game rooms, a library filled from the start of the day, a gym, television room,
theater make the center vibrant. At another center in the downtown eastside, anyone can
bring in their laundry and have it washed the same day. In happier days before Reagan and
market fundamentalists, the Carnegie Center was bursting with activities and counseling,
classes and circles.

Community centers provide a buffer and cushion from the brutal and commodifying
market. When the market is stylized as self-healing, total and absolute, an idol or panacea,
all problems are seen as interferences with the market. With the change from the welfare
to the workfare state, social exclusion is generalized, spreads to all strata and is no longer
a marginal phenomenon. With the capital or anti-social offensive, speculation is directly
and indirectly encouraged. Corporations use takeovers and mergers to maintain high
profits and repress weak purchasing power and outsourced populations. CEOs are called
"job creators" and workers "cost factors."

The mosaic works in Vancouver. People are respected and protected as beings with
inviolable dignity, not work machines helping to increase profit. On buses, 20 people
aren't enamored with their cell phones and their next three Hawaii vacations. The Sky
Train light rail, a computer-operated system without conductors, traverses the whole city
and hasn't failed since its inception in 1986. It runs every two minutes in the rush hour.

The principle threat is Americanization. Hire and fire, winner take all and the right of the
stronger promote precarious work and generalized insecurity. Vancouver also suffers from
problems and myths often originating from the wayward colossus to the south. Social
housing funds from Ottawa are delayed year after year. Stephen Harper's recent "throne
speech" emphasized the "Violent Crimes Initiative," necessitating expanded police and
repression.

Community centers are a way to healing, integration, de-commodification and self-

government. Shopping centers are a way to fragmentation and socialized disconnection
where the means are confused with the end, the part with the whole, the personal with the
public and the imaginary with the real. Community centers remind us that life isn't
nonstop shopping and health isn't credit creation.

As critical thinking and culture shock can be new beginnings, system criticism and
intercultural learning can be dismissed as exotic or luxuries. As the truth is not only in
English, new priorities and perspectives come from outside market fundamentalism. In
"1984," George Orwell warned that wars would become a domestic necessity to divert the
people from economic contradictions. Dissent and criticism would be expunged from
language so critical thinking would be incomprehensible. Noam Chomsky says
information in the US is not censored but filtered. Alternatives are marginalized in
different ways in a culture of info-tainment and celebrity news.

Community centers could be a way of re-socializing ourselves and re-claiming life from
oppressive marketing, commercialization and commodification. We could see ourselves as
story-tellers, as interdependent partners and listeners who are equally needy and
fragmentary. In a truly developed society, roles could be exchanged so the teacher
becomes the learner instead of weavers becoming the web under the work religion.

Dominant corporate media entertains us to death (cf. Neil Postman). Celebrity news and
news-you-can-use (e.g. how to tie your shoes to be cutting-edge in the hyper-individualist,
hyper-competitive world) lead to dummification and brainwashing. Economic learning
and union hours balancing the endless business hours should be priorities after the horrors
of Vietnam, NAFTA, Savings and Loan meltdown, New Economy bubble, De Lay-
Abramoff shake down redefinition of government, Enron, Iraq and the mortgage debacle.

The earth does not belong to people; people belong to the earth (Chief Seattle). It is time
to make peace with the earth (Al Gore). Nature isn't an external, free good or sink but our
mother and partner, our guarantor of a future that often strikes back in pain and warning.
Nature and children have rights in themselves and can not only be instrumentalized and
destroyed. When we finally include the costs of environmental caring, we will close one
blind spot that allows capital rule to appear beneficent.
Efficiency as the sole imperative in a profit-worshiping economy leads to blindness and
one-dimensional life. In a thought-provoking age, we have lost the ability to think (M.
Heidegger). In instrumental rationality (Jurgen Habermas), everything inward, spiritual
and divine is dismissed and all language and relations are dominated by materialism, what
work do you do and what do you own? Fatalism and resignation spread when the mantra -
there is no alternative - is constantly repeated.

The future should be anticipated and protected in the present, not extrapolated from the
present (cf. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope). Community centers could show us that
human and sparkling future focused on simplicity and solidarity, on mending our own
pockets and telling our own stories.

9. FROM OBSCURISTAN TO ABSURDISTAN: BARBARISM OR

A HUMAN FUTURE

Individual security can be emphasized so global vision fades. Half-truths and fish stories
carry the day. "Communism is oppression of man by man and capitalism is just the
reverse." Our challenge is to reawaken wonder and interdependence, to consider the way
of nonviolent resistance.

