Category Archives: Economics

“Economics” is not about calculators. It’s about the one house we all live in and how we manage it.

A Back Porch Conversation on Human Needs Satisfaction

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Today “In the company of hysterical women” referred to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the post “Living Below the Line – Day 2”. The reference to Maslow led to bringing this draft commentary out from the file drawer where it’s been gathering dust since early August.  Here’s the reflection

Defining Human Needs and Their Satisfaction

Terry Gips, Sustainability Associates

Terry Gips, President of Sustainability Associates (click HERE for description), introduced me to Chilean philosopher-economist Manfred Max- Neef’s ground-breaking re-conception of human needs and needs-satisfaction. Max-Neef’s framework offers a different view from Abraham Maslow’s pyramid-hierarchical model of self-actualization that prevails in the West. While the Maslow model is typically Western in centering on the individual, the Max-Neef paradigm looks at the larger culture and society in terms of needs and needs-satisfyers. It’s focus is the community.

The basic human needs are listed here, along with a rating scale to measure how we’re doing (a person, group, nation, world).

Needs satisfaction rating: scale of 1 to 5 (5 = fully satisfied)

Subsistence              1 2 3 4 5                                           

Protection                  1 2 3 4 5

Affection                     1 2 3 4 5

Understanding            1 2 3 4 5

Participation                1 2 3 4 5

Idleness/Leisure          1 2 3 4 5

Creation                       1 2 3 4 5

Identity                        1 2 3 4 5

Freedom                      1 2 3 4 5

–          Manfred Max-Neef – Matrix, Human Scale Development

According to this framework, food and shelter, for example, are not regarded as needs, but as satisfiers of the fundamental need fo subsist.

In much the same way, education (either formal or informal), study, investigation, early stimulation and meditation are satisfiers of the need for Understanding. Curative systems, preventive systems and health schemes in general are satisfiers of the need for Protection.

There is no one-to-one correspondence between needs and satisfiers. A satisfier may contribute simultaneously to the satisfaction of different needs or, conversely, a need may require various satisfiers in order to be met. Not even these relations are fixed. They may vary according to time, place and circumstance. For example, a mother breastfeeding her baby is simultaneously satisfying the infant’s needs for Subsistence, Protection, Affection and Identity.

Think now of “The American Dream” – a phrase coined 1931 by J.T. Adams (1878-1949), U.S. writer and historian, in Epic of America. Here are the words that introduced the aspiration of “the American Dream” to the U.S. national lexicon:

“The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Sipping coffee on Terry Gip’s porch with five seminary classmates, the discussion took a nose dive into theological and economic despair as the Christian pastors lamented the victory of environmental degradation, greed, concentration of wealth, militarism, and consumerism in American life. We were like the prophet Amos, or so we must have thought, thundering our cries of “Woe to you” when Terry, a person of deep and active Jewish faith, asked us to stop and think.

“We won’t get anywhere by negativity,” he said, or something like that. You guys are Christian pastors. People need good news. The old model is a model of scarcity; that’s not good news. We have to re-define abundance. Think about it. You can change the world if you take seriously what Jesus said by preaching a theology and ethic of abundance. We should be talking about a world of abundance, not scarcity.

Jesus: “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly.”

We left Terry’s porch wondering what it would look like to alter the approach to the proclamation of abundance re-defined in light of Jesus and Manfred Max-Neef’s human scale development. The “yoke” (responsibility) that brings satisfaction and rest, not only to the soul but to the body politic, is the shared yoke of humility and sharing.

The American Dream is again up for grabs on the road to the November election. I listen to every campaign ad asking which dream is being promoted, and the six Christian pastors go into the pulpit Sunday mornings chastened and deepened by a faithful Jewish brother who seemed to know our Lord, the Jewish rabbi, better than the Christian pastors on his back porch!

American Democracy – Trevor Potter, Bill Moyers, and Stephen Colbert

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Exercise Your Franchise

….

Voting  is our duty,

One person-one vote.

Together we matter,

Each voter take note!

