First UU Austin, TX

March 30, 2008

Sermons from the Third Act

by

Nathan L. Stone, Ph.D., minister

Invocation

Here we sit ————- waiting for what?

Waiting for some divine inspiration?

Waiting for a sense of calm to wash over us?

Waiting for church to be over so we can get on to lunch or watch Houston and San Antonio play basketball on television?

Here we sing ———– singing for what?

Singing for a moment of inspiration?

Singing because it’s good therapy?

Here we hope ———– hoping for what?

Hoping to learn some new thing that will make life easier?

Hoping that something magical will take away that resentment that is devouring us?

Hoping to find a key to that elusive happiness?

Hoping to make a connection and to find some genuine expression of love to carry us through another week?

Spirit of Life and Love?

Sit with us.

Sing with us.

Hope with us.

Amen.

Morning Prayer

And now we pray. Not because we must — but because we may.

We pray as a way of thinking out loud.

We pray as a way of organizing our thoughts.

We pray — hoping that something beyond us and other — just might be listening.

We pray — hoping that if enough people are thinking out loud at the same time and longing for the same things — maybe — some things could possibly begin to change for the better.

We pray — hoping that maybe such a bizarre ritual might make some changes inside of ME.

We pray — hoping that such an act might widen and stretch our worldview to make us visionaries of some sort.

We pray — having no clue as to why we’re doing it — in fact, feeling a bit foolish for doing it.

But — at least when we pray we’re not fighting or arguing or harming one another. At least when we pray we’re doing something together in harmony — and that IS a good thing.

Some of us refuse to pray — believing that prayer is an archaic practice of magical thinking and superstition.

Most of us pray — just to play it safe.

But whatever it is we’re doing — at least we’re trying.

AMEN.

The Sermon

In my time (over 40 years of parish ministry) — I’ve seen my share of dying. It goes with the job and it is never, ever easy to be with or to watch.

In an earlier and different life — when I was the senior pastor of the Manor Baptist Church in San Antonio . . . in a single year (1986) . . . I did 53 funerals. One per week. That’s when I decided to try being a full-time counselor for awhile . . . and take a sabbatical from being a parish minister. I had been the minister there for 13 years. I needed a break. Too much death.

When I was the chaplain for Family Hospice in Temple in 1996 all I did everyday was to help people to die. It was during that time that I began to realize that everybody needs to somehow learn how to die.

Believe it or not there is actually a book that describes what it’s like to die of a particular illness. Sherwin B. Nuland is the author of a book, “How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter” (Alfred A. Knopf: New York; 1993). Dr. Nuland, who teaches surgery and the history of medicine at Yale, explains the process of dying of heart disease, AIDS, stroke, drowning, suicide, and by euthanasia. Maybe more information than most people want!

What I want to talk about has nothing to do with Dr. Nuland’s approach. It is my contention that we learn how to die by learning how to live — and live well.

The same thing applies to getting old. I don’t think you learn how to be old. I am convinced that you get old just like you’re getting old. Grouchy people now are grouch-ier in the nursing home. People who are negative now are even more so in old age. Gentle, engaged, interested people now are gentle, engaging, and interesting even in the nursing home.

And, by the way, I know that sometimes dementia and Alzheimer’s can set in and literally change personalities, but that is a different story. That is always a sad and painful story. (Recommend “Away From Her” - Canadian film: about a couple married for about 40 years as they deal with the progressive arrival of Alzheimer’s; a tender but powerful movie.)

You learn to be old by learning to live well when you’re younger.

You learn to die by learning how to live — and live well.

There’s a Hasidic story that explains this quite well. A rabbi is dying and his wife sits at his bedside crying. “But why are you crying?” he says. “My whole life was only that I might learn how to die. This is a time to applaud my good work!”

I could swear that the late, great, Johnny Cash sang these words but I can’t get the web or anybody else to confirm it for me. Doesn’t matter who sang or wrote it — the words are still so true: “When I’m old enough to really live I’ll be old enough to die.”

It has been said that everybody ought to ask at least 3 questions when it’s time to die. Three questions that should be routinely asked as we move toward that inevitable adventure of dying.

[I am indebted to my UU colleague, Fred Muir, who has been the minister of the UU Church of Annapolis since 1984 --- for introducing me to these 3 vital questions. (see Heretics' Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals; 2001; pp.46ff)]

Question #1 - Will people know what I meant by my life?

That is, when you die would people know how you would want to be remembered? And, of course, the answer to that is that you have to live what you mean. Albert Schweitzer said — make your life your argument: “My life — my argument.”

For many, many years now — whenever I am asked to do a funeral — it is my custom (whether I know the dead person or not) — it is my custom to ask the family to write the eulogy. That is, write down how it is this person will be remembered. Tell me stories. Just write and I will edit. I like this because the eulogy then belongs to the family not the minister. It ends up being the center of what I do — funeral-wise. It is very real and very personal.

Usually I get more that I could ever use. People send pages and pages of information and inevitably there is one person who shoves about six pages in my face just at the moment of the service.

Occasionally I will get very little. One family wrote on a little shred of torn paper: “Mama loved to party. It was nice that we were able to sneak in a Budweiser to her hospital room before she died!” “Is there any more you’d like to say?” I asked. “Nope! That says it all! That was mama!”

I had to get real creative with that eulogy talking about how mama really loved life and on and on.

Party on, Budweiser. If that’s what she meant by her life then that was a good life.

And maybe it was. Maybe that’s exactly what she meant by her life.

Isn’t it an odd thing to think that everyday you live and all that you do is a statement about the meaning of life for you?

Think of everyday as an entry into the diary of your life. And someday . . . somebody will read that diary out loud. Think of every day of your living as another entry into your own eulogy.

Wanna learn how to die? Then learn how to live your meaning.

Suicide is tough at any age. My stepson hung himself at age 19 — he would have been 21 earlier this month. And so — his suicide (on Mother’s Day!) haunts us with questions, not so much about the way he chose to die — but what, in fact, did he mean by his life? So we’re left scouring every word he wrote, every doodle he made, looking for any note he may have left in a book he was reading. What in the world did Alex mean by his life?

Question #2 - Did my life make a difference in this world?

Now I know that some will write books and some will build buildings, invent stuff, create some memorable piece of art or write a popular song. I think we all dream that somehow we might do some visible, lasting thing.

But the older I get and the more I watch people come and go and live and die the more I think that the real difference is made in the seemingly little and ordinary ways.

I know that I am always thinking that I will write a famous book or craft some incredible and unforgettable sermon. But some time ago I got a reality check. I was talking to a couple I was about to marry. She was 12-years-old when she first met me. I was a youth camp speaker. She said to me, “I’ll never forget something you said.” And I was waiting to hear some great and profound thing that I had said. “All the campers were watching a sunset in Colorado. And you got up to do the sermon. And, silently, you looked at the sunset with us for awhile and then you said . . . “Wow!” And then you sat down. “That was the sermon,” you told us later. “Never compete with a sunset,” you told us later.

