Quotes from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Brilliant thoughts from 

a Prophet for Our and All Times

Quotes from 

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. ”

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

“The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows”

“He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.”

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

“Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

“Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”

“Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude.”

“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”

“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

 “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”

“No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

“The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.”

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”

“At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.”

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.”

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

“Mankind must put and end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”

“By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists … Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”

“Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.”

“The God whom we worship is not a weak and incompetent God. He is able to beat back gigantic waves of opposition and to bring low prodigious mountains of evil. The ringing testimony of the Christian faith is that God is able.”

“The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’

Why are People Poor?  No Living Wage. 

“Can I challenge your homily?”

“Sure,” I replied.

She wasn’t disrespectful, but obviously not happy with what I had preached at Mass.  Masks are required, and I had had to ask her to use her American flag kerchief to protect others as she sat in a front pew.  I thought that might be the source of her dissatisfaction, but that wasn’t it.

“First, Teddy Roosevelt had no right to create National Parks and forests.  In the beginning, we were 50 sovereign states.  Read the Constitution.”

I had praised the foresight of Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot in setting aside millions of acres for parks and forests.  I noted and praised their willingness to stand up to the robber barons of their day. 

“We are the United States,” I carefully replied.  “We fought a war in the 1860s over these issues.  We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

I had been preaching on the parables of the merchant who finds a treasure in a field and goes and buys it, and of a merchant seeking a pearl of great price.  Since the parables were about business people, I quoted Pope Francis: “Business is a vocation, and a noble vocation, provided that those engaged in it see themselves challenged by a greater meaning in life; this will enable them truly to serve the common good by striving to increase the goods of this world and to make them more accessible to all” (Joy of the Gospel, #203).

Gospel parables are to be understood on personal and societal levels.  Parables are striking stories with surprise endings that tell us about the Reign of God, how things will be when God and all of us are in right relationship, when “Justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream” (Amos 5:24).  The Reign of God is a society of Peace and Prosperity, Joy and Justice, Freedom and Faith, Hope and Healing, Life and Love.

My challenger doesn’t see things that way.  Her vision of rugged individualism and dog-eat-dog crony capitalism is, in her mind, blessed by God and is not to be contradicted by some Jesuit priest.

But her vision is morally suspect.  If minimum wage had kept up with what it was worth when I was working as an orderly in a nursing home in 1975, it would be somewhere around $13.50 to $15.00.  It’s only $7.25 today.  I had also pointed out that we pay minimum wage (or less) to those who care for the most vulnerable among us, our elderly and our children.  Day care workers and those who serve in nursing homes earn so little.  I ask, “Why?”  And I get challenged.

“I run a business in Philadelphia.  I could hire more people if I didn’t have to pay minimum wage.”

I just looked at her.  I could not believe that after hearing me preach on a central idea of Catholic Social Teaching, that a living wage is a wage that can support a family, she is seriously telling me it is moral to pay less than $7.25 an hour.

Some rich Catholics often vociferously pontificate in favor of ending abortion, but have little time for Church teachings on the death penalty or social justice.  And for them a living wage is anathema, ridiculous, “socialist” insanity.  

Some wealthy people are willing to give a small portion of their wealth to help the poor, but when I ask why people are poor, and why wages cannot support a family, I’m a bad priest, a dreaded liberation theologian, and the greatest of all sinners, a “communist.”

But communism is simply a social system in which everyone gives according to their abilities and takes according to their needs.  Every normal American family is a communist society.  We don’t charge two-year-olds for their food, or make teens pay for their cell phones.

Crony capitalism and tax cuts, set up to benefit the top 1 percent, have hurt the vast majority of our fellow citizens.  Since 1980, income for the very rich has more than doubled; the bottom 90 percent’s share has barely risen.  In the 1960’s CEO’s made 20 times a worker; by 2019, they were taking 300 times more than their employees (Reich, 2020, p.15).

As an example, I noted Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, got $31 million in compensation in 2018 (Reich, 2020, p.15).  If Dimon worked 10 hours a day, 300 days that year, he was making $10,333 an hour.  Overall, he’s worth $1.6 billion.

“The market should set wages,” she told me.  (Hmmm… Is there no one who would apply to be CEO at JPMorgan for say $15.5 million a year?)

Jesus would say the market was made by and for human persons.  The market should be made for us.  We are not made for the market.

