[Oe List ...] 2/19/09, Spong: The Rhetoric of the Stimulus Package

Thu Feb 19 15:17:56 EST 2009

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Thursday February 19, 2009 

The Rhetoric of the Stimulus Package

It has been fascinating watching our legislators in Washington debating the stimulus bill and seeking to reform the way stimulus monies have been spent thus far. My conclusion is that either memory is short or politics are blind. The Republicans, who controlled the White House for the last eight years and both Houses of Congress for six of the past eight years, and who managed to turn a billion-dollar surplus into a trillion-dollar deficit, suddenly became frightened of "saddling our children with massive debt." Where has all this fiscal responsibility been residing? We listened to the same people who voted for the war in Iraq with its unlimited financial appropriations and with almost no accountability, including many "no bid" contracts let to American oil interests, who now seem to have decided that the stimulus package is a gigantic "giveaway of wasteful spending." People who supported President Bush's irresponsible and failed tax policies, which shifted massive wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest ten percent of the population and thus helped to lead this nation into the deepest economic recession since the Great Depression, now appeared to be advocates of more of the same as their way to get this nation out of the current20downturn. Insanity has been correctly defined as continuing to do the same thing while expecting a different result! Yet the failed policies of yesterday were offered with straight faces as the solution to the crisis those same policies created. 
We listened to the howls of protest from business leaders who have long lived high on the economic hog, accumulating vast wealth and awarding themselves gigantic bonuses through risky and inappropriate lending practices, but who now seemed outraged that their salaries and bonuses should be curtailed or limited. Coming hat in hand to the American taxpayers requesting a bailout with public funds, they apparently expected no change in their executive compensation. They seemed not to recognize that their greed had killed the goose that laid their golden eggs. A man like Ken Lewis, who as CEO of Bank of America has watched his business drop shareholder value by 96%, still argued against placing any limits on executive compensation. "We will lose our best talent," he told us with a straight face. Lewis failed to explain why such outstanding talent had led to such disastrous results. The same could be said for the leaders of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Countrywide Finance, Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia Bank, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, WorldCom and countless other icons of American business. Was it outstanding executive talent that led these corporations either to bankruptcy or to being taken over at fire sale prices? Does that performance result from "irreplaceable" employe
es? Can the executives who have led Citigroup, J. P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, MBIA, Ambac, XL Capital, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Sonic and others to similar cataclysmic drops in shareholder value be so good that their retention requires exorbitant salaries and bonuses? Would it be so great a loss to their companies if the stated threat that they would be gobbled up by foreign banks or hedge funds actually occurred? The cemeteries of the world are filled with "indispensible people."

When the taxpayers of America are bailing out failed businesses run by failed executives, the people of America become the stockholders and members of the various boards of trustees, which gives them the right and the responsibility to set compensation. When these rescued companies recover and repay the taxpayers, then they can set their own compensation, subject only to their new stockholders' best judgment. Bonuses, which were designed to reward extraordinary performances, are hardly appropriate when those performances have led to today's economic crisis. 

Those bank executives who were complaining that they could not live on the proposed $500,000 a year limit for publicly assisted businesses might look at the 7.6% of the population who have now lost their jobs and whose lives and security have been seriously disrupted. Perhaps they might also glance at those in the retired or near retired population who during their working lives invested in what they were told were safe, conservative, dividend-paying businesses that would enable them t
o live into old age with dignity, but who now discover that executive greed and sheer incompetence have robbed them of their once secure future. 

Whatever else this economic downturn has done it will inevitably begin to restore a semblance of that basic sense of balance that once governed American business practices. As recently as the 1970s, the ratio between the compensation paid to top executives and workers in America was about 35 to 1. That is, if the workers averaged $50,000 a year, the CEOs averaged $1,750,000 a year. Today, less than forty years later, that ratio has risen to 275 to 1, which means that if the average worker today makes $50,000 per year, the CEOs' average compensation has become $13,750,000 per year. Our society has lost all sense of proportionality, to say nothing of both our social and economic interdependence and mutual responsibility. When one adds these facts to the massive outsourcing of middle class jobs that has taken place during the last 40 years in the United States, which has forced many workers into less skilled and less lucrative jobs, one realizes how much the purchasing power of the middle class, the working class and the working poor has actually declined, while executive salaries have blown the lids off the charts. The gap between the rich and the poor in the United States has reached unhealthy dimensions. Business leaders appear to have forgotten that there must be a general population with sufficient money to buy their products or recession, or even depression, 
is all but inevitable. 