She went on to say that now she has twin girls who are 12-years-old. “Recently,” she said, “they were griping and arguing over something very trivial and I said to them, “Do either of you guys know how to say ‘Wow!’ to a sunset?”

“You taught me that, Nathan,” she said.

Tears came to my eyes. What a humbling moment that was for me.

I say it again. The older I get and the more I watch people come and go and live and die the more I think that the real difference is made in the seemingly little and ordinary ways.

I still love the saying that I have taped to the lamp on my desk. The more I read it the more right it sounds:

People won’t remember what you say.

They won’t even remember what you do.

They will remember how you made them feel.

Richard Sutton was only 4-years-old when he died. His liver was broken and no transplants were available. And when one finally came it was too little too late.

Did Richard Sutton make a difference? Oh man, you better believe it. He had a smile that wouldn’t quit . . . and incredible courage. Rarely do I see a 4-year-old but that I don’t think of Richard. Awhile back, I went to my four-year-old grandson’s birthday party and I thought of Richard. Did he make a difference? Absolutely. Just by being. And by being real. He lived only four short years but he persistently smiled his way into my heart . . . and brought his parents, Eric and Sharon, into my life. They are among my very best friends. Thanks, Richard!

Only 4 years to make a difference!

Harold Kushner tells this story that speaks volumes to me:

I was sitting on a beach one summer day, watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand. They were hard at work building an elaborate sand castle by the water’s edge, with gates and towers and moats and internal passages. Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it to a heap of wet sand. I expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard work. But they surprised me. Instead, they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and holding hands, and sat down to build another castle. I realized that they had taught me an important lesson. All the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spend so much time and energy creating, are built on sand. Only our relationships with other people endure. Sooner or later, the wave will come along and knock down what we have worked so hard to build up. When that happens, only the person who has somebody’s hand to hold will be able to laugh. (“When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” in “Heretics’ Faith” by F.J. Muir; p.48)

Really making a difference is about touching people and connecting with people: holding hands, laughing, crying, singing, drinking, eating, touching, and dancing together.

Making a difference is about being rich in people.

When my mother was actively dying in 1990 she made us laugh and she made us think. Hospice was giving her morphine to keep her comfortable which made her even more unpredictable. When she was alert she’d tell us — are you ready for this? — funeral jokes in her weak and scratchy voice. Think of it: the dying lady telling funeral jokes. “Don’t you kids get it?” she would say. “FUN as in funeral — get it?” she would say.

“Did you hear the one about the Jewish man that died and as he lay in his casket it was their family custom for people to place money in the casket as a sign of their love — money that would be buried with the loved one — a little something to get him started in the next life. Toward the end of the service when there was quite a bit of cash in place a stranger walked in and began to take the money, count it, and put it in his pockets. The funeral director was aghast and asked him what he was doing. “All this money seems like so much trouble,” the man said. “I’m getting ready to add a little bit and then write a check for the full amount!”

Oh she thought that was so funny.

“Why do you tell us that story, Mom?” we would say. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “Life is not about money. It’s about people. And she’d reach out and hold our hands. Then she’d nod off. And in a little while, in a weak voice she’d whisper, “I’m poor in stuff — but I’m rich in people.”

Margaret Elizabeth Woolsey Stone lived a life that made a huge difference. And that made all the difference in her dying.

Question #3 - Did I leave things in order?

Of course part of that really does mean leaving clear instructions, an up-to-date will, estate arrangements, and burial requests. As a hospice chaplain and a minister I cannot begin to tell you how many people will die without any of this in place. For some dying persons and/or their families it’s like if they don’t make plans then death won’t happen or it’ll hold off until you get organized. Not a good way of thinking.

And, of course, it doesn’t work that way.

Here’s the deal — when people die it usually invites chaos — in the best of circumstances. And — worst of all — if there is any tension or unfinished business in the family . . . it all rears its ugly head when death comes. I swear I’ve seen more nastiness at funerals and weddings: a time and a place where everybody is forced to be together and all the closet skeletons come out and will walk around — and all the things you never wanted to talk about now get talked about.

As much as possible leave things in order: paperwork and legal stuff.

But more importantly — live your life in such a way that relationships and connections are clean and in order. AA and Al-Anon have it right. And, yes, I am a friend of Bill W.

Step 8 - “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.” Step 9 - “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” Step 10 - “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”

Keeping the slate clean!

Wanna die well? Live well by tending to unfinished business.

My father and I had a strained relationship at best. He was physically and emotionally abusive and I took it. Then I took it into myself and went off to college and seminary. And he took it and stayed in Hawaii . . . and then dropped dead at a young age in what appeared to be a very healthy body.

It took me many long years of therapy to repair our relationship. It takes that long when you’ve allowed resentment and fear and hatred to get into your bones. It takes even longer when that other person is dead.

Wanna die well? Live well by tending to unfinished business.

I encourage you and me and us to take a long walk in the woods and ask ourselves these three questions about life that will help us to die — well:

• Will people know what I meant by my life?
• Did my life make a difference in this world?
• Did I leave things in order?

Not long ago the computer gods or fairies (not sure who to blame!) sent me these perfect words that seem to say it all:

When you were born you were crying and everyone around you was smiling. Live your life so that when you die — you’re the one who is smiling and everyone around you is crying!

Or, I’d say — maybe even applauding for your good life!

Amen and may it be so.

Benediction

Hear now the benediction — the bene diction — the good word:

As you go back out into your world full of babies being born and obituaries.

As you go back out into your world full of love songs and reports of war.

May you and I be good students — open to learning to live AND learning to die.

AND — until the time comes when we really MUST die — may we cling to the words of that modern prophet, Woody Allen:

I don’t mind dying — I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

GO IN PEACE.

AMEN.

 

23 March 2008

Davidson Loehr

PRAYER:

May our dark places begin to see the light.

May the large and small deaths we have endured release their grip on us, so that we may return to life.

May the apprehension which has stifled us give way to hope and trust.

May all those who have suffered know they have suffered enough, and that it is time to reclaim their dreams, and their courage.

There are two kinds of people: those who are alive and those who are afraid.

But now it is Easter. It is time to come back to life - in our hearts, our lives, and our relationships.

The night has lasted long enough. It is Easter. Let us reclaim our lives.

Amen.

SERMON: Crucifixion and Resurrection in Real-Time (Part III of the Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth)

This is the third in a series of sermons on the most dangerous fundamentalism on earth - a pretty serious subject. But it’s also Easter Sunday in the traditions of Christianity, florists, restaurants, and those who hunt for Easter Eggs, so I want to honor the seriousness of the first subject and the optimism of the second - a feat that might sound like it would have to be a miracle.

The story of Easter is the Christian version of the universal story of our hope that somehow death isn’t the last word, negating the significance of our lives. Hindus had addressed this a few centuries earlier through their metaphor of reincarnation. And you know the even older Egyptian myth of the Phoenix rising from its own ashes. It’s one of our oldest hopes.