Even Mr. Dimon knows this.  In his 2018 letter to shareholders he stated, “middle class incomes have been stagnant for years.  Income inequality has gotten worse… More than 28 million Americans don’t have health insurance at all.  And, surprisingly, 25% of those eligible for various types of federal assistance programs don’t get any help. … Simply put the social needs of far too many of our citizens are not being met” (Reich, 2020, pp. 23-24).

The fact that so many share so little in our wealth should challenge us all.

Jesuit Father Richard G. Malloy, S.J., Ph.D., is the director of Mission Integration at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, Baltimore, and author of Being on Fire and A Faith That Frees, both from Orbis Books.

References

Reich, Robert (2020) The System: Who Rigged it. How We Fix It (New York, Knopf).

Will There Be Racists in Heaven?

Will There Be Racists in Heaven?   

Richard G. Malloy, S.J., Ph.D.

Director of Mission and Ministry Cristo Rey Jesuit Hgh School, Baltimore MD

“If you hate black people now, and you get to heaven and meet black people there, you’re not going to want to stay.  And that will be your hell.” 

Whenever I’ve preached on racism, it almost always gets blowback. 

“Father, there’s no place for politics in the pulpit.”

“You’re condemning all white people.”

And what someone said and was then reported to me, “He’s just another N***** lover.”

I was born three months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.  In September of 1955, segregation was legal, lethal and largely unquestioned.  If you opposed racist policies and overt racists, you would not just get mocked on twitter; you would be murdered.  Yes, that’s exactly what happened to three young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964.  Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner were shot, and then buried in an earthen dam.

Yes, there has been progress.  Yes, two thirds of African Americans are firmly ensconced in the middle class, and Oprah is richer than the Queen.  Yes, we elected an African American president.

But “Yes We Can” has swung back to “No we won’t.” 

Think of the murders of Pastor Pinckney and eight others at a Bible Study in South Carolina in 2015.

Think Charlottesville 2017.  Remember the murder of Heather Heyer. 

Think the massacre in El Paso, August 2019.

And now add the names Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery.

What does the Catholic Church have to say about racism?

Back in 1998 when racial tensions were exacerbated in Philadelphia, PA, the Catholic Archbishop Cardinal Bevilacqua promulgated a pastoral letter entitled “Healing Racism through Faith and Hope.”[1]  Bevilacqua wrote, “Racism a moral disease and it is contagious.  No one is born a racist.  Carriers infect others in countless ways through words and attitudes, deeds and omissions.  Yet, one thing is certain - the disease of racism can and must be eradicated is.  …  In short, racism and Christian life are incompatible.” 

He makes clear that we cannot be united with God if we are not united with one another. “Jesus is clear that this is a matter of holiness and a matter of salvation.  Our attitudes and actions towards others enter the mystery of our communion with God.  Racism is a sin that weakens and diminishes this sacred union....”

Prophetically he teaches, “Racism has been condemned as a sin many times…  For the truth to have an impact on us, for it to really set us free, it must become our truth.  It must be operative within us.  It must penetrate and ignite our minds and hearts.”

Last August, after the massacre of 22 people in a Wal Mart, the Bishop of El Paso Texas issued “Night Will Be No More,” an even stronger condemnation of racism.[2]

Bishop Seitz asks how we are to comprehend the massacre, another shooting that leaves us “feeling dazed, wounded, fearful and helpless.”  He asks, “How should we think about racism and white supremacy?”

He raises to consciousness the mystery of evil and how it seeps into our minds and lives in our hearts.  “This mystery of evil also includes the base belief that some of us are more important, deserving and worthy than others. It includes the ugly conviction that this country and its history and opportunities and resources as well as our economic and political life belong more properly to ‘white’ people than to people of color. This is a perverse way of thinking that divides people based on heritage and tone of skin into ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’, paving the way to dehumanization.”

“In other words, racism.”

He charges that, “If we are honest, racism is really about advancing, shoring up, and failing to oppose a system of white privilege and advantage based on skin color. When this system begins to shape our public choices, structure our common life together and becomes a tool of class, this is rightly called institutionalized racism. Action to build this system of hate and inaction to oppose its dismantling are what we rightly call white supremacy.”

Bishop Seitz calls this the work of the father of lies (John 8:44) “incarnate in our everyday choices and lifestyles, and our laws and institutions.”

