[Dialogue] 11/24/11, Spong: The Super Committee Fails – Disgust is Rampant!

Thu Nov 24 11:24:16 EST 2011

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	The Super Committee Fails – Disgust is Rampant!
	There was a sense of disgust, followed by feelings of despair when the super committee formed to deal with the budget deficit failed to accomplish anything.  This committee had been given enormous legislative power.  Any conclusion to which they agreed would go to the Senate and House of Representatives to be voted up or down without amendments.  Those who set up this committee felt it needed that much power to accomplish its task.  Alas the super committee turned out not to be super at all, but wimpy, acting like children unwilling to concede an inch from lines drawn in the sand.  It mattered not that every day this nation watched Europe go through the radical dance between austere measures to bring their financial houses into order and riots in the streets from those whose security was being stripped from them.  No one on the “super” committee seemed to pay heed to the overwhelming voices of America’s leading economists who predict disaster unless the rising deficits are brought into balance.  No one on this committee seemed to notice that every non-partisan body that has looked at this nation’s fiscal reality – from the Simpson-Bowles Commission to the Gang of Six in the United States Senate to independent economists – has stated that both budget cuts and revenue increases will be necessary to bring our nation’s finances into a sustainable balance.  Republican leaders on the committee were unwilling to budge on the inevitability of tax increases.  To counter that political naiveté, the Democrats responded that they would support no cuts in entitlement programs without increased taxes on the wealthy.  From these loudly stated political postures the super committee dillied and dallied and failed in their duty, becoming the latest illustration of our increasingly dysfunctional government, apparently unable and unwilling to meet its responsibilities or to solve the nation’s problems.
	If this failure did not reveal their pettiness and immaturity sufficiently, this breakdown in responsibility produced no sense of regret.  Instead they adopted the oldest political strategy in the world called “the blame game.”  “It was not my fault, but theirs,” they screamed in childlike rage.  Senator John Kyl, Republican of Arizona, said the Democrats were not willing to cut a single budget item without raising taxes at the same time.  Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, responded by saying that what Senator Kyl had said was “blatantly not so.”  He did not use the word “liar,” for senators must speak to each other as “my esteemed colleague” from wherever, but the import was the same.  At the same time all the Republican presidential hopefuls blamed President Obama for this failure.  Projection not truth is now the coin of our political realm.
	It seems that no one in Washington understands where the deficit came from.  It does not take either a genius or an historian to reach the facts, but it does require that we stop listening to outrageous partisan propaganda.  The nation’s budget was not only in balance, but was running a surplus when President Bill Clinton finished his eight-year term in office in the year 2000.  Clinton had presided over a decade in which an enormous increase in wealth occurred in the United States.  Indeed, more wealth was created in America in the single decade of the 1990s than in all the other years since the Revolutionary War put together.  Enormous fortunes were made in high tech and America’s life was dramatically reshaped by companies that became household names:  Microsoft, Intel, Google, Oracle, Apple and Cisco, just to name a few.  At the same time all executive salaries began to break the boundaries of propriety and the gap between the wealth of the top 10% of the population and that of the other 90% began to increase with rapidity.  With no international crisis on the horizon, however, the nation was confident and cocky and did not notice.  There was also a quiet loosening of the regulations that guaranteed integrity in business dealings.  People on all levels began to press the edge of what is proper.  The financial institutions initiated policies that would lead to a housing bubble and finally to a housing market collapse.  Giant energy companies began to manipulate the markets for higher prices leading to the disaster at Enron that destroyed the safety net of many elderly people.   The CEO of Enron, Ken Lay, died before he was sentenced for criminal behavior.  Tyco’s chief, Dennis Kozlowski, and WorldCom’s chief, Bernie Ebbers, were convicted of fraud.  People thought at the time that these were isolated cases, but they turned out to be merely signs of what was to come.
	George W. Bush entered the White House in January of 2001 and immediately proposed a broad tax decrease that would return, quite properly I believe, much of the then current surplus to the tax payers.  It passed with bi-partisan support.  Then tragedy struck our nation on September 11 of 2001 when we were attacked by a group of 19 Islamic terrorists armed only with box cutters, who commandeered four commercial airliners in flight, driving two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into the Pennsylvania countryside.   Terrorism became a fact of life in our increasingly dangerous world.  No nation attacked in this manner can fail to respond and still maintain its political credibility, so the Bush Administration planned its response carefully, but resolutely.  When those plans unfolded we initiated two wars, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq that were to last for more than a decade each.  Whether those wars were the proper response or not I leave to others to decide, but the fatal mistake of the Bush Administration was that no provision was made to pay for either war.  No sacrifice was asked of any of the American people except our military personnel and their families.  The assumption was that these wars were somehow free, but the fact is we watched the debt of this nation skyrocket.  President Bush at that time had both the political capital and the popularity to have presented Congress with a budget for the cost of these wars, thus asking the American people to pay for the privilege of living in freedom.  He did not do that, igniting a growing deficit.  What he did do, however, was to propose lowering taxes once again.  He got this irrational law through Congress, with Democratic support.  This second tax cutting bill was weighted heavily toward the rich.  No cuts in any other budgetary items were identified to offset this new loss of federal revenue.  The tired old trickle down argument was used.  Tax cuts for the wealthy “will spur business development and grow our economy” and the money “will trickle down to all levels of society.”  That is so discredited an idea that it is almost laughable.  Wealth does trickle down in our economy, but usually only from the John D. Rockefellers to the Nelson Rockefellers.  Now the deficit began to spiral out of control.
	Next the Bush Administration supported adding a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program.  Once again this huge new entitlement program was not accompanied by any spending cuts or revenue increases.  The budget deficit exploded.  Then came the greed inspired economic collapse of 2008 out of which we have yet to emerge. We are now a debtor nation.  Unemployment hovers at 9%.  The housing market remains mired in depression.  The anger of our citizens is rising on both sides of the political spectrum and our super committee appointed in the midst of this crisis to address these issues concludes its months of deliberation without accomplishing a single thing!
	Will it be easy to solve this crisis?  Of course not!  All of us will have to make hard decisions.  To those on the left we need to say: “Yes, Social Security must be restructured. Perhaps the age for retirement needs to be raised from 65 to 70 over a period of years with bigger penalties for early retirement.  Yes, Medicare costs must be reined in and those with annual incomes of say $500,000 to $1,000,000 should expect to pay a higher premium.  Yes, pension benefits negotiated in good times must be reassessed and adjusted to reality.”  Hard compromises along these lines will have to be accepted.
	To those on the right we need to say: “Yes, the tax rates on the wealthy must also rise, the loopholes that benefit the wealthy must be closed and corporate welfare must cease.  Every citizen of this nation must be given the privilege of contributing to the cost of these two wars fought in our national defense.”   To that I add “Please don’t talk to me about your conservative values, if you refuse to pay for the freedom that makes those values possible. What kind of patriotism is that?   What kind of citizens are you if you feel you should be exempted from sharing in those costs of restoring America’s fiscal integrity?”  I am sick of political brinkmanship based on ideological posturing.  I am sick of the politics of blame and spin.  I am sick of watching this great nation look like Gulliver tied down by pygmies and dwarfs.  I am sick of politicians who place their own hopes for re-election above the nation’s best interests.  I am sick of watching people destroy the economic engine that has made America great by creating gridlock in the name of being true to their own ideology.  If the leaders of this nation want to see a violent revolution, then they should continue to act as they are now acting.  I for one, however, can not believe my nation has come to this.
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