Religious liberals usually see these stories, as I do, as metaphors, about psychological sorts of resurrection, or about the hope that life doesn’t have to kill your spirit, the spirit of love or hope, or the spirit of a people. Liberal biblical scholars talk of the resurrection this way, too.

The crucifixion I’ll talk about, however, is all too real. It has involved and continues to involve the real deaths of millions of people, the destruction of economies and societies, and the murder of hope, right here in our real world.

That’s the story of the most dangerous fundamentalism on earth - what author Naomi Klein calls the capitalist fundamentalism of the past 36 years, centered in Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago School of Economics, also called the Chicago School, or the Chicago Boys.

It made its dramatic entry on September 11, 1973 when, with the backing of our CIA, the brutal General Pinochet murdered the democratically elected president Salvadore Allende in Chile and unleashed a reign of robbery and terror from which the majority in Chile have never recovered.

By the 1980s, a sophisticated and coordinated plan for repeating all of this had been pretty much perfected:

First, they were aware and ready when a crisis happened or could be helped to happen, that could adequately paralyze a nation so they could apply what Friedman called their economic shock therapy. Since they had all these plans worked out, it was like having an overnight bag you could take with you on the next flight out to the latest crisis.

Chicago-trained economists arrived to show those in the power structure how to immediately rewrite the economic structures and laws, to remove all obstacles to looting by American and multinational corporations. This followed the 500-page plan they had put together after Pinochet’s murder of Chile’s president Allende in 1973.

The plan for kidnapping, torturing, terrorizing and killing citizens who opposed this theft had become standardized, following the procedures set out in our CIA interrogation manual known as Kubark. Put together in 1963, the CIA is still using it as their key interrogation manual. It’s the book that prescribes the early-morning or late-night kidnapping, hooding, beating, sensory deprivation, electroshock, and techniques like waterboarding of which we’re all aware.

Finally, a strong police or military presence and varying degrees of violence have been necessary every time Friedman’s “Chicago School” economic plans have been put in effect, for obvious reasons: these are plans to loot entire societies, and the majority of people in those societies will not take it if they have the means to resist - especially the workers. The purpose of rewriting the laws, selling off the government assets, destroying workers’ unions, social support networks and bringing in kidnapping, torture, terrorism and murder is to insure that they won’t have the means or the will to resist.

But the violence isn’t the point. The violence enables the robbery. These are extraordinarily violent armed robberies. These methods have used in so many countries: Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Africa, Russia, China, Asia, Iraq and others. Some would also add England under Thatcher and our country since Reagan.

But today, I want to talk about only one of the countries where these practices were put into effect - Russia - in order to save time for the “resurrection” part, the turning of the tide, the things that people around the world have begun to do to counter this economic plan.

Between 1989 and 1991 the old USSR collapsed. This had been our Cold War enemy. The most hawkish voices in and behind our government now believed that we had no rival for power in the world - and, we believed, no one could stop our greed or our aggression. Just like in a bad movie or video game, we thought we could rule the world. And the real point of ruling the world is money, not just bragging rights.

This occasion brought about the second September 11^th event in this story, on September 11^th, 1991. That’s when President George HW Bush made the speech in which he introduced the phrase “a New World Order.” The New World Order simply meant a world ruled by American corporate interests, since we believed there was now no one to stop us.

A few words on this date of September 11^th, which figures prominently three times in this story. It seems very odd, but I have no idea how or why it would have been an intentional part of a huge overall plan. So as far as I can tell, it’s just one of those strange coincidences of history.

When Russia’s new president Boris Yeltsin came to the World Bank and IMF for help, they responded with this economic plan designed to destroy the Russian economy and remove all barriers to a feeding frenzy of foreign, mostly American, capitalists looting the entire Russian economy.

On October 28, 1991, Yeltsin announced the lifting of price controls, and the Russian economy was on its way to being decimated (The Shock Doctrine, p. 223). By the end of the day, his military assault on his own people had taken the lives of approximately five hundred people and wounded almost a thousand, the most violence Moscow had seen since the Russian Revolution of 1917 (The Shock Doctrine, p. 229).

The Chicago Boys went on a law-making binge, ramming through huge budget cuts, the price hikes on basic food items, including bread, and even more and faster auctioning off of government assets, at a mere fraction of their worth (The Shock Doctrine, p. 230). They quickly sold off the country’s approximately 225,000 state-owned companies (The Shock Doctrine, p. 223).

The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than in 1991, and a third of the population fell below the poverty line. The middle class was forced to sell personal belongings from card tables on the streets - desperate acts that the Chicago School economists praised as “entrepreneurial,” proof that a capitalist renaissance was indeed under way, one family heirloom and second-hand blazer at a time (The Shock Doctrine, p. 225). If you had to sell your possessions in order to eat, is “entrepreneurial” the word you would choose? Can you feel the indifferent and brutal spirit of what Naomi Klein is calling this fundamentalist capitalism? Can you see why so much violence was necessary, to steal so much from so many people, and why one of Friedman’s critics called it economic genocide?

Communism may have collapsed without firing a single shot, but fundamentalist capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns - all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy (The Shock Doctrine, p. 228).

Yeltsin’s assistant in charge of auctioning off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of government assets to corporations became one of the most outspoken champions of Pinochet’s tactics. “In order to have a democracy in society there must be a dictatorship in power,” he pronounced (The Shock Doctrine, p. 232). This is perfect Orwellian 1984 doublespeak! The phrase “democracy in society” here means simply the freedom of corporations to loot the entire economy without restraint. And the “dictatorship of power” and the terrible violence it unleashed was not seen as an enemy of democracy, because no one planning this ever cared about the rights of workers, or anyone else who stood in the way. Human life counted for very little compared to the potential profits at stake.

Just like his mentor Pinochet’s, Yeltsin’s own family grew very rich, his children and several of their spouses appointed to top posts at large firms looted from the government (The Shock Doctrine, p. 233). It was like the old American Depression song, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but ain’t we got fun!” — but without the fun parts.

In the absence of a major famine, plague or battle, never have so many lost so much in so short a time. By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before the Chicago School economic shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By 1997, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. That means that the “economic reforms” imposed on Russia can claim credit for the impoverishment of 72 million people in only eight years (The Shock Doctrine, p. 238).

Nor were these catastrophic results unique to Russia; the entire thirty-five year history of the Chicago School experiment has been one of mass corruption and violent collusion between police states and large corporations. The point of the economic shock therapy is to open up a window for enormous profits to be made very quickly - and to eliminate all effective resistance by whatever means necessary (The Shock Doctrine, p. 241).

This is the crucifixion that has gone on for the last 40-50 years in countries all over the world - always, it seems, with the backing of our CIA and the involvement of some of our largest corporations and wealthiest individuals.

The parallels to the crucifixion of Jesus are surprisingly apt. Many biblical scholars believe the single event that doomed Jesus was his scene in Jerusalem’s huge temple, turning over the moneychangers’ tables, trying to stop them from making an unnecessary profit from the people. It’s not a coincidence that the most violent torture, suppression and murder in every country from Chile to Russia and others has been against workers, workers’ unions, and the artists and intellectuals who spoke out against the looting.