“God gave the earth to everyone, not just the privileged.   We must all work together “to ensure all our children have access to quality educational opportunities, eliminate inequality in the colonias, pass immigration reform, eradicate discrimination, guarantee universal access to health care, ensure the protection of all human life, end the scourge of gun violence, improve wages on both sides of the border, offer just and sustainable development opportunities, defend the environment and honor the dignity of every person.”

There is not an option to opt out.  “This work of undoing racism and building a just society is holy, for it ‘contributes to the building of the universal city of God….”

Here in the City of Baltimore, back in the 1960s, Cardinal Archbishop Shehan called for all Catholics to heed our obligation to promote racial equality.  He joined with other faith leaders calling for abolishing discrimination in rental housing and real estate.  For that, he received death threats.[3] 

I hope no one is contemplating violence against those who will build the new Mother Mary Lange Catholic school, a $24 million, 66,500 square foot complex in West Baltimore.[4]

Truth is truth.  Rev. Martin Luther King said, “We must all learn to live together like brothers, or we will perish like fools.”

In 2018, the United States Catholic Bishops forcefully stated that racism and racist attitudes and actions are destructive of human life.  All ways in which life is threatened contradict the love proclaimed by the Gospel.

“It is not a secret that these attacks on human life have severely affected people of color, who are disproportionately affected by poverty, targeted for abortion, have less access to healthcare, have the greatest numbers on death row, and are most likely to feel pressure to end their lives when facing serious illness.”

Our bishops teach that “racism is a life issue.”  They call us “to speak forcefully against and work toward ending racism.”[5]

To put it bluntly, to be Catholic is to be anti-racist.  In Christ, we are all brothers and sisters.  We are preparing ourselves for heaven by the way we live with and love one another now. 

There will be no racists in heaven.  Racists need not apply.

Jesuit Father Richard G. Malloy is the director of Mission Integration at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, Baltimore, and author of Being on Fire and A Faith That Frees, both from Orbis Books.

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[1]    Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua.  1998.  “Healing Racism Through Faith and Hope.”  (Philadelphia Archdiocese).

[2]   Bishop Mark Seitz.  August 2019.  “Night Will Be No More.”  https://www.hopeborder.org/nightwillbenomore (Diocese of El Paso, TX)

[3]  Antero Pietila.  2010.  Not in My Neighborhood.  (Chicago:  Ivan R. Dee, Pp. 190-191).

[4]  Archbishop William E. Lori.  “Baltimore Archdiocese to Break Ground on New City School.”  Baltimore Sun October 21, 2019.  Op-ed page.  https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-1021-catholic-school-20191021-3ekun7wpanb3dlj5t523unniaq-story.html

[5]   United States Catholic Bishops Conference.  Open Wide Our Hearts. The Enduring call to Love. A Pastoral Letter on Racism.  Washington, DC, 2018, p. 30.  http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/racism/upload/open-wide-our-hearts.pdf

Philanthropy Alone not Sufficient. The Need for Justice, the Righting of Relationships

The New York Times  nytimes.com   Copyright 2015.  The New York Times Company

Why Giving Back Isn’t Enough. 

By DARREN WALKER     DEC. 17, 2015

ref=opinionhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/opinion/why-giving-back-isnt-enough.html?ref=opinion

  CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

DURING this season of giving, I will join millions of Americans in volunteering to feed the homeless, contributing to clothing drives and donating to poverty-fighting charities. Yet I worry that through these acts of kindness, I absolve myself of asking deeper questions about injustice and inequality. We Americans are a remarkably bighearted people, but I believe the purpose of our philanthropy must not only be generosity, but justice.

The origins of formal philanthropy date from at least 1889, when the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie composed his “Gospel of Wealth.” He drafted this intellectual charter at the peak of the Gilded Age, when inequality had reached extreme levels. Carnegie argued, as many still do, that inequality on this scale is an unavoidable condition of the free-market system — and that it was even desirable, if the promise of wealth incentivized hard work. Philanthropy, he believed, would ease the pressure of rising social anxiety that followed from inequality — ameliorating the afflictions of the market without altering the market system itself.