Yet in the political arena the idea that a basic fairness needs to be part of the business plan of this nation is looked upon askance. It was inserted into the last presidential campaign by the infamous "Joe the Plumber" rhetoric as a scare tactic. Republicans dubbed it "socialism." In Senator Joseph McCarthy's era it would have been called "communism"! To some people fairness seems not to be compatible with capitalism and a free market society. The great battle cry from the ranks of the well-to-do when economic fairness is discussed is that the architects of fairness are engaging in "class warfare." We need to recognize that America has been fighting class warfare for decades, but it has not been attacks launched by the poor against the rich, as those who use this cry seek to suggest. It has been an attack, sometimes quite brutal, of the rich against the middle class and the poor. Our present economic crisis reveals the fact that the middle class and the poor have lost that war and because the rich have won, the rich are suffering. The time has come to redress these grievances and to reestablish fairness by adjusting the tax codes so that those who profit the most from the economic engine that is America will bear a proportionate part of the responsibility of financing the government of this great nation and securing its peace and wellbeing.

There are many things that Ronald Reagan did as President of the United States that were exciting and noteworthy. No one will 
ever forget his words, "Mr. Gorbachov, tear down this wall," uttered in a divided Berlin. Mr. Reagan, however, was guilty of the tactic of constantly painting the government as the enemy of the people. He suggested again and again that taxes were somehow inherently evil, that the government was always the problem and never the solution. He kept telling people that their compensation was their money and that they should be allowed to keep most of it. Taxes, he said, were basically confiscatory. This Reagan idea, recycled now through two Bush presidencies, poisons our national life to this day and its echoes are heard in the rhetoric that marks the current debate over the stimulus package. 

I need to say to those who still salute this idea that most of the money they have made in the last forty years in this country could not have been made in any other country in the world. Those who have become successful financially owe most of their success to the privilege of living in the United States. They not only have a vested interest in but a responsibility for keeping this nation strong economically, militarily and socially. It takes tax dollars to do that and they need to recognize that their "confiscatory" taxes represent the biggest single bargain in the budget of every economically successful citizen. When American corporations who make their fortunes in the freedom of this country then decide to establish offshore headquarters to avoid paying a fair share of taxes, they are acting in an unethical, selfis
h and irresponsible way. Freedom is expensive, as is the task of building the atmosphere in which civic life for all can bloom, but those things are well worth the cost. All Americans want to have safe roads, bridges, harbors and tunnels. All Americans want to have good schools for our children, good hospitals and good medical care for all. We all want our food, including our peanut butter, to be safe. We want our investments to be protected from both the Bernie Madoffs and the John Thains of this world. We want our medicines tested and to have their purity guaranteed. We want our people to be safe from attacks from foreign sources or domestic sociopaths. These precious and commonly expected realities of our corporate life cost money. It is, therefore, not just fitting but proper that those who profit most from the life of our society accept the responsibility for and be motivated to keep that system not just functioning, but healthy. Those whose greed and selfishness have led this nation to a place where the whole economy goes into decline, recession and perhaps even depression should bear a proportionate share of the hard times that they have caused for others. I think they will be able to survive for a year or two on a capped salary and restricted bonuses. Class warfare? Socialism? Communism? No, fairness, honesty and mutual respect require these steps. It is even biblical, since the Bible says: "Freely you have received so freely give!"

– John Shelby Spong

Question
 and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Rick, via the Internet, writes: 
You mentioned that there are two sets of the Ten Commandments, and that one of them includes the injunction against boiling a kid in its mother's milk. I believe you said this version was in Deuteronomy. But I looked up the Deuteronomy version, chapter 5, verses 6-21, and I find no reference to boiling. In fact this recitation of the Ten Commandments appears to be in complete agreement with the recitation in Exodus, chapter 20, verses 3-17. Would you please explain where I would find the Ten Commandments recitation that includes the boiling the kid reference you described? Thanks.

Dear Rick,

You must have misheard. I said there are three versions of the Ten Commandments. The oldest one is Exodus 34, the second is Exodus 20 and the last is Deuteronomy 5. It is in Exodus 34 that you will find the injunction about "boiling a kid in its mother's milk." This version is almost totally cultic. 

If you look again at Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, you will discover that there is not "complete agreement" as you suggest. The primary difference is in the commandment about the Sabbath. Deuteronomy suggests that the Sabbath was to be observed because they had once been slaves in Egypt and even slaves must have a day of rest. In Exodus 20, the original Sabbath Day commandment has been edited to claim that God, resting from the work of creation on the Sabbath, was the reason for its continued observance. That addition20to the original fourth commandment was from the quill of the priestly writers in the Babylonian exile (roughly from 596 to 450 BCE, depending on which return from exile was the last one), who also wrote the seven day creation story at the same time. That creation story did not exist when Deuteronomy was written. So the versions of the Ten Commandments are really four: the primitive Exodus 34 version from the "J" writer in the 10th century BCE; the familiar one from Exodus 20, which is originally from the "E" writer in the 9th century BCE but was substantially edited by the "P" writer in the 6th century BCE; and the Deuteronomy 5 version, which is from the 7th century BCE and from the hand of the Deuteronomic writer. The biblical writers accounted for these several versions by suggesting that because Moses broke the tablets, God had to redo them and God did not redo them in the same way.

The fact is that these rules, like all covenant rules, emerged through the life of the nation of Israel and probably always had several versions. That is not a problem unless you are a fundamentalist.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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