Reading: by Rev. Craig T. Roshaven, Witness Ministries Director for the Unitarian Universalist Association, from an October 31, 2011 statement about Occupy Wall Street and related events:
Across our nation and around the world, thousands of people have taken to the streets to question the morality of our financial system. The movement that initially started as an occupation of Wall Street has now spread to cities, large and small, all across the land. It is a movement of people who are demanding a fundamental restructuring of how we distribute the wealth that we, the people, produce.
There are good reasons for this outpouring of anger and discontent. The rich are getting richer, while everyone else is getting poorer. Since 1976, hourly wages have declined by 7% while the share of total income going to the top 1% of earners rose from 9% to 23.5%.
Unitarian Universalists have a long tradition of calling for economic justice. We are especially concerned with justice for the most vulnerable. Hundreds of Unitarian Universalists across the country are participating in the Occupy movement in a variety of ways. We add our voice to theirs in demanding fundamental change.
Reading: excerpts from a New Yorker Magazine blog from October 19, 2011, posted by David Holmes, entitled “The Crisis in a Nutshell: Occupy Wall Street”
A digest of the past week’s prophetic and interpretive thought
“In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party. Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them.” —President Barack Obama
“If you don’t have a job, and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” —Herman Cain, former C.E.O. of Godfather’s Pizza
“I think Mr. Cain has blamed the victims. There’s a lot of people that are victims of this business cycle. We can’t blame the victims.” —Ron Paul, a congressman for Texas
“I regard the Wall Street protests as a natural outcome of a bad education system teaching them really dumb ideas.” —Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House
“Being in the streets and calling attention to issues is sometimes the only recourse you have.” —Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
“I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare.” —Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts
“At some level, I can’t blame them.” —Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve
“I think that if the Occupy Wall Street wants to be upset about something they should go in front of the White House.” —Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman for Minnesota
“Ninety-nine per cent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily ninety-nine per cent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling one percent who disagree.” —Lemony Snicket, an author of children’s books
Reading: “Seven Social Sins,” quoted by Mahatma Gandhi in a 1925 edition of his weekly journal, "Young India"
Politics without principles
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce without morality
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
Wisdom on Wall Street
A Sermon Delivered on November 6, 2011
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
When I first heard about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, I didn’t know quite what to make of it. The first time I heard about it, it was in a news segment that was reporting on the fact, that there had not been much reporting on the occupation, and the allegation that mainstream media outlets were in cahoots with the mighty financial institutions the protesters were picketing. Since then I have heard a variety of accounts that paint the protesters either as kooks, or as solid citizens; either as savvy tech geeks and political activists, or as a public nuisance laying waste to a city park.
Should they be taken seriously? Do they raise valid issues? Our Unitarian Universalist leadership in Boston believes they do. Our financial system does more than simply manage money, it also shapes the very fabric of our society. Actions on Wall Street, and their consequence beyond Wall Street, have serious moral implications.
In his book Rediscovering Values - On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street - A Moral Compass for the New Economy, the Christian activist Jim Wallis says, underneath the public discourse about our financial crisis,
“another conversation is emerging about who and what we want to be - as individuals, as a nation, and as a human community. By and large the media has missed the deeper discussion and continues to focus only up on the surface of the crisis. And most of our politicians just want to tell us how soon the crisis could be over. But there are deeper questions here and some fundamental choices to make. That’s why this could be a transformational moment, one of those times that comes around only very occasionally. We don’t want to miss this opportunity.” (p. 2)
* * *
It all began on Saturday, September 17th, when a loosely organized group of activists gathered in Manhattan’s financial district to protest “corporate greed, social inequality and the corrosive power of large banks and multinational corporations” which undermines the democratic process.
Some say, they were inspired by similar protests earlier in the year, which took place in countries as diverse as Spain and Israel, and Egypt. On the website “occupywallstreet” they call themselves a “leaderless people powered movement for democracy,” “a resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions.”
They say, “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”
They mean they represent 99 percent of the country, in contrast to the 1 percent, that holds a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth, and asserts a disproportionate influence on our political and economic system - and thus, invariably, our society as a whole. There is some truth to this.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, between 1979 and 2007, earnings of the top 1% of Americans have grown by an average of 275%. This top 1% controls about 40% of the country’s wealth.
The Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman says, that while protesters are correct in highlighting the disproportionate wealth of the top 1%, they are actually setting their cutoff point too low. He points to an earlier budget office report that shows: Of the wealth acquired by the top 1%, two-thirds went to the top 0.1%. So while the incomes of the top hundredth of Americans almost tripled in the past three decades, for the top thousandths, between 1979 and 2005, incomes more than quadrupled.
Krugman says, this extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. He asks, “Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?” (New York Times, Nov. 3, 2011)
* * *
How could this come to be? How could a country that was founded with a radical moral vision of democracy and equality find itself heading down a path of ever greater inequality?
Money may have something to do with it. The connection - or perhaps the disconnection - of money and morality may have something to do with it.
In the course of the last thirty years, the banking industry in this country has changed significantly. Some see clear connections to the financial deregulation in the 1980s, and the creation, in the 1990s, of complex “financial products” called “derivatives.” Derivatives allow for financial speculation on projected growth, in effect making bets on anything from the rise and fall of oil prices, to success or failure of a company. By the end of the 1990s derivatives grew into a 50 trillion dollar unregulated market.