During the 20th century, an entire field of institutional philanthropy emerged and flourished in the pattern of Carnegie’s mold. Iconic American families — Gates, Knight, MacArthur, Mellon, Rockefeller — endowed and expanded foundations that built schools and libraries, developed new vaccines, revolutionized agriculture and advanced human freedom. My own organization, the Ford Foundation, has given billions to support everything from public television in the United States to microlending in Bangladesh.

Our work has been indisputably for the good: Millions of people around the world have access to new tools and resources with which to improve their lives. A few months ago, the World Bank estimated that, for the first time in history, fewer than one in 10 human beings lives in extreme poverty. This is progress.

And yet, for all the advances made in the last century, society’s challenges may have outpaced philanthropy’s resources. Today, the cumulative wealth of the most generous donors seems a pittance compared with the world’s trillions of dollars’ worth of need. Generosity, blooming as it may be from legacies of both Carnegie’s age and the newly enriched, is no longer enough.

The world may need a reimagined charter of philanthropy — a “Gospel of Wealth” for the 21st century — that serves not just American philanthropists, but the vast array of new donors emerging around the world.

This new gospel might begin where the previous one fell short: addressing the underlying causes that perpetuate human suffering. In other words, philanthropy can no longer grapple simply with what is happening in the world, but also with how and why.

Feeding the hungry is among our society’s most fundamental obligations, but we should also question why our neighbors are without nutritious food to eat. Housing the homeless is an imperative, but we should also question why our housing markets are so distorted. As a nation, we need more investment in education, but not without questioning educational disparities based on race, class and geography.

Our self-awareness — our humility — shouldn’t be limited to examining the problems. It should include the structures of solutions, like giving itself. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said not long before his assassination, “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” It is, after all, an offspring of the free market; it is enabled by returns on capital.

And yet, too often, we have declined to question our own circumstances: a system that produces vast differences in privilege, and then tasks the most privileged with improving the system.

Whatever our intentions, the truth is that we can inadvertently widen inequality in the course of making money, even though we claim to support equality and justice when giving it away. And while our end-of-year giving might support worthy organizations, we must also ask if these financial donations contribute to larger social change.

In other words, “giving back” is necessary, but not sufficient. We should seek to bring about lasting, systemic change, even if that change might adversely affect us. We must bend each act of generosity toward justice.

We, as foundations and individuals, should fund people, their ideas and organizations that are capable of addressing deep-rooted injustice. We should ensure that the voices of those most affected by injustice — women, racial minorities, the poor, religious and ethnic minorities and L.G.B.T. individuals — help decide where and what philanthropy puts money behind, not in simply receiving whatever philanthropy decides to give them.

We can wield data and technology, see through a diversity of viewpoints, and draw upon a century of philanthropy’s success and failure to identify and address the barriers holding people back.

This modern giving charter should look different in different settings. At the Ford Foundation, our efforts will focus on inequality: not just wealth disparities, but injustices in politics, culture and society that compound inequality and limit opportunity. We will ask questions like, are we hearing — and heeding — those who understand the problems best? What can we do to leverage our privilege to disrupt the drivers of inequality?

Others in philanthropy will take different, but no less effective, approaches. Many already are answering King’s call, working intensely toward a world that renders philanthropy unnecessary. Ultimately, we each must do our part to ensure that giving not only makes us feel better, but also makes our society more just.

Darren Walker is the president of the Ford Foundation.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 18, 2015, on page A39 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Giving Back Isn’t Enough.

We Need More Government Spending, Not Less. Krugman is right.

American taxes of all kinds are among the very lowest as a share of GDP of all developed countries


"What’s required now is more government spending. The federal government can now borrow at the lowest rates in its history. Borrowing and investing in roads, bridges, and schools takes a while to percolate through the economy, but pays high dividends in terms of middle-class jobs. (Federal spending in general is much more tilted to ordinary families than spending processed through banks.) And if we don’t want to incur more debt, we can finance it through taxes. American taxes of all kinds are among the very lowest as a share of GDP of all developed countries."  - Charles Morris, "Whose Recovery?" in Commonweal.  Dec 8 2014.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/whose-recovery?utm_source=Main+Reader+List&utm_campaign=d9287963c6-Dec8_Now_at_Commonweal7_1_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_407bf353a2-d9287963c6-91259349

And Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, has been saying this all along!

Pope Calls for Prayer to End World Hunger

Pray with the Pope today.  He is calling us to end World Hunger.  St Ignatius says, "Love is best expressed in deeds."

