Pass the Bread

 

by Bill Moyers
Text of Baccalaureate Address
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
May 20, 2006

I will make this brief because I know you have much to do between now and your farewell to Hamilton tomorrow, and that you are eager to get out and enjoy this perfect day in this glorious weather that somehow never gets mentioned in your promotional and recruitment literature.

One of my closest friends and colleagues, David Bate, graduated in 1938, and patriot that he is, headed right for the U.S. Navy where he served throughout World War II. David's father graduated from Hamilton in 1908 and two of his children continued the tradition. I asked David what he learned at Hamilton and he told me Hamilton is where you discover that being smart has nothing to do with being warm and dry...Just kidding! Thank you for inviting Judith and me to share this occasion with you. Fifty years ago both of us turned the same corner you are turning today and left college for the great beyond. Looking back across half a century I wish our speaker at the time had said something really useful--something that would have better prepared us for what lay ahead. I wish he had said: "Don't Go."

So I have been thinking seriously about what I might say to you in this Baccalaureate service. Frankly, I'm not sure anyone from my generation should be saying anything to your generation except, "We're sorry. We're really sorry for the mess you're inheriting. We are sorry for the war in Iraq. For the huge debts you will have to pay for without getting a new social infrastructure in return. We're sorry for the polarized country. The corporate scandals. The corrupt politics. Our imperiled democracy. We're sorry for the sprawl and our addiction to oil and for all those toxins in the environment. Sorry about all this, class of 2006. Good luck cleaning it up."

You're going to have your hands full, frankly. I don't need to tell you of the gloomy scenarios being written for your time. Three books on my desk right now question whether human beings will even survive the 21st century. Just listen to their title s: The Long Emergency: Surviving the Convergence Catastrophe; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations.

These are just three of the recent books that make the apocalypse prophesied in the Bible...the Revelations of St. John...look like child's play. I won't summarize them for you except to say that they spell out Doomsday scenarios for global catastrophe. There's another recent book cal led The Revenge of Gaia that could well have been subtitled, "The Earth Strikes Back," because the author, James Lovelock, says human consumption, our obsession with technology, and our habit of "playing God" are stripping bare nature's assets until the Earth's only consolation will be to take us down with her. Before this century is over, he writes, "Billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable." So there you have it: The future of the race, to be joined in a final and fatal march of the penguins.

Of course that's not the only scenario. You can Google your way to a lot of optimistic possibilities. For one, the digital revolution that will transform how we do business and live our lives, including active intelligent wireless devices that in just a short time could link every aspect of our physical world and even human brains, creating hundreds of thousands of small-scale business opportunities. There are medical breakthroughs that will conquer many ills and extend longevity. Economic changes will lift hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty in the next 25 years, dwarfing anything that's come along in the previous 100 years. These are possible scenarios, too. But I'm a journalist, not a prophet. I can't say which of these scenarios will prove true. You won't be bored, that's for sure. I just wish I were going to be around to see what you do with the peril and the promise.

Since I won't be around, I want to take this opportunity to say a thing or two that have nothing to do with my professional work as a journalist. What I have to say today is very personal. Here it is:

If the world confuses you a little, it confuses me a lot. When I graduated fifty years ago I thought I had the answers. But life is where you get your answers questioned, and the odds are that you can look forward to being even more perplexed fifty years from now than you are at this very moment. If your parents level with you, truly speak their hearts, I suspect they would tell you life confuses them, too, and that it rarely turns out the way you thought it would.

I find I am alternatively afraid, cantankerous, bewildered, often hostile, sometimes gracious, and battered by a hundred new sensations every day. I can be filled with a pessimism as gloomy as the depth of the middle ages, yet deep within me I'm possessed of a hope that simply won't quit. A friend on Wall Street said one day that he was optimistic about the market, and I asked him, "Then why do you look so worried?" He replied, "Because I'm not sure my optimism is justified." Neither am I. So I vacillate between the determination to act, to change things, and the desire to retreat into the snuggeries of self, family and friends.

I wonder if any of us in this great, disputatious, over-analyzed, over-televised and under-tenderized country know what the deuce we're talking about, myself included. All my illusions are up for grabs, and I find myself re-assessing many of the assumptions that served me comfortable much of my life.

Earlier this week I heard on the radio a discussion in New York City about the new Disney Broadway production of Tarzan, the jungle hero so popular when I was growing up. I remember as a kid almost dislocating my tonsils trying to recreate his unearthly sound, swinging on a great vine in a graceful arc toward the rescue of his distressed mate, Jane, hollering bloody murder all the time. So what have we learned since? That Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller, who played Tarzan in the movies, never made that noise. It was a recording of three men, one a baritone, one a tenor, and one a hog caller from Arkansas--all yelling to the top of their lungs. This world is hard on believers.

As a young man I was drawn to politics. I took part in two national campaigns, served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and have covered politics ever since. But I understand now what Thomas Jefferson meant back in 1789 when he wrote: "I am not a Federalist because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men, whether in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or anything else. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." Of course we know there'll be no parties in Heaven. No Democrats, no Republicans, no liberals, no conservatives, no libertarians or socialists. Just us Baptists.

The hardest struggle of all is to reconcile life's polar realities. I love books, Beethoven, and chocolate brownies. Yet how do I justify my pleasure in these in a world where millions are illiterate, the music never plays, and children go hungry through the night? How do I live sanely in a world so unsafe for so many?

I don't know what they taught you here at Hamilton about all this, but I trust you are not leaving here without thinking about how you will respond to the dissonance in our culture, the rivalry between beauty and bestiality in the world, and the conflicts in your own soul. All of us have to choose sides on this journey. But the question is not so much who we are going to fight against as it is which side of our own nature will we nurture: The side that can grow weary and even cynical and believe that everything is futile, or the side that for all the vulgarity, brutality, and cruelty, yearns to affirm, connect and signify. Albert Camus got it right: There is beauty in the world as well as humiliation, "And we have to strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful...in the presence of one or the other.

That's really what brings me here this afternoon. I did put myself in your place, and asked what I'd want a stranger from another generation to tell me if I had to sit through his speech. Well, I'd want to hear the truth: The truth is, life's a tough act, the world's a hard place, and along the way you will meet a fair share of fools, knaves and clowns--even act the fool yourself from time to time when your guard is down or you've had too much wine. I'd like to be told that I will experience separation, loss and betrayal, that I'll wonder at times where have all the flowers gone.

I would want to be told that while life includes a lot of luck, life is more than luck. It is sacrifice, study, and work; appointments kept, deadlines met, promises honored. I'd like to be told that it's okay to love your country right or wrong, but it's not right to be silent when your country is wrong. And I would like to be encouraged not to give up on the American experience. To remember that the same culture which produced the Ku Klux Klan, Tom DeLay and Abu Ghraib, also brought forth the Peace Corps, Martin Luther King and Hamilton College.

And I would like to be told that there is more to this life than I can see, earn, or learn in my time. That beyond the day-to-day spectacle are cosmic mysteries we don't understand. That in the meantime--and the meantime is where we live--we infinitesimal particles of creation carry on the miracle of loving, laughing and being here now, by giving, sharing and growing now.

Let me tell you one of my favorite stories. I read it a long time ago and it's stayed with me. There was a man named Shalom Aleicheim. He was one of the accursed of the Earth. Every misfortune imaginable befell him. He lost his wife, his children neglected him, his house burned down, his job disappeared--everything he touched turned to dust. Yet through all this Shalom kept returning good for evil everywhere he could until he died. When the angels heard he was arriving at Heaven's gate, they hurried down to greet him. Even the Lord was there, so great was this man's fame for goodness. It was the custom in Heaven that every newcomer was interrogated by the prosecuting angel, to assure that all trespasses on Earth had been atoned. But when Shalom reached those gates, the prosecuting angel arose, and for the first time in the memory of Heaven, said, "There are no charges." Then the angel for the defense arose and rehearsed all the hardships this man had endured and recounted how in all the difficult circumstances of his life he had remained true to himself and returned good for evil.

When the angel was finished, the Lord said, "Not since Job himself have we heard of a life such as this one." And then, turning to Shalom, he said, "Ask, and it shall be given to you."

The old man raised his eyes and said, "Well, if I could start every day with a hot buttered roll..." And at that the Lord and all the angels wept, at the preciousness of what he was asking for, at the beauty of simple things : a buttered roll, a clean bed, a beautiful summer day, someone to love and be loved by. These supply joy and meaning on this earthly journey.

