Larry Hart
Here are “five more easy pieces” to follow up my last posting:
1) Matthew Desmond’s Poverty By America
2) The Rich and Climate Change; Or Can the Planet Survive the Bourgeoise?
3) The Economics of Empire
4) The Hamas-Israeli Conflict: Is Armageddon on the Visible Horizon?
5) Guilt and Innocence

Poverty By America
After listening to an NPR interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond, Brenda suggested I might be interested in reading his new book Poverty By America. I have listened to the interview for myself and am reading the book. Desmond, who is Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, has written an eloquent, well researched and documented book which demonstrates how the rest of us benefit by keeping others poor. “This is who we are:” he writes, the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy.” A statistic, he noted in the interview that caught Brenda’s attention and which he repeats in his book, is one which indicates that if the top 1% of Americans just paid the taxes they owed – not paid more taxes, or had a higher rate, but just paid what they owed, stopped evading what they owe, we, as a nation, would raise an additional $175 billion a year, which is almost enough to lift everyone out of poverty.” Yet, Matthew Desmond does not demonize the 1%; in fact, his argument is that solving the poverty problem in America will require serious thought and effort “by we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky.”
Desmond provides numerous examples of how the poor benefit both the middle class and the elite. Those who cannot qualify or afford a credit card and pay in cash, nevertheless, subsidize those who do have and use cards by paying higher prices for every necessity they purchase –– including food. Another example he cites is how the billions spent by the federal government on subsidies for homeowners has mainly benefited white families with six-figure incomes. Because of chronic federal underinvestment, only one in four low-income families who qualify for housing aid get it.
The discrepancy between public squalor and private opulence continues to grow, he observes, as those of means have less and less incentive to invest through taxes in the public sector. Those of means don’t want to take a bus somewhere, they want to drive themselves, or take Uber, since they don’t need buses or bus drivers, they see no reason why they bear that expense. We don’t want to enroll our kids in the public school system. We don’t need to play in the public park or swim in the public pool. We have our own clubs, and our own schools. We have our own cars. And as we withdraw into private opulence, we have less and less incentive to invest in public services.
Wealth increases wealth, influence, and power. Those of means attend the elite universities where they develop relationships with other elites so that they then dominate top government positions and corporate management. With money it becomes possible to lobby effectively against sustainable wages, unions, and public services. I remember hearing an angry taxpayer on a talk show who epitomized Desmond’s thesis. He was arguing against a proposed school bond which was on the ballot, “I educated my children,” he snarled, “other people can educate theirs’.”
For other aspects of the problem and the solutions suggested in Poverty, By America you will have to read the book yourself. But I do want to emphasize one more statement from chapter six: “Let’s be honest,” Desmond writes, “Sharing opportunities previously hoarded doesn’t mean everyone wins. It means that those who have benefited from the nation’s excesses will have to take less so that others may share in the bounty.” I find this striking and significant because as a person of Christian faith I believe that the solution to the most intractable human problems comes down again and again to sacrificial caring.
Bill Gates, the fourth richest person on earth has said: “It is not realistic to expect that the climate crisis can be addressed by personal choices such as giving up eating meat.” Gates suggested it would be impossible to convince people to live in smaller houses or to become vegetarians or to travel less. The climate crisis, he said, will need to be solved through technology. “I don’t think we can count on people living an impoverished lifestyle,” says Gates, “as a solution to climate change.” As kind of an aside here, I wonder if he thinks people in the UK where the average new house is three times smaller than the average new house built in America are impoverished. Gates is, of course, talking about climate change rather than about poverty, but not only are the two inextricably linked, Gates’s and Desmond’s opposing statements represent two fundamentally different philosophical perspectives on life, reality, and the problems of human existence which confront us with serious choices. Gates is probably right living more simply so that others can simply live may be an impossible message to “evangelize,” but that does not mean it is not the only one radical enough to save us from a global cataclysm or cure poverty.
Anyhow, I am intrigued by the story Matthew Desmond tells about Tolstoy: 