Every year, authors, journalists, teachers, researchers, schoolchildren and students ask us for statistics about hunger and malnutrition. To help answer these questions, we've compiled a list of useful facts and figures on world hunger.

842 million people in the world do not have enough to eat. This number has fallen by 156 million since 1990.

 

The vast majority of hungry people (827 million) live in developing countries, where 14.3 percent of the population is undernourished.

 

 Asia has the largest share of the world's hungry people (some 552 million) but the trend is downward.

 

 If women farmers had the same access to resources as men, the number of hungry in the world could be reduced by up to 150 million.

 

Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year.

 

One out of six children -- roughly 100 million -- in developing countries is underweight.

 

 One in four of the world's children are stunted. In developing countries the proportion can rise to one in three.

 

 80 percent of the world's stunted children live in just 20 countries.

 

66 million primary school-age children attend classes hungry across the developing world, with 23 million in Africa alone.

 

WFP calculates that US$3.2 billion is needed per year to reach all 66 million hungry school-age children.

http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats 

http://www.cathnewsusa.com/2013/12/catholics-across-us-join-pope-francis-prayer-end-world-hunger/ 

About Pope Francis, NYimes Charles Blow much smarter than Rush Limbaugh (but everyone is smarter than Rush...)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/opinion/blow-the-president-the-pope-and-the-people.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

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December 4, 2013

The President, the Pope and the People

By CHARLES M. BLOW

On Wednesday, while delivering a speech largely about income inequality and economic mobility, a populist president invoked a populist pope. After rattling off a laundry list of dire statistics, President Obama cited Pope Francis:

“Since 1979, when I graduated from high school, our productivity is up by more than 90 percent, but the income of the typical family has increased by less than 8 percent. Since 1979, our economy has more than doubled in size, but most of that growth has flowed to a fortunate few. The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income -- it now takes half. Whereas in the past, the average C.E.O. made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s C.E.O. now makes 273 times more. And meanwhile, a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country. So the basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed. In fact, this trend towards growing inequality is not unique to America’s market economy. Across the developed world, inequality has increased. Some of you may have seen just last week, the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length. ‘How can it be,’ he wrote, ‘that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?'”

This is a worldwide problem, as the pope made clear, but in this country it’s particularly pernicious.

A study released last month by the World Economic Forum surveyed nearly 1,600 world leaders from academia, business, government and the nonprofit sector and found that of the top 10 trends facing the world in 2014, income inequality was second on the list. (According to the report, the top concern was “rising societal tensions in the Middle East and North Africa.”)

And although in America 51 percent of all income earned went to the wealthiest fifth of the population while only 3 percent went to the poorest fifth of the population, Americans were among the least likely to view inequality as a serious problem in the spring 2013 Pew Global Attitudes Project Survey.

And yet, it looms as a central problem in this country, but one that is often invisible from ground level. We remain ensconced in our enclaves of sameness: subdivisions planned by price point and urban oases of affluence set amid vast deserts of urban poverty.

We are not likely to recognize the ravages of inequity because of our isolation from one another, but they are there.

In addition, there is less economic mobility in America than in many other wealthy countries.

As the president pointed out:

“The problem is, that alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years. A child born in the top 20 percent has about a two in three chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20 percent has a less than one in 20 shot at making it to the top. He’s 10 times likelier to stay where he is.”

The Economic Policy Institute’s “State of Working American, 12th Edition,” released last year, echoed that sentiment, finding that “U.S. mobility is among the lowest of major industrialized economies.”

And that mobility gap is compounded by a gender gap. According to a 2008 Brookings Institution report, “Close to half (47 percent) of low-income girls compared to 35 percent of low-income boys end up in the bottom fifth upon adulthood.”

And NPR reported last month that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women’s share of minimum wage workers is nearly twice that of men.

That is why it was important for the president to use his speech to support raising the minimum wage, saying, “It’s well past the time to raise a minimum wage that, in real terms right now, is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office.”

Arguments against addressing income inequality often focus on the possibility of undermining incentives for those at the top. But what happens if and when inequality begins to undermine incentives for those in the middle and at the bottom? Honest work should pay an honest wage. That idea is part of the American social contract and one in danger of disintegrating.