So I brought this with me. It's an ordinary breakfast roll, perhaps one like Shalom asked for. I brought it because it drives home the last thing I want to say to you. Bread is the great re-enforcer of the reality principle. Bread is life. But if you're like me you have a thousand and more times repeated the ordinary experience of eating bread without a thought for the process that brings it to your table. The reality is physical: I need this bread to live. But the reality is also social: I need others to provide the bread. I depend for bread on hundreds of people I don't know and will never meet. If they fail me, I go hungry. If I offer them nothing of value in exchange for their loaf, I betray them. The people who grow the wheat, process and store the grain, and transport it from farm to city; who bake it, package it, and market it--these people and I are bound together in an intricate reciprocal bargain. We exchange value.

This reciprocity sustains us. If you doubt it, look around you. Hamilton College was raised here by people before your time, people you'll never know, who were nonetheless thinking of you before you were born. You have received what they built and bequeathed, and in your time you will give something back. That's the deal. On and on it goes, from generation to generation.

Civilization sustains and supports us. The core of its value is bread. But bread is its great metaphor. All my life I've prayed the Lord's Prayer, and I've never prayed, "Give me this day my daily bread." It is always, "Give us this day our daily bread." Bread and life are shared realities. They do not happen in isolation. Civilization is an unnatural act. We have to make it happen, you and I, together with all the other strangers. And because we and strangers have to agree on the difference between a horse thief and a horse trader, the distinction is ethical. Without it, a society becomes a war against all, and a market for the wolves becomes a slaughter for the lambs. My generation hasn't done the best job at honoring this ethical bargain, and our failure explains the mess we're handing over to you. You may be our last chance to get it right. So good luck, Godspeed, enjoy these last few hours together, and don't forget to pass the bread.

Some CEOs break $100-million-per-yr barrier in 2005

by Gary Strauss and Barbara Hansen, USA TODAY

View source article at http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2006-04-09-ceo-compensation-report_x.htm.

Even after a decade of sharply rising CEO pay, 2005 proved a watershed for a select group of executives. Their paydays — or potential paydays — broke $100 million.
Led by Capital One Financial's Richard Fairbank, several corporate chieftains earned nine-figure sums or the prospect of that much.

HOW MUCH ARE CEOs PAID?: CEOs ranked by top pay | Alphabetical list of largest companies

Compensated only by stock options since 1997, Fairbank claimed one of the biggest windfalls among CEOs, exercising 3.6 million options for gains of nearly $250 million. His personal haul exceeded the annual profits of more than 550 Fortune 1000 companies, including Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Reebok and Pier 1.

Fairbank, 55, pulled in $56 million from options in 2004. Capital One says Fairbank had to exercise options last year because they were set to expire. The company also noted its 24.6% annual shareholder returns the past decade.

Lifted by Wall Street's three-year bull market, 14 consecutive quarters of rising corporate earnings, mergers and turnover in the corner office, scores of other CEOs enjoyed less stratospheric but still Olympian pay packages.

Median 2005 pay among chief executives running most of the nation's 100 largest companies soared 25% to $17.9 million, dwarfing the 3.1% average gain by typical American workers, USA TODAY found in its annual analysis of CEO pay.

"Overall, we're still seeing solid cash and bonus payouts," says Ian Singer of pay-tracker eComp Data Services, which compiled data from Securities and Exchange Commission filings for USA TODAY's study. "I don't think that's ever going to change when you're at the jumbo level."

Compensation includes salary, bonus, incentives, stock, stock-option gains and potential returns from fresh option grants. Median gains were bolstered by larger stock grants, long-term incentive pay, supplemental retirement pay and options gains.

Failure also played a role: The golden parachutes for ousted CEOS and huge sign-on packages of their replacements lifted median CEO pay and promised to set benchmarks for future pay packages.

Coming off 2004's 25% jump in big-company CEO pay, the sharp rise in executive compensation perplexes corporate governance experts who expected temperance following scandals at Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, increasing scrutiny by regulators and shareholder activists, and starting this year, new accounting rules requiring expensing of stock options.

"Corporate boards are under more pressure to ensure there's a linkage to performance and shareholder returns, but they'll still be looking for ways to maximize pay packages to stay competitive," says Carol Bowie, head of governance research at proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services.

One of 2005's largest windfalls so far among those reported during this proxy season came not to a CEO, but to Omid Kordestani, head of global sales at Internet search engine Google. He exercised stock options for a $287.9 million gain. Neither Kordestani, 42, nor Google responded to calls.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page — who requested in 2004 that their salaries be reduced to $1 and refused 2006 raises — exercised no options. But they own big Google stakes; Brin and Page each own stock worth about $12.5 billion.

Another huge payout came to Analog Devices CEO Jerald Fishman, who cashed out $144.7 million from his deferred compensation plan and made another $4.3 million in salary, bonus and options gains.

Hires, fires = big $$$

Whatever the company size, rising turnover in the corner office could prompt higher pay benchmarks to attract new hires. Employment tracker Challenger Grey & Christmas says 2005 CEO departures doubled to 1,322, vs. 663 in 2004. Through the first quarter of 2006, 337 CEOs were replaced.

Among new CEOs with big pay packages:

• Broadcom's Scott McGregor, hired by the semiconductor maker in January 2005, received $7.7 million in pay and bonus, plus stock options with a potential value of $101.9 million. Broadcom says McGregor's compensation is "competitive, fair and reasonable," citing Broadcom's 46% stock price gain.

• 3M's James McNerney, who replaced Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher in June, received $25.3 million in Boeing stock to compensate him for losing potential payouts at 3M. His last six months at 3M proved lucrative, too. He got almost $41 million — $8.4 million in compensation and $32.4 million exercising 3M stock options. There was no golden parachute for Stonecipher, forced out after the revelation of an affair with a subordinate. But Stonecipher made $39.5 million, including $11 million in incentive pay and $26.9 million exercising stock options.

• John Mack, who replaced ousted Morgan Stanley chief Philip Purcell in June, pulled in more than $68 million, including $37.8 million in restricted stock and $30 million exercising stock options.

Purcell's golden parachute was valued at about $52 million, including a $44 million bonus.

Morgan Stanley co-president Stephen Crawford, who also left, received a settlement worth $36 million.

Such payouts — whose key provisions are largely negotiated as part of employment contracts — have become boilerplate as corporate boards agree to lucrative retention agreements designed to prevent CEO "flight risk," says Ira Kay of pay consultant Watson Wyatt and author of Myths and Realities of Executive Compensation, due out later this year.

"It's a seller's market, and executives have real market power," Kay says. "Most directors are as obsessed with retaining their CEOs as they are satisfying shareholders. Directors know if they have the right team in place, they have to do whatever they can to retain it."

Most compensation advisers and corporate governance experts doubt a Securities and Exchange Commission proposal requiring boards to provide more clarity, justification and disclosure about pay, perks and supplemental retirement will curb CEO pay. "You'll still see extraordinarily egregious deals going down," says Bowie.

New accounting rules that require companies to expense stock options beginning this year aren't likely to limit new option grants to CEOs, either.

"We'll see fewer options granted to lower and middle management employees, but there'll be no effect on option grants to CEOs," says John England, who advises directors for compensation consultant Towers Perrin. "Most directors still believe options are an important piece of senior management's compensation."

Boards are under more scrutiny from shareholders and regulators. Bowie says shareholders will vote on nearly 150 proposals aimed at making boards more accountable. Measures include director term limits, annual elections and provisions to remove directors receiving less than 50% of votes cast by shareholders.

There are about as many ballot measures regarding directors as are being floated to curb CEO pay. Yet, most resolutions are non-binding and ignored by directors, even those overwhelmingly approved by shareholders. Most companies oppose provisions such as annual director elections, which tend to make boards less insular and beholden to management.

Some reformers believe fundamental changes in the way CEOs are compensated won't occur until corporate directors are held more accountable. "They're not sufficiently dependent on shareholders, who lack real power to remove them from boards," says Harvard University professor Lucian Bebchuk, who decries the lack of connection between pay and performance and is pushing for bylaw changes at several firms.

Increased shareholder activism is putting more pressure on some boards to weigh compensation practices, such as covering CEOs' income taxes, more closely, says Temin & Co. pay consultant Bruce Ellig, author of The Complete Guide to Executive Compensation.

Moreover, some boards have begun acquiescing to investor pressure. Prompted by the Teamsters union, Coca-Cola said it would seek shareholder approval of future executive severance packages. The move comes after the soft-drink giant fitted former CEO Douglas Ivester with a golden parachute worth $119 million after four years and successor Douglas Daft, who lasted three, $36 million in severance.

Other companies are already providing more extensive compensation disclosure to shareholders, and board advisers say there's far more backroom discussion among directors about CEO pay.