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				John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible. 

				A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.

				Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.

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	Question & Answer
	Jan, via the Internet, writes:
	Question:
	I do enjoy all your books.  I’ve just finished Eternal Life and my question is-OK, now how do we pray?  If we “walk into God” and it’s internal, how do we address prayers?  Thanks so much.  You have changed my thinking about theology-and I’ve spent my adult life as a Christian educator.
	Answer:
	Dear Jan,
	If you could read the mail this column elicits, you would recognize that your question is the one most frequently asked.  In my public lectures, it is regularly either the first or second question that arises.  I think that is because we define God when we pray without thinking about it.  So when we question how to pray, we are in fact, questioning our definition of God.  This means that any attempt to answer your question must begin with a redefinition of our understanding of God.
	Prayer, as we traditionally understand and practice it, assumes a supernatural being who has the power to hear and the ability to respond very much like a human authority figure.  This Supernatural Being can thus intervene in life to fix it and to shape it according to the will of God.  Is that power real or imaginary?  Is it more than a human fantasy?  If God has the power to cure cancer, to stop war, to create a just society, to prevent the Holocaust and does not use that power then God is malevolent.  If God does not have the power to do these things then God is impotent. If both of those options are offensive, perhaps that suggests that our definitions of God are either inaccurate or limited or even that our image of God is modeled after the human experience of authority.  It is not surprising that we speak of God as a parent or a judge able to do things we cannot do or with authority to bless or to punish.
	Suppose on the other hand that we try to envision God as the Source of life then we worship God by living fully and we experience God as power flowing through us when we become the source of life to another.
	Suppose we conceive of God as the Source of love then we worship God by loving wastefully and we experience God flowing through us when we become the source of love to another.
	Suppose we conceive of God as the Ground of Being, then we worship God by having the courage to be all that we can be and we experience God flowing through us when we provide others with the courage to be all that they can be.
	If we can entertain that understanding of God then prayer becomes not a petitioner imploring an eternal authority, but an activity in which each of us is deeply involved.  God becomes not an external force invading time and space, but the power of life, love and the sharing of being.  Maturity replaces childishness in worship and we recognize that God is a part of who we are and we are a part of who God is.
	These are not new ideas.  They have been around for centuries in the work of the mystics.  What is new is that these ideas are becoming not marginal, but main line.  That is as far as I can go in the space allotted in this question and answer format, but included here are all of the elements to work out a new theology of prayer.
	I commend that task to you.
	~John Shelby Spong

					New Book Now Available!

					RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD

					John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible. 

					A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.

					Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.

					Order your copy now on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com!

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