"Our moral values have been replaced by market values." [p 4]

"So, once again, leadership will have to come more from the bottom than from the top. Congregations and communities will likely be the focus of new thinking, new choices, and new solutions." [p 9]

Sunday School with John Stewart, Chapt.1, pp. 13 – 23: The Money Changers; Tables To Be Overturned; Three Moral Lessons

"If you are asking the wrong question, it doesn't matter how good the answer is, you aren't going to get where you want to go." [13]

"What was happening in the marketplace was a spiritual and moral problem, not just an economic one." [17]

Three Moral Lessons:
"First, relationships matter.... Second, 'social sins' also matter.... Third, our own good is indeed tied up in the common good." [20-21]

"We have replaced God with the 'invisible hand' of the market, substituted 'market value' for 'moral values' and attributed all that was good and right to the power of the market to make it so. The market has trumped all else and replaced much of the moral space of society, even questioning the value of having 'moral space' where the market does not reach." [26]

"[Harvey] Cox suggests that the market has become all-powerful (omnipotent), with the ability to 'convert creation into commodities' ... all-knowing (omniscient), and therefore directs our thoughts ... all-present (omnipresent) ... applies to areas that once appeared to be exempt." [28-29, restated for purposes of parallelism]

"'Capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own.' ((Joseph Schumpeter)" [33]

"...the first commandment of The Market, 'There is never enough,' must be replaced by the dictums of God's economy; namely, there is enough, if we share it." [38]

"Our cultural sins have now found us out. And while wealth does not seem to trickle down from the top of this economy to the bottom, it does seem that bad behavior and bad values do trickle down." [41]

"Self-interest without the restraint of ethics has done us in during the Great Recession." [49]

"...its more than a little ironic how so many religious fundamentalists who reject scientific evolution seem to so heartily embrace a new social Darwinism—the survival of the fittest." [51]

"Self-interest was supposed to keep us safe from harm" [52]

"...since the 1980s, narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity.
     "Narcissism is beyond a healthy self-esteem just like hubris [pride]is far beyond a basic understanding of self-interest.... The problems come when "I am special" turns into "I am an exception." When "I believe in myself" becomes "I do not believe in others." [54-55]

"...just because a market demand exists doesn't mean it's a good thing." [57]

"The antidotes to narcissism and extreme individualism are, again, some very old moral and spiritual values: humility and community." [62]

"What was meant to be a tool to help us accomplish long-term goals became a long-term master that replaces all goals except that of servicing the debt." [68]

"While businesses and those who run them should always do their personal best to maintain high standards, we should be upset when government fails to live up to its standards of looking our for public safety." [71]

"...the greatest impact, the most damaging consequences of the new maxim "I want it now," is the disaster for the earth itself and, therefore, for future generations. The "ethic of the earth" has to do with the longer time frame of seasons and years, and sustainability." [72]

"...the best ethic in response to our short-term and destructive maxim is the one that comes from indigenous peoples who say we should evaluate every decision by its impact upon seven generations in the future." [75]

"The last time that inequality in America was as great as it is today was in the Gilded Age just before the Great Depression. Our religious traditions do indeed point the way in times of relatively shared prosperity, there are no biblical prophets, because they are not needed. But when inequality is on the rise, the prophets rise up to thunder the judgment and justice of God.
     "The God of the Bible seems not to mind prosperity—if it is shared." [80]

"...redistribution is exactly what the most wealthy and their political representatives have accomplished—redistribution to them, with little attention and even less accountability. They're right; it is class warfare. And the upper class has won the battle for the last three decades." [81]

"Is it merely the land of opportunity that allows one family to make more money than 120 million of its fellow citizens, or is it a skewed system and a stacked deck that results in such massive inequality?" [84]

"A rising tide was suposed to life all boats, but it didn't. It lifted only the yachts of the most wealthy." [84]

"...the enormous growth of American inequality is the gorilla in the room of every political conversation that nobody want to talk about or even recognize." [86]

"Four hundred people holding more wealth than half of the whole country is a disparity over which we should, indeed, despair and would likely make the disparities of biblical times pale in comparison." [87]