[The following thoughts come from critical theory and liberation theology. Resistance is
part of our nature as antibodies are part of our bodies. Dissent like the refractory child
can be a new beginning in confronting private opulence and public squalor. Leaving law
school and becoming a translator was a triumph of unconditional love. I was overcome
by Jurgen Moltmann's idea that hope sets us apart from all creation in that we can go
beyond everything present and past in the power of the coming, the power of the promise
(cf. "Theology of Hope"). I look forward to your comments on overcoming the
fundamentalist traps and our elite democracy.]

“If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own” (Wes “Scoop” Nisker)

“Some deep alternative current has been flowing out of the spiritual adventures and
identity struggles of recent generations. Of course, we didn’t create the conditions or
questions of the new age; we got caught in them. The ground shifted; the old gods
departed, the economic and political utopias crumbled, and the traditional answers were
washed away. We didn’t leave home; home left us.” (Publisher’s comment on “The Big
Bang, the Buddha and the Baby Boom”)

Wes “Scoop” Nisker, author of “The Essential Crazy Wisdom” and “The Big Bang, the
Buddha and the Baby Boom,” was a radio commentator on KSAN in San Francisco.
Nisker takes us on a hilarious wild ride from West to East and back again in his quest for
true self and enlightenment. Combining the best elements of memoir and social
commentary, Nisker uses his own story to illuminate the Baby Boomers’ roots of spiritual
hunger in postwar America.

Nisker coined the word “car-tastrophe,” a helpful description of our short-term fixation
where means are confused with ends, where long-term necessities like community centers
and sharing wealth are deferred, where dissent and criticism are expunged from memory,
where privatization held to be the panacea leads only to the bitter fruits of generational
mistrust, generalized insecurity and exploding inequality.

Hope comes from outside the system of short-term constraints and manufactured consent,
info-tainment and sports transfiguration, vulgar materialism and turbo-individualism,
self-absorption and trickle-down economic mythology. Hope often seems unwelcome like
a foreign language or incessantly questioning child. Whether our future can be more
human, open and dynamic depends on public consciousness and political mobilization.
Let us face the contradictions and myths of our culture and live the new life of the
questioning child in the midst of the old. “The old gives way to the new as the snow gives
way to the spring.” (Rainer Rilke, German poet).

In the movie “Wag the Dog” with Dustin Hoffman, people were easily convinced Albania
was a terrorist threat. All that was necessary was imbuing the people with a little
philosophy, “You can’t change horses in mid-stream.”

The penultimate needs the ultimate (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer). As time is borrowed from
the future, we are interdependent harbingers of the future. Part of nature, we are part of
the spirit world with traditions of solidarity and resistance. We are called to live in double
vision, in universal and particular history. We are dialogical beings who relate to one
another as question and answer. When questions disappear, we enter the fundamentalist
trap. Agorophobia is the psychological term for clinging to a black-white monochrome
against the daunting moral diversity. Dialogue shuts down as the loudest prevails.

The state has a social nature and cannot only be a power and security state. The free
moral state is in tension with the national security state. Rights are balanced and exist in a
hierarchy: work and privacy, economy and ecology. Majority rule is only possible with
minority protection. All people yearn for freedom and self-determination. The UN
Charter sought to outlaw war. International law is based on self-determination and
reparations. When these truths are twisted or repressed by nonstop consumerism or
corporate elites, we live in a state of manufactured consent, selfishness, herd conduct and
conformism. In the US, the fourth branch, the media, has degenerated to non-stop gossip
and propaganda. Concentration, mergers and profit worship led to the disappearance of
foreign bureaus and international news.

Countervailing narratives challenge the dominant narrative, the US as the city on the hill,
the cowboy on the white horse. Critical thinking, culture shock and intercultural learning
are antidotes to selfishness, herd behavior and conformity.

Lying into war, lying to the American people and the UN General Assembly follow the
Goebbels model as George Orwell warned in “1984.” The big lie relativizes and
normalizes the small lies. War becomes a domestic necessity to divert the people from
economic contradictions.

In “Nemesis,” Chalmers Johnson explains how the empire like Narcissus falls in love
with its reflection and drowns. The US in its epochal system crisis could renounce on
empire like Great Britain and become a republic. Recognizing its own hubris as an
eternal safe harbor, the US could mend its own pockets, accept new priorities and
perspectives and see others as partners instead of vassals and raw material warehouses.

