Current Issues – Page 34 – About Things That Matter

(Sunday Homily) Pope Francis Calls for a Global Catholic Climate Movement

Readings for 1^st Sunday in Ordinary Time: I SAM 3: 3B-10, 19; PS 40: 4, 7-10; I COR 6: 13C-15A, 17-20; JN 35-42

Recently Pope Francis has come in for some hard criticism from the U.S. right wing. It’s not just because of his rejection of free market capitalism, trickle-down theory, and huge income disparities between the rich and poor. It’s not just his openness to gays and divorcees, and his refusal to obsess about abortion and contraception.

Yes, all of these have undermined what conservatives have seen as a close alliance between the Catholic Church and their pet causes and thinking modes.

However, the straw breaking the back of reactionaries is the pope’s unequivocal warnings about climate change. They’ve gone apoplectic about his intention to publish an encyclical on the matter, and his plans to convoke a conference of religious leaders to address it. The pope’s expressed intention is to influence this year’s U.N. Paris Conference on Climate Change. All of that has raised the specter of a global Catholic climate change movement potentially mobilizing the world’s 1.2 billion members. Think about that for a minute!

In such context, Francis visit this week to the Philippines is extremely significant. The Philippines is not only the home of 80% Asia’s Catholics – more than 100 million. It is also the poster child for the devastation that climate change wreaks on the principal victims of global warming, the world’s poor. In 2013 the archipelago was raked by Typhoon Yolanda whose winds and floods killed more than 7000.

So the world listened when on his way to Manila Pope Francis was asked if climate change is “mostly due to the work of man and his lack of care for nature?” In reply, the pope said:

(F)or the greater part, it is man who gives a slap to nature continually, and we have to some degree become the owners of nature, of sister earth, of mother earth. I recall, and you have heard, what an old peasant once told me: God always forgives, we men forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives. If you give her a slap, she will give you one. I believe that we have exploited nature too much, deforestation, for example.

With words like those, the pope’s critics charge he is speaking beyond his expertise, which involves matters of “faith and morals.” But that’s just the point. The pope is making climate change a moral issue, a matter of ethics even more important than more “traditional” Catholic moral concerns about sex which after all presume the survival of the human species and the planet.

The pope’s critics also ignore, of course, that Francis bases his judgments not only on the testimony of 97% of all climate scientists, but on the research of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Its membership roster features the names of the world’s most respected scientists. These include Nobel laureates such as Ernest Rutherford, Max Planck, Otto Hahn, Niels Bohr, and Charles Hard Townes. The Academy’s current president is Werner Arber, himself a Nobel laureate, and the first Protestant to head the group.

But why such right-wing fury? It’s because like Naomi Klein, conservatives see the (for them) disastrous implications of addressing the issue. As announced in the title of Klein’s book, they sense that This Changes Everything. That is, taking on climate change as a moral issue undermines the political right’s program of market deregulation and continued extraction of non-renewable resources.

So pundits like First Things blogger, Maureen Mullarkey have given up on lip sticking the pope and are now in full attack mode. According to Mullarkey Pope Francis is simply “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist. His clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba makes that clear. Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets, sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.”

For Mullarkey, Pope Francis pretty much stinks.

And that brings me to today’s gospel reading. It’s all about stink – about what Pope Francis calls “the smell of the sheep.” Famously, you recall, the pontiff called on Catholic priests to live closer to the poor, to recognize them as God’s people and their welfare as the guideline for economic and social policy – to “take on,” he said, “the smell of the sheep.”

In other words, conservatives are suspicious of Pope Francis and are on the point of vilifying him because he smells too much like sheep — like the poor. He smells too much like Jesus.

Notice that in today’s gospel, John the Baptizer identifies Jesus as “the Lamb of God.” To begin with, the phrase reminds us of the tribal, Bedouin origin of the biblical “People of God.” Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the great King David were all shepherds. They were primitive people close to the earth. They were tribalists. Jesus was a tribalist. According to John’s image, Jesus didn’t just smell like sheep; he was a sheep! He was in spades like his slave and Bedouin ancestors — like the poor people the pope is centralizing in his visit to the Philippines.

Pope Francis is a tribalist too. And he’s practicing what he preaches — both liberation theology’s “preferential option for the poor,” and the traditionally Catholic principle of subsidiarity. Once again, that means endorsing economic and environmental policy not on the basis of market dictates, but according to human decisions about values like the common good. Humane policy, the pope implies, originates not on Wall Street, but in places like the Philippines’ Tacloban City which was leveled by Typhoon Yolanda. It’s there that the pope’s itinerary reportedly has him dining in the shack of a hurricane victim. (Can you imagine a humble Catholic housewife setting her family table to include the pope?)