Popular religion wants to make Jesus a sweet pietistic figure who just preached love. But while that message might get someone ignored by the authorities, it wouldn’t get them killed. In his real life, his crucifixion may have had a lot to do with his activism on behalf of the poor.

And the resurrection as liberal Christian scholars understand it wasn’t about a dead man rising and walking again. It meant that after Jesus had died, some of his followers began to believe that he and his message had represented a perspective far higher and more life-giving than they could grasp simply by saying he was a wise man.

On the first two Sundays in April, I’ll go back to talk about some of the other countries where we have used these methods and the new developments in the tactics for doing so. But I want to spend the rest of our time on the “resurrection,” the return to life of some of the devastated countries, how they did it, and how it might encourage and empower us.

The three chief financial institutions that have supported the economic looting were the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, the World Trade Organization, or WTO, and the World Bank. All three may now be among the moneychangers being thrown out of some of the world’s temples.

The International Monetary Fund had played a powerful role in helping to destabilize many countries so they could be looted, but eventually people caught on. After 1998, it became increasingly difficult to impose the shock therapy-style makeovers - through the usual IMF bullying or arm-twisting at trade summits. The defiant new mood coming from the South made its global debut when the WTO talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999. You probably remember the news stories about the college-age protesters then, but the real rebellion took place inside the conference center, when developing countries formed a voting bloc and rejected demands for deeper trade concessions as long as Europe and the US continued to subsidize and protect their domestic industries. Within a few years, the US government’s ambitious dream of creating a unified free-trade zone encompassing all of Asia-Pacific was abandoned, as were a global investors’ treaty and plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, stretching from Alaska to Chile (The Shock Doctrine, p. 279).

Remember that the words “free trade” are code. They refer to a system whereby multinational corporations are allowed free entry into foreign markets, while subsidizing many of their own industries. So we can destroy local industries because the subsidized products we bring in can unfairly undercut them. This is how many feel we may destroy the native corn crops in Mexico with subsidized, artificially cheap American corn.

Ever since the Argentine collapse in 2001, opposition to foreign looting has become the defining issue of the continent, able to make governments and break them; by late 2006, it was practically creating a domino effect. Columbia seems to be the only Latin American country in which we still have some economic control (The Shock Doctrine, p. 451).

Latin America’s mass movements are learning how to build shock absorbers into their organizing models. They are less centralized than in the sixties, making it harder to destroy whole societies by eliminating a few leaders and replacing them with people who are willing to sell out their countries in return for immense personal wealth and power. The progressive networks in Venezuela are highly decentralized, with power dispersed at the grass roots and community level, through thousands of neighborhood councils and co-ops (The Shock Doctrine, p. 453-454).

In Venezuela, Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 cooperatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers (The Shock Doctrine, p. 455).

How effective has this been? In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent - a sea change in only two years. The transformation reaches beyond Latin America. In just three years, the IMF’s worldwide lending portfolio had shrunk from $81 billion to $11.8 billion, with almost all of that going to Turkey. Naomi Klein believes that the IMF, a pariah in so many countries where it has treated crises as profit-making opportunities, is starting to wither away. The World Bank faces an equally grim future. In the midst of the Wolfowitz affair, The Financial Times reported that when World Bank managers dispensed advice in the developing world, “they were now laughed at.” Add the collapse of the World Trade Organization talks in 2006, and the futures of the three main institutions that had imposed the Chicago School ideology look to be at risk of extinction (The Shock Doctrine, p. 457).

This may signal the end of an era of American piracy that history will look back on in shame - depending, as always, on who gets to write that history. But as an Easter topic, it’s about the difference in the spirits and gods being served, about which ones can bring life. Easter, reincarnation, the Phoenix myth and all other resurrection stories, are always about the victory of life-giving spirits over smaller and more selfish ones.

This looks like it could be the reincarnation of the spirit of life and hope in new bodies and opportunities. And it looks like the rebirth of the sons and daughters of God, again living with power and authority. That’s what all religions worthy of the name teach as our sacred right during our days on this earth.

Let us seek and claim them. To all those in Latin America and other recovering countries, and to all of us seeking to survive the large and small deaths in our lives as well - Happy Easter.

The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part II

Davidson Loehr

9 March 2008

PRAYER:

Let us not underestimate the high cost of serving low gods, for we become what we worship.

Let us learn the names of the gods we serve with our lives. The gods have many names, as they’ve always had: fear, greed, insecurity, power, anger, money, compassion, inclusion, exclusion - their names are legion. And each one will shape us in its own image, for better and worse.

Can we pay the economic cost of serving fairness and the cause of an equitable income for all? Can we pay the human cost of greed or indifference? Will we be so indiscriminately inclusive that we welcome toxic people into our lives? Will we be so indiscriminately exclusive that we lose touch with our greater and nobler humanity? Will serving power mean destroying justice, love, even people?

There are many questions because there are many gods, each with their own seductive demands, each able to make us look like them if only we will give them our lives.

May we seek to live in such a way that we can look back on the path we chose with pride, because it helped make us a blessing to ourselves and others. May we serve only gods that can give us life, not merely the illusion of it.

Religious prophets and sages have said forever that only the greater gods of compassion, justice, service and love can give us the life we seek.

Let us consider that they may be right.

Amen.

SERMON: The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part II

This is the second in a series of three sermons this month and at least two next month, all based on Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I think I have done two sermons based on one book only once before. While I don’t expect you all to rush out and read this long and difficult book, I do want to tell you why I think it’s worth this much of my and our time. A reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle said, “Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time.” I think that’s right. I think she has put together the pieces of the complex story that has been behind most of the political coups and violence in the world for at least the past 35 years - at least the parts in which our country has been involved, overtly or covertly.

Here are some details that resulted from this master narrative in just the past few years, showing only one small part of it:

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law was unveiled that would allow Shell and British Petroleum to claim the country’s vast oil reserves. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly gave out tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of our tax dollars for running the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater. After a powerful tsunami devastates the coasts of Southeast Asia, armed guards prevent residents from returning to their fishing huts on the beach, and the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans’s residents, still scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened.

These are all small sophisticated parts of the methods that have been carefully crafted to serve the agenda of the fundamentalist capitalism I talked about last week.

Those goals of fundamentalist capitalism are:

– to undo all the gains of the New Deal that had empowered workers and the middle class.

– to take money from governments and workers, return it to the opulent minority and reduce the masses to disposable people, most of whom are sent permanently below the poverty line.

– to loot the world’s economies, making them serve American corporate interests.

These sound so over-the-top, so dramatic. At the very least, they are very ambitious plans. How could anyone possibly do it?

While the methods are easy to describe now, they didn’t fall out of the sky in a leatherbound book - though there are at least three key books at the heart of this plan.

But the methods evolved, picking up useful ideas as they came along, developing them behind the scenes.