"There's a change that outsiders wouldn't see — directors asking about the cost implications, disclosure implications, what could go wrong with a plan that pays too much for performance that isn't justified," says England. "Board members are saying they don't want their reputation besmirched."

Overcompensating?

For now, among many corporate boards, looking to enhance pay for already handsomely compensated CEOs remains the norm.

United Technologies' George David has made nearly $300 million in compensation since he became CEO in 1994, including about $40 million in salary and bonuses and more than $250 million from stock option gains, according to SEC filings. He holds exercisable options valued at $138 million. Directors boosted his salary 42% to $1.7 million in 2005, saying it was his first raise since 1998, and awarded fresh options valued at $24 million.

Directors cited his long tenure, leadership, an Institutional Investor magazine survey ranking him tops among his aerospace and defense electronics industry peers and the company's "exceptional" performance. Most longtime shareholders might not quibble: They've gained about 18% annually under David.

"We can all argue how we value CEOs and if their pay makes sense," says Alan Johnson, a principal in compensation consultant Johnson Associates. "But we chronically overvalue CEOs. Until that's addressed, higher pay will continue."

At poor-performing companies, some boards are ignoring performance guidelines to reward executives. Sun Microsystems, down more than 90% from its 2000 peak, gave CEO Scott McNealy a $1.1 million "discretionary" bonus last year, even though Sun failed to meet income or earnings targets. The board cited a "one-time need" to recognize McNealy's performance. McNealy gained $11.8 million exercising options. Already Sun's largest individual shareholder, McNealy also received fresh options worth $7.6 million.

"There's a point where a board should tell the CEO, 'You have enough to incentivize you,' " says Paul Hodgson, pay analyst for The Corporate Library, a governance watchdog group. "But it's still business as usual at most companies. It's all about keeping up with the Joneses. There's still a disconnect between paying for performance and actually delivering it. There's no shame factor."

[See related articles in Human Rights Forum at www.PeacePolitical.com.]

Interesting data from survey of top CEO salaries in the SF Bay Area

The following information is drawn from the "Executive Pay Special
Report," published in the Contra Costa Times, Sunday, May 28, 2006 and
from the SFGate.com website, which summarizes survey data from the San
Francisco Chronicle's annual survey of executive pay at 200 local
companies. To read more about the latter survey, go to the following
URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/21/BUGF3IUCAD1.DTL

The above-cited article reports that: Yahoo CEO Terry Semel was the
highest-paid [local] executive in 2005, just as he was in 2004. Semel
earned $56.8 million last year in total compensation (including
restricted stock and the estimated value of his options), down from
$131.2 million in 2004.

Even with the drop, Semel earned $16.9 million more than the
second-highest paid executive, Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, who
earned close to $40 million (mostly in options). Thanks to a large
recruitment package, new Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd was third
at nearly $35 million, with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison fourth at $25
million (including a $6.5 million bonus and loads of options).

Much of the executive pay is in the form of stock options and
restricted stock rather than actual cash. Usually, executives are
prohibited from selling the stock for years. And stock options are
tricky to value...

In fact, of the more than 1,000 executives in the survey, four of the
seven highest-paid executives worked at Yahoo.

"It sounds like a compensation approach that has gotten out of
control,'' said David Broman, chief executive of Syzygy Consulting
Group in Lafayette, which helps design compensation packages. "I can't
think of anything that would suggest why they should continue to be
No. 1 on the list."

Interestingly, I couldn't find any CEO or other exec's salaries listed
for Google, whose stock has almost doubled since the early days of its
offering when it was going for about $200 per share. Maybe they have a
different way of doing things over at the G-whiz place!

A report just out lists the 2005 actual salaries of the 100
highest-paid CEOs in the Bay Area -- ranging from $5 million per year
(the LOWEST PAID) up to ~ $53 million for the high-paid Yahoo CEO
indicated above. They also listed the top 50 in the East Bay
(consisting of the Oakland-Berkeley-Fremont cluster of cities in
Alameda County plus the suburban cluster of Concord-Walnut
Creek-Lafayette-Danville and the northerly tier of bayside cities in
Contra Costa County). That showed up an additional 40 who made $2
million per year or more (in the East Bay area alone).

Overall, the salary surveys, which also list company profits for 2005,
reveal some rather impressive statistics. One of the largest and (in
this era of high gas prices, almost needless to say) most profitable
of companies in the Bay Area was Chevron/Texaco, based in San Ramon
and with their major refinery in Richmond, both part of the East Bay's
Contra Costa County. The company made a profit of over $14 billion in
2005. Their CEO, David O'Reilly, made 19% more in 2005 over 2004, with
total pay of almost $24 million, including his base salary,stock
option value, and "miscellaneous other pay" of some $3.75 million.

The next most profitable companies, according to the Contra Costa
Times survey, were Intel, Wells Fargo, and Cisco, with about $8.6,
7.6, and 5.6 billion each in profits. Add Oracle and HP, and you've
got all the companies that made $2 billion or more. Didn't we read not
too long ago that these companies were all in hard times? Hmm, maybe
it's more than just the oil companies that are cleaning up these
days...

So, do the really big pay packages match up with the big profits? No,
not necessarily. Yahoo's managers topped the pay list, even though it
missed making the $2 billion profitability mark. And they made a lot
less than that in 2004. Their new guy, a former co-CEO of Warner
Brothers, seems to have done a very impressive job of turning them
around, according to the bizness gurus.

Several CEOs make more than the Chevron CEO, Intel's CEO, Paul
Otellini, is down at #40 on the list, even though his company came in
second in profitability. (Poor guy only made $9,363,600 in 2005.) And
Wells Fargo's Richard Kovocevich was #10 with his package of just
under $22 million, even though his company's profit of over $7.6
billion was the third biggest profit of any Bay Area company. Not bad
at all, eh?

Now -- here's a nice stat for you: Thirty-three CEOs in the SF Bay
Area made $10 million or more in 2005. Wow!

What's really interesting, though, is to see a whole newspaper page,
with listings of 100 CEOs (all in small print), all of whom made over
$5 million in 2005. Then you turn the page and find there are 40 more
who all made over $2 million, and they're in the (relatively
backwater) East Bay area -- in places the likes of Oakland, Berkeley,
Hayward, and Walnut Creek, for goodness sakes!

It always helps to be the boss -- especially the BIG BOSS! Several of
these guys actually managed to keep their multi-million dollar pay
packages while losing $100 million or so for two or more years in a
row. Now that's management you have to admire, don't you think?

It's also interesting to see what kind of companies who are doing so
well in the Bay Area. There are internet companies, oil companies,
retail companies, special effects companies (like Pixar), computer
companies, banks, software, hardware, biotech, brokerage firms, food
processing, grocers, utilities, scientific instruments, real estate
and property management companies -- you name it, it's represented in
this amazing list of successful companies and their CEOs.

I certainly wouldn't want to try to find the average pay for these
guys (it might give a computer a headache), but because of the very
high numbers racked up like the Yahoo folks, median values are
probably more meaningful anyway. That's easy enough; just look for a
central value in each list. Let's say #51 on the 100 list and #26 on
the list of 50 in the East Bay alone.

These positions belong to Richard Justice, CEO of Cisco, with a pay
package of about $8.4 million, and Kenneth Klein, the CEO of Wind
River Systems in the East Bay, with total pay of about $2.9 million.
If these are considered representative, we're looking at CEO payrolls
of some $850 million for the top 100 Bay Area executives, and then
another $150 million for the additional East Bay top executives -- for
a super-cool $1 billion per year these guys pull down. And that's just
ONE of our major metropolitan areas -- by no means among the very
biggest, but certainly in the top ten. Maybe values of the services of
these CEOs is artificially inflated because of Silicon Valley, the
Web, movies, high property values and area wages in general. Perhaps
-- but still, to consider that this much wealth resides under the
control of 140 men and women is rather staggering -- and it gives us a
clue as to why the rest of the labor force may be increasingly
disgruntled with the 'system.' Just a thought -- I could be wrong --
and maybe it doesn't really matter. But... then again -- maybe it
DOES...

What do YOU think?

-- Rick Mitchell

--
PLEASE NOTE: Because I have begun to get spam on my Gmail account :-((
I will NOT be looking at messages sent directly to Gmail, so please DO
NOT USE the Gmail address. (If you see Gmail address on messages sent
to you, please disregard, as I may use to send.)

To send mail to me, please use one of my other email addresses instead
-- such as:

rickmi@earthlink.net
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Thanks and sorry for any inconvenience. :-))

The Disunited States of America (+ a frank comment by the Editor)

by Jim Sorrells, Ph.D.
May, 2006

Controversy over the attacks on 9/11 continues. Despite UNITED 93,
a film I found very compelling, there are those who think that crash
and whatever hit the Pentagon were both fabrications. Even though
there is no question that something hit the twin towers, a lot more
people suspect the government had a hand in the collapse of the towers
and neighboring WTC 7.