– Steve Shoemaker, acrostic verse written in early morning hours, Sept. 25, 2012.

It’s all about citizenship. Trevor Potter said it last week on Bill Moyers & Company (PBS). He had said it earlier in interviews with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report.

Go back and click his name to see Mr. Potter’s full professional biography on the Bill Moyers and Company website. Here’s the beginning of his bio and why the Moyers interview with Mr. Potter is important to us.

A former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, Trevor Potter has been fighting for campaign finance reform through the Campaign Legal Center, a non-profit organization he founded to track and pursue legal cases related to campaign finance, political communication and government ethics at the federal, state and local level.

Mr. Potter is a Republican who believes that the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision threatens democracy itself. In the interview with Bill Moyers, he states as clearly that a democratic republic’s integrity depends on the nation’s voters seeing themselves as citizens. For Potter, citizenship – which means putting the larger good above one’s own narrow self-interest – is seriously at risk. Campaign financial reform is not the whole answer, but it is essential to democracy itself.

Click on Bill Moyers & Company to watch the conversation in part or in whole.

The Line

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In the Company of Hysterical Women from New Zealand published “Live below the Line: Day One” this morning as we in Minnesota, USA are launching a press release to announce  the screening of a film on the new face of poverty in America. Click HERE to read In the Company of Hysterical Women’s post.

Here is today’s press release for “The LINE: Poverty in America. It’s not what you think”:

CHASKA, Minn., Sept. 24, 2012 – The new face of poverty in America is the subject of a new documentary film called The Line. The public is invited to a free screening of the movie at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, Minn. on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. CST in conjunction with the premiere in Washington D.C. and sites all over the United States.

Logo for “The Line”

The Line is a groundbreaking documentary from Sojourners, a national Christian, non-partisan organization committed to faith in action for social justice, and Emmy Award-winning producer Linda Midgett. It features real people, their struggles, and their inspiring and creative responses to the challenges they face. The goal of the film is to break through traditional political divides, foster honest dialogue, and refocus our society on the common good.

Shepherd of the Hill Pastor Gordon C. Stewart will host a discussion immediately following the 40-minute film as part of First Tuesday Dialogues, a community forum held at the church from October through May each year that examines critical public issues locally and globally.

“Poverty is a faith issue. When I learned about the film I thought we should show that here. It fits our First Tuesday Dialogues program mission,” said Pastor Stewart. “What is more critical than poverty? The middle class has been slipping for a long time now. The problems are structural. Hand outs – traditional Christian charity – don’t address the deeper problem.”

Working through Sojourners magazine, Sojourners’ website sojo.net, public speaking events, media outreach, educational resources, books, advocacy, and trainings, Sojourners is an internationally influential voice at the intersection of faith, politics, and culture.

Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church is located at 145 Engler Blvd. in Chaska, Minn. 55318.  www.shepherdofthehillchurch.com

Yertle the Turtle and the 47%

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Dr. Seuss weighed in on the news about the 47% of “dependent” Americans and “the distribution of wealth” and power with the non-partisan story of Yertle the Turtle.

A comment on “Uproar over video offers a warning about what happens when fundamentalism wins” (MPR commentary September 18, 2012) on religion as a tide pool).

Here’s an edited version of what someone named Dan Brunner wrote:

I think tide pools vary but are basically the same-1 source, (1 God) bound by laws of nature (God/humanity/morality) composed of bits of the ocean’s ecosystem (people/works). Tide pool waters are nature being apostolic; even if the ocean isn’t within eyesight, people are instinctively drawn to the marvel of and connection to it, and at the core are likely to believe the tide pool is evidence that there is something greater beyond.
There should be simple joy/peace in such a marvelous place, given space and freedom, there probably wouldn’t be conflict, however a turtle without good motive, without talent or merit can make itself king of a pond, can control and oppress other turtles to elevate oneself/opinion. With the myth that Yertle has achieved the height required for the greater vision, he’s given the power to create arguments around whose tide pool is better, bigger of more virtue; Yertle can burn Korans, yell God hates __ and misrepresent both history and what other Yertles say.