As our century’s most powerful illumined voice of conscience, Francis is using his bully pulpit to wake us up. We’re like Samuel in today’s first reading – fast asleep even before the Ark of the Covenant (a reminder of Israel’s enslaved and Bedouin past). But we fail to recognize the biblical tradition’s significance to our lives – its call to tribal values which unfailingly center on animals, human family, and Mother Earth. We fail to see the implications of Paul’s observation in today’s second reading that all human beings – especially the poor and outcast – are temples of God’s spirit. That’s our tradition! That same Spirit resides, the pope says, in the planet that he (like St. Francis himself) calls our Mother and Sister.

So what would a global Catholic climate movement look like? It would entail:

Waking up like the young prophet Samuel. Like him we’ve heard God’s call many times. But at last in Pope Francis, we have a thought-leader speaking in a voice the simplest of us can hear. It’s the voice of conscience. And like Eli it’s giving us the proper way to respond: “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”

A global Catholic climate movement further entails:

Rejection of corporation-based globalization which has us (over)consuming imported necessities that could be home-grown. (This involves lobbying against the Trans-Pacific Partnership.)
Joining the fight against fracking and projects like the XL Pipeline
Voting accordingly.
Urging the institutions we can influence (churches, universities, hospitals . . .) to divest from fossil fuel industries.
Adopting a “zero waste” policy in our homes and places of work.
Cultivating home gardens.
Adopting a vegetarian diet.
Educating ourselves about “green burial” and including plans for that in our “living wills.”

The list, of course, goes on. But you get the idea.

This stinkin’ pope is waking us up. He’s showing us the way. Thank God!

Charlie Hebdo: a Thought Experiment

If World War II Jews did in Berlin exactly what the Charlie Hebdo killers did in Paris, they would be considered heroes, not terrorists. That realization alone should help us re-vision what took place in Paris last week. It should make us more careful about using the term “terrorism” in the context of our country’s so-called “War on Terror.”

To get what I mean, perform the following thought experiment.

Imagine Germany in 1943. The country is at war with Russia, Great Britain, France, and the United States. The Jewish holocaust is in full operation. German newspapers and magazines are full of anti-Semitic propaganda including grotesque cartoons (like the one above) depicting Jews in general and their Jewish faith in particular. The ones attacking Judaism and Moses are especially offensive to devout Jews throughout the diaspora.

One dark morning in Berlin, two Jewish gunmen burst into the offices of Lustige Blatter , the German humor magazine which as part of Germany’s war effort specializes in the publication of anti-Semitic cartoons. The gunmen know the particular cartoonists they’re looking for. They’re delighted to find them protected by a couple of Ordnungspolizei.

The gunmen open fire.

With their bloody work finished, the killers leave twelve bodies of Lustige Blatter cartoonists, copy writers, and Orpo bodyguards dead on the office floor. The assassins flee the premises.

Later on, they’re cornered and killed in a fire fight with the Gestapo.

How would the world outside the Reich’s orbit react to that sequence of events?

Would it consider the Jewish perpetrators “terrorists”?
Would it sympathize with massive protests defending the press freedom of the Lustige Blatter cartoonists to make fun of Jews and their religion?
Would it admire those waving banners declaring “Ich bin Lustige Blatter” while demonstrating in Berlin’s central Paris Square on behalf of the right to insult Jews and their faith?
Would it expect their leaders to join Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Tojo at those demonstrations?

The answer to each of those questions is probably a resounding NO! Most likely, the only ones considering the shooting an act of terrorism would be supporters of the Third Reich.

If that’s true, the thought experiment puts into perspective the events of last week surrounding the horrific events in Paris connected with the Charlie Hebdo shootings. It enables us to see this latest event in the “war on terror” from the viewpoint of the other side.

It reminds us that.

The Charlie Hebdo killers are combatants in a war and have grievances as real as any that Jews had in 1943.
For example, over the last fourteen years, western governments have daily killed untold (literally) numbers of Muslim civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere throughout the world.
More specifically, their recent attacks on Palestinians killed more than 2000 in Gaza (mostly civilians) including 500 children.
By some counts, more than one and a half million Muslims (mostly civilians) have been slaughtered in the allied invasion of Iraq since 2003.
In war, both sides kill one another; retaliations are routine and to be expected; they are part of war, not to be considered acts of terrorism.
In war (as the above thought experiment shows) most would consider propagandists and psy-ops agents as vital cogs in the combat machine, and hence legitimate targets.

And now a final thought. . . .

What if, during WWII, again during the holocaust, a group of 19 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto somehow hijacked three Lufthansa airliners? And suppose they flew two of them into Berlin’s tallest building housing the offices of companies like AIG Insurance, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Krupp Aviation, and Volkswagen — all vital to the German war effort?

How would we remember those Jews? Would we consider them “terrorists” or heroes?

Hmm.

The bottom line is this: if western governments insist on fighting a “War on Terrorism,” they have to expect counter-attacks even on what the “enemy” considers war propagandists and psy-ops personnel.

Simply put, that’s war.

Charlie Hebdo: Pourquoi?