One of the first ideas, which played a central role came from a set of psychological experiments done over fifty years ago.

They were done at McGill University in Montreal which our CIA began funding in 1957. They were run by a psychologist named Ewan Cameron - whom the director of psychology at McGill described as “criminally stupid” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 35). But stupid or not, Dr. Cameron helped change our world more powerfully than all of us here, all of our friends, and all of their friends combined are likely to do. As overstated as that might seem, I think it’s actually a very conservative estimate.

Dr. Cameron believed he could erase a person’s mind, turn it into a blank slate, and rewrite it any way he wanted, by using massive amounts of electroshock treatment, combined with keeping his patients in extreme isolation for weeks, and overloading their systems with drug cocktails of LSD, PCP and many others.

Dr. Cameron was half right. He could almost completely destroy a person’s mind. After these experiments were discovered in the late 1970s through a freedom of information act, a few of the severely damaged patients successfully sued the CIA, which settled for $750,000, the largest settlement ever paid out by the agency.

But at the time, several researchers at the CIA became interested in his methods as a special interrogation technique. They funded research at eighty institutions, including 44 universities and 12 hospitals. Their relationship with Dr. Cameron dates back to June 1, 1951. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 33)

By 1963, our CIA had incorporated Dr. Cameron’s electroshock, sensory deprivation, and drug and sensory overload techniques into a Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook (which they call Kubark), which claims it can take a resistant person and “destroy his capacity for resistance.” In other words, torture. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 39) The Kubark was the first of the three books undergirding what would become the revolution of capitalist fundamentalism.

A historian writing on the evolution of torture since the Inquisition describes the Kubark manual’s shock-inducing formula as “the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 41) Here’s some more of how it works:

Prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early-morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation. And from Guatemala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iran, the Philippines to Chile, China, Russia and Iraq, the use of electroshock is everywhere. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 41)

In February 2006, the Intelligence Sciences Board, an advisory arm of the CIA, published a report that said that “a careful reading of the Kubark manual is essential for anyone involved in interrogation” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 43). It’s hard to overstate the influence on our world today of this “criminally stupid” man of fifty years ago.

Before long, those in our CIA looking for more effective methods of terrorizing and controlling people realized these same techniques of psychological “shock and awe” could be used to terrorize and control entire populations. This would become an absolutely essential part of the Chicago School’s plan to erase existing laws and freedoms, and remake whole economies to loot trillions of dollars of government assets paid for by taxpayers, while systematically destroying the ability of the middle class to resist, or to recover.

Since 1973, the economic plans have followed Milton Friedman’s theories. He had three rules that must always be applied, which some have called the “free-market trinity.” They’re in code, so I’ll translate them.

1. The first involves wholesale looting. Selling off government assets bought by the citizens for a fraction of their worth to your favored buyers, who may be family, Communist party members, or US or multinational corporations who support you. (The code word for this is “privatization.”)

2. Second, remove all legal constraints, to make the looting fast and easy. (The code word for this is “deregulation.”)

3. Then third, loot all the funds used for social support of the citizens: schools, social security, roads, insurance, medical care, etc. This is a lot of money, and it disempowers those most likely to oppose you. It helps eliminate the middle class and make fear and insecurity systemic - and, hopefully, permanent. (The code words for this are “cuts to social spending.”)

These are the real-world meanings of the words “privatization,” “deregulation” and “cuts to social spending.”

As you can imagine, it will take a lot of power, and almost certainly a lot of violence, to do this, for the simple reason that people will not stand by and be robbed, disempowered and disposed of, if they are able to resist.

So one more important piece of the puzzle was still needed, and we found it in 1965. That was the year our CIA helped Suharto overthrow Sukarto in Indonesia. They had overthrown Mosadegh in Iran in 1953 and replaced him with the brutal Shah, and removed Guatemala’s leaders in 1954 at the direct request of the United Fruit Company. But those were child’s-play compared with the Suharto case. These events were so long ago, many of us may not even know the names, and others may not imagine how they could matter any more.

Sukarto’s sin, as was always the case, was that he would not bend to U.S. corporate interests. He had thrown out the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which he recognized as tools of U.S. corporate ambitions. So we, through our CIA, backed Suharto, who was attracted enough to the great personal wealth and power he’d been offered to sell out his whole country to the desires of U.S. corporate interests - which are usually called “American interests” or “U.S. interests,” in the code language used. Of course he brought the IMF and World Bank back. But he did something else that had not been expected, and which combined nicely with Dr. Cameron’s work to complete the method by which we could and did loot and destroy the economies and societies of a dozen more countries over the next forty years, to this day.

What he did was to unleash such extreme and immediate violence, torture and murder that he effectively destroyed the rebellious workers and middle class. Suharto’s incredible violence got the attention of those in the CIA who were plotting the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. They noted Suharto’s effective brutality, and the role of a group of Berkeley economists in redefining the country’s economy (The Shock Doctrine, p. 68)

The Berkeley Economists passed laws letting foreign companies own 100% of Indonesian resources, handed out “tax holidays,” and within two years, Indonesia’s natural wealth - copper, nickel, hardwood, rubber and oil - was being divided up among the largest mining and energy companies in the world (The Shock Doctrine, p. 69).

Suharto had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock, and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto and his henchmen. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations manager during the years of the coup, said Indonesia was a “model operation…. You can trace back all major, bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power. The success of that meant that it would be repeated, again and again” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 69). This is part of the master narrative of our time.

Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago School of Economics had been educating economics students from Chile since 1956, hoping that a merely intellectual revolution could change their thinking inside Chile, and had even replaced most of Chile’s top economic advisors with Chicago trained economists. But Chile had found this “third way” of structuring an economy that empowered the government - which nationalized major industries and assets - and the workers, who had powerful unions and healthy middle-class pay, while eliminating the powerful American corporations. They were doing almost as well as American workers under Roosevelt’s New Deal - the structure that Friedman and the Chicago School wanted to destroy wherever they found it, and which the CIA, serving the interests of our corporations, also wanted to destroy.

Suharto’s success gave them the vision of a rich opportunity. If they could find a powerful leader in Chile who would gladly sell out his country in return for great personal wealth and power, coach him in following Suharto’s massive terrorism and brutality, then bring in Chicago School economists while the entire country was paralyzed by shock and awe, they could return Chile to a blank slate, then remake the economy of Chile in the image of Milton Friedman’s utopian vision of a world in which all wealth and power were back in the hands of the opulent minority. It’s not clear whether Friedman saw, or cared about, the immense human cost of his utopian scheme, or whether he actually believed the things he said. But it is clear that when Friedman used the word “freedom,” he meant only the freedom of wealthy corporations to loot the economy without restraint, not the freedom of the masses or the governments to stop them.

Chile offered the golden opportunity for both our CIA and Friedman’s economic theories. This first great coup, this first dramatic step toward what would later be called The New World Order, happened on September 11, 1973, and once again our CIA was behind the coup. Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvadore Allende, was talking about nationalizing the oil fields and removing foreign oil corporations. We were not about to permit that. The CIA backed an extraordinarily violent man named General Augusto Pinochet.