"When the poor begin to suffer, it will not be long before the rest of us will also feel it. We missed those warning signs of this current economic crisis. Ultimately, the common good is our own good, and the best thing for all of us is the right thing for the least of us" [92]

Daniel Webster is quoted as saying, "the freest government cannot long endure when the tendency of the law is to create a rapid accumulation of property in the hands of a few, and to render the masses poor and dependent." Either we can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hand of a few, but we can't have both." [97-98]

"In our country, this time of anger [over unfairness] has often been referred to as "populist outrage." It has set loose angry mobs who have, on occasion, expressed their outrage through destructive behavior; but when channeled and focused, this outrage has also been behind great progress within our society. In response to rising inequality at the end of the nineteenth centruy, there was a growing social movement to improve the safety of working conditions and establish the eight-hour workday. The populist uprisings as a result of the Great Depression eventually led to the establishment of a minimum wage, child labor laws, and the establishment of Social Security." [98]

Comment: This outrage has been expressed in Wisconsin in 2011-2012 in response to the State Government's attack on collective bargaining and its shredding of Wisconsin's safety net. [CM]

Poverty and Justice Bible

"...three things are bringing the memory of those old values and lessons back.
     1) the economic crisis itself
     2) worry about what values our children are growing up with
     3) a new empathy that emerges for the poor and most
         vulnerable [102-103]

"...freedom lies somewhere between, where enough is enough." [107]

"If, after the Great Recession, we return to our "normal" consumer habits, the impact will ultimately be more than the ecosystem of our planet, the ethics of our culture, and the inner life of our spirits can endure." [108]

Quoting a Pelagian tract from the early church: "Some people are indigent for the very reason that others hold a superfluity. Take away the rich man and you will find no pauper. No one should own more than is necessary but everyone should have what they need. A few rich people are the reason why there are so many poor." [114]

"Crisis gives everyone a chance to rethink things and start asking some better questions." [116]

"God's economy has two basic principles:
     1. There is enough
     2. If we share it." [118]

"When enough is never enough and greed is good, our lives are in constant tension." [120]

"We need to create multiple bottom lines, not just for assessing immediate profits but for measuring longer-term community and ecological impacts. And we need multiple stakeholders, including not only stockholders but also workers, consumers, the community, the environment, and future generations—even seven generations out.
     "Our aim must be to develop the ethic of a sustainable economy and sustainable communities and to teach that ethic to our children." [133]

"It's time to talk about the healing of our economic addictions." [134]

"Economists refer to these "heads I win, tails somebody else picks up the tab" situations as "moral hazards".... When good people are in a bad system, those good people start making bad decisions." [134]

"The collective failure of the industrialized world to both regulate pollution and curb gross overconsumption has put billions of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people at increased risk of hunger, thirst, flooding, and disease." [137]

"Farmers know that if you grow as much as you can every year in the same soil, without giving it a break and letting it replenish its nutrients, you have a recipe for disaster!" [140]

"We want [children's] heroes to represent compassion, courage, service, and sacrifice, as opposed to self-interest and self-protection." [143]

"But here's the good news. The change to a new "green" or clean-energy economy could accomplish three things simultaneously: (1) protect the planet by beginning to mitigate and even reverse climate change; (2) create new and better jobs (and ones that can't be exported to other places); and (3) serve our national security by changing the single factor that has led us into one war after another—our dependence on oil." [147]

"It will take far more than just a change in the energy system; it will also take a change of hearts.
     "... The issues at stake here are so momentous and potentially transformational that such a conversion will have to be both economic and spiritual." [148]

"Changes in environmental policy often hurt the wallets of poor people first, and responsible policy should always take that into account—mitigating the impact on low-income people . But just because conversion can be a challenge doesn't mean it is not worth doing and doesn't mean that, down the road, it won't pay off." [154]

"Rich Cizik ... wrote, "And when we die, God won't ask us how He made this Earth or how long it took, but instead this question about our stewardship duty: 'What did you do with what I made?'"" [154]

"There has been a war declared on our families, but it has not come from the places and people we have been warned about. It has rather been fought in longer hours, reduced paychecks, distorted measures of success, a relentless pressure to keep up with the Joneses, and a cultural onslaught directed against our children, promoting some negative values that most of us don't want our kids growing up with." [157]