Pourquoi? Why? Why do they hate us? This question always seems to surface for westerners following attacks like the one last week where 12 were heinously slaughtered at the offices of the satirical publication, Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

The question of why surfaced for Americans following the attacks of September 11^th, 2001. Then President Bush’s infamous answer was that the “terrorists” hate our freedoms.

Those claiming responsibility for 9/11 had other answers. They said that the attack was a retaliation for innumerable Muslim deaths caused by 80 years of brutal western imperialism following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It was motivated by U.S. support for the horrors of Israeli occupation of Palestine. It was a response to the deaths of half a million children killed by “American” sanctions imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War. It was retribution for defiling Muslim holy sites in Mecca and Medina by establishing U.S. military bases there.

Most in the west never heard those answers.

The question “why” was posed again in Paris on Sunday – this time in gigantic letters attached to a statue in the central Place de la Republique where hundreds of thousands gathered to protest the barbarous slaughter of innocents at Charlie Hebdo last Wednesday (Jan. 7^th): POURQUOI?

President Francois Hollande and leaders from Germany, Italy, Israel, Turkey, Britain and the Palestinian territories were in attendance. Even Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Natanyahu, fresh from butchering 500 Muslim children in Gaza while injuring 3000 others and traumatizing an additional 373,000 solemnly marched against the criminal barbarism of killing 12 westerners. No doubt he was as puzzled as others in the vast throng. Why on earth do the Muslims hate us? Why are they so barbaric?

Perhaps he might ask the perpetrators themselves. After all, they were jihadists who enlisted in the war against the United States long before the emergence of ISIS (the so-called Islamic State). Their motivation? Abu Grahib and the torture pictures that shocked the world. With that in mind, do you suppose that the release of the “Torture Report” on December 9^th had anything to do with catalyzing the Kouachi brothers in their decision to do something about it? Or the drone killing of 13 Yemeni wedding-goers on December 12^th?

And as French nationals, why not choose Charlie Hebdo. It symbolized their own country’s participation in the war against Islam. Since 2006 the magazine had been publishing what the Kouachis evidently understood as virulently anti-Muslim propaganda to justify a military campaign against their co-religionists which the French air force joined on September 19^th of last year.

None of this is to defend the killers at Charlie Hebdo. They were absolutely barbaric, absolutely indefensible. The point is rather to second the idea expressed by Gilbert Achcar, the renowned Lebanese-French professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He observes that what the world has experienced since 9/11 is a not a “clash of civilizations,” but a “clash of barbarisms.”

And the reactionary barbarisms of the east cannot be understood without first understanding the causal barbarisms of the west.

By comparison, the latter are wholesale; the former are retail.

Twenty Lessons I learned from My 40 Years of Teaching Social Justice

During the fall semester of 2014, I taught a Religion course at Berea College called “Poverty and Social Justice.” The course was personally significant because it rounded off 40 years of teaching at Berea, where my first class convened in 1974 – exactly 40 years ago. I remember how I came to Berea, fresh from leaving the priesthood, on fire from Vatican II, sensing the increasing importance of liberation theology (see below) and (naively) ready to change the world.

In this 2014 semester, nineteen students (mostly juniors and seniors) participated in REL 126. The students were engaged, committed, funny, energetic and smart. They, along with our readings, films and required community activism, taught me a great deal. And that, by the way, has been my consistent experience since 1974 – I’m the principal beneficiary of the courses I’ve taught. (I’m thankful every day for the path Life has so gently led me follow.)

In any case, I’d like to share twenty of my own specific learnings here. Of course, none of my students would be able to draw these conclusions. After all, they were exposed to the underlying historical events and to the resulting ideas for the first time during the course. However for me, as I’ve indicated, REL 126 represented a kind of capstone to forty years of teaching and nearly half a century of trying to understand the world from the viewpoint of its disenfranchised majority. Grasping that understanding, I’ve come to realize, is the only hope of salvation our world has.

But before sharing those conclusions, let me tell you a bit more about the course itself. Like all of my courses over the years, its basic purpose was to stimulate critical thought about poverty, hunger and what the Christian tradition teaches about social justice. Our readings included Ron Sider’s Just Generosity, Cynthia Duncan’s Worlds Apart, and the Bread for the World 2014 Hunger Report. We also analyzed the (still relevant) 1973 Pastoral Letter by the U.S. Catholic bishops of Appalachia, “This Land Is Home to Me.”

In addition, all of us attended monthly meetings of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) and volunteered for their “Get out the Vote” actions. A KFTC activist spent two of our class periods leading us in a game of “Survive or Thrive,” a wonderfully instructive game she had invented to replicate the problems of international “free trade” agreements. The activist wasn’t our only class guest. A grass roots entrepreneur from a clothing factory in Nicaragua and a Glenmary priest-activist campaigning against Appalachian mountaintop removal also graced our classroom.

Inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and taking Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as our guiding image, the course had us attempting to re-vision U.S. history from the viewpoint of the poor and disenfranchised rather than “the official story” of presidents, generals, the rich and the famous.

