Umbrella

INTRODUCTION: In my words to the children earlier, I told how the development of the board game Monopoly came out of a concern to educate the public to how land and property debt function. That was briefly mentioned by one of my professors at Oxford University this summer, who was both the bishop of Worcester, as well as Bishop to Her Majesty’s Prisons. Were I to be very formal, he would be addressed as: “The Right Reverend Dr. Peter Selby, by Divine Permission, Lord Bishop of Worcester.” He is also the chair of the major pension fund of the priests of the Church of England, which has between four and five billion pounds in assets, which is about $10 billion dollars. Think though of someone with a very caring demeanor and a passion for ministry, with a scraggly beard and thinning hair, a growing stomach, wearing sandals and shorts, and absolutely no pretensions, sitting in a circle with 18 postdoctoral students.

Here is a central thesis of Bishop Selby’s class on “The Blank Cheque: Money and the Soul of the Global Economy.” He said, “Democracy only works when voters are persuaded that their interests lie with the rich.” Let me repeat that: “Democracy only works when voters are persuaded that their interests lie with the rich.” Do you believe that?

For example, have you been watching what is going on in Mexico since their presidential elections July 2^nd? In contrast to America in 2000, a significant segment of the population has refused to accept the election of the conservative candidate? They even kept the current President, the very wealthy, Vicente Fox, from making a final speech to the Parliament this past week. Was that an example of where the electorate was not persuaded that their interests lay with the rich?

Would it surprise you to learn that the Democratic candidate for president in 2004, John Kerry, is also the richest man in the U.S. Senate, even though it has almost 50 other millionaires? That his vice-presidential candidate, who was also a senator, John Edwards, has close to $60 million net worth? Would you believe that President George W. Bush has more than $20 million and Vice-President Dick Cheney close to $100 million?

Does that in anyway substantiate that democracy is dependent upon our being persuaded that our interests lie with those kinds of people, the rich? Is that true? And how would we know if it were not true?

Why don’t we check it out in Lee County? For example, voting is the quintessential expression of democracy: We have a primary election coming up this Tuesday. Is that statement true about Lee County? Is “voters supporting the rich” what this election is about? If so, have the voters been convinced that their interests lie with the rich? Or do most sense that they aren’t and don’t bother to vote?

In an excellent article this past week in the News-Press,[2] Erin Gillespie reported that, “Although the median house-hold income increased more than $5,000 last year, more Lee County families continued to live in poverty than in 2000.” Interpretation: There are more poor than ever right here in River City. And “the number of unemployed people almost doubled in Lee County from 2000 to 2005.” Interpretation: Twice as many people are without jobs!

What it also says is that whomever we voted for in 2000 or 2004, it made things worse for the poor and for those without jobs.

Now if we think those data are referring to a bunch of people “out there,” or “over there,” or somewhere other than “where we are,” there was a photograph accompanying the article of the director of the Senior Friendship Centers, who in the preceding three days had delivered 10,000 free meals to needy seniors in Lee and Charlotte counties – that’s 10,000 meals in three days. The cut line under the picture said that “social service agencies are having a harder time meeting the demand.”

I wonder whom those seniors are voting for…which rich candidate…or which person representing the rich? And if the ones they are voting for are not rich and not representing the rich, will they get elected?

After a conversation with Roy Kennix Friday about my “Civic Engagement” class at FGCU, I spoke yesterday with Sharon Harrington the supervisor of Lee County elections. You know what she confirmed: The poorest segment of Lee County is in Dunbar. Guess what: They also have the worst voting record.

There are a lot of ways to interpret that fact, but one is, that the poor people of Dunbar learned a long time ago that voting was about the interests of the rich – except at election time when suddenly the vote of the poor is crucial, and convincing the poor that their interests lie with those in power.

Do they know something we don’t? I went just this week to the Lee County Economic Development Council’s web page. It states that this area has a “balanced economic environment that supports growth while respecting natural beauty and open spaces.”

When I saw that, I thought to myself, name one person in the world who has lived in Lee County longer than since yesterday who would say with a straight face that Lee County “supports growth while respecting natural beauty and open spaces,” unless of course the open spaces refer to parking lots.

In fact, there are many who contend that it was the rich Mr. Ben Hill Griffin – the father of U.S. Senate candidate Kathryn Harris – who successfully and wrongfully maneuvered the building of Florida Gulf Coast University on an inferior site he had purchased, which was in a hugely sensitive wetlands area. The result has contributed to urban sprawl out the gazoo in Southeast Lee County and immensely sped up damage to our environment.

Councilman Warren Wright in a guest column says in yesterday’s News-Press that developers are now frothing at the mouth to roar into our last – not one of many, but “our last”! – Density Reduction/Groundwater Resource (DRGR). It’s where much of our essential potable water aquifers are located. In other words, it’s where we get our useable water. And one of the commissioners most likely to be reelected was given $38,000 at a party thrown by these same developers wanting in on the development of this DR/GR, so Warren wrote.