We must ensure that our society rewards innovation, ideas and initiative while also ensuring equal access to opportunity and more equitable pay for workers. The American identity depends on it.

This is not an us-versus-them argument, but an all-of-us one. 

Inequality, Inequality, Inequality..... Growing, Growing, We're Gone....

Inequality Is a Choice

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

 

 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/inequality-is-a-choice/?_r=0

It’s well known by now that income and wealth inequality in most rich countries, especially the United States, have soared in recent decades and, tragically, worsened even more since the Great Recession. But what about the rest of the world? Is the gap between countries narrowing, as rising economic powers like China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty? And within poor and middle-income countries, is inequality getting worse or better? Are we moving toward a more fair world, or a more unjust one?

These are complex questions, and new research by a World Bank economist named Branko Milanovic, along with other scholars, points the way to some answers.

Starting in the 18th century, the industrial revolution produced giant wealth for Europe and North America. Of course, inequality within these countries was appalling — think of the textile mills of Liverpool and Manchester, England, in the 1820s, and the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the South Side of Chicago in the 1890s — but the gap between the rich and the rest, as a global phenomenon, widened even more, right up through about World War II. To this day, inequality between countries is far greater than inequality within countries.

But starting around the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, economic globalization accelerated and the gap between nations began to shrink. The period from 1988 to 2008 “might have witnessed the first decline in global inequality between world citizens since the Industrial Revolution,” Mr. Milanovic, who was born in the former Yugoslavia and is the author of “The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality,” wrote in a paper published last November. While the gap between some regions has markedly narrowed — namely, between Asia and the advanced economies of the West — huge gaps remain. Average global incomes, by country, have moved closer together over the last several decades, particularly on the strength of the growth of China and India. But overall equality across humanity, considered as individuals, has improved very little. (The Gini coefficient, a measurement of inequality, improved by just 1.4 points from 2002 to 2008.)

Javier Jaén

 

So while nations in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as a whole, might be catching up with the West, the poor everywhere are left behind, even in places like China where they’ve benefited somewhat from rising living standards.

From 1988 to 2008, Mr. Milanovic found, people in the world’s top 1 percent saw their incomes increase by 60 percent, while those in the bottom 5 percent had no change in their income. And while median incomes have greatly improved in recent decades, there are still enormous imbalances: 8 percent of humanity takes home 50 percent of global income; the top 1 percent alone takes home 15 percent. Income gains have been greatest among the global elite — financial and corporate executives in rich countries — and the great “emerging middle classes” of China, India, Indonesia and Brazil. Who lost out? Africans, some Latin Americans, and people in post-Communist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Mr. Milanovic found.

The United States provides a particularly grim example for the world. And because, in so many ways, America often “leads the world,” if others follow America’s example, it does not portend well for the future.

On the one hand, widening income and wealth inequality in America is part of a trend seen across the Western world. A 2011 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that income inequality first started to rise in the late ’70s and early ’80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel). The trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s. Within the last decade, income inequality grew even in traditionally egalitarian countries like Germany, Sweden and Denmark. With a few exceptions — France, Japan, Spain — the top 10 percent of earners in most advanced economies raced ahead, while the bottom 10 percent fell further behind.

But the trend was not universal, or inevitable. Over these same years, countries like Chile, Mexico, Greece, Turkey and Hungary managed to reduce (in some cases very high) income inequality significantly, suggesting that inequality is a product of political and not merely macroeconomic forces. It is not true that inequality is an inevitable byproduct of globalization, the free movement of labor, capital, goods and services, and technological change that favors better-skilled and better-educated employees.

Of the advanced economies, America has some of the worst disparities in incomes and opportunities, with devastating macroeconomic consequences. The gross domestic product of the United States has more than quadrupled in the last 40 years and nearly doubled in the last 25, but as is now well known, the benefits have gone to the top — and increasingly to the very, very top.

Last year, the top 1 percent of Americans took home 22 percent of the nation’s income; the top 0.1 percent, 11 percent. Ninety-five percent of all income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. Recently released census figures show that median income in America hasn’t budged in almost a quarter-century. The typical American man makes less than he did 45 years ago (after adjusting for inflation); men who graduated from high school but don’t have four-year college degrees make almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago.