So we made sure that our current events source reflected those usually neglected viewpoints. To that end, students watched and reported regularly on “Democracy Now.” We even spent some class time watching and discussing a number of interviews with street-level newsmakers by the show’s anchor, Amy Goodman. Additionally class participants researched and reported on issues highlighted on the program including climate change, police militarization, prison privatization, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, reparations to descendants of African slaves, the campaign for a living wage, the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, and Israel’s bombing of Palestinians in Gaza.

In line with our commitment to understanding the experience of the actually poor and disenfranchised, our approach to the Christian tradition in this religion course was that of liberation theology – understood as “reflection on the following of Christ from the viewpoint of those working for the liberation of the poor and oppressed.” Our readings here were drawn from a series on the topic which I had authored and published on my blog site.

A screening of the film “Romero” along with some other shorter documentaries, put flesh on those intentionally brief to-the-point readings. The documentaries emphasized U.S. sponsorship of third world dictatorships under genocidal U.S. allies like Pinochet (Chile), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), the Duvaliers (Haiti) and Somozas (Nicaragua), Mobutu (Congo), and Diem (Vietnam).

Together our intentionally subversive approaches to history and faith were intended to expose students to the untold history of the United States, and to the untold story of Jesus of Nazareth. From all of this, I drew the twenty conclusions I mentioned earlier. Remember, my students could never reach such conclusions. My hope is that someday (if they continue reading outside the dominant culture) they might:

Historically speaking, the United States is the country Adolf Hitler and his backers imagined Germany would be had they triumphed in World War II – the absolute ruler of the capitalist world at the service of corporate interests. In short, the U.S. has become the fascist police state Adolf Hitler aspired to lead.
As such the principal enemies of the United States are those Hitler imagined being the protégés of “Jewish Madness”—viz. the world’s poor and disenfranchised.
These are (and have been since the end of World War II) the objects of what C.I.A. whistle-blower, John Stockwell, has termed the ”Third World War against the Poor” located throughout the developing world. It has claimed more than seven million victims.
This war by the United States has made it the principal cause of the world’s problems in general and especially throughout the former colonial world, as well as in the Middle East, Ukraine, and in the revived threat of nuclear war, along with the disaster of climate change.
Its war against the poor has made the United States a terrorist nation. Compared to its acts of state terrorism (embodied e.g. in its worldwide system of torture centers, it unprovoked war in Iraq, illegal drone executions, the unauthorized bombings in Syria, its preparations for nuclear war), the acts of ISIS and al-Qaeda are miniscule.
Far from “the indispensable nation,” the United States is more aptly characterized (in the words of Martin Luther King) as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Without the U.S., the world would be far less violent.
At home, “our” country increasingly tracks the path blazed by Nazi Germany. It has become a state where corporate executives and their government servants are excused by one set of laws, whereas U.S. citizens are punished by another. Following this regime, law-breakers go unpunished; those who report them are prosecuted.
This type of law is increasingly enforced by a militarized police state in which law enforcement officers represent an occupying force in communities where those they are theoretically committed to “protect and defend” are treated as enemies, especially in African-American and Latino communities.
As a result, new wave of “lynchings” has swept the United States at the hands of “law enforcement” officers who execute young black men without fear of punishment even if their murders are recorded on video from beginning to end.
In addition, disproportionate numbers of blacks and Latinos have been imprisoned in for-profit gulags that rival in their brutality Nazi concentration camps.
The point of the militarized police state and prison culture is to instill fear in citizens – to discourage them from constitutionally sanctioned free speech, protest and rebellion.
As in Nazi Germany, the dysfunctions of “America’s” police state (including poverty, sub-standard housing and schools, drug addiction, and broken families) are blamed on the usual suspects: the poor themselves, especially non-white minorities. They are faulted as undeserving welfare dependents and rip-off artists. Systemic causes of poverty are routinely ignored.
In reality, welfare and other “government programs” represent hidden subsidies to corporate employers such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds. These latter pay non-living wages to their workers and expect taxpayers to make up the difference through the programs just mentioned.
Government programs such as food stamps could be drastically shrunk and limited to the disabled, children, and the elderly, if all employers were compelled to pay their workers a living wage adjusted for inflation on an annual basis. Currently, that wage must be at least $15.00 an hour.
Moreover, since education quality and achievement are the most reliable predictors of students’ future poverty levels, the U.S. education system should be nationalized, teachers’ salaries should be dramatically increased, and all facilities K through 12 regardless of location should enjoy highly similar quality.
All of this should be financed by declaring an end to the so-called War on Terror, withdrawing from foreign conflicts and reducing by two-thirds the U.S. military budget.
Instead, the current system of corporate domination, state terrorism, war against the world’s poor, and lynching of minority men is kept in place by rigging the nation’s electoral system in favor of right wing extremists. They control the system through practices such as unlimited purchase of government (the Citizens United decision), voter suppression tactics (e.g. voter I.D. laws), redistricting, and rigged voting machines. They do not want everyone to vote.
U.S. citizens are kept unaware of all this by a mainstream media and (increasingly) by a privatized system of education owned and operated by their corporate controllers.
As a result, revolution has been rendered inconceivable.
The only hope and prayer is for a huge general economic crash that will awaken a slumbering people.