In the book, supporters supported until they physically couldn’t, but sometimes, in real life, Yertle supporters crawl out of the pond and get on a bus. Each tide pool can have its own Yertle and Yertle-supporters….
The Yertles argue; supporters support. Like a commodity, the tide pool can be fortified, quartered, used, harvested and polluted. The spiritual draw is weakened, but we sit there content and convinced we are right, or we feel obligated to follow tribe/tradition/peers to the point where we end up like the water you describe  – slimy, stinky and immune to the stench.  It’s good to be part of the tide pool, but isn’t our quest to be towards the ever-fresh ocean? Could/would Yertle ever explain that, if it meant he would no longer be seen as king of the pond?

Join Dan and chime in on the discussion of the tide pools (ponds), the kings, and poor little Mac at the bottom of the Yertle tower (the Tower of Babel) whose burp saved turtles from the tyranny of Yertle.

Redistribution of Wealth in America

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Mitt Romney’s haughty remark insulting the 47% of Americans who pay no federal income taxes is in the news. The issue of wealth distribution is philosophical and moral.  Isn’t it time folks concerned about the redistribution of wealth to the top stop being bullied and take back the language?. Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) published this piece in 2010.

“Fear ‘redistribution of wealth’? Don’t look now”

by Gordon C. Stewart

December 14, 2010

Those who own the language rule the world. Words can ignite the spark of hope; they can also light the fires of fear.

Take, for instance, the phrases “redistribution of wealth” and “class warfare.”  The visceral response in the American psyche is fear — fear of communism.  And those who cry the loudest are those who have already waged class warfare, albeit quietly.

Wealth in America already has been redistributed.  The only question is whether to let that redistribution continue, or to “re-redistribute” the upward distribution that has already taken place.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is a rare voice of clarity.  “Mr. President,” he said in last week’s Senate debate on extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, “in the year 2007, the top 1 percent of all income earners in the United States made twenty-three and a half percent of all income … more than the entire bottom 50 percent.” Polifact.com checked Sanders’ claims and rated them “true.”

Redistribution of wealth has already happened in America, but no one calls it that. It has been in the making for decades. How and why did it happen? How did the 99 percent allow it to happen?

It was a quiet class war that appealed to the middle class belief that one day we, too, could be rich.  It was a war of words that sparked the fear that a far-off dream would be taken away.  It was a class war in which no one fought back. It was waged and won not by force of arms  but by the use of code words  like “redistribution of wealth” that hinted a sinister communist or socialist agenda. The result was the slow decimation of the progressive tax structure that once ensured the nation’s fiscal health and that sought some measure of fairness and well-being for all people in America.

One of Minneapolis’ wealthiest people invites me to lunch at her club. The club itself is a place of power and privilege, but I have learned to expect the unexpected there. My host has a conscience. She does great things with her accumulated wealth, but she is clearly troubled today. She wants to talk with her pastor about the drift of things in our state and across America, about her income taxes, and about her faith.

“It’s not right,” she says. “I should be paying more. I’m not alone in feeling that way.  More should be expected from those who have so much. We’re not carrying our fair share of the burden.  I want to pay a higher rate. I don’t need a tax break!”

Like others who have signed on with Wealth for the Common Good and Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, she knows that she did not produce her wealth. Middle class and lower class wage earners did.

The 2008 election offered hope that finally the people of America had awakened to the redistribution of wealth and power. In 2010 that hope is all but gone, held hostage by a Congress and a president who claim that, for the sake of extending middle class tax cuts and unemployment insurance for the unemployed, they must also continue the tax breaks for the wealthy, the growing deficit notwithstanding. The redistribution of the redistribution cannot garner the votes to pass in Congress.

The Democratic Party went down to resounding defeat in the 2010 election in no small part because it had lost its vision and courage. It lost because it rocked back on its heels at the charge that health care and financial reforms were acts of “class warfare” and “redistribution of wealth.” It lost the war of words. No one fought back to reframe the discussion until Bernie Sanders, America’s only socialist senator, spoke the truth of the terrible, growing disparity of wealth in America. He dared to speak truth: The question before the Congress is not whether wealth will be redistributed. The only question is how. Will the current redistribution continue? Or will there be a re-redistribution?