General Pinochet fired rockets into the presidential palace, killing Allende. He quickly instituted torture, mass killings and arrests to throw the rest of Chile into terror and remove his ideological opposition, as Suharto had done in Indonesia. Chile had had 161 years of democratic rule, the past 41 uninterrupted. It all ended almost immediately through the violence and terror - the “shock and awe” - of Pinochet (The Shock Doctrine, p. 76-77).

Very soon a 500-page book detailing the economic restructurings of the entire country appeared. It was the second important book, which because of its size was known as “The Brick.” The proposals in it bore a striking resemblance to those found in the third sacred text - the most sacred text - of fundamentalist capitalism: Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, containing the free-market trinity of those chilling code words: privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 77).

In the coming years, the same policies laid out in “The Brick” would be imposed in dozens of other countries under cover of a wide range of crises. But Chile was the start of it, on September 11, 1973 (The Shock Doctrine, p. 78).

Even three decades later, Chile is still held up by some as proof that Friedmanism works. But the country’s period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties - a full decade after the Chicago Boys implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction - because in 1982, Chile’s economy crashed (The Shock Doctrine, p. 85).

The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet never sold off Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile’s export revenues, and kept it afloat (The Shock Doctrine, p. 85).

What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the workers. By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world - out of 123 countries in which the United Nations tracks inequality, Chile ranked 116^th, making it the 8^th most unequal country on the list (The Shock Doctrine, p. 86).

Chile under the Chicago School rule was offering a glimpse of the future of the global economy, a pattern that would repeat again and again, from Russia to South Africa to Argentina: … roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; decimation of nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to selected private hands, followed by a huge transfer of private debts to be paid by taxpayers (The Shock Doctrine, p. 87).

Following their great success in Chile, our CIA and Friedman’s Chicago economists repeated their success in Brazil and Uruguay. Friedman traveled to Brazil in 1973, at the height of the regime’s brutality, and declared the economic experiment “a miracle.” Next was Argentina in 1976, when a junta seized power from Isabel Peron. That meant that all four countries that had once been the showcases of the Third Way were now run by US-backed military governments and were living laboratories of Chicago School economics (The Shock Doctrine, p. 87). It was an incredible coup that had been over twenty years in the making. No matter what I think of the gods being served here, I absolutely marvel at the brilliance and forethought of those behind the plans. If the world, like the world of professional wrestling, can be divided into the Smarts and the Marks, these are the Smarts, and I am among the Marks.

By the mid-seventies, “disappearances” of people had become the primary enforcement tool of the Chicago School juntas throughout the Southern Cone. An estimated thirty thousand people had been “disappeared” in Argentina alone (The Shock Doctrine, p. 90). “Disappeared,” you understand, is another code word. It means kidnap, torture and murder.

The torture followed the trademark methods codified in the Kubark manual: early morning arrests, hooding, isolation, drugging, forced nudity, electroshock. And everywhere, the terrible legacy of the McGill experiments in deliberately induced regression (The Shock Doctrine, p. 92).

The exact number of people who went through the Southern Cone’s torture machinery is probably somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000, tens of thousands of them killed (The Shock Doctrine, p. 94).

As Naomi Klein puts it, “Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves (The Shock Doctrine, p. 327).”

And the media have mis-reported these coups for decades, focusing on all the sensational torture, murder, violence, and human rights abuses. At the same time, they have commended the countries in opening their doors to American corporations, and making what they like to call the transition to democracy or free trade. The word “democracy” here does not mean the people have freedom. It means the corporations have freedom and the people don’t. The media and most human rights groups wrote the killings up as regrettable, unnecessary violence, as though they weren’t serving other goals. But they are organic parts of the Chicago School plan, which has never worked without great violence and murder. Naomi Klein put it very clearly, this way:

“In a way, what happened in the Southern Cone of Latin America in the seventies is that it was treated as a murder scene when it was, in fact, the site of an extraordinarily violent armed robbery (The Shock Doctrine, p. 125).” It is the crime which in this country we call homicide in the commission of a felony. In Texas, it’s a capital crime: you can get the death penalty for it.

I think this is one of Klein’s clearest insights into the master narrative of our times: that it was always about money, and the violence always served the greed — from Iran, Guatemala and Indonesia to the Southern Cone, Bolivia, China, Africa, Russia, Asia, England and Iraq. Does anyone really believe it will be stopped at the borders of our own country for long?

Much of this has to sound familiar. You’ve heard parts of it in hundreds of major news stories over the past 35 years. But there are two more stages in the evolution of the most dangerous fundamentalism on earth, which I’ll talk about in two weeks, and in April.

We are talking about what St. Paul called the “powers and principalities” that govern our world, the gods they serve, which are the gods we too have been taught to serve. If you buy the premise that people with immense wealth and power should be allowed to take whatever their superior forces grant them, then the human costs may seem insignificant, as they seemed to Friedman and his economists. But if the human costs of unrestrained greed - what are now many tens of millions of deaths and well over a billion humans thrown into permanent poverty - if those costs are insignificant, what have we become? What gods do we serve, and are they really giving us a life and a nation of which we can be proud?

The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part I

Davidson Loehr

2 March 2008

First UU Church of Austin, TX 
 
 

PRAYER:

      It matters so much what we choose to worship.  Let us not serve gods that are not worth serving.  Let us not kiss the hand that hits us, not forgive those who systematically abuse us, or worship gods who do not love us.

      We are surprisingly religious people, whether we know it or not.  Our biggest religious problem is often the fact that we serve not wisely but too well.  We often do what those around us do.  We share their assumptions about life, about what’s worth spending our money on, what’s worth sacrificing for, about what sacrifices will lead us toward that heaven on earth known as The Good Life.

      Most of the gods we serve with our lives are second-hand gods, hand-me-downs from other people.  We get them from our family and friends, those we envy or admire.  And we often serve them almost without question.

      We must serve something with our lives.  We must serve something that transcends and trumps the day-to-day ordinariness.  We will serve gods, whether we recognize them or not.

      Let us try to recognize the gods we are serving.  Let us ask whether they are really worth serving, whether they give us life, or just drain it away from us.

      Let us never worship gods that do not love us.  Let us strive to serve only gods that are worth serving.  For it matters so much, what we choose to worship.

Amen.

SERMON: The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part I

      It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything that seemed to make so many clear patterns and connections as Naomi Klein’s new book  The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

      It is the story of how a fundamentalist and brutal form of capitalism has been seeking since WWII to undo all the advances of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, to transfer immense wealth and power to the largest corporations, the wealthiest people, and the politicians, governments and armies they control.

      Mostly, I want to look at this story as a theologian rather than a historian.  Religion is always about the gods we’re serving, and honest religion must always ask whether they are worth serving, or whether they are being used again by the few to enslave the many, as gods generally are; throughout history, most of our gods have been for sale to the highest bidder. 