"Over the past two decades, states have increased their spending on corrections systems by 127 percent while spending on higher education has only increased 21 percent." [162]

"The rich are richer at the top, the middle-class families get squeezed in the middle, and those at the bottom are crushed by the weight of it all. So here is how the new economy works: high consumption at the top end; high pressure for consumption in the middle, squeezing both money and time; decreased jobs and wages at the low end, causing poverty and leading to more incarcerations—which increases demands for a growing sector of for-profit prisons." [163]

"While we need jobs to come back, wages to go up, and benefits to be restored, I would suggest that we need more. I believe we need to focus on the quality of work as well as the quantity of jobs. We need to talk not just about occupation, but vocation. Not just about what fills up our time, but about the things that make our time meaningful." [171]

"While the percentage of those living in extreme poverty has continued to decline, we are still confronted with the fact that three billion people (virtually half of God's children on the planet) still live on less than two dollars a day, and that is the principle moral reality of today's global economy. The corruption of our "moral sentiments" is the reason that fact is seldom mentioned in our conversations about the market." [175]

"The greed culture is not just wrong; it has failed, and it is time to replace it with a common-good culture....
     "The idea of a strong civil society is not liberal or conservative—it is radical...."
     "...it is time to create a whole new adult Sunday-school curriculum on biblical economics and moral recovery and about the religious call to social service and social justice." [178-179]

"We have the public sector (the state), the private sector (the market, and the civic sector (our voluntary and nonprofit institutions—including the faith community). When any one of those begins to take over the others, or one is weakened and does not perform its functions. all sectors are in trouble—and so are we.... the critical cross-section roles have been eclipsed in the last few decades by the almost total domination of the market.... the market leg of the stool has grown enormously, and the dominance of the market over all else has caused our society to literally fall over." [183-184]

"Instead of trusting the "invisible hand," we must be more honest about the human tendency to think in the short term and to overuse our resources, and we need to regulate accordingly." [187]

"To hear some zealots of the free market talk, you would think they believe in a sinless market, where no regulations are allowed, no limitations accepted, no restraints needed, and no accountability required. In other words, the market is beyond sin and shortcomings." [188]

"The market is not designed to regulate itself or rid itself from "sin." Excesses are inevitable and can only be curbed by values and forces that come from outside the market." [189-190]

"In the name of not wanting small business to suffer from too many overburdening regulations, we have dropped the blanket of deregulation over the behavior of our largest corporations and the financial giants of Wall Street—and that has proven to have been a colossal mistake. The issue of scale could become a key metric for social regulation and even moral accountability." [192]

"But the real battle now is not capitalism versus socialism, but the unrestrained market versus genuine democracy. We have seen the tyranny of the all-powerful market; and it is time to reassert our best and most basic traditions of democratic accountability." [193]

"We need nothing less than social transformation to come out of this Great Recession...." [195]

"The city of homeowners has become the city of foreclosures." [202]

Apr. 1
Palm Sun.

"The predominance of the paper economy over the productive economy was a root cause of this recession, and that preference is one of the core realities that must be changed. Real people with real jobs who do real work have to be the foundation of a healthy economy, rather than the speculative gamblers who just move our money around." [219]

"The time has come to say that some of those banks that were too big to fail have now become too immoral to succeed. We must move from not allowing them to fail, to not allowing their failed behaviors to continue. I believe it is time to consider taking our money out of the big banks and credit unions to protect both our money and our integrity." [222]

"Will we be a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people"? Or will we be a nation "of the money, by the money, and for the money"? The choices are becoming more and more clear." [224]

"Change never starts until some of us start believing that change is possible and then bet our lives on it. But usually the believing comes from doing - from beginning to make the different choices personally, in our families, congregations, communities and nation." [229]

"Any change that is worth your time pursuing will never be easy. Fortunately, there are other people and organizations across the country and the world that are interested in making the same sort of changes you are... You might be ready for a big shift or just some small changes; but no matter what, you don't have to do it alone!" [230]

"Establish the regular habit (and teach your children to do it too) of communicating with your political representatives. ...connect with organizations that advocate on points of public policy of special concern to you." [238]