“The Interview”: Dumb and Dumber Do Regime Change

Recently I spent an hour and 52 minutes watching “The Interview.” I expected having to grit my teeth through nearly two hours of anti-communist propaganda. After all the film was produced by Sony whose CEO, Kaz Hirai, sits on the board of the CIA think-tank, the Rand Corporation. According to investigative journalist, Tim Shorrock, Sony directly consulted the CIA about the screenplay. Langley gave specific approval to “The Interview’s” graphic assassination scene.

Nevertheless, I justified the apparent waste of time on the grounds that the controversy surrounding “The Interview” had made it a cultural event not to be ignored. President Obama’s initial belligerent remarks about Pyongyang’s (completely unsubstantiated) hacking of Sony’s corporate data seemed hasty to say the least. They had made an international incident out of the release of this light-weight comedy.

North Korea’s response, of course, was predictable. Like Cuba, it has for decades been the object of CIA attempts at regime change and sanction. And the hair-brained method proposed in the film for disposal of President Kim Jong Un was completely reminiscent of past CIA attempts on world leaders like Fidel Castro. Moreover, President Obama’s pivot towards Asia, especially with Okinawa bases under threat of expulsion from Japan, has necessitated a high-profile enemy in the region. And North Korea conveniently fit the bill as enemy du jour. No wonder its leadership felt threatened by what they saw as yet another CIA plot to foment rebellion.

As it turned out, however, “The Interview” came across as a more effective send-up of U.S. culture, politics and the CIA than an indictment of North Korea. Whatever the intentions of its producers, its basic take-away was this: U.S. foreign policy is run by provincials who have no understanding of the regimes they routinely attempt to change. Much less do they grasp those regimes’ historical and political contexts.

In fact, the political understanding of the film’s dumb and dumber protagonists, Seth Rogen and James Franco, is summarized in a single slogan repeated throughout “The Interview,” “They hate us ‘cause they ain’t us.” That’s it – a completely ignorant and self-congratulatory level of analysis whose depth rivals Bush 43’s explanation of 9/11, “They hate our freedom.”

However, contrary to their expectations, Rogen and Franco discover in Kim Jong Un (as portrayed in the film) someone totally like them. He’s a frat boy, shallow, insensitive and entirely obsessed with sex, drugs, and American celebrity culture.

Moreover Jong Un’s crimes mirror those of the CIA itself. That is, according to the Langley, the North Korean president’s policies are reprehensible because they starve his people, keep them under constant surveillance, torture his enemies, and threaten the world with nuclear weapons. He therefore deserves to die.

But as North Korea’s “dear leader” himself points out in the film’s climactic interview, those are the very crimes of which the United States itself is guilty – but on a much larger scale. The Americans, he observes, are not just responsible for starting the Korean War. Their decades-long sanctions on the country along with their unrelenting policy of regime change have attempted to create famine throughout the northern part of the peninsula.

Jong Un might have added that the U.S. is one of the world’s most egregious actors when it comes to cyber-warfare and that NSA surveillance hacks into private communications across the globe not just in a single place. The U.S. also maintains torture sites world-wide; it has more prisoners per capita than any other country (including North Korea). It is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, and is in the process of modernizing its entire nuclear arsenal.

This means that the decision to kill Kim Jong Un represents a subconscious act of self-destruction. Its logic actually justifies attacks on the United States, whose crimes (once again) mirror and dwarf those of the “international criminal” destroyed at the film’s conclusion. This makes the assassination a kind of suicide by proxy – an expression of a death-wish.

What I’m suggesting is that the film’s (so far) overlooked message is this: They don’t hate us ‘cause they ain’t us; they hate us because we are us. And attacking us is far more justifiable than any attack on North Korea.

All of that makes one wonder about Kaz Hirai. Might he not be a double agent? Perhaps he has cleverly tricked the CIA into approving a self-parody that unwittingly makes a laughing stock of the organization’s criminality and idiocy.

Such satire represents the essence of “The Interview,” whether that’s intended or not.

Judging the Torture Report

Let me get this straight.

We’re supposed to believe CIA director John Brennan when he says the 6000 page document is wrong when it indicts him and his organization for lying, brutality, torture, head slamming, crimes against humanity, and sadistic practices such as “rectal hydration,” “rectal feeding” (?), “threatened” rape and execution?

This is the same John Brennan who before his own Inspector General proved him a liar, claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee Chair, Dianne Feinstein, was wrong about him last July. That’s when she charged that Brennan’s agency tried to undermine her Committee’s investigation of the CIA torture program by breaking into the investigators’ computers.

At that time Brennan contradicted Feinstein with feigned offense and a straight face saying, “Nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that.”

Oh, but now I guess he’s changed. Now we can trust him. He’s telling the truth this time – as head of an organization whose very job description is to dissimulate, equivocate and outright lie.