American inequality began its upswing 30 years ago, along with tax decreases for the rich and the easing of regulations on the financial sector. That’s no coincidence. It has worsened as we have under-invested in our infrastructure, education and health care systems, and social safety nets. Rising inequality reinforces itself by corroding our political system and our democratic governance.
And Europe seems all too eager to follow America’s bad example. The embrace of austerity, from Britain to Germany, is leading to high unemployment, falling wages and increasing inequality. Officials like Angela Merkel, the newly re-elected German chancellor, and Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, argue that Europe’s problems are a result of a bloated welfare spending. But that line of thinking has only taken Europe into recession (and even depression). That things may have bottomed out — that the recession may be “officially” over — is little comfort to the 27 million out of a job in the E.U. On both sides of the Atlantic, the austerity fanatics say, march on: these are the bitter pills that we need to take to achieve prosperity. But prosperity for whom?
Excessive financialization — which helps explain Britain’s dubious status as the second-most-unequal country, after the United States, among the world’s most advanced economies — also helps explain the soaring inequality. In many countries, weak corporate governance and eroding social cohesion have led to increasing gaps between the pay of chief executives and that of ordinary workers — not yet approaching the 500-to-1 level for America’s biggest companies (as estimated by the International Labor Organization) but still greater than pre-recession levels. (Japan, which has curbed executive pay, is a notable exception.) American innovations in rent-seeking — enriching oneself not by making the size of the economic pie bigger but by manipulating the system to seize a larger slice — have gone global.

Asymmetric globalization has also exerted its toll around the globe. Mobile capital has demanded that workers make wage concessions and governments make tax concessions. The result is a race to the bottom. Wages and working conditions are being threatened. Pioneering firms like Apple, whose work relies on enormous advances in science and technology, many of them financed by government, have also shown great dexterity in avoiding taxes. They are willing to take, but not to give back.
Inequality and poverty among children are a special moral disgrace. They flout right-wing suggestions that poverty is a result of laziness and poor choices; children can’t choose their parents. In America, nearly one in four children lives in poverty; in Spain and Greece, about one in six; in Australia, Britain and Canada, more than one in 10. None of this is inevitable. Some countries have made the choice to create more equitable economies: South Korea, where a half-century ago just one in 10 people attained a college degree, today has one of the world’s highest university completion rates.

For these reasons, I see us entering a world divided not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do. Some countries will be successful in creating shared prosperity — the only kind of prosperity that I believe is truly sustainable. Others will let inequality run amok. In these divided societies, the rich will hunker in gated communities, almost completely separated from the poor, whose lives will be almost unfathomable to them, and vice versa. I’ve visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns.

Gun Violence: 47,856 killed by firearms from 2006-2010. A Jesuit's perspective

It's hard to say, and we all are suffering for and with the multiple victims of Newtown, but the brutal slayings of those wonderful little kids are just the tip of the iceberg. How respond to atrocities like Sandy Hook and the ongoing daily slayings in our society?   (1) We must deal with mental health issues more quickly and efficiently, (2) get reasonable gun control functioning in our society and (3) de-glamorize and confront the culture of violence.   

Guns in the home (47% of Americans legally own a gun.  How many illegal firearms are out there is anyone's guess) is a bad idea and a worse practice.   The gun in your house has a better chance of killing someone you love than it has of hurting an intruder.  10,000 people a year are killed by guns.  Suicide by guns are are almost double that: 18,735 in 2009.

The 2nd amendment gives one the right to bear a musket.  Just as no one has a right to own a tank, a bazooka or an atomic bomb, no one should have the right to weapons of mass slaying.  Let the hunters have their shotguns.  There's no need for a AK-47 or Tech 9 anywhere in the USA.

Back in 1994 the U.S. Catholic Bishops put out a prophetic document, Confronting a Culture of Violence (1994) .  That prescient and cogently argued booklet noted:

"Between 1979 and 1991, nearly 50,000 American children and teenagers were killed by guns, matching the number of Americans who died in battle in Vietnam. It is now estimated 13 American children die every day from guns. Gunshots cause one out of four deaths among American teenagers" (USCCB 1994)

"Our entertainment media too often exaggerate and even celebrate violence. Children see 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence on television before they leave elementary school." (USCCB 1994)

The children of the 1990s are today's adults.  We reap what we sow.

Guns and Violence in USA:   47,856 killed by firearms from 2006-2010.  Almost 10,000 a year.

