The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part I

2 March 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

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 1

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?