In “The Narcissism Epidemic,” psychologist Jean Twenge, author of “Generation Me,”

shows how self-absorption and self-righteousness become normalized as “natural laws”
in a competitive society. Narcissism, overestimation of self or self as center of the
universe, is different from healthy self-esteem. Narcissism brings distrust and aversion,
not success. Spirituality, inclusion in a greater reality, and gratitude are antidotes. Saying
“I love you” is an invitation to connection while repeating “I am special” and “I am a
princess” foster separation. As prejudice can be gradually overcome, narcissism can be
overcome individually and collectively.

The auto-executives who arrived at Congressional hearings in their private jets to plead
for billions in bailouts were a tipping point triggering public outrage and cynicism.
Private vices do not lead to public virtue. Everyone pursuing profit maximization triggers
exploding inequality and social chaos. Private opulence and public squalor exist side by
side, as economist John Kenneth Galbraith warned in the 1960s.

The trickle-down myth of corporate beneficence and the myth of the self-healing market
were foundations of capital’s neoliberal anti-social offensive. The World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund used “structural adjustment” to force acceptance of foreign
corporations as a condition for loans. The Washington Consensus of privatization,
deregulation and liberalized open markets led to lost decades and marked declines in
gross domestic product. Now the global South insists on food security and sovereignty to
put corporate power and mainstream economic theory in its place. Higher profits were
said to lead to greater investments and more jobs. Corporations prefer speculation on
currency markets and takeovers to job creation and economic democracy.

As self-determination and reparations are foundations of international law, food

sovereignty and corporate de-legitimation are vital for a human future that reverses the
destruction of nature and exploding inequality of incomes and assets. Economics is too
important to be left to economists, as war is too important to be left to the military.

Economics should be a part of life, not a steamroller crushing personal initiative and
creativity. As the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, institution
criticism is part of the journey of democracy and reclaiming life. The church, unions,
media and schools are independent greatnesses that often lose their independence in the
onslaught of profit maximization and instrumental rationality. Privatism and
consumerism seem like “natural laws” in a hyper-individualistic culture that eschews
history and intercultural learning. Private and short-term interests drown out public and
long-term necessities. The center cannot hold, the poet William Butler Yeats warned a
century ago. What is imperative is a change of individual and collective consciousness.

Erich Fromm and the democratic socialist tradition could bring light and dynamism into
our frozen overly materialistic culture. Being is more than having. Possessions can
possess us. Bereft of spiritual understanding, we can confuse luxury, status and brands
with life. Repressing the urgent need for self-criticism, rethinking and reducing our
ecological footprint, we can be sedated and narrowed by the nonstop consumer culture
with its pictures of success and unattainable wealth.

Double standards and intimidation are false securities as the capital offensive leading to a
credit- and bubble-prosperity induced a false economic security. Shareholder value leads
to profit worship and the denigration of workers and the environment.

Anthropocentrism is a blindness like narcissism, prejudice, xenophobia and homophobia.

In “Truth and Method,” Hans-Georg Gadamer explained that the human sciences
(philosophy, history, language and play) use a different methodology than the natural
sciences. Experience differs from experiment as the non-repeatable and inexact differ
from the repeatable and exact. Methods of inwardness and listening are necessary rather
than measurement and quantification.

If infinite growth is impossible in a finite universe, qualitative growth could supersede

quantitative growth. As sickness is not sin and life is not longevity, the universal right to
be protected from social risks like poverty is codified in constitutions. The welfare state
wrongly stylized as “Bolshevism” is really the human future. The history torn in war,
hatred and ethnocentrism could give way to a future of interdependence if the political
will and love of life can be mobilized.

If the right to work is to be assured, sharing of income and assets is vital. The earth does
not belong to humankind; humankind belongs to the earth, chief Seattle admonished.
Nature is God’s gift to be shared by everyone. Nature is not merely a free good, external
or sink but the basis of future life and future economics.

Housing as a human right is often eclipsed by the right of speculation (cf. Arnold Kunzli,
“Housing as a Human Right” http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/06/266635.shtml)
Rights are balanced and exist in a hierarchy, work and privacy, economy and ecology.