Words matter. Language matters. Ideas matter.  So long as the American people remain easily manipulated by code words and slogans that distort reality like a funhouse mirror, and so long as elected officials and candidates recoil defensively instead of leading, the re-redistribution won’t stand a chance. It will be stillborn. The war of words will continue to be lost. Those who own the language run the world.

Is there a preacher in the White House who will finally dare to use his “bully pulpit” to put the issue squarely before the American people?  If the word were to come from the Oval Office that the real crossroads is not a redistribution of wealth but the re-distribution of the redistribution that has already taken place, would it reignite the spark of hope in the American soul?

The facts are already there.  What we need is a word from the bully pulpit.

Poverty in America

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YOU’RE INVITED!

A new film, The LINE – Poverty in America: It’s Not What You Think premieres Tuesday, October 2, 2012 in Washington, D.C. and across the country at host sites.

The LINE documents the stories of people across the country living at or below the poverty line. They have goals. They have children. They work hard. They are people like you and me. From Chicago’s suburbs and west side to the Gulf Coast to North Carolina, millions of Americans are struggling every day to make it above The Line.

Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church is pleased to be one of the host sites to this film the attention it deserves.
Click this LINK to trailer for “The Line” to see Sojourners’ description, view the trailer, and find a host site near you on October 2.
If you live the Twin Cities metro area, you’ll be welcome at Shepherd of the Hill, 145 Engler Blvd. in Chaska.
TUESDAY, OCT. 2 at  7:00 P.M.  Send an email to info@shepherdofthehillchurch.com with questions or to let us know you’re coming. Or come on the spur of the moment…and spread the word to your friends across the country for a location near them.

Health Care in America: The Affordable Care Act

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You’re invited to an evening with Bob Stevens, CEO of Ridgeview Medical Center, and other health care professionals and providers for a close look at The Affordable Care Act.

Robert Stevens, CEO, Ridgeview Medical Center

What is it? What is it not?

What does it do? What doesn’t it do?

Facts, information, and discussion about health care in America.

Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2012

7:00 – 8:30 p.m.

Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church, 145 Engler Boulevard, Chaska, MN.

A First Tuesday Dialogues program “examining critical public issues locally and globally.” Offered free to the general public in the service of the common good.

Capture the Flag

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Children playing Capture the Flag

Long before I got hooked on Facebook, my childhood friends and I used to play outside until it got dark.  Capture the Flag was our favorite game.If you had the flag, your job was to keep it; if you didn’t, your job was to capture it.  Only one person had the flag; the rest of us worked together until one of us got it.  And when one of us did, the game started over again.

Even if you hadn’t captured the flag that night, you went home knowing that tomorrow you had another chance.  Nothing was forever in the game of Capture the Flag.

We were learning how the game of democracy is played. We were learning how to win and how to lose.  We were learning the importance of continuing to play the game because no one knew how things would turn out the next night before our Moms called us home at bedtime.

All these years later, we’re playing Capture the Flag on Facebook.  Some of us are Democrats.  Some are Republicans.  Some are Libertarians.  Some are Socialists.  Some of us are Cynics who’ve decided that the game is stacked and that no matter how hard they try to capture the flag for what they believe in, the same bullies always win.

When we played the game as kids, there was a nearly level playing field.  The slowest of us had less of a chance than the fastest, but even the slowest and the smallest had a shot, if we worked together to capture the flag.

It’s not that different now, except that the bullies have money the rest of us don’t have. They’ve also learned how to divert our attention. Well-funded mind-bending scare tactics seek to convince voters that the flag has actually been in our pocket and that we, not they, are losing control of our country if health care reform, action on climate change, and reigning in Wall Street are the results of the November election.