      For better and worse, our religion is usually just concerned with our personal questions and issues, not what St. Paul called the “powers and principalities” that run our larger world.  But those “powers and principalities” in the background always define some of the rules for the lives we live in the foreground.  And the gods being served behind the scenes created by the powers and principalities make the difference between our world today and fifty years ago.

      After WWII, this was a country in which the laws and economic priorities favored and empowered the middle class – the class that Aristotle said 2400 years ago had to be the empowered class for a democracy to work.  Putting it theologically, the gods being served by the New Deal empowered the middle class’s economic possibilities, and controlled the greed of the wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations through taxes, unions, and government regulations. 

      Most middle-class women didn’t work outside the home then, but the man’s one paycheck was enough.  The father of one of my boyhood friends drove a milk truck and delivered bottles of milk to the doorsteps of homes.  You wouldn’t think he made much money, and he probably didn’t.  But it was enough to buy a new house in a nice middle-class neighborhood, a car, and send two boys through college.  It gave his family very good health insurance, gave him lifelong job security, and a retirement that let him and his wife spend their final years living in the style to which they had become accustomed since their early 20s.  That’s a fair picture of the America I grew up in, where you could say the “powers and principalities” served the gods of the Old Testament prophets, the ones who cared for the poor and vulnerable. 

      Today, different gods are being served, and that has changed our world, as it was intended to.  Both partners work in most families, but their combined income buys less than the one paycheck did forty to fifty years ago.  Today our country has the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, is the only industrialized country that doesn’t provide health insurance, has the lowest standard of living for its old people, and the most obscene discrepancy in income between the richest and the rest – CEO’s average more than four hundred times the pay of their workers, a tenfold increase in just the past thirty years.  Public education is underfunded and underwhelming, and tax cuts for the rich are taken as always from public services to the rest.  All of this is a result of the gods we are serving.

      In my sermon on “Living under Fascism” 3-1/2 years ago, I linked together plutocracy, imperialism and fascism as necessary allies.  I hadn’t thought to include violence, torture, illegal invasions and mass murder, but Naomi Klein shows that all these are among the means by which money and power must be taken from the masses, who will not give them up willingly.

      Today, I’ll focus not on those means, but on what she calls fundamentalist capitalism.  It goes by an amazing list of other names in the media.  Here are a few of the synonyms I’ve found for it in the reading I’ve done – you’ve probably heard others, too: 

“barbarian capitalism” (p. 452)

“savage capitalism” (French, pp. 448-450)

Reaganomics

Thatcherite

Chicago School Economics

The “Greed is good” school

Frontier capitalism

Gangster capitalism

Crony capitalism

Free-market capitalism

Laissez-faire capitalism

Disaster capitalism

Economic shock therapy (Friedman)

Hollow government, shrunk to a size that can be drowned in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist put it.  Shrinking the government means removing all possible services that educate, empower and protect the lower and middle classes.

Plutocracy

Neoliberalism

Neoconservatism

Globalization

An entrepreneur’s utopia that exalts profits over people, owners over workers, and corporations over governments

Economic fascism

      What all these have in common is the same guiding economic theory and the same guiding figure: Milton Friedman.

      The larger history, though, is very old.  For all of history, there has been a battle between power for the few and power for the many.  Since money buys a lot more power than poverty does, power mostly serves those with money, rather than those without it. 

      The battle certainly goes back to the founding of our own country. 

      Alexander Hamilton declared that the people are “a great beast” that must be tamed (Noam Chomsky, Profits Over People, p. 46). 

      John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme court, said, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” (Chomsky, 46)   The primary responsibility of government  is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” said James Madison, (Chomsky, 47) adding that those “without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights.”  His solution was to keep political power in the hands of those who “come from and represent the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable set of men.” (Chomsky, 48)

      Madison soon learned differently, as the “opulent minority” began living by the motto “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.”  By 1792, Madison warned that the rising developing capitalist state was “substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty,” leading to “a real domination by the few under [a merely] apparent liberty of the many.” (Chomsky, 52)

      Thomas Jefferson also distrusted the emerging class of capitalists: “The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain,” he wrote.  (Jim Hightower, If the Gods Had Meant for Us To Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates, p. 283). Sounds surprisingly modern, doesn’t it?  Today, we have unleashed that selfish spirit on nearly the whole world, under the name “Globalization,” and all the other more colorful names by which it is known.

      But this battle between the rich and the rest has gone on forever.  The last great victory for the middle class in our country came with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  In a 1932 speech, Roosevelt addressed the problems of the depression by telling the American people that, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

      The New Deal Roosevelt had promised began to take shape immediately after his inauguration in March 1933. Based on the assumption that the power of the federal government was needed to get the country out of the depression, the first days of Roosevelt’s administration saw the passage of banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, and agricultural programs. Later, a second New Deal was to evolve; it included union protection programs, the Social Security Act, and programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers.  What was “new” about the New Deal was that it served the masses rather than the masters – so the masters hated it. 

      In the short term, New Deal programs helped improve the lives of people suffering from the events of the depression. In the long run, New Deal programs set a precedent for the federal government to play a key role in the economic and social affairs of the nation, to rescue it from the unrestrained greed of America’s Robber Barons and Gilded Age, whose excesses had led the country into the Great Depression. 

      The reforms of the New Deal enabled my friend’s father to support his family on the pay of a milkman, and enabled a whole generation of the American middle class to become educated, financially stable and empowered as full citizens of our country, for the first time in two or three generations.  The powers and principalities were forced to serve new gods and many of them hated it.  They said that Roosevelt had betrayed his class by letting the poor come up for air, and they began planning how to get all the money and power back in the hands of that opulent minority, that “better class of men.” Madison had imagined. 

      In the 1950s, it was very hard to talk openly in polite society about returning to the era of unrestrained greed.  But behind the scenes, a lot was going on.  And at the time, it didn’t focus so much on our country – which was under the control of that rascal Roosevelt and his New Deal – as on the rest of the world, especially South America.  After WWII, our country sought global economic dominance, in what we saw as a life-or-death struggle against Communism.  Communism, in economic terms, is known as a liberal or far-left economy, since the government owns the most lucrative assets rather than wealthy corporations or individuals.  American capitalism took the second path. 

      But in the four countries at the tip of South America, known as the Southern Cone, a third way had been found, which worked better and empowered governments and the people, though not wealthy industrialists and bankers.  Chile, for example, had been a democracy for about a century and a half, and it began to look like Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and parts of Brazil might have a better economic plan than either the Soviet Union or the United States.

      The workers in their factories formed powerful unions that negotiated middle-class salaries, and their children were sent off to study at newly built public universities.  The gap between rich and poor began to narrow. By the 1950s, Argentina had the largest middle class on the continent, and Uruguay had a literacy rate of 95% and offered free health care for all citizens (The Shock Doctrine, p. 55).

      If other countries followed this model, then this Third Way between the government control of Communism and the unregulated greed of laissez-faire capitalism could become the path of the future.  This would disempower the very corporations and bankers who had earlier controlled our own government, and who wanted to regain that control.  Worldwide, trillions of dollars were at stake.  Solving the problem of those four South American countries was, in some ways, the most important problem in the world, even though most of us weren’t even aware of it.