Furthermore banks, insurance companies and rating agencies, rather than providing checks and balances for each other, instead all found ways to profit from the deregulation. For millions of Americans these developments were most noticeable in the booming housing market. For years, the value of homes seemed to rise.
I have heard it explained like this: In the olden days, a home mortgage was based on a relationship between a homebuyer and a bank. A bank would be mindful of the risk involved in lending money, since it wanted its money back. Thus the value of a home would be carefully assessed, and the borrowers would provide a substantial down payment - a personal investment in the home as sign of their commitment and ability to repay.
In the new system, local banks could sell their mortgages to investment banks. Investment banks could merge mortgages with all sorts of other loans, like car and student loans and credit card debts, and create so-called “collateralized debt obligations” or CDOs. These CDOs, in turn could be sold to investors all around the world.
Rating agencies, whose job it is to assess the relative safety or risk of financial instruments, gave CDOs their highest rating: AAA. This made CDOs attractive investments for retirement funds, which of course assumed CDOs were safe and low risk.
But this new system meant banks no longer had any incentive to monitor whether the mortgages were safe or risky. Their profit came from the fees associated with selling the mortgages to the investment banks. The investment banks were not concerned about the risk of people not repaying their mortgage, since they made their money selling CDOs to other investors. Regulators had little incentive to question the value of CDOs, because they were getting rich by granting them high ratings.
More and more people were able to borrow money to buy homes. Between 2000 and 2003 the number of home loans taken out per year almost quadrupled. And thanks to the miracle of the market, by which prices rise with higher demand, home values rose.
But the rising value of homes was not real - it was only imagined. It was a product of a system, which allowed us to ignore financial risk for the sake of financial gain.
No one seemed to recognize the precarious situation this was creating. But this is not because these financial transactions were too complex to understand. It is because the enormous short-term profits provided an irresistible temptation for us to turn a blind eye to the risks involved, and the moral implications of our actions. Upton Sinclair, who had first hand experience of the last Great Depression, captured it perfectly, when he said, “It’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding.”
When the bubble burst in 2008, banks and financial institutions that seemed “too big to fail” collapsed. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were spent to save them. Millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs or their life savings. And yet many of the Wall Street executives who made millions during the bubble, have been able to hold on to their earnings. They are still millionaires.
Once the immediate crisis passed, life on Wall Street quickly returned to normal. The same “normal” that led us into this crisis. Soon after receiving billions in the bailout, the banks’ top executives were again receiving billions in bonuses.
In the first half of 2009, just months after the bubble burst, the financial services industry spent $223 million on lobbying to keep congress from enacting any additional financial regulation or restrictions. And they have been very successful.
* * *
Jim Wallis makes the point that while poor financial policies may have led us into this financial crisis, our monetary problems are symptom of a broader moral failure - a moral failure that is well described in the social sins Gandhi saw, which included: politics without principles, wealth without work, commerce without morality.
Wallis says, millions of Americans have good reason to be mad. We were misled. We were persuaded that we could pursue our selfish interests without thoughts to the consequences, because the “invisible hand” of the market would work it all out in the end. We were led to believe we didn’t need to work to become wealthy, if only we put our money in the hands of the right stock broker or in the right mutual fund. We were told that changes in financial regulation would have no effect on our pension funds and life savings. We were told that the wealth of the richest would trickle down, and that the whole country would prosper. In hindsight, we can see that we were mistaken.
But rather than simply being angry, and wondering when this crisis will be over, when employment figures will improve, when economic growth will resume, we should be asking different questions. We should be asking: How will this crisis change us? How will it change the way we think and act? How will it change our priorities and values?
As Wallis sees it, we are in the midst of a structural crisis that calls for new social and financial regulation. But we are also in the midst of a spiritual crisis that calls for new self-regulation. We are in desperate need to re-discover the values of humility, and balance, and priorities, and limits.
There are moral lessons to be learned from the crisis. Wallis sees three big ones: relationships matter, our good is indeed tied up in the common good, and “social sins” also matter.
As a religious community, we play an important role in shaping the moral debate of our community and our country. As a religious community, we have an obligation to hone our moral vision, and to show clearly how sound principles can inform our politics, and morality can inform our commerce.
This is not merely a matter of holding our political leaders accountable and demanding change - though that is part of it. Any efforts to address the moral wrongs of our society, need to begin with the moral dimensions of our own lives - our relationships with those closest to us, and members of our community; in our decisions how we earn and spend our money; the ways we are able to serve a greater good - whether individually, or in shared efforts, like the Hunger Initiative now taking shape in our church.
* * *
The protesters occupying Wall Street have been there for 51 days now. Over the last month, their protests have inspired similar demonstrations across the country. Friday’s New York Times reports demonstrators now gather in more than 70 American cities. Demonstrations are also taking place in Europe and Asia.
May their persistent efforts inspire us to see our current crisis
As a precious opportunity for social transformation
As well as spiritual transformation.
May we be inspired to pursue a clearer moral vision
of the greater good, so we might build a better world.
Amen.