Protest sign: U.S. Chamber of Commerce

It’s time to go out to the backyard and play the game again. Time to stand up together to reign in Wall Street and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and to tell our friends in the Tea Party that  deregulated, laissez-faire capitalism will serve only the fittest, not the many. Time to snatch the Stars and Stripes out of the deep pocket of the bullies who paint themselves as America’s last, best hope. No one gets to keep the flag in the United States of America.

The Copper Collar

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Its my 70th birthday. I get to say whatever I want…flat out. I’m too old a dog to worry. 🙂

America is on the leash…in the collar of Big Money.

Free speech is a basic right in America. But some of us are freer than others. Because the Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech. Some of us have lots of it. Most of us have a buck or two to support candidates for public office.

Montanans once referred to “the copper collar” worn by elected officials (federal, state and local), policy-makers, newspaper publishers and editors, journalists, business people, asnd relgious leaders. The copper collar kept them on the leash of the state’s largest employer and wealthiest campaign contributor, Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Montana was one big company town.

Photo of book “Forging the Copper Collar”

Step in a direction Anaconda didn’t like, and you’d feel a quick tug on the leash – a phone call, a note,  a pink slip, or worse. Want to run for office? Here’s the money. Money for things the average Montanan cannot buy, money for the “free” speech few can afford. Money for professional pollsters to learn voter attitudes and what scares them. Money for advertizing agencies that turn the polling data into ads that flood the airwaves, the internet, roadside billboards, and the print media.Money puts candidates and political parties in the collar. On the leash. Candidates who start to sniff to the side of the path on their morning walks feel a yank on the collar, a reminder that the dog isn’t walking on its own. It’s walking on a leash.  The “free” speech of candidates who stray or bite the hand that feeds them soon disappear. It was paid for by the owner.

The American colonies revolted against the ideas of a king and colonial rule. The political idea of royalty appalls us. We think of ourselves as the home of the brave and the land of the free. But aversion to kings and queens doesn’t mean we can’t be fooled into hoping that any one of us can climb to the top. We gripe about the wealth yet we aspire to it, and we think in personal terms we can understand more easily than the complicated matters of economics and arrangements between private and public institutions. The royalty and colonial privilege we love to hate find a way to disguise themselves as just another citizen with freedom of speech.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that corporations are “persons” with the same rights as a voter with “free speech” campaign contributions has put the collar on every candidate for public office. When candidates wear a collar, freedom of speech is a fiction, and the country we love becomes one big corporate town, the colonial town of the new kings and queens.

America is fast becoming a corporate town. We can bark. We can whine. We can vote. But the speech that matters isn’t free. It’s paid for. Democracy and freedom are on the leash…wearing the copper collar.

For a closer work at how it works, click “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” an insider’s look at what’s happening to America. Or click  “Confronting Ethical Emptiness of Wall Street” for a powerful piece, including the picture below of the raging bull.

The Wall Street Bull – symbol of ethical emptiness on Wall Street

Every day four or five emails arrive asking for a campaign contribution to fight Big Money. Just a $3 or $5 contribution will make a hug difference, say the appeals. But I know that once I give $3, the next one will be for $50 and then $100, and then…. Makes me feel real small…facing the bull.

But…if I don’t give….

The next time I watch a campaign ad, I’m going to read the small print to see who’s holding the leash to the collar.

You’ll make an old dog happy on his birthday by leaving a comment to promote some discussion.

Glory and Tragedy at Southern Cross

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There’s a sermon on Cable Mountain waiting to be preached.

The View from St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel

Southern Cross, Montana is a ghost town, a former mining community on Cable Mountain west of Anaconda.  It’s also the site of St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel, a tribute to the glory of God in loving memory of Timothy Dillon Bowman, the 18-year-old son who died tragically in a car accident following his freshman year at Stanford.

St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel, Southern Cross, MT

Amid the abandoned buildings of the Anaconda Mining Company, one might say that St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel stands as a witness to 20th century theologian Paul Tillich’s believe that

…[M]an and nature belong together,

in their created glory,

in their tragedy,

and in their salvation.

– Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations

Here’s the sermon from the pulpit of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, Minnesota, August 5, 2012.

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