Space in Our Home
Commentary
Bob Hulteen and Tom Witt 7-01-2012
CHOOSING TO PAY more for a gallon of gas than the price at the pump sounds a bit crazy—but that is exactly what a couple of dozen members of the Community of St. Martin, a worshipping group of Lutherans, Catholics, Mennonites, and others in Minneapolis, Minnesota, have covenanted for more than a year. It’s one way they’re seeking to show commitment to environmental stewardship.
After committing to a voluntary “tax” rate (from $1 to $3 per gallon, depending on income), each community member keeps track of gas receipts. The Community of St. Martin (CSM) collectively decides in advance how their taxes will be spent each quarter. Every three months, the group gathers to write checks and conduct a lively discussion about changes in their gasoline usage habits. CSM borrowed the idea from a group in Goshen, Indiana, that started a similar campaign 10 years ago.
Why intentionally pay more for gas than it costs? According to CSM members, this is precisely the point: The price of gas in the U.S. doesn’t reflect the actual costs that U.S. society and the global community incur as a result of the country’s dependence on oil. Those costs include fossil fuel’s contributions to air pollution and global warming. Also hidden at the pump are the costs of U.S. strategies to maintain an inexpensive supply of oil, often through political or military interventions in oil-producing regions—not to mention $4 billion a year in tax credits and subsidies to Big Oil.
Sara Nelson-Pallmeyer, the group’s treasurer, says that “everyone is paying a different amount—from $10 to $385 per month. The fun part is that so far we’ve given more than $5,000 to organizations working on alternative transportation solutions and advocating for political change around climate-change issues.” She added that, ironically, “The real heroes of the group are the ones paying the least.”
Marie Dennis 7-01-2012
IN APRIL, THE World Bank’s executive directors selected Dr. Jim Yong Kim to serve as its president. Kim, whose five-year term begins in July, will be the first World Bank president whose primary experience is in community-level development. Most of his predecessors were bankers or politicians.
As a co-founder of Partners in Health, an international nonprofit dedicated to “a preferential option for the poor in health care,” and as a former director of the HIV/AIDS department of the World Health Organization, Kim has done groundbreaking work in delivering essential medicines for the treatment of AIDS to impoverished countries. He has a proven capacity for designing effective solutions to real problems. His election may well usher in a new culture at the World Bank—a culture that focuses not on economic growth that doesn’t trickle down, but on poverty reduction that is real.
For almost 70 years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been major players in the global economy; the World Bank has 188 member countries, all of which must first be admitted to the IMF. In their many years of doing business, these institutions have reinvented themselves more than once. The World Bank’s focus has evolved from rebuilding Europe and Japan following World War II to supporting large-scale engineering projects in so-called “developing” countries; from emphasizing nutrition, population, and poverty in the 1970s to “adjusting” the economic policies of countries in the global South, beginning in the early 1980s.
As the negative impact of IMF policies and World Bank projects on impoverished people and their communities became increasingly evident, people of faith and grassroots groups around the world, particularly in the global South, began demanding change. They organized and advocated for greater transparency, accountability, and participation, insisting that failed strategies promoted and financed by the IMF and World Bank were related to hunger and other poverty-related problems, a growing rich-poor gap in almost every country, and environmental destruction.
Joan Chittister 7-01-2012
AFTER THE VATICAN’S “hostile takeover” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in April, I was particularly struck by one joke I encountered: “Go Catholic ... and leave the thinking to us.”
I laughed—but not much. That one, it seems, is too close to the truth these days.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), a major educational center for superiors of Catholic women’s religious orders in the U.S., was launched in 1956 at the urging of the Vatican. For years, it has been a venue where officers of every congregation of women religious are invited to meet, study, and consider together the role and place of women religious in the resolution of the issues of the time. Now the LCWR has been put under the control of three bishops: Peter Sartain of Seattle; Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio; and Thomas John Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois.
The officers and body of the LCWR—all superiors, prioresses, or other officials of major, longstanding institutions—are no longer authorized to plan its programs, engage its speakers, or create and implement its structures. Instead, Sartain, Blair, and Paprocki have been appointed to oversee the group: to approve its programs, create its constitutions, determine its operational procedures, and define the content of its conferences. As in, “Leave the thinking to us.”
As in, women can’t do it themselves. Or, women aren’t moral agents. Or, women don’t know what they’re doing. Or, the girls need to be controlled. Or, father knows best.