But if Southwest Florida is one of the significant growth areas of Florida…and if Florida is one of the most economically attractive states in the nation, then what is wrong with this picture? How can it be that the number of citizens in poverty is up, and the number of the unemployed doubled in the last five years, if everything is so wonderful in Paradise?

The bishop says that, “Democracy only works when voters are persuaded that their interests lie with the rich.”

Many years ago in Oklahoma, our U.S. Senator had been chair of the national Democratic Party and was now running for President. I was acting as his spokesperson with the press. While we were driving from one event to another, I mentioned a concern about some investments I had in relation to what was happening in Washington. Quite clearly, I was not a minister then. He said, “Wayne, if you have anything, don’t worry. Half of the U.S. Senate is composed of millionaires. They take care of their own. It’s the poor people who are in trouble.” In 26 of the last 28 months – that’s 2 and ¼ years – average hourly wages failed to outpace inflation, while the rich had their taxes lowered.

Now let’s shift the focus to one other problem of the poor: According to Bishop Selby, something terrible happened to our money in the 70’s. It started when the oil-producing nations of the world – OPEC as we called them, and located mostly in the Middle East – decided that they wanted a bigger share of the revenues from their production. To do that, they raised prices. (As you probably know, America is the only nation in the world where the government does not own the minerals under the ground. In the rest of the world, minerals, including oil, are government property.)

From that moment forward, these oil rich nations – at least their rulers – were awash with money. Due to inflation, money, especially large sums, can’t sit. It has to be used. Initially, that meant putting it in to international development funds like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and lending huge sums to poor developing nations, third world nations.

But the loans came with strings attached. Many of these countries had a strong agrarian base. They were required to open their markets to American and Western agricultural, which decimated their farmers, resulting in huge numbers of their populations going in to the cities, and since they had no money and no job, most wound up in the slums of the cities. Governments were forced to drop universal health care. Socialist practices had to be eliminated and replaced by market driven economies.

And when the payments became due, and they were unable to pay, one alternative was to turn to drugs. Nations whom we’ve lent millions and billions to around the world are rife with drug dealing economies, for which drug addicted America and to a lesser degree Europe, is the major market. Narcotics and the system that it births destroys infrastructure and makes it impossible to govern effectively, which is story over many nations of Latin America.

But that’s about nations. How did all of this impact us? Remember all that money we talked about the oil-producing nations needing to put to work. Guess how they did that? What had been an access available only to the affluent became a resource available for everyone: plastic credit cards. MasterCard and Bank of America began to produce credit cards that almost anyone could qualify for. Literally million of people went into credit card debt. Incredibly, those lending institutions, especially banks, began to compete for the debts of those with other bankcards, offering special incentives if we would only transfer to their card. So they not only enticed us into debt, but they also enticed us to transfer our debt, which meant we could now go deeper and deeper into debt with cards whose debt we had transferred.

But we had an out: If some of us succumbed to the prospect of easy money on a credit card, and we did it so much that it got out of control, there was always bankruptcy. But the moneylenders decided that wasn’t what they wanted and during this current administration they succeeded in getting a bill passed making it very, very difficult to file for bankruptcy. Notice: The regulations are not on the credit card companies who have flooded the market with easy credit, but on the susceptible recipient of easy money promised in letter after letter.

So what does faith have to say about this and our living on Labor Day Sunday 2006?

A few years back, Robert E. Lane wrote a book entitled, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. Dr. Lane is a retired political scientist from Yale. He writes about the rise in liberal, prosperous democracies like ours of discontent and even clinical depression. He says that one of the reasons for it is "a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships and of solidarity in family life."

In addition to his book, he gave an interview to The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he said, “We're so busy striving for income that there isn't time for friendship. You can track visiting patterns for families over the past 25 years: Visiting has declined dramatically in the United States. The divorce rate also goes up when people become richer, and partly it's because their very effort to become richer is a strain on the family. In general, materialists are unhappy people.”

Faith communities like ours have a different understanding of the world. It’s a “gift economy” in contrast to a “money economy.” In a “money economy,” giving of one's time and self makes little sense. To do so would mean we were giving up something of value. It would be a loss, a depletion. But in a faith perspective -- a gift economy -- one is enhanced, not diminished, through the giving of time and self. In giving, we create more rather than use something up.

I can’t tell you how many people have described how grateful and how important it was to hear from people of this congregation, who called during a time of need in their lives. Most recently, it was Maggie Mullins on Friday after her cancer surgery last week. We gave, and she received…but really, we were the recipients of the joy of giving.

The late Malcolm Forbes, editor of Forbes Magazine, said this: "Anybody who thinks money is everything has never been sick, or is sick." Have a joyful Labor Day holiday. Amen and blessed be.

[1] Given September 03, 2006 (Labor Day Sunday) at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting in the Foulds Theater at the Alliance for the Arts, 10091 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.

[2] The News-Press, pp. B1f, August 30, 2006.