Wall Street oligarchs and speculation threaten the real economy. Financial markets
capture the government, as former IMF economist Simon Johnson explains (cf. “The
Quiet Coup” in The Atlantic, May 2009
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200905/imf-advice?x=36&y=1)
.
Confusing offense and defense is a perversion like conflating public and private. Turning
the government into a trough for the super-rich, encouraging politicians to be “money-
chasers” (Bill Moyers) and lobbyists to be legislators are ominous signs of an elite, proto-
fascist monopoly economy that immunizes itself from criticism. With the myths, the
system of “minority consumption” (Robert Kurz) stylizes itself as a natural law, represses
criticism and alternative economics.

What seemed utopian in the past, turning away from the worship of profit and pursuing
steady-state zero-growth stewardship economics, proves to be necessary for survival.
Infinite growth is impossible in a finite universe. Increased gross domestic product in the
short-term can entail destruction of the foundations of life in the short term (cf. Thomas
Fischermann, “Better Growth,” http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/05/391533.shtml)

Consumption, not population, has gone through the roof. The earth has enough for the
needs of all, not the greed of all (Gandhi). With the encouragement of advertising and
credit, needs and wants are confused and unnecessary ostentatious consumption is
promoted. Possessions can possess us where the meaning of life mutates into the
accumulation of things. Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism agree that riches can
be thorns and that simplicity, enlightenment and conversion are ways to life.

Inequality has also gone through the roof, especially since Reagan extolled greed and
shifted taxation from corporate taxation to individual taxation. Three-quarters of the
income growth in the US from 2002 to 2006 went to the top 1% (cf. “Economic Crisis
and the Crisis of Neoliberal Ideology” by Vladimiro Guacce
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/06/391987.shtml). While the top 1% had 15-18%
of total assets in 1968-1970, its share soared to 55-58% by 2007. Over the past 10 years,
the financial services industry (banks, insurance, investment firms) contributed over $5
billion in campaign contributions and lobbyists.

May the love of life unite us against the maladies and myths of the past so production can
be for needs and not for profits. The system of elite democracy and shareholder rule
could give way to decentralization, regionalization and the sovereignty of human rights.
The horse must be set before the cart and our own pockets mended! May we take the hard
path of system- and structural criticism and refuse the path of least resistance, scape-
goating and blaming the weak!

“When the state trusts citizens, citizens trust the state” (Justin Trudeau).

The 26 community centers in Vancouver B.C. could represent a third way beyond the
state and the market. The centers have a cushioning and multiplying effect as surrogate
counseling and classroom opportunities. Anyone can use the computers for three hours a
day and caserolle dinners are only $4. The Canadian spirit, the thankfulness of being
protected from cradle to grave, is encountered everywhere. Do we have anything to learn
here?

The Sky Train, the Canada line, and the Evergreen line in Vancouver B.C. are computer-
operated light rail lines connecting the whole city, magic trains running every four
minuters some since 1986.
When will the US recognize and congratulate Canada and Vancity and break out of its
insular, exceptional hubris?

Victory of the Loud Little Handful

by Mark Twain

The loud little handful - as usual - will shout for the war. The pulpit will - warily and
cautiously - object... at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes
and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It
is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it."
Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason
against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded,
but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar
audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and
free speech strangled by hordes of furious men...
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is
attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will
diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by
and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he
enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
Mark Twain, "The Mysterious Stranger" (1910)
 10.SHOUTING FROM THE CABOOSE

Hope lies beyond Social Darwinism and hyper-individualism. As the end of cheap oil
could be the beginning of community, the end of everyday time could be the beginning of
kairos time, the time of decision. Black is a new consciousness, not a skin color (Steve
Biko).

There are solutions to the banking-credit crisis but they are painful. A dual key currency
of the dollar and the euro may be inevitable along with adoption of a subsistence and
sustainable economics (cf. Fred Bergsten from the Peterson Institute for International
Economics in "Droht die `Mutter aller Finanzkrisen'?" in Telepolis, 2/6/2008
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/02/372229.shtml).

Our footprint is unsustainable. For a long while, our imports have been double our
exports. Our grasping and greed, stylizing desires as needs and all products as products
with inelastic curves, are unsustainable in a world of limits and shared responsibility.

Poverty can evoke sympathy or fear as world collapse can evoke alliances or withdrawal.
The melting of the dollar is a result of the twin deficits, the balance of trader deficit ($800
billion in 2007) and the federal budget. Countries do not need dollars as in the past to buy
oil. The weak currency means it's harder to earn euros to buy imported oil. These are the
new realities in our brave new world calling us to changed priorities and perspectives.