Vincent Miller 6-01-2012
ARE CORPORATIONS “persons”? Legally, they are. They have the right to own property, to enter into contracts, to sue for defamation. Thanks to Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, they also have “free speech” rights. Voting is the only right corporations lack—and the tsunami of political money unleashed by that Supreme Court decision makes that limit irrelevant.
“Person” is an important word for Christianity. We speak of the three divine persons of the Trinity, and of the human person made in the image of God. What are we to make of “corporate personhood?” It’s tempting to invoke idolatry and the golden calf of Exodus. However, corporate persons are akin more to the “golem” of Jewish folklore—a human creation that fulfills our immediate goals, but brings about unforeseen destructive consequences.
Mitt Romney’s campaign gaffe “Corporations are people, my friend” points to the problem. He wasn’t arguing that corporations are literal people, but that they are made up of people working together. But what matters is the nature of these shared projects: The corporation insulates its anonymous stockholders from liability and works solely to maximize the value of their investments.
Indeed, the “corporate person” is the perfect homo economicus. A human owner of a firm, no matter how hard-eyed, will still have moral qualms and live in a community that judges his or her character. In contrast, the corporate person has no interior life. These abstract “persons” are served by trustees with the responsibility to do everything legally possible to maximize profits. They may regret abandoning devoted workers in order to seek cheap labor, but if they refuse, they fail in their fiduciary duty to the corporate person’s one-dimensional interests.
David Cortright 6-01-2012
CALLS FOR THE use of military force against Iran are dangerously misguided. Israeli bombing strikes are not capable of destroying Iran’s deeply buried and dispersed nuclear program, most experts agree. Attacking Iran would prompt a violent reaction that could plunge the United States into another war and unleash a regional conflagration. According to U.S. intelligence estimates, Iran has not yet decided to build a nuclear bomb. If attacked, Iran would almost certainly resolve to proceed.
Consider the lessons of history: Israel’s bombing of a nuclear reactor near Baghdad in 1981, far from ending Iraq’s nuclear program, prompted Saddam Hussein to accelerate that program and begin manufacturing weapons-grade uranium. When U.N. inspectors entered the country 10 years later, they discovered that Iraq was only a year or so from having the bomb. The inspectors dismantled Iraq’s nuclear program, succeeding where bombing had failed.
Sanctions and diplomacy offer a far less risky and more effective strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. To be successful, however, sanctions must be combined with incentives as part of a diplomatic strategy designed to achieve a negotiated settlement.
The Obama administration has convinced the U.N. Security Council and countries in Europe and beyond to join in a rigorous set of sanctions that have cut off financial transactions with Iran’s major banks and curtailed purchases of Iranian oil. As a result, inflation is rising, the Iranian rial has lost half its value in the past year, and economic hardships are mounting.
Conrado Olivera and Jed Koball 6-01-2012
THE ANONYMOUS DEATH threats phoned to Archbishop Pedro Barreto and others in March told them to stop speaking out about the foreign-owned metals smelting plant in La Oroya, Peru.
Barreto, a Catholic archbishop of the Andean region that includes La Oroya, has been a leading advocate for the health of the 35,000-person town, which the plant has made one of the world’s most contaminated places: 99 percent of children there have dangerous levels of lead in their blood.
However, in an unconscionable move made possible by the 2009 U.S.-Peru trade agreement, it is the polluter who claims to be the victim. The massive New York-based holding company Renco Group Inc., whose subsidiary Doe Run Peru owns the smelter, last year filed an $800 million trade-tribunal lawsuit against the Peruvian government, claiming it violated the company’s rights by enforcing environmental regulations in La Oroya.
It’s one of a growing wave of such arbitrations being filed all over the world by extractive-industry foreign investors. In a similar case, the transnational corporation Pacific Rim has filed a $70 million case against El Salvador, after local communities and activists—four of whom have been murdered—opposed gold mining that could contaminate one of the country’s largest rivers.
The suits circumvent nations’ environmental laws by exploiting so-called “investors’ rights” chapters of trade agreements; such provisions are common in bilateral trade agreements, such as the U.S.-Peru pact, and regional agreements such as NAFTA.
Robert Brenneman 5-01-2012
IN LATE FEBRUARY, Guatemala’s foreign minister, megachurch-pastor-turned-politician Harold Caballeros, announced that he had formally raised the topic of drug legalization with his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That same month, Guatemalan Vice President Roxana Baldetti started a Central American whirlwind tour to raise the issue of legalization with heads of state from El Salvador to Panama.