But that’s not the half of it. In fact it’s less than 10% of it.

You see, Brennan is treating the heavily redacted 600 page executive summary of the Torture Report as if it were the whole thing. However more than 90% of what the Senate Committee found (the worst 90%, we’re told!) will never see the light of day. That’s because our public servants are convinced that if U.S. citizens and the world knew “the rest of the story,” general outrage would know no bounds.

Imagine what that might mean. That is, if we’re all outraged by the “rectal feeding,” “threats” of rape, and by untold numbers actually killed under torture, what do you suppose is contained in the 90% of the report that’s too gruesome to reveal?

Let me offer some suggestions: actual rape, sodomy, burnings, electric shock, routine killings and systemic sadism beyond any practiced in Abu Ghraib.

No wonder Mr. Brennan (like all criminals) claims innocence. No wonder he would rather forget about the past and “look to the future.” Criminal trials and jail time aren’t attractive to any “perps.”

By the way, here’s how to evaluate the torture report and Brennan’s denials. Ask yourself, what if an identical document were published about the “enhanced interrogation” techniques (EITs) of Cuba, Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, or ISIS ? What would we think of such practices then? Would we wonder whether they constitute torture or not? What would the Fox News pundits and politicians say about Russia’s (EITs)?

What value would we give to the official denials of John Brennan’s counterparts among our designated enemies? And why should we believe that their crimes are any greater than those of the CIA – or that our official culture is somehow superior to theirs?

Oh, I forgot, it’s because the CIA tells us so.

(Sunday Homily) Black Lives, Muslim Lives Matter: Obama’s as Guilty as Wilson & Pantaleo

Readings for Second Sunday of Advent: IS 40:1-5, 9-11; PS 85: 9-14; 2 PT 3: 8-14; MK 1: 1-8. http://usccb.org/bible/readings/120714.cfm

Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice. . . .

The very mention of those names calls to mind the protests that have filled our nation’s streets over the past week – in Ferguson Missouri, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and places in between. The teenager, the father of six, and the sixth grade child represent deeply racist and unjust social structures where criminals and thugs masquerading as law enforcement officers have implicitly been granted a license to kill with impunity.

The nation-wide demonstrations on behalf of black and brown victims of the resulting “American” police state remind us that our country is decidedly on the wrong track. Like John the Baptist in today’s gospel excerpt, statements by New York’s Mayor de Blasio, Eric Holder, President Obama, and the U.N. special rapporteur on torture call us all to what the Greeks called metanoia – a drastic change of direction.

Ironically however that call to repentance is especially addressed to Messrs. Holder and Obama themselves. They, after all, find themselves in charge of a national and world-wide police state of which Mike Brown’s Ferguson and Eric Garner’s Staten Island represent merely the tip of an iceberg. The call to repentance invites all of us to apply pressure for profound systemic reform that far surpasses anything those “leaders” have in mind.

Today’s liturgical readings inspire such thoughts. Listen to the prophet Isaiah as he cries out for repentance and a restructuring of reality so intense that he imagines mountains being levelled and valleys filled. The point is to smooth the way for the advent of a profoundly non-violent God in our midst. The peace-filled change Isaiah envisions is not trivial.

Listen to Jesus’ mentor, John the Baptizer, as he echoes Isaiah word-for-word. (Needless to say, neither Isaiah’s nor John’s words have anything to do with the artificially excited anticipation of our culture’s Winter Festival and its orgy of selling, buying, and conspicuous consumption – even though “Christmas” deceptively continues to somehow associate itself with the homeless child from Nazareth.)

As a matter of fact, the cult of materialism and “Christmas cheer” couldn’t be more antithetical to sincere recollection of the birth of Jesus who had more in common with Mike Brown and Eric Garner than with the white middle-class culture Christmas celebrates.

More specifically, Jesus was the embodiment of nearly everything “good Christians” (presumably) like Officers Wilson and Pantaleo (the executioners of Brown and Garner) give evidence of despising. After all, the working man from Nazareth was not only the poor son of an unwed teenage mother. He was an immigrant whose family took refuge in Egypt, the penniless friend of prostitutes and drunkards, and the prophet drummed out of his faith community as villain possessed by demons. He was the victim of torture and capital punishment who was treated as a terrorist by the reigning imperial power.

To the authorities of their day, both the Baptizer and Jesus even looked like Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Both were dark-skinned, either black or brown; they were not white men. Today’s gospel emphasizes how poorly John was dressed.

To repeat: during his life Jesus was impoverished, homeless, unemployed, accused of being subversive, placed on death row, and ultimately executed. As a Jew, he was considered as “other” and worthless to Roman authorities as Mike Brown was to Darren Wilson or Eric Garner to Daniel Pantaleo. He was as worthless as Abdulrahman Al-awlaki (pictured above) was to Barack Obama.

And that brings me to today’s real call to repentance.