But those numbers pale in comparison to those who distrust the
reasons given for attacking Iraq. Was Colin Powell misled or
misleading is his presentation to the United Nations? Did the
administration honestly think there were WMDs posing a nuclear threat
to the region, or were we lied to in an attempt to get us to accept an
action we never would have accepted otherwise?

After all, this administration has always operated in secrecy and
doubt. Did polling officials in Florida and Ohio rig the results that
favored Bush over Gore and then Kerry? Was the Diebold Corporation,
which manufactured many of the voting machines, complicit? After all,
the president of Diebold "promised" the state of Ohio to Bush.

After election, the administration established a pattern of
secrecy. Documents that had been de-classified were re-classified.
Wiretaps were ordered and first legitimized with claims of warrants.
Then, even the pretense of warrants was dropped. Cheney, with close
ties to big oil, formed an energy task force, refusing to release the
identities of the participants. We do know that environmentalists,
conservationists, and alternative fuel folks did not need to apply. Is
it any wonder that the public feels bamboozled by the explanations for
soaring fuel costs?

Halliburton, still doling out deferred payment to Cheney, wins
no-bid contracts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and even when those
contracts are executed with shabby accountability, they are renewed.

Bush told us he is a "compassionate conservative." His compassion
apparently extends only to big business and the rich, the primary
beneficiaries of his tax cuts. The poor need not apply. He tried to
privatize Social Security in the name of rescuing it, like rescuing a
drowning man with a large, heavy rock. The Medicare Prescription Drug
program? Tailored to the needs of the pharmaceutical industry, and if
you can't figure it out, you must have Alzheimer's, for which you need
an expensive medication.

It seems like we've added a fourth branch of government, i.e., the
Great American Lobby, headquartered on K Street, de facto president
Jack Abramoff. The speaker of the House resigns in a flurry of charges
of corruption. A congressman is caught on tape accepting bribes, the
money is found in his freezer, and he has the audacity to complain
about the F.B.I.'s intrusion. The Democrats and Republicans alike
issue statements denouncing the F.B.I's intrusion. Is that chutzpah or
what?

Actually, that's small potatoes. We got our knickers in a knot over
the awarding of port security to Dubai Ports World, yet nobody even
noticed that Treasury Secretary John Snow, under whose aegis the deal
was awarded, is a former executive of CSX, a container shipping firm
with links to Dubai Ports World and the Carlysle Corporation, which
you learned about if you saw FAHRENHEIT 9/11. The revolving door of
cronyism between government and industry spins again.

One after another corporation is exposed as running a shell game.
The executives at Krispy Kreme were misleading their investors and
employees right out of the Enron playbook both of which went belly-up
after their executive officers reaped millions. Turns out the high and
noble institution, the University of California, has been handing out
bonus packages right and left, in blatant violation of its rules and
procedures, hoodwinking the Regents, and the President of the
University hardly seems ashamed. The lid is about to blow on Fannie
Mae, the largest facilitator of mortgage lending in the country. Turns
out the Army Corps of Engineers may have bungled the job in rebuilding
the levees and floodwalls of New Orleans, not just now but in the
past, but of course the Corps denies it. At least the President of the
University of California had the decency to admit his wrongdoing.
"Taking responsibility" has become rare and as ineffectual as taking
umbrage.

Or perhaps taking confession. Instead of taking responsibility for
its pedophilic priests and putting them out of the harm's way of
children, the RC Church simply rotated them from one parish to
another, all the while denying any wrong-doing, until victims began
collecting millions. Then something had to be done.

Before the threat of avian flu appeared to subside, our government
had purchased millions of doses of Tamiflu, manufactured by Roche from
a formula owned by Gilead. Who was the former chairman of Gilead
before he became Secretary of Defense? You got it. Is it any wonder
that bird flu is now being spoken of as a hoax?

Same with global warming. I happen to believe it is a reality, but
I'm waiting for the next conspiracy theory to allege that the
administration is doing it on purpose to facilitate drilling in
Alaska.

Last but not least, our sports and entertainment industries. Barry
Bonds is booed as he breaks Babe Ruth's record. Was it skill or
steroids? The last two contestants make it to the finals of "American
Idol." Was it votes or manipulation?

I was inspired to compose this essay by rumors circulating about
"American Idol." Did Reuben win over Clay Aiken because the producers
suspected Clay might be gay? Are the judges' comments a
not-very-subtle attempt to influence voters? Are the phone lines
rigged (like voting machines) to give votes cast for one contestant to
another contestant (a notion I would seriously consider if I found out
Diebold makes the equipment)?

If you add up all the above aspects of life in which trust is at a
minimum, corruption seemingly can't get any more rampant, and the
notion of "truth" is beginning to seem like a cruel joke, the mental
state of America is somewhere between utter cynicism and blatant
paranoia. The motto seems to be, or seems that it ought to be, "Trust
no one."

When I was growing up, i.e., until day before yesterday, it was
during and after WWII. We were "good guys," fighting for the "right"
causes, not just for self-interest (at least until Pearl Harbor). Just
about everybody did his or her part to support the war effort. The
notion that FDR had links to industries that might be profiting from
the war would have been unthinkable, and I don't recall that notion
ever being entertained.

Then it was perhaps Eisenhower's warnings about the
military-industrial complex that brought the sobering awareness that
something could begin to stink in the state of Denmark. The film, WHY
WE FIGHT, spells out that thesis. In America, we hold history in low
regard and scarcely remember our own. If it were otherwise, we would
"remember" many periods in our history when government and various
industries conspired against "the people."

The next glass of cold water, as I recall, came when Spiro Agnew
was exposed as a sleazy, two-bit crook, and I wondered how in the
world Nixon came to pick him. Watergate answered that question for me.

Kennedy was my hero, but I'll have to admit that my unmitigated
admiration took a blow when I learned what a womanizer he was and the
first "conspiracy" theory I can remember, that Marilyn Monroe had been
offed because she knew too much.

The second conspiracy theory I remember lives on, namely that Lee
Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were not isolated nut cases, acting alone,
that perhaps our president had been assassinated by our government.

And then there were the lies about Viet Nam. As Robert McNamara
relates in FOG OF WAR, Gen. Westmoreland once speculated that if we
hadn't "won" the war, he and McNamara would have been tried as war
criminals for crimes against humanity. And they all lied, Kennedy,
Johnson, and Nixon, asking us not to believe our eyes as we watched
the 6:00 news, asking us not to puke when the National Guard shot the
students at Kent State.

That's it, I think, the extent of lying, so prevalent that is has
become the expectation. Maybe not even lying, more the Art of the
Dodgeful Answer, "I did not have sex with that woman"…unless you count
fellatio as sex. Forget "the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
It's more like "the parts of the truth that make me look good."

"Integrity" is a quaint term that used to mean something in
American society, a term that Webster defines as "steadfast adherence
to a strict moral and ethical code." It's as though collectively, we
have decided to abandon the code of honesty, in our commerce, our
government and other higher institutions, even in our sports and
entertainment. Not just caveat emptor, buyer beware, but citizen
beware. That, my friends, to borrow terms from construction and real
estate, is dry rot of the infrastructure of our character. Our piers
and joists have been eaten away by the termites and beetles of greed
and self-interest, unabated by compassionate enlightenment. Any house
like that is bound to fall down, and there is no homeowners insurance
for such losses.

[I'm beginning to think that it is not some external calamity that we
have to fear but the all too obvious deterioration of our system from
within. Not good news, folks -- we're killing our selves from within,
or rather, we're being killed by the excessive greed and stupidity of
our own 'leaders' (of both government and industry) gone wild with
their own inflated egos and sense of infallibility. Not the worst of
news either -- we CAN throw the bums out, There is no way in hell they
can "fix" the elections if a solid majority of Americans decide the
party is over. Mr. Nixon found that out, and he was a good sight
smarter than the current bunch of bozos. Are we tired of this shit
yet? I believe we're getting there pretty damn quickly... ED.]

The problem with illegal immigration

by Jim Sorrells
May 22, 2006

The only thing "illegal" about "illegal immigrants" is that they
aren't documented. The only reason most of them don't have a card is
that they can't get one. The only reason they can't get one is that
we don't give out nearly enough for the people who want them.

Thus, one way to "get rid of" the illegal immigrants is to make
them legal by giving them cards. What would be the problem with that?
After all, they're already here. Will even more come? Maybe, until
word filters back that there aren't any more jobs.