Panamanian President Martinelli, the leftist administration of Mauricio Funes in El Salvador, Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla, and Honduran President Porfirio Lobo have agreed to meet to discuss the topic, though Baldetti cautioned that results “will not come overnight.” Also joining the dialogue is Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, the formerly Marxist president whose political resurrection coincided with a conversion to socially conservative Christian faith. Ortega professed to “fully share the concern” of the Guatemalan government. Caballeros’ conversation with Secretary Clinton went nowhere, of course; the Obama administration is not about to act on such a hot-button issue, especially in the midst of an election year.
But the move was gutsy for a Guatemalan administration that was only in its second month of power. So far, most Latin American presidents have broached the topic of legalization only after leaving office. Former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and Vicente Fox of Mexico, both pro-business allies of the U.S. while in power, have been outspoken proponents of legalization in recent years and were members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, whose 2011 report urged “experimentation ... with models of legal regulation of drugs.” The emergence of such key proponents has likely opened up new political space to discuss what had been largely off-limits in formal U.S.-Latin America diplomacy talks.
Phil Blackwell 5-01-2012
PEOPLE GAMBLE—always have, and always will. But when the state decides to encourage this human tendency and exploit it for its own profit, then we definitely have a moral problem.
In December, the U.S. Justice Department ruled that it is permissible for states to sell lottery tickets online, making it easier for state governments to bilk their citizens. Illinois internet lottery sales were slated to begin in late March. Although the sales are limited to state residents, the greater convenience of internet buying will likely cause more people to try the lottery.
In contrast to a “sin tax” on alcohol and cigarettes, in the case of the lottery the state becomes a pusher of gambling. The government, rather than serving and protecting its people, is “the house,” committed to creating more losers to make more money.
When we follow the advertising money, we discover that the lottery has been sold primarily to the poor and those on fixed incomes: The billboards are in the inner city, not the upscale suburbs. The lottery is promoted in such places with the deceitful promise that a buyer has a good chance to win security for a lifetime.
The Illinois Lottery was started in 1974 and, since 1985, its profits have gone by law to fund public education. In a classic example of “bait and switch,” however, legislators put the lottery money into school funding—but redirected the former funds to other parts of the state budget. Public education remains a major concern in Illinois, even as the lottery has added gimmick after gimmick over the years. Today the state legislature budgets only 75 percent of what is, according to an advisory committee, the minimum acceptable spending per student; it has almost a billion dollars in unmet obligations to the schools.
Yvonne Yen Liu 5-01-2012
IN THE U.S. food supply chain, 20 million workers labor in hazardous conditions for low wages. Uylonda Dickerson was one of them. Dickerson, a 39-year-old single African-American mother in Will County, Illinois, would show up every morning, hoping for work, at one of the many warehouses that litter the landscape of her area southwest of Chicago.
The Chicago region, once a proud steel and manufacturing hub, is now a major portal for food and other commodities produced cheaply overseas, transported by rail from West Coast ports, and slated for destinations in the Midwest or on the East Coast. Ironically, the workers—more than 80 percent of whom are African American or Latino—who were displaced from good, union jobs when factories closed are now employed in bad, temporary jobs, moving goods made in China.
The warehousing and storage industry, which feeds big-box retailers such as Walmart, relies on a pool of temporary laborers. This exempts employers from paying living wages or providing basic benefits and workers’ compensation; it also short-circuits worker attempts to organize into a union. Their costs of living are then displaced onto society. One in four warehouse workers relied on public assistance to survive, according to Warehouse Workers for Justice’s report “Bad Jobs in Goods Movement.”
On days when there was work, Dickerson was not paid an hourly rate, but by how many trailers she unloaded. She was sexually harassed by male colleagues and harangued by her supervisors for taking bathroom breaks. The job took a physical toll: “My body still is not the same,” she told a Huffington Post reporter. “I still have aches and I still have pains. I have migraines because of the stress I went through.”
Melissa Rogers 4-01-2012
The Supreme Court decision on the ministerial exception deserves a "hosanna" — and prayerful consideration.
Dianna Ortiz 4-01-2012
The U.S. government continues to claim the authority to detain and kill without trial.
Michelle Alexander 3-01-2012
The fight against mass incarceration is joined by an emerging faith-based movement.