It can’t merely be:

A superficial call to “trust” – an echo of Rodney King’s “Can’t we all get along?”
A reform of police culture
A de-militarization of police arsenals
A mandating of special independent prosecutors to handle incidents like those in Ferguson and Staten Island
Or even prosecution and conviction of police thugs like Wilson and Pantaleo

Instead, our nation has to address the root of the problem which is a world-wide policy of extra-judicial killings of racially-profiled Muslims and dark-skinned poor people. (That’s what a “signature strike” means as executed by drone “pilots.”)

Put otherwise, President Obama, Eric Holder and their minions are as guilty as Wilson and Pantaleo. All of them place themselves above the law. They kill with impunity those “others” they consider expendable. They answer to no one. They refuse to investigate much less prosecute such crimes.

John the Baptizer’s call to repentance summons us to publicize such guilt and completely withdraw support from the policies of the thug leaders of the world-wide U.S. police state.

That, I think, is what metanoia and repentance mean for “Americans” this particular advent.

Thanksgiving Table-Talk: Immigration Reform

I’m not looking forward to Thanksgiving. Oh, it’s not that I don’t like turkey and won’t eat my share. It’s just that, like most of you, I’ve got this Fox News brother-in-law, and he gives me indigestion. I see Harry once a year, and for the past six Thanksgivings it’s always the same: complaints about Obama. You know the drill; just read Rush Limbaugh’s current talking points. They’re all sure to surface at Thanksgiving dinner.

This year, no doubt, we’ll end up arguing about immigrants, immigration reform, and the imperial presidency. My brother-in-law will complain about “illegals” (that’s what he’ll call undocumented workers), the law, amnesty, border security, and Obama’s failure to reach across the aisle to well-meaning and otherwise cooperative Republicans.

But most of all, my dear relative will complain about the disruptive effects of “the brown peril” – waves of immigrants pouring over our borders and disrupting our economy. “I mean,” he’ll say, “if we keep giving amnesty to ‘those people,’ they’ll disrupt everything. You just can’t let everybody into the country without rules. ‘Freedom’ like that is simply anarchy. And anarchy is destructive. They’ll eventually take all the good jobs.”

Well, here’s what I plan on telling old Harry this year:

“You see, Harry, we’re finally getting a taste of the disruption economies like Mexico have experienced since 1994 and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It was then that in the name of “free trade” tsunami waves of capital investment were unleashed across the Mexican border. To Mexican farmers it was an onslaught of “white peril” that dwarfs any threat you and I might experience from brown people.

“For instance, cheap American corn (actually subsidized in the NAFTA agreement) drove Mexican farmers out of business. True, a relatively few of them got employment in maquiladoras (assembly plants). But many of those factories soon closed when it became possible to hire lower wage workers in China and Vietnam. And in any case, working in the maquilas meant moving from the countryside to polluted and dangerous cities. It also meant accepting wages of $1.50 a day with no bathroom breaks. Conditions like those inevitably cause desperate workers to relocate to where the money is – to where the jobs are. And that’s the United States.

“Remember, Harry, there are two main components of the economic equation – not just capital. Labor is just as important. So any “free trade agreement” that allows capital to move without regulation should allow the same liberty to labor. Instead, the NAFTA insisted on free movement of capital alongside a captive labor force.

“Workers implicitly recognize the injustice of all that even if they can’t say the words. So despite ‘state law’ forbidding it, the labor force will obey the dictates of capitalism’s Sacred Law of supply and demand – of self-interest. Like capital, labor will migrate to where the money is. And you can’t really stop it. That’s capitalism.

“So here’s the way to stem the brown peril:

Renegotiate the NAFTA recognizing labor’s freedom of movement as well as capital’s.
That will mean electing governments on all sides of “free trade agreements” that truly represent working people and not just the corporations.
Make sure that ALL stake-holders are represented at the negotiating table – including male and female workers, children, environmentalists, and trade unionists.
Make sure the final product protects the environment and addresses climate change.
See that the newly elected people’s governments establish a living NAFTA wage of $15.00 an hour – indexed to inflation rates.

“Without such provisions, Harry, I’m afraid workers will look abroad to better their condition. They’ll continue (like their capitalist counterparts) to act in their own self-interest relocating quite naturally to where the money is. Really, we can’t do anything about it.

Like I say, that’s capitalism.”

Pope Francis and the Revolutionary Significance of the Lateran Basilica

Yesterday the entire Roman Catholic Church celebrated the feast of the dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome. That’s right Roman Catholics everywhere turned their attention to a seemingly obscure building in Rome. Pastors from every pulpit, I’m sure, took the occasion to urge us all to explore the wonders of the basilica the next time we find ourselves in Rome. (I’ll try to remember that on my next visit to the Holy City.)

But there’s more to the commemoration than we’re led to believe. That’s because the arch-basilica of St. John Lateran (named for both John the Baptist and John the Evangelist) is actually the pope’s parish church. Yes, Pope Francis’ parish church is not St. Peter’s; it’s St. John Lateran. Pastors yesterday, no doubt, told us that too.