      The capitalists needed a long-range plan to change the economic thinking of people in these South American countries.  They needed to make them stop thinking that an economy that empowered the government and the people – but not the corporations or the very wealthy – was good.  They needed them to think that a good economy was one that empowered only the wealthy and the corporations, and they were willing to spend a lot of money to do this.  Ideally, they would have them trained at the University of Chicago School of Economics, the most right-wing corporatist school of economics in the world.  And that’s what they did.

      Officially launched in 1956, the project saw one hundred students from Chile pursue advanced degrees at the University of Chicago School of Economics between 1957 and 1970, their tuition and expenses paid for by US taxpayers and US foundations.  In 1965, the program was expanded to include students from across Latin America, with particularly heavy participation from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.  The expansion was funded through a grant from the Ford Foundation and led to the creation of the Center for Latin American Economic Studies at the University of Chicago.  Under the program, there were forty to fifty Latin Americans studying graduate-level economics at any given time – roughly one-third of the department’s total student population.  In comparable programs at Harvard or MIT, there were just four or five Latin Americans.  In just a decade, the ultra-conservative University of Chicago had become the premier destination for Latin Americans wanting to study economics abroad, a fact that would shape the course of the region’s history for decades to come (The Shock Doctrine, p. 61).  It was an absolutely brilliant plan.

      Think of this activity as that of religious zealots paying missionaries to go to foreign countries and convert the natives, but with trillions of dollars at stake.  This religious analogy isn’t far-fetched.  Milton Friedman, the High Priest of this fundamentalist capitalism, had described himself as “an old-fashioned preacher delivering a Sunday sermon.” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 6)  His evangelical mission, and the mission of the Chicago School of Economics, was about converting the natives of South America, to undo all the gains of the New Deal in our country, and to re-establish an economy that gave money and power back to the corporations and the very wealthy, so that those who owned the world could run it.  Today, many believe their victory is nearly complete. 

      Like all fundamentalism, like all certainty, there was a blindness to this that was stunning.

      In the 1990s, for example, Friedman looked back on Pinochet’s entire reign in Chile, which we’ll talk about next week – seventeen years of dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured –  and saw it not as a violent unmaking of democracy but its opposite.  “The really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society,” Friedman said (The Shock Doctrine, p. 117-118).  But no, Pinochet’s brutality closed the free society after a history of 161 years of democracy, the last 41 years continuously.  He systematically tortured, murdered or intimidated those who disagreed, and it made Pinochet and his family very wealthy at the expense of the overwhelming majority of Chileans.  This was a pattern we would see over and over again.

      Even in 1991, Lawrence Summers, the chief economist of the World Bank, was quoted saying “Spread the truth – the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering.  One set of laws works everywhere.” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 218).

      That kind of dogmatic certainty can’t be used until you’ve answered some very basic pre-economic questions, like:

– Who counts more: owners or workers, those who own stocks or those who don’t?

– How do you measure whether an economy is healthy?  By the poverty rate, the number of uninsured citizens, literacy rates, infant mortality, the prospects for middle-class advancement and security, whether milk men could support their families — or by the net worth of the top 5%?  If a few become very wealthy while the vast majority become destitute and powerless, is that progress or regress?  If you go to Sao Paolo, Brazil and see some rich gleaming skyscrapers and hundreds of mansions, surrounded by millions of poor people in drug- and crime-infested ghettos, is the economy a success, or a failure?  What if you make the same observation in our own country?

      Lawrence Summers could be dogmatic because, like others who bought the Chicago School’s evangelical message, he had answered those questions in favor of the corporations and the very wealthy, and against the interests of 90-95% of the world.  But those answers to the questions of who is to be empowered and what makes a healthy economy are more important than everything that follows, because they reveal what gods are being served by the economy. 

      It’s an amazing blindness, virtually identical to that found in the history of religions. 

      During the Crusades, the Catholic Church saw only taking land and assets from Muslim powers, not the systematic torture and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of God’s children.

      During the Inquisition, the same church was completely oblivious to the brutality of the torture they routinely inflicted on thousands, or the many they murdered in the name of keeping their faith pure by exterminating those who did not share it. 

      Every major religion has these dark sides to their dogmatic certainty, as fundamentalist capitalism also does.  And in the past 35 years, this form of capitalism shaped by Milton Friedman has fundamentally changed our country and our world. 

      You see how easy it is to become self-righteous, to shake our moral fingers at the Church, or at those with great money and power, identifying them as spawn of the devil from our perch of (mostly impotent) moral purity.  I don’t want us to do that.

      While we are not in those very high circles of money or power, we can identify with this thinking that our sort of inequality should be favored:

– If we have more education than others, or from more prestigious schools, we think it should make a difference, don’t we?

– We think that superstar athletes and entertainers deserve much more money than the vast majority of others, don’t we?

– If we think we’re good-looking, then we think looks should matter, don’t we?  Whereas if we’re smarter than we are beautiful, we may think beauty is only skin-deep, and terribly over-rated when compared to intelligence. 

      Almost without exception, when the rights and privileges of inequality favor us, we favor them.  So it shouldn’t surprise us if those who are good at collecting money and power are doing the same thing – favoring the inequality that favors them, and wanting restrictions on it removed.  Wouldn’t most of us do the same?  After all, it is very easy to rationalize!  A few new cars and a mansion should do the trick. 

      We serve many different gods, and the gods we serve determine almost everything else about our lives and our world.  If we are challenged, we’ll usually insist that our gods are our own business.  But are they really?  Do we really have no responsibility to others in choosing what gods we will serve?  Should a society have no say in the gods, the ideals, served by its powers and principalities?  These are not just political or social questions; they are also religious questions, theological questions. 

      Next week, I’ll continue this by going through the results of this powerful economic theory, what it has done to our world in the past four decades, and the methods necessary to achieve this revolution.  The short answer is that nearly all the violence, all the torture, all the coups, all the human rights violations since the early 1970s have been driven by this fundamentalist capitalism, which Naomi Klein argues has never made the world better anywhere, but has caused almost immeasurable harm, as it continues to do to this day.  Again, these are religious questions about the gods being served by the powers and principalities that govern our world.  They affect us all.  You may hear people talk about the difference between living and dead gods, especially when people say the gods of Western religion are dying, judged by the decline in church attendance and so on.  Well, these gods of fundamentalist capitalism are living gods, wreaking their havoc in your world and in your life, in your credit card debt, in your diminished purchasing power and retirement hopes, and job security. Do you like them?  Do you think they’re worth serving? 

      How do you fire gods?  Here we are left in an awkward picture with our gods dangling. 

      Think about these things, will you?  Think about the gods you’re serving: the gods, the values, running your life and your country.  Think about whether they are worth serving, whether they are giving you life or draining it from you.  And then think of that other odd question: how do you fire bad gods?