Category: Politics

The thing about parables is the story does not have to be true for the lesson to be valid. We often use parables in the form of fairy tales, Disney movies, or even scriptural stories to teach children important lessons about life. Adults too can benefit from parables.

Consider the scriptural parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The story involves a beggar (Lazarus) living outside the front gate of a wealthy family’s estate. Every day, the members of the family pass Lazarus as they enter the beautiful estate compound without giving Lazarus any consideration. Finally, the patriarch of the family dies and is condemned to eternal suffering. He is made to suffer as Lazarus suffered because he had every opportunity to relieve Lazarus’ suffering and chose instead to offer him scorn and indifference. He is told every member of his family who does nothing for Lazarus will suffer the same fate. Therefore, his suffering is deepened by the realization that his example will condemn all his loved ones to eternal damnation.

What is the lesson of the rich man and Lazarus?

For years I thought the lesson was to do unto others as you would have them do to you. Most recently, I have come to understand that wealth necessarily causes deprivation. To accumulate resources beyond our capacity to use, denies resources to other people who desperately need them. Therefore, the morale of the story is not the rich man’s lack of generosity, it is the rich man’s gluttony that caused Lazarus’ deprivation.

In America today, we are the rich man because our wealth is derived from our disproportionate, non-sustainable extraction of global resources for ourselves. And Lazarus is the billions of resource deprived people who are slowly migrating to the front gate of the American estate.

Where once our front gate was opened wide :

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”*

Now we close the gate, build walls, and offer scorn to the refugees who only seek the promise of what America used to be.

*Public Domain Excerpt from “The New Colossus” written by Emma Lazarus, and posted on a plaque on the base of the Statue of Liberty.

They who divides us.

They who benefit from our fighting.

They who win while the rest of us lose.

They who own our government.

They who control the resources that sustain us.

They are the cause of our dystopic nightmare.

Who are They? The nameless, faceless, thoughtless They?

They are the hoarders who derive their gluttonous wealth from the productivity of our labor.

They are the embodiment of the values we are taught to live by.

Yet, They are getting worried.

They realize we are awakening. Too many of us see past their grand illusion.

Try as They may, They can’t eliminate all of the Truth Sayers.

We are beginning to see who They are…where They are…and how They control us.

They have privilege, but the power is provided by our consent.

Now ask yourself: who stands in the way of your highest aspirations?

They who claim everything.

They are our enemy.

I am a free man.

Today, I awoke to a beautiful Saturday morning.

I am free to make this day all it can be; To get in my car and drive in any direction; To visit my family and friends; To strengthen my body with exercise and nutritious food.

In truth, I am free to go as far as my bank account and credit cards will allow me to go. My bills are paid, and I have a few hundred dollars left in my budget to spend before I get paid next Friday. But I won’t get paid next Friday if I don’t show up to work on Monday. Therefore, I am free from now through Sunday.

I am free to choose my vocation, if I accept the compensation will set the boundaries of my freedom and the freedom of my family.

I am free to live anywhere I want, if I can pay the cost to live there.

If I get sick, I am free to see any doctor or seek any treatment I can afford to pay for.

In other words, I am a free* man.

And yet, I’m one of the lucky ones.

*subject to my capacity to earn money.

I have deep empathy for the realization that political affiliation is pointless in a system of rigged elections and mass disinformation. In my view, the underlying cause is our American values. The highest aspiration of American life is to achieve financial independence…to perfect the practice of accumulating wealth to ourselves. Like most phenomena, self-interest and free market capitalism works within a range of activity, and fails to work as intended beyond that range.

Historically, the institutions of government and the media have facilitated necessary corrections when concentrations of wealth and power exceeded the effective range. Over the last 45 years (Google “Lewis Powell memo”), the investment class contributed a material portion of their earnings to co-opt universities (research for commerce over scholarship), government (lobbying and Supreme Court packing – Powell was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon in 1972), and media (conversion of news independent of entertainment to news as entertainment – spin over information) to prevent the correction that would have happened after the financial crash of 2008. The Obama recovery has locked in severe financial inequality, effectively accelerating the already dangerous siphoning of income from working-class and middle-class Americans.

In the absence of healthy institutions, we, the People, are all that is left to bring about the change we need. While much has been written about the need for us to look past the manipulation that distracts us, I encourage our search to go deeper to challenge the values we hold as truth.

The investment class are advancing their interests by any means necessary, which encourages each of us to do the same. We must resist this urge, and come to the realization that the best way to advance our self-interest is to fully serve and support our common interest.