Radical solutions are different than rhetorical or cosmetic solutions. We are all called to be
transformational agents and to pressure Obama to radical progressive policy on
militarism, health care, housing, job creation and poverty. Martin Luther King taught us
that there is good in every person. This could be the cornerstone for a healed
understanding of security. Valuing all persons including enemies is crucial for a healed
world. Reconciliation means finding a new unity relativizing differences.
Empires like Narcissus fall in love with their reflection and perish. We could become a
republic rather than an empire if we follow Britain's example and not Rome's self-
destruction (cf. Chalmers Johnson's "Blowback," "Sorrows of Empire," and "Nemesis").
Consumerism is an anxiety religion that sets having over being. Advertising is based on
convincing people of their inadequacy.

World civil civil society directly and indirectly fights empire-building and its veils -
corporations, myths and lies, long-lasting and multi-purpose lies. People who spend their
lives glorifying sales and profits are living pseudo-lives in cultures of denial and
diversion.

World depression is a bitter fruit of market fundamentalism and economism where

economic corruption and pandering are made practical necessities. The free moral state is
in a tension to the national security state. The state has a social character and can't be
reduced to a power and security state.
Denial like showmanship is a short-term palliative or sedative sometimes spread by all the
media and disguised or justified as a natural law. Being upbeat becomes the all-
determining criteria when advertisers rule over audiences. From a liberation theology
perspective, we are called to create a new language and a new mathematics, a language
that is inclusive and affirming and a mathematics that respects the past, present and future.

Let me give a few examples of concrete existential resistance. Californians live in

internalized rage with the succession of republican governors (Reagan, Dukmajen and
Wilson) each one vetoing more bills than the ones before. Students and mountain people
in Chile formed the real government when Pinochet - their US-sponsored Nazi party -
only served the tiny elite. Bonhoeffer organized an underground Confessing Church when
Hitler appointed a Reich church bishop whose only interest was in making the church
subservient to the Fuhrer. In "Ethics," Bonhoeffer after excoriating "cheap grace"
distinguished penultimate and ultimate when the church was perverted or instrumentalized
to legitimate dictatorial rule.

Civil society is the counter-power to the dominant trickle down mythology. in resisting the
world depression! We are called to an ethic of solidarity and resistance, to work inside and
outside the system for peace justice and integrity of creation. As the left needs celebration
and organization, we should congratulate one another and become interdependent
"internationalistas." We should learn to empathize, to live in and from other people and
other cultures and free ourselves from work coercion, myopia, narcissism and apathy. We
are not here to be "entertained to death" (cf. Neil Postman) but to be transformational
agents working against the spirit of this world, the spirit of greed, over-accumulation and
conspicuous consumption. Non-stop consumerism and corporations promote false
consciousness in status-symbol land. Chevrolet doesn't mean revolution. Possessions can
possess us as the helping professions can help themselves. The car is promoted or
glorified as a lifestyle, a validation of power and status while its destructiveness is faded
out.
Together we can repair the broken language where offense is called defense and
dependence is called independence. There is power in our decision, our proclamation and
our vision. The Great Upheaval brings forth the Great Refusal (cf. Paul Krugman).
Rewriting history is as perverse as using religion to justify the national security state.

In Kaspar Hauser by Jacob Wassermann, a town stricken by drought fell to violence,

mistrust and fatalism until a little boy plays so beautifully on his flute that water rose
again in the wells.

The West is "arrogant, greedy and self-absorbed." This was one of the lessons learned
from 9/11 by Jean Chretian, former Canadian prime minister. Hell is being without
alternative, resigning and acquiescing to political, economic or spiritual corruption.

In a cable public access TV program on "Spirituality and Healing," sharing resources,

listening to all viewpoints and opening our hearts were emphasized as crucial for truth-
tellers and liberators. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, agnosticism and atheism can help
change our paradigms from excess to access. As crisis and opportunity are represented by
the same Chinese letter, times of upheaval should be times when we recognize the many
efforts and campaigns. Diversity is a strength and enrichment, not a threat or false
security.

In a three-hour CSpan Book TV program, David Lewis, Pulitzer prize winning author and
black historian, said he felt like one warning from the caboose that the train's speed was
wrong and that the wrong men were in control.