In 1881, having published War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy moved to Moscow from the Russian countryside. He was fifty-three and a man of means, able to employ a team of servants who ran his household. One of the first things Tolstoy noticed about Moscow was its poverty. “I knew country poverty,” he wrote, but town poverty was new and incomprehensible to me.” He was shocked to walk the streets of the city and see such hunger and hopelessness comingling with such ostentation and frivolity. The problem haunted Tolstoy, and he went looking for an answer. He visited houses of prostitution, questioned a police officer who had arrested a beggar, and even adopted a young boy, who eventually ran away. The problem wasn’t work, the great writer quickly learned. The poor seemed to never stop working. The problem, he ultimately, decided, was himself and his fellow affluents, who lived idle lives. “I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means––except by getting off his back.”

After copying that I have nothing to write. I am just going to sit with it for a while.

The Rich and Climate Change
The Alfa Nero, a yacht abandoned by a Russian oligarch and then seized by Antigua before being sold to a Google CEO, and which then reverted back to Antigua when the sale wasn’t completed; presents a rather expensive maintenance problem for whoever possesses it. In order to maintain its hardwood floors and leather interiors the air conditioning must run 24/7. For the air conditioning to run the diesel generators must run and that means burning “2,000 dollars’ worth of diesel every day. Joe Fassler, who writes for The New York Times reports that the super-rich pollute far more than the rest of us — the wealthiest 1%, he says, create more than double the amount of planet-warming pollution as the bottom 50%, and — and luxury travel is one of the biggest parts of that footprint. More than 5,500 private boats worldwide are considered superyachts, and the 300 biggest of these create a combined 315,000 tons of carbon pollution annually.
I found the above interesting because I had just heard Bill Gates, the fourth richest man on the planet, say that it is not realistic to expect that the climate crisis can be addressed by personal choices such as giving up eating meat. Gates suggested it would be impossible to convince people to live in smaller houses, to become vegetarians to travel less, or plant more trees. The climate crisis, he said, will need to be solved through technology. “I don’t think we can count on people living an impoverished lifestyle,” says Gates, “as a solution to climate change.”
Now I think Gates is at least partially right. I mean what is the use in telling some guy who lives in a cardboard box, scrounges in dumpsters for his meals, and whose only transportation is his own two feet, that he needs to live in a smaller box, eat only vegetable garbage, or give up recreational travel like walking in parks. And I don’t see Gates’s daughter giving up her $35,000,000 horse property, or the bourgeois getting the concept of contentment. The simple fact is that the world cannot afford the American middle class, much less the financially elite.

Economics of Empire
While reflecting on Matthew Desmond’s book I remembered some notes I had made myself about the inevitable collapse of every empire –– including the American Empire:
1) The life of every empire is finite, and its existence can be plotted on a bell curve from its early rise to its apex, to its eventual collapse and termination. This is simple historic fact.
2) Every empire, from its inception, suffers from the congenital and morbid disease of pleonexia (greed).
3) Every empire, regardless of its stated political, economic, religious, or social philosophy, is dependent for its sustainability on an ever-expanding economy at the expense of other geo-political entities; that is, its sustainability is dependent on a set of values and on a system that is ultimately unsustainable.
4) The wealth, or rewards, of imperial expansion and armed aggression are individual, but its costs are social.
5) Every empire will eventually collapse since the pleonexy of its elite beneficiaries is insatiable whereas the misery bearable by its citizens is finite.
6) The real goal of the oppressed once aroused is not the establishment of a way of life that works, or is sustainable, for everyone, but to themselves become the oppressive class.
7) The effect of destroying agrarian culture has been to herd people into urban stockyards where they have become indebted to the rich for food, for water, and for every necessity of life. What once belonged to all for the good of all, a place to take shelter and rest, clean water to drink, a garden plot, or a small field on which to grow rice, or wheat, or corn, has become the exclusive property of the rich lords of this world and common humanity their chattel.
7) To achieve sustainability, pseudo generosity would need to be distinguished from true generosity (See Palo Freire’s Pedagogue of the Poor). The first addresses symptoms rather than causes, and, therefore, in spite of the good it may do, functions to maintain oppression. Ultimately, false generosity serves the interest of the elite. This is one reason that: “There is, always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher” (Victor Hugo).