It is a fact of modern life that we as individuals survive, thrive, and even suffer, primarily based on the actions of other people. The interdependence of humanity is our defining strength. We cannot reach the full potential of our physical, emotional and spiritual selves if we don’t honor our natural interdependence on each other.

This is the way forward.

There comes a point in every life when you first suspect something you always knew to be true may not be. For me, this moment was long in coming. Like the faintest whisper in a dark room, I have felt for some time my core American values that have defined my life were hollow and untrue. Yet it has only been in the last year or so that I fully realized why.

To understand my journey, I must reveal a bit of my story. I was raised by an amazing woman who invested her time and resources into her two sons. Growing up in the Bronx (NY), she worked two jobs to send us to 12 years of the best Catholic education available in New York. We both graduated from the prestigious Cardinal Spellman High School (Justice Sotomayor graduated from Spellman in 1972). After high school, I served four years active duty in the US Army. President Reagan was my Commander in Chief and General Colin Powell was my V Corp commander while I served as a member of NATO in Germany.

After my enlistment, I attended college in Texas and graduate school in Connecticut, before serving a one-year stint as a Lead Disaster Assistance Loan Officer in FEMA for the Northridge Earthquake disaster. For the last 22 years, I have worked as a financial services professional, primarily as a small business banker.

During most of my youth, I was a registered democrat, changing in 1998 to a registered republican, only to change again to a registered independent by 2004. I have participated in one political campaign as a Surrogate Speaker for Matt Salmon (R) when he ran for Arizona Governor in 2002 (we lost to Janet Napolitano). I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and for the first time in my life, I voted for the Green party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, for President in 2016. For most of my life, I have been a true patriot who believed in serving a cause bigger than myself. The virtues of independence, individual liberty, limited government, and the pursuit of happiness have defined my life.

Yet in retrospect, I see the signs of my discontent starting in 1971 with the famous Powell memorandum, a call to arms for Corporate America to contribute a material portion of their earnings to the cause of transforming the government, academic scholarship, and the media to the advancement of corporate interests. By 1987, the glorification of corporate interest found popular expression in the motion picture “Wall Street”, where Gordon Gekko proudly proclaimed “Greed is good.”

Then in 1992, we elected a smooth-talking man of the people from Hope, Arkansas, who presented a new pro-business, socially liberal democrat. During Bill Clinton’s tenure, he led the Congress to ratify NAFTA, signed federal welfare reform, the 1994 crime bill, and as a parting present repealed Glass-Steagall and deregulated complex financial instruments. All these measures proved to be devastating for poor, working, and middle class Americans, and enormously beneficial for corporate interests.

In November 2000, we elected an encore named George W. Bush, who fully monetized the military industrial complex. President Bush codified the predicate for permanent war with the concepts of “pre-emptive war” and the “war on terror”.  Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 coupled with the Medicare Part D bonanza for the Pharmaceutical industry, produced an economy where business was booming through 2006. Wall Street’s mortgage back security con, made legal by Bill Clinton in 1999, blew up the global residential real estate market by 2008. And to the rescue came Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Congressional democrats who joined Bush in bailing out the corporate interests, while millions of Americans lost their homes, jobs, and retirement savings.

Eight years of Obama, two with total democratic control, and all we have to show for it is this stupid tee shirt saying “Yes we can!”. Little did I know the back of the shirt says “I always draw the short straw no matter what major political party I support.” As I said, “this moment of truth was long in coming.” Now where from here?

The American electorate has woken up. In 2016, republican primary voters rejected establishment republicans and general election voters rejected the ultimate democratic establishment politician. Our national tragedy was not offering the American electorate a credible non-establishment option. Democratic Party shenanigans, exposed by WikiLeaks, the Russians, and others, prevented Senator Sanders from being the credible non-establishment option. Instead, we are now led by an owner of the establishment politicians the electorate had soundly rejected. Corporate interests are now the government. Hereafter, there will be no one else to blame for the accelerating siphoning of wealth from middle and working class Americans to the uber wealthy.

The only question remaining is whether the deeply disgruntled, ethnically, regionally, faithfully, and racially divided American electorate will see past the divide and conquer strategy of corporate interest and finally identify the cause of our American nightmare.

None of us prosper by our efforts alone. Money, no matter how much you accumulate, won’t support your life if our natural resources are depleted through waste and gluttony. The time to rethink the virtue of the invisible hand is now. Reconsider your defining values. And in doing so, take your first step toward the future.