I find it amusing that we are trying to force people to become
one geo-political entity who don't want to become one geo-political
entity, i.e., the factions of Iraq, while we keep trying to separate
two countries that are economically tied, i.e., the U.S. and Mexico.

I daresay that if all Latino immigrants who are here illegally
were suddenly to vanish (the movie, A DAY WITHOUT MEXICANS), the
following industries would virtually collapse, at least in some
areas: fast food, elder care, large sectors of agriculture,
housekeeping in private homes and in the hospitality industry, auto
maintenance, yard work, meat-packing, and construction, especially
home repair in New Orleans.

Ah yes, but don't illegal immigrants drive down wages? According
to most studies, the only wages that are driven down are for high
school dropouts, jobs that nobody else will take.

But don't immigrants drive up taxes through their use of schools
and public health services? According to a study by the National
Research Council, "The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and
Fiscal Effects of Immigration," each Hispanic immigrant household in
California received $5,000 more in federal, state, and local services
than they paid in taxes. On the other hand:

The Social Security Administration receives around $7 billion a
year in payroll taxes that can't be linked to valid names and thus
presumably paid by illegal immigrants. If this money were diverted to
states and local governments, it would pay about half the $5,000
difference between services and taxes.

Second, the NRC study also found that immigrants boost the GNP by
$10 billion per year. More workers means more output. This doesn't
count the self-employed immigrant entrepreneurs who own and operate
all kinds of businesses.

Third, the products of companies paying lower wages to workers
are presumably cheaper. Or to state the reverse, if the pool of lower
wage workers were to evaporate and higher wage workers hired, prices
would go up. Philip Martin, an economist at UC. Davis, says that if
the current influx of migrant workers were cut by 40%, the average
American family would end up spending about 2.5% more on fruit and vegetables.

Fourth, the cost of educating immigrant children is actually an
investment in the tomorrow's workforce. Those who stay will become
taxpayers, and the better educated they are, the better jobs they
will get, earning more money, paying more taxes.

The basis of the "even more will come" objection is the
presumption that those additional immigrants will also be illegal.
Instead of spending a ton of money building an absurd, objectionable
fence, the likes of which Israel is now tearing down, and squandering
a resource like the National Guard, so badly needed in the event of
emergencies, we need to put in place a mechanism by which any
non-felon who wishes to come here via Mexico can get a tamper-proof
ID card. He or she could be required to report at intervals to one of
a variety of offices to confirm housing and employment status.

The guidelines for handling those already here should be
flexible. We should encourage and facilitate permanent visas or
citizenship for those who have been here longest, who have stable
employment histories, who have purchased homes, who have children in
school, and who show no evidence of being anything but upstanding citizens.

We have been through this before, after all, with every tide of
immigrants from Europe and the Chinese, sometimes committing
atrocities before we came to our senses. California even went through
it with the "Oakies" amidst cries of alarm that everything was going
to hell in a hand basket. Can't we for once learn from history and
deal with this sensibly, not hysterically?

Jim Sorrells, su amigo en Guerneville

The tears of war

by Jim Wallis

My dad came to visit last week. He's 82 now but still does pretty well
- traveling on his own to see his two grandsons in Washington, D.C. It
was the typical yet wonderful grandpa week - going to see Luke's
second-grade class and Jack's new pre-school, watching both our Little
League practice and the big Saturday game, cheering on Luke's soccer
team, checking out the new Sojourners office (he's been to them all),
and eating some special Mexican meals.

Having my father watch from the stands as I coached Luke's baseball
team felt nostalgic and warm when I recalled how he used to be my
Little League baseball coach. I realized Luke wasn't the only one who
was glad to hear that he had done very well.

Tuesday was Luke's personal sharing day at school (all the kids have
one) and so he brought his grandpa to "share." When Luke told his
classmates that his grandpa had been in the Navy during World War II,
one kid asked who won the war. When they heard that we did, the class
started cheering. (And what was the score?) Of course, at this age,
they have almost no idea of what war really is.

Later in the week, I took the day off and went with my dad to the
World War II Memorial, now about two years old. It is the only major
national memorial or monument in Washington, D.C., that my father
hadn't seen. And since I hadn't yet visited it either, we were both
curious as to what the enormous project on the Mall, pushed hard by
actor Tom Hanks and former Senator Bob Dole, would be like.

We thought the memorial itself was nice (lovely fountain) but not
overly impressive. My dad liked seeing the names of all the Pacific
islands he remembered as the junior engineering officer on a
destroyer-minesweeper. His ship had been scheduled for the invasion of
Japan, and casualty rates were expected to be very high. Like many
others, my father believed that the atomic bomb might literally have
saved his life and made our family possible. His new bride, waiting at
home, might otherwise have become a young widow.

The World War II Memorial includes a comfortable stone bench in the
shade, where my dad and I talked for a long time about those war
years, his school days, and my parent's first months and years of
marriage - which were dramatically impacted by the war. Amazingly, he
was commissioned in the Navy, graduated from the University of
Michigan, and married all on the same day! The Navy was in a hurry to
get fresh officers into the last days of the Pacific conflict, which
ended only months after he was deployed. He became part of the mop-up
operation in that theater of war after the bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki caused Japan to surrender.

My father recalled the visit he made to Hiroshima, just weeks after
the world's first nuclear explosion had been detonated there. He was
part of a two-man team, surveying the impact of the bomb on major
structures such as factories. The devastation, he told me, was like
nothing he had ever seen or imagined. Just unbelievable. He described
how the nuclear explosion had sucked out all the air in the area, and
when it rushed back in everything was flattened - totally flattened,
even huge factories.

He admitted that he had not been at all sympathetic to the Japanese
after they had attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and especially after
they and their German allies had killed so many of his good friends.
Along with many of his fellow soldiers, he felt they deserved the
atomic bomb - though at the time, he said, few of them fully
understood what it was. But then he saw Hiroshima. As the two young
Americans were walking through the flattened rubble, they passed by a
small pile of bricks that had been fashioned into a kind of makeshift
shelter. Suddenly, a little girl appeared from behind a wall. My
father remembered her as about 5 years old, with old, dirty tattered
clothes falling off her body. As far as they could see, she was all
alone with no one to take care of her. As he talked about the child,
he seemed to remember her vividly, as if it were yesterday. And he
recalled the feelings that welled up inside him: She was just a little
child, none of this was her fault, and she had nothing to do with it.
They knew she would die soon, if only from the exposure to all that
radiation. My dad, an 82-year-old war veteran, began to cry as he
remembered a day more than 60 years ago.

"That's war," he said, "and that's why I hate it." He still believes
that we had to defend ourselves from a direct attack in World War II.
But why did they drop that bomb on civilian targets, he asked, cities
with no military significance? They could have dropped them in a
desert, he said, or a deserted island to make the point. My dad has
opposed every war since then, and is especially upset about the war in
Iraq. They just lie about it and it was totally unnecessary, he said,
as his tears turned to anger on a sunny day in Washington, D.C.

My dad is part of what former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw has named the
"greatest generation," and I know two little boys who, after a week's
visit, think he is the greatest grandpa. We all missed him after he
left for home and wish that we lived closer. Luke gave thanks for him
in his prayers before bed, and so did I. But my dad doesn't like the
direction his country has gone since his generation has retired. Now
he often shakes his head while he watches CNN most days. "How do they
get away with it?" he often asks me on the phone.

Sitting with him at the memorial, it was moving to see how this war
veteran has so turned against war and still feels the emotions that
senseless suffering brings up. Most of those who run our wars now are
not really veterans of any war, and have little to say about the
senseless suffering that now occurs every day. I wonder what would
happen to them if a 5-year-old girl came out from behind the rubble of
war to stop them in their tracks. But most of them never get close
enough to the rubble to see her.

Comments on "God's Politics" by Jim Wallis

Since when did believing in God and having moral values make you pro-war, pro-rich, and pro-Republican? And since when did promoting and pursuing a progressive social agenda with a concern for economic security, health care, and educational opportunity mean you had to put faith in God aside?

While the Right in America has hijacked the language of faith to prop up its political agenda -- an agenda not all people of faith support -- the Left hasn't done much better, largely ignoring faith and continually separating moral discourse and personal ethics from public policy. While the Right argues that God's way is their way, the Left pursues an unrealistic separation of religious values from morally grounded political leadership. The consequence is a false choice between ideological religion and soulless politics.