They also probably said that St. John Lateran has enjoyed such prominence since the arch-basilica was first built in the early 4^th century. Its original site was a gift of the Emperor Constantine who awarded the Lateran Palace to the pope of the time. His name was probably Miltiades. The palace got its own name from the Laterani family, the citadel’s proprietors. They were trusted bureaucrats who faithfully served Roman emperors for many years.

And that’s the point I’d like to make here – the Constantine connection. St. John Lateran offers archeological evidence of the tragic moment in history when the would-be followers of the poor working man, Jesus of Nazareth, sold the soul of the church to the highest bidder. The buyer happened to be the Roman Empire – the very agency responsible for the execution of the one Christians pretend to follow. Constantine paid in the coin of land grants and palaces like the Lateran castle.

Can you spell “co-optation” in its most debilitating form?

The result was the nearly complete corruption of the church. Popes started to act like kings and emperors themselves.

In other words, the Church got into bed with Constantine in 313 (the Edict of Milan). Sadly, it didn’t escape till the second half of the 20^th century with the development of liberation theology – which the current pastor of St. John Lateran, Pope Francis, has embraced.

That’s right. The pope has embraced the strain of theology repudiated by his two immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. On this please check out the wonderful article by Newsweek’s Paul Vallely. He published it less than a month ago under the “The Crisis that Changed Pope Francis.”

The pope’s conversion is mirrored in his apostolic exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel,” published last year at this time. The document calls for a “new chapter” in the history of the Catholic Church and for the church to embark on a “new path” (Joy of the Gospel 1, 25). On this new path, the pope says, things cannot be left as they presently are (25). Instead they must include new ways of relating to God according to new narratives and new paradigms (74) – including new customs, ways of doing things, times, schedules and language (27), and with emphasis on better prepared and delivered homilies (135-159). According to the pope the roles of women must be expanded, since women are generally more sensitive, intuitive, and otherwise skilled than men (103, 104).

All of this the pope said quite clearly. And he called for the laity to take the reins.

As far as I can see, NOTHING at the parish level has changed since last November.

As lay people called by Francis to exercise our power, what should we do about that?

The feast of the dedication of the pope’s parish church is a good occasion for answering that question.

About Last Night: Reflections on the Mid-Term Results

Like many Progressives, I woke up on Wednesday quite depressed. The drubbing the Democrats took in the mid-term elections was enough to bring to mind thoughts such as:

•Wow! Even Scott Walker . . .
•The tide of discontent represented by the mid-terms is absolutely disastrous for:
– The poor
– Working families
– African-Americans
– Women
– The elderly
– Young people
– The uninsured
– The imprisoned
– Tribal people who continue to be the victims of “America’s” unending wars
– And, above all, the environment!

But those were just the discouraged, cobwebby ruminations of a sleepy radical clearing his head to face a country whose senate will now be led by Kentucky’s own Mitch McConnell.

However, watching the morning-after report on “Democracy Now” put matters in perspective. There Amy Goodman interviewed John Nichols, a political writer for The Nation. His report on the election aftermath is entitled “Obama Need Not Accept Lame Duck Status.”

In his piece, Nichols recalls that the last five two-term presidents – Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II –all faced in their final two years, a Congress with both houses controlled by the opposition. Yet all five finished strongly with quite high approval ratings (except for Bush II) and significant accomplishments during what was supposed to be their “lame duck” years.

This is not the time to give up, Nichols insisted. Instead it’s time to double-down on grass-roots issues making it clear to the President and to the Congress that the people’s concerns are not governed by the left/right ideologies that play into the Corporate State’s obvious strategy of Divide and Rule. Instead on the issues that mean the most to us, the grassroots is guided by a sense of fair play, the Golden Rule, and simple justice.

In this Nichols was echoing the thought of Ralph Nader in his recently published book, Unstoppable: the emerging left-right alliance to dismantle the corporate state. There Nader argues that ordinary Americans come together on a broad range of issues that transcend left-right divisions. Nader enumerates 25 of them including most prominently:

•The necessity of overcoming government gridlock
•Minimum wage increases
•Equal pay for women
•Infrastructure rebuilding
•Affordable college tuition
•The need for health care reform
•Retaining Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid
•Resistance to the surveillance state
•Protection of government whistle-blowers
•Repeal of Citizens United
•Skepticism about bloated military budgets and resulting wasteful foreign adventures
•Opposition to nebulous free trade agreements
•Rejection of further tax breaks for the wealthy
•The urgency of addressing global warming
•The futility of the war on drugs
•The scandal of voter suppression

On these issues, Nader says, all of us have to (1) join local conversations and form little alliances where we live, (2) make sure those conversations bubble up into the media, and (3) get the issues on the table for the next election cycle.

This is not the time to give up. Rather, it’s time to join together across the chasms that the plutocracy fosters to divide us. It’s time for grassroots movements to address our country’s real problems and to force politicians to do the same, but on our behalf.