The Hamas-Israeli Conflict: Is Armageddon on the Visible Horizon?
Recently I read an excellent article by MSNBC columnist Sarah Posner in which she reported how ninety fundamentalist pastors, and other leaders have, following Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s massive response, issued what they called: “An Evangelical Statement in Support for Israel.” Although the way fundamentalists misappropriate the name “evangelical’ because it has fewer negative connotations drives me crazy, I will try not to get caught up in that just now. Instead, I will focus on the statement itself, which citing “just war” theory, insists it is “Israel’s right and duty to defend itself against further attack.” Virtually all the signers are Southern Baptist or other fundamentalist Baptist pastors or leaders. Posner correctly points out that their support for Israel has nothing to do with a sense of Jerusalem or the land of Israel as a holy place, or with the fact that that the Christian faith is rooted in Judaism. For these fundamentalists, some of whom identify as “Christians Zionists,” their support for Israel is rooted in Israel’s role in eschatological events –– events occurring near or at the end of the world.
More precisely, their support for Israel and enthusiasm for all conflict in the Middle East rests on a bizarre interpretation Book of Revelation popular among many fundamentalists. This interpretation believes that there will come a day in which Jesus not only returns to earth but returns as a conquering monarch who will rule the entire planet from Jerusalem. Preceding Jesus’s ruling the world from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, there will be a horrible war between the forces of good and evil culminating in the final battle of Armageddon. When Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem the far right was pleased not because it favored some well thought out global political move, but because the religious right saw it as step in prophetic fulfillment of the great apocalypse. Consequently, every atrocity, every bloody clash is perceived by these fundamentalists as the pieces coming together for this cataclysmic battle from which they, as the followers (soldiers) of Christ will emerge as the great victors shining with glory. It is a view based on a faulty interpretation of Scripture, and which denies everything Jesus lived and taught about how evil is overcome, not by violence or force, but by goodness, humility, and sacrificial love. “Love does not delight in evil or suffering but is glad at the flowering of goodness and truth” (1 Corinthians 1:6).
For further exploration I would suggest my book: Lawrence D. Hart, Hell’s Abyss, Heaven’s Grace: War and Christian Spirituality especially “Excursus: A Different Road Map to Peace,” pages141-148. (Cowley Publishing: Cambridge, MA 2006).

Guilt and Innocence
The presumption of innocence is a legal principle stating that a person accused of a crime is considered innocent until proven guilty. Under the presumption of innocence, the legal burden of proof is on the prosecution, which must present compelling evidence of guilt. In a reasonably just society all law, including criminal law, is meant to provide an orderly and humane way of arriving at a decision. A verdict of guilty does not prove guilt in some absolute or perfect sense, nor does a verdict of not guilty prove innocence. They merely say that following the rules for determining such matter here is the decision. It is a way of assuring that someone is not unjustly punished. As an individual member of society, I have no legal power or authority to bring anyone to trial or to punish anyone. I am, therefore, under no obligation to regard a corrupt, immoral, or amoral politician, or anyone charged with criminal behavior for that matter, as innocent until they have, under all legal technicalities, been declared innocent. Do I think O.J. Simpson committed murder in a fit of jealousy? Do I think George Santos is a sleazy criminal and felonious conman? Do I think Donald Trump is guilty of sexual assault, financial fraud, and sedition? Sure looks that way. Of course, in the case of Trump he has already been found guilty of sexual assault and fraud in a court of law.