The effect of this dilemma was made clear in the 2004 presidential election. The Democrats' miscalculations have left them despairing and searching for a way forward. It has become clear that someone must challenge the Republicans' claim that they speak for God, or that they hold a monopoly on moral values in the nation's public life. Wallis argues that America's separation of church and state does not require banishing moral and religious values from the public square. In fact, the very survival of America's social fabric depends on such values and vision to shape our politics -- a dependence the nation's founders recognized.

God's Politics offers a clarion call to make both our religious communities and our government more accountable to key values of the prophetic religious tradition -- that is, make them pro-justice, pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-equality, pro-consistent ethic of life (beyond single issue voting), and pro-family (without making scapegoats of single mothers or gays and lesbians). Our biblical faith and religious traditions simply do not allow us as a nation to continue to ignore the poor and marginalized, deny racial justice, tolerate the ravages of war, or turn away from the human rights of those made in the image of God. These are the values of love and justice, reconciliation, and community that Jesus taught and that are at the core of what many of us believe, Christian or not. In the tradition of prophets such as Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and Desmond Tutu, Wallis inspires us to hold our political leaders and policies accountable by integrating our deepest moral convictions into our nation's public life.

[Thanks to David (Sky) Enroth for forwarding this review from publicity for Wallis's appearance, Seattle First Baptist Church, Seattle, WA]

--
"On three things the world stands: on justice,on truth, and on peace." -- Rabbi Simeon ben Gamliel

Help fight for Internet freedom at SavetheInternet.com

The House of Representatives will soon vote on whether or not to preserve Internet freedom—and our fight to protect Network Neutrality is gaining huge momentum.

The SavetheInternet.com Coalition now has 524 member organizations, 637,386 petition signatures to Congress, 3,251 blog links, and 5,634 MySpace friends. We will only win this fight if the public is mobilized, Congress is bombarded from all angles, and word spreads around the Internet like prairie fire.

A MoveOn.org petition can be seen and signed at http://civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/. You are also urged to call your elected representatives at http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1670 .

Here are some additional resources to provide information about the current threat to Internet freedom:

MoveOn's blogger resource page is full of facts and links to inform people about Net Neutrality: http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1771 

MoveOn member Mari Fetzer designed a FANTASTIC image with links to 5 things people can do today to preserve Internet freedom. The coding is at the bottom of: http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1769

Several fun videos are now on the SavetheInternet.com Coalition website, including a great Halo mimick on Net Neutrality: http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1770

Comedy site "Ask A Ninja" has a unique perspective on Net Neutrality: http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1768

Please share your ideas on how thousands of MoveOn blog owners and blog users can work together to maximize our effectiveness in the blogosphere. Your advice will be very valuable as we think about ways to empower MoveOn members to make waves in the blogosphere.

–Adam Green, Noah T. Winer, and the MoveOn.org Civic Action team
Thursday, May 11th, 2006

Key Links

MoveOn petition. (Please include - each signer will get future action items.)

Call Congress today.

Original MoveOn email describing the issue.

How gutting Net Neutrality affects regular people (Ipod users, Google users), and proof that telecom companies abuse their power.

Actress Alyssa Milano blogs on Internet freedom.

Our coalition MySpace profile – including a video explaining this issue (please include).

Coalition website (please include – mentioning our partners Gun Owners of America and Craig from Craigslist).

Coalition blog – good recent developments.

A key House committee already voted against Internet freedom. See if your representative is on this committee.

Find out where your representative stands.

Good Articles

"Gun Owners, Librarians Unite Against Bells," Telephony Online, April 24, 2006

"New Group Aims to ‘Save the Internet’" CNet News, April 24, 2006

"Average Joe And Saving The Internet," Webpronews.com, April 24, 2006  

"Net Losses," New Yorker, March 20, 2006

"Panel Vote Shows Rift Over 'Net Neutrality'" Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2006

"Save the Internet," Jeff Chester article on Alternet.org, April 27, 2006  

Click here for the MoveOn.org home page

A Spiritual Covenant with America: the center of a spiritual progressive politics

On Monday night, May 9, we heard Rabbi Michael Lerner speak at the Danville Congregational Church (UCC) in Danville, CA, on the following topic. He and other progressive spiritual leaders have developed a challenging vision of a new political focus which has great potential for changing the face of American politics -- countering and to some extent neutralizing the undue influence the so-called religious right has had on our national political scene during the past few years. Rabbi Lerner explains why he believes this happened and how we in the center and left of political thought can act to change it. I am convinced he has many valid points and that attention must be paid by the Democratic party and other political parties to the need to develop and articulate an understanding of what some have called "the vision thing." Although this is a deeply-rooted Biblical point of view ("Without a vision, the people perish," paraphrase of Proverbs 29:18), it is also a highly practical one, as most political analysts agree. This has widely been applied to the Democratic party in recent years, and Lerner says it applies also to a vast number of Americans who have lost faith in our system, "dropped out," and facilitated the ascendancy of the Republican party and right-wing political interests at all levels of government in the U.S. Read in this article some of his piercing analysis of how this situation occurred and his proposals of how to go about changing it effectively.
-- Rev. Rick Mitchell ("Revrickm"), Editor, PeacePolitical Digest and Interfaith News Digest.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner <community@tikkun.org>
Date: May 2, 2006 10:21 AM
Subject: A Spiritual Covenant with America: the center of a spiritual progressive politics

The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), A Project of the Tikkun Community

   Here is the summary version of our central document: A Spiritual Covenant with America. It's our alternative both to the Gingrich Contract with America and to the attempts by some political consultants to the Democrats to re-package the current liberal/progressive agenda without really rethinking it. Though it's a vulgar summary of a more sophisticated vision articulated in my The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, it will nevertheless be extremely useful if you want to have a document that could show some of the consequences of adopting  the perspective of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

When people ask you what exactly is a spiritual progressive poitics, show them this as a first step. And take this to the media, to local and national professional organizations, unions, churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams, civic organizations, colleges and universities, and to your local city councils and anyone asking for your political or financial support and ask them to publicly endorse this Spiritual Covenant. This is one way to start the discussion that might actually begin to shift public consciousness about what is to be valued in our lives. Please circulate it to every email list to which you have access, starting with your own friends and family.

Love and blessings,
Michael

Rabbi Michael Lerner,
National co-chair, The Network of Spiritual Progressives
  RabbiLerner@tikkun.org

*********************************************************************************************

A Spiritual Covenant with America
                   
(The Central Vision of the Network of Spiriutal Progressives to be presented to Congress and Media May 17-20 in Washington, D.C.—a summary of the fuller articulation in The Left Hand of God by Rabbi Michel Lerner)
 
Many liberals and progressives who affiliate with the Democrats are disillusioned with the lack of vision projected by their party, but continue to believe that they will make huge strides without a vision in the 2006 and 2008 elections because of the growing backlash against the foolishness of Republican policies.  They may be right, but unless those Democrats feel that they have a mandate for a new direction, they are likely to repeat the same errors Democrats made when they controlled the presidency and Congress in the early years of the Clinton Administration, promoting policies that appeared to many disillusioned Americans to be less of the dramatic change promised in the Clinton presidential campaign of 1992 than a continuation of the self-interest politics of the Reagan/Bush years and thus undermining the momentary flurry of hope that Clinton's election generated.
 
 At moments when Democrats are perceived as acting from the same "self-interest" perspective that motivates Republicans, many people who hunger for idealism and allowed their more hopeful side to "come out of the closet" quickly retreated into a deeper cynicism, They opt for more conservative politics and a narrower conception of their own self-interest that involves rejecting policies that might involve higher taxes. Democrats can only expect to have a mandate for fundamental change if they are willing to buck the "political realists" and articulate a policy vision that excites and inspires people to transcend their fears and connect to their most expansive hopes for the world that they really believe in. Democrats in power who continue the rhetoric of fear of the supposedly ever-present terrorist danger or who continue to believe that "we" need to see the economic advances of other countries as a threat to America, or that education must be based on fears that we will lose our competitive edge with China or other countries, are likely to reiinforce the very worldview that will lead to a return to power of the Republicans in iever more extreme forms—because when people feel that the times require fear and power over others, they get attracted to the political parties most experienced in projecting those kinds of dynamics (which is one reason we may see fear and domination of others placed in the national orbit again in the next few months before the next election).  

            The way to start to build a new kind of understanding in America  is by challenging the "old bottom line" that teaches people that their life's activities will be judged by how much they can advance their own material well-being power and prestige. Surrounded by an ethos of selfishness generated by the old bottom line, people increasingly treat each other as vehicles to satisfy their one's one personal needs. Instead of seeing other people as embodiments of the sacred, they are viewed instrumentally as "useful" or as "human resources" for the sake of advancing societal goals. Living in a society where people regularly absorb and hen act upon this "marketplace rationality" in which "looking out for number one" seems the only rational way to live, many people feel lonely, alienated and scared even in the midst of friendships and marriages—because they see themselves surrounded by so many people who only seem to care about them to the extent that they can "deliver something" or care about their needs.
 