Gun Homicides (average annually):

Less than 50: Japan

Less than 150:  Germany, Italy, France, etc.

Less than 200:  Canada

More than 10,000: USA  Source: IANSA (International Action Network on Small Arms of the United Nations)

U.S. lifetime medical costs for gunshot injuries total an estimated $2.3 billion

 U.S. taxpayers pay for almost half ($1.1 billion or 49%) of lifetime medical costs for gunshot injuries.

ABC News reports there are 129,817 federally licensed firearms dealers in the U.S., including 51,438 retail gun stores.  There are 36,569 grocery stores and 14,098 McDonald's restaurants.  (Do we really need three times more gun shops than Mickey D's?)

TIME Magazine reports  ( http://business.time.com/2012/12/18/americas-gun-economy-by-the-numbers/#ixzz2HgN8ODw3 ) 

-  47% Percentage of Americans have a gun

-  $6 billion Estimated revenue generated by the gun and ammunition industry in the U.S.

-  310 million Estimated number of firearms in the U.S., 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns

-  17-to-1 Ratio of gun-rights lobbyist spending to gun control lobbyist spending in 2011.  Gun rights groups spent $4,212,996; gun control groups spent $240,000.

-  $14 million Amount of money the National Rifle Association spent during the 2012 election in an attempt to defeat President Obama, according to The New York Times

CDC Center for Disease Control Reports:  Firearm suicides.  Number of deaths: 18,735

 The New England Journal of Medicine reports:  [NEJM (2008)

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923 ]

Deciding whether to own a gun entails balancing potential benefits and risks. One of the risks for which the empirical evidence is strongest,1 and the risk whose death toll is greatest, is that of completed suicide.

In 2005, the most recent year for which mortality data are available, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among Americans 40 years of age or younger. Among Americans of all ages, more than half of all suicides are gun suicides. In 2005, an average of 46 Americans per day committed suicide with a firearm, accounting for 53% of all completed suicides. Gun suicide during this period accounted for 40% more deaths than gun homicide.

Why might the availability of firearms increase the risk of suicide in the United States? First, many suicidal acts — one third to four fifths of all suicide attempts, according to studies — are impulsive. Among people who made near-lethal suicide attempts, for example, 24% took less than 5 minutes between the decision to kill themselves and the actual attempt, and 70% took less than 1 hour.2

Second, many suicidal crises are self-limiting. Such crises are often caused by an immediate stressor, such as the breakup of a romantic relationship, the loss of a job, or a run-in with police. As the acute phase of the crisis passes, so does the urge to attempt suicide. The temporary nature and fleeting sway of many suicidal crises is evident in the fact that more than 90% of people who survive a suicide attempt, including attempts that were expected to be lethal (such as shooting oneself in the head or jumping in front of a train), do not go on to die by suicide. Indeed, recognizing the self-limiting nature of suicidal crises, penal and psychiatric institutions restrict access to lethal means for persons identified as potentially suicidal.

Third, guns are common in the United States (more than one third of U.S. households contain a firearm) and are lethal. A suicide attempt with a firearm rarely affords a second chance. Attempts involving drugs or cutting, which account for more than 90% of all suicidal acts, prove fatal far less often.

The empirical evidence linking suicide risk in the United States to the presence of firearms in the home is compelling.3 There are at least a dozen U.S. case–control studies in the peer-reviewed literature, all of which have found that a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of suicide. The increase in risk is large, typically 2 to 10 times that in homes without guns, depending on the sample population (e.g., adolescents vs. older adults) and on the way in which the firearms were stored. The association between guns in the home and the risk of suicide is due entirely to a large increase in the risk of suicide by firearm that is not counterbalanced by a reduced risk of nonfirearm suicide. Moreover, the increased risk of suicide is not explained by increased psychopathologic characteristics, suicidal ideation, or suicide attempts among members of gun-owning households.

Three additional findings from the case–control studies are worth noting. The higher risk of suicide in homes with firearms applies not only to the gun owner but also to the gun owner's spouse and children. The presence of a gun in the home, no matter how the gun is stored, is a risk factor for completed suicide. And there is a hierarchy of suicide risk consistent with a dose–response relationship. How household guns are stored matters especially for young people — for example, one study found that adolescent suicide was four times as likely in homes with a loaded, unlocked firearm as in homes where guns were stored unloaded and locked.