            What we need, then, is a New Bottom Line, one which judges institutions, corporations, legislation, social practices, health care, our educational and legal systems, and our social policies by how much love and compassion, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity they inculcate within is, and by how much they nurture our capacity to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred, who can and to respond to the universe with gratitude, awe and wonder at the grandeur of all that is.
 
            It is that New Bottom Line that has led us in the Network of Spiritual Progressives to urge people to join us in Washington D.C. May 17-20 to present a Spiritual Covenant with America that will both provide an alternative Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" and  economistic visions of  American society that have been developed  by liberal and progressive think-tanks who are trying to help the Democrats out of their dogmatic slumbers. Imagine how different politics would look if progressives were to present themselves as fighting for a New Bottom Line and for this particular way of translating that into political terms. That is what this Spiritual Covenant with Americans is all about. We invite you to  join us in taking the idea of the New Bottom Line and the ways it plays out  in the Spiritual Covenant with Americans and making these ideas the center of a new progressive spiritual politics (more info at www.spiritualprogressives.org )
 
            Here is the Spiritual Covenant with America

1. We will create a society that promotes rather than undermines loving and caring relationships and families.  We will challenge the materialism and selfishness (often rooted in the dynamics of the competitive marketplace) that undermine loving relationships and family life. Every institution or social practice that encourages us to see others as instruments for our own advancement rather than as embodiments of the sacred must be reconceputalized and rebuilt so that it instead maximizes our capacities to be loving and generous and caring. We will challenge cynical attempts to reduce life to self-interest. And we will oppose the cheapening of sexuality that regularly occurs as marketers use sex to sell their products and seek to do so with teens and now pre-teens. Sure, we need full employment, child care, flex time, a coordinated assault on poverty,  and many other economic changes, so we support all these elements of the traditional liberal agenda—but our spiritual focus goes beyond the normal liberal list of demands to insist on a fundamental change in the values that our society promotes: our society must be safe for love rather than fostering the qualities in people that make love more difficult to sustain: cynicism, harshness, individualism, self-centeredness,  despair about ultimate meaning, insensitivity to the possibility of transformation, and fear.

          CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Family support always posed in terms that emphasize economic entitlements, but since everyone knows that family breakdown is not confined to those lacking economic supports, the liberal appeal is seen as just using the family issue for its pre-existing agenda rather than actually addressing the fear in people's lives about the breakdown of loving commitments and the resultant feelings of loneliness. We agree with the supports, but see them as necessary but not sufficient.

          CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Family support for them conservative ideology often means restricting the rights of gays and lesbians to marry (as though that had anything to do with why families break up), teaching women to be subordinate to men in family life (a strategy that requires women to give up their own natural intelligence and wisdom to "go along" with men, rather than to build partnership relationships  based on mutual respect which have a much stronger foundation and greater prospect of lasting), opposing abortion (but giving little support to the child one it is born) and providing religious communities in which families are embedded are central (a positive aspect of the conservative agenda which has to be emulated by creating progressive "communities of meaning" but without a right-wing ideology governing them.
 
 
2. We will take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for ethical behavior, reviving the sacred element in sexuality, shaping a purpose-driven life connected to our highest values, building an inner spiritual life, devoting time and energy to caring for each other as well as in self-development, affirming pleasure and humor and joyfulness and celebration of the grandeur of the universe and the mystery of being, and recognizing that government cannot replace our own efforts to build a spiritually grounded life. We will be compassionate toward each other, recognizing that each of us is unlikely to be the fullest embodiment of our own highest ideals.

     CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA-- Liberal politics rarely articulate any sense of personal responsibility, because they claim that these issues are "personal" and have no role in the public sphere. We agree with them in opposing legislation on these issues, but not in believing that they have no appropriate public place. A movement can foster an "ethos" as well as legislation, and that is exactly what we did do when we fostered the ethos of respect for women, gays and lesbians, and minority groups. Taking personal responsibility is not just a personal issue. It is an issue of creating a form of community-creation that encourages, supports and rewards people for so doing, and that is absent from the liberal discourse. of the liberal world.

     CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Conservatives talk about taking personal responsibility as their alternative to badly needed social programs whose funding they continually seek to slash (health, welfare, education, support for the poor and the homeless). They claim to be concerned about poverty, but then say that individuals should take responsibility for eliminating poverty (for example, urging people to take jobs that don't actually exist particularly given inadequate child care) or homelessness (but then they don't actually take homeless people into their homes each night to provide the 'personal responsibility' alternative to abandoning the homeless to hunger and the streets of our cities).. So when we talk about taking personal responsibility, we do so not to replace government and societal programs, but to address areas in our own personal lives where we could have a huge impact.

3.    We will build Social Responsibility into the normal operations of our Economic and Political Life. The Social Responsibility Amendment (SRA) to the U.S. Constitution that we propose requires corporations to get a new corporate charter once every ten years which would only be granted to those corporations which could prove to a jury of ordinary citizens that it had a satisfactory history of social responsibility. This is one step toward our larger goal of transforming the bottom line in our economy, government, and social institutions.
While seeking support and endorsement of the SRA, we will encourage public officials to establish a Social Responsibility clause onto every contract-awarding process, so that corporations competing for public funds must present a detailed social responsibility report and private citizens and local community groups and unions can challenge the accuracy of that report to the governmental body deciding on awarding of city, state and federal contracts of over $100,000.
 
To make this happen, we will also seek public funding of all state and national elections and instant runoff procedures for counting votes.

CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—They Liberals continually seek to legislate minor restrictions on corporate avarice and social irresponsibility, and usually fail to get those passed such laws adopted because of the tremendous power of corporations to influence provide financing for the legislators who must pass these bills. Meanwhile, corporations throw all their weight into opposing each little reform measure. We seek one big reform which that would end the need for countless smaller reforms. While the SRA may take several decades to pass, the struggle for it will concentrate attention on the systemic nature of the problem we face.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Conservatives typically oppose any attempts to put constraints on corporate social irresponsibility because they believe that the best good for all will be achieved if each corporation pursues its own self-interest unrestrained and then the profits it amasses will "trickle down" to the rest of the population.

4.    We will reshape our education system to teach the values of love, caring, generosity, intellectual curiosity, tolerance, gratitude, awe amd wonder at the universe,  democratic participation and environmental responsibility. We will emphasize education for these values without abandoning necessary reading and writing skills—and focus on learning respect, thanksgiving and awe for the wonders of the universe, and celebration of all the goodness that has passed on the cultural and scientific wisdom of the human race.

CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Liberals focus on getting better pay for teachers and more money for building schools with lower teacher-student ratios. But they'd be far more effective in getting support for these important demands if they gave more attention to demands about the moral and spiritual content of what is being taught.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Conservatives correctly criticize the values that are actually being taught in our schools (materialism, competitiveness) but then fail to note that these values reflect the values of the marketplace that conservatives champion. And they propose false solutions whose underlying intent is to dismantle the public school system or at least wildly under-fund it and thereby "prove" that everything "public" must be a failure and that the only good thing is the private sector.

 
5. We will seek a single payer national health care plan and also broaden the public's understanding of health care. Our physical health cannot be divorced from environmental, social, spiritual, and psychological realities—and the entire medical system has to be reshaped in light of that understanding, focus on prevention, encourage alternative forms of health practice along with traditional Western forms, and insist that because human beings have many levels of reality, health care must reflect that rather than seek to reduce the human to the merely material.

CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA-- Liberals seek the gradual addition of benefits for different sectors of the population but leave the whole system in the hands of the profiteers, thus guaranteeing that their proposed changes will be undermined by the insurance companies and drug companies who raise their costs to make huge profits and thus make these health care reforms unreasonably costly. The single payer plan does not increase but decreases the total amount spent on health care by the U.S.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA--Conservatives continually place private profit over public need when it comes to health care. They think of health care as something that needs to be earned rather than as a sacred obligation we have to care for each other.

6.    We will be stewards of the environment. We will champion voluntary simplicity and ethical consumption while seeking to change the global economy so that it is ordered in rational and sustainable ways. We will bring spiritual wisdom into daily life to change our addiction to endless consumption and challenge the media and advertising-driven belief that how many and how costly the things we own are the measure of our worth in the world.

CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Liberals fight for partial reforms which rarely take into account the systemic and global nature of the problem and rarely notes that for every reform they win, there are ten new areas in which environmental damage is intensifying. They have no global plan or willingness to imagine how to recast the global economy to make our planet environmentally sustainable. And they liberals avoid any serious discussion of, much less fostering, an ethos of voluntary simplicity.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVES- Conservatives cheerlead for policies that actually reduce the amount of land protected from corporate abuse. They put the interests of corporate profit above their responsibility to be stewards of the planet, and often deny the urgency of global warming and other environmental disasters.

7.    Foreign policy and homeland security transformation: We will build a safer world and a rational approach to immigration through a strategy of non-violence and  generosity that eliminates poverty both in the US and in every other country.   The well-being of Americans depends on the well being of every other person on the planet and the well-being of the planet itself. We will support a Global Marshall Plan to use 5% of the GDP of the advanced industrial countries societies—each year for the next twenty years) to end global poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and inadequate health care. This will do more for homeland security and military safety than sinking trillions of dollars into wars and strategies of world domination that can never work and are immoral. Ending poverty both at home and abroad is both an ethical and security priority.

 And We will challenge the globalization of selfishness promoted by Western corporations (and their clones in China, India and Japan) and promote spiritual values of solidarity, caring for others, and love as the most effective way to build a sustainable society and to achieve "homeland security." Our path to a world of peace must be a path of peace, social justice, sensitivity to cultural differences and to environmental needs,  and non-violence. We will maintain an army on our borders and carefully search every container that comes into the country, and redirect the trillions of dollars that will otherwise be spent on military to ending global poverty and creating adequate education and health care. So while we support the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the creation of an international Non-Violent Peacekeeping Force to prevent conflicts from escalating, we do so in the context of a coherent global policy that immediately implements the Global Marshall Plan (not by dumping money into the hands of corrupt governments, but through cooperation with non-governmental organizations committed to human rights, democracy, environmental sustainability, and enhancement and respect for native cultures and traditions).

We seek full rights for all immigrants who have made it to our shores. And we will solve the immigration issue in the only possible way—by making the countries from which immigrants are fleeing much more economically successful. Instead of imagining new methods of repressing of the desire that so many immigrants have to live a life freed of extremes of  from poverty and political oppression, we will support the Global Marshall Plan in ways that would build the economic infrastructure of the "underdeveloped" world, ensuring that its benefits flow to all people and not just to the economic elites of those countries. We seek a world in which open borders are the norm and there is no fear that the rich countries are being overrun by immigrants because their wellbeing has improved so much in their own countries.

                 CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Still stuck in the militarist assumptions of the past, liberal politicians compete with the conservatives about "who is most effective" in projecting American power and domination around the world. They are more concerned to prove that they are "tough" than to prove that they actually have policies that could conceivably address the issues that drive people into wars and terrorism. Similarly, their correct desire to avoid repression of immigrants does not link to a coherent answer to "what can be done to prevent future millions from risking their lives to get across our borders if we create incentives for them to take such risks?"

                           CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Though quick to demand testing of the effectiveness of liberal programs,  conservatives have never proved the effectiveness of their strategy of providing security through wars and the domination of other countries. Distorted by their own "arrogance of power," they can neither acknowledge that 5,000 years of war-making has not worked to bring peace and security but only, century after century, increased the numbers of people killed in wars. Nor can conservatives see that their wars have actually undermined the internal life of America and increased our propensity to rely on violence as a solution to otherwise frustrating problems. They call for more repression of countries that do not follow our rules, and the repression of immigrants, but seem unable to acknowledge that such programs do not work

8.    We will seek the separation of Church, State and Science. We will protect our society from fundamentalist attempts to impose a particular religion on everyone, but will not fall into a first-amendment fundamentalism which attempts to keep all spiritual values out of the public sphere. We will protect science from invasion by the state, religion or corporate priorities, but reject "scientism"-- the worldview that claims that everything capable of being known or worthy of our attention can be fully described in scientific terms.
 
 CONTRAST: THE LIBERAL AGENDA—Liberals mistakenly confuse the separation of Church and State with the separation of spiritual values from the state. They claim to be defending the neutrality of public space, but fail to realize that there is already a religion operating in the public space, the religion of the dollar, of materialism and selfishness, the religion whose highest belief is that all that is real or at least all that can be known is that which can be verified through sense datum or measured by the principle of exchange (which, for the public realm, usually means: money, the one thing most easily validated and measurable). Thus, liberal defense of the first amendment is based on the false assumption that we actually have a neutral public space and that it must be protected from all values.

CONTRAST: THE CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Conservatives  often seek to privilege Christian values in the public sphere and get lots of support from many Americans who know that when their children come home from school drunk with the disease of "making it" in the larger society (either through good grades to get the best career, or by physical prowess and active domination over others) and "making it in their peer group" (either by conforming to the peer group standards of the group or, increasingly for young girls, by responding to the sexual pressure championed by a growing sector of the media even for pre-teens,) these children are responding to a public sphere drenched in corrupt values which loving parents want to resist. Using this perfectly legitimate desire for alternative sets of values, the conservatives offer rush in with a repressive agenda that will do little to solve the social problems, and in addition will or seek to eliminate or dramatically weaken the actual functioning of the separation clause of the Bill of Rights.

Neither liberals nor conservatives understand how much "science" is driven in its choice of research topics by the requisites of the marketplace, so neither has seriously addressed how to protect science from the pressures of both the economic marketplace. And those same pressures exist, though in somewhat different form, in many religious communities which have become dependent on the support of the wealthy or those who have bought into the assumptions of the marketplace to keep their open. Too often this has resulted in a clergy more subordinate to the fund-raisers than to their own highest moral and spiritual values.

We seek to change all this.

This vision, needless to say, is "unrealistic" in the sense that it does not conform to the assumptions of politicians, and pundits in the mainstream mass media. For most Democratic Party leaders, that ends the discussion, because they've consistently been unwilling to risk any electoral loss for the sake of some higher good in which they believe. But that is precisely why so many Americans have come to distrust the Democrats—because if they won't fight hard for their own beliefs, how can they be counted on to fight for the best interests of American society when the going gets rough?

Liberals and progressives (including the leaders of the Democratic Party) need to learn that in order to win with their ideals, they have to be ready at times to lose with their ideals. Or to put it another way, anyone with a backbone worthy of respect doesn't reject ideas because they are unrealistic by contemporary standards, but only because they are inherently bad ideas.

         So, like the women's movement in its early years, or the civil right movement, or even the movement against the war in Iraq, we don't expect  Congress to embrace a new philosophy. But for those who are tired of the visionlessness of the Left, our attempt to develop a progressive spiritual politics may spur them to develop their own visions. This is when interesting conversations will reignite American politics.

         We are a consciousness-raising movement, and so our primary task like  the other major movements that have had a lasting impact on American society is to not compromise what we believe in for the sake of short-term political gain. We must instead advocate for our fullest vision and insist on why it makes more sense.
      

 So when we encourage people to meet with elected officials every year, it is only a small part of what we need to do to get our ideas into the public consciousness, and we are sure that you can devise many more imaginative steps to take.

We encourage people in our movement to take the following steps:

1.    To get the Spiritual Covenant endorsed by local and national professional organizations, unions, civic organizations, churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams, college and universities, individual legislators and by local City Councils and State Legislatures.  2. To create a Spiritual Caucus in every political party (including but not exclusively Democrats, Republicans, Greens) and seek to convince those parties to adopt the Spiritual Covenant not as another plank but as the shaping plank of their approach to the world.  3. To write op-eds and other means to communicate this vision and popularize it in their communities, workplaces, religious and cultural institutions, and professional organizations.  4. To organize public demonstrations, marches, plays, concerts, playful activities, confrontational activities, and any other legal means to get these ideas discussed.

The full version of the Spiritual Covenant and what it implies can be studied in The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right , chapters 9-12.  Please get and read The Left Hand of God and create a study group on it.
 
        The Network of Spiritual Progressives is holding its national conference May 17-20 in Washington, D.C. at which it will seek to present these ideas to the public, the media and the government.  It is not too late to register: www.spiritualprogressives.org   or 510 644 1200 (during working hours, Pacific Standard Time).
  
 
 
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine, author of ten books including most recently the national best-seller  The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco, California. RabbiLerner@tikkun.org. To help get this message in your local or national media, you may wish to approach them and ask them to cover the Spiritual Activism Conference in D.C. or to interview Rabbi Lerner (which can be arranged by calling one of his assistants at 510-528 6250 during work hours, Pacific Standard Time). You can write to the Network of Spiritual Progressives: NSP@tikkun.org or  The Network of Spiritual Progessives, 2342 Shattuck Ave, Suite 1200, Berkeley, California 94704.  www.spiritualprogressives.org